Albert, Bryan, Lee, and Marc,
I've been thinking about the infrastructure issues for some time. It was good to talk to Albert, Bryan, and Lee Thursday, and I drew out some thoughts and went over them with Marc Friday. So this note is to respond to Bryan's note, and to attempt to put in words the picture that is in my mind relative to infrastructure.
First some philosophy.
Dynamic was formed to explore for natural resources in exchange for a % of what is found. To do this we will use the best people and the best technology available. These people and technologies form the Dynamic Professional NetWork. Dynamic will document everything and share it with the NetWork. Using web terms, where the network is the computer, the NetWork is Dynamic. Dynamic is not Roice Nelson, Richard Nehring, Bob Ehrlich, Sam LeRoy, Heloise Lynn, etc., rather it is the synergistic interaction among NetWork members and technologies.
There are several key players in the NetWork, some of whom have been given an opportunity to have an ownership of Dynamic:
There are others who are closely aligned with Dynamic, who will subcontract or work on projects for Dynamic, and who might get an opportunity for an ownership position at some time in the future:
One of the issues with the NetWork is to not let it grow too big before there is infrastructure and procedures in place. The goal is to be able to easily add and remove people from the NetWork, and when someone is removed to reset the NetWork and security so their are no compromises for those who are still participating. As Marc points out, I firmly believe that insufficient management of the NetWork up front will create lots of data which no one knows the quality of nor the value of. When the first project goes on-line there needs to be procedures in place to measure and monitor who accesses the project, who updates data files, what the value of those data files is, and allows project back-up, storage, purging from the system, etc. This same automatic cataloging of data type of process needs to occur within the offices of some of, or maybe most of, the members of the NetWork.
Given this background thinking, to Bryan's question:
http://www.walden3d.com/E and www.walden3d.com/dynamic/AMI007
- Timedex(SM), temporal indexing (overlaying each spatial index and a function of: - Geologic Time (millions of years) - Historical Time (thousands of years) - E&P Project Time (tens of years) - Dynamic CLP Project Time (months to years) - NetWork Time (minutes to months) - Knowledge Backbone(SM), activity indexing, seehttp://www.walden3d.com/knowledge_backboneSM
Right now, by the end of the first year Bryan's estimate that there be five sites on-line fits:
http://www.appliedgeophysics.com
http://www.bentz-engineering.com
I realize the key to Dynamic's success is at NRG Associates in Colorado Springs, Residuum Energy in Dickinson and Salt Lake, Chroma Energy in Sugar Land, EarthView Associates, and Lynn, Inc. near Westheimer in Houston. Each of these sites will have data and will be doing the real work, and they may choose to or not choose to get involved with the Dynamic Infrastructure. They each have the ability to do their work currently, to ftp files, or to put presentations on CD's. I do not want to distract them with this infrastructure stuff until it is proven to be working, until we know how much it is going to cost, what the measurable benefits are, and until each site is signed up to the cost and hastle of implementation.
For instance, Peter King at Cohere Technology, 713.688.0100x327, has an interesting distibuted solution based on storing data at central sites and allowing others to access this data via fiber from any other site. This is particularly useful for seismic data and some of the large arrays which will be used by Residuum. It is expensive, and yet the volumes of data Dynamic will be using can justify the expense if we are as successful as we anticipate. I like the idea of a mesh, where each node in the Dynamic Professional NetWork has the option to be connected directly to each other node in the Dynamic Professional NetWork, based on what the relationships between the nodes will be.
Anyway, hopefully this answers Bryan's questions and can be the start an infrastructure discussion for Dynamic. As mentioned on the phone, I do have a $200,000 budget in mind for this kind of work out of the first $2 million investment for the Gulf Coast AOI, and I expect Sam, as the Team Leader, will want to cut down on this infrastructure budget. Especially if he doesn't feel it provides him any benefit to run his project. Therefore I think it will be worthwhile to mature this discussion, maybe with some specific web page presentations as soon as possible. I will introduce the NetWork to ../dynamic/infrastructure after a couple of more e-mail iterations of the concepts. I expect lively discussion when we bring up the idea of a NetWork "tax" to cover infrastructure costs, and it is important to have our part of the conversation based on specific quantifiable measures of what the benefits or the return on this expense will be. It is my intention to use profits from Dynamic's success to implement new ideas, tools, procedures, etc. for Dynamic, for NetWork members, as well as for humanity (sorry if you didn't know what an idealist I was before this last sentance). We are having the next meeting of the NetWork from 10:00-2:00 on Friday the 23rd of February at II&T in Downtown Houston, and this is probably the ideal forum to introduce the discussion.
I will post this e-mail at: http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/infrastructure along with the conversation which follows. Bryan, Lee, and Marc, I would like to get a signed copy of the Confidentiality agreement before we go too far on this path (http://www.walden3d.com/NetWork/NetWork_Confidentility.pdf).
This page is at: http://www.walden3d.com/dynamic/infrastructure/010210.html