All right. Good morning, everyone. I guess it's as good as any time to start. So let's get started Certainly welcome everyone this morning. No last evening was very fun at StackCity probably too fun. So Now let's start talking about telco cloud requirements Before we really get into the specifics of VNF's and what they need I want to make sure we have level set on the basics. So there's no confusion As is always with that telcos, there's acronyms galore. So I apologize ahead of time VNF's and via the word the phrase VNF particular virtual network function, you know Whoever came up with network function virtualization didn't really think through that very well it's now we have to have a reverse of it, but anyways the Today we're gonna talk about we're gonna introduce some of the We're gonna go through the telco cloud and what it is and what we're trying to achieve And then we're gonna talk specifically about the requirements that we're seeing and then possibly some and get into some of the future things that we anticipate As we get into this I want to level set on What we're up to you? It's very easy to get lost as we go forward and go through the this process to get You know very focused on cost and it's solely on cost So, you know, certainly when we talk about commodity boxes and running routers virtual routers on open source and Making the transition to virtualization Most of what you think of is all about okay They're trying to drive the cost down as we heard on Monday from sore up our Network traffic is going up 150,000 percent. It's gonna keep going up and up and we have to respond and we have to respond in a And as most optimal capital spend as possible. So that's certainly a big part of it But we can't be lost on that and only on that certainly there's the operational aspect and and Making things more automated and such but it has to be more than that. Otherwise. It's just a commodity It's just we're just making another making bits into corn We have to add more value We have to find ways to to add more to what we're doing and this is where the cloud is the essential part essential ingredient to that adding value So over time, you know, we've we've expanded and we've done a pretty good job this way And I think you see that represented it most significantly in the in the last year with our acquisition of direct TV That that move has helped us in an enormous ways Beyond just adding more content and adding more services and more of a footprint That's all good but it's also added a group of people that have been very innovative when it came to The presentation layer the content management the content agreements and there are aspects behind the scenes that are are unique in The next period of time We're going to take advantage of this cloud that we're working on now To make it into something make the next generation Direct TV Uverse combination into something really unique So add more value to it and we're going to take advantage of the ability to spin up new new services and new instances of of the content Management system and the way that we work. We're going to do that far faster than we ever did before So that's one part of what we're talking about that I don't want to get lost on and then when we think about the whole process that we're working on You know and we've talked about this in the ITIL world forever that front end of service definition and making that much faster Is as much a part of automation as the rest of it? So that's what I wanted to to make sure we level set on first I mean just to add to a Toby said I mean personally in my view The nirvana will ultimately be when Amazon starts using these clouds to spin up workloads Ultimately because there is a tremendous amount of value in the assets and and and physical Distribution that a lot of these telcos already have you know I mean so there's there's a tremendous amount of value that's underestimated. I think in optimizing that last mile connectivity For a lot of these these over-the-top players and one thing I would add it's more than just infrastructure optimization and for telcos to add New value added services. I think one of the key components is really opening that environment up for anyone to spin up new services Because they're probably going to be a lot more agile and have the ability to spin up creative services and enhance the value To their customers as a result. Oh Don't talk to that. So if you kind of look at I mean what telcos do they're they're Predominantly have done connectivity for the last hundred years in different forms IP In a lot of ways has been commoditized and that's just a reflection of Building an industry that pretty much has transformed the world. So really the next step is how do I start? thinking beyond just IP services or connectivity and really leveraging what I call the beachfront properties that That a lot of these telcos have so if you just look at some of the key properties of what a telco cloud target architecture is and there's Definitely a lot of different components to it, but I'm just focusing at this point on connectivity is physical distribution I mean, that's a given These this is this is the things the web services guys are just dying to have right if you just look at what they're doing Physically, they're they're trying to expand their networks and their data centers closer and closer to as much eyeballs as possible So that's one key component of a telco cloud and of course that enables the workloads to have low low latency high availability through distribution That's natural as a result High volume of last mile throughput that's just a nice way of saying if Netflix wanted to start offering me You know house of cards with 4k streaming and I'm willing to pay for that Netflix can actually optimize that without having to grow their parent points of the AT&T's networks and AT&T doesn't have to Carry all that traffic in their network. I call it almost like CDN on demand or something when I'm not a marketing guy But that's kind of the intent you can optimize your network not for peak but While enhancing the experience so and then I think the last property of course is Telcos have built a very large network I mean they've billions and billions of dollars in the last decade to two decades really building out this massive infrastructure So you can't get lost in the fact that there's this existing environment You have to make the transition for the telcos a lot seamless or a lot easier to into the cloud world So leveraging the existing technologies that they already have deployed and operationalized around and not only makes it an easy Technology shift, but it actually helps a lot and I've seen it in a lot of different Telcos the discussion a lot easier for a lot of these traditional networking and telco guys to start thinking about cloud because There's a comfort level to it. So yeah, so I'm just to add to that point as a bit You know one of the the problems that Marco and I spend a lot of time working on is this Taking a packet and bringing it from the VM that we set up or the container and bringing it to our user Or spring it from one VM to another that that pathway out of from the VM out of the building To another building that has to be somewhat optimized. We can't be Encapsulating it one way here adding another layer of encapsulation there It we have to think about the whole and and to make this work And this is one of the reasons why the work that we're doing is I think is helping is is taking that and solving for latency and jitter issues by Reducing the overhead across the whole the whole of data center and when So before people start freaking out who the CBGP and MPLS I mean this probably makes a lot of sense for networking telco guys I think at the end of the day what I'm trying to capture here is the building blocks that have been used to build networks for the last 20 years or so Looking at building blocks and how large data centers and fabrics have evolved over time if you just build that out You know, you have the data center fabrics All all these combined ultimately a lot of complexity involved a lot of details to build Really large and distributed networks, which in a lot of ways that's what the internet is It's a large distributed network Therefore, how do you kind of bring that into the cloud environment particularly open stack? And being able to abstract a lot of this ultimately to just common APIs and in this case Neutron is kind of the key value of how you bring open stack into this whole telco cloud environment and kind of you know merging the two worlds together and You can build it. Yeah, so It's kind of the idea Open stack everywhere. Yes, that's it took me about two minutes to build all that out Got to be a better way to do that so so yeah, the idea ultimately is you have this physical network And at the end of the day you just work with workload placement placement whether it's containers VMs or even bare metal. I think bare metal or hosting as a service is probably a very Attractive option for a lot of these over-the-top players as well. So the point is Enhanced the value by allowing these cloud workloads to be spun up close to your eyeballs and one key thing for the telcos to realize is That actually gives an incentive for people to want to stay on their network, right? If me as a gamer can pay an extra dollar a month to some gaming company because it reduces my latency by five seconds So I have a better chance of fragging someone while I'm playing online I'm willing to stay on AT&T's network while at the same time playing this gaming paying this gaming company an extra dollar a month Right and they can monetize that as well and that goes back to the whole new value revenue type stream thing yeah, so when we talk about vnfs and The vnfs when we tell you network function these are this is a pretty good Representation of what when I think of vnfs. That's this is what I'm talking about So it's more than just the L3 L to L7 stack of routers firewalls Natting those that's definitely a part of it But it has to be more than that. It's certainly all the security aspects that come with well beyond firewalls and IPS It has to be much more than that And it in the telco world voices a big part It's a lot of our focus But the reality of voice is that it is just one of a billion applications at this time So we want to make it very good But then we want to move on and find ways the bundle that are work with putting it into other contexts and other services as you as you can imagine having closeness to a user in the old web paradigm where the data came from some center and is Distributed out in the in the TV model where we take content from one place and move it everywhere Caching is an essential ingredient But we also have to realize that with iot that the whole that whole dynamic is flipping itself around But now the data is coming from everywhere And if you just think of one simple example like a connected car Having dash cams front and back with 4k video, which is not out of the question Especially the For insurance folks they want to see that kind of Information that amount of data coming into the cloud and being at the edge Needs to be stored needs to be processed So something's gonna have to happen there to change that dynamic So that's that's an example of a vnf that is is is changing the way that we're thinking about And another reason why we're putting these open stacks everywhere The last few bits The last mile as mark was saying the beach fund property that we have We're trying to innovate there and make it much easier and lower cost to bring fiber to your house And so a lot of the work you