Welcome, everybody. It's three o'clock Swedish time anyway, or central European summer time. And it's time for this latest webinar, which the topic this time is open education for refugees. It's about social inclusion, empowerment, and so on. This webinar is being provided by a number of projects and organisations, primarily the Moonlight Project MOOCs for Social Inclusion and Employability. We're also part of the EDEN webinar series. EDEN is the European Distance and E-Learning Network. And this also part of ITHU, which is the Swedish Network for IT and Higher Education, and also the Nordic Network for Adult Learning, NVL. So it's actually under four flags this webinar. So welcome, everyone. You've come from one of these networks. So it's good to see a nice gathering. There are now 46 of us in this room. We had about 110 registered a couple of an hour ago. So welcome, everybody. You probably heard the idea that open education, the people who need open education most generally don't know anything about it and don't know it exists, and are not able to take advantage of it. The situation in Europe and around the rest of the world today is that we have a real reason for developing open education, but we need to make people aware of it. And these people are primarily refugees, asylum seekers, people who are displaced or disadvantaged in some way. We have to try and make open education, and in particular MOOCs available to them, help them to get on board and find ways of making them actually useful to them. And we're going to start the discussion today. We'll be continuing with several more webinars during the year on this topic. So I'll just explain that so far we've got three guests in the studio, you could say, virtually. My name is Alistair Creelman, by the way. I come from Linneas University in Kalmar in the southeast of Sweden. And I'm a member of all these four organizations, in particular the Moonlight Project. With me, I have Paula. Thank you so much for the invitation. Give me a few words. And I also am to the project as well. And I look forward to sharing and learning with all of you today. OK, John, a couple of words of introduction. Good afternoon. It's great to be here. It's great to have the opportunity to share a few ideas and get some feedback. I'm based in the UK, as Alistair said, and as you can see from the map. OK, and Jennifer. Good afternoon. So I'm Jennifer. I am also working at Linneas University together with Alistair Creelman. I'm working with the validation of competency for asylum seekers and refugees here in Linneas. That's all. OK. OK, you'll be hearing from the three guest speakers in due course. They each have a short session. Will they be providing you with some input? And while you're listening to their input, try and think of questions to ask them. Think of points you'd like to make or follow up or discussion points. And after each short input, you'll get time to discuss with them, ask them questions and put forward your views. And for efficiency's sake, we will ask you to do that in a chat window and in poll questions. So it'll be very much text based interaction with you. So if you, if everybody is OK with that, it's nice to see the spread on the map there below us of people from all over Europe and even over in the USA. As I can see from the poll on the left, are you already using open education or refugee context? We have three examples of already in operation. It would be nice to get some links for those in operation. Four people planning to seven people considering and much the majority at the moment haven't started. And I think that's still quite symptomatic. There are a lot of projects going, but there are also a lot of people thinking about it. OK, it's time then to welcome the first speaker and it's John to give us a little bit of the overview on all this. So it's over to you, John. OK, Alastair, thank you very much. I suppose I'm here because of my involvement with the moonlight project and it probably would make some sense in talking about refugees to firstly to say something about my background and then something about what it is that MOOCs might be and what the idea could possibly mean. So I'm a professor of digital learning at the University of Wolverhampton in the Institute of Education and my specialism over the last 20 years has been mobile learning. In the course of the last five or seven years, I've worked extensively with UNWA, the UN Agency responsible for Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, specifically in Jordan, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria. And also with several British Council and Erasmus projects working with Jordanian and Palestinian universities. So in that sense, I'm very conscious of maybe some of the culture and the context and the conditions that many of the refugees come from. And I guess that informs quite a lot of what I say. I'm also conscious there are many other aspects of both MOOCs and of the refugee situation that I know very little about. But as I say, my contribution is to try and describe very briefly to people who are not familiar with them what MOOCs are. And in one sense, it's quite simple. And in another sense, it's quite complex and confused. It's quite simple because it just means massive open online courses. And they grew out of developmental work in Canadian universities some years ago. And I guess that portrays their, if you like, cultural background and begs questions immediately about is the whole phenomenon culturally and contextually specific? You know, did they work for Canada? Can they work anywhere else? Are they an essentially developed world anglophone phenomenon? And that might be, as it were, an academic question in the European University context. But outside the European University context, it's quite a significant question. So that's their background, North America. But to look at the words one by one, as this slide does, what exactly do they mean by massive? And that's a significant question partly because the original work in Canada was exploring the potential and the possibilities around massive connectivity and massive communities. So what exactly did they mean and is there a cut off or a threshold around this idea of massive? And as the slide says, is it 10 or 100,000 or whatever, you know? Secondly, what's the meaning of open? I mean, apart from anything else, does it mean free? Is there a distinction between free and open? Does it mean free or does it mean affordable? So there's the nature of openness is not straightforward. And it's certainly in other contexts of the open movement. We've seen a lot of diverse opinions and actually concerns about whether open merely privileges and gives resources to people who've largely got privileges and resources already. And again, refugees might not be the people with privileges and resources. So actually, is this an opportunity they can actually grasp or is it actually one that's denied to them for a variety of other reasons? It says online. And again, does that mean synchronous asynchronous? Does it mean kind of large amorphous and undifferentiated? Or does it mean somehow broken up into smaller groups that can interact at a more human level with each other? And then finally, what exactly does course mean? Does it mean a synchronous course with a start date and a stop date? Does it assume some kind of formative or summative assessment, some kind of accreditation? Is there a sense of community that builds up or is it a largely anonymous phenomenon? And certainly, whilst this might seem like kind of maybe hair splitting, it's important when we started looking at the MOOCs available to refugees or indeed those online offerings which portray themselves as MOOCs, where do they fit into this categorization? What are the answers to these questions? Are they conventional online computer aided learning? Or are they something more up to date, more responsive, more reactive than that? So those are a few questions about the meaning of MOOC and how it pans out in different communities. And you can see those questions being played out along this timeline as well and see the original idea being informed by, if you like, a kind of ideological notion of openness reflected in open source software, open content and being played out in the Open University and in MIT, specifically in them making their courses available. Then you have actually in the 2008-10 epoch the actual Connectivist MOOC itself coming on stream. And if you then look forwards in time, what you see is a kind of diversification as the original ideas and the original way of doing it became to a large extent corporate platforms for high quality media broadcasting and corporate training and various very sophisticated platforms being placed underneath the universities that are offering MOOC courses. So again, you can see a kind of diversification, people having different reasons, different ways of operationalizing the idea of a MOOC. And actually apart from anything else, still wondering exactly what the educational point is or the business case is. Is it just making everything available for everyone? In which case, how do we fund these things? Or is it a revenue stream in which case, what exactly is the nature of that revenue stream? To put that point a slightly different way, these are some of the large platforms underneath the current MOOCs being offered by a range of universities and you maybe could argue that Moodle is one of them or not. But certainly edX or Coursera or FutureLearn are. But you can see rather different characteristics across those different platforms. A radically different way of looking up the MOOC phenomenon, maybe a more kind of fundamentalist way is something we did five or six years ago from entirely free and open source software where we saw a vast number of people, I mean, sorry, 600 people, just finding out about it virally and taking part and it being a phenomenal experience of interactivity, of lots of very clever, fascinating people offering stuff for everyone else to learn from. So you've got this whole range of ideas about what a MOOC is, what it could offer, how you might deliver it. But just finally, they are largely an anglophone phenomenon with a very small number of technical platforms. EdRach is one of the few available in Arabic. And so that illustrates once you've broken out of the global north and the languages of the global north, there isn't very much available. And that's clearly a significant issue for people whose mother tongues aren't English, German or French. So I hope that's a reasonable summary of the issues. A word or two about Moonlight, we're a group of people interested in expanding social inclusion and employability through MOOCs for the refugee communities across Europe. Those are our partners, as I say, we're involved in higher education in one sense or another, either as discrete universities or consortia or social enterprises. And we have a number of activities and outputs, surveying what's available at the moment, looking for best practice, developing some tools and then developing some exemplar courses at our own universities and then synthesizing them across our various host universities in order to generate some guidelines for policymakers within the management and strategy of higher education. So that was a very brief and rushed run through of the possibilities that MOOCs offer in general and problems about what they might have to offer for refugees in particular. And I'll hand back over to Alistair now and see if anyone's got any questions. Okay. Now the chat is bigger. I wrote there on the chat at the end that all the slideshowers, you can download them if you so desire at the end of the webinar, so that's taken care of. So ideas about MOOCs and about them being used in this, how do we get MOOCs interesting to refugees? What are refugees' needs and can MOOCs actually supply something here? So far I think, John, a lot of the people involved in MOOCs have been in a way the people who, as I said earlier, probably least need them. They tend to be very much people with a university background, generally