Connect the Districts: Scalable Websites and Google Workspace in Area 07 (NAATW 2025)

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability from the original caption file. Speaker names are standardized using first name and last initial where available. Timestamps are adjusted so the edited audio begins at 0:00.

Presentation: Connect the Districts: Scalable Websites and Google Workspace in Area 07. Presenters: Michael P. and Carrie J., Area 07 Technology Committee. From the NAATW 2025 Workshop, Cincinnati.

[0:00] Presenter Introduction

[0:00] Host: All right, so our next presenters are online: Michael P. and Carrie J. from Area 07, which is CNIA, in California, where they serve together on the Technology Committee. Michael and Carrie have led an impressive effort to help districts across their area build secure, consistent, and easy-to-manage websites, all within a shared, scalable framework. Their presentation, Connect the Districts: Scalable Websites and Google Workspace in Area 07, highlights how teamwork, thoughtful design, and service-minded innovation can simplify digital communication and strengthen unity within the fellowship. So please join me in welcoming Michael and Carrie.

[0:50] Michael P.: Thank you. I'm Michael, I'm an alcoholic.

[0:50] Michael P. Introduction

[0:53] Michael P.: Just want to thank Carrie, Jacqueline, Buck, and the entire NAATW community for giving us the opportunity to present today. It is always an honor and privilege to be of service to Alcoholics Anonymous, particularly technology service, which is something that has always been since I got sober. very passionate for me. My sobriety date is June 11, 2018. I got involved in technology service, building A.A. websites back in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. I launched aaplacer.org, which is our District 21 Area 07 district website. This is my fifth NAATW. I went to my first one in 2021 as I got involved in technology service. I had the opportunity to be in person in Seattle in 2022, and it's just an incredible community to be a part of.

[1:51] Michael P.: From there, joined the Area 07 Technology Committee, first served as webmaster in Panel 72. And now I'm the Google Workspace administrator, and sort of taking the lead on this district website program that we developed that we will be presenting today. So with that, I'll hand it over to Carrie, and she can do her introduction.

[2:14] Carrie J. Introduction

[2:14] Carrie J.: Hi everyone, I'm Carrie, and I'm an alcoholic. My sobriety date is August 10th, 2002, and I am in California Northern Interior Area 07. I'm the webmaster this panel, so I had big shoes to fill after Michael, and this is my second, panel serving on the Tech Committee for the area. It's been really rewarding these last two panels to have our area members recognize and embrace the benefits of the technology that we've implemented. It's really been, a work in progress, and we've come so far in four years, so it's been great. So we'll go ahead and… and if you want to kick off the slides…

[3:04] Michael P.: Yep. Can everyone see my screen? So, I'll go ahead and…

[3:14] Presentation Setup and Resource Links

[3:15] Michael P.: set this up. I'll, give everybody a moment if you want to scan that QR code. It's a link tree that will take you to our district website template. Our pilot district, District 23. There's a frequently asked questions about our district website program, and there's a Google Workspace form and a district… and another Google form that's sort of like our district intake form. You don't need to go through the form or anything, we're just providing that as a few resources so that y'all have an understanding of some of the artifacts that we produce. In the course of this project. And I'll hand it over to Carrie to kick it off.

[3:55] Carrie J.: Hey, thanks, Michael.

[3:56] Background: Area 07

[3:57] Carrie J.: All right, so a little history. CNIA covers the northern interior of California. It's comprised of 29 districts, including 5 Spanish-speaking linguistic districts, and we found that many districts lack the technical and financial resources to build and maintain a district website. Our area from top to bottom is 440 miles. And our districts vary from small rural districts that have one or two GSRs, to really metropolitan districts that have 30-plus GSRs, and so what we were seeing is some districts had the resources, time, and volunteers to build their own, and others just did not have the capacity either by help or finances to create their own district.

[4:52] Carrie J.: So, how this came about is we had a DCM, a district committee member, reach out and ask if we could support them with building a website. And the tech committee started kicking that around. We thought it was a good idea, and started brainstorming of what would be the best way to support them in that.