see us do with cord and With onos around our like volti and our next generation g-pond work is all about that And then the last bit as I mentioned as we Evolve our content management direct TV universe platforms That's gonna be an integral part of it moving and taking that movie that you're watching and putting it into a form that any Device can see I mean just based on that you know what we know right Based on workloads today, right it's akin to web applications back-end databases applications PCRF packet for manipulation You know it's pretty obvious for a vnf in some form or another we got a manipulated packet Combination of traditional networking elements, whether it's sbc load balancing sip UA's or not UA's Back-to-back user agents things like CDN proxies and transformation elements are some of kind of what we know from a vnf Requirement point of view, but if you build us out next what you'll see is we're trying to categorize common cloud and vnf requirements what we see based on The requirements for a lot of these different vnf's which do overlap with traditional cloud native applications and also vnf's that are coming from the telco world, but we do see obviously a very unique set of requirements coming from the vnf's as well And I don't know if you want to talk to specifics there Toby, but yeah, so the key part To telcos want to believe that we're special But in reality many of the requirements that we're seeing from the vnfs I described are very similar to what we've had to deal with in the IT world and I come from a hosting background of host outsourced applications are delivered over the internet and in that realm when you talk about SLA's With a financial company or a government company. There's times when we've written contracts that have hundreds of SLA's in it When you look at the latency requirements of a financial company or the jitter requirements of gaming as as Marco was getting at That's pretty Pretty significant and close to what what is needed in the telco realm So this is an important point that we're trying to make is that a lot of the problems and the requirements Are very similar to ones that have been solved in the cloud world already And where and then that helps us to clarify where where we have actually unique needs So, you know what when it comes to the common parts of it the security and the resiliency and No one wants to see anything go down. There's no no one that doesn't want a hundred percent availability when it comes to Being able to automate everything and our orchestration needs are not something unique There's not something special to a telco's orchestration or monitoring the world of the IT SMs and itils It is very similar almost exactly the same as the F caps world in the OSS world There is almost no difference. So that's that's one of the things that I I Think that OpenStack community is very important about In helping is to solve for this common set of requirements now where we have uniqueness It's certainly when it comes to moving lots of packets and trying to do that in a in a way That's stable and resilient I mean, yeah, I mean I was gonna say those seem obvious at least to me because I've been living this for three years But you know, they're they're just certain things that make BNF's somewhat unique compared to traditional cloud native workloads and that's mainly given the history of the VNF's themselves, right? They've just always lived as as functions in the network PNF's physical network functions So a lot of that is is a requirement as you they transition to the virtual world But as you'll see late as you'll see later I believe that's more of facilitation of enabling the brownfield migration for the very reluctant PNF vendors out there And we'll get into that more detail and we'll get into that in more detail So as we go through this these are some of the high-level methods that we're using to solve for these unique requirements and the one that's top of mind is Getting more packets per second And lower latency and lower jitter and more flows through a x86 server And that's what I like to say is to to SRV or not to SRV I vote not But I think it's a it's a necessity at this point and then Working with the PNF vendors the folks that have made them and getting them to learn more about cloud native mechanisms, especially about horizontal scaling I think You've heard the cat the pets versus cattle analogy the one I like to call pets versus midget cattle Driving toward cloud native is more than that It's a lot more about also about automation and configuration management and and an acceptance of maybe even not having a command line To log into your router These are examples of the kind of change that cloud native is brought to this to the general space Also when it comes to what we're working on We don't live in a greenfield world We have a lot of the old stuff and the legacy and so we have to be mindful of that as we bring things forward and continue to support mechanisms that help to Support things that aren't cloud native so think mechanisms like live migration or remotion These are things that people have used as crutches in the past to help get over the lack of scaling And so that's something that we have to continue to support going forward And then thankfully we can use it for other things like bin packing And then the last bit is I don't think we've done a good enough job at really communicating The especially around networking what we want and what we want to do That's something that we've talked about a lot this week is just the onus is on us to make it much clearer What we're asking for So I'll talk to this particular slide, you know, we've been we've been spending a lot of effort and testing on Trying to figure out for really underneath this There's a lot of each of these lines represents a different V&F and their specific needs And we spent a lot of time working especially Marko And I have been working on trying to test and be able to achieve this level of Performance through our systems so and we've learned a lot and then what I'm hoping to do in the near future Is to create some level of standardization on how to test and benchmark because when it comes to this type of Packets per second our flows through a box There's a lot of variables involved and trying to standardize that and normalize that make it something That's easy to for the vendors and for us to test in a consistent way so we can compare the answers Easily that's that's a been a lot harder than than you can imagine so I'll speak to this slide so pretty much based on You know essentially the sRIV requirements I mean, there's there's a couple of ways you can look at how you address Some of the needs that are coming from these V&F vendors Requiring sRIV so clearly the obvious answer is go build a cloud native V&F And personally for me, you know, I'm sure some some BU folks will be watching this YouTube video at some point You know, that's it's it's a message for them as well is if you can't build a cloud native app a really fundamental question of should you really be virtualizing that app should be asked of yourself and If if the answer that is yes, then you really have to put an effort to rewrite that application So it is cloud native And if the answer is it can't be then maybe the real answer or solutions that problem is automation You really probably have to automate it in a way that actually solves the real problem Because virtualizing something doesn't automatically make it automated Especially if the economics aren't there, of course a second a second option to that is Judicis use of sRIV and traditional cloud workloads. So what we mean by that is Alright, we'll drag you along kick in streaming. You know, you have your traditional via PNF function You've slapped it in a container or a VM and now you're saying you're you're virtualized or your your cloud enabled that's kind of a You know, that's a I was gonna use a word there, but that's kind of the wrong answer, right? I mean, I get it. There's probably some things that you just can't Avoid relative to finding the right people. It's it takes a lot of time a lot of investment But the barrier to entry you should remind these vendors that the barrier to entry is not removed So while we're reluctantly bringing you in and you're telling me I need sRIV for these level of high performance Other vendors now can come in and really differentiate with cloud native based solutions But you know up until now there are options to coexist these kind of workloads with cloud native workloads You know Moore's law, I don't know if you want to talk to that Toby or yeah So there's there's a number of options available to us And what I think is that in this particular area when you look at enterprise workloads There was a lull from like 1995 to 2005 where there wasn't a whole lot of Innovation happening in this in this space. It was VLANs and we're happy. It was 10 You know one gig interfaces. We're happy Now that we're pushing more on this both us and the hyperscale guys are pushing on this area The demand is driving innovation to happen and the Moore's law needs more things to work on so doing offloading of certain functions Makes sense. So instead of for me. It's an extreme SRV is at one extreme where we've done it. We decided we gave up We couldn't do anything in software and we just used hardware to solve the problem entirely That doesn't give us the extensibility or the software benefits If we go all software that we can't make it work quite yet So right now there is we think a middle ground where we have like smart nicks More sophisticated evolution of the existing nicks from Intel's and Broadcom's and such But then there's also the there's a new realm of smart nicks if you looked at what Microsoft's provided with Sonic or what? Others have tried net netronomes and others You're able to offload some of the standard packet processing functions and put them into an FPGA or a GPU And that we think is actually one of the ways that we can kind of Meet in the middle. I can take this one. I mean at the end of the day, you know, it's kind of hits at the hits at the point that You've again you the industry has built truly scaled out infrastructure like the internet I mean, it's it's the basis of pretty much anything we do in our daily lives now So, you know, that's you know, the buzzword is scaled out routing the reality to me It's in my mind given my background that's well, that's called VGP And of course naturally as a result a scaled out platform should look similar but not identical, right? So again, you don't want to reuse or sorry reinvent a lot of the tools that I've already been used to solve a lot of these Very large network problems and you kind of want to bridge the two worlds together and you know an example of a scale-out platform Is it's pretty much this right? You want to you want to get a sense of what problems you're solving in the cloud and leverage as much of the The tools that already exist out there to solve those key problems while at the same time introducing Through careful thinking and thought-out architectural discussions What what should be new in that new architecture to help enable the cloud environment as well, so One thing I'd add to this is it's more than just Taking something and making it a scale-out. It's also reconsidering what we're doing So if we take a packet through the out of the as I described before from the VM out of the building You don't want to really be opening it up and doing stuff to it that many times So there's if you rethink of it at a forest level, maybe there's a way to Consolidate routing functions or consolidate