Managing a Sustainable Online Community

August 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

A friend posted a line to this post on how to manage a sustainable online community which is one of the greener ways to leverage cloud services in a data center.

And these are good things to think about if you want to get involved in social data center networks.

HOW TO: Manage a Sustainable Online Community

Rob Howard is the CTO/founder of enterprise collaboration software company Telligent.

A 2008 Gartner study on social software noted that “about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce.” While the measurement and the statistics behind this statement raise questions, there is an element of truth.

The popularity of the post is high.

I've read the article a few times to think about to leverage the ideas, and completely missed the author's name, Rob Howard.

Rob Howard, Founder and CTO

Rob Howard is the vision behind Telligent's product development and innovation and is known throughout the industry as an authority in community and collaboration software. As Telligent's Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Howard oversees product development and the company's technology roadmap. A true pioneer, Howard contributed to the development and adoption of Microsoft's Web platform technologies, where he helped create and grow the innovative ASP.NET community. In 2004, he continued his vision for customer engagement when he founded Telligent, which was first-to-market with integrated online community software. Howard also understood early on the value of community analytics, and Telligent was first-to-market with an application to address this need.

I worked with Rob at Microsoft and it is great to see he has a successful company focusing on collaboration. Now that I have a connection with the author I am reading the post with a different perspective.

Rob makes three excellent mistakes in online communities.

There are detrimental effects of over-hyping the technology and then committing the three cardinal sins of running a community:

If you build it they will come. This is probably the best known online community fallacy. The premise is that if I roll out a given technology set (blogs, forums, wikis, etc.), users will automatically appear and congregate, forming a robust community. This can be attributed to the lure of “social software” that companies repeatedly bite at, as opposed to seeking to extend or create value for their customers.

Once I’ve launched it, I’m done. Many communities launch successfully, only to fade out and disappear. This is due in large part to a failure to assign ownership of the community and to have a strategy that lasts past “launch.”

Bigger is better. The assumption here is that the overall size of a community is indicative of its success. This is challenging for most community managers and businesses to understand, as it is contrary to what they’ve usually been told.

And discusses the relationship of the size of a group and benefit to end users.

Community life cycles are often portrayed as simple linear progressions, with the goal of “maintenance” once maturity is reached. However, I have found that a community has unique characteristics that conflict with many of the preconceived notions of success. While the value of the community to its creators increases as membership increases, the value to individual members may diminish. Disregard for, or lack of understanding of these behaviors can lead to the failure of a community.

Analogies have been made to high schools and sub groups that exist.

It should be noted that I am not advocating that communities be limited by membership size. Rather, capabilities should exist within a larger community to support smaller, internal groups that can form around narrow areas of interest. This is validated by both Twitter and Facebook , which have in recent months both introduced capabilities to narrow the scope of conversations: Lists, privacy controls, and so on.

Warning an obsession on operational efficiency can lead you to anorexia vs. being competitive

August 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

We have all been frustrated by a bean counter approach that focus on the numbers. Where a short term cost reduction is viewed as a win, even though your long term health suffers.

An example of a potential obsession on a data center efficiency number is PUE. PUE is often used as identifying a green data center, but PUE is only one number and not the end goal.

The Phoenix Principle has a guest blog post that touches on the Yin and Yang of Operational Excellence.

The Yin & Yang of Operational Excellence & Innovation

Efficiency is a good thing, taken in moderation. The same with focus. It is good management hygiene to pay attention to what you’re doing and try to do it efficiently. This helps build a competitive cost structure and a results-based culture. From an operations standpoint that means that the use of an occasional stopwatch or its modern day equivalents in order to eliminate wasted effort and speed workflows makes perfect sense. Frederick Taylor made the great contribution in 1911 of helping companies recognize that labor is a controllable cost that can be managed, but he taught that a narrow focus on the optimization of each operation and repetition of the “best practice” was the key to success. He missed the point (among others) that it is really the improvement of the process as a whole that changes the game. It took Toyota and Yamaha and other Japanese companies to teach the world that lesson 70 years later – leading to today’s six sigma, lean, and time compression concepts.

One of the points well made is an obsession that can occur when management focuses on efficiency as the end.

The pursuit (often obsession) of operational excellence becomes an end unto itself and gets disconnected from the mission of generating growth and creating value.

How many companies are limited by its IT group and data center capacity?

The end game is not to get lean and agile, but rather to get lean and agile so that you can compete more effectively – leveraging these capabilities to go to market in innovative new ways, to compete in new markets, and ultimately to create new markets.

Which is part of why cloud computing solutions like AWS are successful as companies can side step the corporate IT/data center group as they don't want to incur any new costs.

Be careful trying to be too efficient and miss the focus on supporting the business.

