All right, am I on I do apologize. This is going to be much more boring than the last couple talks But they didn't tell you there there's actually a bed backstage if it gets that bad Smart okay, well, um, I mean already introduced me, but I'm Andy I live across the river in Cambridge Really into the local mapping scene. I have this Bostonography blog that she mentioned that's kind of just for fun, but It's Tim Wallace who works for the New York Times and me We we enjoy making a lot of maps of the Boston area and just kind of exploring geography that way Also, I just want to plug I help organize this map time Boston if anybody's interested in learning mapping technology Who was that See if there's a map time chapter in your city or if you're in this city, please join us. It's really good But that stuff's all on the side most of mostly what I do is I work with access maps or a small company We do interactive web maps basically a lot of custom designed Things for a lot of purposes. This is just a little Example of some stuff that we do and Really what I want to talk about today is Like this napkin sketch is kind of I don't know if you can read it, but sort of a version of of a mock-up of a lot of our projects where We're not really Designing just a map we're designing and building this thing where like a client is going to throw Who knows how many different data sets at it and our map is going to have to support all of that and there's a lot of challenges around that which is What I'm going to get into today When we went to cartography school We we really learned this this mapping craft as an attention to detail and Really finding the particular story that lies in the data that you have and crafting your map and your story around that and really perfecting it based on that and In the I think the reality of a lot of modern web cartography is you can't really do that You have to make this map out of something that you know you kind of know about the data But you can't see the data and you don't necessarily know exactly what the perfect story is in there And you're you're building something that Can work okay, and this comes up a lot at least for us because You know sometimes it's that thing where there's a whole bunch of data sets And it's kind of an exploration tool Sometimes we have to do this work simply because the data isn't ready yet That the client wants us to use and but we still need to go ahead and start working on our thing Or maybe because it's going to change in the future They might add something remove something and of course We don't want clients coming back to us a year later Complaining because the map looks like garbage because they threw this new data set at it so Really what what I'm searching for here is various compromises in a number of areas of Where we find these challenges in our experience and maybe some others experience of trying to balance that really Good design with kind of not knowing how to do good design because we don't know what we're designing And I have here what follows is kind of It's a little bit of a laundry list I'm a little bit me thinking out loud about what are just trying to go through some areas where we find some challenges and Think about what the problems are and try to identify certain solutions Which are never perfect again. This is about compromises and Try to find you know some things that other folks have have done in these areas, but also a lot of this I'm just trying to Learn myself, so I'm very interested in other people's experiences and and so forth and I should caution I don't have tons of answers a lot of this stuff is just questions and saying well This is hard. I don't know what to do And so if anybody does have answers for some of this stuff that would be awesome So I hopefully this isn't like too disjointed in my in my ordering of all this stuff But I'll go ahead and start With my first category here, and I think this one comes up a lot for us Just data classification and I mean in particular for Coropleth maps and how do we you know divide been been our data into different classes? And those are going to be the different colors on the map I don't know if you can see this very well, but I guess I could try the zoom thing So this is sort of what I'm talking about different ways to you know arrange your your data classes on a map and this is a graphic from John Nelson who wrote this really helpful article explaining some different classification methods and how they affect the map in the end and If you're not familiar with John Nelson's work Just ignore me for the next 40 minutes and go to his website because it's really cool There's a post here. Oh, and by the way, I should mention There's a link to this these slides in the first page. I also just tweeted it. Hopefully it went out if you want to Actually follow some of these links here and and see that article But this is just a really simple example of what a difference This classification scheme can make this, you know, these three maps have the same exact data but they're just chopped up in different ways and you get these vastly different maps and If we are designing some system of interactive maps That has to accept a whole bunch of different data We don't want something that looks like this one popping up very often because it's not a useful map so We want some kind of compromise that's going to work reasonably okay for almost anything so This frustrates us a lot, maybe we're doing it wrong, but we do these designs in my company a lot where We kind of design around this idea of this really nice almost normal ish Data distribution makes a nice histogram and all this stuff, but nope It's like never like that or there's always one or two with you know Some stupid outlier down here that just ruins everything Pretty much every time there's always going to be one So yeah rule number one just that will happen always so what I'm Yeah, well, this is what I'm getting at we need to have some kind of classification Rules that are going to work pretty well for almost anything without us actually having to look at the data and figure it out For that data set and there's a couple of common ways That cartographers do this which I'll get to in a second But these are some important questions to consider on how you've been your data. This really goes for any map And it's not just For this this particular purpose, but we're trying to make a compromise It's going to be a pretty good answer for all of these so first and foremost is the map going to work Is it going to look good will it be useful? You know like that map a minute ago that was all one color basically that's not a map that's useful And it also doesn't look good Same I just wanted to throw charts in here too because Interactive mapping often involves also other visualization elements like charts that are accompanying it. So same question for those Are the brakes meaningful these class breaks the you know the numbers between the where the bins lie By meaningful, I mean does it actually have some sort of real-world meaning this number that we're using a good example? I think that came up a lot in the cartography classes and colleges if you're mapping income For instance, you might want to have a break. That's at the poverty line or at certain other meaningful area levels Or if you have a diverging set, maybe the number zero is a good place to have a break And are they understandable meaning by this I mean Does the reader to the map user Get like how these numbers were derived and why they are why they are where they are So a couple slides back one of John Nelson's examples was a standard deviation for example Classification where you're making breaks at like the mean and then one standard deviation out and so on But depending on your audience I can imagine that People may not understand what that is and why why you chose chose these numbers and what is a standard deviation? What does it mean? And then this sounds trivial, but are the are they nice numbers like you don't want You want four hundred you don't want four hundred and two point three seven eight five or whatever unless that's a meaningful number so these are some things I think that we're often trying to compromise to Do okay at and a couple of just I just I'm gonna name two like common methods Which should be familiar to anybody who does mapping but these optimal breaks breaks Developed by George Jinx in the 70s. I guess It tries to find these kind of natural breaks in the data by this algorithm that maximizes similarity within groups and difference between groups If you're a JavaScript person check out atomic rights statistics library has an implementation of this you could look at But of course has downsides like this is going to give you some of those weird numbers and And they're gonna be crazy different for every distribution and it may be difficult to compare Or to kind of maintain consistency This is the kind of a fake classification, but it might look something like this on this histogram You know you for one thing this outlier is definitely going to be all by itself because there's clearly like a natural break in there And then you would have some other sort of reasonable breaks in the middle Quantiles then is another kind of easy go-to where you just simply divide your your data into equal sized bins On the map, but I guess I don't have a good picture of this, but again, there was one a few slides ago It kind of guarantees that your map is going to have some variety. You're never going to get that one color map You're gonna see an equal number of Entities in each color So can give you a pattern which it's not necessarily truthful, but it's there Just a code example d3 as quantile scales and by the way, I have like miniature code things thrown about here It's mostly just JavaScript often d3. That's what we use a lot, but this isn't a very technical talk all together But there's big downsides to this like You get these groups that just don't really make sense because you might have numbers really far apart from each other thrown into The same group might have two numbers right next to each other split into different groups So that's a big downside to these So here's an example if you just did what quartiles on this distribution It's you know looks somewhat reasonable in here, but then you get this thing where This doesn't really belong with all look like that So not perfect, but something we've done a few times is Use percentiles, but not even even buckets like this actually kind of try to pull off a high end maybe a low end into its own class to Fix that problem a little bit not really I Don't know if you can see my extra color here, but you know now this guy is still joined with these But it's only joined with a couple of them. It's not quite as bad and Oh, I guess I should