About
Authorship
The lead author and editor of the Non-Skating Offical Guides is David Reed / Stacktrace (games history), currently Head NSO at Denver Roller Derby. Contributors to the Guides include:
- Bill Rickabaugh / Bill O'Fights
- Your name could be here! Learn about contributing.
Goals
The goals of this project are of two kinds: what kind of content we aim to provide for officials, and how we want to make that content accessible.
We want our guides to:
- Provide authoritative, up-to-date guides to non-skating officials covering everything they need to know to succeed in officiating high level play.
- Always start from and defer to official WFTDA, JRDA, and MRDA resources.
- Clearly distinguish between the rules and procedures and officiating conventions.
The Guides are newly-written starting in 2024 from the latest edition of the Rules of Flat Track Roller Derby. Each guide displays its last-updated date. We strive not to duplicate resources from the sport's governing bodies, but to collate, contextualize, and apply them in practice.
We also want our guides to:
- Be accessible and discoverable via the public web, not hidden in document platforms or file-sharing sites.
- Be open to contributions, corrections, and updates from the community.
- Be clearly licensed and allow modification and reuse.
- Be usable wherever officials want them, in print or on any device.
To those ends, the Non-Skating Official Guides are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, which grants users broad freedom to edit, reuse, and repurpose them without cost. The guides are hosted on GitHub, a standard platform for collaboration. We offer instructions for contributing to the project.
Each guide offers:
- a web-based version with a bookmarkable, permanent link.
- a PDF version that includes the guide's last-updated date and permanent URL to ensure users can find the latest resource.
- an EPUB version that can be used with e-readers.
Guides are currently available only in English because the authors only write English. We welcome contributions of translated content.