Welcome, everyone. My name is Jenny Parks. You have tuned in signed into building our capacity in the Midwest, supporting grassroots efforts and statewide collaboration. I'm joined today by my collaborators on a commandee Jennifer's and Katie's a back. They will each give you a little bit of an introduction about themselves as they jump in to help in hosting this slide presentation. So, welcome. Next slide. So, Mac, for those of you who don't know us is an acronym for the Midwestern Higher Education Compact. We're one of the four regional compacts in the US serving higher education. The others are Richie, SREB and Nebby for those of you who are more familiar with them. For those of you who didn't know the four compacts have gotten together and received the Hewlett grant to do 18 months of work or capacity building in OER in our states with a specific emphasis on increasing educational access and equity. We all have the same outcomes for this grant, which we, we have a loose affiliation called the National Consortium for Open Educational Resources or MC OER. And if you went to tune in on Wednesday, we're doing a presentation specific to that collaboration. But if you look at this slide, you'll see the practices on the left are in, I mean the outcomes are involved. That's what we all share. And then if you look at those on the right, you'll see some of the specific outcomes that Mac is hoping to achieve with its work. Each of the compacts is doing things a little bit differently. Next slide please. So specific to Mac, we do have a number of areas in which we are conducting activities, hoping to achieve our outcomes. One of the big things that we've been doing for three years now that is kind of unique to Mac, but I think the other regions are also kind of looking at something similar is to work with OER state action teams. We try to get a group of individuals together in each state to create an OER identity in the state. We've been doing that, like I said, since we started in the fall of 2018 with a convening that was region wide, and which Hewlett Foundation also supported. Those teams keep meeting and keep building community and capacity in each of their states. We try really hard to have members of all sectors of the higher ed community. We try to have the K-12 community, the public libraries, and as many diversified partners as we can so that we can create a new culture of open education and open educational resources in each of our state. We also have a couple of research projects in which we are engaged. You're going to hear a little bit more about them today from the principal researchers in both of those. We're also supporting virtual convenings in each of or virtual leadership activities in each of our states. So we have collaborated there with the open education network for those leadership trainings. This will be for institutional and systems leaders. And then we've been helping a few of our states actually launch their first OER statewide summit. OER also have been trying to work with Revis Foundation to help CTE practitioners develop some new resources across the region. We've had a number of webinars. You can go to the MAC OER page or to the MAC webinar page and you'll be able to find many of those webinars already recorded and put there for you. So we do have an OER technology working group where we're trying really hard to build an understanding of the technologies that touch OERs and the technology that yet needs to be developed and to develop that marketplace and that understanding so that we can keep moving forward with those types of innovations. Next slide. So, one of the things that it's important for us to say that we've been doing in MAC, like I said, we have our OER Action Team is really our unique thing. We have representatives from public universities and many from private universities too. They meet quarterly with phone calls that we all share, but then there's a lot of contact between that time. And they are also the folks on whom we draw upon to schedule our leadership events, but also to schedule our summits. In January 2021, we asked each state to complete a capacity assessment. We're really trying to figure out what are the precursors, the preconditions that are needed in a state to really help it build from the ground up and OER infrastructure, culture, and set of practices. So I'm going to turn this over to Anika now and she's going to tell you a little bit more about that assessment and what we hope to learn from it. Thanks, Jenny. Yeah, so as Jenny mentioned, we developed a state capacity assessment, which of course we're happy to share with folks as part of the resources for this session. And the assessment covered four main areas. The first two are related to state policy and advocacy. And what we asked each state to do was to sit down with their OER Action Team and sort of answer these questions. So do we have legislation in our state yet? Do we have a legislator who is knowledgeable and maybe passionate about OER that we can depend on? And for each of these items under all these categories, they sort of said yes, no, or it's in progress. And then took some time to write some notes on where they're at with each of these things. So under state policy and advocacy, it's really around legislation and support from the state government. Under institutional commitment, we ask people to think about who is engaged in OER across the state. Does the university and college system have an OER initiative? Does the community college system have one? How about our independent institutions? What about our K-12 folks? How are we engaging across the P-20 spectrum? How about our library association or library system? And what about our student organizations? So we want folks to really think about each of these categories and think about whether they have folks engaged at each of these levels around OER. And if so, are we working together effectively so that we can really improve outcomes for students? So these two categories on the state capacity assessment relate to communications and infrastructure and strategic planning. So here again people are asked to self-assess where are we at as a state? Have we put together a website around open education? Do we maybe have a repository? I think I saw Mindy earlier. So a lot of folks have been using OER Commons to create repositories and hubs for listing out their OER. So that's a great way to communicate what's available across the state. Is there an annual event like a summit? Can you say, can you look around and say, here's the people that are here, here's the people that are not here and come up with a plan to engage those folks that are not yet engaged around OER? So we have data and metrics. What are we doing to collect data around what we're doing? And Katie's going to talk a little bit later about what some of those data might look like, especially related to cost savings and other return on investment. And then do we get together regularly and present out to our constituencies and our stakeholders across the state? So