Presently, only Croquet England Affiliate organisations are able to use the admin rights granted in their configuration: if a club stops being an Affiliate, its admins no longer have admin privileges for the club or its members, even though the configuration says the label grants admin rights to the data administrators.

See the help.

We could relax this and ensure that labels are manually edited to remove admin permissions when clubs leave membership and reenabled when they return to the fold - automation is problematic, but this would be unreliable at best as errors are easy to make. It is simplest to keep it locked to member organisations (but see below for a widening of what this means).

The Academies have no formal membership relationships with Croquet England. There are also a number of clubs that are Federation members but not Croquet England Affiliates. Not all Academies are recorded as Federation members.

• Change Proposal #1: There should be a pseudo Croquet England affiliate category, initially specifically for Academies, to be recorded in NMDB. It would be no-cost and assigned indefinitely so should not lead to any confusion or extra office load.
• Change Proposal #2: To properly support Federations using the database, federation members should have the same admin rights that Croquet England subscribers (clubs and federations) have. Admin rights should be granted to admins of clubs that are Croquet England Affiliates as well as those that are members of organisations affiliated to Croquet England (feds).

When the database was initially populated, we imported from CADB (the old CA database) all organisations (CADB Bodies) - each body in CADB had a field defining its type (member club, overseas club, governing body, federation, etc.). Each club also had an "Area ID", defining its federation allocation.

The body type and membership was used to define the object type in NMDB (Club, Federation, Governing Body, Other Body), as well as its initial membership (of Croquet England and a federation).

Note that some (most?) federations have not audited NMDB's view of their members - several clubs are Croquet England Affiliates but not federation members (as well as vice versa). Some clubs are a member of two federations. A fruitful exercise might be to ask feds to confirm the list, or someone compare each federation's website list of member clubs with NMDB.

CADB was used as a bit of an address book by Liz and it included a number of overseas organisations - see the organisation tags - plus a large number of individual records.

I don't believe that any effort is put into ensuring these organisation details are up to date (e.g. current secretary and their address) - nor should it be unless it is really needed.

Some "need" to be there because they are used as Fixtures Calendar venues (there has been a world championship at United NZ, a meeting at the Victory Services Club, a paid-for entry in the Fixtures Calendar from Carrickmines, etc.), or as destinations for Gazettes (some croquet Governing Bodies, the copyright libraries, etc.).

The Gazette report page shows:

• Non-Affiliated Organisations Receiving The Gazette
• Affiliated Organisations Not Receiving The Gazette
• Organisations Receiving Multiple Gazettes

The first set includes overseas organisations and copyright libraries, the second usually should be empty but depends on the organisation's setting of the "Number of Gazettes" field.

Only the "Agency For Legal Deposit Libraries" has more than one copy - apart from that, we could switch the Gazette to being a subscription-type right (as for Associates) plus an explicit label.

Proposal #3

Refer to the organisation tags

1. we prune the tags associated with organisations we don't need to use (by checking the fixtures and whether configured for Gazette) - as a result, some organisations will become completely disconnected and so become inactive and eventually be deleted.
2. For organisations, such as overseas governing bodies, world championship venues, and copyright libraries, don't use the main contact label indirect reference to a separate person record, but use the organisation's name and address - avoiding naming a person in the organisation details.
3. Ensure organisations that are in the database are labelled to show why they are there (i.e. introduce a label for tournament venues as well as the extant meeting venues, plus one for "Non-Associate Gazette Recipients").
4. Ensure that all organisations that are not at least potentially Croquet England Affiliates do not have a label capable of granting admin rights.