I'd like to call the 11th regular meeting of the Sheboygan Common Council to order. Would the clerk please read the quote for the day? No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world. Thank you. Would you please call the roll for the meeting? There are 15 present. Alderman Damro is excused. We have some scouts with us from Boy Scout Troop 818 from Christ Child Academy. Boys, would you please step forward and help us in leading the Pledge of Allegiance? The first one coming up is Nicholas Wecola and Alex Cunningham is with him. Let's stand. Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Next we'll go on to the approval of the minutes from our last meeting, Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to approve the minutes of the previous council meeting. Thank you for that motion and support. The minutes are before us. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, will the clerk please let's see. We can just do this on a voice vote. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. There are no resignations and no new council appointments. And the next we'll go on to confirmation of appointments for the Mayor's Neighborhood Leadership Cabinet City Attorney. This is Mike Vanerstein, Mayor, Julie Coth, Alderperson, Henry Capitillo, Gateway Neighborhood Association, Steve Benish, Gateway Alternate, Greg Leibig, Ellis Historical Neighborhood Association, Ellen Murphy, Ellis Neighborhood Alternate, Chad Pellecek, Director of Planning and Development, Chris Domigalski, Chief of Police, Diane Wilcinski, Sheboyga Neighborhood Pride, President, all terms expiring 430-2015, signed by the Mayor. Thank you. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to confirm. Second. Thank you for that motion and second. Is there any discussion and confirmation of appointments? Hearing none, all those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? They pass. Next we'll go on to a special presentation by the Sheboygan Fire Department. Please welcome Chief Mike Romus. Somebody's working on me. Hello, Council. Do you have the pictures? Next one, please. No pictures, just words. Okay, no. You know what? Don't even show it. Okay. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Mayor, for inviting me here tonight. I really appreciate it. He asked me to come and talk to you about the Fire Department, what we're doing right now, and where we stand at this moment. Would you like it up and down? No. If not, if there's no pictures. No pictures. No pictures, okay. I just want to bring up a couple of things that are important to me, and I just want to let you know where we are right now. First and foremost, I want to talk to you about the employees of the Sheboygan Fire Department. I have an outstanding staff all the way from command to officers to my drivers, firefighters, paramedics. They're outstanding individuals, and it takes a great deal of time and effort to even get on the Fire Department. Our newest hire, Jeff Grankey, an outstanding individual. But not only are they outstanding people, they're very much leaders in the community. I'm sure everybody here knows somebody in the Fire Department. And I have members of my staff and of my department that are Sheboygan County, not Alderman, but supervisors. I have a supervisor on my staff. I have people that are coaches. They take leadership roles in their churches and their schools. They run daycares. They do all kinds of things. And they're just phenomenal people and they're leaders in the community. So everybody here, all the department heads, know that our most important asset is our employees. And Sheboygan Fire Department has outstanding employees. Number two, I wanted to talk to you about the quality and quantity of the work that we do. As you know, budgets are down. We're down from where we were maybe eight years ago or so, seven, eight years ago drastically. And yet, we've taken on the ambulance service and increased our service to the citizens of Sheboygan. Even though we have less money in our operating budget. And I think that's outstanding. We've taken on the ambulance service, which has provided revenue for us. And we added four people when that happened. But since then, we've lost four people. We're at 73.5 full-time equivalents or staff that I have. And it's the same thing as it was eight years ago before the ambulance started. So our people in the Fire Department are doing more with less, just like you asked of them. And they enjoy their jobs. Firefighters are on 24-7. They're on all the time. I live in a neighborhood. Everybody knows I'm the fire chief. They all know that if something happens, if there's a fire or a heart attack or a problem, they can come to me, to my house, knock on the door anytime, day or night, and I'll be there for them. Just like everybody else in my department would be, no matter who asked or what they needed. We'd be there for them. And everybody knows that. We're always on. And we enjoy that. We're held to a higher standard. So I wanted you to know that, too. Third, we are very efficient in our department. And that's a credit to you and to this council and to the leadership of the city. You've asked us to do more with less than we have, just like everyone else in the city has. All the departments have.  We found ways to do things differently. And we've been doing it for many years. And we've gotten really, really good at it. I came from a department that was bigger where this wasn't such an issue. Here it's a very big issue, maybe the biggest issue. And our members have risen to the challenge and we found ways to cut. But it's because you asked us to and demanded it of us. And we are very lean and efficient right now. So I wanted you to know that, also. The fourth thing I just wanted to tell you about was the fact that we do have some challenges coming up in the future. And they've been discussed in finance and public protection and safety. We've discussed these things. But when budget time comes up, everybody focuses on that. But 94.5% of my budget is salaries and benefits. So I control very, really, very little of my budget. Of that 5.5%, now we're talking my operating budget and my line items. So when the budget comes around, now everybody's looking at those line items and they've either been cut or frozen for the last seven or eight years. So we're kind of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Leadership in the city listens to me. If we need a new roof on two of my firehouses, they're working with me to try to get that to happen. Apparatus needs to be replaced. Equipment needs to be replaced. It gets outdated. It breaks down. It gets old, just like everything in your homes. Eventually you have to get things taken care of. And we're looking at that, but that's a challenge. The other one is my department's going to change over soon. In the next year and a half, not quite. I'm guessing around 15-18% of my department is going to retire. And it's not because I'm here. Okay. It just happens to be the timing of it. I have a lot of people that have 25, 30 years in the department. They love their jobs. You know, what if they could stay young forever? I think they'd stay forever. I really do because they have so much satisfaction from what they do. But we all come to that time. We have to retire eventually. We always say it's a young person's job to be a firefighter. And it is. It takes a great deal of effort and a lot of work. And you have to be young to be able to sustain that. It's not easy. So I'm going to have a big turnover. And my goal and my challenge is to make sure that those people that are young are going to be prepared when they do take those leadership positions and that they enjoy their jobs and that everything is there that needs to keep them safe and able to do their job to the highest level that they can to serve the citizens of Sheboygan. So that's about all I wanted to say. I want to thank you again for listening to me. Everybody here listens. They look at me and I believe that they're listening to me and trying to put themselves in my position, just like I try to put myself in your position. And I admire what you do. I went to a course in Boston at the Harvard University Kennedy School for State and Local Government. Half the class was elected officials at a local, county, state, even a federal level. We had a couple of judges and things from the federal level. And I'd say about half my class was people like myself, department heads, assistant department heads, things like that. And you network with these people and you listen to the things that they have to do and the things that you do. And I developed a big admiration for those people, how it just was amazing and what they do and how much they care to even take these positions. So thank you for that. And unless anybody has any questions, I always wanted to do this, Mayor. Does anyone in the council have any questions? Does anyone in the council have any questions? Does anyone in the council have any questions? Hearing none, I think I'm done. Hearing is closed. I'm always available. Thanks. I'm always available for any questions you want. I'll sit down with you. I'll talk to you honestly and openly. I'll give you everything.  So help you make an educated decision for the budget. And thank you very much for having me, Mayor. Thank you very much for that presentation, Chief. We'll go on to public forum. There's no one this evening. Okay, next is Mayor's announcements. I just want to remind people that there's going to be election for the Board of Water Commissioners at our next council meeting on September 15th. And you can contact the clerk's office if you might be interested in that position. Next is a hearing. This hearing is held this evening with regards to the proposed ordinance creating a commuter-impacted parking on the east and west sides of North 11th Street between North Avenue and School Avenue. Is there anyone wishing to be heard? Please come forward. Dan, can I have your name, please? Oh, Goddy. And your address? 