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<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=886370809-27092009>A very
thoughtful reflection on experience with "cloud computing" from a community
informatics perspective (that strongly supports Parminder's earlier
thoughts...</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=886370809-27092009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN class=886370809-27092009>Thanks
Rean!</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=886370809-27092009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=886370809-27092009>MBG</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=2 face=Arial><SPAN
class=886370809-27092009></SPAN></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr lang=en-us class=OutlookMessageHeader align=left><FONT size=2
face=Tahoma>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B>
ci-research-sa-owner@vancouvercommunity.net
[mailto:ci-research-sa-owner@vancouvercommunity.net] <B>On Behalf Of </B>Rean
van der Merwe<BR><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, September 26, 2009 11:57
AM<BR><B>To:</B> ci-research-sa@vancouvercommunity.net<BR><B>Subject:</B> Re:
[CIResearch-SA] Cloud Computing<BR><BR></FONT></DIV>A few thoughts on the buzz
of "cloud computing" from first hand experience - and I hope the ideas are more
than tech-speak ...
<DIV>Nothing that means to be conclusive, just a few "stones in the bush".
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>We run a few dedicated internet servers that support community websites,
and were very interested in the idea. The principles, more than the geek-ness,
were what attracted.</DIV>
<DIV>In theory, we could replace the physical, sometimes troublesome machine we
had in a room at a local service provider, with a small share in an almost
infinite "cloud" of machines. To think through the benefits, the
nearest analogy I could make was the difference between one full time
person, and a group of part timers doing work. If the full time person stops
what they do, output drops to zero. In a group, if any one stops, it has a small
impact on output - particularly if the rest seamlessly take over the shortfall.
Better than that - we could expand and contract the virtual "workforce" to meet
immediate requirements, again seamlessly. So if we suddenly required extra work
to be done, we would not have to formally contract another worker - the group
would simply allocate more resource to us.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>And all this for lower cost than our own machine!</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>The practical reality explains why we still have a real machine in a room -
at the end of the cloud market where most of us operate, the idea creates a
virtual "tragedy of the commons." </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>This larger group of workers, in computing terms, the "cloud" of servers,
were also great from the service providers point of view. They could allocate
tasks so that the cloud as a whole, the workforce, were constantly at optimum
capacity. In practice, our sites performed as if they were under "load" 24/7 -
everything was constant, but slow. Since our sites were not resource hungry, the
arrangement meant that we were effectively constantly allocating some of our
resource to folk that were abusing the situation. When I looked at the
discussion forums of several large providers of cloud services, I found my
experience was not unique. Most who cared about the responsiveness of their
service were soon leaving the clouds.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>A second experience brought a more worrying aspect of the cloud idea home
to me. That internet services are constantly being aggregated upwards. In other
words, we are relying on larger and larger organisations to provide the services
we have come to be dependant on. Organisations that are effectively accountable
to themselves only, to the income of their share holders. Only mass protest has
the impact to shift them - but protest we rely on their services to be able to
make...</DIV>
<DIV>My practical experience - we paid for a service from Google to filter spam
in our email system, the same filter used in Google mail. When we ran into
trouble, I naturally mailed tech support thinking we'd be up and running in no
time....but got no response. Two years, near a dozen attempts later, we have
basically given up and written off the money. The nearest thing to a response
was an automated email directing us to yet another inhuman interface.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>It was a thrill when folk realised the internet could take on all sorts of
power and bureaucracy to potentially build a more pragmatically democratic
society. I fear that in the place of these earlier bureaucracies, with civic
minded constitutions imperfect as they are, we are cheering along something
altogether more worrying. Facebook is now by some definitions the largest
"community" on earth, but a community all the same that is traded as stock for
profit. We read recently about Skype potentially being shut down because of a
dispute over intellectual property - the developers did not sell rights to the
underlying technology to eBay when they traded the brand - the company and its
community of users.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>I'll stop here - the mail is starting to read like a blog post. But the
ideas hopefully relevant to CI and enthusiasm about the cloud.</DIV>
<DIV>I liked the much more coherent take on the topic here: <A
href="http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi?table_of_contents">http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi?table_of_contents</A></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Rean</DIV>
<DIV><BR>
<DIV>
<DIV>On 26 Sep 2009, at 07:37, Michael Gurstein wrote:</DIV><BR
class=Apple-interchange-newline>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV><!-- Converted from text/plain format -->
<P><FONT size=2>Good question Margaret--the short answer is computing where
the software (and data) does not reside on the local computer but in some
central data bank and is accessed as and when needed for us. Gmail is a good
example of computing from the "cloud".</FONT></P>
<P><FONT size=2>M<BR><BR></FONT></P><FONT
size=2></FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>