liquidstarlight photography

The Glastonbury Festival is the world's most famous music festival, and Oxfam recruits, trains and manages 1800 stewards to help run it. And behind the scenes, scheduling the roster patterns and ensuring that the stewards are where they are needed at the times they are needed, is a laptop computer runing some very sophisticated software.

Without accurate records, the stewards wouldn't get their deposits refunded as their reward for working their three shifts; and that would be a lot of angry stewards to deal with!

The Oxbox is the control centre for managing the 1800 stewards who help to run the festival. We spread straw outside in an effort to combat the mud - a low-tech solution concealing inside a very high-tech solution.

Here you can see the software in action as stewards are assigned to their shifts. Colour coding is used to indicate the state of each shift. With no network connectivity in the Oxbox, a replica of the SQL Server database holds all the information locally, and is synchronised with the Oxfam servers after the festival.

This is, if you like, the nerve centre of the process, powered by ComponentOne's TrueDbGrid. On the y-axis are the positions where the stewards will work, and on the x-axis the time slots. Each cell represents a working timeslot for a position, and the colour coding indicates the current situation.

The system must be flexible enough to cope with all the demands made by the stewards: they don't turn up; go sick; want to work the same shifts as their mates; want to rearrange their shifts so they can see their favourite bands; and so on ...