Annual Report on Website
Activities
Prepared for the General Council
June 2000
By the end of June, 2000, the Fellowship website will have served out over 1,000,000 page views since the start of the new millennium. We are currently serving out between 6,000 and 8,000 page views every 24 hours from an archive of over 5,000 documents. This represents well over 50,000 individual accesses to the website in a month, more than half of which are for documents in Spanish. Even cutting these numbers in half to account for individuals who stumble onto a web page while searching for something else and then leave, we are still left with a substantial number of individuals discovering The Urantia Book and using related resources.
Our third most popular language group is Portuguese, consistent with the general high level of interest in Latin America. As there is currently no complete translation, we are publishing reader translations of individual papers. This is stimulating the development of regional social infrastructure. In Brazil a network of over 50 interested readers has formed over the past year as a result of contacts made through the website and interest generated by translated papers. It is my hope that this type of activity will be repeated in other language groups as well.
Dennis Shields and Sonny Schnieder have been working to create web-compatible audio files out of the Malibu series of Bill Sadler recordings. Digital noise reduction technology is making possible the reclamation of much clear reproduction than was possible even with the original tapes. This is a tedious and ongoing process. Additional recordings should be made available later this year including excerpts from the 95 hours of the Oklahoma series.
We continue to build our history archive. Recent additions have included correspondence related to the first French translation as well as correspondence with Sir Hubert Wilkins, a noted Arctic explorer who was a member of AThe Seventy.@
The website is currently providing email list services for nine different special interest groups and has begun to provide web hosting services for selected readership groups such as the Retreat Network ( http://retreatnetwork.org )
The website is the result of integrating the work of several informal sub-groups consisting of the following individuals:
1. Programming and technical support group: Morgan Rauh, Larry Watkins, Mark Turrin, David Kantor
2. Domestic inquiry response group: Gary Deinstadt and New York Society members, Larry Watkins, Marty Greenhut, Paula Thompson, Francyl Gawryn, Ann Garner, Beth Bartley, Meredith Sprunger
3. International inquiry response group: Susan Ransbottom, Rosey Lieske, Agustin Arellano (Mexico and Central America), Juan Paulo Vega (Chile and other Latin American countries), Ana Maria Nacimento Roberto (Brazil), Olga Lopez (Spain), Ken Glasziou (Australia). Several of these individuals have their own sub-groups which provide further assistance with responses and follow-up.
4. Document preparation group: David Kantor, Julianne Clerget, Richard Johnson, Larry Watkins, Ken Glasziou, Richard Omura
5. Administration group: David Kantor, Susan Ransbottom, Mario Caiole, Richard Omura, Ana Maria Nacimento Roberto, Angel Sanchez-Escobar, Ken Glasziou, Joy Brandt
6. Copyright and Trademark oversight: Dan Massey
7. Other support: Marvin Gawryn, Sara Blackstock, Sondra Seeger, Christel Garrick, Robert Reno, Anibal Pacheco, Dennis Shields, Sonny Schneider, Bud Kagan, Duane Faw, Saskia Raevouri, Les Jamieson, Lee Smith
(I should also thank my colleagues on the Executive Committee who have spent a great deal of administrative time this past year addressing the many complaints received from Urantia Foundation regarding our Internet activities. I would also like to thank John Hales, who manages the additional accounting tasks created by this undertaking.)
But even with all these individuals involved, there is still a need for additional volunteers. The most critical area of need at present is for someone willing to put in several hours a week helping with administrative tasks.
This past year a server was installed at the Chicago office along with 100 mb Ethernet service. This is currently being used to create a backup system so that website and email services will continue uninterrupted should there be technical difficulties with the California installation. This system also can provide a foundation upon which administrative work can be distributed and processed at locations other than the Chicago office as well as over an office network. Administrative use of this resource has yet to be mobilized but much of the infrastructure is in place and operational. This past year we switched from T1 service to DSL service in both California and Illinois nodes and realized a significant cost savings in the process.
In the works:
A great deal of thought and effort has gone into the presentation of website materials in a manner which will minimize the amount of time we have to spend responding to complaints from Urantia Foundation about copyright and trademark violations. At present, all of the translated materials which have been created independently of Urantia Foundation efforts are being migrated into the new Planet Urantia webspace where users must register and acknowledge copyright issues in order to access the resources. It is important to appreciate that the Internet publication of these materials has stimulated the development of new regional readership groups, so there is more going on here than the simple act of publishing documents. The Planet Urantia software provides services for private groups as well. In this mode, when a user logs on to the sytem, only those services for which he or she is registered will appear as options on that person=s screen display. If you have need for such services, please contact me.
More communication services are being planned for the website, particularly in the area of providing support for Special Interest Groups. Internet technology is continually changing and over the next year there will be a significant upgrading of our formatting technologies in order to accommodate a new generation of wireless Internet display devices. More audio files will be published. Several new Latin American websites will be coming online in the next few months and we are working to develop a cooperative network and to minimize the duplication of effort. Bill and Kaye Cooper have contributed a complete set of back issues of their newsletter, AThe Circles,@ which will be scanned and published in the newsletter archive. (While we=ve been able to collect a significant number of old copies of the AAgondonter@ it would be nice if the Los Angeles Society could undertake the digitizing of these documents and make them available to our history archive or publish them on their website -- it would be a significant contribution to the documentation of readership history.)
There is a threefold purpose to the website:
1.) To make it as easy as possible for people to discover and explore The Urantia Book and to make contact with near-by readers.
2.) To provide services to readers; to encourage study and provide tools with which these readers can engage in their own efforts to propagate the revelation and spread the gospel of the kingdom.
3.) To provide administrative services for the Fellowship and its Societies.
Respectfully submitted,
David Kantor