The genesis
July 2023. Some old people from Villeray crave baseball and wonder where they can watch a decent game nearby.
They start seeking out for baseball venue information on the web, that search ends up in disappointment.
They do not find many good pictures of ballparks that show potential visitors what kind of experience is to be expected. The little technical data they stumble upon is scattered across a multitude of half-defunct websites. On some baseball league websites, just finding out where each team plays becomes an exercise in complexity.
This shopping for a single baseball game becomes, all in all, a very frustrating endeavor.
It is doubly annoying as Québec is said to be a region where baseball is thriving once again, after just too many rough years. So how come its online presence does not follow?
Wanting to prevent their fellow citizens from such an ordeal, they take matters into their own hands.
The method
It was quickly decided that all the work that would go towards helping Québec's online baseball presence would be granted to the public domain.
That way, the data would be available for anyone to reuse, redistribute, modify, and so on. There is so little point in creating yet another data silo with almost-eternally copyrighted contents.
The old people from Villeray and an old friend from Repentigny started visiting ballparks, speaking to groundskeepers, taking notes and pictures.
To store all those notes and pictures, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons were chosen as repositories.
Thus all the data on this website is also available from those above repositories. All this website does is collect data from them and present it in a practical way.
To put it in other words, anyone could re-create this website from scratch, as all its data is publically and freely available.
