So anyway, hi, we're gonna we're gonna talk about how containers not magic not gonna fix your, you know, corporate culture My name is Bridget Krumhout. I came about a little over, you know, 13,000 kilometers I think that's a thing. I had to look that up, but it actually I'm not positive what kilometers are But I came about that far to get here from Minneapolis, Minnesota If you're not super familiar with US geography and some of you are but if you're not super familiar with it Minnesota's in the middle in the north right near Canada by a bunch of big lakes We have one month out of the year July where it's never been known to snow It's possible to snow the rest of the time more on that later. I work at Pivotal doing tech advocacy for the open source cloud Same words is hard for the open source Cloud Foundry platform. I podcast at ArrestedDevOps.com with a couple of fantastic folks and I am part of the shadowy global cabal that Operates DevOps days everywhere. So if some of you know AJ who runs the one here in Bangalore Where we collaborate on these things? Okay, a little bit more about how I got to here I spent 1999 until August on call for production infrastructure. I was not sad to delete the page of duty app for my phone and When you spend that long in ops you get used to having terrible sleep that sleep graph from back when I was actually trying to track These things was I think while H base was having a lot of problems But as it turns out trading that for a lot of conference talking and traveling does not improve your sleep it's just more jet lag so and That's a container. So this is this is not photoshopped except for I mean I did add the word DevOps like that shipping container didn't come with a bunch of DevOps in it But this is actually a picture I took in Minneapolis where it's apparently like cloudy with a chance of DevOps at all times Because we've got we've got containers. We've got silos. We've got some clouds there you know all the all the stuff that you expect and I Confused my partner Joe by stopping while we're biking on our way to our community garden and taking this picture because I thought This kind of typifies all of the things that people think that they need to worry about or think that they need to do and I gotta say like I have actually spent a bunch of time with containers in production My last gig was running DACA in production for a year. So I have actually done that. It was fantastic It was delightful. It did not actually solve all our problems as it turns out. I know, right? I was surprised too and when I joined I was like these people have been running doctor in production since October 2013 Back when the main thing on DACA's website was like under no circumstances You run this in production and they were like yellow and started running it and so when I joined in summer of 2014 I was like hey, this is gonna be fantastic because you know nothing can ever You can never have any problems whatsoever if you have all if you're docking all the doctors, right? Well as it turns out I found out that I was working at a company that was run entirely by humans I know and staffed entirely by humans which meant that even if we had great technology It didn't actually make everything better Um, we were trying to win a buzzword bingo So we were you know because we started in 2009 at this streaming video service Which by the way was it was kind of like Netflix if Netflix were mostly k-dramas and you know much smaller and ran doctor in production So maybe not exactly like Netflix, but um We were we started in 2009 which meant that because we're a python shop We were obviously using Django and you know by like early 2014 We were rewriting things and go because that was a style at the time lots of lots of Tech fashion stuff that goes on there But what we learned in trying to you know break things out into a whole bunch of microservices is that that I mean Microservices make everything better too, right like well, I mean yes They help certain problem sets, but they're not going to magically make everything better either Because if you if you look at like all of these you know tech trends and I thought that this wouldn't work This slide wouldn't work here, but I went and visited two different tech companies the last couple of days and both times at lunch We had pizza, so I was like, okay I mean of course they were they were smaller pizzas and then I'm thinking two pizza team is a really confusing phrase because how big are the pizzas and how hungry are the people I feel like this does not necessarily work in all cases But Amazon has this whole two pizza team thing where you should have really small teams that own an entire service end-to-end Spotify has like their squads You know there's a lot of tech trends like that and I say okay I mean that kind of stuff works to a point But you don't necessarily need two pizza teams to do microservices, right because your microservices are going to increase your complexity They're gonna make it a little bit more Depending on what your telemetry looks like depending on how you have things, you know In terms of visibility microservices might make it a little bit more difficult to solve some problems Until you've got your monitoring telling you which of the end microservices these problems are coming out of So the communication between the groups that are running in the different microservices still matters a lot Even if the groups are small enough to be fed by you know pizza of arbitrary size But when you look at Conway's law and Conway's law by the way if you're not familiar with it is paraphrased here In the paper in which Mel Conway originally wrote it which was published in 1968 called how committees invent He he got to the good stuff. He got to this right near the end of the paper I don't know how anyone got that part of the paper like I wouldn't read something called how committees invent if you like This is exciting. Let's find something similar an important thing here but apparently it was and this rephrasing of it comes from his website now apparently he's still alive and has website and No real way to contact him on it, so I guess we can't get him to come speak at conferences. I don't know but I think the most important word in Conway's law is communication because a lot of people look at Conway's law and they think oh If the structure of our organization is going to dictate the structure of our software That means that if we want to have microservices, we have to break up into these small cross-functional teams Well, maybe I mean kind of like Nicole was saying when I asked her you know possibly troublesome question after her wonderful keynote this morning The answer is usually it depends because if you have a lot of separate teams Or maybe even teams who work across continents, but they have good communication between the teams You might be fine You might be better than a bunch of cross-functional teams that don't actually communicate or talk to one another and If they have clean API's between the teams and that's kind of this you know like Amazon esque ideal But then if there's breaking changes and you know unversion changes to the API's the other teams are depending on You've made your problems worse. It's like Technology helps us solve those problems a lot, but it does not actually it doesn't provide a panacea It's going to you know suffice for absolutely every use case And by the way like speaking of you know tech trends tech fashion whatever like I don't know about you But I'm really excited for what's going to be 2019 is the year we're gonna all get really excited about inodes and I say this with all you know I say this with great love very tongue-in-cheek, but like the fact that I'm even putting the word container in a in a talk title and then people are showing up to hear about it They don't really know what they're going to talk about spoiler alert. There's some cat pictures in here, right? but uh We're putting it like you know some of these hot tech buzzwords in talk titles does get people to show up and gets people interested But the tech in and of itself is not what's going to solve all these problems for us It's basically you know where I'm going with that and I think like if we if we look at this and And uh yeah, I don't know. I feel like sis calls is gonna just get ignored. We're gonna go right from Threads Dinos I'm pretty sure But if we look at the the hype cycle This is a Gartner hype cycle and we think about like how people make tech decisions I'm pretty sure no one here makes their tech decisions by like running a Markov bot against the front page of hacker news I mean maybe like I'm pretty sure I've seen some organizations that have probably no one here, but like People who are trying to make tech decisions like I work in a vendor now for the first time in my career I go in and I talk to other companies and I hear a lot of people say who like us is having success doing this People want to see a reference customer in their industry in their vertical, you know, maybe with their kind of market cap Maybe even in their country who's having success with this particular technology And I think that's very narrow and segmented But it's also a very human thing to want to look at people who have some sort of commonality with you and see what kind of success They're having trying to make these choices And I think the reason is because there's a lot of choices out there There's a lot of complexity out there and you can shortcut some of the decision-making by saying well other people like me with Along whatever axis have had success doing that. So maybe I'll have success too and That works to a point, but then when you try to have that intersect with the hype cycle, you're like I think I want to use containers, but nobody like me is using containers successfully in production yet And then everybody starts looking at analyst reports and it's like again, this is where We're at an agile conference So I think I feel safe in saying that everybody here probably agrees that taking small steps and iterating and trying things is a lot More successful than waiting around until someone else who's exactly like you has finished an end-to-end successful story It's like that you know as well as I do that that's not the best way for you to get ahead in the market so And at the same time it like we are obviously at a point of great change like we're obviously at a point of you know Just like you know the the idea of like when virtualizations first started happening Like the the fact that we have you know containerization is something that is a big deal to a lot of people right now is Different than it was before like we are at some we are at a time where things are changing significantly changing pretty quickly This is a this is a quote from a science fiction TV show from the 90s that I'm sure some people remember But there's this very profound line that a character who otherwise is rather forgettable says where he says nothing's the same anymore And I'm like yep, you can apply that in so many cases, especially in tech right now At the same time again, I go in and I talk to a lot of these companies and they're very excited about their Greenfield projects and they want to put them on Cloud Foundry our platform and They kind of say sheepishly and then we have all this legacy stuff as if it's a bad thing Like as if you know the fact that there are these startups coming nipping at their heels We're gonna disrupt everything Who are gonna cause trouble who don't have all that legacy to worry about and just have