My name's Ronni Poffin. I am leading or helping to lead along with the European Science Foundation, the ProRes project, which I'm going to introduce you to. I noticed there are some friends and colleagues from the project in this meeting, so they'll correct me if I say something out of line or out of order. But what's interesting is I think the way which Camel started this session is quite useful because he's raised some of the issues that are of direct concern to what we need to try and do within the ProRes project. My aim is to just introduce you to the project, 20 minutes to maybe, you know, half an hour at most, and then we're looking for your help in moving the project forward and telling us how to achieve our complex ends. So I want to, I want to thank FitforRRI for giving us the opportunity to do this. Wait a minute. Okay. And obviously this is just the standard introduction to what ProRes is. Again, it's a Horizon 2020 project, 14 different partners across Europe, and the project is running until, at the moment, until April 2021, but we may be looking for an extension as everybody else has done. These are the people who are involved in this project. Now, I mean, what's interesting about this? I'm introducing you to the partners right away because this is part of the task that confronts us, the complexity of the task that confronts us. We are overlapping a lot of other cluster projects, including FitforRRI, a lot of RRI projects, but a lot of projects within the SWAPS program that is addressing research ethics and research integrity. So we have, we are sharing a lot of interests, we're sharing a lot of goals, and we're also sharing a lot of potential outcomes. The partners that we put together for this particular project, we chose very, very carefully for their skills and in an attempt to cover the range of needs that we needed to address. So, for example, we do have experts in research ethics, research integrity, RRI specific groups of our partners have operated in overlapping cluster projects, but also at the same time, we were tasked to address specific projects of concern to the commission. These are kind of obvious, AI and robotics, big data use, engineering, particularly nano-engineering, nanotechnology, the environment and how to deal with the latter one, crises and catastrophes. And of course, that necessarily brings in, and it's unavoidable, the pandemic and COVID-19, unavoidable. We will go back to discuss that, but I don't want us to dwell on that alone, as I think Kamal was trying to, the point he was trying to make. What specifically our main goal is to encourage policymakers and their advisors to seek evidence for their decisions from research that's been conducted ethically and with integrity. Now, that hides a whole host of difficult issues. The idea is that we want policymakers to look very carefully at the evidence that they choose and that that evidence that they use in order to design policy should be good evidence. Now, we'll come back to the notion of good evidence. We mean ethically good and we mean it methodologically good, although our task obviously is mainly to deal with issues of integrity and ethics in the production of the kind of evidence that we want to encourage policymakers to use. Now, what's the need, what lies behind this? The argument has been that biomedicine has generally dominated the ethics guidelines and it's been very influential in health policies. And all of the ethics codes and guidelines in the other sciences, the non biomedical sciences, the non medical sciences, do address research conduct and practices and there are lots of ethics codes and guidelines and guidelines for integrity and so on. But not many of them focus on improving policy making advice specifically. Now our argument all along and from the original proposal is that if you don't evidence your policy well, then you damage society. You damage economies, you damage the environment if you don't look you don't design your policies based on good evidence. So that's fundamental to the steer that we need to give. Now, lots of people talk about evidence based policy and it becomes a cliche in my career. I think now more than 30 years ago, there was a move towards evidence based medicine, and it was only after, you know, people started to ask questions you mean evidence, you mean medicine wasn't based on evidence before that. Well, a lot of it wasn't and some of the studies the early studies I saw, you know, a lot of medical practice was based on about 10% evidence and the rest was case based or, you know, based on anecdotes or based on what had worked in the past customer practice convention. So they are going to behind evidence based policy making should confront the same set of issues decision takers and policy maybe should be seeking evidence to support their work from all the expertise that's on offer. And if there are practices, whatever form they take, or evidence providers make mistakes in various ways. And this goes back to the notion of science as being uncertain. And so, in other words, mistakes can be made and are made by scientists and researchers. Then, if policy makers just simply use flawed evidence, then they're going to be damaging society in various ways. The social structure, the economic structure, the cultural structure, as well as as we know as having impacts on the environment. So what we're trying to argue for and discover how best to do it is that research should be as open as possible. It should be as reliable and again trustworthy as possible. And it shouldn't be driven by ideology or vested interests that damage the nature of the evidence that can be produced. If we do manage to find out what produces robust evidence, then that's the kind of evidence that can benefit societal well-being. Look after us and look after our societies. As a consequence of trying to do, we realised we have to have a much broader definition of research. I mean, can I even introduce this notion of what do we mean by science? Well, we're not just talking about science, we're talking about research and the broader notion of what constitutes evidence. So the most effective evidence and analysis that's used by policy makers, we know, rarely comes from academic researchers or from blue skies research because it's built it in so many ways. In fact, policymakers are more likely to go to their favoured lobbying agencies. They're more likely to go to the think tanks that they prefer and whose ideology matches theirs. But that's where they are still providing evidence. They are still looking at research, often it's secondary research, not primary research. And so what we want to say is that the standards of integrity that we normally apply to academic researchers and, you know, to independent researchers should apply to everybody. They should apply to everybody who's gathering evidence, analysing evidence for use in policymaking. And that's the only way in which we can develop trust in the process of conducting research. Now, we need everybody's help to do that. So the ProRes project needs to know how best we can do that, how best we can achieve that goal. We've got some ideas and we have made some suggestions in terms of the activities that we've been engaged in. Of course, this is a SWAPS project and so our underlying assumptions are common to all the SWAPS science within poor society projects. It's the interests of those that provide advice to ensure that the evidence produced is reliable and trustworthy and ethically generated because that's how trust and repeat use and repeat funding and so on is developed. And it's the interests of those who take the decisions to show that the evidence has been produced in the best possible way. And so trusting policy makers depends on that process as well. It's not just trusting the science that we're talking about here, we're talking about trust in the policy makers. And of course, again, Camel raised this issue in that old Michael Dove UK minister's notion of people being fed up with experts.  They're fed up with the way in which expertise is presented. And that's something that we need to look at in more care, with more care. So what are our challenges? I mean, this goes back to the original call. We were a challenge to cover all non-medical sciences. That's everybody else. And that's a big challenge. It also explains the diversity of the expertise that we are drawing on. And also, this is the next challenge, not just academic research, because we realize they aren't the most influential evidence generators for policy makers. So we had to include the diversity of all evidence-generating organizations. And that means sourcing the full range of existing relevant resources, you know, what's available to help people do this job of generating reliable and trustworthy evidence. And it also meant that our stakeholder range has got to be enormous, you know, from funding, from commissioning through researchers at all sorts of levels, right the way through to policy advisors and to policymaking, but also to include those people who influence the culture of the debate, like journalists and science journalists, but not just science journalists, investigating journalists as well. So it's a heck of a job this, I don't mind telling you. And it is complicated and broad, broad in terms of all the forms of evidence generation, you can think of, and broad in terms of the range of stakeholders. So then we started to think about, so what's in it for people? I mean, it's quite easy for people to say, I follow a particular code or guideline or I behave with integrity. And that can become kind of tokenist. We need to kind of sanction people or find a way of sanctioning people who don't behave properly, whatever they say they're doing. And we need to be able to reward people who do follow guidelines for the production of honest evidence, good evidence. And then, and again, Camel, one or two of the questions for Camel's introductory speech, talked about the problem of impact. So we need to find a way of assessing what kind of really works and discuss the notion of how we can evaluate these outcomes to see that policymakers are in fact choosing honest, reliable, robust evidence. And the framework has to match the ways in which other people have approached this. We've taken a long time to actually move towards this particular structure. And so what we're actually saying is our guidance framework has to have the following elements. A statement that can be signed up to. And then people will go along with and that covers this range of stakeholder. We're calling it the Accord statement at the moment, we might change that. We need also to help people to be able to identify the ethical evidence generators. So we have, we have a toolbox and we're developing a toolbox. Primarily that would be aimed at policymakers, but also into researchers because if researchers fill the toolbox incorrectly, then policymakers will know where to go to find the right people to make the right decisions. And then, like so many of these cluster projects in research and research integrity, we are providing a range of supportive resources. How I intend to show you how that works by a quick visit to the website. And so fundamentally that framework will supply the support guidance evidence that people need to be able to do the job we're asking them to do. So what we want you to do. And this community which includes RRI includes research ethics and research integrity because we're all in a sense after the same mission. We had a little competition within our consortium for a good slogan, mine lost actually my slogan was honest evidence for honest policies. And why did it lose, well, because what does honesty mean. And how far do you push this notion of honesty. So, yeah, that's the slide what I want to do is simply quickly take you if I can to if it's still around. Yeah, I just, you know, obviously you can spend more time looking at this and, you know, interrogating it and also offering us advice and suggestions but this is just to introduce the Accord statement. And that is, we commit to only using research that's undertaken ethically. We recognize that an underpinning by high quality research and evidence, including appraisals and evaluations is a precondition for evidence based policymaking and so on. Obviously, I'm not going to read all the way through it. But there are issues here that have to do with how the evidence is generated, how transparent it is, how complex of interest can be dealt