Proposal: Quizbowl Team Contact DB and Staffer DB
Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2015 12:29 pm
One observation that's been made in recent discussions is that the quizbowl community is relatively decentralized. There aren't very many organizations or resources (this website excepted) which thread the whole community together, particularly at the high school level, and it's often hard for new teams to figure out how to navigate the "alphabet soup" of organizations that do exist. I don't think there's any quick fix for all of that, but I do think there's more we can do to get newer teams on the same footing as older or more active teams in terms of knowing where the important information is.
To that end, I'd like to propose two projects and ask what it would take to create them. Either or both would work well as additional components to the Quizbowl Resource Center itself.
> a "Quizbowl Contact Database" for middle school, high school, and college teams to display their own information. This would allow an individual affiliated with a team to maintain and update an entry displaying current contact info, and perhaps some other information such as where to mail a check if necessary. (Admins could exist to transfer entries when a sitting team captain or coach graduates.) This would look quite similar to the team entries on the NAQT webpage, but with more leeway for teams that don't play a lot of NAQT and open to community members for keeping their own teams' information curated. It could perhaps even be linked up with a more comprehensive results page for that team, such as the one found on http://hdwhite.org/qb/stats. I think it's especially important for college teams to keep this contact info in a centralized manner which is easy to access, so that any incoming college students at a given school know who to contact if a team already exists. There have been attempts at this in the past, such as the now long-defunct Maize Pages and the Google spreadsheets once maintained by Eliza Grames and George Berry (only sorta maintained these days?), but this is important enough a task to merit something new and more permanent.
> a "Quizbowl Staffer Database": This would allow individuals in the quizbowl community who enjoy staffing tournaments to maintain and update an entry of their name, their current city, their previous staffing experience / level of expertise with different staffing tasks, the radius which they'd be willing to travel to go staff something, the levels of competition they're willing to staff (e.g.: middle school, high school, college, open), and (optionally) preferred contact information for staffing requests. The reason why I think this would be helpful is as follows: There are many older people or recent alumni who might not be super plugged in to the events in their area, and who might be willing to staff if asked, but who aren't asked because up-and-coming teams don't necessarily know who they are. At least, I've heard plenty of stories of the "I didn't know that tournament was happening!" or "None of the high schools know who I am anymore!" sort, and think this would be a decent stopgap, so fewer tournaments up understaffed or smaller than they could be. This would also help quizbowl alumni who aren't exactly sure what they want to do to have a centralized and promoted way of giving back every once in a while.
Ideally, either of these would allow outside users to look up something like "all publicly-listed teams within 100 miles" or "all publicly-listed staffers who are willing to drive to my location", so as to make sure users don't miss anyone when making invitations, outreach, and staff recruitment for their events.
I am not a programmer of any stripe (aside from a little Java and Scheme done for intellectual reasons in college), and I feel sort of goofy suggesting this if I couldn't realistically help with it (though I guess I could Photoshop some images of what I'm envisioning here). So I guess I want to check here how viable it would be to build either or both of these interfaces, whether folks would use them if available, whether folks would want to help design /program these, and whether this site (the Quizbowl Resource Center overall) could accommodate them. How big a task would it be to set this up, and on whose shoulders would it fall?
To that end, I'd like to propose two projects and ask what it would take to create them. Either or both would work well as additional components to the Quizbowl Resource Center itself.
> a "Quizbowl Contact Database" for middle school, high school, and college teams to display their own information. This would allow an individual affiliated with a team to maintain and update an entry displaying current contact info, and perhaps some other information such as where to mail a check if necessary. (Admins could exist to transfer entries when a sitting team captain or coach graduates.) This would look quite similar to the team entries on the NAQT webpage, but with more leeway for teams that don't play a lot of NAQT and open to community members for keeping their own teams' information curated. It could perhaps even be linked up with a more comprehensive results page for that team, such as the one found on http://hdwhite.org/qb/stats. I think it's especially important for college teams to keep this contact info in a centralized manner which is easy to access, so that any incoming college students at a given school know who to contact if a team already exists. There have been attempts at this in the past, such as the now long-defunct Maize Pages and the Google spreadsheets once maintained by Eliza Grames and George Berry (only sorta maintained these days?), but this is important enough a task to merit something new and more permanent.
> a "Quizbowl Staffer Database": This would allow individuals in the quizbowl community who enjoy staffing tournaments to maintain and update an entry of their name, their current city, their previous staffing experience / level of expertise with different staffing tasks, the radius which they'd be willing to travel to go staff something, the levels of competition they're willing to staff (e.g.: middle school, high school, college, open), and (optionally) preferred contact information for staffing requests. The reason why I think this would be helpful is as follows: There are many older people or recent alumni who might not be super plugged in to the events in their area, and who might be willing to staff if asked, but who aren't asked because up-and-coming teams don't necessarily know who they are. At least, I've heard plenty of stories of the "I didn't know that tournament was happening!" or "None of the high schools know who I am anymore!" sort, and think this would be a decent stopgap, so fewer tournaments up understaffed or smaller than they could be. This would also help quizbowl alumni who aren't exactly sure what they want to do to have a centralized and promoted way of giving back every once in a while.
Ideally, either of these would allow outside users to look up something like "all publicly-listed teams within 100 miles" or "all publicly-listed staffers who are willing to drive to my location", so as to make sure users don't miss anyone when making invitations, outreach, and staff recruitment for their events.
I am not a programmer of any stripe (aside from a little Java and Scheme done for intellectual reasons in college), and I feel sort of goofy suggesting this if I couldn't realistically help with it (though I guess I could Photoshop some images of what I'm envisioning here). So I guess I want to check here how viable it would be to build either or both of these interfaces, whether folks would use them if available, whether folks would want to help design /program these, and whether this site (the Quizbowl Resource Center overall) could accommodate them. How big a task would it be to set this up, and on whose shoulders would it fall?