Do you have an accurate image of yourself?

Solar renewable energy generation drives desert areas closer to Peak Water

July 31, 2010 Dave Ohara

WSJ has an opinion article on Peak Water issues caused by solar power mandates. For more in depth of the comparison of the term Peak Water vs. Peak Oil check out this pdf.

Peak Water
Meena Palaniappan and Peter H. Gleick

In the past few years, discussions about the possibility of resource crises around water, energy, and food have introduced new terms and concepts into the public debate. Energy experts predict that the world is approaching, or has even passed, the point of maximum production of oil, or “peak oil.” The implications of reaching this point for energy policy are profound, for a range of economic, political, and environmental reasons. More recently, there has been a growing discussion of whether we are also approaching a comparable point of “peak water,” at which we run up against natural limits to availability or human use of freshwater.

Back to the WSJ Article.

Peak Water

An unintended consequence of solar power mandates.

Harry Reid has decided that Senate Democrats will put off their cap-and-tax energy ambitions for now, focusing on smaller-scale subsidies and mandates. Anyone who thinks this counts as a "compromise" might visit Arizona, where the green campaign for renewable energy is forcing the state to confront the limits of a nonrenewable resource—water.

With more than 10 months of sun a year and vast tracts of desert, Arizona is seemingly ideal for solar power, aside from the fact that solar isn't cost-competitive with conventional fuels. So, in a preview of the "renewable portfolio standard" that Democrats want to impose nationwide, the state mandated that utilities produce 15% of their electricity from green sources by 2025. Scores of solar projects are thus under review by federal and state regulators, with some of the applications fast-tracked so developers can qualify for tax credits in the stimulus.

What is not common public knowledge is the relationship between energy and water in power production. Australia has a study that shows the relationship that I posted on last year. I think the Australians learned this as part of when a desalination plant was built to be powered by a coal power plant. You can guess when you account for the fresh water use by the power plant, the amount of energy required to generate fresh water through desalination, the economics and environmental impact didn't work.

Looking at the big picture of the relationship between water and solar power is in the WSJ article.

One hitch: The hot, arid regions best suited for solar also tend to be short on fresh water, and Arizona is no exception. Utility-scale solar power works by generating steam that spins turbines. Cooling the system at the end of the process consumes almost twice as much water per megawatt hour as coal-fired power plants that use the same cooling technology, according to a 2009 report from the Congressional Research Service. The study, which examined the consequences of a solar expansion in the southwest, adds that it could consume as much as 1% of the state's finite water resources within a few years.

The environmentalists answer is to not use steam, but photovoltaic.

Environmentalists say other solar methods require less water, but these aren't as efficient for generating power and they raise costs even more than the usual solar process. At any rate, Arizona is already an electricity exporter, mostly to California, so it isn't as if energy is in short supply. The state's green regulations are effectively a mandate to export water, which is in short supply.

The greens also claim that advanced photovoltaic solar farms (which convert sunlight directly into electricity with de minimis water) are just around the corner. But photovoltaic technology is no closer to commercial scale than cellulosic ethanol, plug-in vehicles and the other "second generation" science projects that environmentalists claim are just five years off to excuse the shortcomings of technologies as they exist today. They're always just five years off no matter what year it is, in order to justify continued subsidies.

Issues like this are why I say it is difficult to define a green data center. A better method is to take the steps to make things greener.

Green energy has been sold as a great free lunch, promising millions of new jobs and cheap electricity, but somehow it never turns out that way when you look under the hood.

The greenest data center is the one that doesn't exist and has no environmental impact. But, I am not going to take that radical environmentalist view. Cloud computing getting people to be charged for their usage in real-time is a great step to get people to see the costs of their technical and business decisions to run information services.

Unknown Environmental Impact of Dam Removal

July 31, 2010 Dave Ohara

Data Centers built next to dams are assumed to have low cost power using renewable energy. In the Pacific Northwest, Hydroelectric is not classified as renewable energy, and dams are viewed by many environmentalists as damaging.

A year from now the largest dam removal project will start on the Elwha River in the pacific Northwest. There are many environmentalists who champion dam removal.

Many of the dams in the eastern U.S. were built for water diversion, agriculture, factory watermills, and other purposes that are no longer useful. Because of the age of these dams, over time the risk for catastrophic failure increases. In addition, many of these dams block anadromous fish runs, such as Atlantic salmon and American shad, and prevent important sediments from reaching estuaries.

Many dams in the western U.S. were built for agricultural water diversion in the arid country, with hydroelectric power generation being a very significant side benefit. Among the largest of these water diversion projects is the Columbia Basin Project, which diverts water at the Grand Coulee Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation manages many of these water diversion projects.

