Green (low carbon) Data Center Blog

Managing a Sustainable Online Community

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.

World Cup Soccer, assessment of unrest and violence

Today is the start of World Cup Soccer and I was watching this screen, and it reminded of some work done by some really smart people.

Below is the setup for the South Africa first goal.

The movement that allows South Africa to get in position.

 

And the goal

It is easy to do a post-analysis on what caused the goal.  But, it is much harder to do a pre-analysis on the factors that affect winning or losing.

Now let me show you what the smart people I know are able to do at the World Cup Soccer to understand the potential dynamics that can cause unrest and violence.  Here is the PDF I will be referring to.

The following is a demo showing the use of Thetus's Savanna product.

In the upper left is the assumption, "Demographics and migration patterns may influence stability during the world cup.  Immigration is a primary issue"

Which then supports, "What are the potential dynamics that can cause unrest or violence during the World Cup?"

How many systems have you seen that accept questions as input?  Almost all other systems are focused on data you have already set up monitoring, looking only within your system.  Can you ask questions that gets you looking for information beyond your data feeds?

You can browse the PDF to see more of the events and relationships.

Thetus Savanna allows an analysis process to see relationships and how events occur.  With this understanding you can mitigate undesirable action and invest in areas that are win conditions.

People actually do this activity all the time, but almost no one has a tool like Thetus Publisher.  (Disclosure: I am working with Thetus to figure out how their technology can be applied to data center scenarios, because they are some of the smartest people I've found to figure out how to model the complexity in the data center.)

There are only a handful of people at this time who can understand this technology and apply it.  And, luckily after two years figuring out who the right people are and what are the right scenarios, this method is closer to being deployed.

Writing this blog entry was the easiest way to tell the less than 10 people i know who will understand this approach "here is a cool graphic you can use to illustrate the potential use to your co-workers and team."

And, it is time to start sharing this approach.  I'll continue to post on this modeling method as it explains how I am using my blog posts.  In general, I am blogging about public facts that fit in modeling data centers.

As a few of my business associates and clients know, there is logic to my posts, and they can read the relationships between the posts.  This does not apply to all posts, but they know how to parse what I write.  One benefit of using this blogging approach is I can meet with people, and we immediately can drop into details as they have been reading what I have been blogging.

As my wife just told me last night, I wish you could tell me how to use technology as well as you write things.  I told her well, I spend more time thinking about what to write, than I do thinking about what to say.  :-)

In the same way it is sometimes hard to understand the exact movements in a soccer match that support a goal, once you recognize the patterns that you want to repeat, you start to score more.

Enjoy the World Cup Soccer. 

Can Data Centers benefit from Supply Chain Management concepts?

Currently, I am studying data center site selection, and have been asking the question what is wrong with data centers having 1% of the cost being in the land when other commercial real estate will typically have land 20-25% of the cost.  One big thing most miss is land is not a cost, it is a non-depreciable asset. 

Capital assets that are inexhaustible or where the useful life does not diminish or expire over time, such as land and land improvements. Infrastructure assets reported using the modified approach to depreciation are also not depreciated.

Land is not an expense, it is an investment.  So, land should be looked evaluated on its ROI, not it's overall cost, including land improvements. 

Which then led me to think why is it data centers don't use more supply chain management concepts which would address issues like land cost in the overall solution and most likely save you much more than the cost of the land?

Supply Chain Management is defined as.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the management of a network of interconnected businesses involved in the ultimate provision of product and service packages required by end customers (Harland, 1996).^[1] Supply Chain Management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory, and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption (supply chain).

Another definition is provided by the APICS Dictionary when it defines SCM as the "design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring performance globally."

Can't you think of all the different groups and vendors involved in providing data center and IT services as a supply chain management problem?  Is the CIO in charge of the supply chain? Maybe.

Here is a piece of irony from a CIO.com article on supply chain management.  Supply chain management SW is a mess.

