REALNEO members and visitors will have noticed some technical difficulties over the past few months and especially over the last few days, for which I appologize. This has been the result of a combination of too few people doing too much hard, complex work, and the enormous growth of our community and response of the world - we are now supporting dozens of virtual communities world-wide, and 100,000s of hits a month at REALNEO alone. All this with what has been largely a volunteer corp. Well, all that is now changing for the better, and further growth. To insure a stable future for the community, we are pleased to have the great talent of Derek Arnold back on our team - welcome back and thanks, Derek.

Derek was our first hard-core Drupal developer, who took some time away from REALNEO development to explore other technologies. Derek never lost the Drupal love, and remained an active member of the NEO cyberspace, and recently was convinced that his talents are ideally suited to both Drupal and REALNEO. Last Friday, March 9, 2007, he returned his attention to both and already we are excited by the results - REALNEO and all our sites are stable again and Derek is methodically drilling down through our servers and software installations to tweak what needs tweaking, implement what needs implementing, and prepare NEO for a truly open and resourceful future.

Derek is much loved far beyond NEO, as he represented the region and REALNEO at DrupalCon in Portland in 2005  - the only NEOan there, I'm sure - where he forged strong relations with all the global Drupal folks driving this exciting platform to be the dominant open source content management system in the world. And it is such global participation that has allowed REALNEO to survive and succeed at all, as we have been very fortunate to have the blessing and support of such amazing Drupal-innovation organizations as Bryght, where we host some of our sites, and Firebright, where we host our Drupal server.

So, in this brief posting, I thank Derek for his ongoing support, along with our friends at Bryght and Firebright for their excellence and collaborative support for a community far from their own (Vancouver, BC, and Sacramento, CA)... all together in the pursuit of a level of social computing excellence and virtual community freedom never before achieved in this region. Together, they represent open source computing and economic development at the best. Adding this powerhouse collaboration to the great work of all the other members of the REALNEO community, and especially tech guys Phillip Williams and Carl Edwards, it is safe to say NEO and REALNEO are positioned for greatness. Wake up, NEO, as it's a new day in REALNEO! More on the future of this community to come.