There are few lifestyles more chaotic than those of professional classical musicians. For the rank and file, there’s no 9 to 5 routine, no office, just a constant kaleidoscope of airports, hotels and concert halls. As a player, your mission is to turn up where you’re told, when you’re told and play sublimely.
But pity the poor souls who have to manage these itinerants. Orchestras range in size from about 40 players for a typical chamber orchestra, up to 100 or more for a symphony orchestra, and all require different levels of organising, reminding, cajoling and harassing. Players often come from many different countries and are very frequent travellers.
For most, email is a reasonably practical solution to keeping in touch, not only because of its cost effectiveness – orchestras often struggle to balance their books – but also thanks to its ubiquity. Email though has its drawbacks, especially for people with busy in-boxes: important emails can be mis-categorized as spam, misaddressed, lost or forgotten.
Wikis provide an alternative method for communicating with a group. Like email, a wiki can be ubiquitous so that anybody with a browser can access it, but, unlike email, wikis have the important advantage of being centralised information stores so that anybody needing to communicate with the group only need enter information as a web page; no need to worry about keeping email address lists up to date, etc.
The downside is that wikis can be complex, and not everyone is compatible with challenging technology. And that’s where RubberSquid comes in.
RubberSquid offers all kinds of groups and teams a wiki that:
- is very simple to use;
- works on almost anything with a browser including mobile phones;
- is free to use on a desktop and very cheap on mobile devices.
RubberSquid is being used by several major European orchestras as a simple and convenient way of keeping in touch with widely dispersed players and other support staff. They have found that, for most people, RubberSquid is simple and quick to use on a PC, requiring only basic knowledge of browsers. Getting people to use RubberSquid on mobile phones has been a bit more of a struggle as many still believe they are charged by the minute (and through the nose) for an Internet connection on a mobile. Once over that fear, and set up with appropriate data tariffs, most find using RubberSquid on a mobile phone both simple and enjoyable.
But streamlining communication has not been the only positive outcome, some of the peripheral benefits have been surprising. Chasing down scores is an important part of many musicians’ lives, so having a RubberSquid channel for storing information about who’s got what score has saved valuable practice time, players simply type in some information about the score they’re looking for and RubberSquid’s AI assisted search locates the most likely entry.
But, of course it’s not only orchestras that can benefit from adopting RubberSquid. All kinds of groups and teams can reap benefits from this easy to use, cross-platform wiki, be they small companies, consultants, sports teams or social groups.
Whether you’re a musician or not, you can register for RubberSquid here (registration and use on a PC is free).