mention. Yeah, one of the problems with percentiles or quantiles is you are no longer You're not really looking at the actual numbers anymore necessarily and even my little scale here This is not giving you actual numerical values. It's just saying 50th percentile and you don't know what that is What we often do in a case like this is we'll label our graph Maybe our legend this way with just 25th 50th something like that, but then relegate the actual number to an interaction maybe you hover over this to over this thing you can see This of course, I'm not interactive But imagine it if you hovered over this thing you would see some actual value of where you are in that histogram Or on the map, of course Well, this is just a screenshot of something we did do like that. It's a map of some health data in Public health data in Illinois and Very much like that. There's this one outlier way out here, which is Cook County, Chicago And as Ken Field is in the audience, I want to assure him that this is not because there's a lot of people in Chicago This is actually a normalized map So it's not a bad choropleth just whatever I don't remember what the variable is but it's it's It's something per capita. I think Anyhow So anyway, that's just an example and one final thing that I've done a few times is Kind of getting away from that understandable Criterion but rather than dividing up the actual data itself to do percentiles based on the unique values So transform that the problem that we often encounter if we don't do that is you'll get these data sets were like Half of them are just the value zero or something and technically if you did like quartiles on that then your zeros would span like two or three of the classes Well, I guess if it's half it would be two classes of that data and you get this really weird map where like you have zero labeled on two different colors and Probably the code is just gonna end up coloring them all the same. It's really confusing so this is something I've done sometimes is Pull out the unique values and based the classification scheme only on the unique values and not on all the values Simple little code code example there in JavaScript. There's probably easier ways to do it Okay That's my last bit on data classification The next bit I wanted to get into is simply how Things get really messy when you don't know what's coming you end up with stuff on top of other stuff and it's illegible So this is probably pretty obvious, but things are always going to overlap and Really thing a thing not to forget is just to if you have say circle symbols Make sure the small ones are on top of the big ones. Otherwise you can't Get at the small ones or you can't see them simple little example here bunch of circles all on top of each other, but They're ordered right so you should be able to like get your mouse on every single one of these Also overlap just a quick thing goes for not just the map, but also like labels and things like that histogram here where by default it would just label everything directly under where it is, but We wrote some code to make sure that things get spaced out and never end up on top of each other then there's this there's issue of scale and Good example of this is a county map Where some counties are huge and you can easily get at them and some are going to be really tiny and you can't unless you zoom Or maybe you don't even know what your geography all of your geographies are and You don't know if they're going to be big or small or what? This this here is a kind of a fake mock-up using a New York Times election map But it's trying to show a Thing that we have done from time to time and New York Times Sometimes also does some similar map navigation, but it's your basic kind of slippy map You have these pan and zoom Capabilities you got those zoom buttons you can freely move around the map you can zoom into wherever you want But also we add this kind of extra More design Guidance of the map user by not forcing them or not relying totally on them clicking zoom button every every time but when you're zoomed so in this example you're zoom when you're out at looking at the whole nation We have you if you click on a state it zooms right into the state rather than Interacting with that county level and then once you're zoomed in a little bit then you can interact with counties You can still pan and zoom or what? and it's We've done this a couple times just to in an attempt to Give the yeah give the user a little more guidance and try to Design what we're doing so we don't know everything that's going to be underneath there But we do know that we have say states or maybe it's countries or something and you can kind of take advantage of that And use what you do what you do know to try to guide people into the more unknown scale This is to say nothing of actually varying extents Like if you don't know if your data is going to be in the US or Asia or what I that's another issue. I suppose to Which I apparently don't have anything to say about No, I mentioned it Okay, then there's this next bit No Is to just to remind The cartographer that there's probably always going to be holes in the data missing data Maybe bad data and you just don't know and you always need to be aware of that always catch that those those null values and explicitly designed for them because they are in the sense they are data as well and those of you here last year Andy Kirk gave this this nice talk about the design of nothing and One of the sections that of his talk was was really about that. It was about how do you about designing? for the lack of data and actually what a what a powerful element that can be there's there's certain visualizations where that he showed where these gaps are really meaningful and they're kind of telling a story and He showed my there's a bunch of examples there You can check out check out the video of his talk last year because that's pretty good So the first thing we always have to remember is that this no data can come in a variety of ways and We at least need to know what we might be looking for and hopefully we do But when it comes into that when it gets piped into the JavaScript, however, it gets in there You know it might come up as null or undefined or not a number or a blank string or an actual like literally the word null Or some you know stupid number that they put in to stand for no data So yeah, the important thing is to just I guess I don't really have a great example of this but There's a lot of functions we write where of course the first line of this if this function is like if this thing's not Or whatever then do something else Because if you don't catch that stuff the map can get confusing maybe things might just disappear or You're gonna get some default thing like an SVG solid black fill which looks terrible Things like that so you we really want to be explicit about it and and not let the map get confusing because we want we don't want the map reader to confuse no data with data Just a little thing that I always forget to do is remember that zero is different from like null and there's some a Code thing you can kind of get tripped up on if you just say if this doesn't exist It's also gonna think that zero doesn't exist, but usually zero is actually data that we want to catch So a couple of examples of how you can design for null data and again You should just go back to Andy Kirk's talk from last year because there's a lot of this but Texture is something we've been getting into lately. This is a Modified example of this textures JS map, which is really cool I think it's for D3 and it makes it really easy to make these SVG textures and That is a lot better than trying to figure out how to write a path command for a stupid diagonal line and like It's been figured out for you. You can make nice. Maybe hatch stripe patterns to indicate your no data It's very clearly distinct from colors You know, we also just color things gray a lot if it's no data But depending on the color scheme of the map or everything else that could get lost could get confusing so check out this textures thing if you're a D3 person it's pretty pretty great These lines are just one example. There was all kinds of patterns that are built right into it Just another specific example is a time series data and being explicit about when there's gaps in there and not trying to interpolate and suggest that there's actually data in between two points. So this is a You may recognize us from the iOS 8 health app that somehow figures out how many stairs you walk up, I guess But yeah, so there's all these days here where I guess I didn't walk up any stairs and I I do live on the second floor so Apparently I didn't leave the house But I like how it really makes this dashed line the shading underneath it to make it really clear that this is not Like a real trend. There's just nothing in between But well still kind of maintaining that That consistent line. I guess I updated this yesterday because the previous graphic I had in there was like Average of one and there's like a bunch of days missing lazy month. I guess This is this is a screenshot from an old old map. We did some years ago. It's probably a little hard to see but We had a I guess this was an animated map of proportional symbols showing Jewish population in various US cities Over some time period and it would do it what you expected You know the symbols would grow as the population got bigger, but we had all these years Where there was missing data for certain cities where so there's a st. Louis here We had data for 1850 But we didn't have data for 1890 and then maybe we had data for 1910 or something and We attempted to do Something here. I don't know how well this really works, but we didn't want the symbol to just go away We also didn't want it to remain To say 600 because we know it's not 600 still in 1890. We just don't know what it is so what we tried to do is retain the last known symbol But give it this like empty. They're all pretty small but empty circle character and Hope that that was clear. I I don't even remember where to find this map anymore There was probably like a legend with it that maybe indicated that But this is an interesting thing I actually I would like to hear other thoughts on how to Kind of design for gaps in animated maps where you are missing data Okay, next thing a little bit about text and I don't have a lot here but I wanted to bring it up because I'm talking about maps, but It's easy to forget that a big part of maps is actually the text that goes with it Whether it's on top of the map or beside the map or whatever that's It's almost always there Marty Elmer wrote this nice post a year or two ago about Pros in cartography and a lot of good examples. That's what this link is up here. Don't read the rest of it but I Only want