Reflection on the Weekend of the 4th of July

I spent the weekend off-line, with friends and family. The whole weekend was a glorious respite from the overly hot first week of summer, and the overly hot press of business. It was set up by some re-assertions of natural rights over the rights of government by the Supreme Court. And the garden, despite the ravages of the deer, is beautiful.

First, on the blessings of Hurricanes. My family in California asks me how I can stand to live in a place with regular hurricanes. I am always amused, because many here in North Carolina ask me how I could live in a place with earthquakes. I never point out to them that to those who grew up in southern California, it is the Sana Anna winds and the brush fires that are scary.

The first hurricane of the season bounced off of the Outer Banks without doing too much damage. Here, more than a couple hundred miles away, we didn’t even get rain. We did get relief from weather in the high 90’s, replaced by cooler, clean air from the ocean. It always seems that there is a band of clear blue sky surrounding a hurricane, and in that band the air is fresher, and clearer than the air before. Now, after more than two days, the summer haze is returning. The temperature, though, has peaked each day in the low 80s. Hurricanes are great for those they miss.

I could have used some rain, though. Despite a wet spring, May and June have been drier even than the drought years recently past. The lawn is crunchy underfoot. The gingers in the garden have a curly edge to their leaves not seen in the rain forest. This has some advantages; the old rambling rose by the front porch, the one that gives way to mildew by mid-June each year, is spotless. As the air gets drier, even the intoxicating scent of the magnolias get thinner, as if it needs moisture to convey its erotic musk.

Perhaps that is why the deer are so active this summer. A decade ago, when they four-laned the highway, I could grow nothing, as they swarmed the yard each evening. The variegated hosta, lining the driveway, was a particular favorite of theirs. After three years, it was no more. In February they would eat all the buds, as high as they could stand on their hind legs off of the camellia. My attempts at vegetable gardening were futile. During several years of drought, the depredations persisted. This last year, though, the deer let the landscape re-grow.

That’s why I wonder if the deer are back because of the dry months of May and June. I plant the old fashioned vining tomatoes, the ones that crawl out of the cages and onto the next. Indeterminate, they call them, because you can never determine where they will end up. This year they are all neatly trimmed at 20 inches tall, based on deer leaning in the top of each cage and eating on down. They have left the peppers alone, though. Habaneros are bitter even in their foliage, and two habaneros on the end seem to protect all the other peppers.

I am not writing of business today, for I have resolved to stay away from it until the weekend is over.

Appropriately, before the 4^th, the Supreme Court re-asserted the individual natural rights of the Declaration against the ever creeping encroachments of the State and the Mob.

The ruling that made me happiest was the undoing of decades of misunderstanding of the digital age and the fourth amendment. The Supreme Court has always acted as if digital communications and technology are terra nova, with no conceivable relation to what went before. I don’t know if they were horrified by the revelations of Snowden or finally got themselves smart phones, but they seem to be considering, at last, what it means to be a citizen in the digital age.

Two my mind, the most egregious example has been Kyllo. In Kyllo, the court opined that there was no expectation of privacy so long as a well-known technology was used for the police encroachment. The case was internally ironic because they both ruled for the plaintive, but did so because the technology, thermal imaging of buildings, was little known to them, although it was already well known to most readers of this blog.

With similar ignorance, the courts have persistently ruled that anything backed up or on a server not owned by the citizen is not private because it has been entrusted to someone else. In smart phones, they ruled that police could search a smart phone merely because it was useful to see the last number dialed in a single drug case. Now, at last, they have ruled that a search of a cell phone requires a separate warrant.

Finally, they have begun to acknowledge that the email and contacts and access to the cloud available from our phones is in face among the persons, houses, papers, and effects named by the 4^th amendment. I am truly glad, and hope that they choose to continue to restore the fourth amendment.

My mother used to say, when we were little, and asserting our rights, “Your right to swing your arm ends at the tip of my nose”. This is where disputes about rights to action and to property usually lie, at the boundary. There has been a great assertion from the State and from the Mob, that whatever they want, they have a right to, just as my brothers and I asserted a right to swing our arms. To get these wants, they first assign the property of others to themselves. The Mob has been very hungry recently demanding not only that it gets what it wants, but that others must believe as they do.

