Collaboration  - "Working Together to Achieve"


The impact from deep collaboration is much more than just our's, we inherit large pieces of well thought out, proven and tested evolving daily technologies which allows us to know more than we are capable of knowing by ourselves.

Collaborative thinking is аn interactive process that involves a higher lеvеl оf communication and a mindset that іѕ different than working alone.  We need to better understand the complex mosaic and rapid creation potential of our collaborative teams. To do the simplest of tasks we now need to collaborate which includes people, devices, apps, databases, electrical grids and much more. Covid forced us all to collaborate because we could not exist without online collaboration in everything we do. We are quickly learning what the younger folks already knew that the anytime anywhere power and speed of online collaboration is amazing.

As an industry who in the past traditionally has not collaborated we have isolated ourselves and greatly stunted our growth and potential. Collaboration is a new experience for us. Think of the powerful collaboration of Uber and Google Maps, The Uber model is so intertwined in that collaboration it is hard to separate each player's value and functions. That's the kind of thinking we need. When we collaborate, what value do they bring to us and what value do we bring to them? Our collaborative presence needs to achieve an identifiable difference. .

My most recent industry collaboration was done very quickly within the last couple of weeks, all online, we put together our 12 education sessions for Las Vegas. Great support and collaboration.

2022 Las Vegas AHR Expo Educational Sessions  our 22st year presenting at AHRExpo.com

The AHR Expo (International Air-Conditioning, Heating, Refrigerating Exposition) will return to Las Vegas Jan. 31 - Feb. 2, 2022, after a forced cancellation in 2021 planned for Chicago. The highly anticipated 2022 Show will be the industry’s first major in-person gathering following pandemic shutdowns. Registration is free and attendees are encouraged to register early on ahrexpo.com. Show management is elated to sound the horn, “We’re back!”

AutomatedBuildings.com is extremely pleased to collaborate with AHRExpo and provide free education sessions at the Vegas show. We have 12 free education sessions proposed. Our theme is navigating the adoption of smarter buildings with sustainable BAS.

This industry Collaboration is now in its 18th year, Cybersecurity Awareness Month - observed every October, continues to be a collaborative effort between government and industry to ensure both businesses and consumers are aware of the cybersecurity pitfalls and have the resources and knowledge to stay safer and more secure online. Amazing and very necessary.

A great industry example of collaboration is The Project Haystack Organization (www.project-haystack.org), a collaborative community addressing the challenge of utilizing semantic modeling and tagging to streamline the interchange and interoperability of data among different systems, devices, equipment, and software applications, today announced the next issue of the Project Haystack Connections Magazine is in development and is issuing a Call for Contributed Articles and Advertising Sponsors for their fall 2021 issue. Connections Magazine is the organization's biannual publication on data interoperability, tagging models, reference implementations, applications, and use case stories from the global community working together to make device data easier to use across applications for the built environment. Previous issues can be found at: https://marketing.project-haystack.org/connections-magazine/past-issues.


Our AutomatedBuildings.com  October theme is, Collaboration, Integration, Education. We need to better understand the complex mosaic of our collective collaborative teams which we now are all part of. We are now required to work with the strangest of bedfellows and it's in addition to that, there's our close relationship with edge devices, clouds, apps, AI databases, and the rapid evolving electrification of everything. The sustainability of the electrical grid's rapid evolution depends on everything collaborating. So collaboration and understanding what it is we need to collaborate with is our goal.

This caught my eye is a white paper on AI benefits  on the grid energy transformation. "The efforts to decarbonize the global energy system are leading to an increasingly integrated and electrified energy system, with much more interaction between the power, transport, industry and building sectors. The move to decarbonize the energy supply is also leading to high levels of decentralization in the power sector. This will require much higher levels of coordination and flexibility from all sector players – including consumers – in order to manage this increasingly complex system and optimize it for minimal greenhouse gas emissions."

That's very interesting, because that's all going to be more control, more collaboration, more integration, and more education.

Monday Live!'s October theme is Industry Collaboration. This week, we'll be joined by Terry Sharp, President of the Building Controls Industry Association (BCIA) in the UK. Join us to learn about how we can work collaboratively to further the deployment of smarter buildings.

This also caught my eye, a discussion between Brian Turner, Nicholas, our contributing editor, Knowledge transformation, solving metadata interoperability challenges in practice.

