It is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning and welcome back to the Economic Development Webinar Series. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the Design, Coordination and Outreach Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology. I'll be providing some technical support and moderation for today's webinar. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwungen people that's the Esquimalt and Songhi's First Nations. I'm joined today by Steve Thompson, who will be our moderator. Steve hails from Ferney in the traditional territory of the Tanahan Nation. And our guests today are Robert Bell of the Intelligent Community Forum and Joe Sterling of Rainforest Strategies, and they'll each tell you a little bit about themselves when they begin. Before we go any further, I'm just going to review some housekeeping items. So the orange arrow, just looking at the control panel, the orange arrow lets you shrink go to webinar panel to the side of the screen. It automatically shrinks if you don't do anything for a while. So if your controls disappear in the middle of the webinar, don't panic. The orange microphone shows you that you're muted. You may get unmuted if we end up having some discussion later, but please keep it muted just by default, just in case. The blue box lets you expand the whole webinar interface to full screen and the little hand lets you raise your hand if we're going to be taking verbal questions. But there's many of you and only one of me. So the best way to raise a question is to enter a question in the box in your control panel that says, enter a question for staff. And we're going to be using that a little bit later as we do some interaction on this webinar. So stay with us. Finally, you have two options for connecting to audio via your computer over VoIP or by phoning in. If you click on the phone call radio button, it'll give you a phone number to call and then access code for this webinar and a personal identification number for you individually, which shows your name on my screen so I can see who you are. If you're joining us through the Instant Join web app, things look a little bit different for you and your audio controls are hidden in the gear section. So if that's what it looks like for you, there are your options. Today's session is being recorded. It will be capturing the audio portion and the screen recording of the session and the speaker slides and presentations are going to be collected up and shared later. It takes us about a week to get all of this together. So if you want to view this or past webinars, you can go to our website gov.bc.ca slash economic development and look under the BC ideas exchange for our past webinar recordings. Okay, let's get moving. Oh, one more thing. Sitting with me today, I have Alex Sashanuck, who has put together the 2018 local economic development and BC survey. Do you want to say a few words about it or shall I? Okay, so each year or every two years we go through this survey process and what we're looking at is how do different communities in BC structure and pursue their economic development activities what's going on in your community for economic development and what tools and resources are you going to find most helpful for your community. So the survey is open until Friday. So if you're waiting for the last minute, this is it. This is your turn to go and fill out the survey. Please let us know last time we had 400 respondents and we'd really love to have that again. The scuttle butt is the local elected officials are filling it out at great rates, but the economic development professionals are a little bit behind. We haven't got a pool going, but if you're an economic development professional, that's kind of a call to action to step it up and fill out the survey. Alrighty, today's session is Tech Dev 101. This is a continuation of our webinar series and it's also been part of our Tech Dev 101 workshops that have been delivered through the province since March this year. So Steve Thompson and his colleagues Beth Gallup and Cindy Pearson have delivered two webinars so far. You can watch them online from back in June and last month and Steve is back today to moderate a fascinating exploration of benchmarking and measuring your progress on something that's really quite intangible. Steve's going to do a great job of setting us up and introducing the concept. Before we get going, however, we want to ask a poll question. So this is how it's going to work. I'm going to set up a poll on your screen and you can come and you can vote on it or enter in the correct answer for you. What is the size of your community? We'd like to know who's out there and what size of community you're serving. If you serve multiple communities but you live in one, perhaps you can answer for that one, but if you don't work for a specific community, we actually have an option for you this time. So I'll just let that going. I had a question. Someone has figured out the ask a question of staff, which is fabulous. How many participants do we have on the webinar right now? We've got 27 who joined us. Usually we get about five or 10 late comers. So in terms of stats, we we often get about 75%, 60 to 75% of the people who have registered for the webinar actually come and the others are waiting to watch it online. So that's an idea of how many people we get participating. We welcome everyone, whether you work for the government or an agency, anyone who's interested in economic development. All right, so we've got most of our participants have answered the poll. So I'll close it and share that back so everyone can see the results. So on today's webinar we have, oops, I'm hiding things on myself here, 17% of our attendees are under 5000, 17% from 5000 to 15,000. Most people 42% are in communities, over 50,000 population, 17% of you are not serving a specific community. So thanks very much. I'll hide that and go back to my presentation here. I have one more question for you, which I'm going to actually have you answer in the questions box. I'd like to know what are you hoping to measure through benchmarking in your community? What I'll do is as you answer in the questions, Steve is going to do his introduction, and then I will share back some of the common responses that we saw before our guests come and do their talks. So if you can do me a favor and just write in one statement so I can sort of have a list of things that people have entered, that would be great. So I will turn things over to Steve now to do his presentation. Coming in, Steve. There we go, we've got it. Okay, of course the first thing to start, you know, just a reminder that all of the presenters today are consultants, so the opinions expressed in the workshop or in the seminar today are those of the presenters and may not reflect necessarily the policies and positions of the province of British Columbia. So as Susan mentioned, my name is Steve Thompson. I'm a principal with capacity consulting. We're based now in Fernie, British Columbia, snowy Fernie, British Columbia today. And my background is in working both with technology startups directly as a product manager, product development, early stage revenue generating activities, as well as working with enabling organizations, governments, non-profits, social enterprises and the like. I don't want to take up too much of the time. I just want to get us into the meat of the other two presenters. But as Susan mentioned, this is the third webinar we've done in the series and the final one for now. And it's tied to the Tech Dev 101 workshops that we've been delivering for the province. I thought that before we get into the meat of the day, we'll just give a quick recap and then talk a little bit about why we consider benchmarking. So if you haven't already, you can sign up to host a Tech Dev 101 workshop, a one-day workshop in your community. I think we've delivered nine so far and we have another seven or so to do. Within that, we've created an innovation ecosystem model. As all of these technology strategies and benchmarks tend to have very similar components of five common themes that I always saw. Access to capital, access to talent, access to markets, getting to markets, building your community and culture, and of course building your infrastructure and place making elements. So in our model, the innovation ecosystem canvas, we've called these components biomes and we use the BC coastal rainforest as a metaphor to explain how these various biomes interrelate and the types of positive feedback loops that we're hoping to create in each of the biomes so that we can grow our communities. A couple of weeks ago, we had a great webinar talking about building your community. We had a couple of great speakers, Rose Hoer from Nelson, talking about the amazing things that she's doing in Nelson or that is doing it being done in Nelson and how they're growing the community there. And we had Jim Gibson from Rainforest Alberta talking a lot about how they're building community and culture in the Alberta's technologies ecosystem. Coincidentally, these speakers kind of align with our speakers today. Nelson has followed a lot of SMART 21 criteria from the Intelligent Community Foundation while Rainforest Alberta is using the SCORE carding from Rainforest Strategies. I think Joel talked a little bit about that as well. So when it comes to why benchmarking, obviously we need to have objective measurements for our progress. And I always remind people that it takes at least two pieces of data to establish a trend. I mean, you need to know where you are today and where you want to be in the future so that you can drive that line. The key element here is that you get what you measure and that's both good and bad because to quote a Harvard business review that I think sums it up, human beings suggest behavior based on the metrics that they're held against. And anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his SCORE or her SCORE on that metric. And what you measure is what you'll get. And that can be both a good thing and a negative thing if we're not tracking or scoring the right measurements. There are several benchmarking tools available. We're going to feature two today with our speakers. Each benchmarking tool I find has a different focus. And so, you know, when I look at things, you know, different jurisdictions, I would probably choose a different tool depending on the project that I was working on. You want to pick the benchmarking tool that best aligns with the objectives that you're looking at. And you always want to be looking at some of these other benchmarks and reports because there are some interesting things where you can see some comparisons or they're comparing communities on a different set of issues and components than you might be looking at. So, a couple that I just want to touch on as an example.  So, there's a great tool set that has come out from the BAS Initiative, which is being hosted at the Brookings Institute, a U.S. think tank. And so, if you're looking at innovation districts, there's some great things to look at there. Another great one, and this sort of started where many years ago, company Startup Genome was literally benchmarking Startup A against Startup B to say, you know, how does your startup compare to other startups in its field? And then they realized that there was some value in the aggregated data. So, they changed companies to, changed names to Compass and they, you'll see some reports out there with Mark Compass. And a good one here from 2015 that I encourage every Canadian to look at is the Waterloo Startup Ecosystem Report that they did. And then somewhere around 2016, 2017, they separated the Compass and Startup Genome again. And so, now you'll see it all under Startup Genome and Compass is a different company just focused on benchmarking individual companies and performance metrics.  