There has been a great deal of activity this year here at the Cyberspace 
Snow and Avalanche Center. An update is long overdue, and all the 
specific changes to the web site cannot be listed. So we urge you to take 
a look through our pages. To summarize what is happening:

Bulletins:
=========

The bulletins have been moved to a separate "Current Conditions" page. 
This should speed up loading of the home page. The number of bulletins 
has continued to grow, so space was an issue as well.

The Canadian bulletin has been available via mailing list for most of 
this season. The list is now maintained by a volunteer in Canada, and has 
well over 200 subscribers.

The Colorado bulletin continues to be conspicuously absent. Many people 
are interested in accessing it. The CAIC now has email, but we have not 
heard anything back from them concerning submissions of their bulletins. 
So we are referring all questions to the CAIC.

There is now a great deal more information available for Italy.

For Montana we now have all three bulletins available. This week marks 
the appearance of the Missoula region bulletin. The NW and SW Montana 
bulletins are now set up for email distribution similar to Canada. After 
a few more days of verifying that the lists work correctly we will be 
adding subscription links to the Bulletins page.

The Northwest (USA) bulletins are now on the net. A mailing list has been 
set up for these bulletins as well. Unfortunately the center does not 
work directly with us, so it is not clear weather the list will be used. 
We hope to have their bulletin linked into our site and have archiving 
set up later this week.

No changes on the Scottish bulletins. They have had their own web site 
since last year and we point to that.

The Swiss bulletins are now much more accessible. The SLF, where the 
bulletins are issued, now has a web site. We have set our pointers there 
instead of the old gopher site. We are also ready to open the new lists 
for their bulletins. If you want to subscribe to receive the Swiss 
bulletins automatically by email send mail to majordomo@csac.org and in 
the body put "subscribe csac-ch-x" where x is d for German, f for French, 
or i for Italian. (Do not use the quotes.) We thank the SLF in Davos for 
their cooperation on this.

The Utah bulletin is still handled the same way. They are not capable of 
emailing out their bulletins so the UofU gets them from the UAFC and we 
get them from the UofU. We hope to improve this system on our end later this 
week. We will probably not be able to set up mailing list distribution until 
the UAFC can email the bulletins directly to us. They are working on that.

Wyoming (/Idaho) is now online. They have a web page, and we now have a 
pointer to that.

Incidents
=========

Unfortunately, the incidents section has grown rather rapidly. The 
cooperation of an increasing number of avalanche professionals in sending 
us the reports is greatly appreciated.

This section is obviously in need of major reorganization. It is not 
likely to happen this season, but prior to next season this section 
should have a totally new look to it.


Education
=========

The education page has just been updated to incorporate some new 
information which we have found on the web. There is a good page on 
avalanche dogs and a nice site with basic info which was created by some 
students in Michigan for a Natural Hazards class.

We have plans to add additional educational material of our own, but 
again this may not happen this season.

Organization
============

The CSAC as an organization is moving along. We now have an EIN and a 
(near empty) bank account. The organizational page is being developed as 
time permits. We are working on getting a list of contributors, a list of 
volunteers, and other such things onto that page. Our bylaws and minutes 
of our Board meetings are now online.

Fundraising
===========

The project has reached a point where it is requiring too much in the way 
of computer and human resources to be done for free. So we will begin a 
fundraising drive soon. We are seeking sponsors, and believe that we will 
have our first one shortly. And we hope in the future to be able to get 
some small grant money. But user contributions will be an important 
component of the funding, particularly during this start-up period. An 
additional letter on this topic will follow soon.

Volunteers
==========

We are ready to incorporate volunteers into the project. This will be 
necessary to maintain the momentum we now have. There are projects of all 
sizes which use just about all skills, including business development, 
graphic design, language translation, and computer ability. Let us know if 
you are interested in helping out. More will follow on this later as well, 
after we finish refining our list of possible projects. 

Summary
=======

The CSAC was incorporated in August (as a non-profit). Our domain name 
csac.org did not function until almost November. What we have 
accomplished since then seems remarkable. But it never seems to be enough 
- there is always so much more to do!

We hope you enjoy our site, and that you find it useful. 

Jim Frankenfield
Director, Cyberspace Snow and Avalanche Center
http://www.csac.org
snow@csac.org