Clubfinder

There are a million and one club-finders on the web in various states of decay, each having set out to be more accurate or user-friendly than the last and then abandoned. It is quite hard to get stale information updated or amended in those abandoned datasets.

All of them should be redundant of course, since our NGBs should have comprehensive and full-featured club-finders exported direct from their databases of Affiliated Clubs. However, this is apparently not the case. I would say props to the NRA who (since I wrote this in January!) have very recently updated theirs to list clubs by region, giving people a bit of a hand as to where helpfully-titled organisations like “Albion Gun Club” are based (East of England apparently).

However, the NSRA’s is still languishing, and I note that some clubs are omitted from the NRA’s finder.

An open Clubfinder

So is it worth building a cross-NGB database? One that covers both NRA and NSRA clubs, as well as FT, airgun and UKPSA clubs. The problem of course is that each time someone sets out to build a new club finder that is up-to-date they have to start from scratch, inevitably piling data into their own private silo. Then they lose interest, and it goes stale. Until the next one… rinse and repeat.

I think there is merit in going another way. Instead of building a clubfinder website, I am now hosting a repo containing an SQLite database with a basic listing of clubs, along with their County/Country and web address. It also contains a rough idea of their discipline coverage and whether or not they are a University Club.

There are just over 400 clubs in so far, covering Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. I’ve been entering English clubs by county and am up to “London”.

There is no front-end. I’m not a designer. It’s just a database licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 which allows you to use and modify it for any purpose (including commercial) so long as you Attribute the source and indicate/document any changes you have made. Do with it as you will. Build stuff on top of it. And as I add more clubs, you can just drop in the latest DB copy and they’ll magically appear in your club finder. If I get bored, then someone else can take it on without starting from scratch! I built it using Liya which is free and dead simple. But there are a bunch of other tools for wrangling SQLite files.

And before you reach for your pots of green ink, this dataset contains no GDPR-Regulated data. It also contains no precise location data such as physical addresses, postcodes or coordinates.

It is my hope that in the future, organisations and associations can use this data source in their club finders and receive updates by simply copying in the latest version of the database.