Monday, March 1, 2010

THAT's why it's so difficult...

"A picture is worth a thousand words" -- how true that is sometimes. Trying to explain to folks at Alerton my involvement in the BACnet world was extremely frustrating because they couldn't put all the various pieces together. Eventually I just drew a diagram of the various BACnet-related organizations and committees, who talks to whom, and with my various roles (other than member or participant) spelled out, and the bubbles colored where I was an actrive participant. I pulled that out today and updated it -- there are new organizations such as BIG-China that have appeared since the last revision, and a few subcommittees or working groups that have wrapped up and gone home. The end result looks something like this (sorry the text is not legible at this reduction), based around ISO/TC205 (yellow), the BACnet committee (green), BACnet International (light blue) and BIG-EU (purple/magenta).




Recently I had a similar difficulty in just describing how I am connected to the Smart Grid efforts and the NIST Smart Grid Interoperability panel, and part of it was that even I didn't have a good image of how the various pieces fit together.


So I killed some time on the plane last week by researching the connections and sketching maps. My American supervisor said Friday he thought this might be a help to him, so I went ahead and drew it up -- again with the committees or organizations I work with in color. Once that was done, it was clear why it was hard to explain verbally. (For this posting I highlighted my name in yellow; some other colleagues are named in this diagram, and I see I missed one of their connections -- sorry, Tariq.)


1 comment:

  1. I think that your BACnet map would be a valuable addition to the bacnet.org web site.

    ReplyDelete