2706 North 11th Street. Okay, go ahead. And I'm so happy I wrote this down because I was looking at you now. I never would have made it through. But first I want to say to Chief Romas, I work at Aurora ED Department, and your EMTs are outstanding, professional, and wonderful to work with. So you're not saying more than what they are. So I live on the north. I'm also going to test your direction. So I hope you can stay with me because I'm a lot of northeast, west, south, but stay with me here. I live on the northwest corner of 11th and North Avenue. I have the former Maitland Apartments, and I call them that because I think you can maybe reference that, and North High School to the north of me. And I have Urban Middle School to the west of me. I am sandwiched between both schools. Thus I've been able to observe the fiasco at both start and release times. Just this morning, I watched the confusion caused by the installation of a new four-way stop on 12th and North Avenue. Traffic coming from the east on North Avenue, traveling west on North Avenue, formed a long lane going west, along with a second lane, which was formed at the curb for drop-off. So the left lane assumed that these cars were parking, when in essence they were only dropping off and trying to work themselves back into the left lane of traffic. What I observed was the left lane figured they had the right-of-way to make a right turn on 12th Street while they turned right in front of a vehicle trying to get back into the lane. So no one knew what anyone was doing there this morning. Okay, this certainly did not make a safer crossing for the students as it was intended to do. Now, add to the confusion, and I'm getting to 11th and North Avenue. We have parked cars all the way from North High to North Avenue on the west side of the street, which is your proposed two-hour parking. You have North students when school is released. You have these students trying to get into the lane of traffic and make a right turn on 11th and North Avenue, or they're trying to go across 11th and North Avenue or make a left turn. With the parking that is already there, only one lane can be formed. So it doesn't ease traffic to make a right turn onto North Avenue. With the two-hour parking, that would ease up some of that, and two lanes could be formed on 11th Street going south to the 11th and North Avenue intersection. I also observed what you have with the additional stop sign today. You have release of the school. The traffic was backed up from North High, or School Avenue, to 11th and North Avenue. From 10th Street west to 12th Street. No one was observing an open intersection to let traffic cross over 11th Street. So what you had was everything blocked. Now without the two-hour parking, you're not going to have a lane for turning right onto North Avenue either. So it basically is pretty chaotic now. Now on a personal level, last year when we had a snowstorm, students parked my two-car driveway in. Now certainly they cannot see that that is a driveway because of the snowstorm. But if you had looked 15 to 20 feet to your right, you would have seen two garage doors.  So my access from my driveway, I had to create my driveway butts up against an alley, which is also used as a roadway from urban to get back onto 11th Street. So I had to create an access from my front driveway so that I could back out of my garage, back forward, back backwards, get into the alley, and get out. Now if there was two-hour parking, I would have had an opportunity of window to get out there and plow that open. Well, I had called Dan Stengel and asked for assistance from North High, which I didn't get. So basically I was plowed in until spring came. So my case would be, if you had the two-hour parking, that would allow a right turn from 11th Street onto North Avenue. If there is opposition from people in the Maitland apartments, I guess I would ask that you consider from the alley access that I was talking about to North 11th Street at least have a two-hour parking, so that would kind of free up some of that distance and still have the right turn lane. I hope I made some sense. A lot of direction. But I see its benefit. Thank you. Thank you, Sue. Is there anyone else wishing to be heard? Please come forward. Can I have your name, please? Yes, my name is Barbara Minster and your address, Barb. And I reside at 2738 North 11th Street. Okay, you may go ahead. Thank you for the information, Mrs. Cotty, because you can cut me short.  On the east side or the west side. It didn't matter. The traffic. The students had us parked in. I guess what I'm recommending to everyone is that the city work with the school district. And I want people to consider that our students today have a privilege of driving to and from school. And they do. It's a privilege for them. So why don't you get together with the school district and encourage them to have those students park in the parking lot? I recognize the fee is $25, possibly more now. I don't know. But I am saying, we need to work together. And this needs to be not only a city issue, but I believe we can work with the school district and quietly resolve this. My final thought is if you do decide to give residents a sticker, give us to it for a free charge. Just give us a sticker. We are residents of this community. We are taxpayers likewise. And I really don't believe that the $6 should be necessary as a resident of and a taxpayer of this wonderful community. And that's really all I have to say. So thank you. Thank you, Barb. Is there anyone else that would like to be heard on this issue? Is there anyone that would like to be heard? Is there anyone wishing to be heard? Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to close the hearing. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? The hearing is closed. Next, we'll go on to the consent agenda as item 3.2 through 3.10. Alderman Hammond. Thank you again. I move to accept and file all ROs, accept and adopt all ROCs, and put all resolutions, ordinances, and substitute ordinances upon their passage. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? Seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll for passage? I'm sorry, my internet connection isn't working. It is. That would be an aye. So I would vote aye. Okay. No, that's okay. Thank you. 15 ayes. Motion passes. Next is report of officers. Item 4.1 through 4.3 will be referred to various committees. Under resolutions, 5.1 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond accepting a conditional gift from the estate of Carol Bootson. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. First, I move to suspend the rules. Second. Is there any objection to suspension? Seeing none, please go ahead. Thank you very much. I move to put the resolution upon its passage. Second. The resolution is before us. Is there any discussion on the resolution? Seeing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Item 5.2 is a resolution by Alderman Hammond authorizing entering into a contract for the construction slash installation of a sanitary sewer and water main in Whedon Creek Road. Alderman Hammond. Actually, it's Alderman Heidemann. Heidemann. Thank you, Mayor. I need to make a motion to suspend the rules. Second. Is there any objection to suspension? Seeing none, please go ahead. And we have to have the suspension. There's only a short period of time that we can get this work done. We needed to get the contracts. We have discussed this at Public Works. So I put the resolution on its passage. Second. You have a motion and a second. Any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Next is item 5.3, a resolution by Alderman Heidemann authorizing entering into a contract for the crack ceiling of various asphalt streets throughout the city of Sheboygan. Alderman Heidemann. Thank you again, Mayor. I move the suspended rules. Second. Is there any objection to suspension? Seeing none, please go ahead. Thank you, Mayor. And again, this is the same situation where we've got a contract with somebody once. We want to get these things signed. These projects started, and there's only a limited amount of time that we could do that. Thank you for those comments. Any other questions upon this passage? Second. Thank you for that motion. Is there any other discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor of the resolution, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Items 5.4 and 5.5 will lie over. Item 5.6 and 5.7 will both be referred to various committees. Next is reports of committees. Item 6.1 is a RC by finance, to whom was referred, RO number 109 of 1415 by the director of planning and development, and recommends approval of the 2015 City of Sheboygan Tourism Budget Request from the Sheboygan County Chamber of Commerce for room tax, profit, and loss. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move to accept and adopt. Second. The motion is before us. Is there any discussion to accept and adopt? Seeing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Item 6.2 is an RC by salary and grievances, to whom was referred, charter order number, ordinance number two of 1415 by Alderman Carlson, and recommends filing the documents that provide for the appointment of the city attorney in lieu of the current method of election by the voters to such office. Alderman Donahue. Thank you, Mayor. I would move to accept and adopt to file this resolution. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. The motion is before us. Any discussion? Seeing none. Would the clerk please call the roll? Registered. Just did. Okay. 15 ayes. Motion passes. Item 6.3 is an RC by salary and grievances, to whom was referred, resolution number 58 of 1415 by Alderman Donahue, and recommends authorizing the human resources director to contract with diversified benefit services for the provision of insurance benefit consulting services. Alderman Donahue. Thank you, Mayor. I would move that the resolution be, excuse me, resolution be put upon its passage. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. The motion is before us. Any discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes. Item 6.4 is an RC by law and licensing pursuant to RO number 76 of 1415 recommending denying a taxi cab driver's license number 0450 based upon his failure to accurately reveal all relevant convictions on his application, his record of violations related to the license activity, and his record as a repeat law offender, his failure to cooperate with the committee. Alderman Vanderwill. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I move that the RC be accepted and adopted. Second. Thank you for that motion and support. Is Peter Regis here this evening? He's not here. We did invite him two separate occasions, and he did not appear. Any other discussion? Seeing none. Will the clerk please call the roll for passage? 15, ayes. Motion passes. Next is item 6.5 an RC by law and licensing recommending that RO number 90 of 1415 denying a beverage operator's license of 0484 based upon his failure to accurately reveal all relevant convictions on his application, his record of violations related to the license activity, and his record as a repeat law offender, and his failure to cooperate with the committee. Alderman Vanderwill. Thank you. I move that the RC be accepted and adopted. Second. Thank you for that motion under discussion. Is Alton Lucas here this evening? He's not here. Same thing with him. We invited him two separate occasions, and he did not appear. Thank you. Is there any other discussion? Seeing none. Will the clerk please call the roll for passage? 15, ayes. Motion passes. Item 6.6 through 6.10 are all related to the budget for 2015. Those will lie over. Item 7 is ordinances. 7.1 will be referred to public works under matters laid over. 8.1 is RC number 142 of 1415 by public protection and safety reporting that the documentary evidence by the city engineer pertaining to general ordinance number 22 of 1415 and RC number 110 of 1415 creating commuter impacted parking on the east and west sides of North 11th Street between North Avenue and School Avenue does meet all the necessary criteria to be eligible. Alderman Carlson. Thank you, Mayor. I move to accept and adopt and put the ordinance upon his passage. Thank you. Thank you for that motion. Alderman. Alderman Bourne. Thank you, Mayor. Could somebody give me a definition of computer impacted parking? I wasn't able to attend the... Commuter, I'm sorry. Commuter. My mistake. Impacted parking. I wasn't able to attend the committee meeting in the document and make it real clear to me. So could I get a definition of that from somebody? Thank you. Go ahead, Alderman Carlson. Thank you, Mayor. Essentially what it is is that the residents along those streets will pay $6 a year for a sticker to be allowed to park on that street. Otherwise, I believe it's two hour... Pardon me, Ryan. Otherwise, it's two hour parking. Yes, we did. Alderman inside. Okay. Is there any other discussion? Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I understand the necessity of doing this and with the commuter. I guess the one concern I would have would be the $6 fee. I know to most people, let's say, that's just a nominal fee. For one or two vehicles, I'm questioning whether we need to charge $6. I'm wondering if it wouldn't make sense to charge nothing for the first two vehicles and then six for each vehicle after that. I'm not sure where the $6 was arrived from, but I just maybe want to take a look at that. Thank you. Alderman City Attorney, could you answer that question? I can't say where it comes from other than it's the ordinance that it's $6 and it's been that way forever. So this is common in other areas we have this type of parking? Yes. And I think part of the rationale is that otherwise, if it was available to everybody in every neighborhood for nothing, you'd probably get a lot more requests for impacted parking permits so that people could feel that they could park in front of their own house without any additional charge. And I don't think, you know, I can't speak necessarily for the reasonableness of it, but $6 per vehicle, per year, you know, is not really an excessive amount, I don't think. Alderman Van Akron. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I guess if we could try to open the floor to Ryan and maybe have him explain the process that's involved with permits, what we're trying to solve here, the actual problem that we're trying to address. I know this is something that's been discussed in that area for several years now. If Ryan would be willing to come up and just explain the process he's gone through to get to this point and then also, like I said, explain what residents are going to be eligible for that, the permit and the exemptions and so on. There's no objection. Ryan Sazma, would you please step forward? So I guess the question is, you're wondering how we got to the point here with Commuter Impact Parking and what it is. Commuter Impact Parking, when you started, you started with a traffic study and you check it, you check it out for several weeks. You check it like once a day or three or four times a week. If over two thirds of the traffic parked on that street are from residents that don't live there, and in this case, obviously, it's probably North High students. It meets the Commuter Impact Parking. And the residents that do live there, as was explained by Alderman Carlson, is if you live there, you pay the $6, you can park there longer than two hours. But the issue is it's just, the neighborhood just gets packed tight from North High. Any questions of Alderman Gassler? If I can follow up.  Can you explain the permit process? Who is going to be eligible for permits? Are students going to be eligible to pay $6, or is it restricted to only the households that live on those specific blocks? And how does that process work? And also, I guess if you can explain the $6 fee, it seems to be, I guess, a little bit of an unknown, because I don't see a $6 fee in the ordinance itself. Is that part of our Commuter Parking program throughout the city? That I'm just not seeing that. And it's in the ordinance? I believe it is in the ordinance. I know the other areas we've done, it's always been $6. I'm pretty positive that it's in the ordinance. How you would get the stickers, you would go to the police department, and you would just show that you live on that street. Therefore, you're eligible for a ticket. I mean, you're eligible to get the sticker. If you don't live on the street, then you wouldn't have the proof that you live, that you have a house or a home on the street. Alderman Dassler. That adjusts my question. Thank you. Okay. Alder and Carlson. Thank you. You just want to go through the process and how you contacted all the residents in this area and the response you got and how many people actually got back to you. Yeah. Okay. First of all, the request came in. We did the study. It met all the criteria in the ordinance for Commuter Impact Parking. But part of it is you have to send out a letter to all the residents on that street. And there's a total of 35 letters we sent out to everybody. I sent that out July 22nd. I believe I gave them a week or two to respond to me, either by email or phone call or by letter, telling me if you're in favor of it, if you're not in favor of it. And then the letter had said, if I do not hear from you, I'll take that as a positive, that you are in favor of the parking. And from my letter, I got four responses. Three were positive. Yes, they want. The other one was no. They didn't want Commuter Impact to parking. Like I said in the letter, it was pretty specific. If I don't hear from you, I'll take that as a yes. Okay. Alderman Bourne. Thank you, Mayor. Is the two-hour parking something new up in that area, you know? Yeah, it is. Actually, up in that area, that's the only Commuter Impact to parking that's going to be if the ordinance is passed. Okay. So right now it's not two-hour, but it will be. But then the residents will be able to buy the sticker and park there all day if they need be. That's correct. Okay. Thank you. And I think we've got everybody then. I'd also like the city attorney to make some comments about the ordinance and what's in there on the fee. Thank you, Your Honor. Yeah. Perhaps to address Alderman Van Ackman's question. When I was speaking about the ordinance, I wasn't speaking about this specific general ordinance, but it's in our municipal code. And the fee section is, well, the whole impacted parking or residential daytime parking privilege is section runs from section 118-191 through 118-220. And it has the factors that the committee and the council needs to consider the procedure for designating and talks about the fee of $6 a year. And one of the factors to be considered by the committee and the council is on the fee speaks of the desire and need of two-thirds of the residents for residential permit parking and their willingness to bear the administrative costs and connection they're with. So really the $6 is to cover a little bit of the administrative costs in issuing stickers and managing who's on the street and doing all the studies and so forth. But this ordinance has been in place for a long time. I can't think of, I think there are several other impacted parking areas in the city. I can't identify specific ones or maybe Ryan can, but it works in cases where, you know, if it's near the hospital where you've got a lot of employee parking on the street or here in the case of a school, you've got kids parking on the street and it's unlimited parking so they park on the street rather than having to pay to park in the parking lot and so forth, so designing to alleviate some of that so that the residents can have some relief. Thank you for that explanation. Alderman Hammond. Thank you. Just a real quick question, Ryan. Is this the only area we're looking at doing this in that North High area or are there other streets that are under review at this point for this very same issue? No, this is the only block because it's the only communication that came in at PP, public protection and safety. It's the only block we looked at. And answers, Steve McLean's question. The other two big areas is over by Fifth of New York down by the county building. That's all impacted parking and also over by Aurora by 6th and North. That's all commuter impacted parking. Very, just like this will be. Thank you. Alderman Bellinger, did you have a comment or question? Go ahead. Thank you, Mayor. The reason that this came about was I was contacted by a constituent who happens to live on 11th Avenue. He is a relatively new parent and new to the neighborhood, works third shift, and he would come, by the time he would get back home from work, it would be after 8 o'clock in the morning, and he wouldn't have anywhere to park. And you'd have to park two or three blocks away and then have to, if it later in the day, he was going to take his newborn out and run errands or take her to the doctor, whatever he had to do. He had to take Bundler up in the wintertime and take two or three blocks away to get to his car, and it became just a real hassle. So he came to me and asked me what we can do, and I talked with Ryan, and this was a solution. If it met the criteria, we would look at it and see. I also have three kids at recent graduates from North High School, and at the time they graduated, the fee was $35 a year to park in the lot. And the only time I ever saw the lot full was in the winter when a third of the lot was used for snowpiles that they didn't haul away. So it was never full when I was there, or when my kids were there, I should say. So that's kind of the genesis in how this started and was impacted, and he did show up to the PPS meeting, and he did address the committee and spoke in favor of some type of resolution to his problem, and this is what came about. And Ryan, I do believe, are we looking at it on 7th in North by the hospital too? Wasn't there some complaints there too about parking? I know there was some, it was brought up and no communications had been brought in yet. Okay, yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for those comments. Any other discussion? Seeing none, will the court please call the roll for passage on 8.1? 14 ayes, 1 no. Thank you. Motion passes. Next we'll go on to Other Matters, city attorney. Document 9.1 is a resolution by older person Hammond, authorizing an application to the Wisconsin Coastal Management Program for a wave surge and hydraulic modeling study for the Harbor Center marina. That'll be referred to the finance committee. 9.2 is an arrow by the city clerk submitting various license applications for the period ending June 30, 2015 and June 30, 2016. That'll be referred to the law and licensing committee. Alderman Hammond. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Move to adjourn. Thank you for that motion and support. All those in favor of adjournment, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? We stand adjourned. Thank you very much.


This spectacular cliff is one of many exposures of the Madison Limestone Formation found in Wyoming. The Madison Limestone Formation is found in two-thirds of the Cowboy State and is visually impressive wherever it comes to the surface. The Madison forms the headdress on Jackson Hole's Sleeping Indian Mountain. The Proposure River disappears into a cavern in the Madison Formation and sinks Canyon west of Lander. In the Bighorn Mountain Range, 10 sleep and shell canyons on the west flank and the Fallen City area on the east side are just a few of the many places where the Madison appears. The Shoshone River Canyon above Cody, Snake River Canyon through the Wyoming Range and Wind River Canyon all feature massive outcroppings of the Madison. As do the east flank of the Wind River Range, the top of the Owl Creek Mountains, the Black Hills near Newcastle and Sundance, the Mammoth Hot Springs region of Yellowstone, the Bear Trap Meadows on Casper Mountain, and the Ferris Mountains near Muddy Gap. Madison Limestone is an important formation and is a major component of Wyoming's fantastic landscapes. From the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Brian Sebade, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.


