Oh, I guess it is. I guess it is. There we go. Awesome. Because as we were just sitting here joking, we're like, this is absolutely the slot to see who made it to bed early and who has already, ooh, and now I'm everywhere. This is awesome. We called it the hangover slot. So welcome. Yeah. And of course, we only have one microphone, so the good news is that works better. So welcome, everyone. And we're going to take a little bit of a different approach, I guess, than just presentation slash panel. Because one of the issues with this is it's an evolving space when we're talking about the data and the privacy and all the issues with, I mean, if you ask anyone to define as Britain's going to talk about some of the aspects of the data privacy in XR, I mean, we don't even have a common definition for some of the technology, so then how are you going to define what it's doing? So I'm Liz, and this is Britain. And we're going to talk, first Britain's going to lay a great foundation and give us a framework from which to have a discussion. And then the idea is we'll talk amongst ourselves, and then once you all have had an opportunity to wake up, have, you know, get the brain cells firing, then we thought we would open it up to a conversation and questions from the group. So bear with us, and I'm going to let a much smarter person than I introduce the topic and explain a little bit of where some of the challenges lie. Question one, can you hear me? Awesome. Question two, who's heard of Lego Universe? All right, I have a salty story for your Sunday morning about Lego Universe. Lego Universe was a highly anticipated, massive multiplayer online game like Roblox, Minecraft that ended up being shuttered. The experience looked great, and the company was really looking to allow users to build their own type of content and their own environments. But given how utterly trusted Lego was as a brand, they committed to whitelisting content before it went live.  The only problem was that there is a term in content moderation that Lego did not think about, and it's called time to penis.   Lego needed, amongst other things, to figure out an automated, scalable, economical way to prevent teenagers and kids from drawing penises in the virtual world, and they couldn't do it. It became a wide-scale problem, and it actually ended up killing the project. This is not an unusual story. Many companies find that their expectations about governing and moderating user behavior and user data flows and spatial computing are turned on their head. My name is Britton Heller, and I like to describe myself as the lawyer of the Black Mirror. I am a visiting scholar at the virtual human interaction lab at Stanford University, and I teach international law and AI policy, and I've been focusing on immersive environments for about seven years. There are three things that I would like you to take away today. One, immersive media has a different impact on our bodies and our minds, and this is what differentiates it from flat-screen social media. Existing privacy law does not accommodate for this. Two, the different technical stacks between flat-screen social media and immersive content mean that we have different layers of enforcement when you're looking at behavioral tracking and modification in XR. And three, AI will not save us, and that one is worth repeating twice. AI will not save us. Overall, the systems that we create in 3D environments are fundamentally different from 2D environments because of the technical stack, the potential impact on users, and the uninformed state of the law. This leads us to three questions. What kinds of data flows do you get from XR environments? What does this mean for business models and the law, and why does this matter to users? Imagine that you and I are playing a race car-oriented game in XR. And I see this red McLaren, and I really, really like this car. I was going to say a Tesla, but the one that they're hacking over there, I don't know if it's actually going to be able to drive after this week. So I like the Tesla. I like McLaren. You can like the Tesla. When I see this car, my body starts to physiologically react to my pleasure. So my heart rate goes up a little bit. My skin gets a little more moist. My pupils dilate. I really like this car. Later on as we're walking around the conference and we go into a different experience, I see a similar red car drive by driven by someone who looks more than a little bit like me. I go to a virtual sports bar and someone who looks exactly like my crush says, isn't it a great time to buy a new car right now? I go to my email and I start getting targeted ads from Geico about why I should re-up my car insurance. This sounds like science fiction, but the framework for it actually already exists. Companies have been putting advertisements in XR environments since 2021, I believe it was announced. And I've written papers about how advertisements in immersive contexts are actually experiential. They don't look like billboards. You actually pay for the privilege of having the car advertised to you. I developed a term called biometric psychography to describe the potential for this harm where your likes, dislikes, and consumer preferences are married with your physiological reactions, often involuntary. This is not against the law. This is not covered by normal privacy law because privacy law covers your personal identifying information. And when you and I entered into the game, I had a verifiable billing address. I had a user account with my authentic identity. The companies know who we are. That's not what's at issue. It's the inferences about our behavior and our physiology and our preferences that are really at risk.  So privacy law is not the right regime to deal with this.  Because there are different psychological and neurological impacts that then socializing with people in video game worlds, I'd like to review the three characteristics that make something immersive. And I think that when you understand this, you really get that this is not flat screen media anymore. First is presence. Presence has been studied in communications departments for decades. And formally it's called the illusion of non-mediation. When you go into an XR environment, it feels real. The first thing that we do at the virtual human interaction lab when we have somebody visit is I have them walk the plank. I put them in an experience where they are over a chasm and they are walking along the plank because nothing brings the feeling of presence to you more acutely than feeling that vertigo and feeling your heart rate rise and seeing how your physiology reacts to the screens and the spatial audio and the impact to show you that this is not a Twitter feed. And therefore, maybe we shouldn't be regulating it in the same way. Jeremy Balanson, the founding director of the lab says we should think of VR not as a media experience, but closer to an actual experience. And the visceral pit in your stomach, you get when you have fear of heights, that's what that is. And we do that before talking about empathy and education and all of the other benefits of VR so that people understand its power. Second is immersion and that's when users really feel like they're in a virtual environment. A virtual violin performance has to have all of the trappings of watching a performance in an actual theater. Different views from different seats, different movement flows through aisles, spatially oriented sound. So it's the way that XR experiences use your sensory input to stimulate the user through light, sound, sense, tactile input. Finally, there's embodiment and this is my favorite one because it reminds me of Looney Tunes. Embodiment is the feeling like your avatar or your virtual body is your actual body. And a researcher named Mel Slater took a famous social psychology experiment called the rubber hand experiment and he had people look down in VR and see a rubber hand placed in front of them and then proceeded to go Looney Tunes on it, to hit it with a mallet, to stab it, to really abuse the virtual arm. And when you watch the recordings of these, you can find them on YouTube. People scream. People jump. People react like it's their actual arm. This is the power of embodiment and it can be beneficial in medical applications if somebody has phantom limb pain where you want to show them an arm that is not theirs and have their brain actually associate what happens to that with their physiognomy. But it also can place users at risk considering the violence and other user harms that we're starting to see emerge in XR. So if this feels so real to our bodies, what does it do to our minds? Tom Furness, who's one of the inventors of VR headsets, says that when something happens to you in XR, it's like it's imprinted on your brain in permanent ink. The experiences that you have in a virtual environment are processed through your hippocampus in the same way that you create memories like you and I sitting here having a conversation today. It's more like entering somebody's living room and screaming in their face than it is reading critical words on Facebook or Twitter. Because of how XR impacts our bodies and our minds, it's a mistake to just cut and paste terms of service from flat screen social media and presume that they're going to do the same thing. And that sounds really obvious, but that's what a lot of companies are doing these days. Second, I promised we talk about different stack layers and moderation vectors and spatial computing. What that means in normal people speak is that when you do