In early 2026 I designed and launched the software behind WayneCounty.events, a community-wide events calendar that includes local events for Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. I built it to solve the fragmentation and reliability issues common in existing calendaring tools and in calendar sites already operating in my community.
After evaluating and rejecting off-the-shelf solutions that prioritized single-organization promotion, opaque automation, and poor data quality, I developed a system focused on aggregating, normalizing, and distributing accurate event information from many sources across a local community.
The platform was architected from the ground up using Laravel, Filament, Livewire, and Tailwind CSS, with an emphasis on extensibility, structured data management, and interoperability. It supports automated event ingestion via iCalendar/ICS feeds, APIs, and text extraction powered by large language models, along with tools for enrichment, deduplication, and geocoding. All of this is designed to be complemented by human curation for maximum community usefulness.
In addition to powering a public-facing calendar with search and filtering, the system integrates with print publishing workflows, provides an API for downstream use in our local community newspaper and other products, and includes a flexible administrative layer for managing venues, hosts, and permissions. The software was built to be adaptable for other communities, with future plans for expanded integrations, user personalization features, and potential open-source distribution. I wrote more about the calendar software project in a blog post.