Ringing Forums

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

Well it's fascinating stuff, but where would the money come from? — Alan C

This press release from an organisation I've been involved with dropped into my inbox this morning. I had a look at their accounts - in the last year their income was approximately £1 million. That's for an organisation started by a small group of people who had nothing but their shared passion, and have built a substantial and well-funded and clearly well regarded organisation from the ground up.

Ringing ticks most of the same boxes they do in terms of culture, community involvement, wellness and many more, but they had none of the advantages that ringing has - no existing national organisation, no access to infrastructure that in ringing's case is probably worth billions of pounds. They are visible to the public perhaps a few dozen times a year, ringing is visible at least once a week in thousands of locations across the country. Global Grooves don't have centuries of heritage in this country to draw on, ringing does. By comparison, I think the case ringing could make to funding bodies is an exceptionally strong one.

As far as I can tell, what ringing doesn't have is an ongoing fundraising effort with contacts to the relevant funding bodies in the UK. Any publicity and fundraising seems to be episodic and based around individual national events such as The Millennium and Queen's Jubilee. Clearly it will good if Ring For The King delivers a crop of new ringers, but if that's all it does I think it will be a missed opportunity. It seems like an excellent launchpad to move funding of ringing onto a long-term, sustainable basis.

What could ringing do with £1 million a year?

Will do, I'm busy today but will try to get it done by the end of the weekend.

But I suspect we need to recreate it, in a more modern age... — Jason Carter

I've had a very quick poke at the PDF docs - they convert quite nicely to text with the layout of the tables mostly intact and only a moderate amount of cleanup required. With that done it should then be possible to cut+paste the tables into a spreadsheet. If that would be helpful, let me know and I'll do a more thorough job.

OK, I wasn't sure what their exact remit was - thanks.

I can't see a way to get to a good enough sample of individuals for quant. analysis without a bias towards prosperous towers and learners on ART, short of a firm being paid to take on the task. — Tristan Lockheart

Haven't we recently announced exactly that?