content moderation on Facebook or Twitter, you look at two things, conduct and content. When you move in from a 2D to a 3D environment, you have to look at content, conduct, and environment. So the architecture of your world, like we talked about with the penises in Lego Universe, becomes a moderation factor. One that you don't have when you have a text-based social media environment. That means that there are actually different ways to mess with people in XR worlds. I like to think about spam. And how does spam translate into XR? Pretend you and I are tired of my sports car and so we go to a sports bar. And in the sports bar, I can buy Liz a beer. I don't want Liz coming to my bar, though, or playing on my pool table. So I buy her so many beers that it fills up the virtual pool table, and she can't play the game. Impeding a user's gameplay in an XR environment is the functional equivalent to spam in a flat-screen computing environment, but it would never be defined as such if you didn't think about it in three dimensions. I'm going to skip a little bit ahead because we have a lot to talk about. Three, platforms are having a lot of challenges trying to create trust and safety regimes and privacy regimes because of all of these complicating factors. This is a new form of media with new impacts on your body and mind. You need new rules. A lot of people ask, why didn't LEGO just create a filter to screen out all the penises? And the answer was that most social media content is moderated by automated filters in an X anti-fashion.  And the way that they do this is by using classifiers. So it's basically a huge AI profanity filter. This is not possible in the XR context yet. We don't have scalable, affordable, reliable ways to create classifiers for 3D environments. We don't have the data sets yet to use. Computer vision is the way that I think we're going to be able to do this, but think about all the different ways you can describe a cat. We don't have publicly available data sets yet to try to audit what a cat would actually be in its many forms and colors and shapes and sizes. Currently when companies do content moderation, one, they just don't do it for XR. Two, they use a voice-to-text transcription and then run it through social media filters, which does not catch context or behavioral or environmental factors. Or three, they try to use real-time behavioral tracking, which is just not scalable and puts the burden on users. When you report a violation in a platform like Horizon Worlds, it takes one to two minutes of content and gives it to the company. That normally is not enough to determine the context of what's actually happening. And if you watch videos of people who are reporting abuse happening, you often can't tell who is saying what to whom and what's happening, especially in 60 seconds. Reporting is done differently as well on every different platform. So that's like if we went to Vegas and you call 9-1-1, but then if you went to Henderson and you had to show up in person, when you use public safety services, if you had to call for help in a different way, in every different city you went to, you would never use 9-1-1. And I think companies are finding that it's the same way if you don't have standardized safety protocols across different XR platforms and XR worlds. Generative AI looks promising as a tool to help, but it does not yet have the discretion or the contextual understanding of what's going on in discretion or the contextual understanding necessary to help with the nuance that will be required for helping to modify or govern user behavior. Realistically, AI-based solutions are several years away from having sufficient sophistication and enough data and adequate training to work in spatial environments. So overall, the differences between social media and XR are stark. And they emerge from the interactive features of immersive experiences and the neurological impacts that this has on users. And this has resulted in violations of what I called the right to mental privacy. Other scholars in Chile have called this neuro rights. Brain-computer interface scholars are talking about a battle for your brain. It's a new book that came out discussing that. And they're all part and parcel of the same thing, where the sanctity of the content of your thoughts and the inferences that can be made about your health and your sexual preferences, your political preferences, your gender, your age, all of these things we can determine from data flows really shouldn't be used to send you advertisements. If so, I think it's actually a failure of the imagination. I think that's a good way to turn it to Liz. And one of the things that really strikes my mind is it's not just the gaming experience, that this is moving beyond so many different aspects and potential. So as Britton was talking about, like moving into the healthcare environment, that your healthcare will be delivered potentially through this data that is being collected from your physical reactions. So the questions start to become, is this data painting a correct picture? Is this the full picture? Is it picking up on all the nuances? And who's getting access to that? And there's a big difference between what I may post on social media at 2 a.m. when I am fired up about something and what I would actually say or do. Or you think of a lot of the, as we saw during remote environments where people were having job interviews over Zoom or other conference calling. And a lot of it dealt with, there were companies in some states have started taking a harder look at this where they were creating biases. That if you didn't make the proper amount of eye contact or if it looked like you were distracted during, because the sensors on the screen weren't picking this up properly, that suddenly you were getting penalized during your job interview because you weren't meeting this set standard. And so now what happens when we take that and all of those AI data sets that are expecting certain behaviors, they're not expecting children to start drawing inappropriate things, which anyone who's been in elementary school, you should have expected it. And you should have expected fart jokes. You should have expected lots of poop. And all those different things. But what happens when we're trying to create protections and we're trying to do all this with a bias towards like we're already starting so far behind. And now we're taking all these other little cues of how does the VR headset, like how does that experience know that it wasn't because a spider crawled across your foot or someone else in the room thought it would be hilarious to tap you on the shoulder as you were playing the game or I'm not saying this has ever happened. I've definitely never done this to someone playing. But what happens if you move furniture while they're in the middle of and suddenly they're tripping over something because it was really freaking funny. And it just serves them right. But suddenly that reaction is getting captured and how do you know that I haven't logged in to Britain's account? That I'm not playing as her and should I be so lucky to have all the sensors pick up and they're like, you have the same facial structure. You have all this and I'm like, yes, I do. Yes, that's right. Or you're just off today or heavens forbid. I think all the times I've tried to log in to my iPhone and it's like facial recognition not recognition. I'm like, wait, what? No. Oh, my God.   Like, oh, I didn't mean to do that. So how do regulators and how do you work all those different aspects in because we're already playing catch up? One of the things that I like to do when I talk to regulators is tell them the type and quality of information you can get about a person from these data flows. And I realize I didn't mention that before. There was a study that came out last week. This is the absolute newest information from UC Berkeley. And the study said that a machine learning model was able to accurately predict the height, weight, age, marital status of a user in XR by the way they moved. So I know earlier I said that it doesn't go into the realm of personal identifying information, but initial studies are starting to show that you can actually tell somebody's foot size by the way they move. The lab at Berkeley and the lab at Stanford have had some similar studies. And Berkeley came out with a study that said there was 100 seconds of recorded data you could uniquely identify a person in XR with 94% accuracy from a data set of 50,000 people. Stanford did this earlier, but the data set was a couple thousand people. It wasn't statistically significant. 