The JIS Projects List

This is a compilation of improvements, features, ideas, projects, and dreams for new development of the JIS. There is clearly no limit on how this site can grow and improve. If you have thoughts on improvements that you don't see listed below, please send them here for consideration.

If you would like to get involved in tackling one of these projects, or creating your own, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Send any comments to jis@juggling.org.

• General Thoughts on the JIS

  • There's lots that could be done. One of the first things I need to do is continue putting my ideas into this file, and perhaps people may offer to do some of them that they find interesting.

  • Ram has offered to update the FAQ, but I need to provide some input. Both html and text versions would be nice. There are a lot of things not covered at all in the FAQ that should be. Some things in it now could perhaps be removed.

  • The overall structure of the JIS could use some rethinking. There are probably too many buttons and links from the top page, and more new sections are planned. Some things should be combined.

  • A regional view of information would be nice. One could browse by country, or state or province, and find all clubs, vendors, and festivals in that area.

  • Encourage more regional juggling sites, especially in non-English languages, such as the Swedish JIS.

  • More and better graphics, everywhere. We need an artist and graphic designer to completely redo many of the sections.

  • Extensions to the e-mail services to allow access to all CGI software, such as search tools, club meeting software, etc.

  • An automatically generated Table of Contents for the entire JIS would be very helpful.

  • The Juggling Museum should be created, with historical images, playbills, reviews, old promotional material, classic film clips, and other memorabilia. This should include the section about great jugglers of the past, described below.

  • Create an official list of world juggling records, complete with written explanations for what categories are included, and what the requirements are for acceptance of a record. This addresses the ongoing problem of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies that continue to appear in the Guinness Book of World Records, and the lack of any other authoritative body willing to define and maintain such a list.

  • We could seek support from vendors, and possibly offer advertising space to raise some money for additional services.

  • Do a better job of organizing and using volunteers. Contact those who have offered to help, including:
    • Ram Prasad (naras-r@acsu.Buffalo.edu)
    • Mike Welch (mike@tara.demon.co.uk)
    • Rick Torzynski (magic@nmia.com)
    • David 'Mort' Mortman (mort@rainbow.uchicago.edu)
    • Janell Lehmann (JLEHMANN@dsava.com)
    • Al Shaver (vshaver@piedmont.net)

• Juggling Help

  • I think what is most needed are help pages for the beginning jugglers who want to know what to do next. Often asked for is information on how to do 3 clubs, 4 balls, 5 balls, and 6 club passing.

  • More graphics would be nice to enhance this growing body of information, which is primarily in text and hypertext.

• Jugglers' Home Pages

  • The list of jugglers with home pages is one of the largest files at the JIS. It has gotten nearly useless by growing so large. As we approach 500 jugglers in the list, this file needs to be subdivided somehow. Geographically might be nice, if we can determine how to do it.

  • I would like to see further development of the professional performers section, with many pro acts being added, such as Airjazz, Dick Franco, Anthony Gatto, Kris Kremo, Albert Lucas, and Michael Moschen. Several performers have provided me with material which could be used to create a home page for them, if someone can find the time to put these together.

  • I'd love to see someone start to create the historical section for Great Jugglers of the Past, with pages being created for such acts as Felix Adanos, Ben Beri, Selma Braatz, Bob Bramson, Francis Brunn, Lottie Brunn, Rudi Cardenas, Cinquevalli, The Elgins, William Everhart, W.C. Fields, Serge Flash, Boy Foy, Sergei Ignatov, Kara, Bela Kremo, Trixie Larue, Bobby May, Mel Odey, Enrico Rastelli, Three Swifts, and Massimiliano Truzzi. This can be done as a Juggling Hall of Fame. Andrew Conway has volunteered to get it started.

  • The e-mail home page service is quite popular, serving about 70 otherwise homeless jugglers. But a complete revision using forms to allow interactive creation and editing of text and hypertext pages would be a welcome improvement. Binaries will continue to be a problem, but they could still be handled by the e-mail service, or by cutting and pasting uuencode'd text into the forms.

• News and Old News

  • There are now available packages for news archive browsing via the web that are much superior to the simple tools I created quickly for this purpose. HURL is one of them. Converting to something like this would be good, and would allow threaded browsing, sending public and private responses to messages.

  • Links to various local juggling mailing lists could be compiled here. Several clubs have such lists, as well as some regional organizations. There are juggling mailing lists in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We can provide info on all of them, and possibly archive some of them. I have the complete German mailing list that could be archived. There are also related mailing lists, such as for balloon modeling.

  • The news/mail gateway at Petawawa should be moved to the JIS, if anyone has experience in setting up a Majordomo mailing list. Steve Joyce has offered to continue to maintain it.