In a case right before the 4^th, the court recognized that one has a strong right to act in a manner repugnant to one’s faith and beliefs. In my mother’s phrase, they have recognized the nose of the other guy. 

In another case, more directly about money, the court ruled that no third party could assert a right to an individual’s income. No union can claim the right to the income of a private individual who has entered into a private contract with another private individual. Again, the right of a mob to assert its rights to the possessions of others was limited, at last.  

The greatest right remains the right to be left alone.  On the 4^th, I rejoiced that this right was recognized a little more.

So I sit, in the lower than expected temperature, with a lower than expected humidity, admiring the exotic orange tiger lilies contesting every edge with the native purple and white mallows, anticipating the burgeoning of the garden despite the deer, and know that.

Despite all the annoyances, this is a good time, and a good place, to be alive. I work every day to see that my grandchildren (should my children ever arrange their lives to produce any) will be able to claim  the same.

Bidding for Schedules—VPOLL and VAVAILABILITY

Last week I watched live multi-vendor demonstrations using the new specifications vPoll and vAvailability. These extend calendar interactions to support live negotiations about schedule and performance. These negotiations can be machine-to-machine (M2M) or augmented by human input. These were not applications, these were live interactions between mainstream calendar servers. The testing used simple user interfaces, just enough to operate the tests. These simple information exchanges extend existing systems for schedule negotiations into automated polling and bidding.

As I have written before, I spent three days with the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) at AOL headquarters in the suburbs of Washington DC. Although the meeting was technical, it was against a backdrop of a scandal in the VA that is summed up, by the press, in the single word “scheduling”. Members of CalConnect went quietly about demonstrating their new work, based on iCalendar, that points to a new way forward, one that extends schedules negotiations into automated polling and bidding. CalConnect rules forbid any direct discussion of who was at the meeting, and what their precise interactions are.

CalConnect works to extend the reach of existing Calendar and Schedule systems (new specification development) while testing whether they work in exchanges between vendors with different code bases. Sometimes the code is changed, and sometimes the specifications.

ICalendar (RFC5545) defines a common grammar for creating information exchanges information related to schedules and defines a several such exchanges. The iCalendar event (vEvent) is familiar to anyone who has added a meeting to their calendar by clicking on a web site or opening an email. ICalendar defines other common exchanges such as tasks (vToDo) and alarms (vAlarm). OASIS WS-Calendar describes how to use iCalendar inside service oriented exchanges, with a focus on describing sets of schedule information that hang together in a series. There is a growing use of WS-Calendar world-wide in energy markets and smart grids.

vPoll is a new iCalendar exchange that uses iCalendar grammar to present a choice. Assume it is a simple meeting (vEvent). A vPoll could present a number of meeting times and ask the potential participants to vote. This is different than asking for a summary of when a recipient id currently scheduled (vFreeBusy). A recipient may choose to vote for a time knowing he can cancel a meeting. A recipient may be keeping that afternoon free for a visitor from out of town—even though nothing is scheduled. A recipient, for security reasons, may choose not to share any free-busy information.

vPoll further defines how responses go back to the originator. A poll typically includes an ending time for polling. The originator may choose to schedule the meeting in accord with the most votes, or when a few key personnel can make it or for any other reason. vPoll does not define the business rules or the application, just the messages and message pattern.

vPolls may be tied to prices rather than to votes. Maybe the single best price, or the three best prices, get invited to the meeting. Maybe prices determine the venue. The vPoll specification defines the BASIC Poll Type. Others will be defined later for specific use cases.

A recipient may choose to respond to a vPoll with vAvailability. Availability uses recurring patterns to indicate when something might happen, and what it might cost. Consider a meeting room in a commercial building. It can be scheduled during business house, using the calendar, for free. After hours, because of additional security and custodial needs, the same room can be scheduled for $200 / hour with a minimum charge of $300. These schedules can be expressed with vAvailability.

