Boomtown festival is a mad and brilliant project. It's the world's largest immersive theatre event. Every year some 70,000 people descend on a valley in the South Downs, and inhabit a living city, constructed of beautiful sets, and populated with a cast of over 1000 actors and performers.

For the past three years I've been one of their Theatrical Ground Crew Directors - my role being to populate the city with those performers and make sure that people's interractions with them run smoothly and cohesively.

As a task it's a really interesting one - it's part performance, part narrative design, and part human traffic flow. I particularly enjoyed working on 'in-world' narrative reasons or game mechanics to move people through the site - it gave us really fine-grained control over the district and the wider site, without breaking immersion or the game.

As a project I also think Boomtown is an absolutely fantastic case study in collaborative working. Over about a three week period a whole city emerges out of the ground - like a mad mushroom. As an organisational structure it delivers this with a huge amount of trust - delegating significant responsibility and creative freedom to a community of collaborators, but providing a structure and a world in which these individual creative choices can be integrated. It relies critically on a brilliant team of core organisers who can see the links between these different collaborators and connect them together. This way of working: of devolved responsibility with careful integration is one that I think lots of organisations can learn from - and this idea, of an entity being the connective tissue that holds a wide variety of brilliant and independent stakeholders together is part of what I like ideologically about the waterways too. They - like the Boomtown city, provide a connective link to bring people together, but enough creative freedom and opportunity for each individual project to thrive.

To read more about connecting people through the waterways - go to Theatreship or Advisory work. To read more about organisational structures go to YourStaffKnow. To read more about traffic flow, go to a defence of bus lanes (and the humble mini-roundabout). Alternatively explore the link map below to find other connections to this page.