to mention one thing this often happens to us is that we have this nice designing We're kind of assuming there's going to be this nice little text snippet here somewhere, but What actually happens is sometimes? Yeah, we get a few lines of text But sometimes the data that's sent to us is like this 4 million word thing and if we're not careful our text box is suddenly going to like get huge and just cover up the whole map and whatnot so just You have to be mindful of Some CSS properties like you know restrict the height and make the user scroll through the box If it's going to be really big Otherwise it can kind of ruin the layout of the map And certainly I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to account for things like that like you know Cutting off the text and having a like read more button or pages or something like that Something to be aware of anyway Quick thing here. I found this example of one of our projects to but Abbreviation for I'm talking more or now about like label size things Here are the labels on the bottom of this bar chart Kind of get restricted in size and this is just due to some constraints of our layout So we kind of abbreviate truncate them with an ellipses and when you mouse over it, you can get the full name But I just wanted to point out how you that you can be more You know thoughtful about how you abbreviate words, you know here the names you just kind of cut them off at the end, but this is a congressional district and If we abbreviated every congressional district the same way that we did these names, they'd all say the same thing They just be like co n dot dot dot and so remembering in this case that the number of the district is actually something That you need to see we abbreviate a different way we cut off the word and then show the number So this then this is an interactive thing by the way You would the chart doesn't always look like this You could have like five congressional districts in there or you could have just like one bar where the thing actually does fit So we needed to be able to account for all of that Another thing that always gets me is remembering to format for singular Words like we have these labels all the time where it's like x number of Whatever's and then you forget that if it's only one the word is going to look different Also over here orders of magnitude this label, you know, you don't want something that says a thousand thousand you want that to say one million so you need to Be smart about formatting things like that and by the way, I guess I don't mention explicitly, but If you're a D3 user, you know that the axis Thing there and the scale ticks are really amazing because they give you these nice pretty numbers out of any range But they're not really going to label them like that for you That's just a little like, you know simple code for how you might do that. I do this quite a lot say Add add an s if it's one if not don't add anything Okay, so a quick couple things about text there and then kind of stepping back to the map as a whole This term the lorem ipsum map which I'll reference in the second but I'm thinking about how the The whole gist of this is that when we're designing building a map, we don't have real data We don't necessarily even have realistic data So we're using some kind of stand-in whether it's something we made up or something that's close to what we need or what and We're building our whole thing around that And that can be a problem sometimes. There's this little Usability study by Rob Roth and Mark Harrow were that kind of cautioned against really designing all your interface without Also designing your map and knowing what it's going to look like because the user experience can kind of be degraded So this this little study was based around this map which we did Back in grad school at the University of Wisconsin Also go badgers tonight We so we ended up this the map itself is kind of this like soft fuzzy green blue thing But we didn't really have that design Finalized really well. We went to town building this interface. So we just started building this like Cold metallic looking UI because when you did things in flash in 2007, that's what you did and So there's a I mean there ended up they did this little user study afterwards a usability study and There was some negative reaction to that. It's just the How incongruous this this map and the UI were so That's one of those shruggy moments I don't have like an answer for how you do that if you don't actually Have the material if you're a map, but it's something to keep in mind that said If you're making fake data just to test your stuff out and to build your UI around it It actually could be a really good test of code because this is a super unrealistic election map in Egypt Egypt that we're kind of in progress on but if if your map can work like functionally technically if it can work with this Terrible data then it can probably work with real data So in some sense is the the worst your fake data the better So this thing like you have precincts that are like these stupid multi polygons and stuff like that and the map is okay, so We're good Caroline fish was was kind enough to get a thing posted this morning so I could link to it on in here But if you go to this you should read her post. It's she's talking about an experience that she had Where she's using open data open street maps specifically while designing some map templates To stand in for what in the end was going to be like the total opposite of that Classified defense data that she could never even see and There's some challenge obviously some challenges around that like getting this one type of data to stand in for another type of data When you're designing it and you know a little bit about what it's going to look like, but you don't know everything I Like her term trying to come up with smart dummy data so you can look at her post is also talks about getting into open street map and So starting to wind down here. This is all kind of getting at Trying to approach that more traditional human driven design where you're really paying attention to details But doing it somehow by rules and code I have a quote here from something from Daniel Huffman a cartographer who I Love among other reasons because he's a real rise of the machine's alarmist and cartography Like he might be a time traveler from some carto apocalyptic future So I want to do a little just the sort of thought experiment here This is a map that was around the internet so a couple years ago this wall map reference map the US by David I miss it's like heralded as the greatest paper map ever and it's it's a really it's a good example of a modern Example of that really human human design map like yeah, it's made on a computer, but So just to kind of extrapolate this a little bit because these days we're talking about these tiled web maps of the whole world Apparently this map it's one to four million scale and it was apparently about 6,000 hours of work So if we take that out, it's about zoom level seven for six hours Have that down to zero Double it up to say 18 That's being conservative because map size actually quadruples if you zoom in one one level So this map is going to take him 2,800 years to design with that level of care and 222 days And that's only the US so this is just a point to what I want to call big design this challenge of making good design of Data that is just far too massive for you to really inspect as a really caring human that's the question there and Pretty specifically. I'm talking about designing these global maps And we're usually using open street map unless you're Google or somebody, but this is open vis so we're talking about open street map and this is a data set that's got millions of users and You just you can't guarantee there are conventions But you can't guarantee that the quality and consistency of this data is going to be the same everywhere across the world And that your design is going to work on every little bit of this data So your challenge though is to come up with these rules that it are going to work even though you could never See it all So I just want to summarize something from Nikki of map box at nasus last year She talks a bit about this look quite a lot about this actually because they do this kind of work, of course Just some rules she she suggested prioritized prioritized your use case areas in your specific use case of course and Prioritized the most common examples of something But then you know do go out and look for some atypical examples and try to develop your compromises off of that and their software map box studio now has This kind of feature here where you can view multiple areas at once you can kind of inspect what? Certain feature might look like in different areas of the world I don't we have map box people here because I don't I can't quite figure out how to use this and I could use some help but That's an example of some tools I can help with that Also some of the open street map API's and so forth Where you can kind of inspect details about types of features and tags and geographic distribution and actually get the data and all this stuff This is an example of some highway tag that As you can see it gets used a lot in Europe But not so much in the US and you could easily be fooled into thinking that this tag just doesn't matter Don't design for it if you're just doing a map of the US, but You don't want to do that if you're doing the whole world you need to be aware of such issues and you can explore them through something like this and Of course with open street map and I glossing over open street map here I hope most people know what it is, but if you don't maybe you don't if you're not a mapper But it is this just massive open community driven geographic data set so if You find something wrong in the course of your inspections that you are doing of your design you can just go in and fix it and It's fixed So if you're a mapper definitely get into open street map use the data first of all, but contribute to the data There's a whole community out there, which I am not as into as I should be but it's there so I Think on that mini plug for something super open. I'll I'll leave it there, but Thanks, I look forward to


Now, fighting broke out on the floor of Bolivia's legislative body. The fight in the fight rather petered opposition politician Henry Romero against a member of the ruling socialist M.A.S. party, Antonio Colquay. The latter was visibly injured in the fighting. At issue with the issue rather was Bolivia's role in politics of recent years. In 2019, Bolivia socialist president Evo Morales resigned amid widespread violent protests against his government of allegations he fraudulently won an election when running for an unprecedented and unconstitutional fourth term.


