Remember the events where everything has worked.
Think back to the happy and free moving people. These good memories probably mean you have implemented a range of technics, from planning to communication and on ground management. If the outcome is good then it’s deemed successful.
When we do our job well, organizers may feel the level and expense of crowd management is unnecessary because they “don’t need it” This underlines a difficulty in our industry.
It has always concerned me neither clients nor ourselves can measure how well management worked or how a positive crowd turned into a negative crowd… We gauge our success based on broad subjective human heuristics not measurement. Performance measurement is everywhere today. How do you measure crowd management success? What real time measures can we use to calculate the crowd sentiment and prove our management expertise?
This is why crowd management deserves a tactical definition like
“Successful crowd management is maintaining the crowd in a neutral or positive mood.”
Previously it’s been an unmeasurable statement because we only had subject assessment of crowd moods and humans are unable to compute such statistics in detail without bias.
I would be interested in discussing this with you further if you have an alternate tactical definition that can be measured. We need technology, we need an instrument.
No human is able to count and graph smiles like a computer, which is why we built Dynamic Crowd Measurement software to turn CCTV into smart cameras. Our software presents you measures of density and flow, two metrics a manager can control, and the affect it makes on crowd mood. DCM provides a privacy protected sentiment analysis to give you early warning when mood starts to fall so you can act in real time to keep the mood positive or neutral. You can now illustrate the effect good planning, communication and on ground management has on crowd mood to help keep your audience and clients happy.
