About This Document
This case study describes the development of IT services used by the Adderbury Morris Men since 2010.
Background
Since 2010, The Adderbury Morris Men, in recognition of the world wide interest in their dances, have used various forms of IT to make their dances available to anyone who wants to find out more about them.
IT Developments
Website
The Adderbury Morris Men website was first published by Stephen Wass in 2010.
Initially, it included a brief history of the team, reports from various international trips the team had been on and other basic information.
Stephen Wass added the tune bank at a later date. The aim of this was to share the tunes, as played by Adderbury Morris Men at that time, with a wider audience but specifically other musicians who wanted to learn the tunes.
In 2016 it was recognised that the nine volumes of log books that had been kept from the 1975 revival (and were in a box in the Bagman’s loft) should somehow be shared on the website. This proved trickier than expected. The early log books included handwritten notes, photos, leaflets etc. and were not in a format to easily put them on the website. Eventually, it was decided to take photographs of each page of the early logbooks and then load these photos onto the website. This was very time consuming. The later ‘logbooks’ did not include the detail of the earlier ones and were already kept in a format that could be loaded onto the website (i.e. they were photographs and word processed documents).
Hosting of the website has moved around quite a bit since 2010 and has again recently changed. This means that there is some tidying up of the material to be done, particularly the photographs.
Since 2014 the preference has been to use our Facebook page to communicate with others.
The Adderbury Morris Men Facebook page was set up in October 2014.
From the beginning the aim of the page was to announce upcoming events and to include photographs, videos and written content of these events.
This has been very successful and people from all over the world visit it to look at what we are doing and, thankfully, add their own photos, comments and videos.
Facebook remains our preferred form of communication with the wider public. Our Facebook page is shown below.
YouTube Channel
In June 2020, at the request of Tim Radford, Keith Norton set up the Adderbury Morris Men YouTube channel.
The aim is to include, at least one video of every dance we do. We are a few short of that aim. There are a number of reasons for this, the main ones being that there are some dances we only rarely dance and, with the national lockdown due to the COVID pandemic, we have not had the opportunity to video the ‘missing’ dances. It still remains the aim to include at least one video of every dance.
Having our own channel has meant that we have been able to gather in one place all the videos that we have filmed ourselves and those we have found that have been posted on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms by other people since 1975. It has also provided a place for a few ‘quirky’ videos that have been filmed during the lockdown (e.g. see the “The Fool DoD 2021” and the “Jockey to the Fair DoD 2021” videos).
Internal Communications
This has always been a challenge. The main form of communication remains personal emails within the team.
The use of social media is more challenging as individuals have preferences for the platforms they use. We have, however, in 2021 set up a WhatsApp group for the team members to use. We chose WhatsApp because most people in the team used it already. The purpose of the WhatsApp group is to enable team members to communicate with others at short notice. So, for example, if there is a dance out planned that evening and you can no longer make it then everyone gets that message and it is not reliant on the organiser to relay the message. We have very strict rules about the use of WhatsApp. If you have ever been part of a large WhatsApp group you will already know that you can very quickly be inundated with messages which can ‘hide’ any important messages that have been sent. There are still team members that are not WhatsApp users so they need to be contacted either by email of telephone. We still have one member of the team who has neither a computer nor a mobile phone.
The team has an email that everyone can contact them on adderburymorrismen@gmail.com. This remains our preferred form of contact as it remains constant even if the ‘bag’ changes.
Status of this Document
Document created: 7 Sep 2021
Document updated: 20 Sep 2021 (two new images and links to ‘quirky’ videos added)
Licence for this Document
This document is available with a Creative Commons Sharealike (CC-BY) licence. In brief, this means you can copy and make changes to this document provided you give acknowledgements to the author/publisher. A suggested wording for acknowledgements is:
This document is based on the “Case Study: Adderbury Morris Men's IT Developments” document by Keith Norton and published by the Morris Federation.
About the Author
Page written by Keith Norton, Adderbury Morris Men
