Mister Toad's Wild Ride was the name of an internal project at OPN designed to resolve growth-related problems. The name was a parody of a fictional story, and is not in any way intended to denigrate that excellent work of children's fiction by Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, or any derived works.

The project was largely successful. The web site redesign was completed very quickly, though the news pages never quite reached the level of frequency and useful content desired. This project will be picked up again as time permits.

Funds were raised and sent to a lawyer. We've created a non-profit corporation and are currently in the process of organizing the corporation and preparing an application for 501(c)3 status. Due to availability and coordination problems, this process has moved very slowly.

The "next generation server code" project was revived, though it took a year to implement and roll out the new code, due again to time demands on participants and coordination problems. Due to the various problems, growth on OPN during the next two years was considerably slower than expected. Rather than 8,000 users at the end of 2001, we reached 6,000 users in early March of 2002. Nonetheless, this relatively rapid growth rate (tripled userbase since late 2000) will probably continue.

The head of operations, Rob Levin, still manages the network on a part-time basis. If anything, his time availability has been reduced. His full-time job allows insufficient time to steer the internal projects which provide tools for growth. Discussions with the larger businesses in the open source community about sponsorship have been cordial but inconclusive.

So, we continue on. Thanks to nas for designing the page layout for the new site and to \broken, TauCeti, and Mike Baker for hacking it into shape. Thanks to andy, Angel, guidob, Jericho, starzz, woot, Jan Kneschke and many other users for checking out the new web pages and making them look good under Netscape, w3m and IE. Thanks to \broken for figuring out how to fix the Mozilla deco problem, and to Andrew Francis for fixing our CSS validator problem in a big hurry one evening.

Thanks to Andrew Suffield, Peter Abrahamsen, Richard Braakman, Andre Guibert de Bruet, Gerhard Mack, Gerard Oskamp, Matthew Sachs and various other people who are either working on dancer ircd patches or familiarizing themselves with the code. And thanks to everyone we've missed for helping us take a few more halting steps towards the next level!

Sincerely,

Rob Levin
Head of Operations, Open Projects Net
"Open Source, Open Technology, Open Information"

Copyright © 2001-2002 Open Projects Network.
Current network date and approximate time: Friday, 14-Jun-2002 23:44:10 GMT.
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