end of an era for the P2 community

["Butner, R Scott" <scott.butner@pnl.gov>]

P2TECHies --

 

Stepping out of character, let me be serious for one moment (I promise I won't make a habit of it).

 

I just received notification from my friends over at P2Rx, regarding the closure of the Enviro$en$e web site.  Although Enviro$en$e may not have figured prominently in your bookmarks in recent years, there was a time, early in the advent of the world wide web, that it was pretty much the center of the P2 universe, in terms of online information.  For many years, it continued to be a source of innovation in the use of the Internet for promoting P2, and many of us who have dabbled in that area since the early 90's owe a large debt to Myles and the folks at SAIC -- Chris Messner and Barclay Inge in particular -- for their leadership and vision.  Dating back even before the web, via dial-up systems like PIES, Myles and his team were among the first to embrace many new technologies.

 

In all candor, Enviro$en$e in recent years has largely been supplanted by more focused, more effective information tools -- the spread of Internet technology into every corner of our lives has ensured that a thousand experiments in P2 information transmittal would take place, and many of them have proven very effective.  But Myles and crew helped to lay the groundwork for many of us, including my own personal debt -- the virtual plant tour, which we first prototyped for Myles in the earliest days of the Web, as an Enviro$en$e project -- and have seen it subsequently refined and reused on numerous other sites in the P2 and compliance assistance spheres. 

 

I wanted to take the opportunity to publicly thank Myles and the SAIC folks for their contributions to the P2 community, which certainly were noticed by some of us, and helped to energize the application of web technology to P2. 

 

I'd also like to remind my colleagues in the P2 community that rust never sleeps, and that the opportunities for innovation in the way we use the Internet only continue to multiply.  The best tribute we can pay to Myles is to redouble our efforts to be creative in how we use information to make the world a little better.

 

regards,

 

SB

 

p.s. -- this also seems an opportune time to wish another P2/Information pioneer, John Calcagni, good luck in his new endeavors.   John will be leaving P2Pays (http://wrrc.p2pays.org/) to work for the EPA Region 4 Air Planning Branch later this month.  If you've ever posted a question on P2TECH, you've probably heard from John, who has helped to build what's probably the single largest collection of P2 documents available online.  Though P2Pays will carry on (as will John!), John's replies will be missed by many citizens of P2TECH.

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Scott Butner
Director, ChemAlliance
c/o Pacific NW National Laboratory
PO Box 999
Richland, WA  99352
Voice: (509)-372-4946/Fax: (509) 375-2443
Website: http://www.chemalliance.org/
E-mail: scott.butner@pnl.gov
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