.tel Story of Oliver Humpage

Oliver Humpage, Watershed's ICT Co-ordinator explains how Watershed.tel works. Launched this week, watershed.tel is a strong example of how a .tel domain can be used for near real-time communication in a simple-to- access format. Bristol-based Watershed Media Centre has 3 cinema screens, several events spaces and a Caf�/Bar, and has lots of events both film and not film.

"Watershed opened in 1982 as Britain's first dedicated Media Centre - that is, concentrating on photography and the moving image. Watershed's strength is its ability to mix up creativity, learning, R&D and business in ways which benefit everyone. "

"The internet is a vital part of Watershed's activities. We started experimenting with online content in 1999 (we got a symmetric 10Mb internet connection, well before broadband was widespread), and we were one of the first places in Bristol to offer completely free wireless access in our Caf�/Bar. "

"Watershed is a rarity in the arts world, having a relatively large IT department and managing as much IT as possible in-house. This gives us the knowledge and flexibility to experiment with new technologies.
A large part of being a successful IT dept relies on having the time and skills available to do R&D, coupled with an underlying recognition that technology is there to help people communicate more easily and more effectively."

"As a result of these early experiments we concentrated more and more on online artwork and activities, until we reached a point around 2004 where we made a conscious decision to stop having "traditional" exhibitions in the building at all. http://dshed.net is our online showcase, which is currently undergoing a major redevelopment to help it cope with the sheer quantity of creative output it's trying to display."

"I joined Watershed in 2000, straight from doing an MSCi in Mathematics at Bristol University, and within a few months was made ICT Co-ordinator. I'm a jack of all trades, from coding to system administration to networking. Although most of my time is spent "making stuff work" (our departmental motto!), I'm easily distracted by new ideas if they can help enhance Watershed's capacity for communication."

"I first heard of .tel in a newsletter from our registrar, Joker.com. I'm not sure what caught my eye - it may have been the iPhone app, or just intrigued that they were pushing what appeared to be Yet Another Pointless TLD, but I followed the link to telnic.org and was immediately fascinated by the way .tel domains worked: basically, pushing the DNS to its limits in a way that would have made the inventors of DNS proud."

"I immediately registered watershed.tel (and humpage.tel, for personal use). I took the idea of .tel at face value and entered some basic contact information for Watershed, then tweeted that I'd done it. Three minutes later, Justin Hayward - Telnic's director of communication - tweeted back to point out that I could use the domain to advertise our cinema listings and other events."

"There followed some email conversations between me, Justin, community@telnic.org and even Henri, Telnic's CTO. Everyone was really friendly and helpful, and it was clear they were very excited about .tel domains - it's always a good sign when people in an organisation have spirit and a sense of fun. After ascertaining what was possible, and looking at other example .tel sites, I got down to work."

"It was immediately clear to me that .tel domains are excellent for mobile use: the speed of DNS compared to even a basic mobile website is blazingly fast. Our website, although well designed, is far from optimal on mobile devices, and we'd never really made anything except a WAP site for mobile use. To be able not only to have a mobile site made for us by the .tel web interface, but to be able to give very fast data via DNS to mobile client apps, was absolutely perfect for helping potential customers who were out and about and wanted to see what was on."

"Our web developer had just finished a new REST API for our website, so it was a fairly simple task to write a script which queried our own API for event data, processed it, and uploaded it to the .tel SOAP API. Using the PHP class that Telnic provided, I quickly got the hang of creating and updating events listings. After a week of coding and a week of testing, whats-on.watershed.tel went live at the end of June 2009."

"I decided not only to have listings categories of "Today", "Tomorrow" and "This week", but to have a "Next Hour" category appear if a film or event is coming up soon. This is especially for people who are nearby in the city centre and suddenly have a whim to see a film."

"In its current version, watershed.tel has What's On listings, opening times for the box office and Caf�/Bar, plus links to directions, more detailed listings, online booking and our various social networking sites. I'm sure we'll find more things like "special offers" to add to it over time.
We will be promoting this domain to all our customers in the hope that the clear and accessible way the information is laid out will help them feel comfortable that they know what's on, when the Caf�/Bar's open for food and drink, and the many ways in which they can contact us."