Media.Knet.Ca

The month of January proved to be a busy month for six of the K-Net servers (the main portal, the mail server, the personal homepage server, the hosting server for other First Nation web sites, the KiHS server and the photo gallery). There were more than 8.5 million hits on these servers during this month.

The mail server required a major upgrade as a result of the volume of traffic flowing through it. This upgrade was successfully completed overnight on January 31.

The personal homepage web server (myknet.org) also was recently upgraded to accommodate the increased volume of traffic on it. This particular service is proving to be one of the most popular sites with users on it accounting for over 2.7 million hits in January.

On Monday morning, January 27, Carl Seibel, Dan Pellerin and Brian Beaton were all scheduled to fly over Balmertown for day long meetings with other Keewaytinook Okimakanak managers. On the way to the airport, visibility was very poor due to the snow storm. At the airport, the airline let us know that there were possibilities of delays and not being able to land at the Red Lake airport. We phoned over to the KO office and were informed that the visibility was reduced to zero. Everyone agreed that we would return to our office and do the meetings by video conference.

The day long meeting included bringing together the Smart Communities program administrators in Ottawa and the program auditors by teleconference along with the two video conferenced sites (Balmertown and Sioux Lookout). The meeting proved to be very useful with the required plans put in place to ensure the success of the Kuh-ke-nah Smart First Nations Demonstration project.

The new Northern Ontario Medical School (NOMS found at http://www.normed.ca/en) took another step in its development process with 300 people coming together from across Northern Ontario on January 16, 17, 18 in Sault Ste Marie. FedNor (Northern Ontario's Federal Economic Development Program) once again made it possible for everyone to gather for this historical conference. Their generous financial investment continues to ensure the furture social and economic development of Northern Ontario.

Dr. Arthur Kaufman, from New Mexico, stated during his presentation that for every doctor that comes and works in their region, there is an economic spin off of approximately 18 additional jobs for the community. With the new medical school, new resources that will come into this region, businesses and families will once again begin investing and moving to Northern Ontario.

Four people from Keewaytinook Okimakanak, Orpah McKenzie - Health Director, Jim Teskey - Education Advisor, Gibbet Stevens - Telehealth Project Scheduler and Brian Beaton - K-Net Services Coordinator, attended this gathering. As well, Mary Lawson represented McDowell Lake First Nation and James Kakepetum represented Keewaywin First Nation at the first curriculum planning conference. Nishnawbe Aski Nation was well represented at this gathering with both staff and other members from other tribal councils attending.

The new Northern Ontario medical school, with campuses in both Sudbury and and Thunder Bay, promises to engage First Nations from across the region in all aspects of its development and admissions for future Aboriginal doctors!

MYKNET.ORG Facts:

On January 13, 2003

• 205 people made changes / updates to their web pages
• 1850 individual web sites were accessible for public viewing
• 12 new accounts were requested and set up for individuals to use to create their own web site
• 101,674 hits were registered o­n this domain
• 2,106 visits were also registered
• many people are now including new tools and creating unique pages for their site
• resulting in over 1,018,076 hits to this server so far this month
• the MYKNET.ORG server had to be rebooted late in the afternoon because it became too busy, meaning we now have to upgrade the server by increasing the memory.

Conrad Bobiwash and Crystal Nielsen from the Royal Conservatory of Music's Learning Through the Arts (LTTA) program visited the K-Net office in Sioux Lookout this afternoon. They are o­n their way over to the Keewaytinook Okimakanak's Balmertown office and then making a whirlwind tour of several KO First Nations to introduce and plan the next LTTA session in the local schools.

You might be interested to note that the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Telehealth project is highlighted as a success story o­n pages 7 -9 of the document Canadian Rural Partnership - Annual Report to Parliament 2001-2002.

Maybe this will help to inspire the powers to be to find the funding to continue this worthwhile initiative!!

Editor's Note:
The featured "SUCCESS STORY - NORTHERN AND REMOTE" is entitled Telehealth - A Cure For Isolated First Nations in Northern o­ntario. It contains many references to our excellent partnership with FedNor and other groups who have made these developments possible. Thanks to Lyn for sharing this good news story with us.

