British Canoeing Event Safety Workshop

I went to the British Canoeing Event Safety Workship last night run by Dave Rosseter and the SCA.  Here’s some notes for my own interest and memory.

Events runs by SCA affiliated clubs are covered for liability by the Perkins & Slade Insurance so if someone dies at an event the insurance covers you being sued.  Following some incidents the insurance company asked for this workshop to happen so clubs at least have an idea how to check the events they run are safe.

An event is defined as an activity run by the club involving non-club members and outwith the BCU terms of reference. (Or run by an SCA committee.)

When running an event we have a duty of care to look after those involved.

We discussed a chain of responsibility which typically has an event organiser in the middle and club committee and SCA above them and volunteers below them.

We discussed the need to get authorisation of events, at a club that might be by the committee or at an AGM.

We discussed risk assessments which for each risk should include likelihood and seriousness as well as mitigation and whether that mitigation is proportionate.

We look at the 5 stages of an event

  • Decision to run – why do you want to run it?
  • Application and Authority – internal (club committee, safety officer) and external (property owners etc)
  • Pre-event considerations (roles needing filled, equipment needed, briefing volunteers, facilities needed, training needed)
  • Day of event (people in the right place, what happens when something unexpected occurred)
  • Post event (review afterwards and where that review needs to be sent)

There was a slide about checklists for events but not much details.  I found one on the HSE website: checklist for village and community halls.

The acronym CALM was covered which are principles involved in dynamic risk assessment (and are similar to leadership principles of CLAP):

  • Commuinication
  • Avoidance
  • Line of Site
  • Management

There was a slide on people’s roles and span of control but not much detail on this.

There’s a load of resources that are due to come out to us. Useful stuff is on the HSE website and the gov.uk website such as the guide to organising community events.

It was an interesting enough workshop but I’m not convinced I learnt much, we already do all this in our club and many of the topics weren’t gone into in much detail.

Interesting to see British Canoeing use a photo from the FCC website in their slides, I wonder who authorised that and what their span of control was.

 

SQL CRUD: what’s good and what’s crud?

I maintain a membership database for my canoe club and I implemented the database years ago using a PHP library called Phormation which let me make an index page with simple code like:

query = “SELECT * FROM member WHERE year=2015”
show_table(column1, column2)

and an entry editing page with something like this:

query = “SELECT * FROM member WHERE id=$id”
widgets.append([column1, “name”, Textfield])
widgets.append([column2, “joined”, Date])
show_index(widgets)

and voila I had a basic UI to edit the database.

Now I want to move to a new server but it seems PHP has made a backwards incompatible change between 5.0 and 5.5 and Phormation no longer runs and it’s no longer maintained.

So lazyweb, what’s the best way to make a basic web database editor where you can add some basic widgets for different field types and there’s two tables with a 1:many relationship which both need edited?

 

Muon in Need of a Maintainer

Muon, the Apt package installer UI is in need of a maintainer.  It has been split out from Discover and Updater which are application focused and to some extent work with multiple backends.  Muon is package focused and covers the surprisingly important use case of technical users who care about libraries and package versions but don’t want to use a command line.  It’ll probably move to unmaintained unless anyone wants to keep an eye on it so speak up now if you want to help out.

KDE at FOSDEM 2016

FOSDEM is the biggest free software conference and KDE will have a stall and help organise the Desktop devroom for talks.  If you have something interesting to talk about the call for talks in the devroom is open now.  We should have a stall to promote KDE, the world best free and open source community.  I’m organising the KDE party on the Saturday.  And there are thousands of talks going on.  Sign up on the wiki page now if you’re coming and want to hang around or help with KDE stuff.