ANST - Keeping track of who has what awards

[Michael Tucker]

I previously wrote that it was difficult to keep up with who was what awards. To
this, Valentyn wrote:
> 
> I'll offer a solution, though a bit sooner than I had planned -- I've
> written some database software to track information for the youth rapier
> and youth boffer authorizations, warnings, and sanctions.  From there I got
> a little carried away and added sections to record a person's awards, offices,
> and demographic information (household, heraldry, homepage addresses, etc).

Thank you for your offer to share this software, but that's not the problem. The
person responsible for maintaining the Kingdom OP has a database, we have our
card files, others have their own solutions, etc. The problem is in _keeping it
up to date_. That turns out to be a major pain, not because it's particularly
hard (at least not for one group) but because it's a _never-ending_ chore.

In my years in the SCA, I've seen person after person be ground down and worn
out trying to keep the Kingdom OP up to date. As I posted previously, I'd _love_
to just use the on-line OP, or download it to my Palm computer. But it's 6
months to a year out of date, and I haven't thought of a way to fix that. I
think we could hope for at most 6 weeks out of date, if reporting heralds always
turned in their reports punctually and if the "keeper of the OP" entered the
data promptly upon receipt. But the former doesn't always happen, and the latter
is hard to do every time. So... any ideas?

Yours,
Michael Silverhands
Baron of Stargate
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