About PETS
Petition Entry and Tracking System
PETS is the computer database, programs and network which supports the legislative activities of the General Conference. The PETS database contains the current and historical information about every petition, committee item, calendar item and updated Disciplinary paragraph submitted to or created by the 1996 General Conference. This includes the text of all petitions, committee items and calendar items.
PETS programs will run on 30 - 40 PCs at the Denver Convention Center over a TCP/IP network. Authorized users update information about the various legislative documents on these Microsoft NT based PCs.
Various reports are written by PETS throughout the conference. One set of reports is transmitted electronically to the Daily Christian Advocate Staff for direct inclusion in the DCA. Other reports include listings of pending business delivered to the elected officials of the Legislative Committees, lists of calendar items with financial implications for the General Council on Finance and Administration, Discipline updates as they happen for the Committee on Corelation and Reference and presiding bishops, and many others.
PETS also electronically maintains this world-wide web site. The site is composed of approximately 12,500 files which give any interested party access to the legislative work of the General Conference. The entire site, is mirrored in Denver to allow high speed access from over 90 networked PCs at the convention center. Approximately 2000 - 3000 files are updated each day as required to accurately represent the activities of the conference.
By the time the conference is concluded, PETS will have electronically stored over 80,000 files representing more than 625,000 typewritten pages of information. At its peak, PETS will have responded to as many as 25 requests per second for information regarding legislative documents.
A single session of the General Conference can be deluged with as many as 20,000 petitions. The Discipline requires that each petition is voted on by the plenary session. Many complex rules, procedures and reports were created over the years to cope with this literal mountain of paper. Over the years, the conference process became so complex that very few individual people understood the process in its entirety.
Each petition was stamped with an incrementing rubber stamper as it was received by the Petitions Secretary. When they were all received, then lots of volunteer labor was brought in to type up petition lists (with several carbon copies). When the lists of petitions in serial order were complete, then the volunteers had to physically sort all of the petitions into order by Disciplinary paragraph and start typing up lists again. Time permitting, petitions were sorted again by title, source, and any other way that the Petitions Secretary thought might be valuable in the heat of battle during the conference session.
These typed lists were precious as gold, and only by careful checking against them could the Secretary of the General Conference, the Coordinator of the Calendar and the Petitions Secretary be sure that all petitions had been acted upon once and only once.
After the conference was over, it took as long as several months to sort all of the petitions into piles of those which were approved and those which were rejected. Piles of petitions, together with hand typed and hand written committee revisions and motions from the floor were all merged together into the next version of the Book of Discipline and Book of Resolutions. In some quadrenia it took as long as one year to complete this process.
In 1984 John Brawn volunteered to help the Petitions Secretary, Newall Knudsen, create a computerized list of petitions. The intent was to replace the manual sorting and repetitive effort of typing lists. John provided a CPM based, Hewlett-Packard 125 PC and training for the volunteers to help them create a list in a word processor (Word-125 which was an early specialized version of WordStar.)
A primary and backup floppy disk were used for all of the petitions related to each legislative committee. When complete, these 24 floppies contained a text file per committee with a paragraph per petition with the petition serial number, the related Disciplinary paragraph number, the title and the source.
John took the files to his office at Hewlett-Packard, uploaded them to an HP3000 minicomputer and using TDP/3000 (a text and document processor) fixed up the punctuation, acronyms, and titles, sorted the list in various ways, and printed them out to a high speed laser printer. (Actually the 45 page/minute HP2680 was faster than any laser printer used by the General Conference in the 12 years since.)
A new General Conference Secretary and acting Petitions Secretary, Faith Richardson, saw value in having the information about the petitions available on-line at the conference site. Faith and John designed a simple database to track some basic information about each petition during the conference including the calendar item number and whether it was approved or rejected in final vote.
This was a significant step forward. The pre-printed list in 1984 was helpful, but it did nothing to address the pile of paper to be contended with at conference's end. The new idea of tracking each petition throughout the conference enabled considerable time to be saved both during and after the conference session. To highlight the difference in scope, John proposed the acronym PETS for PEtition Tracking System. Faith, finding two capitalized letters in a world unattractive, suggested Petition Entry and Tracking System instead.
