Overview:

Write code, cut electricity costs!

Welcome to the WateringHole project. Click on the links to the left for more information about the project, NERC, the OASIS specification and more.

In a nutshell, it's like this:

• NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Council, is tasked to ensure that when you turn on your light switch, electricity flows through it and lights your lamp. It's somewhat more complex than that, but that's no matter here.

• NERC defines a specification for a system called OASIS, the Open Access Same-Time Information System, which is used by wholesale electricity marketers and transmission service providers as a marketplace for power transmission contracts. Every transmission provider within NERC must have an OASIS node available.

• There are several commercially-available OASIS software packages available. Most of these come at a high cost to the transmission service provider, which eventually turns into high electricity costs for the consumer (not that it's the only contributor). Since the specification is published publicly, this is a prime target for an open source project.

• While we can't promise that you'll get a discount on your electric bill for contributing to this project, a free, open source package would reduce the cost of electricity at the wholesale level, and, through regulation, these cost reductions should be passed along to the consumers.

What the project needs:

• Architects. While there's not a lot of work to be done in this area, as there is a specification published already, there are a lot of things to hammer out. I'm thinking of JBoss as a platform to develop on. I don't know much from anything about Java, J2EE or anything else related to JBoss, but the architecture looks solid, as does the support community.

• Coders. Can't have code without coders.

• Database people. Can't have a database without database people. Wait, actually you can. It's just not as useful.