Dear Committee folks:

Here's a little ramble/synopsis of my thoughts after our last meeting of the Lane County Y2k Steering Committee.

DOING IT RIGHT IN A TIME CRUNCH

Rick and I spent a good hour and a half after the meeting reviewing some more details and I have to say that I'm pleased with your choice of Rick. He's frank, quick, bright, and seems to be quite thorough.

His biggest challenge may be one I often have myself - he knows that, in order to understand what you're going to have to both ask others to do and critique the results effectively, you have to get in there and do it yourself.

Since the time factor with this project is absolutely insane (and I've been reading the personal diaries, via internet mailings, of Y2k managers around the world for months now), he doesn't have the time to do that as well as it takes - if we really are going to be focusing almost entirely on Priority 6 & 7 (human endangering) Objects, then the process itself is a Priority 7 and should be treated as such.

LANE COUNTY CITIZENS TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH TEAM

This leads to my suggestion for the immediate formation of what I'll call the Lane County Citizens Technology Research Team. This team would be made up of people in Lane County/Oregon who have a proven background in Y2k research already. I know them because of their participation in other Y2k Forums in the country, including our own. They have the resources to most quickly seek the URLS - URLS of the total databases of compliant or non-compliant equipment; URLS of freeware that works; URLS of documents and communications and recovery strategies that others have already done and placed on the web, precisely for you to use to make your job easier.

This team can begin to provide support data to Rick, Jim, Zoe and Jackie and the rest of the y2k department coordinators. What your staff needs right now are fast answers to critical questions such as the following:

1) What is the best software or hardware checker for the object? If your committee has data, it can make choices. A Citizens Team can help seek out the data and provide it to the staff.

2) What are the counties with advanced y2k projects doing with communication and budget? A Citizens Team can find the web-based newsletters of these counties and other organizations and share them with Mike Milosovich and the rest of the Committee.

3) What is the ongoing status of critical shared infrastructures like power, telecomm, fuel, transport, etc? A Citizens team can participate in tracking this information by perusing official websites, copying the Committee heads on best practices suggested by the various industries (example: who is currently tracking the best practices suggestions for y2k put out by the IEEE and communicating that to this Committee?)

If the County is not following standard best practices publicly declared by the leading industry associations (like IEEE) and there is an accident or major fiscal loss *and* the county can be showed to be spending money on what might be seen as "less important" tasks than reviewing, acting upon and publicizing emergency best practices, liability seems obvious.

The way I would suggest the use of such a Citizens' Team is to keep it diverse and well-spread amongst staff, with individuals assigned for short blocks of time to particular staff members, rather than acting as an independent body that must stay organized. The Citizens could sign up for one month stints. If they'd proved helpful, the staff could ask them to do another month. I know folks in Eugene who would be proud to help.

Example:

The person Rick has tasked to do the Power assessment might have one or two of the Citizens' Team helping to gather data from URLs on the net and e-mails (free!) to responsible parties - i.e., self-declared status vs. NERC status (still self-reported) vs. independent critique and research into the power company. Such a preliminary assessment might find that one of the power companies the county depends on may be in a very tight cash or information bind, unable to order parts until the last minute, or even the "too late" minute. Maybe the parts aren't available. Will the county spend extra money moving the operation at the last minute, or can the county do some preliminary research now and make wise choices about locating operations while there's still time?

Imagine the results if Rick can get 10-20+ hours of hard research on the power question donated, in the space of a week or two, or perhaps in only a day or two? Imagine if the request of the volunteers is to communicate the information to Rick via the Forum Software (I demonstrated this software briefly to him and have informed a number of you about this via the listserv and e-mails back in the summer of 1998). What your group would have is hard data, more verifiable than "data" usually is because it's on the Web, posted and archived where anyone can read it, 24/7/365.

And this is where the positive citizen benefit comes in. This data can be shared with the public. Everything that is relevant to county business continuity and and county health and safety is relevant to the citizens. When you facilitate the compilation of this data (by providing a project as a focal point), and then share it, businesses and individuals all over the county - the state, even the nation - can benefit.

You will need to fund a volunteer coordinator, and should. I suggested to Peter a few months back that LCOG and the cities of Eugene and Springfield join together to fund this person - the data the Team generates will be useful to everyone. There will be no doubt in the public's mind that this is a good thing, worthy of public funds.

I actually have worked this out in much more detail - see Lane County Proposal

or

Lane County Collaborative Forum- "Lane County Proposal" section.

What I'm proposing to you now is a variation of that proposal. I believe it will work. I have several people I can ask right now to help us on such a team. If you look carefully at the suggestions, you'll realize that they're not just about emergency preparedness - they are steps that create better information flow amongst all of us, and will be relevant tools for a long time to come.

