Hello there, it's Thursday at noon. I know it is Do you remember our arrangement Thursdays at noon on CFUV Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first-person plural You make it sound excessively attractive That's what I have in mind One year ago tomorrow May 9th the first episode of first-person plural was aired on CFUV FM Here in Victoria, British Columbia today We celebrate our one-year anniversary by keeping the plural part of the show honest with a panel discussion First-person plural is based upon the simple idea that events in our daily lives occur within the context of our Relationships to other people what each of us does is important for his or her own life But it is also important for the lives of others We make history together and as such our destinies are intertwined with each other No better example of this beautiful complexity can be made than a community-based approach to health the biomedical model focuses on diseases Interacted by individuals health However can mean much more than not being sick and can involve much more than Individual behavior community-based approaches to health and health promotion research regard cultural and social factors to be important to personal health development of community resources is as important in this approach as Vaccinations and antibiotics are the members of our panel today are playing important roles in a Victoria based Project in the Hillside Quadra and North Park neighborhoods Concentrating on the prevention of chronic conditions that tend to start in midlife That is 35 to 64 years of age Promoting action toward health or a path is a research Project that is taking a community-based approach to health issues in their second year of work path is currently Facilitating a community kitchen community garden low-impact exercise classes and community mapping designed to understand community resources and Community history this five-year effort is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is as much about Research as it is about health promotion the term Community-based research is broadly used and has varying degrees of grassroots involvement The basic principle behind most of the work that uses the term however is that Information gathering and knowledge production must have some connection with and must give back something to the community being studied This is easier said than done taking this approach becomes a balancing act of the community's needs Along with the desire to publish research results and the demands of funding sources used to more traditional models of research First person plural is a show focused on how groups including communities are formed and sustained We are a spoken word show produced on community radio It seems appropriate on this first anniversary of our show to take some time to think about Community and how social research relates to and supports communities We hope you will enjoy our panel discussion today as we examine community and reflect upon our roles in promoting community In an episode we call when our paths cross Thank each of you again for agreeing to be here today. I want to start off with each of you telling me your name and What you're part of the project entails I'm Doug Rhodes. I chair the Hillside Quadra neighborhood action group and our part of the project is as a community association Co-operating with and benefiting from the study I'm Laura Funk. I'm the research coordinator on the path project and my role entails things like data collection it for instance the survey we did of residents of the Community and as well as to some dissemination efforts of that information back to the community and on just ongoing other ongoing data collection throughout the Project and my name is Debbie Pierce and I'm the community coordinator Which means that I work with individuals and groups in the community to identify what kind of initiatives We might get going to try to improve the health of the community I've heard the word community already today, and it's a very powerful word I think I'd like to ask each of you how you would define or describe What community is or how it might be defined or described well community in this sense is Defined officially by the city according to an area of land, but that's only one way of thinking about a community other ways of thinking about it would Revolve around people's interests and mutual interests for example People in a similar socioeconomic group might have similar needs or similar problems And they might come together to try to solve those problems as a group and that might be a community and of course today with the The internet and so on we have virtual communities that have no relationship at all to geography So as we think about communities I think we need to go beyond the notion of people who happen to live beside each other or even people who happen to be doing the same things for whatever reasons and we need to look for some element of Commonality or some element of people trying to do something that's bigger than themselves and As an example there might be two people who live in the same community They drive to the same area every day. They suffer the same traffic congestion every day And they might even have the same response to that they might be going to a meeting or writing a letter At that point I don't think we have community. I think we have parallelism For it to become a community people I think would need to recognize That they share with each other some of these concerns and begin to think about how they might work together To address them. So when I think about community, I think about intentional ism. There needs to be some intent to Create something larger than yourself. There needs to be a sense of a common wealth if you like that we all contribute to And it's more than just private people doing what they would have done anyway And doing it together One thing that we asked people on the survey was if a group of people in an area Don't have a sense of community or sense of belonging to one another Can you really say that that's a community if they have other similarities? Also, we asked people about one thing that came suggestions that came back where people thought there needed to be more of a sense of community developed in their neighborhood and for them that entailed things like they wanted to get to know their neighbors better and Have that idea where you and your neighbors look out for one another that kind of feeling it to me is a sense of community in it In a neighborhood or a defined geographic area. Yeah, and I agree what you guys have said But I also think community is also based on interest. That's kind of what you were talking about Doug And there's has to be some intentionality there and that's one of the challenges I think of this project is that we're working within a geographically defined area But within that there's all sorts of different communities not just neighborhoods But there's various ethnic communities. There are People who don't really have a sense of belonging to a neighborhood community, but they have other communities in their life I mean, you know, it's not that they're disconnected totally, but they may not be connected to that community so it's a Creates a lot of challenges When you're really trying to build community around a geographic model And and for a research perspective perspective if you're trying to study community one of the things we've tried to grapple with is how do you define it and and for Research purposes you can often only really define it by that geographic thing Which is why I think a lot of people keep coming back to that but it's how do you? Gather information on these other communities. I think you need a lot of Sort of new and innovative research methods to do that We've talked about community. I guess partly having an aspect of things in common So things that people share and we've talked a little bit about intention or Perception if you like and people perceiving themselves as part of the community And I think that brings in a whole question of a public private split The I'm thinking of the recent book that that came out. It's called something like bowling alone and it's arguing that in America People are less community spirited and less community oriented that they once were Robert Putnam's book, right? I don't know if that argument to you know, well eventually prevail or not, but it's an interesting question that says how Wealthy if I can put it that way not just in money, but in other senses how wealthy do we feel as a community? To what extent are people prepared to? You know make investments in the common benefit versus private benefit And if I go back again to a traffic example, there seems to be lots of money to buy fancy cars and SUVs and so on There seems to be no money to improve the public realm within which those vehicles operate So the the spectrum that I'm talking about I guess if a community is strong, however It's defined it is able to mobilize its resources financial and human and intellectual and social in order to achieve things That are common to everyone if a community is weak then private interests will try to achieve their own goals possibly even to the detriment of the rest of the community so that our group for example is defined around some Institutional things that relate to zoning and traffic and bylaws and land development and it's so it's very geographic in its definition And yet we recognize that there as Debbie has said are any number of communities that Overlap with or operate within our geographic area and sometimes the I think you've probably had some experience with this with the nag