Help Strengthen the ECF's IT Team

[John Upham]

Dear Member,

Following the retirement of our IT Manager, Nigel Towers, at the end of August, the ECF is reviewing how its IT function should be organised for the future.
We are looking in particular for someone who may be interested in taking on an IT Manager / IT Lead role, with responsibility for helping coordinate the ECF’s technology, priorities, suppliers, resilience and ongoing development.
At the same time, we do not expect all of the ECF’s IT responsibilities to sit with one individual. We are therefore also keen to hear from members with relevant professional experience who may be interested in contributing in specialist areas such as:
• cyber security and Cloudflare
• Linux and infrastructure
• Rating and LMS development management
• website technical support
• website strategy and content management
• IT service and office support
• supplier management, planning and IT governance
• development and use of AI resources
We are open-minded about how the future team should be structured. Depending on the people who come forward, responsibilities may be shared between an IT Lead, specialist volunteers, existing team members and external suppliers.
Our IT environment
The ECF operates a mixture of commercial and internally developed systems, including:
• Membership: JustGo
• Rating system: PHP, Laravel, JavaScript and MySQL
• League Management System (LMS): PHP, Drupal and MySQL
• Websites: WordPress
• Infrastructure: Linux-based virtual server environment hosted by ANS
• Cyber security and content delivery: Cloudflare
• Email and collaboration: currently Linux-based email services
• Other tools: NextCloud, online forms and a range of smaller applications and integrations
The estate supports core national services including membership, ratings, league administration and the ECF website, so resilience, security, documentation and reducing reliance on individual people are important priorities.
Flexible opportunities
We are initially inviting expressions of interest from people willing to contribute on a voluntary basis, either in a broad leadership role or in a more specialist capacity.
However, we recognise that some responsibilities may require a level of commitment that is difficult to provide voluntarily, so we are also willing to hear from people who would only consider paid work, or who would be open to either paid or voluntary arrangements.
If you have relevant experience and might be interested, please complete our short online form:
https://britchess.wufoo.com/forms/engli ... tion-form/
You do not need to have experience across all areas of IT. We are particularly interested in hearing from people who could make a strong contribution in one or more areas.

Kind regards,
ECF Office

[Kevin Thurlow]

Ironically, I couldn't load this site last night and got a cloudfare warning...

[Carl Hibbard]

Ironically, I couldn't load this site last night and got a cloudfare warning...

There was a hardware issue I am afraid.

[Kevin Thurlow]

I wasn't blaming you! It was sorted quickly.

[Christopher Kreuzer]

Should be emphasised that the ECF (English Chess Federation) does not provide support to this forum (the English Chess Forum, which should be called the EC Forum, not the ECF Forum) though I believe there has at times been friction over both or either of the issues of the organisation acronyms being similar (ECF) and whether or not ECF officers should post here.

Also key to point out that Carl (with moderators) runs (and pays) for this forum almost single-handed. Lots of people (me included) are very grateful for that. I say pays, when I should probably leave Carl to say however much on that topic he wants to (my experience from other forums is that costs and who pays can vary a lot), though maybe not in this thread (the topic has come up in the News and Support section).

The other point being that we (the community that use this forum) are dependent on Carl and the support services getting things back up and running. Thank you!

Back on-topic: how many people does it takes to keep the ECF's IT infrastructure running currently?

[Carl Hibbard]

Costs run at a little under £100 a month.

[John Upham]

Back on-topic: how many people does it takes to keep the ECF's IT infrastructure running currently?

The number will be dependant on the skill sets possessed by each individual and their availability and what they are permitted to work on plus some other factors I've yet to think of.

I recall many years ago indicating an interest in becoming the ECFs IT Manager (when the ECF was clueless about web sites, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc) receiving a mysterious telephone call one night from someone who did not provide their name but immediately proceeded to waffle on about all of their back office IT responsibilities in tedious and minute detail.

I put them on speaker phone and let them get on with it whilst I did something useful.

That person was Bruce Holland it turns out.

[John Reyes]

i do want to know how many people here are skills enough to do the role?

i know my skills set is not that but i am interested who is good enough?

I know someone like Gavin Cartwright was very good and also was a excellent Gold rep when i worked with him, Julian and Deema.

[John Upham]

i do want to know how many people here are skills enough to do the role?

There will be a large number with sufficient or more than sufficient skills.

If someone wrote "26" would that help you?

The question is how many with sufficient skills wish to work for nothing apart from expenses?