with, because they're always going to be there. And vested interests are part and parcel of policymaking and also of course of science, necessarily so, and all forms of research. But we are trying to seek ways in which we can secure independence and integrity, and so on. And the final thing that I want to do is just look a quick look at toolbox. And this will operate as a range of different levels. But if you want to say to a policymaker, you know, they might say to you, well, how do I assess the ethical quality of research evidence, you're telling me to do this. This is the best way to make the decisions that I have to make. Well, we want to operate at a level, varying levels of sophistication, if you like. And the first level is very, very simple. Who did the research? How did they do it? Who did they study or what did they study? Why did they do it? Where did they do it? Was it reviewed in any way, peer reviewed or ethically reviewed? And what was the outcomes? Now, a policymaker or even their advisor will want those questions answered simply. If you're a researcher, you'll want to know how to fully address those questions so that you can convince a policymaker that in fact you are the one providing the evidence that they should be looking at. Okay, so fundamentally, that's a very quick overview of the progress project, what it is we're trying to achieve. And you can see immediately how it kind of links to the issues, certainly the chemical rays but it certainly overlaps with all the sort of RRI considerations. A few closing remarks. We were actually tasked to generate something that was equivalent to the OVADO convention and the Helsinki Declaration in biomedical science. Now, that is no easy task. And I think it's problematic because not everybody signed up, not every state signed up to the OVADO convention. And in my experience in doing ethics evaluation, ethics research appraisal for the European Commission, I noticed an awful lot of people simply declare and biomedical applications declare that they support the Helsinki Declaration. But how do I know that they do? So it can become very tokenist. So, and we don't know, nobody's ever conducted an impact analysis of OVADO or Helsinki. So we're tasked with achieving something that nobody knows was effective in the first place. I've actually written both to OVADO and to Helsinki, and they've never answered my questions. Several times I've said, you know, what effect have you had? What's the impact? They don't know. Now, I want something more than that. I want certainly our progress project to have an impact to make sure that some of the mistakes that we have seen very, very clearly in policymaking in terms of the pandemic. They should never have happened. So we want policy makers to think transparently, openly and carefully about how they get the evidence that they need in order to make the decisions that they make. Okay, so thank you very much. I hope we can get some interactive and some suggestions about how we actually do this. Don't tell me how difficult it is. I know how difficult it is. Tell me what we can possibly do in order to achieve. Thank you so much, Ron. I think to all the participants, if you want to raise a hand or leave a question to Ron, you can do it. Suggestions as well as questions? Any critical comments? Yes, we have one here. Are there any low hanging fruit when it comes to influencing policy makers? My feeling is that we might have more choice focusing on policy at the local level. Yeah, I think Andrea is right there. And again, we are seeing this in terms of what's happening certainly in the UK and also I live in France and I can see the same happening to a certain degree in France as well. I think it is so true. I think you might have more effect. The question I asked to Kamal has to do with that notion of how do you gain confidence and ensure that the public has some trust in evidence. I think it's easier to do if you have a closer connection with the generators of the evidence and the people who are actually implementing the policy based on that. So I think yes, Andrea, I think you're right. I didn't want to say too much with regard to Kamal's talk, but you see it specifically with a highly interdisciplinary set of issues to do with public health. So the temptations in public health is to always do things at a national level. It immediately raises issues of social control. There is, if we're talking about the power and the distribution of power, of course, the biomedics, biomedical or clinical tend to have some power, but public health medics are quite different in terms of their operation in the world. They need national levels of power and control in order to manage an epidemic. And certainly that is necessary to manage a pandemic as well. It is essentially about power. But the interesting thing, of course, it is about the influence of behavioural science could be a lot stronger because it is about understanding how people respond to the application of those power. It's definitely the case that it would operate more effectively at a local level. So what's happening in the UK now, of course, is that it is drilling down to local levels, but that power application is coming from the centre. Now, instead, it should be in the hands of the local councils and the local authorities. And then I'm sure it would be a lot more effective and perceived better by people in the community. Okay, so there's another comment from Rafael. I guess your proposed solution covers my questions, but as it seems to be one of your base assumptions I want to ask in nonetheless, what does it mean not to be driven by ideology? What about the economic framing of research in sense of what is being funded and what is not? Example, you can do tech research from an economic perspective or you can do it from a human-centered perspective. Both these ideology settings, the call and providing sound evidence. So what are you going to do? Yeah, again, I mean, it's a very good question and it's something that we have thought about. I suppose dealing with one element, not being driven by ideology, means that you have to be, we want to encourage policymakers to be open to the range of evidence that's available. And not simply go back to the tried and trusted think tank or lobbying agent or maybe academic research centre that they've gone to in the past. What we would want to encourage is have you considered the alternatives. It does not mean, and it can't mean that we would have to challenge people's ideologies because ideologies, the basis for, you know, if you like their election, their elevation to the position of decision making. So it doesn't mean you shouldn't have an ideology, but what you should do, and this is where transparency comes into it, and transparency then engenders trust, you should declare what your ideology is. You should be able to say, yeah, this is the particular set of assumptions and beliefs and values and principles that I follow. And you should also say I'm willing to look at other ideologies to see if they can convince me that, you know, or even maybe try it, you know, conduct political experiments to see if an alternative theory or alternative ideology possibly works. I mean, I can give an example, I think Raphael's point about economics or human centred perspective is interesting because we should be looking at economics as if it were human centred. I mean, my particular economic ideology is linked to Schumacher's notion of human centred economics, which is essentially Buddhist economics. So, you know, I'm combining, you know, the notion of a, you know, if you like a particular economic perspective or economic theory with a humanistic one. And there are people who argue from that point of view. But to take an alternative, if we look at a particular think tank, I mean, I've used this example often because it illustrates the problem that we confront. There is a think tank in the UK called the Institute for Economic Affairs, the IEA. Now, the IEA is extremely well funded, has a tremendous amount of influence. Fundamentally comes from a freedom and ask perspective, it is known by no means Keynesian. It was certainly favoured by the Thatcherite ideologies. Now, there's nothing wrong in a think tank providing evidence. The problem I have with something like the IEA is we don't know where the money comes from. Now, if they could enhance their transparency, my trust in that particular ideological position would be improved, would be enhanced. However, my trust is lowered as a consequence of me not knowing where the money is coming from. Now, that's not the only issue I would raise with something like an agency like that, because I would say they move beyond simply being a think tank into being a lobbying agency. Now, so that raises another issue. But Raphael, you're right, it is extremely difficult, but the way around it is a declaration of what your ideology and or your theoretical position is to be transparent about that. But also from the point of view of the policy makers to say, oh, what are the alternatives? I just don't rule them out immediately. I consider what they might be. Thank you, Ron, but Raphael is another question here also, but how to guarantee that there is an equal integrity in each local government and not a concern with local economies or lobbies or other interests. The fact is that there is no real transparency in what lies beneath the local policies. Yes, that's from Raquel. Yeah, I mean, this is a very realist position. Sorry. Yeah. It is a very realist position. I mean, we're under no illusions about the nature of local politics. And clearly, there are dangers because local political influences, disguised power bases and so on, can influence what actually goes on and they're going to be more or less interested in transparency. Clearly, they're not going to be transparent if there is a degree of corruption going on. I suppose it requires, I mean, I'm not against and what I said before about public health, for example, is that it needs to be, to some degree, operating at a national and given the pandemic at a global level, global with the local, the national with the local. And the question of saying, you know, if local lobbies or economies or whatever are influential, they need to be transparent about it. And the assurance of that transparency must come from a higher level from a national level. In some cases might come from, if you like, a professional level, the profession of researchers. At this moment, it goes back to that notion of a community of researchers and scientists who are interested in research integrity. And that has grown, obviously, as a consequence, I would say, as a consequence of the Cancer Project Commission has funded, because that community is where we know each other, we can work with each other, we share each other's ideas and suggestions. So that, you know, we can operate both of you, like at the political level, the legislative level, the ministerial level, but also at the, in terms of the profession of researchers, so we can challenge if things look a bit, for want of a better term suspicious or fishy at the local level, that needs to be challenged. And that goes, that goes to the other stakeholder, remember that I've said we're interested in the journalist and the science reporter, and the local journalist and the national journalist because that's how you find out about these kinds of things. We've got a particular esteem for investigative journalism, and we have contacts within our group with the two groups of investigative journalists, one that operates at a global level and one that operates at a national level. Now, we will need them to sign up to our Accord statement, we'll need them to behave properly as well, and not operate just within the ideology of their newspaper. But I'm trying to answer that really difficult problem that Raquel has raised there, and that is that notion, how do you tease out what the suspicious nuances are within local communities. Thank you. Thank you once more, Ron. I don't know if anyone has more questions to raise to Ron. So, thank you so much once again, and please remind that we have another session so we're going to make a huge break, and then we start at 11, 1145. Okay. Let me say thank you for the opportunity and encourage people to keep in touch with us so that we can, we can do this job. We need advice, we need suggestions and we need ongoing interaction, it's very important. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you so much.


