Operations and FreePlan Report =============================== By Lisa K. Donnelly 16 December 1996 1. Operations ============= a) NCF Staff Sharing Dunton Tower Offices ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Starting in early December, the three person full-time staff of NCF have begun to share office space in Dunton Tower at Carleton University. In the past the office manager was the only person to work in a central office. Other staff and contractors worked from home. This presented occasional management challenges and we area all happy to be working together! This also provides plenty of opportunities for volunteers and Board members to drop in to lend expertise with projects. The main office can still be found on the 4th floor and our annex is on the 14th floor. The current NCF staff includes: Lisa Donnelly - Executive Director (lkd@freenet.carleton.ca) Roy Hooper - System Administrator (rhooper@freenet.carleton.ca) Sheila Alder - Office Manager (office@freenet.carleton.ca) To review staff job descriptions and our current To Do Lists, please see items 5,6 and 7 under "go team". b) NCF Account Renewals ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Renewal programming and office procedures have been completed. The program, designed to clean out unused accounts, update our membership records and ask for annual donations, was launched in early November. Below you will find information on renewal activity. November: 24 days December: 13 days Renewals sent: 6,000 3,250 Renewals received w/donations: 141 188 Total from Donations: $3,063 $4,222 Average donation per renewal: $21.70 $22.45 Percentage of donors: 80% N/A Members are given two months to react so we may not see a large influx until mid to late January. c) THe NCF Birthday Party ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Its almost time for NCF's fourth anniversary and we are already planning the festivities! The reception is on Wednesday February 5, 1997, at 5 PM in the Rotunda (main level foyer) of the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton headquarters at 111 Lisgar Street. Regional Chair, Peter Clark, will be on hand to welcome the guests and members. There will be light refreshments, a cash bar and, of course, birthday cake! d) Home Business Association (HBA) Partnership ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NCF is developing a partnership with the HBA of the national capital region. NCF Board member, Julie Chahal and HBA Board member, John Clarke are working together, along with assistance from Lisa Donnelly, to get small businesses trained and on-line with NCF. Currently projects include using the NCF Outreach Centre (515 Cote Street) at the OPL St. Laurent Branch to train HBA members seeking a web presence. e) Library Partnerships ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NCF has a long standing relationship with the libraries of the region. In addition to NCF public access terminals and Help Desk meetings, NCF Board member Julie Chahal sits on the Board of the Regional Library Chairs. In November Lisa Donnelly was sent as a substitute. This was a nice opportunity for NCF staff to meet some new faces from around the region and check on the status of our public terminals. f) Corporate Accounts ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ System Administrator, Roy Hooper, has developed a preliminary plan for technical implementation of corporate accounts. The administrative elements and programming will be reviewed and implemented soon. We are planning to offer this to members in early January. g) Complaints Resolution Committee (CRC) Update ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ After a year of activity, Brian Monkman has stepped down from the CRC. Brian's day job just got more demanding due to a promotion. In November, Board member Natalie Munro and volunteer Donna Shaw joined and began training. As of December 1st the new three person team has been working together. According to these volunteers, the IRC users and newsgroup activity makes up the single largest source of complaints. They average 25 messages a day. 50% of these are what has been dubbed "playground monitoring". This means there has been no violations of the Membership Agreement, so best judgment is used as to amount of attention to give to each complaint. Formal reporting is difficult given work load. We recommend trying an informal approach. Natalie Munro can give a verbal update to the Board each month during the Operations Report. h) Time Limits Task Force ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This is a three member team. Requests from May to mid-December number at 53 - with 12 more pending. The latest round of requests are primarily from members with visual impairments. Expired extensions were cleaned out last Spring and the TLTF will do another in January. There are currently 75 non-xx accounts with time limit extensions - Including all administrative people. We also have 30 xx accounts in use. i) Continuing with Co-op students in the Office ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Volunteers have always been a crucial element to the success of our office activity (processing accounts and donations, helping members who call in). In 1996 we have added to the office team by obtaining high school co-op students. The recent OC Transpo strike has had an impact of the volunteers and co-ops alike causing a slight slow down in processing. Luckily we have secured more co-ops for the January and are always on the look out for new volunteers. Write to Sheila (office@freenet.carleton.ca) if you want to help. j) Administrative Database Status ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Board member Jean Wilmot organized a technical meeting to develop how files will be importing from the registration system. Testing and documentation are being worked on by the office manager and office volunteers. A new volunteer Oracle expert has been found to assist with import and export issues. This work is pending knowledge transfer from our existing volunteer developer, Dave Boswell. 2. FreePlan: NCF's PPP-based Services ====================================== a) General Update ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FreeMail, FreeNews and FreePages are all up and running. There are still refinements to be made and early analysis shows that the majority of our members are not yet using these features. Of those using a service like FreeMail we are finding a low success rate of only 32.5%. This illustrates the need for NCF to develop a mentoring program where members can assist other members in training or house calls. Here's some numbers: (Nov- 08 to Dec-08) Total members activating PPP 2,183 Total members who tried but didnt complete connection: 1,554 Success rate of members attempting PPP connections: 32.5% Data transfer statistics: (Does not include users who could not connect) Bytes sent: 1 684 483 637 Bytes received: 168 055 617 Successful users: Total connections: 10,862 Total time connected: 71.2 days (24-hours per) of modem time which equals 0.36 of an hour per day per modem or 1.5% of total modem pool time is used for PPP connection Average time/connection: 9.4 mintes Unsuccessful users: Total connections: 2,828 Total time connected: 22.5 hours Average time/connect: 28 seconds This data does not include xx users. b) FreePlace ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FreePlace is the name for where the family of PPP-services come together (with the exception of FreeWeb - the Internet Sampler lines). NCF provides dial-up PPP access to its general membership, but does not allow direct access to services and information not contained on the NCF servers. Using a piece of software known as a proxy server, we provide information to our members from the WWW that supports our Mission Statement. In order to provide beneficial WWW sites from which our members can retrieve information, the proxy server regulates which information can be retrieved and from which sites. Any site that we allow access to is considered advantageous to the general membership. In order to field requests for access to sites we are creating the WWW-site Evaluation Team, which will be responsible for evaluating member requests for access to outside sites against the WWW-Site Evaluation guidelines. The team and the process members will use to request a site are to be posted by Friday, 20 December. c) FreeWeb ~~~~~~~~~~~ A key component of FreePlan was having some lines available for full PPP access. We have reconfigured our modem hunt groups and have a pool of ten lines set aside. This pool will be called the Internet Sampler. Members will be able to surf the web for thirty minutes a day per member. Launching the Internet Sampler lines are pending replacement of several faulty modems. We plan to offer these to members around the first week of January. d) Documentation ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ NCF volunteers have been working hard at testing and creating documentation for FreePlan. Instructions can be found under "go FreePlan". e) General Plan for NCF Website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We now need to begin focusing more energy on developing the content and look of the NCF website. Look and feel guidelines need to be developed and NCF service pages created. We hope to get some new and old volunteers involved with this. In addition, we are exploring relationships with university and college students who are learning graphic design and HTML. -- ** Lisa K. Donnelly, M.B.A., Executive Director ** * National Capital FreeNet/Libertel de la Capitale nationale * (613) 241-9554 voice & fax (613) 241-2477 Join in the NCF/Microsoft Auction! Type 'go auction' to bid on great software!