By Taylor Anderson, Big Sky Weekly Assistant Editor
Several businesses in the Big Sky area are creating a community calendar that will collect and display all events in town for locals and visitors.
A main driver: Jackson Hole.
The tourist and ski town on the other end of Yellowstone National Park was referenced numerous times at a meeting in which representatives from about 10 local businesses—including Moonlight Basin and Big Sky Resort—discussed ideas for a collective calendar. Several attendees said Jackson Hole is harnessing community calendars and apps already, and that they have set the bar for how businesses market themselves today.
The general consensus is Big Sky needs to display its events in a single location, rather than having visitors check the websites of various businesses in town to see what’s going on.
There was also discussion about an app that would let people check via GPS tracking which event was happening near their current location.
The same idea was proposed four or five years ago, but lost steam as groups quarreled over who would control the calendar. It was decided at the meeting that the Chamber of Commerce would run this site if it comes to fruition.
Robin Brewer-McBride, the chamber’s membership director, was nominated at the meeting to become the committee’s new chairman. She said it would take eight weeks to build a calendar from scratch, or hardly any time to use an existing format.
The group now will check with website programmers to see if the proposed formats would work with existing formatting on the sites. The next meeting is scheduled for Feb. 2 at 8:30 a.m. in the Big Sky Water and Sewer District office in the Meadow Village and is open to the public.
