The Technical Committee is a very active group that meets weekly and corresponds extensively on-line. There are about 20 participants on this committee. The work of the committee can be divided into two categories: operations and development.
The past year has seen CCN's growth level off. This has been fortunate in some ways as it has given us a chance to deal with increased demands on the system due to upgraded software and, we presume, more demanding use by our users.
The number of active users is 5,055 at this time, compared to 5,400 at this time last year. Accesses to our site grew from 3.9 million in March of 1997 to 4.8 million in the same month this year. To the end of 1997 we had introduced about 17,000 people to the Internet. On a daily basis, about 4,800 sessions take place. We handle about 20,000 email messages incoming and roughly the same number outgoing on a daily basis.
We recently installed a new computer to serve CCN users and have moved mail processing onto this machine to ease the load on the main computer which was becoming dangerously overloaded. We will be migrating more work onto this second system over the coming months.
Within the next two months we hope to add 16 modems and start to experiment with some form of limited PPP (graphical) access.We will also be upgrading CCN to the latest version of CSuite software and work with the IP Committee to streamline the IP process so that CCN can consolidate its position as the best online community resource in Nova Scotia.
We completed work on CSuite 1.0 which is now available on CD-ROM. This represents the end of a contract with Industry Canada to develop our software into a form that could be distributed to other communities across Canada. This development work has strengthened the technical resources of CCN and we will reap the benefits of the improvements made to the software.