group is that there are Sometimes competing interests within communities There's lots of things that are shared, but there's different there are different socioeconomic layers within a community So if you take social housing for example, there may be some portion of the community that that Advocate for social housing because they can't ever afford to buy a house They can't even afford to rent and then there are other groups who can't afford to buy who may not want social housing in their Backyard because they may perceive that it creates traffic problems or there's more kids in the neighborhood than they want to have a They would if they had single-family dwellings and all sorts of other things So I think part of the challenge of community is How do you balance those interests and how do you bring people together to recognize that in spite of the fact that there are differences? We have to work together if we're going to live in a healthy environment. That's really a good example I am and you know if we think about Solving problems in quotes if someone sees run-down buildings and poor quality of housing as a problem in quotes One solution is to bring in people who have the income and the resources to fix up those buildings and make them nice Yeah, so so-called gentrification, right? So if we focus on the problem being look at those run-down buildings We've solved it if we focus on the problem as being how do people find a decent way to live in their community? Well, we've just got rid of all those Problem people yeah and replace them with others and and now everyone's happy because their property value is going up or something But really all we've done is displace From a community point of view that's more like an immune response You know to try to get rid of some aspect of the community and I would see that as destructive, right? You know reduces diversity and and it makes people feel less Welcome and belonging. That's some of the tension in the community development literature And even we found in our survey a number of people identified we asked them to identify things They liked and didn't like about their community and a lot of them didn't like the more visible You know issues of drug use and prostitution and that kind of thing That's an identified concern on the part of people but from a community development perspective. How do you deal with that? You know, do you If the majority of people want to push these other people out of there Do you go along with that or you know and the the whole tension between in community development? Some people say you have to develop a consensus in the community and then that's you have to agree upon a goal And that's good to in my view is the hardest thing to agree upon is that that goal and how to how to get there Other people say though that you need that conflict and a lot of discussion a lot of healthy discussion around the issues And that it what's that conflict that will lead to the more meaningful change Of course, that's this may be getting into another area, but that takes a lot of time to do that Right and most research projects are not set up to with a lot of time to be able to do that That's what makes ours kind of unique We do have some time to be able to actually work in the community and and try to build around some of those issues Yeah Well, what i'm hearing is that the word itself is informed by a taxonomy or rather how you define the word drives a taxonomy That in turn informs the research. I want to hit methodology more specifically now I'd like to hear from each of you or from all of you collectively a short description of what community research is And how it differs from more traditional traditional in quotes, please forms our research How is the methodology driven by this conception of community? And how is the method by which the conception is formed influential on the research methodology? I guess the first thing is that community-based research is about community. It's about people. It's about community So that's that's the first thing The second thing is that the community and the people that live there have to participate in it in an integral way In order for the research to have have value I'm not quite sure what you mean by traditional research So i'm going to put my own spin on it. I know you put quotations around that so i'm kind of thinking about, you know, the usual quantitative approach To research and community-based research is by and large qualitative It may have some quantitative aspects to it, but it's very different in that It allows you to explore the complexity Of community issues and community research, which you can't do when you're simply trying to quantify a problem That's it's not possible. So it's much broader and some people use the term community-based research They mean more of an approach where if you're talking about say health promotion or disease prevention where Researchers will go into the community. That's their forum for disseminating information to people about health promotion And that can be a very sort of top-down from a research perspective They're just using the community as a almost the the setting in which they are doing their research Um, and there's almost a continuum then from the that kind of If that you could call that the traditional community-based research and then at the other end of the continuum is what The community development stuff has informed is kind of at more of an action research approach And that's the stuff that fully and completely involves community members even in defining What it is they want to research and what they want to change and usually it's it's informed with a change perspective That you there's something in in there that in the community That's an identified thing that that people want to change So there's sort of and then there's a variety of things that fall in between those two sort of opposite ends of the spectrum You're listening to first person plural on cfu v victoria's public radio 101.9 fm 104.3 cable And on the internet cfu v dot uveg dot ca Giving sociology an edge This is a hard this is a it's a difficult area community-based research. It's hard to remain true to it because Sometimes what you have in mind as the researcher or even for myself is kind of in the middle of it all, right? um You have an idea and you think it's a pretty good idea, but the community doesn't necessarily share that idea So then you're in a bit of a pickle, right? How do you work with the community so that either they See the wisdom of of what you're trying to do or you realize the stupidity of what you're trying to do by taking direction from the community and one of the things that um Doug does is he tries to keep us honest In how we work with the community So if we profess that we're going to take direction from the community then Doug reminds us when we aren't Or you know, he plays that which is is exactly what he should be doing as a community member Well, maybe a more specific question then How can community research benefit the communities being researched? What kinds of challenges are faced by communities when they're part of these projects? Well, I think there are several And probably pretty obvious benefits that are available to the community One of them would be that we're able to learn about ourselves Through the expertise and methods that the researchers are bringing We may have day-to-day perceptions of what our community is like But the application of scientific method or the survey information or whatever Can tell us quite a number of things that weren't immediately evident And we referred earlier today to how diverse the community is and in fact, there are different Sub-communities if you want to call it that within the geographic area of the study and also the area that our group works with Uh, and again, we might be kind of dimly aware of that But the research gives us some facts and figures and Quantitative as well as qualitative impressions of of what those issues really might be So the first advantage is that the research tools themselves are illuminating and they help us to learn things about ourselves That we might not otherwise have learned The second advantage is that to the extent that the researchers are interested in carrying forward projects which we Were interested in already There's everything from extra sets of hands and that the people on the research team can help us to do things right through to funding and If I think about some of the mapping exercises we're doing we had a demonstration the other day of some Uh graphical or geographical information system technology And it was interesting to me because in the demonstration I think the people were trying to show us from a technicians point of view what this technology did But the community folks were all immediately zeroing in on the content in the maps and saying well, that's not right Or oh look at that Or whatever so again looking looking at ourselves through a different lens or or Um seeing ourselves in a different light because of the expertise that people have um So funding obviously additional human resources and additional insights would be advantages some of the challenges I guess uh to some extent are the mirror images of those in the sense that And it's been mentioned already that some of what the community's Objectives are maybe different than the researchers um I think if I if I think of a more traditional Scientific model if I were studying a community of animals or insects or whatever There would be a what was called a top-down approach We bring the research protocol to the problem and the subjects really are just Subjects