The spreadsheet that ran a village

There are no servers in the village hall. There is a laptop, a kettle and a spreadsheet maintained by Anneke, a retired bookkeeper, which tells four hundred people when the bins are collected, who owes the water co-op, and which ten households are lending the minibus this month.

The file has forty-one tabs. Nobody planned it. Each tab was added when a problem arrived, and each colour-coded cell hides a small negotiation. It has survived two floods and one attempted migration to a proper app, which the committee voted down after a trial month.

Why the app failed

The commercial tool was cleaner, but it assumed rules the village did not follow. Exceptions were the norm: the minibus waived for funerals, the bin charge halved for widows. A spreadsheet can hold an exception in a comment. The app wanted a field.