[5:13] Program Overview

[5:13] Carrie J.: addressing the issues that were preventing them in the first place. So, the goal was to provide each interested district with a no-cost WordPress-based website. It would be built on a common website template hosted by our area, CNIA.org, and it would lower the barrier for sustainable digital participation and communication. And so once we decided, yes, we wanted to pursue it, Michael took the lead in pursuing the technical details that would help make that a reality.

[5:50] Why We Built It

[5:50] Carrie J.: Why we built it: as we said, many districts lacked a web presence, technical and financial hurdles were common in the districts, and we wanted a centralized, scalable, and supportable solution. It was really exciting to look at providing a real-world solution for an A.A. need in our area. You know, I had personally looked at wanting our area services to more directly support districts and groups in supporting the still-suffering alcoholic, and I thought this would be a good way to do it. We have the capacity as an area to solve that need at no cost, and in a way, we could support the district with panel transitions

[6:35] Carrie J.: as needed, so that the website didn't die with that particular trusted servant. You know, as someone with a tech background, I have implemented and watched die, websites at a group and district level, so when I left, there was no one to maintain it, and it went away. So we wanted to address that issue of having the area host it, and having access if that trusted servant left and someone else new came in that didn't know, we could help them in the meantime to keep the site live and not just lose it. The other thing that was a big consideration as we were building it is, and as tech nerds, we resisted the urge to over-engineer, because there's lots of fun bells and whistles, and we could do this, and we could do that, and then we dial it back and say, okay.

[7:21] Carrie J.: If a low-tech person is coming into this role, could they maintain this? Could they easily keep this up, and would it be sustainable? And so we really worked to ensure that we built something that could be easily maintained by someone with all levels of technology experience moving forward.

[7:42] Template Design Approach

[7:42] Carrie J.: And the template design approach, I have to tell on myself here, I am super decisive in my life outside of A.A., and as was discussed several times, the slow process of A.A. can sometimes be frustrating for me. As I'm sure you've experienced. And then Michael suggested that we do a focus group, and I thought that was the worst idea possible. I thought that was not something that interested me at all. And I even tried to talk him out of it a couple of times. But that's the beauty of working in a committee, and Michael and I are a really well-balanced partnership, in how we approach things and look at things, and so it's been a really good balance as we've worked on projects.

[8:27] Carrie J.: And guess what? He was right. The focus group was so informative, and thankfully confirmed that we were well on the right track with the design we had started with, so that was a relief. But there were new insights, and… Coincidentally, along… At the same time, we had a new accessibility chair assigned to our area, and she became involved in the process, and so it was perfect timing of looking at, ensuring we had accessibility considerations included in the building of this website template for the districts. Then we let go even further, because as we started building out the template site, Michael worked with two young men from that district and really let them do the heavy lifting of building the site. And it was so great to see their investment in the process.

[9:24] Carrie J.: The ideas they brought to it, and the pride of ownership when it was done. And, and they really rose to the occasion beautifully, and I think that, there were so many more lessons besides just building a website, as several people have shared, you know. you show up, and you let the magic of the group conscience work, and then you're open to new ideas, and to truly just being a servant, and not being the boss, or the director, or a dictator, and encouraging others to grow in their service, and there were a lot of rewards in the process. So, it was guided by insights gathering during those group focus sessions, which included a variety of trusted servants from Area 07, and they were key to shaping user-friendly, accessible, and flexible design. The key design principles were they were informed by feedback from trusted servants.

[10:17] Carrie J.: They included core content areas such as New to A.A., Meetings, event calendar, district resources, and contact information. Basic accessibility features like readable fonts, clear navigation, and mobile responsiveness were considered. And then it's designed to be customized for each district with minimal technical overhead, so they can do as little or as much as they want to do once they have access to the site. And then, so from here, I will turn it over to Michael to talk about the technical side of making this all a reality. Thanks, Michael.