OK. Thank you, everyone, and welcome to our talk on API server-only clusters for fun and hopefully for some profit. So, do you introduce us? My name's Matt Turner. I'm a software engineer at Tetrate, and we have my esteemed, inestimable colleague, head of platform, former Istio maintainer, software engineer, very embarrassed person, Liam White. So, yeah, we both work at Tetrate, which is a company that uses service mesh to do identity-based application micro-segmentation at enterprise scale, so for high-insurance environments, dealing with the organisational and technical scaling problems that you'll have, trying to do hybrid cloud, multi-region, and zero trust at large scale. So, we know, I guess, a fair amount about Istio and Kubernetes, and we've hopefully got an interesting talk for you today based on those tech. So, let's remind ourselves first how a Kubernetes cluster hangs together. Apologies to the Kubernetes experts in the room. I see some literal upstream contributors in the audience, but I need to do this to get us all speaking the same language, and this is maybe a mental model that not everybody has. So, this is, I guess this is a diagram of a classic Kubernetes cluster, exploded with all the components of the control plane for folks who've not seen them before. So, let's just run through an example, right? So, if I submit a deployment, I write some YAML because it's Kubernetes, that's what we do, and I submit that YAML file into the cluster via the API. So, first of all, we hit the API server, right? Just the thing that serves the API, and our request is authenticated. Are you a user of this cluster? Can you prove it? Then it's validated in some other ways. Some authorization, sorry, happens. I know who you are now. Do you have permission to create new deployments? And then, eventually, this deployment is serialized and written to the database. And at this point, there's kind of a pause. There's no more synchronous actions that take place. This resource is at rest in the database. It's stored persistently. It's actually encoded to some protobuffs, and it sort of sits there. Now, at this point, the deployment controller, which is a piece of code, this has a watch on that type of resource in the database, and it wakes up and it processes it. Now, I'm using controller in this case as a kind of abstract term. I mean like a particular loop of code that runs and processes this kind of resource. Physically, this loop of code is in the controller manager component, alongside a lot of other loops of code. Liam's going to talk a little bit more about what we actually mean by controller later. So, like all controllers, the deployment controller reconciles its input. So, it takes its input, which is this deployment resource, and it reconciles it with the state of the world. So, in this case, what it's going to do is it's going to make a new replica set resource and add that back into the API server. Now, that goes in the front door, just like your cubectl command or anything else would do. So, this goes through the API server, through the same set of verifications and authentication and authorization that anything else does. It's the same path, so once it's traversed the API server, if it's okay, then it'll go and again sit in the database. So, we have another controller. The replica set controller, physically in the controller manager, but a separate loop of code, that wakes up, reconciles the replica set to a pod, which is again fed back into the system. Now, this pod, so that's node name the field that I've shown there. So, this pod has its node name field set to nil, because the replica set controller knows that it wants a pod running, but it doesn't care where. That's not actually its job. So, it just says, hey, I've got no opinion on that, go do it. So, into the scheduler. Now, the scheduler is another controller. It actually physically runs separately for reasons, and it has a watch on pods, specifically pods, so the pod gets sat in the database with its nil node name field. The scheduler wakes up and processes it, and it's got a watch on pods, specifically with a nil node name field. It does some logic to work out where to place them, what that node name should be, and its reconciliation is to put the pod back in the system with that node chosen, with that node name field filled out. So, this isn't a new resource in this case. This is a patch, an update to one, but it's still reconciliation. So, when this is back in the database, it's at rest again, yet another controller kicks in, and this one is the cubelet. So, the cubelet wakes up and picks this thing up, and, as I said, the cubelet is, if you look at it, that way a controller too. It reconciles pods, scheduled pods, you know, with a non-nil node name field, into containers running on the cubelet's worker node. So, in this case, the cubelet on this node has a watch for pods with the node name field set to node one, picks it up and reconciles it into actual running containers. So, just to get that pod running, we saw four controllers reconciling things one after another, actually feeding into each other. So, the endpoint controller that reconciles services into endpoint resources, and kube proxy can be thought of as a controller that reconciles those endpoint resources into IP tables rules. So, that's another two controllers just to enable the basic deploy a workload and make it accessible functionality. So, this is how I personally like to reason about Kubernetes. If this is new to you, you take nothing else away from this talk. That's hopefully a useful model. It really helps when things get stuck and when you're trying to debug the system. Apart from that database and the API server that's kind of brokering access to it, like being a front end to it, I would say that everything is a controller. So, there's one controller per type of resource, and they reconcile those resources into other types of things. Maybe other resources, or maybe external things. Maybe containers on nodes, maybe IP chains. This is the beauty of Kubernetes. This is what makes it asynchronous and declarative. There's actually nothing to stop you interacting with any of these resources at any level, by the way. You can deploy like a pre-schedule pod with a node name field set. You can deploy your own endpoints, and it'll just work. It's one of the things the CKA actually tests you on. But you normally use those high levels of abstraction. But controllers aren't very powerful here, but they certainly weren't invented by Kubernetes. They're not just a Kubernetes thing. So, Liam's going to talk in more general terms about controllers as we look to stretch this pattern a little. He's probably speaking to Mike without help. So, some of you may be aware that Kubernetes, let's go and borrow the concept of controllers, are more specifically control loops from industrial control systems. So, unless you live in a cabin in the woods, you come into contact with several control loops every day. So, there's one controlling the temperature in this room, most likely, and one is actually keeping me alive. So, this is an insulin pump. For those unfamiliar with the endocrine system in your body, which is the system that this manages, our bodies have to maintain a certain range of glucose in the bloodstream. If that goes too low, the brain doesn't have enough energy or fuel to actually do anything, and you can probably guess what happens if that happens. And if it goes too high, it basically damages your internal organs. And that's kind of what type 2 diabetes is. That's why you get some of those side effects. So, the side effects are things like blindness, weakened immune system, and eventually it leads to the same outcome as going too low. So, I have type 1 diabetes, which basically means my immune system attacks my pancreas, and so my body is unable to produce insulin to lower my blood sugar. So, instead I have the insulin pump, which is a control loop. So, it has a pumping mechanism, which is the thing actually working on this device, the kind of core process that it does. It doses the insulin. It is the system element in this diagram. It has the controller running on the pump, which is the algorithm basically that identifies when my blood sugar is out of range, and then adjusts my insulin dose based on that. And then finally, if I can get access to it, I have a sensor on the back of my arm here, and that communicates with the pump and accesses the sensor in this control loop. And actually this pattern of sensor controller and system is so common that the different parts of this particular control loop are actually regulated based on this model. So, the FDA, which is the pharmaceutical regulations body in the US, explicitly gets medical companies to approve each of these boxes individually. So, in my loop, the sensor is developed by a company called Dexcom, and the pump is developed, and the algorithm actually is developed by a company called Tandem. But when they go through FDA regulation, they have to go through it twice for each of those different things. And we can actually go even further and say that this pattern occurs in nature, right? Because all of this external stuff I have keeping me alive, everyone in this room has it internally, right? Thanks to millions of years of evolution, they've eventually ended up with a sort of control loop that manages this kind of automatically for you. And all of