ODUNDE has gathered South Philadelphia every June since 1975, one of the oldest African-American street festivals in the country. The procession to the river, the marketplace of African and Caribbean makers, the families who come back year after year. The team has run all of it on paper, phone calls, and the memory of the people who did it before. We took over the technology and built them one home for the whole thing.
There are really two ODUNDEs now, the festival and the youth sports program, and we run both from a single codebase behind one front door. The public sites take ticket sales, vendor and volunteer sign-ups, athlete registrations, and sponsor inquiries. We also built the Art Sho pipeline end to end: an artist applies, uploads their work, pays the hundred-dollar fee, and a staff member approves them, all on one screen. When a booth or a ticket count fills up, the Sold Out sign is honest, because it asks the payment system before it says so.
Behind the public sites sit two control rooms, one for the festival and one for sports, where a small staff approve artists, manage booths against real capacity, run events, post news, and track sponsorships. Money moves through seven different checkout flows, and the team never touches a credit card number themselves. What used to be a once-a-year scramble across a hundred inboxes is a year-round operation now, and it lives in one place.
The crowd ODUNDE draws is something the organizers count at over a million people a year, across the June festival and its year-round activations, and an institution that size deserved more than goodwill holding it together. We were glad to give it that. The work that mattered most was the quiet kind, the back office, so the people who love this festival can keep their attention on the celebration and the city it belongs to.
