Brian Dear from EVDB wrote me recently to bring to my attention the Eventful Demand service on Eventful.com (the event-planning website powered by his EVDB service). He is justifiably proud of this new feature:
We premiered it at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego in March.
Eventful Demand is a set of tools to enable fans to form grass-roots campaigns to “demand” an event to happen, by inviting their favorite performers to come to their town. Performers might be lecturers, book authors and journalists, musicians, bands, filmmakers, politicians, entrepreneurs, astronauts, scientists, who knows… it could be anyone.
The idea is, put the power of creating events in the hands of the people who want most to go to the event – the
people! What’s great is that we’re seeing performers start to embrace the technology, and participate with the fans in making events come about.
I have to admit, that last bit does sound cool. If you’re interested in watching this in action, you can view the “hottest” current demands
The first two sheduled events to emerge from this service were a book signing / film screening by blogger, author, and actor Wil Wheaton in Boston, and a music concert in the DC area by Jonathan Coulton (of the Thing a Week blog project and the classic multimedia song Flickr).
To grease the skids, Eventful Demand also provides tools for performers to encourage fans to start “demanding” them. I wonder if this could be adapted for the next Ross Perot or Wesley Clark to encourage supporters to draft them to run for office?