lucasmg

Northern Indiana actually has relatively high penetration rates for residential solar installations largely thanks to the Amish/Old Order Mennonite communities in the area. In comparison to lighting your home with gas, solar and battery systems can look pretty cheap.

As others have pointed out, technology more likely to be accepted so long as it doesn't threaten the cohesion of the community.

I'm curious, when you say a limited set of capabilities, what libraries or systems would you juxtapose us with?

Our large goal was to make the sharing and collaboration piece much easier than other systems allow for. So let's say that one person might be responsible for instrumenting a system, but others want to be able to create their own notifications or visualizations. One user can publish a stream of events, and then allow others to subscribe and create their own transformations/visualizations. There are other pub/sub systems that achieve a similar result, but generally access control doesn't exist and usually lacks any real system of discover-ability. In the same way that github/bitbucket/etc make repositories easier, we wanted to enable a similar effect with streams of data. And in the same way, we built in a number of tools that make manipulating or visualizing a stream of data easy without leaving the system (sure, you shouldn't probably do the bulk of your code editing out of github's text editor, but it's very handy for quick changes).

I'm not sure if that helps frame our system better. We're still working a bit on how to position the system, so we might even try and revise our landing page to emphasize this more.

Hi folks, I'm one of the creators of Upstream. We'll try to be around all day to answer any questions you might have. We're feeling pretty nervous, but excited to get your feedback!