50,000 people. That might be you in the Taylor Swift crowd. By the way that you tilt your head and point can be uniquely identified in an immersive environment. The type of medical and sort of human rights-oriented information that I'm concerned about really is tied into eye tracking. So the type of information you can get by somebody's pupil reaction you can tell who somebody is sexually attracted to. You can tell whether or not somebody is likely to be telling the truth. And you can also tell whether or not somebody shows pre-clinical signs of certain medical ailments like schizophrenia, ADHD, Parkinson's and Huntington's. These are pre-clinical signs, so these are things that you may know about yourself yet. Your doctor may not know about you yet, and a company if they were to parse the data set would have access to that information. This is what I mean by the right to mental privacy. It's not just the content of your thoughts. It's the implications that can be made about who you uniquely are, your medical conditions and the type of behaviors that you may choose to engage in or not. One of the things we're seeing is the states are starting to try to play catch up because keeping in mind data brokers are taking this information and creating these pictures and they're selling them. And the regulations really are not keeping up with who should have access to this and how do we protect it. And it's also what happens if it gets wrong? That one out of 50,000 it's wrong. But yet this is now flagged in a file and it's you know as a child you're told this will go down in your permanent record. Well how do we fix that permanent record when it's our biometric and it's our mental information that objection your honor I was just having a bad day and that wasn't me. Or the it that was someone else that piece of information so it's not the entire picture that gets off it's just one piece how do you fix that? I don't have a good answer for that. I wish I did. Because right now these type of data sets aren't auditable by the public. In certain jurisdictions people are proposing a right to have all the user information about you available. But these are profiles made to sell you something. It's not an essential part of your user account and things. Another thing I tell regulators is that you can't outsmart the machine. Because a lot of them think I'm somebody advertising something to me that's obvious. That's not, I'm not going to fall for that. In XR environments you can actually switch out elements in the environment at a blink rate. It's been done in experimental context but there's nothing saying that you could have somebody with a can of soda and switching out Coke and Pepsi and tracking somebody's more positive reaction versus the other. It's kind of like that social psychology experiment where you're told to count the number of basketball passes and so you miss the gorilla walking in the background. It's a similar type of a dynamic where people think they're smarter than the system but the system works faster than you can articulate your preferences or requests cognitively. And that's a really kind of scary thing. If you watch sports and Liz is here and I'm back in California Liz and I will actually see different ads behind the players. Augmented advertising is already a thing and it's based on your zip code. And somebody in the stadium will see even different ads than Liz or I would see on different network channels. They sell this space. So advertisement is in immersive context is more about targeting and personalization than it is in an offline context. And that makes sense but the capacity and the ability to really target it to people makes XR the most persuasive medium that we've developed so far. One of the things that we saw back to that is the data sets. What is it getting based on? Where are those data sets getting built from that are creating some of these models and being able to audit it and being able to audit and get to your information and make sure like hey is this the picture that I see and basing it on a bias towards well English speaking US based things when you're talking about an immersive experience that is intended to open up the world. Like the idea is that you were playing and you were experiencing things with people in any different physical location. So now how do you build the rules and even train that it's getting it right when not everyone's going to look the same, react the same and different cultures have built in different mannerisms and as we saw with a lot of the again even just trying to unlock your iPhone heavens forbid you're a woman of color because guess what all of the modeling that was based on was not you not even a little bit and so they had to go back and say oops are bad. Well now what do we do when we're talking about collecting all this data and it's like on the reactions of you know we talk about a lot in the medical world a lot of the early training was done and it wasn't done based on women's bodies and it wasn't based on so it's like oh well you're going to react to this medication in the following manners or these are the following symptoms it's like but but no I am not so now you've got the VR and it's assuming heavens forbid I don't want to be a red head middle aged woman in my I want to be a kick ass like ninja dragon whatever the hell I want so how are we going to start building that and work on regulators when you've got because again heavens forbid that Australia the US New Zealand like insert country get the upper hand in being the regulator who sets the rules for this because oh no we can't let Canada do that I mean they're just nice and maple syrup and you know so how how do you broach those conversations when you're going all over the world and talking to them you know we need to let this country take the lead on it or play nice with them and not share the data if you'll notice I give Britain all the really hard questions because this is what she gets for being so smart and being a professor shaping young minds that are creating this future so sorry but those aren't young minds those are like crusty old minds that's why I'm like hmm about this a lot of people in Europe argue that GDPR should cover it they argue that article one of GDPR should cover all of the privacy protections for XR and then we're done I take issue with that because these are new types of data flows and they're not really anticipated by the regulatory structure and they're more akin to medical data to me than they are personal identifying information the future on privacy forum just did a really really optimistic study where they determined that biometric laws biometric laws in the US are covered by state based law and if you have a business that creates XR products you know this because there are certain states you're really really worried about selling in and certain states you may choose to not release your product in and those may be Illinois, Washington or Texas there are other states that have privacy laws not biometric laws but you think about sometimes I talk to regulators and I ask them if they've tried smell vision and they look at me like I'm nuts and I tell them that in the lab and in commercial context now you can actually go before a campfire in XR and you don't just hear the campfire and you don't just see the campfire smell the charcoal and in the lab we put a little toasted marshmallow in there as well just for fun you can go into a garden and smell flowers these type of inputs are really not anticipated by law also have to there was a company that recently released a breath gauge for a meditation app and my question for them is is that biometric data could be body based data based on some of the states so it would be regulated as such in other states it wouldn't be I think the way that I make regulators understand this is I try to actually bring them into the developer's mindset and bring them into the chair of somebody who has to make a decision about selling and producing these products and doing so in an environment that is ambiguous at best some countries are better about it than others Australia has an East Safety Commissioner's office so they're very very motivated New Zealand is very concerned about public safety in the online context France has had a national metaverse strategy China and Colombia one other country that have started to hold trials in the metaverse don't do that by the way that's not a good idea so countries are starting to engage in little ways I think Bahamas had a an embassy in the metaverse I think the way to actually get to these countries is to talk to them more about their economies and corporate environments and that should get them more motivated rather than talking about digital diplomacy and a new sovereign space or other type of nonsense think about how even in the US a lot of our laws that touch on things that we deal with a day DMCA CFA a lot of them came because members of congress for example were afraid that their blockbuster rental history was going to be published oh yeah or they saw a movie and they said you know what we're games huh huh so I love that idea of putting it in that personal context because unfortunately that does ground it for them and show them because so often we spend time chasing the technology like oh we have to react to this when it's like no let's look at what it's actually doing what is it doing at its core what is the actual concern and then how do we build from there so I love that you're getting them that hands on but how do y'all scale that kind of advocacy or how do we as a community of users who are concerned about or builders how do we take that idea and that approach and scale it beyond you know and bring it down to that local level or that regional level of hey do this, see this, experience this and know that this is going to impact what you're doing I think you don't use law I want to call out someone in the front row Caroline Cinders who's research about how to use effective design to create healthy online communities and environments is awesome yay so looking at design based principles looking at social psychology about how we create cultures some of my very boring academic work focuses on the theory of code as law and how that has ignored norms and norms are the way that we create culture and we self-regulate our own online environments and try not to place the full burden on users but distribute it collectively amongst a whole community that it seems like a cop-out answer because