firewall functions with routing functions the or consolidate load Load balancing or or these types of thing that in functions together into one thing And a smaller footprint so we have to as is always the case as we move through this world in an agile way There's times when we iteratively keep adding and there's times when we have to step back and refactor and simplify I'll take this one So brownfield enablement again back to the physical vnps to make their lives easier during the transition so by nature Their legacy in a lot of ways and clearly they expect certain behaviors surrounding it So you can't just expect something people or functions have been doing rather for the last 15 and 20 years and saying Cloudify it right so there there's clearly some some vendors out there who will through business means should be incentivized to rewrite But at the same time you want to make the transition easier not only for for your benefit to understand the challenges as a result but also to to Evaluate certain types of functions and other options you have out in the industry and some of the technologies that are being used to enable this brownfield migration of Pnfs to vnfs in the telco telco cloud is you know again a lot of these a lot of these pnfs for liveliness detection Which is essentially a you know how do I detect the certain note or certain function is no longer functioning in a way that can provide the service You know mechanism like ping HTTP or I level checks BGP BFD These all you know I want to get into details like Toby warned you with acronyms But the net of that is these are mechanisms that all these vnfs are going to be wanting to use now So you have to make that you have to almost have a platform that enables that or else the transition just won't happen to even get the Ball rolling dynamic insertion network reachability. That's a very long way of saying routing and You know there's clearly some requirements coming from vnfs You know where they use routing as a mechanism to insert reach ability for certain types of tunnels that they were that they were Facilitating right and it literally is it's gotten to a point where you're saying well You don't have to do routing anymore just use this API to insert reach ability They're like well, I can't find the guy who wrote the app or my vendor went out of business So your platform needs to enable that for me. So that's kind of we're the guys that made that whole thing are all dead That's a possibility right so And then the two points I'll let Toby speak to because I know it's yeah So I mentioned the live migration piece and then another part that we're we're working hard on is Rationalizing okay, where are all these things gonna go? Where does it make the most sense and for us? It's been a you know one thing I would like to impress upon everybody for us It's an opportunity to take something that had been very siloed what direct TV or uverse was doing was very different than what voice was doing So this brownfield that we work in it has its it's fraught with all kind of minefields But it gives us an enormous opportunity to pull it together and so one of the brownfield aspects that we have to solve for is How do we deal with the resiliency when? The connection to your house is a single point of failure or the central office is a sent a central point of fail single point of failure We can't get away from people don't really have the option to have connections to two places So that that limits to some extent our ability to to do Cloud-native mechanisms as well the other part that I want to press upon everyone is the and then an opportunity for simplification Is that each of the p&f's the physical network functions of the old days came with their own orchestration tool? so there's Nokia orchestration tool. There's a Cisco orchestration tool. There's a Erickson orchestration tool that you know multiply that by a hundred So one of the brownfield things that we're working on is how do I take all of those things and transition them to a More common approach. There's one of the Things that we want to see the community do more of is how can I take a marano a mistral? Heat how can I take those open-stack components and bring them together to make and solve for? Quite a lot of redundant effort. So this last piece. I'll finish up with you know Left left to our own The natural path there would be I would have to attend four or five different standard boards standard groups efforts at us TM forum ITF whatever Oasis DMTF when you when the world's a telco and IT collide for the unit those worlds collide there are a lot of standard bodies Etsy So you have to attend all those and then and then now with open-source world. There's an ever-burgeoning set of of Open-source efforts that we go into so like not only open-stack, but open daylight and Like open contrail FDIO is coming. There's dpdk work opening that up. There's open data plane work. There's a lot of efforts So this is one of the reasons why I'm so I want to sell everyone on the concept of open FV there needs to be someone somewhere that brings it all together and helps to Coordinate the telco requirements and use cases and manifest that in something that can actually be used to test Are we gonna actually achieve this these requirements and be able to fill not only the functional ones But also the performance ones as I described before so in open FV We're doing everything we possibly can to document and clearly enumerate what it what we what we're needing and If and I urge everyone to look at it and then provide feedback Where possible to tell us where we need to be better Clearly when we talk about networking you can get lost in all of the acronyms and all the concepts and we often Lose sight of trying to make a much more simple description Sure, I mean, I guess the second one's obvious documented well entirely obvious but documented apis and data models You know that that's key right that literally gets everyone on the same I kind of think of it like everyone can speak English, but everyone's still either grammatically incorrect or talking gibberish You got to get everyone talking literally the same structured language and you know There's there's a lot of different efforts to do that. You know the world is kind of converge on certain data model representant representative type Languages, but at the same time that's all for not if everyone doesn't agree on what all that means So it's a Toby's point there. There's you know, one to the you know, two to the end exponential type operating Or orchestration tools out there that's mainly because they all speak the language with their specific applications or PNF slash BNF So I mean taking again a PNF and putting the VNF and still requiring your own own orchestration tool is not going to work I mean that just that's not going to fly right the reality is everyone needs to come together In some of these initiatives that document common use cases for the telcos and get everyone on board That's kind of my view Yeah, and then I'll close with just one last piece is that one of the really great things about open stack is where there was Not a storage standard for provisioning APIs. There is now one Whether it wasn't for networking there is now Enormous opportunity to make that happen And so we're spending a lot of time working with with the community to try to make this happen across many many different domains So I think that that really concludes our content for right now wanted to save enough time for some questions. So Yeah, all right, well just in general that You know as we talked about it's more than just the things that are Finding the right balance of hardware and software for simplifying getting the common APIs all that is very helpful to fulfill the cloud Requirements, but there's also as I was getting at at the beginning. We don't want to lose sight of okay The that's all commoditizing what we do. How do we add value? How do we make this into a platform that can evolve faster? So one of the things like what I'm working on lately is Adding storage to the story. How can I add storage to the central office to make it something that allows you to back up your mobile phone? You know, how do I add more? How do I combine services together? How can I take maybe IBM's public cloud or? Rack spaces public cloud and combine it together with our network and our our capabilities to make a hybrid cloud That's compelling and bundled These are things that I'm thinking about a lot lately is how do I how do we add more more value on top of this? Set of the base requirements. How do we make more requirements that make make us more valuable? What he said All right, so if anyone has any questions feel free to stand up step up to the mic And oh one last thing is we made the guy stop crying Thank you very much very interesting Do you think that there is an eventual desired outcome where the telcos will want to use a carrier neutral? Open-stack cloud purpose built for VNF Much like you see carrier neutral facilities being used where they are able to gain connectivity to the last mile Are do you think that AT&T and other telcos will want to continue to invest? Engineering resources to differentiate their own open-stack cloud That's a very good question. I think as it was kind of getting out with the the bits. I mean, I think Everyone here wants to see us find a way where all the telcos work together to make the bit moving the bits cost less and And I was getting at a little bit last night in our in our time together with all the different telcos Audit stack city, you know There is such an enormous opportunity to help get from the first billion people that have access to the next Five billion or six billion people and making this kind of technology available to a broader set of telcos Even the smaller ones, you know That's what the tip effort with Facebook's really working on right now And I think that's that's quite exciting and kind of it kind of I think gets to some part of what you're saying is that the carriers can work together to to sort of Make the bits less of important But again for us to continue to exist and be fruit, you know to grow we have to find ways to add more value Thank you Anything so be considered bias. So Yes, so a question we're talking about the technical challenges and moving into NFV and The question that I have is mostly on the moving to open source as a business model And the type of vendors that you expect will happen This is definitely a disruption because the current model of In which a lot of the equipment and gears that you're using right now is being sold in Appliances and very close kind of licenses model and moving to open source as a completely different model Do you expect that the new players that will come to that will be completely different than the incumbents Yeah, you're working with right now. Absolutely that this is probably one of the more important points I wanted to make as you've seen with with Unix just take Unix is a good AT&T example I mean for the longest time people made 20 like when I started in IT. I used to pay $20,000 for a C compiler That's a lot for something now. That's very undifferentiated and essentially is everywhere so it and then Red Hat and others have shown that it is possible to make a business out of taking something that Eventually gets out to everyone and makes a make can add value Themselves by adding services or support. I mean when you have to for us we have 50,000 red hat instances So they provide a lot of value just by helping us keep those up and running So there's there's always there's always something for them to do There's always