There you go. Thank you for coming. Really appreciate it. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Randy Bias. I was formerly the CEO of Cloud Scaling. That's our lovely logo up there, which was acquired by EMC in October of last year. I want to say thank you to the OpenStack community for whatever that's worth. Maybe people watch this video posthumously, but because of OpenStack, I was able to build a really great company and then to exited it to another really great company. Without OpenStack, I'm not sure that would happen. Thank you very much. For those of you who are new to this, I haven't done it in a couple years. I was a little preoccupied last year, as you might expect. The whole idea behind the State of the Stack was to try to give kind of is honest and unbiased kind of a view, end-to-end view of OpenStack as possible. What I really tried to do in the first and second versions was really sort of say, hey, this is what OpenStack is and unpack it and show you all the pieces and what they were good for and what they weren't good for. To be honest about it, I wanted to do that this time too, but then I realized as I started that was going to be very hard. It was going to be hard for a few different reasons, one of which we're going to talk about today. The first is that there's just a lot more stuff. From four years ago, there's just a ton more stuff. There's like 19 or 17 or 19 projects in this release, so it's just hard to cover them all. And then the other thing is that there was, I hate to say this, but there was a lot of almost self-denial when we approached PTLs and we said, hey, we're doing a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Why don't you tell us what's great and what's not great about your project? And a surprising number of PTLs were unwilling to tell us what they thought was bad about their project, which I was very disappointed in, because as we know, everybody's software sucks.  So today we're going to talk about some of that. So I was part of the original OpenStack launch in 2010. I've been on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors since it was formed. I built some of the earliest clouds and the very first cloud that Cloud Scaling built was in January 2011. It was the first Swift public cloud outside of Rackspace anywhere. So that was six months within the launch, within six months of the launch of OpenStack. And then some people seem to think that I've got something interesting to say and they like to call me top whatever, whatever, whatever, you know, that's all good. And this watch is going to drive me crazy because people are tweeting and it's telling me all about it. So we're going to take that off. So traditionally I would talk about what winning looks like and it's good to start there. And then my co-founder Adam, he always told me that if I had to deliver bad news, it was best to do it in the format of kiss, kill, kiss. So kiss, kill, then kiss again, right?  We're still the fastest growing open source community ever, right? These are the stats directly from the foundation. You know, it's just stunning numbers, just absolutely stunning numbers.  If you want this deck, it's right here, tinyurl.com slash sots-v4. You can continue to take pictures of all the slides if you like, but you could get them in a high-res PDF instead, tinyurl.com slash sots-v4. Okay, so Google trends, right? You know, this is what sort of calculates or looks at the searches that people put into Google. So I used to show this as kind of OpenStack versus Eucalyptus and CloudStack, but I think this is even more interesting, right? I mean, look at OpenStack closing in on vSphere, right? vSphere has a massive, massive enterprise presence. And the very fact that we're closing in on its mind share, the amount of people who search for OpenStack is almost as great as those who search for vSphere. I mean, wow. Up and to the right, number of contributors in the community. Up and to the right, commit volume. Up and to the right, active developers. See? I told you I wanted to download it. This is a new one. Oh, by the way, I tend to go fast through this because I have 49 slides that we're going to present in 40 minutes, so, you know, hold on to your hats. So this is really interesting. And the Redmont guys were using the LinkedIn API to do an analysis of people who were in groups that were either related to Amazon Web Services, Azure, or OpenStack. And that blue, middle line that's OpenStack. Look at that.  I mean, that's just really phenomenal. There's as many people in LinkedIn groups for OpenStack as there are for Amazon. That is an impressive achievement. I'm just really impressed that we made that happen. I mean, that shows that the level of interest in making OpenStack awesome is there. So why did we win? We won because of this explosive growth. We won because, you know, we created a certain amount of hype. You know, we got out. We started executing. We made things happen. We had a big tent. We had a lot of people in it. You know, we went from two projects to 17 projects. All that stuff's really, really awesome. And it's also really, really scary because, you know, unmanaged explosive growth can lead to some pretty severe problems. And I think that's where we're at now. So we should take a look at it. Just kind of review it together. This, thanks to Shamal to hear one of the EMC folks that I work with. Shamal, you're here. Raise your hand, please. Thank you, Shamal, so much. This is his kind of like way of sort of spreading out, right? There's so many projects now. There's 19 projects here. That's why this is sort of like an eye chart, right? It's just hard to capture them all. And, you know, we've got the core, right? Sort of the infrastructure as a service piece, then all the pieces that kind of manage it. And then the, you know, pieces that kind of provide services to different, you know, applications or platforms that really consume it. And then kind of the common underlying components as well, right? This is a lot. And if you were to look at this and you're coming into OpenSec for the first time, you're going to say to yourself, wow, where do I start? And if you're a developer and you're trying to figure out what are the dependencies between these things, you wind up with a spaghetti ball, right? This actually comes from the references.txt file and the GitHub repositories that describe the dependencies between these projects. And we kind of manually put it together, kind of a map between all of them. Now, when this was only two, and it was Nova and Swift, it kind of had one line, right? Now it's getting much, much worse. And I would guess that we're going to get closer to like 30 projects in the near term than people expect. So, you know, just imagine what that does to this picture. So, earlier this year, I kind of, you know, called it out, because I guess that's my specialty.  And, you know, and I just sort of said what seems pretty obvious to me, and I think it's probably obvious to you as well, which is that, you know, that explosive growth is actually causing quite a bit of risk. And, you know, it's not just me. There's other people in the community who see this as well. And surprisingly, I see more people in the TC who see it than I saw on the board who see it, although I would say generally most people see it. So, that's a little bit of the sort of, you know, foreshadowing of kind of, you know, where the danger lies. But, you know, we've been making a lot of improvements and actually we've been doing this very, very fast. So, September last year, I got on stage at OpenStack Silicon Valley. I made a lot of noise. Basically I said we're not doing product management.   And then a whole bunch of really, really smart people, much smarter than me. A lot of them in this room decided to form the product working group and really try to figure out how to organize a multi-release roadmap, how to figure out how to help the technical committee out in terms of serving the long-term planning, how to help evangelize inside of their organizations about sort of shared values around certain key blueprints that need to get prioritized over others and how to fund those, how to make sure people are actually working on the right work, so that it wasn't just a bunch of people kind of doing what they felt like doing from day to day. It was sort of more organized, more strategic. So that's pretty kick-ass. I don't know if you went to the multi-release roadmap presentation the other day, but I think the room was totally packed, even more packed than here. So like I said, they're smarter than me. So continue to go to those and support them. And thank you to the people in the product working group because I just kind of, I start the problems and then other people kind of go and clean them up and I'm very appreciative for that. The other thing like I said is the TC has been really, I think they were some of the first to really understand that the weight of the open sec was just becoming just too much. And the reason was because when we were trying to do an integrative release with Swift and Nova, no problem, right? When it started to be like 17 projects, they all had to be tested together and validated together and all those teams had to be managed and encouraged and guided. It just got to be really, really hairy. And so the TC really led by Terry kind of helped figure out kind of this reform, this kind of big tent reform where they said, let's get rid of this six-month integrated cycle. Let's think about what people assume the integration or core, these things mean. Let's try to break things down and kind of come with a sort of more loosely coupled organizational structure. So again, you should check out some of these slides offline. This is just some information on the product working group. I think you should talk to folks in the product working group rather than me tell you a lot about it. The important thing here to notice is that we're trying to coordinate as well with the user committee. So really working very actively with the user committee because one of the places where we haven't done a good job is going out to the people who use our clouds and I do not mean the people running the clouds. I mean the application developers putting applications on top of the clouds and really talking to them and figuring out what's working and what's not working. This is just a quick slide on the big tent release cycle. There's a URL here where you can go and get more information on the move towards this sort of tagged release model.  So again, I have no need to cover this in detail. But it's not enough, right? These are two brand new initiatives. They've only had about six to nine months to really get going. You know, we're starting to see the fruits to our credit. That's actually a lot faster than I expected. But the problem is that complexity kills, right? You know, I used to say when I was running the business when people kind of mean when I was running clouds again and then asked me how we go and approach solving a certain problem.  