Well hello there, Mark Riz and Hopkins, founding editor of SiliconANGLE, coming back to you at Google I O 2013 with our ongoing coverage, extracting the signal from the noise. I am here with Ian McDonald, who is the CEO of Skillpages, a way to find skilled folks to hire and put the work or to find work yourself. So he's going to tell us a little bit about that. Ian, thanks for taking the time. Yeah, I'm very delighted to have the opportunity to chat to you. So Skillpages, as you quite rightly said, we're a social platform for finding skilled people, getting your own skill found, and finding new people to collaborate with. So say, you know, as part of your life, you need to find skilled people a couple of times a month. You might need somebody to paint your home. You might need a graphic designer to design something for you. On Skillpages you can go, you can find people who have the skills that you're looking for, see who they are, what they do, see examples of what they do, and then you can see your real life connections to them. So maybe you've got a friend in common, maybe you went to school together in the past. And the whole concept is that when you're looking for, say, a babysitter to come into your home, you like to find people with whom you can trust or with whom you have a real life connection because people like to do business with people they know or people they have a connection with. So Skillpages helps you do that in a much, much faster way and across a much wider network of people. So I want to ask you more skillpages related questions, but first let's talk about why we're talking because we're here at Google I.O., we're in the Google Plus sandbox area. So what do you, what's your deal? Why are you here with Google? Yeah, so G+. is like a really exciting integration for us. So with 16 million members on the platform, we identify that an awful lot of them are already members of G+. So now that you can sign in with G+, what it does is it immediately means that you can find people on Skillpages with the skills you need and you can see your connections to them as a result of your circles. So you can see you've got a mutual friend or you can see that your friend has added somebody to their circles. So it's a very easy way to find skill people and then get instant recommendations from people whom you know who have already had a relationship with the person you're considering using. So that's one kind of basic integration of G+. But other things that we're excited about is that on Skillpages you can, for example, post a task. I'm looking for a graphic designer to make a menu for me. When you post that task, it can get shared into your G+. stream. So your contacts on G+, all of the people who have added you to their circles can see that you're looking for a graphic designer. They can comment on that and suggest somebody. They can apply there and then or they can share it onto their networks. So you're accessing all of the contacts of the people whom have added you to their circles on G+, with one simple click. So talk about that a little bit. So first of all, you've Googled the sign-on with Google+, is new for you guys. You've just added this on. But how much referral traffic drives new hires?  It's come through the people that I know. So how much of like, I'm assuming you're tracking successful matches, how much does that comes from a referral and how much does that just comes from people browsing the site? So we see when somebody does a search for, I don't know, an Android developer, what we're seeing is that the likelihood of them clicking on and subsequently messaging somebody with whom they share a social connections is four times the likelihood of them clicking on somebody with whom they don't have a social connection. So almost immediately, almost more important than content is the fact that, hey, this is a friend of a friend. So your challenge of trying to hire people through your network is that you've got to contact your network all the time. You've got to tell them I need this, I need that. But that's quite a difficult thing to do. We've met today, but you probably won't call me tomorrow and say I need to find a new researcher. But if you saw, oh, there's a researcher, they look very interesting, and they're a buddy of Ian's. Maybe you'll just ping me a message and skill page and say, hey, I met you at the G+, Google I.O. And I see that you're a friend of this. Is this person any good? So it's a very fast way of finding social connections to people with whom you want to have a commercial relationship. So you've got a foot in both pools, so to speak. You've been with Facebook, you use Facebook single sign-on and you've recently, not switched, but added Google+. So tell me a little bit about the differences in the ecosystems that you've noticed so far. So from a retrospective on skill pages, we've used Facebook because G+, single sign-on just wasn't available. When it became available, we saw how many of our users were already on G+, because they can add that to their profile and we said, this is a no-brainer. This makes sense for our members. We didn't expect it would be too quick to catch on, but what we're seeing is that almost 50% of social sign-ons, two skill pages, are now through G+. See, it's fascinating, because you know, you keep hearing in the press, Google+, such a ghost town. Not the case. Absolutely 100% not. And what we're seeing is that not only is it the single sign-on is used by our users, but then the sharing of their interactive posts when they're looking for skilled people or when they're creating a new profile on skill pages, the engagement on those posts out of G+, from the news feed is extremely high. So we're seeing that almost on a par with Facebook, despite the fact that we've only been integrating for three weeks. So, what's next for skill pages? We're like five years, where's this going to go? I mean, because there's a lot of new social technology, especially coming out of the Google ecosystem. So what's next? Well, we're growing extremely quickly at the moment. So we launched in January, 2011. We've now 16 million people have joined us. They've had a 22 million skills. Over a million people a month are now joining skill pages. And what we want to be is the go-to place for finding skilled people. So just like 10 years ago, there was a thousand online book retailers. Now, Amazon is the go-to place. We feel it's an opportunity to just deliver a really easy experience for finding skilled people.  If we can make that easier, then we'll deliver value for our members, create new life enhancing opportunities, and therefore deliver a scale of organization that is capable of delivering value across the globe. Well, I thank you for your time, Ian. It's been a pleasure. And we'll be back with more interviews and more demonstrations from Google Iow 2013. So keep it tuned right here.


Okay, we are broadcasting to chat. It's not like intro or anything. Who's running this shit? Well, I know. What? What? I need to take over. Okay, here we go. No, I've got the opener. Okay. Ready? That's more like it. Okay, so now we are here to talk about OER by domains, the debrief by the Reclaim Hosting team. In that intro, we even had photos from, I think, our first conference, right? Back in 2017. That was when you were joining, right? Yeah, that was 2018, and it was in Bristol, England. Like, is it like that's so crazy to think it was in person. Oh, we are. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. So both. Yeah, we had the work soon. Yeah. There was the Oklahoma City, where the whole womb area, right? Grant Potter, and then there was 2018, which was in Bristol. That was the famous movie theater one. Yeah. Yes. It's 2019, and now domains 21. Pretty crazy. Combining forces for good. So, yes, to kind of put the timeline in perspective with when we're recording. The conference was end of last week. So we kind of had the weekend to sleep on it and fill the high. I think that was the most exciting thing. And it was a lot of, I remember just vlogging, blogging a ton more than anyone else. I've been the only one blog more than anyone else. Like, it's just been Jim blogging.  This was your first like big event. I mean, I was brought on in December, so everything that I've done hasn't been in person, like I've been communicating 100% virtually basically with everybody, I feel like, apart from Meredith, because we're both in the Reclaim HQ in Fredericksburg. But I think that I came away just feeling like really encouraged by the community because there was just an overwhelming feeling of just like genuine open realness and vulnerability about it, like nobody was trying to hide that, you know, they were in a time zone where it was after midnight and they were on their fifth cup of coffee and just, you know, that kind of just vulnerability openness there really stuck with me. I think it was just really awesome, especially I think my favorite part was being the kind of backstage hand guiding presenters through the tech, but then like also being that last that last post of comfort, like right before you go live, I'm the one who's like, ready, three, two, one, hyping them up and it was just like, that was my favorite part. I just had a great time. Everybody was just so high energy and I just wish I could do it again. Yeah. No, you and Meredith were both instrumental and kind of helping facilitate some of those sessions, which is definitely new for this type of event, you know, in the past with in-person conferences. When they're fast with in-person conferences, we haven't started clapping at the window. Unbelievable. I always get the short end of this thing. Who put me up here? Don't put baby in the corner. I was thinking Mike was asking for more to think. But no, being able to do, you know, the staff role of facilitating or the session sort of behind the scenes, you know, and I don't think many participants sort of knew that there were two admins, you know, you have this frontward facing session host, which was the volunteer, you know, the committee members for the OER by domains conference, but then we also had a member of staff that was sitting behind the scenes doing the layout, the intro and outros and, you know, making sure that everything was seamless from start to finish. And so that's really cool that you all were able to do that. Yeah, I thought that was really well done because it made it easy for the participants and even just the chairs themselves to really like be involved and like enjoy the conference. There wasn't like a