something for people to add value on even if the bits themselves are Open-sourced now the part that I really want to compel everyone is right now many of the VNF's They aren't open source even with routing It isn't really a meaningful open source router that I can use it in the WAN and we'd like to see that We'd like to see that more with other other components and so I think you'll see that more But it hasn't happened quite yet. So there is there is business There is still a business to be had and Red Hat has proven it even if the bits changed open source So similar the question is to Juniper here. Yeah, I mean clearly we obviously are a company that has Traditionally offered a certain set of products over the years. I've been a proponent internally saying As the world ships to open source and even open hardware Who knows the stuff better than us especially in certain industries, right? So we can be the hot, you know the high-end services integrators For these types of services because look at look at Red Hat, right? They built a model around understanding and knowing Linux inside and out, right? Well, there's we have great guys, right? So it's a Boris's point, you know, we have a lot of good ninjas, right? So it's just time to lease them out for hire, right? It's it's a different business model And that's the biggest challenge for any any public company is trying to shift business models that way But I think it's it's a necessity. Yeah, and I also want to add make sure but he's clear on this open source Is not free that it was never meant to be free. There's still I am a developer I like developing and at some point somebody needs to pay me So there's even if I have apply an open source license to it so that everyone can get enormous Generative value out of it still there's somebody has to get paid for supporting it and the ninjas got to get paid Thanks Hi It was a very nice Presentation it's nice to see that there's a focus on the network because what the reality is network is our cloud, right? As as good as your network you provide better services But unfortunately from 1980s 1990s the network vision. Oh, I have private cloud I have I have a private network public network in the middle DMZ and The view is all these are to have has the same DNA same characteristics. Unfortunately. It's not true, right? So when you move into this today's world the front-end traffic versus back-end traffic there their DNAs are much different So what's your vision to differentiate the back-end traffic by means of providing facilities different views? For better services for machine-to-machine and to see better performance of the VNS. Thank you No, you go No, I go look so I'm trying to understand the question there. You're essentially asking how we see this this telco cloud Adopting to these different Requirements that you're seeing from different applications say on front-end back-end. Oh Someone kill this mic What I'm asking do you See a solution or features coming from open-stack for example neutron to allow you Do better features for the back-end traffic to handle more traffic because the back-end traffic is more Much ahead of the front-end traffic for machine-to-machine and help monitoring and stuff with the ecom architecture of the AT&T for example, there's a special Framework called OMF and DCA for analytics. This is all back-end traffic So back-end traffic versus front-end traffic the ports on the front end not necessarily to be used on the back-end vice versa So when you go at one security profile, it will not fly for you for a back-end for example Yeah, so I mean this is a very good point is like What we're trying to solve for is to solve this problem you're describing I mean and this is overlays are one way to solve it But I mean and neutron is certainly a key plays a key role in it, but this is why we want The network to switch to be more about software so that we can provide QoS in certain areas and not in other in others we can provide high throughput in some areas and not in others we can do full Full packet inspection in some places and not in others. We want to judiciously apply these techniques To the problem so we can be more efficient and software helps us to be that flexible to do that in where and when we need that Where the hardware wasn't able to do that in the past So now that understood the question I think at the end of the day we at least us as juniper We had we obviously had a very conscious effort to make sure we addressed all these issues as much as possible in the back-end But at the same time be very conscious to contribute a lot of that to the community as much as possible and that was the rationale for getting and Putting open-contrail out there because there are just there are a tremendous amount of requirements and this stuff's moving very fast I mean it it has to move fast because I believe it's an existential threat to a lot of the telcos So we're trying to keep the community open as much as possible By building the essentially what I call the implementation on the back-end for neutron to address a lot of those use cases And over time as those start getting pulled back into neutron in the community We obviously make sure to adhere to all those APIs and data models as they get defined and maybe at some point You know some of these projects do become part of neutron. That's you know, it's up for debate It's not it's not clearly in in my hands to make that kind of decision, but you know that's I don't I can't answer your question in a different kind of way But at the end of the day it all depends on the implementation to address those use cases And if you either wait on the community or execute on something you believe you need now With the with the expectation that it'll eventually evolve and become part of a larger community effort And that is our our ultimate goal as well. That's why we open-source it from day one and the beauty of open-stack And the ability to bring new things in quickly. Yep So you spoke about operators or vendors, sorry Not just porting their applications into Virtual machine and then call it cloud. You said you talked about how it should be native Could you explain maybe some of the things that you like to see done on maybe not the firewall or NAT level but more at the Higher level applications like the MMEs the HSS and the CSS these kinds of things what in your opinion would Mean that this application has been ported into into cloud and and it's native You want to like specific examples? Yeah, that's absolutely. So one part is very clear is that if I want to add more If I'm getting more load in that the way I add more Capacity is by scaling up and adding more virtual machines are writing more containers Whatever it is and scaling out that way and I can do that infinitely There's no stopping. There's no boundary and the pnfs. There's always a boundary So that's one one part of it. And there's also the thing where with cloud native you have an acceptance that resiliency of the six nines ilk or durability of the 16 nines ilk Doesn't come from being in one place It has to be able to be located in more than one two three times three places sometimes And many of the vnfs aren't made to do that and so Some part of it is inherent to making a connection and keeping a voice call up and running But we have to work through that and make it so that that can actually be serviced out of multiple locations to be able to maintain a high level of resiliency and a high level of Durability, so I mean that's one part of it That that we're asking for is having more flexibility scale out another part of it too with cloud native is is kind of working in an API model where you're Allowing yourself to be just a module within a larger framework and you're not thinking of yourself as the only thing And then reusing other components where there's where there's the possibility The crying guy at the beginning is crying in part because he used to own the whole stack And he could control the whole thing himself and that's also on our end on in our Organization we had teams that owned how I built the infrastructure and how I built the Presentation layer and everything between and they they don't have that anymore So going toward a more modular design is another another characteristic. That's that's unique to cloud native I mean that was probably my key point was modular design I mean I get there's a transition phase from going from a pnf to vnf but if you look at certain applications and In my mind if it's already running on some form of appliance, that's x86 base It just happens to be in branded hardware for a certain vendor That's ripe for moving it to a vnf But then you have to really really zoom into the application and the architecture this service is offering and whether you can Explode it out and really start rethinking how that fits into a larger framework That's that's kind of what I meant by What I said earlier All right, thank you everybody for showing up and thank you


Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have a great trio of guests on a really exciting topic. I'm really looking forward to a conversation. I think as long as the Future Trends Forum has been around, we've been using social media in different ways, both directly to share information about our program and also to gather guests and to gather participants. But also we've had sessions about it. How do you use Twitter, for example, in the academic world? Our guests here are going to join us to give us a kind of catch-up on what's going on in this fall 2023, especially as the big social media site of Twitter seems to be, as they say, increasingly problematic. Some academics have been leaving it. Some are staying. What goes into that decision? If someone leaves, where do they go? I'm absolutely delighted with our trio of guests, wonderful people. I'm going to bring them up one by one and give them a chance to introduce themselves. I'm going to do so in our customary Future Trends Forum way. Let's begin with Karen Costa. Hello, Karen. Hi, everyone. Hi. I'm excited to be here. I have no idea what happens after Twitter. I quit last week. That's why I'm here, to figure that out. Well, that's what we'll do together. Karen, where are you today? Where have we found you? Well, I live in Massachusetts. I'm about an hour west of Boston. I've been working in higher ed since 2001. I teach online. I do a lot of faculty development work. And I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter talking about higher ed and faculty development, trauma-aware teaching, online learning, living as somebody with ADHD, late diagnosed, all of those things. And now I don't know where I'm going to do that talking. So I'm going to find out. Well, let's bash this out. Thank you, Karen. I'm so glad you can join us. Let's bring out some more people, because we also have my colleague, co-conspirator, co-teacher, and all kinds of things are one of our dear Canadian friends, Lee Scaler of Basset. Hello, Lee. Lee, are you muted? Yes, you are muted. No. No, we still can't hear you. Okay. Well, do you fiddle with that for a second? I'll circle back to you. Let me bring up your other colleague. And this is a colleague who I have to say proves the rule that if you're going to be a guest on the Future Trans Forum, it really helps to have fantastic facial hair. Let me welcome to the forum, Thomas J. Tobin. Hello, Tom. Hello, Brian. I'm grateful to be here with everybody today. Thank you. Where are you today? Are you in Pennsylvania? Yes, that's right. I'm coming to you from my home office in State College, Pennsylvania. So I'm just down the street from