this is kind of to make the point that these patterns are well known. They're widely used and they're not unique to Kubernetes. And given that they occur naturally in nature via revolution, you could maybe even argue that that actually is actually a universal pattern. It's not just like an engineering thing. So, if we go back to our deployment example, in our case, the sensor is the API server. You can kind of argue semantics there. The controller is obviously the deployment controller. There's a reason they're named controllers. And the system is kind of the combination of the replica set controller, the Kublit, the pod controller, the nodes, basically everything that's responsible for making sure that that container ends up actually getting run. And the nice thing about Kubernetes is that early on the community realized that if they can make this pattern extensible, if they can make it so that anyone can use it, then basically anyone can write code that will leverage this framework. And that's kind of the origin story for CRDs. And one example of a project that leverages this extensibility in particular is Istio. So, when the idea that would eventually become Istio was being formed, there was some discussion about whether or not it should be in the core Kubernetes project, whether it should be a separate project. But because Kubernetes had already done the work to externalize this control loop framework, it was much easier for it to act as a standalone project. Istio is built using the same controller pattern as my insulin pump, but Istio actually isn't a closed loop like my insulin pump is. So, in a closed loop, feedback is, for lack of a better term, fed back as an input into the system. Whereas in Istio, input is solely from the API server. So, it watches the API server for endpoints and services, and obviously all the Istio CRs, so virtual service, destination rule, that type of stuff. And then it configures a fleet of envoys based on that information. So, it's still that same control loop. It's just open, not closed. And the reason that it's open is because those envoys never feedback into the state of the system.  They respond on those addresses, but they don't actually... There's no full-circle, snaking-his-tail type thing. But Istio is just one example of a controller. There are smaller, more scoped custom controllers, like CERT Manager and external DNS. Or there are larger ones like Crossplane, which allows you to provision all of your cloud infrastructure using that same control loop framework. Which brings us back to Matt, who is going to discuss how far we can push this patent in Coop. Thanks. So, this... Only one of these is on. So, this was the original idea. Actually, I was using Crossplane.  And I was just using it to spin up a cloud cluster. Quite a simple use case. But for folks who haven't used it, unlike Terraform or Pallumi, you actually need a cluster to run Crossplane in. So, I had a bootstrap problem. I had a cluster zero problem. So, like all good engineers, I wrote a bash script. Right? And this thing spun up kind, and it installed Crossplane into my kind cluster. And then it deployed the Crossplane CRs, Custom Resources, to specify that cloud cluster that I actually wanted and to bring it up. And it waited for the cloud cluster to come up. And then it tore down kind with Crossplane inside it. That's quite heavy. It takes quite a long time. It uses quite a lot of RAM. You know, cloud clusters can take a while to come up. Mentioning no provider names. So, obviously, I wanted to play Stardew Valley, but it just kept, like, paging steam out to disk because it was using all the RAM. It was very annoying. And I thought this probably isn't the best way to do this. And I was looking at, you know, the kind I was having to use to do this and thinking I actually don't need all of these components. Do I? Can I just sort of go build myself an API server and then, you know, run dot slash API server locally and then dot slash control plane and connect to that? Do I really need any of these other components? This didn't, admittedly, that experiment kind of stopped there. This doesn't really work for Crossplane. You've got some fairly big issues, like Crossplane doesn't do everything in the, sort of, in the Crossplane pod that you initially deploy. It actually spawns worker pods to do those actual reconciliations. It'll spawn one to talk to AWS, one to talk to GCP. So, in order to deploy those pods, you basically kind of do need a whole Kubernetes system that's sort of what it's for. But Tetrate, you know, we do a lot of work with Istio and Envoy. So, I was sort of talking to my co-workers about this idea and we wondered if we could apply it to the Istio control plane instead. Because, importantly, Istio doesn't spawn its own child workloads it manages Envoy's. So, that idea kind of goes like this. Now we've got our mental model. So, in this diagram I've got another pod running down here. The only difference is this one is an operator, right? You can see it talking to the API server. So, this is a controller too. That's what the operator pattern is. And what am I saying? Oh, yeah. So, what are the controllers in the control plane that we discussed before in the controller manager and in the scheduler? They handle built-in resources, built-in types like deployment and replica set. These are like first-party operators, if you like. So, this thing is just a third-party operator that handles third-party resources. Anybody old enough to remember the TPR, third-party resource type? These things are now defined by CRDs, right? Which is just a replacement for that. So, it's not magic. It just makes calls to the API server, which is always accessible to all pods and is called Kubernetes. Client Go is actually going to do most of the work and you just write the reconciliation business logic. Now, this one reads from the API server. It does actually feedback into it again. So, like Liam says, this is sort of a closed loop controller. It makes more resources in the same system. So, this is maybe cert manager or something. But this one, for example, is Istio. This is open loop. So, this reads from the API server. It processes those Istio CRs. But its output, the world that it affects, is the sidecar proxies. Those could even be proxies that are on VMs through the Istio's mesh expansion feature. So, they could be completely outside of the cluster. So, if this is what I'm doing, reading from submitting CRs through the API server into the database and then reading through the API server out of the database into this operated pod and affecting envoys, well, do I need a controller manager? Because I'm not reconciling resources in the database. I've not got that closed loop. I'm not reconciling resources back into the API server because I'm not ultimately trying to make containers on a node. So, I don't really need the controller manager because I don't need the deployments into replica sets into pods. If I've got no pods, I don't need to schedule them. I don't need that scheduler because I'm not going to have any pod resources. I don't want to assign any to nodes. So, if I've not got pod resources that I'm assigning to nodes, do I actually need the cubelit because that's the sort of container controller that reconciles pods into containers? So, maybe I don't need that either. And then, if I don't have any running pods, I'm not going to need cube proxy either because that reconciles into, you know, IP tables rules to do the in cluster network vips. Technically, if you want it to be technical, it only does the sort of low balancing vips, the sort of flat overlay network for the whole cluster is made by CNI components which are a lower level they're not shown. But they, you know, they also are probably not needed here either. So, if we look at this picture, it now looks pretty simple, but we do still have a bunch of features here. This API server is very feature rich. We've still got a production grade HTTP server, right? We've still got the authentication layer. We've still got the authorization. This is all in the API server, by the way. We've still got built-in admission control with that you can sort of program to guarantee certain features of the resources you apply. We've got the hookable admission control so you're mutating and validating the API server's versioning support where it can mangle versions, upgrade and downgrade versions based on rules you give it. We've got its defaulting support so you can apply partial resources and you can do three-way merges, server-side applies. We've got a serialization layer and then a database driver for the persistent storage in XD. So we've got a lot of stuff. If you look at these pictures, if you think about the model, we've still got systems. So is this sufficient to do what I was talking about? So the first big question is, well, how do we run this operator, right? Because without Qubelet or Qproxy, this blue box is just a computer. It's not a node with a capital N so I can't submit a pod resource and have this thing run. So I need to find some way to run it. I could use a Qubelet with static manifests. But without Qproxy, it can't just get to the API server by asking for Kubernetes. It's not going to be that convenient. We don't really have a cluster here. So are you better off just using system D or Docker or whatever and doing your own load balancing and IPs? As I say, this is a theoretical minimum. This isn't easy, but it's an interesting thing to reason about. There are a few other things that won't work if you do want to mutate or validate your webhook, which is something that is theorised on quite a lot. You would need certs for that so that this pod, API server needs to be able to call it in a secure fashion. It needs certs. You'd normally use cert manager for that. Where are you going to run cert manager? How's cert manager going to do its thing? And the other big issue is service accounts. So while a service account is a resource, it's just an API server SCD thing. The tokens for them are reconciled. They're made by a loop in the controller manager and they're made available to the operators because they're mounted into pods. We don't have any pods. This isn't really a pod. So none of this is going to happen. But it's not so easy. But what you could do maybe for the token thing is you could turn off security. You don't need a service account token if you don't have RBAC or ABAC if you've disabled all of the authorization layers in the API server.  