This is certainly not something that I recommend unless, you know, absolutely necessary. But this is an example of the Michigan Municipal League. They have, as part of their community development awards program, created a program, created an award in this case that measures eight assets, things like physical design, you know, walkability, culture, multiculturalism, transportation, green initiatives, entrepreneurship, technology, and education. But they're doing that within a, you know, a larger set of awards criteria. And with that, I'll take back to Susan and then we'll hand it over to Robert. Thanks, Steve. So, I'm not going to put my webcam back on. I'll just leave it on your screen. But we did get a couple of responses to our question of what are you benchmarking. And we've got economic growth. One respondent is looking at benchmarking the community to get an understanding of the impact our society has on increasing tourism and economic development in our communities. Those numbers are crucial for applying for grants. And any of you who are in the position of applying for funding know how important metrics are. Another respondent is looking at progress in various city departments, particularly our planning department with building permits. And this morning I had a really interesting conversation with CUNY in the Fraser Valley that is actually looking at encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship by changing their home occupation bylaws, so what you can do in your home. So that's actually Maple Ridge if people want to look into that more. Sorry, I'm getting off topic. But what your planning department does has a big impact on your innovation ecosystem. And the final response is we're hoping to measure the increase in tech workers and companies in our city. So, thank you everyone who wrote in a response and I'll turn it back over to you, Steve. Great. And so our first presenter today is Robert Bell from, he's the co-founder for the Intelligent Community Forum and he heads up their research analysis and content development activities. So I'll hand it over to you, Robert, and tell us a little about yourself and about ICF. I am very happy to do that and it's a great privilege to be with you here today. I'm coming to you from New York but it gives me a chance to wish you all a good morning. We've ticked over into the afternoon here. And thank you Steve for that introduction. We started this work some 18 years ago working with communities around the world to try to understand why some of them succeed economically, socially, culturally, and why so many of them are getting left behind by a great wave of change. So that the core of what we do is actually an international award program but it's become a good deal more since then. So yeah, you're not going to work for me, right? Okay. Hang on a second. We're going to make the computer happy. So that's me and this is what we're going to talk about. What makes the SMART 21 so smart? SMART 21 is the semifinal stage of our annual award program in which we benchmark cities and metropolitan areas and counties on a wide variety of things. And so I'm going to step through our methodology for you kind of quickly to make sure that we all have time to gain what we want to say. So the SMART 21 process or the process that leads up to the SMART 21 starts with a questionnaire. It's questionnaire with 27 questions. We've spent a lot of time boiling it down to 27 questions because of course there's so much data you would like to collect. Which 21 are about numbers are quantitative and six are qualitative. They're storytelling which gives context to the numbers. And as I say, we've put a great deal of effort over the years into distilling down into what we hope are the fewest data points, meaningful measures of what's going on in communities, affecting their economy, affecting their society, and affecting their culture. And it's all based on a methodology that we developed while going back to 1999 actually that we now call the ICF message. It says that there's six fundamental things you need to look at, things you need to be working at in a community in order to be understood. So the first of these is the new infrastructure about digital age broadband. If you have it, if it's a robust, if it's cost competitive, you've got the road, you've got the highway, you've got the airport, you've got that economic development engine. They were all very used to seeing except now it's an invisible digital form. And if you don't have it, then you're off the highway, you've been bypassed, and so you need to do something to change that. The purpose of that is to power a workforce that's able to use knowledge to create value. In this digital age, increasingly, anyone who's not creating more value through what they know through the application of their mind and their experience to what they're doing, that person is not going to be successful economically. It was back in the 70s that the management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that it would become impossible to live in the middle class within 20 years if you just work with your hands and nothing else. And Guy, you're certainly prophetic, and that's the age we find ourselves. And so knowledge work is done using the new digital infrastructure of broadband. And the thing you're trying to do with all of that is to innovate. Robert Sowell is an economist who won the Nobel Prize for proving that 80% of all economic growth comes from the creation or the use of technology, of innovation in technology. And so if you're not participating in that in some way, whether it's using, adapting, or developing, you're left with 20% of economic growth, which doesn't sound like a very good sign for any of us. Those three things, broadband knowledge workforce and innovation in our model, are what gets you a digital economy. And I appreciate Steve's comment about the Brookings, I'm going to actually follow up that Brookings Innovation District, because that's obviously a very important part of what we do. But to make sure that these benefits actually stay in the community, that they benefit the people of your community as opposed to a distant shareholder, you need a great deal more. And we call it advocacy. We call advocacy as basically the creation of champions in your community who will convince everybody, who will be educated about what's required to adapt to this new world, and then become the leaders who forge a consensus in the community that change is necessary. Because we all hate change, it's where we start from, we all hate change. And we need to be guided into a future of really frankly, never ending change. And so in toasting communities work very hard on this intangible thing of advocacy. The same time they also look after their, the effects of having a very progressive, very aggressive digital economy, you're going to be leaving more people out, people who are already on the margins of your community, but will become increasingly so because they don't have digital skills. They don't have access, they don't understand why it even matters to them. And so intelligent communities reach out to try to prevent as much exclusion as they possibly can. And finally, sustainability is our sixth criteria. And there's two sides to that. One is sustainability of course is something we all need to work on because we all need to be able to breathe and to drink water and to feed ourselves. And that's going to get harder and harder in the future if we don't get sufficient attention to this. But also sustainability is a, is a uniter of communities over and over again, we see communities engaging in projects that bring people together around sustainability. It's a driver of quality of life. And it's a driver of economic growth because sustainability is going to be an amazingly large industry in the next 10 or 20 years. So that's the framework. And I went into it only just so that what I'm about to show you next actually makes some kind of sense. Then each one of these things that produces a growth cycle, and we've seen this again all around the world over and over again, communities that work on all these things kick themselves out of stagnation and get themselves to growth. What we measure when we have to benchmark them of course is constrained. We can't ask as many questions as we'd like to. But in broadband we ask about competition. How many competing providers do you have and what type are they? Because that's a really good proxy for how cost effective and powerful your, your digital infrastructure is, the more competition, the lower your prices are likely to be and the better the service. Availability, which is basically in the cable business, cable TV business is called home is passed, right? Premises passed. What percentage of your population actually has access to meaningful broadband, not just a 3G mobile, but the actual broadband at a decent speed. What percentage of your, of all those premises are actually subscribing to that broadband service. Three obviously key indicators of this. And then in this, in this area as well and all the others, we do ask that, that storytelling question. We want communities to help us about a project that they're doing to promote either the better availability of broadband, the better adoption of broadband, greater competition. And what we're looking for is to find out, have they identified a problem, a gap, a concern, and are they doing something effective to try to solve it? And so we want to hear that story to put that context. Second one, knowledge workforce. We ask again, questions in four areas. One of them is about the technology you have in schools, not because tech in schools by itself means all that much, but because when it's done well, it transforms education for the better and it creates that generation of digital natives who are going to be the leaders in the next economy. This is something that we've come to recently, but have come to recently realize how important it is. The history of education in certainly my country, the U.S. and Canada in so many places is about silos. We have an elementary school and we have secondary school and we have community colleges and technical schools and universities. And they've always tended to operate in their own silos as though they didn't connect to much else. And most importantly, they never really connected to the base of future employers who are going to ultimately be where their students end up someday, hopefully if they stay in the area. Well, there's tremendous benefit to be gained by actually connecting those things, breaking open the silos, and getting schools to collaborate, getting secondary schools to work with community colleges on joint programming, on universities with universities and joint programming, bringing employers that are important to your sector into the classroom, into the program, coining the young people that are growing up in your community with the opportunities that are available in your community. And amazing things happen when this is done properly. Fundamental infrastructure access to higher education. I mean, not every place is going to have a university. Not every place is going to have a technical school or community college, but you have one nearby perhaps. Or if you don't, what are you doing to try to bring that education digitally into your community? Without that kind of access, obviously you're starting far, far behind the starting line of everybody else. And then again, we've asked, we have questions about a number of things that you currently have, and then we want to know, what are you doing today to try to fix the problems you have, fix the gap? What is your knowledge workforce project that addresses that missing piece that's going to get you to a true knowledge-based economy? Number three is innovation. And if there's something that's difficult to measure, I think this probably is top of the list. It's a big, big, big word. Probably not a very well understood word in many ways, but we have some very specific things we look for. First and foremost is something that I think comes as a bit of a surprise to most leaders of cities in the mid-sized to small range, which is, do you have an innovation policy? And the answer, of course, for so many cities is what? Because we've got policies for all the things that we know how to do, but innovation. Well, okay, in the future, communities of any size, whether you've got 5,000 people or you've got 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million people, you're going to have to think through what their policies around innovation are so that they can get a piece of that 80% of economic growth. We'll go down a list of specific innovation programs you have. And again, this is something you'll see in bookings or any of these other programs, makerspaces, hackathons, incubators, accelerators, how do they tie together? How well do they work together? Where's money available for things? At the same time, we also look at the public sector side, because we find over and over again in intelligent communities, the government points the way, it leads the way by example, it creates digital services that meet the needs of residents and organizations, and in particular makes that a community the kind of place that a built digital native will want to live, will want to stay, will refuse to live. Waterloo, the Waterloo case study was mentioned earlier by Steve. One of my favorite stories about Waterloo is when they had their big meltdown of Blackberry, what would normally happen is all their engineers would leave town, but instead all the engineers stayed in town because they wanted to. It was the place they wanted to live. And Google and Facebook and all the technology companies in the world came to Waterloo and open offices. That's that's a perfect outcome that you can get. And then lastly, we want to know what you're doing in innovation. We call the innovation