And the reason was is that when you start stacking simple things up, together they inherently get complex. When you start stacking complex things up together, you get this exponential curve in complexity, which then causes brittleness, which then causes things to break. So to give you some perspective, here's some information from the RightScale State of the Cloud report which just came out a few months ago. They're sort of this, you know, kind of bell curve with, you know, kind of people like, core people in the middle who are just now experimenting or starting to build clouds. And if you look at sort of their top challenges, they either can't get the resources and expertise they need or the complexity of building a private cloud is too hard, right? So this problem of building a private cloud, this exists beyond OpenStack, right? This is why I always kind of just like do the face palm when I hear people say, wow, CloudStack's easy to deploy. And I'm like, if I only have to deploy Nova, then yes, that's much easier, right? But people are more ambitious. They want to do a lot more with their clouds. They want a private cloud that has a lot of value for their internal developers. And so there's inherent complexity in just building a private cloud. You have to understand networking and storage and compute. You have to understand different types of compute now, bare metal and containers and virtual machines. I mean, all of this stuff is very hard to put together. And so these folks, the average enterprise that wants to use our software, is struggling under that complexity. They're, dare I say it, dying under the complexity. Now if we look at something adjacent like Docker, who's used Docker? It's drop dead simple, right? I mean, it's, you know, it really takes nothing to get Docker up and running on a laptop or even 10 servers, right? It's very, very trivial. And this has really led to it being adopted much faster. So in the first half of last year, they had 3 million downloads. And then in the second half, they had 100 million, right? That's just a crazy ramp, right? And you can look here on the right-hand side where people who were previously looking at Chef & Puppet, and I'm a long-time Chef & Puppet user, so I'm not trying to throw them on the bus, but they're starting to think about using Docker to replace those. And the level of interest is so high that it's about to eclipse both those tools, because it's simple, right? The reason that your average enterprise IT guy likes to use a virtual machine images, that's a terrible way to run the world is that it's simpler. So the moral of the story is that if we want OpenStack to be successful, we need to make it simpler. We need to figure out how to make it simpler, at least to get your feet wet. Right now, there's a big gap between DevStack and what you need to do to run on 10 machines. So I'm sure you've all seen this technology adoption curve before, right? So one of the things that's really interesting about this is that all technology goes through this, right? All technology, right? Something happens. There's some kind of trigger event where suddenly, uh-oh, we're going to have a mic misfilter here. Excuse me. And is that... So, last time I tried that. So what happens is there's a technology trigger. There's a need, right? There's a problem. There's a pain point. So people come up with some way to solve that problem.  They're like, oh, man, this thing is awesome. It's going to solve all my problems. It's going to feed my babies, cure world hunger, right? And that's where OpenSec was pretty recently, up kind of that peak of inflated expectations. That's where Docker is now, man. Everybody's like, Docker is going to save the world. But we're kind of sliding down the other side right now. And we're headed towards, you know, the trough of disillusionment. And this is where people start to give up, you know, kind of hope on this new technology and start to walk away from it. So we're headed down, right? If we don't take care, if we're not cautious, if we don't think about what do people need to be successful with OpenSec, we might derail. And I don't know about you, but I would not want to derail at the bottom of that, right? So we have to really think about this. We have to really be honest with ourselves. One of the things that has been frustrating to me is that there are elements of the community that want to be in denial about problems that exist that are obvious to the vast majority.  So how do we know that we're kind of running down the other side towards the trough of disillusionment? Well, there's a lot of growing skepticism. Even inside of OpenSec, but I don't want to call anybody out, there's growing dissatisfaction with certain aspects of OpenSec and I think that's really important because it's leading to failures in the field. And I'm not going to give you my percentage estimate of the failures in the field because that would get quoted widely and be really misused, but it's way higher than it should be. So I think that we probably reached peak OpenSec. It's up to you to figure that out for yourself, right? But that's my estimate. So this is some information from Gartner and some others. There's a lot of quotes you can go find, but what I found most interesting was this one at the bottom which I want to call out to you, which is that what's hilarious is that it dovetails completely and I found this like last night. It dovetails completely with what I've been thinking and what I've been hearing, which is that number one is difficulty of implementation is a problem. Two, shortage of skills, people who can actually build these things. Three, conflicting or uncoordinated project governance and this is stuff that we started to address with the Big Tent approach and things like that, but there needs to be more. Weak spots and some projects and then integration with existing infrastructure which I violently disagree with. If you're building OpenSec Cloud, you should probably do it on the new stuff, on net new stuff, but Gartner is smarter than me I guess, supposedly, but this is pretty smart. So on this number four week spots and some projects, no, I'm just going to keep going. All right, so last week, kind of under the gun, I realized that I wanted, I didn't want to just get up here and tell you what I thought was wrong. I thought that it would be better if I could get more people's opinions. So I tried to put a survey together under the gun to kind of get some feedback from people and you could take it right here, tinyurl.com slash improve dash open stack after you download the Sats presentation and that would be very helpful and I would really appreciate it. But the idea was just try to figure out like, was I crazy? Was I seeing stuff that wasn't there? Was I on a POT trip or something? I don't know. So first is we asked who people were and because of the time crunch and because of the limitations of people who follow me on Twitter, because most of them are not native application developers and so on, we didn't really get any of the actual open stack end users, the people who deploy apps on it, which kind of sucks. But even the user survey has problem getting those people so I don't feel bad. And then most people who responded were actual open stack developers or operators. So I had to set baseline, right? What do you love about open stack? What's your favorite project? Well, as you can see, it pretty much lined up with kind of the maturity and the length of time that projects have basically been around Nova and Swift at the top, the size of the actual communities working on those projects. So that's no big surprise. But then Neutron came in at number five, which was a big surprise because it turns out that Neutron's also one of the most hated. And so what was funny about that is that you look at that previous slide and it kind of lines up the way you expect, but in this one when you say, hey, which project do you not like in open stack? It turns out that there's sort of an overwhelming bias towards Solometer and Neutron. And you probably all heard that this week. And this is unfortunate, especially with Neutron, which is almost four years old now. So the user survey, I don't know if this data came out in the blog postings or if you had a chance to see it. You might have seen some of the top level user survey data. But what was interesting was the actual, some of the comments that they got back, right? Neutron is a lot more complex and harder to provide real HA. Complexity availability and scalability remain some of the concerns of the operators, right? So this isn't just me saying it, like there are people out in the field doing things with open stack and they are saying Solometer and Neutron are not working the way that we want them to. This was a part of the user survey that asked if you're using Nova Network, you know, why can't you move to Neutron? Number one reason, it needs to be simplified. So I thought to myself, and this, you know, I figured this would happen. So this is why I had this question survey. I thought to myself, you know, well, if there are projects that people do not like, why the hell aren't we doing something about it? And I thought maybe the community has an allergic reaction to actually throwing away stuff that's broken. Because like in a good technology business, right, a startup, or even a big business, you kind of build a V1, you learn a bunch of things in the V1, and then you realize that the way you were going about solving the problem was wrong. Like the architecture is fundamentally wrong. You can't iterate and kind of like, you know, fix it a little bit at a time and make it a better thing. You just have to throw the thing out, take everything you learned and do it right the next time. And I asked the community how they feel about that and it turns out that everybody is totally good with that. Except for some people who I just guess haven't really been to business. So why can't we fix these?  We say that they're broken. You know, we say that they're causing problems in the field, that they're helping with the slowing of the adoption, that they're causing grief, that, you know, they're giving us a bad reputation. You know, we say that we should be able to throw away, you know, bad V1s and bad V2s of code, but yet we're still apparently not willing to throw these pieces away. And there is precedent. You know, Keystone was rewritten three times, right? I mean, apparently communities, a whole has the ability to do it, but for some reason we can't exercise that with certain projects. So this is what the thread is, right? This explosive growth is going to create that complexity, which is going to slow adoption, which is, you know, driven by our inability to partially reinforce our inability to kind of fix or address some of the projects. I also think that if we look at the governance model, right, this is part of what the TC is doing. They're trying to make the governance model less rigid, right? We just, we don't, we have too much centralization. There's too much need to go to the central party to basically get things fixed, right? We would, I would prefer an organizational structure that was more loosely coupled, right? Because that's the way we want the code to be. And then, you know, there's still kind of a gap on long-term vision and product strategy. We're working on it. The product working group's doing great stuff, but there's a need for more, right? And I think that we just need to double down on all those efforts. So, back to the kiss.  