22-Nov Energy E-Dialog

Submitted by Dwight Owens on Thu, 11/23/2006 - 9:16am.
I watched/read yesterday's e-dialog, and would like to offer my neophyte observations: 1. Seeing comments fly in willy-nilly was somewhat disorienting, and I was thinking it might be better to have the discussion threaded. Also I found it hard to navigate around the blocks of quotes within quotes within quotes within quotes. Threading the discussion would reduce or eliminate the need for quote blocks. 2. I was not able, with my feeble brainpower, to follow both the presenter discussion and the audience discussion, so I ignored the audience discussion. It's like having a chat feature during a web conference; to me it's too much dividing of attention muddling up all the discussion into a foggy mental chatter. 3. I wish the dialog site could be set up to auto-refresh. That technology is available, and would be better than having to constantly hit the refresh button. 4. I was surprised that the presenters focused so much on energy efficiency/conservation instead of alternative energy. Of course, it is very practical and effective to harvest "negawatts" through efficiency, but I expected to see more of a future view. No discussion of wave power. Only passing mention of wind and solar. A quick comment or two about geothermal and co-gen. But how quickly the focus shifted to finances, taxes, codes, and regulations! I would have been interested, though, to see how presenters might have responded to a question like, "What will our energy infrastructure look like and how will our buildings be heated 50 or 100 years from now?" 5. I noticed close links between transportation and energy topics, as transportation issues kept creeping into the discussion.
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Thanks so much for your

Submitted by Levi. Waldron on Tue, 11/28/2006 - 8:43am.

Thanks so much for your feedback on the forum technology. I fully agree with your suggestions - we need a substantial overhaul of the software, and it will happen as soon as budget permits. It was especially confusing last week because of some new bugs caused by a system upgrades - those bugs were supposed to be worked out for this week but it's uncertain now due to the Victoria "snowstorm."

agree

Submitted by Darcy1 on Fri, 11/24/2006 - 12:16pm.

I agree with Dwight's assessment of the technology. Honestly forum software is not meant to be used for real-time conversations, and it quickly becomes tough to follow as the comments aren't linear (4 people preparing a response at the same time, and by the time the 4th gets done and enters his comments the discussion has already moved somewhere else).

Having 2 separate forums at the same time was also a lot to follow even with tabbed browsing (it was also painful to have the threads flipping from oldest first to newest first seemingly at random).

In general with forums different topics go in different threads, in order to keep conversations coherent. You may want to look at doing this, so that whenever you ask the panel a new question or give them a new topic of discussion, a new thread begins. That way people who want to continue on the current thread don't get overrun by comments and dialogue on the new discussion.

It would also be marvelously helpful if somewhere there was an ongoing indicator of who the presenters are, if you stay with forum tech I reccomend putting signatures in their profiles, so at the bottom of each thread it says "John Smith, CEO of Energy Enterprises, Vancouver BC". With 8 or so panelists, remembering who is who and what their background is is easy to forget after the intros.

My 0.02 on the tech, the debate itself had lots of interesting stuff and was a lot to fit in a few hours!

Mindset vs performance measures

Submitted by shelley on Thu, 11/23/2006 - 6:59pm.

I found it interesting that the e-panel also commented that the energy issue was one of mindset not just performance measures. In fact Rod made the link that performance measures have not only to be metrically sound, but in order to understand the higher order measures one had to have a worldview that encompassed them.
... an example that I would be curious about is the inquiries into the zero point energy field -- what mindset will it take to move that research from the physics lab and the philosophy classroom (if it's even there) to the workbench. In fifty years will we be literally pulling our energy out of "thin air"??

thanks for process input

Submitted by shelley on Thu, 11/23/2006 - 6:46pm.

Thanks to Dwight for his suggestions on improving the experience for the e-audience. I agree it is a bit like jumping waves in the e-audience while being deluged by the tsunami in the e-panel :-)

I was also struck by how

Submitted by chrisling on Thu, 11/23/2006 - 2:13pm.

I was also struck by how quickly the discussion turned to "finances, taxes, codes, and regulations" and I wonder if this is because the challenges are no longer technical - the challenges are encouraging uptake of existing technology.

What fiscal or other measures are used I suspect will largely answer the question Dwight posed above: "What will our energy infrastructure look like and how will our buildings be heated 50 or 100 years from now?"