Good morning. Good afternoon. Good morning. Hi. Hello. We'll wait a couple more minutes and have a few more people join. Okay, we'll start in one minute. We'll just give a few more people time to join. Let's begin. So we'll start off with a quick update on the tech leads and co-chairs. So I'm really happy to announce that both Shang and Rafael have been elected in as tech leads by the by TOC votes. So they take up their new roles as tech leads within the SIG. Yay. Thank you. And we also have two more nominations. So Nick Connolly is also being nominated to become a tech lead. And also given that Aaron is stepping down from the SIG, at least for now, while she is sitting on the TOC, we are nominating Jing as co-chair. So congratulations to everybody. Hopefully the votes will come through shortly and and we can formalize it, but welcome Jing as co-chair. So what we were going to do today was to focus on the cloud native disaster recovery document. We wanted to review it such that we can, you know, identify some clear actions to to to to work towards finalizing the document. And to this to this aim, Rafael was potentially going to be able to do a demo and we would then go through the document. And the project vineyard team would also like 10 minutes to clarify their project following the TOC sandbox vote. So Rafael, would you prefer if they went first or if they presented towards the end? As you, as it's better, let them go first, I think. Okay. It's okay with me. Yeah. All right, that makes sense. So so project vineyard, the tau tau, do you want to do you want to take the next 10 minutes and cover off a quick update on the vineyard project? For clarity, I raised this at the last TOC meeting to get some feedback from them in terms of why they deferred the sandbox vote. And what they wanted to understand better was how the project fits into how the project could fit into the CNCF and whether the CNCF was the right home for the project rather than maybe the AI foundation or something like that instead potentially. So I think that information would be useful to share now. Hi Alex, I'm not sure whether tau is, hi tau, would you like to take over or or maybe, maybe yeah, my name's Ben Yuan Yu and maybe I will give the presentation. Brilliant. Okay. I will share my screen. Next. Okay. Can everyone see me? Yep. Cool. Yeah. So we have given the presentations at previous SIG meetings and today I will just quickly go over the previous like the key points like in the previous presentation and I will focus on a few questions raised by the TOC members. One is like what's the value added to to CNCF and another is why this project fits CNCF just as Alex just mentioned. Yeah. I will quickly go over the Wanyard projects. First of all, what is Wanyard? Wanyard is a distributed in-memory object manager for data-intensive applications. And it's designed for cross-system in-memory distributed data sharing and we want that to have very low cost as in zero copy fashion and we want to provide out-of-the-box high-level abstraction and we want to support easier IO and integration. And lastly, we want to leverage the ability provided by Kubernetes and to be able to co-schedule data via end of the workload together with Kubernetes. Here is a background white bolster like for processing the data processing on a single machine like in a Python environment. It's sharing data across different libraries could be very very efficient like with actually the zero copy. Here is an example of sharing an array from NumPy with NumPy and PyTorch. Basically, we declare an array using NumPy and it can be easily converted to a PyTorch tensor and that tensor, if you change one value, you can see it's like basically you are touching the same piece of memory. But it is not easy to do so. Like if we have the memory shared across different processes like user-friendly, it's not very easy. It's possible with a component called Plasma from Apache Arrow. That's a local object store using shared memory. But like a user needs to like program manually with Plasma and manage the metadata by themselves or sharing the different like data serialization or deserialization logic. So it's not very straightforward for user to implement and it will be even harder for like for such a data sharing in a distributed setting. Like we have a distributed data structure across distributed across multiple machines. And even if the data leaves memory, it's very hard for like different libraries or systems to share this piece of data. So that basically we want to use one yard and the Kubernetes to solve this problem. And like a real like it's a real-life big data application in Alibaba. And we have many like kind of the similar pipelines in Alibaba running. We observe that like now like the workload working on data like it's quite diverse. And it's no longer possible to process like every kind of workload on a single like system like such as Spark. We can't use Spark to do everything. Like we observe more and more like pipelines in Alibaba involved multiple systems working together. And how can they share data? It's not easy. The most common way is to like dump the data into a distributed file system. And we load the data again. And then this kind of operations takes a lot like have a lot of huge costs called huge costs. And finally applying cross-task optimizations like we want to pipeline on these tasks. It's very challenging. We have to wait for the previous task to finish before we can start the next one. So our vision is to like use leverage one yard and Kubernetes to like as a new way to build future cognitive big data tasks. Here like the data's between shared between different like systems or libraries can be represented as CRDs and they actually stored in one yard. And it can be directly mapped to the respective engines. And in this way we can have the data like big data applications completely deploying Kubernetes and the intermediate data can be like managed by one yard and Kubernetes together. Like it can be as abstracted as Kubernetes resources. And if the data like can live in memory and be used later we do not like dump them to the external file systems. And we can leverage the scheduling like capabilities provided by Kubernetes and to minimize the cost of data migration. And we make the data sharing as efficient as possible. Here is like a brief like architecture of one yard on Kubernetes. Here one yard as run as a demon set on top of the Kubernetes cluster. And every object in one yard is abstract abstracted as CRDs. And for for data intensive applications build on top one yard on Kubernetes they can like ask for some objects like in their task specs and they can like access the data just like the normal objects in their memory. We can map the object directly there. And if there is cross like if these objects like create a shared between different processes we can use a scheduler propping to build on top Kubernetes to schedule like to move the data around and to like not move. I'm sorry. I suggest to calculate a better placement for the next task varying those CRDs. So can I just try and summarize this? Because I think getting the summary right is important for the TAC. So I think the summary is that this is a distributed in memory object cache with a number of integrations with different libraries such that they can natively consume the data from the in memory object cache rather than using say files from a distributed file system. Is that correct? Yes it is correct. Also there's a few like added features on this object store. We have a scheduler propping build on top Kubernetes. And so such that we can for each like a job we can like find the optimal like affinity of this job. So we can like minimize the cost of data migration across the cluster. So and one yard itself actually can can leave in a like separate container like using leverage the container-based schedule system provided by Kubernetes such that it can some kind of isolation between those kind of application and the store. We can also yeah. Right got it. Okay I think I think I think that I think that's that's that's very clear. I think what what we can do is I'll I'll reply back to to the TAC mailing list with that with that sort of high level summary and I will point them at this this sort of 10 minutes recording in case they need additional information. But I think I think that clarifies it a lot. Thank you so much for for adding the extra context Okay. Thank you. Should I like quickly go over the next few slides or maybe I'll just leave the link of the slides to the minutes in later. Yeah. I think if you if you leave the link to the slides in the minutes that would be good. Yeah. So so okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. I just follow up question. Just a small question that these objects these are like read only right these are like not the basic they're immutable right if somebody one of these elements in the pipeline transforms the object basically we're creating a new object and those new objects have to get propagated to the right nodes based on your algorithm where your course course scheduling compute and data right. Yeah. Yeah. Your answer is correct that the object here currently we are only handling emailed by date but then we can handle streams as well. So so that enables pipeline in between those between those systems. Thank you. Brilliant. Thanks again. Okay. I think in that case we should move on to the cloud native DR documents. Rafael do you want to drive? Yeah. I'm going to share my screen. Should we talk about the should we do the demo or should we go on the document? If if if we do the demo I think that would be cool too. I'd really like us to sort of spend a little bit of time though providing the feedback for for the document because I think we've you know we've reviewed the document and we've gone through the deck a few times and I think I think what we need now is is some clear actions to to move forward because I think we have general consensus about that this is a good idea. There are a few things that I think we want to clarify or clean up in the document but I think we have the foundation for something really really good here so we should we should aim to get it to a point where we can publish a draft. Wonderful. Wonderful. Okay. So okay let's so last time when we talk about this I think it was a few a few weeks ago but if you remember we we saw a presentation that was essentially the summary of the longer document and we got to a point where we we covered the theory but I think I thought it was useful to also see all of these in practice and there were some actual questions on I I showcase what the demo would have looked like in the architecture and there were some questions so the idea today is to actually look at the demo and then I'll try to do it quickly and then we go over the document like Alex was was saying so this is a a demo that obviously has to run on some specific products but there's nothing here that that locks you in on this combination of products. The products are there just to provide capabilities and so we use we use Submariner for the natural tunneling between cluster SDNs and Cooker CDB as our workload. Cooker CDB belongs to this new generation of databases if you want to I think of them as as enough spring of the original idea of Spanner which is this geographically distributed database that Google offers as a service but then startups have started providing the same capability with with software that you can install in your data center so Cooker CDB belongs to this generation of databases and and you know I I'm using this because I have operationalized it but meaning I have all automated but you could do the same thing with the other like there is Yuga Byte there is NuoDB there is TKDB there are many other that have the same capability so just to remind I think we saw this slide I also have it in the in the demo deck but just as a quick summary we are trying to delineate a difference between traditional disaster recovery and what cloud native disaster could look like and where the main differences are everything is the recognition of a disaster is automatic and the recovery process is fully automated right and then we want to get to Neo0 downtime so that that is Neo0 RTO and we got we want to have full consistency so we don't ever lose any transaction we prefer to be down rather than losing transactions and so we get zero exactly zero RTO. I'll go quickly over the rest so skip the rest this is the infrastructure that we are going to build that I already have actually built we have a control cluster where that essentially I'm using to spin up these other clusters it's not it's not really mandatory to have