barrier of where you need to know the platform first. Like that was kind of just like the host job to do. And it's just something fun. We were able to experience and we were like in right now, like recording this. So I just thought that was really, really well done. And I like that, you know, the staff role didn't have the pressure of being, you know, in the frontward facing view, you know, you could kind of do the back end management and focus solely on that. And you didn't have to worry about introducing a speaker or, you know, even just being visible, you know, it just kind of takes the pressure off in that way. And then the person that is visible, their one role is to be visible. And so I think just defining the roles that way, yeah, just kept things super seamless and, you know, you're muted. Interesting, too, because a couple of, sorry about that, a couple of people said how much they loved StreamYard, like Sheila McNeil in a recent post today about it mentioned like how great it was to have people producing it while they were kind of cheering. And they also just loved how seamless StreamYard is. And I know I got a shout out directly, Marin Diepwell, who runs Saalt and who was partnering with us was really appreciative of the work Meredith and Isabel, you two both did and communicated that directly. Like, so there was a real sense, I think that feeling you were talking about, Isabel, that like everyone was excited, but we were also partly excited because it was going well, like it was fun, like the technology was working and people were like doing what they came to do. Connect. And when we had Domain's 19, I made a big push to try and record and publish every single session that we did, and it was a ton of work. That's where like I feel like this setup and being virtual was actually a good thing because we almost like put it into like automated mode. It wasn't automated necessarily, but so much was taken care of for us to where it was like at the end of the conference, it's like, yeah, and everything's live now and everything is already put on the YouTube channel and it's good to go where it's like at the Domain's 19 conference, there was hardware that we had to purchase, there were I tried to get it to the point where people could just hit the start and stop button before in their main sessions. But then, you know, Jim, you blogged a little bit about, you know, just like that feeling of like at the end of the conference, now I've got to upload every single video file. I was trying to do it while I was at the conference on hotel internet and that wasn't working out. I saved a lot till the end and then you're editing videos to cut out the ones that didn't work properly or people, you know, and so it was a ton of work trying to do that back then, whereas now it feels like seamless. Let's just get in a string yard, make a video, goes online, you're done. And I think there's also like a really important window during and after the conference where people are paying attention to the content. They want to be able to link it out. They want to go back and catch something that they missed. And that window, as much as people wish or want to think that it's longer, you know, where in the weeks leading after they're going to go back and watch the content that never happens, it's like you have to be in that mindset. You have to be have the time dedicated to the conference to watch the content. And so the fact that these sessions were essentially produced live, you know, you have the folks putting the intros and outros. And then once it was done streaming, it was automatically archived. You know, you had then folks in different time zones that could come in and catch the next shift of watching automatically. If we had said, you know, these aren't going to be available until next week, which was essentially our timeline with Domain is 19. You know, I don't think we would have had the same level of engagement or visibility for some of those sessions. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. And I said this to you, Lauren earlier today. One of the things that was cool is because we went into this kind of like, hope it works, big fit. Like, and my whole thing to Lauren earlier when the conference was like, no matter what happens, we're going to have a beautiful archive and we're going to have a beautiful website. So even if the conference is horrible, because you never know, but the OER community proved itself once again to just be awesome. And the domains proved themselves to be awesome. But like, I do think that, you know, saying this earlier today, it's I, I liked being in the chats and then seeing after the first session, like people arrived and they were talking about their coffee and they were hanging out. And I just felt like it was great. And I think I didn't lose the high for the next, like still, I'm kind of writing it like it was just so cool to connect and have the prerecorded sessions because I stayed mainly in domains 21. So I got to go back and watch the other ones. And I just was trying to like talk with folks and hang out and connect. And there were some awesome moments over those two days where people just showed up to engage. And I think that really is a testament to the broader open community that I really I'm glad, Isabel, you've got to get exposed to some of that and see some of these folks. And, you know, because there's so many great people and to have a kind of the discord stuff you did, Lauren, was amazing because it really provided that platform where we could connect beyond the videos and the schedule. It was super well done. It was it felt good. Absolutely. And it's still it's still going on today. Like I checked like half an hour ago and people are still in like the resources channel and like in the like the social feed of all the post after the fact, too, like it's all still going on. So, you know, and obviously you can't recreate an in-person experience, right? There's no way to fully duplicate that. But I think one of the things that we thought about really early on with this conference was finding a way to engage with folks outside of the 20 minute session, right? Outside of the 60 or the minimum character tweet, right? You know, this the the conversations that happened in the hallways or during lunch, you know, were sometimes, if not always, you know, more valuable for me at least to connect with others than when I was listening to someone speak at the front of the room. And so, yeah, for me, I think having discord, you know, in the different channels, the hallway chats, the resources, the introductions, you know, in just all the different ways that you could kind of say, hey, I'm here, what's everybody else doing and feeling comfortable in that. Again, it goes back to what is about you were saying about, you know, that vulnerability, but also just feeling like you're connected to a larger group. And that was the vibe that I got from a few folks was that this was the first conference where people felt connected to other participants in a way that virtual conferences haven't been able to do in the past. It's true, too. And, you know, interrupt me at any point, but I have to blog a bit. I don't know if you've read my blog, so I have some things to talk about. But but the thing that was key to me and I think it's important for this for reclaim, but I'm sure for a whole bunch of other tech groups around the world, like professional conferences, as much as people want to say, oh, they're hard to get to, they're expensive, they're this and that, all true.  And I think that was getting lost a bit as everybody was doing everything in Zoom and everything was kind of rootnized and you couldn't really get outside of that. And I think the ideal of a conference, and I'm not sure we did it, but would to get people back in that zone with some of that energy so that they're seeing things outside of their bubble and they're making connections they wouldn't normally make. And like that dream of the conference, which is actually what matters can find its way in a little bit, right? And I it's true, you know, Jim, you kind of compared in some ways the excitement to Faculty Academy, which is a conference that we would have back the University of Mary Washington. And that was my first exposure to the faculty there that introduced me to the community that I would be supporting as an instructional technology specialist back in 2011. And so, you know, I had just come there to do an interview.  And that was a way to like really meet the people and understand what the culture was at the university there, which got me way more excited than even just an interview would be. I was like, I want to work here. I want to work with these people. And so, you know, that's just another example again of where when you bring people together like that, it's an incredible opportunity to really understand what the what the community can be beyond just the virtual, beyond Twitter, beyond whatever the case may be. And I think this was, you know, even within the confines of needing to do it as a virtual event, this was the first time that it really didn't feel all that virtual to me. You know, it really felt in person in that same way. And it was because of the community, I think. And even just the way the presentations were set up to, like it was cool to see different types. Like I hosted a podcast episode recording of 25 years of ad text by Martin Weiler. And that was so cool to be in and get to see it. And that was outside of stream art and in Discord, but just the just that type of presentation itself was just kind of cool to be involved with and to see that you would normally see in another conference. Kind of having the different types of of sessions, right? So we had the recordings, the live versions. You had the workshops pre-conference and post-conference. And then there was this idea of open spaces, you know, where they happened in voice channels and Discord. And then we also have these seven minute flash talks or gasta sessions, I believe they were called as well. So I kind of liked this sort of this idea. There were all of these different mediums coming together. And in some ways, it reminds me of the show and tell portion of the domains conferences that we've done, where it's just sort of ad hoc everybody bringing the work that they're doing, whatever that looks like to the floor to chat about, you know, and it might look different session to session or booth to booth. And so being able to have that, I keep calling it like this creative chaos that you see between Discord and StreamYard and YouTube and all of the different ways. And so I think that for me was really exciting is being able to take all of these different platforms and really fancy tools on the back end and sort of push them together and mesh them in a way that it felt super streamlined on the front end. And it was a really simplified, but still really engaging conference for participants. You know, you didn't have to be super techie in order to join. And the thing that I always hated from conferences was working with hotels to do that. Like, because you work with all these fun ideas, you'd say, like, we're going to come in and we're going to do this. And then everything down to like meeting an outlet somewhere becomes this like committee decision and costs like they're like, well, for $150, we can get you an outlet on that wall.  