dart league documents loaded into the cloud

Since taking over as president of the Santa Clara Valley Dart Association (SCVDA), I've been working with the other board members to get as much of our data as possible off individual computers and up into the cloud.

I've only been a member of the league for three years now, but in that time, I've witnessed some of the challenges that arise when folks keep important documents on their personal hard drives and then life happens, in other words: the computers crash or they go missing or the people just up and walk away from their duties.

No matter the reason for the missing info, the result is always the same: the league suffers from a lack of documented history. The remedy? Relying upon well-meaning-but-often-fallible memories of long-time members.

Combine all the above with the fact that most folks just want to get together and throw darts as an excuse to drink and be merry, and you've got a perfect storm of events conspiring to erase the institutional memory of the league.

So, since taking office last October, I've held the following items as the priorities of the board:

1. Get the current weekly match results and statistics posted as quickly as possible - we'd fallen about eight weeks behind in reporting the results of matches, and as you can imagine, it was more than a little frustrating to not know how you're doing for the season, either as a team or an individual, especially when there were tough sanctions for not reporting the results within 24 hours of the match.
2. Update the league documents to reflect current rules and bylaws - The published Rules of Play hadn't been updated since 2005 even though there'd been many changes to the rules voted by members in the many seasons since the official document was published. The Bylaws were even older (Feb 2004) and so knowing how the league was supposed to be run was difficult to determine for a newbie like me.
   
3. Get all the historical data trapped on paper score sheets digitized and published - herein were trapped all the results showing team standings and individual highlights for the past five seasons and no one could get at them
   
4. Hold the first SCVDA Awards to give away five seasons' worth of awards. Since joining the league in 2005, I'd never actually known an award to be given out for individual achievements (ton-80s and the like), and for amateur darters, it's all about the individual accomplishments when you're losing, as a team, to superior talent week in and week out.

Through quite a bit of effort by the board, we've been able to plow through all of the above and get everything published to the league's web site (hosted on a members' personal web server) so everyone in the league can access the info at our league's domain: http://scvda.com It's been a long uphill climb, but we're finally on top of it. I couldn't be more proud for the work these guys have done.

Now, our priority is to get all our data off one person's server and instead get it into "the cloud." In other words: getting our documents hosted on servers that are managed by teams of full-time employees, not a part-time volunteer who's having up-time issues with his own ISP.

My thinking? I'll trust my data to the Google servers because if the Google servers go offline, something catastrophic to the entire world is likely happening and the status of our darts stats is likely not to be at the top of the list of pressing issues if Google's crashed.

So, my first thought was to rent space at a domain server (like GoDaddy) and install a CMS like Drupal or Joomla. But as I dug into configuring the CMS packages, I realized they were still too complicated for our needs.

I've instead settled on using Google Sites to host our data, and so far, I'm pretty pleased with the capabilities. I'm a long-time wiki lover (Twiki then Socialtext then PBwiki and now JotSpot, aka Google Sites) so I really love how easy it is to pull the site together.

And now I'm uploading all our league documents and results from past seasons onto the site and starting to configure the loose architecture so others can follow.

What I still need to figure out is a good solution to emailing lists and how to set up form-driven activities on the Site (do they need to be form-driven anymore?).

The holy grail is how do we capture the reporting of results each week online. We've made the leap from submitting paper-based score sheets via USPS to now faxing the results to a virtual machine that PDFs them for us.

I'd like to think we can make the leap into a peer-reviewd reporting process next Season, but there's lots of habits to change and norms to create to enable something like that.

For now, I'm happy to have our stuff in the cloud so no one can hold the league hostage again, intentionally or accidentally.