there there's a distance or an alienation between them and the researchers Well, we don't think of our community as something to be studied It's where we live and and you know the concerns that we have are are the concerns that that people have in their daily lives and to the extent that um The research methodology or approach Alienates us from that that's a challenge Another challenge. I think is that a lot of the Community components of the research are done by volunteers And they're generally people who have day jobs and they come to meetings at night And they're they're tired and they have family responsibilities or whatever And so have quite a different perspective on meetings and outcomes than perhaps people who are paid to participate And I wouldn't say this about anybody who's present today But there has been discussion in the past about research type projects where it seems to be enough to the researchers to have a meeting and have some energy And and to kind of go away and say well that was a fun event Whereas the community people say that was three hours out of my life And I had to get someone to take care of my kids or you know, I I didn't get my My paper done that I had to get done for the next day or whatever it was And so I needed to see some outcome You know, it wasn't enough just to see some community dynamics happening We want to see some product and and so again, that's an example of how the objectives Of the people doing the study may differ from the objectives Of the people who aren't just people like anybody else Who are participating on a volunteer basis? I guess the the next thought that I have is is around What are the the ultimate outcomes for the community? And not to pick on what you said Demi, but if if the objectives are different And the measures are different then it's unlikely that the research project will be seen to be a success So again, well I raise that Doug actually did as a point of of what you have to work towards in this type of research You have to come together on that or else it isn't you know, just the point you made It isn't going to be a success. You can't ignore that. It's part of the process for the community and the researchers To reach consensus on what it is if it's really community-driven research Well, and I think we've talked before about Different ideas people had and and I've tried to bring the community's perspective How would people respond to the idea? I'm thinking of one where we were we were talking about You know recording and broadcasting some of our meetings and and We always have this tension between Something to be kind of a neat and cool thing to do for the project. Yeah, and thinking well. What would the response to people be? You know if you're thinking of Someone who's at university And then someone rolls in one day and says i'm going to film the class and broadcast what you've said on the internet or Whatever, yeah, the students are probably going to go wait a minute. Um, this wasn't what I expected and let's talk about it And people in a community are no different So as we think about how we want to do data collection or how we want to interact with Some of the existing institutions of the community or just wide open public meetings We always have to think You know, what does it look like from their point of view because They may be people who are quote-unquote disadvantaged Or challenged or you know by definition, we wouldn't be doing the study if we didn't think there was something interesting there But at the same time, there are people who have individual dignity and concerns and aren't necessarily interested in furthering other people's Objectives, yeah, and you see that's that's really a challenging Issue for a project of this size which is community-based Because a lot of community-based research projects you have a small group of people who are really They're from the community, but they're driving it So they make the decisions around it and to a certain extent We have that with almost all of our initiatives that we have going on in this project but as they grow you're involving more and more people and Those people have different ideas. There's not consensus within the larger group that's developing So it's it's it's quite interesting and how this uh, how this is all all going to boil down at the end of the day Well, can I just add one more point there? Now what I was going to I just wanted to support what you were saying around the researchers Not sort of studying the community. I think that's another important difference between community-based research and traditional research Researchers don't try to be objective In this situation. They try to be part of the community They recognize that it's there's a lot of artificiality around objectivity anyway But it's clearly part of the methodology to be immersed in the community because that informs the research question develops more understanding of the context And that relates to what what I was going to say in the sense that there's there are a lot of tensions even in that faced by researchers because All of the stuff that they normally apply for grants and stuff that requires them to have this very sort of A view of research as very objective and very top-down and of course the researchers decide what they want to study and so even people that are granting projects Are just starting to have this other kind of community Research involved and they don't always they still sometimes require the researchers to have the very heavily quantitative objective kind of approach to how they evaluate it. And so I think some of the granting agencies need to Take a new perspective if they're going to have You know fund community research Also researchers are often aren't trained You know to work with communities in the way that doug was describing You have to involve the humans for whom it is a problem Well, especially because it's such a heavy volunteerism aspect from the community point of view I mean these are people who don't have to come if they don't want to so This type of research is reliant on community members coming out and applying their time and effort and and resources and Pretty much the incident that it starts to smell wrong to them. They melt away So we have to be aware of the human You're listening to first person plural on cfu v 101.9 fm victoria in the early 70s of Trying to basically impose birth control in india and not understanding why Indian women would not want to take the birth control pill I mean they were poor and they wouldn't they really want to have some control over how many children they had when in fact What was going on in those communities was because there was a high infant mortality rate and child mortality rate that Families really need to have lots of children because they needed children to support the parents and extended family members in their old age So there's no way that the community women were going to take birth control I've heard that about indonesia as well. Yeah, it probably happened in lots of places You see the assumption there is that the if I can be brutally blunt about this Is that those women didn't know where babies come from and once we showed them and gave them technology It would solve their problem A we misunderstood what the problem was as you've said, but b we had an incredible arrogance about How much we as the smirk people knew that's and how little the community people knew The example that makes sense to me is is smoking In our society who could not know that smoking is dangerous to your health. It's on the cigarette packs It's all over the media. I think everyone has been exposed to the message The fact that people continue to smoke in spite of that is not because they don't know it's bad There must be some other factor And so if we bring to these research projects the notion that all we have to do is tell people some information And they will change We may be frustrated That's a great example because um There are different approaches one might take with different communities again around smoking But unless you work with those communities you have no idea what the solutions might be because you don't understand the problem For example, women we know if you look at the problem of smoking with women with a gender lens And involve women in the discussion about why does they continue to smoke? There's all sorts of other issues for women. There's issues around body image and weight loss and There's a whole other dimension there So you might apply a totally different kind of strategy to try to encourage women to quit smoking And then you would with men but unless you involve women in that discussion unless you become immersed as part of the community To understand it you're not going to get those answers Well, and you know the path project being focused on health many of the things that we're trying to do through the project Relate to encouraging people in midlife to change their behavior patterns not because they're particularly ill now But because their health in later life will be profoundly affected and smoking is one diabetes It's another just getting people out walking two or three times a week You know would improve their health. That's right. But again, uh, do people know they should exercise more eat less and not smoke I think they know that right and so we need to get to much more fundamental kinds of Of issues and we we hear people say well if only there was a safe place to walk I would go walking Well for that's great and we should build those chip trails But we should not be surprised if they aren't filled with people You know the day that they open because there's