triangle that connection of business government and institutions that drives innovation and keeps the results of the community. Tell us what gap you're feeling. Number four, advocacy, this again difficult human thing, we want to know of course what's your strategy, do you have a strategy to bring your community together? Tell us about it, show us how far you've gotten in developing that strategy. Is somebody accountable for carrying it out? What tools and techniques are you using to engage citizens, to engage organizations, to engage your leaders in this process so that everybody's voice gets heard? How effectively are you communicating the new benefits of your community, not just the fact that we have good transportation and clean water and good power, the new advantages that are attractive to digital companies? And what's your project? What's your project to fill the gap? Digital equality, this is a really it's a really interesting topic. I guess that obviously a lot more time on all of these things, but you've got the problem of bringing citizens online. And so everybody knows, of course, we're going to go to our library, we're going to set up Wi-Fi hot spots. What we're going to do other things, we're also going to go out to the community. We're going to have tech fairs and competitions. We're going to create community champions to turn to their neighbors and say, well, here's why this is really important and to show them something that is a benefit to them today on that strange thing called a computer or a tablet. We also look at the issue of business adoption. One of the tough facts of life is that small to mid-sized businesses are the backbone of every local economy. And they are also the slowest adopters of the technologies that could help them become more profitable and grow faster. And so we ask about programs to assess their digital readiness programs to train them in digital readiness programs, let them come and play with the technology and find out what it does. These are very valuable strategies. And then again, that project, you know, what where are you today? And then what are you doing today to prepare for a better tomorrow? How do you kind of fill your gap with a project right now? And lastly, sustainability. Of course, we ask about metrics. What are the metrics you're tracking? Because as Steve said, if you're not measuring it, you certainly are not managing it. And so that's a fundamental thing. What are your policies for sustainability? How much of it is just something we talk about because it makes us feel good? And how much of it translates into actual policy and action on the ground? In particular, we're interested in policies that are not just about, you know, putting down a better kind of paint on your roads to mark the lanes or about putting in solar cells or windmills or improving your sanitation. We're interested in projects that efforts that bring the community together around the issue of sustainability because everybody cares about the place called home. It's the most important place in the world. And so we look for communities that are taking sustainability agenda and not just doing it to make the place better, but doing it involving the community deeply and making the place better. So those are the six axes, if you will, on which we ask questions. Those are the topics, the questions we ask. Above all of this, there is an overarching question, which is why? Why do you do this? Well, for us, you know, one of the whys can be that you want to be named as one of our smart 21 intelligent communities of the year, which this year we're going to be naming in Hamilton, Ontario on the 25th of October, as well as online. So if you want to find out, you can go to intelligentcommunity.org on that day and you'll find out. And from that, we name a subset of them as the top seven intelligent communities. We put them through another evaluation process, which is kind of labor intensive for them, but they all tell us it's of immense value. And one of those is chosen every year and we're doing it in June of this year in New York City to be our intelligent community of the year to take the place of a community called ESPO, which is outside Helsinki in the nation of Finland. So that could be one reason you do all of that, but it's not really the reason. And it's not the reason that we care about. The reason we care about is that going through this process makes a very large contribution to future proofing this place called home, the place that matters most. It's about creating a competitive local economy that creates inclusive prosperity for as many people as possible and genuine wealth for the most successful because that drives the community forward. Regarding my creating a skilled workforce that matches the changing needs of employers and creates new businesses in the process all the time. Innovative businesses, institutions and government that drive growth and attract talent, expanding economic and social opportunity for all your citizens, not just for the lucky few. And creating a really widespread engagement in building a better future. I think if you look at that bullet point list, you've just described the nirvana of community development and benchmarking is the place it starts, but it's certainly not the place it ends. So thank you very much for allowing me this time and I look forward to hearing our next presentation or answering any questions that may arise. All right, I believe we are. We have time for questions now. I'm going to see if I can mute the person who has their phone ringing. So if anyone has any questions for Robert about this, you can answer that. You can enter them into the ask a question to staff button or box on your go to webinar control panel. We can also take a few minutes to think about it and we'll have time for questions at the end as well. So I believe we're over to Joe next. So Steve, do you have anything you want to add in the in the intermission here? No, I was just going to introduce Joe if there's no no questions at this point. Not yet. So go ahead. Great. So our next presenter is Joe Sterling. Joe is the General Manager of Rainforest Strategies at Consultancy that's putting into practice the ideas propagated in a book called The Rainforest and and it's a great a great book and a great read and and coincidentally the Rainforest book and in our Rainforest methodology both have a common nexus in that they came out of work that was done originally in San Diego with and led by the University of California San Diego and their Global Connect program. Many years ago Global Connect came up and assisted us in Vancouver or in British Columbia with our then technology strategy and which we evolved into the the innovation ecosystem and at the same time a further evolution led to this Rainforest book. So with that Joe, tell us a bunch of stuff and methodology. Good morning everybody and Joe Sterling here. I'm speaking to you from Grand Junction, Colorado where it is sunny on the on the fellow in the middle there. Rainforest Strategies is a group that has been doing work in the innovation space from the combination of design topics to community development, economic development for many many years across a broad swath of client types and as Steve mentioned the one of the books that started the conversation was the Rainforest, A Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Wang and Greg Horowitz who was the fellow from the University of San Diego or University of California at San Diego. The Rainforest scorecard that was produced by my colleagues Henry Doss and Alistair Brett we'll talk about quite a bit in in a moment here. The key thing that I'd want to mention is that the the oops let me back up the the and this I think makes a nice compliment to what Robert was addressing is that the the principles here we find anyway in practice they work across large and small populations having had quite a lot of experience myself and doing this work in rural areas as well as in major cities it's important that the that the material be easily translatable into those different kinds of settings and the the angle that we approach this topic from is more specifically about innovation and innovation ecosystem which might take place in a specific company or a non-profit or an educational setting or a government setting or as is as is the case in our work in Alberta it may take place across the an entire province and the the concepts that we use are derived from observation of course in places like Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv and Austin Texas and and other places around the world in Vancouver and so on plus our experience of doing the work to build on what Robert said about you know why why bother why go through all this the notion of course is to be economically socially and environment environmentally sustaining and what is that has always been the goal what is different in the 21st century is the is the tempo the pace and so velocity becomes really really critical whereas it is it wasn't in the age that I grew up in and so we think about you know human potential sustainability as Robert spoke about and as he also mentioned prosperity and capacity for more innovation and to be able to do it faster so this is just to reinforce the message that he was suggesting the other piece here that I think is so important to bring up is that it is easy to read about places like Silicon Valley or you know big cities like New York or big cities like Toronto or places like Waterloo and say well how can I compare myself to them and the ultimate answer has to be we're talking about British Columbia and wherever people live in British Columbia and as you start to build the digital infrastructure the broadband infrastructure that means that wherever people live they can participate in this economic growth that is inbound and as we know British Columbia is not all big cities it is a lot of smaller places that have unique skills talents resources histories local cultures geography and so on and so the name of the game is how do we apply these principles in a unique setting that you have so speaking about you know how do we even approach that today I want to address the what of this which for this conversation the piece that we'll look into is measuring both the assets of your innovation ecosystem but also the culture and I understand that you had that had been touched on last week we'll look at the as you do that measurement it is also subjective which for the engineers in this audience or the demographers in this audience or the economists in the audience it's very frustrating but we'll adjust how how do you how do you attend to that the the question of where do you begin we'll look into the difference between trying to impose tools and things like this from the top down compared to growing it from the bottom up and then of course the question of who do we benchmark against and is that even useful that is super important and and then lastly the the we'll return back to the why of it which we touched on a moment ago so first I'd like to just say that assessing and improving innovation ecosystems is fuzzy it seems like magic it's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat and the reality is once you get a methodology an approach to it it really isn't that magical though it worked that we did and you can read this later but we modeled our approach after the Baldrige quality award and the the methodology there and so we're applying continuous improvement concepts and methods which are very familiar to managers and and innovators that at institutional and government levels but they're also easily digestible at the level of entrepreneurs and individual groups in the case of Alberta we have effectively made made our way through steps one through four and are in second and secondary and tertiary cycles because this is a continuous improvement mindset as Robert mentioned this is something that is a never-ending process of change and so mastery of that is critical and it's it's accelerating so being able to do it quickly and having it baked into the annual cycles and ways of working at different levels very very important and that speaks to your municipal policies and agency policies and so on so I want to make a distinction here about the the range of things that one can measure and attend to and also outline a pothole that often happens it is very common historically when economic development agencies or universities or local governments want to spur innovation or they want to see more economic development they will focus on the hardware side of this conversation the assets and they're easy to count they're easy to see you can throw money at something and you get a beautiful incubator building or a big campus or you develop a policy or you say we've got x number of dollars available for these different levels of startup financing and that's relatively easy to