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Over the last year, the Vision plan, and its variations, have dominated the Outpost. There have been many visible changes, for example, the way our departments are organised and the recent upgrades to many of our systems, including our homepage. But why did we decide to write this plan? And when? The Vision plan was being discussed more than a year ago. The Outpost was nearly four years old and had expanded way beyond it's original form. We were a truly Global community with registered members numbering into the thousands. The challenge was on to see how much further we could go. Could we continue to expand and improve? And how could we achieve this without compromising our unique atmosphere? The solution was simple: we would have to redesign the Outpost. The application was hard! We had to look closely at every aspect of OTF; departments, the chatrooms, the systems for managing the membership, security systems . . . It should be said that having our own server gave us a lot of freedom to realise the plans we had. And plan we did! There were countless meetings between various different people, talking about innumerable aspects of OTF. Slowly, a plan began to emerge. This plan was christened 'The Vision for the Future'. It was subject to many, many draughts, and eventually it was taken by our own Kali D'or to the Admirals in Vancouver. There, key aspects were discussed and the plan was finally ratified at a meeting of the Executive Council last September. Since that time, changes have begun to emerge, such as the creation of two new Administration Divisions (Marketing and Logistics), a reveiw of our projects, the merger between Engineering and R&D . . . and many more. Now that many of the changes are complete, we can go forward to the next level. We have the management structures and the systems to handle a bigger membership. Our departments are now better set up, with access to better designers and systems, to produce work of a high quality. The Outpost has state-of-the-art technology that our competition simply can't match. In short, OTF is now ready for the challenges ahead. We have the Vision - let's head for the future! |