it but it with the red dots through it this makes life easier you could do it differently but this RHA ACM is simply a way to spin up other clusters quickly and then we have this cluster which is where our workload actually runs and we connect this cluster via a this is some this network tunnel you can build a tunnel in many ways here I'm using this Submariner product Submariner is is a product that was initially started by project was initially started by Rancher I don't know exactly where I think they want to go to the CNCF I'm not sure what they stand in that path but now all right that is also heavily contributing to it and it's it's a it's a way to build a network tunnel between CNI compliant SDN implementations okay it it builds so all all you need is that some of the nodes are routable between these clusters because they will act as a gateway and then it essentially builds a NIP sector tunnel so in this picture we see cluster 1 connected to cluster 2 connected to cluster 3 but also obviously cluster 3 is also connected with cluster 1 okay so once you build this tunnel pods can talk to each other and can can discover and talk to each other just by creating a connection directly to the IP of the pods obviously you need to build these clusters Kubernetes cluster you see OpenShift but consider it just Kubernetes OpenShift is just a distribution so you can build these clusters you have to build this cluster with non-overlapping ciders for the SDNs but other than that they will it will everything will act like act like a larger network right in this case three network combined into one and in front of it we have a global load balancer here we are running on AWS so I'm using route 53 as the global load balancer again there is nothing you don't have to use route 53 you just need global load balancers so a global load balancer by that I mean essentially a DNS that has some additional features so it can allow it allows you to define multiple backends for a for an entry for a DNS name and can allow you to define some load balancing strategies rather than just you know the simple route around robin or multi-value and maybe also has the ability to actually not maybe it needs to have the ability to to health check the the status of the applications that it load balances so that when applications go down it will redirect all the traffic to the healthy healthy backends route 53 has all these capabilities but many other enterprise great load balancers both in the cloud or things that you can install on premise also have these capabilities okay then I wrote a little operator to automatically program route 53 this is this is an open problem in I think in the kubernetes community the reason really an operator to program global load balancer there is an operator which is called external DNS which works very well if you need to program a DNS to be a simple DNS name you know yeah DNS name for your cluster stuff let's say but when you when you want to when you want to start working over multiple clusters external DNS doesn't have the right capabilities luckily there are other people now working on other implementation and I think KGB if you guys want to take a look is a wonderful wonderful implementation of a global load balancer operator much better than what I did so probably in the future future I will replace this with with that operator which I hope we will grow together as a community into something really enterprise worthy but it's it's a it's a very nice because it's a self-hosted global load balancer so it's coordinates running in actually in these clusters and and they coordinate in such a way that then they can provide the service very nice implementation so anyway moving forward this is yeah what's the load balancer you mentioned KGB it's called KGB oh KGB yeah yeah one question about Submariner yep so when you create a tunnel between two clusters that means all the pods in one cluster can see the pause and like every side piece in the other cluster right and but that basically is the tunnel between two clusters or does it create like a mesh where when you have let's say two tunnels for example in this case you have one tunnel between cluster one and cluster two and one between two and three but does it create a full mesh where all pods can see all all the other pods in other clusters or yeah this is just between the two end points like I said for just layout problems I I don't have a tunnel depicted here between cluster one and cluster three but it is actually there so it's any to any connectivity I think it's creating like more like a mesh and there's in fact a central operator sitting somewhere and providing the information how to connect it to the like what cluster and what subnet it is if I remember correctly it's like a long time long time ago what else so well um yeah anyway in in this deployment there is there is also a tunnel between one and and three right yeah um using it's actually yeah it goes out using the same gateway node but it's essentially conceptor a different tunnel um Submariner as as different support as different transport options this is essentially what you can do with IPsec if you change the transport option to Weigard Weigard there's a piece of it exceptionally nice nicely done as the VPN implementation and with Weigard you can actually do full mesh meaning node every node as an open VPN connection with every other node and so you don't have to do the additional moving your connection from moving your packets from your node where the pod is where to the gateway node to the gateway node of the target cluster and then to the pod to the node where the pod target pod is right it's a it's really an any to any node that you can achieve with Weigard but what I have now is not like that it will go through through a gateway node every connection will go through a gateway node if that makes sense yes okay so one question yeah just one follow-up question so let's say you have some pause in cluster one you have some pause in cluster two how do they discover each other but now that we establish connectivity between them through Submariner like how they how can they discover each other and know for example they offer the same service or not there but yeah so Submariner has a component called lighthouse which provides discovery it's essentially I believe it's coordinates but the way it's populated is by following the new standard that is being published by Sink Sigma the cluster I believe where essentially it's first of all you will have to explicitly export a service using a CRD so you say I want this service to be visible across multiple cluster clusters and then there is a pattern to determine what is the name exactly as there is a pattern to determine the full name of a service within a namespace right so it works pretty much the same way instead of cluster local essentially they have cluster set and then I see cluster set lockup or something like that so so the names are predictable and and that's what you can use to to write you know your configuration files thank you yeah a nice question okay so that's preparation I also have something that is not depicted here but I have a distributed vault deployment here to provide the secrets certificates I should say in a consistent way to all the nodes because uh everything is is over TLS when we build the cockroach to be cluster so this is a I'm deploying cockroach to be each node has three instances for local quorum this is not necessary but if I understand correctly cockroach can leverage that for some of the additions and then obviously we have three node three region here regions here for global quorum because we want to be resilient to the loss of an entire region okay so it's a nine nine node cluster so essentially nine nine pods right um I will now switch to this the browser to just show to you a little bit what it looks like here and this thing is so here is cockroach to be we have nine nodes we have three regions two on the east coast and one on the west coast and as this nice I like very much this feature of co-creativity which show you where the things are on on a map and I have pre-populated the database with a little bit of data you see I have about 10 gigabytes not very much but just enough to to run this demo um and um we can see that um the nodes are here I have three clusters and this is these are the nodes okay this one is slow um so what I'm going to do now for the demo is is to no sorry wrong button is to cause a disaster okay so we're going to take offline the one region we're going to first of all we're going to generate some load with this tpcc client tpcc is a standard benchmark for SQL databases so we in this case we just use it to generate some load but I have actually used it to do a bench performance test on this deployment and we we demonstrated that together with the collaboration with from co-creators labs but we demonstrated that after some tuning that we got 96 efficiency which means with this deployment on on a on a test which was cited with 1000 small databases that's just just implementation details on this kind of test but it's the tpc we run the tpc tpcc 1000 and 96 efficiency it means that it it performs um pretty close to the theoretical you know 100 so essentially it it's a it was a pass so it's it's usable for um highly transactional use cases because that's what tpcc does so essentially updates insert and and select a small amount of data that that was the that was the use case but in this case we just generate load so we pretend there is traffic coming in the in the three regions with by creating this tpcc pod and generating load and then we are going to take down this entire region and our objective is to see that the cluster obviously keeps working and it realizes that there is a problem it self organizes because co-creators has to manage the fault and then and but mainly we want to see that these clients keep working okay they don't uh they keep working and then the other thing that we want to see is when we reestablish connectivity uh the cluster heals itself right and and uh and in the meantime these these clients always keep working we will lose this one uh i believe yeah uh so the way i'm going to cause the disaster is by taking by um isolating the vpc in which this uh this cluster is deployed so even if even if it's a multi zone multi az deployment once we remove connectivity to the entire vpc nothing can go in or out and so from the perspective of these two remaining clusters they will send connection and and see the packets being dropped so they get they get a time out and that's probably the worst condition when you know when you because it's easier to manage an error if if you get a connection refuse or if you get some error from the from the other side but if you don't get anything you really don't know what's going on okay so we are trying to generate the worst-case scenario for a fault um questions okay so i'm gonna go and close the disaster let me see uh sorry one small question so what's the network latency between the like once go through the submarine was network latency between the sides right let me answer this please showing you so submarine has this nice table here in which we'll tell you it's observed natural latency between between all of the nodes so obviously it's a matrix uh and um um this when you see this 70 is is is between nodes that are in the east one node is in the east and the other one is in the west and this is consistent with what uh with the latency that amazon publishes between their own regions um meaning meaning submarine really doesn't have a lot of a lot of uh oh um you know latency oh um and then um what i understand of this product is every transaction always needs a round trip so what we can expect is at least 150 millisecond for each of latency for each transaction but obviously you can have multiple transactions at the same time and this is pretty much consistent with what i got when i was doing the performance test like it was something around between 150 and 200 milliseconds yeah so um if uh rough out so if i understand correctly you previously said that the efficiency you get it like 96 percent in this situation and basically you're saying that with the network latency of 72 milliseconds it's going to be like even like cockroach db running the workload on this situation is going to be the performance of 96 percent of like for example zero or near one milliseconds if that's uh uh okay so if you're asking um if we didn't have so much latency like if all the all the all the nodes were on the east coast like or we were using another region closer would would the would the performance test have been better yes i think so yeah it couldn't