I think it's, I think it's trackable. I think it's trackable. I wouldn't bother being up here and talking about it. We want to be over there. We have to get through this traffic disillusionment without derailing the train, right? That's what we got to do. This is my idea of a five-point plan to kind of address this. You know, I'd like to streamline the governance model. And I'm not talking about radical changes. I'm talking about the same kind of changes we've made recently. I'm talking about, you know, considering empowering projects more. You know, there really should be kind of almost a TC for a project. That's the way the Apache Software Foundation works. It has something called the PMC. And those folks pretty much just own the project. And they're not beholden to anybody else. And that would also help the working, the product working group focus. And I'm talking about sort of like high level things here, right? I'm not going to say exactly how that streamlining should work. That's a conversation, right? You know, I have a bias towards what I'm making it look more like the Apache Software Foundation. And we're not far from that. But you know, if we can figure out another way, that's fine. But the important thing here is that individual projects need to be empowered to either succeed or fail on their own. And we should not be propping up the failures. I think we need to allow competition. This is very controversial, right? We need to allow non-Python languages. We need to allow competition between projects. A lot of people get really bent out of shape about this. They're like, well, we don't want something to come in and compete with Nova. Okay, fine. Let's not go that far. Is it okay if we have something to come in and compete with Solometer? Because I think that there would be a huge amount of community that would be just fine with that, right? Right. So, and then, you know, something like Neutron also probably be controversial. Because it appears, according to the survey data, it's got a love-hate relationship. People just love Neutron. I mean, they're network guys, I guess. And that's fine. You know, they can love it. But, you know, I don't think it would be a problem to bring in a competitor to Neutron. And to be honest, like, does anybody think that the path that Neutron's on of doing Layer 2, Layer 3, VPN as a service, Firewall as a service, Load Bouncer as a service, name your network thing as a service is actually ever going to work? I mean, talk about boiling the ocean. It took, like, a huge industry, a multi-billion-dollar industry 30 years to build that functionality into hardware appliances with various APIs and all kinds of different semantics. I mean, you just can't roll Layer 2 through Layer 7 up into Network as a service. It's not like storage. Storage is relatively simple. It's kind of got three basic, you know, approaches. Right. I'm conformed in well-known APIs and I'm going to rant about this because it's driving me absolutely nuts. You know, Intestable Reference Architectures. This is my personal hot button. Like, if we had all these different projects that were good for all these different things, then we should be able to assemble them kind of for different kind of use cases like OpenStack for NFV, OpenStack for Republic Cloud, OpenStack for Enterprise Private Cloud. And I'll talk about that some more in a second. But, you know, this is what I think people want. They come into OpenStack and they're like, I need OpenStack. But then the next question needs to be like, what do you need OpenStack for? What are you doing with it? Oh, you're going to do NFV. Okay, come over here. Here's, like, a place to start. Here's a blueprint of a map of how you put OpenStack together for NFV. Here's the recommended components. Oh, and by the way, here's a testable, here's an interoperability test suite that can verify that once you put it together, it works the same.  As long as the interoperability test suite works, then we're all good to go. Why shouldn't we allow that? Okay, maybe they can't call it OpenStack, but they're using OpenStack. They're part of the community. They're probably going to contribute back. You know, they don't have to use all of OpenStack. And then last, you know, ruthless simplification. And this needs to be true kind of across all things. Here I just call out one example, which is that when somebody first comes to OpenStack, they should be able to get, you know, something basic up and running on a small cluster basically in the corner with little or no effort and not using DevStack. Okay, I'll let you look at this offline since I'm probably running behind time and I don't have a clock up here, but I'm sure I'm running behind time because I bit off more than I can chew, as usual. And so this is just a map of kind of how the Apache Software Foundation works. And so some people might be wondering, why do I think that this is the way to do it? Well, it's because they're already running over 100 freaking projects. Okay? Right? We're struggling under the weight of 17. Okay? So I'm doing my startup over the last five years and I just keep saying to myself, man, I really don't want to make any mistakes that anybody else ever made. So I would go get people in to help me out who had done, who had made huge mistakes before. I figured it would be better for me to make new mistakes. Right? So I think that would be good for us, generally speaking. So this allow competing projects, right? This is very controversial, but it turns out there's already some leeway. Like, if you go and you actually look at the project requirements that the TC set forth, they say, look, you know, the project must cooperate with existing projects rather than gratuitously competing or reinventing the wheel. And when you talk to them, Terry and Russell, they say, yes, we don't want you to come in and compete with NOVA. But no, we would consider if you were coming in and you were going to compete with something that we think is broken, we would consider actually allowing that. So the door's already cracked open. I mean, I'd like it fully wide, but I will take what I can get. So, but I don't think people know this. They're like, oh, I don't know if I can, you know, cylinder's broken, but I don't want to do, you know, turn it to it. Instead, I'm just going to go get something else and integrate it. Well, I'd like people to know and walk away from this knowing that if you want to compete with some of the projects in OpenStack and bring that in, it is doable under the right conditions. Okay, and Python isn't good for everything.  Operating systems, low-level firmware drivers, nobody will do that. Thank you. So, please, please, continue to press on people, right?  Some of the people on TC would say, well, we want a developer to be able to start one project and go to another project.  So, is OpenStack the APIs or the code? What if it's neither? You know, I was talking to Terry the other day and getting some feedback on this, so I made sure that I didn't say anything that would be putting both feet in my mouth. One foot's good enough. And he said to me, OpenStack is about community, common values and a common governance model. Not necessarily about the code of the APIs. And I said, man, that is brilliant. That's like the smartest thing I think anybody's ever said to me in OpenStack land, right? Because we're all here to accomplish a common mission. We all want a common outcome. I mean, that's just seems like a no-brainer, right? Like how we get there like the details of the APIs and the code and the languages we use, who gives a shit?  Sorry, that was me going a little berserk. The Keystone API. Sorry, I'm about to go berserk again. You know, WTF. Actually, I actually said the entire thing the other day. I apologize for that. But like, why does the Keystone API exist? Right? There are dozens and dozens of well-known and documented authorization and authentication APIs that are scalable. They have existed for 20 or 30 years. And there is no excuse for building a new API that solves no new problems and that almost certainly creates new security issues because the people who created it are almost certainly not security experts. And if Google can use OAuth 2.0 to authenticate all of its services, then OpenStack can too. This is inexcusable. This is inexcusable NIH. Not invented here. Just absolutely, totally inexcusable. This isn't even a public-facing API. My apologies to the Keystone Ptl and team. So these reference architectures I was talking about, you know, like, I just, like, what is OpenStack? Draw a line around OpenStack for me. Tell me what it is. Like, you can't. Okay, it's private cloud. Okay, great. Now draw a line around private cloud, right?  So I just think that, like, we should chop it up, right? We should have, you know, kind of like flavors of OpenStack. And these things are not necessarily, you know, competitive with each other, and some of them may even contain the other. So, for example, I said, hey, basic IAAS, basic infrastructure as a service, right? This should be something where you go to the website, you click a button, you download OpenStack, and you've got something you can run on five machines, and it's just basically one of the compute things, plus, you know, the OAuth 2.0 server. And then the advanced IAAS contains that, plus it adds, you know, Cinder and Swift or Neutron if you really want to hurt yourself. You know, and then things like the application services, right? You know, the message boss, you know, the database and service thing, DNS, like, you know, those things, like, please, somebody explain to me why we wouldn't allow databases as a service and message users as a service and DNS as a service to run on top of Amazon Web Services. People are running OpenStack on top of Amazon to, like, deploy their applications. Oh, and then they figured out that they can actually run the same set of services on top of Amazon as on Google Compute Engine, so now they're using OpenStack to give themselves public cloud independence. And then, you know, they suddenly figure out we're going to build something inside, and neither Google nor Amazon have a private cloud solution, so they say, why don't we use the rest of the OpenStack stack? Like, the whole idea that in order to, like, have any of these services work, have to deploy all of them, like, it's just, it's ludicrous, right? It would be better to chop them into pieces and to encourage them to be used together, but also to allow them to all be run individually and to have a set of interoperability test suites so that you can just verify that these things are actually what you expect them to be, because that's the big thing, right? If a person builds their application to talk to the set of services and OpenStack app services, they want to know, they want to know that when they move from one set of those to the other that it acts and operates the same. So this is what it might look like, right? We have interoperability test suite, which we already have now with ref stack. Thank you, all the people who have been working on that, Rocky and Company. And then that interoperability test suite tests the reference architecture. That reference architecture is something that's put together kind of in collaboration, right? We all kind of have some input on what those reference architectures are. A reference architecture needs to be the set of capabilities and the set of projects that are going into it as well as set of default configuration options so that what we're testing is well understood. And then there's some set of projects that make that up. Those projects have code, API unit tests, and then they have capabilities tests because the project teams own those, and those are what ref stack runs, right? A set of these tests for each of the projects. This looks really doable to me. We're already basically doing this. Def core plus ref stack right now is basically creating a reference architecture for what I'll call basic infrastructure as a service. The problem is, is that if you go and you look at a lot of people's intentions, they think that what Def core will become is that it will slowly expand until it encompasses all of this, right? And that people, in order to get open stack, you know, will basically get the whole ball of blacks, which of course doesn't make sense. Okay. Larry Ellison in his infinite wisdom explained to us that cloud didn't exist and wasn't a thing. And we learned that that wasn't true. Steve Jobs blesses hard to love the man, love what he did at Apple. He was assured us that streaming music would never happen, I guess, until Apple bot beats. You know, and there's just a lot of other naysayers, right? There's a lot of people right now who are watching us plunge down that rail, right? They're just watching it, and they're saying, like, open stack's over, it's dead, it's, you know, whatever. Fine, that's good. I mean, the criticism's great. Like, I get criticism all the time.  