Today, July 24th – or 24/7/12 – is Samaritans Day, recognising that Samaritans are available to callers who need them 24/7.

At Three Rings, we’re committed to supporting Samaritans and Nightlines as we streamline helpline administration, and we’ve been doing so for a pretty long time – in fact we’re the oldest continually operating rota and volunteer management system that we’re aware of! We were founded back in 2002 with a single, clear purpose: to enable helplines (in those days, just Nightline!) to run more effectively, and much, much cheaper. In fact, for the first six years of our operation, Three Rings was given away completely free, and our team not only built the system but paid out of their own pockets to keep the server running, too.

As Three Rings has grown, of course, it’s become less and less feasible for us to keep running everything for free – too many organisations are learning the benefits of the system and even though we’ve built Three Rings using trusted open-source technologies and a brilliantly scalable model, we do need to charge a small fee to keep things running for everyone.

Normally, that fee is £150 for a Samaritans branch, or £40 for any Nightline that isn’t an affiliated member of the Nightline Association (although affiliated Nightlines get Three Rings for free, and always will).

We’ve always said that we aren’t in this to make money – we’re in this because we want to help people, and we want to make sure we’re doing all we can to help the volunteers that are out there helping people.

Everyone at Three Rings is a volunteer, both for Three Rings, and for the organisations we support. We’ve sat awake at 4 in the morning, taking calls from people in their deepest moments of despair, or in the throes of anxiety, or simply in need of someone to talk to because, at 4am, they haven’t got that many choices. And we’ve got up the next morning and gone out into the rain to shake buckets and collection tins to make sure our organisations can keep going so we can be back and awake at 4am next week too.

Nobody here is in it for the money, and, as we said back in November, there’s there’s only one way we wanted to celebrate our 10th Birthday:

As we said, Three Rings was originally set up to help Nightlines, and we’ve never forgotten those roots. So, we’ve been doing some careful saving and budgeting to help ensure we can celebrate our 10th Birthday in the best possible way – by making sure we’re doing absolutely all we can to support our users.

And this offer isn’t just for current users of Three Rings – it’s for everyone! So, if you’ve been hearing about the huge difference adopting Three Rings has made for other Samaritans branches in your region, and you’d like to find our how Three Rings can help streamline your helpline administration too, there’s never been a better time.

We offer absolutely every new organisation one full calendar month’s free, no-obligation trial of Three Rings, too – so if you start a trial on the 2nd of August this year you’ll get the whole of August, then the full calendar month of September to try Three Rings for yourself, supported by our volunteers and our promise of responding to all support queries within a maximum of 24-hours – and it’s only in March (when we’re sure you’ll already be completely satisfied!) that we’d send you that invoice for £40, down from £150, to help celebrate our 10th Birthday.

If that sounds like a fair deal to you – and we hope it does – then please do get in touch!

You may have seen recent revelations about hackers stealing thousands of passwords from users of LinkedIn, eHarmony, and LastFM.

If you’ve got an account on any of those systems, you can check if your password was one of the ones stolen using an automatic tool for the purpose (either LinkedIn checker, eHarmony checker, or LastFM Checker, depending on the website).

We’re always in favour of erring on the side of caution for this sort of thing, so we’d recommend that any user of these services changes their password anyway, and if you use the same password on other sites, you should change those as well.

Of course, you should use a different password for every website you log in to (and there exist some great free tools, like LastPass, KeePass, and SuperGenPass, to help you to do this), but we know that not everybody does this. That’s why it’s so very important that web services like Three Rings store your passwords in a way that can’t be easily compromised.

Any website that lets users create an account is going to try to keep people without accounts out. There are a lot of defences against hostile attacks from non-users (Three Rings uses lots of different ones!). But, just like there’s always a risk a burglar will get into a house despite locked doors and burglar alarms, there’s always a slight risk that someone might break through and steal details of people’s passwords – that’s what’s happened to those three websites over the past few days.

Because there’s always the risk that will happen, it’s very important to do two things: firstly, to keep checking your website protection is the best it can be (this is a bit like making sure the burglar alarm works and you haven’t left any windows open anywhere). Secondly, it’s important to secure important data like passwords (just as you could put jewlery in a safe inside the house).

