CONGRATULATIONS NIGEL!
My colleague at University of Bath and fellow EJU Level 4 Judo coach, Nigel Thompson made the news yesterday, when his club secured new premises.



The Judo Club has seemingly been chasing the building for quite some time. So it is excellent news. Hopefully it means Nigel gets a permanent mat area and will be able to do great stuff there.

Hi,
here are some more thoughts on what I think would be a brilliant project, an Open Source Judo software package.

Platform: Web based, with formatting for iPhone/Mobile.

Areas:
. Members DB
. Class register
. Fees
. Contest management, entries etc.
. Contest scoreboard
. Contest draws
. Contest results
. Coaching programme management (Class plans etc)
. Athlete programme management (Periodisation, testing, etc)
. Grading records
. Syllabus management
. Communication. Newsletters, PR, social networking etc
. Rankings
. Calendar management
. Grading management
. Certification management (coaches, officials etc).
. Education - provide tools to teach for certifications, classes etc.

Technology:
. PHP (it is the "working mans" language) large developer base.
. CakePHP - Good solid MVC Framework.
. MySQL or XML. how to store the data and at what cost? Avoiding a DB "might" improve portability??
. OAuth - For authentication between installs
. XML - Data transfers, Data exprts, etc.

Concepts:
. OPEN - Open Source, so we can leverage a large pool of talent and it can benefit all Judoka. Also open standards so XML, JSON, RSS, etc.
. Federated - Make it possible/easy to share data between isstallation where relevant
. Secure/Private - Ensure all sharing/federating is done securely and that the users know its being shared and control it.
. Modular - Make a core and then create modules. So a club will have a set of modules, a tournament a different set, NGB another.
. Multi-lingual - Judo is a global sport so we need to support languages from the start.

Overview:
As it seems to me, the idea would be to build a core system, that allows modules to be simply added and removed via the system. Federation and user management would be in the core app. Functionality pertaining to the activities of a club, player, coach, NGB, tournament organiser would be included in modules.


Thoughts?

Hi All,


I have created some CDs for podcast episodes from www.thejudopodcast.eu starting with the first series. They are available on Lulu.com.

This is the first time I have used Lulu, so I'd appreciate any feedback.

By the way I found a book on Judo games on Lulu also, looks interesting, anyone have it? ( http://www.lulu.com/content/2016759 )



Lance.

Hi everyone,
below is a short draft article I am writing for a Judo coaching course, I woudl appreciate your opinions/comments on it. It is a very early draft so your polish would be much appreciated.

What I am trying to do is explain why writing with references is important and worthwhile, I think I am missing the mark at the moment, do you agree?

Lance

Introduction:

Judo coaches are entrusted with educating their students, this is a responsibility that we should treat with great seriousness.
What we tell students is taken as fact and should be exactly that; yet how do we know or show that what we say is fact and not an old wives tale?
Referencing... that's how.

Referencing is the discipline of showing where your information comes from. Rather than just saying that Judo was created in 1882, you need to say where you you learnt this little fact.
So where did you learn this fact? Who said this?
This source of the information is your reference, you need to "cite" your reference in your writing and then list all the references at the end of what you write.

Why?
By providing these citations and your reference list, you show where your information comes from. You show where you learned, you provide a path that another coach could follow.
This could be so that they could check your facts, or simple so they have a better understanding of your train of thought. Of course, it also gives them a good reading list should they want to learn more about the areas you are writing about.

It is also good manners and an important way of showing respect for the people who have provided the knowledge that you are sharing.
It is also important academically to show what is your opinions or findings and what is the work of others. You do not with to steal others works, referencing others works in your work, shows this.



How to cite a reference:
Now this is slightly tricky as there are a variety of methods of referencing. There is the AMA method where a simple number in superscript is added to the text and the number refers to the source listed at the end of the document. At the University of Bath (on the Judo courses) we are using the APA method. In the APA method we need to include in the text of your work the name of the author(s) and the year the source was published. At the end of your document you list all your references by the authors last name.

Now to cite a reference that said that Jigoro Kano founded the Kodokan in 1882, you might cite of of the many books that include this fact like this:

Jigoro Kano founded the Kodokan in 1882 (Kashiwazaki & Nakanishi, 1992)⁠ .

or better yet you might cite several sources, which adds more weight and authenticity to what you are stating, better yet, you might phrase what you are stating as their opinion after all they might be wrong, you would do this as follows:

Jigoro Kano founded the Kodokan in 1882 according to Kashiwazaki & Nakanishi (1992)⁠ and this is supported by other authors (James Pedro, Jimmy Pedro, & Durbin, 2001; Sterkowicz & Maslej, 1999; Villamon, Brown, Espartero, & Gutierrez, 2004)⁠.