I'm a lawyer but this isn't a legal problem I think it's more of a a social problem and an issue of science politics well and I think that also putting it on the users overlooks the builders, the makers like if we are intentional from the design aspect and when I say we, I mean the people at the companies who are building it from product to engineering to all that understanding and seeing that big picture and knowing when to call it like oh this is going to impact this let's be intentional let's bring them into conversation so as a DEF CON community I think that's one of the easiest ways to start I was like start the change and I think we can also be really intentional about how we design these products and who we are accommodating when we design them how many people here are familiar with simulator sickness probably a bunch if you're not if you've gone into a VR world and you feel nauseous and sick to your stomach and really disoriented that's simulator sickness in the earlier iterations of headsets more women than men reported simulator sickness and people started to write about this and some said it was just my delicate female constitution and the fact that I may I may produce babies one day or the fact that I don't play first person shooter games it's all bullshit what actually was happening was that the headset was designed for an average male form between 510 and 6 feet tall there is one measurement that is essential to preventing you getting simulator sickness it's the interpupillary distance the distance between your eyes if you go to the optometrist they measure this to put you in a pair of prescription glasses the interpupillary distance on early VR headsets was not adjustable so it was akin to putting 51% of the population in the wrong pair of glasses no wonder women were reporting sickness and discomfort and there were studies following that by Jessica outlaw that actually showed people what women weren't returning to VR environments because they felt uncomfortable there were similar studies that came out one from the MIT media lab where there was a researcher doing her master's thesis work in Nairobi she took Oculus Go to try to put it on Kenyan entrepreneurs and she found that with the women 50% of the time the straps snapped when she tried to fit it over their hair 50% of the time she ended up deviating from her master's thesis to design an adjustable fucking strap easy fix if you think about the wide beautiful variety of people who you want to be your customers it's smart to think about the wide diversity of body shapes and types disabled populations are some of the earliest adopters of XR hardware and they are the last people that many companies think about when they design these products and services Oculus didn't change their vantage point to make it adjustable whether or not I was standing or sitting until update 31 and it came on the heels of a scientific American article that showed that somebody had to modify an Xbox controller to use a rock climbing game they were a user with muscular dystrophy and so they really wanted to know what rock climbing felt like and they had to modify it themselves because the game wouldn't accommodate them this is something that we can do as a community so when you're doing your prototype testing or your platform building or your experiential design think about all of the people you want in your world and then go bigger and I think bringing it back to what Brent was talking about before is like that full stack of an understanding it's not a level playing field and by that I mean it's not a flat screen and so as you're building and as you're designing taking all of those different aspects and also incorporating it into the conversations on the biometric data like what exactly so we're not using those same definitions it's not the same game and being intentional in how you're building, how you're designing but also how you're approaching it and be it with the conversations you're having with you know regulars as you're watching that I think really just kind of bringing it all this is not you know this is an immersive environment it is the entire all encompassing environment and there's some best practices that you can follow as developers or even as security experts a best practice for XR is to actually keep the data on device that means that you have to get a warrant to access the data the problem with that is it really impedes your processing speed it's very very expensive kind of drains your battery so the other thing you can do is when you're into third party cloud providers you can be really deliberate about asking them about their data retention storage disposal all of their data policies because what your third party data provider does is basically what you do and being a savvy customer so pushing back if there aren't privacy protective services like you feel meets the threshold that you want that you want to protect your users and that's excellent because the change starts with calling it out and bringing it to the attention of and paying to you because you also think of all the different users and whether they're going to understand you know a 12 year old child is not going to care about all their different things but it's like all they know is there's a lag time it's like no let's make sure that we are paying attention that we are bringing it in and that we are reporting it, raising it it's kind of the name and shame of hey this is a great game that you've created for children or geared towards this market now you're creating their permanent record for their school for the equivalent of that example that's going to follow them forever and is going to be based on AI modeling that are not necessarily accurate I mean they're going to be based on if we're looking at the early sets the 5 11, 5, 10 male interactions and all of that different things like if you had to think of like one kind of way to bring it home of how you're dreaming of electric sheep what are some good takeaways other than I love what you were saying with the proactive steps what's a good nugget what's the quote it's the hangover spot on Sunday morning I don't know if I have a quote someone asked what is inspiring in this space which is a great question to end on because it's all doom and gloom when I go to the dinner party XR is magic it's magic it makes it can make you feel like you are in a different body you start to embody the characteristics of your avatar in a social environment within two minutes so if I make myself an 8 foot tall dragon I'm going to dominate that space in two minutes it takes two and a half minutes for me to put you in my lab context and give you a third arm and have you pop three balloons neuroplasticity is magic XR is a means to access your neuroplasticity your imagination is really the limit and we've never had a technology like this before so let's not fuck it up that's my quote I like that no thank you so much and thank you to the XR village for bringing this topic please go check it out if you haven't already I'm Lawyer Liz on Twitter please feel free to engage I'm Britton Heller you can find me as Britton Heller on Twitter or on LinkedIn yeah thank you so much


It is my honor to be here for the opening of Balakatan 2023, the 38th iteration of our largest military exercise with our oldest treaty ally in East Asia, the Republic of the Philippines. The United States and the Philippines have been treaty allies for over seven decades. This year's Balakatan will be the biggest ever, an indication of the growth of our alliance and how it continues to evolve to meet our shared goals. Balakatan is the marquee annual event for our alliance and I'm thrilled to be here this morning to mark the opening of this important exercise with you. Our alliance spans beyond the exercise that will start today. In fact, it extends well beyond security. Later today, as our military forces get some rest after their first day of exercising together, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin will meet their Philippine counterparts, Secretary Manalo and Secretary Galvez in Washington DC for our first defense and foreign affairs two plus two ministerial meeting in over seven years. In Washington, our respective leaders will discuss not just our security alliance, but also other central tenets of our bilateral relationship, including the significant economic partnerships that bring prosperity to both of our nations and the shared history and cultural ties that connect us as friends. The fact that the opening of Balakatan and our two plus two dialogue are happening on the same day, thousands of miles apart, speaks to the strength and significance of the US-Philippine relationship as friends, partners, and allies. It is inspiring to think that US and Filipino service members were shoulder to shoulder on that terrible day 81 years ago and yet that continues today where we see Filipino and American service members again shoulder to shoulder. And I like to think that our grandfathers and grandmothers will think their sacrifice well worth it when they see us all here today continuing to work together as friends, partners, and allies. The United States and the Philippines share a vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific that is more connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient. Each of you standing, each of us standing, shoulder to shoulder, Balakatan, help make this vision a reality. Thank you very much and best wishes for a successful exercise, Muraming Selamat Po. Thank you very much, ma'am. Thank you.