In fact, Three Rings encrypts the data it moves about, but in view of the recent password-stealing attacks against other websites, we thought we’d better re-assure you that passwords kept by Three Rings are safe. Things are about to get a little technical – not too much, but if you’d rather skip the nitty-gritty details, just scroll down to the section marked ‘So what does that mean?’.

Comparison of password storage methods

This table summarises the password protection strategies employed by the recently hacked services, and by Three Rings:

	LinkedIn	eHarmony	LastFM	Three Rings
Encryption (hashing) used:	SHA-1 (okay)	MD5 (weak)	MD5 (weak)	SHA-512 (good; and “BCrypt” upgrade planned)
Salting used? (more info)	(passwords can be cracked in bulk: LinkedIn have announced that they’ll fix this)	(passwords can be cracked in bulk)	(passwords can be cracked in bulk)	(passwords cannot be cracked in bulk)
Password restrictions:	Okay 6 characters	Weak 5 characters	Very Weak no limits	Strong 8 characters; must include 2 classes of characters
Two-factor authentication:	Not available (unless using Facebook authentication)	Not available	Not available (unless using Facebook authentication)	Coming soon! We’re already rolling out two-factor authentication to our administrators, and we’ll be making it available to your volunteers in the future.

Some technical explanations

To help you understand that table, let’s look at what some of the things in the column on the left mean.

‘Password restrictions’ is pretty simple: the more restrictions there are on a password, the better the password is. (Letting someone use a password that’s only six characters long isn’t as secure as making them use a password that’s twelve characters long, for example). So websites with more complicated password restrictions are offering a bit more security.

‘Two-factor authentication’ means that you need to log in by providing a password and a second code. The password stays the same, but the code changes. That means that even if someone managed to get your password, they couldn’t log in as you without guessing the secret code. It’s like having a PIN on your bank card: even if you lose your card, whoever finds it can’t use the card, because they don’t know your PIN. (Which is why you should never write your PIN down on the card!)

The only difference is that two-factor authentication online changes the code more often than most people change their PIN, typically by using a special machine that generates a code that’s valid for one minute. To log in using two-factor authentication, you give your password and, when the system asks, you enter the code shown on the little machine. As part of our continuing review of Three Rings security proceedures, we’re investigating the possibility of letting people use two-factor authentication on our system. We wouldn’t force you to, of course, but we’d make the option available for people who wanted that extra security.

‘Encryption’ is slightly more complicated. What happens when you enter a password is that the server – the special computer the website is running on – checks its list of passwords to make sure that you entered the right password for your username. Just in case a hacker manages to steal the file with everyone’s password in, most servers encrypt the password file.

A password stored in ‘plain text’ looks the same in the password file as it would when you typed it in. So if someone gets a password file that says ‘David’s password is QVd0t10W’, they can log in as David. An encrypted password gets scrambled up, so instead of saying ‘QVd0t10W’ it says something like ‘David’s password is 72c6d96ee597b92febbf596ab2c541a457c4baea’. Even if someone types all that in, they still won’t be able to log in!

There are different ways, or ‘algorithms’, to encrypt passwords. The more complicated the algorithm, the harder it is to use a computer to ‘brute force’ an encrypted password back into plain text.

• The MD5 algorithm is pretty old (it was invented in 1991), and it’s known to be flawed. You can still use it, but things encrypted with MD5 aren’t secure – too many people know how to break it!
• Another algorithm is SHA1. That was invented in 1993, and there are a few problems with it. It’s not as bad as MD5, but there are weaknesses that mean it’s not as hard to decrypt as it was intended to be.
• Three Rings is using a third type of algorithm, SHA512 (sometimes called SHA2). That’s only from 2001 and – so far – there aren’t any known weaknesses with it. It’s the most secure of the three (which is why we use it!), but we’re investigating a change to the even-more-secure BCrypt standard in the future.

The key thing to remember here is that algorithm doesn’t change the password you type. It just makes sure that the copy of the password that’s kept on the server is scrambled up enough so that nobody could tell what your password is, even if they broke through all the other defences on Three Rings and snuck a look at the password file.