a greenfield app to deploy as if those people Have the significant advantage that the companies that have been established don't have and what I would say to that is well again back to the back to the Nicole's point it depends because if That legacy data that legacy system didn't matter you just turn it off like obviously there's something really important there Probably your customers you your revenue stream Like there's usually a reason that the legacy system is important enough for you to be working on trying to migrate it now The reality is that sometimes if you hang on to a legacy legacy system long enough You're probably gonna have to do some massive like rewriting replatforming I went to the science museum here actually and I was super excited to see in the museum and IBM 14-01 The reason I was super excited is because I don't know if anyone here happens to recognize it The font that I'm using here is a font that is based it was made by Jeff Callum And it was based on the font from the that was produced on the IBM 14-03 So it's like yeah, that's kind of awesome. I got I had never seen an IBM 14-03 Which is the the printer right there I had never seen it in person so because I guess they have one at the computer history museum in Mountain View And I've always been upstairs at the Dev Ops days events and need to go down and actually see the machine But the thing I thought was really interesting about this is that they had a sign Saying that this was you know getting donated to the museum from the government and it was in use until 1989 And it was producing money orders with the post office or something and I thought you know what? They kept that system until it was no longer useful Like impossibly longer than it was you know useful or whatever But I bet you anything when they first started using this, you know a really long time ago It was probably useful for a lot of things including perhaps money orders But probably not limited to money orders and I would say there was probably a very smart pattern here where one piece of Functionality at a time was migrated off of this main frame until finally it was able to be retired and shipped to the museum And that's actually when you're trying to move to microservices. That's and you know You can't necessarily take your entirely legacy your entire legacy application off of the 14-01 Shove it into a container and be like we're done pray. It's like that's probably not going to work super well So there is going to be a certain amount of redesign refactoring Figuring out which pieces of the application you can rewrite and then maybe have something proxy back to the old data store Until you've you know kind of that strangler pattern which sounds sort of murderous and terrible But I guess it's related to like vines or whatever and until it's possible to actually move away from the old but Trying to do this, you know kind of second system second system syndrome as a Astrodactycin and Google called it her keynote at Qcon Doesn't really make a ton of sense like this. We've built an entirely new perfect thing two years later We're going to cut over to it. Let's hope it's ready It's like even though agile obviously started in software development as an IT apps person I can tell you like we have to think about this, you know iterative change in operations, too And if we don't I gotta tell you this by the way, I took this picture I think it was April in Minnesota that was still snow not a lot of snow, but there was still snow and That's that snow man is definitely not long for this world And it reminds me of this Deming quote where he says that I mean you don't have to change like it's not necessary to change However survival is not mandatory. So like at some point you need to make the decision to go ahead and change and deciding what the right path for change is for you and Exactly how to implement it and which things need to go first is a completely localized decision And that's kind of one of those things where you know People will sometimes pay consultants to come in and tell them exactly how to do this and it's like that's cool But get you know get somebody like you know Thoughtworks or pivotal or whomever to come in and help you with your agile IT transformation There's a whole bunch of great sponsors here that will come in and help you with that transformation But you're gonna have to make the decisions yourself about what's right for you because nobody else is gonna understand your use case as well as you are And you definitely should be aware of anyone who tries to sell you devops in a box So like just like that shipping container earlier definitely didn't contain 200 units of devops There are not you know a couple of dozen delicious devops chocolates in this box Well, actually there are but this was at devops days Belgium in Ghent in 2014 our badges were a certificate of devops And they gave us devops chocolate and which is just kind of the tongue-and-shake well I mean yes, you can get devops in a box. It will be it will be delicious It's still not going to dev any of your ops like it's it's not going to actually make the transformative changes You need to make in your organization That's a question of your internal will and the leadership coming from your organization like um, for example all state insurance Has a very forward-thinking CTO Andy Zittany who spoke at Cloud Foundry Summit last year And was talking about how when all state decided that they wanted to make changes They had leadership, you know at the top saying this is important This is something we're going to prioritize and they also had people, you know throughout the ranks saying yes We want to do this like you do need both But it's not something that you can just buy And these tweets entertain me a lot because like if we consider that devops is empathy Then I mean are we selling enterprise empathy automation tools? I mean like probably not So it's not that it's it's not necessarily a drop-in one-to-one replacement, but it does make us think a little about If we're using this concept of devops to have to move more effectively Oh, and we actually we also have a from Patrick de Bois who started the first devops days It was actually an agile conference. I don't know if you've heard this story It stopped me if you've heard this one before I make sure actually don't stop me There's video, you know other people who haven't heard it before who aren't in this room with us I might hear this later, but in 2008 at the at the agile conference one of the agile conferences I Andrew Clay Schaefer put up a birds with a feather session that he wanted to have about agile systems administration And then he thought nobody's gonna come to this And so he didn't show up at his own birds of a feather session one person showed up It was Patrick de Bois who had to go track Andrew down later and talk to him because Andrew wasn't at his own session and their discussion eventually led to Patrick going back to Belgium and starting the first devops days in Ghent in 2009 and When we asked him about okay, so if it came out of agile like why is it called devops days? He said agile systems administration was too long for a conference name I'm like, okay. I can see that that would be a pretty long hashtag That would be a little bit harder to fit on a badge than even any of this stuff so I can see that point but like this idea of Moving towards thinking of devops as you know, not just tooling But also this human cooperation between the different parts of the business is not just touchy-feely stuff as Nicole was saying this morning If there's data that shows that this makes us more effective. It's like we're gonna be more successful If we're focusing on this team stuff, there's an effective devops book that's coming out soon It's a pre-release from a Riley right now. That's very much worth reading I was fortunate enough to be an early reader for it Jennifer Davis and Catherine Daniels are writing this and What one of the things John Davis said in a blog post for sysadvent this year Just focused on we don't want tooling that makes it impossible for the humans to understand what's happening At the same point, you know, like we like we just heard we don't want to have tooling that Requires human intervention, you know unnecessary gating where we don't actually want to stop the process We don't want human intervention But choosing and creating tooling that's comprehensible to the humans involved in the process is super important and Like the idea of you know, the secret herb bunker like please do not touch this the separation You can get between dev and ops where you know, okay Op stuff is checked in but it's in a private repo and like the devs can't have access to that I think that's an anti-pattern because that's not going to make it easier to have transparency and visibility throughout the Organization as to what's actually going on I a couple of startups ago. I worked somewhere where we had, you know graphs we had a Graphs on you know coming out of graphite Like, you know displayed on TVs that showed things about like, you know things hitting our API endpoints and whatnot And one time a customer success person came in in the morning before me I mostly rolled in like just in time for stand-up but she came in she saw on the TVs that our normal pattern had turned to and everything was flat and She looked at that and she could tell from which graph it was that that was clearly one of our major customers And we were no longer we there was no way we were still appearing on their website if That was the traffic pattern coming off of their site because we were we were the dreaded third-party cookie ad tech Ooh, I used to be evil. I might still be evil except I report up through marketing now But What she found was that when she went look to the customer site indeed our which it was missing She was able to diagnose that talk to the customer They had had a botched deploy that had accidentally taken our stuff off the site early in the morning hours And she had it fixed in the graph back up to normal like before I even came into work It was fantastic and like when you have you know visibility rating out to the radiating out to the rest of the organization And you aren't keeping all the information into the you know the ops priesthood like you can have much better success for everyone and this idea of like choosing both, you know, you're monitoring your tooling your architectural patterns and Just making the right thing making the thing you want everyone to do the easy thing I think it's really profound like that's that's the direction. We're trying to go and We have shall I say we have the technology like we can with technology Gait people towards the behaviors that are going to be the best for everyone Things like exactly which get workflow you choose like hey if you choose a get workflow that is no kind of Anti-continuous integration with long continuous deployment that is going to cause problems for you So I also think that we have to consider the complexity in the systems that we're building and the systems that were you know Making visible to the consumers maybe inside our company of the stuff that we're automating like for example If you're a platform team and you're making services available to other teams inside the org like if those services are such that They are You're you have very leaky abstractions and they have to comprehend absolutely every single bit of complexity in your system And yes, I'm looking at you storage system in Azure So confusing if you've tried to use EBS