do it's easy to count it's most many cases something you can walk up to and touch and so it's very satisfying and there are there are 100 stories of places that say well we did all of that we put all that in but then nothing came out of it and so they it's sort of like well we bought the computer but we didn't know that we had to have software to make it do anything and so this notion of the culture and how do you grow the grow this and actually animate it is a matter of having the right software and that is the recipe and it needs to be in the right proportions in order for the whole thing to work a couple of key points that we find is that in order to create a more innovative state in a system a an environment where the where the innovation is like popcorn it's happening rapidly but while somewhat randomly and surreptitiously it is happening that takes diversity that diversity of ways of being thinking approaches ideas and so on and of course that generates friction social friction and then you have to have elements that dissipate the social friction so we all want to work together and that includes things like extra extra rational motivations social trust which you may have heard of the rainforest social contract which they've done a beautiful job of rolling out in Alberta and engaging and and the advocacy for that's been very very good having the what we call the rules of the rainforest which is basically a set of ethical and values and behavioral guidelines that are the type that tend to generate innovative behaviors and groups and then how those rules get expressed so this in any kind of benchmarking any kind of measurement that you do you have to account for both the hardware side and the soft side both the assets and the culture so that's just and you'll find this explained in depth in the rainforest book but I wanted to just make this a quick overview to that so the rainforest book was developed and published in 2012 and was very very well received we knew at that time that we had a great concept but we didn't have a framework for actually rolling it out and doing the metrics work and to create a continuous improvement effort as Steve said in the intro you know you get what you measure for and so what is it that we observe that you need to have if you want innovative states whether that's in a single entity a single company or a non-profit or a government department or an agency or if that's at the level of a city or a region and so we've broken it down to six categories that we find and these attributes operate in concert they reinforce each other in certain ways and they can also and in some very counterintuitive ways thwart each other depending on on their condition so leadership which takes many forms frameworks infrastructures and policy policies resources which is of course financial resources but also information and physical settings and so on activities and engagement how do we engage role models who are the individuals that are that we all recognize as a role model in this thing called being innovative and in many ways entrepreneurial is almost synonymous with innovation here but that we start start splitting hairs but for the purposes of our economic development conversation we can think of innovation and entrepreneurism as connected at the hip although it's not always the case and then lastly is culture which has to do with our traditions the way we are around here and not to mention what we what we award people for and what we punish people for so in developing the rainforest scorecard and rolling it out it was developed in two two basic forms one was the short form and at the bottom of the screen you'll see a url where you can download this for free and it's there for you to use and and play with the rainforest scorecard was developed with two levels of engagement in mind the first level was the short form which you might think of as the executive summary or the the you know it's the quick and dirty set of concepts that we can use to start a conversation with and enough to get us going it's informal it's easy it's quick and it has intuitive notions that are there to play with the long form is the second half of the scorecard book and that really is the in-depth breakdown of each of the elements that are addressed in the short form and it's a balance of qualitative and quantitative inquiry and it's specific enough for policy design it is specific enough for deep dives into improvements in major programs all kinds of things like that so that one is much more disciplined and usually it comes into play when people are working initiatives that come out of the short form but it can also be the you might say the recipe book for a deep dive for an entire institution so once we gather the I don't have enough time to go into all the detail of how this works but once we gather information most commonly we do it online have people fill out the short form which as I mentioned takes about 20 minutes if you spend more than a half hour on it you're working way too hard then the question becomes how do you visualize the results so that we can have a meaningful conversation about it and see the whole system of metrics as a health snapshot if you will and what we have here we developed something called a rainforest radar which arrays the six attributes around the circle and gives them gives us a way to plot the scores and each activity that we do engages people both in in doing the assessment then visualizing it then we have them talk about it and compare their scores and the important thing to keep in mind about this is that this is a contact sport this is a process of being together rubbing elbows engaging about what do these things mean you're talking about leadership or what about leadership and what about resources isn't that just money or what about frameworks and how do your frameworks in your organization compared to the ones that I have in mind and the beauty of the experiential learning processes that we designed to go with the assessment is that it creates these conversations and it and the visualization tools enable people to see different patterns and then have meaningful conversations about it unlike just counting the assets which are critical to have but unlike counting the assets when you want to change the culture and engage people in doing something about this you have to give them ways to be together physically be together in dialogue look at patterns together and knock about the various linguistics and definitions so that they begin to come to common understanding of those things and the photos that we've been showing you here these are from a couple in the previous slide from global innovation summit we conducted in Silicon Valley is our first testing others here are from El Paso Texas where we had a bilingual room of Spanish English American Mexican nationals working on their border region and of course we've done these same kinds of projects in across Alberta just to very quickly give you an idea what the more engineering form of this looks like here we have this is from Alberta immersion number three which was a blend of Calgary and Edmonton folks mostly Calgary and the each of the questions of the short form are arrayed here with the number of response you know what the score was and then what the percentage of total is and at the bottom you can see what they're for this category what their group said was you know collectively what they felt was the score potential for them and this one happens to be about 60 participants and here's how it averages out then we array these scores across the the radar here and we can begin to see a shape emerge this pentagram or a hexagram and we've gone back and forth with the question of well how much detail does it actually let me back up how much detail does it actually require to get a meaningful conversation and when we initially did this we used all kinds of statistical analyses and so on and fundamentally it was good enough if it was a ballpark because the you know it in this particular case it's obvious that the leadership one is strong it's weaker than role models and it turns out that that is statistically valid as a as a pattern which I explain a little later or another another time but we can see that there's room to grow and in a moment I'll show you the comparison between Edmonton and Calgary and how they've changed but the notion here is that it gives you enough to go on to have a meaningful conversation a really important thing when you're starting this especially if you're in a relatively small setting is well where on earth do you start and is this something that an economic development agency can just roll into town and lay out and it's been our experience that the answer is no this to Robert's conversation about advocacy advocacy has to begin you have to find the advocate before you roll out the program and in here we have Brad Zumwalt and Alberta we've got James Kirstead up in Edmonton this one here is Ricky Mora in El Paso Juarez Kathy Swain El Paso Juarez and the thing that we find is that it's it's frankly more important to worry about not who to invite but to make sure that nobody's getting left out or nobody wasn't invited so I always worry much more about who's not showing up yet and so that's a key point about that so with regard to role models and how do you benchmark and is that even useful the key thing I want to say here is that here we have in the case of Calgary they've gone through four cycles from September 2016 through March of 2018 and you can see that their measures change in each subsequent reassessment they were reassessed every six months and they've been running initiatives internally and we can see that their scores generally speaking have been growing and that the balance of their scores is increasing and pro tip here balanced is better than bigger so if I had a choice between a balance set of scores and just you know one really big one balance statistically correlates with higher innovation states and the chills for you to cut you off we're running up against the hour so I know Susan needs to close off here so if you could quickly wrap up yep I'm there great very good thanks so the Edmonton one the key thing here about benchmarking in comparison is that Edmonton is different than Calgary their scores are different the environment's different and so the shape of their the shape of their their radar is different and it is and they will go at their own pace just as all of you in British Columbia and different parts of it will go at your own pace and you'll start out in different place so it's a key thing there lastly in wrapping up how do we approach this once we have some sense of what's cooking we as we've been talking about we measure we facilitate processes to move culture leadership and strategy along provide education and coaching and gradually move our way across this terrain and that is it for me so thank you very much great thank you and Joe that's that's really appreciated and Susan do you want to take it back and finish us up sure thank you I know that we had a couple of people who submitted questions for Robert and I expect there might be a few coming in for Joe as well before we wrap up here well I'll say is that we have your questions and we know who asked them and so we will forward those off to those presenters and they can follow up with you through writing and they may also be able to send something back to me and then I can post it on the past webinars page so that those questions can get asked before we drop off the webinar and just got a couple of announcements here are upcoming sessions October 16th we have social enterprises in local economic development and then November 6th we'll be looking at supporting business succession in your community and that's really about what you can do as an economic development professional to make sure that your community has the resources and the connections in place to help the entrepreneurs or business owners get their business ready for transition and get it actually transferred to a new owner so that will be a really useful presentation I think and of course there's more coming up into December and within about a month we'll be announcing our spring sessions so if you have any ideas for webinars by all means send them over to me at economicdevelopment.gov.bc.ca Most of you got this on the email list so I don't need to belabor that point but I do want to ask people to complete the feedback survey that will be popping up or coming in your email after the webinar and remember you can go and look at the recording online and share it with your friends so thank you very much to Joe and Robert for joining us from around North America and Steve for being a great moderator and pulling all of this amazing knowledge together so I want to say thank you very much and I will see you all on the next webinar have a great day


That's how we roll here.


