As Facebook builds its data center in Prineville, it plans to learn from Google’s community relations mistakes in The Dalles.
Facebook is currently building a data center in Prineville, and plans to learn from the community relations mistakes that Google made surrounding its data center in The Dalles.
Operations manager for the new data center Ken Patchett hopes to build good relations between Facebook and the surrounding Prineville community.
A rural community like Prineville or The Dalles, Patchett said, necessitates a different approach. Few people have more experience with data centers than Patchett. He helped to build data centers for Microsoft before coming to Google, where he worked on several more in the U.S. and Asia. In the four months he has been in Prineville, Patchett has tried to create close ties to the city’s leaders.
It’s a strategy that appears to be working. During a recent interview at Facebook’s construction site, Patchett paused to take a call when his iPhone rang. It was Prineville’s mayor, Mike Wendell, asking to borrow a golf club. Patchett laughed and told him to come up to the site.
Read more at The Bulletin.
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