Brainstorming EK historic event listing

[mikekn]

One of the projects on my list is to create an on-line listing/database of all of the events ever held in the East Kingdom. The West Kingdom has something similar at: http://history.westkingdom.org/ I've not looked to see what other kingdoms have yet (probably should).

The minimal information I feel is required:
- Event Name
- Date
- Hosting Group
- Location (city, state)

Other information that might be nice to have:
- Location (site name)
Mostly useful for site research and to answer the occasional "what site was that?" question.

- RP?
Maybe with a link to the court report on the OP site.

- Autocrat
Only slightly useful on its own. More useful if it is a part of a larger database of people.

- Costs
Might be fun to see how prices have changed over the years, but with the different types, sizes and kinds of events, I'm not sure how useful it would be.

- Full announcement
The West has many of these in their listing. These would be the hardest to enter, but possibly the most useful things from a history/research stand point.

complexated suggested that once it is decided what will be in the listing, that I see if I can get hooked into the EK website's event system so that the information I want is sent right to me when events are added or updated. I'll be looking into this.

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about the what would and would not be useful to include?

Comments

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Some events will be well-served by a more detailed or descriptive name than the formal event name. So a comment-type field explaining that "Field of Acorns and Pearls" was BBM Investiture for example. That can also serve to link up things like "S&M War II" as part of the series now called Great Northeastern War.

We can talk about my adding anchors to the court report documents to enable linking, sure.

[mikekn]

I think just linking to the reign files would be enough. Anchors for each event would be cool, but I'm not looking to make more work for you.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Also, for events that were RP, some way of linking to who the R were, in addition to a court report link. Do you, or the kingdom webminister, keep archival versions of the crowns' own websites?) Must allow for at least two sets of royalty per event (e.g. coronations).

Where possible, links to photos or chronicles either things you have webbed or that the local group has. (This is a LOT of extra legwork, since such stuff can get posted anywhere from 12 hours to several months post facto, and would have to be proactively hunted until the locals get used to furnishing links to you.)

[mare-in-flames.livejournal.com]

I think that including the "costs" section would be fascinating and fun! I would love to see what a site fee was in the year I was born.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

(You might think I could get all my ideas organized into one comment, wouldn't you?)

Yet another comment text field, for notable facts about the event. First event held by new canton, first time East held an event on a Sunday, last principality event before its separation, etc.

If you do it as a relational db, you can express the parent-child relationships, showing cantons under baronies, and principalities under kingdoms. So a Canton of Northpass event would turn up on a list of Northpass events, and also on a list of Ostgardrian events.

[jducoeur]

Yet another comment text field, for notable facts about the event.

I'd actually go further than that, and recommend having specific facilities for *writing* chronicles and descriptions in here. While linking to external ones is great, not that much has really been written down -- most of it is oral history. So I wouldn't think of this as a simple comment field: I'd make it an actual textarea, and allow an arbitrary number of fairly long entries. (For extra points, allow HTML -- since this thing is presumably going to require a trusted login, that's not as dangerous as usual. For real bonus points, screen the HTML to allow only certain tags, so you can have your functionality cake and eat the security as well.)

IMO, this is actually the #1 most useful feature. If you can encourage folks to write down some of that oral history, that would be fabulous, and might make a really important site. That assorted commentary is, IMO, what makes the West Kingdom History Project so interesting...

[cellio]

Seconded. Get other people to do some of the work for you and make it richer at the same time -- sounds like a win to me. :-) You probably still want to have a comment field that you control and that is *distilled* from the others, so people don't have to crawl through 80-bazillion comments to find out that this was the first tourney Sir So-and-so entered, which was the crown that Duke Whatshisname got bumped out in round one of, that was held at the site that isn't there any more in the shire that's now the barony of whatever in another kingdom, that... you get the idea. A field for you to figure out what's important, and a way for people to publicly contribute.

[mikekn]

(if we could do this all in one comment, it wouldn't be much of a brainstorm :) )

[sskipstress.livejournal.com]

When available, PDF copies of whatever paper stuff was handed out to attendees. Photos of site tokens.