Ever since we crawled out of the salt pond and began evolving to modern mankind we've been creating one form or another of settlements to make life work. In the last 100 years we've begun to see life structured by employment, shelter, agriculture (food), health, education, safety and governance. More recently we've added focus on the scarce resource of land and the subject of sustainability (including energy and the environment).

The table might put these issues in perspective (when it gets further developed) within three categories of nationbuilding.

Our current vision is inspired by the crisis in Haiti. Our intent is to create a "computer model" that will allow one to say "I want to prepare a plan for a settlement providing for "X" families to be completed in "Y" years and I want the plan to provide for the full range of activities in our 8 categories (of settlement needs)." "X" can be any number of families, perhaps 1000 or 10,000. "Y" can be any number of years, perhaps 15 or 30. The basic model will have built in a set of standards, policies and assumptions based on experience in other countries adjusted by our best guesses. The person using the model will have the ability to articulate a different set of standards, policies and assumptions as his/her planning proceeds. The model can be used for several or many projects and can be constantly updated as planning and development experience proceeds.

We believe that our effort can be a major help to the crisis in Haiti and that later activity can be immensely useful throughout the planet.

This text (updated 3/26/12 11:57) was begun after the SFSQLUG meeting. The prior page has a great deal of material that can be added. Click here for the prior text, now called SitePlan. A further comment seems important. Clearly the planet is our focus, not the U.S. To reach the planet we need to achieve entire new levels of ease and power with regard to cloud computing. This project is not of interest if we cannot assume new levels of ease and power with regard to cloud computing.