[10:51] Michael P.: Alright, cool. Thank you, Carrie. So, before we jump into that, I just wanted to show everybody, sort of, what our process was with the focus group. Essentially, we had, Dan C. from the Roseville history group facilitate. the focus groups, we had two sessions. He basically sent out some Google Form surveys, and based on the Feedback from those forms. we were able to gather, sort of, these requirements, or some of this information. We had it broken out into three categories. We wanted something that would be attractive to the newcomer that would give just general information for the newcomer, you know, and covering material. We felt it was something… Important to have something for the sponsor, and for the trusted servant, of course, because this is going to be

[11:39] Michael P.: general service website as well for the districts. And you'll see that for the newcomer, there's, FAQs comes up quite a bit, meeting information, events. What will this cost? So, I'll show later when I demo the template that we covered all that in our new to A.A. page. We have a page dedicated to the sponsor, and then we have, various trusted servant pages. We have, a page for GSRs, we have a page for resources, we have a page for meeting minutes. We'll show you an example of how we were able to implement meeting minutes from District 23. And we…

[12:19] Michael P.: Covered accessibility. We're… this is something that we still want to build out down the road, but we do have some basic accessibility features. Again, we were informed by our new accessibility chair, Claudia, on some of this information, but we feel like we made a good start on the accessibility front.

[12:27] Understanding Subdomains

[12:36] Michael P.: And there's some other items here. District identification, which we identify the district in the site title and the tagline. So we feel like we've covered the bases Of everything that was captured in our focus group sessions. So we'll go through a few more slides here, and then I'll jump into the demo. So, subdomains. Now, what I want to make clear is that, this program is Area 07's experience with a program like this, right? We know that there's kind of two approaches to doing something like this. There's the subdomain approach, and there's the WordPress multi-site approach. And we actually talked to another area. that is doing multi-site. And after having some conversations, we felt like that the way that our website was designed, it wasn't a good fit for multi-site, so we went with the subdomain.

[13:32] Michael P.: route. We're not saying that that's the best way to do it, but in our experience, it's been working well so far. Another… So I guess I should jump back to what a subdomain is, just understanding the basics, is that it's just a way to organize sections. Of a website. you might have been on a website where it's, like, shop.contaso.com or resources.contaso.com, right? In this case. It's our districts that are the sections. The URL, sort of, design is d23.cnia.org. That's how we… map out the districts in our URL. So, another benefit of… Doing subdomains is… connecting each district website to Google Workspace. This allows seamless access to Gmail, Google Drive, and the ability to communicate with Area 07 trusted servants inside of the Google Workspace environment, along with

[14:35] Michael P.: other districts. This is something that is… that we haven't really tested with yet, but we know that it's possible, and it's… We have a vision of being able to do that somewhere down the road. And so, again, our hosting provider is Bluehost. They support subdomains. I'll show in my next slide, how all that works. But essentially, we have a host that supports subdomains. We are able to create a pre-configured WordPress template.

[14:49] Implementation Approach

[15:04] Michael P.: And right now, we're providing Google Workspace accounts for DCMs and Webmasters. We haven't… Sort of scaled it out to all the… Various elected officers and chairs that you would have. the district. We wanted to start small and see if there would be sort of a desire down the road as we Implement and use this platform. And we're utilizing central backups and the template migration using UpDraft Plus, a WordPress plugin. We have the ability, in Updraft Central to kind of centralize backups and to go in and restore different districts at the area level. If necessary. And this is the way that we take the template and copy it over to a new district subdomain. Which, knock on wood, I'm going to demo that today. Hopefully that all works out. I tested it this morning, and For the most part, it worked.

