Strategy for Genuki Development - Executive Summary

Introduction

At the time of writing (June 2019) Genuki has been in existence for over 25 years.  During that period, genealogical and family history information has been collected and entered into the system covering all counties and many places in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands.

Genuki has always been run by a group of volunteers called "maintainers", each of whom normally maintain one or more counties.

For the first 20+ years of Genuki's existence, the system consisted almost entirely of static html pages created by each of the county maintainers.  Approximately 5 years ago the decision was taken to move Genuki onto a Content Management System (CMS), using Drupal.

Genuki has always been governed by a group of Trustees.  In 2018, once the conversion to Drupal was complete, a small Executive Team was also created to run the day-to-day operations and to continually develop the system.

Changes to the rules and procedures in GENUKI are governed by one of the GENUKI standards.

Purpose of this document

Using Drupal as our CMS, it has been possible to add many new features to the system.  However, the Executive Team is of the view that a proper documented strategy is required to articulate how Genuki should be developed over the next few years.

This Executive Summary attempts to outline a strategy for Genuki for the next 2-3 years covering the following areas:

• the information that is held in the system (Genuki's "content")
• the functionality provided by the system
• the development of the Genuki technical infrastructure
• the acquisition and retention of maintainers
• the governance of Genuki
• documentation of Genuki
• outstanding issues from the conversion of Genuki-1 into Genuki-2 in Drupal

This Executive Summary is based on the more complete Strategy for Development of GENUKI which attempts to define a strategy for Genuki for the next 2-3 years. This includes background discussion and rationale aspects.

The information held in Genuki

The Genuki system current holds 5 main types ("content types") of information:

• Place pages - every town and parish within every county has a separate page.  Information is categorised and displayed in 70+ topics.
• Topic pages - these pages hold information relating to a single topic for a single place, and can be automatically incorporated into Place pages
• Plain pages - these are typically miscellaneous pages holding additional information that is not stored on the main Place page
• Church pages - ideally every church, chapel and cemetery in the whole of UK and Ireland should have an individual page.  These pages can be used to store information for a specific church, and again the information is stored in a number of topics
• Gazetteer pages - ideally every place (ie. City, Town, Village, Hamlet, etc) in UK and Ireland should have a separate gazetteer page showing the location of the place, within reason

In each of the above content types there is a wide disparity between counties.  Although Genuki has been around for 25+ years, some counties are highly developed and other counties are barely started. 

In addressing such content

• the autonomy of individual maintainers should be respected
• nevertheless, given the above constratint, GENUKI should have a common look and feel
• it is recognised that there are some facets where total consistency is not achievable
• the status quo and preferences of individual maintainers are supreme
• church-related data currently spread across place pages and church pages should be reviewed, with the objective of concentrating this within church pages
• a rigid consistency in all things is not desirable or achievable and should not form part of any global strategy.

Proposed strategy: 

• we should concentrate for the next 2-3 years on getting all counties to a similar level of detail in each of the above content types.
• we should specify a required target standard for each content type
• we should decide which type of places should be included in the gazetteer and which should not
• we should decide what is the basic information required to be held against each place entry
• we should decide what is the basic information required to be held against each church entry
• we may need  to define some status and/or exception reports showing progress against the required standard
   

NB.  The above strategy assumes that there is no requirement for a completely new type of content to be held in Genuki.  Should such a new requirement be identified as part of this exercise, then this should obviously be taken into account when defining the strategy.

The functionality provided by the Genuki system

Over the last 3-4 years a significant amount of features and report/queries have been added to the Drupal system.  For example, over the last 6 months significant effort has been added to the Genuki mapping features to enable the parish boundary to be shown on every Place page.

Proposed strategy:  

• a prioritised list of new features should drawn up.  (There are already many outstanding requests already logged as support tickets). 
• we should address mapping features to enable not only parish boundaries but other boundary features to be shown on every place page
• the Genuki maintainers should be given the opportunity  to input into this process.
   

The development of the Genuki technical infrastructure

Currently the Genuki service runs on a web server hosted by the company Mythic Beasts. Genuki’s existence is now closely intertwined with Drupal, with its need for constant upgrading which requires technical expertise way beyond that of the average maintainer.

Proposed Strategy: It is recommended that Genuki move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 by the end of 2020, so that we are no longer using Drupal 7 should it become unsupported in 2020.

• we should shortly (by the end of 2020) migrate to Drupal 8 as support for Drupal 7 is coming to an end.
• we should put in place long-term succession planning for the support of the Drupal platform.
• potential future developments, however attractive technically, should not require maintainers at large to undertake ‘work’ beyond their usual routine responsibilities such as link checking and content enhancement.
   

Acquisition and retention of maintainers

• we should extend the role of the Volunteer Coordinator to address existing maintainers as well as newly-recruited ones
• maintainers need to ‘take ownership’ of genuki beyond their own counties. The obvious way to bring that about is to involve them in pan-Genuki activities thus fostering a ‘sense of belonging’ .
• we should continue our attempts to develop training materials for both new recruits and existing maintainers.
   

