On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Gwillim Law wrote:
Too much work is involved to expect any one person, especially a volunteer, to do it all. There's a natural way to subdivide it: by countries. In general, time zones are determined by legislation which applies throughout a jurisdiction, almost always a whole country. In many cases, a volunteer could take responsibility for several countries or a whole region. On the other hand, a country with a very complex time zone history, such as the United States, might be divided up among several volunteers. Ideally, each volunteer would be acquainted with the languages and culture of the region he or she is responsible for. Uniform guidelines should be drawn up, covering things like database design, data authentication, and update notification.
We also should be working with Shanks, ACS, le Corre etc. on such a common database, rather than irregularly taking updates from each other.
may have to be reconsidered. What we need is a file containing every available document that has clues to historical time zone data. This file could be partitioned by country or region, so that each time zone volunteer saves only those documents pertaining to his or her specific area.
A paper or an electronic file? My file of papers relating to time zone history in the UK is about four centimetres thick - and this is mostly just copies of the relevant laws. A file that also included all relevant extracts from Hansard, etc., would be somewhat thicker; and if all the archive material in the Public Record Office were added - providing much of the colour behind the bare details of the dates and times (and also including miscellaneous papers relating to other European countries) then there could be a metre or more thickness of papers. Such a collection of "every available document that has clues" seems rather ambitious. -- Joseph S. Myers jsm28@cam.ac.uk