So far, I have described vPoll using only meetings. A Poll can also include tasks (vToDo). A task is often distinguished by its required completion time. Recipients can use their calendars to bid on various completion times. Presumably, bid for completion tomorrow will be more costly than a bid for completion next month. VPoll can gather the bids and present them to the originator, to choose one.

Most of us think of calendar communications (ITIP) conveyed inside email (IMIP). We open email and we accept the iCalendar request. At the CalConnect meeting this year, multiple participants demonstrated interoperable iSchedule, used for direct server-to-server communications. This promotes the polling described above from the personal to the enterprise. I will write more about iSchedule later.

The Right Time at the Right Place

Smart Energy uses schedule negotiation and schedule coordination to operate systems and equipment at the right time to take maximum advantage of variable energy supplies. As the internet of things grows up, it will move from gathering data from sensors to coordinating things to enhance our lives. The future of business breaks down into smaller entities with stronger missions that coordinate activities over time to support customers as if by a single business, only better. We all took steps closer to these seemingly simple coordination results, at a meeting at AOL headquarters.

For the last decade, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) has worked to improve the interoperation of tools that coordinate schedules. We use their standards to run our personal and business lives, every time we accept a meeting request by email. Their work is critical to smart buildings and smart grids. This week, they demonstrated how to extend this work to support live machine to machine (M2M) schedule negotiations, including schedule auctions. My mind is buzzing with the implications.

Representatives of the US Veterans Administration (VA) were at CalConnect this week. The VA is in the news and under fire this week for failures related to scheduling and appointments. One can look to procedures and people and motivation, but under all is a cumbersome system that makes it difficult to accomplish some essential scheduling functions. These problems encourage employees to augment the system with a variety of out-of-system manual processes. These manual processes present opportunities both for mistakes and for gaming. Tragically, there was some of both.

VA management recognized the problems with scheduling systems well before the current scandals. It takes time to change anything so big. Last year, the VA held a competition to demonstrate standards-based approaches that could not only address the problems they have now, but can also prepare for more powerful stresses on their systems in the future. But knowing they had problems was not the same as knowing where and who the problems were. We have all found that out publicly in the last few weeks.

The story of the VA and open standards and how they hope to transform their monolithic systems in agile systems able to embrace outsourcing, insourcing, and distributed operations, is too long to fit here. I will write of it soon. I had the privilege of contributing to one of the competitors (my team came in third).  This week, the VA and those who hope to work with the VA were at CalConnect.  

CalConnect, now a decade old, ebbs and flows as does any organization. CalConnect was founded in a flurry of activity to address minimum capability cell phones, and worked through such problems as coordinating recurring meetings on a device too limited to compute once-a-week meetings. Today’s phones are more capable than personal computers then, and CalConnect has moved on to the problems of personal calendars in the age of social media. Calendar federation and social coordination bring new challenges.

Five years ago, CalConnect led the refresh of the aging standards for calendar information. iCalendar (RFC5545) is flexible and extensible, and describes key semantics and essential structure for everything you might see in your personal calendar. ITIP (RFC 5546) describes how to negotiate information between calendar-aware systems. You use it not only when you accept an email invitation, but also when that meeting is moved or cancelled.

Three years ago, CalConnect produced vAvailability, now moving to a standard in the IETF. (The Internet Engineering Task Force is the organization that manages the key specifications and communications of the internet.) . VAvailability is used in smart energy to advertise changing schedules for energy supply and for demand response. EMIX (Energy Market Information Exchange) defines contracts for Energy Reserves as financial options linked to vAvailability. OASIS developed WS-Calendar in close coordination with CalConnect.

But that is in the past. This week was exciting for the demonstration of new work that expands the tools for schedule coordination.

This week at CalConnect, multiple organizations demonstrated working interchanges of live schedule negotiations and schedule auctions. I will write more about the new standards such vPoll, CardDAV, and iSchedule later. The news is that this week CalConnect demonstrated three-server three-organization demonstration of standards-based schedule polling and auctions. The essential interactions for resource advertising and exchange were front and center. Direct server-to-server communications of schedules without the usual email were demonstrated, along with specific hooks for authorized interactions between web sites and personal calendars, and between trusted business partners.

