The best ideas often begin with someone asking why there isn’t a better way. For Tasmanian event producers Tarik Stoneman and Ryan Limb, years spent navigating the controlled chaos behind major music festivals eventually provided the answer – build one themselves. O n the other side of the fence, a major music festival can look deceptively simple. The gates open. Artists take the stage. Thousands of people arrive. Food is served, drinks are poured and, if everything has gone according to plan, most of the enormous operation behind it remains largely invisible. For the people putting it together, the reality is very different. Site maps, schedules, equipment, contractors, staff, volunteers, suppliers and countless moving parts need to come together, often across spreadsheets, emails and software never really designed for the job. Tarik Stoneman and Ryan Limb know that world particularly well. Between them, they have extensive experience producing some of the state’s best-known contemporary music events. Limb is co-owner and general manager of Party in the Paddock, while Stoneman is co-owner and general manager of Great Escape Music Festival Australia. Party in the Paddock alone has grown from its humble beginnings in northern Tasmania to one of Australia’s largest contemporary music festivals, attracting a record crowd of 14,000 to Quercus Park in February. Stoneman, meanwhile, brings another skillset to the partnership. Alongside more than six years of hands-on event management, he has more than a decade of experience as a software engineer building large-scale systems.
For years, like event organisers everywhere, they had managed the enormous volume of information required to deliver events through a collection of spreadsheets, project management systems, mapping programs and other tools. Each might perform an individual task well. The problem was getting all of them – and all of the people using them – to work together. “As event producers, we have seen how messy operations play out, spreadsheets, email threads, and retrofitted, disconnected tools that don’t talk to each other and aren’t built for the job. As our events grew, those gaps created miscommunication, wasted resources, and unnecessary complexity, slowing down planning and execution,” Limb says. What Stoneman and Limb wanted was one place where an event could effectively live. The platform they developed brings functions including site mapping, scheduling, equipment management and signage into a connected system, with changes updated across the team in real time. A piece of equipment placed on a site map, for example, can feed directly into the event’s equipment list. A schedule can be maintained centrally but presented differently to individual teams. Live links can provide contractors and suppliers with current information without another attachment or version of a spreadsheet joining the pile. The philosophy behind it is straightforward: the person planning an event six months out and the person physically building it on site should ultimately be working from the same source of information. “Our mission for EventLab is to enable event teams to collaborate on one platform where everyone can create and deliver the festival together,” Stoneman says. “From the planners starting months ahead, to the contractors, vendors, staff and volunteers on the ground, it’s built to connect everyone in an event ecosystem.” Initially, there was little expectation that the system would go much further than Stoneman and Limb’s own operations. Then other event producers saw the advantages of it. “When people in our own event production network started asking if they could use the platform we’d built just for ourselves, we realised the problem
Eventually, those two worlds collided.
“We needed a better way to plan and run the complexity of our own events,” Limb says. “Nothing available was built for the realities of live delivery, so we built what we could not find. This is how EventLab was born.” Importantly, EventLab was not initially conceived as a software business searching for a problem to solve. It was an internal solution to a problem Stoneman and Limb were already living.
35 Tasmanian Hospitality Review August/September Edition
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