‘Salting’  is an extra security function that goes on top of the password encryption. Salting adds a bit of random data to the encrypted password, which makes it even harder to brute force a password back to plain text. (This effect “stacks up” on top of the algorithm, so a password salted and encrypted with a strong algorithm is safer than a password encrypted with a strong algorithm but not salted, and so on down the chain.)

If anyone did steal a file full of passwords, and the passwords were salted, they couldn’t just set a computer to try and brute force every password – because of the random data added on to each password, they’d have to break every single password one by one. A side effect of salting is that no two passwords will ever be encrypted the same way (even if they’re the same when they’re in plain text), and it means none of us here at Three Rings can work out what your password is.

So what does that mean?

In short, Three Rings takes the security of your passwords as seriously as it treats the rest of the data you entrust to it. We do everything we can to defend against hackers, of course, but we also make sure that your passwords are secured by encrypting them (with a ‘salt’ of random data, to add even more security), and we’re constantly looking at ways we can improve on the security we already offer.

We’re not trying to show off, here, but we do know some of our users are concerned, and we wanted to put your minds at rest: Three Rings’ data is being kept securely and safely.

Computer security isn’t simple, and to get it right takes careful planning and a detailed understanding of the technologies involved, as well as continuous assessment and auditing to make sure the system stays protected as new threats develop. But that’s something that we take very seriously, and we’re confident that the kinds of attacks used to reverse-engineer passwords on these three sites could not be used against Three Rings.

Often, people are surprised to find out just how old Three Rings is! These days it feels like just about everything is possible online, so internet-enabled volunteer management feels like the natural and normal thing to do (especially to us and the many organisations benefitting from Three Rings every day!) – but that wasn’t always the case!

Way back in 2002, when Three Rings began (or at least, when the first version of Three Rings was launched – in fact, Dan had the idea for online rota management as early as the year 2000!), it was seen as a new and exciting thing to switch from a paper rota to a new computerised version.

As we gear up for our 10th Birthday celebration and our 10th Anniversary Conference, and with our 10th Birthday Anniversary Discount year still in full swing, we thought it might be interesting to turn the clock back and speak with one of the people responsible for introducting Three Rings to the first ever organisation it supported!

Liz was coordinator of Aberystwyth Nightline back in 2002, and is still volunteering, these days as a listener at Macclesfield Samaritans. She was willing to share her memories of what life was like before Three Rings – a thing that many organisations who’ve already started using the system quickly find hard to imagine!

The arrival of Three Rings had a hugely positive impact on how we worked at Nightline.  Before Three Rings, we were completely dependent on a paper based rota which was kept in our private call centre office.  The office itself, and therefore the rota, was only accessible if you were on duty or if you were on campus and requested the building key from a warden. The wardens were always available before the shift to hand the keys over, but were notoriously difficult to get hold of at other times.  

We desperately needed a better way of managing the rota.  We were an enthusiastic and dedicated team at Aberystwyth Nightline and the same security which protected our anonymity by restricting entry to our offices, also placed barriers in front of us to accessing our own rotas.

The rota was difficult to manage and we were increasingly dependant on dedicated individuals to take shifts at the last minute.  There were also a number of instances where we found ourselves chasing up those who had forgotten they were on shift.

It was Dan Q, in his calm and assured way, who first raised the possibility of using a web based rota system.  He was a key member of the Aberystwyth Nightline executive team and had already partially developed a system before mentioning it to anyone in any great detail.  He was confident that it would work following the development time he had already put into it and it didn’t take much of an argument, if any, to excite the team.  Even if it didn’t work, we were hopeful about the possibilities it presented and were keen to try it.  

Most members of the exec team, and anyone else in Nightline who was willing to help, got involved testing the system and trialling it before it was launched.  With the wealth of individuals involved, there were a number of ideas to further develop the system tried out. Some of these have now been lost along the way;

* The stars which celebrated the number of completed shifts, which quickly became a competition between a few to get the most stars

* The icons which took ages to draw, and which tried to cover every possible need a Nightliner could have (I don’t even remember the purpose of the TWO plane icons (1 a generic plane, the other being a Typhoon!)

* The colour scheme and background design which changed with the seasons
And many more.

