Ok, time to put my head over the parapet, now it seems a bit calmer. As some of you might know, I'm one of the IT delegates, seconded at the 2016 reunion to look mainly at the GIS (mapping) area of the IT refresh, specifically tools for calculating climbing/AAA and minimum distance values that would improve transparency and remove our dependence on external sources. My background is Linux system admin and some coding though I'm not really a full software developer.
My understanding was that the board wanted to move away from a reliance on volunteers and put in place a professionally written and maintained solution, and I can understand why as I'm a case in point - with the sudden retirement of the old AAASec my AAA prototype was pressed into service for use by the new AAA man but due to competing demands on my time (and my general crappiness at finishing projects), after a year I still haven't managed to deliver a full production-spec version that could be made available to DIY orgs and members, plus documented and published to github for peer review, etc.
I was peripherally involved in the selection of Control F1, primarily scoring their GIS credentials (about as bad as the rest basically), don't think it's worth dwelling too much on this now, suffice to say I would have much preferred a solution completely based on FOSS tools but wasn't really prepared to fight that corner, there was a fairly exhaustive selection procedure and at the time their bid seemed pretty reasonable, though the escalation in projected costs means that I can no longer see this being feasible for us as an organisation.
I'm a hands-on kind of person (as anyone who's ridden my events should know), I'm not that good at delegating, project managing, budgeting, (or debating in online forums) etc. which is why I decided against going for the IT Director position when it came up, despite so many volunteers working really hard on this project none of us have been prepared to put our neck on the line for that role, and having seen some of the reactions here and in the AUK forum, I can understand why, however it pains me to see this unfilled and would be great if we could see this addressed.
However, at least the Chairman's statement has helped focus our minds and galvanised members to come forward to offer services, so I would add my support to a new approach, looking at what can be taken from phase one, and tackling further phases ourselves, via an open API, etc, as discussed above. I'm not a development methodology expert but would propose ideally doing this in the form of sprints - interested parties meeting somewhere for a weekend, defining and delivering particular milestones on a fairly regular basis.