Wesson, actually. Excellent. Excellent. We have a strong Northeastern vibe going on today. Tom, the way we ask people to introduce themselves in the forum is to describe what they're going to be working on for the next year. And for you, as far as I can tell, that means writing 12 books, organizing 600 seminars, and probably leading a small country to victory. Brian, why don't you correct my vision here? The vision is correct. The numbers are just wrong. I'm actually going to be writing two different books. One of them's called Universal Design for Learning at Scale. And I'm grateful that Greg Britton from John Hopkins University Press is on here, because two of my co-authors and I are going to be sending him probably this week the proposal for a second edition of Evaluating Online Teaching called Evaluating Teaching in the Digital Era. So I'm really looking forward to that. As for leading countries, not so much. But yeah, a lot of travel coming up, and I'm grateful to be working with lots of colleges and universities and keeping my ear in what comes next. Well, excellent. We're really, really glad to host you. And a shout out to Greg Britton, the hardest-working, strongly publishing editor in the education business. Now, let's see if we can bring back Lee. More importantly, let's see if we can hear her as well as see her. Lee, how are you doing? Can you hear me now? Perfectly. Not being able to hear me is a rarely something that people complain about when it comes to me. I'm a stellar upset. No, I know. I'm surprised you can't hear me from the room of requirement. We're on the same floor in the same building here at Georgetown University. So I am best known on social media as ready writing. I've written extensively about using social media about how I wouldn't have the job and career that I have without Twitter and social media. And I've been, you know, just a really proponent of using social media for personal learning networks, networked learning. I know most of you here in the audience and recognize your names because of Twitter. Yeah, largely Twitter and then leading over to other social media. And I'm really interested to in this question of what's next. Well, excellent. Excellent. I'm really glad to see you. And yes, by the way, Lee and I are about maybe 60 feet away from each other right now. We're separated by a beautiful open atrium. And so I'm really glad to see you. But here, let me arrange things.  Let me get everybody up together like this. Friends, if you're new to the Future Transform, I'm going to ask our guests a couple of questions to get their thinking out in the air and to get things rolling. But then I'm going to try and get out of the way to make room for your questions and your comments. So as our guests start to start to talk, please think about what you'd like to ask them. If you'd like to ask them to think about which platforms they recommend or practices or what's going on. Again, the form here is a bit like Soiling Green. It's made out of people. It's made out of all of you. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. So to begin, I guess I want to ask, I don't want to put the question of what's wrong with Twitter. I'd like to ask outside of Twitter, where are you folks looking? Where are you playing? Where are you exploring? Where do you think academic Twitter might be added? Are we talking threads? Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky? What do you think? Not threads. I'll start there. And I'm on Blue Sky. One of the reasons I quit Twitter was I figured I should try out, give Blue Sky more attention before I came on here to talk about what's next. And so it's your fault, Brian, that I quit Twitter. So I gave Blue Sky a try last week. And what I found was just going on and posting regularly, this is an old school social media lesson. But for me, reciprocity, you get out of it what you put into it. And I started to get out of it what I was putting into it. And each morning I would have fewer engagements, far, far fewer engagements on Twitter than on Blue Sky. And that Twitter had been dying for me engagement-wise for a long time. And there was some really nice engagement and meeting new people and old friends on Blue Sky. So I think I'm going to give that a shot and maybe put a little more energy into LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a little weird for me. I kind of feel like Big Bird at the business meeting meme on LinkedIn. But everyone's very nice there. It's just not where I can be my fully weird self. And I think I can be a little bit weirder on Blue Sky. So that's my current plan. Nice. Nice. Let's share it for weirdness. And just remember, before everyone else goes, weird Twitter has long been a thing. So how about you, Tom? What do you think? I'm struck by something Chris Aldrich just mentioned in the chat. He says, all the platforms that Brian just mentioned are broadly, corporately controlled. Haven't we learned our lessons in doing that? And it allows me to post a little something in the chat from our good friend Anna Cook, who is one of the designers at Microsoft now in the accessibility space. And she says that the problem with any social media trying to replace Twitter is that none of them have tried to significantly change the fundamental issues with the platform. The recipe is too similar. And yes, some things have been changed, but it was an opportunity to do so much better and still could be. So when I'm thinking about Twitter, so for example, my accounts, right? So I don't have an account on Threads, Counter, Diaspora, T2, Tumblr, Clubhouse, Discord, Reddit, TikTok, WT social, Substack, Notes, or Spill. But I do have an account on Mastodon where 80 people are connected. I have an account on Blue Sky, which is rocketing up all the time. Instagram, which used to be my personal account. Facebook, which used to be just my personal account. LinkedIn, which was always just professional flu fluff law. And then Twitter and X. But the challenge is, for me, a lot of folks are heading over to Blue Sky because it is more like what Twitter used to be. And that vibe of sort of weird Blue Sky is getting there. So because it's an invitation-only platform, the challenge is how do we scale that up quickly? Because right now, for me, Twitter is still the place where I'm connected to the greatest number of all of you.  This is a whole series of great points. You've mentioned features. You've mentioned corporate ownership or otherwise. You've mentioned the question audience. And Karen, I want to make sure that you... She mentioned one of the great lessons of social media as well as the blog is here, which is to keep engaging and not treat it passively. This is wonderful stuff. Lee, what do you have to add? Where are you thinking of heading? Well, I... So in preparation for this too, I have not yet left Twitter in part because all of the hockey riders that I follow that I have on a list are all still there and haven't migrated to other places. So if I want to get my Montreal Canadians and NHL hockey news, then Twitter is still the best place where I have this curated list where everybody is. I feel like this is what... It's almost like a moment... This is like a small example, but I don't know if people remember Grantland. Grantland was this great sports and pop culture website and they shut it down and all of the riders dispersed. And so it was trying to recreate the SS feed or a Twitter list of everyone who was at Grantland so I could keep connected with all of these great riders that I had. Well, I spent... So I spent the morning... There's a plug-in that you can get for Chrome that will... That will move through your contact list and try to find those people on Blue Sky. So it's basically just scraping the Twitter list, your Twitter contact list, and then connecting that through an API to Blue Sky trying to find the people who are there. And of course I don't remember the name and I'll have to call it up on my browser. But it's limited capability. Skybridge. Skybridge, thank you. But it's limited availability. It's not that reliable. Like people that I knew who are on Blue Sky, who I also followed on Twitter, it didn't pull up the right names or it didn't find anybody. But it also took me three hours because it only scrapes as far down as a screen and then you have to refresh the screen. And when you follow over 9,000 people, that's a lot of refreshing and scrolling down the screen. So I'm rebuilding. I think that my weirdness, my Twitter weirdness will probably move over to Blue Sky. But you were asking before why people changed and it's not just the invitations to get it scaled up quickly. It's the amount of labor involved in rebuilding something that made that in my case was 12 years in the making. Yes. And for disability communities, for other marginalized communities, what they don't have is time. And so we can complain about the data practices and the Nazis and Elon Musk all we want. But if this is the place that is easiest, that takes the least amount of time and effort and spoons. Until it's gone, I know that a lot of these communities are staying there for the sole reason of just the sheer amount of time that they have invested in their networks and the sheer amount of time that they would, over a long period of time, saying, well, now I'd have to do this in a really short period of time. I don't have that energy, the capacity, the bandwidth where I know I can still come to Twitter and easily find my people and find my tribe. So that's a lot of the sort of counter narrative to, it's a bit of a privilege to be able to pick up and move to a different platform, which I think a lot of us around here do have, but it still took me a lot of time, right? And it's still not rebuilt. And on the other hand, I saw a lot of, well, as I was scrolling through, because it kind of makes you scroll through and there's something about reflecting on your social media network, that it is a moment of reflection. It is a moment to say, do I still need to be following all those people? Do I still want all these people following me? What was I doing with 10,000 followers? So it's sort of this chance to also reflect and review what it is that today in 2023, am I trying to accomplish on a platform like Blue Sky versus what I was trying to accomplish in 2010, right? 