Next steps

I think I get it. And it’s not abstraction, or composability, or extensibility, or reliability, or separability or applicability or surfaces or interfaces or services, or parsimony, or abstraction or …

It was somewhere during the 8th hour of discussion, listening to the pain and frustration in Aaron’s voice, during the environmental conversation, maybe when he stopped Bill and said “say it without the –ilities.”

That’s what I think we must do. “say it without the –ilities.” I saw the 45 items, of which only 25 worth were writing as Jira issues as bizarre. It was actually the questions that we need to answer, not in changes to the standard (for the most part) but in explanation of the standard. Why does it look so weird? Why does it not look like other standards in this space? Why do something that is so different. What new power will it give the utilities and the wholesale market and the system suppliers. Explain the business results.

And that is something we don’t do. And we won’t do it in the Specification, because Specifications are not supposed to be discursive or argumentative, merely descriptive. And we won’t do it in the committee note, because OASIS committee notes are produced by nerds for nerds. It’s what we do.

And that’s what turns the original list, and the hard work done by Aaron and Jeremy and Marty into an invaluable asset to the TC. It reminds us of the business cases that needs to be made—and how it needs to be made.

We’ve all sat through position papers in PowerPoint. They are agony to me. But every now and then I remember that Reagan told his staff that if they were not able to put the meat in a one page summary, *they* had not done enough work to demand his attention yet. “Go and come back when you have figured it out yourself.”

This makes sense to me of all the issues, not just the problems. The spreadsheet is the case that needs to be made. Marty and Jeremy and Aaron have put the whole case together. They have written half the answers for us. I did not have the wit to recognize what they had handed us, because I was thinking of Jira issues and closeout and timing.

It is really the business case for EMIX. The submitters did not have all the answers, but they told us all the questions. It should be the basis of a non-normative product that would never come out of the OASIS process.

The TC needs to make it, but the TC process cannot take it there.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
– George Bernard Shaw.

Toby Considine
TC9, Inc

TC Chair: oBIX & WS-Calendar

TC Editor: EMIX, EnergyInterop

U.S. National Inst. of Standards and Tech. Smart Grid Architecture Committee

Email: Toby.Considine@gmail.com
Phone: (919)619-2104

http://www.tcnine.com/
blog: www.NewDaedalus.com

emix message