Volunteering with Samaritans today I know there have been many iterations and improvements on the original Three Rings system since those early days, but even then it was a godsend to us.  It allowed us greater flexibility and control in both filling shifts and and ensuring a full rota.

I’m impressed every day by the dedication of the Three Rings volunteers in developing a system which is tailored to the needs of individual organisations.  It is easy to underestimate how different each Samaritans and Nightline branch works and therefore the differences in their needs which the Three Rings team cater for. Ruth, JTA, Dan, Paul and everyone else who has been involved down the years and today have given so much of their time, over and above the requirements of their day jobs, to develop something which is provided essentially at cost to Samaritans and Nightlines.  

It is incredible that the project we were so excited about in 2002, which we hoped would improve the way we worked, has been so successful and that so many others have benefited from it: only the other day I saw an email from Macclesfield floating about saying ‘yet again Three Rings saves the day.’  It made me smile.

Three Rings is 10 years old in 2012! And, to celebrate our birthday and our Nightline roots, we’re giving every organisation using Three Rings a discount: every invoice issued in 2012 will be at our ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40!

Back in 2002, Three Rings was a tiny project intended to help the 10 or so volunteers that ran Aberystwyth Nightline. But word of mouth soon spread, and more and more Nightlines began to adopt Three Rings, and each new organisation wanted to tell other organisations about us…

…Now, ten years later, Three Rings supports over ten thousand users, at more than a hundred and twenty separate organisations, including Nightlines, Samaritans, and similar support networks around the UK and Ireland – and some even further afield.

Throughout that time, our aim has been the same: to streamline helpline administration so that volunteers can devote more time helping their callers, and less time to paperwork. We’ve aimed to provide the highest quality service, and the best, most flexible system we can make, at the lowest price we can afford so that every Three Rings client – from the largest Samaritans branch to the smallest Nightline – gets the best deal available, and can save more resources to devote to things like training and publicity.

We’ve always been open about our pricing structure: individual Samaritans branches pay £150 a year, with no extra set-up charges or support fees, and Samaritans regions get a discount rate of just £120 per branch and access to our powerful suite of Regional Tools to support collaboration between neighbouring branches. Meanwhile, we support the Nightline Association by providing Three Rings free to affiliated Nightlines, and for £40 a year to non-affiliated Nightlines.

We’ve been able to keep these charges low thanks to our own dedicated team of unpaid volunteers – including our grassroots champions and advocates amongst our users – and through the use of the same free, trusted technologies used by Internet giants such as Amazon and Google. Right from the start, we worked to ensure a scalable architecture and a strategic business model that meant Three Rings would become increasingly sustainable as its popularity grew, rather than risking the company overreaching itself with rapid expansion.

Thanks to that scalable structure, each new organisation we bring on board helps to sustain and improve Three Rings for all the others and, as we enter our 10th year, we think it’s time we gave something back. We’ve been planning to do this for a while, and it’s the best way we can thank you for helping us to help everyone:

To celebrate our 10th Birthday, and to reflect our support for the Nightlines that helped inspire and improve early versions of Three Rings, every invoice we issue during 2012 will be for the ‘unaffiliated Nightline’ rate of just £40 per organisation. That means our standard rate for Samaritans Branches, for non-affiliated Nightlines, and for any other comparable organisation, will be just £40 for the whole of 2012 (unless you’re a Nightline affiliated with the Nightline Association, in which case we still won’t charge you anything!).

If you already use Three Rings, you’ll be invoiced on your usual date. Every organisation will be issued an invoice for just £40, as if they were an unaffilitated Nightline, even if they’d normally pay £150. Samaritans Regions will be invoiced at £40 per branch, instead of the usual discount of £120 per branch. And, if you’re an organisation that decides to start using Three Rings in 2012, you’ll still get our standard full calendar month trial, and an invoice for £40 if you’d like to keep using the system after that.

A decade ago, we never dreamed this project could get so popular with Nightlines, let alone with organisations like Samaritans, but our aims haven’t changed: we still want to make it easier for you to get volunteers on shifts. It’s thanks to the support of our existing clients that we’re doing so well in achieving that goal, and it’s thanks to our future clients that we’ll be able to build on our successes in the future.

