With the mileage reimbursement rate now up to 48.5 cents per mile. it may be of interest to walk through a cost analysis to see if videoconferencing can be justified. Here is a scenario:

Assume a monthly management meeting for an organization with 7 field offices and a central office. The seven field office managers travel to the Central Office for a meeting each month. The meeting takes about six hours. The Executive Director and staff are already at the Central Office and have no travel time. The seven field office people travel anywhere from 20-132 miles to get to the Central Office. Travel time and distance calculations were taken from Google Maps link.

We figure a total of 544 miles driven one-way, and a total of 13 person/hours driven.

We’re assuming that everyone drives their own vehicle, and is compensated at the 48.5 cent/mile rate for travel, and their hourly rate for their travel time.

The total mileage cost is $263.85

The total compensation rate for the hours traveled is $426.53

Total one-way travel cost is $690.37

Double the cost for the round trip $1380.74

And we haven’t even held our meeting yet! By the time we figure in a six hour meeting with everyone’s hourly rate figured in… $229.69 x 6 = 1378.13, the travel costs exceed the hourly costs for participation during the meeting.

Total calculated costs: 1380.75+1378.13 = $2758.88

Don’t like these numbers? Download the spreadsheet.

Would you settle on a brush and then go look for a painter that could use it? Or would you rather find a good painter and then let him use the brushes he sees fit for the task. Put like that, I’d wager few would argue for the former. But when it comes to technology, it happens all the time.

Interesting discussion with lots of comments.

From 37signals a group that has produced several web-based applications for a to-do list, and project management.

I find myself coming down in the middle of this question. Wearing my “network manager” hat, I’m in favor of as much standardization as possible, using development tools and operating system platforms which are well understood, and have support beyond that of a single local person. Wearing my “programmer” hat, I agree more strongly with the “good painter” idea. One thing I would always ask a programmer is: “What sorts of third-party tools and libraries have you developed/bought/learned that will leverage your ability to program in [insert programming language here…] ?”

The difference in productivity between an “outstanding” programmer and a merely competent one can be staggering. If you are paying by the hour, then you could be talking about a factor of 10 in cost difference…building an application for for hundreds instead of thousands, or thousands vs. tens of thousands.

Further down in the discussion there is a mention of passion…of inducing a person to not only be enthusiastic about your problem, but even passionate. I would settle for competence and enthusiasm over passion and incompetence any day.

Link

 In an opinion piece available today in the NYT, Tina Rosenberg describes how American companies are fawning over the Chinese market to the extent that they will sell their grandmothers to get a piece of the action.  Yahoo is particularly egregious. An excerpt:

In April 2004, a few weeks before the 15th anniversary of Beijing’s massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square, the top-ranking staff members of The Contemporary Business News in Hunan were called into a meeting. An editor read a message from the Communist Party’s propaganda department warning that protests or media coverage of the anniversary would not be tolerated as June 4 approached. Though the message was routine, the reporters were warned not to take notes.

But Shi Tao, one of the journalists, did. He e-mailed them to a Chinese dissident in America, who posted them on the Web. A few months later, Mr. Shi was arrested. This April, he was given 10 years in prison, a sentence the judge called lenient, for disseminating state secrets abroad.

How did the police find Mr. Shi? His newly published verdict states that the prosecution relied in part on information given to the government by Mr. Shi’s e-mail provider, Yahoo.

and further….

American companies like Microsoft and Cisco have all sold China security tools and firewalls that China has turned into political controls. The companies argue that it is not their fault if China misuses standard politically neutral technology. They are right, but many foreign Internet companies in China have gone beyond neutrality. Some, including Yahoo, signed a pledge of “self-discipline” in 2002, promising to follow China’s censorship laws. Many Internet portals actively censor their Chinese Web sites.

Snitching on a client to totalitarian police is still another category of bad behavior, a move that should shrivel the keyboard fingers of Yahoo users everywhere. Since Chinese legal verdicts so rarely come to light, it is unclear how commonly this occurs. It has always been easy to imagine China’s government asking Internet companies for the e-mail of, say, a foreign businessman competing against a Chinese business or government entity. Now it is easy to imagine Yahoo complying.

