Ringing Forums

not having a recruitment initiative for the coronation would have been a very big missed opportunity — A J Barnfield

I agree that would have been a mistake, and with the rest of what you say - centrally, I think things have been done well. But I've also heard nothing at all from the four associations I ring in, I've also checked all four association websites and there's nothing on any of them either.

it is up to those introducing new recruits to make sure they are teaching people who see this as an activity that will continue for a long time — Simon Linford

Exactly.

We have a recently retired new ringer who ticks all the boxes - learns fast, making good progress and is now a fully integrated member of the tower. I can adjust my work schedule to give her 1 hour of 1:1 time a week on the simulator, the goal being to get her ringing PH by places as quickly as possible so she can join in with the rest of the ringers, who, after a 40+ year hiatus, are starting to learn methods. I'm not going to push her to one side so I can teach learners who's commitment might not even last to the end of the coronation ceremony.

Although I've been on the ART M1 course and am teaching "By The Book" I'm unlikely to register as an ART teacher as I don't have the time to teach people who might be referred to me. Plus the ART teacher who taught me has been burned out by the process, to the point where she talked about giving up ringing. I'm not going to risk the same.

If we were to actually recruit 8,000 new ringers, with about 6 months before the coronation we'd probably need 1-2,000 new teachers in place before Xmas. Even teaching 1,000 ringers would be a stretch, I think.

And of course if we ever were to digitise that sort of material, there wouldn't be much point unless we had secure, long-term digital archival in place already...

this discussion is about preserving information that's already in digital form, not digitising paper records, which would be a separate effort. But in any case https://www.whitingsociety.org.uk/old-ringing-books/old-books-menu.html shows that it's perfectly possible to digitise paper without vast expense.

And yes, I've already said that a key part of digital archiving is copying the content onto new storage formats as they become available. But that's really not hard - it took me around 20 mins of fiddling to figure out the best set of options for the 2 commands I needed to archive this forum and push it to cloud storage, cloud storage which costs me nothing. In fact I've just re-mirrored it, there's no reason why it couldn't be done automatically every day, with zero effort after the initial setup is done.

There's no justification for not archiving digital data related to ringing.

if you have any problems, let me know what bits you need and I'll copy them into a spreadsheet.

it's the full report in a form you can cut and paste the tables from into a spreadsheet, if you use fixed width column mode. I don't know exactly which bits you are looking for, there didn't seem much point in guessing! :grin:

What's the best way of us doing that? The current scramble around people's machines to get copies old survey and reports is a perfect case in point - "individual people's hard drives" is not a suitable archive strategy! :scream:

No argument with that from me!

Proof of Concept: a snapshot of https://www.ringingforums.org

http://bleaklow.com/www.ringingforums.org/index.html

You'll notice this post isn't present over there :razz:

Needs ~111Mb of disk space, hardly life threatening...

We all need to be fostering leadership and organising skills, even at an early stage — Tristan Lockheart

By running something along similar lines to this, perhaps?

https://www.globalgrooves.org/get-involved/future-leaders

Which, before anyone raises the money issue, is funded by The Arts Council. If they can get funding, I see no reason why Ringing couldn't.

the issue of money — Alison Hodge

I can't think that a few high capacity USB SSD drives are going to break the bank, and there are any number of free / cheap cloud based storage services.

There are 2 primary issues that would need to be considered:

• Content format. I expect most of the content of interest would be text based, in which case Plain Old ASCII Text is the best format - other formats such as MSWord or PDF require the corresponding software to render them, and take significantly more storage space. For example, the PDF of the 104-page 1988 survey that I re-rendered to plain text is 1/32 of the size of the original, and when compressed, 1/132 of the size. You could fit 26 copies of it on an ancient floppy disk, or ~19,000 copies on a nearly-as-ancient 1Gb flash drive.
• Storage medium. The principle here is to have copies in multiple locations and on different storage mediums, e.g. CD/DVD, USB drive, Cloud. And crucially, they need to be regularly verified, and new copies created as old technologies become obsolete and new ones become available.

It's all doable though, not doing it because of "issue of money" is ridiculous, on multiple fronts.

ut only one person (me) is teaching at the moment and this is the pinchpoint. — Jason Carter

As it is almost everywhere. I don't see how we can deliver the quality of training needed to retain and progress the responders to "Ring For The King".

learners are one thing, established ringers, who make up the bulk of the ringing population, are used to a lifetime of "cheap or even better, free"

That depends on who you talk to. When The Ringing Foundation was set up to raise money and channel it into ringing a lot of ringers said 'it's not needed'. — John Harrison

That approach has turned out well then.

If ringing is to grow rather than to continue to decline it needs vision plus long term planning and support, that takes money, and a credible and professionally run organisation to raise it. But I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to this particular choir :joke:

good luck getting £52 per year out of your average ringer... :rofl:

↪John de Overa
if you don't mind doing that John, it would be useful to have. I don't want to miss a question out that we later regret not having an answer to. — Jason Carter

Here you go:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZlmtNf52veNZoVuUkH-bNt7Jq_hycpQg

What's rather depressing is that all of the problems that were identified 34 years ago still seem to be endemic.

n which case, we would have to compile a dataset by requesting information from associations and merging it with the Dove dataset. — Tristan Lockheart

I've had a look at three association websites round here, they all have lists of towers including branches so I expect most will have, nationally.

One other wrinkle that occurred to me is that some towers are in more than one association, so some deduplication would be needed.

No, I couldn't find a column at that level, just Association. It might be in the database.

The other thing that would be of interest is tower contact details, but I suspect that might have to be obtained directly from Associations, and that might have data protection constraints. The other option would be to scrape it from association websites, where the details are public.

Yet another reason for a direct membership organisation :wink:

I'm part way through cleaning up a plain text version of the two PDF files containing the survey report that were posted earlier, does that have value or am I duplicating something that already exists?

Yes, and the just announced funding is £236,300 a year for the next three years, it's not their only funding stream.

So do we have details of the towers in each district and branch? — Tristan Lockheart

This is a start: https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/dove.csv?geo_region=1&bells=3%2B&ringable=1