Recently, we’ve had a spate of users asking us here at Three Rings HQ to comment on the ways in which the Data Protection Act 1998 applies to their organisation. We’ve had to make it clear that we’re not experts on the subject, and we’re not qualified to provide legal advice, so any of our clients with specific questions or concerns really need to seek professional counsel, but there’s clearly a degree of interest – and perhaps even some concern – among our users on this subject.

So, for the benefit of any users who’ve heard of the Data Protection Act, but don’t know much about it’s requirements, we’ve put together this blog post to provide a quick summary of the requirements of the DPA as they might relate to one of the voluntary organisations using Three Rings. Our hope is that this post will help them review their own situation and policies, and make it easier for them to work out if they or their organisation require any further guidance or advice.

It’s also worth making it clear that, although this blog post assumes your data is being stored in Three Rings, the DPA applies to your organisation even if you aren’t yet one of our clients: whether you’re using Three Rings, an Excel or Google spreadsheet, another electronic volunteer management system or even good old fashioned pens and paper, what matters is that you are storing volunteers’ personal data, and you have to do so in accordance with the law.

(Note that organisations outside the UK should bear in mind that their use of Three Rings is governed by the laws of England and Wales – meaning they’ll need to abide by the DPA in their use of the system in addition to any national laws on data processing which apply in their home jurisdiction.)

For a far more comprehensive and authoritative summary of the DPA and its requirements in relation to organisations, you can read this helpful guide created by the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is the independent body which exists to uphold and regulate best practice in data management by public bodies and organisations.

A brief summary of the DPA

The DPA exists to protect individuals from having data about them wrongfully gathered or used by organisations. It boils down into eight key Principles, which any organisation storing individual’s data must follow in order to comply with the terms of the DPA. The primary legislation for this is available online here, but there is also a much more readable version direct from gov.uk .

There are two key definitions to understanding the DPA in the context of voluntary organisations using Three Rings: ‘Data Subjects’ and ‘Data Controllers’.

Data Subject means the individual whose personal data is being stored – in Three Rings terms, almost certainly one of your volunteers.

Data Controller means the individual (or individuals) who decide how and why the Data Subject’s personal information is stored and used. In the case of Three Rings, this is likely to include people such as a Director, Shop Manager or Coordinator, representing your voluntary organisation as a whole, as they gathering and use certain items of personal information in order to run the organisation effectively.

Three Rings stores the information on behalf of our client organisations, but Three Rings CIC is not a Data Controller (except where we store details on our own volunteers). Instead, we’re what’s called a ‘Data Processor’ – we processes the data on behalf of the data controller, through the Three Rings application itself. We don’t require that organisations store any particular type of data on their users, and our own policies ensure that we never examine individual volunteer data without express permission (usually in response to a support request). The ICO provides an in-depth guide to the differences between Data Controllers and Data Processors here.

Broadly speaking, the DPA requires that your organisation and the volunteers administering its Three Rings account (the Data Controllers) do not store any individual volunteer’s data unless you need it for a specific purpose. It also states that any information gathered should only be gathered with the permission of the individual concerned, and only used for the purposes it was originally gathered for.

So, if you’re storing Joe The Volunteer’s phone number in order that you can contact him to help fill gaps in the rota, then you need to make sure Joe knows that’s what you’re doing and is happy with you doing that. As long as Joe’s OK with you storing his phone number for that purpose, then a Rota Manager can retrieve his number from Three Rings in order to call him and try to fill a gap in the rota.

However, if Joe also happens to be an ace mechanic (as well as a sure bet to fill a gap with only 20 minutes notice!) the Rota Manager can’t retrieve his number from Three Rings in order to try and help out a friend who needs their car fixing: that isn’t the reason your organisation gathered Joe’s number, it’s not the reason you’re meant to be storing it for, and Joe himself didn’t give any of your organisation’s volunteers to gather, store, or use his number for any other reason than the one you originally said you wanted it for.

In this way, the Data Protection Act protects individual volunteers like Joe from losing control of their personal data.

What Eight Principles of the DPA (probably) Mean For You

The eight principles of the DPA govern how organisations who are storing data should treat it: we thought it would be useful to give examples of how they might apply specifically within the context of a voluntary organisation.

Bear in mind that the precise circumstances in which your organisation operates are likely to be different than those we’ve imagined here – and we’re experts in delivering volunteer management systems, not legal advice! – but these should give you some idea of how the DPA can be applied in a voluntary setting, and give you a basis to seek further professional advice if they raise any concerns. You can also get more guidance direct from the ICO’s guide by following the links that make up each “Principle” heading.

Principle 1:

Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully and, in particular, shall not be processed unless (a) at least one of the conditions in Schedule 2 is met, and (b) in the case of sensitive personal data, at least one of the conditions in Schedule 3 is also met.

Essentially this means that if your organisation holds any personal data on your volunteers, you must have a legitmate reason for collecting and using it, and must not use it in any way that could have a negative impact on the individual whose data it is.

You also have to be clear and open about how you’re planning to use the information, and only use that information in a way the individuals might reasonably expect you to. The concept of “fair processing” is central to the first Principle of the DPA – if any aspect of the way you gather, store or use an individual’s personal data is unfair then you will be in breach of the DPA even if you met other conditions for processing the data.

Principle 2:

Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes.

This is the principle we touched on earlier with our example of Joe, the volunteer who’s also a great mechanic. It means that if your organisation does store any data on its volunteers, you have to say why it’s being stored. For a phone number, this might be to help with gapfilling. For a home address, it might be so you can confirm travel expense claims, or study how effective your recruitment drives are in certain areas.

This principle also requires that organisations acting as Data Controllers register with the ICO where necessary. The ICO has produced some guidance on which organisations are exempt from such registration, including non-profit organisations and private clubs, which may mean your voluntary organisation does not have to register.

Whatever your justification for storing an item of data, you can’t then use the data you’ve gathered for a completely different purpose that is incompatible with the purpose you had in mind when you first gathered the data. (So – depending on the reasons you gave Joe to start off with – you’d probably be OK using Joe’s number to tell him his shift this evening has had to be cancelled because you can’t find anyone else to do it with him. You probably wouldn’t be OK selling Joe’s home phone number to a telemarketing firm!).

Principle 3:

Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed.

You shouldn’t store more data than the minimum information you need for your purposes. You can store someone’s home address, if you need it, but not who else lives there. You can’t collect extra information “in case it’s useful later” – you have to be clear what information you need, and why you need it.

You should try to store as little information as you need in order to run your organisation.

Principle 4:

Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date.

If you’re storing information on your volunteers, you must take all reasonable steps to ensure it is accurate, and that it doesn’t become outdated.

