Here are 10 facts about Three Rings that we think are awesome, and we think you should too:
1. Three Rings has helped around 12,000 volunteers and the helplines for which they’ve worked. If we were to take all of those volunteers, there would be enough of them to fill the new Basketball Stadium for the London 2012 Olympics. And then you’d need about 188 double-decker buses to take them all home again!
The London 2012 Basketball Stadium – with space for 12,000 volunteers!
2. If there was only one person to do all of the shifts that those volunteers did, it’d take them over 126 years. Without stopping to eat or sleep. Think about that the next time that you get called in at the last minute for a long, late shift.
3. Running since 2002, Three Rings is – as far as we know – the oldest and longest-running system of it’s type. Initially developed as a one-man project to help a University Nightline, it now supports over 80 different organisations (including over a quarter of all Samaritans branches) – and growing!
An early version of Three Rings being presented at a conference in 2003
4. Three Rings is also pretty much the cheapest rota management system – click the link and see for yourself (we believe in transparency, so we don’t hide our prices or charge any sneaky fees for set-up or for importing existing data). We’re able to be so economical through the combination of trusted open source technology and the effort of volunteers. As much as we’d like to have a swimming pool full of money to lie in, we’d far rather keep our prices fair, so we pass on these cost savings to you.
5. But just because we’re volunteers doesn’t mean that we’re unqualified. All of the code written for Three Rings has been written by programmers with honours degrees in computer science and software engineering, and they all work as developers and consultants for high-tech companies around the UK.
6. Perhaps more important still, every single member of the Three Rings team – from the programmers and support team all the way through to the guy who looks after our bank account – is, or has previously been, a volunteer at one of the organisations that we support! We feel that this gives us a unique insight into how best we can support these helplines.
7. Almost 50 volunteers from the helplines we support offer to give up their time, three times a year, to “beta test” each new release of Three Rings. With meticulous care they stretch it to its limits with a fortnight of use and exploration, playing out every imaginable scenario in order to help ensure that the final product is bug-free… before the other 6,000 users get their hands on it!
8. Your helplines are a vital and necessary service, and we’re always excited to hear about the different ways that you work. That’s probably why we’re always so keen to talk to you and – when we can – visit you and see what makes your organisation unique and special. If only there were more hours in a day…
Three Rings volunteers preparing to meet with helpline volunteers at a conference in 2010.
9. The milestones in the first releases of Three Rings, almost a decade ago, had cryptic and unusual codenames like Vorpal, Maple, and 3am Eternal. Many of the codenames were based on or inspired by song titles, so when we began a complete overhaul of Three Rings back in 2006, we codenamed that effort Project Jukebox. Nowadays, Three Rings milestones are named after elements and isotopes – and they’re conveniently in alphabetical order. The most recent milestones were Erbium, Fermium, and Gallium. Sometimes there are arguments about which element to use next!
10. Our automated backup system works tirelessly to ensure that even in the worst case scenario, the data stored by Three Rings is safe. Every hour of every day, backups are encrypted and moved off-site for safekeeping. Thankfully this is all done over the Internet: if the backups were made to DVDs, we’d get through 500 of them every year!