ArmouryDatabasePipeDream

This is a pipe dream of how the armoury might work if we lived in the Future where people kept databases of information up to date and I had the coding-fu to implement a nice website frontend on a nice packing-problem-solving algorithm. Hopefully thinking about the ideal will help us work out which bits of information would be most helpful to collect and motivate people to actually collect them this time.

Every piece of kit, place where kit is stored, and method of transporting kit would have some kind of identifier associated with it. This includes personal kit, potentially even personal kit that you have no intention of lending out as long as you are willing to wear it as a monster.

A piece of kit carries the following information:

• What it is (probably with some kind of optional 'tagging' system for colour, coverage, size, usefulness for certain monster types to make searching easier)
• Where it is
• How much space it takes up
• Who is allowed to use it under what circumstances (e.g. 'only Rosie is allowed to use this', 'anyone who has asked Tom and taken personal responsibility for this kit's safe return', hopefully in some kind of sane way that allows automatic assignment or contacting of relevant parties)
• Who is allowed to store it under what circumstances

A location carries the following information:

• How much stuff it can store
• Who should be contacted to arrange delivery/pickup from it
• What can be stored there under what circumstances (preferably in some way which is easily convertable to a list of items)
• Information on when delivery/pickup from it is likely to be feasible, where that differs from 'evenings of interactives and days of linears'

A transport method (which includes 'people walking and carrying stuff' as well as 'cars which can be loaded up with kit') carries the following information:

• How much stuff it can store
• Who should be contacted to arrange use of it
• Possibly what it will carry under what circumstances (although it's probably a safer assumption that anyone willing to transport kit is willing to transport any requested kit that will fit, whereas it's not a safe assumption that anyone willing to store kit is willing to store just any kit)
• Information on when its use is likely to be feasible, where that differs from 'evenings of interactives and days of linears'

The intention behind putting together all this information is as follows:

Refs planning an interactive or linear can go to the interface for this information and set up a kit order for that event, and the underlying program will offer possible solutions for getting the requested items from their locations (likely of the form 'email foo and ask them to bring bar, email baz and ask them to pick stuff up from quux's house in their car, don't forget to ask foobar if you can use their stuff for this at all') or alert the refs that there isn't enough transport capacity to get the items to the event and they need to pick less items or bully more people into providing item transport (note this includes carrying stuff by hand while walking as well as loading up carfuls of kit).

People who have stuff they want to donate to the armoury (or refs who want to order new kit) can find a storage location for it by looking at the storage location information (or find that there are no storage locations).

When a storage location becomes unavailable or shrinks in size, items will try to find other locations to be, and alert appropriate people if there is no space for them any more (then the appropriate people, probably refs and exec, can decide whether to chuck some stuff out to make room or whether to nag people until more storage space appears).