You know, is it like, it makes my argument stronger. Like, I'm like, okay, I was wrong. I'm gonna go fix that argument. I'm gonna go fix that fact. I'm gonna go correct it. I'm gonna make a cope. I'm gonna apologize. I'm gonna, whatever, eat crow. But the point is, is that criticism is not bad. Like, I don't want to operate in a community where we pretend that everything's wonderful, because, you know, it's not. The number one problem that I had when I was building a team at Cloud Scaling was I had people come in who would look at everything that was going on, and they'd say, wow, man, this is really awful. You know, we should do what those guys over there are doing. It was always the grass is green on the other side. Always the glass is half empty. The glass is half empty. I'm like, look, you live in a universe that's filled with entropy. Like, everything is falling down. Like, cities did not assemble themselves. Human beings came around and made them. Right? We live in a world where we're basically building sand castles on the beach. The waves are coming in all the time and washing them out, and it's our job to basically keep working on the sand castles, because without it, sand castles go away. Right? Nothing is ever perfect. We have to spend the time to figure out what's wrong and fix it. Right? And these guys will be made wrong if we do our jobs and we kick ass, which so far, we've been doing. We just need to do more of it and do it faster. So, I think we can do this. Like, I think we've got to just think about these projects as being interrelated and not interdependent. Right? I need networking with my open stack system going in a new drawing. No. No. That shouldn't be the answer. Right? Maybe they need to use open daylight for some reason, or they need to use big switch. Maybe they're a carrier. The carriers are not going to use neutron. Not in the shape it's in right now. Testable reference architectures that are interoperable. We need kind of like those reference architectures. We need flavors of open stack. Right? The Linux kernel runs in red-handed and prized Linux and it runs on an Android phone. On an Android phone, there is no GCC tool chain. There is none of that stuff. But it still links kernel. Exact same code. That's the way open stacks should be viewed. It should be viewed as something that can be used to build a lot of different types of cloud systems rather than just one because I don't think we can get there. The other thing that that really breaks free and maybe I wasn't clear about earlier is that we have a big tent. We have a lot of people around open stack who want to make it be a lot of different things. Trying to get all those people to conform. Like, I gave that fight up like two years ago. Right? That is not going to happen. Right? I was waving the flag like, my way of building an open stack is the right way. Yeah. No. That's not happening. Right? But if you have flavors, if you say there's reference architectures, then you leave the door open. Hey, and somebody could come along.  And maybe nobody will ever use it. But it will be there. And if you want to use open stack and make it as compatible with Amazon as possible, there will be a path. There will be a way. There will be a description that you'll be able to use. Streamlining the governance model. Right? We need to... Any time there's anything that's centralized that any decision-making has to go through, it needs to be broken down. Right? We need market dynamics. And that's how we'll get the survival of the FITUS project. Right? We're dropping up bad projects or programming languages that aren't working for particular use cases. And we need to really internalize this last thing, which is that open stack is really not about the code or the APIs. Right? I'm actually ahead of time. I cannot even believe it. I must have been talking seriously fast. And I apologize for that. I didn't even have coffee today. I think I just got in a rant or a rant in a role. So we need to remember that open stack is not the code and the APIs. I know it's hard. Right? I don't want to take my code and throw it away either. But I remember one of the very first coding projects I ever did. I did the prototype. And it was awful, like really bad. And when I got to the end, I was like, oh my God, I do not want to hack on this. I went back and I rewrote from scratch. And I don't like to redo anything. Right?   I don't like to redo anything. But I learned the hard way on that first project that after I got that prototype done, doing the new thing took me one-tenth of time because I had solved all the problems. I had figured all the pieces out. And then it was basically in my head. It was just a matter of spewing it out. How many people have written an email and then to their boss maybe, that was like scathing.  Right? Pretty much everybody, right? Made it less scathing.  Right? I'm not saying you throw out everything. I'm not saying we go around and we re-write all of them. It's like, God, no, jeez, there's so much in there now. I'm just saying that like, when something's obviously broken, we should be willing to throw it out. And we should remember that it's not about that code. It's about the learning and it's about the community that we have together. Right? So I hope that this really resonates with you and that you're able to take it back and think about it and share it with your teams and maybe share the deck. And I know I'm rattling the cage a little bit harder than I normally do, which is hard to believe since I'm pretty good at rattling the cage. But I think this is important. Like, there's a cultural change that needs to happen here. And we're so close. We're so close. Like, I can smell it.  And that's the end of my presentation. Thank you.


Alright, Facebook, I'm going live and I want to, let's see here, want to take this, going to copy the link and share it. Alright so, ACA Engage is coming up this week as you all may know and they sent out this box, this swag box to everybody that's registered and I peeked in it but I thought it would be fun to do an unboxing kind of thing and just share it on the page here. I was going to do it on IGTV. What happens if I go Duk Yellow Duck? I haven't opened this up in a while. I'm just playing with all kinds of streaming software lately. So if you haven't been watching, I've been doing a weekly-ish, weekly-ish chiropractic news show on Twitch actually. How many of you guys are on Twitch? Let me know. And I have been just going over some, you know, the recent news that week, whether it's researcher articles, actual stuff in the news, like if it shows up on popular media or maybe YouTube or something like that. And then I've been talking about also doing events and things like that coming up. So that's over on Twitch and also putting it out as a podcast and hopefully as an Alexa flash briefing because I like getting those in the morning. So just trying to go live here on Instagram as well. Thanks, Dean. Have you been listening or no? Save and finish. I think I want to cancel. Okay, I do not know how to do this. Got it. So we won't go Instagram right now. I have to do that again in a moment. So let's pop open the AC engage swag box. Let's see what we got. So obviously I used to have a whole freaking bag of these NCMIC pens. I actually quite like these pens. They're nice and fluid. Let me swatch, swatch over, switch over. So these pens are pretty cool. I used to use them all the time. I think Palmer before I chose Western States Palmer also had very similar pens. So these are quite nice. I have a very, very special favorite pen. This is the only pen that I use. If I can help with the Dr. Grip Pilot gel pen. But I will keep these handy. So there's the NCMIC pen. Of course a mask. I kind of don't, I mean, this is cool. But honestly, why the heck do we need a mask when we're joining virtually? So I guess we're just supposed to wear it and, you know, pimp ACA in the clinics or outside. Oh, there that goes. But it's kind of a nice red. I don't usually wear red, but that one's pretty cool. What else do we got? It looks like it's a thank you card from President Robert Jones, discount at health supplies pro, which I haven't heard about. Actually, I'll have to check that out. Make sure you know how to get online, even though the email and setting up event, event seal, is that what event sent event sential cheese. I like that. It changes the the app icon when you install that sponsors must be tough for sponsors. You know, they use they're used to selling a bunch of stuff when you get there. So it's going to be interesting to see how they do that. So reminder of all of the sponsors free sample patient info cards. Okay, these are from the ACA shop. I've looked at these. I have not used any of them. But that's nice homework station. What about a mattress? And I just lost my light stretches for back pain. All right, that's pretty good. Prevent video game injuries. And the hands down better. That's a card for the cards. So that's pretty nice. What else do we have? This is where the fun stuff comes in. So of course, bio freeze, always there to sponsor. I from school, I have a whole bin of probably 20 of these. I always thought I was going to use them just use them up within the first couple months of clinic. And I did not ACA hand sanitizer, very nice, very nice. I'll always can use that with my kid. I like the carabiner. They did not skimp on a that's, oh, yeah, that's a, you know, nice heavy carabiner. Again, kind of silly to go with the mask. We're not going to be using that but a good reminder that we should always be sanitizing. And I don't know what this little guy is. Anyone know what that is? Let's open it up and see. It reminds me when I worked in a bank and I had that little, to count the bills, instead of licking your fingers, you would just touch. And that's not what this is. Headphones, cool, cool, I guess. I mean, I have so many Apple headphones. Now I have AirPods. This will not work with my phone because I don't have a headphone jack anymore. It does not work for my computer either because it's too far away. And I've got some fancy studio headphones that I use for online meetings and such. But I imagine some people are not going to have headphones and have family around when they're doing the meetings. And this is the one I saw everybody talking about. Check that out. Another Nick McSwag. It reminds us of the Kushball. I've seen others say that. My kid's going to love that. That's a great fidget toy. But I don't know exactly what you're supposed to do with it. It just feels like it's going to slap me in the face. So, all right. Well, there's that weird thing. And a couple things buried down in the paper. Oh, this is great. Does it extend? Please tell me. Yes. This is hands down. The best swag I've seen in a long time. Hands down better. Back scratcher. I've been complaining a little bit to my wife that I need something like this. My dad always wanted a back scratcher around. That's quite nice. And he would actually use a spatula, just this old metal spatula, which is the very fine edge in the kitchen. And so, of course, we would throw that spatula out, or he would just keep it by the bed. But this is great. This is really nice during the winter when my skin has been drying out. I really like that. Okay, ACA. I'm not disappointed now. The rest of the stuff I could do without, but this is awesome. Another bio freeze and a little ACA engage 2022 2022. So that's for next year reminder to plan ahead. And that should be plenty for all of the notes we're going to take at this year's ACA engage. Well, there it is, other than the stuff that will give my kid a paper cut.  Pretty cool. Little swag box. I'm, look, other than, let me swap over here. Other than the back scratcher, I'm not thrilled with the stuff. I don't like swag bags at conferences anyway. I tend to either just throw it out or keep it just stocking up and cluttering my office. But what I love ACA is that you tried to keep us connected to the event. And I appreciate that. I appreciate, you know, sending out kind of a surprise box. I had no idea this was going to come. Throw that into my bio freeze collection. And I think that's what, you know, virtual events are about right now. We can't meet in person. And so the fact that you're sending a physical object to us to remind us that this is happening, well executed. Just in general, conference swag is not that great. But this was fun.  I'm looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to attend all the sessions live. So I hugely appreciate that there's recorded sessions that we can watch before or after the fact. And I think the Q&A sessions that are kind of happening sort of in sync, you know, on the day or just after the live broadcast is another great way to keep people engaged. And this kind of stuff is such a challenge. I've been, you know, paying attention to people that these companies that do online events for big Fortune 50 companies. And it's a huge challenge. It takes a lot of either a lot of money and production behind the scenes or little things like this. And so I'm pleased with the ACA for reaching out and keeping everybody connected and sharing some fun stuff during before and hopefully during the event as well. So cool. Thanks ACA. It starts, I think there's some pre-conference stuff tomorrow, February 4th, this Thursday is officially the start. Again, a lot of the pre-recorded stuff is already available. Some of the CE qualified events you can go and start earning that CE early on. And then you can participate live in a lot of the Q&As. And I'm bummed that I'm not going to be able to participate in a lot of those because it's family time this week. But looking forward to see what everybody's doing. So check out my, what I'm calling Twitch, TWICH this week in chiropractic over on exploringchiropractic.com where I'm again just talking about news once a week and pushing that out on YouTube as well as on a podcast feed and hopefully an Alexa flash briefing. So thanks for tuning in. Thanks for everybody else doing their unboxings and kind of getting me to finally do this. And I hope to see you online at ACA Engage and maybe even at the Carl-Oquium in virtual in a few more weeks at the beginning of March. I think that is. So enjoy ACA Engage. I will see you around.


Welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawaii. My name is Jennifer Dotson, and I am your host. We are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios here in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in online, join us at www.thinktechhawaii.com. While there, please subscribe to our programs and get on our mailing list. The theme of Business in Hawaii is to share with you local stories of local businesses by local people. Our guests will share with us their journey to building a successful business right here in the Aloha State. In the ThinkTech studio today is Beverly Munson, also known to me as Bev. She is a team leader for Wahine Working Smart, AAUW. Bev, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you, Jennifer. I appreciate the invitation to be here. I'm really excited to have you on the show. So, for our audience, I know you, but they don't know you. Can you share with us a little bit about your experience and your background? Sure. First of all, I've been very fortunate to have had a career that's been very diverse and lots of great experiences. My background is in human resources. I'm a graduate of Fresno State University and I have a master's degree from San Francisco State University. My human resources career was mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, my last corporate job before I went into retirement full-time was with Hawaiian Telcom when there was the changeover from Verizon to local management. And in my career, I worked in a lot of different industries including health care, insurance, government. What was most exciting was to be involved in the software and internet industries in the beginning. Another facet of my career was that I was sort of, if you will, in the freshman class of women who were breaking into professional level and managerial careers. And that was a very exciting time. Previously, women had been viewed as being capable of only clerical jobs unless they were traditionally female professional jobs such as nursing, live attendants, that type of experience. So moving into corporate management, I was in that time period where we were sometimes the first. In some companies, I was the first female manager in the entire company. It was a very exciting time to be in corporate America. I think this is a great segue to talk about the topic at hand that we have for this show. So we have titled this show, Wahine Working Smart. We also have a tagline, Ask for the salary you deserve. So tell us and the audience how you got interested in this topic. Well, historically in America, women have been paid less than men doing the same jobs. That goes way back to our original history in the 1700s. In my generation and during my working years, as I said, we were breaking into managerial and high level professional careers. And most of us took whatever salary was offered to us because we were trying to blaze a career trail and prove that we could do these jobs. But over time, we've developed a gender pay gap that is 28% on national average, that varies from state to state. And you might say, well, is that really such a big deal? It actually has a huge impact on families. In that over a lifetime, over let's say a 40 year career, a woman who's making 20% less than her male peers, that's almost a half a million dollars, it's $480,000 in lost income. Now that's not just a female issue though. That's a family losing income. And so how I got involved in this is I felt that for future generations, as I look at my grandchildren and their careers, I want them, when they're having their families, to benefit from that lost income by helping close the gender pay gap. Right. And so I have been learning a lot from you. So in my day job, in my day job, I work at the National Kidney Foundation. But as a volunteer, I am a member of AAUW and I've been able to join your Wahine working smart team. And so tell us a little bit about this program that you have led up and you've had a workshop. I understand there's another workshop coming up. But tell us a little bit about what is Wahine working smart for our audience members that are curious. Yes. Well, first of all, I'm really grateful that you joined the team. And think about it and because then I finish answering your question, I'd like you to tell the audience a little bit about why you got involved. First of all, AAUW is a national organization that works towards advancing education, leadership, and equity for women in the United States. We have a long, multi-century history. And work smart is an AAUW initiative. It is a training program to teach women how to negotiate their salaries. They've did an extensive research study that found that men tend to naturally negotiate when they're in interview situations and women tend to approach that with a little more passivity because they're concerned about coming across this too aggressive and what kind of image that might make. So through work smart, we are trying to teach women how they can negotiate salaries and still maintain their professional decorum in the process and get comfortable with the process of negotiating salaries. It's a two-hour program, the work smart portion. As we talked to women in Hawaii though, we found that women that are in early to mid-career in Hawaii have expressed that they want broader training. So we expanded work smart to wahini working smart and customized it for the local market for the women in Hawaii. And what we have done is we've added segments such as how to maximize your professional network, how to develop a network, how to maximize it, how to understand what protections you have under the law and how to respond in a professional and concrete manner if you're asked an illegal question in an interview but still move the interview forward in a positive direction. We also have Ann Ibaia who is a retired HR executive from General Electric and she does a great segment on maximizing your executive presence. And this is for women who are maybe in their first managerial job but they're having to talk to senior executives, the real decision makers in an organization and how they can communicate with that person in a way that that person will understand what they're talking about and the information they're presenting. It's a very interactive program. We spend a lot of time practicing. We spend a lot of time in small group workout sessions. We do online research in the class and it's overall just a great day, a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun and I really enjoy working with our team and you mentioned Ann Ibaia. We also have another team member, Hope Bennett who I absolutely love because she is an attorney by background and she brings up amazing experience and also examples, case examples of how we need to really pay attention to Hawaii specific employment law. So now you moved here to Hawaii to work and you worked at a local company. I'm wondering if your experience working in that local company helped you sort of tailor this program to be more Hawaii specific because you did name it Wahine Working Smart which is a take on women working smart at the AAUW national level. Tell us about your experience working on the mainland and how it compared to working here for a Hawaii corporation. The big contrast is it wasn't so much California versus Hawaii but working in the software and internet industries which by the nature of what they do is at warp speed because there's so much competition and so much new technology being developed all the time versus in Hawaii there is a pace of doing business where you can not be as you still have to make decisions and get things done in an expedient and efficient manner but it's not at warp speed.  That's not to say that doesn't happen in Hawaii but it's the way people collaborate in Hawaii is really delightful and there's a huge wealth of energy and information and expertise in this state that can really be capitalized on. So I'm wondering how that now relates back to salary negotiations. So you've talked about the culture, you've talked about maybe some of the ways that we do business here in Hawaii. Salary negotiations is not easy no matter where you are. Tell us about some of the examples or some of the feedback, some of the testimonies you've heard from the participants in these workshops, these Wahine working smart workshops. What have people told you? What are some of the stories they've shared with you? Well first of all we have been very pleased to get some positive feedback and the feedback that I love the most is that people are actually using what we teach. It might be helpful if we talk about a little bit what we teach in the salary negotiation part. It's a methodology so it's very simple to understand and it's very simple to apply. The first part is researching what your salary would be, what is a competitive salary, or the position that you're in or applying for. Then learning how to set a competitive range for your years of experience and your particular expertise in a job. And then developing a communication, for lack of a better word, a script if you will, but to think, not just a scripted out, but to think about what it is you want to say and what you want to communicate so that the person you're speaking with about your salary will understand what you have to offer. And then that's where the practice comes in. Now the feedback we've received from the participants is that probably the number one thing we hear repeatedly is that going through the program gave them the confidence, gave them the tools and the methodology. So they learned how to go about through this process, but then it also gave them the confidence to have salary conversations and be more comfortable with it. And recently on Saturday, Hope and I had breakfast with a group of five of our most recent grads and they've all changed jobs since they took the course in May. They all were successful in negotiating salaries higher than they were originally offered. Well this is fantastic. And so before we break, because we are going to come back and hear more about this, could you just give us again a really short summary of what is Wahine working smart and the topic that we're talking about and then we'll go to break. Bev tell us a little bit. Wahine working smart is a free four hour program. The next one's going to be November 16 from 9am to 1pm. It'll include morning refreshments and lunch. It is an impact hub and it will include all of the topics that we've been talking about. Plus lots of opportunity to practice with your peers in the job market. Fabulous. And again, this is Bev Munson, our guest today on Business in Hawaii. We are going to take a short break. I am Jennifer Hudson and I am your host. We'll see you back here shortly. Aloha. I'm Winston Welch, host of Out and About. It's a show that we have every other Monday on Think Back Live Here. We explore a variety of topics that are really interesting. We explore organizations, events and the people who fuel them in our city, state, country and world. We've got some amazing guests on here like all the shows at Think Tech. So if you want to catch up on stuff, tune into my show every other Monday and other shows here on Think Back Live. It's a great place to learn about stuff, to be informed. And if you have some ideas, come on my show. Let's talk about it. See you later. And Aloha. Aloha. Stan Energyman here. You can see me every Tuesday at 3 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. We're not on Friday anymore, so don't be looking for me on Friday. I'm on Tuesday at 3 p.m. here on Think Tech coming to you live and direct from the beautiful studios in downtown Honolulu's Pioneer Plaza. So please join me and we'll talk everything about hydrogen and clean energy, not only for Hawaii, but for the whole wide world. Aloha. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii. My name is Jennifer Dotson and I am your host. With us today in the studio is Bev Munson, Team Leader, Wahini Working Smart, AAUW. Welcome, Bev. Thank you, Jennifer. So here we are after the break. I was wondering if you could tell our audience a little bit about the work you're doing now. Well, I am volunteering in a couple of capacities with AAUW. I not only head up the WorkSmart team, which we've been talking about, and in a few minutes I'd like you to tell the group what you do with the WorkSmart team and a little bit about your background because I think they'd like to know that and it's important to share that. I also, we have a book discussion group where we read books on women's issues that are important to women today and it's more of a, it's not just a normal book club, but it is actually a format of educating ourselves on issues that are affecting women. In addition to that, I have in the past worked on the Public Policy Committee for the State Chapter of AAUW. A couple of years ago we were able to take the lead in passing some very important legislation to try and close the gender pay gap. One problem is when people are asked their salary history and they've been paid less than their peers in the same job, that salary history then causes that lower salary to be imported from one job to the next. So I am happy to say that in Hawaii now that question is no longer allowed in a pre-employment interview or on an application form. Employers can ask what a person's salary expectations are, but the history is relevant because salary history has no direct relevance to what the person brings to the next job. So I've worked on that and that involves meeting with legislators, it involves writing written testimony, it involves going to the legislative hearings and giving testimony and answering questions and trying to help educate legislators as they consider different bills. Now, Jennifer, I've been saying that I'm going to ask you to tell everyone about your background and I think it's important for you to share your story about how you became involved with AAUW. Oh, Bev, you're too kind and now you're turning the tables on me. It's like the interviewer gets interviewed. So you're very skilled in your negotiations, I must say. I've been very, very fortunate to work with you and AAUW, but also very fortunate to get involved with this organization. And before I received a grant from them, and I'll tell the audience a little bit about this grant, I actually was familiar with them. I had heard about them in the past. I was involved as the president of the Junior League of Honolulu and we shared an affinity for women's empowerment and in fact shared an office in the historic AAUW home in Makiki. So I was familiar with AAUW, but never did I ever imagine that at the age that I am in the career that I am at the point in my employment that I am, that I would receive a grant. And this specific grant is called a Leadership and Professional Development Grant. It is given out by AAUW. I had no idea and I applied and I spoke about how as a fundraiser for a nonprofit organization, unfortunately nonprofits don't have a lot of money for professional development. And I know you're an HR and you believe very strongly in professional development. Now maybe in the private sector you might have resources and a budget for professional development, but most nonprofits unfortunately we just don't have money to go to the staff that will be used for professional development. That is something that I've been very creative about and looking for alternatives. So I came across the AAUW website. They were also very good about advertising about this leadership and professional development grant on social media. And so I looked it up and I applied and I received $4,000 to apply to anything I needed in terms of professional development. What I ended up using it for was to attend a conference. It's an international conference of fundraising professionals. It was held in San Antonio this past spring and thousands of fundraisers from all around the world gather to hear the best speakers, the best workshops, the best seminars to really make us better fundraisers. And the reason why that is important is because I don't only fundraise for the National Kidney Foundation, which is an important mission. And we save lives and we do so much work in terms of kidney disease and preventing kidney disease and raising awareness about organ transplantation. But I also volunteer as a fundraiser for my kids schools. So as a PTA member, I am responsible of working together with other parents, all volunteers to raise money so that the school has better programs for my child. So the fact that I received a $4,000 grant from AAUW, I was so pleased at my age to receive this opportunity. Because I know a lot of times professional development is reserved for maybe younger staff members because you want to boost them up. But to make someone who is at my point in career to be better, I feel like I really was able to amplify my skills to do more good work for the community. And so I'm very grateful that AAUW also included as part of that grant membership, this amazing organization. And that's how I met you. And that's how I was able to get involved with Wahine working smart. And so please again remind our audience today we're talking about Wahine working smart. We have a tagline here. Don't leave money on the table. That's right. Negotiate for the salary you deserve. When I received the grant it actually coincided with the point in time that I started my new job at the National Kidney Foundation. So tell us and tell the audience here about what is Wahine working smart? What are you covering in the workshop? And some of the maybe tips and tricks that you feel are important for those of us who are negotiating salaries because it's not easy. It isn't easy. As I said before, one of the segments of the program that we spend some time on and this is the beauty of the internet being in our phones and we can just quickly look up something. We actually have each participant look up either their current job or jobs that they're aspiring to in the workshop to start figuring out what is a competitive salary for people with their experience and expertise. And then how to take that and set a target salary that they're going to aspire to either when it's time to talk about their salary and their current position or when they're interviewing for new positions. And then to practice the delivery of the messaging. So one of the things that a lot of people don't know how to do is that they don't recognize that when they're in a job interview, that's their marketing campaign. They're there to sell the person that's interviewing them and the company that they're interviewing with what they have to offer, what they can contribute in that job and to the organization as a whole. And we find, I know, as someone who's interviewed thousands of people, there are very, very talented people out there who are really smart and have a lot to offer that they don't know how to communicate it. Because before they go into an interview, they just think about how nervous they are, how they're worried about whether they're going to get the job or not. Instead of what is it that if I have only 15 minutes, I want this person to remember about what I bring to the table, what I have to offer this organization, what I can do to improve their organization's performance. And that's what we do in the program, along with the other things we've talked about previously. Okay, so you're an HR executive. Like you said, you've interviewed a ton of men, women for these positions to join your company. Let's say I'm a candidate and I'm really interested to join you. I've done well in my interviews. Now we're at the point in time where we need to negotiate a salary. So it's both ways, right? I have a number in my mind because as a working mother, I need to support my family. I have a mortgage to pay. I have to buy groceries. I have electricity bills and a car payment, all of these things. So I have a number in my mind. Here's my question for you. Let's say you have a number in your mind as well. Because you have your budget. You as an HR executive have your marching orders to fill this position. What if those numbers don't match up? My number is higher than your number. Your number doesn't match my number. And I feel that I've been offered a salary that's lower than what I would like. What are we going to do here? Does this workshop actually teach us what to do? And if so, share with us a little bit of those details. I'm glad you've asked that question because it's a really important question and it's a critical part of the workshop. It's not always just about salary, not just about base salary. There are many components to compensation. One can be that there might be bonuses involved. The other might be paid time off. The other might be the benefits package. So let's say for example, you have a number in mind because in your current job, you have to pay a certain amount for health insurance for yourself and your family. And so you know that okay, you have the expectation you're going to have to spend that much. But then I might sit down with you and I might say, well, Jennifer, let's look at the whole package before we talk about salary further. At my company, we actually provide a health insurance plan for you, your spouse and your children under the age of 26 at the total cost of $50 a month or $100 a month as opposed to maybe the $300 of your paying. Well, that closes the gap a little bit more. You might also say, Jennifer, in your position, you'll start with three weeks paid time off. And oh, by the way, we have a personal time off program. So it's not just vacation you can use it for.  Well, so it sounds like it really is a negotiation and the more practice that we can have the better. So this workshop, I understand provides those opportunities. I feel like we can just go on and on about this topic for our audience. If they don't have time to attend this workshop in person, can you share with them where they can go online to take this educational opportunity for free? That's right. AAUW has an online version of WorkSmart. It takes two hours, but you can do it in small segments. AAUW.org. That is fabulous. For a busy working mom like me, I love those resources. Thank you so much for being my team leader at AAUW. Thank you for sharing this important information with our audience. We are actually out of time. So I would like to say to our audience, thank you again, Bev Munson of AAUW for joining us. And a great big thank you to the great production staff here in the Think Tech Studio. If you would like to be a guest on this show, please like us, subscribe, and leave a comment below. This is Hawaii, airs every Thursday at 2pm. We look forward to seeing you here next week. I am Jennifer Dotson. Mahalo.


