Let’s find the collective wisdom to fix our planet

The story of petroleum is our own story (Rick Rolston)

The consensus is in…we’ve screwed up our planet with fossil fuels!

Elimination of fossil fuels has become a very personal mission for me.  Genealogy tells me that my own great uncle (and cousins) were oil entrepreneurs, drilling some of the first oil wells in the world (1860s Petrolia ON), and establishing the very first gasoline station in Canada (June 1907, Vancouver).  No, the inheritance didn’t come our way!

It no longer matters if climate change is  true or not; the collective decision has been made.  Now we need to find the collective wisdom to fix it.

Note:  GHG reduction isn’t enough.  Zero emissions is a solid goal to shoot for.  I propose that we go for global zero-emissions by 2040.  We can’t leave to our own children and grandchildren to pick up the dirty mess.

Finding collective wisdom is not easy

As I write this post…with coverage of politics and world events on television in the background…I sometimes wonder if, at certain levels, collective wisdom even exists!   If it doesn’t, our planet’s future is bleak, and the fossil fuel era will end with what economists refer to as “the tragedy of the commons.”

If however, within local communities, collective wisdom can be captured and channelled to more sustainable decisions, we can make the future bright for future generations.

BuiltSpace set out to capture better knowledge and wisdom from the bottom up

Ten years ago, our small team set out to tackle this big data challenge.   We realized that people are the key to knowledge, and the ultimate source of wisdom.

We believed that if we started with people servicing building assets, then building communities, then entire digital cities,  and now energy and water infrastructure, we could help people change the built environment for the better.

By digitizing these assets (and services) we capture experiential outcomes and asset condition data.   Outcomes, observations and history inform wisdom, and wisdom allows decision makers really “know”, act, and measure the new outcomes.  With experience and knowledge comes wisdom.

Here’s one of the most basic problems we’ve found in gaining visibility and knowledge of  buildings:

“I completed that work order!”

…is not a measurement, data, information, or knowledge, and may not even be fact!

Existing enterprise work systems  support reactive…(ie. there’s a failure, go fix it)…operating processes.   BuiltSpace transforms theses traditional field services to proactively measure and manage change, across large (city) scale asset portfolios, and the communities they support.

Wisdom will save our planet.

Rick@BuiltSpace.com