Developing dRTP Leaders with Melodramatick: Audience Engagement Pilots with Cultural-Sector Partners

Many arts organisations face increasing pressure to attract younger, tech-savvy audiences in the context of constrained funding.DRTPs are increasingly supporting public engagement activities, yet leadership pathways and opportunities for shared practice within arts and cultural contexts remain limited.

Melodramatick is an open-source web framework for cultural-domain websites that encourage audience participation and repertoire discovery, similar to platforms such as Goodreads or Letterboxd. Its core “tick” mechanism allows users to log their engagement with works of art (e.g. attended, streamed). Deployed prototypes include Operatick which catalogues over 1,000 operatic works.

This project shifts the model from user-driven to partner-driven delivery. Four pilot projects will be delivered in collaboration with cultural-sector partners, using partner-supplied data (for example, an orchestral season). Each pilot team will include a dRTP lead, a co-lead, and an optional third member, collectively responsible for coordinating the pilot with external collaborators. Teams will identify suitable partners, articulate the benefits of participation to build buy-in, scope the work, ingest partner-supplied CSV data (with no personal data), publish a Melodramatick site, and coordinate distribution through partner channels to enable relevant audiences to record their engagement.

Delivering four pilots will demonstrate dRTP leadership in community building, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement. The project will also generate reusable assets, including a versioned Melodramatick template with import and export pathways, recorded clinics, and public outputs. These resources will support future digital-humanities research and feed into the Network’s leadership-training pipeline.