We didn't even discuss that. And so it's like everything gets arbitrary traded through these like awful scenarios with these conference centers and hotels and things to where it just it takes all the life and passion out of that love, that sense of experimentation. And there was none of that here because it was all virtual because it was using tools that we were comfortable with. We could just say, hey, you know, we're going to do karaoke today or hey, we're going to broadcast this one on the radio. You could just do it without the having to find approval for stuff and have to talk to different organizations. Is this going to cost money? Do we have the bandwidth to do this? You know, we could just run with it, which I think was really a lot of fun. Not to mention the food. Yeah, well, there's that too. Yeah, you mean you didn't make your own set of conference chickens? Anybody who's ever planned a conference knows what the food or deal thing is because you've got the allergies and the variants, the different types of meals. And, you know, it's it's a lot. And it's it's arguably one of the more expensive parts of the conference. The food and the venue are usually the two biggest ones. I will say, though, Tim, to kind of counter what you were saying, you know, I think there was life and passion in Domain's 19 with our big absolutely and like we weren't able to hang anything on the walls. But we couldn't afford the internet, but it was very passionate. There are there are ways to work against the system, but you are working against the system that was to charge you through the nose. Yeah, exactly. That level of experimentation is just super hard when you don't know in the building and you don't get to call all the shots on things. So I have a question for everybody, actually. So I'll start because I won't I won't be a leader and be like, OK, everybody else. But like, what's the session that you walked away from? And there are many. So I'm not going to focus on the Domain's 21 because that's biased. But I'll tell you, Rajiv's closing keynote for me was a call to action. But also really like I think if you're coming into the open education community and you're trying to get a sense of like, where has it been? Where is it and where is it going? That was such a pointed and very specific look at the changing nature of this community of open education and the challenges. And really, it was just a passionate, thoughtful, really grounded kind of gut check of the community. I just thought it was amazing so much so that that little ringer you just heard was basically like, yes, like it was really for me an amazing moment of the conference and what a high to close on. So I just love that. But how about you? Yeah, I was actually hosting Virginia Rhodes session. And she did. She talked about the digital divide between classes in Uruguay when they all went online for the pandemic and stuff like that. She was presenting her preliminary research for her paper about it. And I was just fascinating. Like, I wouldn't have chosen it if it was an in-person conference. But I think like the schedule itself was just so flexible enough that like I just popped in and it was very surprising. But like really, really cool to see. So I popped in on a few different ones, too. But I think Joanna Franck was doing some really amazing work when she was comparing open practice and education and you know, you know, indigenous communities and how there's a lot of correlation there and how it's pulling that into even modern times with higher institutions of knowledge here. And a lot of the hierarchies are the same. So she was pulling connections from systems that have been in place for such a long time. But I think that, you know, when you add that digital layer to it, you get that new 2021 perspective on it because, you know, you can spin it a different way. Like there's different contexts there, I think. So I was really, really intrigued by everything that she had to say. And she was just a delight. She was great to meet in person, like face to face. That was awesome. She was great. Apart from... Yeah, I followed a lot of the domains tracks. And, you know, I mean, you could see a common theme, at least for me, in the work that CUNY had done and the work that they had built up that then spread even beyond their institution to the point where you had Zach Davis as a development team able to work within the confines of open source and what they could do there. You could see, you know, what Boone Gorgeous had done. And so, like, even the broader effects of the work that had been rooted at CUNY, which was really inspiring. But for me also, just like even the keynote from Laura, you know, like at the very beginning and the way she modeled this sort of randomized sly thing. And I love that because, like, people get so worried about, like, what if something breaks? What if something goes wrong? And she said, I'm just gonna put my slides on random because random is what I'm all about. And so, like, she just starts going and the slides come up and she starts talking about them and talking about things and she's just so passionate about the work she's doing. And it was such an interesting keynote for this moment in time to really tell people, like, this is okay. It's okay to have fun with the work you're doing. It's okay to have the element of surprise in there and that surprise can actually be fun and be okay at a time when I think people are kind of weathered by the pandemic and when it's all broad. It's just to say, like, if things go wrong, they'll just be different. They won't necessarily be a bad thing altogether, which I just thought was an awesome message. No, I'd have to agree with that. I didn't have a chance to sit down and watch a session start to finish just because I was sort of on the back end running around. But I did, I was able to focus on the keynotes and Laura gives a keynote, really did resonate me. I think resonate with me for that reason. Just as a speaker, presenter, I get so anxious and sort of bogged down with preparing and just to see that she kind of took that pressure off and really kind of flipped the keynote mindset on its head and then still was able to bring across the care and passion with just knowing the slides would show up on random and she could see a single picture and go, oh yeah, and talk about that, a single project for 15 minutes or something like that. It was just, that was really inspiring. And I would love to work towards just as, my own speaking abilities to be able to do something like that, so. And they were from like 20 years of work and like 250 slides randomized where she was coming in and you could see, it was amazing to watch just to see her light up with every slide that came her way. And then to make a game of it on the other side with the bingo cards, which was just like it was a joyful presentation. And obviously I kind of introduced it so I'm biased, but I was like, this is like nothing I've ever seen. And it's almost like you're just watching her be excited about her work. And it's like, it is what it pretends to be, right? There's no, and she was nervous because she's like, I don't like video. I don't like live presentations, right? I don't like any of this. So she made it work for her in a brilliant way. I agree. I think it'll be an interesting challenge. I was trying to think about like what things we could take away for in the future when we're back to whatever normal is, and the idea is like, you don't wanna go back to that conference chicken. You don't wanna go back to the bad parts of a conference. You wanna take the elements of the good ones. And I'm actually working with an organization right now that's thinking of their conference in December and they're actually gonna do a hybrid approach where they run both a virtual and a face-to-face at the same time, the exact same conference. And I think that'll be a huge challenge. And I think it's interesting to think what things we can take away from this event and this style of learning of professional development. What kind of ideas can we take and translate to the face-to-face in a way? Or will it just completely change for the foreseeable future where people will continue to do the virtual alongside the face-to-face in some fashion? Those ideas of discord, of stream yard, and how can we use those things even in a face-to-face event to kind of reap those same benefits. And I think there's certainly still a place for discord in an in-person event. I mean, I think that's, you know, because beforehand you would have all of these, like even just scheduling meals. Let's say you wanna go grab dinner with a group of folks or you don't have plans and, you know, where are folks gonna be? It's kind of this blast out to this community that's sort of watching this space. Whereas beforehand it was on Twitter you had people kind of planning things in DMs and conversations got lost. And I think, you know, we tried to combat some of that in domains 19 by setting aside time where folks could come up, you know, and put their name at a restaurant and, you know, try and plan that way. But even just having discord to say, you know, I'm in this session right now, it's awesome.  You know, I love that that channel blew up the way that it did where folks are now sharing their slides there.  