About Gallopoli

Gallopoli started as a hobby project/idea to see if it were possible to create an easy-to-use system for tracking stillwater gala results.

You too, can get involved with Gallopoli.

The challenges faced with a near realtime scoring system in our environment include:

• there are a number of last minute entry changes
• heats are often altered on the fly in order to avoid "empty" heats
• timekeeping is done manually
• names are often mis-spelled
• ages are ambiguous when confirmed with an exhausted athlete
• almost all the "staff" are volunteers

Overview

The design goals were to make the supporters' interface mobile-friendly while allowing the backend interface to be as efficient as possible while not requiring any previous training or experience as a data capturer.

Geek Details

On the technical side, the applications had to be built by a very small development team (of one) and be easily deployed and managed in a cost-effective manner (essentially donated). For this reason, Azure Cloud was the platform of choice. The backend is written as an .Net Core app (C#) with the data stored in a MS-SQL server. The front end is a lightweight combination stack of C# .Net Core and plain javascript with a standard material UI design in CSS.

Marketing Summary

As a result, the site is able to run cost effectively and capable of managing ~15k interactions with ~200 users during the course of a gala easily.

Features

From an athlete's perspective, there are a couple of features which Gallopoli wanted to introduce; most notably, progress. Clicking on an athlete's name will bring up their history of events across multiple galas and allow them to track their performance quite nicely. From a club's perspective, we wanted to allow clubs to quickly drill into events, age groups and genders to help them understand better where their strengths and weaknesses are, competitively, so that they can take the data and the learnings to help shape their future training goals. And lastly, from an administration perspective, the data available across the gala helps inform organisers on the periodic growth of the sport across events/ages/genders to assist them with future logistics planning.

Get involved

There are still some features which will be included over time, as time allows to develop them but if there are any other ideas, please feel free to reach out and share your thoughts about what could make Gallopoli better for everyone to use. Or if you want to "get on the team" to be involved with design or testing, let's chat.

Sponsor

And if you ever feel like getting behind the development of the platform (with some advertising benefit for you or your company up for grabs), similarly, reach out and let's start a conversation. The last gala saw 200 unique users (all very specifically swimming/lifesaving focused, all within the Cape Town area and between them generating 15k interactions [backend staff are excluded from the analytics]) and spending on average 15 minutes per user on the site. And all this is achieved by organic marketing via word-of-mouth and link sharing over WhatsApp.