The company admits it linked the e-mail to Mr. Shi’s telephone for the police. Its only comment has been a brief declaration that its local subsidiaries must obey local laws, regulations and customs. But according to the verdict, the Yahoo subsidiary that turned in Mr. Shi is in Hong Kong. It has no more obligation to obey China’s security laws than does Yahoo in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Having spent many billable hours removing the Yahoo instant messenger from people’s computers,  I think Yahoo is a internet parasite. What value does it add exactly?  And now, behind the smiley faces and pop-up ads, Yahoo contributes openly to the gulag.   

My favorite is “Enumerating Badness”

Why is “Enumerating Badness” a dumb idea? It’s a dumb idea because sometime around 1992 the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness. For every harmless, legitimate, application, there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of malware, worm tests, exploits, or viral code. Examine a typical antivirus package and you’ll see it knows about 75,000+ viruses that might infect your machine. Compare that to the legitimate 30 or so apps that I’ve installed on my machine, and you can see it’s rather dumb to try to track 75,000 pieces of Badness when even a simpleton could track 30 pieces of Goodness. In fact, if I were to simply track the 30 pieces of Goodness on my machine, and allow nothing else to run, I would have simultaneously solved the following problems:

* Spyware
* Viruses
* Remote Control Trojans
* Exploits that involve executing pre-installed code that you don’t use regularly


Link

Microsoft Small Business Server is the Microsoft answer to Linux; a small-scale server for a single-server network environment…ideally an organization’s first dedicated server. Pricing is in the $499.00 range for a total of five users. The system includes Windows 2003 server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and a host of ancillary server and service products all designed, (that is, restricted) to work on a single machine.  There is an upper limit of the number of connections. 

The programs come on five CDs.  By booting the first CD, you go into a typical Windows 2003 server setup routine, and you end up with a Windows 2003 server, which then runs several scripts to install additional software, including Active Directory, and Exchange.

Once installation is complete, you receive a screen with a “to-do” list which suggests other bits of SBS to install, and and which discusses security issues, and how to solve problems that arose during the installation.

 I installed this on an older Dell workstation with a 40 gigabyte hard drive and a 2.8Mhz processor, and 512K of RAM.    

Running list of statistics, both good and bad about the current state of the world.

Found in this week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy — a survey of giving habits of the baby boomer generation.

The executive summary is located here. The “summary” is quite comprehensive. It is made available as a .pdf file, and requires you to register with a name and eMail address.

How citizens’ groups destroy themselves

One largely overlooked cause of low levels of citizen involvement is the internal dynamics of all-volunteer groups. Lack of attention to what can go wrong inside a group means countless grassroots initiatives wither and die without achieving anything. The problem is quite simply that many citizens groups drive away their most able members. In a typical arc, a new member will step forth to work with others on some public issue, last for a relatively short time, then disappear back into private life, never to be heard from again. A glimmer of green then nothing. What causes grassroots rot?

Found in the NonProfit OneLine News

Random notes. I’m trying to lower the stacks on my desk.

Working with our distributed videoconferencing exercise program this morning, our instructor and camera crew are at the video studio…I’m in my home office logged into the studio multi-point control unit to monitor all the connections with our patients in their homes, (we’ve got 7 connected today), and our chief engineer is logged in from the Bahahmas. All staff, CE, studio and myself are logged into an instant messenger. The CE is supposed to be on vacation, but always takes pride in demonstrating “conspicuous connectivity.” Last time I was in the studio, he showed me his car, located in the parking lot a quarter mile away, on a GPS screen on his computer.

Occasionally, I have to just step back in amazement that all this stuff works.

From Kim Kommando’s newspaper column: There is a free add-on to eliminate spam for OutLook Express located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/spambayes. Once I found this, I downloaded it from a mirror server in St. Petersburg.

A commercial spam eliminating progam is available from Symantec.
Cost is about $40.00 retail (you can pay, download, and install it in about a half hour.) Tried this to mitigate a bad case of inbound spam that didn’t seem to respond to tweaking at the server end. Further recommendations for anti-spam programs are in the current issue of Consumer Reports and on their web site.

The July issue of VON (Voice over the Network Magazine) has an interview with Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University. Schulzrinne and his colaborators are authors of major papers for and the inventor of SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol. . SIP is a major building block for making telephone connections over the internet.

Looks reasonable.