Supply chain management software is possibly the most fractured group of software applications on the planet. Each of the five major supply chain steps previously outlined is comprised of dozens of specific tasks, many of which have their own specific software. Some vendors have assembled many of these different chunks of software together under a single roof, but no one has a complete package that is right for every company. For example, most companies need to track demand, supply, manufacturing status, logistics (i.e. where things are in the supply chain), and distribution. They also need to share data with supply chain partners at an ever increasing rate. While products from large ERP vendors like SAP's Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) can perform many or all of these tasks, because each industry's supply chain has a unique set of challenges, many companies decide to go with targeted best of breed products instead, even if some integration is an inevitable consequence.

So, if a bunch of people who focus only on supply chain management can't get the software right, how can the data center industry get the right software to run data centers like a supply chain?

I think I have an answer on how to approach supply chain management for data centers.  The first step is to identify the problem, then test what approaches solve the problem best. The fragmentation and silos is the opportunity to address.  How do you pull all the pieces together?  My ideas are based on using social networking and memetics.

More to come.

Open Data Map movement demonstrates innovation opportunity for Open Sourced Data Center Initiative

Tim Berners- Lee has a 6 minute TED presentation on the year open data went worldwide.

Map and location services are top scenarios for mobile devices.  Google and Microsoft have their maps.  Nokia bought Navteq and MetaCarta.  Apple bought PlaceBase.  With all the companies creating services, volunteers using an open approach to collaborate can beat the proprietary services.

The MercuryNews reports on Open Street Maps.

Volunteers create new digital maps

By Mike Swift

mswift@mercurynews.com

Posted: 04/09/2010 09:08:55 PM PDT

Updated: 04/10/2010 01:36:26 PM PDT

Ron Perez hikes by a waterfall while a portable GPS device records his tracks as... (Jim Gensheimer)

When Brian "Beej" Hall first heard about an audacious volunteer effort to create an Internet map of every street and path in every city and village on the planet, he was hooked. At the time, the nascent effort had only a few American members, and the U.S. map was essentially a digital terra incognita.

Just a few years later, the Berkeley software engineer is editing digital maps so precise they include drinking fountains and benches in the Bay Area parks where he hikes, and the mapping community has swelled to more than 240,000 global members. The effort, OpenStreetMap, is a kind of grass-roots Wikipedia for maps that is transforming how map data is collected, shared and used — from the desktop to smartphones to car navigation.

The reporter makes the observation of how a nonprofit community can change the map business.

But increasingly, the nonprofit community collaboration model behind OpenStreetMap, which shares all the cartographic data in its maps for free, is also changing the business of mapping, just as Wikipedia changed the business of reference. More and more, the accuracy of searches on Google Maps or directions issued by your car's navigational device are based on data collected by volunteers like Hall and other members of OpenStreetMap's do-it-yourself army.

Part of the reason why OpenStreetMap is popular is the fact that the end users are creating the maps.

OpenStreetMap users say that because their data is collected by people who actually live in a place, it is more likely to be accurate.

"It's the people's map," said Paul Jarrett, director of mapping for CloudMade.

If you are interested in the use of OpenStreetMap in Haiti go here.

We chose to tell the story of 'OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti'.
We all followed the crisis that unfolded following the Haiti earthquake, many of us chose to donate money, a few were flown out and deployed as part of the relief effort. But what practical impact can many have without being there in Haiti itself? Well, during this crisis a remarkable story unfolded; of how people around the world could virtually collaborate and contribute to the on-the-ground operations.

With the little existing physical, political and social infrastructure  now destroyed or damaged, the situation was especially challenging for aid agencies arriving on the ground. Where are the areas most in need of assistance, how do we get there, where are people trapped under buildings, which roads are blocked? This information is important to the rescue agencies immediately after the event, and to the longer rebuilding process. In many developing countries, there is a lack of good mapping data and particularly after a crisis, when up-to-date information is critical to managing events as they evolve.
Enter OpenStreetMap, the wiki map of the world, CrisisMappers and an impromptu community of volunteers who collaborated to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence. Within hours of the event people were adding detail to the map, but on January 14th high resolution sattelite imagery of Haiti was made freely available and the Crisis Mapping community were able to trace roads, damaged buildings, and enter camps of displaced people into OpenStreetMap. This is the story of OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti:

There are many who think the Open Source Data Center Initiative will not work.  There are a lot of people who thought OpenStreetMaps wouldn't work too.