[15:58] Hosting Details

[15:58] Michael P.: So, the hosting details, we use Bluehost, it's $179.88 per year. We purchase it in a 3-year package, we get a bit of a discount when we do that. Right now, we get 20 gigabytes of storage, we get 20 websites, we get, Let’s Encrypt SSL at the district level, at the subdomain level. And, I would kind of ignore the Yoast SEO, that's free, we all know that well. Those of us that do WordPress web development know that There is a pre-vision. So, we have 29 districts, right? So, let's say we needed to scale this up a bit. We do have the option of purchasing up to 50 subdomains. I don't see the need for that right now, but it's nice to know that if we were to pay a few… I think it's, like, $300 more at a 3-year Plan to scale that up a bit.

[16:50] Theme and Plugin Stack

[16:50] Michael P.: So this is the general sort of theme and, plugin stack that we're using. We're using the Bravada theme. Or… folders and files, we're using Filebird Lite for language translation, GTranslate. We're using the free version among the districts, but we're thinking of purchasing the paid version at the area level. So that we can go in and we can modify the template. or true Spanish language translation. As something you know that'll work with translation. The translation that Google provides isn't 100% accurate. In fact, there are some keywords that we found that we use in Alcoholics Anonymous that don't trans over… translate over properly, so we'd like to go in and we'd like to get the best translation we can for our Spanish speakers as possible. Or…

[17:41] Michael P.: calendar, we use events calendar, we use the free version. So, what's nice about the paid version is that you can do recurring meetings. We're going to give districts the free version, and if they have, like, a district business meeting every month, they'll have to go to… they'll have to go in manually. that event. Again, for backup and template migration, we're using UpdraftPlus. For the mail server, we decided to install WPMail SMTP with Brevo for authentication. Essentially, what happens is that Gmail especially recognizes, system mail that comes from WordPress. as spam. In fact, it won't even put it in the spam folder, it'll outright reject the mail. We want our district servants to have the ability to get the automated messages that are received from WordPress on theme updates, plugin updates, and if a district were to install

[18:35] Michael P.: plugin down the road that was dependent on some sort of mail delivery. We wanted to have that installed out of the box. And for SEO, if a district decides to do SEO, that's not something that we're… that we're going to configure ourselves. They can use the documentation provided by Yoast to do that, and there's actually some documentation that's been spread, I think, among the NAITW community on how to use Yoast. That's the SEO. Plugin that we're shipping out with this template. So, our Area 07 costs, now to be clear, this is at no cost for the districts, but there is a cost for Area 07.

[19:12] Area 07 Costs Breakdown

[19:19] Michael P.: There's the hosting, there's the UpdraftPlus premium subscription for the plugin, there's domain registration and privacy, which is at a yearly basis. In total, it's $311 for us to… have the ability to provide the UpdraftPlus premium, and the subdomains already came with the hosting, so we didn't pay extra to have subdomains. That just comes out of the box with our With our hosting package.

[19:47] District Subdomain Example and Demo

[19:48] Michael P.: So what I'm going to do here shortly is I'm going to demo the template. Demo the template in action, the District 23 website, our pilot. We believe it's a simple layout, and we've covered, sort of, the core content areas. There's a New to A.A. page. Meetings, which are capture, which typically we want to use. The 12-step meeting list. Meeting directory that's closest to the district, which in our experience, that's usually a central office or an intergroup. Sometimes it's a district group. There's an event calendar, and trust and servant resources. And we've also taken into consideration accessibility, language translation, and the contact page. So with that, I'll get right into it. This is our template, so you can see, like, in the title and the tagline, we put sort of some placeholders here.

[20:39] Michael P.: We put the ready to stop drinking, I think that we kind of threw that around in the focus group sessions, if I remember correctly, and this is sort of, what we came up with. for the newcomer. We have a placeholder here for whatever the central office or whatever the hotline number is for that District's area. We took into consideration accessibility. We have an accessibility chair that thought it was really important that we highlight this in our template, so we have a link with this image to deafaa.org. See that that opens up in a new tab. The way the homepage is designed here is that really everything is in the theme settings. So, the menu directs to… these are all different pages that are created behind the scenes. But the homepage is implemented with posts, so there's pages and posts in WordPress.

