The Kootenay Slate

Finding out what is on in the Kootenays took eleven browser tabs. Towns keep calendars, venues post on Facebook, and tourism boards stop at their own town lines. Research mapped 63 local event pages across both Kootenays before any design began, and none of them covered the whole region.

An event is only true for a night, so the rules came before the design. A poster holds the title, the time, the place, who it is for and what it costs, and it links back to its source for the full description. If the source did not say who an event is for or what it costs, that field stays blank. The word Free appears only when the source said free. The wall runs in start-time order, and nothing else moves a poster up or down.

The site is drawn as a risograph print of the Kootenays in four inks, with 28 towns illustrated from their real landmarks. Every picture is a drawing, so no image can be mistaken for a real venue or a real crowd. The front page reads like a poster wall, with a stamp showing when it was last pasted and how many calendars fed it.

Coverage is the hard part. A program reads 64 public calendars most mornings, from town halls and libraries to arts councils and live music listings, and it skips any page a site's robots file asks it to leave alone. Each calendar is scored out of 100 on how complete, current and early its listings are. Size does not count, so a small hall can outscore a tourism office, and a calendar that scores under 60 comes off the wall. In late September I re-tested all 1,035 sites the first research had listed, reading their pages this time, searched 31 towns again, and eight new boards came on, among them Tourism Fernie, which the first pass had dropped with 63 events on its own pages.

The people who keep those calendars are volunteers and small offices, so the Slate presents them the way a gig poster presents its acts. The boards page is printed as a gig bill, headliners first, in the order of each board's score, and each board's pass shows its billing. Every board has a page of its own with its next dates set as a tour poster and a card that shows what earns its score, and event and town pages name the board behind them. Each board can also take home a seal that says it is read by the Slate. The seal carries no score, so it never goes stale on someone else's site.

Plenty of events never reach a calendar and only exist on a poster. So anyone can photograph a flyer, and Claude reads it and fills in the add form in a few seconds. In testing on 64 flyers, including rough phone photos, it never invented a date, a time or a price, and every miss came flagged as unsure. I read every submission before it goes up, and the photo is deleted once I decide.

The Slate runs on the same habits as The Kootenay List. Every poster names its source and links back to it with an ordinary link, and anyone can ask for their event to come off. Every event also has a calendar file a venue can use on its own site. If your business depends on people knowing what is on and when, like a venue, a festival or a class schedule, this is the system I would build for you.