Land Food and Community Series is the core series of courses in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems where we bring students from all the different disciplines within the faculty together to work on interdisciplinary challenging questions within the food system. We have these community projects that we involve students in that allow us to get them beyond the classroom and into a community setting thinking about food system issues with practitioners within the community. We're developing a food asset map for the North Shore and so we're working on a database collecting information about different resources that are geared towards food security, food recovery, sustainability, growing, harvesting, different opportunities to access food. At its most basic level it's meant to be a tool for service providers who are supporting people who are a little more vulnerable in our population who are looking to access for your low cost meals or grocery items. At a different level from that we're hoping that it'll be a really useful tool for community members and local governments when they're looking at some of the new development that's happening on the North Shore. It's been a really great experience. I think our group is super cohesive and the work with the North Shore Table Matters Network has been very supportive. They've really guided us through the project. I love working with the students. They're really passionate about this work and being able to contribute something meaningful to the community that's actually going to be used and that's valued by the members of the steering committee specifically for the Table Matters but in general I think the students get a lot out of it and so do the community partners. I think there's a big difference between like project work that you're working on an academic project versus working in the community because you have to kind of take a step back from your academic kind of like silos of knowledge and also recognize that communities and community partners have a lot of information to share, a lot of knowledge, a lot of passion and I think a big thing that I learned was how to integrate many different forms of knowledge and just learning to work together in a professional setting. It's really great to be part of learning community and having a little bit more diversity of voices and perspectives at our table I find really valuable. Inner-disciplinarity for us and trans-disciplinary when we bring in social actors beyond academia really helps us get our students to prepare for what is it like to talk to individuals and work on a project although you might not share the same disciplinary language, disciplinary perspectives or even social locations within society and how you work together to effectively address common issues.


It's still morning, 10 minutes to noon, so still good morning. And welcome to Singapore for our visitors and welcome to the talk. I'm going to talk about me and Shupin, we're going to talk about Ruby and Robots today. So can I begin? It's okay. So let me start by talking a little bit about myself. I work for a company called PayPal. We do payments. Before this, I used to work for HP, doing some research for HP Labs. Also work for Yahoo. And of course, obviously the reason why I'm here today is because I love Ruby. I've been doing Ruby about 10 years now. So did some recollection, I think I started off in 2005. It's just so quick, it's just 10 years for now. I like Ruby so much that I've actually written a few books on Ruby. And my last book was actually not exactly about Ruby, but it was close enough. But it was translated into multiple languages, so that was pretty cool. So I spoke in this conference since 2011, the first conference, together with Mark. So I'm glad to be here again. I've been speaking in 2012, 2013, I skipped last year and I'm back this year. But I'm back and I brought a friend with me. So let me introduce Shippong. Hello, can you hear me? Hi there, I'm Shippong. I'm a software engineer at PayPal as well. And I did my internship at Intel before. And here are some open source projects I've been working on. This is MiniQ. It is an open source quadcopterite design. And here is Jack Duno. It is a device that you can plug into your mobile phone that do data transmission from your audio jack. And here is Cashew. It is 3D sketching software. Sorry, it's a bit awkward that we have switched back and forth. So let me tell you a little bit about how we came up with the idea. In two years ago, Jim Warrick was here and he spoke exactly on this stage. I think it's two weeks exactly, it will be exactly two years. As before, the night before we had the conference, we had speakers dinner. And I sat next to Jim during the speakers dinner and we chatted about many different things. And one of the things that he showed me and something I want to show you now is this. You can't really hear it and it's a bit slow. But when I first saw this, it sort of totally blew me away. It was like, wow, you can actually do that. And of course Lightbulb started to flash in my mind and say, look, I got to do this and I wanted to try it. So last year I wanted to try something like this, but of course I couldn't make it last year. And at the beginning of this year, I was thinking, what should I do for RubyConf this year? And then I thought, hey, this is what I saw two years ago with Jim while Jim is no longer with us. I want to continue the spirit and talk about hardware and talk about robots. And this is how we arrived to this talk and this is why I'm here today. Okay, so in this talk, I'm actually going to just go through the journey about how we came out with the robot, how we've actually developed the robot. And unlike, I think I've seen some robot talks and I think some people talk to me about, hey, you're not going to talk about robots and you're not going to actually do a lot of stuff. So true enough, I'm actually not going to do a lot of stuff, but I'm going to show you how we actually went from almost nothing to actually building the robot and actually running it, making it work using Ruby. So let me start off with the hardware. When I first came up with the idea about doing a robot, I didn't actually want to do a drone because Jim did a drone and I know Shupang was actually good in drones. You saw his open source project, but I wanted to do something slightly different. So we went scouring around the internet to see what could we do and lo and behold, I saw on eBay something like, hey, this looks cool. What can I do with this? So as it turns out, this is actually a robot frame called Torobot is by a Chinese hardware company that specializes in building robot frames. So that was pretty nice and it's not that expensive as well. So I wanted to give it a try. As we dug a little bit deeper, I saw that actually has a clone of another robot company called LynxMotion. So the specific model is called LynxMotion Phoenix. Of course, the Phoenix was actually a little bit more expensive than the Torobot. So the Torobot is about $173 and the Phoenix was close to $800. So this means that this is the body as well as the servos. The servos are basically the motors that runs the robots. It has no electronics, of course, but that could come later. So I guess there's no question on which one we should actually go for. So we bought the Torobot frame and then we went shopping. And we went shopping on all kinds of places. We went to Dew Xtreme, we went to Qtan, which is a local company here, eBay, RS Online, selling electronics. And we bought a lot of stuff. So instead of the ones that came with the Phoenix, we bought the Tower Pro MG995. MG here is the Metal Gear servo. We bought 18 of them because it needs 18 servos to power the Hexapot, which is the robot you saw just now. It's pretty cheap here, $6, whereas the other ones that we bought from Lynx will be about $40 each. So we got this. Pretty nice and popular servo. To power it, we got the 32-channel servo controller. Again, from Torobot. It's reasonable price. The servo controller has power for the servo controller itself. So it actually requires two kinds of power. One kind of power for the controller and another power for the servo. So it needs two power sources. Then that's the input and output for the controller. And of course, that's the jacks for the servos themselves. So to power the servo controller, I got a... So