So this is our way of saying thanks, not just to the Nightlines that nurtured us in the past, but to the Samaritans that continue to suggest enhancements today, and to the organisations curious about what we can do for them over the coming months. It’s a thank-you not just for the support you’ve given to us, but for the assistance you’ve given your fellow Three Rings users, and the vital support you continue to give your callers. Enjoy this year’s celebratory discount, and have some cake on us!

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!

In addition to Three Rings‘ efforts to help individual Nightlines, we’re also proud to support the efforts of the Nightline Association, an umbrella charity that represents the interests of Nightlines around the UK and Ireland. One of the ways we’ve been helping out recently is by providing a single-sign-on authentication mechanism so that Nightline volunteers can easily get access to Nightline Association resources… by using their Three Rings username and password!

The Nightline Association website, showing Three Rings as a login option.

Using a free and widely-supported standard called OpenID, Three Rings makes it possible for trusted third-party websites – such as that of the Nightline Association – to allow their members to have to remember only one username and password wherever they go. Now Nightline volunteers can use the trusted, security-tested Three Rings login system to get access to all kinds of resources shared through the Nightline Association website.

Nightlines and the Nightline Association benefit too. By not having to manage logins, it’s easier than ever to ensure that former volunteers and other unauthorised parties can’t get access to private information: the very second that their Three Rings account is put to sleep, a volunteer can no longer log in to Nightline Association services, either!

If your helpline uses other computer systems – for example; an intranet, an e-listening system, or any kind of members-only forum – and you’d like your volunteers to have the convenience of being able to log in to all of them with their Three Rings identity, get in touch and we’ll help you to make it happen. Single sign-on, backed by the power, safety, and convenience of Three Rings, is a great way to unify your computer systems and to simplify life for your volunteers.

We’re all busy at Three Rings HQ writing code that’ll make it into the next release of Three Rings: Milestone: Hafnium – but we thought we’d take a few seconds to share with you the news of some of the “back end” upgrades our team have been making over the winter period. These aren’t the same kinds of exciting updates that come in our milestone releases. But they are little things which will have an ongoing benefit in the years to come. We like to think of it as investing in the future of the Three Rings service. Changes include:

• New Processor – We’ve upgraded the processor of the server that powers the Three Rings service. Rather than being powered by two “cores” – which can be approximated as being like two little “brains”, working tirelessly – it’s now powered by six, as well as a handful of other minor upgrades. This should result in a boost to the speed and responsiveness of the system when used at peak (busy) times, by enabling the server to consecutively deal with more simultaneous users without slowing down.
• New DNS Servers – DNS is a crucial part of the backbone of the Internet. It’s our DNS servers that enable your computer to know where on the Internet to look for the Three Rings service, when you type the web address into the address bar or click on a link. Previously we had two DNS servers, both hosted in the UK. To improve our redundancy, we’ve upgraded to four DNS servers spread across three continents. This means that users’ computers should be better-able to connect to Three Rings, even during times when Internet links are damaged or servers become unavailable, as occasionally happens.
• IPv6-ready – You may have heard that every computer on the Internet has an IP address, that looks a bit like this: 12.34.56.78. Well: a problem that’s facing Internet engineers right now is that we’re running out of IP addresses. When the Internet was invented they only bothered to make it capable of having four billion addresses (they didn’t ever suspect that someday we’d all be on it), and we’re running out! There have been a few hacks made to make the Internet work for as long as it has, but the only long-term solution is for everybody to switch to a new system, called IPv6: your Internet Service Provider be planning for this to happen within the next few years. Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others all plan to test IPv6 soon, and we decided to join these tech giants in making sure that we’re ready for the Internet of tomorrow. That’s why Three Rings is now accessible via IPv6 (the new one): you don’t have to do anything, but if you’re already using IPv6 (you can find out, here) you’ll see the IPv6 version of the service when you log in to Three Rings (it’s identical, so you won’t even notice!). There are other benefits to IPv6, too, but I’ll refrain from boring you with the details.

Now you know how Three Rings is preparing for the future and laying the groundwork to continue to provide a fast, resilient, and future-proof service for years to come. Of course, if you’ve got any questions about any of these changes, you’re welcome to leave a comment or get in touch!