be better so about 96 uh like a percent of efficiency that's so what we are comparing to at the time yeah that i i always have a hard time explaining tpcc because i don't fully understand it myself but they what they're trying to say is um we so they inject thing time in the in the in the way the the load is generated trying to emulate actually users doing something and so based on the size of the test which was 1000 in our case and the duration of the test they calculate the theoretical number of transaction that you could execute if the if your system was perfectly efficient but considering the think time okay and then they they see how many transactions you actually execute and and the efficiency is the ratio between these two numbers right so um so that's not obviously if you didn't if you did remove the think time your your you probably could get um you know more transactions in the unit of time but because there is think time that's um that's the that that that's how you can define efficiency and i think that the purpose of the of this benchmark is the challenge to the to the database vendor is to pick a size of the test like maybe tpcc 1000 you can do the pcs 100 okay pick a size and then tune your software and and and find the the smallest hardware that you can that you can build or put together to to contain the cost to get to a good a good enough you know efficiency ratio and then and then yeah and then people can can decide which that they basically want yes um yeah i think i understand more now so it's basically saying this is the this is some hardware some environment you can pretty much run the database without like has any can we call it like major performance issues or stuff but basically you can run it as in production environment but the but maybe the absolute performance is not really that high compared to say if you're like of course if you include the same time and which is determined by the network and maybe the the disk IO ops as well no it's not determined by that the think time is really embedded in the client to generate in the workload and it is addition it is in addition to any actual wait time that is introduced by having to process the transaction over the network for the disk right so so that's why that's why you get you don't get 100 it's because there are those additional wait time that you that you need to that the users if you know we are pretending to generate load as a user would do that the user has to wait for right um so so just just to make a point here it's we're not trying to say that these database or this kind of deployment are good any you know for any use case if you need very fast latency for your transactions probably this is not good deployment because because there is that the distance across you know across space then and no no product can solve for that right yeah but um but if you're just if you're okay with the latency and you're looking for scalability so volumes at that speed right um or you're just looking for resiliency across for a disaster maybe these these are good solutions although although I guess the same technology can apply say across availability zones in the same region or something like that right if you're if if if latency is a concern too you can you can still get the failover capabilities right right and that's this is the the kind of latency you will get in the same az but obviously now you are resilient to the loss of an az not not the loss of a region it's it's obvious yeah obvious consideration yeah okay so let's go and generate and create the disaster so I need to be in the control cluster and I need to copy this okay so this is going to if you can read here it's going to do a deny of everything in in this um in this vpc make sure everything is in place you're doing you're doing a live demo and you haven't made an offering to the demo goods yet uh yeah I don't know I was doing something else before and I probably don't have the right context that could be the reason so let me see I need to set this as the context and let's try again just this one why is it saying user must be logged in oh oh okay okay got it um I'm not logged into the cluster to the cluster I don't know why I just did it but to the control cluster to control the cluster so let me do this I'm going to log into all of the clusters again hopefully this works okay so now I'm going to block traffic oh um no I forgot to start this guys I'm gonna start sorry I forgot to start the workloads so obviously we can't do it without that it wouldn't be a complete demo so for some reason I've lost the pause yeah something has happened here and unfortunately I already did this one so I can't start it on the actually let me do this restore connectivity um it should all be good so we I'm gonna start the load also on the third cluster there is a character here it shouldn't be here well okay so I have some networking problem with the third cluster probably because of that um but but these two are working so this is our generating load on the cluster number one and two I don't know what happened here yeah but okay so let's pretend that the disaster is already has already started I'm going to now start actually make sure we are we are in a disaster situation I apologize for that um okay so what we what we expect to see um so first of all you see that there is um load on this the pod is running inside the cluster but I'm just telling the standard output to here so it's it's running all of these you know delivery new order transactions and uh with with some um it was actually a very good performance that's something strange there but and then if I go to the overview here we should see that now the load balancer may take a little bit to realize what's going on I hope I haven't broken it this this is a demo that is not going well you see the the cluster is not ready it does that sometimes when it rotates the certificates it's uh it's a problem in accuracy but the unlucky thing is that they were rotated right now so this is how I can fix it but uh we won't have I think time to see the entire demo and it was it was okay before before we started the meeting because I checked everything okay so let me try to fix it on the fly that's raffaello you said rpo zero rpo zero I know I know sorry I joke you know the live demo live demo is always hard we always has when we do live demo which has like what do you call but you know this demo this demo is um I don't want to say famous but they asked me to do it like every other week this is the but but these certificates are in here I said I said the the lifetime two three two weeks so maybe maybe I can just support raffaello here because I was a previous redacted employee and we deployed that in production for a dutch customer and raffaello can can can see that with Andy Bennett with the temp at redacted for that customer so so this isn't working situation from open shift to open shift to open shift um the only caveat here is that it's really having some issues linked to the cni provider so there's a deep dependency on that so um at the beginning when we started the project we deployed it uh on open shift four four I think which was still using sdn and then we were moving forward five from six and we we had some issues when we tested with obn at the time it was was not yet supported from submarine or something you're talking about the submarine right correct yeah no but we what's happening here is the pods couldn't come up because the certificates were expired so now you see they're up and I bet if I go here um I should we should be able to see the console all right um and you see it it's trying to repair some of the nodes but okay so now this guy should start sending more yeah so it's more significant to see we start to see something here and I might be able to start this one also since we yeah okay so we are at the point where we could start the demo right now so if you guys can stay uh on a little bit longer I'm gonna do it um so we want to generate the fault situation by doing this okay okay so now now co-currency b should realize pretty quickly that uh three nodes are not reachable anymore we should see that these are still working right um but the third one obviously the connection is severed so we don't get the tail of the standard output um but these they they continue to work with you know these random numbers for the for the latency um and summary here as you can see sees that there are three suspect nodes and if we wait long enough they will become dead nodes that's just it's an it's internal way of managing it now um we are gonna repair fix the world as somebody said during one of these demos uh I would usually have waited a little bit longer but but the the important thing is to is to notice we are simulating a big disaster because it's the loss of an entire region right and we didn't have to do anything for for for things to keep working and we didn't you know if we went to look at the data we wouldn't have lost any any data so now I'm I'm establishing the connection um and what we should see well now first of all um the submarine tunnel has to heal we don't see that but um the tunnel is being established now and then as soon as the tunnel is we establish we will see that also cocosby will heal and it may have just done it quickly but usually it takes a little bit longer and so both the and managing of a disaster but also when when the disaster re-enters and normality goes goes you know comes back also restoring normal configuration it's all managed by the system and you could interiorly sleep through a disaster uh although maybe that's not exactly what you want you may we want to get alerts but still if everything is fine you don't have to do anything so that's I think you know forget for a minute all the implementation the products that we have seen but the this model is what what I would like as to promote as a team right as the as the cnc of six storage and then um you know it's essentially saying that we we want to set a bar for for this new generation of products to reach that level that doesn't mean that if you should not there you cannot do the usual you know more traditional dr with active passive right um but that was that that's that's what I would like to do together all right thanks thanks so much raffaele this this this was this was really great as xing mentioned it was very brave um I think I think we'll use the next meeting to to maybe go through um some of the actions in the document in the meantime if people can review the document and um and provide some feedback I think that would be that would be released for or at least familiarize themselves so that we can we can work out um we can work out any future actions together for convenience everybody I've included this in the in the meeting minutes but I've created a short a short link to to the working copy of the document raffaele I've made copies so that it can be shared more widely yeah that's perfect and I'm gonna be working on that one based on your initial suggestions I'm gonna really start working on that awesome as well thanks everybody um and we'll meet in a couple of weeks have a great rest of your days bye thank you bye see you bye good bye


