Polaris organisation

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Team Polaris

Polaris is a modern managment system for Rotarian communities (clubs, districts, etc.) introduced in January 2021 as the successor to the RCMS (Rotary Club Management System), which was successfully in use for 20 years.

The Polaris organizational structure follows the motto "By Rotarians for Rotarians". It is provided as a solution to Districts (not to clubs) which have a contract with the Association Rotary Media Switzerland/Liechtenstein (ARM), a non-profit legal entity controlled by the 3 Rotary Districts of Switzerland/Liechtenstein. The supervisory board of the ARM is the Council of Governors (Governorrat), which is composed of delegates from the 3 District Boards of Switzerland & Liechtenstein. The ARM is the legal owner of the Polaris product and the contracting party with the districts for the Polaris licenses.

All the activities related to Polaris are managed by the Polaris Team. The system is developed and operated by independent companies that are contracted and paid for this purpose. The software engineering and operation of the Polaris system are carried out by Couldtec AG. The IT infrastructure is provided by Metanet AG. There is no personal relationship or financial involvement, and thus no conflict of interest, between these companies and Rotary.

User support is provided by volunteers in clubs (CICOs), districts (DICOs), and the by the Polaris Team.

OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay

Collaboration between Districts and Polaris

The assembly of Polaris District Representatives (PDRs) is the entity receiving all information from the Polaris team and participating in the definition of the product future plans. The purpose of this Assembly is to seek the votes of the districts on certain important issues for future developments. The topics for the future assembly are recorded as ideas in the RedMine projects.

The PDRs represents both their district and all clubs in that district. They are responsible to collect the feedback and requests from the districts and clubs and make the first triage on them.

The Polaris Team collects information from the PDRs and consolidates the ideas into topics to be presented in the assembly meetings. It organizes the assembly meeting and creates the agenda containing all the topics to be discussed there. Only "high level" topics are discussed. Request for features are handled by the regular change request process (RedMine).

After the assembly, the Polaris Team  organizes the electronic voting about the discussed topics and informs about the voting results and the final implementation plan. 

The PDRs are responsible for information to the clubs and to the districts they are representing.


Depending on the organization of the country, the DICOs, their deputies and other people from the district meet annually - or more often - with the representatives of the Polaris team. These meetings are very important and strengthen the community of Polaris users. Whenever possible, they are held face-to-face.

Polaris collaboration charter (access for DICOs only)

You do not have the permission to see this folder.