in terms of strategic planning, a lot of our states have been working on developing their own vision and mission statements around open education. So what are we hoping for as a state to achieve with this? Each of the state OER action teams have started to articulate roles and responsibilities towards achieving that mission and vision. So we asked our states to think together about what are some three goals you think you could achieve in the next six months. And really spend some time thinking about what's achievable and what can we do together. And then finally we asked folks to think a little bit about what do you need to move your work forward? What kinds of resources do you need? Maybe that's from MEC, maybe that's from the state, maybe it's from your system or your institution, or helping people come together and really identifying what they need in order to build that capacity. So I'd love to hear from the folks here and I see there's a couple little blips in the chat, which I haven't read yet. Elizabeth Sue, you can totally join us in Illinois and Elizabeth Sue, we would love to have everybody. I'd love to know from you all, you know, do these kinds of things resonate in terms of building capacity within the state? And are there things that we're missing here? Are there other indicators of capacity that you think we should include here? Feel free to put your thoughts in the chat and I'll give everyone a minute to do that. What else could we be including? And I'll flip back to the first. Professional development, that's a great one. And we talk about in infrastructure and communications having like annual events and stuff, but we didn't talk specifically about other kinds of professional development. I think that would be great. Yeah, and rebel, absolutely, you can share. We will upload a copy of this assessment to sketch after the conference today, so that you can actually download that. Thanks, Jonathan, great thought. Yeah, we've been trying to work across the state, and sometimes that engages with state systems, but we've also been engaging outside of those systems and trying to bring different systems together so in a lot of states we have community colleges that are in a separate system from the public four years which are in some often a separate system from independent colleges so we've been trying very much to try to bring people together. The way that they're defining OER that's really great thank you for those thoughts. Yeah, thanks, Mindy. Yeah, professional learning is great. I think that's a great suggestion for us to call that out more specifically. Alright, we're limited in time. I'm going to put my email in the chat. If there's any folks here like our colleagues in Illinois that want to engage with the Illinois State team, just send me a note and we'll get you on to that team. Thank you so much. I'm going to pass this off to Jennifer now. Thank you so much. And thanks you all for joining us here today. My name is Jennifer Zinth and I'm founder principle of a consulting firm based here in Denver, Colorado, consulting and just a little background about myself for about 20 years I was at Education State, 50 state organizations serving state policymakers across row groups across the 50 states and dual enrollment. For the last 10 or 12 years I was there was the number one topic that I fielded I covered a number of issues on high school to post secretary transitions as well as stem and computer science but from state demand. And from our constituents dual enrollment was the topic that I did the most work on. In 2019 I left to start my own consulting business continuing to work with states nonprofit organizations. Also some foundations on this work so I'm delighted to be here today. Next slide please. So just a quick point of clarification in my comments today and in the report we use the term do enrollments as an umbrella term for college courses offered to high school students regardless of the course location instructor type, or course modality. So this report is really intended for multiple stakeholders on the OER side state and local K 12 and post secondary OER stakeholders, as well as dual enrollment stakeholders again coming from either the state or local level, both from K 12 and post secondary. And this could be for those who haven't yet thought about the use of OER and dual enrollment, or who have begun using OER and dual enrollment courses but are looking to take their efforts to the next level. And so the out the intended outcome of this report is to inform these stakeholders and state policymakers in general, on the potential challenges to equitable dual enrollment program access, participation success, and the cost of the traditional OER can be barriers. How we are can mitigate those challenges on the current state policy land escape in terms of who's responsible for covering dual enrollment textbook costs, and a sort of how to for integrating OER to dual enrollment courses, or taking OER integration and dual enrollment, the next level. Next slide please. So before we dive in on, I sort of share a word about how using non OER textbooks and dual programs can potentially negatively impact equitable course access and student participation. And the number of states have two or more dual enrollment programs and so even within the same state, the entity responsible for covering door at textbook costs can vary. For example, in a state where a post second institution may receive a small amount from the state, that amount might be responsible for covering not just the cost of tuition, but also fees, textbooks, any course materials as applicable. And so an institution might be disinclined to offer courses with high textbook costs if we have to cover all of those types of expenses with an amount of money that maybe even less than they would get for tuition alone for a regularly matriculated student. And so an institution may pull back on offering courses to high school students that are some STEM courses have high textbook costs than most liberal arts courses, or some CTE courses that may have high course material costs like for example, photography welding or culinary arts courses where each student has to have their own knife set they might say, you know, the textbook doesn't cost that much for that culinary course, but you have to cover the knives as well so maybe we're going to have limited slots for high school students or just not offer that course to high school students. Alternatively, where the district has to cover textbook costs for dual enrollment courses. The district similarly may want to scale back the number of dual enrollment courses they offer the types of courses, or the number of seats and some courses again to rein in textbook costs and this could be daily common in other resource school districts, or rural districts that are experiencing declining enrollment and having to make difficult decisions on staffing facilities, all sorts of other issues, in addition to a dual enrollment costs including textbook costs. Alternatively, if a district has to