PETS ran on two HP 150 "Touchscreen" PCs, and four HP Vectras (8 and 12 Mhz 286 based PCs.) The database was just over 1.5 Mbytes and fit compressed on one 720k, 3.5" floppy. The program was 6,000 lines long and compiled in 25 minutes. John volunteered over 300 hours of programming time to create PETS.
1988 was John's first general conference session. John finished most of the difficult work in the first week of the conference, and then worked with his father, Mel Brawn, (who was a network consultant for HP) to document the entire work flow of the general conference.
The results of this analysis, covering a 30' wall in the Secretary's office from floor to ceiling, were usually met with something between horror and disbelief. While everyone who was a part of the process aknowledged that their part of it was correct, none had any idea of the scope or complexity of the entire process.
It was clear to John by the half-way point of the 1988 General Conference that tracking petitions through the conference session only gave visibility to a small part of the entire legislative process.
Carolyn Marshal, the newly elected Secretary of the General Conference worked with John and Richard Peck, Editor of the Daily Christain Advocate, to design a simplified paperwork flow to administratively support the entire legislative process. John took the assignment one step further and defined information entities, limits of authority, approval processes and segregation of responsibilities. After this, it was a fairly simple matter to outline a series of modules which could be added to PETS to not only track but be the official repository for information about petitions, committee items and calendar items.
John had worked for the corporate internal audit department of Hewlett-Packard for three years as a computer security and network auditor. In addition to travelling 18 - 20 weeks per year auditing, John also put just over 700 volunteer hours into programming five new modules for PETS in the nine months prior to the start of the General Conference Session.
Besides the programming, John also designed a network of 24 PCs which would be used by the Secretaries' offices, legislative committees and on the floor of the plenary session to use PETS to track all of the legislative activities of the conference. When the convention center opened, it was learned that the building wiring which had been promised for use by this computer network would not be available. Six volunteers spend the first two nights of the conference working nearly all night to string nearly 10km of twisted pair data wire between all of the rooms of the convention center.
There were a few glitches in the computerization of the conference work flow, but for the most part, PETS was widely recognized as a huge step forward in the administrative work of the conference. The entire text of every petition was available on-line. For the first time, no documents had to be completely retyped because of typing errors. All intermediate versions of all documents were retained facilitating problem resolution. The name of the person making each change was recorded along with the date and time to ensure proper documentation control. Post conference work on the Discipline was completed in under two months.
This was also the first year in which PETS provided support for real-time inquiry through the United Methodist Communication's InfoServe 800 number. Response from Methodists who were not at the conference session was very positive, and the delegates voted a change into the Discipline requiring "bulletin board" access to PETS information for "all who are interested in the business of the General Conference."
The PETS network included a 33Mhz 486 server with 670 Mbytes of disk space running OS/2 LAN Manager serving 22 rented 25Mhz 386s desktop PCs and one Toshiba T2400 portable. The network protocal was LAN Manager over TCP/IP and supported remote printing to a 17ppm HP LaserJet IIIsi.
The PETS modules used at the 1992 session were composed of over 30,000 lines of programming code and compiled in two to three minutes each.
John has volunteered approximately 300 hours fine tuning the existing PETS modules to include the following enhancements over the 1992 PETS modules:
In addition, John volunteered nearly 400 hours in the creation of two new modules. One will be used to keep a copy of the Book of Discipline up to date as changes to the discipline are voted in the plenary session. This will allow the Committee on Corelation and Editorial Revision to review and approve the changes to the Discipline as they happen. This module will also allow the Presiding Bishop, Parliamentary Assistant and Secretary of the General Conference to have an constantly updated hard copy of the Discipline in order to help catch inappropriate subsequent changes to paragraphs which have already been modified by vote.
The second new module is a World Wide Web writer. This module maintains the thousands of files at this web site which satisfy the requirements of the Discipline for electronic access to PETS information from any interested party. This module includes a mix of database to html and rtf (text) to html subprograms.
