by Chris Gray
I want to announce in this message ACB’s bold new initiatives regarding our Internet presence. We are well under way with the work of maximizing the power of today’s Internet and the world wide web for our organization, its members, and friends.
As many of you know, we experienced a huge crash of the ACB web site in August. The ACB web site was down for five-plus days, has had varying degrees of stability since coming back up, and some data was irretrievably lost. In addition, there has been a degrading of our list services in the past several months, and the software that runs our lists is seriously out-of-date by today’s computing standards. ACB is now poised on the brink of major changes in how we work with the Internet, partly because of these events but primarily because we are in a position to take several major steps forward in this arena.
Within the next month, ACB will move most of its Internet activities to equipment wholly owned and supported by the organization and located in an environment that maximizes connectivity to fast, reliable Internet channels of communication. ACB will manage and fully implement the capabilities of ACB.org as well as utilize this new architecture for a base to increase web-based and Internet radio services. Finally, we will significantly upgrade and change how we handle list management for lists such as ACB-L, ACB-Announce, and ACB-Leadership.
I’m sure you can appreciate the magnitude of this move and its undertaking. At the moment, we are in the process of finalizing some equipment orders, and waiting for other equipment to arrive that allows for a solid connection to the Internet. Once the equipment has arrived, the work of loading and configuring the ACB Internet system must be done. Then, we must organize a smooth transition from our current situation to the use of the entire ACB.org domain and its wide array of new possibilities for the organization. There will doubtless be a few hiccups and snags as we move through this work, so I ask for your patience while things get organized and put together.
I want to thank and acknowledge the work, now and in the near future, of the core group involved in this effort. Members are: Earlene Hughes; Jonathan Mosen; Matt Campbell; and Charlie Crawford. I also want to thank Scott White and Penny Reeder for their support and involvement during these past several weeks.
I know that, as time passes, and ACB.org becomes the exciting and reliably stable Internet resource we expect it to become, we will all be able to celebrate the most informative Internet resource about blindness and blind people on the world wide web.