Committee Meeting 10-Jan-2026 Technology Report
Report on Technology for the Committee Meeting on 10th January 2026 by Kevin Machin
A summary of the progress made since the 6th December 2025 report, along with plans for the next steps.
Achievements
- New website: nothing significant to report. It was a quiet month, what with the festive break and all. The behind-the-scenes work continues.
- Old website/shop: things were (eventually) set up for the membership special offer. We've now received some new applications, so it appears to be working.
Next Steps
The plans, as reported at the last meeting, remain. In addition, there's a piece of work to consider with renewed importance.
One of the most difficult, error prone, time consuming, and labour intensive tasks, is keeping the writing groups directory on the website up to date. This currently involves something like the following:
- Obtain the latest membership spreadsheet from the Dropbox.
- Save this as a comma separated values (CSV) file.
- Manually massage the data in the CSV file to create the list of group names in each region.
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For each geographical region:
- Load the regional groups document (PDF) into LibreOffice Draw.
- Manually edit the "drawing" to get the information up to date, referring to the CSV file.
- Resave the regional groups document.
- Upload the new regional groups document to the website.
- Change the appropriate "contact one of these groups" button so that it downloads the new document.
The proposal is to develop a software tool to automate most of the above procedure, by doing the following.
- Ingesting the latest membership spreadsheet directly (once manually obtained from the Dropbox).
- Automatically generating text for the regions and group names, which can then be pasted (still manually but a lot easier) into the website.
- Automatically generating the complete PDF regional groups documents which can then be (manually) put onto the website.
While not a complete solution, the above should save us a lot of time and effort and enable us to:
- Keep the writing groups directory current, by regularly running the simplified procedure,
- Avoid groups being accidentally omitted from the directory.