Eventmanager: Accreditation for Festivals

Ticket systems exist in abundance. But at larger events like festivals, up to 40% of all visitors are accredited guests: artists, crew, press, sponsors, VIPs, volunteers. These people need a completely different workflow than ticket holders.

The problem

Accredited guests require granular permissions, specific area access, product delivery at check-in (wristbands, meal vouchers, backstage passes), and real-time tracking of who has arrived and who hasn't. A ticket system handles one question: did this person pay? Accreditation handles dozens: what zones can they access, what products do they receive, who approved them, when did they check in, did they get their crew meal voucher?

Most festivals still run this on spreadsheets and printed lists. It works until it doesn't.

What I built

Eventmanager handles the entire accreditation workflow: planning who gets access to what, which products they receive at check-in, security permissions for different zones, and real-time tracking across the event.

Built in PHP with the Typo3 Flow framework. An unusual choice, but it fit the domain model well at the time. The framework's entity modeling mapped cleanly to the accreditation domain: people, permissions, products, zones, events.

The proof of concept was built for Ringsted Festival 2013. The system coordinated between event organizers who defined the accreditation rules, security teams who enforced zone access, and check-in staff who handed out wristbands and credentials.

The plan

The Ringsted Festival proof of concept worked well enough that I planned to launch Eventmanager as a commercial product. The festival infrastructure world is surprisingly underserved when it comes to accreditation management. Ticketing has been solved many times over. Accreditation hasn't.

This was during my time at Fest Data with Thomas Fest, where festival and event technology was part of our focus alongside the Talk IP telephony work.