Create an Military Services Directory

[rebelsheart]

Title
Create an Military Services Directory

Short, concise description of the idea
Create a military service directory similar to the schools directory.

Full description of the idea
The Schools Directory is for accredited or accredited and degree-granting institutions only. Institutions and programs such as the Army Ranger School or the various Officer Candidate Schools do not meet these requirements, but are a significant factor in the life of those who attended them, as is their overall military service history.

A new directory should be created wherein users can list their time in a particular government-recognized military service, including time in significant training programs such as the Army Ranger School.

The idea here is that a user would select their country, then their service of choice and enter the time frame during which they served. After this, they could then select an approved special training program for that particular military service and indicate when they were part of that.
An ordered list of benefits

• Give military personnel a place to display their valuable time and effort.
• Allow a greater sense of community for military personnel from all countries.
• Encourage the growth and creation of communities for military personnel.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• This will require volunteers just as the Schools Directory does.
• This may require additional personnel for LiveJournal/SixApart if they do not wish to assign responsibility to an existing staff member.
• Extensive modification of the Schools Directory's programs would be required to implement this, if not a new program entirely.
• While this would be smaller than the Schools Directory, it would still use a significant amount of storage space.
• The profile page must be adapted to display this information.
• The Schools Directory must be scrubbed of all military programs.
• Degree-granting military-run schools such as the United States Naval Academy and the Virginia Military Institute would remain in the schools directory as they are schools. This may cause confusion for some users.

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

• Call it the Military Services Directory.
• Unlike the Schools Directory, the Armed Services Directory must allow user input at multiple levels of the infrastructure: first for the particular armed service, then for any specialized training programs within the armed service.
• Possibly research valid military organizations before implementation of the directory, thus limiting the number of duplicate pending submissions.
• If the above is done, repeat for specialized training programs such as the Army Ranger School and various Officer Candidate Schools.
• Specialized training programs must allow date information to be entered as month and year (as opposed to just years like the Schools Directory) as many such programs are multi-week programs, not multi-year.