and then you've tried to use the storage in Azure and compared them Like you'll know what I'm talking about. It's like why are you? Exposing these particular limitations and the abstractions to the end user like if you can have really clean APIs that Exposes you know leak as few abstractions as possible, you know when you're cooperating between your teams and your organization it's like way more helpful and Containers are back to containers. They were in the title. So I got to talk about them from time to time Containers I think are a really useful boundary object because if for example some developers have dependencies and that they really care about and They can package those up and build the container through their CI system There isn't going to be any of that Docker build Docker push from somebody's laptop And you're like the Docker file has add a bunch of stuff wonder where that is is it checked in So like obviously any images that you're going to actually run in production are being generated by your CI pipeline but for the for people who are Very concerned about moving to something more modern than what they have because maybe what they have now They at least know that like they've got their version of Java and their dependencies under control And then they realize that hey if I move to something that's more containerized whether the containers are being Generated inside the platform or out like via a build pack or via a Docker image like that stuff Those are implementation details, but if people are going to move to a more containerized runtime The dependencies that are necessary for an application go with the application and The application developers don't have to worry about whether or not somebody's going to upgrade the underlying OS and render their You know super essential. What's it like inoperable? So I think that's kind of valuable Yeah, that is if any of you are from Portland This picture is from the carpet replacement at the airport apparently some people were very I'm not from Portland But I visited there when they're in the middle of replacing the airport carpet apparently the I think the the one closer to me is the old carpet and one for their ways the new one and people were very Very concerned about slash attached to the old airport carpet like I don't even know But I kind of had this visual in my mind of like, you know clean distinction between Worrying about the concerns of the underlying OS and worrying about like the concerns of your specific application Because we don't want the classic wall of confusion, right? Like you've you've seen these a million times. I feel like you know You could change you could replace the I want change and I want stability with like YOLO and nope I mean this is the The classic tension between development and operations that I think we don't need to have Because we have decent tooling now to make it Unnecessary to have all of the manual friction and handoffs that cause a lot of this tension And because Nicole referenced it this morning I took that had taken the slide out and then I decided to you know drop it back in because she mentioned it this morning So pop quiz does anyone actually know when this was said I know Nicole does But does anybody else know when this uh, you know in the last week there were 67 deploys of 496 changes by 18 people Jez knows if you actually know or are you guessing? All right, let's hear it Yes, you know when Almost you're right. This was from a flicker dev blog in 2008 It was quoted in the talk at velocity that tend to ploys a day at flicker talk of velocity that Nicole talked about in her keynote this morning and the reason that I want to bring this one up is because So many of us today are not at a place where we can say this and if the people are looking around in the room and saying Oh, no, no, I deployed 10 times a minute and you're like, okay You do put a lot of large organizations. I talked to do not and we have to think to ourselves Why could flicker do this in 2008 if a lot of us can't do it today? And yeah, the tooling is better now for a lot of this but They were operating with the tools that they had in 2008 and they could do it So I think that's a pretty good and that's pretty good evidence that tools are not the only part of this that matter Having the culture of cooperation between dev and ops and cooperation across the action the entire organization Like it seems pretty clear that at least at least in this particular case that made a big difference for them and I think when we're talking about cooperation between Organizations and you know across teams, I think it's really important to remember especially since I'm standing here in Bangalore still sort of jet lag talking to folks that There's a there's cap theorem which some of you probably are familiar with this It's a concept out of distributed systems and it's about basically when we are looking at it Say a distributed system. Maybe it's distributed data store or whatever you can have Consistency availability partition tolerance you like pick two you can't have all three at a given time and I think it's really interesting that Eric Brewer who came up with this concept went back He revisited it like 12 years later wrote an interesting article that I think is on info queue or something somewhere Where you talked about how for a partition what you really are saying is well, it's a time bound, right? I mean like okay, you're partitioned, but Until how long it's really a question of how long you're going to wait for that partition to come back together Before you're going to say all right, we're just operating in split brain And we're trying to decide we're trying to design a lot of our distributed systems today such that it's possible to operate in a state of continuous partial failure as they like to call it because Realistically whether you're in public private cloud, whatever you're going to be operating in a state of continuous partial failure pretty much all the time I mean, oh, come on that was the queue for the projector to go out. Why is the power still on? but seriously the Looking at this and thinking about a partition as being, you know time-bounded just immediately makes me think of Yeah, like here in Bangalore if you're cooperating with people in Minneapolis Are you gonna wait ten and a half hours every day before you make any decision like I'm gonna go with no I don't know to shout it out. Yes. No, you want to wait ten and a half hours. Oh Absolutely not. I got to the tour of the target's agile dojo on Wednesday and it was I knew it she's actually sitting right here And invited me to come and see it and what I was impressed by was that it had many similarities to the target agile dojo In Minneapolis, but it was also being run completely independently There were no callbacks to and then when Minneapolis does this then we do that and I'm like excellent because Just like if you look at something like console from Hashi Corp The nodes are all talked to each other via a gossip protocol There's no like waiting for the you know, the lead node to kind of give it kind of some kind of information And it's like you can't have this just like in our distributed systems We don't design them to be blocking on some sort of central sources of truth at all times And we can't do that with our human interactions either So I think that these are the kind of patterns that again using a lot of the modern Or perhaps not so modern. I mean containers have been around since 70s at least but using a lot of the you know Tooling that we have today. We can enhance the kind of cultural practices that make us more effective. I Also think that there's no substitute for actually talking to people and and yes when I When Nourish asked this morning, like what's your favorite part of a conference? I said hallway track because like I like to come to conferences and Hear what other people are saying get to know other people because you get a hundred and forty character snippets on Twitter here And there maybe from time to time you're going to read a blog post but the Real-time high bandwidth interactions of in-person communication definitely, you know the value of that definitely can't be denied and I'm a remote employee. I've been one for a couple years now And I enjoy that a lot, but the face time that you get to spend with people is also super valuable so That said like especially for people who are remote employees or collaborating across teams We do a lot of pair programming at pivotal which is fantastic We also do pair ops work which I find unusual but interesting and I just came back from a two-week rotation with our cloud ops team That runs our hosted Pivotal web services where I got to work on that team for two weeks Which was pretty great and one of the things that we did was you know day-to-day when we're swapping pairs people would orally Pass on context, you know one person would stay with the problem And you know the other person go work on something else and then the person with context would like stay in the problem And another pair would swap in and that works for you know Like moving forward with high velocity there there's can't deny that pair programming is very useful for that And it's at the same time like you have to still write things down because at some point Someone's gonna go on vacation or go to a conference on the other side of the planet and not be available to you for real-time querying whether it's because they got a promotion or another job or whatever so on the other hand I'm not a huge fan of Documentation and runbooks and giant checklists and the reason I'm not a huge fan of those is because I feel like they get outdated the second You make them But at the same time saying well this code is self-documenting also doesn't necessarily solve the problem Because what I end up doing is looking at the code that I wrote like six months later and saying pass you What were you thinking like why does this you know? Why does this code commit? Just tell me what this code does that is not helpful. I can read the code. I know what the code does I don't know why so I think that the kind of documentation that's actually useful is just a Detailed commit at the moment that you make that decision and commit it that says why you did this as opposed to the myriad other things You could have done because I mean of course like you can add more information than that But to me that's like the minimum viable if we're gonna be all agile and say like MVP like the minimum viable commit should say Why this is going in? because that way people can they don't need to go try to consult a giant checklist or a Giant, you know design document that's probably wrong to figure out why a little bit more about devops's culture, so I feel like Point I was I think I tweeted this into August 2014. I was very You know set on this devops's culture. It's only culture. It's not tools tools are definitely not part of devops and When I tweeted this Andrew Clay shaker answered me and said everyone is selling and just kind of his like you know mysterious Oracle Adelphi sort of way and what I think Is actually true here like is that devops is culture, but the tools enable the culture So the tooling and the practices all the stuff that we're doing To make you know our cooperation possible is how we practice devops together Which means that we have a lot of choices that we need to make to try to figure out how to do this I'm like, okay. That's great. Was there a lot of ideas? Well, like how should we actually do this? Like is there you know, is