Websites for associations, societies and foundations

An association's website has a problem an ordinary company's does not: the people in it change on a schedule, and the website is the last thing anyone remembers to update.

A mandate ends. A commission elects a new coordinator. An editorial committee turns over. Every page naming any of them is now quietly wrong, and stays wrong until a member notices and emails somebody about it. The answer is not to write the leadership onto a page but to hold mandates, boards and committees as data — so the page changes when the mandate does, rather than when someone has an afternoon.

The second thing is that the membership is the point. What these organisations do between congresses — a clinical discussion, a call for papers, an archive of the journal nobody outside the room ever saw — has to live somewhere, or it happens on email and reaches whoever happened to be copied in.

The work here spans twenty years, from a 2004 site that replaced a paper call for papers and an inbox, to a governance model built as an application.