Board report for the months of October, November and December 2007.

There is a real sense of traction at the NCF at this time.  Everyone is 
working hard and real progress is being made on nearly every front. 
Member support, web site functionality, marketing and growth in membership.

Marketing: Through the fall, NCF has been developing and testing bus ads on 
OCTranspo.  Our last test will be for the month of January 08 with 200 
posters spread across 800 busses and all routes.  We are collecting statistics
on new subscriptions and should be able to study this to determine if it is
cost effective.  The current cost is $7.50 per poster per month.  We have seen
marked increase in new subscriptions in January.

The economies of scale are starting to pay off.  We have recently negotiated 
to raise the cap on the DSL bandwidth to 200GB/month up from 40 and we 
have also had a decrease in the wholesale costs for DSL hardware.  We have
passed both of these on to the members as of the 1st of January.  Members
seem pleased.

Budget: The 2008 budget is almost complete and has been distributed to 
the Board members to mull over.  Most of the expenses (rent insurance, 
phone lines and bandwidth) are fixed while donations and DSL fees are 
relatively easy to forecast.  Overall we are expecting approximately the 
same income and expenses as last year.  We have some choices to make with
respect to development and marketing although this is a small percentage 
of the overall budget.

Donations: Overall contributions from dial-up members 
are falling about 10% year over year, but the difference is being taken up by an ever
increasing number of DSL subscribers.  Donations for October and November 
were down by approximately 10% while surprisingly December came in 
at $18,400 or approximately 15% over last year.  

Membership growth:  The membership numbers have fallen very slightly relative
to this time last year.  8000 local residents use NCF services, of those more
and more are switching from dial-up to DSL.  Those that leave the NCF are 
often chosing a bundled package from Rogers or Bell.  Having said all of that,
since Christmas we have noticed a significant upturn in the rate of new
DSL subscribers.  The rate of new subscribers has more than doubled during the
past month.  This has left us scrambling in the office to ensure that we 
maintain a good level of service.

Technical development:  During the fall we have seen a number of improvements 
to the NCF on a technical side.  Office tools have been improved to speed 
normal office operations and to allow lay people to better support some
of the more complex DSL support issues.   Many scripts have been written 
to automate the connecting to DSL testing and trouble ticketing tools.

The Start page has been re-designed removing some of the less used functions 
and grouping commonly used functions together.  Many of these improved 
groupings should help members to better understand what is available to them.
For instance all of the email functions are grouped together (webmail, yellowmail
disposable email addresses, email alias, spamfilter setup and report an 
email problem)

The SpamFilter has also had what I think is a major upgrade with an improved
interface and streamlining of common operations.  We have been working hard on 
replacing some of the legacy systems with opensource alternatives.  Once 
completed this should result in systems that are more easily maintained
especially in a volunteer supported environment.

There has been an issue between Telus and Bell that has resulted in some
members not completing calls successfully to the main dail-up modems pool.
This seems to be an intermittent malfunction and Bell and Telus are working
on the problem.

We continue to be looking for an additional NCF staff member.  Although the 
current staff and volunteers are keeping up to the load, it is too heavy 
a load and does not allow for breaks for sickness or holidays. an additional 
person in the office would ensure that the current improvements at NCF 
continue.

I hope to be able to give you more details on Tuesday night

john