But for a small and embedded system with maybe no network access at all, maybe it's not that crazy. And that, as I say, was the original idea that prompted this. It was bundling an operator, something like a crossplane or an SDOD with just the API server and the database almost acting as libraries in a very small self-contained unit. Maybe I run them all in one system D slice or something. But just to absolutely repair down the resource uses and the complexity of what I need to get my bootstrap. So, as I say, theoretical minimum, hopefully an interesting thing for folks to go and think about. I think it is possible to build it. I didn't. I'd be interested to get tweets out of it. But Liam is not going to talk about a slightly less extreme version that he actually did build that does make a lot of sense and offers us a kind of serverless Istio. Okay. So, like Matt said, one place we can use this minimal API server control loop is what's known as remote Istio control plane. So this architecture diagram is just from the Istio eye docs. But basically it's in the remote architecture model. Istio can manage the networking of multiple clusters and VMs either on premise, in the cloud, doesn't matter from a central location. Now, to run the control plane like this requires an API server to get the desired states and something to run the Istio controller process itself. Now, thanks to cloud providers, getting an API server nowadays is a relatively painless experience although some are less painless than others. In our prototype we use GKE but any coonetys works. I mostly use that because the GKE cluster has been up pretty quickly and the feedback loop is much better. But next we need to run IstioD. We don't have to deal with provisioning nodes, so let's go with serverless workloads and then all we have to do is ask for POTS. On GCP, this is autopilot on AWS, this is Fargate on Azure, that virtual nodes. It uses the virtual coonet project under the covers I believe though. Whichever cloud provider you use here, the key is that we've gone up a level in the abstraction and we've reduced our maintenance burden because we don't actually have to manage nodes in this scenario, we have to manage container image vulnerability, sure, but you don't have to upgrade nodes, you don't have to worry about that side of things. By the way, there's actually nothing that requires us to run IstioD inside of coonetys in this scenario. We could run it on a VM somewhere but we don't read remotely from our API server using that same service account token thing. Because remember, our API is just operating as a database and control loop framework, it just happens to have a side gig as a container orchestrator. So next we need to run IstioD but no, sorry, I'm coming back to the same thing. The next problem we have to solve is how do our workloads reach IstioD to receive their networking configuration? We need to run a service pod because it's a gateway, not a side car, we don't need to do the IP tables that enable the service pod to connect to IstioD. So it doesn't matter if it's on a different VM somewhere else or another coop cluster, all that matters is if you have that L3 reachability, right, and then IstioD is responsible for managing the security of that once you have that reachability. Now we don't need to do the IP tables redirect, so we can do this on serverless still, we don't have to worry about notes. And what we've effectively built in this scenario is a very rudimentary Istio is a service offering, right? We, yes, we have to make sure Istio is deployed, it's scaled correctly, you know, upgrades are handled correctly and high availability, but we've reduced our maintenance burden to only include things at the abstraction level we actually care about in this scenario, right? This was definitely a win, as anyone who's had to upgrade notes recently will attest to. So this remote architecture in Istio is actually being used by several users in production, so I highly recommend you go to this link on the left. Airbnb basically did a talk talking about the remote IstioD architecture. They use their architecture to bridge VM and coop. They use a fully-clired environment, but again, it's semantics where it's run and doesn't really matter to Istio. Although I don't think they're using the serverless cube compute stuff. But in the talk, they discussed how they migrated from their existing ZooKeeper-based service discovery system to an Istio as a service that their platform team runs in their own central cluster. And on the right there, you'll find the codebase of the very hacky proof of concept I've put together that demonstrates this, this serverless Istio as a service in GKE. We built it using the codes there. It's built using Pulumi, so it's TypeScript, but anyone who's familiar with Terraform will see what we're doing there. So this pattern also applies to something like cross-playing. It doesn't have to be Istio. In Matz's example, a platform team can basically build an entire platform as a service, using this same pattern. It doesn't... There's nothing within cross-playing that I know of in the architecture that needs it to actually have a pod on a physical node. You could run this serverless as well. And GitOps leverages the same model with tools like Argo and Flux, right? It's that same control loop pattern, and both of these tools, again, can be used to build platform as a service things, but scope to deploying and upgrading workloads in Kubernetes instead of something like cross-playing that does your entire cloud infrastructure. I'll hand you back over to Matt. Thanks. So, yeah, we recapped how the control-playing works, or maybe we learned it for the first time. I think we then introduced the idea of using the minimum possible parts of it, and as I say, maybe a bit of a thought experiment at the moment. I personally not built it, but I think it's possible. It just didn't fit my use case at the time, but Liam showed something slightly less extreme that did come off the back of that that we have built that does work for us. It, you know, when you're getting that managed cloud provider control-playing, you will have a scheduler and a control manager sitting there. Their CPUs are basically idle, because we're not calling on them, but they do exist. But like Liam says, we don't have a maintenance customer at the level of abstraction that we want. So, hopefully this talk, we've taught you something and I'm going to inspire you to take away that pattern, maybe even build the totally extreme one if you do, let us know. So, yeah, thank you all for coming. We'll be happy to take them.


Hello everybody. So, depending on where you live, what's going on if you're a dental hygienist or not, you might be wondering, you might be excited about your new teeth whitening business and wondering, can I work or not? So, here's the kicker. So, it really does depend on where you live. So, depending where you live, you need to check. If you are a dental hygienist and they allow dental services, yes, you can work. If you're not a dental hygienist and they're not allowing hair salons to open or nail salons, think spa services, you cannot work. So, this is where there's a fine line. So, here where I live, dental hygienists can work, but spa services cannot. So, you might be wondering, well, are you allowed to work as a teeth whitening technician? What's going on? Since I'm a dental hygienist performing teeth whitening services, I can work because I'm a dental hygienist and dental is considered essential. Teeth whitening isn't, of course, but I'm doing it because that's in my practice. Okay? If I was a nail technician, a spa, I wouldn't be able to perform teeth whitening. Is it fair to those spas out there that can't do teeth whitening, but I can? No, it's not fair, but it is what it is. But where you live, if you're not a dental professional, please check our spas allow to be open. If they're not, you cannot work either. Okay? A lot of people are being very honest with me and saying, well, I want to work. I'll make sure my clients feel comfortable. I feel comfortable. What do I do? Well, I can't tell you what to do. That's up to you. Okay? But I'm just telling you the right thing to do is you cannot work if spas are not open. So does that make sense, you guys? Let me know if any questions and have a good day.