professional people who are wanting to sort of learn a little bit more about a new subject rather than opening up to people who don't have access to higher education. Yeah, certainly the successes in the UK have proved to be three-week long, six-week long, CPD professional development courses for people already in jobs with a specific career objective. And actually our experience with the MOBI MOOC one was that you need a fairly high level of digital literacy and subject knowledge to start with. The original idea was based around a lot of mutual interaction and contribution. And so people without that background or without the necessary digital literacy would sync without a trace. And I suppose that was predicated implicitly on the idea that all these people involved had access to the great kind of technology coverage connections as well, that they were sitting in front of high spec network desktop PCs. And certainly future learn has gone more in the direction of making it more device independent and mobile accessible. But that's a technological level rather than at the level of asking whether people have got the finance and the technology within their grasp. So I think there's a number of issues along those lines about what it is that MOOCs do at the moment and how is that relevant to what they could be doing for refugees? Yeah, I think there are several people typing here. We'll just wait till they come up. But I think the digital literacy thing and the access to infrastructure are two key questions. And I think that's possibly why many people have not been accessing open education. They simply don't know it's there. They don't know how to get onto it. They don't have anyone to help them. There's Johani asking a question. Yeah, I think there's a more general answer to Johani's question. And that is how little we might know about the expectations or the experiences of refugees. And that's not to bunch them all together and to say all refugees are the same, just that we don't know very much about how different they are, either from what we're expecting, what we're used to or from each other. And one of those expectations and experiences we might need to explore is their experiences of education or being in an education system of what education might consist of and why you might be having an education. You know, is it for a kind of liberal ideals about being a better person or to get you a qualification or to get you a job? You know, those three things might overlap and they might not, but we'd have to be very clear why is people come to MOOCs and what their expectations, their competences and their experiences are they bringing to the MOOC. Yeah, and as Francisca has asked the question, how do you measure starting level of refugees, their knowledge, skills, devices, internet access? Well, I think that's a question we certainly need to be asking and we probably don't have the answer to. And until we do, it's largely either prejudice or guesswork, prejudice meaning stuff we already do with our existing stakeholders and communities or guesswork stuff we think should work. But like I say, I think we have a very poor idea of actually what it's like to be living as a refugee, essentially before you've entered the formal system, before you've entered the procedures and formalities of Western European countries. Indeed, and Olivia very clearly, I think that's also a very relevant point that as I think our later speakers will point out, refugees want hard currency, they want something on their CV. I'm not even sure if I have CVs in the sense that we might mean it or that their expectations about how you earn a living are necessarily ones where qualifications are the root to it. The economic practices of wherever they've come from may be very, very different from the kind of institutionalized qualifications that we give that largely get people jobs in corporations or formalized businesses. True, but they're very keen to get into the new society and whatever is required but if MOOCs are not a way of getting in or getting recognized then maybe they're not so interesting. Okay, I think we can move on and actually from going to, I mean John's sort of overviews what are we talking about about MOOCs about open education and so on and some of the, it's not as simple as people think we often think that a MOOC is one particular thing and as you said it's very many things and it depends what sort of MOOC, what sort of course we're talking about. We're going to move on now to Paula and she's been working in the field also as John has done but she's been working in the field and offering MOOCs to refugees and has quite a lot of experience on this. If I could move over now to invite Paula into the discussion and your presentation should turn up next to us any second now and for those of you on the chat everyone out there as Paula is talking think of questions, think of some points and keep the chat going and you'll get time to ask her and make your points as soon as she's finished. So I'll hand over to Paula. Thanks Al, sir. Thank you so much once again for the invitation. What I'm going to present is the project that I'm currently working in Jordan and Lebanon and Syria and we have been working with the European Commission and this is funded by the European Commission and it's being commented by the British Council. Just a very brief overview about the project. It's a three-year project funded by the European Union. It targets Syrians so that is our main target group in refugees, Syrian refugees and also these advantage are in Jordan and Syrians in Lebanon in this case with refugees Syrians in Lebanon and also Syrians in Lebanon itself. The idea is that we have the language and the academic skills so moving from the language to bringing the refugees to the online accredited courses and also to the online short courses for foreign participants. This is a target group, a very specific target group that we have for 18 to 30 years old so it was something that we found that would be important to have this timeframe as they were lost within the education system and within their own possibility to learn and we are using, so following from what John has just said we are using MOOCs with the Future Learns so OER and also the Open Education site and MOOCs and SPOCs with a drug which is in Arabic so we have these two different partners working with us. What we have decided was that MOOCs can mean, as John said, lots of different things so what we created it was what we considered our own working definition for MOOCs what are MOOCs for our group and for what we are doing so participants is part of larger cohorts not only in the project but they can come and join the larger cohort in terms of the MOOC the participant will attend the MOOC within the date provided by the MOOC provider or in case of the self-paced course when we launch the registration the participant will go to the learning center whenever he or she needs because one of the things that we came across is the accessibility and having access to the internet so it was a major consideration how they could access it and I'll be going back to that question that Francisco has asked a few minutes ago the participant will be provided for participation and will also issue an open batch so it was a way for us to define what it was regarding SPOCs we define it in a different manner so dates will be defined by the British Council the participant will be part of the small cohort and we have great small classes with other participants registered within the project it becomes part of the specialization and what it did it was create an employment specialization and when I'm saying create it was the EDRAC they had already several MOOCs that we can see that could be part of the employment specialization and we launched it as a specialization so it was a way of using whatever we have and make the most of it without extra costs it's supported by facilitators so we have someone we're supporting the learner during the SPOC while it's taking place it is a clipped classroom and with community-based learning and active methods so we involve them in the community most of them this is taking place in learning centers which are located in Amman in Zatterley refugee camp and we'll be launching shortly in ASRAC refugee camp as well and we'll issue a participant certificate in the end what did it do as a pilot? just check how it would go and then see how it could move on and it was very interesting because we start having learners finding themselves also jobs inside of the refugee camps main challenge is that we had to face internet access it is a major challenge especially inside of the refugee camps for security reasons the location because it requires for them to move with the learning center for instance it requires the refugees to move to that learning center and that poses constraints in terms of transport the language the mobility so it's a very mobile group which means that they are in one place and the next week or the next day they can be somewhere else with some of them going back to Syria and coming out of Syria going to a different country so that is something that we need to keep exactly so now it could be local and cultural centers it could be a good place to use as learning centers the other thing that we came across is that they are not used to learning center approaches so they are very much used to teacher centered approaches which requires another mindset and that was the reason why you are using active approaches, active methods and also community based approaches digital literacy most of them and it was something that we did several surveys so we have around 95% of them who are using mobile phones with smartphones and we are talking about Syrian that is something that I want to make sure is that it's clear to all of you that when we are talking about refugees we have a huge we are totally different so please always have that in mind that when I'm talking about digital literacy in this situation we are talking about Syrian so they are very different with very different needs as you were saying so that is something that we always need to take into account and so this for instance these participants they have 95% of them are with smartphones 95% almost all of them they have a Facebook account and they are using WhatsApp so that is our reality with this target group and the other is the engagement all to engage them and all to keep them going and all that so these are the main constraints that we face retention MOOCs are very similar to the other context so we have about 5% to 7% retention rate in terms of our MOOCs when it comes to SPOCs then we have a 50% retention rate so we could see that there is a huge difference between using the typical MOOC or using a different approach as we did with SPOCs the employability specialization it has two participants already found employment inside of Zattery refugee camp for instance and it was just for the first module because the specialization goes from creating your CV presentation skills branding and just for the CV two of them were already able to find a job because of it so it was very, very yes, with the with the Clips classroom approach also so it's not just a small private so yes, exactly, so it was really a success for us and we are really happy about it I just wanted to finish my presentation with this phrase from one of our students in my mind I'm hopeful and always searching for opportunities to improve myself and those around me I thought in Azra camp I am in the future because my mind is in the future and I'm taking any opportunity that will help me to complete my studies which are interrupted by the war in Syria so I want just to share these with you so thank you so much great, thanks Paola so folks some ideas from you now I noticed there's been a few things in the chat there but so now in Belgium the local libraries and cultural centres are very important as learning centres for newcomers do you see that as a how do you see that Paola because we need where do we find these that sort of on the ground support in