cover their textbook costs, the district may tell students not to take home their dual enrollment textbooks for fear that students will lose them or they might be damaged, or they might tell students not to write in their textbooks, so that the same textbook can be used in the same course offering in a subsequent academic term. As you can imagine, both of these practices might negatively impact student learning and student performance in the course which is going to be on their permanent student transcript. Next slide please. Oh wait, sorry. I went back to intended outcomes so informing state local policy or stakeholders on the benefits as practices, state policies. Next slide please. And so to research this report, I first looked at dual enrollment textbook policies in the 50 states and District of Columbia. And in dual enrollment, I used to call updating this 50 state resources playing whack-a-mole because it could be in a single state, it could be in statutes, it could be an appropriations bill, it could be in board K-12 regulations, higher education board regulations, and a policy document that sits outside of regulations. But I looked across a number of places in the states and as needed clarified practices with state K-12 or higher education agency staff. Interviews in early 2021 reaching out to folks who responded to request for interviews on Listers operated by the education network, SRAB and MEC. And the SRAB states, southern states per SRAB's preference, those were more focused on state or system level OER initiatives. And then the MEC states, we looked more at institution level initiatives and we included a couple of interviews in Colorado. They are under the same post-secondary regional accreditor as Midwestern states and are experiencing some similar challenges related to dual enrollment as part of their accreditation. So it was a total of 11 remote interviews conducted with a total of 19 state and local stakeholders and you can see here the variety of stakeholders I talked to in those interviews. Next slide please. And so looking now at the state policies on who pays for dual enrollment textbooks. This adds up to more than 51 because as I mentioned earlier, in some states there may be two or more entities responsible depending upon the program, the post-secondary institution type, for example, in one state. A student takes a course through community colleges. It's one funding model, but if a student takes a course through the four institutions, it's a different funding model. Or again, just depending on the type of high school the student attends, public, non-public or homeschool, there may be different entities responsible for those textbook costs. As you can see here, in three states, the state was responsible for covering textbook costs. In seven states, it was the school district or the high school or secondary school. In one state, the post-secondary institution, independent of state aid was partly responsible for covering those costs. In 13 states, it was the student. In 16 states, it was the state policy required that the local agreement between the K-12 and post-secondary partner specified if the K-12 partner was covering the cost, the student or parent, if the post-secondary partner or some combination thereof is covering textbook costs. And then the largest number of states, 20 states, plus the District of Columbia policy was completely silent. There was no mention anywhere of which entity was responsible for covering textbook costs. And so in practice, it's something that's locally determined between the K-12 and post-secondary partner. And as you might imagine, in those states where the policy is silent or it's a local decision, there's the greatest potential for inequitable development access between districts or even within a district, if the high school is making the contract or agreement directly with the post-secondary partner. So you could have a student in District A where the family is paying nothing. The textbook cost is completely covered by another entity. And the next district over, students and their families are fully responsible for textbook costs. Next slide, please. So I'm looking at the institutions. We've got a lot of interesting findings here. I'm the kind of person where, if I've done a report, I hate to just regurgitate information from the report. I'd like to include a few interesting tidbits that weren't covered in the reports. But looking here, commonalities that we heard across multiple interviews were that's really credible for course, for faculty to approve the learning outcomes first for the course, and then develop the OER or approve OER, or if the institution is updating its learning outcomes, make sure that update takes place before faculty dive in and begin modifying the OER or approving an OER. Another key finding that we heard in multiple interviews was the real need to explain to faculty, department chairs, even institutional leadership, the why behind the what. The benefits are to all different types of stakeholders, also students, and the benefits of faculty's ability to customize their content to their specific student populations, or specific learning outcomes or faculty preferences. And a couple of really interesting examples came through in interviews in Colorado. This is a story about a business law professor who was dissatisfied with all the business law textbooks out there because they didn't quite fit the course that she had designed. And so she had the capacity to enhance academic freedom by developing her own course materials and she actually co-wrote the textbook with her students but also pulled in some guest contributors from her time as a lawyer. The legal authorities, judges and so forth. And so the resulting OER business law textbook, she found that the course had actually become more rigorous by using this textbook, and at the same time, students experienced higher levels of engagement with the material as well as higher levels of academic performance. An interesting example was from Colorado State University's Pueblo campus, which is a Hispanic serving institution. They're using OER to offer Spanish courses to heritage Spanish speakers. We're looking to pursue Spanish in an academic context. And so these students having spoken Spanish from when they were infants have different learning needs from students who are learning Spanish as a second language. And so one professor developed OER to embrace her students experiences Spanish heritage learners and she liked the law professor found that using this OER resulted in better student engagement as well as better student outcomes. And one of my favorite quotes, which I think it's somebody from who's in this session right now said, I won't say who don't just tell faculty is so many ocean there are so many resources out there that faculty's eyes will roll back in their head. If they don't have some sort of guidance or support. And so this person urged both folks at the institution level but also at the state level to make sure that faculty are connected with curriculum