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Comment by greatpatton | Hacker News Reader

This is quite strange, having organized a large music festival this kind of document were split among different teams. Meaning that people in charge of the backstage are managing their part (getting food, M&Ms, specific brand of beer, and other non nonsensical request, etc) and the people in charge of the stage and technical stuff are taking care of technical requirements (and aligning them between different bands sharing the same stage). So if someone from the backstage team messed up the M&Ms, it will bring absolutely no information about how the situation was handled by the guys in charge of the stage... So this canary will be quite ineffective in reality

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It can tell you something about hiring practices. The quality of the host of a restaurant probably shouldn't tell you about the staff in the kitchen, but in reality if they made the choice to go cheap in the front the the house they also very likely made the same choice in the back.

I did my share of event management and I disagree. It shows how well the teams are managed and attention to detail.

Of course, you should probably have more canaries.

If the backstage team didn’t miss the M&M detail, does that give you any information about the overall attention to detail of the promoter?

(If it does, then it seems like the lack of that information is itself information.)

> So if someone from the backstage team messed up the M&Ms, it will bring absolutely no information about how the situation was handled by the guys in charge of the stage...

Sounds like there was little to no organization then.

I showed this to my co-worker who managed the technical aspects of a large college theater that also served the town. They hosted multiple large events including bands who had fleets of semi trailers to haul their gear. They had a single contract review person who read everything carefully and then coordinated the teams doling out requirements. As each team satisfied the requirements they would report back.

This may be possible for a theater hosting a unique event, but never for a music festival, where you have like 30-50 different artists/bands on one night. There you have people responsible for each aspect. Of course you have a stage manager responsible for the overall operation of each stage, but there is no way that a guy can make sure that everything is ok in all details for all artists (the riders sheets can sometime several pages of different requests, like that hotel room must contains this kind of pillow etc.). As you say you have to delegate, and if one of the guys of the backstage team forget to sort the M&Ms, it will be a problem for the guy in charge of the backstage, but that's it. Like in any large organization, you cannot imply that because the customer support guy messed up that all the engineering team is bad. So here, if they wanted to make sure that technical guideline where followed it would be better to put something like: please mark all this kind of cable with pink and yellow tape.

In my experience doing video work for some of these type events, its possible for a music festival to negotiate riders that work for the festival an implement them properly, it might take a few more people and decent planning ahead of time.

The problem is that it requires a fair bit of documentation, coordination and processes to make it work, which some festivals do fine and I guess some just don't.

The key is that your head QA person knows who is in charge of what and has a process for holding them accountable, one such way would be to create a checklist of all the items that need to be checked, based on the riders, production requirements, regulations, expected amenities, plussing, etc.

Its also needed for each stage of the process, planning with stuff like speaker modeling, truss engineering, power load calculations, network and communication requirements, etc... on to checking the event area after load in and setup is complete and continuous checks on key items for safety and a reliable performance.

So, its certainly possible to reach an optimized state where you have a negotiated list of requirements and implement them correctly.

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