undoubtedly something else going on People talk about I don't go walking because I'm afraid of crime And then we go and get the stats and we find out that we don't really have very much crime We have a lot of fear of crime, but we don't have very much crime And so again, it's the solution to reduce the crime statistics and get more police Well, it turns out that the complaints I hear through the neighborhood association When we do get additional police attention Is that it's interpreted the wrong way. It's not oh, I'm glad to see that police car. I feel safer now. It's Seeing the police car as evidence of how dangerous it is in my neighborhood. And so I'm definitely not going to go out So again, we're dealing with some phenomena here Which are part of a matrix that comes from larger society and the media and I don't know where Factors that that we have to get at And another example is we have a very difficult place right at the edge of our neighborhood Motel it's used as a center for drug dealing and criminal activity And one of the ideas was that we get a neighborhood crew together and go and paint the place because it looks bad It was an outsider who had that idea the neighborhood immediately said well, that makes no sense at all to us we had Right-wingers who said that's private property and I wouldn't want someone coming from my house to be painting it without my permission We had left-wingers who said that's not going to solve the problem You know, it's a it's a fundamental environmental Sociological kind of problem and a coat of paint can't address it But everybody immediately reacted negatively Because it was treating a symptom And not a fundamental problem and if people were shooting up in that motel They would continue to do so if it had a new coat of paint on the outside because they weren't Doing it because it looked Tacky and we often see these kinds of quote-unquote good ideas We I think have talked before about the the urban renewal and construction of a major Traffic artery through our neighborhood that happened 40 years ago and the scars are still there and when we hold public meetings and talk about neighborhood history and And and the future People talk about that to this day And the irony of it is that the some of the facilities created through that have not succeeded The school for example It was built as is likely to be closed and we had this huge empty area in the middle of the neighborhood Created by people who undoubtedly had the best of intentions at the time To solve the problems that the neighborhood had when in fact it it damaged and hurt the neighborhood To the point where 40 years later people sit in rooms and talk about How bad that was So all these things have kind of a theme I suppose that that people are trying to apply the tools they know Regardless of whether it's a good fit people are treating symptoms instead of fundamental causes and Arguably it all comes from not understanding what the underlying Fabric if you like of the community is and therefore imposing things from the outside or top down that But not only don't solve the problem and sometimes they actually create more harm than good to There's a lot of really complex think complex issues Which is Reminding me again of how hard it is to do research with communities because of all the issues involved in the You know the different interests in the community and that kind of thing But for me, I mean even though it's really hard for researchers to do this kind of work and for communities to do this kind of work It's not a reason for researchers to stay away by any means From a health promotion perspective as well I mean if you're going to try and tackle those root causes of you know unhealthy lifestyles or ill health that the socioeconomic and the The broader determinants of health then you have to do that with communities You have to do that in the context So you have to do this research and you have to if you're going to Have any effect on health as a health promoter you have to work with communities. So It's you know, even though it's hard I think it's just something that that has to be done. I mean that's the only route to to change I think Well, I really agree and I think you know the history that we have of sort of urban planning and design is Is a history of optimism that if we could we can design our way out of social problems and it's somehow You know some of the problems that communities have Relate to the physical and built environment. There's no question that that improvements can be helpful and they can have an influence But but they're not fundamental and the kinds of things Laura that you're talking about Which are much more difficult to research Being more fundamental ultimately have a lot more leverage probably to deal with some of these issues then as I say You know if you want people to walk more make more trip trails and they'll get out and walk and run Well, maybe they will maybe they won't we need to understand the problem more deeply than that After a time objectivism has done all it can do And at that point it has two choices it can Turn it over to other methodologies or it can simply assert that there can be no other methodologies Well, you know, I don't I don't want to give the impression that that So-called scientific method isn't useful earlier on I was saying one of the benefits of the community is to see ourselves through Different lenses and these tools can be helpful And I think of it as as you know If you're trying to solve a problem with your automobile You logically break out the different systems and you do an analytical approach You're probably going to find out that the carburetor is flawed and get it fixed The problem that we're facing is a human community. These are vastly more complex than than an automobile And using only that analytical method Is not going to get us where we want to go But I wouldn't want to throw at the baby with the bathwater here. There definitely is some value in the Objective and quantitative approach. It's just that we don't want to stop there. We need to to do more You need different methods for different purposes, right? And I would say that there is a scientific method involved in qualitative research It's just not a positivistic one, right? But it's you know, it's methodological. It's a method There's there's um, there's a process that you go through. There are steps. It's just there are different kinds of steps and involves reflection and Um, you know re-looking at what you've done and constantly changing it. There's you know with the positivistic approach Here's point a and you get to point b and you figure out what caused the The uh, the reaction in the middle But um with community based research, that's that's that's not the method, right? You look at what you've done You recognize that what you've done is going to have some effect Uh on what you're trying to change and then you change your method to make it more useful and so on so forth Well, I'd like to thank you again for coming to DEC. It's been uh, very pleasant speaking with you about these issues Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for inviting us We're listening to first person plural Your source Of sociological The police state is using its phallocentric organ the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me We'd like to thank everyone who tuned in to first person plural during our first year of broadcast It's hard to believe it's been a year. Yes, but it has well nearly so a day short of a year We've enjoyed doing this show up to a point. There's a kind of creative tension between us creative Yeah, I think so. Don't you? Yeah, I would say so. I think we work well together if that's what you mean Yeah, and I've had a lot of people tell me that that's the charm of the show that it's obvious that you and I are Sympatico that we talk about these in a tense kind of way Yeah in an entertaining sort of way We have a share of action scenes. It's probably the best way to put it Bow bow Wap, Biff, boy Batman. I can't believe we got out of that one.  That's true Maybe you should switch over to video full-time that way you can just show up and look pretty and that would be the end of your obligations Aside from the off-screen work I think my brains are more important than my beauty is the problem. Oh, I wouldn't say that Well, you're um Biased so let's talk about the last year. Okay. What have you enjoyed most About doing first person plural? I've enjoyed a lot of different things about it So it's really hard to pick out just one The fact that we use such a variegated approach is one of the things that I like about it Which is a cop-out answer, but it's my answer I've gotten to talk to a lot of really interesting people pick their brains and I found that enjoyable I've gotten to look into a lot of issues in depth that you just don't find in the popular media And I found that gratifying and I've gotten to spend a lot of time sitting around a table almost exactly like this one Speaking to you about these issues, which is something that we were doing before we did the radio show But now we get to record it. Yeah. In fact, we did a radio show before this one an internet radio show It was called coffee shop and we did that for a little bit over a year It did 30 episodes of that and it consisted of us going to a coffee shop Turning on a cheap tape recorder and just recording our conversations onto normal bias cassettes And that was the show we just came up with a different seed topic each time and talked about that for a while And then meandered and perhaps meandered back and perhaps didn't and that was coffee shop It was