Advisory board to pursue a community events calendar after tech-board demo

The Grand Island Economic Development Advisory Board discussed options for a centralized community events calendar after a demonstration by members who had met with the town tech board.

Corey summarized the demo and said the tech-board member (John) had shown a proprietary platform with customizable filters, event‑submission queues and email ingestion. "You can do these tags to categorize it more like maybe what a user might be looking for," Corey said, describing tag-based filtering and a back-end approval queue for submitted events.

Board members compared that proposal with a lower-cost Google-based calendar approach. Concerns included administrative bandwidth to approve events, governance rules for which organizations can post, and sustainability if a private vendor ultimately charged for the service. John, described by participants as a tech-board member who has developed the product, offered an initial free trial for the town, but multiple members said any future costs or procurement arrangements must be put in writing.

EDAB agreed on next steps: the calendar subcommittee will meet with John to get a formal proposal and written terms, and the group will prepare a package for the town board that describes the pilot, administrative roles and any procurement implications. Committee members recommended a one‑year trial with usage metrics to justify future budget requests.

No contract was signed at the meeting. The committee also noted an internally created "Grand Island Service Coalition" Google calendar that civic groups are already populating; members said the community calendar should be able to ingest or link to that feed to reduce duplicate entry work.