report to Leadership Committee

Introduction

The year 2010 was a year of major growth, in both member numbers and political visibility and influence, and significant change for May First/People Link.

1 -- We are now comprised of 500 members, about 75 percent of whom are organizations. Taking into consideration that each of the member organizations has a group of its own members who use our resources, MF/PL has a "membership user base" of nearly 2,000 people. Essentially, this makes us one of the largest political progressive organizations in this country.

2 -- We are now "looked to" by many of the US-based and International movements and conferences as the major source of technological work, planning and leadership.

3 -- Our political influence has strengthened by virtue of our deepened relationship with the Social Forum movement, the Climate Control movement and our individual work with labor unions and grass-roots organizations. We continue our work within the Association for Progressive Communications Also, our stances on such attacks as those launched against member "the Yesmen" have identified us, in many minds, with a resolute stance on privacy and Internet rights.

4 -- Internally, we have established a solid, working tech support group which answers support tickets and does server maintenance work. This is completely new in MF/PL.

5 -- We now have 70 working servers spread across five locations. Our back-up systems are stronger and more sophisticated. Our security measures are stronger than they have ever been.

All growth brings challenges and errors. We have our share.

1 -- Portions of our infra-structure appear to be unstable with outages and daily downtime on at least three of our better known production servers. There have been few cancelled memberships as a result but this affects members' work (which runs counter to our priorities) and it may very well dissuade new members from joining.

2 --