there a 14-point, you know devops thing I'm like well while there are people like say Nicole and Jess who will definitely help you evaluate Whether or not you're deving all your ops and if you're going to be devopsing at the velocity and with the accuracy That's right for you. Like the answer is it's it really depends it depends on where your organization is now What you're trying to accomplish? like this is it's always a very Individualized and self-evaluate Evaluatory But the self-evaluation that you go through is a lot more valuable than Trying to go and get certified by someone else because like again I mean honestly if somebody is going to give you a certificate of devops like they're saying you successfully graduated from kindergarten Like you're not eating crayons and you're sharing with other children. It's like that's fantastic Like you wanted to share that's great But I mean that's I don't think that that's a useful thing to say somebody is certified in But the kind of things that I think it's useful to measure is like say you're trying to evaluate your progress Like how well you are actually doing and improving your culture For example here like we have these squash. I mentioned the community garden earlier That all those containers and silos are on the way to you So maybe squash and they're absolutely enormous way better than those tomatoes So that means that we did a great job of growing squash, right? Well, not exactly because those are patty pan squash and they're supposed to be smaller than my fist So we actually neglected them way too long when we tried to eat them. They were terrible So if if your only measure of progress is like the number of people working on this and how high the budget is and The lines of code produced I mean there's there's so many ways you can measure progress that are probably not actually useful and so looking at the actual value achieved like what are the actual results that we've gotten for our Organization that are useful as opposed to looking at, you know, I mean I like monitoring. I like metrics.  It's like It's possible to make your measurements look like anything you want them to and so it's a lot more valuable to at least focus on What has improved in our organization in our culture like and for our business? another thing that I want to want to warn people off from is the idea of Saying we want to implement a lot of changes, but we also want to keep our old processes We want to keep our release management. We want to keep our ito and we want to keep our fill in the blank Okay, so a lot of process is usually in place because something went wrong in the past like for example This is from Amsterdam and I'm I'm a quarter Dutch So I can say like I don't understand those Dutch people man because like I was in Amsterdam and there's a There's a the sticker is in Every bathroom of the hotel that velocity in Amsterdam was in last year And a lot of people started tweeting the picture, which is why I didn't go and visit every bathroom But like a lot of people started tweeting the picture, which is why I realized that this wasn't just in our bathroom This isn't apparently in every bathroom and what it says there if you can't read it is we kindly request you to take your shower in the bathtub and I'm thinking what happened at this hotel enough times that they thought it was important enough that they printed a sticker and put it in every bathtub and I'm thinking like there's so many places where I mean I worked someplace that had really actual heavy process and we had a 42 page change management process And it would go to the change control review board and they would decide whether or not that change could go to production And unless something was horribly wrong at which point we could just put things in production immediately It's shocking. I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations expired on that job because that was like, you know over a decade ago So I'll just tell you it's shocking how many emergencies we had Because pretty much every time I wanted to make a change I only had to fill out like the three-page emergency form and just do it And the thing is if a change being made in that kind of way is okay When everything is on the line when everything is broken when everything is down and when you're you know Like we were hearing earlier It's three in the morning and somebody is trying to make that decision then if your fast-track hot-fix Processes okay, then it's probably okay in the light of day when everybody is there Like but the a lot of organizations that are trying to change do kind of fall into that trap of but we still want to keep and then the giant heavyweight Processes that's like okay. That's not actually going to make things better. That's actually going to make things worse And I think another thing that people run into some trouble with is I warned you there are cat pictures This is this is a cat me more affectionately known as attack kitten He spends a lot of time attacking well everything but lately mostly he's been attacking on Laptops fingers apple branded cables. I guess they're more delicious than any other cable and also learning a lot about everything that you see on that laptop just by Osmosis from the stickers. I'm pretty sure he's become an expert at docker by this point Just by proximity But I think staying on top of all of this stuff that we need to learn that we need to know about all of the Computering stuff is actually kind of tough and then you're thinking like Okay, I was told I need to docker all the dockers I'm definitely doing that and now wait. I also have to have some Platform or orchestration or scheduling like I need to also do all those things That's I just changed this other thing or I was just looking into changing this other thing Or I was just trying to get some configuration management and now you're telling me I also need some containers and I feel like Trying to stay on top of every change and implement every change instantly is a fool's game Like that's not actually what a successful organization is going to do this is back to the you know technology trend stuff It's like you have to pick the stuff that's going to make you more effective not the stuff that everyone else is saying is super because if we're if we're trying to make a good culture for our employees a culture where they get to try and You know new things and learn is great a culture where they feel like they're under constant pressure And they can never catch up. It's horrific. It's like we don't want to do that to people And I think when we were talking about that wall of confusion earlier The little brick wall that was so low you could throw things over it's not what it really looks like right like the wall of confusion between teams It's more like something like this. I took this picture standing on a frozen lake in Minnesota and so like this is my partner Joe just standing right there and I'm way out on the lake and that all that way stuff is like and yes that that is what it looks like a fair amount of time and Imagining trying to see past that wall trying to climb that wall I mean, I assume there's probably like some white walkers or something terrible beyond that wall, you know, like this is this is not the kind of Environment that we want to have people in when they're trying to figure out what to do like when people are trying to be successful and make changes in their organization, but When I when I go into organizations where we have to go and have separate meetings because the head of application development And the head of IT infrastructure are not going to come to the same meeting I'm like you probably shouldn't buy anything like sorry sales people cover your ears but like selling you any kind of tooling is not going to help because You need to first get your culture to a place where people are willing to cooperate and get past You know just kind of blankly staring at something like this to hey like this wall doesn't actually have to be this way You can just walk a little bit further down and you can see under it and through it and just go around Like yeah, you may not be able to tear down every silo You know the whole DevOps trend of like give it to those silos and you're like Again, we can't do it. We're we have thousands of people We can't do a giant reorganization into five-person squads and like have that be our company That's not realistic for us. You don't necessarily have to do that. Why tear it down. Just walk around it you can give yourself permission to ignore the rules that don't make sense for what you're trying to do today and Like that is in a nutshell That's like the DevOps journey like and I think and I took this picture back in 2009 actually in South Africa And I recently gave this talk at Cape Town and someone said I've taken a picture of that tree and I thought wow Okay, that's kind of random. It's like the exact same stretch of road They drive on the left side of the road there as well. I tried to drive I panicked I couldn't I had to leave all the driving to my brother and I got to say though This was a fairly typical road on that particular drive on the Garden Road in South Africa Pretty much every road I've been on here is the exact opposite So I must commend absolutely everyone here who is brave enough to drive a car on the left side of the road With that many cars on the road because it's I'm gonna say everyone here is a better driver than almost anyone I've ever met so but it's a little bit terrifying as a passenger but Imagine if you will that there was a road that was not entirely full of honking auto rickshaws and Imagine that the journey itself was you know a very interesting part not just the destination But the journey itself was part of what you actually were trying to do and I feel like Trying to say oh we have fixed everything ever and now we are DevOps It's like it's ridiculous, right because we're all on this continuum. We're all on this journey We're all progressing towards the goal of having improved But that doesn't mean that you're going to get there and be done like that's not actually how it works And I think the places that you know the places I've worked in the places that I've talked to that are the most successful with This are the people who are using an agile approach to their iterative IT organizational changes To continue to improve all the time with or without containers again The tool while handy is not necessarily the point so with that I want to say thank you, and I'm not sure if we have time for questions But I will be around and I appreciate checking with everyone. Thanks I can I can take one question one brave soul who is not hungry enough for lunch and actually wants to Talk for a moment No one ever no one ever takes me up on that This is the right before lunch time slot. Okay, we're done. Thank you so much You