Thanks everyone for attending so this session is going to be about the I3C 802-154 layer in the Linux kernel. So I'm Mikkel, I recently got involved into the WPAN subsystem on a project with Corvo trying to bring more support for the Mac management commands in the Linux kernel. So I'm going to stop this presentation with a go through the specification just to give a little bit of context what I'm trying to achieve and how and then I'll go through the Linux kernel stack how it's currently managed and maybe at the end I'll try to do the demo if I have enough time. So here is a a short picture that shows where the specification brings something in the system so you have the kind of an OZ model on the right so the specification brings two layers the fee layer and the data link layer fee and Mac. So this was first introduced to create low power, low range and low rate networks typically you have several devices to connect you want them to be battery powered if possible the devices will usually just wake up send a bit of data a few bytes and then go back to sleep. So that's what you use in home automation, infrastructure monitoring and there are other fields that are listed in the specification as being the target for this document. We usually have above the ZigBee applications or the ZigBee network thing is using those two layers as is the six-slope one layer as well was using those two layers and anything is built on top of them. So the fee layer well the fee has several things to handle like changing the channels of course it can perform energy detection scans so space it is sensing on a channel if there is someone that is talking you don't really listen at what's being sent on the on this channel. The medium access of course so the main algorithm I think is a CSMA CA so carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance so you try to avoid collisions with some algorithms that's one of the different algorithms that are available in the spec but quite common of course you can transmit and receive packets when you receive packets you have access to an indicator which is the link quality indicator the LQI the LQI gives you the basically the strength the signal strength with the well that defines the device in front of you and the physical data encoding of course there are many algorithms again you can possibly perform running as well so only on ultra wide band fees and finally you basically get some data from the upper layer so namely the MAC layer and you can you have to encapsulate it into a fee protocol data unit a ppdu with a header and a synchronization here what's inside the payload of the fee frame is defined there so the the MAC sublayer which is above has actually two kind of services one of the two services is a data service so just sending the data forwarding the data by encapsulating the payload that was received into a MAC frame so that's named the mpdu the MAC protocol data unit and this MAC frame contains a frame control field at the beginning this is a field that defines the frame for the peer so basically it says what type of frame it is if it's an acknowledgement if it's a data frame if it's a MAC command whatever and it also defines the other fields that are present in this in this frame because almost all what you see here is optional and it depends on the type of frame and the how you configure it so a good example would be the address fields you have a source field a destination field both of them can be present or not and within those address fields you can have extended addressing or short addressing so you have to define in the frame control field what's to be expected at the end you have the frame check sequence the fcs which is a basically a to buy checksum usually on the other side of course you have the MAC management services which goes through what we call the mlme the MAC sublayer management entity the MAC sublayer management entity offers different services like is my mic still working yes okay yeah okay perfect i was also hearing myself back so from the MAC layer you have to choose the channel of course that you want to well you tell the file please send change the channel and the frame validation is supposed to happen at MAC level as well the all the network management features such as scanning, beconning, associating, the associating is also handled at this by this entity there are some security mechanisms as well which I want to talk about and the acknowledgements are also part of the MAC layer in the field you'll find two types of devices so the reduced function devices which are pretty limited devices just battery powered the sensors usually the leaf nodes in the network they have very few computational resources and try just to connect to another peer that has more resources and more power usually which are the full function devices so a full function device may either act as a leaf node as well or as a coordinator and a coordinator is meant to have more features is supposed to to help managing the network so it provides more synchronization services than a regular leaf node so coordinators well any device can connect to a coordinator which makes in the end a network which we call a personal area network the pan one device has at some point to create a network so this one will become the pan coordinator there is only one pan coordinator in a network it can then give the hand to another device which might have more computational resources or maybe a better internet connection as well but well that's how it starts so the pan coordinator will take a will pick a pan id so it's a 16 bit value and a short address so that short address is only valid on this particular pan it will then advertise the pan through the beacons it might decide to send and possibly allow the associations from other devices to create a bigger network this works thanks to the discovery mechanism which uses beacons so beacons are very short frames they have no destination field it's a frame that tells the other nodes around i am a coordinator i am part of this pan so you give the pan id and if you want to reach me i'm available at this address so the other nodes around either lift nodes or other coordinators well yeah will receive those beacons process them and build a list of the available nodes around there are two kind of ways of advertising a pan either by sending beacons at a regular rate so it's called a creating a beacons enabled pan or by just answering beacons requests so if you want to join let's say you are a pretty you don't have a lot of battery you just want to wake up perform a few exchanges and then go back to sleep you might either decide to wait for a beacons if there is any or if you want an immediate beacons you can send a beacons request on the channel you're on and all the coordinators around which are already part of a pan should in theory answer you with a beacon so you can basically perform three types of what we call a scan so the energy detection scan is just to sense the channel and that's all the passive scan which expects a beacon to arrive at some point and the active scan where you actually send a beacon request you'll get thanks to the beacon reception and link quality indicator which gives you the strengths of the signal with a pair with a coordinator which helps you building the network like you have on the right side figure you might or you might see on this figure several numbers on the edges those are the LQIs between all the nodes so you know which coordinator might be the closest to you for instance so why do we why would we want to create beacon enabled fans in the first place and I think the main answer would be that it helps saving battery at least the lift nodes can save more battery because you expect beacons to be sent at a given rate this rate is advertised in the in the beacon frame actually and as a lift node you would expect the next beacon in a very short time frame so you can just wake up at that moment that's when all the devices may try to access the medium and send their data so they are there are time slots you can try to access the medium during the contention aware period which is right after the beacon after the contention aware period there is a contention free period this is reserved for specific critical and low latency devices which might request a guaranteed time slot a gts and after those slots there is an inactive portion so the during the inactive portion all the devices should just turn off the radio perhaps start sleeping and this active and inactive those two portions are actually configurable there is a beacon order which is a number between zero that ranges from 0 to 15 or 14 and same for the superframe duration superframe order so those orders will increase exponentially the time of the two periods and you can that way tune the amount of inactive time and the amount of active time between the the beacons another feature is the hardware filtering this is actually useful if you don't want to be woken up if you don't want your transceiver to wake your host every time a new pack a new packet gets received so you can set in hardware your extended address your short address your plan idea as well and you'll also receive the broadcast messages and basically what's not matching the frames that are not matching those parameters will just get dropped by hardware so you don't get interrupted for nothing provided of course that you've successfully tuned your hardware filters otherwise you might lose some frames most transceivers are capable of at least having no filtering at all on one side and full filtering with the addresses on the other side there is in the specification two intermediate levels one of them is called the promiscuous mode which in the specification is defined as a mode that just checks the frame integrity but if you look at code in the Linux kernel in particular the Linux WPAN community and I see Stefan laughing has decided that it will not be like that so in the Linux kernel when you see promiscuous mode that actually means that there is no filtering at all because the promiscuity was meant to be used for devices that would act as sneakers so you really want all the frames to go there even those which are badly constructed or may have a wrong checksum so in order to build those those networks you need a number of MLME operations which are the discovery of the surrounding devices so this implies scanning on one end and beconning on the other end enlarging and shrinking the network which implies associating and disassociating keeping all the devices synchronized may be done through the beacon enabled pan feature and the acknowledgments and finally handling all the faulty situations that might arise which I will detail a bit after as well so those are the main Mac management commands that you'll find in the spec so let's go through them one by one what does all of them imply for the scan so this is an MLME request you have from the soft Mac layer to stop all the transmissions you want all the transmissions to be over before you actually send your your MLME request or your your your MLME frames so you turn your you change your filtering level as well because now you want to only receive becons during a scan we no longer process any data frame no any command Mac command we only process the becons so there is something to tune at the filtering level you need to provide of course the list of channels that you want to scan because a scan usually goes from one channel to the other and you have to wait a given amount of time on each of them so the amount of time is the beacon order that you can provide that you should have should be able to provide and upon reception of a beacon of course you need to pass the frame extract the the the address of the coordinator it's