The Keelson

Toronto publishes a great deal about what happens on a given street — police reports, building permits, development applications — and almost none of it reaches the people who live there. The Keelson does that reading once a month, for every Toronto neighbourhood, answering three questions in about two minutes: what was reported to police last month, what is being built nearby, and what homes sold for. Residents’ associations can publish an edition in their own branding at no cost; the first is the Moore Park Residents Association. It is deliberately a web page rather than an app, because the audience includes many people who are older or not especially comfortable with technology. An app would ask them to find it in a store, install it, create an account and remember a password before reading a single line. Instead there is one email a month, and one click opens that month’s edition directly — nothing to download, no account, no password, type large enough to read without adjusting anything, and the same page on a phone as on a computer. Every figure is computed deterministically from the source records and machine-checked against them before publication. There are no rankings — the project will not say which neighbourhood is ‘worst’ — and where a monthly count is low, no percentage change is printed, because at small numbers it is noise dressed as news. Corrections are published with a dated note rather than quietly edited away, and every published number is reproducible from the stored source response, the recorded query, and the boundary version used to assign a record to a neighbourhood.