Notice of upcoming changes….  (caution, a 10 minute read 😊)

Recently the CDC club officers notified us of changes and to halt items related to the website.  Much of this relates to new leadership and desires to enhance the club’s website presence and really overhaul everything.  All endeavors we applaud (and in fact went through 18 years ago). 2 years ago we stepped back from actively operating this role hoping new faces would bring new ideas. While not actively managing the committee role, were open to provide any support to new board members and new IT chair were to draft/implement changes to the website – and there was still alignment to publish those changes and/or do any necessary technically that might be required to bring such ideas to life.  Little has been done on that front as many have noticed but glad they’ve made progress on the other end with their new architecture – to which we know nothing about – and again that’s ok – it was always their choice to keep us outside the loop.  Perhaps preferred.

First some thanks.   We’ve had many partners along the way that have allowed us to provide so many services (hosting, PBX, email hosting, database vendor relationships) mostly leveraged through outside commercial endeavors/relationship/donations that allowed so many new ideas to come to life or hosting and enterprise services so affordable.  I’ve said THANK YOU to those vendors/clients many times and will again here say thank you for helping the CDC run all these services affordably.  Being cost sensitive with any endeavor was ALWAYS a priority in our club as when we started the club was roughly $37k in the red and have come such a long way with your help.  For clear transparency, the IT spend for the club (phone,email,data storage, licensing,website,DNS,certs,etc.) was under $1.4k annually and was spread through all services, league, trails, central operations, etc.  League/Trails ops tools were separate and based on # teams/participants and they drastically reduced the hours spent managing certain items.  Everything from registrations to awards were automated. 

Moving towards the future though – and through recent communications from the current CDC board of directors – my partners and I believe we need to separate our operations.  The platform in current state has become dated and we feel it’s best to begin the shutdown process now with leadership informing us of their new direction. And while the Club’s new leadership hasn’t chosen to share or partner with us on this new direction, we’re happy to have partnered for recent years and wish them the best. There are certain security updates that needed to be finished (things silently done for many years) to maintain the environment in the current state and recently the CDC president (to whom we take direction from) informed us to freeze all work. Instead of debating this and trying to convey the importance of such actions, our leadership has instead decided the better course of action will be to decommission back-end systems and all CDC related materials be returned to Club’s IT leadership team over next two weeks (of course at no charge).

We continue to support the CDC as whole and offer (open arms) to provide any future design/hosting services in a more formal and professional manner, but right now we need to allow their team to fly solo with their ideas and not be in tug-a-war as to what the legacy systems can or cannot do. It was built with certain goals many years ago by different volunteers and the new leadership has a new direction. That direction, the costs, the design or requirements are all unknown to us – even as club members. 
But again, we’re excited and supportive of the new direction!!!  We know that these are volunteers trying their best – and we did too!

Coming up with ideas to help operate our club and streamline back-end operations to save time and money has always been the goal - if I'm speaking personally.  Specifically volunteering for this task over the last 16 years has been an honor and a pleasure.  But I’m not JUST speaking for myself and would like to thank the countless volunteers and members that submitted ideas to webmaster@darter.org or other like-minded designers or freelance developers that helped to bring your great ideas to life for the betterment of the CDC as a whole.  Also, would like to thank the handful of developers in eTS that contributed – perhaps forced 😊 – into making the tools work or simply getting a job done you cared nothing about (darting that is).  I owe everyone a round of your favorite cocktail!

Click here to learn more about your club data and the priority of privacy while in our role

One key priority I, myself, always took seriously was the privacy of your data.  Simply said, we ensured we always stored membership data (names, emails, phone, etc.) on secure and private servers – not planting those data-points in tools like Google Drive for example where terms of services and privacy were very loose.  Most don’t know but for over 10 years our data has sat encrypted on an Oracle secured platform – to which annually I’ve found sponsorship for over half that cost of ownership.  Everything from your names/addresses, trails scores, emails & phone numbers, and even awards, shirt sizes was always locked down.  We felt this data safety and integrity a priority and responsibility.  In fact, unless you were logged in, you couldn’t even see a single name of a member!  The new leadership has been informed of this as well and I’m sure it’s in their scope.  Up and until the CDC’s interaction with the DartConnect platform, your data was never shared with any 3^rd party services.  We would advise YOU to always seek terms of service agreements and find out what companies are doing with the data you give them.  DartConnect clearly states that they will sell your information and the software is riddled with Google & Meta adsense and monitoring tools… but we love DartConnect just as much as others – maybe more without all the bloatware though… so anyway, public service announcement - be aware where your data is going.

Change is always a little difficult to consume and we wanted to be transparent that at any stage we've been here to help if asked. The CDC website and platform will be moved in to a read-only state.  All data is being exported (securely) from our hosted services grid into HUMAN READABLE industry standard XML formats all documented internally with each data point to which seated board of director members have had access to for over a year.  As someone that does this for a living, I can say this is by far the easiest way to go.  The data will be delivered to the club’s leadership on physical media (again privacy).  Also, every webpage, site document, club document are in the process of being archived and saved into native formats that can be viewed on any mainstream browser.  In essence, nothing is being left behind as we personally don’t want to be accused of setting up anyone to fail in these regards.  Transition has been 2 years in the making and all key members of the club BOD have had access to back-end tools like trails, league manager, membership records, affiliate records, etc.  Luckily the new IT chairperson comes in with a technical background and surely, he will do great things moving forward.  The want to be transparent that we’re not trying to be difficult in anyway is the point here.

Click here to learn more about what was offered to assist.

Being transparent still, eTS (company I work with) did offer (in June) to update everything for the club at no cost enhancing back-end tools to remove the need for ANY technical experience.  This should be noted in June Board of Director meeting minutes.   The simple goal was keeping some consistency to everything moving forward and allowing the Club’s leadership to take full control – with many completed enhancements submitted to the BOD (in August/September IT committee report) which should be available in their published minutes.  Unfortunately, while we thought the leadership was onboard back in June this proved not to be true.  It’s of no consequence at this time because our partners have decided internally that the time for CDC to move forward with their solution is now - after all it's been 2 years.  As one said, “if they complain daily about what was built but never are pushed to implement their new solution, they’ll just continue bitch at us and rely on us at the same time.  It’s become a toxic relationship”.  Except for the last part, I agree.

Again, it’s been a great honor to have tried to serve the CDC audience in this volunteer role.  Not perfectly of course but learning and hopefully doing some fun things along the way.  I’ve enjoyed meeting and chatting with so many about your great ideas and look forward to the new ideas from our new leaders.  Running the leagues with Rose Scott for many years was fun and being the first club in the nation to bring online scoring and stats to life was a thrill ride!   I can’t speak for everyone, but I remain committed to volunteering in other areas… but we’ll leave all this technical stuff to the new experts.  Please have patience with the new team after all, they’re volunteers too. We sincerely hope this transition goes professional and positive and from our end we will keep it positive as that's the only way to move forward.

For me… maybe I’ll try something different like running a trails night again 😊

Thanks so much for reading and happy darting!
Eric Belloma  (2006-1006)