Chebucto Community Net

1995 Annual General Meeting

Technical Committee Report

The primary accomplishment of the Technical Committee in the past year is its own invention. Prior to the fall of 1995, the technical committee really only consisted of individuals at Dalhousie who worked together, with occasional input from others.

We now have a working committee with a weekly workshop that tackles practical problems facing Chebucto.

The work of the committee can be divided into two categories: operations and development.

Operations

The past year has brought dramatic growth in many aspects of Chebucto, all of which have implications for the technical infrastructure. The number of active users has grown from 2,065 at the beginning of last year to 4,681 at the beginning of this year. Accesses to our site grew from 800,000 in February of 1995 to 2.5 million in the same month this year. Last year at this time we had 36 modems and now we have 72.

Of course, this kind of growth has put increased demands on equipment and staff. We replaced the SPARC 10 computer that was on loan from Sun Microsystems with a more powerful SPARC 20 that we purchased. We are now in need of more system memory and other upgrades to meet the demand, even before we add more phone lines and modems.

We will work to automate more and more routine tasks to free up staff time. Better statistics will be generated to guide decisions and predict needs before they become problems.

Development

The work of this committee is reflected in the 1995 Canadian Internet Award for "Best Development Team".

Challenges met during the year included the transition to a new Internet Service Provider, the change in name for the system and numerous software upgrades which included new services for our users and many new programs to facilitate administrative tasks and revenue generation.

We distributed the "Alpha 2" version of Chebucto Suite to many other communities in Canada, the USA and beyond. We will soon complete a business plan for further development of CSuite. We began the work of bringing the Town of Windsor on board as a "Virtual Community Net" (VCN).

We hope that our business plan will lead to funding for CSuite development in the coming year. This will accelerate the development of features for our own community and for many others. A good deal of work will go into facilities to manage VCNs.

We will be providing more cable-TV connections to PATs including the connection of entire school classrooms, with community access to these facilities after hours. We will continue to examine new technologies for incorporation into CSuite.