Dams in the Pacific Northwest and California block passage for anadromous fish species such as Pacific Salmon and Steelhead. Fish laddersand other passage facilities have been largely ineffective in mitigating the negative effects on salmon populations. Bonneville Power Administration manages electricity on 11 dams on the Columbia River and 4 on the Snake River, which were built by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Seattletimes covers the largest dam removal project scheduled to start next year.

Elwha River's coming dam removal has scientists flooded with unknowns

Scientists see much to learn when two dams come down on the Elwha River, beginning about a year from now in the largest dam removal project ever in North America

By Lynda V. Mapes

Seattle Times staff reporter

PREV 2 of 2 NEXT

ELWHA RIVER, Clallam County — From all over the country they came to ponder this river: its gravel, its teal-green waters, its shores and mouth and mostly its future as the site of the largest dam-removal project ever in North America.

Sweeping north from Mount Olympus to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Elwha has been collared by two dams since the early part of the 20th century. Both will be taken out chunk by chunk, releasing some 18 million cubic yards of sediment impounded along with the river's flow. The process will take about three years, beginning next June.

With $350 million allocated for the project. There is no money for scientific research in the budget.

Oddly, for its importance, Elwha research is a shoestring effort. The $350 million federally funded restoration project includes no money for scientific study. So as they toured the river corridor, the scientists were framing potential research questions to propose for funding by agencies, universities and other sources.

The environmental impact of dam removal at this scale is unknown.

"It's the first time anyone has done a staged, step-by-step dam removal of this scale," Randle said. "It's the largest controlled release of sediment ever in North America, and a very different process than we've seen elsewhere."

So how do you the decision makers and environmentalists know the dam removal is better for the environment? It would seem logical that how the dam gets removed has a huge influence on the impacts to issues brought up in the article.

"We built a model of this, but I've never actually stood on it," said Gordon Grant, research hydrologist with the U.S. Forest Service research station in Corvallis, Ore. "How does the river adjust to the change in level? You have a tiger by the tail, and the only knob you have to turn is how quickly you take it down. What's upstream will drive what is downstream, and that is what makes this such a juicy problem.

"I can't think of another analogue anywhere for the experiment this river is going to be. It's a natural laboratory unlike any other."

It will take three years to remove the dam and many more years to see the environmental impact.

What is environmental impact of dam removal? We don't know.

Application of Video Analysis, future data center capability

July 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

I am having a blast with this helmet cam idea. People are so excited they want to figure out how to use this as a differentiator, and ask to not tell others. I could have gone down the money pit path of trying to patent a helmet cam idea applied to data centers, but that would have just put lots of money in the hands of patent attorneys.

A demonstration of the use of video analysis is in this Fast Company article.

Made to Stick: Watch the Game Film
BY: DAN HEATH AND CHIP HEATHJune 1, 2010

Photograph by Max Wolfe

Dan Heath and Chip Heath ask, Have you been looking closely enough at your business?

Related Content

RELATED LINK

Made to Stick: Presentations that Stick

Football Coaches pore over game film to spot things they'd never see in real time. Check it out: When the defense blitzes, the free safety picks up the running back. So by picking off the safety, the middle of the field will be wide open for a screen pass. The value of this meticulous observation is intuitive in the sports world. After all, coaches get a week to review a 60-minute game. In the organizational world, where every day is game day, such analysis is less common. It's unfortunate because studying the game film can yield unexpected insights.

The application highlighted is in teaching.

Lemov suspected there was technique underneath the teaching magic -- and if he could find it, he could teach it. So he identified a classic top-5% teacher at North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, and asked if he could observe the class. Lemov's buddy, a wedding videographer, agreed to record the teacher in action (a welcome relief from the Electric Slide).

Five years later, having recorded and analyzed hundreds of hours of videotape, Lemov has some answers. In his new book, Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, Lemov reveals what he learned. As he expected, great teachers have a lot in common. For instance, star teachers circulate around the whole space of their classrooms. They are always within seconds of being at the shoulder of any student in the room. Less experienced teachers rarely "broke the plane," the imaginary line running between the blackboard and the first row of student desks.

One of the books I am reading now is Teach like a Champion.

Top Five Things Every Teacher Needs to Know (or Do) to Be Successful
Amazon-exclusive content from author Doug Lemov

1. Simplicity is underrated. A simple idea well-implemented is an incredibly powerful thing.

2. You know your classroom best. Always keep in mind that what’s good is what works in your classroom.

3. Excellent teaching is hard work. Excellent teachers continually strive to learn and to master their craft. No matter how good a teacher is it’s always possible to be better.

4. Every teacher must be a reading teacher. Reading is the skill our students need.

5. Teaching is the most important job in the world. And it’s also the most difficult.