predictably well regarded by the critics and completely ignored by the public Predictably. Yeah, let's hope that doesn't become the story of our lives Critically acclaimed impoverished. Yeah, let's uh, let's hope we're cut out for better things than that I think we are. What have you enjoyed about this show? Let's turn the question around Well, I've actually enjoyed the production of it more than the being on the air part of it I think that's one of the ways that you and I compliment each other I've done a lot of good writing in the last year. You've done a lot of excellent writing in the last year Yeah, and I've enjoyed bringing concepts together that I don't think other people would necessarily bring together So that's been fun. And I like I like writing the I don't do all the writing for the show Let me make that clear, but the writing that I do for the show I've really enjoyed and I've enjoyed learning how to edit I've learned an awful lot about how sound works and how editing works and I've not always been very good at it. I've sort of learned a lot by trial and error But what's community radio if it isn't full of trial and error? I wonder how atypical we are in that we pre-record most of our show each week I think we probably are pretty atypical But I'm glad we did it the way we did because I think that our ultimate direction is not to become radio Broadcasters, which makes us a little bit different as well Our ultimate direction I think is going to be multimedia production And it will probably end up on film more than on audio alone and the Pre-recording of the audio and learning how to edit and move things in and out And that kind of thing has been great preliminary practice on a lot less of a budget Then editing for film and we are finding for those of you don't realize this But we're in the process of learning how to do film We're kind of learning it informally on our own again with practice making perfect That we are finding it much easier to pick up on editing of digital film after having edited digital sound So I'm really glad that we did it the way we did even though we didn't plan it that way Yeah, it's been a good form for practice of nothing else. They keep telling us well You have to start somewhere we went from tape recording a conversation and caring only if it was intelligible to a much higher level Of production. Yes, but it wasn't just a production It was also the idea that I was on the air and while I knew I was on the air So to speak on the internet I also had a good idea of how many people were and were not listening And we were having conversations that we already had. We just had a tape recorder on We weren't trying anything new or anything different other than we just stuck a tape recorder in between us In other words, we've been we've been going for coffee and having long talks about the world Ever since we've known each other the 12 years that we've lived together sure absolutely That was not anything big or new They putting something together in a creative way for the radio show and then being on the air and not really knowing Who's listening and who isn't and sort of being shocked every time I hear that somebody is It made me nervous. I mean I had jitters I still get a little bit of jitters And I mean one of the reasons that we started pre-recording is because I had such jitters that I didn't think I could do it live And it kind of felt good to be a novice in a weird sort of way It made me feel like there's still stuff out there to learn and the show hasn't been 100 Pre-recorded. I've done live voice breaks more often than not Keeping people up to date about our website that sort of thing and I've enjoyed that and last minute things too There have been sure some things that it seemed important to talk about and we didn't know that when we were pre-recording Have you enjoyed doing the website? You seem to get something out of it. Yeah, that's another thing is that I like doing website development And yeah, I mean, I'm really not anywhere near an expert at it. I'm heavily dependent upon Web in a box. Yeah web in a box. That's good. I was going to say babysitting web But yeah, so I'm I'm not, you know, I'm doing very well with that with those constraints But I know of people who can take things and do far more than I can do having said that I've really enjoyed doing it and I've really enjoyed the response to it You know people pick up on it. I get an email from people who read things and are interested From that perspective. So it already is multimedia. I mean even before we added the film We were doing multimedia because of the website presence. That's right. I think I've asked your skills I think you have the single most important skill necessary of a webmeister or maestris Maestris my my germans a little weak And that is the willingness to update the site once in a while. I prefer web diva. I'm sure you don't But there are any number of people who put up a website and never update it again And whenever I see a website that hasn't obviously been updated within the last year I think dead site and I lose interest Well, and we do we have weekly visitors We have people who visit weekly to check out because I change it every week You've been tracking it. Haven't you you're using nedstat. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's the name of the program. What can you tell using nedstat? I want to make sure that people don't think that we know where they live and what kind of Oh, no, you can't know that you can tell who I mean some people have their own domain names So they're pretty easy to mark because when they show up from their own domain name I know who they are. Um, but there are other people who use University domain names So I've got a general idea of who they are to sure because I know of different people who are at different universities So I suspect when I see a university name that it is somebody from that university that I know That's not necessarily true. It tells you the country of origin, which is really interesting because we've been visited by Over 35 different countries. Of course the name of our website is cultural construction company And I have a suspicion that we get traffic from people who are looking to build things Yeah, I think the emails I've received asking me about buying scrap lumber Suffice to prove that. Yeah, we're all that a sufficient argument in and of itself We're on a few developer web lists and that kind of thing. So we get interesting junk mail The way that it works. I've got markers on more than one webpage So I can tell the people who just visit the front index page and don't go anywhere and people who are negotiating through the website And from that information, I can figure out whether or not people are really coming to read and visit Or they're just hitting it and finding out that it indeed is not a construction company So it doesn't tell me a lot, but it tells me some there's also a thing that tells me where it got linked from Like I run a blog Called fattie patties and I had to give the url go ahead and give the url. Sure. Yeah, it's um fattie f a t t y you gotta spell it out p a t t i e s dot blog spot. That's b l o g s p o t dot com Or you can go to cultural construction company and look at the table of contents and link to it from there And fattie patties gets the most traffic because blogs get more traffic than anybody else In personal web pages and because it belongs to several different web rings that kind of thing But I had a spike a couple of weeks ago Like almost twice as much as usual traffic on a particular day and I couldn't figure out why I mean that usually means that somebody's Referring to the page somewhere. Well, yeah, that's automatic. Isn't it? Yeah, necessarily the case, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean you're being linked by somebody else is what I mean That somebody's written about you and they've put a link up to your web page That's that's usually what a spike in traffic means. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean as opposed to a random occurrence Right, got it But I couldn't figure out how to tell and then I discovered that net stat actually will tell you where people linked from And when I found that out, I actually was able to trace it back and found where One of my favorite websites called alas a blog That's alas comma a blog who is a cartoonist. He's a really great art cartoonist He goes by the handle ampersand He's one of my favorite writers on the net and I was so excited because he actually put on his Blog that he was reading everything on my website. So apparently we're mutual fans. Well, that's great It's always good to know that somebody's impressed. I suppose I was being annoyed earlier by critical acclaim in the absence of Popular acclaim, but I admit that having neither would bother me a great deal more But we also have been linked by two or three other web pages on permanent links to cultural construction company So some like-minded people. Um, there's a website called why work dot org Which gets into discussions of how to define work and how to define what is meaningful work And they've linked to our manifesto, you know slowly, but surely we're getting a presence on the web And I really like that presence I think though that we've what we've got to do in the next year as long as we're doing the anniversary thing and thinking Out loud as it were about past and future Is I think the next step for us is to find projects that actually pay And I'm more hopeful about that with video than I am with radio Our listeners at home may be curious about exactly how well this pays. This project is