MC-12 is the 12th Ministerial Conference of the Ministers at WTO. That obviously is a space that's much more oriented towards realizing a free trade system and the right to health is not a priority issue for WTO. In contrast, the World Health Assembly is hosted by the World Health Organization and the right to health, meaning the highest attainable standard of well-being very much at the center of WHO's agenda. So the institutions are different also in terms of their procedures. WHO is more transparent than WTO. So for example, at the WHO, the agenda is published and the documentation relating to particular agenda items is made available usually in advance. In addition, civil society organizations that are in official relations with WHO can attend the meetings, they're party to discussions, they can listen to discussions of agenda items and they can make statements from the floor. In contrast, the World Trade Organization is much more closed so civil society organizations don't have access to meeting rooms, you don't know what's being discussed and also the proposed texts and so forth are not published as a matter of routine. And so in this way, WHO is slightly more open to civil society participation. They can work on similar issues. One example would be food, but they see them very differently. So WHO, for example, would look at the health effects of food. Food would be something that they're concerned about in relation to diabetes, heart disease and so forth. And so we've seen in this agenda that WHO is addressing interventions aimed at mitigating the extent of NCDs, so dealing with the effects, but that they're still kind of constrained in dealing with the commercial determinants of NCDs. So the way in which corporate actors can shape the policy landscape, for example, there's an acknowledgement that that's an issue, that that's a problem in WHO documentation, but there isn't necessarily an emphatic exclusion of corporate actors and big agree or big food from stakeholder consultations, for example. So WTO also deals with issues around food, but here the issue is seen as an extension of the trade agenda, but still these agendas have an impact on social determinants of health. So for example, one of the items being discussed is an item relating to fisheries and agricultural provisions. And there is a concern that at this ministerial conference, decisions will be taken that harm the livelihoods of small scale fishes and agricultural producers and that give big players in these industries even more power. So obviously that will affect livelihoods and also access to food and in this way down the road, it affects also the right to health. But as I said at the beginning, WTO is mandated to prioritize the right to health. So similar issues with very different approaches, although in both institutions, there is an openness to consultation with full profit actors. Under the guise of multi-stakeholderism. Many of the current discussions aimed at creating an infrastructure that could make responses to health emergency more effective, but also one of the mandates was to make sure that these responses are more equitable. So there is some concern that some of the framing around the language of pandemics versus health emergencies, that that's likely to undermine equity. So what do I mean by that? A pandemic is something that comes along less frequently than health emergencies. And many of the equity considerations being discussed, for example, the obligation of welfare countries to assist developing countries under conditions of health emergencies. There's a concern that when the language shifts from health emergencies to pandemics, those kinds of equity considerations only then apply to these much more wide scale events, because pandemics of course broaden their scope in health emergencies. And so ideally we'd like to see equity considerations in responses to health emergencies, not just pandemics. So there has been a kind of struggle around the language. I used to describe the kinds of responses to these specific types of interventions. There is a lot of discussion about institutional reforms and increasing efficacy. And one way in which that discussion has moved is a set of proposed amendments by the US government to the international health regulations. So those proposed centralizing decision-making power in the DG. It suggests shorted time frames for reporting outbreaks and so forth. And it also limits the obligation to consult with national governments experiencing an outbreak. And so this is something different. This is something that to some extent limits, I suppose, if it were to be accepted, the sovereignty or the degree of consultation with states in which outbreaks are happening. So that's I think something that might be posed for concern for some countries. There's a lot of discussion about financing for pandemic preparedness, surveillance and so forth, or alternatively for health emergencies. So the financing discussion is obviously important, but it does seem to be centered around a fairly specific issue, which is this issue of health emergencies. And so more extensive attention could be paid to investing in health systems as the foundation of any response to a health emergency. So in other words, right now, the attention seems to be on making health systems resilient during emergencies. But I would argue that a more foundational response is to make sure that health systems are functional all the time and that could then make them more capable of spotting outbreaks and if needed, responding to health emergencies or pandemics. I think another thing to think about in relation to this is that yes, financing for emergencies is important, but so there are other mechanisms that could increase the fiscal space that governments have. One would be looking at debt, especially odious debt that countries are holding and that constrains what they have available to spend on public services like health. And so debt and austerity policies also are problematic in terms of undermining investments in the public offices. Yes, so trips waiver was introduced in October 2020 by Indians of Africa. And it's been, I think, a steep road in terms of getting WTO members to accept the waiver in its original form. A leaked text was released a couple of months ago and it was framed as a text that had been created through consultations with Indians of Africa, the EU and the US. So the leaked text seems to be closer to the EU's position throughout the debates on the trips waiver. Of course, the original waiver asked for suspension of many different forms of IP, not on patents. And it also asked for the suspension of the waiver to apply to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. What we see is that the leaked text is much narrower. So for example, it only deals with vaccines and that doesn't seem to have shifted. It's been criticized for not really being a waiver at all, but an extension of the EU position that the trips flexibility is sufficient. And so the waiver expands on the ways in which, for example, licensing compulsory licensing will be done to increase access to vaccines in particular. And so I think it's very much an issue that is important. I think if the waiver and its original form can be passed, it would set a huge precedent for equity and access to essential medicines. And I think the length of time that it's taken to pass the waiver shows that the IP system is dysfunctional. So even in the midst of a huge crisis, it's not doing what it supposedly could do with existing flexibilities. It's been two years, more than two years, and existing flexibilities have not delivered. Tech transfer increased access to vaccines and so forth. And so I think it would be regrettable if the leaked text would become the baseline position in the future for future suspensions of IPs during health and emergency. So I think one of the things to look out for in terms of the assembly is to generally look at what happens with a conversation around funding for health emergencies and health pandemics. I think it would be really problematic if there was a vertical approach to that because you want the health system as a whole to be strengthened to present the basis corresponding to any kind of health issue, including a health emergency. I think on the point of verticalization, there's generally a threat that runs through many of the agenda items that issues are somehow considered in silos. And so again, when we look at the health system as an integrated whole, that's not necessarily something that will strengthen the health system as a whole, particularly not if you're trying to build a comprehensive primary health care approach as the center of your health system. I think one of the things that's really important is the issue of commercial determinants of health, of how full-profit corporations impact health. There is this framework for engagement with non-state actors that WHO adopted some years ago. And there are many agenda items that speak to the need for consultation with corporate actors, non-state actors, including corporate actors, that speak to the significance of corporate or private sector sources and sources of funding for WHO's work. And so I think that what happens on that front and how it impacts the power of commercial determinants of health is definitely something to keep an eye on because the issue of corporate power has not been front and center, I would say, in this agenda. And it's been highlighted, I think, in the context of abandonment, just really how much of a determinant of health transnational corporations currently. I think for MC12, definitely what happens in terms of negotiations on fisheries and agriculture, that's important from the point of view of food security, food sovereignty, prospects for food sovereignty, and livelihoods sources of income that people can use to access all of the other things they need to live their lives. And then I think the other thing that would be important to keep track of is what happens to these so-called JSI's, the joint statement initiatives, particularly the ones focusing on e-commerce and trading and services, both of which have an impact on the health arena and how health care is provided in the private sector. So JSI is not officially part of the agenda, but there does seem to be some interest by the development states in particular to bring them to the meeting, and so that definitely is something to keep it high.


Okay Julia, what is the meaning of all of this? What's going on? We're dancing to be of service. We are dancing for different service causes. We're dancing specifically for the elderly. We're bringing, we're revolutionizing elder camp, bringing dance, music, art, and nature to nursing homes and long-term care. So this is a way to allow fundraising and spreading awareness. And how good is it dancing on the beach at sunset? We're dancing to, with headsets, with our bare feet, and it's self-care as a catalyst for change. You can take care of yourself and make a change in the world at the same time. Dancing makes you feel better. I've been dancing every Monday night at Venice Beach in a silent beach dance where you wear headphones and you dance amongst a group of people in support of a charity called Plant Pals. And I was always carrying inhibitions around dancing. I always was self-conscious that the way I was dancing, people were going to look at me and go, what the hell are you doing? What moves are they? Because I don't really have natural rhythm. At least I don't feel like I do. But Julia Grace, who's a friend of mine, runs this wonderful charity called Plant Pals. What she does is she takes music and dance into nursing homes, into where the elderly stay in healthcare facilities. And dance and music and flowers and plants really have healing capabilities. They really do elevate people's moods. And actually there's a lot of science to suggest that plants and dance and music can reduce someone's stay in a hospital. It just gives you this boost in energy, this boost in mood. And so a group of friends go to Venice Beach Pier on a Monday night and also on Thursday mornings and we dance at sunset or on Thursday we dance at sunrise in support of Plant Pals. I'm about to go dancing on the beach at sunset. My friends behind me are getting ready. We're going to put on some headphones, listen to music through the headphones and dance. To people watching us they're not going to be able to hear the music so it's going to look a little peculiar. Here we go. And then you know I went to the Good Shepherd healthcare facility in Santa Monica to deliver some flowers and to also dance with them and to listen to some beautiful music from a beautiful pianist called Murray Hildery who owns a company called Mind Travel. And he plays this music on the piano and it comes through on your headphones. And you know I saw patients in there moved to tears. I mean Julia is just lovely. She moves around and she's dancing with these people but I saw people you know elderly patients suffering from dementia wearing these these headphones and listening to this beautiful music and literally being moved to tears. It's incredible. So dance like no one's watching, listen to music and let it heal you. Dance, move, smile at flowers, give people flowers and come and join us on a Monday night in support of Plant Pals on Venice Beach in California. Thanks for watching this video. If you liked it please do like it and leave a comment down below. What's your favorite song that you'd like us to dance to on the beach next week? Leave a comment down below. I'd love to hear from you.