[21:40] Michael P.: you create a new post, and you get sort of this, you get these components on the homepage. And after you create a post, you have the option on whether to make it visible or invisible. This is… there's definitely more that can be done on the homepage, and we're going to give, sort of, the districts the autonomy on what to do. If you are viewing on your mobile, if you scan that QR code, you'll want to use that hamburger menu right there to kind of access everything on mobile. One of the limitations that we found with this theme that we haven't figured out yet is that the language translation doesn't show up in the menu on mobile or on the homepage. You have to put your phone in landscape in order for the language translation. pop up.

[22:31] Michael P.: Responsiveness is really important in this template. We want to do more with that, so we're trying to figure out either working with the vendor, GTranslate, or some way to ensure that language translation is easy and accessible. So again, we have some placeholders, If you go to the New to A.A. page, You'll see that, we've… Kind of addressed a lot of those questions, or some of those, desires that Our folks had, and… In the focus group sessions. We have some information on folks that For the newcomer, right? I can't stop drinking. We have that quote off of page 44 in the big book that can help the new alcoholic identify whether or not they might have a problem with alcoholism. And we have placeholders for the hotline number, For the central office. For Al-Anon, in case somebody that has a loved one

[23:30] Michael P.: that might be an alcoholic. We wanted to provide some Al-Anon resources. This is sort of the FAQ area with common questions, and what we did is we linked to aa.org resources. So I'll just go ahead and hover over… I won't click on every link, but in the lower left-hand corner, you can see as I hover over. That these are all links directly to Alcoholics Anonymous. AI has been discussed a lot in our workshop this year, and I will say that we created sort of, like, a rough draft, and then I ran it through generative AI, or ChatGPT, refined it a bit. And then I went in, I spot checked for hallucinations and accuracy, made sure that all the language aligned with, you know, our language of the heart in A.A. And in my experience, one thing you want to be careful of is, ChatGPT in general, AI in general, will

[24:25] Michael P.: produce fake links. They'll take what… the best information they know from the internet, and they'll just create, like, a URL, and a URL stuff that doesn't really exist. So after I ran it through ChatGPT, I found that I had to go through and correct some of these links. But, we… If someone sent from the courts, we provide information on how we cooperate with the courts directly linking to A.A. literature, and then we have some more information about the history of A.A., resources for professionals, and people for people with problems other than alcohol. So we go ahead and cover all that for… Our newcomers, we have a page on sponsorship, And, resources. I think what I'll do now is I'll jump… over to… The template in action, essentially. So this is what a copy template looks like, we…

[25:25] Michael P.: Have a tagline that we put in that's based on the area that the district serves. If we click on the New to A.A. page, you can see that it's been updated with, District 23 is in the Sacramento area, so we have the hotline for our central office hotline. We have a link to AAsacramento.org, our central office, our intergroup website. Find an A, meaning to you, we link directly to this 12-step meeting list. or, for A.A. Sacramento. And then we have the local link to Al-Anon in Sacramento. And, our vision initially was that the districts would kind of take the placeholders and then fill them out, but I found that we have 6 districts that we've onboarded. So, well, we haven't completely onboarded them yet, but we've created the sites for them. Sometime in December, we're going to go ahead and hand over the district's their websites. But,

[26:23] Michael P.: what I've gone through is I've actually gone through and learned everything about their districts and filled out that Myself. So if you click on the district. page itself, there's going to be just basic information on, in this case, for District 23, and I do want to give a shout out to the folks in District 23 that built all this content out. Victor S, Kevin Kaye and Nick C. at District 23, they built out all this content, they did an incredible job. So, we have a map of the area, and… Basic district meeting. information. So we have a page for GSRs. This is a list of active GSRs, the GSR preamble, a link to a GSR kit. at A.A.org, and we have sort of this GSR school slide deck that we distribute out to our new DSRs in Area 07. We have a GSR budget. That we… Showcase here on the BSR page.

