Executive Director's Report
October 2003
===========================

October 15th, 2003
By John Selwyn
(execdir@NCF.ca) 

Donations:
Donations for latest period: $10,391 vs $11,968 forecast and a year to date
total of $137,070 vs $146,647 in the budget and $118,990 for the same period
in 2002.

Expenses:
Operating expenses for the core NCF service during the period was $24,691 or
approximately 50% above the budget for the period of $16,497. This is almost
entirely due to a two month charge for dial-up services resulting in an
overcharge of approximately $7,000.  Bell Canada has indicated that the
previously posted termination charge of $115,000 has been canceled and the
summers over payment of approximately $13,000 will be reembursed. 


Raising Awareness of the NCF:
In September our campaign to raise the awareness of local residents to our
services kicked off. 
 
Print media
	Ottawa Citizen 5 ads 		131,000 impressions
	Ottawa Citizen article 		131,000 impressions
	Monitor Magazine 3 ads   	20,000 impressions
	Carleton Magazine article 	60,000 impressions
	Ottawa Business Journal article

Flyers
	2000 distributed at the GTEC show
	 500 distributed at outlets around the city

Membership:
Total membership of Freenet has increased to 7815 currently from the 7467
reported in September.  This membership is inline with reaching our goal of
8400 members by January.

Modems:
Dial-up services are being expanded by 50% later this week. Two hardware
failure and the resulting disabling of modem sharing resulted in a degradation
of dial-up service for a period.  The modem servers are being replaced with
a newer high density modem server. The new equipment is currently being tested.
In addition 92 new lines are currently enabled and being tested with the new
equipment. The new equipment is expectd to go line when testing is completed
later this week. 

Email:
An external audit of the NCF systems including email and web mail wil be
completed during the coming month.  This should help to guide future
maintenance and development efforts.


John