occasionally if we shop, you get freemiums. So this is one of the freebies I got. So this powers the servo controller. To power the servos themselves, we got a battery pack of four double ASI's alkaline batteries. This costs about $2. It's about $1 for the pack itself and $2, $2 Singapore dollars in Daiso. We got the alkaline batteries. So this comes about $2. We thought, okay, that's 1500 milliamps per hour. Is it enough? Maybe not enough, but hey, it's just $2. So let's get three of them. So we got three of them. 450. That should be pretty good. So let's start building the legs now. Each leg actually has three degrees of freedom, which means really three servos per leg. And we model it... Well, this is actually model against the legs of an insect, which has the coxa, the femur, and the tibia. So we model against the insect leg. And this is how we actually build the legs with the coxa and femur servos. Then this is the actual femur and this is the tibia. So we build all these things separately, then we put them together. So this is the coxa, femur, and tibia. So that's one leg. You see each of this leg has a servo with the wires coming out. So it sticks out. The red and black is for the power in the ground and the orange is the signal cable that goes in. And this is how the leg and the servo controller works together. We have the wires sticking into the servo controller. So now we got the mechanical part of it. We have the legs. We have the controller able to control the legs. We need the brains. So what kind of brains do we use? We use the raspberry pi. So at that point in time, the raspberry pi came out with version 2. Say, hey, that's perfect. So we got one and we attached the raspberry pi to the servo controller using the GPIO output. So how do we control the raspberry pi? How do we actually communicate the raspberry pi? We use the USB Wi-Fi adapter and stuck it on the raspberry pi. So this is how it works now. So we have the raspberry pi. We have the servo controller and we have the legs. We have everything now. So we put it together. More pictures. You can see, like, resembling the robot. And finally, we have it. It's a little bit messy, but hey, that's not too bad. Fully resemble Hexapod version 1. And here you go. Let me just show you a quick video of it. It's coming, it's coming, coming. There you go. It moves. That's good. Next, we wanted to make it move more, right? So it should move more. So it needs to move. Otherwise, it can't be a robot. So let's make it move. Okay. Sort of moving, but it's not really going anywhere, right? So, okay. What's wrong? It's basically there's not enough power. So we went back. We pour through the specifications and say, hey, what's wrong? We look at the servos themselves. It's 400 milliamps when there's no load and 1 to 2 amps when there's under normal load. So we have 12 servos that powers the leg when it's standing up and 6 servos that are just not doing anything when it's standing up. That comes out to be about 21 amps. And the power required for that to drive it is 126 watts, right? Let's look at what we actually need, what we actually have in the AA battery packs. So we have each one of them. We tested the current and the voltage. So we got about 7 watts per pack. So we have 21 watts. So, of course, it wouldn't work, right?  Okay, that's what it is. So we went ahead and bought another battery. We went less cheapo this time round, right? So that was $2 each. So we bought this LiPo battery. LiPo is lithium polymer battery. This is actually used to power radio control helicopters. We bought this about $20. It's pretty okay. Not too expensive. And we calculated, really, our calculations again. 160 mAh x 20C. It's 32 amps. And the power we get is 237 watts. Well, that's a lot more than 126 watts. So, yep, should work. So, great. Let's get it moving. So we did some fancy soldering. This is actually me. I have not soldered for 22 years. So that was my first attempt. It actually failed miserably. So I got shipwreng to help me to soldered after that. And then we went ahead. It blew up. So what happened was I connected it. There was a sizzle. There's a snap. And then smoke started rising from the ear servos. So I made a really, really terrible mistake. So I thought it was 7.4 amps, 7.4 volts because it says 7.4 volts. Of course, I did not RTFM because the next line says actually it is not two cells. It's a three cell battery. So it's 11.1 volts. And 11.1 volts is definitely a lot more than the 7.2 max operating range of the servo. I got 7.4, a little bit more than 7.2. It should be okay, but it's actually a lot more. So, yep, smoke came out. The whole thing burned. And I lost eight servos. It's just totally demolished.  That's a rookie mistake. So, went back again, did more research and we found a voltage regulator. So what a voltage regulator does is it converts a power source of high voltage and convert it into a low voltage. We did some more fancy soldering. So I did some stuff and then went ahead. So what else could go wrong, right? So as it turns out, the Raspberry Pi that we got either is because it's just too many tries or it's just lazy handling or I did not put it. Whatever it is, hardware breaks and that was unstable. We could not communicate with the Raspberry Pi. It killed the SD card we put in. Whatever it is, it just did not work. So, that was really terrible. But we persisted and thought of a different way of communicating with the robot now. So instead of putting the Raspberry Pi in the brain directly on the robot, so what if we actually put the brain somewhere else and communicate with the robot remotely? So, we bought the JYMCU Bluetooth adapter and stuck it to the server controller instead of having it into the Raspberry Pi. And then we send signals from the computer through Bluetooth into the server controller. And then, here we go. Let's see how that works. This is it. It stands up. Good. Eh, it starts moving. So, flush with this success what we did was we went ahead and did some tweaking. It was actually quite noisy. I did not have the sound here but it was like hard metal heating the floor. It made a huge sound. Like woke up all the neighbors and everything. So, padded feet. So, I plug out some rubber padding from your pens and then stuck it as the legs. Use some cardboard and build a case. And then, we have the version tree. That's the version tree stretching its legs. That's the version tree ready to go. And here you go. Like standing up. Then, slowly strutting its way towards me. Slowly, slowly. And now, it moves. It's pretty good. It's not too bad. It didn't make a ruckus. It didn't wake up the neighbors. My wife wasn't complaining. It was just good. Then... So, it's hello world robot. And it works. So, that was the hardware. So, how do we actually control the software? Let's see how that works. So, as I said earlier on, we actually use a computer to send the signals through Bluetooth to the legs. But how does it actually do it? We send it through serial and we send text commands, really. So, the text commands have things like this. So, hash 1. 1 is a servo channel. So, it has a 32 channel. So, a servo channel means that the first channel is sent to. How much to rotate a servo? So, a servo is basically a motor that can only move to a certain degrees given the particular signal is sent. Here is 100... 100... 1500... whatever it is. And there's a rotation between 500 to 2500. And then the command after T is the speed from 100 to 9,999. So, that's controlling one servo. To control three servos, basically, you just string them together and you can string as many as you want to the servo controller. And the servo controller would then trigger off the legs. It's not that complicated. So, this here is servo 1, servo 2, servo 3. Now, that's pretty simple enough. So, to make it even simpler, build something called bots, simple library for controlling robots. And it's pretty simple. I'll show it to you later. So, time for some Ruby code. So, basically, we just model the servo, initialising it with a number, which is a servo channel. And then we do a rotation. The rotation does nothing else but we turn the string that indicates like the number to servo and how much rotation it should actually do given the degrees. And then we model a leg as well. So, each leg is a degree of freedom leg initialising with the coxa, the femur, and the tibia, which is a servo each.  