Many of us on the Three Rings team are, or have previously been, Samaritans volunteers ourselves. Some of us have even been lucky enough to be Samaritans volunteers at any of the 50 (and growing!) number of branches that use Three Rings to manage their rota. But – until today – not one of us had the opportunity to visit General Office, the Ewell-based headquarters of the national Samaritans charity.

Few volunteers do. Perhaps that’s why there are so many misunderstandings about what it is or what everybody there does (images of an enormous soulless corporate skyscraper couldn’t be further from the truth). But today, a handful of volunteers from the Three Rings core team got the chance to visit General Office to learn more about the Samaritans Connect project. This project – funded by the Chad Varah Appeal – aims to provide a sophisticated new platform to help ensure that callers can always get through to an available volunteer, no matter where they are, and could provide valuable emotional support to up to 370,000 callers per year.

Three Rings team members outside Samaritans General Office, in the snow (click for larger image)

We could perhaps have picked a better day to visit! Heavy snowfall this week has cut off parts of Surrey, and, while the old millpond behind the charity’s offices looked particularly beautiful covered with ice and surrounded by snow-covered trees, it did make driving conditions on the roads nearby a little hair-raising at times! Nonetheless, it was great to make it there and to finally visit the place: both as Samaritans volunteers, who wanted to see “where the magic happens” and with our Three Rings hats (well: shirts!) on, to try to better-understand the work done by Samaritans and to discover how we can help to make their plans come to fruition.

By better-understanding how they plan to make the Samaritans Connect project a reality, we can now be far more confident when we provide new services through Three Rings that we’re not “treading on the toes” of the Samaritans Connect project. Moreover, we’ve laid the groundwork that might one day allow rota management to integrate harmoniously with other IT systems within Samaritans, which would be of benefit to many thousands of listening volunteers.

We were also pleased to hear about many of the open standards that the Samaritans Connect project will be embracing. This means that in making sure that Three Rings is compatible with Samaritans Connect, we may also be able to improve connectivity between Three Rings and other third-party services, too. Of course, in accordance with our privacy and security policies, any such integration will only be done with the co-operation of the helpline involved, and there’s an immensely long way to go before you’ll be able to, for example, sign in to Three Rings’ rota management system and your organisation’s other IT systems simultaneously, sharing data completely effortlessly between them… but today we made an important step, and we thought we’d share that with you.

Have you ever got in touch with the Three Rings team team to suggest a feature that would make things easier at your organisation? We love to hear from the people who use Three Rings on a day-to-day basis, because we’re committed to helping to make volunteering – and particularly the management of a voluntary organisation – easier.

Have you ever wondered what happens to all of those suggestions that we receive? Here’s the answer!

All of those feature requests get put into a special database (unless they’re already in there, as the more popular requests often are, in which case we make a note that you want that feature too). Using this system we can see what’s been requested, who’s requested it, how important it is to them, which of our developers have committed to start working on it, and what work has been done on it so far (which is particularly important for our peer review process). We’re even able to use the system as a springboard for online debates on the best way to tackle particular problems, or ways to add value to new features.

Right after every milestone release, the development team gets together and uses this list to prioritise the features for the next release, into those which must make it in and into those which we’d like to provide, if we have the resources. So how do we do this?

Our strategy is to prioritise each feature request by ‘weighting’ it according to a number of factors, such as:

• Who will benefit? – a feature that  will only help a handful of users at only one or two organisations is less important than a feature that will benefit almost everybody who uses the system. (Similarly, we’re also strongly-committed to putting existing users first: we’re more focussed on providing the best possible experience to our current users than we are about adding in special features to ‘win over’ potential new customers).
• Is it overdue? – we like to keep our promises; so if we’ve tried to get your feature in during a previous milestone but couldn’t make it, we’ll put an extra effort into getting it into the subsequent milestone.
• Does it integrate with other features? – an important consideration when developing software is whether or not a new feature will “fit in” nicely with the existing system. Sometimes a feature can’t be implemented until we’ve laid the foundations in earlier milestones: a lot of the work that goes into each release doesn’t give an immediately obvious new feature – but it makes it possible for that feature to be brought in next time round.
• Can it comprise part of a larger solution? – we believe that one of the things that makes Three Rings special is that it adapts to just-about every organisation’s own distinct way of working. That’s because when we implement a new feature, we look to see if there’s a way in which it can be realised that’s more universal: that will meet similar needs by diverse organisations.
• Is it fast to implement? – features that are easy and quick for us to plan, develop, and test are weighted with a slightly higher priority than those which are complex or time-consuming: we want you to have the best tools in the shortest timeframe!