In the context of Three Rings this most often means that volunteers should be able to keep information on their Directory page up-to-date. You don’t have to give them ‘Self Manage’ permissions to comply with this part of the DPA, but if a volunteer doesn’t have permission to update their details, and their data changes – for example when they move house, or get a new email address, then a volunteer who does have permission to edit their details  should do so promptly, once they are aware that the details stored have changed.

Principle 5:

Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes.

You can’t keep information too long. If a volunteer goes on an extended leave of absence, and won’t be back for 12 months, it’s probably OK to keep storing their information in Three Rings (and possibly sleep their account, if your policies require that). But if a volunteer leaves the organisation entirely, and you have no reason to suspect they’ll ever come back or contact you again, you should remove all of their personal data.

It’s probably OK to keep some of their information for a while (in case they change their mind, for example, or if you think they might ask you for a reference and you can confirm exactly how many hours worth of shifts they did with you), but you have to get rid of the data once it’s clear you no longer need it (and you should make sure that you get rid of any part of the information you hold as soon as it’s not needed any more, even if you continue to keep other data on the same individual because that’s still necessary).

This is where purging sleeping accounts is useful, and it’s also why purging accounts which have been slept for a long time is one of the new Maintenance Tasks introduced by Milestone Krypton – it would be a very, very unusual organisation that legitimately had a greater number of unpurged sleepers in its Directory than it had active volunteers!

Principle 6:

Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under this Act.

This principle can sound intimidating, but it really just sets out exactly what rights the Data Subject (ie, your volunteer) has over their data even after they’ve given it to you. These are:

• A right to see and access what data you hold about them,
• The right to object to any processing of their data which might cause them substantial damage or distress (but not if they have already consented to you processing the data in that manner, or if it is necessary for your organisation to process that data in order to meet a non-contractual legal obligation),
• The right to stop you sending them direct marketing materials,
• The right to object to any automated decisions made based on their data without any human intervention or review,
• The right to have any errors or inaccuracies in their personal data corrected (or, depending on the situation, to have a note added to explain the true facts)
• The right to seek compensation through the courts for any loss or damage suffered as a direct result of your organisation failing to comply with the DPA.

Principle 7:

Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.

This is a principle where Three Rings can really help your organisation to comply with the terms of the DPA! The act requires that you take precautions to protect the data which you store from unauthorised access. That includes taking steps to store the data in the most secure way possible, using good passwords, and making sure that nobody can access the data unless they’ve got a good reason to.

We’ve written about the technologies that help keep Three Rings (and the data on it) secure on our documentation website, and the  ability to set different levels of access control based on Role to match how things work inside your voluntary organisation has always been a powerful tool for ensuring that volunteers only have access to the information which they need to see to do perform their role  (a feature which is even more powerful since the ability to control access to individual Directory fields was introduced with Milestone Krypton!)

Of course, Three Rings can’t protect you against everything – it’s very important that you never tell another volunteer your username and password, and equally important that you sleep the account of any former volunteer with your organisation, so they can’t continue to log in after they’ve left you – but we do our best. That’s part of the reason your Three Rings session will time out if you don’t seem to do anything for a while, and why you’re not allowed to pick passwords that are too common, or too easily broken.

Principle 8:

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

The eighth principle requires that the data you are storing about your volunteers isn’t transferred beyond the borders of the EU, unless it’s being sent to a country which has a level of data protection which is at least equal to that provided by the DPA.

In terms of where we, as a Data Processor, store information – it’s all inside the EEA. Any information which you store on Three Rings will be stored on our main server, which is housed in Manchester. We make hourly backups of the data, which are also stored in Manchester. That’s to ensure that, in the incredibly unlikely event that something went so wrong with the system that we had to restore from a backup (which, due to the way our server is constructed, would most likely require the total failure of multiple primary and backup drives, simultaneously), nobody would lose more than an hour’s worth of data when we brought the system backup online.

To safeguard against the even-less-likely event of something going seriously seriously wrong, to the point where the part of Manchester housing Three Rings and its backups was completely destroyed, we also make a daily backup, which is encrypted and transferred to a separate server in Ireland (so in the event of a catastrophic disaster crippling the north of England, nobody would lose more than a day’s worth of data from Three Rings). At no point is the data processed or transferred beyond the EEA (except where a Three Rings user in another country chooses to access it, which is why we ask that organisations based in other countries check that they can comply with both the laws of England and Wales and the laws of their own nation).

In Conclusion

Most voluntary organisations are unlikely to have trouble with the DPA – by their very nature, they’re rarely in a position to use the information they gather on volunteers and store in Three Rings to engage in direct marketing campaigns aimed at their own volunteers, and it’s unlikely that they will start using the information they have to do things their volunteers didn’t agree to.

But, it’s important to be clear on what data you’re storing about your volunteers, how and why you’re storing it, and who will have access to it. It’s also important to purge unnecessary information from Three Rings (and anywhere else your branch stores it) after a volunteer has left the organisation. Volunteers should be able to see, and if necessary correct, the data that you are storing about them on request, even if they don’t have permanent or edit permissions in relation to that data.

The DPA can sound pretty scary and confusing, but the eight principles mainly come down to being open and honest about what information you store about someone, why you’re storing it, and how you’re going to safely dispose of it afterwards. If you do have any concerns, we’d like to refer you once again to the excellent resources provided by the ICO, and we’d encourage you to seek expert advice on any particular points you’re not sure about.

This blog post is a bit unusual, in that it’s not about the Three Rings system itself. Instead, it’s here as a big “thank you” to the graphic designer responsible for the new Three Rings logo which we first introduced on October the 27th. In fact, the logo had been waiting in the wings for a while – we offered a sneak preview of it at our Three Rings Roadshow last summer, as a final “test run” to gauge opinion.

We’d discussed changing the logo for a while (as we said when we launched our new look, the old “red phone” image was starting to put off organisations that could really benefit from Three Rings just because they didn’t run helplines!), and so in February we started to look seriously at updating our corporate image. We started the search for a professional graphics designer, and we were very fortunate in finding Philip English, who was extremely generous in giving his time and expertise.

Philip was willing to design our logo on a pro bono basis (a great relief when you consider that all our income comes directly from charities and voluntary organisations!), and he asked very intelligent questions to find out what sort of image we wanted Three Rings to have, exactly what we did, and a rough idea of what our objectives were as a company.

