AV Transparency Project

Good morning Board members, neighbors, and friends. I’m Dan Magenheimer, known in these parts as DanTheGeek [put on propeller hat], and more recently as DanTheActivist. 16332 Somerset Dr

[hold up slide] I brought this one-page slide with me today to talk about, but to avoid killing too many trees, I’ll just leave a few copies in the back for after the meeting.

Many of us are here today specifically to talk about the Aspen Lodge audio visual system, and discuss, the smartest, most responsible way to get it fully functional again.  I promised T that I would keep my inner geek on a short leash this morning so I don't put you all to sleep.

This one-page summary provides five different solutions.  Four of them were not considered by the ALC. Let me quickly run through them starting with the one that almost got voted on today, and that's...

Plan A $400,000: I call this the blank check.  The Lamborghini.  We tear out ALL our AV equipment and replace it all with... unnecessary ultra-high-end gold-plated shiny objects.   Until I raised my hand, until I threw my body in front of a train two weeks ago, this was the only option being considered.  I basically asked at the meeting: Why gold-plated?  Which led me in less than 24 hours to:

Plan B $250,000:  The same approach, except we substitute standard commercial-grade equipment. It's still very solid stuff and just fine for a cost-conscious community.  But it's still tear it all out and replace it all with new stuff.   It’s kind of the equivalent of junking a car just because the navigation screen froze.  Why is that necessary?  Which brings me to

Plan C $50,000: That's the surgical solution.  The sweet spot. Fix only what's broken. Replace the Brain, which is the one component that died, and at the same time we can Surgically Remove the Handcuffs, the proprietary stuff that's been locking us in. And we treat everything else, Every Other Component, as an independent asset, that is we continue to use it and replace it only when it truly needs to be replaced.  Many of these components could last another decade.

Plan D $5,000: Risky advanced brain surgery.  In April, the top two techies in the community -- that's Peter and me -- were discussing how to try some ideas to bring back everything to normal as quickly and inexpensively as possible.  Might have worked.  We didn't try it. That option is pretty geeky so I'm not going to say more here but I'm happy to geek out with anyone interested.  And finally...

Plan E: Essentially do nothing.  I call it "Umm... we're good".  For the last three months, probably 98% of residents didn’t even notice there was anything wrong. [pause] In other words, we are not in an emergency crisis, which means the Board has the luxury of time to consider ALL the choices and make the right choice.

So those are what I see as the true range of choices and I want to close with a question: How did we get here?  How did we get to the point where seven intelligent community-minded volunteers on the Aspen Lodge Committee, were presented with four choices and they were all variations of Plan A.  They were basically given a choice of four different colors of Lamborghinis.  Four choices of throwing away possibly $100,000 worth of working stuff which continues to serve us fine today.

That's why for the last two weeks I've been researching our TRUE options... which led me to the question:  How did we get here?  And more importantly how do we ensure this process -- however we got here -- never happens again?

Thank you to the Board for your hard work, your volunteer hours, and for hitting the pause button so we can get this right.