How do you know the board is telling the truth?
Three rules, kept deliberately. It never turns 'nobody checked' into 'missing', it never presents an estimated date as a confirmed one, and it never relies on a status a person has to keep up to date. Every card says whether what it shows was confirmed by a system or worked out from the air date.
A board that guesses is a board people stop opening. These three rules are written down because the pressure to bend them arrives with the first complaint.
It never turns “nobody checked” into “missing”
A drive it could not reach, a system nobody has set up, and a file that genuinely is not there are three different facts. They stay three different facts on screen.
It never passes off a guess as a fact
Some dates are confirmed by a program watching your storage. Some are worked out from the air date and your show’s schedule. Every card says which one it is showing - not in a legend somewhere, on the card.
It never asks you to keep a status up to date
Anything a person has to remember to update is a field that will eventually be wrong, and one wrong field is all it takes for people to start checking the board against reality instead of trusting it.
Why say this out loud
Because it is the part that is hardest to verify from a demo, and because every one of these rules costs something. Showing four handoff states instead of two is more work than showing a green tick and hoping. The reason to do it anyway is that a board is only worth having if people believe it.
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