My Inspiration for Networking, my son

Going to data center events are great ways to network.  And, honestly I learn very little from the presentations, other than different ways to present the same material or how slow progress is being made in the data center industry.  I learn 10x times more as I talk to others before, during and after the events.  I am driven to network to learn.

When I was young, I was one of the smallest and quietest kids in class.  I was introverted, and it is easy to go back to an introverted mode as I think and research topics.  Thinking of things by myself is easy.  But, there is so much more you can do when you work with others.  I left Microsoft 4 years ago after 14 years mostly working on Windows.  Microsoft has an immense network inside and outside the company.  I needed to create a new network to work on some new ideas.  I didn't want to start a company with employees, but I like developing innovative solutions.

Some people join other companies right away, but I took a year off to think about what I wanted to do. and started the green data center blog as part of a way to research the topic and socialize ideas.

When I left Microsoft my son was 2, and will be 6 next month. He has a special gift of networking, a talented extrovert.  Socializing is natural for him, allowing him to build a large strong network.  He can play sports with 3rd graders, the 5th grade girls think he is cool, and he makes high school kids laugh.

How good is he?  He is in kindergarten, and he is one of the most popular cool kids at school.  Yes, we have had many parents warn us we are going to have interesting challenges given his social skills and popularity.

On his own he wanted to be in the school's talent show.  He is in kindergarten and wants to solo perform in front of the school.  He has his own idea of what he wants to do, makes up his own dance, and won't listen to any help from his mom who is a talented dancer.  He's got his own vision.

How popular is he?  He gets applause and people call out his name when he walks on stage, receiving more attention than most get after they perform.

He's been practicing his moves.

His smile is natural and effective.

 

He knows how to create intensity.

And finishes with a bow, then another, and another as the crowd claps.

I can't even come close to what my 5 year old can do, but I keep on trying to learn from his natural talent to network.  :-)

A different interpretation of “Open Source” in an Intelligence Analysis scenario that defines how GreenM3 works public data

I ran across the term Open Source Intelligence.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.

This description fits what I have been telling others about the various data center sources of information. 

“If there is a public publication of information, we are open to look at and provide feedback on the value we see in the information.”

Which is a pretty good description of how this blog has been run, commenting on public available information.

The description goes on to clarify the difference vs. open source software.

In the intelligence community (IC), the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.

Sources of information are:

OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources:

• Media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information.
• Web-based communities and user generated content: social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
• Public data: government reports, official data such as budgets, demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, speeches, marine and aeronautical safety warnings, environmental impact statements and contract awards.

We have seen helicopters flying over Apple data centers, and world wide maps of Google data centers.

• Observation and reporting: amateur airplane spotters, radio monitors and satellite observers among many others have provided significant information not otherwise available. The availability of worldwide satellite photography, often of high resolution, on the Web (e.g., Google Earth) has expanded open source capabilities into areas formerly available only to major intelligence services.
• Professional and academic: conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and subject matter experts.^[1]
• Most information has geospatial dimensions, but many often overlook the geospatial side of OSINT: not all open source data is unstructured text. Examples of geospatial open source include hard and softcopy maps, atlases, gazetteers, port plans, gravity data, aeronautical data, navigation data, geodetic data, human terrain data (cultural and economic), environmental data, commercial imagery, LIDAR, hyper and multi-spectral data, airborne imagery, geo-names, geo-features, urban terrain, vertical obstruction data, boundary marker data, geospatial mashups, spatial databases, and web services. Most of the geospatial data mentioned above is integrated, analyzed, and syndicated using geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS) not a browser per se.

OSINT is distinguished from research in that it applies the process of intelligence to create tailored knowledge supportive of a specific decision by a specific individual or group.^[2]

I wonder how much OSINT has started searching twitter and Facebook.

In the Open Source Data Center Initiative I anticipate we be using this type of description for what we will be doing.  Part of the challenge for the data center industry is there so much information out there, it is hard to make sense of it for an organization that doesn’t have a full staff of experienced professionals.

Here is where I got the idea for Open Source Intelligence.

