The Abandoned Digital Warehouse
Spanish Version — Much has been said about the large amount of reconstruction materials in the Palo Seco warehouse allegedly in the hands of the Electric Power Authority of Puerto Rico.
PREPA rejected the allegations that it had not distributed the contents of the warehouse. Regardless of the scope of the accusations vs. reality, from keeping it a secret to making full use of it, it is clear that PREPA has lacked transparency in inventory and accountability, resulting in mismanagement of essential resources. This lack of transparency is the same reason why there is a warehouse of digital solutions to inform and monitor electrical faults in complete abandonment.
This “digital warehouse” contains 73 repositories, each represented as a bubble in the following image. There are all kinds of applications, data mashups and even games. By moving the cursor through the circles, you can see a description of each repository. In this case, we see AEE Incidents:
Some of those applications are still in use today, although most were abandoned after the government shut down the CIO office in May of 2015 and serve only as concepts to show what was possible when the government opened the data in real time and in machine-readable format.
Four of these applications were related to reporting failures of the AEE, written in a variety of programming languages ranging from JavaScript to Python. Open and reusable, they could still be in use today and would have helped to better understand power failures and assist in the recovery process. Lets review them!
AEE Incidents
I was able to talk to one of the developers of this application, Raúl Ortiz, who told me that he remembers the Hackathon and the “roller coaster ride” that was “AEE Incidents” as if it were yesterday. Raúl comments:
The concept of “AEE Incidents” was simple: Use the “stream” of breakdowns reported by municipality / sector and report said event on Twitter, in the account of @AEEIncidents (https://twitter.com/aeeincidents).
Every so often our service was connected to the WebService of the AEE, it stored the events in a Database (PostgreSQL), and then it was in charge of publishing on Twitter the new and / or updated events. The events usually started as “Reported Breakdown” and then became “Assigned Personnel”. Each twit also included a hashtag with the town of the event to facilitate searches. In addition to the twitter feed, they created an online heat map of the towns that have the highest number of faults, whose URL was also included in the twitter feed description.
The sense of importance in doing something that had a positive impact for the people of Puerto Rico filled me with pride, both for me and for the rest of the team.
AEE Incidents released publicly on June 7, 2013. The bittersweet moment came a week after ‘tweeting’ breakdowns and presenting them on a map. The AEE forced us to deactivate the service. It was one of many battles that we lost in our efforts to digitize government operations. It was impossible to reason with PREPA to see how the app could be adapted or improved, leveraging what this talented group of programmers had developed. They emphasized that it stored historical data that made them look bad — something we saw as useful information to analyze trends and improve service! Wanting to hide information that is supposed to be public for frivolous reasons: “it makes us look bad” was simply a symptom of something bigger.
In the end, PREPA blocked access to the WebService, propitiating a blow to the morale of the technological community willing to collaborate and provide solutions for a better Puerto Rico. However, this community remains willing to be part of the solution. After Hurricane Maria, the Maria Tech Brigade was formed, led by Froilan Irizarry, Miguel Rios and Alberto Colón Viera. One of its members, José Padilla, developed a tool to maintain a historical record of the progress reported in Status.PR.
What’s Next?
In the very short-term, the AEE would do a favor to Puerto Rico if they open all of the complaints data so third-party developers and data scientists can help visualize them in a map and be more accurate with the reporting process. This would also facilitate independent assistance efforts and allow the technology community to provide a method to update on that progress. It would also serve the ‘due diligence’ process to privatize PREPA.
The Governor just announced that the Government will soon be initiating a three-phase process to privatize the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. The first phase consists in defining the legal framework and enacting legislation.
The Government Blockchain Association has an active working group exploring how blockchain technology may be used to address distribution and regulation challenges to increase the efficiency, security, resilience and sustainability.
Startups like LO3 Energy and Power Ledger are redefining concepts around energy transactions by enabling peer-to-peer energy sales and creating new ways to engage the market, while companies like Impact PPA seek to find new ways to fund new generation developments. These are just two examples of potential applications and use cases relevant to the energy sector.
We must make sure that future legislation is designed to leverage the unique benefits offered by blockchain technology in decentralizing energy retail and improving transmission stability. The fiscal board, on the other hand, should look into it for new mechanisms of project financing.
Join us this Thursday, January 25, at Piloto 151, in the first in a series of monthly events of the newly formed Government Blockchain Association — Puerto Rico Chapter, an organization of individuals and organizations that are interested in promoting blockchain-related solutions to government needs.
Expect to engage in open discussions about the Blockchain, how it works and a review of potential uses of the blockchain. We will also discuss the topic of how we can use the Blockchain to build a better electrical network.
The Government Blockchain Association is committed to helping people and governmental and public sector organizations understand, implement and benefit from the technologies and capabilities related to Blockchain.
