Re: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING THE FUTURE OF RECORDER
As all of you will be aware the public sector, generally, has to make significant cost savings over the next three years (typically around 20%). Given that the central support and development of Recorder is funded through the public sector I wanted to clarify exactly what the strategy is in relation to the package.
The total investment in developing and maintaining Recorder over the last three years within the UK and Ireland has been roughly £300K with the majority of this being spent on development. There have also been other contributions from elsewhere, particularly Luxembourg and Germany. A significant proportion of the investment has been staff input from JNCC (monitoring the forums, developing requirements, testing etc.) and it will no longer be possible for JNCC to maintain this level of investment. However, the costs have generally been declining over the last three years and Recorder is now in a reasonably good shape providing a stable, scalable platform for collating biodiversity records. There has also been very good uptake, particularly across the local record centres, and the steering group agree that it is very important that an appropriate level of support for the system is maintained if at all possible.
The overall strategy is therefore to identify a private sector partner (or partners) to provide the essential central support and maintenance for the system with user representation involved in decision making.
Since the strategy requires public sector funding, the scale of the support and maintenance function cannot be determined until there is confirmation of the funding that is likely to be available. However, it is very unlikely that there will be sufficient funds to support significant new development - the goal will be to ensure that there is enough to address bugs that appear and minor enhancements to the functionality. However, as part of the framework there will also be a mechanism to allow separate funding of new aspects of functionality, though processes would need to be in place (as they are at the moment) to avoid any adverse or incompatible changes.
The next steps in the process are to establish a framework contract that will provide a mechanism to fund the central support and maintenance functions and we hope to complete this over the next month.
If you have any queries around this strategy please don’t hesitate to get back in touch. Similarly if you would like to be considered as a potential contractor please contact myself or Mary Campling in confidence.
Best wishes
Steve Wilkinson, JNCC