Player ID by Mark Guthrie

[Juha Luostarinen]

I put Mark's email here, so all would be at the same place

Hi Juha and everyone,

 Apologies for being no good with all of this collaboration technology, I'll pick it up I promise!

 My thoughts on this:

 * There is some great communication and we should be able to come up with something that works - great start!

* We should set low targets first - no country is going to give up on their numbering system and adopt something else any time soon

* What we need is a mapping from country id to international id (and then back to another country id)

* I think we have lost if we make the country name somehow part of the global identifier, it should be properly international and one of the things you can get once you have someone's global identifier is all of their country ids. e.g. I am 123456 in Australia. You look me up in the global directory and find my global id is 45678. Now you can find that I am also ABCDEF in the EBU and WXYZ in the ACBL. And maybe QWERTY on BBO and AAAAA on Real Bridge. If I move countries then the country shouldn't follow me. I don't like being AU-123456 because I first register in Australia.

* I don't think bridgemates matter for this - they are a problem for each country to solve (which they have done already).

* Checksums are a good idea, one character is enough though.

 Maybe I am not setting as high a goal as some of you but I think if we got to a point where we had a simple translation database that could take someone in one country and map them to the same person in another country then we would have achieved a lot. Someone in each country could be responsible for uploading their own data, I think the hard part is keeping it clean and working out who is a duplicate and who is a new person. I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of that. In Australia we already have duplicate players and that is only one country. I am sure this problem exists elsewhere.

 Thinking ahead, how nice would it be as a new player in Italy to be told you are registered as DFGHJ in Italy and your international number (for when you play globally) is 12345678. That would be quite something.

 (And no, I don't want to be Juha's suggested project manager!)

 cheers

 Mark

[Juha Luostarinen]

Ohh shitt Mark. While reading your mail, I thought you would be a good head for us. But you did decline.

I don't know how WBF data looks now, but this could be the working process. Is there some troubles I can't see?

• Player international ID. Why we just can't let it be what ever - maybe all numbers generated from 1.000.000 to 999.999.999. That ID follows player always like a finger print. That ID is just a number and no other data in it. Of course there would be a record for dead players, and that number could be free after some time? Let WBF decide.
  
• When the nationally changes, the data comes from new nationally after old country put it hold or something.
• NBOs keep records from the data they want. Club changes too. There is also the player international ID.
• In national tournaments Bridge Mates working like now, and in International tournaments could use player's fingerprint ID. Or...always using international number. I think one way is the best. No worries there...
  

After countries sending data to WBF the common divisor is that international ID, and data goes to right player no matter what country he/she represents. Simple?