Cortland Mahoney

Data Dancers

The Setup

While in New York City, I organized algoraves and livecode workshops. After moving to Atlanta, I felt the absence of this vibrant livecode environment. Using Meetup.com, I found others interested in live coding and started Data Dancers.

Though finding public spaces to meet and project screens or make noise can be challenging, it is always worthwhile.

I enjoy introducing new members to Strudel and Hydra, which often blows their minds and provides an accessible entry point to coding music or art immediately.

The First Algorave

Our first algorave took place on September 15th, 2023. View footage here!Since then, I have helped community members learn how to contact venues and book events.

My goal is to teach sustainable community practices, allowing the group to grow and thrive indefinitely.

Hackathon

After 12 months of monthly meetups in various locations, it became challenging to explain what we do to newcomers. To address this, I hosted a 3-day hackathon at my house in Stone Mountain, GA. We had 3 in-person coders and 2 remote participants. Over the weekend, we followed the entire software development lifecycle:

  • Planning and ideation on Friday
  • Setting requirements and nice-to-haves
  • Determining ACL, hosting provider, and ownership
  • Establishing contributing guidelines
  • Selecting technologies and deployment method
  • Designing the website and pages
  • Building the wireframe of the site
  • Code sprints with loud music
  • Peer reviews, testing, and daily homemade vegetarian gluten-free meals
  • Final publication of the new website on Sunday

You can see the website we created during the hackathon here. This site also features event history, including workshops.

The Hackathon Result

We made a website! Visit here:

https://data-dancers.github.io/

Ongoing Community Success

The community is thriving! One member has organized the next algorave in September 2024, and another is planning a follow-up show for November 2024.

Through organizing these events, I learned:

  • Engagement: How to improve my interactions with new meetup attendees, making them feel warmly welcomed and involved.
  • Communication:
    • Non-Technical: Improved communication to non-technical artists. I helped them understand JavaScript 101 and enabling them to use it immediately for editing art in the browser.
    • Technical: Assisted experienced users by directing them to documentation, examples templates, and presets for Hydra/Strudel, and additional livecoding tools and resources.
  • Event Organization: The biggest learn for me was how to ask for help in organizing public events. Not only did this become necesssary is time went on (hosting is a lot of work!), but also enabling others to voluntarily provide their skills and time creates a better sense of collaboration and community.