History of AYSO Wiki

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The AYSO Wiki was initially conceived by Randy Harr in 2007 as he was leaving his RC post and becoming an AD. He had many dedicated, senior volunteers on his regional staff that were leaving but had not yet transferred their knowledge. In many cases, they desired to have it captured to pass onto the next person as they had done much to improve the process and system. It took another year of back burner investigation and work before it was clear how to solve this issue — an online Wiki similar to the Wikipedia along with other features of Content Management Systems (CMS). It would be another 7 months before Randy found the time and impetus, beyond simply doing his normal volunteer job in addition to coaching and refereeing, to get the site templates developed and initial content captured for use by others. It was in February 2009 that the site was made fully public with demonstrations given at the Section 2 / 9 Conference in Sacramento that year.

Unfortunately, those original volunteers whose information needed to be captured are long out of the picture now. But hopefully others will come along that can benefit and contribute from the initial start.

Dave Elward become the first user and has contributed many files and archives of material he has collected over the years.

Many others havesince registered but the sought after grass roots movement to fill in the material is not yet ramped up. Since this time, the new ayso.org site to replace the old soccer.org one is up and showing tremendous improvement in useful information contained, easily found, and linkable to from other sites. But the content is still strictly controlled by the National office with a process of vetting that occurs before information is posted. So time will tell which model, if not both, will work for the volunteer community best.

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