From that brief (which felt vague even to us, since we mostly just knew what we didn’t want the logo to look like!), Philip produced three designs for our consideration. Each suggested design was eye-catching and unique, and expressed a different facet of what Three Rings means. To make the decision easier, Philip offered his own thoughts on the different logos, describing what they expressed to him, and some of the logic behind the design (the dark ‘Three Rings blue’ of the old design made vibrant by a deep and complimentary yellow in one design; a rougher “sketched”-looking logo offset by a warm orange strapline in another).

In the end, of course, we picked the new “concentric rings” logo, which suggested timeslots filled out on a rota and, brilliantly, expresses the core values of the Three Rings project in a single clean and accessible image. Once we’d made that choice, Philip gave us a high-resolution, scalable copy of the logo, which you’ll have seen on last year’s Christmas cards, and on your Three Rings mugs! We’ve even used the launch of the new logo to give the appearance of Three Rings itself a much-needed refresh, when we launched Milestone: Neodymium back in January.

What we do want to say is that, in addition to clearly knowing his stuff, Philip was very friendly and patient with us while we made our decision. The process of rebranding the whole of Three Rings and rebuilding the website from scratch was a lot of work on top of our day jobs and our regular volunteering to develop Three Rings (and for other organisations!). It would have been a much, much harder task to without Philip’s skill and hard work, which is why we wanted to thank him publicly here, and offer a direct link to his website: philipenglish.biz.

Summary

Starting on the 1^st of April 2014, Three Rings is changing our pricing structure for all new organisations.

Until 1^st of April 2015, existing organisations will be able to pay an invoice calculated on either the old system or the new system (whichever’s cheaper for them). From April 2015, everyone will be invoiced on the new pricing structure.

For most organisations – especially those with lower turnovers – the new pricing structure should mean they either pay the same as they pay now, or even less. Organisations with higher turnovers will pay a little more, up to a maximum of £300 per year for those with a turnover between £400,000 and 1 million pounds per year.

Why are prices changing?

We haven’t changed the cost of Three Rings since we first started charging for the system in 2009. During that time the profile of organisations using Three Rings has changed dramatically. We now support Samaritans branches, Nightlines, Community Stores, volunteer-run libraries, and a variety of other helplines and voluntary organisations large and small.

As the number of different organisations benefiting from Three Rings has grown, our old “£150 for everyone” pricing structure has grown increasingly unfair for some of our clients. If you’re a small charity with a turnover of £14,000 a year, that £150 takes up more of your budget than if you’re a charity with a turnover of £220,000. We wanted to address that imbalance by introducing a new pricing structure that scales in a more reasonable way.

Here’s a visual representation of the way our pricing structure’s worked up until now:

You can see three crosses on that picture. They each represent a fictional – but plausible – organisation using Three Rings. Working from the bottom left upwards towards the right, you can see:

• A yellow X down near the bottom left representing Little Stapleton Community Stores. They’ve got 35 volunteers, and an annual turnover of just £17,000.
• A green X at centre-left representing Nanway Samaritans. They’re a moderately-well-off Samaritans branch, with 125 volunteers and an annual turnover of around £29,000.
• A red X for Midlands SuperHelpLine at the top centre right. They’re a big, well-funded organisation with 195 volunteers on the books, and a turnover of £497,000.

…Under the old pricing structure, all three organisations pay £150 per year. Which is fine by us – Three Rings isn’t here to make money! – but it isn’t fair on all those organisations.

Proportionally, Little Stapleton Community Stores are spending much, much more of their budget on Three Rings than SuperHelpLine are, because they’ve got less money to start off with, and the old pricing structure completely ignores variations between organisations.

We’ve always been proud of the fact that Three Rings is flexible enough that it can adapt to the way your organisation works, but we’ve never reflected that flexibility in the price.

How we planned a new structure

We wanted to introduce a fairer pricing structure that didn’t hurt smaller organisations. And it took a long time. Here at Three Rings our volunteers have been coming up with new pricing models – and discarding them – for most of the past year. We wanted to be sure to get this right, to make sure nobody faced sudden increases in cost, and to make sure we could still make enough money to operate without taking advantage of our users.

In the end that evolved into four key principles which helped guide us towards a new price structure:

1. Under the new structure, most organisations using Three Rings should either pay less for the service or see no increase in what they pay.
2. Whatever new pricing plan we picked should be simple enough that any prospective organisation could look at it and easily see how much Three Rings was going to cost them.
3. Everyone using Three Rings should be charged based on their resources, not on what features of Three Rings they chose to use…
4. …But even organisations with very high turnover shouldn’t face exponential price increases.

How the new prices work

Using our four key principles, we sat down and developed a new pricing structure that put organisations into one of seven bands. The bands were mainly centred on each organisation’s annual turnover, with finer gradation for small organisations with a turnovers of £50,000 or less.

It took a few goes, but we eventually found something that didn’t mean Three Rings would suddenly start running at a loss (or end up with too much of our users’ money!), and which met all of our four criteria for a fairer pricing structure:

Under this new structure, organisations with an annual turnover of £50,000 or less are split into the lowest four price bands:

• £40 per year for those with 20 volunteers or fewer
  
• £120 per year for those with between 21 & 60 volunteers
• £150 per year for those with 61 – 140 volunteers
• £175 per year for those with over 141 volunteers.

Band A is specifically designed for brand new organisations that are just getting off the ground – very much like our old discretionary price rate of £40 which we occasionally offered to very small, badly-off organisations that wanted to use Three Rings.

For bands B, C & D we’ve worked hard to ensure the price difference between the bands moves smoothly: the last thing we want is for organisations to avoid taking on new volunteers in order to save themselves from a sudden jump in costs!

For organisations with a turnover of more than £50,000 we don’t price by volunteer numbers and instead work by turnover alone:

• Between £50,000 and £200,000 we charge £200 per year
• Between £200,000 and £400,000 we charge £250
• Between £400,000 and £1,000,000 we charge £300.
  

Theoretically, there’s an eighth band, Band H, for organisations with a turnover of more than £1million: we’ll price that band on an organisation-by-organisation basis if it ever comes up!

For a quick example of what that means, let’s look again at our three fictional organisations from before: Little Stapleton Community Stores (yellow X), Nanway Samaritans (green X), and Midlands SuperHelpline (red X):

Under the new system, Midlands SuperHelpLine, with their £497,000-per-year turnover pay the most: they’re in Band G, so they’re now paying £300 per year instead of £150. Nanway Samaritans are in Band C, and so they pay the same as they paid before: £150 per year. And Little Stapleton Community Stores are now paying just £120 per year, down in Band B. If you compare this to the first illustration, showing the old system, we hope you’ll agree the new pricing structure is a lot fairer!