not paying us a dime We're doing it essentially on a negative budget The the radio station has let us make use of some of their equipment which we found to be extremely helpful But we've had to cover a lot of expenses ourselves and we're not getting any revenue I've done a little poking around as to what exactly one can do to feed oneself and spoken word radio in canada My best guess at this time is that you're either working for the cbc or cladio canada Or you're not getting paid that it's almost that simple or you're doing some sort of popular dribble that shows up On commercial radio and you pretty well style your soul So we're talking about soulful employment as well as lucrative. We're talking about something suitable for a college graduate Yeah, and killing time between commercials was not what I had in mind. Yep, the luma news holes The news holes. Yeah, that's a j word, isn't it? Yes, that's a j word that just basically means that Newspapers get laid out. Um, the first thing that gets laid out in a newspaper is the ads. Yes, that's right the advertisements and then And then this this look is meant to walk convey surprise And it does in a facetious sort of sarcastic way Anyway, so then after that the things that bring people to the newspaper are laid out the regular features such as the comics and the ongoing bridge tips and the deer abbeys or whatever it is in canada That kind of thing gets laid out next and then after all of these things have been laid out They figure out how much news they're going to tell you so Newspaper is actually a huge misnomer. I can confirm this from my personal experience I was looking for a job when I was much younger with this sports paper in florida where we lived for entirely too long And I contacted one of the two guys who was in charge of the paper and he said Oh, we just concern ourselves with selling advertising if there's any room left over then One of us just writes something to fill it in. That's not verbatim, but that was essential yet It was that the sports writing was compared after thought it's a filler You know, why would you hire anybody to do that? Yeah, it was oh, no, that's not something for which one gets paid No, no, that's something one does after the work is finished After the real work our goal this year is to find some ways to make our lives more sustainable Instead of just filling news holes and instead of doing wonderful things on community radio I mean having lived in a country where community radio is pretty well gone And is pretty well whatever's left or what someone's of it is left is pretty corporate oriented I really appreciate community radio in canada and I've been very happy to have it available to us But it is obvious that it can't go on forever, but we are going to try to do first person plural this year I don't want to leave the impression that the experiment is over No, this is not our farewell episode or anything like that. Yeah, we're going to slow down a little bit over the summer So you'll hear some reruns if there's something that you missed that you'd love to hear again You can email us at fpp at cultural construction company dot com and we'll be happy to Well, we'll be happy to get any kind of feedback And we'll most likely honor any request that you make From that feedback, but yeah, we'd be willing to um to offer up reruns on request Let's go over the urls and the emails again. Sure the email is fpp at cultural construction company dot com The page for the show first person plural is fpp dot cultural construction company dot com Yeah, let's make it clear that cultural construction company Is all one word no space is in between it and you have to write out company. No fair writing co and leaving it at that That's not going to work the page for cultural construction company itself is www dot cultural construction company dot com You could have figured that one out, but why not make it official and patty's giving you her blog url once already She may as well give it to you again It's fatty patty's. That's f a t t y p a t t i e s Dot blog spot dot com and that's how you get in contact with us and otherwise check up with us when we're not actually on the air so Here's to us and to another year of first person plural. Yeah, here's to it You have been listening to first person plural because how people get along with each other still matters First person plural Is a show created for community radio by carl wilkerson and dr. Patty thomas to examine social and organizational issues music for first person plural is performed composed and produced By carl wilkerson except where noted For more information about first person plural dr. Patty thomas or carl wilkerson Visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com Or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com


Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with co-host Keith Townsend and this is Nutanix .NEXT Conference in New Orleans. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Vijay Luthra, who's the senior vice president, global head of technology infrastructure services at Northern Trust. Vijay, great job on the keynote this morning. A lot of cool technologies that you're digging into. Thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. All right, so luckily it's easy, Northern Trust understand finance, but tell us a little bit about your organization and kind of give us a high level. What are some of the biggest challenges you're facing? Yeah, absolutely. So again, Northern Trust, the global financial services firm, I primarily in the asset servicing, asset management, wealth management business. Again, 128 year old history built on some very sound principles around service integrity and expertise. Some of the challenges we're facing is around growth. The firm is growing, revenues are growing at a very, very healthy pace, especially when you compare that to our peers and competitors. And the challenge number one is, how do we scale the business while managing the overall operating expenses, right? So we want to create some leverage in the business and we want the growth to be a healthy growth. So that's challenge number one. And we recently, our CEO recently launched a value for spend program where while we grow, let's make sure we're spending and we're getting the value for the spend. Yeah, Vijay, can you just sketch out for us? You talk about growth and scale, how many locations, how many users, they're M&A that you have to like, you know, wrap into this stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So Northern Trust, about 18,200 employees, I would say 50, 60 plus locations. I would say well distributed across the different regions between US, Asia pack, and EMEA. Yeah, at a high level, those are kind of the, how we're kind of geographically dispersed. Okay, great. And cloud, what does that mean to your organization? How does that fit in your role and across the company? So cloud, so we've been on the cloud journey for several years now. We had a very mature virtualization strategy which transitioned well into our private cloud strategy. We have enough scale internally where we said if we built an efficient private cloud, which by the way, if you heard on the keynote, was built 100% on converged, hyper-converged technologies. We were actually in the forefront and we adopted these technologies back in 2013, 2014. The goal back then was how do we get efficiencies and scale from the private cloud by leveraging automation, converged stacks are highly reliable because, for example, the patching is a lot more well tested by the vendors. So on our journey to the cloud, that was essentially the first phase when we transitioned from virtualization to private clouds. And since then we've actually built more value added layers on top of that, because the goal is not just to cater to traditional applications that leverage infrastructure as a service, but also to cater to some of the more contemporary cloud native applications that we're building or even some of the containerized workloads. So we've built on top of that with Paz and CAS and software defined components like SDN. And we are closely measuring the outcomes and the benefits. So Vijay, let's talk a little bit about that initial investment in decision. Northern Trust, well known for being conservative among the most conservative of investment firms. I'm from Chicago, so I have an affinity for Northern Trust in general. Back in 2013, there was not as simple to look back, it's simple to look back now and say, oh yeah, right choice, easy decision. But 2013 OpenStack was, you know, all the rays, building clouds based on these open source and available technologies was kind of the way to go. What made you guys take a look at hyper-converged and say, you know, we're going to buck the trend and we're going to go with hyper-converged? Not many of your peers made that choice. Yeah, that's a great question. So at Northern Trust, we are heavily focused on outcome-based investment decisions. So within technology infrastructure, our mission is pretty straightforward, which is as we scale infrastructure, how do we continue to reduce total cost ownership, improve time to market, improve client experience, which is a very essential part of our decision-making process, and while we're doing that, not lose sight of reliability, stability, security. So with that kind of as our guiding principles, as we make major investments, we take them through these lenses and Nutanix hit all of them. So it was fairly straightforward. And again, some of the benefits, as you probably heard on stage, were phenomenal. We were able to increase capacity without