BCRA Council Manual of Operations
This is the landing page for BCRA's emergent Manual of Operations, as put together by David
Gibson. This is a collection of notes in the form of web pages on the BCRA web server.
Click here to visit the current List of Contents
Click/Tap a link or scroll on down.
History
BCRA Council has discussed a Manual of Operations since at least the time when Bryan Ellis
was the Administrator, some 30 years ago in the 1990s. About ten years ago (2013) an attempt was
made by David Gibson to start a wiki style of document. The principle of a wiki is that it is a
collaborative structure, with multiple people able to create their own entries and to edit
existing ones. However, this met with precisely zero interest or enthusiasm from BCRA Council, and
so the project was abandoned. The wiki was implemented as part of BCA's own Manual of Operations
— a project that has similarly petered out. The few out-of-date entries to the BCRA wiki can
be found at https://manual.british-caving.org.uk/wiki/
but it is likely that you will need to request a password for that page.
The page you are reading now is the landing page for David Gibson's latest
attempt at a Manual of Operations, which is described below.
Structure
The current Manual of Operations is a much looser structure than previously. Also, it is in
no sense 'collaborative' — the concept of collaboration has been shown to be a futile
aspiration. A wiki encourages a good, logical structure to the documentation, with each page being
part of a hierarchy of documents. That concept can (but does not have to) mirror the physical
structure of the file system within a hierarchy of folders. The current documentation abandons all
of that. The individual web pages comprising the manual are scattered around the BCRA web site,
with many of them being placed in the folders to which they are most relevant. To organise the
documents, a List of Contents (see link above) is available, which attempts
to group the physical documents into a useful logical structure. Clearly this is
somewhat messy and it is not conducive to cross-referencing or searching but the salient point is
that it is the fastest way to get the individual pages written and online. Much of the content of
this manual comes from historic notes that were written some time ago, as the web site developed;
and a single overall List of Contents is the fastest way to
collate that information.
In summary, it will be helpful to remember that the logical structure implied by the
list of contents bears little resemblance to the physical structure described by the
hierarchy of files within the directories that comprise the web site.
It is also important to note that some of the documentation is actually part of the public
set of web pages, which can be navigated via the tabs and pull-down menus of the web site.