So this is a call to discuss composting in the spirit of weaving the world on Friday, December 17, 2020. Brilliant. And Bentley you're having still having trouble finding your video. There's the OBS. There's there's the virtual cam. Yeah, but you can't find your way back to your natural physical cam. Oh, you did it. My built-in camera so fix it. You did it. You're here. Okay, Wendy. Long time no speak. That was like a princess wave. You got totally this is the royalty wave. And then this is the don't talk to the pinky wave. I mean, don't don't talk to the pinky because the hand don't don't want to talk to you anymore. That one needs practice. Yeah, I know it's I just, I don't have it. It's sort of like my British accent. You also don't have right precisely precisely exactly, although I tend to enunciate words and I've had people ask me if I was British before and I'm like, is that just because I'm completing the words. I don't know. You don't have to go into the bathroom. We have we're beginning to have some episodes called weaving the world which I need to finish transcribing and assembling and posting, but, but we have a series of interviews, which will go in some direction. And the conceit of weaving the world is that we have follow on calls or shadow calls or right now I'm liking calling them composting calls, where we go back over the material and, and hopefully it's people who are already on the call but maybe also others who are interested in the watched the episode beforehand, where we sit down and enrich the conversation, map about it, share the maps, connect the maps, do other kinds of things. It's an act of collective intelligence of some sort or at least of collective sense-making, how about that? And at this moment, we have very different tools on deck that don't talk to each other. So I'm a brain addict, Gene is a Kumu black belt and now a heavy, heavy, heavy Rome user. And I don't know what other tools you're in, but he's also reinstalled and deleted the brain. Oh, I don't know, eight, 10 times in your life? Or more, possibly more. Wendy is freeform with Scapple and I don't know what else. Bentley is, which tools do you prefer? I build my own, I don't know. So, why use a tool that someone else has spent a lot of time crafting with a lot of people when you can just spend twice as much time building your own tool and get half as much done? Makes so much sense to me.  Right. Not I. So, part of what I wanted to do here was not to compost the call that I had broadcast, but rather to just slow things down for a second and talk about composting. And then, if we do this right, to come up with a series of questions that composting should sort of address or answer, maybe even a process for the composting calls, like, why don't we start with this, continue to this and end with this, or something like that? I don't know, but I'm trying to figure out and totally open also to what do you mean composting that sounds ridiculous? Like, if that's your response to it, then I shouldn't go waste a whole lot of time writing new code to invent the new thing called composting. But I have this feeling that slowing down conversations and then going back in and making them better will help. So, and I would like to just add something to what I said earlier. I'd like to invite the participants, including the guests who were on the original episodes into the composting call. So if Daryl Davis wanted to show up and think about what was said during his interview with me and then go deeper and see where that goes, that's extremely cool. And also it helps us kind of trace back where do particular statements come from? Like what is the evidence or the basis for thinking something, saying something? What might that turn into as policy or what would you do because of that? What is replicable? There's a whole bunch of really nice questions that you don't get to when you're just ripping on through a conversation, however interesting that might be. So I'm trying a little bit to slow down and pay more attention. I'm trying a little bit to combine our perspectives on the same conversation and then enrich them. I'm trying a little bit to create a richer asset between us that can be in the commons, that is the leave behind artifact that describes what happened and what that nugget of activity might mean in the broader world. Now I'll shut up, at least for 30 seconds. Thoughts, anyone? I've been thinking about the composting call and some of the questions I think I saw someone asked maybe it was even Wendy about like, are we supposed to watch the video beforehand? Oh, I didn't. I think that was Nancy. We're gonna actually go without, right, you're right. And then what do we do during the actual call and afterwards and a lot of people talk about what we want, the stuff that did not have to happen during the call. So there's two ways I thought of it. One would be great just as a kind of a co-working room to where you're all sitting down and doing your own thing and then someone might ask a question and pop up but it could be a work session more than actual discussion. It could be a place where people are, they just know they wanna participate in something cool and so they might just come in without an idea or want to team up with someone else that's already doing something. And it may be just a discussion kind of like a book club where you talk about what were some interesting parts of the interview that we think we should tease out and maybe two or three people could choose to take one segment and map that one segment in three or four different ways or something. Those are the purposes I think could come out of a meeting. And then I guess one other is, we talked about having a consolidation, can't remember the actual C word we used, video at the end but now I'm thinking maybe the grouped together are curated artifacts collection kind of like a museum exhibit. We're taking some of these things and piecing them together. That may, maybe that's more of an interactive piece than just a video, although I think it'd be good to have a video of it anyways afterwards. So that composite call could even be after people have created some content and maybe it's talking about how that content gets woven together. Right. So I just threw a whole bunch of ideas out without any directions. That's lovely, that's perfect. That's very composty.  So there we are. Ripping off of that. I really think Vincent would be a good person to invite to talk about this because I think his platform is quickly moving there where it could be a good space for all the different pieces. Because I wasn't even thinking you and I were talking a little before Jerry but I wasn't thinking about the repository part of it also, right? So, which of course is essential. So it could be a good repository and I know he knows how to embed KumuMap. So it could be, we could use Kumu until we come up with something that we like better, right? To map and now that he's reorganized his database I think the organization of that page for the repository, the organization of and then the resulting KumuMap would be much more useful. And also the simplest thing for us to do is kind of to link to one another's maps and insights and to kind of build sort of in parallel different entities using whatever mix of tools we each prefer sort of moving toward the center of what the topic is. And I have no idea what this is gonna look like in 10 years. Go ahead. Yeah, and I guess just to make sure I was being clear where his site could hold all the different versions of the maps I don't think his site yet could be the final, right? It would just be a holding space. Which is kind of why I said if we each point to each other then you can get to all the different artifacts kind of from whatever path you find your way in and there is no canonical single reference version in the middle. And then maybe we figure out how to separate the data from the tools and maybe we wind up creating or joining an effort to create open linked reliable contextualized data in which case that actually becomes the asset in the middle and we're all just kind of living on top of the asset, enriching it, adding to it linking it and using it all the time. And then that sort of becomes the artifact and the artifact then isn't held in anybody's tool there's no vertical here's the data in the database but rather the data sprinkled through IPFS or in some distributed store. We now have a way to have different lenses or tools access and improve the data as we go. And again, we don't have that today but I would love to be there in five or 10 years. And that makes it easier to figure out where the center is or what the asset is or something like that. Cause then the asset is this layer of information that conceptually I picture as a layer above things like Wikipedia which is a layer itself of facts and pages about stuff. So what do you perceive is missing? Whole bunch of stuff. What do you mean about where it could be in five or 10 years? Yeah, you mean what's, why can't we do that now? Well, partly the data is stuck in each tool. So Kumu can import some database files and other sorts of stuff, but it's, it creates a Kumu file that, you know, that I can't look at from the brain for example and you can't, I think you can't go inspect from graph fizz, am I wrong about that? And same for the brain. It depends upon whether or not you have access.  So if you make it public on the web anybody can link to any element in your brain not just to the brain they can actually link to individual elements, okay? So my understanding is that even though I published my brain openly right now you've actually got to go in through an instance of the brain on the brain server to get to my data. Now we have exported my data into a large bag of JSON objects in a NoSQL database but nobody knows where that is. Nobody's been playing with it yet, right? Well, everything has to be somewhere. Yeah. Okay.  Yeah. You have to get to it. So you said you have to get to an instance of the brain through the brain server. Well, if it was in Google Drive you'd have to get to it through an access to Google Drive. In other words, you have to provide read or read write access to whatever it is that you choose to make public. Right. But part of it is access privileges to the file which is doable at the file system layer. Part of it is, hey, this is actually an instance of proprietary software called the brain. And unless you're running an instance of that server you don't get to see and visualize the data that's tucked right there. And I think that's harder somehow, right? Cause there's no AP, at this point, I think there's no API where you can actually programmatically make a call into the data that's being kept in this brain format. So I might give you a file access but you couldn't do very much with it at this point yet. Correct me if I'm wrong, Bentley also. Well, I'm not quite. I think what Jerry is getting at is kind of a longterm vision where we kind of have the raw data and it can be pulled up in multiple systems at the same time with different visualizations of different ways of looking at it. I think that's a pretty large discussion on what it even means. And maybe we should get back to the problem. Okay. Well, including access privileges and stuff like that. And the reason I say that this is a further vision far out that maybe in five or 10 years is that I think that that's complicated. As you just said, but Gene to address your question, that's one of the things that I think would help us actually collaborate in this space as opposed to every one of us who's interested in doing this is busy curating our own little snippet of the world, our own little tiny sort of view into the universe and trying to figure this out. Now, I'm very interested in what like Rome collaborators are doing in multi-user Rome spaces where they're all editing things or Athens or other kinds of tools that already within the tool permit collaborative editing and collaborative creation of that space. That's really interesting to me. But I'm looking for the step beyond also eventually which is the collaboration across tools or at least the conversation across tools. It doesn't need to be, I can go in and edit your thing but how do I link more intimately