Of course, any special discounts we’ve agreed with people – for example the 20% discount we offer to Samaritans branches paying regionally, will still apply: each branch will be placed in the appropriate band, and the 20% discount will be applied before we calcualte the total value of the invoice given to the region.

When does this change happen?

We want to be as fair as possible about this. The majority of our customers will pay us less money, or the same amount of money, under the new pricing structure. But we realise some organisations, with higher turnovers, will find themselves paying more. We don’t want to upset anyone’s budget planning, so if you’re already using Three Rings then you don’t have to pay on the new structure until April 2015, unless you want to.

We’ll start to issue invoices following the new pricing structure from April 1st 2014. If you’re a new organisation, you’ll just see an invoice priced according to your band. If you’re an existing Three Rings customer, your invoice will show the old, £150 price, and the price you’ll pay under the new pricing structure.

If you want to start paying on the new structure (for example, if your organisation is in Band A or Band B and is about to pay less for Three Rings) then you can start paying on the new scheme, so you start saving money as soon as possible.

If you’re organisation is in Band C, it won’t make any difference to you – you’ll be paying £150 under either the old plan or the new plan.

If you’re in Band E, F or G, then you can still pay the old price of £150 until 1st April 2015. After that, you’ll be invoiced according to your new band, but you get plenty of time to factor that into your budget planning before it happens.

Here’s a mock-up of one of these “transitional invoices” to make things clearer:

We expect that the majority of our customers will pay the lower of the two rates during this transitional period (although, if you want to pay the higher rate, that’s fine too!). In the long term, though, our turnover will remain more or less the same under the new pricing structure. We don’t mind our income dropping for a little while – as we showed with our 10th Anniversary Discount! – and we certainly don’t mind it happening when it’s part of our plan to ensure that the pricing of Three Rings remains fair to everybody.

The price of Three Rings hasn’t changed since we first started charging for the system five years ago. It’s a pleasure to say that, now a change in pricing is finally being introduced, it’s one that will help to make Three Rings the best and most affordable choice for more voluntary organisations than ever before.

From today, Three Rings is changing its look and feel, introducing a new logo and a new strapline. The actual Three Rings application will keep working just the same as it always has, so unless you’re a particularly avid fan, or deal with your organisation’s invoices, you probably won’t see any difference. Even so, we’d like to introduce you to Three Rings’ new look, and explain why we’re changing things.

Three Rings began in 2002, as a free service provided to Nightlines. Back then, volunteers working on Three Rings gave not just their  time, but their own money to keep the service going. It wasn’t until 2009 that we realised we could also use this service to help other voluntary organisations, and so it wasn’t until 2009 that we expanded the service and, as a result, established Three Rings Limited as a formal company.

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 2009 having an electronic rota was a daunting prospect for many organisations. Although just about everyone who got to use Three Rings praised the system for being user-friendly, the information that they’d be asked to sign up for shifts using computers often sounded like it would be complicated and challenging.

So, to combat that, we did our best to ensure strapline looked both professional and traditional, and tied it closely to the idea of traditional telephone-based emotional support through the friendly-looking “Red Telephone”:

With the strong, dark colours and transitional serif typeface, the old logo and strapline were calculated to reassure users that, while Three Rings was different, it was just there to make running their helpline easier, not change every single thing they did.

However, as Three Rings has grown, the old logo and strapline have become increasingly unsuitable. For a start, we care about a lot more than “streamlining administration”, and we always have! What we’re really here to do, what we’re giving our time to do, is to make life easy for all volunteers, whether they’re administrators or not.

And, as Three Rings has grown, we’ve developed past the stage where we only support telephone helplines. Indeed, we haven’t just supported telephone helplines since 2010, when the wonderful volunteers behind Maytree Respite Centre came on board (after waiting, very patiently, for more than a year!)

These days, Three Rings supports our “traditional” base of volunteers at Nightlines and Samaritans alongside community centres, village stores and volunteer-supported and community-run libraries, both in the UK and abroad. Since many of these organisations don’t rely on a telephone to achieve their goals, using one as our logo makes us seem like we might not be the right system for them. But, in many cases, we are the right system for them: Three Rings is flexible for a reason, and that reason is so we can help as many people as we possibly can.

Sometimes, we get wonderful voluntary organisations – just the sort of people who could benefit from Three Rings asking “We’re not a helpline – are we allowed to use Three Rings?”, and while it’s wonderful that they asked (so we can say “Yes!”), it makes us worry that there might be people out there who get put off by the phone, anddon’t ask, leaving them to use a volunteer management system that’s not the best match for them.

That’s why we’re changing the logo and strapline: a small-scale “rebranding” exercise that will help us reflect not only our own, open and honest style of operation but which should make it clear that we’re there for any nonprofit organisation that could benefit from a powerful and affordable volunteer management system.

The old logo implied a serious and traditional focus on the management of helplines specifically, but the new logo and strapline better reflect Three Rings‘ core aim of making it easier for volunteers to get on with volunteering:

The logo and strapline were designed for us on a pro bono basis by the very talented Philip English – in exchange, we’ve promised to describe what it was like working with him in a separate post, which you’ll see here shortly.

We’ve also taken the opportunity to redesign the company website (which hadn’t really changed since 2009 and was looking pretty dated and tired!) New sections of the site you might be interested in include a whole new page clearly setting out our corporate values, updated information on the various features and tools Three Rings can offer you and, for the first time, photos and short biographies of all of the volunteers who make Three Rings happen – so you’ll at least have some idea of who you’re talking to if you contact us for support!

This is Part 1 of a 3-Part series of posts. Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here.

At the penultimate session of the Three Rings 10th Birthday Conference, JTA presented a session entitled Where do we go from here?, taking a look at the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade, and some of our plans for the future.

This post covers the third part of that talk, announcing our plans for a massive shift in the way users interact with both their Three Rings accounts and with the organisations they volunteer for.

Three Rings Accounts:

Ever since the very first version of Three Rings, a user account has been part of an organisation. When a user logs in, they’re logging into their account at their organisation: as long as they keep their password secure only they can access it, but the account itself belongs to the organisation. You can’t log in to Three Rings if you aren’t volunteering with an organisation that’s using Three Rings.

That’s fairly logical, at least, but there are occasions when it creates trouble:

The above diagram shows one of the biggest problems of the current Three Rings account structure. Dave lives in Finnpool, where he volunteers as a Samaritan, but he catches a bus every day to go and work in neighbouring Gesway. After work, he volunteers with a youth club at Gesway Community Centre. Because user accounts belong to one single organisation, Dave has to have two separate accounts on Three Rings, with two unique usernames: one for each organisation he gives his time to.

