Interim Website Report
January 2006

Urantia Movement Digital Archive Project

This website related project is being managed by Larry Watkins who will provide more information as well as a demo at the General Council meeting.  This is an ambitious and comprehensive project aimed at digitizing and archiving the historic materials of the Urantia Book readership.  The archive will include conference talks, books, a photo archive, an archive of video materials, legal documents, personal correspondence -- any media containing information relevant to the history and evolving work of the revelation.  There is some talk of forming a history committee that would work in conjunction with the archiving committee to archive new materials as they are created in conjunction with conferences, media presentations, etc.  This group currently consists of Larry Watkins, Kristen Michaels, Victoria Clark, and Dick Johnson. 

Volunteers are needed to help with a labor-intensive part of the project -- reviewing each document and writing a brief descriptive paragraph which can be included in the index as well as fed to Internet search engines.  The website presently contains some 20,000 documents.  This will likely expand to well over 50,000 documents by the end of 2006. 

The archive will be divided into two primary sections -- one for the general public and one for members.  When this is complete, members will need to enter their email address and password to access the restricted document collection.    

Anyone interested in helping with this project should contact Larry Watkins at mailto:watkinsl@comcast.net

Internet-based voice and video conferencing

At the heart of our work is communication.  Study groups, conferences, email, newsletters, telephone conversations -- all of these and more are important.  International work has been somewhat handicapped by the expensive nature of telephone calls.  Agustin Arellano and Nelida Oliver in South America have pioneered the use of a product called "Skype".  Skype is a software program which lets its users make telephone calls over the Internet to any place in the world at no cost.  Later this year Skype will be upgrading their services to include online conferencing.  The basic software package can be downloaded free from the Internet.  By mid-year 2006 I hope that we have our key international workers in South America, Africa, Pakistan, and Eastern Europe using this program.  We will then be able to communicate much more frequently, greatly enhancing our working potentials.  Skype can be downloaded at http://www.skype.com/helloagain.html

Automated email list management

We now have centralized email list management in place.  The Fellowship will increasingly make use of electronic mailings as opposed to sending lots of paper through the postal system.  Automated email list management includes automatically deleting anyone whose email bounces back to the server.  In conjunction with this we are publishing an approximately monthly E-newsletter, "The Fellowship Community Update",  to keep the readership and interested persons abreast of news and work being done to spread the revelation.  Interested persons can register for our E-newsletter online at http://urantiabook.org/subscribe.htm.  Old email addresses are automatically removed when the server receives an error message so if you change your address please come to this page and add the new address to our database.  You can give yourself a password which will enable you to update or edit your postal address information in our database.  This will eventually be expanded to include managing your own study group information.

Online Listing of Study Groups

An upgraded study group database is being maintained and is accessible online at http://urantiabook.org/study_groups/domestic_study_groups.htm.  Bobbie Dreier has taken on the task of keeping this updated.  Some of the related tasks are being automated in conjunction with the overall data integration efforts in which we are engaged. Bobbie is the person to contact if study group information is to be changed, added, or deleted from our database.  Her email address is bdreier@earthlink.net.

Online Credit Card Transactions

We now have the ability to process credit card transactions fairly smoothly on the website.  We are currently refining the back-end of the process so that the accounting goes more smoothly.  I am currently working with Gloriann Harris and Rita Vachenko, our accountants, to make their access to the website financial transaction database easier to integrate with their accounting procedures and software.  In conjunction with them and with the Finance Committee we are working to get a Virtual Point of Sale Terminal in place so that we can use web-based access for a variety of transactions such as book, CD, and DVD sales, processing of contributions for Societies, conference registrations, etc. Robert Burns should have more information on this in his report.

If you wish to make a contribution to the Fellowship or to the Pipeline of Light project, you may do so by visiting http://urantiabook.org/support.htm.

Database integration

Integrating all of our organizational data into a single, coherent database system is the primary technical challenge for 2006.  At present we have multiple collections of data such as the document collection on the website, our study group information, contribution information, our readership database, our email lists -- all of these are being integrated into a single system so that we do not have information duplicated in various places.  Robert Burns will have more on this in his report.

Statistical Analysis

We are adding statistical analysis software to the website this year which will enable us to find out a great deal more about our website visitors -- what they are looking for, where they enter the website, which documents they download, where they came from before they got to our website, and much more.  This information will enable us by 2007 to do a much better job of optimizing our presentation of information and the navigational structure of the website.  This will also provide us with important information which can be used in structuring marketing programs for The Urantia Book.

Present Needs

Our present needs are for people with technical skills who will work with our team on an ongoing basis.  We are overflowing with ideas and suggestions but impoverished when it comes to technical people who can actually do the work to give reality to these ideas and suggestions. 

Additional money is needed to enable us to hire professional design consultants.  We have a long list of improvements, new reader services, and enhanced electronic study aids which we cannot actualize without additional resources.  Anyone with web-related technical skills who is interested in helping us on an on-going basis should contact me at dkantor606@yahoo.com.

Respectfully submitted,

David Kantor

Webmaster, urantiabook.org, ellibro.org, uversapress.org