Europe my suggestion is just be creative and don't be afraid to ask because sometimes if we go there for instance in the case of Azra it was Kuze who was asking to other organisations if they could go there and have internet access with other organisations besides the partners that we had found because of the location because it was easier for them to go to that specific location because the camps are huge we seem to have lost you Paola I don't know if you can hear us but your connection has gone I can see some of the comments here that the dropout rate in MOOCs of course is notoriously quite low in many of these massive courses that you see reported on the media but with Paola they got 50% retention and more and that's very good but then they're generally very motivated again there's been a lot of discussion about the dropout rates in MOOCs over the years because what do you mean by dropout? Many of the people who so-called dropout of MOOCs never actually dropped in they just register and then never do anything so that you can't count them as dropouts I don't know if John or Jennifer could jump in here and help me with some of the questions and comments here because we have lost Paola at the moment it would be nice to Hi John, I mean you've been working also with the Palestinian camps and so on I mean there's Johannis asking Paola here about how are the participants communications used as a resource in the courses have you any experience of that? Part of my work recently was trying to identify what actually digital literacy might mean in the context of the Palestinian refugee community and I suppose I come up with a working definition which is not the same as everyone else's but it's actually something to do with a difference between what people can do and what people could do the kind of opportunities they might access if only they had this thing called digital literacy and clearly that's very, very context-specific very culturally specific and trying different solutions and see how it works and engage and needs analysis Paola has connected connectivity difficulties and I think it's out of sync at the moment she's actually in sync with our discussion let's see, do you hear us Paola? Okay, we're talking about there's also Katarina's point here there's a delay on you Paola of about five, six seconds which is due to your Wi-Fi probably Katarina is saying, John, that do you need the analysis and you find that the profiles are so diverse that it's impossible to start the course? Does that happen? Well I suppose I'd start from that assumption but then clearly that's not operationally very useful because you just end up with a kind of utter diversity and maybe you can look at overarching factors and some of those might be the kind of institutional and educational structures which people come from the kind of educational programs they've been through in school or college in Lebanon or in Palestine because that allows some basis for a useful generalization and then maybe also and that's not actually just generalizations about structures and institutions and organizations but also how those institutions and those educations deliver education what it looks like over there and again, at the risk of generalization it might be highly didactic content based transmissive and teacher centered and that's what it is however different it might be from what we do that's where we're needing to start from and I guess there's also generalizable remarks about differences in culture which cultures are more risk-taking or risk-averse or more individualistic or more collectivist and is that a basis for looking at generalized differences in the approaches we can take I mean I'm only trying to present operational ways to answer the question I don't think they're necessarily intellectually rigorous and they're only questions not answers, sorry about that Okay but did you find that the profiles were too diverse to allow you to do the course? From my side just to go back I don't know if you heard my reply to Katerina we did a need analysis that no it wasn't we were able to understand what was and that is one of the things because we used already communication so what we did it was we were using Facebook it was Google plus British Council website so those participants replied to the need analysis where people were already online so we got it allowed us to understand what were their needs and what they would like to learn so the program and the way we defined it was based on these trainees analysis if any of the calls would like to have it I can share with them the trainees analysis and so it was a great okay moving on we'd like to get really the refugee perspective and I'd like to invite Jennifer to put her video on and get the sound going and move on to her point because Jennifer is an asylum seeker here in Sweden and has been incredibly active in getting into the university and continuing her okay so good afternoon and so it is my pleasure to share to share with you my thoughts today and so what I'll be sharing what I'll be presenting is based on my own experience in working in the university as project coordinator for validation of competency for asylum seekers and refugees and aside from the fact that I myself is not even a refugee yet but still an asylum seeker so here it goes and I need my first slide okay so in my second slide there is this is what the refugees perspective so I myself I can say that education is the key to integration so I strongly believe that education will help the refugees and asylum seeker to rebuild their lives in their new host country because experiencing war is really tragic like hearing the bullets and gunshots that people on the street will really affect you psychologically and knowing like it's just a week of an eye everything that you have is gone so I think for having to integrate into the new host country will help them regain their knowledge and will help them regain their knowledge and enhance their skills and so they can also like align their skills in the educational standard the host country they are in and to be prepared in the labor market so I will share to you my my project so my project in the Nios University is called validation of competency for asylum seekers and refugees so we had our our pilot testing last year we started like February so this is called validation of competency for asylum seekers and refugees so we from the department of computer science in the Nios University initiated a validation of skills so our main goal is to bridge the gap of the asylum patient that asylum seekers acquired in their home country to the like for us Swedish educational standard so to make them prepare for the labor market so what we did is we are assisting them to get into the university to complement their studies so because most of them are interested to get into the university but they don't know what to do or they don't know how to start or when to start so for us we are assisting them like registering and creating an account into the university admission advising them what to do to fulfill the requirements and we also give them some validation test we ask them to assess themselves because we believe that the best thing who can assess you is yourself if you will be honest of course and some interview so we are doing this integration and so we come up with a pilot test so the next slide will give you like we categorize them into three main tracks so the first track is applicant with no college education we also have applicant with the applicant who started some college and some applicant who have finished their college education with some with some working experiences so in our pilot test we have a track for track one actually we started with like 14 applicants and due to various reasons these applicants did not for sure because some of them got a job there was no documentation so only eight proceeded so to follow the track one four applicants followed on track two and two applicants followed on track three and basically the one who just accepted or for sure is two applicants for our autumn 2016 class so they have started and some of the two of them has two different experiences so one of them cope up with the new learning process or the new learning system and the other didn't he found difficulty when it comes to distance education but it's hard for him to work alone so aside from this we also are working with asylum seekers and for asylum seekers we are also assisting them and since they do not have the capability or the capacity to pay for the tuition fee we have this scholarship program for asylum seekers and last test we have ten we gave ten scholarships for asylum seekers from our program also and for nowadays our applicants I am advising them to use MOOCs so I gave them links to Coursera and to other websites where they can learn even though they are in the asylum comes refugee comes so and then I asked them some feedback and most of the feedback I got so I will start with the opportunities or the advantages of using MOOCs for refugees so first is they can gain new knowledge and skills of course they can implement or deepen prior learning and they can challenge to think critically and interact with participants but this one is most of the one who can really do this are those who are familiar with the language so most of them who is enjoying the opportunity of bullet number three who can speak English and understand English fluently then they learn to empower themselves to create change they are giving just like it gives them hope because they are acquiring new knowledge through MOOCs and they discover new topics based on their fields they discover not actually new teachers but new teaching styles new ways of learning especially this MOOC and they can get certification somehow of course for this opportunity with the MOOC okay and then for the next slide I will give you the challenges for the challenges actually we have the three main barriers three main obstacles the technology the culture and the linguistics so for the traditional barriers so still though we are in the computer world nowadays but still there are people who are not into using computers so it's or they are not used to online learning so especially for elder people and some are the female participation is a bit low okay for the reason and then so the computer literacy so some are afraid to hold the computer because they don't know and for the refugee comms they said that facilities most of the refugee comms are not equipped with good computers and internet connection so some of them those who are really interested they are just using their mobile phones to access with the internet or even there's an internet connection in the camps sometimes and then of course the language barrier though but nowadays there are a lot of organization who are who started to develop MOOCs that will adapt the languages of the asylum seekers and refugees so like the Azraq so it's also in Arabic so it is really a good one and for the retention yeah that's what I saw that in Paula's presentation also which is really correct it's really hard for the retention yeah for the retention I'd like to bring in some of the participants if we've got a little bit of time here to just sort of get some questions rounded up quickly we have a question you want them to answer Jennifer here from your perspective what do you think is needed to help refugees in coping with the challenges of MOOCs and if you just go to that little square of the box and write a quick answer there what do we need Jennifer gave quite a lot of ideas there but the coping with the challenges what's the answer if you could put them in that box there there's a lot of stuff in the chat as well here Sonal and Krisanti are coming I don't know if you have time to read them Jennifer while people are writing in the other one how do we get more women involved thank you also there's something you do not address yeah what are you saying yeah so maybe by by inviting them to or let them feel that they can can be developed they can develop themselves because first thing also is they feel