increasing staff. We were able to reduce some of our automation team, sorry, build teams significantly. Reliability, stability improved drastically. For example, our virtual desktop infrastructure, the number of incidents, client-general incidents, internal client-general incidents went down by 80, 90%. So again, to answer your question, outcome-driven, have key metrics and measures on what you expect the outcomes to be, and then partner with the right firms to make sure you get the outcomes. So as we look at the next phase, infrastructure as a service, you guys seem to have that down. Mature, virtualization practice, you laid on top of that infrastructure as a service. Now we look into the next phase, CAS, past type solutions. What are some of the major decision points and what's guiding your decisions? Yeah, so clearly on everybody, and all head of infrastructures, or any organization's mind today is how do we build a hybrid cloud strategy that is safe, secure, does not lock you into a specific vendor. It's the right application, the right type of workload. And that's what we're focused on now. We've got a few applications, nothing that's production-client-centric is in our public cloud from an AAS perspective. But we think we've invested in the right components to allow us to now orchestrate safely and securely across multi-clouds. So that's what we're focused on now. Can you talk a little bit more about containerization? What's the experience like with working with Nutanix for those type of solutions? Yeah, so we were early adopters of containers with partnering with Docker, built on the Nutanix platform. We've been working with them since the last couple of years and more recently, since they announced the Kubernetes integration, we are factoring that into the Docker environment. The goal with containerization is, again, back to kind of those guiding principles, right? Lower cost ownership, improve time to market, reliability, stability. We see an opportunity to consolidate Linux Windows-based workloads because of the efficiencies that containers bring, as well as extend DevOps-like functionality to app teams that might not be looking to refactor in a cloud-native, pass-like format, they could take advantage of containers to get a DevOps-like experience. We're enhancing security as we move to containers. There's several things we're doing there. So the point being, we're looking at it through kind of the same lenses. So you threw out a couple of things. I heard DevOps in there. In your keynote, one of the things that you talked about, a team going from 45 people managing something to 12. Maybe explain a little bit about Ops in your company. What happened to all those other 33 people? Great questions, two parts. On the infrastructure as a service side, a few years ago, we had a build team, mostly contractor-driven, where we would use them to build servers, deploy applications, extremely manual, with converged technologies and all the automation that we have deployed, that team is down to 14, 15 people because a lot of the work has gone away and our goal is to continue to fine-tune that. So that's infrastructure as a service. DevOps-wise, what we did was, we carved out a team of four or five, what Gartner calls versatileists, multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary resources, senior engineers that focused on building out our DevOps practice on top of our platform as a service. And that has gone extremely well. The team has very successfully onboarded hundreds of microservices as we re-architect some of our applications. So, Vijay, talk to us about the decision and the capability of being able to take monolithic applications that are not gonna be refactored and go into containers. There's a lot of debate on whether or not that's worth the trouble. But beyond that debate, talk to us about the importance and the reliance on the capability that Nutanix will be bringing in with ACS 2.0. Are you guys looking to deploy that or are you looking to manage Kubernetes and that capability of managing these traditional applications inside of Kubernetes? So we are a few steps ahead of Nutanix. In one of my conversations with Sunil, I was saying, man, I wish this feature was available six months ago. So we are watching that development very closely and we're very interested in it. But because we have an existing Docker footprint, that's what we're leveraging for Kubernetes for now. Great. Could you speak about Nutanix, the relationship you have with them and their ecosystem? Things like secondary storage, how do you look as Nutanix as a partner and what do you see the maturity of their ecosystem and any solutions you'd want to highlight there? Yeah. Clearly, what Nutanix did to the primary storage market, there's an emerging market on the secondary storage side and we're working with a couple of different companies to help us in that space. But just the Nutanix ecosystem itself, just because we are a few steps ahead and we've got some Nutanix components, we've got some third-party components as part of Nutanix. I think the fact that Nutanix is becoming a one-stop shop, as you can see with some of the announcements today, from a total cost ownership perspective, it becomes very interesting for someone like myself to say, if I took out a few vendors and focused on the Nutanix stack, what does that mean? At what point is it usable? When can we start migrating? And those are the types of things we're kind of focused on now. So have you gotten into a situation, especially seeing that you're at least six months or so ahead of Nutanix when it comes to container orchestration? Has the infrastructure gotten in your way at all? Have they done anything? Because Nutanix can be opinionated and how they manage infrastructure. Has that opinionation, has that opinion, rather, gotten in your way as you look to go down your cast route? No, so far, I would say no. I think a lot of their tooling is very intuitive, very easy to use. The engineers, with very minimal training, in fact, some of our engineers that retrain themselves on Nutanix happened over such a small duration and had to do with how simple to use Nutanix. That goes, you know. One of the lines I love from your presentation, you said you run IT as a business. What advice do you give to your peers out there, learnings you've had, staying a little bit ahead of some of the general marketplace? I think the key is back to kind of my initial comment. How do you build scale with an infrastructure? Meaning, how do you take on more workloads, new technologies, while managing your operating expenses tightly? We have essentially done that extremely well over the last few years where we have added capacity, absorbed a lot of growth, introduced a lot of new technologies, while keeping a very close eye on our operating expenses. So I would say, if anything, when you run IT as a business, you take into account not just all the net ads, you have a program to consider optimizations. For example, where we use a technology that helps us reduce physical VMware-based footprint, helps us optimize and says, here's where you have some dead capacity. As leaders in somebody in my position, you should be willing and able to take out costs as well while taking on new technologies. I would say that's the key. So you say you guys are running IT as a business. What have been some of the KPIs and showing success in that transformation? Okay. We closely watch our operating expenses and we measure that as a percentage of total company operating expenses. What percentage are we of that? We closely watch time to market. How soon are we providing environments to app dev teams?  So I think those have direct impacts on our internal clients as well as end clients. And then as a business, who are your competitors? As normal trust. No, as you run IT as a business. Yeah, that's a great question. I would say cloud providers are competitors. But to be honest, I shouldn't say that. I mean, in a new model, I want the team to think about cloud as just another endpoint. And we need to be able to safely and securely deploy the right app in the right cloud, kind of the end state that we want to be in. So I wouldn't say they're competitors. I think we as a firm or any firm should get comfortable with being able to orchestrate and move the right workloads in the right data centers to say. All right. Fiji, I want to give you the final word. You're out there looking at some of the new technologies. What's exciting you? What's on your wish list from the vendor community that maybe you can share? I'm very personally, I'm very excited about AI in apps. I know people talk about AI in financial services and other industries, but I think the application of machine learning and AI within data center operations is relevant. And there's many things we're doing in that space in terms of a client facing chat bot that integrates with link or certain add-ons onto Splunk that help you with machine learning and analyzing logs or bots that help you classify tickets and put them in the right cues at the right time. So we're looking at how to take advantage of those. Again, to build scale, to lower cost ownership, improve experience, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I think that's something I'm personally very, very excited about. All right. Well, Fiji Luthor, really appreciate sharing your story. Great success and look forward to catching up with you. All right, thank you. In the future. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from the New Orleans Convention Center.next, Nutanix's conference 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE.


