Vision Statement

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     Because Mission statements can over time become constrictive, the thought became
perhaps a Vision statement would be more inline with understanding the goals of this
forum.

     This forum was born in the vacuum left by another forum when after several months
of being down for an hour to several hours it went down for several days, the membership had
no clue as to what happened or when and if the forum would ever return. This forum was put
together rather hastily in an effort to gather the membership and provide continuity that was
vacated by the downed forum.

     After the decision to launch this forum was made a rather hurried analysis of what was needed
in a forum was made. Because of the ever tightening controls on imports and the final banning
of small non compliant diesel engines it was determined that remaining singularly focused on
the listeroid engine was basically a dead end road. With no new engine's coming in there would
be no new guys looking online for information and by extension far fewer new folks looking to join
a forum based mainly on banned engine's.

     The decision then was to expand the focus from basically one engine to several, so as to appeal
to a broader audience. It only seemed natural to include a broader base of generators and because
previous experience has shown, many who build gensets soon are attracted to harvesting and useing
the waste heat generated.

     Generating power and harvesting heat is the basis of "cogeneration" so the logical move toward a forum with a "general" focus toward cogeneration seemed a logical direction to take.

     While cogeneration is nothing new, having started by many large industries in the later industrial revolution days of large lumber mills, auto manufacturing plants and basically anywhere large amounts of power was generated and used with a byproduct of heat. That heat had value and those guys figured out either how to use it or pipe it into downtown officebuildings where they could sell it
for space heating.

     What is relatively new is cogeneration on the micro scale, suitable for residential use. What is even newer is any effort at DIY cogeneration in any organized way, as far as we can tell we are the first forum of this type on the north american continent and maybe the planet. We have the opportunity to get ahead of the curve a bit on this one.

     Enough of the history and thinking that went into the formation of this forum, now the vision or goal of this forum.

     The short term goal of this forum is to stabilize the membership and to find new members that might compliment area's that we are weak in. Certainly there will be those that are experts in fields such as  refrigeration for instance that might well be interested in diy power generation and don't know about our forum, we need to find those sort of individuals.

     As the forum takes shape over the next few weeks, there will be a board of directors chosen and a
group of moderators formed to help manage the many different boards on this forum. Not everyone is interested in all area's of our forum, but everyone is interested in some area's and having moderators that are primarily interested in a specific board or group of boards would seem to make the most sense.

     Over the next several months we would like to be able to join the national cogeneration association, that group is comprised of mostly larger businesses that produce mid to large scale cogeneration systems, businesses that use cogeneration, some college research depts, and a few other groups. The NCA lobby's congress in all that is of concern to cogeneration and have been working for epa exclusions for diesel engine's used in cogeneration. Having our forum represented with the NCA would be a huge step in getting some of our concerns at least heard, perhaps getting the hp limits lowered on any lobby efforts they are working on. In any event certainly there would be much to be learned from being involved with their organization as they publish several documents we could learn from that might scale down and be useful to us.

     Not much of a mission statement, but more of a general explanation of how we came to be, what
our goals are at this time, and the general direction we are headed. Nothing here is carved in stone and over time we may well morph into a much different forum. This forum will be what the  membership wants it to be, each board will take over time take on its own look and feel because of the members that frequent it and participate in it on a regular basis. The success of this forum is truely in the hands of its members and will only be as good as the effort that is put into it.

     For my part i will strive to improve the functionality of the forum, make changes where needed, keep ontop of the spammers, try to keep the peace and work to make this the best forum of its type on the internet. All i would ask in return is for the members to be involved, use the forum, ask questions, provide answers if you can, do some research and report back what you have found, if you see an area we need help in and you know of someone that could be an asset here tell them about us.
     
     If we all work together there will not be nearly as much work as it would be if we all individually go about reinventing the wheel.

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