pan ID and we retrieve as well the LQI indicator associations work this way any device in the system including coordinators may try to associate with coordinators or the pan coordinator as well so the peer will send an association request the coordinator that receives the request should immediately acknowledge the request this is time critical then it has some time to decide whether or not it wants the device to be associated this the an association response is then sent back to the peer the association response contains a status so either the the device was accepted or the the pan was at capacity you will reach the maximum number of devices or you just simply don't want this device to to join so there are two error codes that can be provided if the peer requested a short address on this pan which is not mandatory the spec says that if the device is too limited it can just refuse the the short address and in that case you would return 0x fffe which is a standard which is a placeholder of saying this this device doesn't have any short address otherwise the the coordinator should allocate one on the pan and send it to the to the peer in the association response these associations can be done from both sides so the coordinator may tell a child that it's been kicked out of the network at any moment and the child itself may also leave if it if it's its desire and in both case of course you the address filters should be updated on the peer side because you no longer want to get the frames from the the pan if any the conflicts that may arise are called pan id conflicts so there are two situations that may lead to a pan id conflict one of them is your pan coordinator you receive a beacon in this beacon there is a bit saying that the beacon has been emitted by the pan coordinator and this bit is set meaning there is another device on the same pan id on the same network that says i am the pan coordinator which might happen if maybe the devices move and get in range at some point well that that's possible so this is a situation where that is not acceptable for the the pan controller that received the beacon and an action should be taken another situation where this could arise is maybe having a node in between two other coordinators there the the pan ids are 16 bit values so you have more than 65 000 possibilities but it's possible that two controllers have decided to create pan with the same pan id they don't get the beacons they are not in range but the device in the middle might receive the beacons from both of them so it is associated with one pan coordinator and it receives a beacon from the other pan coordinator saying oh i am also the the pan coordinator which cannot work so in that case the device should send an a conflict notification to its own pan coordinator which then should take an action in that case the concerned pan coordinator might need to sense the network so sense all the channels find a huge a new channel that is not used and a pan id that is also unused on this channel and send to all its children a coordinator realignment command the devices upon reception of this command should follow the coordinator change their channel and pan id and continue working on another channel and another pan id of course what may happen as well uh device may lose the synchronization with the coordinator so maybe it doesn't receive any more acknowledgement from its coordinator or maybe he didn't receive the coordinator realignment command because it was asleep i don't know or not in range at that moment so if it was associated it may try to do something that looks like a scan but instead of sending beacon requests it will go through all the channels and send orphan notifications until the coordinator receives the notification and immediately answers with a coordinator coordinator realignment command saying yes i recognize you you can still be part of the network otherwise the device should have to just forget about the pan and start a new association with after another scan so let's now switch to the link kernel stack here is my beautiful figure trying to picture how it's built in the linux kernel hopefully you can you can see uh so um let's uh start from the bottom i have the bottom you have the hardware hardware it's on silver with a phy the phy uh so you can have several files on the device but it's not really common so i use the simple situation where you only have one the phy is described in software by a w pan phy structure uh this structure is there is a one-one mapping with the the actual hardware okay but then from the mac layer you can create several sub interfaces on a single phy so each sub interface will actually be given a role the three roles that are now available well in the past we only had node and monitor and with my recent contributions we should now soon be able to create coordinator sub interfaces as well so a node is just a device in the network that acts like leaf node basically the monitor is the sniffing device so uh during the the demo i will try to set up a monitor interface on one of my three uh at usb's and i will open wire shack to show you what happens on the network while the others are talking but this one will remain silent on the network of course and the last possibility is being a coordinator which is something new and the coordinator uh can also send the beacons which is uh uh which is something new and possibly in the future have may maybe more features as well a sub interface contains a w pan device structure this w pan device structure actually belongs to the i3c 802 154 layer where we have a cfg layer that kind of makes the link between the net link layer and the uh mac implementation so right now in the linux kernel we only have a soft mac implementation which is the left most side uh we might have at some point a hard mac driver which would interfere in the interface with the cfg layer in that case right now we have an hard mac a single hard mac device in the linux kernel that is supported but it's been wired through the soft mac layer so it's it's a bit specific i explained at the beginning that some of the features were um that the the file had some uh some duties on the mac as well in practice some of the mac duties are offloaded to the to the hardware and are not performed by software uh typically the frame validation and the acknowledgements uh well the for the frame validation you read as i said you don't want to be interrupted too frequently so it's best if you just want to receive frames from your own well that are targeted to you to set the filters properly so that uh you're only interrupted when it's needed and for the acknowledgements uh this would be hard to support in software because we have uh because this operation is time critical as i said so uh we need the acknowledge well we need the frame that must be acknowledged to go through the address filters because we only want to answer frames that are targeted to us then this frame should have the acknowledgement request bit enabled in the frame in the mac frame and also the the the the hardware should be configured to answer those those frames if everything is right then the acknowledgement frame is automatically sent back so the current implementation in the Linux kernel well the one before uh my huge pile of patches didn't allow the the dynamic discoveries we couldn't create coordinators there was no beckoning uh beckoning feature possible at that time so you would have to create your network beforehand to set up an id a static pan id and hopefully it would work on the field but of course this is a bit limiting so we prefer to be able to create a network directly in the field and have those dynamic uh interactions between the different devices so that's what those commands are made for so the first interface that has been brought was of course the scanning interface and there is a netlink command for that the netlink command takes a the type of scan that should be performed if it's a passive scan an active scan energy detection scan are not yet supported then the range of channels possibly as well the page and the beacon order that so that's the time you want to wait on each channel this request will be processed by the netlink layer and forwarded to the mac layer which will actually perform the the scan by stopping the traffic wait for the transmission queue to be flushed and well basically create a background job that will do the channel changes and wait on each of the channels and this background thread should also even possibly send beacon requests if you are performing an active scan and in all cases wait for the incoming beacons until we receive the beacons we check of course they validity and we forward them directly to the to the upper layers so that the user now has full access to all the data that's been received the user can stop those the scan feature at any moment and a when the the scan stops or is is aborted or stops naturally the information is also sent to user space to notify user space that the scan is over and the interface is set back to in its original state the beacon interface works more or less the same you need to provide a duration the maximum duration that you can provide is 15 so below 15 you are actually providing a real beacon order which will change the the beacon interval if you provide 15 it it actually means please only answer the beacon request so by default a coordinator in the Linux channel will not send any beacons if it's a coordinator interface you can allow the beacons to be sent by using this command and either you provide a number below 15 and this will send beacons at a given rate or you give 15 and only the beacon request will produce the emission of a beacon this is also handled in the background job and you may change the the beacon order at runtime here you have the new commands in the IAWPAN tool so there is a WPAN tool repository for the user space tool it's based well the idea is based on the IW tool for wireless devices so this one is just for the WPAN subsystem you can now start a scan of course the scan the first command will start the scan and show you the results while they arrive and then return the the the command will end when the scan is over otherwise scan trigger will just trigger the scan return immediately if you want to follow you can look at the netlink socket with IWPAN monitor for instance which will show you what happens on the socket if new beacons are being received or not you can abort the scan and of course on the other side so the other coordinator that advertises its own pan you can start sending beacon or stop sending beacon basically after scanning you know what are the coordinators around so you can decide to send you can decide to associate with the device so you the user might decide might choose the the coordinator with the highest LQI the so the link quality indicator and the the while a netlink command is also involved on the mac side a an association request will be sent we expect an acknowledgement that was a a problem to while while developing this this feature because we missed this information in the past and we then wait for the association response past this response and update our our address filters accordingly that was a trick there because the address filters had to be updated at least with the pan id before sending the association request because the association response will be targeted to this pan id so the pan id field the pan id value would be within the destination field of the association response and the processing of the association request is very simple either you so we added a new parameter which is basically the number of devices that you allow to connect that can be tuned with a netlink command as well otherwise for now i've decided to make