Welcome, scale. Yeah, you know, this is the second time I've ever used slides.  I thought I'd get a little bit of more abuse and come today unprepared to talk about Mentoring and all the problems that young people and people that make changes and the solution that I came up with The last year I talked about free education in a community-based type of a platform Which allows people to get free education and degrees? World Mentoring Academy and basically an open community very much like scale and the Linux and Apache and PHP community basically MOOCs started two years after I started and We've built a platform out and it's about 34,000 35,000 users The problem that a lot of people do is they get into the content and they don't know what they want to do Which I find kind of sad because things are changing so rapidly with big data automation robotics That people get rather confused. They're in college. They're spending all their money and they're spending five or six years They still haven't declared a major and I thought well, how can I solve this big problem and I actually knew what I wanted to do when I was in college. I wanted to be a clown So for 35 years as a clown after I graduated in engineering and I used to be four four years of college boy My dad's mad right, so that you know Actually Kathy Davidson who actually wrote a nice little article about me in New York Times She said that 65% of today's jobs will not even exist That when the elementary school kids get of age and actually that kind of reminds me I'm from Alaska. We had gold, you know dredges and stuff like that So I thought no, how can I solve this problem if the target keeps shifting around and I noticed something about young people, you know when they're younger They know what they want to do like I want to be a you know a doctor an astronaut and They get to middle school and their friends say so. What do you want to be?  I was a member of the Pasadena media and I took my camera and I went out to Caltech And I thought well, maybe I should ask some people that might know something about being an astronaut. So I Was ready and I saw I talked to three astronauts. I said hey, what could elementary school kids get involved in for future space and technology? Because I'm not an astronaut. I would know he said hydroponics and robotics go. Wow hydroponics and robotics Hmm these slides aren't shifting quick enough, but anyway, we'll wait. That's actually a very nice guy I was talking to him and I said so what do you think the future is gonna need you gonna need minors and he laughed at me It's so I thought well say hydroponics I went out to an aquaponics farm and filmed all the wonderful fun things you can do in an aquaponics farm You know learning all the different types of things and I was amazed to find that there's quite a few of them around Where you can go in you can volunteer you can work on you know horticulture and learn all kinds of cool stuff I thought you know kids would really like to go to these kind of places and a lot of times they're in underserved areas like this one in particular was in the projects in Long Beach and so what I did is I went out and I Start to build a database of all the community gardens hydroponics aquaponics permaculture is in the world Everything about it kid friendly hours of operation YouTube Facebook Instagram snapchat So so the young people can find you know They're watching YouTube video with the interview with the astronauts and the the interview with all the various different fun stuff At there and then they go out at the end of the video go find a garden next to the click on a button A map opens up local them four blocks away on Toledo is a hydroponics that they can join Two years later they get to middle school and their friends say so what do you want to be? Oh, I want to be an astronaut, but you're not smart enough to be an asset the young person can say well For the past two years. I'm working out of rye of tomatoes. It's been considered for the Martian colony I don't think you know what you're talking about Right because when that flame gets blown out middle school the kids have no direction no ambitions no drive The only reason they do well in school is because they're good teachers and parents So I went out and interviewed a bunch of other people because you know I've interviewed astronauts interviewing senator Barbara box or Tommy and all different types of people say where are these creative spaces that young people can go to To get support Instead of being heckled at when they come up with the idea that they want to be a spokesperson Or in fact actually a new york marathon of shaleen legan who I interviewed march who won the new york marathon So if you like to participate with me come join me. I appreciate it. Thank you very much


Hogwarts Legacy is already a great game to begin with, but what would we like to see being added as a DLC or simply as patches or improvements to the game? Now, I made a list and I want to have a discussion on this topic. Are you still enjoying Hogwarts Legacy? If you missed out on my big review video, make sure you watch that also after this one. Now, the first thing that comes to mind that I would like to see them add at some point would be a sense of time, so that you can see what time it is in-game, what time of day it is for immersion purposes also. So far, we have a day and night cycle, but that is pretty much it. Certain quests and collectibles are locked behind being a day and night thing, such as collecting the demi-geist statues. Now, you can already skip between day and night in the map menu. Some people still don't know about that one. Also, another point to be made. There are currently no curfew to the school. There is no sleep schedule. You don't have to go to your dormitory to sleep, and you know, curfew and all of that.  You don't get grounded. You're not losing points to your house. There's nothing actually. I heard that this was a cut content. I'm not sure if that rumor is true, but I heard that rumor that they were initially going to have a curfew system and that you had to sneak around in the night in the school. I don't know if that is true, but at least that is not in the game as of right now. But I would like to see at least the opportunity to sleep in your own bed. Now, the next thing that I would like to see them add, and I would like this pretty soon actually, and that is a way to sell several items at once. I have seen this plenty of times in all the games, where you can actually highlight the items that you want to sell. Also, like just a button that says sell all low level items, because you pick up a lot of gear in this game, and you equip the best gear, obviously. But selling them off can take some time, and I mean, like, it shouldn't be too hard to implement such a thing, so I would like to see that happen. Okay, so here's a big one. Multiplayer. I don't think personally that they will do multiplayer in this game, but I think it could be fun. Imagine inviting someone over to your world, and you can explore this game together, and fly on your brooms together in the world. Imagine adding a lot of world bosses that you can invite some friends over at into your world, and defeat them together with separate loot, of course. And you can help out with finding field guides, pages, and solving puzzles and stuff. I mean, just having fun around in this world together with friends, that would be very fun. No doubt to that. But that poses the question, how would they do it with the main story quests? Tons of games have done this before, and I'm sure they would figure out that, but I don't think they will, to be honest. Now, the next thing that I would like to say are several quality of life features. One of them would be a green or red arrow pointing up and down on the gear, actually in the inventory of the gear, so that I could more quickly see if some gear I have is better and what is worse than what I'm currently wearing. You can kind of already see such arrows when you are deciphering gear, so I mean, put that actually in the gear's menus as well. Just the quality of life and future thing, I mean, and also while we are at it, make it an option to have the minimap in a fixed position. I don't like it when it spins around. I'm the kind of person that likes to have my minimap fixed. With North pointing up, okay. Also, would love to see the ability to pause cutscenes. They are unpauseable as of right now, and that makes no sense, because I mean, we have a real life sometimes when we just have to pause, whatever, if you have kids sort of thing. You cannot pause the cutscenes. That should not be hard to put into a patch. And also the option to mark collections as red. It takes a lot of time to go into every single thing in the collections and, you know, hover over them, so that they no longer glow up and that sort of thing. And a lot of people has also mentioned photo mode. I think this game is too beautiful to not have a photo mode. Imagine all the photos that people could do in this game. Tons of opportunities, missed opportunities, and ideas with not having a photo mode right now. Next up, I would like to have more consequences. I can lockpick any door. I can go into people's homes at night, even when children are in bed and stuff. I mean, there are no consequences to anything that you do in the game. Already went over that we don't have a curfew at the school, but I mean, I would like NPCs to point out what are you doing in my house in the middle of the night. And also being seen stealing food and drinks, and nobody cares.  And also, in Skyrim, you actually had to sneak down and not be seen by anyone. When you are lockpicking doors and stuff, I mean, you already have sneaking in this game with the invisibility spell and also invisibility potions. I think this is a missed opportunity. Now, we could also push it further and have a law system. Now, I don't necessarily see you being put in jail if you are breaking the law or something, but I could see how they could implement it into being. Some sort of punishment that you get with house points being taken away from your house. Basically, what I'm saying is that you have no penalty for anything in this game. Would be fun to see some consequences. I would also like to add the ability to add more map markers on the map. You can currently only highlight one point on the map, one marker. Now, in For Spoken, you could track five things, I think, and that was so satisfying. So that I could plan my way on the map for the collectable things and it just made more sense and it was more convenient. Now, I have to open the map for every single thing that I wanna, you know, check out and do. Often, you just find stuff that you know that you wanna go back to later. Maybe you don't have the necessary spell to do a certain quest or puzzle in the world and you know you wanna get back to that. Customizable map markers would do it. I think a huge opportunity for a great DLC content to this game would be to put that train station to use. Now, I could see the possibilities to add new, huge locations that you could travel to using this train. Maybe go to some big series, maybe go to London for an entirely new storyline going on or something like that.  Also, I see opportunities for DLCs to be adding more areas to the continent like they did in, for example, Horizon Zero Dawn. They just added more to the already map. Now, what would you guys like to see being added to this game? Are you still enjoying it? Leave your comment down below and I will read them all. If you hit like on this video, that would mean a lot to me. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you are enjoying Hogwarts Legacy as much as I do. Check out my other videos on this channel. Subscribe if you are new and I will see you later.