Leveraging the GoldSim User Community
Rick Kossik
Principal
GoldSim Technology Group
rkossik@goldsim.com
Introduction
The GoldSim user community is quite diverse, with users in
over 400 commerical, government and academic organizations
worldwide. These organizations use GoldSim for a wide range
of applications, including managing water resources, reducing
environmental risks associated with hazardous and radioactive
waste, modeling insurance risk, evaluating alternative business
strategies, predicting disease transmission, optimizing mine
and other industrial operations, and designing complex engineered
systems, such as computer networks and space missions. GoldSim
is also widely used geographically, with users in at least
25 countries around the world.
With such a wide range of applications and users, it is almost
certain that someone out there has GoldSim modeling knowledge
and experience that would be of value to you. The question
is: how can you best leverage this?
Current User Statistics
Before discussing the varrious ways that you might leverage
the GoldSim user community, it is useful to first briefly
summarize what the current GoldSim user community looks like.
Because of the broad range of GoldSim applications, it is
necessary to group the various users into four general categories:
Radioactive Waste Management. This was the original
application for GoldSim, and as such still represents one
of our largest single categories of users. This community
uses GoldSim to simulate the risks associated with existing
and proposed radioactive waste management sites worldwide.
In these kinds of models, GoldSim is used to model the migration
of contaminants through the environment, and the resulting
health, environmental and financial impacts.
Environmental Systems Modeling. This community is
quite broad, but have in common that they are modeling the
interaction of man with natural systems. (Radioactive Waste
Management is actually a subset of this group, but due to
the size of that group, its is split out here as a separate
community). Applications include evaluation of water resource
issues for municipalities, design and optimization of mining
operations, evaluation of coastal resources, analysis of
agricultural operations, ecosystem modeling, simulating
disease transmission, and predicting the fate of pharmaceuticals
and other compounds within biological systems.
Business Simulation, Strategic Planning and Risk Management.
This community focuses on using GoldSim for business
and economic modeling applications. Applications include
insurance risk modeling, strategic planning, financial analysis,
risk analysis and management, cost modeling, portfolio management,
Six Sigma, business process modeling, supply chain modeling,
econometric modeling, and financial engineering.
Risk and Reliability Engineering. This is one of
our newest communities of users, and although it is currently
small, it is included as a separate category here because
we expect it to grow significantly. This group uses the
recently released GoldSim Reliability Module to simulate
the reliability and performance of complex engineered systems
over time. Applications include risk and failure analysis,
reliability and maintainability analysis, systems engineering,
vulnerability analysis, logistics, and material management.
The current breakdown of users in these four broad communities
(in terms of the percentage of organizations using GoldSim
for a particular type of application) is shown below:
Where are these users? They reside in over 25 countries worldwide.
The current breakdown of our current commercial and government
users (in terms of the percentage of organizations using GoldSim
in different parts of the world) is shown below:
Existing Ways to Leverage the GoldSim User
Community
Currently we provide two ways to leverage the knowledge in
the GoldSim User Community:
Annual User Conferences. The primary purpose of
the annual user conference is to facilitate communication
between members of the GoldSim community. The conference
typically features papers, poster sessions and plenty of
opportunities to meet and socialize with other GoldSim users.
Model Library. The purpose of the Model Library
(in the GRC section of the GoldSim website) is to provide
a forum for users to easily share models. Currently, most
of the models in the Library have been contributed by GoldSim
staff. As will be discussed below, however, we will soon
implement a program to encourage the broader community to
share models.
New Ways to Leverage the GoldSim User Community
In an effort to improve the ways that you can leverage the
GoldSim community, in the next several months, we will implement
several new features/programs to facilitate communication
within the community:
Online User Forums. We plan to host an online user
forum so that users can exchange questions and comments
directly. GoldSim staff will regularly monitor the forum
in order to provide answers and help connect various users.
Incentive Program for Model Library. We plan to
implement an incentive program to encourage more users to
contribute models to the Library. The incentive program
is likely to involve gift certificate awards for contributed
models (e.g., to Amazon.com) and/or discounts on future
GoldSim products and services.
Distribution Platform for Third-Party Custom Elements.
As mentioned elsewhere in this Newsletter, later this year
we hope to add a new feature that will allow users to create
a complex model in a Container, and then "encapsulate"
the Container. Encapsulation involves locking the Container
so that no one can look inside at all (without a password),
and building a custom user-interface for the Container (listing
inputs and outputs). An encapsulated Container will effectively
be a custom element that can be reused and distributed.
Users may be more willing to distribute models if they can
protect their intellectual property, and perhaps even be
compensated to some extent if someone wants to use the custom
element. Encapsulated Containers should facilitate both
of these concerns, and the GoldSim website could provide
a platform for helping users to distribute their custom
elements.
Suggestions?
Do you have any suggestions for how we can help you to better
leverage the GoldSim community? If so, I'd love to hear from
you. Please contact me directly at rkossik@goldsim.com.
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