Secretary Report 2023
The secretary’s report is pretty succinct – minutes were taken and distributed.
The only activity completed above and beyond that was the renewal and updating of CASC-OR’s Ontario incorporation information as required on an annual basis.
Webmaster Report 2023
At this time last year, we were talking about several initiatives
• License applications would be moving to an online-only model
• Multi-year licenses
• Digital hard cards to replace physical hard cards
The digital hard card was rolled out successfully in early 2023. License applications were directed to the online members site throughout the year (which is not really a technical challenge, it’s an operating policy).
The plan to offer multi-year license renewals was shelved for 2023 because it would also require clubs to move to a multi-year membership model and this would have forced change on all the clubs. The main goal of multi-year licensing was to reduce the work of issuing licenses and the implementation of the digital license accomplished much of that reduction.
We continue to address issues as reported (although to be honest we do more work on issues in the off season than through the summer) so if you have written about issues that are as yet unsolved don’t hesitate to ask again and there will be improvements and evolution of our sites.
We had two significant interruptions in our web services and email during the year which were a result of failures at our hosting provider. Although we operate our own servers on which we store our data and serve the websites, the failure at the hosting provider meant that the servers could not be “found” on the internet and were inaccessible. There was no data lost and eventually everything was restored but it caused considerable work for the divisions in the middle of their seasons.
Our main reason for using a hosting provider at this time is to provide email services which we don’t have the capacity to host and manage ourselves.
Our plan to mitigate this going forward will be to migrate our email to Google Workspace so we have much more robust email services. In doing so we will convert to Google Apps and eliminate the Microsoft 365 licensing we pay for annually. The Microsoft savings will quite possibly offset the cost of migrating to Google.
Yours in motorsport,
Scott Ellsworth
Secretary/Webmaster CASC-OR