• Picture Gallery

  • This could use a dedicated regular maintainer, if not for the whole section, than for each subsection, such as cartoons, promo pics, action shots, etc. Someone with access to a good scanner, and some knowledge of image processing and WWW concerns would be great to find. This could be a much more popular section if someone put work into it, and made regular additions.

• Movie Theater

  • This could also use a dedicated regular maintainer, by someone with the tools to generate MPEG's from video. Unfortunately, we are pushing the technology here, and there are still few people who can play high quality MPEG's, especially with embedded sound. As this technology becomes more accessible, we will want to greatly expand our offerings of quality juggling videos.

• Juggler's Mall

  • Ian Rutson maintains this section. Any suggestions on this section should go directly to him, at mall-info@diabolo.demon.co.uk.

  • We could attempt to help more vendors get online.

• Festivals

  • Rupert Voelcker is already maintaining this section diligently. Any suggestions on this section should go directly to him, at Rupert.Voelcker@bt-sys.bt.co.uk.

  • One thing we might try to do is actively seek an e-mail contact person for each festival, as we are attempting to do for club meetings. If the organizers do not have e-mail access, it is likely we can find someone nearby who attends, who could serve as the e-mail contact. This would be very convenient for online jugglers, but would also allow us to contact these people after their festival is over, to get information on next year's event, assuming there is one. Most festivals are held annually, so we should try to always have information on the next one available, without waiting to be given the information.

  • We could prepare documents to assist people who are putting on a festival, or who would like to try to do one. Gather some collective wisdom, and put it in a document. There were recently posts by thomasl on this, but others have made suggestions as well. We could find someone interested in compiling these into a single document, and have them use the festival archives to find past and upcoming festival organizers to contact for input. THe resulting document could become part of the festival section.

• Club Meetings

  • This needs someone to do the ongoing maintainance of processing the mail messages that come in with updates.

  • As a one time project, we need to actively seek out an e-mail contact person at each club that does not yet have one, as that is essential to opening up communication between the clubs and the JIS, as well as a world-wide network of jugglers, whether they are on the net or not.

  • Produce maps of the world, countries, and states and provinces, showing the locations of all juggling clubs. For all clubs in the US, generate local maps, and where possible, detailed street maps, with the precise location of each club noted. [This is mostly done for the US, but the rest of the world is still to do.]

  • When similar map data for other countries becomes available, provide such detailed maps for all juggling clubs in the world.

  • Create a form to answer the question, "What juggling clubs are near me?" Allow the entry of a distance value to define near, and a way to identify one's location, and return a list of all juggling clubs within that range, with a map showing the location of each. [This is now mostly done, but needs more work.]

  • We could prepare documents to assist people who are trying to create a local juggling club. Gather some collective wisdom, and put it in a document.

• Magazine Rack

  • Getting more magazines archived as is being done for Juggler's World would be nice. Gabi Keast has offered to provide Kaskade, Grant Mathieson has offered The Flying Kiwi, and Ben Decker has offered to cooperate with Two Ply Press. Kym Kaos is thinking about providing Oz Juggle, but has some concerns. We need to get The Catch online, so we can begin talking to them as well.

• Juggler's World Archive

  • There are many more issues of Juggler's World that need conversion to HTML, and much image scanning still to do for many of those that are available in hypertext only.

  • Try to get volunteers organized on this, as it is a significantly time-consuming project.

• Juggling in the Media

  • Clean up, correct, and update the media information.

  • Maintain bibliographies of juggling books, magazine articles.

  • Maintain lists of juggling scenes in movies.

  • Compile indexes of commercially available video tapes, such as are in the indexes produced by Jim Barlow.

  • Juggling Library. Combine magazines, books, essays, movie and video info, and other similar reference material into a complete Juggling Reference Library.

  • Essays

  • Carey Bunks

  • Kit Summers

  • Anna Jillings

• Juggling Software

  • Add screen images for all software, so people have some idea what the software will look like. If possible, show animations of the software in action.

  • Make use of Java site swap viewers in documents that discuss site swaps or simple juggling patterns, as it gives us a simple way of including inline animations that display these things.

  • Organize a major collective software project to create the best possible juggling program, portable and free. I have considerable input on features that might be included.

• Organizations

  • Find a maintainer for the organizations section, and collect additional organizations to include.

  • Create subsections for these organizations, such as the EJA, NZJA, CJA, and any others interested.

• Search for Any Words or Phrases

  • Upgrade the JIS search tool to use the latest version of glimpse, and take advantage of any new features that we can.

• About the Juggling Information Service

  • Update the acknowledgements page, which has many omissions.

  • Create a separate FAQ for the JIS itself.