Face-To-Face NA Meetings

June 2, 2020 – Slowly physical, face to face, NA meetings are being organized in Hawaii. For the website we have a dilemma on how to list these meetings through the BMLT database (Basic Meeting List Toolbox).

When the emergency started and there were no physical meetings available NA transitioned to online meetings. However the BMLT database and associated applications are predicated to physical locations, not virtual locations.

The software developers saw the immediate need for updating the BMLT database software and implemented some quick changes which allowed us to deal with the emergency better – including an acceptable display of  virtual meetings.  

The normal before the emergency in searching our website for a meeting was either (1) download a PDF file (generated by our BMLT database) for printing, or (2) use the BMLT search interface to find a meeting.

Because of the delay in software upgrades and a variety of non-software issues, we have a database that needs to be updated to reflect the new normal. In fact the software used has been updated again to repurpose the software to show both virtual and physical meetings more harmoniously. This has increased the web-servants’ learning curve on adjusting to the new normal.

Our current problem however is in displaying the virtual and physical meetings in the same “window”, on your screen or on a PDF file for printing with the database as it is right now.

As a temporary solution we are going to list the physical meetings on a single page of our website arranged by island. This will give us time to upgrade the data in the database and adjust the software so that we can print the information into a document that is coherent for our members and the public.

Web Page Work Group