[27:31] Michael P.: And, this, I think, is kind of cool. What we've done is, for the minutes and reports. Again, every… Every district will get a webmaster. Google Workspace account and DCM account, which means they'll have access to Google Drive, right? So what we've done is we kind of leverage an iframe here, HTML tag. that takes… that folder that they have for the monthly meeting minutes, and embeds it here on the webpage. So, they don't have to do anything on this page, essentially. All they do, they go in, they go into their folder, they upload their monthly meeting minutes, and then via the iframe, it displays here kind of automagically. on this. And it's, pretty simple to implement, so we thought that that was kind of funny. For those districts that We'll post our meeting minutes. their website.

[28:25] Michael P.: So, bylaws, if that was something that was captured, and again, I wanted Emphasize that all these, all the different menu items, the pages, these were all captured in our focus group sessions. So some folks thought it would be important to have their bylaws. Officers and committees is another page that we showcased. Again, a link to the central office, meeting schedule. Another thing that was, Found to be important. Was, we… we put… we put a link to the Meeting Guide app. And it came up that folks wanted access to wheelchair-accessible meetings, so what we do… is we just kind of use the 12-set meaningless filter for wheelchair access, and then we capture that URL. And we put it into the menu. So, folks can take a look. At all the different wheelchair accessible the schedule.

[29:26] Michael P.: And various resources, we have a link to the A.A. homepage, Area 07, we have a page on Area 07's website for all the districts, this is our intergroup, or central office, and this is our accessibilities page. on CNIA.org. Alright, quick time check here. So what I'm going to attempt to do now here is I'm going to show you, how we copy over the template to sort of,

[29:47] Template Migration Demo

[29:56] Michael P.: to a newly installed subdomain, right? So what happens is, when we want to create a district website, we create a subdomain. When creating that subdomain, we have the ability to install the fresh install of WordPress. This is a theme that's provided by our host, Bluehost. What I'm going to do is I'm going to… Go ahead and copy over the template. To this subdomain. So we use Updrop+, It has a… basically, the way that it works is, if you go into the settings. it's going to retain a copy of all the backups that are attached to that Google Drive account. So in this case, it is connected to The district support at cni.org. account, that's where I keep all the backups for the template. It's all housed in that Google… in a Google Drive folder in the District Support Google Workspace account.

[31:01] Michael P.: So, all these records… that you see here are in that account. The way we copy over the template is by doing a simple restore. So we'll go ahead and check all these boxes. Select next. It's downloading the files. And this usually, when it… when it's functioning properly, it takes no more than 3 minutes. average. So it's downloading everything from the template. And in my testing this morning, at the end, it did flag an error that the backup was not successful, but then I went back. the homepage. and took a look at, you know, some of the core features, and everything seemed to work, so if we see that error, I'm optimistic that It still may work. Give it just another moment here. And so far, we've done about 6 websites, and there's a couple of different ways to do this, and this process that I'm demoing here seemed to be Bye.

[32:23] Michael P.: Quickest and the most reliable process. So right now, all it's telling you in the warning is that this was taken from a remote backup set, because it's taken from the template.cnia.org website. And what it's telling me here, I'm checking this box to search and replace. So what it's going to do, it's going to search the entire database for references to template.cnia.org and update it to, in this case, D27.cnia.org, which is super important so we don't have broken links. So right now, it's restoring the database. It will update the new plugins, the themes. In all likelihood, it's going to flag this error that I referenced earlier, but it seemed in my testing this morning that awards. And so, yes, it says restore failed. I'll return to the configuration, it might prompt me to log in again. So I'll go ahead and log in.

