COMMUNITY CONNECT™

To be honest, there are two reasons we created COMMUNITY CONNECT:

1. It is in our DNA to share knowledge and experience. Nothing gives us greater pleasure than to see people achieve their goals thanks to the knowledge they gain through our business. But we believe that the functionality of Mobius CONNECT, CBM CONNECT®, and RELIABILITY CONNECT®, and our international conferences, will not meet the needs of everyone in the broader reliability, maintenance, performance improvement, and condition monitoring community. We believe COMMUNITY CONNECT will benefit far more people.
2. We do run a commercial business, so it is fair to say that we hope that we will have more people attend our training courses and conferences, and more commercial organizations will choose to provide knowledge and sponsorships via our sites. We have employees and their families to feed, and we aspire to run a commercially profitable business. We see it as a win-win.

COMMUNITY CONNECT will receive funding from three sources. Given that, at this writing, COMMUNITY CONNECT is just getting started, we have not determined the exact balance of these three sources.

1. Although membership will be free in 2020, we anticipate introducing a small fee in the future. We have a separate FAQ on this topic.
2. We are seeking to form partnerships with organizations that serve the communities to generate sponsorship revenue that will support the community. These sponsorships will be “nonintrusive”; members will not be spammed, members will not need to pledge allegiance to the sponsors, and members will not be required to purchase their products. However, if members are aware that there are organizations that have products or services that will help them achieve their goals, then it is a win-win. In addition, we want to allow local companies to financially support their communities to help them be successful. This may be in the form of sponsoring individual meetings, paying for a presenter to attend a community meeting, hosting meetings at their workshops or meeting rooms, and in other ways. Sponsors could be commercial “vendors” or location industrial companies as part of their civic duty.
3. Mobius Institute will also be funding the communities. We do hope that some members of the community might decide to take a training course or attend a conference, but COMMUNITY CONNECT should not be a profit-making venture.

If you are willing to share your time and experience, and you will do so in a noncommercial manner (even if you run a business rather than working in an industrial facility) then you have what it takes to start a community. Please write to us and we can begin the discussions: learn@mobiusinstitute.com

Yes. We anticipate that some groups may like to focus on CBM, for example, or even just on vibration analysis rather than focusing on the much broader area of reliability plus CBM. We want to make the communities work and therefore if the best structure is to have multiple overlapping communities and we will work with you to make that work.

Membership will be free until the end of 2020. We anticipate establishing a small fee, which will be different in different parts of the world (being sensitive to the vastly different costs of living) that will help fund COMMUNITY CONNECT. We will seek to strike the balance between creating a barrier for people to join on the one hand, and generating so little money that it is inconsequential, on the other hand.

There will be some activities that will require additional funding. For example, if you want to hold a meeting at a Holiday Inn and serve food. One way to handle it is to charge just for that event and even have member and non-member pricing. Another way to do it is to charge a higher membership free and use the revenue to conduct meetings.

It will be up to the leadership of each community to make these decisions.

We will help you every step of the way:

• We will work with you to define your approximate geographic region.
• We will help you establish a new site for your members, for example, www.mobiusconnect.com/southernflorida
• We will train you on how to:

• Register new members
• Schedule new meetings
• Communicate with members
• How to use all the web-based tools

For now, please write to learn@mobiusinstitute.com

No. We will provide all the “infrastructure” to start and run the community without charge.

We do have certain expectations of the community leader:

• We expect the leader to seek out people working in industrial sites and recommend they join the community.
• We expect the leader to hold at least one meeting or learning/sharing session per month. The leader does not necessarily have to attend all meetings, but they should ensure that someone will take a leadership role at those meetings. The meetings could also be conducted online, for example, a simple Q&A session or presentation by one of the members or an outside expert.
• We insist that the community leader does not exclude anyone from joining the community unless it can be shown they will be disruptive to the meeting; this certainly includes excluding membership decisions based on race, religion, or for competitive reasons.

• To clarify one of those points, if the leader is a vendor of Product A, then he/she may not exclude the participation of a person who sells competitive Product B. Consultants must allow other consultants to participate.

• We insist that the community leader does not use meetings to promote their own products or services. They must be neutral at all times – unless they have specifically organized a meeting where they are to discuss their product/service/technology.

Yes. If that is your preferred structure, then it can certainly be supported. We can provide access to the tools and “back-end” to more than one person.

Yes. We have an execution squad on standby. It will be a swift and painless death. We can then work with new leadership.

Jokes aside, ultimately, Mobius Institute controls the tools required to operate the COMMUNITY CONNECT group, and we will facilitate the change-over to new leadership if that is proven necessary.

