Welcome to the Reel

I built a website for Antigonish. It's called the Antigonish Reel: one calm place to see what's happening in and around our community. No accounts. No comment sections. No social media algorithms.

The idea is simple. Finding out anything local these days means digging through feeds built elsewhere, tuned for engagement and designed to turn us into data points that can be sold. A road closure competes with outrage bait. The answer to "what's open this weekend?" is buried somewhere in a comment thread. Those tools aren't ours, and they weren't built for a place like this.

The Reel does the boring work of a utility. It pulls together the local information we actually use: weather and road conditions, gas prices, more than four hundred upcoming events drawn from over two dozen public sources, construction and public notices, obituaries, a what's-open directory, and a plain guide to who handles what around here. Every item shows its source. Nothing requires an account.

It's curated, not exhaustive. Clearly partial and useful beats apparently complete and wrong, so if something is missing or wrong, say so: there's a "Spot an error? Report it" link in the footer of every page, and corrections are real. I review them and I fix them.

The goal is bigger than convenience. It's to give Antigonish a chance to free itself from social media algorithms and rebuild the sense of the commons that is the heart of community. The Reel's goal is not to know about you, but to help you know your community.

This is all inspired by the foundational ideas of the Antigonish Movement: the idea that communities can build futures for themselves. In the 1930s, ordinary people in this county studied their problems together and built their own institutions to solve them. The Reel doesn't claim that mantle; it takes the inspiration. Because if our small towns wait for Silicon Valley or Ottawa or anywhere else to come to the rescue, that help will never come.

My name is Colin Duggan. I live here, I had the skills to build something like this, and so I did. The Reel is my first step into trying to build that future for us: freeing our information and giving folks in the Nish something better. It runs as a civic utility, not a business, hosted on Canadian infrastructure, and it answers to nobody but the community it serves.

This journal is where I'll post occasional notes about the service itself: what's new, what's changed, what's planned. Not news. Just housekeeping, done in the open.

The Reel is free for everyone, and local nonprofits are never charged to have their events and information carried. So take a look, tell me what's missing, and if it's useful, make it a habit.

The Reel is for us. A clear view of our own backyard.