developers their institution librarians and other types of staff who can support them today. I saw your learning outcomes for this course. There are five options you might pick and choose from to develop the OER that's customized for your course and your preferences. I also heard over and over again. I'm glad to hear professional development was mentioned in the responses to Annika's question but over and over again I heard in the interviews the high quality professional development and training are just invaluable for faculty as their high school counterparts. One example came from Baker College in Michigan that uses its Center for Teaching Excellence together trainings for faculty, both to help them know how to most effectively use OER, but also how to most effectively support students and using OER, along with interesting faculty the resources that might support their classroom and how to use the use of those resources. So the last on the institution interviews that I heard multiple times was really importance of sending staff and faculty out to state or regional conferences to further empower them on local adoption and innovation and that people commented that things changed so quickly in a digital world that these kind of external opportunities could help them stay up to date. So one example was in Arapaho Community College in Colorado which is the two year institution in Colorado that offers the most dual normal courses statewide. They talked about the value of sending a team to the state's OER ambassador training, which is a train the trainer model, but also helps faculty effectively message to their peers back on campus the benefits of using OER. Next slide please. So looking now at state level interviews. Again, a lot of really interesting findings with just a few here. It was really interesting that the span across states in terms of the number of years that some initiatives have been in place. There are some that have been in place for quite a long time, and then some that are just getting off the ground in 2021. There are multiple interviewees also that there were fewer OER in current technical education, both in terms of full blown OER courses as well as OER resources for CTE areas. At that said, people mentioned that there are multiple efforts underway. One was mentioned in Georgia where the technical college system is interested in developing OER materials not full loan OER courses, particularly for early childhood education. The state college system in Colorado was also recently awarded a grant just earlier this year to develop OER for the eighth college level courses in CTE that have the highest enrollments statewide of high school students. And then looking at what can help state efforts, some commonalities across interviews were not just a top down approach and not just a grassroots up, but some combination of state level direction and grassroots support. So a lot of thought could be particularly helpful. People also commented on the value of focusing the development of OER on the most impactful courses, for example, college courses that are general education requirements in the states that are also taken oftentimes by high school students. I did not find in any instances where courses or OER were developed exclusively for use by high school students, but post secondary faculty may work alongside high school instructors in developing college level content for courses for high school students. And the interviewees commented on a number of different types of funding sources, but that's funding itself was critical. This couldn't be done just on the existing resources that an institution might have. They talked about the importance of faculty stipends to cover faculty's time outside their regular teaching load to either adapt or update or develop OER, as well as when high school teachers were involved stipends that might cover their time outside their regular school day or school year. They talked about federal sources, including Perkins grants for developing for instructor support, professional development on using OER for CTE courses. Louisiana commented that they had received $2 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education to support built with OER. Some states mentioned using state agencies funds, for example, Louisiana previously used funds from their boards of regents before they received that federal grant. Texas has had a legislative legislatively funded competitive grant program for a few years now, but they're also using federal CARES Act dollars for OER projects, including but not limited to for courses offered by high school students. Jennifer, thanks so much. I know you have so much more you want to share, but we're getting a little bit behind on our schedule to make sure Katie has enough time for her piece. Thank you so much.  Hi, Jennifer and Annika. My name is Katie Zabak, and I am a Education Consultant with Zabak Consulting. More recently, I was the Director of Policy at the Colorado Department of Higher Education, and I've been working with states and systems to implement policy change through data and research for almost the last two decades. So I have just really been fortunate as part of this project to get to be part of the OER community, and a little bit of background on my project. I'm working to work with that to create some consistency around cost savings, measures, OER, and conversations around investment. And so when they asked me to do this research, I did a quick scan and I said, we don't need more research on this topic. We've got lots out there, but what we do need is we need the experts to come together and tell us the best way to use the research to start it out. And so the way that we've approached this project is we put together a workgroup, and you can see the members of the workgroup. Some of them may be here today, but these are the 13 members of our workgroup who have just been invaluable in helping to guide this work. So on the next slide, I'll talk to you about what we're actually doing and what we define this. So we are developing common principles to improve consistency and reliability in the field for measuring cost savings and the return on investment of OER. We want the final product to create that consistency. So we want it to be possible for somebody to create and or replicate an estimate whether or not we publish a final number is still up for debate. So what is our audience? Our audience is decision makers who define resource allocation. So that includes many of mechs members, the legislators, the systems heads, institutional leadership. We do want our research and the report to be accessible to the public and to people who vote for those people who or help get those people into decision making rules. But ultimately, the conversation around cost savings is one around decision making. And so that's why that's our main audience. So on the next slide, we are the next I kind of tells you why we want to do this work and why Mac undertook this and one of their projects for as part of the partnership with