[33:55] Michael P.: Email… administration email. And… We've copied everything over. So… From here, what we do is we manually go in and we update some of these placeholders with the information that's relevant to the district, but you'll see right here that it is D27.cnia.org. It doesn't take long to go through and update everything. It's… It's not technically difficult to do. We wanted this to be… we wanted to keep it as simple as possible for new trusted servants to come into the area to migrate our template over to these subdomains. But in my testing and experimentation, this seemed like the most seamless process. So what we would do after that is we would go in to ensure that the backups are local to the district, we would update UpdraftPlus with the webmaster's

[35:01] Michael P.: Google Drive account so that the backups going forward would go in to their Google Drive account. Rather than… Excuse me, the district support account. So I'm doing a time check. It looks like we have about 9 minutes, so I'm just going to kind of move through the rest of my demo pretty quickly. The last couple things that I wanted to show everyone was,

[35:26] Hosting Dashboard and Google Workspace

[35:27] Michael P.: our… let's go to websites. This is sort of in our hosting form, no thanks. It's right here, it's websites. This is sort of our dashboard in Bluehost on how we can kind of manage all our various subdomains. So right now, as you see, we have 5 on this page, and we have District 23. We have the template right here, and we have a few test subdomains that I've been working with. But this gives us a centralized location where we can manage our subdomains. If I need to, I can log directly into the WordPress installation for that subdomain, but I can also manage it, which we've already found has been super useful. If, for example, a plugin update crashes the website, I can go in, I can take a look. all the plugins.

[36:19] Michael P.: And I can start, doing, like, a process of elimination. I can start… this is a common troubleshooting tactic, too, that if a website crashes, we want to try and isolate the source of the crash so we can go through one by one and start deactivating plugins to try and find the source. of that crash. We actually did this with CNIA.org through this process, and it worked. We were able to disable plugins one by one and find the root cause of that crash. So again, we have sort of a centralized location where we can easily manage All our subdomains. And on the Google Workspace front, I don't have a lot of… I mean, I could… we could do… and I know that we've had other presentations with Google Workspace, I just wanted to give you sort of a snapshot of what it looks like for us, and how we've been

[37:10] Michael P.: You can see that we have all our subdomains listed here, that they've been verified, the Gmail activated. We don't have to go in manually and update MX records and DMS records and these things anymore. It's all kind of automated. If I had the time to demo that for y'all, I would, but it's actually… it's simple, and Google support has really excellent support documentation for all their products. So what we would do is just provide our trusted servants with a link to their support. This is a list of different groups that we have in Google Workspace. So we haven't… again, we haven't fully implemented this yet, but this districts group would be the group that we would use for our subdomain, so we would add a webmaster and potentially a DCM to this group.

[38:04] Michael P.: And then they would be part of a group that would have the ability to communicate with Area 07, Trusted servants, and communicate with other districts. And this is sort of an example of how we do chat. This would be an area where, everybody can communicate with Right? We have these different spaces that we created. We have one for our all-area chat. For our technology committee, we have a smaller one for our web development team, and we can, you know, kind of, we can… we can control member access. And our vision is to give everyone a space, district trusted servants and area trusted servants, a space for them to communicate all area business among each other. Okay, and with that, I think we've got 6 minutes left, so I'm going to go ahead and hand it back over to Carrie to… It's a… oh, I forgot to sign. I need to sign in.

[39:11] Michael P.: I'm going to stop sharing my screen just for a moment while I, log in. I don't want to show my 1Password to everybody. Give me one moment, please. Alright, I think we're all set. Okay. Can everyone see my screen? Alright.

[39:43] Host: We can see your screen.

[39:44] Michael P.: All right, great, thank you. All right, Carrie, go ahead and take us home.

[39:47] Work in Progress

[39:47] Carrie J.: Michael, thank you so much. We'll just wrap it up. Thank you for your time and attention. As with anything in A.A., we know it's a work in progress. I think you maybe have all, experienced the bittersweet letting go of turning over your baby to the next panel, and So, we hope to have the six sites, district sites live before the end of this panel. We're going to do a group training, finish up the user guides, finalize for the linguistic district. We really want to do a Spanish website, not a translation of a website, so we'll be working on that. further accessibilities integration, and then next panel may be trusted with working on the Google Workspace collaboration.