Choosing whom to Collaborate with, in this article our Contributing Editor Scott Cochrane has cause some great discussion on LinkedIn    BYE I T!    Well, that’s it, I’m officially dropping the gauntlet on IT departments of businesses that exist in buildings with a modern BAS system within. The business of IT is to connect, protect, manage, deliver, all sorts of cool stuff in a digital world. They are the heart and soul of our business and are a part of every aspect, but does a business IT department really need to be a part of their building's comfort, safety and security systems?

A great counter from James Dice and his group supporting I T solutions

But the true answer is it depends so who you collaborate with and when is complex.  Collaboration is a complex moving target often driven by your client.

Our Collaborating world is ever expanding as this graphic clearly shows in this LinkedIn post.  If all sites had their data accessible from a published API or an open standard like MQTT, how does that change our approach to the Smart Infrastructure space?

Collaboration now extends between edge devices and clouds and is well explained in this article  Why Cloud and Edge Intelligence Need Each Other in the Smart Building Space

There is a common misconception that AI at the edge replaces AI in the cloud and vice-versa.  When you look at the challenges that each of these two approaches has independently, it becomes clear that they need each other. Let’s talk about the cloud first.

There are now dozens of cloud providers and thousands of software companies creating innovative ways to turn data into “actionable insights”. These solutions usually live in the cloud which allows them to easily scale the solution across multiple clients.  These cloud applications also require large amounts of data usually generated from multiple sources. Getting this data out of an IT system has its challenges but it is manageable. Read complete article

We need an industry image change to encourage younger collaborators to join our industry from a discussion with input from the UK at Monday Live

We have a perception that we are about dirty water in pipes when that's not really what we do. We were about high tech making buildings perform efficiently and maximizing the user experience of those buildings and occupant comfort. We have a pool of motivated and highly taught and educated engineers coming into the marketplace. But we're not describing ourselves adequately. But we don't talk about what we do. We talk about how we make valves and actuators dance. In reality, we're making buildings work. And that's exciting. But we don't talk about that. That's not how we market ourselves. We need to tell the story about how we make these buildings work, and how we take this technology these students have learned through schools and colleges, and how it can be applied, I think what we do is very exciting. It's about attracting the talent of those enthusiastic young people. Attract, retain them, and develop a regime to replace that old apprenticeship system that those big four manufacturers used to follow. So we need to have a structured training program to retain, develop, harness and energize those enthusiastic young people. This is an opportunity, not a threat. ....Amen!

To grow our industry we need to embrace collaboration with those we do not yet know allowing us to know more than we are capable of knowing by ourselves.

Let's all Collaborate and work together to achieve


WE ARE THE COALITION FOR SMARTER BUILDINGS We envision a world where people live, learn, work, and play in healthy, comfortable, and productive built-spaces, enabled by smart digital technologies that ensure sustainable and economically responsible development and operation.

This is a free industry collaboration tool that shows how we best collaborate with each other at our clients purpose  Using the Monday Live - Open Source Stack Tool

We have been at this industry collaboration for a while.  In 2013 we started Connection Communities Collaboration group on LinkedIn at every AHRExpo we have met with our last meeting in Orlando.

"2020 Vision" AHRExpo Orlando, Our Eighth Annual Connection Community Collaboratory

The connection community is growing while rapidly changing how we connect with a plethora of enterprise software platforms and new connection standards like 5G CBRS. We are reminded of the dot-com days of radical change.  Can so many platforms exist without dot-crashing? Hard to say as these platforms require an amazing community of practice to be successful, which has more value than the actual platforms. Maybe a better way to view each platform is as a community of practice COP, not a software identity. In this manner, I feel success can be achieved using the COP that created that platform. It is not the secret sauce of the platforms but the people that bring the solutions and structure and never before done features. When they are removed, the platform value is questioned.  Recalibrate for 2020 provides an amazing capture with opinion and observation. At our 8th Collaboratory, experts will speak of their 2020 vision. Lots of scopes to be blurred out in only five minutes by the industry expert who will also provide their visions for Integrating the OCCUPANT EXPERIENCE into Smart Buildings.

ControlTrends Video of 2020 Connection Community Collaboratory

The 8th Annual Connection Community Collaboratory offers useful insights into the future of HVAC and Smart Building Controls.
Hosted and moderated by automatedbuildings.com Ken Sinclair, this panel of Industry Experts including Lynxspring’s Marc Petock, Sky Foundry’s John Petze, Contemporary Control’s George Thomas, Distech’s Martin Villeneuve, and EnOcean’s Troy Davis offer invaluable insights into the future of HVAC IOT and Smart Building Controls.

Join us in our ninth Collaboration in Vegas 2022 Las Vegas AHR Expo Educational Sessions