Built in a post office, not a boardroom

Baton started because the same question kept getting asked out loud all day. where is this episode, and who has it?, and the only place the answer lived was in somebody’s head and a spreadsheet only they fully understood.

The rules it runs on were not invented. They were pulled out of how a real show actually works, one at a time: that a tape day can feed several broadcast weeks, that a package reused across a season has to carry a version and a list of what it affects, that credit durations are counted in frames so the frame rate is not a cosmetic setting. Getting those right took more digging than writing the software did.

Why it is careful about what it claims

A board is only worth having if people believe it. The moment it says something is missing when really nobody checked, or shows a guess as a fact, people start checking it against reality, and shortly after that they stop opening it.

So there are three rules that do not bend: it never turns “nobody checked” into “missing”, it never presents an estimate as confirmed, and it never relies on a status a person has to keep up to date. Each one costs something to keep. They are kept anyway.

Who builds it

People who work in post. Not a product team that interviewed some editors once and went away to build something.

It was started by Kevin Kelsey, a Lead Assistant Editor and a member of IATSE Local 700, with 15 years in post. Scripted television, unscripted television, scripted features, and VFX-heavy shows. He was nominated for a Children's & Family Emmy for editing on The Muppets Mayhem.

He got into editing for the reason a lot of good editors did. It is assembling a puzzle with no box and no idea what the picture is supposed to be. That is also a fair description of walking onto a show in week three and working out where everything actually is.

The other half of him writes software. He takes MITx software engineering courses through MIT Open Learning, for fun. He has licensed apps to Big Brother. So the habit is not new. Look at a process that grew by accident, work out what it is really doing, then build the thing that makes it hold together. Long-running shows collect a decade of workarounds, and most of them were somebody’s good idea once.

He also founded a commercial insurance agency, currently 4th in SmartChoice's Leadership Agency standings year to date. Which sounds unrelated and is not. Both jobs are logistics under a deadline that does not move, with auditors on the other end. A show that misses a delivery and a policy that misses a filing fail the same way.

Why it does less than it could

Most tools in this space are built the other way. Every request becomes a setting, every setting becomes a button, and five years later there is a screen nobody can explain to a new coordinator.

So the principle here is ease, and it is a constraint rather than a wish. Get the core of the job exactly right and leave out the hundred small features that one show in a thousand thought would be nice. Every one of those has a cost that lands on the other nine hundred and ninety-nine, and it is paid on their first morning.

Which is where the rules above came from. They were not gathered by asking people what they wanted; they are what the job actually does, written down by somebody who had been doing it for a decade and a half.

It is also why the board refuses to guess. Years of being handed a cut that had already been replaced, of chasing a status somebody forgot to update, of a tracker that was wrong by Wednesday, is a fairly complete education in how these systems lose people’s trust.

He built it and still writes it. A walkthrough is a call with him, not a sales engineer reading from a deck, which also means he will tell you when your show is not a fit, because a bad fit costs more to support than it earns.

About the data on this site

Every board, card and name you see here, on this site and in the live demo, is synthetic. It belongs to a show that does not exist. No production material appears anywhere, and the demo is checked for that automatically before it is published.