to the cool stuff you've built? Does that make sense? So for instance, where you've got a food systems kumu diagram that's a really, really great systems diagram about how things work. I would love to sort of have that somehow exist within the same space that I'm doing brain stuff in but a systems diagram is a different thing than a brain display, right? So having one in the other, the construct isn't accommodated, okay? It depends on how you're looking at it though because well, and here I'm talking about my pay grade because I am not an information architect and I don't know exactly what's being done at these levels. And as Bentley said, maybe we should get more closer to what composting actually is and means and how we do it pragmatically because we're in a bit of an abstract kind of like where's the data and how does it live conversations? Yeah, so I think, go ahead. So the way that they have continued to evolve the brain so that you can link to that map and have it show up as though it's a page in the brain. In other words, you split the view and the content of the link shows up on the right hand side of the bottom, wherever you put it. It looks like it's actually in the brain only, it's actually somewhere else. So it's embedded actually in the notes page kind of because the notes will handle embedding. Is that sort of what you're saying? Right. Yeah, because every thought in the brain has a notes page and then the notes pages, they just rewrote all the software so it's not pretty powerful. It now has Rome-like backlinks-ish but it also has pretty powerful embedding. And one of the things that Mark Trexler did, I think, which kind of confused me, but I got the power, was he embedded my brain and his brain in the notes field.  And I'm like, I just went one recursive loop too many and my brain broke. But I get that that's doable and interesting and possibly powerful as well. So you could in fact have a Rome graph embedded in the notes field. Right. Yeah, so we should play with that. And I think that might be super interesting where, and conversely, there could be links from the Rome database within Rome out to the brain, which is also likewise embeddable in different places. I don't know how friendly it is to embedding but I've embedded it before. And so each of us in the maps that we're holding could say, oh, and by the way over here is a shared cultivated garden of interesting stuff. And that's doable today with what the tools already do, which is good. So partly I'm also trying to get back to what does it look like to deepen the conversation on a topic that happened? And just riff on that for a bit.  When we have these group groups, okay, which is I think a good description of them, they tend to be divergent, all right? And you corral them back in from time to time, all right? And then they go back out again. So that if you compost it afterwards, which is fine, you can call it that if you want to. You end up with a bunch of pieces throughout that discussion that are related to whatever the topic was that we were supposed to talk about. And then you got all these pieces off to the side, some of them loosely connected and some of them not connected at all. But one thought leads to another thought, leads to another thought and it just comes up. So you could in fact map it. You could map it in the brain, you could map it in Kumwe, you could put it in Rome. I think you could put it in almost anything. It's a matter of preference, though I don't, from my perspective, I'm not sure that there is a real best place to put it. It depends on what you want it to look like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And also what you're trying to get done at that moment and also a bunch of other things, right? Are you just trying to, are you just trying to build a big beautiful resource list in which case you might want to use air table or bubble or something that's really good at a huge list, right? Are you also, are you trying to do a systems diagram, right? I can't fake a good systems diagram in the brain when you can do a beautiful one in Kumwe. And so I think the suitability to purpose of the thing at hand really matters here as well. So in the sense of- Which is the part that had me confused in terms of in the future, I can't see all of the content being accessible from one perspective because the construct of the content is different. Right, yes. And the idea that there are strands that go off in different directions, I'll just bring up my notes from my interview with Gerald Davis. So he talked about Mathias Cole, who was the head of the American Nazi Party after George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated and how he ran it. He told an anecdote of how he ran into Cole and things that happened. So his sophomore high school year in his class called Problems of the 20th Century, Cole was a guest speaker, right? That happened to Davis in his life. And that's a segment in the video, which I'm not linking to here, which would be really fun to be able to link directly to that segment. So when you hit this nugget in my brain, you could play exactly that stretch of the video. And you can do that. And you could pretty easily do that. It would be just work, right? To go back and do a timestamp into the YouTube video in this sense. And then eight years later, Davis confronted Kale at a protest in Lafayette Park, all of which is in this sort of episode of this. But then when you start going to the American Nazi Party, you can go off in lots of different directions about the rise of neo-Nazism, about a whole bunch of other kinds of things. And I like that very much. So to me, composting is like inoculating something with mycelium. You want it to sort of break down the nutrients and then grow in whatever directions and then weave into other root systems and then make the exchange. So I like the visual of this has lots of little threads that are dead ends or go in different directions and it's not a neat package. I'm really comfortable with that. And this perspective on this conversation, this set of topics is in this one tool and it's not gonna easily connect to other perspectives but there are other rich perspectives also that you can go hop to through embedding or just by following a link. And for now, that's fine. Unless that breaks someone else's brain. And? So to me, the thing that's missing in creating a good composting conversation from the way we were talking about it so far is having kind of what you, what's the thing you want either, what point do you wanna reach at by the end? Where is this heading? Because if all it's doing is extending the conversation so that we get more connections in the brain for as an example. Okay, that's fun, but that's just more connections in the brain. I'm interested in getting a little bit closer to what's emerging, making some sense out of it, trying to get to some semblance of wisdom even though we haven't defined what that is either. To me, the composting is an interesting word in the sense that it's then providing nutrients for something to grow. So what is that thing that we want to grow? Because let's say it'll help guide the discussion. It doesn't mean that discussion has to be targeted at a specific thing because I agree with you letting it free flow is part of the joy of it, I think for a lot will be for a lot of people letting it go where it needs to go, but having some guidelines, some boundaries by way of expressing kind of where you want it to end or the question we're trying to answer or something will be an important piece of this so that it doesn't just go anywhere. Yeah. So in that spirit, so for me, what I think I'm trying to say is I'm interested in what I and anybody else who's joining for the composting think where are the tasty bits? And so for me, in my perspective, how can you hate me when you don't even know me is a really, really tasty bit and connects up to bridging the cultural divide, familiarity dispels fear, great questions. And I'm interested in making this better. Like this is a lot of resources, a lot of links. Here's a diffusing conspiracy theories. Here's people who left racist nationalist groups and it's a list of former Nazis and former skinheads and stuff like that. So I think one way of defining where are we trying to get to is to, a bad metaphor maybe but since I'm calling this composting, we're sort of trying to digest the call to better settle it into its greater context and to improve the important notes that are hit in that conversation. Does that make sense? And is that enough of a goal? And can we refine that? So you mentioned the rural community sustainable food system model that we developed. Right. I realize now based upon all the things that you said, we composted that on the fly. So that every one of the meetings that we had, there was six or eight people in the meeting. Every time someone brought up a comment, the question was, where's it go on the map? Yep. What's it connect to? What's the relationship? So that you didn't have to go back over the conversation later to figure out what the structure of the relationships were because you built them on the fly. And we went around and made sure everybody got a chance for their inputs, right? And some people would say, well, you know, I think this is relevant, but I don't know where it goes yet. So it would go on the map, but it's not yet connected, okay? And afterwards, in other words, all of those pieces were connected at the time that they were surfaced, but we went through it afterwards and distilled it into more refined views of what we initially developed. Yes. Yes, and because you had a sort of a project to build this map and the food system and because you had some participants who were trying to leave the conversation with a map they understood that would be helpful as a systems diagram that they could then use for the projects, every time you got together to talk, you were busy making the map better, asking important questions, things like that. So you're totally right. Your process with that feels like composting in that sense, but you had a narrower, more focused goal, an end product because you're looking for a map of the food system that would be useful to that community. Where here it's like we're trying to improve general knowledge and figure out how to solve the big puzzles. It's pretty... So even with that particular topic, you could build a map on the fly. By on the fly, what do you mean? As people offer comments or perspectives, you put them on the map and you... People look at them and ask them about, okay, is there someplace else on the map that this ought to connect to? Yes, and so that's a piece of the interesting thing is that most mappers are starting with a fresh sheet of paper and creating a new scaffold diagram or a new MindJet page or whatever else. And then when the page gets crowded, they're out of room. When Pete crogged, when he sort of post-processed the metaverse call we had, he spent a lot of time and energy creating new pages for basically the nouns that we mentioned, the people. And in fact, those people have representation somewhere out, he could have linked to the person's profile in LinkedIn, but he didn't do that. He created a page in the Wiki space for them. And one of the things that is groovy about doing this ongoing with evolved infrastructures or evolved substrates of content is that you're connecting to known entities all the time and you're sort of always weaving, you're weaving the stuff that exists instead of instantiating things either again, which