Slowly but surely, the Orcasound collective is beginning to evolve. Donors are planting seeds of reslience, donations are trickling in, and new projects are taking root while others bear fruit.

Here are two quick updates:

The 2024 Orcasound t-shirts have been distributed to most volunteers, but some inventory remains. We are offering another round of sign-ups to volunteers within the community, but are also extending an invitation to collective contributors to order a free shirt. Beach Reach will cover the on-going shipping costs, and has invoiced for the $2000 in GSoC mentor funds that were earmarked for the t-shirt production. This marks a first major reimbursement (payment of an invoice) by the collective.

As an experiment in catalyzing some design/development progress this summer, Val and Leslie Veirs (of Beam Reach) have contributed $2500 as the first Ecosystem Sponsor. The intent is for the Orcasound community to invoice against this budget in a new project aimed at launching and testing a new home page for Orcasound. The goal of the Complete Orcahome project is to eventually replace the original Wordpress site with one in which the content can be managed by any of our community members without having to sign up for more than one account (likely a Github account now, and maybe an Orcasound web app or oauth account later).