Today it finally came out in the national news that the Macondo Oil Gusher is pouring an order of magnitude more oil per day than the previous estimate and two orders of magnitude more than BP’s initial statement. The people who have been tracking this disaster obsessively since it first went public were not surprised.

Why? Because at every single level every single part of this disaster has reeked of optimism and under-valuation of risk.

I don’t think I’m unreasonable. I think BPs engineers are probably the most qualified to be dealing with this. I don’t think that BP executives are eating pelican stew and shrugging off the serious ecological, economical, and health-related implications.

I do think that there is a suspicious lack of well warranted hysteria. The estimates of worst-case scenarios are seriously lacking in imagination. An issue we’ll have to deal with for years? Give me a break. Barring some miraculous technological advancement (which I hope for daily) the amount of oil that has *already* been pumped into the gulf will not stop being a problem within our lifetime. What is the real worst case scenario? Well the flow can be far worse than reported…check. It can decimate one of the region’s strongest economies…ah. It can be an especially bad hurricane season…hmm. It might prove impossible to clean oil out of the wetlands…oh. Oh, and what if there’s some horrifying toxic air effects from the giant oil slick…shit. Want more? What if the oil in the wetlands causes their complete and utter disappearance within a year or two? Then New Orleans becomes a barrier reef. What if the relief platform fails? What if (the rest of the US pay attention – this concerns you) it gets in the gulf stream? Let me be clear:

THE EARTH IS SPEWING
HUGE AMOUNTS OF BLACK POISON
MILES FROM WHERE WE LIVE

Hey, that’s a haiku!

How the hell are people not panicing? Is it perhaps that we’re optimistic and underestimating the risk? It’s friggin’ tragic.

And what the hell is BP doing anyways? My understanding is that they’re following along with the stop-a-blowout playbook. I don’t have any problems with this except they’re being too damn optimistic. Why on earth did it take so long to get the first dome into place? It seems because there was a lack of preparation based in poor risk assessment. When it failed and they decided to try a smaller one why the hell was it not already on the way? Because they were so damn sure the first one would work. There are dozens of different high-quality ideas pouring in (my favorite: bunker buster aimed right at the pipe). What are they going to try next? How close are they to pulling that off if the current attempts fail?

Under current law, BP liability is capped at 75 million dollars. This is a number that they have already reached and surpassed. Easily. If I was a cold-hearted, hand-wringingly-evil executive I would tell my engineers to stop trying so hard. Why expend more money and effort? Why take risks and keep the story in the limelight. I would say let ‘er rip until we get that second rig into place. We’re paying the 75 mil already anyways.

I don’t think that anyone at BP is actively this evil. I’m a strong believer in that there is no “they”. Corporations and governments don’t have plots and opinions. I am always the first to point out that “they” are always just people, usually with contrasting motivations, goals and ideas. I think “they” are all concerned and consciencious. But I also think that they have a clear conflict of interest and a poor track record of correctly assessing risk.

So why in the world are “they” still in charge? I’m not saying that everyone should be canned. I do not think that Obama needs to park himself over the pipe and try to figure out how to clog it (chucking executives and regulators at it sounds like a decent enough idea). But I do think that the urgency of the situation warrants new incentives be introduced. I’m a fan of putting the military in charge. They have actual experience running things when lives are on the line. They know that being optimistic is anathema. Give them the keys to the kingdom.

Obama has never expressed much kinship with the Bayou though I do believe that he is trying to make the best decision for the situation. I think eventually he will declare a natuional emergency and command the military to take over. I think he is delaying because he doesn’t want the Federal government to be in charge of an operation that might be doomed to failure. I think he hopes that BP can stop this. I think he’s being optimistic. I do not get a sense of urgency from him.

I think its high time that we all panic.

So now until March 26th they’re putting out a Request for Information for people to nominate their communities. You know what I want you to do? That’s right, go here and nominate New Orleans.

Here are the reasons I gave:

1. We desperately need an influx of new ideas.
2. In a depression, we’re undergoing a technology boom. Seriously. Everyone that comes down here and checks us out leaves impressed. We were the cover story of Entrepreneur magazine, had articles in the NYT and a half dozen other places. We’ve hosted Microsoft employees who were impressed enough to proclaim that Austin has nothing on us.
3. And we’ve done that on a practically inexistent tech foundation.
4. Did I mention Microsoft? They’re doing all sort of nice things for us. TechEd 2010 will be here. Doesn’t Google to get in on the ground floor?
5. We just elected a new mayor who understands the potential of being a tech hub.
6. In the near future there will be a project to fix up a large part of the city’s sewer system, it will be a lot easier to lay down fiber alongside.
7. We need cheap, high-speed internet in our schools. What we have now is pathetic and is not helping the already resources-strapped system one bit.

I could have gone on but 1000 character limit…

They also ask for evidence. There’s only one link per nomination and I gave them this excellent post from Taylor Davidson cataloging the NOLA start-up scene.

So what are you waiting for? Go go go!

Google’s site about the project

It is the second day that was destined for real magic.  The challenge was simple: “Do something to help with the organization of the leagues of people who donate their time to volunteer for the New Orleans public school district”.  Those familiar with software development in general – and the challenge of herding hungover techies who get in at 10am to start and complete a project by 4pm in particular – will recognize it as simply jaw-dropping.  Especially when “something” is expanded to mean “create a full blown, maintainable, multi-media website to bring together and thank volunteers” – wowee.  And yet I’m proud to announce http://www.nolaschoolvolunteers.org/ which as of this morning did not exist and now does all those things and more.  Everything you see, including domain name, CMS installation, layout, and much of the content was created in one afternoon by a group of dedicated barcamp attendees.

In a word, everyone there was just astoundingly professional.  How professional?  Well a room full of 15 geeks from different backgrounds and diciplenes spent all of 10 minutes debating language choice and platform.  The conversation was literally:

- So it sounds like  PHP is our lowest common denominator and we’ve got a PHP guru?

- Yup.  So let’s do PHP.

- Ok.  Can we do this in wordpress?

- I think so.  We’ve got a couple guys that are good at wordpress and some more that are familar with it.

- Wordpress it is.

And if that isn’t shocking enough then we did it!  In one fell swoop and in no small part through the leadership of Matthew Tritico and others; requirements were defined, refined, scoped back, matched up with a technology, assigned,  implemented, and integrated in a whirlwind six hour session that I consider among the most productive hours of my life.

Oh and luck.  I’m going to go ahead and say that a lot of luck was also involved.

So take aways:

1. Never underestimate the collective power of an enthusiastic, experienced, and focused group.  The trick is getting all three.
2. Value of someone who’s done it once before is that of ten bright people. Value of someone whose done it twice is that of twenty.
3. Take the time and pick the right tool for the job.  The site was created in wordpress with a variety of plugins, and a healthy dose of google products.  A huge amount of functionality with hardly any code at all!  Microsoft take note – this is RAD developoment done right.  It is possible, but drag-drop and a fancy IDE is no replacement for true knowledge.
4. Finally, equally as important as the availability of the right component is the ability to integrate with the rest of the application.  Do not take this for granted – the excellent ecosystem of wordpress plugins was a major deciding factor for us and cut down considerably on integration time that we did not have.

So again, a spectacular job by all.  A lot of great relationships fostered, a lot of tech talk, and one kick-ass site banged out in an afternoon.  Frankly, given the glacial pace at which I see projects progressing in the enterprise space, I really needed to see this.  I’m not even sure what I think about this yet – was it all luck or did I really learn something interesting?

I think likely the latter.