Since I started laying airsoft, the inner nerd in me led me to keep a paper-based log of all of the times that I played. It felt like a good idea at the time.
As my son became old enough to join our team and play with us, we took pleasure in recording the logs each time we went out to play airsoft. The little log book actually became quite a useful resource to remember where we’d been and what happened when.
And then one day, one of our team members asked a question like “when was it that…” and I knew that the log book contained the answer. I got it out of my kit bag and at this point nobody but my son and I was aware of the log. Our team were surprised by this but also really pleased that we’d kept this record of who, where, when etc, and it quickly helped us to answer the question that we’d been unable to recall before.
What then happened was that everyone in the team wanted to have a read of my log, especially the notes section where we’d tried to record the important aspects of each of our game days. All that I can say is thank goodness I hadn’t recorded comments like “Toby was a pain in the ass today” or “John didnt play very well”. It was all positive and appropriate!
The more that we talked about the log though, the sudden thought hit my that why on earth arent I recording this information digitally. As a web developer this wouldnt be overly complex for me to achieve and so this was when the project began. We realised that once we have these logs in the cloud, it’s be easy to share them with our team members and people could comment and upload their own photos etc from the games. There is just so much opportunity with the idea…
The other important part of how the idea quickly evolved was with our friends from Ammo Hive who are also members of our Honey Badgers team. As the web developer I’d created their website for them and we’d also included an Airsoft Game Site Direectory. We agreen that this data could be included into the Airsoft Log project, and then the individual game logs could power user feedback and reviews of everywhere people played. A game directory with real ratings and feedback would be a great resource to have.