In principle, we would like the molecule to be at low levels of energy, right? It's better to be good than to be bad. But the question is, what do we mean by good and bad? You would probably instinctively say that something here, if this is energy as a function of some arbitrary coordinates, being low is good and being high is bad. But how bad is bad? If that red peak was half that height, would that still be horribly bad? Or is it somewhat bad? And is that blue astronomically good or just a little bit good? We don't know. Second, you have two more valleys here. I didn't mark them as good. But does that mean that they're bad or not just as good as the lowest one? We don't know that either. And we're going to need some tools to start describing that or there is no way we're going to learn how to describe how molecules behave in practice. The problem is that that's not entirely trivial. There are a couple of examples that we can use to introduce that.


We'll call the Capital Improvements Commission to order. It is four o'clock. Call the roll. Mayor Ryan Sorenson is here. Alderperson Mitchell. Alderperson Flicky Paneski. Alderperson Perella. Planning Commission member Jerry Jones. Citizen member Sarah Wies Harrison. Nick Dussault. All right. For those in attendance, if you're able to stand, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under guide, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Next item on the agenda is approval of our minutes from our April 25th meeting. Is there a motion to approve? Motion by Alderflicky Paneski, and by Jerry Jones. Any discussion on the minutes? Seeing none. All those in favor, please stay die. Aye. Any opposition? Minutes are approved. Next, RO number one, 2223 by administrator submitting the Capital Improvements requests for the years 2023 through 2027. Motions, comments, questions, thoughts, concerns, ideas. All right. We'll hit the buzzer. We'll start with Alderflicky Paneski. Go ahead, but hit them. There you go. Thank you. I would like an explanation, again, of the program that says yellow dash previously approved in the same year and then the blue, which is previously approved in a different year so that I got that clear in my head. Minister DeRolf, do you want to take that one? I will do my due diligence to answer again. So this explanation dates back to when Daryl Hufflin started and basically the yellow previously approved in same year basically means that if it's yellow, that year it is when it was going to be approved. The blue previously approved in a different year means that it may have been, if we look at one of these, where you see a blue, let's say it's a blue in 2024, it could have actually been in the program in 23 and it was pushed out to 24 or it was in say 25 and was pulled into 24. It basically means that it was approved in a prior year and it moved according to when it was actually implemented. So again, the yellow and the blue just basically are to show that there's movement within, as we've talked about projects have been kicked down the road. These are to show you that these have either moved or they were moving within the capital improvements program. Alderpenisky follow-up? Yes. So in 2023, there were 14 little yellow marks. In 2024, there are 16 yellow ones. So those 16, when we approved the budget, when we approved this plan today, we're approving items for 2023, but not 2024. When we get to 2024, we have to approve those again. That is correct. What we are focusing on, this is a five-year capital improvements plan. The commission or committee should be focusing on 2023 with the understanding of what's in 24, 25, 26, and 27. With a five-year plan, we are trying to show the council and this committee what is in 2023 because we're trying to stay within a budget and we're trying to show the committee and commission and council basically what our proposed spending is for 24, 25, 26, 27. So basically it's to allow the committee and commission and council to better understand where the departments are looking to have additional projects in the future. So if the committee, commission, council were to say, well, where's this road? Or what are we doing next year? Or what are we doing the year after? You have an understanding of where those projects can land and what the spending will be for the future years. So again, we're just trying to show in a five-year program where that additional spending is going to be. So if a council member was wondering, well, where's my road? Well, if it's in the five-year program, we'll be able to show you where that road is proposed. If Director Beeble during the five-year program says, you know what, this road is actually in worse shape or a sewer project popped up or a granting, a grant project popped up, then we would move and juggle around the other four years. We're really focusing on 2023 for the approval, which will also allow us to better understand our financial borrowing for that next year. So if it's yellow, we approve something and if it's, if it's, pardon me, if it's blue, we approve something at a given year, but it carried over to the subsequent year and the subsequent year? It could have been approved, meaning it was in the program. It could have been in a prior year and it was pushed out or it was in the program in a year further out and it was pulled in sooner. It means that the blue means that it moved. And the reason for the yellow and the blue is just to be able to show the committee council commission, all of the groups, that there was movement within that line item. Okay, so for this year four projects moved. They were either pushed ahead or pushed back. Pulled back, yes. Pulled back. Okay, so when we get a phased project, phase one, phase two, phase three, we'll pay for it this year if it's phase one. If we go to phase two, it shows up as blue in the subsequent year? No, because it's not moving. It's not moving. It's there. It's there. It's been approved. If it didn't move, it stays in its approved year. It would be yellow then. Okay, so simplify. We approve something that's the first of four project sequences. If we approve it today, that means we've approved two, three and four likewise. You've, no, you're approving it in concept. You're only approving 2023. So in 2024, when we have capital improvements, that phase two would be in its place, and then the committee commission council would have to approve it as phase two for that year. Thank you. Thank you very much. Nick. I have two questions. My first one was last week when we meant we talked about the constraints that are inhibiting the fire department from improving. And one of those was lack of expansion space in some of their departments. And I was driving down 25th street and I saw fire station number three is at the right code. And there seemed to be a big lot of land next to that one. And the discussion that we had last week was that's an important fire station for training and other things. And my question was there seemed to be quite a bit of land there for expansion, particularly on the north side of the fire chief. Yeah, that is true. There is a land between James imaging and fire station three. However, obviously we don't own that that would be. So this proposal that's on there for 2023 of that two million was to look at potential sites, whether it's that area, other options. Again, as administrator Wolff had explained last week, we are trying to look at all avenues and take the best option that allows us to look into 30 years into the future and make sure our needs are met there. So that's not fire department land. Correct. It is not. Okay. My second question is we've got a lot of small projects here with capital improvements over time. Why isn't the library on one of these capital improvement plans for for repairs and replacement of roofs and other things that are I see that for the the police department and other things were there. They have needs over time at the funding for that. But I didn't see the library on it. I saw other things like the Indiana Trail project. And I like books. So I was wondering why the library is not Garrett. Do you want to provide any input? Well, traditionally, some of the larger projects come to the city CIP projects. Some of them we fund through our reserve as well as through donations. So we have a foundation. Some of those smaller repairs we do ourselves, depending on what they are. For instance, during COVID, we had front doors replaced that were pull handle doors. And we got the electric ones that open up for you. And so this process, since it takes a couple years, we just decided to do that since it's a smaller project ourselves. So there's some things that we usually the larger facility type things we bring to this to this group. The library is not a larger facility issue. We have facility issues. Yes. But so sometimes we bring it to that. And this is actually something Todd has been talking to the library board about and how to kind of come up with a plan on how to work with the library. So we've been actually discussing this very, very big problem. So next year we can perhaps see the library as part of the long range planning. Correct. And I believe I've been on this committee for five or six years. It's gotten substantially better. And I appreciate the work that everyone has done because it's more detailed and more laid out in the class seem to be done. Thank you. One of the points that I've brought up is that next year you'll actually see a 10 year plan. And that way we can actually again, we only focus on the next year, but it allows the committee commission and council to understand the needs of the city outwards. That's that's incredibly helpful and prudent. Correct. Again, it's hard to it's hard to focus on today and not understand what needs we have for tomorrow in the future. Because if we don't we as a city in my opinion from my own personal personal preference, I don't want to make a decision today not realizing the ramifications and needs of, you know, two years, three years, 10 years out. If we spend too much money up front, something else may pop up that we weren't aware of. I wanted to kind of piggyback off the library portion of that also. My understanding is that we are not funding anything this year for the library. Correct. Finance director. Thank you. We are looking at bringing forward a resolution to council actually later this month to fund two projects at the library that are no longer in the CIP because they are bringing being brought forward to 2022. That includes exterior wall maintenance, which is going to cost about $100,000 and then also a fire alarm panel replacement for $100,000. That resolution