NCF President's 2004 Message
To: The
members of the National Capital FreeNet
When I was thinking about what message I might write to NCF members
this year, it struck me that the NCF is not often thought of as “leading edge”
but you know, we really should be.
Being out in front and bringing good things to
Ottawa has always been a FreeNet tradition. 11 years ago a group of forward
thinking pioneers, visionaries in my opinion, founded the National Capital
FreeNet. At that time, the word “Internet” was unknown and FreeNet was the
first, and only way that people in Ottawa could communicate with others
electronically. As it turned out, the organization wasn’t well organized in
those early years for keeping abreast of advances and technology developments
overtook us.
Increasingly, people in Ottawa adopted the
Internet into their daily lives and using email and surfing the web became
commonplace. In order to revitalize our original information and communication
tools, and to offer services more in keeping with the so-called “information
Age” we were successful in securing grants from both Federal and Provincial
governments to develop new applications and services. Now we are seeing the
fruits of those grants and the enhancements which they enabled and once again,
we are "with it" with our new services -- now we need people to build
content using the now-current tools, just as our early members did in 1992 As
in the beginning, we can help people be in touch with each other, and now that
we can provide the tools to do it, we can rekindle our role in building a
healthy interactive community.
Throughout 2003, the NCF Development Team
worked on making a whole suite of online services available; several of these
are well ahead of commercial offerings. We have a history of introducing new
technology and concepts and our new services are an excellent example of this
in action.
These new offerings will knock the socks off anyone who
tries them. A personal start page for every member leading to communication
tools, software, discussion, news, and much more, is reminiscent of the early
days of FreeNet where all members logged in to the FreeNet space and really
understood that they were part of the NCF community. Nowhere else but in Ottawa
is a platform available with such a feature-rich suite of online services for
every citizen and community organization, just for a small donation. Moreover,
the new platform builds on a solid tradition, of not only making the latest
technology easy to use and available for everyone, but providing a great way of
connecting with each other, thus giving us all the tools to build our
communities.
As much as I am proud to have had my part in
envisioning these projects, I am delighted that our Executive Director John
Selwyn and his team have made the dream a reality. John, who is known for his
team-building approach and for getting things done, put together a development
team on a par with the best in the world, and the resulting products that we
recently launched at our 11th
Birthday celebration will be not only be envied by other community networks,
but once they learn about the power of our SPAM elimination system and other
tools, I’m sure that commercial providers will want to take a leaf from our
book as well.
These exciting new services herald a renewed
interest in the NCF, surely a 25% membership increase to 8,500 members in February suggests that you our
members are excited too.
This is indeed a time for every NCFer to be
proud to be a part of communications history in the making. We have created
something truly valuable for our community, we have demonstrated that we can
develop leading edge services and we have done it all locally.
Thank you.
Chris Cope,
President NCF
ccope@ncf.ca