ashamed to participate because of perhaps the knowledge but we have to give them some support some motivation to participate because if you will feel welcome just like my own experience if you feel welcome into a group or into a society so you really like going to it but if you feel like not welcome so it's just like you will be yourself and you will just stay home yeah meaning we should adapt not adapt the learners yeah it's a complete idea getting some answers in here and then access to digital learning centers for support badges as sort of rewards for being involved support and feedback from mentors I think buddy systems seem to be popular as well getting some a trusted person to help you on your way maybe there's a lovely project in Sweden at the moment where refugee various refugees with my T skills are being used as mentors for elderly people and helping them get online so that it's like they're helping the older generation and it's giving them they feel good sharing their knowledge and the older people trust them yeah and in Vekko also the Rotary Club of Vekko they have this mentorship program for refugees and asylum seekers so there are like volunteers Swedish nationals in Vekko and they are partnering with trusted experienced people getting people to help each other but I think you need with a digital literacy matter and even with language you need a friend somebody you trust somebody you're close to that you can sort of ask the stupid questions that you wouldn't ask a sort of more person you feel is some sort of authority figure and I think in most European countries libraries, learning centers community centers churches, there's lots of organizations that can play a part in this and are already doing so there are some excellent projects around I'd like to invite Paula to come back into the interview because I'd like to round off our webinar time goes very quickly and I will just move over to a fight, oh sorry sorry I will move over to this view I just explain a little bit before we wrap up here please some comments on the webinar was it useful what would you like to know more about what sort, just general feedback is always excellent over on the right you'll see slides to download so you just click on whose slides you would like to see and upload file and you can collect them there are also some links to the organizations behind this down at the bottom right so final remarks from the three of you Paula any sort of a minute of final thoughts well just to let you know that I have already shared on the chat the link to the needs analysis so that you can you can have access to it as for the final thoughts is just that we need as John was saying is critical that we go for the participants, for the students and not the other way around adapted to address their needs to address their reality, to address the context that they are living right now the other thing that I would like to share with you is that and it's a little bit of we all could be in the same situation it all could be happened to any of us we just were lucky that we are in a different place in a different time because anything like this can happen to any of us and we are talking about human beings about someone with a specific name with a specific face with family, with kids, children with so please always bear that in mind when we are looking at providing solutions, providing service providing whatever you want to provide that there is a name there and there is a person besides just the name or the tag of refugee and I'll pass on to John and have a great day as well thank you so much John, thank you I guess I only say something very very similar actually that I'm conscious of how little we know and how we need to work together and find out more about what is needed but the only people really who are going to tell us that stuff are the potential learners themselves, the refugees and the refugee communities and the countries and communities from which they come and so I'm just very nervous about us jumping too quickly too powerfully too soon to assumptions to implementations to institutions to standards without checking, without finding out first we are only here to help and to serve Jennifer so anyway I just want to answer the one who asked for it's actually on my slide the one that I was supposed to do so what I can say is we are all doing refugee we are working with refugees and asylum seekers and even though we do little thing as long as it is coming to our heart it will be really appreciated by us so you can continue I realize that Jennifer's slide show that was in the slides to download down there that wasn't working I've now replaced it and if you click on her slides you will now be able to download it because I've just checked that it works and I hope it's the same for Paola's and John's it's unloadable even in the recording so if you don't manage to do it just now you can do it later so everything else works in the recording as well it's a little bit past four o'clock here and it's time to wrap up thank you everybody for being here oh does Linda want to say something about the conference in Gothenburg you have microphone rights hello everybody can you hear me yes so the conference in Gothenburg will be on the 12th of June and you are all welcome to come to Sweden if you have the possibility I can post the link again or actually if it's still here I'll just do it somewhere anyway it'll be at the beginning of the chat somewhere but you can put it in again and so the conference is free of charge I'm with the asylum migration integration funded project from the Swedish migration board it's a European project where we work with developing mobile technology for Arabic speaking migrants in Sweden so we will have Professor Agnes Kokolska home as the keynote speaker and also some other people speaking within our mobile learning and migration so you're all welcome to this conference and it will be really nice seeing you there okay thanks Linda from Gothenburg finally we'll be back with another webinar on the 30th of May with more on this topic we will mail you details in due course you will all get the link to the recording of the webinar fairly soon I can't promise if it's tomorrow or the next day it's not me that does it but very very soon you will also all get a badge for your participation that you can put on your LinkedIn profile or wherever you want to put it but you will all be receiving an Eden badge for participation thank you everybody for being here we'll hang on a little bit if you want to chat or say anything now open the microphones but now I'm going to


Sailors assigned to Coastal Riverine Group 1 took to the waters of San Diego Bay to train on both offensive and defensive response to potential threats such as the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. What we're training these guys on right now is to adapt to those threats and to be able to provide that level of security that wasn't there for the USS Cole. The exercise included unpredictable high-speed maneuvers and blank firing from a variety of guns to simulate a real scenario. I might try to basically get my boat around them, put them in a blue and blue situation where they actually have to see if they mitigate not shooting at each other and stuff like that. From San Diego, I'm Seaman Christopher Lindong.


Today we find out, was old gold better than new gold? What's up guys, we're back with another epic video and we are opening both premium gold return of the bling and maximum gold El Dorado and you guys may have heard, if you've ever been around a local car shop or any UEO people in general and they see that new gold rarity like, ew, back in my day, gold rarity was way better and so much cooler. What we're about to find out today, is old gold actually better than new gold? We're pitting them against each other. One box versus one box, completely even. They might have a different number of packs or whatever, but they're both the same, like basically product. So we're gonna see which one's better. But before that, we do have a giveaway. Well, not before that, where it's every pull from this video, you guys can win. So whether it's old or new gold, so that was the new one. Whatever, let's keep going.  So we're gonna open the new gold and by you guys, I mean just a bunch of random people say that it's bad.  I probably like old gold better too, but let's be honest, nobody really liked old gold when it came out either. So it's just aged really well, you know? So let's see if we can step it up with new gold and beat the old gold. I'll tell you one thing though, they have made those boxes way bigger. If you didn't notice, just compare these two things. This is just one thing, like it's way taller and way wider. It's ridiculous. I don't know why it's so big. All right, let's start with the first one. I went ahead and cut all these open because it's just a pain to open these things up.  All right, let's go with the first four packs of Maximum Gold L Dorado. So we could get access co-talker in here, which would be pretty nutty. Let's see if we can do it Eva. Scrap Wyvern's a pretty good card. Starlight Road, okay. Cyber's Gadget, and Torrential Tribute. So I'm pretty sure, did they do multiple gold cards in the, or are they all gold? They might all be gold in the older ones. So if you like less, then you like the new one. If you like more, then you like the old one, I guess. We got the Prank Kits. Prank with the Rainbow Nias. Good reprint in there. Fossil Dina. I love that card in Edison. Fossil Dig and Exodia, the forbidden one. And we can also get Blue Eyes and stuff like that. Feels like every gold series has Exodia, Blue Eyes, all that different stuff. So that's not really that unique when it comes to this specific gold series. We have the Weather Painter Thunder. Prank gets doodle-doo. The Urgent Schedule, pretty good card. Scrap Dragon. Nightmare Unicorn, that's also pretty good. And a Red Eyes Black Dragon. Probably my favorite card in this set, just because of the alternate artwork. It looks amazing. It's only worth like $2, like absolute steal if you get that card for $2. Maximum Gold L Dorado, let's go. Let's see what we can do. Lost World Ultimate Conductor Tyrant. A lot of Dino support in here. So I really like this set. Big Dino fancivers. Gadget the Hida. Destiny Hero Plasma. Okay. Code Talk are inverted and at number 81. So that was the first of the gold. You know, maybe we should alternate mini boxes. I think we should do that. All right. Let's get into this. We're going to do one mini box at a time. Inside this, there's three five card packs. That's it. Three five card packs. So, okay. I got to do a little math here. So I guess we need to open two. All right. We'll figure this out. We're going to still alternate. I think we're going to need to do like two of every Eldorado. So there's a lot less cards in these older ones. Are they actually more quality? Because if they are like you guys say, it should be fine. You know, they should be able to beat the new premium gold. Let's open this thing up. I will say I really like this look of the premium gold. It's like old. I don't know. It looks nice. I feel like all the golds look really nice, but this one looks specifically really cool. All right. Now that we've gotten the shrink wrap off, let's keep going. We have premium gold and look at this. It's one singular pack. She'll wait. No, it's not. Oh, I forgot. No, every mini box has three. They change it up every time. It's so confusing. So I guess we can alternate then because everyone's going to have three. Yeah. It's going to work out. Okay. Premium gold return of the bling really beautiful packaging. I'm a big fan. They always have nice packaging, but it's always just so wasteful. Okay. Whoa. Is that our secret right off the bat? Parallels what dude old gold was better. No, I'm just kidding, but it was like incredible. Oh, these are both secrets. Oh, a crush card. Nice. This isn't the original gold series crush card, which is insane, but it's still a nice version crush card rank. It looks like the secrets are at the beginning. And then the downward magician also pretty good.  