We’ve always said that Three Rings is driven by the needs of everyday users – users like you – and that’s why it’s important that if you have an idea about how Three Rings could be better – tell us! Even if your suggestion is one that’s been made before, adding your voice helps to show us how important that feature is and how many people will benefit from it.

We want to hear about your experience of using Three Rings, and what we can do to make it better for you! That’s what makes Three Rings better for you, and for everybody else, too.

We’ve made a deviation from our usual pattern of updates this autumn: this post is here to explain why we’ve changed the release schedule, and when you’ll be getting the other features you asked for.

Before January last year, Three Rings was used exclusively by Nightlines. Indeed, even today it’s used by virtually all of the Nightlines in the UK and Ireland, but by 2008 it became apparent that the system already did just about everything the Nightlines needed it to do. We’d barely had a support request in a year, and there didn’t seem to be any great list of requested features for us to introduce to the system. After the challenge of the past six years, the feeling of not having much to do didn’t sit quite right with the team, so we opened Three Rings up and began offering our services to Samaritans and to a select few other charities.

Since then, we’ve been taking on new branches on a regular basis. We keep a waiting list – no more than one branch per week, so to make sure that when a new branch starts using the system, they’re the only branch that’s brand new to the system. I don’t think any of us could say we don’t have much to do anymore!

Feature requests keep coming in, and as we’ve said before, we try to prioritise new features based on what will provide the most good to the most users. Each new release of the system is a mix of behind-the-scenes improvements, and more obvious changes that reflect the feature requests we’ve been given over the previous few months.

One feature request in particular has appeared two or three times recently. Three times isn’t actually that many for a feature request, but this one’s a bit different. As we’ve taken on more and more branches, the diversity of Three Rings users has grown. Back in 2007, the average user was a 21-year-old student, probably female, and slightly more likely to be studying psychology or English Literature than anything else. Today I have no idea what the average user is like, except that they almost certainly provide emotional support through a listening service of some sort.

For all that we’ve been doing our best to develop the features that do the most good for the most people, one type of Three Rings user was being left behind. As more branches came online, their volunteers became users of the system. And some of those users were blind, or visually impaired, and they found the system very hard to use.

Once we heard about this, we did what we could to patch things up: we shoehorned some extra features into Simple Version, which helped a bit, but it didn’t fix things. Of course, we wrote Three Rings to meet all of the web accessibility standards – we didn’t set out to fail our users on purpose – but there was still a lot of room for improvement. Standards-compliant though it was, working through a page of Three Rings using a screen reader took an unconscionably long time, and by the time you’d got to the bottom of the page it was often hard to remember what the first ten links had been.

We’ve been hard at work to fix this, and we think we’re almost there. Feedback from our alpha testers on the improved accessibility version of Three Rings has been very positive, and we want to get those improvements “out there” as soon as we can so we can improve the usability of the live site.

For this reason, we’ve taken the difficult decision to put back our next major milestone, Hafnium, to the New Year. In a few weeks time, we’ll put out a minor release (code-named G-124) aimed at addressing some of the difficulties which blind and visually impaired users have raised over the last few months.

I realise that this goes against our normal philosophy of prioritising the features which benefit most volunteers, but it’s in a very good cause: we love features that help lots of people because we love what Three Rings does: help you get volunteers onto phonelines. Since we became aware of the usability problems with Three Rings and screen readers, we’ve been  concerned we might do the opposite, and make life just that extra bit harder for those unable to use the visual display. We volunteer with this project to help your volunteers stay on the phones and in the branch, and we want to keep it that way.

The normal majority-driven feature-led releases will be back at the start of 2011. In the meantime, thank-you for your patience whilst we try to make life easier for visually impaired volunteers at Samaritans branches – and elsewhere.