I've been invited to present to you a little bit about digital humanism, and I've entitled this call, I did this talk, The Challenge of Being Humanely Digital. And since we're talking about humans, I thought I put in a few images of naked human people, and you'll see why. Let me just explain that this talk is, yes, it's mostly going to be philosophical, probably, but as I will explain, you might as well call it political, but actually it has an engineering objective, and while that may all seem a bit confusing, I hope it's going to be clear very soon. And I'd like to start with a picture that I always show in my presentations, picture taken by a friend of mine in Melbourne, actually, of a beautiful sunset that is watched by a group of people. And well, actually, it's not so much watched, it is recorded. It's actually very few people in this image actually watch the sunset. What they do is they watch their mobile phones mostly and take pictures of that sunset or of each other. And this, for me, is a symbol of how we live today. So we live digitally mediated. We live in a world that philosophers call actually the post-digital world, not because it's no longer digital, but it is actually so digital that it doesn't make sense to separate the digital world from the non-digital world. We always already live digital with very, very few exceptions. And as you know, this is a world that's networked, that's fast, that tends to be anonymous, it is ubiquitous and where systems have started to act autonomously, or at least so we are told. But of course, this way of living is one that has not really been planned so much. I'd rather suggest that this way of living has emerged. And certainly we have not reached its final stage. It is moving on and people like yourself in this workshop are keep on designing it. And I've chosen an interface design picture that I hope most of you will know. It's one of the most influential films, one says, that has influenced science and technology, minority reports, where especially interfaces played a big role. But really what the situation that we have today is one in which digitization or digitalization has co-evolved with automation over decades. And now we are in a situation where we have all these systems which don't follow a grand design. They do not follow a big vision anymore. Rather, this is something that is evolving. It's evolving very much in an evolutionary sense. And as you know, we are building these systems on top of each other. Very rarely do we design complete systems from scratch as designer. We are using whatever is available. And we are doing this very much in a local search kind of way. We are designing systems to make them better, to optimizing locally rather than having a grand vision that is driving our design of these systems so as to realize one big future. Has this ever been different? Well, probably not, but at least a few decades ago when you think back there have been discussions very much about that free information should be one of the drivers of a free society realized by the then new worldwide web where citizen participation would be at its center and there would be knowledge for everybody through digital access to academic knowledge but really to all sorts of knowledge. And nearly today this sounds like, well, not like a joke, but it certainly is a vision that we would say is no longer true. There was a big issue of Wired, the magazine, which argued that this vision may actually partially have been even one of the problems, but it's certainly no longer the case. It's no longer that we all believe that this availability of knowledge for everybody is something that the web realizes. We no longer truly believe that the web is supporting democratic processes in the way that it was once envisioned. Somehow something on the way has gone wrong. And all of this, let's say, is a situation that is not a standstill. We haven't reached a standstill here. It's still moving. And many people are concerned about the direction in which digital technologies are moving as a whole. And some of the reasons are, of course, that there is a feeling of disempowerment, that humans are becoming more and more the subject of algorithmic decision making to an extent that we now find this expression even in our legal system, policymakers have decided there should be rules about it. Many people are concerned about the de-objectification of societal discourse, that there is too much fake news and people believe it, that there is a few agencies or large-scale platforms that are driving online communication that have become the powerhouses of online discourse. Other people are concerned that, especially in Europe, we are losing sovereignty over what's going on in the digital world. We are no longer able to control and be that communication, but also building systems that are truly reliable where we actually know what's going on. And as you know, the current situation, especially follows a big debate about, for example, the degree to which Chinese technology should have a role in our digital world, in our European digital world, I should say. There is fear of controlling human behavior through digital systems. There is from surveillance technologies to the deactivation of online systems to controlling the movement of people through their mobile phones. There is a fear that the digital takes over control. There is, without any doubt, a very strong position of online platforms who have become economically so powerful that they have the research budget of not just small, but actually medium-sized states nowadays. And all of this, many people argue, contributes to a social disconnect where people prefer to talk to their mobile phones rather than to real people. So these are just some of the concerns, and I'm sure you are aware of many of them, maybe not all of them. But this is, let's say, what is at the center of also our concern that we have addressed in digital humanism. Let me give another picture here that is, of course, a simplification, but it tries to put the phenomena that I've just mentioned into a logical chain. So we live in a world where a lot of the digital hardware that we are using is becoming cheaper and cheaper, that's perhaps not true for your current latest smartphone, but certainly the number of sensors that is available in the world, the number of objects and systems connected to the internet is growing at a massive speed. It's hardly any machine nowadays that is produced that doesn't have an interface. And this low-cost platforms are, of course, feeding into digital service platforms that can control these machines very often with online interactions and where they harvest data. And in many cases, data about people and they do this in order to predict people's behavior for digital marketing, which facilitates a certain degree of digital control and strengthens the digital power. So this is just a different way of looking at some of the phenomena that I've previously mentioned. So it's a dynamic chain of digital processes that creates these phenomena of surveillance, prediction and also of control. Now, digital humanism is born from this abyss between on the one side, the promises of digital technologies and on the other side, an infocratic dystopia, if you want to see. So the infocratic dystopia, obviously, is about surveillance. It's about foreign powers, powers that you don't want to have. Whereas the promises of digital technologies are, of course, access to information for everybody, leveling of opportunities for every citizen. Everybody has a say in the world and in society. And somehow between these two visions, there is digital humanism born from it that says, well, look, we have had so many positive effects of the digital technology, but we're also seeing so many issues we need to address them. And one way of addressing them is by making, by asking ourselves, really, what do we want? What do we want from the future? And putting the human in the center. So while acknowledging that digitization has led to improvements in efficiency and in convenience, also saving resources from energy to all other sorts of resources, it can accelerate revolutions, it can uncover conspiracies, it can liberate people. But there are these terrifying developments which we, first of all, need to acknowledge. So there is people who argue and I think digital humanists would be some of them that this technology can potentially endanger our European fundamental values of basic and human rights and democracy. It can strengthen undesirable powers of control from control over discourse to platform powers beyond public control. It can lead to increasing alienation of people, for example, from labor. It introduces new brittle less and unsustainability of systems and services that if just something very little goes wrong, are no longer available. And it may also actually increase challenges of Europe in a now globally connected economic and geopolitical world. But that's also maybe true of other regions of the world. I just choose to take a European perspective here. So in response to that, and if I had to characterize digital humanism very briefly, I would argue, well, digital humanism is a positive, constructive initiative that puts humans and society at its center. It argues that digital technology must be designed to empower people and advance our democratic societies rather than limiting them. It emphasizes the need for technologies to, while embracing innovation and progress, to also further our already made social achievements, such as human rights, such as democracies, but also other social rights that we are particularly proud of in many European countries. And thirdly, and perhaps a bit surprisingly, if I talk to a group of engineers, that technology is not a destiny, but this is precisely the feeling that many people have, even academics debate this rather extensively. We are not helpless, is one of the messages of digital humanism. We can empower people and society, we can take a stance that also defines limits of technology. But in particular, it's simply the message that the technology we have today is really just at the beginning of its development. And first of all, we have much better technologies already available. And secondly, we should aim for and develop even better ones in the future. So digital humanism roots in European values of the enlightenment in understanding that some of these problems that we are addressing are maybe caused by our own shortcomings, but really we shouldn't forget about human rights, about democracy, about inclusion, and we should use these technologies to secure and to expand them also in our digital life. Now, the topic of clusters that digital humanism addresses is really the whole range of problems from automation and work, from participation in society, to of course AI ethics, to the question of surveillance and privacy, to how to regulate the large platforms, to fake news, but also to freedom of speech, education, digital politics and geopolitics, and how to make our systems more resilient. And if I had to point out one weakness of digital humanism, then I would say this is it. It's the effort to address all of those questions, but on the other hand, as I will try to show, it's also very difficult to separate these issues from one another because they actually have certain characteristics in which they are linked and why it's probably necessary to discuss them jointly. So what are these European values that digital humanism is emphasizing? So obviously it's a very European development of enlightenment and human rights, which have proven very successful globally, but which are probably also the most important recent achievements in Europe and are the basis for property, for justice, for health, for also our technical achievements. And so we could argue with some consideration that these should also form the basis for our future, freedom, for our future democracy, and for expanding human rights access for everybody. But they are of course under threat. So democracy has come under threat through influencing online discourse by a few selected organizations. There is a big debate about freedom of expression online, about non-discriminatory access to the technology itself, about surveillance, about data protection, and also about sustainability of these systems. But these are the values that we are talking about and where we believe that digital humanism should be a guiding force. Now, how could you turn this into a guiding force? I think one way of approaching it would be asking, in your system, design a set of questions. So for example, are you using the best available technologies in your system for protecting people's privacy? Very often we have to explain to people that compared to what is available technologically, what we are actually using is rather poor. And then, of course, there is room for further improving technologies to protect people's privacy. Is this a system that really leaves human dignity unaffected? Or is it by the way that the system takes a stance, takes an image, takes a snapshot of a person? Is it affecting human dignity in a negative sense? Is this IT lending a personal voice to the user? Does it increase knowledge and participation and inclusion in society? Is it a safe system? Is it robust? Is this AI working in partnership with humans? Or is it trying to solve all the problems on its own? Is this system designed to strengthen our understanding of the community, of a social contract? Is this furthering democratization? Is it increasing transparency in our political system? Did we involve varied stakeholders? And finally, is this resource efficient? This is a sustainable system. So these are questions that, from the point of digital humanisms, need to be asked critically about systems. And the reason why we think it's important to ask these questions is because there may be some features of the digital technology that you could perhaps characterize as inherently bad. I wouldn't go so far, but at least there is a danger that some characteristics of digital technology are actually inherently disempowering. So one of course is this tendency of the technology to offer surveyors. Not that I'm