We have taken on a lot, and are looking for help at all levels. If you love athletics, and have some relevant skills and spare time, we welcome offers of help.

Appeal for photos

We urgently need some good royalty-free photos to build an attractive site. To get the next slice of funding, it’s really important that we can explain to non-athletes that this is a big, happy sport - and in some cases, to explain quickly in a picture what a road relay or a funnel actually is.

The safest way to achieve this is for the photographer to give us permission. So if you have a good pic or two which shows the sport in a good light, please send it in!

• all disciplines, from track and field, cross country and road relays
• from school sports day up to veterans
• an emphasis on the team and club aspect of the sport
• plenty of sunshine, as our XC pics from winter tend to lack this ;-)
• officials at work - timing, judging, photo finish, funnels - to help illustrate how the sport works

We will give you full credit.

If you wish to go further and make some photos free for ANYONE to use to promote the sport, we’re starting a royalty-free collection; read more on our Open Data page.

Note that for close-up pictures of children who are still young, whoever the photographer, we prefer parent’s permission.

Please email pics to opentrack at reportlab dot com. Don’t send loads; just one or two each please.

Web and Graphic Design

As you can tell, we could immediately use some help creating a strong brand, with a good logo and certain other assets. The logo needs to tell anyone that this is about changing the sport through advanced technology.

We plan to offer some very attractive, visual results services so there is work to do creating reusable stylesheets.

Writers

We can always use people willing to write documentation: how-to guides with screenshots, FAQs and so on.

API and Standards Design

If you have experience of creating APIs that worked in the real world, or of standards-forming processes, please let us know. We have to set standards at a “common sense” level that will work for people in the sport (i.e. columns and fields to use in spreadsheets), as well as in terms of JSON documents with validation.

Data scientists

We aim to build big databases on clean foundations, and will be producing data sets which are available for research because they are labelled as Open Data from the start

Back end developers: Python, Django, MySQL and MOngo

Our platform is likely to involve Django, Mongo, ReST APIs and OAuth2. To date we have been Django developers, but we aim to decouple front and back ends.

Front end developers

If you know all about bower, grunt, minification and the like, and can build easy-to-user interfaces which talk to ReST APIs, we want to hear from you.

As part of the FIWARE project, We aim to build next-generation components using Google Polymer, to make it easier to plug together systems down the road. Web Components should make it possible to build reusable ‘club pickers’, data input fields that understand times or distances and so on. However, Polymer won’t yet work in all browsers, so we’re doing plenty with good old Bootstrap and JQuery.

Meteor

If anyone knows their way around the Meteor framework, we’d love to talk. Nothing could be better for real-time event management.

Contributors

In vaguely chronological order…

• Nicola Fleet of Croydon Harriers - analysis, testing and design of system
• Peter Kennedy, BMAF IT Manager - analysis, design and testing, and a comprehensive athletes and clubs database to get us started
• Martin Alvarez-Espina provided a complete list of Spanish clubs and tracks
• Richard Holt of Momentum Sports - photos
• Gus Upton