Hi Gary:

+ AA6YQ comments below

The Grid Chase was a year long event just like the ARRL Centennial and POTA was before. It is somewhat "strange ' so to say that there has not been another annual event after it.

Is there any other year round radio activity being organized from HQ? Well, it may have to be for 2023 onwards (yes I do have an idea).

In the meantime in a few days there is the First Transatlantic Amateur Transmission Centennial activity.

+ The ARRL ran three "operating activities": NPOTA, Centennial, and Grid Chase. I opposed all of them, because they required diverting LoTW developers from the higher priority task of eliminating the LoTW Server's "technical debt" -- the development work that should have been done before LoTW first went live but wasn't because doing so would have taken the lone LoTW developer several more years to complete: identifying and correcting the latent crash defects, improving the cryptic error messages, and improving the poor performance and scalability. Partly as a result of this diversion, the two LoTW developers whose hiring by the Board was authorized in 2013 didn't complete their revision of the LoTW Server until 2016.

+ That said, those three "operating activities" were each excellent, attracting many new LoTW users. That the increased load on the LoTW Server didn't expose yet another latent defect or performance bottleneck that would bring LoTW to its knees (as happened in late 2012) was probably the result of Rick K1MU and Robert KC2YWE extending TQSL to reject QSOs already submitted to LoTW, reducing the load on the LoTW Server by as much as 50%.

+ I doubt that the ARRL has the resources needed to re-run one of the previous "operating activities", much less develop a new one.

73,

Dave, AA6YQ

And we all had fun in spite of your opposition.

Get over it, Dave. Your jeremiads are wearing very thin.

+ You said the exact same thing back in 2010 - before the ARRL's focus on adding award support (WPX, Triple Play) over addressing all of the corners it had cut during development caused LoTW to grind to a life-threatening halt in late 2012.

+ Cheerleading might make you feel good, Hans, but has no impact on reality: there is less LoTW development capability now than at any time since it was first initiated. The ARRL's stated plan is to start over from scratch, meaning that the current situation will persist for years.

While I have not actively pursued these events, I have enjoyed many interesting QSOs that resulted from them. From an objective
viewpoint, why should anyone oppose such activities and their promotion?

+ I opposed them in 2013 because they diverted the ARRL's two LoTW developers from the higher priority task re-implementing the LoTW
Server to improve its robustness and performance. Recall that a latent defect in the Server triggered by increased usage in late
2012 brought LoTW to a dead stop. Diverting LoTW's developers from the task of preventing a recurrence of this event to tasks that
would increase the probability of recurrence (by attracting more users) was a demonstration that the Board had learned nothing.

Frankly, it all sounds like good clean fun with a laundry list of positives and negligible/no negatives.

+ Right, if you don't consider the increased usage triggering another fatal performance defect and LoTW being canceled by a
frustrated Board of Directors to be a negative. Fortunately, that didn't happen - likely, as I said, due to TQSL's duplicate
rejection.

+ Were development resources available now, I would not object to their resuscitating NPOTA or the Grid Chase. But there are no
LoTW development resources now, so the point is moot.

On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 04:50 PM, Michael Adams wrote:

although that interest might be tempered if a dues increase were required to fund the additional development burden on LOTW

I doubt there will be a need for increased Dues to support LOTW
Fact is there are many of us that will ear mark donations and or pay for some 
ARRL LOTW Prime member benefits, if they ever get that ball rolling.

I have provided direct feedback on these points to Headquarters staff
but as I have said more than a few times
the league is a big boat and it does not turn on a time,
however I am hopeful we will see something within a couple of years, maybe.

Steve
KG5VK

+ AA6YQ comments below

I doubt there will be a need for increased Dues to support LOTW
Fact is there are many of us that will ear mark donations and or pay for some 
ARRL LOTW Prime member benefits, if they ever get that ball rolling.

I have provided direct feedback on these points to Headquarters staff
but as I have said more than a few times
the league is a big boat and it does not turn on a time,
however I am hopeful we will see something within a couple of years, maybe.

+ No competent software developer will join an organization in which their compensation is dependent on donations.

    de AA6YQ

 

Here's the real point... why bother tying these events to LOTW at all if  you have a resource crisis?  The operating event should be the primary focus. 

 

+ Because even resuscitating NPOTA or Grid Chase requires development work. Remember the Leaderboards?

 

If LOTW is an issue, then use the Award Checkers through ARRL affiliated clubs to validate applications and TRUST people to attach a simple log on their application for the reward.  Longer term they can submit their logs to LOTW outside of busy periods to  even out demand load. 

+ An operating even that requires no software development would not be problematic, assuming the other resources you suggest could be appropriately organized. I suspect that they would be less attractive, as there would be no realtime scoring.

