The Secular Hub Information Technology Committee is just one part of the Secular Hub volunteer army. We meet weekly (with a few exceptions and sometimes more) and as needed to keep the technology working (with a few exceptions).
In 2024-2025 the S.H.I.T committee worked on and accomplished the following:
- Developing and maintaining documentation and a team to allow the team to deal with issues.
- Keep the Hub’s email infrastructure maintained by adding email accounts and maintaining the email forwarding lists.
- Keep the Hub’s email domain (secularhub.org) from being labeled as SPAM to make sure our messages are getting delivered.
- Configure our email infrastructure is maintained to accomplish #2 by using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards. Google has been enforcing this standards and bouncing or deleting email that does not conform.
- Maintaining the Hub’s web site as needed to keep up with technology and the Secular Hub’s Board directives.
- Maintain several servers (2 cloud, 2 physical) that are used for administrative functions of the Secular Hub.
- Maintain a membership application that is used to track membership dues payments, voting eligibility, donation emails, and family connections. Providing various reports to better understand membership constitution.
- Maintain a online walled garden for members only (Hub Online) to allow members to interact virtually when not at the Secular Hub. This is also a forum for information about the Secular Hub activity that is not subject to random trolls and adversaries. We maintain access to this resource for all current members.
- Respond to issues related to our Meetup account that has been a moving target and Meetup morphs depending on their current owner. This includes efforts by Meetup to monetize the platform.
- Maintain a calendar feed from our Meetup calendar to our web site. This recently changed to require us to develop an application that uses OAuth2 and GraphQL protocol standards that Meetup has moved to, but supports poorly.
- Maintain a mailing list application to disseminate information, such as newsletters, news, and meeting notices. Maintaining this using our domain to prevent these messages from being labeled as SPAM.
- Maintain a statistical survey application to develop and publish online surveys, collect responses, review statistics, and export the resulting data to other applications. This has been used several times in the past to survey Hub membership.
- Maintain a repository of Hub documents that can be managed by this committee. This includes Board meeting minutes, forms, bylaws, policies, etc. This is not Google Docs which is virtually unmanageable.
- Maintain an electronic mailing list which allows a sender to send one email to a list, which then transparently sends it on to the addresses of the subscribers to the list. This allows people in a group (for example Book Club) to interact without knowing or seeing the other group members email addresses.
- Keep this Hub’s information and electronic infrastructure secure for hacking and data breaches.
- Use open-source free software to reduce IT costs and to prevent vendor lock-in.
- Handle various and numerous technical issues that are brought to us by Board members and Hub members.
- Help Hub members access our technologies.
- Learning and exploring new technologies and applications that will help the Secular Hub community.
As for the future, I am announcing a competition to redesign the Secular Hub Home Page. This is open to anyone, not just Hub members, but must meet the following requirements:
- Must be viewable in recent versions of Firefox or Chrome web browsers.
- Must be mobile friendly. This means the page must adapt to the screen size of the view device.
- Must provide navigation elements to move to other areas of the web site including, but not limited to: About, Contact, Calendar, Hub Online, etc.
- Should provide a template for other pages on the web site.
This competition will be open until July 31, 2025 and will be judged by the Secular Hub members. For more information, watch this blog post or contact the committee via our Contact Page.