The Kidlink Association Annual Report AofA Art 5 says: "The Board's Annual Report and Financial Statement must be sent to the members together with the notice to the Annual Meeting." 2008 REPORT An Interim Board was created by Stellan Kinberg in the beginning of November 2008. The purpose of this Board was to create a new Kidlink Project organization that would replace the Kidlink Society. The Interim Board members were: Pia Avolio de Martino (Italy), Jing Zhang (China), Grace Brasilio (Peru), Domenico Filippini (Italy), Stellan Kinberg (Sweden), Bonnie Thurber (USA) and a "The Kidlink Project" youth representative, Nicolò Ancelotti (Italy). The Interim Board had its first meeting 9 November 2008. "The Kidlink Association" was created, Articles of Association were adopted and a Board was formally elected  the 23 day of November 2008 in a Constituent Meeting. Dan Wheeler took over Grace Brasilio's chair in the Board at this meeting. Stellan Kinberg was elected chairman, Pia Avolio de Martino was elected Deputy Chairman and Domenico Filippini was elected Treasurer. Stellan Kinberg and Domenico Filippini are those who firm for the Association. The Articles of Association and the Constituent Meeting Minutes are now traveling around the world by post, to be signed by the Board members. On 11 December, 2008, The Kidlink Society gave the Kidlink Association the user rights to the Kidlink Project and its web-based content from the server Cosmos and Galaxy. The Kidlink Web The old Kidlink ran on two servers hosted by the University of Cincinnati. The Kidlink Web has more than 14 000 html pages. www.kidlink.org had 210026 unique visitors in November 2008 who downloaded more than 30 GB content. The most popular pages are MCC followed by the Spanish cell site. The Kidlink Association has with the new member dues purchased a VPS server on www.linode.com. All web content has been transferred to the new server. Bonnie Thurber is leading the work to get the new Kidlink Web Site visible and working. Registration The registration is working well. 113 kids have registered answering the 4Q in December 2008 (http://listserv.nodak.edu/archives/response.html). Stellan, Pia, Domenico, Graziella and Epi are actively approving registrations. Projects Kidlink has many active and inactive projects on its site.  Some are ongoing projects, like MCC and KidArt. Most Kidlink projects are written for and by teachers for students. Only Kidart projects and a few others are addressed directly to the kids. Pia is leading the Project Committee and its documentation on the project list. The project discussion is available for interested members on http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pscSNi7QXJGmlN4bi99IccQ PLANS FOR 2009 The Board suggest these changes in the Articles of Association: - The Members elect the Chairman. The new Board then decides who is to be Treasurer and Secretary. See Art. 11. - We should have a System Committee as a permanent committee listed in the art 15. - Ortographical and grammar corrections should be made if such are found It's important that the Kidlink site is found on Internet. Work will be done to make it easier to find the Kidlink site with search engines. In order to finance Kidlink we need more members. The Kidlink Web The entire Kidlink site will be built upon Kidspace. There will be one login page only and all pages will be database driven or written in php. General pages and interesting project pages will be reviewed and then integrated into Kidspace. We need to make the Kidlink Web is appealing and easy to navigate. We will develope a new layout for the Kidlink Web. Privacy and Security Kidlink must have explicit authorization from users under 18 years old and from the users relatives if names, family names and photos are exibited on our site. Family names and/or individual images of students will not be in the public pages. All family names and photos of users under 18 years will be removed or made not visible in the public pages. Only adult Board members or volunteers may publish their family names and photos in the Kidlink public pages. There are a lot of names and family names with personal information in listserv (http://listserv.nodak.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind9103c&L=response&T=0&P=153 ). We will request that the Listserv archive for response be made private. If that doesn't work then we will modify our system and make it stop from sending the info to Listserv. We must give users the options of making their  page content readable only for themselves (eg kidpages), for Kidlink members or for the world. Administrators must be able to read all content. The Kidlink Web will remove all illegally uploaded, copyrighted material. Users that upload content will be informed to upload only content that is their own. Registration The old Response Team will get the name "Registration Committee" according to the AofA art 15. We currently have two places to login and logout. One is at http://www.kidlink.org/registration and the other is at http://kidspace.kidlink.org. During 2009, http://kidspace.kidlink.org/start.php will  become our main page and registration will be done from that page. We will combine our two login and logout pages into one. Many students give very poor answers to Response Questions three and four. Some students answer without reflecting on the issues at all. We intend to make questions three and four optional and let the students answer them freely in their Kidpage profiles. We believe that students  will dedicate more time and thought to their answers if they write them in their Kidpage profiles. Currently the Four Response Questions are also part of the Who Am I (WAI) project. Teachers and students who want to participate in the WAI, may answer the questions while they are participating. The Registration Committee will dedicate more time to ensure security by checking that the newly registered students really are what they declare to be. Projects We will become better in promoting our projects, making our pages easy to be found on search engines, informing educators about our projects in teacher forums. We will promote Kidlink projects, find coordinators for these projects and link them from the main pages. All other projects will be available for interested people looking for project ideas in our archives. Class oriented projects can not be followed by many teachers around the world. We need to find new ways to implement projects in schools. We need to address more projects directly to the students. We will try to keep the students with us during and after school projects. It must be possible for the students to do more on the kidpages. The kidpages are important for students to share with each other. It must be easy to start kidcom and kidmail from the kidpages and to start a chat with the kidpage owners and send him/her messages. We will make Kidcom and kidmail easier to use. Rooms that are not in use will be hided and the total number of rooms will be minimized to make it easy for the students to find each other. We want to develop Kidart. It must be easy to upload art. A user friendly page will be created were students can upload their art and decide if their work shall be published in the Kidlink Gallery, be turned into puzzle or used as e-card. Kidlink has few scientific projects. The Spanish cell pages are very successfull. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009 ). As many kids are interested about astronomy and these years, especially Mars, will we start a project with a layout that is Mars inspired, with home pages about Mars made by kids, with possibly a chat area with rooms on a Mars station also created by kids. The 4Q can be answered thinking about the difficulties of life on Mars and how important it is to improve our life on Earth. The Kidlink Association has its base of operations in Göteborg, Sweden. The Kidlink Project will have its base of operations on Mars until 31/12 2009.