[texbirds] Re: Century Club

  • From: David Sarkozi <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: D D Currie <ddbirder@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Lamont Brown <lamont@xxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 08:48:53 -0500

Lamont and D.D.

Lamont, your 16 page process is just crazy complicated, and it
completely overlooks how does someone know where to send updates to?
Your process is essentially an email calling tree, way too many points
of failure.

I've come to the conclusion the Century Club has to become self
service. I think it serves the spirit and mission of TOS best if that
data go into eBird. Tens of thousands of new data points are being
generated by this. Those who are not entering in to eBird are not
contributing to an interesting data set.

I've found a way to get eBird into the TXCC website, go to
http://www.texascenturyclub.org and click on "Chambers Test" on the
main menu on the left. This displays the top 100 life lists for
Chambers County in eBird. Note that many of the names have a "cc"
after the last name. This is something I asked people to add to their
last name in eBird so when I was updating county totals in eBird I
knew you were participating and would update your totals when I was
updating a county and saw you had a new total. This could also address
the concern of knowing who you were competing with.

Back entering old data isn't a huge chore into eBird either. You can
do a mass upload, of data. worst case is you upload the data under one
date and mark it "hide from output" and then all the records are
automatically invalidated. Invalidated records still show in your
totals, but don't show on maps and charts for eBird. If you are using
Avisys still, I understand it has tools now to export to eBird.

If I can not get enough buy to support using eBird, then the website
site could be converted to MediaWiki, the platform that Wikipedia is
built on. Then people could register, and update their own totals.
There could also be community supported guides to individual counties,
to aid othesr working on their lists.

In the end, we're just not going to make everyone happy, I tried to do
that and that's how we got here. I've outlined two options on my
vision of where we can go from here and welcome feedback on them.

-- 
David Sarkozi
Houston, TX
(713) 412-4409 twitter ID dsarkozi

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 7:58 AM, D D Currie <ddbirder@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> David Sarkowzi and I have visited a few times about TXCC. I have put together 
> a 16-page document describing what I believe to be the best overhaul of TXCC. 
> I will be happy to send a copy to all TOS Board members and even meet with 
> you to discuss this project overhaul at a future meeting. There is no pride 
> of authorship in this document as it can be reworked and massaged to make the 
> TXCC viable. It is simply a nice place to start in the process.

> There are ways that even the current data entry can be streamlined without 
> having to import from eBird. Over the last six months or so I have added 
> Brady Surber, Vernon, to take about 20 counties in Regions 1 and 2. Also 
> Steve Welborn, Quanah has taken 30 or more Region 1 and 2 counties as editor. 
> He is willing to do more as we can streamline the process. Additionally Steve 
> has shared some really good ideas with me in the planning process, many of 
> which I incorporated into the planning document mentioned above.
>
> Lastly, I would hate to see the TXCC be exclusively based upon submissions to 
> eBird. First I do not want to be in competition in a county with everyone 
> that ever lived or ever submitted data to eBird. I want to be in friendly 
> competition with all of you [those] that WANT to play the game. Secondly 
> there are at least two and possibly more TXCCers that do not contribute to 
> eBird. Having this as a requirement would necessarily push out some good 
> birders.
> Lamont Brown
> Denton and Harlingen
>
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