Build a system, not a site.The Centre for Events & Festivals does not behave like media or like an association brochure. It behaves as a working operating layer. Career planning, burnout, advocacy, accessibility, workforce planning, mentoring, recognition, jobs, standards — usually drifting around as separate categories — sit inside one connected ecosystem. The point is not content. The point is structure.Duignan's build at eventsandfestivals.org, framed against decades of industry patchwork.
The industry has been functioning with patchwork logic.Careers are real but hard to describe. Skill is visible inside a trusted circle but hard to signal outside of it. Value is constantly asserted but in a narrow economic frame — attendance, square footage, hotel nights. The human cost of the work is obvious to the people doing it and oddly invisible in the official language around it. The same goes for accessibility, mentoring, and progression. The patchwork is the problem.Duignan's diagnosis of the structural condition the Centre was built to address.
Most people in this industry don't have the altitude to step back.They are producing the next event, solving the next venue problem, answering the next sponsor demand, dealing with the next staffing issue. The work is live, local, deadline-driven, and all-consuming. Even when the audience is global, the labor is rooted in a place and a moment. You rarely get enough altitude to ask how the whole thing should work. That is why the connective tissue almost never gets built from inside.Why the structural work of the Centre had to come from a position slightly outside the operator's daily loop.
Improve in public, with use.New build environments shorten the distance between creator and user. A burnout tool gets sharper when event professionals push on it. An advocacy tool improves when people try to use it in the real world. A development planner becomes useful when people bring actual career messiness to it. Tools do not have to emerge fully finished to matter. They can improve in public, with use.Duignan's argument for why this kind of system can exist now in a way it couldn't before.
Take the value conversation beyond attendance.For decades the events business has measured itself in attendance, square footage, sponsorship revenue, and hotel nights. Tools like ImpactCalc and EventAdvocate push toward a broader accounting — what events do to economies, societies, people, and places. The narrow frame protected the industry for a long time. It does not anymore.The thinking behind the impact and advocacy tools inside the Centre.
Treat accessibility as planning logic, not cleanup.AccessPlan reframes accessibility from an end-of-process appendix into a planning input. The shift is not about compliance. It is about building events whose architecture assumes the full range of attendees from the first sketch — not the last revision.Duignan's framing of accessibility inside the Centre's tooling.
Burnout deserves language and structure.BurnoutMeter does something the industry has avoided: it gives language and structure to a condition the field has normalized. Naming it is not therapy. It is the precondition for treating workforce welfare as a measurable industry problem instead of a private one.The reasoning behind one of the Centre's most-used tools.