Website Committee Report – December, 2003

Our area website continues to be in a state of constant change. To date, we have added two new sections to the site; the New to Service section under the Resources menu, and a West Central Region section under the Area Business menu. Both of these new sections are designed to provide basic information about these two dimensions of service.

The New to Service section contains diagrams of how we communicate in our area, maps of the area divided by districts, a map of the metro districts, and a document that provides descriptions for many of the acronyms and entities in our service structure. At the current time, there are 16 documents available for download or printing. If you find an acronym or entity missing, please email us at website@area36.org and we will attempt to include it in the document. Also, if you have a document or process that you think should be included in this section, please email us with that idea or document. We want to make this site an excellent resource for the service workers in our area.

In the West Central Region section we have links to downloading, or reading, the new Regional Reporter – which is a new effort to share service experience within the West Central Region. It might be of some assistance to anyone considering the various service positions, as it contains the sharing of those who have held, or currently hold, many service responsibilities. There is also a link to a flyer for the West Central Regional Conference in Wyoming next year, as well as reports on past regional service meetings. This part of the site will undoubtedly expand as the sharing within the region increases.

Our site currently contains more than 1850 files. This includes web pages, images, documents, email files, and server-side programming files. For our Webmaster, Nick, to ensure the site continues to function properly is a significant task. One, which he does extremely well! Nick has continues to work closely with the Corrections folks to expand the utility of the inmate assignment function that the Temporary Sponsorship Program uses through the website.

We are currently working on two projects. The first being the placement of the video PSA’s from GSO on our site. This was a request from District 25. They feel that they could use these PSA’s from the website in their work with professionals and other public information activities. A conversation has taken place between the web committee chairperson and GSO staff. Currently, a letter is being written to request this (since the PSA’s are copyrighted) approval from A.A.W.S.

Our second project idea came from District 13. The suggestion is that we place some historical talks (i.e. Bill Wilson, Pat Cronin, etc) on the website. We have received some tapes from Dave, in district 13, to experiment with. Our web hosting company, in the recent past, has added the ability for us to stream both video and audio. However, we will need to do some testing to ensure that anything we put on or site can be received and used well by the folks who have slower dialup connections, as well as those who have high-speed connections.

We continue to seek stories from members, of their first year of recovery, to post to the site. The intention is to provide a “window” into the AA experience that someone who is considering joining AA might read. Hopefully, this will help provide a clearer understanding of what AA has to offer and share some helpful experience about things that help get a person through their first year of sobriety. If you are willing to write your first year experience, please email us and let us know. We are looking for something about 2 typewritten pages long.

We recently received an email from Southern California asking us to share our experience in developing our website. It is exciting to be able to do this. I have no doubt that we will learn as much from them as they may learn from us.

Statistically, we average about 1200+ visitors to our website each month. October’s activity was a new high at 1389 visits. We tend to average a minimum of 2 visits to the site every hour. There is not a clear pattern on which days of the month see more visits, or which hour of the day. The parts of the site that see the most activity are: 1) Meetings page, 2) Corrections pages, & 3) District 1’s page. The Calendar page, as one might expect, fluctuates based on the months in which there is a service function. We received visitors from approximately 33 countries at our website during the last 3 months, which provides a reminder to us that what we place on our site reaches AA members far beyond the geographical boundaries of our own area.

If you have suggestions for the site, or concerns/complaints, our committee meets in the morning before each Area Committee Meeting (see Area Calendar on the website or in this newsletter). You are always welcome to come join us.

Dennis B
Website Chairperson