Working with the Star Island Corporation

Conversations with Ron Cordes and others indicated that SIC was working on its own registration interface. Recent information from Scott Tombleson indicates that the situation will be mostly the same as last year. See the text of his correspondence at the bottom of this page. Our registrar will still be required to manually enter conferee information into the SIC system. This is a major pain but we have little choice in the matter. Scott did offer to work with us to create some sort of downloadable output file so that we can retrieve a summary of what we enter the SIC system.

Goals & Strategies

It is highly desirable to automate an export/import process so their db can take a data stream from ours & visa versa. Data integrity is important for everyone so we don't want anyone entering data twice — we need to know that the exact same information is in both of our db's.

• If we can't export to SIC, we might consider the possibility using their system as the main repository for conferee information. This would probably mean revising our data tables to be more like theirs. Presumably SIC will share table format schemas with us; there's no good reason to keep them secret.
• It might be sensible to arrange things so that Rodney can enter a minimal amount of information in our system as each application comes in. Once the Chairs have made the initial acceptances, Rodney would then do the full entry into the SIC system, download the data from them and upload it into our system. As cancellations and waitlist acceptances occur, he would make the changes on the SIC system, fetch the changed data, and re-upload it to keep us in sync.

Correspondence

The following was sent to Scott Tombleson at SIC on Oct 1.

Thanks for the info. My main interest is to update/redesign our All Star II registration and conference jobs database in a way that makes life easy for all concerned.

Since it sounds like any automation of the registration process from the conferee point of view will be our responsibility for 2006, the information from you that would help us most is as much detail as you can presently provide about the interfaces, file formats, and protocols for communication between SIC and AS2.

We'd love to be able to automatically upload our conferee list to your system and retrieve room assignments and any other needed information. In the final days before the conference, we'd like to easily update changes due to cancellations and new acceptances from the wait list.

I need to have some further discussions with Rodney, our registrar, plus this year's and last year's chairs to clarify their needs. Knowing the technical details on your end will help me to efficiently frame a design that meets their needs and works with what you're planning to have in place.

In the spirit of 'I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours' :-), here is some of my current thinking for the AS2 registration system:

I'm looking seriously into converting our existing FileMaker system to a Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python web interface. This will give us maximum flexibility for the future. It will certainly be feasible, for example, to provide you a password-protected web page from which to download a CSV file with whatever field order and formats we mutually agree on.

From a database design standpoint, I want to move us away from our present indexing system based on on family identity to one based on application forms and individual identities. The reason for this is that families mutate from year to year due to divorce, remarriage, birth, adoption, reaching adulthood, etc. From a registration standpoint, it seems to me that the concept of family is significant only in the following ways:

• We are a family conference and reserve the right to ask applicants to revise and resubmit applications that don't constitute a family in our very broad and liberal sense of that word.
• Family identity is important for room assignments, but that information is available directly from the application's roommate requests.

I mention the family issue because my understanding is that there was some difficulty interfacing last year and that differences between SIC's and AS2's family codes contributed in some way.

I hope you find the above at least mildly useful. I look forward to hearing from you about the details of next year's interface from SIC's viewpoint.

And Scott responded on Oct 29, 2005 as follows:

Hi Mike,

I wrote this offline a few weeks ago and forgot to send it. My apologies.

The only interface in the plan for this year is one similar to last year’s Online Registration. Hopefully it will be a bit more polished and provide more useful information for the conference registrars after the data is entered. There will be no interface aside from the online data entry by the Conference Registrars this year. There are a number of other systems used by other conferences, and as I’m sure you can understand, Star needs to go for the biggest bang for its limited bucks, and that means a good clean easy to use interface that all conferences use.

While I think your idea of indexing based on registration forms sounds good, and if I was starting from scratch I might go in that direction, quite frankly the idea of families and family membership is a pretty fundamental part of the design of SIC’s database and I don’t see it changing without a MAJOR rewrite. You are correct that family membership is a dynamic thing and is therefore one that requires a good deal of maintenance, but those relationships are important to Star for purposes beyond the registration process.

Data input will not be automated this year, at least in terms of an upload to the star system. One thing to keep in mind however is that conferees that have been to Star in the past will have a majority of their demographic data pre-populated after a search and only information specific to their registration to the conference this year will need to be entered. The only complete data entry for a conferee will be for people new to star. I would like to solicit your help in defining the output to the extent that I can make it happen within my limited contract with Star. It will definitely be a downloaded file after the data entry happens. But I’m open for suggestions about what it would look like and what information it will contain.

One thing to note about room assignments is that it changes all the time (usually up to and even after the conferees arrive on the island). I believe any report about that information should be initiated from the Island Registrar when assignments are nearly complete. This happens later than you might think. If people need to be moved, based on unreported medical conditions for example, the Island Registrar needs to have the flexibility to do that without having to worry about displaced people complaining about their room being changed. So therefore that information needs to be handled with care and released only when the Island registrar deems it OK.

Let me know if I can provide you with any further information.

Thanks

Scott