will be going to council for approval later this month. Got it. And then my second I wanted to caveat too is as a citizen I was a little bit disappointed. I kind of looked at the metrics of the meet public library and just some rough facts. There are over 30,000 memberships at the library and roughly 13-14,000 people that walk through those doors every day. And for us not to incorporate the library feels to me as though we are not giving back to our community, which I can see that the numbers plainly see that it is a necessity in our community. Thank you. Aldera Perla. It seems that I'm going to add to the choir because in fact I really appreciate the other members bringing up this subject. When at last meeting Garrett explained the expense that he was asking for, I was actually surprised. I thought wow, how is that possible that one of our I mean that that is the only expense brought up to this committee about the facility for the library. Now I want to reiterate like everybody else. I think that the meet library is perhaps the heart of the city. I consider it one of the major assets of the city, honestly. And so I do to think that we don't give the library enough attention in terms of money, especially considering that obviously it is a facility that belongs to the city. So I wasn't aware actually of the other two projects that are going. So are those projects that we will completely cover for or there will be contributions from the library to cover those projects? And I know that is beyond the agenda of today, but it may have an impact on our decisions today too. The two projects that are bringing getting brought forward to 2022 are going to be completely funded not by the library foundation. There is 50,000 that will be towards the fire panel from the Friends of the Library Foundation. So I have a question which is not as rhetorical, but why does the foundation need to cover for that type of expense? I mean infrastructural expense at the library. Who wants to take that? Thank you. Right now I've been working last year and this year working with Garrett, Maeve Quinn, and Debbie DeAmico on better understanding the relationship with the city and the Mead Public Library. The Mead Public Library receives funding from different resources, the city, the county, and other groups. They get levy dollars. They also get donations.  They are a unique gem. They are part of the city, but yet they also have the ability to operate on their own. They have their own committee commission and they take direction from that group. Similar to transit as an example, who gets city funding, state and federal funding, they have their own commission that is the decision arm, even though they're part of the city. So transit, as an example, they are responsible for their facility. They can get state and federal funding and they take care of it. The city does contributions, but technically transit is its own entity. The library is its own entity, but they are part of the city. So we have a collaboration where, as I'll use the roof as an example, because these are projects that were prior to myself, the agreement prior to me was that the library had to put a certain portion of money away each year for repairs like the roof. So the roof was estimated at 300 plus thousand and each year for so many years they put away to put away up to 50 percent of it and then the city would borrow the other 50 percent and that's kind of the collaboration that they've had. The library has been very generous in doing projects on their own because, as Garrett said, the capital improvements project and program, you literally have to plan years in advance to get approval and then it comes down to which what's more important. So because of the funding that the library has and with Debbie's assistance in juggling the dollars per se, they've been able to raise money for carpeting, do the front door project, they've done the heating and cooling with the city. So the city does contribute, but we don't pay 100 percent of the needs that they have, but we also need to open up our communication and have a better, I call it the bridge, building the bridge so that we better understand what their needs are for the future because again there's a lot of needs within the city, thus the 10-year program, that we know we're going to need to do, but we don't know what they are. I hope that answers your question. Can you follow up? So you did answer my question and I really appreciate it. I guess the way I look at it is that the decision we make today or that we make, within this committee for the capital improvements of the city, also in some ways demonstrate the city's priorities, obviously, and also the city's approach to the services of the community and the philosophy behind it. So it is true that for example what the library is able to contribute may, because they have been good with budgeting, they have been reserving some money, they can contribute to some project, major infrastructure projects. However, we all know that those monies could go to fantastic additional programs, to books, to assets in the library. So the question would be, do we as a city give enough attention to this asset? Do we contribute enough? So I understand that maybe they, at this point, they will be able to contribute 50% of the roof, but should they? And it is an open question. Anyone want to answer that? I guess I'll jump in again. The water is getting warm anyway. I guess what I would recommend for the capital improvements committee is also something that I think is also a direct need for the council to better understand. We only have so much revenue coming in and again, the library is an example and let's use transit. Let's go back to transit as an example. Transit has a union, transit has certain wage expectations, transit is as important because it touches everybody, every constituent, even visitors, just like the library is a gem that helps so many people in our community and outside our community and we need to remember that. It is a resource library where the library actually does receive additional funding being a resource library, but what I do need the council committee and the capital improvements committee to understand is this is a bigger discussion than we can have just in capital improvements. This is more of what we want to do moving forward as a city because if we move dollars around and we say this group is more important than this group, we still only have so many dollars to play with and we have to remember that if we put more money and we're also going into a wage study that's going to affect everybody, if we put more money to one group over the other group, we need to understand the ramifications of that. We are running our budgets so tight that we are really at risk of reducing our services and we are short-handed in so many areas and then we also look at the cost of economics with supply costs going up, I'm sure book costs are going up, everybody's having costs going up, our overhead costs are going up and realistically just like, and I'm digressing, but just like our personal budgets at home, our budgets are getting tighter and tighter at home because our revenues are going down because of the value of the dollar. So I agree with everybody that the library is a gem, it is very important, we have a lot of gems and we're very fortunate in our community to have our lakefront, our marina, our transit system that travels all over our community and outside our community, our water system, I mean we have so many things as a city, but what we forget is we only have so many dollars in the checkbook to spend and then we need to prioritize that, so my recommendation to the group would be that we move forward this year with the understanding that the council and the departments are going to help better understand with our strategic planning what are the priorities of the city and then how can we build that bridge with the library to say, will the city be allowed to assist in getting involved with the library so that we can work together on our efficiencies and effectiveness with the dollars that we have to be able to get these things done. The money that they've put aside for their half of the roof isn't going to save the world per se because they're putting this year and I believe it was last year, they put $27,000 towards the roof, correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't the 20 fund anymore, you gave us that to put in, plus I put in the 10,000 previous, if anybody wants to see how I've done that, I'd be more than welcome to sit down with them at any time. But I believe we're about $8,000 away from your half. Yeah and then I also ran calculations on what the roof would cost today versus $2,025 and I guess $400,000 and the calculation that I came out with is about $390,000. Yeah so the bottom line is the longer that takes to get these projects done, the more it's going to cost and that's one of the pet peeves that I have that my department heads have heard me preaching is we have to have accelerators in here to take into consideration the cost increases because $100,000 five years ago is not $100,000 today and $100,000 today it's not $100,000 in five years. So we have to better understand that and have contingencies. We tend to go over budget on projects quite often and these are just some of the opportunities for improvement in the future. All right thank you for those comments. Alder Flicky Panesky. Thank you very much. Let's get away from the philosophical concept what if the library building ended up in a heap of bricks for whatever reason tomorrow? That comes off of the city's balance sheet does it not? Does the transit department if their building ended up in a heap of bricks? That comes off of the city's balance sheet. So in my mind the city owns those buildings is that accurate? So if the city if the city owns the buildings the city should use capital improvements to improve those buildings so they don't end up in a heap of bricks. I don't care if it's transit or library or police or fire. Thank you. All right any other discussions on the RO presented in front of us? Any motions? Alder Mitchell. Thank you chair I would move that we approve. All right there's been a motion to approve is there a second? Motion second final discussion comments seeing none all those in favor please state aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Aye. Chair votes aye that is approved thank you. Next motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. There's been a motion and second all those in favor of adjourning please state aye. Aye. Anyone opposed? Chair votes aye we are adjourned at 427. Thank you.