Out of the Burrow¶

Before the move, the east wing’s volunteers were coordinated in the Burrow, a Notion workspace Priya built over a weekend on her personal account, because the alternative was three spreadsheets, a calendar only two people could edit, and a folder of documents called things like “FINAL rota April ACTUAL v3”. By Monday it had a roster, a task tracker, a page per resident with the volunteers cleared to work with them, and a calendar everyone could edit. IT learned of it eight months later from a helpdesk ticket asking how to log in to “the Notion thing for east wing”. It held nineteen people’s access, volunteers’ names, contact details, DBS check reference numbers and expiry dates, candid notes on suitability written at the end of long shifts, a subset of Bestiary copied in by hand, and a page called “Incidents and Near-Misses” with eighteen entries that the Head of Programmes had not known about and, on reading, had a difficult afternoon over. The scraps for this layer say: the Burrow was the best-run system in the building and the least defensible, and those were the same fact.

What Priya built¶

The first scrap was an inventory of the Burrow as a system rather than as a problem, because it was going to be rebuilt and the rebuild had to hold what the east wing used. The Burrow was four things. A roster of volunteers with availability, role and clearance. A board of tasks for resident care. A page per resident that summarised what a volunteer needed to know. A calendar. Everything else in the workspace was one of those four wearing a different view, except the incidents page and the suitability notes, which were something else and went to the DPO.

Notion, read¶

The Burrow was on a free personal account, so there was no contract to read, which the Burrow page puts as a jurisdiction that depends on which Notion legal entity the account belongs to, never established. A free personal account has no data processing agreement because nobody signed anything, and the DPO’s summary of the situation, “not ideal”, was the polite form. What Notion does offer is a way out: its export writes any page as Markdown, any database as CSV with a Markdown file per row, and a whole workspace at once. That property made the move an afternoon’s work, and it is the one to check first about any tool somebody builds on a weekend.

Where it went¶

The Burrow’s successor is not a new landlord. The Home already pays one for a Nextcloud, and Nextcloud has Tables, a database app from Nextcloud GmbH, and Deck, a kanban board, beside the calendar it came with. The roster went from Notion’s CSV into a Tables table with the same columns, the task board into Deck, the calendar into the calendar, and the resident pages stopped being copies. Each resident’s page in Tables now holds the volunteer-facing summary and a link to the record in Bestiary, entered once, which ends the problem the Burrow page names of a copy that may not reflect what Bestiary says any more. Access is by the identity provider, through the file store’s login, and Priya administers the roster as a group owner rather than as the owner of the account everything lives in. When Priya goes on holiday, the roster does not.

Two European tools built for the job Notion does were looked at and set aside. Capacities, Capacities Labs GmbH in Germany, hosted in Europe with full export in standard formats, and Anytype, made by a Swiss association, local-first with the data on the user’s own devices. Both are notes tools by their own description, built around one person’s thinking, and the Burrow’s problem had been exactly that: it was built around one person. A roster wants an owner that is the Home.

What did not move¶

The “Incidents and Near-Misses” page did not move into the roster. Eighteen entries about volunteers and residents over two years is an incident log, and an incident log belongs to the DPO and the Head of Programmes, with access to match. It went into its own Tables table, restricted to the two of them and the shift supervisors, and the Head of Programmes read it a second time, in daylight, and wrote the reporting process that had been missing.

The suitability notes were read one at a time by Priya and the volunteer coordinator. The measured ones stayed as a field on the roster. The candid ones, the ones written at the end of a long shift about a named person, were deleted, on the DPO’s view that a note appropriate for a private conversation is not appropriate as a semi-permanent record, and on Priya’s view that she would not want to be on the receiving end of one. What the roster records now about suitability is what the coordinator would say to the volunteer’s face.

The Notion workspace was exported once more, in full, to the Home’s own storage as the record of what had been there, and then deleted, with Priya’s account closed after it. The east wing did not notice, which was the test.

The warren¶

   identity provider (ZITADEL, the .eu)
              │
   Storage Share, Falkenstein ── the file landlord, no new one
              │
   ┌──────────┼──────────────┬──────────────────┐
   Tables:    Deck:          Calendar:          Tables, restricted:
   roster,    task board     the east wing      incidents, DPO and
   residents                                     Head of Programmes
   (link to Bestiary, not a copy)

   Priya: group owner, on holiday sometimes

No new landlord, no personal account, and an export that is CSV whichever way the next move goes.

What could go wrong?

• The file landlord goes, and the roster goes with the files, the price of one landlord for both. The premises copy is a day old and the roster is a CSV.

• Somebody builds the next Burrow on a personal account of something else, because the need was real and the approved tool was slow, and the asset register’s discovery conversations are what find it.

• A resident summary drifts from Bestiary again because somebody types instead of linking.

• Priya leaves. The roster is fine, as intended, and the east wing is not, which no tool fixes.

The roster is gone, what now? The CSV export on the premises opens in any spreadsheet, where the roster lived before the Burrow, and the volunteer coordinator runs the east wing from it for the days it takes to restore the Nextcloud. The resident summaries are links to Bestiary, which never moved. The incidents table is restored from the same copy, to the same two people.

Tiffany Aching keeps her diary in a language nobody else on the Chalk can read, and the sheep are none the wiser.