A final piece of the PETS picture at the 1996 General Conference Session is the physical network. PETS is running on three servers. One is the primary database and text storage machine. A second is a hot-standby for the primary server and is capable of taking over in the event the first server is lost with a maximum of 10 minutes of work lost. The third server provides web service to all of the PCs on the convention center network, and provides replication service to the official www.umc.org web server in Nashville. All three servers are pentium based system (90 - 120 Mhz) with 64 Mbytes each of main memory and a total disk storage capacity of 14Gbytes (4.4 million type written pages of text.)
The convention center LAN is connected via a 64Kbit/sec ISDN line to the UMC wide area network in Nashville. The UMC wide area network is connected to a public internet service provider with 64Kbit/sec service.
The PETS source code is now well over 40,000 lines and each of the seven modules compiles in under 50 seconds.
The complexity, scale and especially the importance of the PETS system to the General Conference of the United Methodist Church, has gone far beyond the point where it makes sense to rely on one volunteer to provide all the programming, network design, web design, network support, user training, equipment setup and troubleshooting!
In 1995, John Brawn, the volunteer PETS developer, formally requested in writing to the Business Manager of the General Conference that a large, established software development company be contracted to provide enhancements, support, installation and training for the 2000 General Conference and beyond. As of this writing, no software company has been selected to perform these tasks. If you represent a company capable of providing these services, I would urge you to contact Roger Kruse at (708) 869-3345.
The PETS software written by John Brawn is owned by the Commission on General Conference Session. PETS contains database, screen and file handling procedures which are copyrighted and owned by Hewlett-Packard Company. These procedures are together known as PCSoft Tools. HP reserves all rights to those procedures which were developed for internal use, and provides no support nor makes any warranty of any kind.
PETS also requires several commercially available copyrighted software programs to be installed. These include:
I would like to thank several people for instrumental support of the PETS project.
Robert Brawn: My brother and a much sharper programmer by far. Robert spent many long evenings and early mornings at my house making suggestions for database structure, programing structure, web page relationship, etc. Robert also has bashed away at the keyboard for hours on end a couple of times in an attempt to identify bugs. And, there was his 1984 mad dash to the airport, petition lists (still warm from the laser printer) in hand, passing an ambulance with it's lights on, and arriving at the gate just in time to hand the lists to the Petitions Secretary as the door to the airplane closed. Thanks Robert!
Joy Brawn: My wife who knows very little about the General Conference and would like to keep it that way. Joy has been very supportive of the time I've had to spend at the keyboard, the days I've been away to meetings, the late night and early morning phone calls, and the ever expanding heat generating devices in the computer room. She constantly reminds me when my reimbursement checks haven't arrived. Joy plays the new user role, reads help messages and tries to make sense of the reports, softkeys, menus and screen colors. And through all this, she still loves me!
Brian Paulson: The best man at my wedding and the best PC database guru around. Brian has developed testing protocols and then actually followed them to prove that the file and record locking schemes actually work on a multi-host network.
Mike Cunningham: Information Systems Manager at the United Methodist Publishing House. Mike's early technical grasp of PETS, and steady assurances to his management went a long way toward relieving their stress and reducing my phone bill.
Carolyn Marshal: General Conference Secretary and good friend. Carolyn has listened patiently and acted promptly to every request I have made for information, help, and consensus.
Vern Denny and Glenn Hinton: These guys are Mighty Morphin' Power People who at the 1992 General Conference transformed from publishing professionals and managers into two of the most tallented and dedicated PC support folks I have ever met. Given only an overview of PETS and a walkie-talkie, both of these guys took on every kind of off the wall problem from early morning into the middle of the night with unflappable calm and grace.
Gere Reist: Rev. (Wild Man) Reist took the bull by the horns and expanded the reach of the PETS system into the plenary activity with creativity and tenacity.
Rich Nielsen: A long time HP employee and the creater of HP's PCSoft Tools, Rich agreed to support my request for access to the tools to corporate management. When one of his utilities did the unexpected on the UMC network, Rich rewrote the tool to allow it to run the same way at General Conference as at HP. This was on personal time and was way beyond my expectations.
UMCom Webmaster: Susan Peak,
SPeak@umcom.umc.org
General Conference Webmaster: Susan Brumbaugh,
Susan.Brumbaugh@Colorado.EDU
PETS Creator: John Brawn,
JOHN_BRAWN@HP-Sunnyvale-om2.om.hp.com