it simple and always allow the associations this will not be enough and we would need at some point to forward the request to user space because this is not so time critical and let the user space decide whether or not it wants to allow to associate with the device with this device on the disassociation notification side it's very simple just a notification so the netlink command gives the pan id and the coordinator address that you want to reach to send this this this association not only the there is no pan id involved here just the the address so here are the new commands as well the association associate command disassociate command the list association command will show you your both the parent and the child devices and the set max associations will also give you well allows to set a maximum number of devices that you may want to associate in the network so here are the patches if you want to check out this work and may want to try home i strongly advise you to check out the github repository instead of the patches on the mailing list because i have like 60 or 70 patches ongoing only the first 10 patches also are sent at new in each new iteration i've also played with a zeffir device that you have here so this is an arduino nano ble that runs the zeffir stack just to see if they were operating together i had a few issues with that so there are some patches that are being discussed on the on zeffir github but otherwise it's more or less work now so we can we can scan the devices running the linux stack on one side and associate with them and also send a disassociation command from both sides i have five minutes so i'm gonna do a short demo let's first i hope you can read yeah um so let's first set up the the monitor interface so that's just setting a channel we can show just setting a channel creating a monitor interface and setting it up on the other side i'm gonna start wire shack just to show you the various freak the various frames all right so it's gonna be here we are we first set the same channel on the two remaining at usb devices so the devices that are here they are all running the same linux stack we create a coordinator interface on one of them the other one will be a leaf node this coordinator gets a pan id and a short address i will then perform a scan so this is a passive scan i'm only scanning two channels just to make it quicker while the so the leaf node will perform a scan while the coordinator itself will send beacons once this has been done i will stop sending beacons passively there i will change the beacon order to 15 meaning please only answer beacon beacon request to not pollute the wire shock output the on the then you have when after scanning you have the extended the extended address so you can perform an association we will list the associations and then perform a dis association and again list those so first those are the the interfaces it performs a scan you have the kernel log on the right it finds a pan coordinator a coordinator sorry which advertises pan number two we can associate with it so now we have when we list the associations on both sides one has a child the other has a parent and then we can finally do associate and we have no longer associations between the two i could as well use the zefir device so i've just enabled the interface here i can perform an active scan which finds the the device running the linux stack and now i can associate with this device as well and on one side i have the zefir device saying okay i'm associated on the other side i can see the association was successful as well and i can finally show the wire shock output where we have first the three beacons that were sent then and i say i'm sorry it's a little it's small small you you have to trust me now so there is an association request here an acknowledgement the response an acknowledgement then the disassociation notification well everything that i've sent is visible on wire shock we could also on the association response for instance if it was big enough i would show you that we can see the short address that was allocated to the to the device and that's all for me do you have any questions you you can use well it creates the the interface that gets created is visible under ip l or ip a and you can use it to send data as well yes i fear there are no ways for now that's indeed something that we've discussed a little bit internally that would be very nice to have both being connected together but i think there is no interface yet short answer no well we are running out of time so thank you very much everyone


Hey guys, happy Sunday. That noise in the background is the washing machine because yes, I'm doing laundry again. We're either really dirty people or really clean, I don't know which anyway. I don't have anything done today, but it's Sunday, Bob goes back to work tomorrow. My sister comes into town tonight. She'll be with us for a couple of days and she's gonna drive north towards my dad's, be up there for a couple of days and she's gonna come back down here and stay with Rebecca and Paulias and the new baby, Junior, and help them out while Paulias goes back to work. Anyway, I don't know the exact timeline on that, but that's what's happening. Got one of my new thrifted shirts on today. Don't you just love it? I just, I love it. The length is good. It looks good with my leggings. I could wear it with some of my wide leg pants. I mean, yeah, it's so cute. Anyway, we're just relaxing at home today, getting some chores done, making bread, you know, all the things. Anyway, there's other stuff going on. We'll talk about it later. All right, I'll be back. It is Tuesday, May 2nd. Yeah, I forgot to vlog yesterday. Oops, I have a dentist. It's about 10 a.m. I have a dentist appointment today, so I'm gonna walk over because we are walking distance from the dentist. Ooh, mail's here already. Squirrels. Anyway, my sister is in town, and you know, we just got to doing a lot of stuff yesterday and I forgot to vlog, but I am making a pair of patchwork rainbow pants. Yeah, I will put the video down below that inspired this process, and so check it out. And when I get back and start sewing on the pants, I'll film some of that for you. Also, stay tuned to this vlog. And I also have an old rent fair skirt that I haven't been to a rent fair in a long time, but it's a really pretty, I think linen or cotton fabric, so I'm gonna make it into another pair of pants, maybe two, because there's a lot of fabric there. Anyway, also reorganizing my sewing patterns and, and, and, and, but first, we need to go to the dentist. So I'll be headed home. My mouth is numb, but the last metal filling in my mouth is gone. Ran into my next-door neighbor, Nate. He's got a filling, he's got how filled, so he was at the dentist and had a nice little chat with him, so anyway. All right, we are going to walk home, maybe take a few pictures, because I was in a hurry to get here, so I didn't do that on the way here. Hopefully not get rained on, but we have stuff in case. And yeah, let's get to it. Maybe get some sewing done today, maybe. We'll see, I'll be back going home the way we got there. We're gonna go buy the duck pond, because I haven't been over there in a little bit. We'll go see if there's any ducks over there. Everybody's out trying to get some yard work done before the next bout of rainstorm comes. Don't blame them any. All right, let's go. I decided to line the rainbow patchwork pants because I put pockets on them. And yeah, the pockets are already on there, so I assembled the outside seam of each leg, then laid it out flat, then centered the pocket where I thought I wanted it, and then sewed the pocket and it's flat down. Then I finished assembling each leg, then put one inside the other one right sides together and sewed around the crotch seam. Now, I just need to hem them and add the waistband. My mouth is still numb. I think it might be not, maybe thought enough, is that the right word, to eat something? I'm really hungry. Yeah, it's 2.30, yeah.  Maybe we'll finish the pants today. They're so cute. I think they're, I mean, how do you not love pants that colorful? I'm pretty pleased.  Now, I'm not sure I would wear it with this top exactly. Tucked or untucked? Probably untucked, because I'm an untucked kind of gal. But I mean, we even have nice big pockets that will fit my phone and or wallet. They're lined, elastic waist. I mean, I really like it. I like the length of them. I could make them shorter, but honestly, I don't think I want to. I mean, I could, but I don't want to. What do you think? And will you make yourself some? Let me know in the comments below. Hey guys, good afternoon. It is 12.45 PM Wednesday, May 3rd. Outfit of the day. I'll put a picture here somewhere. These are the pants I made. Yes, one of the pairs of pants I made yesterday. Love them. Anyway, we are going to work on some bleach stamping of this green knit dress that I thrifted. It is a large size, is it? It's an extra large.  But what I want to do first is bleach stamp the fabric. With one of my art foams, this one, I'll put a link to it down below. You're going to need a plate, big enough to stick the stamp in, fold up some paper towels, place them in the plate. And then you're going to want to get the paper towels wet with 50% bleach, 50% water. Don't use straight bleach. It's bad for the fabric and the stamp.  Anyway, we're going to do that. I'm going to set you up in the corner so you can watch what I'm doing and I'll be back. Once it's bleached sufficiently to your liking and it's lightened up the color enough for you, put it in the wash and wash and dry it as normal, which you can see I cleared off the table so it's downstairs and then you're ready to go. All right, while we wait for that, I've got some seam ripping to do. I'll be back. I saw another video today by T. Myers and she showed these pair of pants that she made. I made myself some using what I had. I already had a pair of blue jeans down there downstairs that I never wear. They were already distressed and they are stretchy jeans, but I made it work. Went through the fabrics. I happen to have some with big, giant flowers on it because, you know, anyway, I'll show you them here in a minute. I'm not going to put them on because we're going to go walking, but hang on. Okay, this is the front. Also added one of my patches that I made like a long time ago and I love that. So now I'm just going to wash them and put them in the dryer and that'll help fray some of the edges. I did seam rip the side seams in order to do the sewing unlike what she did because these pants do kind of fit me. They aren't super big enough that I was comfortable losing a whole bunch of seam allowance. But if you got a pair of thrifted pants and you got them one or two sizes too big for you, this is a perfect idea. I'll link the video down below. Anyway, we better go get some steps in. I'll be back. You guys got the pants done. Yay. I think I got my butt out the door. So we're going to go walking. We are supposed to get some more storms tonight. Rainstorms, I don't know. We'll see. The sky looks a little ominous, but you know, kind of always does. Anyway, I also drafted a vest. Well, I made a, I got a good progress on making a vest out of some fabric actually from our old couch. It's a long story. I know it's a little ridiculous, but it's a pretty fabric. Anyway, I got the fabric, probably 50, 60%, maybe a little more put together without a pattern, just drafting it on my dress form. I haven't done that since high school, but it's looking pretty good. It's like a project runway. I know, right? No pattern, no nothing. I didn't put it on the, draped the fabric on the dress form and just started sewing. The dress form will start cutting and. I, you