And the problems don’t necessarily end there. Let’s imagine Cathy gets a new job in Gesway and, instead of commuting to work like Dave, sells her old house and moves to Gesway. She stops volunteering with Finnpool Samaritans, and instead joins Dave as a volunteer at the Community Centre. Right now, this is what has to happen:

The need to delete old accounts (and the need to create new accounts for people who actually had accounts on Three Rings before they moved organisation) is creating quite a lot of work for volunteers. What’s worse, is that it’s been creating that extra work since we started offering Three Rings to Samaritans branches back in 2009, and the workload is increasing as more and more organisations adopt Three Rings. We want to fix that.

A new account model

In addition to the other improvements we’re planning for Milestone: Krypton next spring, we want to make some changes to the way user accounts are structured. These changes will then pave the way for further developments, with one big change in the pipeline for the future: we want individual volunteers to own their own Three Rings accounts.

So, instead of logging in to your Three Rings account and seeing information for the organisation your account belongs to, you’ll be able to log into your Three Rings account and see any information that’s been shared with you by organisations to which you belong. That’s a big change, but it should make life easier for a lot of our users, both right now and in the future, as they develop their volunteering careers.

When we make this happen, all existing Three Rings accounts will remain associated with their current organisations. Organisations will still be able to create accounts, too. But a big difference will be that – as long as the user and the organisation agree – a user can link their account to more than one organisation.

Just look at what that would do for Dave, with his two accounts:

We’d ensure that the organisations retained control of each user’s permissions within their organisation – Dave wouldn’t have Rota Manage permissions at Gesway Community Centre, even though he has them at Finnpool Samaritans- and in the same way, Dave would be able to share some of his personal information, like his phone number, address or CRB status, with Gesway volunteers that he might not want to share with the Three Rings admins at Finnpool: in this new model, everyone would have more control over what data they share, and who they share it with.

This new system works well for Cathy, too:

As the newer version of Cathy’s tale shows, the proposed new account structure would also save volunteers at the new organisation the trouble of creating a new Three Rings account and filling it with data for someone whose account already exists on the system.

If you’ve taken a close look at the above diagram you might also have noticed the note talking about ‘Alumni Settings’. That’s the second big change we’d like to make to the way accounts work.

Account Levels

Currently, Three Rings assigns volunteers permissions via the Roles system (and, to a certain – and sometimes confusing! – extent, through Experience Levels). We’d like to tidy that up and fold Experience Levels into Roles, because that better matches the way people are using (and expecting to use) the system these days. But we’d also like to introduce different account Levels.

That’s not some sneaky way of charging more, or of suggesting that a ‘Trainee’ account wouldn’t be cheaper than a ‘Volunteer’ account (we’re really not after your money, and we’re not introducing individual accounts just so we can charge you for them!). Instead, we want account Levels to better represent the different types of volunteer that already exist at organisations usingThree Rings.

Before we go any further, let’s take a quick look at how Roles & Experience Levels work right now:

As you can see, Three Rings currently assigns permissions on a model founded on the assumption that each organisation has only one type of volunteer, reflected by the Everyone Role. Some of those volunteers then get given extra permissions based on their role, but nobody can have fewer permissions than the Everyone Role has.

That’s because Three Rings has historically focused on volunteers staffing a rota – what many of our organisations call ‘listening volunteers’ – and our design has tended to ignore the various ‘support volunteers’ who do essential work to keep their organisations running, but don’t have much to do with the rota.

Increasingly, though, we’ve found people asking how they can use Three Rings to manage those support volunteers, and even whether they can use Three Rings to keep in touch with former volunteers, who’ve got no business seeing what the rota looks like today, but who might want to be updated about outreach or fundraising events.

So, we’d like to introduce a system of account Levels. A Level would be like a very general Role (in fact, it’d be most like a really big ‘Everyone’ Role, except you could have more than one!). Users would be able to have both an account Level and one or more Roles (so someone with the Volunteer Level could still have Roles like Training Officer & Biscuit Monitor, just as they do now!), but the Level of their account would set their basic permissions – the minimum level of data they could access without any modifying Roles to increase their permissions.

Right now, we’re kicking around words like ‘Trainee’, ‘Volunteer’ and ‘Alumni’ when we describe the different sorts of Account Level that might exist, although we’re likely to be a lot more flexible than that in real life! To keep things simple, though, let’s imagine an organisation that has set those three Levels of account. That would mean that instead of following the old model with an Everyone Role, they’d have a structure of Three Rings permissions that looks something like this:

This is actually a much simpler structure. Organisations would be able to create one account Level for their Support Volunteers (who don’t need to see the Rota or the Directory, but could do with having access to the Wiki so they can see the list of maintenance tasks) and a different Level for their Listening Volunteers (who obviously need to be able to see the Rota!). Both types of account Level could have extra permissions granted through the Roles system, but organisations are spared the need to hamstring the permissions granted by the old catch-all ‘Everyone’ role, because the Levels system gives them closer control over which volunteers can see what.

What’s more, we’d allow organisations to change an individual’s Level just like they can change Roles. So if Charlie finished his training, he could be moved from Trainee Level to Volunteer Level, and automatically get more permissions (based on his organisation’s settings). Even better, if Charlie later moved on to volunteer for another organisation his account could be switched to an Alumni Level – he’d lose access to the Directory and the Rota (and any other data the organisation decided to keep away from him), but perhaps he’d still be able to see some information, such as ‘Alumni Level News’, as defined by his former colleagues: that way, he’d be able to keep in touch with developments back at his old organisation and, if there was ever an opportunity for him to help them out in some way, he’d hear about it through Three Rings without someone else needing to tell him specifically.

What that means is that our plans would make it possible for Three Rings to enable something we call ‘End to End Volunteering’.

End to End Volunteering

Right now, Three Rings is helping thousands of people to volunteer. It’s making it easier for organisations to manage their volunteers than at any other time in history. But we think it can do more.

Right now, Three Rings can only help manage volunteers who are fully trained and currently part of an organisation. Our vision for End to End Volunteering is that Levels could be used to let organisations track volunteers through Three Rings from the moment they apply  to join until the time they move on to another organisation, and perhaps beyond.

Here’s a view of a volunteer’s path through an organisation, as it relates to Three Rings:

Of course, that diagram is a bit of a simplification – included in that single green box are no end of features that Three Rings provides to make things easier for the volunteer and the organisation. But, once Account Levels allow organisations finer control over what their users can see based on what kind of volunteer they are, End to End Volunteering creates a chart that looks more like this:

That’s a much more exciting prospect: because the permissions levels for a Trainee-Level account are much lower than those of a regular volunteer (at this organisation they just let a user see the dates & times of training sessions, and the contact details for the Training Team), a new volunteer can join the organisation with a Trainee-Level account that will track their progress through Training, and once their training is complete they can move up to a Volunteer-Level account, with more general access. When they leave they can take their personal details (together with their training record!) to a new organisation, where they can continue to useThree Rings. They’ll also be able to stay in touch with their old branch using the much-reduced permissions of an Alumni-Level account even as they gain new permissions and experiences with their new organisation.