So, if it's the left side and the right side, there's actually 100 degree difference, 180 degree difference. So, we need to convert it. And then it just returns the three strings together. The single string containing the three servo controls together. And that's more code. So, we have this now. But testing the robot was kind of a dicey matter. So, we decided to build a physics simulator. And let me pass it on to Sipeng now to talk about the simulator. Hello? Okay, it's working now. Yeah, so one of the problems we had when we were developing the export was it's not really convenient to test and develop on the real device because export itself is kind of heavy and it's not easy to carry it around. And the battery gets drained pretty fast. So, we want to build a physics simulator so that we don't really need the real device. So, we can just run the simulator on our laptop and we can do development on the export on it. So, we created this Hackspot same project. It is a physics simulator for Hackspots. You can find the source code and instructions on how to run it in this GitHub repo. So, first, let me do show a demo video of how this simulator works. So, you can send commands through TCP port 5555. So, I just do a telnet so we can send commands to it. So, the commands we send to this simulator is server controller commands like the dash 1p something. So, once you send the command the Hackspot will move as the command says. So, now we combine two commands together so you can see both of the legs are moving and also you can drag robot around to see if anything is wrong. So, here is a demo video for Hackspot same. And quickly go through how the simulator is built. So, first, we send commands like this through the TCP port and then we will use this command to update the bullet physics engine and then we update the positions and rotations of all the objects we have in the same and render it with OpenGL so we can visualize the moments. Sorry, the simulator is written in C++. So, here is there are four items we need to define for creating a new simulator. First, you need to define a world so you can add different objects in it to create physics simulation and then you need to define shapes for each body part and then you can bind the shapes with rigid bodies and because each servos we have on the Hackspot is like a joint so you need to create this constraints so you need to create a constraint for each joint so the legs are moving correctly. Here is the code for how to create in the shapes. Basically the body part is just a box and the legs part is capsule shapes and here is the code to bind the shapes with rigid bodies and next is to add the constraints so this is a lack of Hackspot so it has three axis so what we can do is we can add hinge constraints here basically you just need to define the transformation matrix for the two bodies and then you can add this kind of constraints and this is the code for adding the hinge constraints and now I'll pass it back to Sasha for all together. So now we are able to control each one of the servos individually we are also able to control each leg but how do we actually make the robot walk and walk properly? So we model the Hackspot against that of an insect specifically of an ant so we wanted to see how an ant actually walks so by the way I did not actually take this video of an ant walking like I got it somewhere from YouTube so you notice this is how the ants walks and this is what is known as a tripod gate so it has a treelix moving at the time and then it was a treelix first and then the next treelix and then the next treelix and next treelix so this is how it walks this is a six-legged tripod gate so a tripod gate for an ant is really not a running gate it's actually just a walking gate and that's good enough I suppose for what we wanted to do so using this particular diagram we built that walking gate and let me just show you the code let me just show the actual code here so include the pod initialize the legs set the channels and then as we move it we set the tripod step one tripod step two tripod step three step four this is a little bit primitive there are other mechanisms of actually moving the robot legs and there are algorithms like the inverse kinematics so we actually use the simplest way possible that's the most primitive way but it works pretty okay not as smooth as it could have been but it works pretty okay so that's the hexapod code let me just get back into the slides and then let me just show you how it all works together now with the code and the simulator this is how it works edit in pry so that you can control the simulator directly you can see here now I get into the simulator I just say walk and the robot walks and then if I say I issue it a command another command say all the legs I want to calibrate them so it will calibrate the legs to moving to 90 degrees each and then say something else I want it to tiptoe so it will just stand up like so now we can control the simulator using the bot's library so this is it and actually that's where we just stopped because the whole duration so we spent I think close to 90% of the time on the hardware we went through a lot of iterations and a lot of problems and the software we spent just really not as much time so it really just begun and we will be continuing after this there are other things that we actually want to do so previously we were sending commands from the laptop to the robot to control it but we're not giving up on the rest of the pry because I think it's not autonomous until it can actually think on its own and move somewhere else it requires better servos we bought the cheap servos 6 bucks each but there is a reason why some of the other servos cost 40 bucks because they are better servos and we wanted to put in sensors once it's autonomous you can put in sensors then you can detect the surroundings and it wouldn't walk smash into a wall can maybe detect its environment and walk towards the light or even do what Jim did as to make it follow a particular sensor or something we want to try other different types of things we want to try for bipads and we want to try for different kinds of materials as well so as you were doing the hardware and waiting for the new servos to come and so on try different types of things so this is what I call strider the cardboard quadruped so I built this with cardboard using a slightly different servo also I built cardboard and this is bipad robot so this is a lot simpler it's quite fun to build so basically what I did was I took some recycled cardboard and I cut it up and I built the foot and the tie string them together attach it to a body this is the lower body and then doing the same principle basically stick the servo controller on top and on the legs and it's a video of cardboard so it's stumbling on each other because my cardboard cutting skills are not exactly the best in the world but it works and so far I think that's that's what we have today there are other robot libraries such as Argus this is the one that Jim did and R2 as well which is actually an excellent library to control robots and this is something that I've tried as well but before I go I just wanted to show the real life demo if you can just turn on the lights please I hope this works I hit live demo almost never works on me it's too fast oops sorry it's still showing date sorry I need to change the code a bit so this guy as using the simulator I just need to make sure it goes to this guy so let me run it again it's connecting with the robot hopefully it works hopefully it doesn't fall off the edge thank you


Bright themes, light themes, those things are the worst things. I didn't really mean to start this video out with a rhyme, but there you go. I think that light themes are bad and everyone should use dark themes. And I think dark themes should be the default on every single Linux distribution and when they're not, I think we should all refuse to use those distributions. I think that that should be the new law, the new rule, whatever you want to call it. Because dark themes are, well, they're the best and it's scientific. It's proven that dark themes are the best and that light themes are the worst. So save your health, save your eyes, use the dark theme. I'll be back tomorrow with another video. Thanks everybody for watching. Support me on Patreon, patreon.com. Slashlinxcast, I'll see you tomorrow.


