bca meeting 25/3 /2017

[Badlad]

Universal membership was a term I first heard used by Damain Weare, the previous BCA secretary.  The context it was used in was one member one vote, no second house, no club or group votes.

 

[Kenilworth]

I'm just gonna keep going into CROW caves whenever I want.

Simple, if everybody else just did that too...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I can't figure why they wouldn't

 

[nickwilliams]

Thanks Tim

 

[Bob Mehew]

Universal membership was a term I first heard used by Damain Weare, the previous BCA secretary.  The context it was used in was one member one vote, no second house, no club or group votes.

The two house situation was adopt by BCA because we made it plain that BCA needed to know individuals in order to make the insurance cover work.  NCA membership was purely clubs and other groups.  I am far from confident that sufficient clubs will vote to give up membership to their individual members.  But that is a campaign for the future; let's keep focused on CRoW for the time being.

PS - NCA also gave the power of veto to regional caving councils; be thankful we were able to drop that!

Please note that Bob Mehew was one of the twenty three people who attended the CSCC AGM last year a mere two weeks prior to the BCA AGM.

Make no mistake, he knew what was coming.

Agreed and utterly failed to get people at the BCA AGM to see sense.    I just hope we can do it better this time.

 

[AlanH]

for someone who's not even a member of BCA are you truely arrogant enough to think that your views or opinions on what decsions the BCA makes have any validity

The sole point of your post is to try to scare me off the topic by using my real name, which undoubtedly you know my employer does not like, given the industry/sector I work in.

Amended back to newstuff

You want to do caving politics? I'll debate all day. But deciding to drag my life outside of caving into this? That is low, underhanded and dirty.



If you can't argue a case on it's merit's, and have to resort to that, you have no case.

I'm not a member of the BCA anymore *because* of idiots like you desperately attempting to resist change. I would like to be a member of the BCA again, if idiots like you are removed. It's a simple concept to understand, but evidently you are significantly more simple than it is.

For anyone who enthusiatically advocates vandalism and criminal damage as a means to achieve what THEY want regardless of the rights of the wider community its a bit rich to call any other actions low underhand and dirty. Perhaps if you learnt to behave like a reasonable member of society you wouldn't need to feel so paranoid about your employer finding out what you get up to.

 

[MarkS]

[mod]Please let's keep this discussion on the topic of the meeting and avoid things getting personal. Thanks.[/mod]

 

[alastairgott]

They should have agreed that it acted as a block BEFORE the mandate was given.

The word "Likely" (to be a block) implies that it is of insignificant effect to stop the mandate from being followed.

 

[NewStuff]

For anyone who enthusiatically advocates vandalism and criminal damage as a means to achieve what THEY want regardless of the rights of the wider community its a bit rich to call any other actions low underhand and dirty. Perhaps if you learnt to behave like a reasonable member of society you wouldn't need to feel so paranoid about your employer finding out what you get up to.

I have never advocated that. I suggest a lesson in reading comprehension at your nearest community college is in order. I may have a laugh and a joke about such matters, but I suspect only curmudgeonly old men, the intellectually challenged, or someone with Autism would actually take that seriously. It is a text medium though, and you may have had difficulty in understanding humor, so take this as Gospel:-  I do not advocate cutting off gates.

My employer couldn't give a toss what I get up to, as long as I don't use my real details on the internet. It's not in work, and not involving work, so work don';t care.

Now, how about we keep this on topic, as the mod's have asked, eh?

 

[Stuart France]

Anyone got any news on the meeting please

Let?s get back to that original question which started this topic, namely the 8-hour March BCA council meeting.  They also discussed their instructor training database and buying in a replacement system.  This part of the meeting began at 1130h and ended at 1415h, including pub lunch.

The background is the splitting of amateur caver training from professional instructor certification.  The latter is in a mess and the paid administrator is at her wits end in trying to sort out database inconsistencies and to make it work.  According to minutes of the January 2017 council meeting, the first references to this qualifications data problem were made in 2010 but not minuted then.

There are ballpark 500 instructors at various levels on the qualifications database who contribute fees.  BCA funds any deficit which is justified by saying that the wider caving community benefits from the work of the instructors, such as people being introduced to the sport that way.

But it isn?t rocket science to put together a database with Microsoft Office for the modest task of managing a small instructor community.  And it doesn?t need a brain surgeon simply to attach a Word/Excel document version of an instructor logbook to an email and click on send ? yet BCA is justifying investing significant caver money in a commercial database to avoid posting paper logbooks.