That’s what we mean by End to End Volunteering: using Three Rings to make the whole volunteering experience easier for our users and organisations.

As far as we know, Three Rings is the oldest system of its type in the world, and the last ten years have seen some amazing developments, in terms of the number of people Three Rings is helping, the variety of different organisations on board and the technical capabilities of the system. We want to start the next decade of online rota management by continuing that improvement, and by making sure we offer as much help and support to volunteers as we can – whether they’re a new trainee, a current volunteer, or an ex-volunteer enjoying some well-earned rest.

There’ll be some exciting changes in our future, but we hope you can agree that our desire to forge closer relationships with our organisations, to streamline our own release cycle, and our re-affirmation of our ethical, non-profit business model puts us in a great position to lead all our users into the future.

This is Part 2 of a 3-Part series of posts. Part 1 is here, and Part 3 is here.

At the penultimate session of the Three Rings 10th Birthday Conference, JTA presented a session entitled Where do we go from here?, taking a look at the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade, and some of our plans for the future.

This post offers a re-cap of the second part of that session, which unveiled our plans for more frequent upgrades to Three Rings using a less-disruptive method.

Where we are now:

Back when Three Rings was only helping a handful of Nightlines, it made sense that we released a new version of the system two or three times a year, in line with the University holidays. Technology’s changed a lot over the past ten years, though: back then, even having a basic rota online was seriously cutting-edge, but now people expect a lot more from an online system.

We’ve always prided ourselves on responding to our customer’s needs, and as new technologies develop and our users make new feature suggestions, we’ve found we’re sometimes taking longer to release new upgrades than we’d like – often, a feature gets written but not released because the other features we planned for a release aren’t done yet, which isn’t always the best way to meet everyone’s needs!

Even so, we want to get back to the faster development cycles we had in the old days.

The end of Monolithic Releases:

The next version of Three Rings, Milestone: Krypton will be coming out in the early months of 2013. We want that to be the last “monolithic release” (that is, the last release in which all the new features are released as a single massive block). The problem with a monolithic release pattern, like the one we’ve had, is that if 99% of the new features are written and ready for testing, but the last 1% aren’t complete, everything has to wait until the final changes are ready.

Instead, we want to adopt a regular release cycle, where the emphasis isn’t on completing a set jount of tasks, but instead on introducing new features at a steady, predictable rate. So, after Milestone Krypton – which will help to lay the groundwork for these changes – future Three Rings milestones will be unveiled every two months. As soon as a feature is written it will be listed as appearing in the next release.

If one feature happens to be unfinished at the end of the two month cycle, all the features that are complete will be released as part of the upgrade, and only the incomplete feature will be held back (and that will come out in the first upgrade after it’s been finished).

This is a major overhaul of our existing processes, but it means all of our users will be able to see when a new feature is expected to be completed, and they’ll also know exactly when the next system upgrade is coming. On top of that, we want to create a section of the corporate website where you can see whether a feature suggestion is shortlisted, in development or scheduled for release, and check how things are going, helping to reduce the uncertainty that the old monolithic release style sometimes created.

Less Disruptive Upgrades:

The second big change we want to make to our release policy is to do with downtime. In the past, every time we’ve released a new version of Three Rings we’ve taken the system down for a couple of hours whilst we upgraded things. When Three Rings was younger, and upgrades only happened in the middle of university holidays, that didn’t cause any disruption to anyone (because once the students have gone home, the Nightlines usually take a well-earned rest!), and it wasn’t a problem.

As more and more organisations have adopted Three Rings, though, it’s become harder and harder to find a time when it’s OK to take the system down for upgrades – we’ve managed OK for the past few years by starting releases in the middle of the night, but now that we’ve got users based in both Australia and New Zealand, not even that’s going to work!

So, once we’ve switched from monolithic releases to regular ones, we’ll do our best to avoid that sort of downtime. Sometimes, it will have to happen – if we make big changes to the database, for example, we can’t allow people to access the database and change things at the same time as we’re moving everything about! – but wherever we can we’ll ensure that the regular releases ‘just happen’.

There’ll still be nothing for you to install, because Three Rings will still be an online service, but users should find they just log in to find the system’s been upgraded without inevitably going through two or three hours where they’re completely unable to get into the system!

This still isn’t all we talked about for the Future of Three Rings – there’s a third part yet to come – but we think it’s a great step forwards: with these changes, we’ll be able to make our improvements to the system much more frequent, much more responsive, and much less disruptive for everyone.

This is Part 1 of a 3-Part series of posts. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.

At the penultimate session of the Three Rings 10th Birthday Conference, JTA presented a session entitled Where do we go from here?, taking a look at the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade, and some of our plans for the future.

This post offers a re-cap of the first part of that session, in which we explain our desire to more friendly, and more in touch with our users.

Without ever engaging in direct marketing – working solely on word-of-mouth recommendations from our own delighted customers – Three Rings has become a major player in the rota and volunteer management sector. From our humble roots providing a basic rota system to just a couple of Nightlines in 2002 we now support the majority of UK Nightlines, more than half of the Samaritans branches in the country and other voluntary organisations from Community Stores to Libraries to major restoration projects.

As we’ve grown we’ve naturally had ever more to do – it’s been a long time since we had the time to visit an individual organisation to offer training, although we’re always happy to see our users at larger gatherings where we can make contact with multiple groups at once. We’ve come to feel that we’re more distant from our users than we’d like – as JTA said, we don’t want to be the sort of company that only gets in touch once a year to present the bill (especially since we officially confirmed that it’s not about the money!)

So as we enter the next ten years, we want to start doing more for our users, and for our volunteers.

For our users:

Starting in 2013, we’d like to offer each of our users a small gift, once every three years. We wanted it to be something practical, which would help to remind anyone using it that they’re not alone in doing what they do. As volunteers ourselves, we recognise that there are times when you need a bit of a boost, and so we’re aiming to present each organisation using Three Rings with a mug to thank them for their support.

We’re going to start that process in the first few months of the New Year, and we hope it will help us to re-connect with our users, even if it’s only in a small way.

We also want to do something to recognise that our users are make a difference to the wider world, not just because they do what they do, but because they do what they do through an ethical, volunteer-driven project like Three Rings.

