Scroll Database
Target Users: Scribal Community
The proposal seems like a good fit for Querki: as described, it's downright quick and easy, just a few minutes' work.
Should have one more field, for Calligrapher, which is often separate from both the artist and the author.
Also needs a field for what the award / recognition is, so folks can look up, eg, the texts of past Troubadours. This will be a common use case, since one of the major questions this is supposed to answer is, "show me some example texts for this scroll I need to create".
Bureaucracy
I expect the biggest challenge for this project is the Kingdom bureaucracy. There is a strong tendency towards micro-management and NIH Syndrome, that leads to demanding that everything run on the Kingdom's own servers. Even pace that, for this project to succeed it would require significant buy-in from the scribes to actually use it.
Design Outline
Security
The most interesting challenge is Security. Each entry really ought to be written before the scroll is given, since it is hard to get all the info once it is out the door. But scrolls are usually secret, so the entry must be visible only to a tiny subset of people until it is awarded. In theory, there should be a "Has Been Given" flag, and the page is only publicly visible if that is set.
This could be hacked, using manual code with _hasPermission in order to manage who can actually read the webpage, but that's ad-hoc and a bit risky. A better approach would be to finally implement Who Can Read Computed, and set it to something like [[_if(Has Been Given, Public, Editors)]]. This would be a QL expression that takes a Thing and produces a List of Security Principals. It could be implemented inefficiently in the current framework, but would ideally be calculated once and cached in the Dynamic Cache. Done correctly, that should provide rock-solid security.
Also: this is probably the straw that breaks the camel's back, and demands that Created By get added to the DB. In particular, we probably want scribes to be able to add entries, but only be able to see entries they have created. Conceptually, this is the Contributor / Editor split, but there's a problem: Contributor doesn't have any way to let you see Things you have contributed. So we really want Who Can Read Computed to include Created By -- I should be able to see scrolls I've added, so that I can edit / update them. (This might actually want to be part of the standard for Contributor, but that needs more thought.)
Interview Notes
The original proposal, from Lillie:
We'd talked about the possibility of a list or database (or something) that would contain scroll texts given out in the SCA. I know it would be hard to put texts that have already been put out (unless some scribe was very industrious and documented all of the scrolls they worked on), but at the very least we can input those which go out from now on.
The basic idea I had in my head is that it would be a list of all the scrolls given out, and then if you click on the name it's hyperlinked to a picture of the scroll and the text, with a few other vital pieces of info. The info I think we need to capture is the following:
A picture of the finished scroll
The artist who did the calligraphy
The text of the finished scroll
Also include a translation, if needed.
The author of the scroll text
Date the scroll was given
King and Queen giving the scroll (or if a local area scroll, Baron/Baroness/etc.)
Links to inspirational sources of the text or artwork
If it's anything more complicated than a google doc or a basic Wordpress page, I won't have the computer expertise to create it. But I think this project is something that would help the scribal and heraldic communities immensely and I'd be willing to help however I can, including doing a lot of the inputting of past scrolls into the document if needed.
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