The BMLT (“Basic Meeting List Toolbox”) consists of a suite of tools for managing NA meeting lists. As of November 2022, known BMLT servers list 32,733 total meetings, across 1150 service bodies, which is 43% of the 76,075 known meetings in the world. BMLT offers many advantages over simply pasting a list of meetings on an area website, including better search capabilities, a web form for doing meeting updates, tools for automatically producing printed schedules, helpline support, easy synchronization of meeting data with NA World Services, and more. A BMLT installation consists of a “root server” that holds a database of meetings, and “satellites” that display meetings for a given service body.

One of the main activities of the WSZF Technology Workgroup has been supporting the use of BMLT in our zone, with the goal of having BMLT used widely, and ideally for all regions and areas in the zone. We have already made significant progress — the meeting map on https://tally.bmlt.app shows all the meetings on BMLT servers in WSZF (and everywhere else in the world).

1. We have deployed a zone-wide BMLT root server (https://bmlt.wszf.org/main_server).
2. Regions and areas in WSZF not currently using BMLT are invited to make use of the zonal server for their meeting data. The Technology Workgroup can help you come on board, including technical assistance and also potentially helping to enter meeting data.
3. Regions in WSZF with existing servers should feel free to continue using their current servers indefinitely if they are happy with that way of doing things.
4. Alternatively, regions in WSZF with existing servers can migrate their data to the zonal server if they prefer, and we would work with them to do that (see Merging a Server). The BMLT community is seeing an increasing number of zone-level servers — other examples include the Southeastern Zonal Forum, the Brazilian Zonal Forum, the Plains States Zonal Forum, and the Canadian Assembly of Narcotics Anonymous. Some advantages of joining the zonal server are that you don’t need trusted servants at the regional level who can maintain a server and keep it backed up, access to the zone’s yap server, a simplified process for synchronizing meeting data with NA World Services, and potentially some cost savings.

This being NA, of course no region or area will be required to use BMLT, but we hope the advantages will be convincing, and that in time the zonal server along with regional ones will cover the entire zone.

Please contact us at bmlt@wszf.org with questions or comments.