To that end, for every five years that an organisation uses Three Rings, we’ll plant one tree in recognition of all the paper they’ve saved by keeping their rota online instead of printing it out, and we’ll plant another tree for them every five years from then on.

For our volunteers:

We’re also keen to do more to reward our volunteers, especially the testers, the many users of the system beyond the ‘core’ team of developers and support volunteers who give up their time to check that new features work as they should and report any problems in time for them to be fixed before they cause anybody any trouble.

Of course we use automated unit tests here at Three Rings HQ, but however good a unit test is, it doesn’t compare to a real human using a feature in the wild (even an artificial and controlled wild like the beta server!).

As of Milestone Jethrik we’ve launched a ‘Best Tester’ award, to be given to the member of the test team who provided the most detailed, most accurate bug reports during the test period. We’re pretty pleased with the prize for this: the Best Tester recieves a certificate in recognition of their achivement, but they also get something money can’t buy – the chance to pick a feature off our long-list, to be developed on their behalf ready for the next release of Three Rings.

In short, as a reward for their work to make the system better, a Best Tester gets to pick a light or medium-weight feature suggestion for immediate development, bypassing the usual feature planning ‘balancing act’ that can often keep lower-popularity features from making much progress. It’s a wonderful opportunity to shape Three Rings, and given the contribution our testers make to the overall quality of the system, it’s very well-deserved, too!

We also want to host an informal gathering for our testers: from Summer 2013, we’ll host an annual Tester’s Barbecue, which all testers and their families will be welcome to attend. We’d like to be able to get to know our test team socially, to thank them for their work in person, and to conduct a nice conversation without needing to apologise for things not working properly.

There’s a lot more to what JTA said on Saturday – covering both our plans for future versions of Three Rings, and our ideas for some major feature developments, so stay tuned for more updates. We’re also processing some of the films we shot of the day, and we’ll let you know when they start becoming available, too.

Just days before Three Rings’ 10th Birthday Conference, an Extraordinary General Meeting of the company formally agreed upon a not-for-profit stance to guide us into as we move into the second decade of online rota management.

We’ve always believed that, as long as we could afford to keep the company going, Three Rings should be more concerned with providing what its clients needed than with the size of its bank balance. This move, announced by Ruth in her closing session at the conference, helps to enshrine that philosophy.  There’s still a little way to go in terms of updating our paperwork and company Articles, but the policy has been agreed upon and came into force on the 12th of November, 2012.

From now on, in any year that Three Rings makes a profit, we’ll distribute our money accordingly:

The 75% of profits that are re-invested in the company will help us to grow the system, expand our users and improve our own internal processes to help keep us at the top of our game.

The 5% of profits given to open-source projects recognise our debt to the Open Source community which creates many of the trusted, powerful tools and languages that make Three Rings such a stable and affordable choice for so many organisations around the world.

The 20% of profits given to charities reflects and re-affirms our commitment to supporting the work of volunteers and charities.

We’ve always said that we’re building Three Rings to help people rather than to make ourselves rich, and we meant it. It’s great to know we’re going to be able to do even more good in the future.

Summary:

Between around 17:00 and 18:00 UTC on the 2nd of November, it may not have been possible for some of you to access Three Rings. This was because our DNS servers went offline. We have brought backup DNS servers online to resolve the problem and have also made substantial improvements to protect Three Rings against future downtime from this source.

What is DNS?

DNS, or the ‘Domain Name System’, is like a telephone directory for the Internet. Most people access websites by typing the URL, or web address, into the address bar of their web browser, and their web browser then takes them to the website.

What’s actually happening behind the scenes is that the DNS server is translating a nice-for-humans address like ‘www.bbc.co.uk‘ into a nice-for-computers address like ‘212.58.241.131‘. Just like a phone book, the name of a website is usually a lot easier to remember than the string of numbers you need for your computer to “speak” to it!

What happened today?

Anyone hosting a website is advised to have two DNS servers, located in different places, so that if one breaks the other can keep going as a backup. Three Rings actually has four, so we should have been fine.

Unfortunately, our DNS provider’s master systems in New York seems to have been badly affected in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, and they’re not having any luck fixing the issue from any of their other offices around the world.

As a result of that problem, all four of our DNS servers began to fail around 17:00 UTC (because the DNS issue will have affected different Internet Service Providers at different times, it’s hard for us to be precise about when our clients will have been unable to access Three Rings).

That meant that even though Three Rings was still running, nobody’s computer could access the site (because even though the computers were being given the human-friendly address, there was no DNS server to translate that into a computer-friendly address they could understand).

What have we done about it?

As soon as we became aware that Three Rings was unreachable, we started an investigation into what happened, and began work to get the site back online. We also posted live updates on our Twitter feed:

We issued Tweets with updates every few minutes throughout the downtime. Click for a larger view.

Once we had determined that the problem was with our DNS providers, we fired up new DNS servers with a backup provider. Because of the way DNS works this can sometimes take a long time, but in this instance it seems to have happened quickly.

Three Rings is now accessible again, and the issue should now be resolved.

What did we learn?

We’ve learnt a couple of things today.

Firstly, even though we had twice as many DNS servers as recommended, on four different continents, it turned out that there was a single point of failure in New York. That meant that once our DNS provider was unable to fix things at their New York site, their other three sites became useless too (even if it took a one-in-a-hundred-year storm to trigger the failure, a single point of failure is still serious business!)

So, we’re upgrading again. We’ve now got eight DNS servers around the world (quadruple the recommended number!), but they’re hosted with two separate companies, so even if an event occurs to knock out one set of DNS servers, the other four will keep directing users toThree Rings.

We’ve also boosted our Watchdog service. Previously, we had a system which was checking that Three Rings was up and running once every hour, and that was emailing us in the event of a problem. That system checked for a problem based on whether or not the Watchdog could reach Three Rings itself. As a result, there was a window between our DNS servers going down and the Watchdog noticing a problem (because the Watchdog spent a little while remembering the computer-friendly address for Three Rings before it asked the DNS to remind it and discovered the DNS wasn’t responding).

From today we’re paying a little extra to make that check happen once every 15 minutes. We’ve also instructed the Watchdog to monitor all eight of the new DNS servers, so if something happens to either Three Rings or to all eight of our DNS servers at least three of our volunteers will immediately receive an email warning them of the problem (and, to be extra safe, they’ll receive one email on their Three Rings address and another on their personal or day-job emails, so  there’ll be no missing them!).

