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CalTRACK’s trajectory

Steve Schmidt
 

Fellow CalTRACKers --

Due to travel schedules HEA will miss tomorrow's meeting but we wanted to provide related comments, specifically regarding the important topic of CalTRACK's trajectory.

As we approach our first working group anniversary, HEA has several concerns. Specifically:
  • Clear goals: our assumption is the goal of the working group is to promote improvements to CalTRACK that will benefit current and imminent P4P programs. But this goal hasn't been agreed upon by the group. Setting a clear goal should be one of the first priorities going forward.
  • Participation levels: to be vibrant and robust, open source software needs an active and committed constituency working directly with the code to help with enhancements & testing. Lack of activity in our working group could indicate there is either little support of CalTRACK or not a clear understanding of the importance of participating.
  • Timely updates: Since we formed we have approved exactly one enhancement, and it has yet to be deployed in any CalTRACK implementation. (A sample schedule for updates from a more vibrant open source community is shown at https://jcp.org/en/resources/guide.)
  • Funding: a possible solution to the current lack of participation & updates could be to fund experts to implement and test suggested improvements. Lacking funding, we rely on participants to offer "a substantial commitment of time and attention, which may and probably will go beyond a compensated work activity into a voluntary labor of love" (ref).
Based on nearly two years of CalTRACK-computed payments HEA believes there is much need for improvement: we do not believe the results have accurately & consistently presented energy savings. We have proposed methods to better assess accuracy & other enhancements that have not been taken up primarily due to the reasons stated above. Other parties have also submitted suggestions.

For NMEC to advance and for CalTRACK to become the de-facto standard for NMEC programs it is necessary to have a vibrant community working to improve it. This is not currently the situation. 

BruceM: Feel free to share with the Steering committee if you think it appropriate.

    -Steve


On Tue, Jan 7, 2020 at 8:01 AM Jon Koliner <jonk@...> wrote:

Hi CalTRACKers,

 

Happy New Year! I am seeking self-nominations to run for Working Group Chair for 2020. Help guide the future of CalTRACK and be a leader in Open Source Standards! Currently we have zero (0) interested individuals, and I would like to have at least two in the running. Please email me if you are interested! It would be great if you could tell me you’re in the running ASAP, then submit a candidate statement to me by Friday, January 17th.

 

The next meeting is Wednesday, January 22nd, at 10 AM Pacific. As a reminder, we will be kicking off voting, discussing process improvements for the Working Group, and discussing CalTRACK’s trajectory and use cases.

 

Thanks,

                                                                                                     

Jon Koliner

Apex Analytics, LLC

345 W. Washington Ave., Ste. 301  |  Madison, WI 53703

Office:  (303)590-9888, x106  |  Cell: (412)576-8100

jonk@...  |  www.apexanalyticsllc.com

 

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