If something happened in 2013 that still bothers you, I'd recommend some outside the box solution brainstormibg instead of being a "Dr. No"

 

+ As a member of the ARRL's "LoTW Committee" back in 2016, I participated in an effort to develop a roadmap for LoTW. That roadmap was iterative, meaning that the current LoTW implementation would be incrementally improved though a sequence of public releases to achieve the desired improvements in usability, personalization, performance, and revenue generation. Re-implementation of the LoTW Server was the first step in that roadmap - successfully completed, but delayed by the diversion of development resources to support three on-air activities. Sadly, the ARRL re-assigned all development resources away from LoTW in early 2018, a situation that continues to this day. Even more sadly, ARRL management has reached the demonstrably false conclusion that the current implementation of LoTW cannot be incrementally improved, planning instead to start over from scratch with a goal of producing an LoTW 2.0 several years from now. Meanwhile, a year has elapsed without successfully hiring an IT Director who could recruit the necessary development team.

+ The ARRL's new plan reeks of 1980s-style Waterfall Development, long abandoned by most organizations with critical dependencies on software. I stand by the iterative roadmap developed by the ARRL's LoTW Committee.

de AA6YQ

 

 

 

+ AA6YQ comments below

Again, you are considering ideas in a very literal and narrow scope.  If the ARRL collects donations, it can then use those funds to fulfill or offset a fixed budget for competent software developers. 

+ That scheme would fool no developer the ARRL would want to hire.

de AA6YQ

I think you are mixing two different things:

1. Creating interesting opportunities to get on the air.

+ If you want realtime scoring, as was provided for NPOTA, Centennial, and Grid Chase, then software development is required.


2. LOTW development.

The latter will take years to mature, but in the meantime we need to encourage and support on the air activities. As this any
systems transition, development on the legacy side will need to deminish over time, but whatever efforts that have been spent on
these activities have proven worthwhile.

Now that there is a roadmap, work with it with a renewed sense of confidence and consider constructive and opportunistic commenrs
that advance activity.

+ There is no current roadmap beyond what Director Baker outlined here a few weeks ago, and there are no available development
resources. Your comments inconsistent with reality.

+ My opposition to on-air activities was specific to 2013, when support of those activities diverted scarce development resources
from higher-priority tasks. While improving LoTW's usability is certainly high priority, I would not oppose the support of on-air
activities now. I supported the inclusion of WAZ in LoTW back in 2018 -- in fact I negotiated the arrangement with CQ. But as I've
already said, it's moot because there are no developers available to do either.

de AA6YQ

It's not a scheme. It's a fixed budget to software development. If there are donations, then the ARRL management can use them to
pay for the development and free up money for other projects and needs. If there are no donations, then the development proceeds
per the budget.

+ If the Board asserts that it needs donations to enable LoTW development, prospective candidates will seek other opportunities.

+ If the Board doesn't assert that it needs donations to enable LoTW development, it will not receive many.

+ I've already seen video of an ARRL Director speaking to a radio club, claiming that donations are need to enable LoTW development.

It's been awhile since I've seen such negatively. Hans seems to have a point. Your arguments may have some validity, but the
negativity is tiresome. Honestly, I start to avoid negativity, even when accompanied by some useful thoughts, because of the
"overhead". This leads to some folks being ignored. You might want to present solutions that get more people on the air without
invoking a derisive rant mode of response that runs through your posts. They are a turn-off and do not help improve anything.

+ I will continue to post the truth. Sadly, the truth regarding the ARRL, LoTW, and software development is extraordinarily
negative.

+ In late 2017, the LoTW Server was stable and performant, we were working with CQ on adding WAZ support to LoTW, and had IOTA lined
up to accept LoTW confirmations. Conversations with JARL were underway. Mike K1MK had developed a prototype that would enable any
award sponsor - large or small - to submit an ADIF file containing a user's QSOs and receive a report indicating which of those QSOs
were confirmed - without requiring that user's LoTW credentials; larger sponsors like DARC and WIA would have paid a modest annual
license fee for access to this mechanism. We had a proposed set of capabilities to which LoTW users could optionally subscribe for
$10-$25 annually, which would likely have brought LoTW to financial break-even with two dedicated developers. This would have been
sufficient to continue executing the proposed iterative roadmap.

+ Instead, ARRL management re-assigned the two LoTW developers to other projects: reimplementation of the DXCC system, and
deployment of the Personify association management software. Three years later, neither of those projects have borne fruit.

+ And now, ARRL management wants to start over from scratch.

+ "Grasping defeat from the jaws of victory".

73,

Dave, AA6YQ