Key points:

• We had four DNS Servers, spread around the world. They were used to tell users’ computers how to find the Three Rings website.
• Our DNS provider had a problem. They were unable to solve this problem because to do so they needed their New York centre online and that is still affected by the fallout from the superstorm Hurricane Sandy.
• With our DNS provider unable to fix the problem, users’ web browsers became unable to translate the human-friendly web address ’3r.org.uk’ into a computer-friendly web address. As a result,Three Rings became unavailable around 17:00 UTC (it’s hard to be precise about the time because of the way DNS works).
• In response we brought up backup DNS servers with a different provider. This fixed the issue and most people will have found Three Rings was accessible again by 18:00 UTC.
• In response we have added an extra four DNS servers. We now have a total of eight DNS servers from two separate providers, and there is no longer a single point of failure in New York (or anywhere else!)
• We are also paying more for an improved Watchdog which will monitor both the Three Rings site and our DNS providers for any problems. If anything happens, several Three Rings volunteers will be alerted to the issue immediately. So not only will we be able to start fixing things immediately, but we’ll also be able to give much more accurate times if there’s ever another DNS problem!

In the meantime, we hope our clients will please accept our apologies for any inconvenience we’ve caused them, and also feel assured we’ve taken this opportunity to learn, and to improve our operations still further.

Update: 01:00 UTC, 03/11/12:

Our DNS provider are now investigating whether the outage was the result of a Denial of Service attack against all their servers, rather than a problem centred on their New York centre. (This doesn’t affect the impact of the DNS servers going down on Three Rings, nor does it make our response of doubling our DNS servers and providers any less effective).

As part of our ongoing 10th Birthday Celebrations, we thought it might be nice to take a look at how Three Rings used to look, back in the day. We think it’s interesting the way websites change as technology and standards improve – if you compare what the BBC News Website looked like in 2001 to how it looked about this time last year it’s pretty obvious that a few radical overhauls have been made along the way.

We’ve got a few screenshots from one of the early versions of Three Rings, Version 0.721, ‘Aloha’, so we thought we’d share (just click on any of the images to see a bigger version).

Back when only Nightlines were using the system, it was possible to select the location of your Nightline using the drop-down box (because there could never be more than one organisation using Three Rings in the same town!)

We’ve never given much away on the login page, although the image of the phone’s long-gone, and now-familiar checkbox to allow a Certificate to grant extra permissions on a trusted computer won’t even be in development until 2009!

Beyond the login screen, however, things start to look a lot more old-fashioned – for a start, the Overview page isn’t called the Overview, and Aloha didn’t even have an Upcoming Events section:

As the news article says, all of these old screenshots were taken from dummy data on the Beta server, back when Aloha was still in testing. (Incidentally, we’re just as keen to get extra testers willing to support the project now as we were then, so feel free to get in touch to volunteer!)

The brown look, incidentally, is because it’s Autumn. Once upon a time Three Rings cycled it’s themes’ appearance based on season (which wouldn’t be much help to clients outside Europe!) For comparison, here’s a view of the system as it would have looked in Spring:

Moving down the links – rather than changing section using ‘tabs’ at the top of the screen! – we can take a look at the Rota.

Generally people looking at the rota are surprised by how compact it looks, but back in 2003 even software developers were using much lower screen resolutions than they do now. There’s also no option to change view – it’s a month or nothing (although since this was designed for Nightlines, all running just one, long, shift each day, that’s not the problem it would be today).

With the new rota system making it possible to run more than one rota at once, organisations using Three Rings can display extra information (like the name of the Shift Leader), as well as keeping seperate statistics for things like Day and Night shifts.

It’s quite fun to compare how the Directory used to look to how it might look today, in this screenshot from our dummy “Demonstration Branch”:

Even today the Directory doesn’t look perfect – we won’t have fixed the strange cropping of photos until Milestone Jethrik is released! – but it feels quite a bit friendlier these days.

The star char above represents the only statistics option in Aloha. Today the star chart still exists, but it’s supplemented by several more reports to help you keep tabs on the running of your organisation. On top of that, it’s now possible to output several stats reports in different formats, like spreadsheets or PDF files, as well as viewing them on the web.

The Service Delivery Report even outputs a graph, and can be really useful if you want to track how well your organisation is filling the shifts you’ve said you’ll run.

Finally, here’s a bit of a bonus: a snippit of the ‘change list’ from the very early days of Three Rings. So far all the old screenshots in this post have been from ‘Aloha’, version 0.721. The oldest changes, at the top of this picture, are from the even earlier version 0.044, ‘Easter’!

Even by the time of the changes listed here, Three Rings was evolving fast in response to user needs and requests: These changes are from Version 0.4xx, but it was only Version 0.3 “Offhook” that made it possible for more than a single organisation to use the system.

In version 0.2, ‘Mortarboard’, we still assumed that Three Rings would only ever be used by the volunteers at Aberystwyth Nightline, and that one of the very early bugs, found in 0.423 was discovered by Liz, the world’s first ever Three Rings Champion, who described introducing Three Rings earlier this year.

We think it’s quite nice to look back on where Three Rings used to be.

Partly, that’s just because it’s nice to see how things have changed, but it’s also because, from here in 2012, we can look at these early versions and know what’s coming, and see how Three Rings has – or will! – evolve to continually evolve to make sure we’re giving the best support we can to our users.

We know that News items for the Main Page – the future Overview page – will arrive in Release 0.52 ‘Fleet Street’, that weather forecasts will appear on the rota for 0.65, ‘Perfect Storm’. We can look back at last November’s improvements to Inactivity types and recognise them as an improvement to a feature that’s existed since version 0.5, ’3am Eternal’, and one that was developed to help ensure we better-reflect the needs of the volunteers using Three Rings today.

Looking back now at those early versions, the idea you’d only ever need one rota, or two people on a shift seems crazy – the challenge to make Three Rings suit the styles of such varied clients as we support now is part of what makes it so rewarding, but back then we thought we’d support no more than 40 people at one organisation. Even looking back we can’t imagine how we’d have felt if we’d known then that we’d supporting over 13,000 separate users by now. Looking back is nice, because it gives us the cosy glow of hindsight.

But looking back is also exciting. A decade ago we didn’t know where we’d be in 2012. We never imaged Three Rings would turn out to be the oldest continually operating system of it’s type!

And in the same way,  we can’t tell from here how Three Rings will look in 2022, or how it will evolve to meet the demands of its users over the next ten years. But knowing the changes and improvements we’ve made so far, knowing that most of our ideas come from our users, looking back gives us the confidence to keep improving Three Rings to better match the needs of our organisations as they move into the future with us, because we can see that it’s what we’ve always done, right from the start.

Based on how far you’ve carried us over the last decade, Three Rings in 2022 ought to be quite something!