means, oh my gosh, how often are we gonna have to write this name or do this thing or doing them fresh the first time? So I think that's a subtle and really important and interesting part of this process is that when there's a shared ongoing memory and when you connect up to some other thing that just got mentioned, it's rich already, that's cool. And you're kind of building this bridge between domains of interest, solution sets, whatever it might be, I don't know. And I have a feeling that that web of connections is really important. So the reason I like weaving the world is that the weaving feels like the warp in the weft of these little links between things that matter. Anyone else thoughts? I was thinking of a slightly different purpose. Cool. The title is Weaving the World. And so rather than taking the presentation sounds like, I mean, it is kind of finding the nuggets in there, but it's associating them with other stuff out there. So I kind of see this as a time for people to come in, see what maps and links that other people have made and link to their links. And then we're kind of bringing everything together and building that mycelium network. I think that would be a good use of time. And then making sure we're, like you were saying, cross-linking between all the things and then building out a few hubs like the OGM website and Vincent's site and a couple of things where we put a majority of the links and maybe throw everything in IPFS or whatever. So maybe that time is like, well, here's what I got or here's some links and stuff like that and how can we link these things up? How can we cross post? But it's kind of a coordination. And I think, so one model, we had a mapping hoedown early in the history of OGM, but I only posted it one time and we picked a topic and then we had different people come in with different tools and then we talked about the topic just for, I think, 20 minutes. And then we said, okay, let's go around the room and screen share what we did with that, with our tool. I think Robert Best was there with Mind Manager and someone was doing Miro and so on and so forth. And it was quite interesting and we just did it once, we should have kind of maybe repeated that because that could sort of easily turn into this kind of rhythm of composting. Yeah, Wendy. And it's partly, so one of the things I find from my use of the brain over time is that I get better at summary questions, I get better at synthesizing, I start to see connections that I didn't see before and it just sort of gets richer and more interesting in different ways. And I realize, oh damn, I should just create a collective thought for these great questions, right? And so then I can go in and find a way out from those places. And that feels to me like a move toward wisdom from just a big bucket of knowledge. I would, that's what I would love to see if you can get to in the composting, right? It's more than just adding in the connections that we all made, right? It's what do those connections start to tell us? Right, and this is gonna be a goofy example but just it occurs to me as an inspiration for me where some years ago I met a guy who cared a lot about history and Asia and all that and I was like, oh yeah, yeah. And the Mongols basically the Chinese build the great wall in some sense to prevent the Mongols from coming in and invading so often. And the Mongols bounce off the wall and go to Europe. And all of a sudden Europe's getting invaded because hey, the Mongols love planes that they can feed their horses off of and up until they hit mountains in Europe they're doing great. And then my conversational partner says, yes, but and then this and I was like, oh my God, I didn't know that. And there was this like layering of history that was beautiful that I wasn't, we were just standing in a lobby and he and I haven't talked since and I was just sitting thinking, how do we compare notes on things like that? And then say, oh, and I got this piece of insight from this book over here, you know, the secret history of Genghis Khan or whatever and this piece from over there that kind of weaving together of how things work is to me a new way of telling history and of making your way through history. And if along that journey, you're like, oh, and to understand this point, go watch this segment of this TEDx talk, that's brilliant. Like that's just fabulous. But what is it about that, right? Cause so far even in your example, you're talking about different pieces of data, right? And the only way I know it brought meaning to you was the way that you're talking about it. So what is it? Not talking about the fact in and of itself that you learned about history, but it's the change in your perspective or it was the change in your understanding, right? Or it was a piece of information that maybe conflicted with something that you knew before that it's the shift in perspective, understand it, right? That's what we're trying to go for not that we're trying to necessarily compost with that intention in mind, but if we can recreate a little bit of the environment that encourages those openings, right? That is the great stuff, right? So to me, creating the repository, making the connections is only the first step, right? And there are technical hurdles to that and those are important conversations and there are ways that we can view it and those are important conversations and there are ways to include people so we can get more connections and those are important conversations. But to me, they're all the foundation for a much richer conversation, which is, what does this mean? What is this telling us? Is this bringing us forward at all in either our individual or collective understanding of what we're trying to do here, right? And if the better verse is the goal, we don't even know what that means yet, can we conclude at the end of every call that what was our takeaway and how did this take us even just the tiniest step toward a better verse, right? If that's kind of our umbrella, right? So even if we were to use that as a compass, then we could mine the conversation by the end of the conversation saying, okay, all right, we had a fun conversation, we'll let it go everywhere. Here's a nugget, here's a nugget, here's a nugget, right? And we don't even have to do anything with it, but just acknowledging these were the little steps. This is how we expanded things a bit. I love that. Those connections are often narrative paths, they're often storytelling within the map for me. I'm just talking about my own experience in use, but some notes and some thoughts in my brain are just nouns, here's an association, here's a person, here's a song. Others are, hey, and I just looked and I never put the Mongols bounced off the Great Wall in my brain because I was gonna go show you that, but I never actually added that narrative. But there's a bunch of them that are sort of storytelling or opinion on purpose. And the opinions connect into larger stories and larger narratives and stuff like that. And on the one hand, I think that's interesting and useful and often opaque to newcomers coming in because they don't know which path to take or where to go. And then the second thing I think you said, which I think is hugely important is if this can become a rich venue for conversations where people are like, got it, and they can see things differently, and understand things and then contribute back to the growing of the shared asset, that's fabulous. So how do we, and then one thing might be, hey, if you're really interested in this topic over here in this little nexus, there's a thriving conversation over on Reddit, on this subreddit about it. Or there's a Discord server that in this period, go look at these dates to these dates, they had this super rich conversation about is AI conscious or not conscious, right? And those kinds of things would be really interesting additions to the shared map, because then you can actually find your way into the conversations, you're muted. Yeah, thank you. So you added something for me, which is a good reminder of not only would a composting call or anyone who watches it, right? Be an avenue to bring a community together to talk about these things and further our way towards Vetaverse, but it would also feed individuals' connections to other organizations or deeper learnings or things away from weaving the world that we may never ever know about. Bingo. Because of the repository and the way we're presenting it. And if we do this right, we're sending people off to great conversations about everything that are being hosted by other people in other places entirely. Yes. And in that way, giving them, supporting them and finding the things that serve them best and enabling them to serve the world better too as a result, making it all faster. Yeah, so just by tomorrow, we should have this. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, what's funny sort of a little bit from what Jean was saying a little earlier is that I think some of these tools are capable of a whole bunch of this right now. Some of it takes legwork, like embedding one of our displays and another display is a manual act and we have to go figure out where and how to tell people about it and how to make it make sense. Going and finding a segment. So YouTube has long had T equals number of seconds in offset. You can make a link like that super easily but they just added a feature. I'm not sure it's universally yet called clips which is, I think it's the same feature with an endpoint. So you can send somebody a call out into a video and they're watching a segment, not just a start point. That's really interesting. And I need to go find out more about whether, because I think they're rolling it out just a few users as a test, but that's nicer than just a pointer into an offset. And then manually, you have to say, oh, okay, for this segment, I got that idea from this point. And then one of the ideas that came up during one of the recent calls around this topic was wouldn't it be cool if while you were in the middle of our conversation, let's say one of the Thursday check-in calls, when there was a really interesting thread that happened, you would hit like a red button, a little bookmark, a little happy icon or whatever. Oh yeah, I was bringing that up. Yeah. And then AI could look back on the transcript and say, oh, at this point, like six people in the call did the shaky hand gesture or raised flags, let's go find, let's go find how long that clip is on this topic. Sort of some real content analysis that goes back into the transcript and says, oh, it seems to have started over here and then automatically create a bookmark to that spot and make that easy to put in other places, easy to refer to, et cetera. That would be very cool. Very cool. And that's kind of wishlist. And Bentley, I wanna know more about how you're envisioning the video, just the video player thing that you're prototyping and thinking about. What I just described is like four steps beyond what you're thinking about entirely, but not unrelated at all. Yeah, and so how might that work? Yes, so I know that we have this interview and then people are building maps and other mostly visual displays, sometimes hexed by Whitney. So what I wanted to do was I was thinking about how can we combine all these into a video later on and then just with some other stuff working on. The question is, I thought, well, wouldn't it be neat if anyone could come in and add their maps to the correct part of the video where they would like it to display? And I realized I could do that all in JavaScript. And this also is very similar to Jerry to your, you hate that, is it Prezi that went away or they changed, right? It's Prezi, it's Prezi. They lobotomized themselves. Yeah, it won't follow the Prezi format, but I'm really starting to think it's more than a video thing. It's more like a presentation thing. So anyways, you could have you and the interviewee talking and then up would come up someone's Kumu map. And if it's a video later on, then it would just be a picture of it and maybe they could be navigating around. But also if they're viewing this on a website, that could be an embed, right? And they could pause the video and play with the map and then hit play in the computer and then that would, and then there might be a third thing that pops up. And then also I was thinking, there's a lot of times where during your interview, and I'm sorry I forgot his name, but the NFT guy you're talking to. Jesse Engel. Yeah, so Jesse was using a lot of terminology that a lot of people may not be familiar with it. I was thinking, oh, I just reinvented pop-up video, right? Things popping up, but they would also have links in them. So yeah, so then making an editor later on to where anyone could go and take all the different content that we have and create playlists. A playlist may be in the wrong term, but it's like a dynamic single video of interrelated stuff where things pop in and pop out at different timing. It's like an enriched path through the video and related stuff. And it looks a little bit like FedWiki.  