Proposed Strategy:  This draft strategy document should be distributed to all maintainers to obtain their input and feedback.

• further effort should be given to develop new training material for new and existing experienced maintainers.
• further work should also be done as to which work should be offered to new recruits as soon as they start, as opposed to other responsibilities that can be allocated once they are more experienced.
• for existing maintainers, we should try and get somebody in place to regularly keep in touch with the maintainers, to encourage them, and suggest improvements that can be done and ways to make the job easier.
• we should consider setting up a number of small project teams of maintainers to work on initiatives beyond their own counties.  An example of that might be labour intensive low-tech projects such as Kain boundary drawing where there is still much to do.

We should also consider each of the following:

• improved quality control - some more systematic means of identifying sections of Genuki that need to be concentrated on
• investigating possible partnerships - identifying/creating ways in which we can make cooperation with Genuki an interesting and attractive proposition for people who currently are pursuing related efforts quite separately, e.g. one-place studies sites, individual FHS sites, etc.
• publicity for Genuki, so that it resumes it’s place in typical general published accounts on how to get started with, and to progress in, genealogy
• publicity (via a sequence of articles and announcements) for the technical improvements that have been made in Genuki - the Drupal conversion saga and the ensuing benefits, the gazetteer improvements, the map facilities, etc.
• an aggressive recruitment campaign - possibly via a set of targetted messages aimed at particular regional mailing lists and family history societies that correspond to weak parts of Genuki.  The above list no doubt could be greatly improved if we put our collective minds to it - but it is our belief that the single best thing we could do is recruit one or two energetic individuals (possibly, but improbably, from among the present maintainers) who would like the challenge of dealing with this whole issue, i.e. we need some more managers/organisers, not just maintainers, so that we can getter more and better maintainers, and get more out of them.
• revitalise the maintainers list as the main conduit for raising/communicating ‘everything Genuki’. No need to invent something else for the job, it will do for now. People need to be encouraged to ask their questions on it, keep it light hearted.  Are there list archives that are easily accessible?

The governance of Genuki

Over the course of the last 2-3 years there was much discussion between the Genuki Conversion Team and the Genuki Trustees.  This discussion eventually led to the establishment of an small Executive Team (Ken Greenslade, Phil Stringer, Brian Randell).

Proposed Strategy:  It is proposed that the existing Trustees / Executive Team governance model is allowed to run for a year or two, before deciding whether further improvements should be made.

Documentation of Genuki

GENUKI documentation tends to be largely plain text, excessively wordy due to the need to cover all situations and avoid ambiguity, with few illustrations, no doubt because no special hardware or skills are required to produce it in this way. It is often produced to meet a particular panic, and tends to go out of date very quickly, overtaken by fast-moving developments. It is also poorly structured and maintained, with many pages now obsolete or redundant.

Proposed Strategy: 

With a conversion to Drupal 8 now in sight: 

• we should take the opportunity produce a new, clean and simplified set of documentation as the new system is being developed, to be launched in parallel with the new system itself. 
• we should use more illustrations, for example using defocused generic page images to explain things, to focus the reader's attention on the main points, and minimise the need for constant updates.
• we have already seen suitable short videos on particular topics have proven to be useful.
• we should be looking for something easier to develop and use, and be self-indexing. Any chosen process should not preclude production of documentation by the maintainersv themselves.

Completion of conversion from Genuki-1

There are still odd bits of the site that use Genuki-1 to provide the information. These include:

• Church database search. The very first bit of the search from the menu link still uses the genuki-1 gazetteer to look up the place name to get a lat/lon before it then uses Drupal code to do the searching.
• We have functionality to link Family History Societies to places using the genuki-1 gazetteer entries and provide links to the societies via the place nodes. There is also means to draw maps showing the areas the societies cover. This development was also being used as a model  for providing information about other organisations such as Poor Law unions, Civil Registration districts etc. It would be best to continue to defer work on this until we have a Drupal 8 system in place.
• Church records information. When looking for church records the information for an individual church can come from multiple sources. A record office may hold the original registers, a group such as the Lancashire Parish Register Society may have transcribed and published them, and an FHS may have published the MIs. Now that information can of course be added individually to each church node, but it requires a lot of effort from the maintainer and it isn't easy to learn about updates. So we have system in place where we can have a csv file for each institution holding the records which is used to automatically add details to the relevant church nodes. So an FHS could have a single list of its church publications which they can periodically update and pass on to use to automatically update the individual church nodes. This currently uses genuki-1 code. Work on this should again be kept on hold until we are using drupal 8 as a redesign is likely and choice of how to hold the data.
• all the outstanding element of the Genuki-1 conversion should be resolved either during or shortly after the move to Drupal 8.

Proposed Strategy: 

• all the outstanding elements of the Genuki-1 conversion should be resolved during, or shortly after the move to Drupal 8.

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