As you can see, you can use the authors name in the text and just put the publication date in brackets, you can also put a collection of authors together.
At the end of your document you then need to list all the references, something like this:

Kashiwazaki, K., & Nakanishi, H. (1992). Attacking Judo (p. 136). Ippon Books.
Pedro, J., Pedro, J., & Durbin, W. (2001). Judo Techniques & Tactics (p. 192). Human Kinetics.
Sterkowicz, S., & Maslej, P. (1999). An evaluation of the technical and tactical aspects of judo matches at the senior level.
Villamon, M., Brown, D., Espartero, J., & Gutierrez, C. (2004). Reflexive Modernization and the Disembedding of Judo from 1946 to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 39(2), 139-156. doi: 10.1177/1012690204043458.


Zotero:
You can probably tell by now that to wrote in this manner takes time and energy. The easiest way to make your life easier is to maintain a database of your references and use that database to write your citations and reference list. There are several products that can do this, including the build in system in Word 2007. T system I use and recommend is a free software package called Zotero.

Zotero consists of two components, a plugin for the (also free) Firefox web browser and extensions for Word or Open Office, that adds the citations and reference lists to your work. having the software in Firefox is handy as it is often from the internet you shall find academic papers. of course you can add books or other non electronic references by hand. Once the information is in the database, you are able to access it from buttons within Word or Open Office.

The process of installing these software packages I shall show in a later post. But it is pretty easy, so please do visit http://www.zotero.org and try it for yourself.


Summary:

As a coach in the modern day and age, the time has passed when you could simply say something as a fact without stating where you learned what you are saying.
You are able to cite all sorts of sources, such as videos, lectures, workshops, DVDs, CD-ROMs, Websites, etc.

Hopefully this article has helped explain why referencing is so important and why it has value to you, your colleagues and your students.
I look forward to seeing more Judo articles that are referenced and to following the clues (citations) you leave behind so I can understand your thinking even better.

Lance

I took a little time this morning to visit the BJA forum. Mainly because I was getting some good traffic to www.thejudopodcast.eu from them as "Features" posted a link to the latest episode where I discuss the new rules being tested at the Junior Worlds with Luke Preston from Camberley Judo Club, who is there as one of the British coaches.

Anyway... after having re-requested my password yet again, just so i could have a look around, I spotted a thread started by "BobC" about a system to manage the 2012 Olympic Judo. So I posted a reply in the thread (included below).

Now, to be frank "I went off on one" a bit and it was only partially related to the topic. What I describe is an idea that has been bubbling around in my head for a while. I have even spoken to people in the EJU about it and got a little support. The idea is to build a Open Source Judo management system.

It has been higher up on my agenda partially because of a podcast by Mike and Gene ( www.thejudopodcast.com ), where they discussed Dojo management software.

What I would dearly love to see is a single modular system that any club, governing body or event organiser could use. Something that was FREE, both as in beer and as in Freedom. An Open Source software solution for what I like to call the Open Source Martial Art.

What do you think?

Lance.

My post from the BJA forum is below:

Hi all,
sending text messages is not that far out there. It is dead easy in fact to do from software. It's just a matter of if you/we are willing to pay for all those text messages.

My opinion would be to build a web based system (with iPhone and Mobile support of course). Registration, draws, results, scoreboard all driven from same system. All with RSS outputs etc. so it could be syndicated easily.

Ideally... and this is my "pie in the sky" idea, it should be part of a larger project to develop a federated Judo management system. One that would be suitable for clubs and smaller events also.

So you could have a installation on you club site which manages your membership, class register, fees etc. From there the BJA would have an installation with different modules. They would be "pushed" (or possible pull) membership details as appropriate and approved by the club system.

Events would again have an installation, clubs would push from their system entries to that event (this could be tied to the BJA system, so that valid membership etc is confirmed by machines). During the event the software does what is suggested in this thread so far. It creates a RSS feed that other sites like the BJA, EJU, IJF, PlanetJudo, BBC, local papers, etc. could parse and include automatically.

Obviously, the BJA system could federate to the EJU and a EJU installation could federate to the IJF. And vice versa. So perhaps the IJF installation pushes the rules as a XML file. The EJU and IJF systems could receive that and use it.

The system(s) could be used to link into/from sites like JudoInside or my own RWJL.net.

If effort is put into creating connectivity between the systems it would mean amazing possibilities. For example, if all the clubs automatically told the BJA system how many people they had on the mat, and the BJA and other NGBs aggregated that info together and pushed it to the EJU and the same is repeated to the IJF you could have near realtime statistics on how many people do Judo worldwide. Equally the IJF data could be accessed by a club installation to show that data on their sites.

Returning slowly to the topic of this thread. Building such a system for 2012 would be great as part of the "Legacy" of the games. To make it happen I would say we would want to develop this as an Open Source project that anyone could contribute to.

Lance