Angkor. The first thing is that advocates in the OER space of which some of you might be need a clear and concise statement that articulates and communicates the value of OER. And there's lots of things floating out there and we know that cost savings is essential to this conversation and we want to be able to have some consistency around it. Decision makers want a consensus based metric to use or to customize when they are measuring the cost savings and return on investment of OER to students and their organizations. Leaders need to understand the good work and progress already created to measure the impact of OER so that they can use it within their own efforts. And similarly, practitioners have limited time. They need a short cut to help them be able to talk about the value of open education resources and to communicate to the field. And then finally, we need some consistency in the space so that we can hold ourselves accountable. And so that we can ensure that OER continues to increase the effectiveness of our in higher education and in higher education attainment. So those are just some of the reasons why this project has been important. Like the working group, we define some key questions which starts with why are the current model or what are the current models of cost savings and return on investment in the research and what are their strengths and weaknesses. So we've been exploring that. We really wanted a landscape of what's happening in the field. We wanted to understand what are the best practices for states and institutions who are already measuring cost savings and return on investment.  We have had good conversations about the distinction between textbook cost savings or resource cost savings and return on investment. And you'll see on the next slide we've made a distinction between the two. How are cost savings and return on investment different for the state, the institution in the student and in the student and you're going to see some of the answers to that questions there out in the next slide. How and should we define OER when measuring cost savings and return on investment. What is the time horizon for measuring the impact of open education resources. And how do we account for non monetary costs, things like faculty and structural changes, and also non monetary returns, things like student learning additional access to resources, increased retention greater equity. We know all those things are associated with open education resources and how do we measure those things. So on the next slide you'll see kind of the two constructs that we hope to talk about in our final report which we plan to release early next year. The first is an understanding of cost savings and so there are some really good examples of state level reports that have come out system level reports that have come out around how much does creating an OER save our students overall either at the individual course level or at the national level. In general the way that we calculate this is pretty consistent. We often look at the number of shop sections that have open education resources this is made easier when states have course marking or systems have course marking. We look at the overall level of enrollment sometimes that's specific enrollment sometimes that is an estimate of enrollment. And then we look at the multiplier and this is what varies the most that's why it's in red and our multiplier has the tendency to have fluctuation in it. And so that looks at what what cost savings to students see because of because of an implementation of where we are. But there's other important things that our system needs to consider and that is where return on investment comes into play. As somebody who's trained in policy I am starting to think about our return on investment conversation as a cost benefit analysis conversation. So what are the costs to our state in our institution to invest in OER. And what are the benefits that our states and institutions gets from implementing OER. And so that's some of the key things that we are thinking about as part of this work, and in order to support the, the discussions that will go. Okay, I think you muted yourself back then. In order to support this work, and to put this work in context, we have put together a set of principles that we follow when we're looking at either the cost benefit, or the cost savings. And so this is our set of working principles that will continue to evolve prior to the report coming out. But the first is based on the fact that all students should have access to the course material that they need. The second is based on the fact that open education resources support learning in the same way that commercial and all rights of reserve materials support learning. And so we that's just a general principle. Good course development requires planning and integrating regard integrating course material regardless of whether or not that course material is OER and so we need to think about that when we think about the costs. Developing new new OER resources is not always required. Sometimes we're supporting the implementation of those resources, but there's been a lot of development that's happened and so when we think about costs and assumptions around costs we need to look at what's already out there. OER has benefits beyond the direct cost savings that should be acknowledged so that's key to our cost benefit side of the equation. That's important, but to scale estimates are probably going to be essential. And their estimates are really invaluable tool when we start to look at national cost savings. And then you need different levels of specificity for cost savings and return on investment estimates, the 10 depending on the kind of stakeholder you're working with so whether you're working with a legislator, or as somebody at that. If you're working with a specific department level at the school, those individuals are going to need different kinds of information and so we want to make sure that we call that out as a principle and we also acknowledge it in the final report. So when you. Thank you so much I think we only have one minute left in our session today. Our time is really flown by. I think we can stay on for questions after the session concluded for a few minutes. If we do have some questions I just wanted to acknowledge that we're we're just approaching time so if you want to just wrap up with some of your next steps. Yeah, I know I was going to do the same thing so thanks. Thanks so much. And very interested to hear folks feedback on this. Well thank you, Annika Jennifer and Katie. One more time. Thank you all for being here we did learn some big high level lessons in the work we've already conducted, and we find it helpful in informing the work we are moving forward with. I don't have time to go over all of them but if you take a look there you'll see that they really involve taking people where they are acknowledging their diversity and leveraging that to make the movement stronger. And we'll stay on for more questions. Thank you. Thank you.


