Congratulations and a warm welcome to each of the new Board members and a warm
 welcome back to everyone else.  I am happy to report that the AGM and NCF’s 
election ran smoothly and were completed without a hitch.  Many thanks to Jim, 
Graeme, Andre and Andre.

The past three months have been busy as the pace of new high speed members 
seems to have taken a step function higher at the start of January and the 
pace has continued unabated.   During each of the previous three months between 
90 and 100 new members have signed up for DSL – a pace about double what was 
expected.  NCF how has 1544 high speed members as compared to a budget target of
1440.  Overall membership has grown slightly from the low of 8,500 to a current 
9,100 members using all service.

In addition we only filled our support vacancy in March.  I would like to welcome
 Anna Krangle-Long to our support team.  I hope to tell you more about Anna at 
our Board meeting.  Almost on cue with Anna’s arrival, support calls have dropped 
allowing us the luxury of answering support calls as they arise.  

Financially NCF is close to on budget for the first three months of the year.  
Total donations have been $60,262 as compared to $57,978 in the budget.  Total 
DSL subscribers have grown to 1,544 as compared to 1,440 in the budget.  Margin 
for DSL service is therefore ahead of budget, being $17k for the three months.   
With the recent price reductions for DSL hardware comes reduced earnings from 
hardware sales.  Over the 3 months NCF has sold $23K of hardware, with a margin 
of $8k as compared to a budget of $7.5k.  

Expenses have been generally on track with no major deviations from budget 
expected.

We have been fortunate to have received the previously noted donation of four 
wide screen LCD monitors from Dell.  This is a major improvement to the working 
conditions for the NCF staff and volunteers.   

We are now needing to start searching for an additional server.   One of our 
main servers (Sauraman) is reaching the limits of its I/O capabilities and its 
peak load during early morning backups has made the server unreachable for members 
wanting to use their start page.   Andre has explored the options and he is hopeful 
that we can find a Sun server that lists for about $8K along with a support contract
that Andre values highly.

On the software front there have been a number of improvements – updates to 
YellowMail, improvements to the start page, DSL line stat display and DSL support 
pages and finally the addition of search functions to discussion groups.  

We are currently testing an open source replacement to webmail.  Our existing webmail 
is based on software that was licensed from Sun and is currently unsupported.  Moving 
to the open source product will allow us to drawn on a large support community 
resulting in both a better service for our members and reduced support costs.  

On the advertising front we have discovered Google ads.  I was really impressed at 
what a good product Google has produced.  NCF now has a campaign underway that is 
restricted to web searches in the National Capital Region for a large number of key 
words such as “internet” “DSL” “high speed” etcetera.   We typically have between 
3000 and 4000 impressions per week with about 40 click through with an average cost 
of 15c per click through.  

During my time at NCF, the organisation has never run better.   Focus on the core 
services has paid off in that we offer huge value to our members.  Our goal now 
should be to grow the membership as quickly as possible.  We have a golden opportunity 
with Bell and Rogers both getting a bad name for their antics.  Most people over 
thirty have heard of the FreeNet but have misconceptions as to what we offer.  Most 
people under thirty have not heard of FreeNet.  

It will be great to see everyone at Tuesday’s meeting

Cheers

john