Dispatch augmentation for a 3,700-member film-industry union local. Built by the dispatcher who used it. One person wrote it, ran it, and dispatched real shows through it for a 90-day paid pilot — then retired it. This page is its record.
Pilot complete · Paid in fullEvery figure below traces to database records or sent invoices. Nothing here is projected, extrapolated, or rounded up.
Show #11386 was dispatched twice in one week — first by hand, then through The Board. The only variable was the mechanism.
And the part with no manual equivalent: 35 standby workers reached across 5 positions in 8 minutes 19 seconds — timestamps in the database.
Shipped in one month of the pilot, solo, after hours: 15 features, 32 bug fixes, 2 performance improvements.
The Board began as an internal tool: a working dispatcher automating his own worst mornings. It grew into a 90-day paid pilot with his local — invoiced monthly, every invoice paid within a day.
One person was the operator and the developer at the same time. That is the reason the fill rate was 95.8%. It is not the reason the pilot didn't continue.
The pitch called it dispatch automation. To the dispatch team — union members themselves — a tool that let one dispatcher do the work of several sounded like a tool that made the others unnecessary, and their union asked for a pause. That reading was fair, and the framing was wrong. The Board never dispatched anyone on its own; every offer went out because a dispatcher decided it should. It was augmentation — the same people, with the phone tree replaced by something faster — and it was never sold that way. Lesson taken.
The pilot term ended on schedule; the system ran unattended for two more months without a single dispatch error before it was deliberately wound down and its member data deleted.
The codebase remains — a working reference for calling-sheet generation, bundled SMS dispatch, and legacy-system sync — pending a general-use rebuild.