Complimentary Online Seminar:

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Online Seminar

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Time: 11am Eastern; 8am Pacific
Duration: 1 Hour

Hello Dave,
Al Qaeda uses online videos to recruit and train. Other terrorist networks use audio files to disseminate messages. China circulates propaganda via video. The Internet is exploding with multimedia; streaming video, audio, images, PDFs and more. Open Source Intelligence needs to account for and take advantage of all advanced media types. But how?
Learn how you can:

• Capture streaming video for on-demand classification and detailed examination
• Automate extraction of multimediaOSINT and all contextual data
• Transform complex data sources into accurate information for advanced analysis

Please join this free online seminar and see a live demonstration of Kapow Technologies’ advanced web harvesting capabilities in use at US Intelligence Agencies, extracting from sites like YouTube, China.org, Al-Jazeera and MySpace.

News as nodes in a social network

Slate has a website with news as event nodes in a social network, showing the relationships of information.

News Dots: The Day's Events as a Social Network

An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily.

By Chris Wilson

Like Kevin Bacon's co-stars, topics in the news are all connected by degrees of separation. To examine how every story fits together, News Dots visualizes the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network. Subjects—represented by the circles below—are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.

Most Wired Place on Earth, South Korea an indicator of where we are heading

I am watching the PBS Frontline special Digital_Nation, and previously blogged on dangers of multi-tasking.

The show is now discussing South Korea as an example of the most wired place on the earth.  I haven’t been to South Korea for over 15 years, ironically the start (1994) of the broadband growth in South Korea.  I worked with Samsung when I was at Apple and acquired & managed the Korean fonts for Win3.1.

Here are some of the facts from the Frontline website.

WIRED KOREA

Population: 48.4 million(July 2008 est.)

Median age: 36.7 years

GDP (PPP): $1.312 trillion (2008 est.), 14th largest in the world

Korean gaming industry (including game centers): $7.8 billion (2006)

Internet usage rate: 76.5 percent (2008)

Percentage of Internet users age 3 to 5: 2.3 percent (2008)

Wireless Internet usage rate (ages 12 to 59): 52.5 percent (2008)

Household broadband penetration:: 97 percent (2008)

Landlines: 23.02 million (2008)

Cell phones: 44.98 million (2008)

Other facts:

• The Korean government began investing in a nationwide broadband network in 1994
• South Korea has over 20,000 Internet cafes called "PC Bangs"
• 43 percent of Koreans maintain a blog
• 20 million people belong to Cyworld, an online "parallel universe"/social networking site
• In early 2009 the Korean Communications Commission (KCC) announced a plan to invest $837 million -- in addition to $21.1 billion in private funds -- to provide 1-Gbps average broadband speeds to major cities by 2012 (meaning a 120-minute feature film will take 12 seconds to download). The average U.S. broadband speed is 4.8 Mbps -- 200 times slower.

Trust in the Data Center, Lost in Translation

Mike Manos’s post on why Private Clouds will exist brings up an interesting view, a belief that “trust” is what is going to define people’s behaviors using cloud computing.

Private Clouds – Not just a Cost and Technology issue, Its all about trust, the family jewels, corporate value, and identity

January 24, 2010 by mmanos

I recently read a post by my good friend James Hamilton at Amazon regarding Private Clouds.   James and I worked closely together at Microsoft and he was always a good source for out of the box thinking and challenging the status quo.    While James post found here, speaks to the Private Cloud initiative being what amounts to be an evolutionary dead end, I would have to respectfully disagree.

It’s a little ironic that Mike discusses ‘trust” as an issue when he is a Sr. VP at Digital Realty Trust.  But, this trust is more like this kind.

In common law legal systems, a trust is an arrangement whereby property (including real, tangible and intangible) is managed by one person (or persons, or organizations) for the benefit of another

The Trust Mike Manos refers to

In sociology and psychology the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, benevolence and competence of the other party. Based on the most recent research, a failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty. In economics trust is often conceptualized as reliability in transactions. In all cases trust is a heuristic decision rule, allowing the human to deal with complexities that would require unrealistic effort in rational reasoning.

Part of the problems to establish trust is the lack of good communication.  Lost in Translation is a book on this topic for IT.

