Looking for alpha/beta testers: "Chicago Stubs"
A couple of years ago, I managed to get tickets to the Timeline Theatre Company's production of "Copenhagen". This seemed to be an interesting play and I was looking forward to seeing it.
Unfortunately, that didn't happen. For some reason or other, I didn't make it out to the theatre and the two tickets that I purchased expired on my kitchen table that night. I was disappointed that I couldn't make the play, but I was also disappointed that the tickets went unused.
Well, all of that changes soon. For the past few weeks, I've been working with a small team of undergraduates on a site we're calling Chicago Stubs. Think of it as a local Craigslist devoted exclusively to tickets to events. Using Chicago Stubs, you can search for specific tickets, browse for tickets by time or place, and list your own unused tickets.
The fundamental difference between this site and other online ticket sites is that it is designed for both browsing and searching. Why does this matter? Picture this scenario:
It's Wednesday evening, and I still haven't figured out a good weekend outing for my mentee and myself. I know that we're both free on Saturday and Sunday and that I don't want to do something we've done before. I visit Chicago Stubs and browse the tickets for events on Saturday and Sunday. Most of the listings are for single tickets, but I find a pair of tickets being offered for a special event at the Field Museum that has been sold out for weeks. I see that the person offering the tickets is in my neighborhood, and I accept his offer. Accompanying my acceptance is a brief personal message suggesting that we make the swap at a local tea house.
A couple of hours, I get an e-mail informing me that he'd like to complete the offer and to meet him at the tea house to pick up the tickets after work. I go to the tea house and get the tickets. Saturday rolls around and my mentee and I visit the museum. We have a great time. When I get home, I log into the site and post positive feedback about the offering user. He gains reputation within the community and becomes someone who I might give priority to, should our roles be reversed in the future.
This is one potential scenario, and there are many more that I'm sure you could imagine (the season ticket holder trading unused Cubs tickets for musical performances, the local office swapping tickets among themselves, fledgling theatre companies listing unused tickets to fill the house, etc.). On a macro level, this site aims to reduce the amount of "ticket waste" in the local area. And I'm planning on using the technical resources at my disposal (including the web, e-mail, RSS, and text messaging) to solve this problem.
At the moment, the site is still being developed for a course in online communities I'm currently taking. However, I think that this idea has legs and I hope to get an actual functioning service up and running early this summer.
So, where do you come in? For this site to work, we need actual users posting actual tickets that other actual users can search and browse. We need a critical mass of users for this to take off. No users = no site.
At the moment, I'm putting the finishing touches on the alpha version of the site. I'll be ready for users/testers later in this week. So, if you're interested in helping us make this site as useful as possible, head on over to Chicago-Stubs.com and add yourself to the invitation list. I'll be sending out a limited number of invites for the alpha, and once we fix the inevitable
bugs and are ready for more users, we'll open up the site and invite the rest of you.
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