It's kind of sick. Okay. That's nice for the premium goal. It's gonna be a longer video than I thought. There's a lot more packs in here. There's 15 total packs. I guess the Stardust re-spark nice. The Rose Paladin don't know much about these cards. Doom caliber night.  Go yo. I kind of don't like this lettering though. It's kind of hard to read it. It's like crystal Lee. It kind of looks like a diamond or something. It's pretty nice. Exodia. What did I tell you? Exodia is in every premium gold. It feels like, but beautiful. So this is gonna be a close one guys. This is gonna be interesting to see you win. If they pull like access code, I think Eldorado's probably got a good chance to win. But I don't really know outside of that. Naturia beast. That's very good. Debris dragon for a lot of good Edison stuff. And ceasefire. When did this come out? It might have come out somewhere around Edison actually. I don't think it's actually that old though. Maybe it's like 2015 or something like that. All right. On to our second mini box of Eldorado. Let me know if you're enjoying this gold battle. I'm enjoying this. You haven't opened a lot of premium gold before. We have of course opened Eldorado though. But trap trick. Let's get a rose. Okay. Pretty good. Twin twister. So we got twins. Wait. Twister and twin twister. So the other one we got twister. This one we got twin twister. Very interesting how that works. If we can get that access code, that would be pretty sick. Let's, and you guys will be able to win it. So that would be awesome. Oh look. So we got the ultimate conductor Tyranoh. Altergeist. Siliquus. We got the danger. Bigfoot. Okay. Cool as well. Two to go. So far nothing huge out of the gold. I do like the alternate red eyes, but it just doesn't hold the value really right now. Prank gets Meow Meow. We have the Eldorado Nightmare Unicorn. What is going on up there? That is awkward. Okay. The Book of Moon. Okay. And then the number one. So, okay. Not great so far. The final of the mini box. The last mini box I think was better with the red eyes for sure. An Exodia and stuff like that. What can we get in this one? This one is straight up damage. What's new? It's a new Yu-Gi-Oh! product. Microcutter. The Fossil Dig. Number C1000. Very cool. And the soul leading over Raptor. One of the best dinos out there. Prankids. Pandemonium. All right. Very cool. Next mini box. Let's do it. Let's see what we can get. Mini boxes. Galore. We have 10 total. Wait. Did I cut the one? That was weird. That was like I didn't cut it. Okay. All right. Three premium golds. Let's go. We have the Junk Giant Secret Rare. We've got the Black Wing. What does this say? Nothung? Nothung? The Starlight? I went in the world. Blue Eyes, White Dragon. Okay. We got the Tablet Art. Nice. Dandelion's a good card as well. And then the Silver Charity. The thing about these though with these brown borders is like they look used even before you've ever used them. Like they're mint conditioned and they look used. It's very, very strange. I have no idea what the score is right now because I don't know the values of any of these gold series cards. Like especially the older ones. Like I don't know if they're a dollar, two dollars, five dollars. I don't know what they are. So we're just kind of going with it. You guys are going to see the totals pretty much, you know, consistently. So you guys will know. We got Santa Claus. That's a classic Santa Claus is in here. I love to see that.  I wonder if this came out around Christmas. Dark Hole. Very cool. Card Trooper as well. And then, ooh, solemn warning. That's a pretty version of that. I think that actually fits really well with this rarity. Okay. One more pack. We're not even halfway through. This is going to be kind of a decently long video. I hope you guys enjoy it. If you guys like those a little bit longer videos, ask your Anki. Beautiful. Even though people hate that card. Number 95. We got the Naturia Barkion. We got Exodia again. And then the Book of Moon. Book of Moon is also in every gold series and just every pack in general. It's always Book of Moon. Next mini box of maximum gold. We're crossing the halfway point. Once we're done with this, it will be over halfway. We've got the Prankids. It'll do the Lost World. We've got the Prime Math, Mac, Albatarian. Oh, Mathmex. I don't know if that's worth anything because of Mathmex. Prankids Place. I know Mathmex are getting a little bit more popular. They've had some success in recent tournaments. So it could potentially be worth something. I don't really know what is in the Mathmex deck, to be honest. C1. We got the Trap Trick. Hot Red Dragon Archvinkine Calanity. We got the Scrap Camara and the Magical Dimension. Yeah. Even the Scrap Stuff, which goes well with Dinos, is in here. So gold series. Very clutch for that deck. We have Lost World yet again. The Golden Land Forever. The Scrap Dragon. The Fire Formation Tinky. Rescue Cat. Beautiful as well. And then Frame Lord Zeta with the Giant Rix. One more pack. I really wish I knew who was winning. I think Rescue Cat's with a couple bucks. Number three, we got the Weather Painter. And a reminder, it's always $1 cards and more. Adolka, another Dino card. Just amazing Dino stuff yet again. All right. Two or three more of these Return of the Blings and two more of the El Dorado. Let's keep going. Let's see what we can pull. So far, a pretty solid opening. We haven't pulled anything insane yet, but we're still looking. Let me know in the chat, are you a premium gold fan or are you a maximum gold fan or a new slash old gold? You know, I think there's also other old gold which looks even better than this. I think like the original in 2009, those both look really good. Very cool with the Assault. We got the Crush card again. Very nice. Trap Tricks and the Lavalval Chain. That's also pretty nice. All right. Two packs to go here. What will be inside? What is the biggest hit out of here? I don't even know. Rose Pallet and the Parallel Twister yet. No, it's Parallel Twister, not just Twister. Doom Cal, that's good. Medetian, the Time Lord, and Preparation of Rites. That's also a pretty good card.  Blackwing at the Stardust, Respark, the Detruria Beast. Right leg of the Ben 1. We got two pieces now, not bad. And then Trap Tricks, Mermelio. I don't really know like premium gold Exodia sets. You don't see those very often. Like full sets, not just like one piece. All right, four more packs. We're down to the second to last pack of the fourth mini box. So the fourth mini box is what I'm trying to say. Number four, we got the Cypherm Lover Omega. We got the Knights of Brake Sword, Alter Geist. It was Orlagia, very good. Rygeki, also very good. Win the win, Sharmer or Chandler, no Sharmer. It's very confusing. There's Chambers. Chambers. No, there's no Chambers. Maybe they'll be next. Chambers, okay. All right, we got the Weather Painter. Just ignore that statement. RedEyesDarknessMetal, very good card. Lambda, Eldorado, Scrap Chimera, also pretty good. NumeronNetwork, and the Prank Kids Weatherwasher. Okay, two to go. So far, Eldorado. You have not pulled the access code. Just saying, you have not pulled it. Just reminding you, Eva. Let's see if you can do a Trishula. Okay, and by you, I mean me. Pull it out. Okay, that's just getting weird. Conquistador of the Golden Land, very nice. Final pack of the fourth mini box. So we're almost to the final mini box. We've got two more of the Return of the Bling. Nymer Unicorn, cool. We got the Cypress Gadget. Prank Kids Meow Meow, Torrential Tribute. Numeron and Dragoonity Aromulus. Okay, so how you feeling, guys? You old school gold fans?  You know, you think so? Is gold better than new? That's what I was going to say. Is gold better than new, huh? What do you think? Three packs to go till we know if gold is better than new. Here we go. We have number 14. We have the Ghost Charon. We have Enemy Controller. Up, down, left, right, A, B. No, it's... No, yeah, is it up, down? Maybe it is. Okay, Temple of the Kings and Debris Dragon. Another good pull for those Edison decks. A lot of these have seen reprints recently because of Edison format, you know, getting more popular. They've put some of that stuff in as commons and rares and stuff. Well, not rares. I guess we don't have those anymore. Supers. Santa Claus. We've got the Five-Headed Dragon. We've got the Traptrix Trap Hole and the Rank Up Magic Numeron Force. All right, last pack. Someone is revving their truck up for old school gold. Somebody outside is hyped. Let's go. They said, old school gold for the win, baby. Absolute King. We've got the Gores. Oh, that's sick. That's a nice version. Ring of D. That's also amazing and mathematician. So honestly, that seemed like a pretty decent pack going into the very last mini box of both sides. All right, last four for maximum gold. Here's the score currently. We're going to let you know how close is. I'm guessing it's pretty close. It might be an intense battle for the end. Who will win? Hot Red Dragon Archie. Make sure to let me know in the comments. Prankids, Rocket Ride, Cursed Eldland. Okay. The Skystrucker is Ray and the Zephran Nui with the Area of the Water Charmer. Okay. All right. It always feels weird just saying area. It sounds like you're saying A-R-E-A like an area. It's just weird. I might be saying it wrong. Phantom Knights of Ancient Cloak. The Scarlight Road. The Scarlight Road and Torrential Tribute. Okay, we've got a couple of those. Dragonmaid Hospitality. Two to go. Can we get that access code?  I'd be down. I'd be down. Yeah. I mean, I'm not trying to say I want new to win, but access code, baby. Let's go. Evel's Orlaugia. Nice. And Twin Twisters. So we're going to a lot of Twisters today. And the Zeta. It's going to give that old school last chance to either solidify their win, which they might already be ahead, or come back. The Weather Thundery. Missing Mine. That's worth a couple of bucks. Hey, won some YCSs recently. Prankids. Bow. Bow. We got the Elvlitch. Ooh, the alternate art. Okay, a couple of good pulls in that final pack. We didn't get the access code, but that was definitely solid. All right, final gold. I can't remember where I cut this open. Final look at the mini box. We've got three more mini packs to end it. This has been a fun video, actually. Pretty fun to open up this old school gold stuff. Let me know if I should get my hands on like the really old stuff. It's really expensive. Like the gold series one, but maybe we should do it. We got the Blackwing Tamer. Blackwing Chris the Crack of Dawn. I think this is actually a pretty good card like Edison Blackwing Dex. Enemy Controller. Rank Up Magic and Card Trooper. Another good Edison card. Just a lot of that good stuff there. Let's see. Two more packs. Can they come back? Can they end it? They have the number 14. Greeny. Greeny. Greeny. Suriyemi. Cerame. Whatever that says. The Timeboard. We got the Traptics. Dianaya. Oh, and the left arm. Three pieces of Exodia for you guys. That's actually not bad for like a few mini boxes. So three out of five pieces. That'd be pretty cool to have a set of that to be on, especially like near mental mint condition. Final pack. Let's see what we can pull. Roof for that old school gold. Or boo the old school gold in the comments. Let me know. Blackwing Pinaki. The Parallel Twister. Smashing Ground. A really nice print of that. Pot of Duality. AKA Pot of Awesome. Beautiful. And Traptics Mermelio. Okay. That was a pretty nice opening. So the cool part is when you get done and it's just a bunch of gold on the side. I really like that. So if you guys enjoyed this video, make sure to subscribe to the channel and let me know in the comments what you thought about it. Shout out to TCGTrustedCards. Tone Phone Show. Tomatoes used. Daxer. JT Show. Puffins of Doom. Ernesto Deanna. Squirtle Flexi Boy. Hoppest Dizzy. Stanley Mike Nats. Mime Gekko. Ian Musa. Junior Barting. John Nolan. An unditized show. Thomas McClain. Seth Fisher. Anton Z. Thank you guys for supporting the channel. I'll see you guys next time. Peace.


