Coordinators Report for Dec 2008 and Jan 2009
Hope everyone has had a chance to have a good break over the holiday period. It was nice to end the year with a volunteer dinner at Errols.
It has been a busy start to 2009. Already we have distributed over 50 computers to individuals via our shop. The increased demand for service is a result of the magic 1278 radio announcement - a raging success.
While this is great, I'm not sure we can sustain the level of demand with our current level of staffing, work for the dole and volunteers. Hopefully operation brainstorm will allow us to look at this and help work out our next steps.
Our Work for the Dole project is running quite light at the moment. Sometimes we have more volunteers than WFD people! Kristen, Kim, Geoff and Matt have all joined up as volunteers and usually attend on days they did WFD. They have been a great help.
We received news that our WFD project will roll over in February for the very last six months. WFD will be finishing up as a federal government program. A new program will take its place, it is not yet known how we will fit into it, if at all. Kangan TAFE are currently looking at ways they may be able to work with sponsors in the future. This has implications for Computerbank in that our work and staff capacity will be reduced, it also means that some costs are no longer subsidised by funding.
We've also had some new volunteers coming along on Fridays and Saturdays. Welcome to Chris and Naeim. Chris and Naeim have both been working at the front desk.
We received another donation from GHD in Dec, there have also been small donations from other companies and individuals. So far there have been no major donations in Jan (go slow month).
User support has been steady, hopefully Barry can provide a report about this. Many more people are interested in the USB wireless broadband options.
We've finally released the hardy distro,even with its slow logout from KDE. Many thanks to Mohan and Barry for efforts here. The desktop now has a clean look, we've integrated everything into the panel. It is easier to play a DVD Movie. We also included kcheckers. We have moved across to kopete for an instant messanging client as its MSN implementation has support for web cameras. We dropped Fspot in favour of digikam. We are also including the network manager (0.7) that comes with intrepid, this make setting up network connections a breeze. We've also included the user agent switcher in firefox, plus the Firefox (Windows XP) user agent so as to get around the hotmail 'can't compose' bug.
Computers Out
Numbers and Groups
December 08
31: includes 4 ebay/shop sales
2008 Total: 495 + 20 ebay laptops and pc's
January 09
59: includes 5 ebay sales
Income
November
Total non-grant income was $5246.72, this includes ING interest of $246.72. The drop in interest is due to a drop in interest rate for the account. A grant payment of $7916.48 was also received
December
Total non-grant income was $4915.95, this includes ING interest of $265.16.
January
Total non-grant income is $5980.35 as at 26/01/09 with cash to bank. ING interest will add another $230 odd dollars.
Account Balances as of January 26th 2009:
ING: $62,093.19
Westpac: $3418.54
Total: $65211.73