That's one kind of limited way of thinking about it, but the vertical panels are often explaining what just happened. You know, you're basically going deeper through the same topic. So here a panel could be a static page or an embedded object or a KUMA map or it could be a video or something else. Somebody's really angry at somebody else outside. That was a very long honk. I don't know if you heard that. Yeah, so in the visualization, so the example I had did happen to use kind of like three columns, but I was also thinking on a mobile device it would probably be kind of three rows. And what's interesting about that is that you could scroll up and choose to focus on different things while the video is playing and interact with things while they're going on. So yeah, that's the idea, but have it where people later on, have it where people could come in, create their own kind of presentation with all the content or add their stuff to request their piece, say, hey, at five minutes into the conversation that there'd be a forum that they could go up and put in, here's a video, here's a link to my KUMA map on what they talked about there. It's funny, when I realized that Prezi had become a dead end, I Googled, of course, open source Prezi and I found a couple of different things and I found one thing that looked really promising until I realized all it was, in some other place you author stuff and you feed it a list of what you want to show on screen and all it does is scroll around and do the effect of following the path. It doesn't let you off of the path, it did nothing else whatsoever. And I was like, oh man, that's just really like weak beer. And Miro and the brain don't let you tell a story the way Prezi does, but they ain't that far from it. And one of the features I wanted Harlan to add to the brain was paths, give me playlists, let me specify, hey, click here and it'll take you through a particular path through the brain and maybe even do what Prezi was doing at the end, which is you could attach an audio clip to each node so that it plays a story as you go through. With Miro, you can do frames, but it's really clumsy to go from frame to frame and there's no way to say, play me, connect these frames automatically when I hit next. That doesn't happen. That could be a feature. Although that's a pretty easy plugin though. Yeah, that would be an easy, and at least Miro has a plugin architecture and we know a Black Belt Miro user for three. So you could maybe hack Miro to do what Prezi was doing. That'd be really interesting. Yeah, some of it, and a lot of these tools can import and export sort of to each other, because you can import some aspects of call metadata into Miro and map it out programmatically and you can import some of that data over into Kumu and see how it interacts and stuff like that. Now, Jerry, to your idea of the path through, so the backend is all set up for that, the database and the API from what Mark and Talon's done and I talked about, let's just recreate how you use the brain, just as a simple UI, leaving out the pieces you don't use. But now, maybe the first kind of use case is to create that path tool where you can just put in timings and select links and it would walk you through it and then later the audio files. That would be that hard to do. So I don't know if you wanna put that on your list of wish list. We should sit down and refine what that is, because I have a vague idea of what your viewer demo did, but I'm not sure because like... Oh, this would be a separate thing. The separate thing entirely, yeah.  So really what I decided is I'd almost like, in the other day I pulled it up on my phone and I'm like, I would like to explore the brain on my phone. So also making a phone interface for the brain, I think would be helpful and I haven't quite thought of how to do that yet. But even if it just like listed here, I don't know even what you call it, but here's the first five ups, and you can click more. Here's the first five downs and here's the first five sideways in three different rows. Yeah, panels that go up and down. And I think I told you that Kenneth Tyler and I long ago used his seed wiki to experiment on PowerPoint, blog, and brain, and he just used frames. So there was a frame, there was a top frame across the whole screen that was parent thoughts. There was a middle frame that was the active thought. There was a side panel for sibling thoughts and there was a lower pane for child thoughts and they were all listed there. Like it was just a call into each direction. And it worked remarkably, it was ugly as sin, but it worked remarkably well. Yeah, I guess for mobile, having a scrollable pane at the top and a scrollable pane at the bottom would be doable. I just don't know how to make it easy to get to the sidelines. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Jean, did you want to jump in? No, not particularly. In other words, we're off on one of these. Yeah, that would be a separate app from the viewer. But I thought it would be helpful to embed that in the viewer rather than the whole brain. But yeah, it's a bit off path. Yeah. So in terms of an environment that multiple people could contribute to on the plot, in other words, the problem with the brain is one user is not cheap and five users is outrageous, all right? And I had a need for an environment that would allow multiple people to edit the environment simultaneously. And Rome gave me that. So with my subscription, I can create a Rome graph and give 100 people edit access to it or my subscription fee and there's no addition to it. Huh, they don't have to be paid up Rome members. They can just be. No, they just have to have a Rome account. An account. But they don't have to subscribe. And you can set it up so that some people can view or you can make the whole thing public if you want to. So if you don't make it public, some people can view and some people can edit and you can also implement what's called immutable blocks, which says you can't edit anybody's blocks, but your own. Though if I create a block and you want to essentially edit it, you can reference it, essentially create a copy of that block and edit it to create your version of that block. And you can comment on blocks. Which is a little bit what Federico does. It gave me what I was looking for without, because I had tried using the brain in the past at one time with a couple of users and we crashed it. We lost a ton of content. And the people at the brain couldn't save it. I mean, they tried, but it was all messed up. So we keep looking. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. We're near the top of an hour and reasonable time to wrap. I'm just wondering, has this conversation better illustrated what composting might look like?  Is this a quixotic quest? Anything like that? I'm not sure that composting is the real appropriate label for what you're talking about, at least. Alternate names, extremely welcome. What might we call this? Is this post-processing? Is this knowledge weaving? Is this info looming? Really, like I would love to better term for it. I'm going for composting just because I'm loving nature metaphors these days. And it feels like we're looking through the waste products and getting nutrients from them and weaving them in. So a better word? Well, I don't have one at the moment. Oh, no. I will ponder that. Okay, please, please. We distill and synthesize. And I'm trying to also have a friendlier goofy metaphor instead of synthesize or something like that. Because this is a form of collective synthesis or collaborative intelligence, no problem. I think that we're on that path, but I'm trying to avoid terminology that would stop people from just climbing in and trying to join in with a conversation. Is that only any thoughts? I don't know that we came to, we solved your problem of when are we going to have the next composting call and what are we going to do during the call? I was going to suggest maybe just go ahead and have people to go ahead and create their own weavings and post them in the MatterMos channel. So if anyone is inspired, they can take movement. Are you gonna just, do you think you're gonna just pick another time since Pete seems to think Goodle's no longer? I think his suggestion was just pick a couple sort of suggest a couple of times and then if somebody important sort of pops up and says that doesn't work, then move them around a little bit, but basically just start with some suggested times. And I'm comfortable putting some times out and then being flexed about how we use the times with depending on who shows up and what they're interested in. And back to the rural community sustainable model. Not only did we have meetings, Zoom meetings for a half a dozen people, two or three of the people worked on the map between the meetings. And then during the next meeting, they would sort of explain to everybody what it was that they did on their own. And we established a set of guidelines on how a person could go in and make changes to the map and leave a set of breadcrumbs that someone could follow so that we weren't actually destroying each other from one meeting to another, which would be very easy. Yeah, totally, totally. So you created some small community standards for collaborative work on our complicated document. That's good. That's very needed. Cool. So invite me to the next meeting, whenever that is. We'll do, and then we're bumping up on Christmas. I think the week between Christmas and New Year's might be good for some of this because some people are off their normal duties and relaxing, but some people might wanna participate. So I think I might try something Monday, Tuesday, the next week, I might actually skip to the following week. I'll be here, I'll be around. Cool, I'll be in the Zooms too. Good to see you again, Bentley. Yeah, good to see you again. Yeah, thank you very much. Really appreciate your co-thinking on this, your co-composting. Yeah. Bye, Joe. Bye for now. See you later.