K-Net staff want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and thank you for making K-Net your o­n-line communication resource.

K-Net servers have received 6.8 million hits in December for the second month in a row! Check out the stats for each of the present seven o­n-line services at http://tech.knet.ca/~tech/monitoring/webalizer

It was a busy month for individual K-Net users who are developing their own individual web sites using http://myknet.org - MyKnet.org actually overtook the main K-Net web server for the first time as the busiest o­n-line service for this past month.

Each myknet.org user is given a maximum of 5M of space to post pictures and share their thoughts. Everyone is developing new o­n-line skills with many sites demonstrating some advanced features. Peer-to-peer sharing of scripts and presentations seems to be the best method for developing these skills.

All myknet.org users are asked to respect the variety of ages who use this service by avoiding inappropriate content and language. There are times when individual sites are temporarily taken down until they are changed by the user. All the users are asked to help us identify any inappropriate web sites and content.

We look forward to serving everyone in 2003 who is helping make these o­n-line services a valuable communication resource for the First Nations across the region. Please share your ideas and suggestions with any K-Net staff member or by sending an e-mail to suggestions@knet.ca

The Chiefs of Keewaytinook Okimakanak are meeting in Winnipeg for their Annual Christmas board meeting. This year, the meeting is being distributed via video conference and the Internet using a variety of o­n-line communication tools. Check out the pictures from the meeting. As well, people are invited to check out the meeting by visiting http://smart.firstnation.ca and follow the links to the Live Chat and Discussion Forum sections.

Les Meekis, KO's Community Manager for the Smart Communities Demonstration project, is organizing regular meetings with the KO First Nation Smart team members to discuss a variety of topics. o­n December 5, Les worked with the Keewaywin FN team to bring together seven sites in a video conference meeting to discuss the data entry for this year's community surveys as well as the plans for this year's community ICT planning workshops in each KO First Nation. Darlene Rae took and distributed the minutes of the meeting from her office in North Spirit Lake.

Other topics discussed at this meeting included developing individual business cases for each of the Smart team members to ensure their positions are sustained after the Smart project is completed. Plans for the Christmas Chiefs' meeting were also discussed.

GREAT team effort!! Check out the pictures of the meeting (we were connected at 256K from each site using the K-Net IP bridge o­n the K-Net Network).

On Thursday afternoon (Dec 12) K-Net staff (Dan and Brian) met with a number of people to discuss the efficient deployment and use of the public benefit, C-band satellite transponder. Industry Canada FedNor (Carl Seibel), Government of Northwest Territories (Linda Maljan, Gerry Sheridan, Jacquelyn Burles) and SSI Micro (Jeff Philipp) were also in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a strategy to see how a pilot demonstration might be facilitated in some of the NWT communities using the TDMA platform supported by SSI Micro.

With the reduction in the amount of bandwidth being made available to K-Net (12.5 mhz) o­n this transponder because of the sharing of the resource with the governments of Nunavut (12.5 mhz) and the Northwest Territories (5 mhz), there is not space left o­n the K-Net portion to accommodate the requested 3 mhz of CIR for a GNWT pilot service.

Discussions around the possible development of a shared DVB resource that included using our mutual allocations of transponder space o­n continuous carriers (ie. the K-Net allocating 3mhz at o­ne end of our space and GNWT allocating the 3mhz up to the guard band space) lead to the conclusion that further meetings with both Telesat and Northwestel are required.

The need to discuss the possibility of migrating this public benefit resource across a number of transponders is becoming an important consideration for all parties involved. For the 3 parties (K-Net, GNWT and Nunavut) involved in the use of this public benefit, the ability to spread "an equivalent bandwidth to that availabe o­n o­ne transponder" over a number of transponders will result in everyone being able to accommodate more partner communities and a more efficient use of the resource. We will be able to "grow" this resource and distribute the additional costs involved in having additional traffic and partners.

The benefits to Telesat are that they would be able to sell additional commercial bandwidth as the need and applications are developed using the public benefit resource as well as a much more efficient use of the available resource. This multi-transponder strategy will provide all the partners involved with the ability grow into commercial bandwidth without building new infrastructure which will be good for everyone with the increase capacity and usage.