It has only just become known that BCA Chairman Andy Eavis had signed a contract with a software company last October.  The BCA Treasurer Robin Weare only heard about this deal a few days before the January Council meeting and has since done ?due diligence? on the company, presenting a grim report at the March council meeting on their business viability and that of the linked companies.  The January minutes state BCA IT Working Party was not consulted either prior to signature.

The contract is said by Eavis in March to be ?non-binding?.  It is for ?5000 up front then ?2400 in maintenance fees in year 1 and ?3600 per year thereafter.  Customization and ad hoc work costs ?100 per hour on top.  Weare now says he is no longer confident that Training will break even in 2016.  Various council members said that ?5000 was not a large amount to lose if the whole thing imploded ? effectively that commercial risk didn?t matter because an urgent solution was now needed and the Tahdah offering was acceptable.  But any write-off will cost more than ?5000 because it doesn?t factor annual maintenance fees, data repair/ validation/ re-formatting/ import costs, any customization costs and waste of the BCA administrator?s salary.

Eavis said ?we?ve spent three years digging ourselves into a deep hole?.  Only three years?  Only one hole? And some suspect BCA are now digging a deeper pit.  One BCA Council and IT Working Party member with programming skills has offered to write this database by himself at, quite astonishingly, a total cost of ?5000 to BCA.  Nice work if you can get it, when an organisation is being invited to contract out work to its own people in their own time having discovered the competitor?s price.

I?ve never sat on the BCA Council, and I?m not enjoying attending their recent meetings at my own expense on sunny or even wet days, but BCA needs close external scrutiny given their lack of progress with CROW.  The IT procurement and money side of things came as a surprise to me.  I will have more to say about their money, which is our money, but that is for later.

Some of the present BCA council members have bounced around in BCA for many years through the revolving door of holding different positions one after another.  Seven people in post right now, I think, were in post too at the inaugural BCA meeting fourteen years ago.  It beggars belief, mine anyway, that BCA has become such a way of life for some.

Some other cavers at large should start attending BCA council meetings and get their voices heard.  Anyone can attend and speak.  The CROW discussion in the postings above talks of reforming and democratizing the BCA.  But the first step on that road has to be in communicating clearly that the present BCA is broken. 

 

[JasonC]

....It is for ?5000 up front then ?2400 in maintenance fees in year 1 and ?3600 per year thereafter.  Customization and ad hoc work costs ?100 per hour on top.  Weare now says he is no longer confident that Training will break even in 2016.  Various council members said that ?5000 was not a large amount to lose if the whole thing imploded ...

Really?  For a largely voluntary organisation, that sounds like a huge sum.  If there are 500 instructors, that's ?10 each just to set up.  Unless there are some complex requirements you haven't mentioned, putting them all on a spreadsheet sounds perfectly adequate.
As a treasurer for (non-caving) voluntary group, I keep a 'database' (though it scarcely deserves that description) of members on Excel, with a few VBA macros to simplify routine tasks and mailings, which I put together in my spare time.

I'll do it for only ?4000!

 

[cavemanmike]

Thanks for the thorough answer Stuart 
Much appreciated, can't wait for the minutes 

 

[Martin Laverty]

Re: Tahdah ( http://www.tahdah.me/what-is-it ) - I don't know whether ?5000 for a bespoke 'solution' is excessive, but ongoing annual charges of ?3600 for 'maintenance' certainly sound high to me. Presumably they cover hosting the data securely, upgrading the hardware platform for performance and the software platform to guard against security flaws, (well, those are covered by the use of the AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform, I note from their blog), and amending the system should any legal requirements eg (data protection) change and this cost might, perhaps, be justified as giving insurance in the form of a scapegoat for any problems (although there would perhaps be arguments about users misunderstanding what their responsibilities were too). As for the initial cost, I think that might be justified on the basis that buying an existing (well, 18 months so far) system obviates, to some extent, the need for a detailed specification of the system's requirements, and testing of the delivered system against those requirements. Commercially, software development costs are much more divided between these areas than mere programming. Obtaining an adequate requirements specification in a reasonable time in a voluntary organisation is, I suspect, almost impossible...within BCA as it is...incredible?

That there are problems with the existing, old database/system suggests that just getting a new system is not a full solution either - the data put into the new system, and the user(s) responsibilities in the new system,  need to be sorted out first, or the old Garbage In Garbage Out dictum will apply...

