EventFlow for Tehran: the cultural events of 22 districts on one system

The cultural events of Tehran's 22 districts run to hundreds of programmes a year, and each one passes through several hands before it happens: content, budget, deputy, headquarters.

The problem had four heads. Approvals stalled somewhere nobody could name. Cultural venues — cultural centres, neighbourhood houses, Quran houses, parks — had no current record a citizen could consult to find out what was on where. Field reports proved nothing: a photograph with no evidence of where or when. And evaluation effectively did not happen, because collecting citizen feedback was harder than running the event.

One more constraint shaped the design: a field officer does not always have a stable connection, and an app built assuming an open internet breaks in the field.

EventFlow was built: one platform with three clients — a web panel for the cultural unit, the districts and headquarters; a mobile app for the field officer and the citizen; and an API that feeds both.

The event cycle is governed by a state machine inside the domain: draft → content approval → budget approval → deputy and headquarters → dispatch to districts and delivery → evaluation → closure. Programmes and sub-activities are versioned and the change history is kept.

Beside it sits a public cultural atlas: venues with categories, photographs, facilities and coordinates, on a map and open to citizens without signing in, each with a district approval flow. Venue services — classes, bookings for halls, libraries and workshops, club membership — sit on those venues, switched on per venue.

Field reports are captured inside a geofence and a time window and wait in an offline queue until the network returns; the reachability probe was tuned against our own server so national filtering does not make the system report itself offline. Evaluation runs on a question bank and single-use tokens, asking citizens and delivery teams different things.

Under all of it sits the access layer an organisation this size requires: the geographic hierarchy of districts, areas and neighbourhoods alongside the organisational one, capability-based permissions — each endpoint guarded by a named capability rather than a raw role — multi-tenancy, and an audit trail on every access.