Do you speak "business" or "IT"? Perhaps you speak a little of both. In today's connected world, where business and IT are fused, chances are that if you're a business or IT executive, or someone working to transform a business, you speak a little of both. But what if there was a "third" language? A common language that was natural for both "business" and "IT," straightforward enough to use, yet sophisticated enough to work in today's connected world? What if such a language only comprised a handful of words? With such a language, the "loss in translation" between the business and IT would happen less, because both would be using the same language. With such a language, business outcomes and transformations would become much more achievable. This handbook describes what this language is-the language of Information Systems for the 21st century.

How many problems do you think could be addressed if both parties understood each other better?  And not Lost in Translation?

Are you “we” or are you “me” – social networking influencers, P.S. the “we” crowd is more fun

Part of what I enjoy about working on green data centers is meeting interesting people and figuring out how they fit in my social network.  There are people who are definitely and there are many who I don’t bother with.  The mistake you can make in social networking is sign up for too many networks and try to be friends with everyone.  This is not a race for quantity.

Wharton Knowledge has an article that touches on this topic.  The specific area they discuss is word-of-mouth marketing in the pharmaceutical industry, and many of the ideas apply to data center innovation and marketing.

The Buzz Starts Here: Finding the First Mouth for Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Published: March 04, 2009 in Knowledge@Wharton

Call it viral, buzz or word-of-mouth advertising: Getting customers to spread the word about a new product through their social or professional networks is a hot strategy in the marketing world. Its proponents insist that the technique -- whether online or face-to-face -- is sure to boost a company's return on investment (ROI).

But how can companies find the right individuals to deliver the message? Marketers may wonder if they are finding the best "seeding points" -- that is, well-connected people at the hub of social networks who will latch on to a product and promote it widely among the people they know.

The traditional approach is to find the leader. The person that says look at “me.”

Who's the Leader?

The study indicates that the spread of a product by word-of-mouth -- what the authors call "contagion" -- can and does happen over social networks. The study also indicates that marketers may need to re-think whom they identify as the best seeding points in their word-of-mouth campaigns.

Traditionally, drug companies have focused their efforts on reaching notable community leaders, believing well-known experts to be the most effective emissaries of a new product. In other industries, said Iyengar, marketers and their market research companies have tried to find opinion leaders through direct surveys, asking people, in essence, "Are you an opinion leader?" and then linking those answers to observable characteristics such as age, income, education level, media habits and so on. That, however, has proved rather ineffective, leading some companies to give up on finding seeding points and go for flashy "buzz" campaigns everyone talks about, such as when British fashion retailer French Connection UK put its four-letter acronym in large letters on its bags and shopping windows.

There is another group they categorized and this is the “we.”

The researchers also asked all physicians to name up to eight other doctors with whom they felt comfortable discussing the clinical management and treatment of the disease, and up to eight doctors to whom they typically referred patients. These nominations from fellow physicians produced a second group, whom researchers called "sociometric leaders" -- the most influential and well-respected physicians in the community based on how often they were mentioned by their peers.

What did the study find as the aha moment?

"That was the biggest 'a-ha!' for the company," said Van den Bulte. Physician 184 "was not the most important in the number of connections he was getting, but he was vitally important in linking the networks."

More about Physician 184 characteristics as a “we” person.

Physician 184, for example, didn't fit the description of an individual who marketers thought would be the most effective promoter of their product -- an outgoing, high-profile doctor whose name often pops up on research papers or on conference speaker lists. "Physician 184 was self-effacing. He did not want to stand on a soap box," said Van den Bulte. "He was respected, but not in a flashy fashion. He was the opposite of a rock star."

And, they actually found that the “we” people were actually earlier adopters than the “me.”

Matching the network data with prescription records, the study showed that sociometric leaders like Physician 184 were quicker than the self-reported opinion leaders to use the new drug, and were also more likely to influence other physicians to try it. The study also found that sociometric leaders did take into account what their colleagues were doing. For marketers, this implies that word-of-mouth can affect opinion leaders as well as followers, in contrast to what is often believed and taught -- that only followers are affected by social influence.

Whenever I go to data center events I watch for the “we” vs. “me.”  I filter the me people and don’t spend that much time with them.  What I want to do is build the better connections to the “we” people as they are social network influencers.

I’ve used this method so long it feels obvious and natural, and thanks to a “we” friend I was having an IM conversation with regarding another “we” person’s behavior, the “we” vs. “me” became clear.

Are you a “we” or are you a “me”?