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All right, everyone. Hello. Welcome to wildly distributed programming wasm in the future of distributed computing. My name is Brooks Townsend. I'm a lead software engineer at Cosmonic. And I've also been a maintainer for the open source project wasm cloud for the past two ish years now. Love programming and elixir rust and web assembly, which puts me in a really interesting than diagram of programmers and serial open source contributor. And of course a demo enthusiast always going to do a live demo when I when I talk at a conference. So lightning talk, I'll try to be quick. We're going to start with why wasm cloud and kind of a what is wasm cloud. If you haven't heard of it before, we're going to do my young, wild and free demo and then talk about distributed computing. So when we look at the modern computing environment, we're talking about this trend of compute getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And you may have seen the PC cloud container evolution. We're abstracting more and more away from the individual developer for the benefit of the developers mental health and for the management of their applications. Right. So with Docker, we're abstracting away the kernel. We see web assembly is going a step above this abstracting with a host creating a truly portable piece of compute. Now this is great. And with wasm cloud, as we're looking at what we can do is we're taking advantage of web assembly. There's still an opportunity to abstract away the non functional requirements or the capabilities from applications. So to give you a concrete idea of this functional versus non functional, if you think about like a to do application, your functional requirement, you're going to create read update delete to do's right. That's the thing that use a developer you get down and you want to write that code. The non functional requirements are things like I need to receive HTTP requests on this port on this API and I need to route that into my receiver. And then I need to be able to store those to do is in some kind of persistent database. Like these are the things that you just copy and paste from project to project.  And that makes it difficult both for maintenance and when vulnerabilities arise to do these kinds of patching. So this is where we see, you know, ourselves on the computing environment landscape. Now I'm going to go through quickly to describe wasm cloud and why it's perfect for this distributed use case and why it uses web assembly in five, excuse me, five different layers at the base level. We're using web assembly running web assembly. This is the code that you as a developer would write so we get all the benefits of portability denied by default security and scalability that the web assembly provides. The wasm cloud app runtime sits on top of that removes the boilerplate code and lets you securely access those non functional requirements that I'm taught that I was talking about in the last kind of section. Now the capabilities. These are both an abstraction that makes writing your application easier and something that you get to pick at runtime. So you're working on your local development environment. You write a web assembly application. You can interact with a key value store. That's just a hash map in memory. When you actually deploy that, of course, you're going to pick a real vendor. You're going to pick like AWS Dynamo DB or cloud mem store, but we don't want anything to change from your local development environment to production and the portability of web assembly where we're trying to like extend that to the app development process. Now these composable actors just again a fancy way of saying web assembly modules for wasm cloud implement that business logic. This is where you're writing your code. They're coded in terms of contracts and because they're so tiny. It's really easy to scale these out to different clouds, different edges. And what really comes to be a challenge with that is web assembly can really run in a ton of different places. But it doesn't really matter very much for composable applications when you're running them on the edge. If you can't connect to it, if you can't have your compute communicate with each other. And that's exactly what the lattice network does for wasm cloud. It's a mesh network enabled by NATs under the hood essentially lets your applications seamlessly talk to each other no matter where they're physically running. No concept of discovering nodes or running in a specific location. And you know I work for a company called Cosmonic Cosmonic. The platform is essentially a managed platform for web assembly applications went into developer preview about a month ago and you know obviously accepting everybody here to come sign up during cube con. But it's the painless experience to develop those server side web assembly apps easy to go cross platform across cloud. You'll get to see that today here in about a second. And the really cool thing is everything the Cosmonic platform is built on wasm cloud. So we're running the Cosmonic platform using wasm cloud and web assembly in production now. So when you go play around at the platform, it's all web assembly. And so that you know I would love to talk about more but actually Taylor Thomas my coworker and I were doing a full talk about it at the main conference on Wednesday. So you know if you're sticking around hope to see you there love to talk more about it. Now that's enough. I have about 10 minutes and I used about four of them to just talk and I really like to show you a demo. And what this demo is going to be is an application built with web assembly that is cross cloud cross region immediate fail over auto forming auto healing network with distributed persistence on different cloud providers. And so if you'd like to see it. There you go. Really? No, nothing. Oh maybe it's because I was in light mode. Hold on. So this is a real real to do list real distributed application. But of course it's really simple when you look at it. So what is the actual architecture of this application look like? I have no idea if this is going to be legible at all. That's not bad. So I'm running an HTTP server or a web assembly module that's accepting HTTP requests on Cosmonic and what this WebAssembly module is it's a it's like an API gateway for to do so it's receiving my API requests. I'm sending a message out on a message broker specifically using Nats but like you can swap that out for Kafka or for Red Panda which is kind of just Kafka anyways or whatever. And then I have another WebAssembly module that's storing those things in a key value store. Now I'm running this app actually on AWS, GCP, Azure and Oracle cloud. All of those things are seamlessly connected into one network. So to show you what this looks like I can go over to Cosmonic. I have five Wasm cloud hosts that are running. You can see like this is the Oracle one. This is the Azure one. They're on a variety of different architectures, operating systems and regions and clouds which is awesome because I wrote this whole app on my local Macbook. And obviously I'm not compiling and deploying to Mac but I never had to worry about any of that when I was writing my application. I deploy it on my local and it works all the same when I deploy to the cloud. And when you look at what this actual application looks like I've got my HTTP server that's getting those requests and forwarding them to the to-do WebAssembly module that's sending out a message to the distributed key value WebAssembly module. And that's storing that in a Redis backed data store but each individual one on each different cloud is configured to talk to on AWS, it's ElastiCache, on Azure, it's cloud mem store, whatever, on GCP, it's cloud memory store. So I'm not just like distributed storing this in one cloud like across a few different regions. I'm actually storing it in four different clouds in four different databases. And is this the architecture that you want for your production app? No, no, you probably don't want this, right? It is a ridiculous demo on purpose. But when you hear the tagline, like that's something that someone would talk about for a cloud native application today, you know, the cross cloud, distributed persistence, like immediate failover. I can actually come in to the Cosmonic dashboard and I can pick something like, sorry, I'll pick on you Oracle cloud. I can get rid of that entire piece of infrastructure and everything will still work all the same because it's persisted across all those different clouds. Now, why would I do this?  