Tangent off the Spares thread.

[M S G Benning]

Might be a cost consideration to this, BUT in the UK membership listing (& on the renewal form) we have the 'First Aid Codes' . Would it be feasible to list members as they live in EACH COUNTY? If you are on the road & break down etc., you generally know which county (& roughly where) you are, but you may not know a particular member. If you could get out your list & flick to e.g. Worcestershire/ Shropshire/ Leicestershire etc., at least you would have a starting point. Also it may be a lot easier with regards to movement of club items ( i.e rally banners & so on) back & forth around the UK. Answers on a postcard please, again, I will forward this Alan for Mag.

[Jack]

Not a bad idea. Considering if stuck in, for example, Bedford, who is your nearest person to call? Midlands section? Southern Section? One would hope that a call to a section chairman or secretary would come up with a fairly good idea of who nearest members able to help might be, but what are the chances of catching them at home on an August Bank Holiday for example, and even if they had a helpful local member you might find them on holiday or unable to assist.

What we really need is an app. Input into the data would be all the name and address details, even better with a mobile phone number and e-mail address, and then a postcode/town lookup feature. Then we can distribute the app to our members, and anyone with a smart phone would know straight away who the nearest members would be, and have a single button to send an "SOS" to members within X radius, asking them to call if they can assist. This would not just be useful for breakdowns, for example when organising the Basingstoke rally we spent some time working out who the nearest members were to the event to see if they could assist, and this proved quite difficult to do, the sheer number of phone calls involved (after all who can actually ring another member and not end up chatting for more than 10 minutes!) meant that e-mail addresses as we now have would make life a lot easier.

I am sure Bob and Mo have the county information for people, after all their full address is already listed, so perhaps just a case of adding an additional column to the Section Order part of the membership list when next published.

Jack.

[Tony Fearn]

Some years ago I suggested this at an Exec. meeting, as I also thought it would be a good idea, and it should have been relatively straight forward. The membership list was altered, and printed, but finished up rather chaotic for whatever reason.

So we went back to the original format.

Nowadays, with all the modern paraphernalia it might be much easier, although I don't know how many of us have a smart phone.

Tony.

[Forumadmin]

Our Chairman made the decision not to ask for First Aid information on previous renewal forms that he designed against some of our advice. His reasoning was to make the form simple. Similarly car details are not asked for, hence we have no register for many years. Perhaps some lobbying of your section reps or question at the AGM might address this.

Probably the easiest way to implement this is to add it as a Jowett internet Services application. Currently all membership details for 2012 are held by the system and these can be updated to 2013. When I was membership sec in the 1970s I instigated the printing of members by section with first aid details to make such location easier. Having implemented location services on websites for the UK government (direct.gov.uk) I can tell you it is not easy. The 'County' is not a universal concept so cannot be used for location. Anyway it is difficult to locate in an address and will have many different spellings. Post codes can also be problematical.

Sure an app that would take the location details from your phone and give you a list of first aid members in order of distance from you could be done, but let us first get the data into the system. Then let us decide whether the effort to implement the app is justified. If you are broken down then having the membership/first aid list with you is probably all you need. I have done this on a number of occasions, it usually only takes half an hour to locate and phone a few people. Software such as a spreadsheet aids this capability, but it does rely on you having the data in electronic form. Whether this is acceptable to members is something that needs to be discussed. As always, I am wary of security issues.

There is the pin on a map principal as available on Jowett.net but this relies on people's geography knowledge!
I may find time to find some software that may aid the location of members on a map, but there are other website priorities for some winter work!

[george garside]

So that's why there have not been any registers!. I for one would definitely like to have them reinstated starting with the next membership renewal form.

george

[p.p.]

if member's of "The rest of the World" will travel in europa mainland and the UK with there Jowett's it would be very important to have a helpig Jowett friend!!!
peter

[Jack]

So that's why there have not been any registers!. I for one would definitely like to have them reinstated starting with the next membership renewal form.

george

Probably best to write to the Exec - all letters addressed to the meeting are read at the start, just need to write to Mary Young and ask her to read at the meeting, which should put the item onto the agenda for discussion. At some point in the the last couple of meetings it was raised and the general opinion expressed was that we had all the details stored so people could just contact the registrars if they wanted details, but I suspect if a few members were to make a coherent argument in favour then this could be addressed.

For example, if someone joined the club since January 2012 they might have a dozen cars that the registrars know nothing about. If I then left the club without telling the registrar, a chance to capture data is lost. But this is quite a different discussion, probably worthy of another thread.

Jack.

[Forumadmin]

The most promising way to collect the car information was done in the Scottish section which took the trouble to contact each of its members. Whilst this only captures the data at the time at least it is more up to date than currently exists in the registers. I was told some statistics about the current register accuracy from the Scottish Section. It was not good. The results of their effort can be seen in this Word doc in the Gallery here.

Note that the intention is to have all car information on-line so that section secretaries, registrars and members can update. This was agreed (believe it or not at the last exec) although not minuted by our Secretary.

[Forumadmin]

I had a spare hour since it was so hot in the garageso here is a test map.
All I have to do now is populate the array of variables in the program with every member's longtitude and latitude and their names and telephone numbers.

At the moment you scroll over the pins and you will see some Australian beaches. Just reminding you that we beat them in the first Ashes test.....just.

[BarryCambs]

Just to say I had a form to fill in from the East Anglian Section a few months ago, as they are trying to hold some sort of Register. It does seem a shame not to have something comprehensive and central though.

[Jack]

Just to say I had a form to fill in from the East Anglian Section a few months ago, as they are trying to hold some sort of Register. It does seem a shame not to have something comprehensive and central though.

I think there is currently a hope that the section information can be fed in to the registrars, though this will require all sections to take part and all the registrars to invest quite a lot of time updating their records.

Once this is done, that might be when we will see a register published, hopefully it will be up to date as a result. Unless of course what the sections are doing is not with the intention of feeding into a central database, but this seems unlikely.

[Forumadmin]

By popular request I have added a First Aid Service to Jowett Internet Services. This brings up a Google map with all JCC members pinned to it. You can do some of the usual things such as zooming in our out, and panning around to find the area you want. Then hover over a pin to show the name and telephone number of the member.

Access is controlled by Jowett Internet Services so you need to register for these and then log in if you have not already done so.
You can read about the services here.

[p.p.]

that is just brilliant
but on the mainland euopa i missing the members, also me....????

peter

[Nick Webster]

Yes that is very good. I have this feed back. As usual when I just dip into Jowetttalk I had not bothered to log in. When I clicked on the link in your message I was straight to the map - no logging in or anything. Perhaps this is just because your link managed to bypass the login? The home page looks like a beta version of a new site? Nice and fresh looking. Perhaps it is time to ditch all the legacy sites (huge migration I know) because a Google search can place you almost anywhere and it is all getting a bit confusing.

Nick

[Forumadmin]

I am glad you are checking. You will now find that will not work as the page has the security enabled. I must have just been in the process of adding the security wrapper.
Please see if you can break this one. It is not 100% secure yet as I have not implemented the 2013 membership list.

The other site has been around for at least three years and is designed for more advanced users and browsers. It houses the Jowett Internet Services. Currently 50 members have JIS logons.
Jowett.org and Jowett.net are basically mirrored in content. Jowett.org is main club interface but everything there can also be reached from Jowett.net. JIS can only be reached from Jowett.net.

Google will mainly only go to info on Jowett.org. It is very important to maintain legacy sites. The other incarnations of Jowett web sites are all there and still maintain links.


Anyone want to help with the huge migration?