 

[Alex]

So this system needs to be a web based system? I guess hosting it and maintenance could be a little expensive but I would not have thought that much. However development costs are normally about ?500 a day for bespoke system. It sounds like the best solution is to find a similar system to what you want and make it work for you, far cheaper than bespoke stuff. Either that or just build it in MS Access or something.

I would volunteer my help but as of the moment my work is all windows based applications and I know very little of web based apps, though that might change as my job progresses.

This to me sounds like something that needs to checked out thoroughly before being brought to the committee meeting, to save the many hours of discussion.

 

[notdavidgilmour]

Obtaining an adequate requirements specification in a reasonable time in a voluntary organisation is, I suspect, almost impossible...within BCA as it is...incredible?

The timescale agreed at the meeting was as follows:

• Requirements specification to be produced by April 30th 2017 (not a typo - 27 days from today)
• System to be fully functional by Christmas 2017 at the latest, but ideally September 2017

I don't suppose the requirement spec will be made available for BCA member viewing at all?  I happen to know a bit about building databases?  :-\

 

[notdavidgilmour]

or just build it in MS Access or something.

I would volunteer my help but as of the moment my work is all windows based applications and I know very little of web based apps,

I completely agree.  MS Access is probably perfectly adequate, depending on the requirement spec of course.  Surely a MS Access database hosted on Googledocs, Dropbox or One Drive makes it web based? Just a thought...

 

[MarkS]

This sounds pretty ludicrous to me. Most caving club websites have some sort of online database containing over 500 entries in the form of a trip log.

I suspect that a simple post on this forum explaining the basic requirements would yield knowledge, advice, and potential solutions that wouldn't cost thousands and thousands of pounds.

If those numbers are right, just the annual maintenance cost of this database alone after year looks to equate to almost 5% of the annual BCA income from individual members. That seems an awful lot to me for one small database.

(Membership numbers from here and 2017 fees from the BCA website.)

 

[alastairgott]

hosted on Googledocs

I guess some comp wizz might be able to use Google Scripts to create their own Android/apple application which uses a google form to update a spreadsheet or database?

https://developers.google.com/apps-script/

Might even be a way to use an app to update a caving log and get it signed off by their Instructor?

https://sites.google.com/a/praguesummit.org/praguesummit/conference-sessions/using-google-apps-in-higher-education-distance-learning-programs

Just a thought?

or maybe you limit the software (or solution) to the number of people who are CIC's rather than the full 500 instructors, they will be able to add trips in bulk from Excel for their Trainees. By adding these trips to the database they are signing them off?

Has their been consultation with a small focus group to ascertain the needs of instructors?
I don't anticipate their being much need in providing a solution that is not fit for the instructors as the front line.
There will be much more cleaning up if the solution does not work or falls out of favour with instructors.

 

[jharlow]

Perhaps to offer a slight counterpoint to the prevailing anti tahdah sentiment, this is by the sound of things the same system which the Mountain Training Association uses for all of it's climbing and mountain leading awards. In my experience, the system is easy to use, practical, and well suited to the purpose both for candidates and instructors. If we get the similar DLOG, course and assessment booking page, and award registration system out of those ?5000, I may well finally consider undertaking the LCMLA.

Frankly, other database systems might be just as apt at data storage, but if we get the same kind of user experience that MTA candidates receive out of tahdah I will consider the money well spent.

 

[notdavidgilmour]

The finances of the Tahdah "family" of companies seem like an absolute car crash.  Should the BCA really be gambling it's member's money?

Something that was also discussed at the BCA meeting, was the fact that individual members would have to subscribe (pay) for premium membership to enjoy full functionality of the software.  It would be interesting to know just how "functional" the software is without paying the premium, and also, how much premium membership would cost.

This also poses another question;  If something was to happen to the software provider, who would be responsible for refunding the members who had paid for premium membership?  Would those members just be left out of pocket or would the BCA be obliged to refund them?  If the latter was the case, this is pushing the amount of financial risk to the BCA higher and higher.

Comments at the meeting suggesting that the BCA could afford the financial loss did get my goat a little I must say.  It is very easy to gamble with money that doesn't belong to you.

 

[droid]

So: ?5000 on a system that appears to have been foisted on the BCA without adequate pre-planning.

And ? *how much* on a ballot regarding CRoW where ducks hadn't been lined up beforehand.......


I'm with NewStuff now.  BCA needs to sort itself out badly because I am not inclined to put my money into this f***ing shambles.