And it's for two reasons. One, to show that the future of applications is distributed both because it's motivated by the edge and it's creating the edge. But people have figured out like running a container on a cloud host pretty well. Like if you just need to do that, you're pretty golden. But the edge capabilities and what we're seeing with people making applications today, people are trying to get the fastest response times running it as close to the user as possible. People are trying to get the lowest cost. So not running this massive cluster, running things as close to the data as possible to to save on network costs. And the reason why this is a perfect use case for WebAssembly is because WebAssembly brings that portability and security wherever you go. You write your application when you develop on your laptop, great. But your enterprise, you know, when you're when you're creating this app for your company, you may think, oh, I'm just going to run this on one cloud and it's going to be great.  Like, do you have to go back and re engineer your whole app to add load balancing and add failover? You probably do. And that's a huge pain that some of a framework like wasm cloud that's built for distributed application brings to you. Additionally, the management of this application is greatly reduced with the capabilities being abstracted away. As soon as there's a vulnerability in, you know, ultimately, I'm not writing the Redis client library to reach out to a Redis compatible database. Sorry, there's nothing over there. You know, someone else is writing and I'm bringing it in from open source. And if there's something that I need to patch there with wasm cloud, I'm not recompiling and redeploying my entire app. I simply update to the new version of the Redis key value provider and then deploy that instead nothing actually changes within my application, which is huge for just me, maybe about the same amount of work for, you know, even Cosmonica small company where we have nine different developers and we're scaling across like we have a couple different applications. It removes the management from all of those things. And so really at the end of the day, WebAssembly is perfect for this type of distributed computing because it brings that portability and security and connecting it all to the edge is the challenge that we're trying to tackle. Now I have a couple, couple references. Please feel free to join our Slack. Everything that you saw today, even if it was through the lens of the Cosmonic product is empowered by the open source, all open core company. All of this code is open source the under my GitHub org. They are wildly distributed wasm. Probably need to push up a couple of scripts that I like hacked up, but it's all it's all there. And if you're interested in some more things that we're doing around this conference for for Cosmonic and wasm cloud. Dang it. What happened to my thing? All right, whatever. That's it. Thank you, Brooks. We've got a couple minutes before the next session. Any questions for Brooks? Hey, how's it going? So when you're able to ship code across clouds like that, are you able to make use of like component model like reusable components at all? Yeah, this is a great question. So the kind of capabilities model that we are chasing with wasm cloud. This is actually something we've been working with since 2019. So something that's been around for like pretty long before the component model. However, looking at what components and what world files are bringing, this is actually a perfect place for this is exactly where wasm cloud is going. And though it doesn't have support for the component model today, this is exactly our plan, right? The transition from using capabilities and using wasm instead of that is exactly where we're planning on. Any other questions? All right. Thank you, Brooks.


How do you overcome the sense of meaningless in your life? And the answer is, you stop chasing and pursuing meaning and start finding things you love. The more things that you love and the longer you do those things, the more chance there is one of them will become a passion. And if you do a passion long enough, it becomes like a responsibility to keep doing it. Because where passion meets responsibility, it then becomes a meaningful thing to do in your life. Your purpose, your why, your reason to get up in the morning is there. So stop chasing meaning, figure out what you love, do a few things that you love. One of them will become a passion. The passion will feel like a responsibility and there you will find meaning in your life. Cheers.


In the south-east region has been plagued by insecurity for years affecting peace, serenity and economic life. However, an MOU between Nikom Satz and a peace in the south-east project – a peace set – is set to change this and witnessed by Deputy Speaker, Right Honourable Benjamin Kahlo, at the National Assembly Complex in Abuja, plus TV Emanuele Higene completes the report. Deputy Speaker acknowledges the initiative as a transformative journey to tackling security in the south-east region, highlighting its alignment with President Bollard's renewed group agenda, and believes that the community enterprise, due to Abu's full activation, will promote peace and economic prosperity for the country. Peace in the south-east project is more than just a non-governmental organisation, where it is catered to an organisation driven by the vision of nurturing lasting peace, stability and sustainable development in the south-east. Two innovative and inclusive non-kinetic approaches, because kinetic approaches have not achieved much. So, there must be another option. If there is no kinetic, then there will be no kinetic. And what kind of kinetic is preaching is that we can do peace without the sounds of wrong and the patterns of wrong. We are sure that a project will not be replicated in other federal constituencies in the south-east and other parts of the country. We will stop peace and unlock the entire potential within this region. We will save it over and over again because we are becoming more focused and we will get it off because it is doable. And yes, we can. This is why today's partnership, this is why today's partnership with government agency, Michael Sartre, is a game changer. A game changer because some businessmen have always believed they are not part of this government. And if we cover the president through the Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy and allow these agents to partner with this initiative from the south-east for good, for empowerment of those in south-east, we should stop crying and we are united from the center of power. Maggie Director, Jane Egerton-Edin of NIGCOMSAT claims this is a false time a project promotes a non-kinetic solution to address the security in the country, a means to empower youths and discourage mischief. A lot of government services can actually start a reform act. We also believe that it could also empower people into tribes and businessmen. But I believe it's beyond the south-east. We are actually using this because we are creating an ecosystem where young people can actually run their startups, their tech businesses from that point. We are believing small businesses, e-payments, and they don't run the whole. The partners have signed an MOU to commence approaches aimed at addressing security insecurity and answering economic prosperity of the south-east people. Thank you.


