I’m not giving the Baumol talk again. Sorry. It was a huge hit the last two years, and there’s still some great work to do on that line of research, and I am still giving the talk other places. But for New Music Gathering mark 3 in Bowling Green this May, I wanted to do something new.

The theme is support, so I’m bringing together three great executive directors of arts & technology organizations to talk about how to support artists with software.

This is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, obviously. I spend my life helping philanthropy & non-profit orgs learn about building and managing technologies, and helping technology-native organizations learn about living in the non-profit space. There are a lot of different ways to approach this, and the panelists we’ve got have wildly different ways of doing it.

Ed Harsh, from New Music USA, will talk about what it’s like to have an engineering department and custom software be part of a non-profit organization that’s over seventy years old. Full and unnecessary disclosure: I am … well… involved here :-).

Jesse von Doom, from CASH Music, will talk about what it’s like to build open source tools to help artists take control of their careers, and start a non-profit to do it. Also, CASH Music makes amazing tools that more people in the ‘new music’ space should use. Check it out. In related news, join the CASH Family. Full disclosure, I’m doing some work with CASH.

Shaya Lyon, from the Live Music Project, will talk about building a community events calendar around the actual community, leveraging her background as a product manager. There have been a lot efforts to “all have one big calendar”, and most of them just centralize some paper pushing for orgs, and fail. LMP really works, and it’s really growing. Full disclosure, I’m the board chair.

Software in civil society organizations is a big giant deal, and it’s only going to get bigger. Helping artists, and artists helping each other, is going to rely on good tools that we can trust. There’s a whole infrastructure that we need for the arts, and these three people and organizations are making that future happen. So come hear what they have to say!

And if you’re at the conference, and have crushing doubts about your future, come find me in the ‘Therapy Room.’

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