It has a timestamp on it. So, you know, if there's anything that was said, you know, you don't have to take notes. It's just there. So we love that. I would say too, one of the things that I, if we're talking about future at what worked or what I'd want to see, Michael Branson Smith was kind of imagining this idea and it kind of goes to a point people made during the conference of, I wish I really liked the platform because they could switch between sessions, guilt-free, like so you could go in one and then jump to another video, pretty guilt-free. Well, Michael Branson Smith was gonna make the channel changer on the TV so that you could click which channel. So track OER1, track OER2, DOM21. And that would be a really cool, like, switcher. So you could say, oh, on this channel right now is Joanna Funk. On this channel right now is like, and so you could kind of go through it like you're surfing. I would love that. I think there, I believe that we had a vision that we couldn't completely do because of time and other restraints, but I think we could actually fill out some of it in another iteration. So I think we all need to like, do our victory laps, right? We did it again. Like, we should do that. But then, you know, I think we have more to do. I do think that, you know, because the site itself, like Michael and Tom, their work to put that together is just phenomenal. It was so, so cool. If I had one, if we had more time or the ability to add in an additional feature or something, I think that that concept, Jim, that you're talking about, what's happening live right now and really highlighting that would be great. However that looks, I think that's maybe the next really important thing because when you go to the site, you know, you have the full schedule and you can see the ones that have already happened or, you know, it's kind of upon the user to go in, find the time slot and figure out what's actually live and streaming now. And I think if there was a way to just say, take me to what's live, you know, in domains or OER one or two, I think that would have been helpful too for folks that were kind of popping in in different time zones or coming back from a break or, you know, what have you. I did have a, so I'm sorry, I don't mean to talk so much, but one more idea because this intrigues me. So we originally were talking about each of the tracks being a channel and going live consistently and having commercials between them and bumpers. And so there was this idea that you were sucked into the channel and you couldn't leave, right?  And so like someone would break into a presentation it would be like static.  And that would be like the jamming of the sessions to really make chaos. And like that would be so cool that each session would then have these like wild cards and people wouldn't know they're coming and it would be funny because they would be from the community. And like you would break into a session and say something funny and then break out and people would be like, what the fuck? I was getting very Dr. Oblivion vibes. Yeah, he said that. I'm all for Easter eggs and wild cards and things but I think at the point where you're willingly creating chaos, confusion is tough for from the perspective of supporting and minimizing confusion and chaos. So we'll leave that for a future discussion. If you will it, it is no dream, Laurie. Oh gosh. What else? Any other? The blast, that was hilarious. That was very, very fun. What was the blast? Sorry. The yokey. Oh yeah. The yokey. The yokey. Yeah, I love that it was a mixer to get everyone in the system beforehand. I think I checked the numbers and we had something like 50 or 60 people already in Discord the night before the conference which is really good. So I thought the karaoke did a great job to kind of bring people in and it was also super entertaining. It was so funny. Isabel and I were just having a dance party in the office like behind me here like we were just laughing so much. We had a couple of ringers because I was really nervous because I was having all sorts of technical problems and like not doing a very good job but that people were just there to hang out. Again, it was that spirit that kind of set stage for the next couple of days because I think Lauren, am I right? There were like 200 people of the 250 that registered that were in Discord, which is just ridiculous. By the end of day two, we had over, I think it was something like 209 participants in Discord and that's not including staff, admins and co-chairs. So it really just was that role. But yeah, and to think that Discord is really like one level of engagement. You didn't need Discord to participate. You could have just been in the video player on the site. You could have just been on Twitter or whatever. So the fact, I was not expecting those numbers in Discord. I was like, let's get half. Half of the people in Discord, I'll be happy. So the fact that almost everyone was in there, by the end it was just, yeah, my Discord dreams came true. And I have to say, Rajeev, a keynote came in and karaoke, which I thought for me was another really good sign. I think Marin said something like, you know you've killed it, the pre-conference prep when your keynote is karaoke already.  Like the social element of this stuff matters and the tone you set, despite the technology matters. And we got really lucky. So that was awesome. Thank you both for hanging out in there and giving us courage as we sang. Yeah, and it's cool to see what lessons that we can learn and bring to the table each time from the main spaces. Like Discord is very much used by gamers. And I also think of Twitch as an element that we kind of brought to this in some ways, that idea that something's happening live and that there's this channel of people talking about it while it's happening live and the presenters are able to respond to those people in the chat. I think that was the piece that felt so unlike, you know, a Zoom meeting, you know, to where people are like, wow, this is different. For academics that don't necessarily live their lives, you know, like jumping through Twitch and, you know, talking in Discord voice channels or something, it was very different and unique and exciting, I think too, which I think is awesome to be able to say like, hey, we're gonna try something completely different here.  So I really liked that and that was something we kind of wanted to make a priority from the beginning, you know, so we didn't have Zoom bombers or anything. But going back to what you were saying, Tim, just about lessons learned in Discord, I mean, and into the future, I think there's so much more potential in Discord, so many areas that we can still explore in tools that we can still bring into Discord. You know, I brought in a few to kind of do pre-scheduled announcements and Twitter and things like that, but, you know, you have a lot of live streaming options in Discord that we didn't really touch the surface on. You know, you can integrate with things like Spotify or, you know, I think there's a whole world of DS 106 radio that could be integrated with Discord really nicely. But then I think we also learned that Discord isn't great for everything. So the voice channels weren't as popular as I thought they might have been, so we could have, you know, maybe in the future we'll have more guidance or, I guess, structure around those, but overall, there's a lot of potential there and I'm excited to continue exploring. And I think there's some buzz that there might be a reclaim hosting Discord maybe when it works. Yeah, there is, inspired by the conference itself, working on trying to incorporate more of a casual way to get a water cooler channel going or even ask for help and support tickets and stuff like that or just talk through scenarios where you have to schedule a meeting to get on a video call or something like that. I think there's something to be said about having the Discord space for work because it's so easy to pop in and out of voice channels and that sort of thing that it's easier to kind of stir up conversations within a remote team that you wouldn't get normally as like having the scheduled and like formal conversations in a video call. So, yeah. It's funny, Slack feels corporate now. It's like we use Slack all the time.  It's like that's the corporate office space and you want something more fun to be the water cooler chat type of space, right? It's interesting. And there's going to be something beeping in the background. I apologize. But it's interesting too, because Michael Branson Smith said when he popped into one of the Discord chats is like, so what's the backup for Discord given that's going to be pulled up? And like, I think Discord is a great tool and I'm all ready for it, but like that's maybe why people are pushing towards some open source options like Mattermost and stuff. And I don't know what those integrate, but like it's a good question to ask early on, not that I'm like Discord, it's got to be open source. Like I'm not pulling out any credentials, but like these platforms are the future in terms of right now for a social connection and exploring them and knowing about them and us as a, you know, as a group kind of playing with them is super important. And I think that was like the lesson learned for me about Discord is like, this is an ed tech community. These are people who are in the space trying to figure out how to make community happen online. And like to go back to the like norms of like, yes, let's do it in Zoom, maybe a Google Meetup or like, you know, just like, yeah, let's kill all excitement immediately, right? Like we needed to do this. Like it was actually like incumbent upon us as the ed tech superstars that we are to step it up to A game and we did it. And to that point, we had a little bit of a scare because StreamYard got bought out just a few months before the conference was to begin. And there was a moment there were like, what's about to happen? You know, we had planned a lot of stuff around using StreamYard and are they gonna, you know, close shop or whatever, but at least now not been lots of wood for the time being StreamYard is still being run as an independent thing separate from the group that bought them out. So, but it's always a concern. Do you think we could have done this in DS1 to 6 TV? I think we could have. Okay, it would have been a lot more work. Yeah. No, we couldn't know. It would have been insane. It would have been OBS. Everybody download OBS. It is no dream. This is what I was told. Michael Branson Smith, we have one more thing. We need you to do one last request. Could you just do this, please? So any final thoughts or comments about OER or Bidomains? I love my shirt. I love my mug. I just need to say that. I know I need to order a mug. I saw it post on Twitter and it was so cool. You made it. You made it in the mug too Lauren. And then, oh yeah, I saw my tote bag back there. It was a lot of fun. I had a blast. These types of events usually really kind of motivate me for the next year of stuff until I can get to the next big conference.  