Hello everyone and welcome to Arch Linux Conference 2020. All around the world we are facing challenging times. Like all this isn't enough, we are in the middle of a global pandemic as well. Today I would like to take the time and remind every one of us that we should focus on the good, not the bad. We shouldn't fight against something because we hate it. We should fight for something because we love it. For example, the pandemic forced us to re-evaluate Arch Linux Conference and ultimately led us to this online format, which is pretty awesome. I would like to express my appreciation and gratitude to all our speakers, to everyone behind the curtain who made this conference possible, to our team members and district contributors, as well as our awesome community. And of course, thank you for joining us here today. I hope you enjoy our talks, the first one of which we'll start off with is Arch Linux, the past, the present and the future. Hi everybody, this is Judd. Happy Conference Day. I'm very happy to see that Arch has grown into something bigger than any one of us. You know, when I first started it many, many moons ago, it was always just a scratch my own itch. And it's one of the most joyous things that have ever happened to me, that the community has grown above and beyond any of my best expectations. I'm sorry I couldn't be there with you guys today, but I'm very happy it's happening. So all my best wishes and enjoy the conference. Hi, this is Greg Crow Hartman and welcome to ArchConf 2020. As a longtime Arch Linux user, I'm really happy to see this conference happen, even when we're all stuck at home. Thanks to all the Arch developers for maintaining such a great system that I rely on every day. Enjoy the conference. So I have about 15 minutes to give you a rough history of the 18 years of Arch Linux. So in the beginning there was crux and it was good. Highlights being it's simple package build scripts, simple configuration, utilities, but there was no dependency tracking. So the founder of Arch Linux, Judd, wrote Pac-Man. And it essentially spawned a distribution. So beginning in 2002 Pac-Man 1.1 was released, and then Arch Linux 0.1 codenamed Homer was released not far after. Good quote from the release notes is, the bad news is that you don't get a pretty interactive installer. So some things have not changed. The big selling points at the time were the i686 optimization, when most other distributions were using i386, and install once continuously update, never have to reinstall policy, and it being simple. Now simple was defined in terms of the packaging and the tools for administrating the distribution, not in terms of being simple to use necessarily. There's some good quotes from Judd around that time, such as, I've been told that Arch's documentation is less than perfect, so things improved there, and I would have to say that, yes, Arch is very suitable for servers. So the world was very optimistic back in 2003, probably pre-COVID. Our distribution releases used to have names, and some of these names are inventive, and some are pretty boring. So point 2, Vega. It came with an interactivist, Staller, that was the ASCII graphical installer, I'll call it, and a utility called Paxsync. Now this has gone to the ages, but I'm pretty sure that it was supposed to automatically update your system without your intervention, so things we don't recommend anymore. Mid to the end of 2002, Pac-Man 2.0 came out, which finally managed dependencies, and the initial script for the Arch build system, which would allow you to sync all the package build scripts and build your own packages, and Firefly was released. Months later, Pac-Man 2.1 came out. This had to support for multiple repositories, so packages got split into an unofficial repository and the main repository. There was the big move in October 2002 to GCC 3.2. That was the move from GCC 2.95 and was rather a big move, and so Arch Linux 0.4 named Dragon was released soon after. With the release of Pac-Man 2.3 in 2003, an unstable repository appeared. That was used for mainly beta releases and very, very testing sort of programs. Big changes in the distribution were the adding PAM support in mid-2003, and that stage PAM was rather experimental, so we were sticking on the bleeding edge of software usage. Arch Linux 0.5 Nova was released, notably a million package updates, according to the release notes, but we had PAM support, LVM support, Grub support, all added in that release, so we're starting to look a bit more like a Linux distribution, we know. There was two ISOs released. One had 628 megabytes of packages, and one just had the base packages of 105 megabytes. So back in the day, one CD for the entire repos of Arch Linux. Here goes all the other release names we had, Widget, Wombat, Noodle, Voodoo, Don't Panic, and Overlord. So in 2007 it was decided not to use version numbers anymore and stick with the date. That sort of continued on now, except at that time releases were going to be made as each major kernel was released, so you had the installer with the latest kernel on it. That didn't last for long, and eventually we moved to more monthly releases. So there's been a lot of flux in the repositories and their names over the years. In November 2003, trusted user repositories became a thing. So my understanding was each trusted user had their own repository, which they could put a bunch of packages in, and people could pick and choose what they wanted. In the 2003 there was some renaming of the repositories. Stable was called Release, and later got renamed to Current. I'm not quite sure when that happened. I couldn't find that information, but it just happened. The unofficial repository turned into what we now know as the extra repository, and in April 2004 the testing repository was added. And the warning was these packages will be about as unstable as it gets in the testing repository. Slightly less unstable these days, maybe. Early on there was a lot of big software changes. I think in the early 2000s was when a lot of software was being developed and turning into what we currently know as Linux distributions. So X-Free86 was replaced by Xorg. Udev appeared. We got G-Lib C, which dropped support for very old Linux kernels. Kernel 2.4 support in 2006. You can see when all the Wiki and forums in AUR opened, 2002 the forum opened. You can actually go back and read the original posts. They're still available in our forum. Never been lost, or easily searchable actually. 2004 the Wiki was created. In 2005 we got the AUR. 2007 saw the start of the Archdev public mailing list. My understanding before that, a lot of the development was handled either on IRC or on a private mailing list. And so that's probably been lost to history there. 2007 end of it. We also got mailing lists. These were renames, but Archgeneral and AUR General got their current name. So 2007 saw leadership change. Judd was booted out and Aaron came in as the leader. He stayed on as leader until 2020. So this year we changed how the project leaders were elected and made it into a two-year rolling position instead. Other repository shuffles that happened. 2007 was when our repos turned a lot like they are now. Core and extra were became, so that was the current or became core and extra was already renamed. We got the base and base deval package groups created. The base group has since became a meta package there. In 2007 also was the declaration that all core packages must go through testing after a couple of nice incidents where systems stopped booting. 2007 we also had a logo competition where the current logo that we have was created. So here goes a few of the historic Arch Linux logos. We started off with this sort of zero one ribbon style. We went into the Archer base force badge type style and currently we have the Archer design by Thay Williams, which won our competition. You can actually go back and see the other entries for that competition on the Arch website too. So summary of some of the big packaging changes that have happened over the years. In 2008 man pages stopped being put in user man and all got used to user share man as dictated by the FHS. 2008 also docs were added to packages and that includes info pages. The policy until then was only to use man pages, only add them to packages and everything else could be found on the internet. Info pages was really the driving force to get docs added back to the packages and now we can treat them for pages more like man pages when packaging. 2010 we switched to exit compression. Also user bin Python got pointed to the Python 3 implementation as it should be. Looking through the mailing list this was actually less controversial among the developers than I remember. Pretty broadly supported. 2012 we saw the intro of system D. So system D tools replaced UDEV then. Carrying on through 2012 we got package signing enabled and also the lib directory became a sim link. End of 2012 system D became the default and only supported in its system in Arch. 2013 we ended up moving the bin, it's been in user bin directories to become sim links, simplifying the file system layout. So the x8664 port was unofficial for many years or for quite some time it became on official in 2006. It didn't get any multi lib support until 2011. It was actually officially supposed to be pure 64 bit until that stage. And in 2017 we said goodbye to I86. So when we started Arch, I686 was nicely optimized at one of the selling points. We really haven't moved on optimizing our binary since 2006 when the 64 bit port was added. A bit about spin-offs. There was a spin-off in many architectures so we've got I586, PPC, Spark, MIPS and ARM. There was spin-off distros. The first one really started, well first big spin-off was the KD Mod repo which hosted at the time KDE was a big monolithic package where you got pretty much everything in one big package. The KD Mod team split it up into lots of sub-packages and actually designed what would now become a package splitting. This turned into Chakra in 2010. Since then there's been many other distros and distrolets added. There's also been spin-offs such as Arch Stable which was supposed to be for server usage and supposed to be more point release distribution, ArchBSD, a BSD port of Arch Linux, a Herd port of Arch Linux which I think is still currently available in bootable. Other fun observations I had from going through all the archives of mailing lists where there was at least three newsletter variants and an EZN over the years. There was a bunch of attempts at automated security monitoring, automatic package building, distributed package building that all fell to the wayside so it's good our security team currently is in a more established position. Lots of debates over which C flags and LD flags we should use while packaging both for security and optimization purposes. In 2008 you could read about the debate of choosing SVN over Git for managing our package scripts. Turns out SVN was chosen because we didn't need all the power of Git and SVN did the job quite nicely at the time. Another thing you can find on the mailing list is lessons about not doing a control C in the middle of an update on a remote server that hosts most of the Arch infrastructure. Luckily someone was available to fix that. And with that quick summary of Arch history I'll hand over so we can hear a bit more about what's going to happen in the future. Welcome to the second part of Arch Linux past, present and future. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the future but before we do that a small disclaimer. So basically this is just a view into a possible future. The future has not been written yet as we know so everything is possible and not everything I present here has been finally decided. So it's basically a mix of general consensus and personal ideas. So take the information like that. First let's look a little bit at the agenda. So we're going to talk a little bit about our culture because this is very important for our future. And also we're going to have a small insight into the concepts of change and then we get a little bit technical by discussing how we regain some of our lost excellence and also talk a little bit about future improvements. First a little bit about myself. I'm Levente Poyak and I'm a full stack software and security engineer and I also love doing dog ops duties. I joined Arch in 2014 as part of the security team and today I am also involved in packaging and development and also in DevOps work. I've been elected as the current Arch Linux project leader in 2020. So let's focus on one of the very important aspects of our distro which is our culture itself. This basically we should a little bit think about how we should approach things to succeed. This is a very fundamental part of our distribution after all because we are people and not just technology. So what I mean by that is we should also look a little bit into our team spirit and how we can extend and expand our current team spirit. At the end working together is always more efficient and also more fault tolerant. So sometimes there were some ideas of having package teams or some core teams which are responsible for a certain aspect or certain subset of packages. But I think because a little bit of our nature it more went in a direction that we have package maintainers maintaining software they're actually interested in which is totally good. So I believe not something we need to change. But what I want to talk about when it comes to our culture related to that topic is and there has been some trend lately which I really like and want to see being extended is that we stop seeing packages as my package or thinking in terms like that. Because at the end we are all serving arch and being a package maintainer is just a duty. What I mean by that is we should extend co-maintaining packages having a little bit more team effort like having two or three maintainers for complex packages or something like that. This is a good idea because we reduce bus factor by that and I still believe it's very important that we have certain dedicated people attached to a package because domain knowledge especially for complex packages is always very important and you lose domain knowledge if you just share it across everyone. So I think we are doing fine. We should just improve the team spirit of having co-mainteners. This is actually I think very beneficial for our distro. Another part of our culture is communication because as I mentioned earlier we're all humans and the human part of our distruing through weird technology is very important because we the people are who creates the technology, who maintains the technology and it is super important that we maintain non-violent communication and extend also in this area. It's super important that we are all always friendly and excellent to each other. This should be normal but sometimes it's not as easy as that especially in tech sometimes it leads to heated discussions. I believe one reason for that is because we are dealing with a lot of text which also lacks some side channels like emotions, voice and also facial expressions. So if we take that into account we should always know that there are different ways how to interpret text and if we do so we should or the most important factor here is also that we expect the others don't being evil minded even if it feels like being a heated discussion. I think nobody wants to hurt someone else. It's not about that. It's that we have some needs, some topics that are important for us and we want to get a point straight and so always try to sync it like that. On the other hand contrary to that always try to write texts and follow a discussion in a way that it is less likely to be misinterpreted. At the end we are all volunteers and we want to solve problems and we have our opinions which is a totally good thing but we should keep it to technical facts and opinions and we shouldn't discourage some contributors or this has bad influence and we should focus on the great parts here. Nobody is evil minded and we should always keep that in mind and don't discourage work, free work. So the last part about our culture is improve openness. What I mean by that is that we make it a little bit easier or a little bit more modern for external contributors to join and help maintaining and improving art. We will also talk about that a little bit later but one central part would be like the interaction with patches and things like that. I believe we can improve it and this is actually not very far future so we will talk about that shortly. So the second part now is talking a little bit about the concept of change. This a little bit goes hand in hand with culture actually. We should have a different mindset about change in general. I feel like there is often a little bit of fear involved when change comes into mind. So always be open minded about change. Change should be about reanalyzing something and about concluding and deciding based on current facts and the current state. So we should keep it at a rational level. It will also make us more flexible and more adaptable. We should also treat it as something positive. So there is nothing negative in change. The world around us and technology in general is always changing and evolving and we can't, well, that's just the fundamental nature. And this is actually good because we also want to evolve. It basically can mean two different things. Either we are adapting to a new situation or it's just part of evolution itself. And so we should treat change really as something positive. It's not something negative. It also doesn't mean if we change some aspects that it invalidates the past. This is absolutely not the case. There is nothing bad about change as we, as I mentioned right now, it's just either adapting to something or generally evolving. And also success in the past doesn't guarantee success in the future. This is also very important to take into account. And at the very last, change also doesn't invalidate or disrespect the past. It can be totally great the way we haven't been doing things that led us to today. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't reconsider some aspects. And this is why I just urge that we are always open-minded about change because this will bring us forward. So now let's get a little bit technical because I believe this is also one of the reasons a lot of people are watching this talk or this part of the talk now because they want to hear about actual changes. So let's get into that a little bit. The first thing I would like to talk about is a little bit regained lost excellence. What I mean by that is well, we have an 80 years ongoing journey and some of our excellence, well we lost it kind of. So let's talk about the first topic which is optimized architectures. Back then we basically were having optimized architectures because we are in a very early stage already providing a new set of optimized packages, architecturally optimized packages. We lost this excellence because we stopped evolving on that aspect and we just stayed to what we introduced back then for a very long period of time actually. This is also because we have some technical challenges we need to tackle before we are able to have further optimized architectures or also potentially more architectures in general. But this is something we lost somewhere on our journey and we should think about gaining or regaining this excellence. So it could be either repositories with subset of optimized packages or in general have more optimized architectures for all packages. This is not something we decided yet but I think we are all agreeing on that we want to have this. So at one point when we have some of the challenges we are aware of that are holding us a little bit back we should really have an open discussion about how we regain this part. Actually right now it's not too far in the future because we have a lot of changes made especially lately that will help us to regain this. Another aspect I want to talk about is modernizing package sources. We are still using SVN to maintain our sources, our PKG builds which are basically the description about how to build packages. This is a bit cumbersome in some aspects to deal with it. Also it is not very open if we think about we talked about openness in the first slides. It makes it hard to contribute right now when it comes also to packages. People try to create diffs and patch files and append it to bug tracker and things like that but this is not really streamlined and this is not really a great process for contributors overall and also not for us as team members to deal with all this. I think this is pretty much the established consensus so we are actually in the middle of having a transition. We are working on having the migration ready including everything related to it as well as changing some of our infrastructure and our tooling that will allow us to get there. So Git sources are actually very near future and we will get that hopefully very soon. There are just some tiny details we need to figure out and solve. The third part I want to talk about here is signed repo databases. This is not actually something we lost because we didn't ever have signed repo databases but the world around us changed a little bit and signed repo databases repository I mean where we are pulling software and packages out of is defective standard today across major distros. So we should really have that as well. I've been working on some proof of concept also with help of others and also with the help of DevOps looking into how we can have a bare bone, very secure locked up servers. So we will have some discussions about that because we still try to I mean people had concerns and we shouldn't just invalidate it but we should take it into account so the current proof of concept we are working with so far took the concerns into account and I think there were some nice solutions that we could tackle this topic. So we will raise some discussions about that shortly and hopefully also gain some repo databases in a near future. This also has a little bit to do with Git migration but we'll come to that when we are actually discussing this topic in the future. So now let's talk about actual future improvements. One major thing I want to talk about and this is also the first bullet point is accolade, delayed package updates. What I mean by that is timely package updates are our core value. We are rolling this through and users are expect that our packages are always up to date and we are rolling fast. This really our core value. Now some of you may ask why we need to accolade and what I mean by that. The only thing I mean by that is that right now we don't really have a central way of detecting upstream updates. So basically it's a per package maintainer effort to somehow keep track of upstream sources. In some areas it works great and in some areas it actually doesn't work out that well and sometimes it takes weeks or months and multiple releases until a user flags a package out of date on Archweb and then we finally roll an update because a package maintainer was not really aware maybe of that and I don't think this is a people problem so we should not start yelling at people while you're in a properly keeping track but I think this is more like a tooling problem. We should solve it with technology so I've been also lately playing around and toying with something we call ourselves send crawler so this is also something I will erase in the future having something technologically integrated in Archweb which is able to automatically flag packages as out of date and this will also accolourate at the end delayed package