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2024 Report

Hello,

Welcome to the Annual Report for The New Universes Project’s 2024 calendar year! This year, we saw change, growth, and a little stagnation within the group; however, none of these things stopped us from doing what we do! FallFest and SciWorld were held successfully, continuing our tradition of hosting events that bring the collaborative writing and role-playing community together. Our writing activities transitioned more to Discord, reflecting the evolving needs of our community and the ease of use of Discord as well as its mass adoption and while active writing in our RPs persisted until March, things slowed down in the latter half of the year as we focused on restructuring and streamlining operational processes in hopes of making participation more straightforward for our members.

We also had changes in the Council while Brian and I continued in our roles as President and VP. Monica returned to the board after Matt stepped down from his voting role, and we were fortunate to bring in a new volunteer office manager to enhance our organizational capacity. We also gained a webmaster so I can focus on other areas of our technical operations.

Key Activities
• Events:
o SciWorld (24-Jun-23): Hosted on the combined Discord for events operated by SimmingHub, in collaboration with RPGWriting and Star Army. Organized by Amanda Rose and Wes Davis. Attendance numbers were similar to previous years. The community reported good things about this event.
o FallFest XIV (12-Oct-24): Hosted on the combined Discord for events operated by SimmingHub, in collaboration with Star Army. Organized by Wes Davis. Attendance numbers were similar to previous years. We had more good feedback from this event as with SciWorld earlier in the year.
• Platform Transition:
o Writing activities moved primarily to Discord, adapting to the preferences of our members by allowing them to post bios, logs and other important IC information on the Discord that was once fully located on our wiki or forums.
• Role-Play Activity:
o Our role-play community currently has 15 members, including 3 on Leave of Absence (LOA) and 3 new members who joined this year.
• Infrastructure Changes:
o We moved our data center operations, with the exception of our web server and offsite monitoring tools, to a server owned by the organization and housed in a data center near our office.
o Due to financial constraints, we canceled our IP space with ARIN.
• New Sponsorship:
o We secured a new sponsorship with Snakecraft Hosting, which is assisting in hosting our Discord bots.

Looking Ahead
As we move into the new year, our goals include reenergizing our writing activities, expanding our community engagement by bringing on new partners, creating a catalog of historical information related to play-by-post conferences and events to ensure this information is not lost to time, and building on the success of our events. We remain committed to preserving and supporting the collaborative writing community for future generations.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our efforts this year. We look forward to continuing this journey together. If you have any questions or need support, please feel free to reach out.

Regards,

Josh Hina
President
The New Universes Project