13 years later, we are all not the same people using social media in the same ways. And so then it becomes a moment to say, well, am I using it for in 2023? And what am I looking for from it? First of all, thank you, Lee. You've touched on also so many good things, both you and Karen, and this is another great social media practice, which is how our wrangle refers to as pruning or gardening social media to go over and say, why am I following these people? And what am I getting out of this? And also I just wanted to make sure that you had Canada represented here. Very nice, thank you. Brian, can I, there's something I'm just dying to say. Is that one of the things that's come up for me to this question of what are you going to do after Twitter is to go offline a bit more. So I don't know if, and somebody in the chat was talking about that, but I'm seeing a lot of people say, I'm not going to replace it. I think a lot of people in this space, if you're like me, for many years prior to the current owner on Twitter, I was actively debating if I was going to quit because I felt like it was taking too much of my time I was really conflicted about it. It felt like an addiction at times. And it was also for, you know, as somebody with a disability and ADHD, Twitter was also a lifeline. So it was very much, and it is for many marginalized folks. It was very much a both and, but somebody in the chat said, what are you going to do if you're not, how are you going to connect with people if you're not on Twitter? I'm taking a pottery class at a craft center at the, you know, local city craft center. I'm getting out and seeing friends more. I text people. I call people. I email people. The three of you all have my email. A lot of you in the chat have my email. I'm surviving. So I, you know, the end, I don't really want to replace it. I'm hope I'm kind of grateful to the current owner for, you know, driving me away. Finally, it's probably for the best in the long run. And I think we all, you know, if I may bring up climate action, something near and dear to your heart, maybe a little less time online and a little more time in the natural world could do us some good. Karen, I'm so glad you said this. I was really hoping we get to that point. So, you know, one way of thinking about this is as a substitution, you know, so instead of Twitter, we're going to be using Instagram or whatever. But instead of a substitution, we have a reduction or a transformation. So taking those hours every day or every week on Twitter and then putting them into something offline. I would love to hear what people think about this in the chat and questions. Speaking of which, something has come up in the chat. That's a brilliant question. And I just lost the person who asked it. I want to say Daniel Lawrence. When we're saying if a platform is good or useful, what do we mean by that? What's the goodness that we're looking for in a social media platform? I mean, I think it depends. Right? Like, it is... I was looking... When I first got on Twitter, I was looking to connect to people. I was looking to actually start a small business. And, you know, it turned into that that's not what I found. But I did find community. I found a new career. I found really interesting people. I found out I had ADHD and so it was perfectly wired for something like Twitter. Like, there was a lot of things that I went into... And I think we all did when Twitter and the social media started very naively. Right? Let's see what this place is about.  Right? And it's funny to me that so many of the people that I connected with early on in Twitter and as I went through, became very close with on Twitter, all ended up being diagnosis neurodivergent in one way or the other. Almost all of them. And I don't think that that was particularly surprising given our personalities, given how we used Twitter, given all of these various circumstances. Even our age bracket, we were all Gen X as well. Like, that's something that people tend to forget that, you know, Gen X made Twitter big. It was mostly Gen X users. So now am I looking for the same thing in a social media platform? I'm looking to stay connected. I'm looking to keep learning to keep bumping up. One of the things I loved about Twitter that I didn't know I needed was bumping up against so many different ideas and disciplines and experts in all kinds of different fields that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise. I find just my LinkedIn network is helping a little bit with that. I find a lot of the professional articles, materials, research that people would use to share on Twitter on there.  You know, so it's a lot of different things and I think a lot of it now ends up being distributed across networks where you're getting certain things from certain networks but it's not necessarily, I don't think you're going to be able to get it all from one network the way we all got Twitter if that makes, if that makes sense. I think we're smarter now about it for better or worse. And that kind of, that, Lee, as you're talking to the question of what's the value that we're looking for, it's kind of the three C's. It's community, it's creativity, and it's crazy. And when we think about community, I posted into the chat a quote from Robert Wolfe who ended up on Blue Sky a couple of months ago and he said, I feel like this place is the summer cottage you thought you might visit a few times a year only to end up living there full time when your house burns down. And that metaphor of Twitter as the house having burned down, the metaphor is of Twitter as home, a place where you feel that you can be your authentic self. You don't have to mask for others. You don't have to put on the social niceties for others. You can just kind of let it all fly and let it go however it is. That sense of safety is what seems to be missing in the new iteration that is X.  But then I go back to my friend, Ralu Pacheco Vega, who's sticking it out on Twitter as well and I'll probably be there as well until they turn the lights off. But he talks about why it's hard to shift. And he says that several things need to be said about social media for academics. He says, obviously social media platforms are time consuming and you should be in the spaces where you want to be. To Karen's point about, you know, taking a pottery class or investing your time where you feel it's valuable. But Ralu goes on to say, network effects and scalability remain powerful elements that will keep some or even many people on this platform and will not facilitate their migration. So if we think that way, I'd love to open the question up to all of you as well. How fast do we want to recreate what Lee just mentioned took us years to build? Is that a reasonable expectation? I'd love to hear your ideas in the chat or if you'd like to come on stage or use the question feature. We'd love to open up the conversation in that way. Please. Good question. Before folks start peraging us with answers, Karen, what would you like to add? What is the goodness that you're looking for? Yeah, we've talked about this weird Twitter and Twitter as a space for neurodivergent folks. I just started talking about having a diagnosis of ADHD on Twitter without putting much thought into it. And then people were saying to me, you're so brave for speaking about ADHD. And I was like, I did. It just, it kind of happened organically. That's a loss for me. And it's certainly not something I'm talking about a lot on LinkedIn a little bit, but in a different context. And I'm kind of still looking for that space. So I'm looking for a neurodivergent affirming space. And if anybody wants to create one, I think there's an opportunity for that. I will join and follow and promote it. I think Lee was talking about these, like I forget the term you used, but like more focused spaces. I'm seeing that as well. So you all know I love Adrian Marie Brown's work. Small is all. So I think maybe we're going to see smaller, more focused communities and a neurodivergent affirming space would be one that I would be eager to have. The other thing I'm missing about Twitter being off for a whole week is I realized Twitter was my professional Rolodex. So somebody asked me in the past two days like for names, for recommendations for this and for that. And I went, oh, sure, let me grab that. And I went to go to Twitter that I would search for my name and their name or my name and a key term. And that is how, you know, one of the things I like to do in higher ed, one of my misfit roles is to connect people and to know who does this and know who does that and to make these kind of weird connections. And I was like completely at a loss. Like, oh my gosh, who do I recommend for this? So the good news is I kind of panic for 30 seconds. And then I was like, why don't you just think about it? And I did. And it kind of hurt my brain a little bit. And then I remembered who those people were. And I Googled them and found them. And it took me like two extra minutes, but maybe those are parts of my brain that weren't getting used and now are. So, yeah, I, you know, that's one though that I'm missing a little bit, that sort of professional Rolodex where everybody is, that I'm not finding in other spaces and the weird neurodivergent affirming space. Those are losses for me that would be goodness, perhaps in other places. And a follow on to that sense of community. I'm noticing in the chat, people are posting their blue sky invitation codes. So people are feeling the community here, the sense of safety here. And to answer a quick question, no, you can't use a code more than once. So if you see one and it doesn't work, we'll move down the list. Well, this forum is definitely a good space for this. Please go ahead. I was just going to talk about these safe spaces is that I, again, I talk about my kids all the time and drives them nuts, but they are really huge discord users. And that is their safe space where there are neurodivergent ones. There are mental health ones. There are all kinds of discord. The way I describe discord, if you don't know what it is, is if the gamers got a whole to slack. And that's exactly, I mean, if the gamers did get a whole to slack, it was developed for gamers to communicate, but you can set up closed discord communities.  You know, and it's been really fascinating to watch them negotiate these things. Really empowering kinds of ways. There's still all the drama that comes with being teenagers, but like there's this really interesting dynamic, but for me, I guess, I guess the openness of Twitter was something that was always really appealing to me where I get the importance of more closed spaces, but at the same time, like there was just this, anyone could find you on Twitter and you could find anyone on Twitter. And there was just, and again, there's the hashtags where you would find people and connect. There's just something about that. I mean, it's still missing a blue sky because there's no hashtag. So it's really hard to like find like-minded people.  And so, you know, I think there is something about that openness, that again, you're probably all way too naive about that I would miss on a place like Discord or in a place like Slack or even on this place by, even on Blue Sky. I wonder if we should have a special session on messaging apps, WhatsApp and Telegram. Thank you, Lee. Thank you for adding to that. Let me throw the floor open to questions because they already come in and I want to make sure all of you get a chance to ask and all of you get a chance to answer. So this is a question that comes in from Karen Belgnane. What is appropriate? What functions or features do you feel will be most important for a new community space? So if I may, Karen, I think in part people have been answering what they valued and still value in Twitter and other social spaces. But I'm curious if I can just twist this a little bit. What would you like to see that isn't already there? What would you like to see besides no Elon Musk? Yes, one of the pros of leaving is trying to divest from billionaires. But as somebody was reminding us, Jack owns Blue Sky. I don't, yeah, so it's really, it's hard to get away from the billionaires. It's hard to answer that because my brain is a little foggy on this because there's the Twitter of last week when I left and then there's the Twitter of six months ago and so many of the accessibility features were being gutted over the past six months. So that was a huge loss and continues to be a huge loss. And I don't know, I don't know that Blue Sky and LinkedIn have prioritized that as the pre-current owner Twitter folks had. But for me, I'm always one who, and I think, I don't want to speak for Tom and Lee, but I sense they would agree with me that we want to design from the margins and make sure that inclusivity and accessibility for all, watching, you know, Twitter had done some cool things with all text and they had an accessibility team that had been put in place right before the current order took over and that whole staff was fired or many of them and that was gutted. So that would be really important for me is to listen to the folks who are at the margins and making sure their needs are met and making sure our accessibility is at the forefront. I know a lot of folks that feel that Blue Sky is like, the invite codes, I'm sure there's a reason for that, but it doesn't, you know, really send a message of inclusivity. So that's a problem. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Tom, Lee, did you want to add more to that? Absolutely. My feature list, some of which exists in various places, but it's five things. Voice, choice, agency, safety, belonging. You have to have a voice that you feel that other people respect. You have to have choice about where you go, with whom you interact. Safety, you have to feel that you're not going to be attacked even when, and perhaps especially when you're in conversations where there's contention and disagreement. Agency, you have to feel like you can act for your own good and the good of the community that's around you and a sense of belonging. You have to find your tribe and whatever weird there is, you can probably find a few of them. So voice, choice, agency, safety, belonging. Thank you. That's a great slogan. That's a great idea. Thank you. And Lee, did you want to add? Yeah, mine's less catchy. Just, I shared this in the chat because I remember writing this and I said when did I write this? Of course it was seven years ago, so ages ago. When the choice was made to change Twitter from just a straight timeline to an algorithmically curated timeline. So showing you what you want and it's even worse now. It's really even worse now. I would love to just go back to most recent on top, scroll down to find stuff that's older. But the other thing, and I think this is something and I don't know if it's a feature or if it's just something that we really have to keep in mind as we build for the next one is that not only did Twitter become a lifeline for communities to connect with one another, it became a lifeline for government and other important organizations to communicate important information to us. Right? And you know, entire government agencies, and I know people have studied this, have units that are all about just making sure that correct information and timely information goes out to the right people on social media at the time. And you know, we just had the telephone test yesterday. So maybe this is a good time where all of our phones went off in the afternoon quite loudly.  I mean, we sort of saw news happen, got information faster. People who needed information got information faster, like what we're doing here and like sharing blue sky codes, but it's like tweeting where people have electricity, tweeting where people are safe, tweeting where the waters have proceeded, tweeting where how to get aid, mutual aid, that it became this really important public good, right? We can talk about does this mean that it should be a government you know, a public utility or anything like that. I think that becomes another question. But but again, there is some there, that's why saying all these features kind of collided in one space to be able to do that. And I don't know if that could be replicated or if I said like it's just things are just going to get broken off and and and and live on different apps and live in different platforms and live in different digital spaces that are also and the one thing that'll connect them is our smartphone, right? Like that'll live on our smartphone but in 27 different apps. That may be really may be. Thank you. Thank you for adding that as well. A great question, by the way. Thank you, Ken. We have another question that follows along this line in a really specific way and maybe this is another request for a discord here, but this is our good friend Steve Ehrman. He asks what I want is a social network composed almost entirely of academics who want to improve education participants should see relevant messages with a minimum of non-relevant messages avoid information flooding. What do you think? What do you think? Would you even be the change you wish to see in the world and that you should start that and I will join it because I want that too. Me too. I tend to go where it's to you guys. And I didn't I didn't invite Stephen to come on over to Academic Blue Sky. One of the challenges with Mastodon was everyone could put a server up and our friend Josh Eiler put on was one of the founders of SOTOL dot Mastodon standing for teaching and learning and all you know six of us joined it and it was meant to be exactly the thing that Stephen is referring to here the organic community building that happens on a network platform seems to be happening over on Blue Sky less because Blue Sky is itself a community of academics but because of the the echo chamber effect of I follow people with whom I'm already connected in other spaces and then they get me to see other people who are doing the work and this is actually one of the reasons why my experience of Twitter up until very recently had not been that of seeing all the crazy because I was connected only and purposefully to academic colleagues and so for example I never would have run across Nicole listen at the University of Michigan she studies black social media spaces Dana Boyd at Microsoft who is a big advocate for the accessible and disability advocacy community Andre Brock over at the University of Iowa he studies urban and hip hop communities or Meredith Clark at Northeastern or Chris Gilliard a friend of the forum at Maycom Community College doing his hyper visible about the surveillance culture of technology and I was able to reach out to all of those folks through connections on the various social media that I've got so to Steven's point most of the spaces where you go can be the thing you want if you are curating with an open mindset toward it so and I'm saying that sadly so Lee saved me on this one I think I mean it's part of the like how do you again over 12 years of Twitter there is just a lot of happenstance that happens in terms of finding people right like the same thing and if you know again like you said well six of us joined right this space and then became the six of us and that might be really useful but it's more than how do you I love the noise of Twitter I don't want a quiet space where all anybody is talking about is making higher education better right I do want that space I want that conversation and I want to know about people's cats and dogs and breakfast and kids and commutes to work and all of that kind of stuff because that's the thing that builds community right those are the things that get that you get to know that gets you invested that gets where people are I don't think it's noise and junk I think you know when people are like oh Instagram is just people's breakfast pictures so what right that is part of their lives and just part of their day we are beyond just our professional selves you know I want that space where Chris Gillier and I talk about surveillance but also complain about how bad our two hockey teams are right and or you know when and so like I just I understand and I know and I'm a part of closed communities and closed spaces and I really like those but I want I love the noise and I know it's not for everyone and I know Twitter isn't for everyone either but I love the noise of Twitter and that's the thing that I'm going to miss is that all of a sudden if everybody is only talking about their very narrow focus of their academic lives or their professional lives then like then we should just all be all linked it yeah well said then we should just all be all linked it these are very very different purposes I mean you want the immersive city everything going on versus the small group but I don't want to react I want to add another question to the mix here and this is from Chris Aldrich and I was hoping you would ask this what does the indie web or the older blogosphere need to have to become more individually controlled space for this sort of communication and it gives us a link to the indie web for education and Chris I'm going to try to put that in the chat as well I don't know if I trust higher education to do any better job with this than the corporations or the government well and maybe that's just my cynical hat right now but the institution of higher education has not shown itself to be inclusive as institutions individuals yes as institutions we are still exclusionary we are still we still put up walls and fences and gates we are still mired in surveillance capitalism we are mired in big attack you know I have you know I want my institution to stay out of trying to run communities and social media like I just said and so I think it's individuals and it's collectives I think we can look to our professional organizations I think we can look to our unions if we have those and look to those other spaces to be able to create something something different because again I just I do not trust the administrators the institution of higher education to have our best interests when it comes to or the community's best interest when it comes to creating some sort of platform digital platform I'm loving what I hope I'm loving what I hope is the irony in John Hollenbeck's comment he says we need an assistant vice provost of social media what do you mean higher ed can't help yes that's John that's definitely John which educators can't do well Lee says Karen did you want to add to that I just keep coming back to you know Lee was talking about it and Liz Gross is here and chatting about like this desire to have a space where we can be our whole selves so we can talk about higher ed and that the red socks suck and how we feel about Taylor Swift and social activism and I guess I'm kind of thinking like isn't that like what relationships are for I don't know you know like so that's just that's bubbling up for me and that's something I think I did rely on Twitter for increasingly that's why I had that both and relationship with it I started to be able to get those things on Twitter and I put less time into investing in them and you know this I'm really torn about this because y'all know I'm a huge advocate of online education and online spaces but you know it really did have a negative impact on my mental health to I had I think you know I'm kind of waking up to like three and a half years into this pandemic how isolated I had become and how much I relied on those interactions that I never needed to leave my house for and like I forgot to leave my house y'all like and finding those people who I can have those conversations with and connect with on different levels and be my whole self with has been a challenge but it's been improving my mental health so that's coming up for me is I'm torn about like do we how much do we want to invest in finding a new space or creating a new space when you know maybe we need to just go outside and take a walk with a friend I don't know I'm torn on this one Speaking of the touch grass idea Brian mentioned a question in the chat has anyone talked about Facebook and that's perhaps sort of my wrap up comment on this whole conversation is that in the before times Facebook was for me a way to be in touch with the people with whom I was personally friends in real life or my family members and it still has that thing so if somebody from another college or university sent me a Facebook request I would decline and it was a separate space just for my own in real life connections after the