Yes. Mobius Institute will provide e-learning training that covers the basics of reliability improvement and condition monitoring, which includes maintenance practices. We are doing this so that people who are new to this field can gain a jumpstart and thus understand the recommendations provided by other community members and those who deliver presentations during meetings.

Training material will also be provided, in a specially secured format, for community leaders and other community “experts” to deliver the same basic training. That training will not be provided in a commercial setting; i.e., it must be free and for the purposes aligned with the goals of COMMUNITY CONNECT.

The training will not lead to certification, but it will lead to enlightenment.

Yes. You will have access to a tool like GoToMeeting, and you will be able to conduct meetings, presentations, and anything else that would benefit the group.

Yes. And we hope you do this frequently.

We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to ask people within the community with expertise or experience in specific areas to deliver presentations to the rest of the group. These meetings could be conducted during the day or in the evening.  It should also be possible to involve experts from vendors, consultants, or service providers to deliver presentations.

You can also utilize virtual presenters. You will be able to hold a meeting, and the presenter could deliver the lecture via GoToMeeting (or a similar tool), from his or her home or office, from anywhere in the world. In that way, your group can receive a world-class presentation without the travel costs and time required for that presenter to travel to your location. When performed in this way, it would be possible to have a Q&A session after the presentation as well.

In addition, we are constantly running webinars via cbmconnect.com and reliabilityconnect.com, and we would recommend that communities either hold meetings to coincide with the webinars or watch the recorded webinars as a group afterward. These presentations, and other content on the two websites, are highly educational and would provide an excellent way to begin a discussion on the same subject.

The primary idea of COMMUNITY CONNECT is to help people share their knowledge. Meetings, even virtual meetings, are one way to do that. COMMUNITY CONNECT members can also meet privately to discuss issues. But another way to share knowledge is via web-based forums where people can ask questions, and other members from the community can provide comments, advice, suggestions, or answers.

While there are forums via LinkedIn and other platforms that provide a similar function, we recognize that many people do not feel comfortable asking questions on those global forums, and many do not feel comfortable providing responses. With the growing number of “trolls” and people who simply like to criticize, global forums are not as effective as they could be.

However, forums that are made up of members from the local community, many of whom you will know (especially after a few meetings), provide a stress-free, safe way to ask questions and provide a response.

That is entirely up to the community.

For a community to be effective, it should be relatively easy for the majority of members to attend the face-to-face meetings. However, in many locations around the world, there may be concentrations of businesses within a physical area, with other industries located at a greater distance away. Those remote businesses should still be invited to participate in the community, even if it is difficult to attend many of the meetings. The more that can be done online, with virtual presentations, virtual meetings, and discussions on forums, the more the entire membership will be able to participate and benefit.

However, if a group was set up to cover an entire (large) state, and the membership grew, one day in the future, it may be decided to split into two groups. That can be accommodated.

We would encourage this to happen.

We would love to see communities made up of companies who all mine minerals, or produce paper, or produce chemicals, or pharmaceuticals.

Members may belong to two COMMUNITY CONNECT groups: one made up of people from their local community and a second group made of people who will all work in a similar industry, potentially from around the world. One forum would be general in nature, and the other forum would be specific to the unique problems faced by people in their industry.

Yes. And Mobius Institute will help you run your conferences. Whether the conference is a one-day event or a multi-day event, we will be happy to help organize the hotels, catering, registration, exhibits space, exhibitor/sponsors, speakers, and anything else that it takes to run a successful event.

We believe there may be opportunities to run conferences in cooperation with other groups; for example, a group in the north of the state could cooperate with the group in the south of the state to run a combined state conference.

Ultimately, we want COMMUNITY CONNECT groups to take an active role in the Mobius Institute sponsored RELIABILITY & CBM CONNECT international training conference events. People in the local community best understand the topics that should be covered, the people who should deliver the presentations, the dignitaries who should be involved, the customs and practices, the best cities and venues, and so on.

Yes. We will make our audit/assessment tool available that is based on the Asset Reliability Transformation process. You will be able to perform an assessment and identify strengths and weaknesses and thus identify the opportunities for improvement.

No. Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite.

As the founder of Mobius Institute, there is one thing I have learned over 35 years of experience, and I know many other people have learned the same thing – the more you learn, the more you realize that you need to keep learning.

We want communities to help themselves, and we want to help the individuals within the community.

However, if a time comes that community members need additional training or assistance that is beyond the means of the community, then the training companies and consulting companies will have a new opportunity.

On the other hand, if organizations remain in the reactive maintenance cycle of doom and don’t know about the opportunities that exist via a reliability improvement and condition monitoring program, then they will never require training or consulting assistance.