updates. One of our core responsibilities. Second and this is a new topic I want to talk about is integrate reproducible builds. We have been really doing great achievements in this topic and the topic of reproducible builds there will also be a talk of Morton the state of reproducible builds if you're more interested in that topic but it is basically a part of supply chain security that we validate just to phrase it maybe in one single sentence that we validate that the least packages are and can't be backdoored because you always build the very same thing from the sources we are committing and maintaining so there could be no sneaky patch invisible ninja patch which implements a backdoor or something like that this would be detected and integrate and the integration part I mean better integration to archweb in terms of icons, in terms of api and finally also user facing tools users should be able to query the state of their system related to reproducible packages and maybe in a very far future we could also dream about something that reproducible packages should be the standard and people should be able somehow to tell I only want reproducible packages not install non reproducible packages of course this is very far future and we need to solve a lot of problems that we are facing if we want to achieve that but this is still a dream we should think about for a future the third topic is implement single sign on this is actually a very near future because we are already working very hard on it and we are also testing it and for team members this is already present so we need to integrate it in all our different services a little bit better it also helps a little bit in terms of community openness and we will also have external login providers which helps a little bit well to eliminate some kind of annoying factors and it also simplifies from our team perspective the on and off boarding and is less error prone and it's just something great so we are very near on having that and a certain final topic I want to talk about is a little bit of consolidating detached areas so we currently have already GitLab and we are moving some or most of our projects to GitLab we need to solve some problems first and also be able to open up the single sign on our platform which allows to use GitLab also for external contributors but then and it's something I personally would like to see is we should think about consolidating all our fragmented tools basically our Kanban boards our bug tracker and yes, things like that for some parts like the Kanban board we already have a consensus on a single aspect so there will be some discussions but I personally would really love to see it integrated into one platform because then we gain a lot in having it at the central place especially when it also comes to packages packaged sources PKG builds and bugs related to it it's very easy then to deal with everything and have cross references in terms of issues and sources and merge requests and also Kanban boards about some epics and things like that I believe GitLab is there really a nice tool that will help us to streamline some of our fragmented areas so we should have a discussion and see how we can extend platform or how we want to use this platform in the future so let's see but more about that in Sven's talk Architecture at Arch next to this talk so join in and listen to him and the final words I want to say thank you all thanks to the community you're actually what Arch well Arch wouldn't be where it is today we wouldn't have you so we are very happy about our community and we are also inviting you all to take a look into maybe how you can get involved or how you want personally to get involved if you feel like you want to do that and there is this wiki link you can follow it it gives a little bit of explanation about the different aspects and the different parts where you could get involved and start helping Arch more to stay what it is and to evolve even further so a big thanks to our community as well hope you enjoyed the talk and now we can go over to a little bit of Q&A and welcome to the first live segment of the Arch Enix of Arch's conference so I'm here with Leventha the project leader and then Alan McRae who had to teach me how to pronounce the name so I think we'll just kick off with questions so the first question that arrived was what are info pages from Verst if anyone wants to explain so info pages are like man pages but a bit more verbose again for access mainly via command line so a lot of new projects like GCC have big info pages and not very much man pages and so that was the drive to get them back into our packages interesting so another question from March March the 12th will there be another split in repos Leventha probably I'm not totally sure what split in repos is meant here I'm not suspecting maybe because of the optimized for optimized architectures it basically depends on the decision which way we want to support optimized architectures so this is not something we could answer right now but besides having optimized architectures I don't really think it would make sense to split it even further so yeah probably for Alan where does the name Arch Linux come from from secret oh so Arch is from Arch enemy I'm not sure why it was chosen but that's what John came up with I recall reading about primary as well being part of the reasoning from post factum what I don't understand is SVN choice why the SVN choice so back then it was basically not that widespread compared to today because today it's I guess the most used version control system and also in the developer and technical community it's very well known so I guess the decision basically was because it was not that known back then not that widespread and it was just simpler to use this was why it has been decided like that in the past which is totally fine because it made sense back then but as I also explained today times changed a little bit and that's why we are now in the transition to JIT so there's been a few questions about Arch Linux ARM so March the 12th asked will there be an official ARM port if it gets popular like if ARM gets more popular and another question is how about Arch Linux ARM into the Arch Linux fold third question is also why is alarm not more tightly integrated into Arch which all ties together okay so I think the ARM architecture is pretty popular so some of the reasons why was having to have kernels for specific machines it wasn't so easy as just I686 and your plot provided a single kernel there was a lot of different architectures to choose from so what support also the alarm people they do an awesome job they've got a good infrastructure they've set it up quite nicely so they're doing their thing very well so there's not much point us replicating it so the question would be more will they merge with us at some stage and the topic's been broached a few times I think us not using Git for our package management is a big point because they use it for theirs so there's potential but there's a lot of factors in the background of sponsorship of machines and everything that they get with their branding and how that would work if they merged in with us so a lot of issues to be sorted and they're doing very well without us so we can let them continue so what about Felix actually was asking what we're thinking about with Risk 5 I know Felix has been working on it but what are your thoughts well I have no thoughts on Risk 5 I haven't considered it I think basically it will boil down to how much interest inside our community or inside of new volunteers related to Risk 5 appears because at the end it is not enough to have just a small tiny portion of people being interested in maintaining it of course maintaining a new architecture will also gives us a lot of work in terms of support and other challenges related to different architectures so I guess there is no clear answer yet because there was no discussion about it but I'm inviting to start discussion and we will see where we go yeah I'll also point out the 64 bit architecture started out as a community driven project and then when it got popular got moved into Arch so there is past there because there's been many many different architecture ports of Arch that have fallen along the way side over the years so when it gets big enough maybe so we also have a question about diversity in Arch probably for Leventa how is the diversity of the people in charge of Arch I would say this could be improved but basically it depends on people who are interested in doing work so if you just look at the pure stuff right now it is not very diverse I'm personally not really sure what the reason for that is but we would love to see it being a bit more colorful so nice so I'll just skip a few questions from the audience because we don't have that much time left we can take one of the more CPU questions which has been going on but what's the current state of the discussion regarding dropping support for old CPUs what would be cut off at the time of that CPUs work being considered as too old and at the same time I have a core to do that's perfectly fine as I had this in box which was asked by Malaku so CPU optimizations and stuff I suppose this came from me trying to push some more optimizations into packages maybe a year ago now so I think the discussion is more focused around providing additional architectures rather than dropping support but I will note back in I686 days we had the Fire C3s that had almost I686 support and often failed when an optimization landed in a package and we just said tough so I think it's a decision that will be discussed as we work towards more optimized architectures whether we continue supporting plain x864 I would assume we would yeah cool so for Levente here is Arch Linux lacking in volunteer power this is also asked by Lirst so this opinion or this personal opinion I have for quite a long time I think we really could extend the area of having people using testing and giving more feedback for our testing repositories I think we are very much lacking volunteer power there to do it better than we are doing today it works for some packages more like core packages and that are not that much of a problem but we also want to be able to use testing for community packages and not so critical parts of the system which in my opinion is not very well tested so this could be something we really search for new volunteers who help us use testing and give real feedback to it but in general basically in every area it depends on just people who want to involve time we are happily inviting people to join and help us of course I wouldn't say we have any area where we totally need absolutely no volunteer power at all just look up what you like and help us but if you want one area then help us in testing it's your time for one more quick question how does arch plan continually succeeding as a major distribution going forward either Elm or Leventa I guess this is a tough question to answer because how I mean this is a little bit what I talked in the future part we should just look over and over again at our excellence and see if we can still held it up until today and if not how we adapt to new situation or where we see areas where we want to just evolve a little bit further so I couldn't pinpoint one thing on how to do it but we should just be open and go with the time and yeah just raise a little bit hand in hand with regaining some stuff that we lost and also looking into more future proof platforms for contribution but this is also something Sven will be talking about in the next talk a little bit so yeah I would say just be open and look at the current state more often so that's all we managed to get in on the Q&A session super many thanks to Ellen for answering questions and Leventa and then we'll go over to the next talk soon bye bye bye