An upgrade of our existing 4-computer network and the provision of permanent cable access. Funding to enable us to employ and house 2 full-time workers, who will as ordained monks and nuns, be paid a stipend. At first it as a bulletin board concerned mainly with Australian issues, but growing national and international interest led to it moving online in 1995 and greatly expanding its range of resources. Whether we are talking information, textual resources or directories, BuddhaNet has over thirty times the information of Tricycle and Dharmanet, its closet rivals. BuddhaNet is made available by the Buddhist Educational Association in Sydney, which is headed by Ven Pannyavaro.
Funding comes by donation, mainly from Buddhist temples.
The organisation is run on a shoestring. Unfortunately, with so many time pressures on volunteers, the downloading and analysis of server logs has had to take a back seat. Our last analysis a year ago showed over 200,000 hits a day. This was before the new directories, and the popularity of BuddhaNet has increased greatly since then. In addition, there is of course tremendous web interest in Buddhist countries, with the Vietnamese-Americans and Japanese leading the world in web innovation.