This page contains information about the technical development plans for Pocalay.com. We put this information on the web site to get your feedback on what is important and your ideas on how we can make pocalay.com better. Please use the comments fields to give us your input. We will change and update our plans based on your feedback and ideas!

Use the links in the text to navigate to pages with more detailed development plans. Hyperlinked text has a development plans page. Text in italics indicates that we will have a page for the development plan soon.

Structure
Pocalay.com is designed around three basic building blocks:

• Players
• Games
• Venues

The purpose of pocalay.com is to arrange games where players meet to play at agreed venues. Read more about each of these building blocks below.

Front page and navigation
The navigation and the front page will be built around the three building blocks. As a player, you will have your own player menu on your left, where you can change your information or settings (including preferred language), find other players, get organized in teams, etc. Along the top menu you will find a site menu, with links to the most used features such as finding games to play, accessing the forums, registering new games or venues and login/logoff. The bottom bar menu will show links to information about Pocalay.com.

The main body of the front page currently displays some news stories and a brief explanation of pocalay.com. This will be replaced by a personalized home page with special features to help you find games including news items where you find out which games your friends are playing in.

Players

This page contains a description of all the information that is registered for each player, including an explanation of the player levels, player profiles, and statistics. Certain players who contribute more to the community will enjoy organizer privileges, such as advanced game registration.

Players can be organized in groups, which on pocalay we call teams. You can be a member of several teams. Membership of a team gives you access to exclusive games, a group to play with in tournaments, and a way to communicate with your friends.

Players can communicate with each other on our discussion forums, by commenting on each others' profiles, commenting on games, by direct messaging or by sending out emails to users who have committed to a game or are members of a team.

Read more here about recruiting players: who we are targeting, how we will work to recruit them and where and when we will expect to expand from our geographical starting point of Oslo and our activity starting point, which is football (soccer).

Games
Games in the pocalay terminology is any time players meet at a prearranged venue. A game can be 4 guys playing 2 on 2, it can be a club using pocalay.com to organize their normal practices, or a game can be a 1000 team tournament. Read the games page for plans for game registration. When you register a game, you enter when and where and how the game will be played. You can also specify which players are eligible to register for your game. This can be done either by password protection or only allowing members of one or more teams to sign up.

Once you have registered the game, it will be displayed so other players can find it and sign up to play. As all games will be linked to a venue, each game will have a time and a location, so players can find games at a suitable time and place.

Most games on pocalay will be organized by our players themselves. Occationally, we at Pocalay will initiate games. This will be done when we are starting up in a new location or to organize bigger tournaments in partnership with others. Read more here about our short term plans for tournaments or activities organized by Pocalay.

Pocalay.com will also offer player registration for pay-for-play tournaments or games, where the players have to pay an entry fee to play.

Venues
A venue in Pocalay is any location where you can play, indoor or outdoor. The players register new venues, then they find venues when organizing games. We ask the players to register venues, because this means information such as how to get to the venue and what goals are available at this venue must only be entered once. Players can edit the venues other players have registered.

Venue owners are Pocalay players who through their day job or role in an organization have administrative responsibilities for a venue. Venue owners can sell available practice times through pocalay.com. They can either sell the time to other players in bulk or they can invite players to pay-for-play tournaments or games.

Revenues
Pocalay is a commercial venture. We are currently planning to offer the following services:

• Advertising space at pocalay.com
• Pay-for-play tournaments and games
• Reselling time slots at venues to venue owners
• Advertising and vendor services at pocalay.com-organized tournaments
• Reselling apparel and equipment through partnership agreements
• Premium services to players with advanced requirements

Click on the links above to read more about these services and give us your input in the comment fields. If you have ideas about other services we may offer at pocalay.com, either to our players or to others, please comment on the services page.

Technical
Pocalay.com is developed using open source technology. We use a Content Management System called Drupal . We will use Google Maps to register the location of each venue. We are considering different payment systems for our pay-for-play or reselling services (we welcome any tips/ideas you have regarding different payment services). We are also considering creating a Facebook applet for Pocalay, where you can use Facebook to announce and invite users to your Pocalay games.

If you are a programmer and would like to contribute some time to enhancing pocalay.com with new functionality, get in touch with us at team@pocalay.com and we can discuss your ideas and how we can get you started.

Timeline
The live version of pocalay.com is under early development. We released the Alpha version of pocalay.com on June 1st 2007, after 10 days of development. New functionality is added continuously. Serious recruiting efforts will not begin until after the early testing period is finished and a beta version of the site is ready. We expect a Beta version to be ready around September 1st and a launch in the spring of 2008.