[40:37] Key Takeaways

[40:37] Host: And then the key takeaways from this project is to focus on accessibility, simplicity, and scalability.

[40:44] Carrie J.: It was really a priority to have it be no cost to districts. to have resources for the newcomer and trusted servants using the site, and that it was designed and developed through the group conscience. And as I shared, it really was, a labor of love for our tech committee the last two panels, and we all learned so much, and I think we're really proud with the project we're leaving behind. So, thank you for letting us present.

[41:13] Host: Thank you so much, Carrie and Michael. That was amazing. We've got three and a half minutes for questions, and I want to see if we can fit them in. So, Jackie, let's go. Let's make them real quick if we can, so we can go here and online, too.

[41:20] Q&A / Discussion

[41:33] Jackie B.: Hi, thank you. So this, this is an immense amount of work, thank you, it's good to see you, Carrie, and Jackie B. So… a couple of us are thinking, what about intergroups? Because I know CNIA has 5 or 6 intergroups, and a lot of the materials you've created on your homepage for these districts is local-based service things, where it's about connecting local newcomers to, the local meetings, which is usually the work of an intergroup, local services, and then general service is about supporting districts and the GSRs in being a part of that service structure. So, have you guys talked to the intergroups that will be affected by this? Because you're creating a duplication of efforts that can affect the groups is gonna affect newcomers, it might affect SEO, people can…

[42:32] Jackie B.: for both websites, so I would almost say, like, there are districts that do this kind of work, but you could make the default not to have all that newcomer material, and just have, “Do you have a problem with drinking?”, and direct them to the intergroup sites. And then for the cases of districts that don't have an intergroup, where the district is providing that service of local services, then have a special template for them, because this could be… This could be… yeah, there's some… there's some things in there that just, as a special worker, makes my heart go pitter-pat, but I… I see so much benefit for general service district websites if the content was kept to general service primary purpose.

[43:17] Michael P.: Those are all very interesting considerations. Thank you.

[43:20] Host: Thanks.

[43:23] Michael P.: Robin is, with our central office. Maybe we can give Robin, if no one else is in line in front of her.

[43:30] Host: Robin's next.

[43:31] Michael P.: Go ahead, Robin.

[43:32] Robin T.: I'm an alcoholic. It's really good to see you, Michael.

[43:36] Michael P.: Robin.

[43:37] Robin T.: keep ending up in the same places. So yeah, my question was, would central office have access to that communication to, the area and the districts, because I know that that is… our area has more websites, districts have websites, than I think, a lot of them around, the United States. So. for me, as the office manager, it's difficult sometimes when there's changes. I know, for your, district webpage, there was that communication on the back end of it, so anytime there was an update or anything like that, it fed to us, and there was always, you know, do you want this updated on the central office. So, I was just wondering, could the central offices

[44:38] Robin T.: also have… be in communication, just in case they don't have that kind of communication with the office, automatic emails and things like that, if we could just have, access to be able to communicate.

[44:53] Michael P.: We should talk more about that, Robin, there might be a potential for that.

[44:57] Robin T.: Alright, thank you.

[44:58] Carrie J.: And I would… I would just clarify, we're not maintaining unique databases or information on the district websites. We're just sharing out links to those. being maintained by other people, we're not…

[45:11] Robin T.: Well, not all meetings in each district are registered with us, and so they don't all end up on our website. So, if we have good communication with the districts, we can find out which meetings are not registered or not listed, because new meetings are happening all the time, and we want to definitely capture all the online meetings. And anyway, thank you.

[45:40] Michael P.: Thank you, Robin.

[45:41] Host: All right, we're out of time, and so let's give Michael and Carrie, a big hand again. Thank you so much.

[45:52] Michael P.: If anybody has follow-up questions, I'll keep an… we'll keep an eye on the Slack channel, and we can answer.

[45:57] Host: Yeah, and head over to the Slack channel, and I want to do some announcements, before we bring on our next presenters.