I wanted to put this video out a while ago, but time was just not on my side and today what I'm going to do is put that video out that I promised a long time ago and what this is it's the interview I did with amp founder co-founder Tyler Spalding and we did an actual interview itself with Tyler a couple of months ago and here's us just talking about what amp is the amp token, ampera and a couple other different things that was just you know pretty much on the surface and I will link that video in the description below title ETH is a long way to run with inflation dead and amp flexa and if you don't know if you're familiar with Tyler of course he is the co-founder of flexa previously at NASA building rockets MIT alum and of course ampera and the amp token so what we talked about in this interview was actually a recording before we did the actual interview itself and we just went over just some basic things we talked about regulatory clarity where things are going we took a lot of look at the parallels between the history of the internet and what happens today and then really just can not knock down the nuts and bolts so there's a little bit more in-depth than the on-surface interview that we did which we released a couple months ago so without further ado here's the interview with me and Tyler Spalding. It's an e-commerce company in 1996 so I lived through all that and it was this is a scam this is a fraud this will never work customers don't I mean you read this and you're actually kind of stunned because we're 20 years on the other side right but there was literally I can remember on like Barron's leaflet magazine when this was out there's literally a amazon.bomb and they have a bomb on the cover with bezos on it saying no merchant will ever sell on amazon what an absolutely terrible idea you're losing all these investors money why are you doing that I mean that's just one of many many other examples but there you go all right see I didn't make it up I know exactly what you're talking about because I use this all the time as as an example of people just to hang in there because people they get they get short sighted like well it's just you know the price is down so the so the project sucks like well it's not doesn't work like that because you know like you talked about e-commerce there was remember the day when uh it was all the regulation to get forth because state by state it was hard to get the tax situation oh yeah oh yes I know way way too much about tax taxes laws and having lived through that as well yeah but I mean because we're all enough to remember those days and and I remember when before the internet and when the internet came out people like they're not they're always people always tell me the government will never allow this to happen because this this free flow of information I'm like maybe it will never happen and then of course it went through and then it's the same thing here with with crypto and bitcoin I think that's why I like your products the things that you're trying to do make payments but make payment so people don't understand what's going on underneath the hood no one cares no one cares no one cares when you when you take your phone you scan it or tap it again something all you care about is you get the service in return right only thing that people care about so you know building that and if you can make it better and by better it means it needs to be faster cheaper right and you can do that right so maybe it can't be necessarily faster and summons this is maybe but the cheaper is very very possible when you start looking now using that infrastructure but then also harnessing other sort of payment paradigms that I think people have completely neglected because we live in this world of we have credit cards therefore I spend this I get rewards I'm in this cycle underprivileged people pay for my privilege to be able to use my credit cards because they're the ones revolving on credit paying ridiculous fees sitting in a debt cycle forever that's all also abstracted away to the end user that's not good marketing to say here's your great platinum card with all of these benefits you're keeping a thousand people in poverty and their families because you are benefiting from it like that's not a great marketing message and and this isn't like secret this is all out there's been reports that Kansas City Fed has a great paper on it I quote a lot and like this is wide open right but that's a lot the times how capitalism works and so I'm not necessarily saying this is this entirely evil system but what if you can have something that's comparable that's just as fast that has infrastructure that then works and you don't have to have that economic model and now people can start paying with assets that they want to communities that they want to assets they want to support communities they're part of using loyalty points and expanding what you've in your definition of money or assets or value are that is just undeniably powerful and we're we're leading that way so that's just inevitable for me when you know we first started this it was I remember telling people oh yeah the you know companies like Facebook will will make a digital token and they're going to explore money you know an intra platform money people like that's nuts they'll never do that like Facebook have no interest in ever building something like this and not only in this cycle right not only do that come but then something you know why what bigger ambitions that I think people thought and that you know didn't really work out for a variety of reasons but not technical ones I can tell you that and not interest or market interest I can tell you that it wasn't those reasons so it will evolve it will continue to evolve because if that if what Facebook was trying to do is inherently very very valuable right um it's going to happen it'll happen in some manifestation because you have Amazon and Walmart and other multinational companies that you know the underlying economics of that don't change internationally right so everyone sees this so it's coming and we'll see how it's all going to evolve but uh extremely powerful um and just inevitable so anyway sorry for uh no a little tangent thing well it's a good tangent it's a tangent to talk about especially when you brought up you said the reason behind with with Facebook and Libra and one of the issues that I see was it was it was regulatory uncertainty and regulation clamping down and it seems like if we don't get regulation right things can't move forward I have a problem on this channel and the problem on the channel is like when I say regulation I get lambasted because people say you we don't need regulation in crypto and digital assets because we're our own person we're our own people and we control what happens we don't need the government to tell us I'm like I understand that part but there's a problem that if we can't move forward we can't allow things to flourish here in the States I mean it'll just go someplace else it'll happen but I think we need some kind of clarity and this is where like I run into a lot of roadblocks with people yeah and and one element of that in you know and I've been in crypto for more than 12 years at this point so like really talking with people throughout this process is is yes that's absolutely an angle to take which I personally really believe in but the other reality is if you want payments let's say or money you are going to have to interface with businesses that again are multinational businesses or businesses that have so much complexity to them outside of just processing payments that you can't just erase because you like a different version of money so you have to understand that that connecting to these archaic systems some good some bad that's just all part of the process and that there's an entity that has thousands and thousands of employees and how they pay them and how that is structured and how they pay their vendors and their operating expenses and all this other complexity that has evolved some of it very positively over the course of a thousand years some of that works very well I mean I look at it and take a step back for just you know even one second and say yes there's a lot of really bad things in the news and frustrating things in the news regarding you know global politics or events or maybe even you know specific to us and regulation in our world and broad and all these other bad things and that's absolutely true but at the same token I can go outside and I can buy whatever food that I like in a major city and I can go you know rent an apartment and do all these other things and there's a lot of things that are actually pretty cost efficient and really effective and you go back and we have air conditioning we have heating we all these great things whatever refrigerator and you know a hundred years ago you don't really have that you really have indoor plumbing so when you start comparing it to some advancements it's very easy to get caught up in how bad everything is or how frustrating it all is when you start comparing some of the other advancements what we do have from these other systems whether they're economic sociological or government you know created so yeah worked out really well um this is just always kind of keep that you know and I'm not trying to say everything is all fantastic by any means but there's always going to be some sort of a balance now there's a there's a lot of good out there it's just people just don't want to don't want to see it sometimes yeah negative sells more uh negative and uh trying to complain around things and uh having you know the attention grabbing headlines for sure yes exactly the clickbaits so so tell us so what i'll do is is today because uh i think well first of all let me ask you this how can i help you get to where you where you want to go how can i help you how can my channel help you guys ah so um let's say i'd say there's two there's two main pieces um so um not sure how much you have looked into things what we have uh basically flexa is doing its thing absolutely probably seeing a lot of information around all of that but in growing all of that um i personally have now even forked off uh with another now um a whole group of global contributors to where we're building a new collateral protocol um that ultimately we think is going to end up servicing flexa in a dramatically more powerful way than it currently works um but we sort of realize that the fundamental aspect of powering flexa so enabling these collateral based payments we're sort of at the top of the tip of the iceberg and so as we look to say how do we make this better how do we accept payments more globally and how does the system actually work across all different ports of open source wallets non-constitutional wallets all these things um we wanted to make small tweaks into how this would work to make it more efficient and you know in true crypto fashion going down the rabbit hole it turned into an entire thing hole of this is way bigger more complex and actually more valuable than we ever even imagined and so we realized it wasn't something that even made sense to solve within the confines necessary of flexa to make it as powerful as it can be so