General Service

Alcoholics Anonymous is a worldwide group that started in 1935 with the sole purpose of alcoholics helping other alcoholics get and maintain sobriety. This General Service App provides a single platform for both A.A. officers and A.A. members to upload and consume information respectively, about the service aspects of A.A. as a whole.

Currently, A.A. members must navigate to thousands of independently operated websites, newsletters, emails, and/or attend multiple business meetings throughout the U.S. and Canada, where A.A. officers upload or communicate information about A.A. service. This reality is a time-consuming and confusing way to understand “what is happening in A.A.”. If widely adopted, this app has the potential to provide A.A. service information in a single, easy to understand location, rather than disparate websites, newsletters, emails and business meetings.

Each District and Area Chair can either: A. Post their news, events and resources to the generalservice.app website, similar to a social media interface, with three posting options: a. News for Announcements & Events; b. Business for proposals and discussion topics; and c. Resource for where to find more information.
B. Work with the app developer to either generate an automated feed of posts that populates their page from an external website.

Additional functionality includes: • Screen shots include user posts with “call to action” buttons, where users can click to find more information, or “Add to Calendar” for events.
• Each post has start and end dates, which automatically disappear when the date expires. Stories can be re-ordered within each section to accommodate District and Area Chair’s priorities.
• Users opt-in their phone’s location services to auto-populate their correct District and Area’s hexagonal location stored in an Excel sheet, maintained by the developer.
• Color is used throughout to differentiate District vs. Area vs. General Service Office (all U.S. & Canada) service levels.

Active beta testing is ongoing in the San Francisco Bay Area Districts and California Northern Coastal Area, with more regions to be added post go-live in the Apple App Store.