know. Anyway, all right. All right, I'll be back. Good morning. It's 9 30 AM Thursday, May 4th, I think. Anyways, you can tell my hair is still wet, but I'll put a picture here. This is my outfit of the day. My new pants I made yesterday, thrifted jacket. So upcycled, found thrifted outfit of the day. Found as in this blouse I found in my closet that I kind of forgot I had. Found it a bit back, but anyway, you get the idea. We're gonna go, I have to check the PO box, which you all know, I've said before, they're doing road work on our street downtown and our main street and it's a nightmare, but I think what I'm gonna try to do is park your valley village, go shopping and then maybe walk over if it's not reading too hard. I don't know. We'll see. I'll be back. You can't tell now because it's a bit messy again, but I did try to do something with my hair, experimenting for an upcoming family wedding we have. It actually did look good before I got all hot and sweaty. Anyway, a little bit of curling iron and some hairspray works like a charm. Bob is off to a Masonic Lodge meeting. I'm up in the art room finishing up some sewing. I've got garbage cans to empty, dishes to do and all of that stuff, but first I made another pair of pants. I know, I'll try to get some pictures and insert them here and I'm working on two more puffy sleeve t-shirts. One out of some t-shirts I had in my drawer are called my depression t-shirts, just plain and kind of ugly and then one address that I found at the thrift shop. So I'm remaking them into things that make me happy and that I wanna wear. Anyway, I have four shirts cut out. I'm gonna do two tonight and then I have the black one and then the bleach dyed one with them, one of my art foamy's. So yeah, and they are the Vera knit top pattern from Forget Me Not Patterns, just for FYI. All right, I better get sewing. I'll be drifting today as you all know if you're watching this clip.  I'm not sure how much is there, at least two yards, maybe three, but then I got this little knit sundress to do something with and I realized just as I was coming down, it's still wet. I was coming downstairs to put things away and I looked at the dress and I looked at one of the shirts I just made out of a dress I had upstairs. They're the same fabric. That's funny. I guess that means I can make a skirt to go with the top I just made. Okay, I'm good with that or a tank top. I really do like the fabric, so that was not on purpose. That was a complete accident, but I'm good with it. All right, I'll be back. This is the white top that I made. Isn't it cute? I love the puff sleeves. I'll be making more of the more fitted long sleeve one at some point before next winter because it's gonna be a great winter layering shirt, but for the spring, I love the puff sleeves. Now the pants, these are the pants. I mean, they're cute. They're covered in patches. I have some rainbow sewing thread that I've had for a while. I used it on the pants. I think I might be addicted to making these pants. It's all Tracy Meyers fault. I'll link her video for these pants down below. Let me try on the other T-shirt for you. I'll be right back. I'd say the pants are a little bit draggy on the floor because I probably didn't take enough off the hem. At the moment I don't mind it, but at some point if I do mind it, I'll just take another inch off and resew the bottom and then wash it to fray.  I'll do a closeup of the rainbow threads. Anyway, let me put the other top on. Now, every time I make this top, how long the top is and how long the sleeves are depend on what I'm making the top out of. In this case, I had a little less fabric than I did for the white one. So it's a little shorter, which is okay.  I still love it. And it does the fabric matches that other dress that I got today. I had no idea. I knew it was cute and it looked familiar, but you know, all right, that's it for the minute. I'll be back. Sewing thread, it's rainbow colored. So I just used that on all the stitching on the pants. And yeah, I love the way that turned out. Anyway, I don't know where I got the thread from. I think Etsy or something, but cool. Tomorrow. Either these are my rainbow patchwork pants, but yeah, cool. All right, I'll be back. By the way, I think I'm addicted. Everybody, yes, I have my new blouse on, a t-shirt I made yesterday and my new pants. I did take the waistband of the pants because they're originally men's jeans and I cut a hole in the waistband on the inside on about an inch in from either hip seam or side seam. I pulled a piece of elastic through and then pulled it a little bit taut and so zigzagged the edges down, of course, with my rainbow thread. It just makes it a little tighter because these are meant for men's hips, which are straight, right? Makes it a little tighter and feel less like they're gonna fall off, which is always good, yeah. Anyway, we have to go pick up some food for dinner tonight and, because the kids are coming over and grandson, AKA juniors, coming over, yeah. So we're gonna go pick up some stuff and I'll be back. Why is Costco always so crowded, but it's Costco. Anyway, let's see if we can get everything else that we need at Fred Meyer. All right, I have the fabric washed and dried. I cut out one of my favorite top patterns, which currently is the Vera Knit Top. I don't know if you can see it through there. I'll put a link down below. I've spoken before about how I altered the neckline on the top, because the pattern's a v-neck and it has really long, puffy sleeves with cuffs, which I don't put the cuff on, I just put elastic in the bottom and it's the top you've been seeing me in the T-shirt with the puffy sleeves. That's the pattern. Now the sleeves on some of the tops are shorter than others, because it just depends on what thrifted garment or fabric that I'm making the top out of. In this case, a sundress that we bleach dyed, right? And yes, I have it on, so hang on. Maybe this will work, because you know a professional YouTuber and all, I can't be bothered to get a proper phone stand or anything. Oops. So that lighting sucks, hold on. So this is the bleach dye top with one of my new patchwork jeans on, but anyway, it's cute. I love it. Now the sleeves are patchworked together because again, we're using thrifted items, right? We're not buying the new fabric. Number one, it's too expensive. Number two, we're trying to do our part, right? So the sleeves are patchworked together with bits and bobs. And so they're shorter because I didn't have as much fabric left. Most of it went to the front and back of the bodice, but that's okay. I also always reuse the parts of the garment that I can, i.e. the hem, or if it has buttons or something like that, I try to incorporate it into it. So I may do the same pattern, but it may look a little different from time to time. In this case, I reused the hem. I didn't have to hem it. So what do you think? I love the pattern and I love that it's my art foamy. So if you have art foamies, do some bleach stamping on some fabric and see about making yourself a garment or using the fabric for a journal cover or something else, it's a really great idea. If you don't have art foamies, I will link their website down below. Whether you buy mine or one of the other designers, there's some really great designs over there. All right. I have one more knit top to make this weekend. It's not gonna make itself, so let's get sewing. I have a black one done that's actually exactly the same as the one I have on because it's made out of the same garments. And so I had the same amount of fabric, so the sleeves are the same and everything. I love these shirts. Can you tell? All right, I'll be back. It is Saturday morning, May 6th. I think it's coronation day. Obviously, I'm not watching that right now, but anyway, I have dishes to do from last night. Plants to water. Yeah, what am I doing? Heading upstairs to pull out a sewing pattern? Yeah. All right, hang on. Keel silk fabric we've had for way too long. I was going to do this pattern out of it, but I think I found some better fabric for that pattern. And I actually think I'm gonna keep it simple. And I thrifted this pattern from the Goodwill Up Near My Dad's House. And I think we're gonna do a version of that. Not so long. Probably the scoop neck. Maybe without sleeves. I don't know, we'll keep it really simple because we don't have a lot of fabric. But yeah, I think we're gonna do that. And then I bought some floral fabric just the other day at the thrift store that I think we'll do the other pattern out of. So yeah, now that I've pulled that out and set them into piles, or I will in a minute, then I guess I can go do my chores if I must. I'll be back. All right, I'm gonna add this in before the end of the vlog. Remember me talking about thrifting the other day and how I showed you I came home with a dress, little knit dress that perfectly matches another knit dress I brought home and I made this shirt out of this one. Well, I took the other one and it decided to make a pair of shorts. Yes. Yes, I did. And they turned out pretty cute. So now I have a home matching outfit and it had pockets in it, so I left them. I've said before and I'll say it again. So when I'm doing these upcycling things, I incorporate what I can into the pattern, whether the actual original pattern calls for it or not. I use the hem that's already existing. If it's got pockets, I incorporate them if I can. If it's got buttons, whatever. In this case, pockets. And yeah, pretty cute. Now, I'm gonna try hard when I'm thrifting not to come home with any more of this fabric, but obviously no guarantees. Yeah, I'll be back. It's 5.21 p.m. on Saturday, a 6th. Yes, May 6th. We've been out, we did errands this morning, came back, had some lunch, and then we went back out again. Went to a few places just to walk around, went downtown into the city that we live in. They've been doing a lot of road work and it's been a nightmare. We wanted to see what they did and what kind of progress they've made. They've made progress, but I don't understand what they're doing. Anyway, and then we drove down to local farm stand and bought a new plant for the front porch for the spring. Bought some homemade ice cream that they sell and a few other things, you know. So, as one does, maybe. All right, Bob's getting his bear cooter ready for hopefully driving tomorrow to the sun in laws. He's gonna be helping them with some work on their car. Well, helping sun in law with work on his car.  Or I might run out to the fabric store, but that's a big if because I'm not sure that I wanna do that. I don't really need to do that. I don't need to buy more stuff. I need to work with what I have, so there's that. I do have a dress I wanna make from some thrifted fabric, but I've got to get some lining fabric for it. But I don't think I wanna jump to going right to the fabric store, especially on a weekend when I have other things to do. So anyway, I hope you guys have all had a great week and that you've been able to create what you want and enjoy life and have a good time. That's like the most important thing. If you have questions, comments or concerns, leave them down below. Please like, share and subscribe. If you want ready access to me and what I'm doing on the regular more than you see here on YouTube and social media, you can ask me questions. I post things at minimum once a month, if not more. In our private Facebook chat and over on Patreon, become a patron. I sure would appreciate it. There's a few pieces of equipment I need and yeah, can't afford, so there's that. All right, that's it for the minute. Go out and have a great day, have a great week. Do something nice for yourself, because you deserve it and I'll see you next week. Bye guys.