What's up everybody, I'm TheMangus, you are awesome and I got to play Project Stamina. This is the one that has nothing to do with Paragon but is instead a fan driven reboot of the game Gigantic. I've been hyped for this one mainly because of how well coordinated the team behind this project is, but I never played Gigantic so I really had no frame of reference for what Project Stamina would be like as a game. Until now. I was invited to participate in testing a very early pre-alpha build, I can't stress that enough. This is a very early pre-alpha build of the game and everything has changed. I mean I still respect the team, that's not what changed, but what I'm saying is the game itself is an absolute blast. It was just so much fun to play. Many of you prompted me to play Gigantic after Paragon was shut down, but I went the smite route instead and I am now realizing what a poor, horrible, terrible decision that was. Smite isn't okay game, but it's really not for me. Project Stamina on the other hand is absolutely up my alley. I did sign an NDA beforehand and good on Project Stamina for that, they're the only ones that have actually made me sign one, however after showing them the footage and talking things through, they decided to let me show you my experiences. We played Team Deathmatch which will not be the main game mode, however it will be available when the game is released if that's what you want to do. The map has so much verticality incorporated into it, you can see the outcroppings of Brock, pillars that jump between, and basically two and a half levels to the playing field. And you can take full advantage of all that verticality. Every hero has a massive amount of mobility and with that mobility comes the opportunity to outplay your opponents. If I had to make a comparison between Project Stamina and Paragon, I would say it would be like playing Sera. Sera's mobility and immunity frames always gave you the ability to outplay anyone no matter how fed they were. That's every hero in Project Stamina. After every engagement, good or bad, you always come away feeling that the outcome was decided by gameplay and not by overpowered items. Your mobility is tied to a stamina bar that gets used up when you sprint, dodge, yes every hero has an ability to quickly dodge in any direction, or use certain abilities. So it becomes a balance of when to use your stamina. If you never use it, you'll never catch anyone. If you use it too much, you'll just be a setting duck. I played all three available heroes, however Kira currently uses a placeholder. You'll see that little green Gumby running around shooting folks. That's Kira. My favorite was R4 bit, aka Rabbit, and while he didn't have big pointy teeth, he didn't have a big-ass two-handed base that he used with one hand because he's only got one arm. As you can see, his attack animations are smooth and due server purpose, each attack in the chain deals more damage than the last. He had a jump attack, kinda like Greystone's Assault the Gates, and a charge that pushed people back like Steel's Bull Rush. And a basic speed boost, which doesn't sound exciting, but it really was quite useful. I was able to speed around people to put their backs to a wall, smash them into it, and then leap onto them. The other character you see is Matani, meant to be a support-style hero. She has an AoE heal, a quick leap to a friendly target, kinda like Mercy in Overwatch, and a ranged wind ability that speeds up allies and slows down enemies. Her attack animations were absolutely beautiful. You really feel like you're doing a dance as you attack. In the final version of this game, each of these abilities will have a branching upgrade system as you level up. This is how Gigantic did things, and this is how Project Stamina will as well. Instead of going to a shop to buy items, you pick different upgrades to your abilities. For example, and I'm just making these up, these aren't official upgrades, but perhaps with R4's charge attack, you can level it to either increase the range of the knock pack, or increase the damage. This allows you to customize your play style. My main takeaway from all of this is that feeling of each encounter being decided by players' skill. Even when I got smashed, it felt like there were things I could have done differently to increase my chances of survival or secure a kill. That is what I think will make this game great and keep people coming back for more. That feeling that you can learn from your mistakes and play better each time, combined with the exhilaration of really outplaying someone and scoring that kill. I approached this game with open-ended expectations and was thoroughly pleased by the experience. The team behind Project Stamina are really creating something special here. The game, even in a very early pre-alpha state, is extremely enjoyable and will only get better as they add in more heroes, mechanics, and modes. I can't wait to see how this one unfolds. If you want to find out more about Project Stamina, I'll have the links to their various social media in the description below. For now, this is the Mangoo signing off. You guys, have a good one. Mangoo!