that's what impera is in that it's a basically it's collateral protocol i can go into more detail it's um very boring and very straightforward but we think very powerful um and so it's just a mechanism now to enable uh collateral to be shared across platforms in real life across apps people um you know and there's other details that anyway if you're a question yeah what so talk to me well real quick so i understand and and when we talk about these things you know of course we dumb it down as much as possible mostly for me and of course for my subscribers but for for impera when you're talking about about the collateral he's talking about all types of collateral or he's talking about like like reward points and everything else that are just out there it's it's going to be anything um i mean anything more broadly defined but they're going to be assets that are more appropriate for collateral so some things that are more liquid things that people have that they want to use as collateral so in our current framework like ether or bitcoin are great examples of that yeah um and we actually are trying to look more for like uh yield bearing assets um so assets that you can basically hold that are earning some sort of uh yield generation on top of them whatever that looks like right not related to us but an asset that maybe inherently has that those features um and they could even be like fully regulated project like uh products like tokenized T-bills which we've seen which are amazing that already there's uh from what i've even seen over a hundred million dollars worth of those like fully regulated products already in the market even after launching a few months ago so i mean there's going to be a landslide of things they're going to be available for this um but yeah so there's that um so from uh from an awareness perspective or sort of uh the the help on our side it's one people just being aware of this other protocol how they could integrate it within other projects they might be working on or know of when they start seeing some of these issues pop up in other protocols like oh man this this unparalleled thing might help this um or just the peer spending on flexa itself um uh spending digital assets whatever those are whether they're the the typical ones or stable coins or basically anything um that movement is really starting to grow and i think start building momentum and the more that gets talked about um when we were at like flexo when we were through the you know last market cycle we were literally getting like thousands of inquiries per day from merchants looking to accept this stuff so oh yeah oh yeah i mean not big ones they're small ones but oh absolutely i mean it's just so overwhelming you can't even come close to servicing it um but if we have so so talk so like i'm a retailer and i want to take payments because i don't want to pay the strike and paypal fees of 2.99 plus 30 cents per transaction fee right which i have to do on my businesses so they're saying you know integrate this with with us as much as possible take as much crypto so we can reduce the payments is that what it's all about which which i i think would be more for flexa yeah for flexa yes right um so on the flexa side and it's even easier than that we try to already integrate with everything they already had so it's literally just a turn something on um and then ampere now is a technology that will power collateralization within flexa um and that seems a little more complicated that really is but it's not it's more of a oh we're going to use ethereum for processing transactions is like a similar analogy so flexa right now is using ethereum and a product called flexa capacity we have to stake collateral separately into pools backing protocols and this is all gosh to also be clear this is all totally abstracted from the user or even the merchant no one knows this is all happening this is just how the technology work they can know so it's like we don't hide it but it's not you know it's not you don't ever need to care right much as you use um you know your uh microsoft excel or google docs you don't need to know the database that's actually storing that information like you don't it works for you so that's how that um uh that product currently flexa works and now what we've done is we've generalized a collateral um protocol to basically message that collateral exists how it gets locked how it's securely basically secured against transactions and we've done that in a totally generalized way um which also then makes it you know 10x more usable for flexa is doing today because there are little limitations on on flexa being able to open this more permissionlessly um two other types of wallets and assets and that's a lot of minutia on the details of why so i'll hand wave and just say there are complexities uh which now we we have solved through this protocol and it turns out in doing it this oh wow this actually is applicable to any sort of a transaction um so we are looking at it a lot more myopically um than what it actually can become and that's why i'm really excited about it despite being so excited about everything that flexa had done being with that project for five years this was not something i was going to just slowly walk away from like that i've been in payments for a long time and i'm very proud around what is there so it had to be something that was so entirely compelling that also happens to amplify the goal i already had so now i get to you know do even more i'm rising kind of the the tide to ride all of the ships with the ship i'm you know most proud of but now i actually have to build something as a primitive that affects everything more globally in that you know that's sort of that like challenge or kind of overall you know perspective i need otherwise i'm not i can't just jump into something and like you know dedicate my life to that so sure well i mean you've had a long a long lineage of working in payments so of course it makes sense so hey so so back i can give a i don't know i guess uh if we're recording this too and you're kind of splicing things maybe this one we can't say publicly but i can give you a quick example gotcha okay and then just to back up for a couple things you said you were talking about ampera and then amp token and then you know flexa and you talked about when you were you know to do this with ampera for collateral and of course it's a pain in the ass right now that you know i'm guessing you're talking about using the ethereum network yes absolutely and so you can you can just say we're not going to do that anymore because it's a pain we're going to use ampera for collateral and we're going to do away with this and whatever's going to happen with there and the uh the fees everything else we're just going to use this collateral version and that's why you're doing that it uh yeah it's similar it's um so impara is a contract on ethereum still so it's still using the underpinning security of ethereum okay but rather than just a collateral token used in a not that extensible smart contract the way that flexa is using it now we've made it so rather than taking something like flexa capacity which there which is the smart contract which governs the collateral usage of verifying collateral is there verifying a transaction has taken place all the mechanics around that yeah which it works um we're basically generalizing that and just saying rather than having that contract using amp now um you know specific reflexive payments what if that got re-engineered to make it you know 100x more powerful and open and fully decentralized usable for any transactions which now then flexa can use so now it's a more generalized got you yep okay perfect yeah you know what so that was there was this question because i was asking people you know what kind of questions you got for tyler and uh dany b okay d


Got the t-shirt, got the cap, got the mic and we are good to go. We are going on the Variety Bash, the 25th anniversary bash, proudly brought to you by Trilliantra. Raising cavalcade of crazy vehicles for you to watch out for. We're leaving the heart of the Taranaki tomorrow, bright and early, we're leaving from New Plymouth, we're heading off to Vult, to Marston, to Wellington, we're going to Tauronga via Taupo, to Cambridge and then all the way up to Auckland over the next week in crazy vehicles just like this one here, with crazy folk just like these folk here. Watch out for the Lion Cup game, for the Thunderbirds, for the Fish Pot, the longest jolly fire engine you've ever seen and we are doing it all for kids, all for Variety and we're looking for you and your support. Hey guys, you all good to go? Yeah!


I have this glass of water with some sand dissolved in it and I want to separate the sand from the water. Can I do that? It turns out there is a method to do the separation, to carry out the separation and that method is called filtration. Filtration is used to separate a solid from a liquid and in this case the solid particles they are not dissolved in water. Filtration only works for such purposes when the solid particles are not dissolved in water. Now how to carry out filtration? Let's have a look at this. So we can pour the mixture of sand and water on to this filter paper that you can see is fitted in a funnel and I have something near the bottom of the funnel which can collect the water that will come out. So when I pour the mixture, the filter paper filters out the sand particles and lets the water pass through it which is then collected in a container at the bottom and you can see that in front of you. Now this works because the filter paper has very small ports in it which can allow the water particles to pass through it but it filters out, it does not allow the bigger solid sand particles to pass through it. So all the sand is collected in the filter paper and then you get much clearer water. It might still have very small sand particles present in it but the majority of the sand particles have been filtered out. So now let's have a look at the diagram. This over here, you can see that this is the mixture of the solid and liquid. It could be anything, it could be chalk in water, even chalk does not dissolve in water, right? And when you pour this mixture onto this filter paper, this right here is the filter paper. It lets the water molecules to pass through it which is then collected at the bottom and that is called a filtrate, that is called filtrate. In this case, the filtrate is water. Whatever sand that is collected in the filter paper, that really is called residue. So this is sand in this case. Alright, now this over here is filter, this is a funnel, so let me write that as well. This is a funnel and this could be anything, you can collect the filtrate in any sort of container. It could be a conical flask, a beaker or just an everyday usable container. So this is how filtration works. It is used to separate solid from liquids and this is a kind of a physical separation. This is called a physical separation because there is no change in how the particles are arranged. Nothing new is formed, you are just separating sand from water. No new substance is formed, you are just physically separating them. And this is how filtration works.