Distributed schedule-based auctions are at the core of smart energy, including the budding efforts for interoperable transactive energy agents.

Standards-based scheduling engines will expand the reach and availability of specialized veteran’s services for today’s more mobile population. Open specifications for schedule negotiation can support more efficient and auditable queuing of complex scheduling requirements to be performed by multiple clinics. Distributed schedule-abased auctions will enable the VA to expand services and schedules to incorporate community resources far from the big VA Hospitals.

The next step of computer service is schedules for systems big and small to interact with our lives. The next step of business is improved provision of services across multiple businesses acting a single personal concierge, in medicine and in other personal services.

The tools for this were demonstrated at CalConnect this week. This work has powerful implications for smart energy, for medical scheduling, academic scheduling, and for social media. More later.

CalConnect invites interested organizations and companies to join CalConnect in moving the work
forward. www.calconnect.org

Making New Homes ready for Smart Energy

Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. Grid assets are managed by central control. This only works so long as the assets are central and the assets are centrally owned. Distributed assets should have distributed ownership. We must turn the centralized model on its head. Smart energy manages from the edges, not from the center. Smart energy treats homes and commercial buildings as microgrids responsible for their own power.

The concern of smart energy policy is to remove barriers to enable rapid entry and virtuous markets for new technologies. Policy is implemented by regulations and codes. Today’s post arises because I am wondering when we will have a model building code for the smart energy-ready residence. What should a commodity builder do if he wishes to claim that each home in a neighborhood is “smart energy ready?”

Let’s start with the interconnect. Today’s rules for distributed energy focus, as they should, on safety first. To this end, they mandate anti-islanding, i.e., if the grid goes away, power systems shut off. This prevents a linesman from being electrocuted when the downstream side of a downed line is “hot.” The model smart energy ready building should instead choose safe islanding. Local power systems, generation, batteries, even electric vehicles, should work safely within the home no matter what the local conditions. Software and hardware at the building entrance should support this safe islanding.

Within the home, there should be an emphasis on safety and extensibility. The Electrician working in a house needs to be just as concerned with unexpected power sources as does the linesman outside the house. If there are distributed energy resources, then there will be unexpected power sources in the home. The interconnect in the house is as important as that between the house and grid.

So we need two interconnects.

Rooftop solar requires paths and connections. If added during construction, conduit to the roof to support the eventual installation of PV costs almost nothing. This conduit can be put in while the walls are open and before siding is installed. Designed-in conduit is less likely to leak then after-thought retrofits. Preparing for roof-top PV likely means planning for an inverter closer to the home’s power distribution panels. 

A similar logic suggests that garages should plan for plug-in electric vehicles, even as the standards for them have not gelled. My guess is that this area will come to be dominated by smart charging stations coupled with storage. Whatever the technology, there will need to be wiring able to safely support high power flows over long periods of time. In the smart energy ready home, empty conduit may be enough for now.

The smart energy ready home should plan for power storage. Chemical based storage systems may lose much of their capabilities at extreme temperatures. There should be some space for storage installation that has an adequate and safe path to and from central power distribution. Again, empty conduit may be adequate for now.

To achieve reliability goals, some homeowners will opt for site-based generation. At its simplest, this requires a pad and conduit back to the central power distribution for the house. At its most complex, it requires very complex configuration. Because utilities today must pay above market rates for solar generated home power, they must watch carefully to make sure that the homeowner is not selling them “solar power” sourced from a backyard gasoline generator.

The answer is to get rid of the above market rates, and let the homeowner operate in the market. Distributed energy resources are first and foremost to serve the needs of the distributed site.

When I consider smart, distributed energy, I always call to mind the words of Doug Gwyn, when asked of a feature in UNIX: “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” We must be careful that we apply the same thinking to distributed energy.

To get more participants in smart energy, we must make it easier. A good start would to be to define the requirements for a smart energy-ready home. We can then see if builders would be willing to build them, and whether the market will bear the trivial costs, or at least trivial if designed in.