INFORMATION SHARING

One of the biggest challenges I see ahead of us is the spread of bad information. Dealing with bad info by limiting the information stream till it only contains approved/verified information is not the most efficient way to deal with a dynamic information stream.

If the County invests now in fast, open, and pragmatic information streams, it will do more to create the tools to offset bad information and rumors than anything else possible. Sure, more rumors will fly, but more voices will be available to correct them. As the rumors fly, the mandate of the community will become more apparent - the "reasonable positions" will emerge. The Victor Bocs, Alan Siporins, KEZIs, Alan Pittmans, and Register Guard Mailbags will take up the issues and deepen them. (scary perhaps, but really quite healthy, IMO).

The reason why rumors will fly is that as soon as enough folks start doing this checking and find problems, as soon as the equipment people have ordered becomes back-ordered or late or unavailable, as soon as a single country goes critical because it isn't going to fix its systems, people will be in a scramble to solve the problems they've been putting off. This will create many streams of information flowing as everyone re-invents the wheel - the inventory, the assessment, the review process. Wouldn't it be nice to point folks to a county-based source that could actually help them?

BUDGET INFORMATION THAT WORKS

One of Rick's concerns at the meeting was how to present the budgeted repairs so that private news companies like the Register Guard wouldn't exaggerate the "findings" into saleable headlines that the County would have to spend a lot of precious time correcting and responding to. A useful way to handle this might be to break the budget down into Dollars by Status, and then publishing it on the County's web page. This would give the news media a tool they could refer people to. The information could be dynamic, readily and cheaply changed or corrected, and it would convey to the public the volatile nature of the information.

A more complete breakdown of the dollars might be:

Total inventoried object dollars

Object dollars - UNKNOWN, rather than Untested
Object dollars -

COMPLIANT PER TEST

Test - Preliminary
Test - Full-field tested in live environment

COMPLIANT PER VENDOR

Object dollars - NON-COMPLIANT

Action Strategy - Replacement; target compl. date: ____
a. Previously scheduled replacement (in .budget)
b. Unscheduled replacement (new budget item)

ii. Replacement status:

Not ordered
Spec'd but not ordered
Ordered but not delivered
Delivered but not installed
Installed but not tested

Action Strategy - Repair; target completion date: ____

a. Previously scheduled repair (in budget)
b. Uncheduled repair (new budget item)

ii. Repair status (assumes parts are in, otherwise should be guided by Replacement strategy):

No specs yet
Spec'd but not scheduled
Scheduled but not staffed
Staffed but not completed
Completed but not tested

Breaking these dollars down into essentially Unknown $, Compliant-Tested $, Compliant-per Vendor $ (potentially non-compliant), and Non-Compliant $ categories will be much more useful for all of us. I recommend the Compliant breakdown because the single loudest argument I've heard about compliance is whether or not it's a tested compliance. It's standard op procedure now to consider equipment verified by vendor statement to be essentially unverified.

The breakdown I suggest above should be accessible through the Object Inventory database anyway, as each of these different criteria will likely become relevant at some point.

A scenario to plan for: It's February, 2000. A critical vendor was just purchased by another competitor, and a whole stream of parts from the purchased vendor has just become unavailable or will soon be. Sorting your OI by Priority 7, Undelivered parts/Vendor will quickly net you the list of itesms affected by this glitch and you can perform workarounds more efficiently.

Remember, every smart choice that the county makes can be replicated by others, ensuring even more resilience for our community at large. And yes, this will have impacts, but I suggest that the largest impact you'll have for the next few months is setting the example of getting to work, and being very thoughtful, thorough, and reasonable about this.

Thanks for your patience in reading through this.

It is called The Oregon Project. If you like it, we can have it fixed up (again, it will cost some $ but we're not talking much. The fellow who crafts it will maintain it for a VERY low fee, and the amount you will save in staff time will be more than off-set by the costs)

My own time is going to be limited to only a couple of free hours a week for this Committee, including meeting time. I will try to share as much with you as I can, as efficiently as I can. If you do end up with some consultant dollars, let me know. If you're spending anywhere from 50$-100$ per hour, I am personally available through Sussman and Associates out of Portland. The low rate is based on whether or not I can job out some of the task to my staff. The higher rate is when I have to do it myself (and pay others to do my Red Barn and other work).

I am currently in line for assisting the state of Oregon's NIST and OMEP groups, via Sussman, and we anticipate the contract to come through in the next couple of months. This will be part of a project that analyzes rural manufacturing vulnerability to Y2k and strategizes prioritization and assessment. I wish to work with this group because I think they can contribute a lot to my own personal, civic, and business vitality over the next few years. That is the same reason I am participating here, with you, in this committee.

Thank you for your attention.

Best,

Cynthia

-- Cynthia Beal (cabeal@efn.org), February 24, 1999