I offer the following idea in order to speed up the reporting of satellite conditions on amsat.org. The situation is, as I see it, thus:
1. The best source of information is oscar.dcarr.org. It harnesses the many-eyes that the Internet can provide and summarizes their reports in a helpful visualization. Users can gain detailed information, like how FO-29's repair is progressing, or what mode AO-7 is in. In my experience its uptime is excellent. Moreover, if I understand it correctly, it does not require manual operation. Its only fault is that its url is not in amsat.org, and so beginners or those with just a general interest are unlikely to find it. It might be subject to spamming or malicious reporting, but I have seen no evidence of this.
2. The official amsat page of information reports conditions on a roughly week-by-week basis and does not include the detailed information described above. This is because, if I understand its operation correctly, it does require manual work by an authorized individual. This precludes the moment-by-moment reporting that oscar.dcarr.org offers, but it does mean that the trust factor is high.
To my mind, an ideal solution is in two steps:
A. Make oscar.dcarr.org an amsat.org page. At very least, this entails nothing more than the use of the HTML iframe element. It is true that amsat is thus endorsing an external page, but I think based on past performance, this is highly warranted. On the other end of the spectrum, the entire code and server software that drives oscar.dcarr.org could be moved to amsat.org. In any case, this would require the permission of Mr. Carr and prominent recognition from the organization for his (and Bob's) pioneering application of the Internet to this problem.
B. Perhaps more complicated is to make the current official page become automatically updated from the dcarr page, or by means of an operator who is automatically informed from the dcarr page, or some combination of the two. For instance, a sufficient number of 'not heard' reports from dcarr.org pertaining to a given bird would change its status in the official page to be '?' or something like this.
There are further possibilities. For instance, dcarr.org could be upgraded with a broad-based trust model. The twenty most enthusiastic reporters could, for instance, be furnished with passwords in a secure mode and their data could be privileged for the purpose of reporting.
Besides improving the reporting on satellite conditions, this change would have a further effect. It would communicate to the members that if they create good resources, their work might eventually become highlighted by the AMSAT community, in effect, a 'publication' of AMSAT. 'Volunteering' thus becomes not much more than 'doing cool stuff that the community likes'.
(Similarly, I hope that William's extraordinary vision in building his transponder board might, after broad testing and examination, be validated by it becoming an 'AMSAT' off-the-shelf product. With William's approval, let's appeal for the bucks to have a team of people replicate these, test them, and set them up as temporary terrestrial repeaters around the world. We'd much more easily convince a cubesat team to include one of these if we could say one was running uninterrupted in Toronto for a year, or if we could have them do a QSO through one in a live demo!)
73, Bruce VE9QRP