I mean, obviously there was an exhaustion that came from waking up at four in the morning or 3.30 in the morning. But not the draining that comes from sitting at a screen at your desk for eight hours. I felt that invigoration and not like, yeah, we did it again kind of thing after this conference. And so I thought to some degree that has to be a win, right? Absolutely. Yeah, I was definitely reflecting on it that it reminds me why I'm in the job I'm in now like as the community as a whole. And I think after this year of the pandemic has just taken a toll on all of us it's just like so refreshing to have that sort of community and yet that's like after a year that's been so isolating for a lot of people. So, yeah. That's a great point. We'll start playing the next one. Yeah, people are going to start were like, what do we do for Domain's 2022? I know, exactly. And Lauren's like, but I will say though, on that point and I'm not suggesting another Domain's Conference anytime soon, but I am saying what it did do. Like I really dug the prerecordings. I really dug like hanging out with people and talking with them and getting their story. Like I really like this format just for some things we could do, you know, whether it's kind of, you know, hopefully we have in-person road shows but should we not? I think we have a pretty bitching platform to turn people into and be like, hey, this is how we're going to do it because I did feed off the connection and it did like you were saying, Meredith remind me why we're here and like you Lauren, like give me that energy for what we do. And it depends a lot on remembering we're part of a broader network of folks who are trying to figure out similar things. So for me, it was what I needed and I just didn't realize how much I needed until I was in it. And then I was just like, I couldn't stop. And then even when it ended, I was like going through like the shakes because I needed it so bad. It was crazy. I also just have to say too, like, you know, having the Discord platform and the work it takes to get everyone on boarded in that system and now they're there.  There's so much need all the time for facilitating community conversations and leaning on what other people are doing. And you know, where can I go to chat with other people in my similar situation? We have our community forums, obviously, but the personal connections that you can make in Discord, you have the direct messages, you have the ability to blast a bunch of people and the conversation and foundation is already there. So in some ways I want to keep it around, you know, and it's, so it's just, I don't know. It was an interesting decision when DigitalOcean, as soon as that Discord, like they had a Discord, we borrowed a bit from DigitalOcean. They had a Discord, they had the StreamYard thing. And then day two, like the conference was over, it was like bloop, it's down. And I wonder, A, your thinking and B, I kind of agree with you. Well, but the same thing is like to, Lauren, to counter yourself earlier in this thing, it was like people hope and dream after a conference, like, oh, I'm going to go back and do all this. And I bet half the people that were in Discord will never open it up again until the next event that requires them to, like, it's, you know, there's still a little bit of activity there for sure. But it's also like, there's something to be said for this was a moment in which we were all together in a space and now we've gone on, you know, to do other things and, you know, trying to be like, oh, we're going to continue to share resources in here and continue to do that. It might not be, you know, it might not be square peg round hole kind of situation where it just doesn't work. One more place to check, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, now it's another inbox that I've got to be aware of, right? Yeah. No, that's very true. And I think that's probably.  Don't let him, if we listen to him, we wouldn't be here right now doing this picture and laughing.  But then. Listen to him. Just put a logo back over his head again. Oh, wait. Drew. Here we go. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. We did it. We did it again. We got rid of him again. Yeah, I can't believe I helped him, you know. There we go. Nice. Are you kidding? No, I, well done team. I think we did a great job. It was a blast. You all ruled. It was fun. It was fun. I want more of that in my life.  I want to see that. Oh, that's nice. Well, yeah, I think hopefully at the end of the tunnel, we'll all be able to start traveling and meet up soon. In the meantime, this is a pretty good middle ground. Yeah, it's great. All right, is there a closing outro that I need to do? I'm going to do a special one. No, no, I'm going to do a special one. Yeah, ready? And pull everybody out once I do it. I want to go to black. Faith to black. Ready? Faith to black. OK. Nom, nom, nom.


Hydroplasmic organelle is endoplasmic reticulum. First the contents. Definition of endoplasmic reticulums, location, structure of endoplasmic reticulum and the types of endoplasmic reticulum. First the definition. Endoplasmic reticulum is the complex network of tubules which may be sheet-like, which may be sac-like and they extend from nuclear membrane to the plasma membrane or the cell membrane. They are present throughout the cytoplasm. Students, if we look at the endoplasmic reticulum, all the organelles of cytoplasmic reticulums are extended or extended organelles of endoplasmic reticulum. Endoplasmic reticulum is a rich network of tubules. These tubules are connected to each other. On one side, this network is attached to the nuclear membrane and the outer nuclear membrane. On the other side, this network is attached to the cell membrane. So we can say that the nucleus is directly attached to the cell membrane through the endoplasmic reticulum. With this, the entire cell is extended to the network. Location. Like I just told you, the nucleus is connected to the cell membrane from the nuclear membrane to the cell membrane. The entire cell is connected to an extended network. If we look at it diagrammatically, it is very clear. You can see that all these tubules are connected to the endoplasmic reticulum. If we look at the nucleus at this point, the endoplasmic reticulum is attached to the nuclear membrane. After that, the entire cell membrane is extended and extended to the cell membrane. If you look at the structure of this, you can see that this is an irregular network. This is connected to the cell-like structure of the endoplasmic reticulum. This is a sheet-like structure. We have just discussed that some endoplasmic reticulums are like this, because it is a sheet-like structure. Some of these are like this, because we get the structure of sac-like or irregular type of structure. Now, the different sheet-like structures of the endoplasmic reticulum are basically made up of tubular network. These are called sheet-like tubules or sac-like tubules. Basically, the endoplasmic reticulum is a combination of all these sheets and tubular structures. What we will call the hard tubular structure is called cystrodenium. Overall, all these are cystrodenium, which make up the endoplasmic reticulum. Now, the inside of cystrodenium, which is called limin, the environment of limin is completely different from the environment of cytoplasm. That is why we will have to study that a lot of chemical reactions that cannot be in cytoplasm are in the limin of endoplasmic reticulum. So, the tubular structure of the endoplasmic reticulum and the space in it are called limin. The types of endoplasmic reticulum are two basic types of endoplasmic reticulum. The smooth endoplasmic reticulum and the rough endoplasmic reticulum. The name is indicating rough. Rough means that it gives a rough appearance in the appearance. So, basically, on the endoplasmic reticulum, the rough endoplasmic reticulum is attached to the surface of ribosomes. Due to the attachment of ribosomes, this surface looks rough. So, who are the rough endoplasmic reticulum? Which are having ribosomes on their surface? The surface of ribosomes is on the rough endoplasmic reticulum. Here, in the diagram, you can see that the endoplasmic reticulum on the outside of the nucleus is made of dead red dots. These red dots are attached to the ribosomes on the endoplasmic reticulum. There are some ribosomes and some endoplasmic reticulum on which there is no ribosome attached. On which there is no ribosome attached, that is called the smooth endoplasmic reticulum. Interestingly, rough endoplasmic reticulum and smooth endoplasmic reticulum perform on different functions.


And so I did some searching around on Amazon and I found the SpyGen Spigen arc field watch stand. And it's a simple little watch stand. It's integrated in terms of the little charging puck, but it's 100% Apple watch compatible. So it's like official, a little more on the expensive side because of that. And it's a nice little stand. And it's like perfect.  So it'll put it at the correct right angle. It sits horizontally.  So it works with that. It does have an integrated cable, which is not always my favorite thing. So like, you know, the cable is non detachable. But in this case, you don't really move it around. So that doesn't bother me as much, you know, I worry about the cable breaking and then I got to get a whole new thing. So that's maybe not the best part of it. But the other thing that happened was I was sitting here and I had my AirPods and those needed to charge. And I went, you know, I wonder if I could throw my AirPods on there, my AirPods Pro. Sure enough, I put the charging case on there. It locked in with a magnet and went ding and started charging those two. And I have the first gens. So I thought that was a second gen version. Yeah, we were talking about that pre show. I agree with you. I thought it was only the second gens that would charge on the watch puck and not the first gens, but evident. You didn't replace your case, right? Your case. Yeah, not at all. Yeah, original case. So it all worked. And it's a nice little compact stand. It's nicely weighted on the bottom. So it's got good heavy weights weight to it. So when you lift things off, it stuff doesn't go flying. I think the price on the website was about 54 bucks. I paid less on Amazon. I don't remember what I paid. Oh, okay. We'll find an Amazon link for that for sure.