As our Webmaster for the last five years, Liam Kennedy has used his tremendous energy and creativity to continue to build our website into a central informational resource for our members and an incredible introduction to the club for those who first learn about us through visiting our website. Building and maintaining a site like ours does take a lot of time, and, unfortunately for us, Liam no longer has that time available - the limited time he now has for club activities he would prefer to use in other directions. He's also indicated that, after having one person in charge of the website for so long, he feels that it would be good for all concerned to turn the management and development of the site over to others who may be able to bring different perspectives and different sets of skills to the job and continue to keep the site a growing and vital part of the club.

Russell Sipe was responsible for taking the OCA website to a professional level in the late 1990's, and was also the Webmaster for Sky & Telescope for several years - and he has developed sites for other entities as well. We are delighted that he has agreed to step in as Interim Webmaster during this transitional period.

Our site is now complex enough that it really needs more than one person to run it well, especially as there are few people in this world who could do it full time as a volunteer.  Russ's main interest and area of expertise is in working with the content on the site, and we are very fortunate that other members with more technical expertise have also volunteered.  This is an exciting period of reorganization of the management of the site, and we will keep you posted as the details are worked out.

On behalf of the Board and OCA in general, I would like to give Liam our deepest thanks for all he has done for the club, both with the website and in all of his other projects, and for his willingness to continue to work with Russ and whoever else will be involved in the website to make sure that it continues to function well. I would also like to thank Russ for all he has done for the club in the past and for stepping forward to take on responsibility for the website and for doing all he can to make this transitional period go as smoothly as possible.

Barbara Toy
OCA President