This report combines the Editor’s and Events officer reports.

Merging the web sites

At the moment we have three separate sites:

  • britishaplassociation.org containing posts on news, events and reports such as this page. Material can be posted by committee members and sustaining members.
  • vector.org.uk contain papers and articles produced by authors. Some material has been moved from the transferred from the original archive. A few papers have been produced by the authors directly onto the site.
  • archive.vector.org.uk is the original online archive and contains a catalogue to the Vector journal and some published papers. The larger part of the back catalogue only exists on paper.

We have a plan to merge the first two sites into a single site. We think this will be easier to manage and will offer greater scope to support publishing papers and also add presentations to the journal.

There are no changes intended for the original archive and this will stay in place. There are a number other site that link to the papers on this site and we would not want to break these links. However, this site was written some time ago largely in PHP, and some of the site has degraded.

Digitizing the historic Vector journal

We have a proposal to digitize the printed Vector journal and make the whole Vector journal available online. That is and an agenda item for the 2021 AGM so more about that there.

Contributors

Up until now we have seen Contributors as principally concerning the authors of papers submitted to Vector. We intend to extend this to include people who are providing online presentations. As mentioned above the aim is to treat such presentations as part of the Vector journal.

A proposed enhancement is to give Presentations a supporting anchor page to carry the YouTube video and any other supporting material. Posts of this type can support a comments section. The contributing presenter will be given access to and ownership of the post should they wish to take advantage of it. Comments could then be fed back to the Contributor.

Webinars, Symposia and Mini-Conferences

When the planned mini-conference for March 2020 was overtaken by events and had to be cancelled, a series of impromptu Webinars was set up on a fortnightly basis, initially arranged around the proposed presentations intended for the mini-conference, they evolved into a series of open sessions with the occasional presentation. These have proved very popular and have brought people together from far and wide. These will continue indefinitely.

The highlight of the year has to be the Iverson Centenary webinar that took place 17 December 2020. Nearly two hundred people attended from all around the world. A YouTube video for that event is ready and is being reviewed and will be published very soon. So thank you to all who have waited so patiently and look out for the forthcoming announcement.

The Symposia meetings for 2021/22 – currently these are still suspended due to Covid-19. But we hope to resume these physical meetings on the last Friday of the month as soon as circumstances allow. They will continue as a parallel activity to the Webinars as long as people are willing to turn up.

The spring and autumn mini-conferences are still a tangible prospect but nothing is like to happen on this front until 2022. We would like repeat the exercise we went through in March 2020 for the “Worshipful Company of Information Technologists” at Smithfield or something very similar. Watch this space.

Communicating with the membership by mailshot is a new thing that we started doing to publicise the Webinars. The current circulation list is around four hundred, eighty of whom have self registered through britishaplassociation.org. May it continue to grow.