demise of twitter and especially during the pandemic that went by the wayside now if you send me a Facebook request I'll gladly say sure let's connect but that meant that something was missing or something had changed and when we think about the spaces that we've got I want to I want to say two different things on different sides of a coin the return to in-person conferences symposia events like I'm going to EDUCAUSE in Chicago next week and I'm really looking forward to connecting with a whole bunch of folks and that does me some good spiritually as well as professionally it's just nice to be able to talk to somebody in person at the same time I'm also an advocate for continuing to do the virtual conferences and virtual access because there's folks who are immunocompromised or can't afford to go or for whatever other reasons of privilege or circumstance can't engage in those kinds of places so I would always advocate for having a space where it's welcoming and it's accessible so that's a your question about Facebook Brian takes me right down that path thank you thank you and just I checked this into the chat a little while ago I did some quick back of the envelope calculations and Twitter, sorry Instagram and Facebook remain by far the hugest socials right now people keep pronouncing Facebook dead and it's not happening the second tier is really Twitter and then the avenues we've been talking about are mainly far below we do have a question that has come in from Heather Mangrum and I think this is a terrific question and I want to make sure she gets the chance to ask this in a higher education declining is it not important for academics with fact centered information to share to stay despite the toxicity where else can these voices have a loud enough microphone I'll put that up again because that was that's a rich question I want to speak to that oh go ahead Lee no what I was going to say that it I mean if this has been long been a debate on Twitter about should I stay or should I go in terms of how safe somebody may or may not be right we know that who you are what you look like how you present all of your gender your gender identity your disabilities all of that kind of stuff matters in terms of how your voice is received whether or not you have a PhD or affiliated in higher education and I think that's even more true right now but the way I see is a lot of academics have started this is another space where people have moved since Google Reader has died a long death long ago but the the substack right newsletters going back to an earlier connective technology which is email to be able to so it's more of an opt in much like blogging was an opt out we still have that opportunity for communication connection those kinds of things but I mean I don't know you know I don't even I don't think I've shared anything relevant to academia on Twitter in six months it's been on LinkedIn or on Facebook or elsewhere because I just find with the algorithm I don't think it's reaching anyone so I just I guess I understand that and I appreciate that I guess the question is not again Heather if I'm misunderstanding this please let me know I think is in question of individual choice so much as communal responsibility you know if we step back from a place that we find to be some degree toxic however we define toxic that incredibly overused word what is the responsibility of academics to wade in anyway or do we seed ground through disinformation, misinformation and so forth Brian I was going to share that early on when the new owner took over my friend Sharla Berry and I were kind of talking about this and she pointed me to Sarah Kensior did I get that right thanks Tom I put Sarah's tweet on this in the chat and Sarah don't seed territory in an information war and that was very powerful for me and that was one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did lots of folks were fleeing but I knew that for me in particular the disabled community and the ADHD community were on Twitter and again for many folks that's a lifeline and I felt like if I'm leaving you know where where does that community go I have some resources and privilege to share how can I support that community staying felt like the best way to do that for a long time once I got a little more confident and settled on Blue Sky and I saw there were people transitioning over there I felt better about making that decision as part of a marginalized community to say okay there is another space to go that has lots of its own problems as well no easy answers and to Heather's point about seeding territory or do we have an ethical obligation we have to weigh the fact that we can't be everywhere we have to take care of ourselves before we can take care of others and we have to recognize that being in these communities is already a privileged stance I take a lot of boxes for examine privileges right cisgender, white, older all the gray hair you name it and if I'm in a space and I'm able to have an influence on a conversation for a positive good I have that ethical obligation also to create space for other voices I want to welcome in people who are newer to the field I want to welcome in people who have circumstances and viewpoints at the same time I'm not going to fight every battle every person who's got a bone to pick and wants to disagree with me, Lee is absolutely right if we're thinking about substack or other publication venues we've had these problems for decades I'm a public scholar and I posted something on inside higher ed or in the Chronicle of Higher Education or I wrote a letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper in 1986 and every crank in the Cincinnati area just wrote back to me right but what we've got now is we have communication channels where it's not just three people who are reading it but you actually can have a wider conversation with a large number of people and I think having those conversations finding the place where you can actually contribute you feel safe to do so and if you have some privilege go exercise it on behalf of other people who don't so that might be my rallying cry to everybody here on the session and you've been doing it while we're holding this panel I'm reading through the chat and I am absolutely proud and amazed at the community that's building here well it is a terrific community if I can be cynical for just two seconds about that question as well no you can't it's also funny take as many seconds as you need to me there's there's a cynicism that bubbles up when I see that it's like isn't this our responsibility to stay on these platforms for the greater good when we were told when we first got onto these platforms by academia that we were wasting our time in what we did to account or anything and so now we've come full circle where the work we have been doing is retroactively I don't know if recognized as the right word but maybe weaponized in order to you know burn us out even further right like we were I'll show you all the comments on my public scholarship on inside higher ed and everything that told me I was wasting my time that what I did didn't count that Twitter was like social media generally was a waste of time and you know then to kind of turn around to a lot of these communities and say you know it's your responsibility to keep the truth alive you're kind of like really where we all when we were when we were you know turning around on us and hitting all over what it is that we were doing on here exactly where they were thank you I don't think that's cynical at all but what I do have to say that it's truly dark is that we are almost out of time we that's the problem I'm not going to let that happen what I wanted to ask you all as a final parting shot for each of you if you could just say a sentence about where you think academic Twitter is going to end up in a year from now so I'm going to give you all a chance to think about that and just say one sentence you know where you think it's going to end up is it all are we all going to follow Karen into pottery and offline are we going to distribute ourselves across all kinds of different platforms as Lee described or are we going to be very careful and come up with curated individual small communities as I think Tom has described off and on so what do you think and we'll do this in the order in which you arrived Karen what's your sentence for a year from now what do you think small is all okay and who is the author that you cited for that oh that's Adrian Marie Brown thank you small is all small is all very good and Tom how about you after a year the network effects will mean it won't be academic Twitter it'll be academic blue sky that's a strong clear run thank you sir and Lee I don't even think Twitter is going to last another year just generally academic Twitter or otherwise I mean and if it is it will just be bots yelling at each other so you know I I don't have a lot of hope for Twitter more generally or X as it's now called Twitter is already dead guys it's X now so I can have Twitter it's academic X and I just I I don't see it I don't see it lasting longer than a year and if it does it won't be much longer than that afterwards it'll go well thank you thank you for that and thank you Lee thank you Tom thank you Karen this has been terrific and very very useful conversation and thanks to everybody for such tremendous activity in the chat you know I like to end this by pointing where you can follow me and that's how I updated that follow here so here's where you can find me on Twitter where I still am along with Shindig here is myself on mastodon there is my threads handle and there's my blue sky handle so you can find me in all of those I continue to explore them and also to follow Chris Aldridge's question you can follow me on the Indie Web my own blog which I've been running for years right there as someone who's an early adopter of social media back before the term was even coined I find this all historically fascinating and also personally very invigorating but I especially love is that we can do it in the social context of all of us together thank you everybody for all these thoughts and ideas if you'd like to go back into our previous sessions and take a look at what we have been saying about this just go to our archive tinyurl.com FTF archive all the way back to 2016 if you'd like to look at what we're talking about coming up just go to the forums homepage and look for the upcoming events by the way Educause next week in Chicago next Wednesday who would like to join us live and in person there please let me know also if you would just like to all of you please take care of yourselves it's a wonderful thing together with you it's wonderful to collaboratively future with all of you please all of you take care be safe and be well we'll see you next time online bye bye


My mom and my grandmother have never gone to school. They have been robbed out of their basic human rights because of their gender. I'm born in a country that believes that women are less valuable to the society. My peace building work revolves around policy implementation, advocacy, awareness raising, and having everyone to be part of the big picture. The community now understands, especially the women and girls, that they have rights and they have to stand and do something. Also survivors of sexual, gender-based violence got a safe space where they can come out and talk about these stories at the traditional courts because we have women there. I have seen how work can be destructive for generations and I wouldn't warn my kids to have the same faith that my parents and I have been through.