OED Principle

By talking to a range of potential users and thinking about a shared dashboard, OED developed important principles that guide our work. These are:

• All aspects of the project would be forever free to anyone. Our open source license legally guarantees this and all software we incorporate from other packages also abides by this. It also means OED is self-contained so you don't need to get or purchase other software to run an OED site.
• Advances to the work by anyone would be shared with all. This means everyone is required to share their work on the OED code base per our software license. It also means you can choose to modify the dashboard as you see fit.
• The OED project is driven by the needs of users. We seek input from the community and choose direction based on this.
• Data belongs to the site/user of OED. This means you should be able to easily export your data at any time.
• Anyone should be able to manage their site without paying someone to do it. This means we provide easy to use pages to add meters, aggregate and analyze data, perform site functions, etc. Non-IT people should be able to do this work.
• We would use modern technologies that could be maintained over time so the dashboard would have a long life and be high quality.
• People using the dashboard should get quick responses. We have defined this as getting a result in one second or less. This means we spend significant effort in optimizing the data techniques we use.
• The dashboard should provide both predefined and interactive views of energy usage. Sometimes you want to show a particular, predetermined view of energy usage to people and at others you want to be able to choose and interact with the data to support your work.
• The dashboard would work on any reasonable device from desktops to laptops to cell phones. This means we try to optimize the graphics to fit your device. It also means we minimize network transfers and computing needs by doing as much work as possible on the server.
• There would be no application to install. Early potential users told us that it should just work. That is why OED runs in any web browser.
• The dashboard should be reliable. We are proud that we have never lost any data at a site. We invest significant efforts in quality control so you can know that OED will work correctly. We are open about any limitations of the dashboard and keep public records of all issues.
• OED is vendor neutral. This means we are willing to accept data from any source and work with anyone to connect up information sources to the dashboard.

As you might expect, it is harder to develop a dashboard around these principles. We don't quickly whip off features but develop new features within this framework. Over and over again we have found that input from many people has allowed us to develop features that are more general and support a wide range of needs even though the initial ideas seems more limited. We believe the long-term benefit of a high-quality product that is a result of collaboration more than pays back for these efforts.