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History of the Power Globe

In 1989, Dr. Heydt, then at the National Science Foundation, put together a list of e-mail addresses taken from the NSF data base known as the “HP System.” This was a list of reviewers for the entire foundation. The names used were those who had participated in an NSF review in the power engineering program. The HP system was fraught with problems: many e-mail addresses were outdated and the list was poorly maintained. The idea of an e-mail bulletin board was described at the 1990 PES Winter Meeting and several useful suggestions were received on how to make use of the list.

At the 1990 PES Summer meeting, this was discussed further in connection with the possibility of forming a University Research Subcommittee of the Power Engineering Education Committee (PEEC). The idea was to use the subcommittee -- and potentially the list of names and e-mail addresses -- to network the community in matters of power research. Dr. Sarosh N. Talukdar of Carnegie Mellon University assisted in this matter and volunteered to use the computer at CMU as a host. The number of names on the list was in the 25-50 range, and all were at universities. The machine at CMU was called the Globe machine, and the name Power Globe was given to the list. Dr. Talukdar, assisted by Dr. Peter Sauer of the University of Illinois and Dr. Jerry Heydt -- then at Purdue -- put together the Power Globe.

Dr. Heydt composed the rules and edited the list, Dr. Talukdar made sure the computer implementation worked. There were a lot of problems since list editing was manual and often fell behind schedule. There were many disgruntled users who wanted their name added or removed in a timely way.

In about 1995, Dr. V. C. Ramesh, then a graduate student at CMU, was recruited by Dr. Talukdar to make sure that the list of names was maintained smoothly. This worked well initially but the list grew steadily in size, and it became clear that a manually-maintained e-mail list was not practical. The main additions to the list in this period were industry and government people on a worldwide scale. Dr. Ramesh completed his Ph.D. and left CMU for the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he continued to remotely maintain the Power Globe. This worked for a time, but maintenance of the list was still time-consuming.

In PEEC Research Subcommittee discussions, it was suggested that the operation of Power Globe might be streamlined by utilizing a more advanced listserver. North Dakota State was contacted in regards to the use of their listserver, which hosts over 1500 e-mail lists and employs software that is in common use at many universities. Dr. Don Stuehm of NDSU investigated and found that it would be possible for Power Globe to be hosted there.

On August 7, 1996, Dr. Heydt transferred the existing subscriber list to NDSU and the present listserver-based Power Globe was created. Dr. Mork has been the “list owner,” coordinating the configuration of the list and providing subscriber maintenance. The list owner task will be rotated among Power Globe Working Group members in the future.

Operating experience to date has been positive, with high reliability of service. Since most subscribers can now take care of their own subscription on a self-serve basis, maintenance has been minimal.