Crew Manager Support Forum

It would be very cool if in Yacht Scoring and Regatta Network (and other Scoring Products),
1) A CM Skipper can post a crew needed request against a race in CM, and it then appeared in Scoring Products. From Scoring Product, a link is available to jump into crew manager for the boat seeking crew.
2) Unknown Crew can post availability a desire in Scoring Product, as they do today, or perphaps with a few more data fields like home town and skills.
3) A CM Skipper can receive notification when Unknown crew (i) Chooses the skippers boat (ii) simply posts their availabillity in scoring product.
4) In addition to notification, when the skipper is in CM on a specific race, they can see how many Unknown Crew are looking for races for a specific event.
5) If we choose an Unknown Crew, we can see more information and Invite them to our boat. Crew Manager would ask us the additional questions needed to add crew to our roster, e.g. maybe Display Name is all that is needed?
6) If necessary, we have the ability to pay a fee to scoring product / crew manager for enabling the match up.
7) Unknown Crew and Crew Manager Boats can comment give each other a rating from 1 to 5 stars, about the experience, exactly like Uber
8) In addition to above, Scoring Products allow Unknown Crew to offer availability to Yacht Clubs with a URL. E.g. we can give out a URL in advertisements to the effect, scan this QR code to get matched up with a sailboat skipper at our yacht club.
9) The Ideal integration, will indicate the current status of an Unknown Crew, with status, "Invited to a boat, pending acceptance", "Taken", Available, "Available but has turned down {list of boats}" so skippers can work together to attempt to get all possible Uknown Crew onto a boat, one way or the other to support the sport of sailing.

Scoring products benefit - If crew can find boats, more boats register for events, yacht clubs pay scoring products by number of boats in events
Crew Manager benefits - Crew manager skippers have a huge leg up in finding crew, over anyone else.
Sport of Sailing benefits - Make it easier to reach out to past sailors, and get them into races

Dan - an interesting concept. Can you please post some real world links on these sites to show examples of what is there?

Crew Manager automatically creates links for the Regatta Manager (Yachtscoring, Regatta Network, Netsailor and Jibeset.net) hosted regattas. Each of these sites has a protocol with a unique ID associated with an event, and some sort of consistent structure to develop the links for items such as notice board, scratch sheet, results, etc. Crew Manager detects if the Regatta Manager unique event link has been saved in either of these fields - Payment Link on Crew - Regatta Registration Status page, or on the event itself either the Website URL or Payment Link. A check is done to see if any of the Regatta Manager event URLs are entered, and if they are will generate the standard links for that event automatically.

The highest level of integration is with Jibeset.net (Northern California) where we were able to work out an API so that Crew Manager sends a request, and Jibeset.net returns a JSON encoded response with specific fields populated. I have been unsuccessful so far in getting the other Regatta Managers to provide the same level of access that Jibeset.net provides. For the other Regatta Managers a brute force method is used where Crew Manager will read the Regatta Manager's event page and use routines to detect and grab the unique URLs. This is know as web scraping and subject to errors or missing items if the Regatta Manager changes their page structure at all.

Some questions to be answered and comments include:
1. What data does the Regatta Manager make publicly available? If information such as contact information, name, etc are not made visible, it would not be possible to detect and grab that.

2. Is the data structured so that it is easy to get specific fields? If the information is free form text it is almost impossible to have a routine that reliably gets the correct information.

3. I am aware that some yacht clubs and events have their own boards to post crew wanted / available type posts. Most that I have looked at are stale and once posted never get updated with status (e.g. found a boat or found crew).

A suggestion might be for you to contact the Regatta Managers whom you use for events and say - I have this great idea with a need for my boat that could apply for almost all the boats who register for events through your site! If they respond positively, further coordination could be done.