saying that it's necessarily like that, but I think we all know what the options are, what the possibilities are, what the powers of those are designing the systems to roll out a surveillance that is basically historically unprecedented. There are other constraints. Every system design puts constraints on the user. And by the very fact that we are constraining the user, there is a limitation emerging from that that potentially is also disempowering. And I will give an example. There is this tendency towards exhibitionism online as the philosopher Jung-Chul Han argues. There are networks, network effects which strengthen monopolies in online platforms. And there is this rather new effect which is the flip side of the shared economy that we are serviced, a trend towards services, a trend towards dematerialization of things. So all of this comes with an added rather innocent way in which the systems intrude our way of living, our lives. They look rather innocent and sometimes they even give the illusion of empowerment. And the question then is what do we really want and what do we mean when we talk about these, a high level concert such as human rights? So let me, and I try to give some because I know this group is interested in interfaces. So I make some people try to come up with some interface examples. I start with the consent illusion that many people will know. So it has become a widely accepted practice in system design that to use dark patterns online where we are psychologically, in my opinion, manipulating people so as to give the answer that is desired from the owner of the systems or the one who paid for the system's perspective but which give an illusion of choice. That many people, of course, are, you know, find first of all rather intruding and unnecessary but secondly, they just click yes without ever thinking about what it means to the extent that, you know, people have tried out that when you agree to some online rules, you agree to granting a non-transferrable option to let your kid be named by that company or if you download an e-book from the website, you agree to grant a non-transferrable option to not eat pizza for the next 12 months and so on or swipe the floor or whatever if you use the Wi-Fi. So what I'm saying here is the rules, not only follow dark patterns but what it means to agree has become such a weird concept because no one can possibly read all these terms and conditions anymore so that we have to ask ourselves what do we actually want from this world? Do we really, you know, want to insist on a world where we have chains of rules and agreements built on top of each other that make no sense practically and I think the answer is clearly no. I think the answer we have to come up with better ways of doing this. We have to improve our ways of interacting with systems. Second example would be the illusion of choice where there are significant constraints and again, I'm using a simple interface example here. Some simple design decisions have durable impact on the rights of people, on what they can do and what you can do with that system as a next steps. The interface is more than the face. It's a point of empowerment and disempowerment and the simplest example is of course ticking this box which reduces the world into a category of two classes that really may look much more difficult and much more complicated. But then again, even if we often like Facebook does today a plethora of options for your gender, we have to ask who is really empowered here? Are we empowering the user for giving them multiple gender options? Or are we empowering Facebook for even better facilitating personalization and targeting advertising? So these are some of the questions that we talk about. In more principle view at the interface, the question arises with whom are we interfacing really in computing? Much of computer technology focuses on the individual based on the highly individualized nature of this interaction. Actually, that's true for a lot of technology but it's especially true of computer technology. There is me the human and there's you the machine, me the customer and you the service. There is no, as again, Jung-Chul Han would say, there is no other as in no counter, no counterpart. Keimgegen Über is the word that he uses in German. There is no Geigen, no counter that opposes me. Actually the idea of the system is very much that everything is fluid and seamless. And we don't have to deal with the intricacies and the complexities of other people that we need when we're not using or not talking to them through a computer. But as a side effect of this, the community is abstracted away at the very interface. There is no community. There is always just the system in a very basic and very fundamental way. And so then the question emerges, how do we get the community aspects back in? How do we get anything social back into computing? And this goes on of course to, for example, personalization. I mean, personalization has become occasionally very creepy based on data harvested. We get all sorts of recommendations. We get all sorts of individualizations that seem based on information that seems to have a model of ourselves which we sometimes agree with, sometimes do not agree with. But really the question is, who is building those models? Who is optimizing with what respect, what these models are? Shouldn't a personal model be something personal? Shouldn't it be my model of myself? Should it not be my very right to know that model and to decide when to use it and for which purposes? Do we not have to think about how we can build such models and make them much more personal than it is today? And I think in digital humanism, we would say, yes, we need this, but this is research. And maybe a final example here is of course online discourse. You know that the power to lead the discussion is not just the power to select, it's also the power to show certain comments to certain people, it's also the power to delete. Some of you will know that, and I know that from your program, some of you are actually working in this business, this question of which online comments do we delete? What do we detect? How do we assess what's going on online is very tricky. It is a very hard problem. It's only superficially simple. We can do it maybe in one language very well, but we cannot do it in, for example, Rohingya. And this may lead to killings as it did in the Rohingya scandal when Facebook was not able to delete certain comments in Rohingya that would have been deleted in English. But then the question arises from a digital humanism perspective, is that really what we want? Do we want to treat people differently just because our systems work better in one language than in another language? And a much more deeper question arises, what do we even mean? Many people nowadays talk about harmful content. So one thing would be illegal content where we have clear legal limits in most countries, but what's harmful content? Harmful seems to be a term that, well, is up for discussion. And it seems to suggest that there is something like a good discourse, like online, perhaps we all should speak factually and be friendly with each other and only use arguments and people light. But this is, even when I'm telling you this, it's even absurd. Our language and how we interact with another sometimes needs to be rather offensive, maybe. It needs to be strong. It needs to be new. It needs to be upsetting as in the 60s and 70s, the debates even in academia were. So here I'm using an example of Vina Actonismos where the guy that you see here was then imprisoned. Because he, well, you see what he did. But looking back at it, it was an important political movement. It was important to do that. So what do we want? What kind of online life is the good life? And I could go on with examples that really we have a lot of questions that sometimes we tend to answer rather technologies. So here's maybe a final one. Most of you will be aware of the challenges of AI systems to avoid bias when we use machine learning. And there is much talk about to set for such systems to be fair. But what do we need by fair? What kind of fairness are we talking about? Do we want to maximize total accuracy in an assessment? Do we want equal opportunities to be represented? Do we want predictive equality or equal odds or counterfactual fairness? All of these have been debated not just in computer science. They have been proposed in philosophy and all of which have different mathematical answers about what fairness is, what a fair data set is, what an unbiased data set might be. And these discussions are not just engineering discussions then neither are they just philosophical discussions. In the end, they are political debates about how do we want to live? How do we want these systems to be? But it's a discussion that is unavoidable. We need this discussion and that's one of the arguments of digital humanism. And I could mention here, one big challenge that I see coming ahead of us and that has been only where we barely scratch the surface. It's the shift from things to software. It's the shift that most of you will be aware of from rather than buying records, you are downloading music, which is nice because we don't need resources for doing that. But on the other hand, are we taking away people's rights of what they can do with it? Can you still exhibit your records in your living room? Maybe not. Can you still collect and give your collection to someone else? Well, it's very difficult. Can you destroy it? No, and this is because for thousands of years, we have developed certain things that you can do with things, but they are not represented in what you can do with services and software. Again, a big debate that we need to have, we need to discuss and digital humanism is the proposal to have this debate and the invitation to talk about this. So it's not just about AI, it's not just about decision making, it's not just about surveillance and privacy because these things are linked with each other. It is the digitization on the hardware side that's driving the surveillance side which is again a basic root of the power of big platforms and so on and so forth. So we need to debate these things together and cannot isolate them easily. I skipped the geopolitics, this is just an image of Jacinda Ardern from New Zealand and Emmanuel Macron deciding to work together in order to be even borderline able to regulate what's going on in online discourse. So all of this has led a group of academics in Vienna a couple of years ago to declare the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism. I'm not going to read this to you. It's a set of principles that suggests we need a new way of dealing with these questions that goes far beyond just technology or just philosophy or just politics. It's really bringing all of this together which includes research challenges and that is why it's a positive view of digital technologies. It's not one that says digital technologies are inherently bad and we cannot solve these problems. No, we may occasionally decide to not to use a certain type of technology as some countries did with nuclear energy, for example, but there may be other ones in digital technology as well. But by and large, we feel we can be much better than what we are doing today. But this requires the interaction of computer science, of law, of philosophy, of social science, of economies, of economics, then also of course of training and educating people and maybe also artists. We need to bring together these people to first of all understand what do we really want and then realizing it, including by the use of digital systems. So I think we have in Europe some initiatives that exist. We have a huge interest from computer science but also from other groups and maybe that's one important characteristic of digital humanism that it comes from within computer science. It's very much driven by informatics people. It's not driven by science and technology starters. It's not driven by philosophy of technology. It is computer scientists who brought this up and this is why we feel there is a real wind of change. Technologies can be part of the answer but they may not be everything but really what we need is we need a better understanding of what do we really want. What does it mean to live the good life digitally? That is the underlying question and that's what we are trying to do with it. If you want to learn more about it there's a book we've recently edited. It's an edited collection, Perspectives on Digital Humanism. It's completely available online. You don't need to buy it but if you buy it makes us all so happy. Thank you and I'm ready for some questions.