Hello. Hey, how's it going? Good. How are you? Happy new year. Happy new year. Yeah, I'm, I'm still catching up. I was looking at our agenda and I'm like, I don't know what we're doing. Yeah, I don't have much. Just with my name. Yeah, I'm, I can't, I, I'm pretty far along with the framework, which is pretty cool. And as you know, Scott volunteered to help. So he's going to interview a few other people. And I think once we have that, it's already kind of massive, but it's good. I think we can interviews yet for. Oh, yeah. And I think for, let me see. Yeah, I think there is really good Intel. And Scott wanted to speak with someone from container D and Prometheus. So I think that's good. I just realized like the bigger projects. Have a lot more. So it's, it's, it's good, right? Like the smaller projects, they have bits and pieces here that are interesting, but they're also just trying to figure it out. So, but the big ones have already figured it out.  Oh yeah. So I'm just slowly signing in. Hey Karen. Yeah. And I think Scott is on PTO still. Do you know that Karen? I think like I was talking to him. He hasn't told me anything. So, I probably check to see. Yeah. Because I pinged him and he was going to me during his vacation. I was like, no, no, no, just take your vacation. Yeah. I don't know when he's going to come back, but I think like, yeah, once I wanted to do kind of the. I don't think he's, he's like not online as far as I can tell on teams. So he's probably out. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. He was going to take, he said he was going to take some vacation. And it's summer over there. So it's like the best time. And they have pretty much managed to. Deal with COVID really good. So I don't know how they do it. The Aussies, but. They're doing fantastic. So he's probably having fun. I was just hoping to get an idea of what people are actively working on. And if. Anyone can help or, you know, move support or collaborate. I just posted it in the agenda. We have like a. Yeah, content tracking issue of things we needed to make. No. There's the contribution ladder. I don't know. Can we mark that off yet? Or is that still, we're still iterating on that. So the last thing I remember was Paris is going to take it to some people to approve or something. And I don't know if that ever happened. As far as I can tell. Like I don't think anything's happened to the. To like the file. It's just kind of still sitting there. I don't know if like they would have done anything on GitHub or if it was more of just like approval during a meeting. But not. Yeah. I don't think anything's changed. Yeah. Okay. The framework, which should be somewhere in here, right? I don't think we've captured that. Let's add that out. Let me edit this issue. And we have. The contributor framework. Is that the right name for it? Contributor growth. Framework. What's your GitHub. Name. I'm just going to link you on this. It's. Oh. That was. Always on it. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. That shows up. And here I, I, I'm just wondering what is the, like, What's the, what's the scope of the framework? Cause I don't really know the flow. And I've seen that Karen was super white, like already in them, almost. Done with the sharing. So we have it now in a Google doc. And I want to do like the, what's it called the. Hand over to a Scott. So he can interview his people. Yep. And then. somehow. So how are we're not ready yet, but just so I understand what we have to do. Well, let's look at what Karen's PR was, because that's basically what we want people to do. You need the link. I can drop it in. Okay, yeah, yeah, because your PR kind of shows how to go through that process. Awesome. Oh, there's a poll request that added it, but what? There was like your poll request that showed how to, oh, yes, it wasn't a poll request. Okay, never mind then. Oh, yeah, I created a drafts folder and then. Yeah, okay. So, Cameron, what you would want to do is make something like that. If it's a template, we have like special comments. If it's a pure content like advisory thing, you can just write it and mark down and not worry about it. You can just what? You can just write, mark down and not have to worry about. We have like a special way of telling people like they may need to edit one of their files. But you should be able to submit it to that same spot like in that directory, the drafts directory right there. And that would give us a way to collaborate on it. And when we're ready to say, this is a recommendation, and everyone can look at it and there's no like caveats like, oh, don't look at it. Then we'll do a PR and we'll move it to a different directory. Okay, cool. One directory up and just be like, this is real content. This is happening. Of course, my mouse just died. I just like obsessively tap my trackpad. It'll work. Does that make sense though? How to do it? Your PR doesn't have to be perfect. People can iterate on it and add their own things. You could even put it right now in there and then invite Scott to make changes using his own pull request so that you don't have to be like the aggregator of everyone's comments and edits. Okay, cool. That makes probably sense. We like to like favor getting anything in the repo versus having something be a Google doc for a long time or a pull request that it feels like it's never perfect enough to merge rather than just merge it and put it in that draft stock. Okay, I'll do that tomorrow. Okay. What I've been working on is that website. Have you seen it? I don't know. I'm not sure if I saw the latest version I saw. I have reworked it over Christmas. Oh, I saw a link popping up, but I didn't. Yeah. Yeah, I think we've changed the name of it a couple times. I think Carter Netlify. There we go. Okay. So we changed the ideas that this would become contribute.cncf.io. I'm just waiting for people to say I can put it there. And so we have one, which is I want to be a contributor. And this is the existing content that is if you go to contribute.cncf.io, the contribution guides, the ecosystem list of the projects, but it's now in the website. So you're not reading. Oh, it's for a graduated project. Do you have, is it only graduated or I'm just wondering is I am hoping Linkerd is for incubated or? Yeah, so if I click on incubated here, on the right hand side, there's a nav for all the headers. And we'll be able to see some more projects. Cool. And some sandbox products. This isn't content that any of us wrote. This is just existing stuff. So if you want to change it, you can click edit this page. And it'll give you a chance to edit it. But because this isn't a live site yet, I don't recommend doing that because you'll be editing, I think my fork right now. Let me click on that. I think that's what would happen. Yeah, so you would go to Carolyn's fork, which isn't terribly useful, but you go to the main one. If you need to list a project. Can you send the link please? Yeah, sure. I like how it hides chat every time. We're like, that's the one button I want to see. Okay. So that's what that content is.  This is all of our content that's in the SIG contributor strategy repository. And like, for example, the contributor growth framework or the contribution ladder, when it's ready, you'll be able to find it on this when this is all up. So for example, Project Health is one of ours that actually is finished. So you'd be able to get things in here. I don't know how to find the right people to say that we can make this website live, but eventually we'll figure it out, I guess. That's cool. Did we have anything like that before now? Right? No, no, we don't have anything like this. Right now we just have these two separate repositories, one for SIG contributor strategy, and the other one, I don't know who runs it actually, but it's just that other repo. And so this kind of combines it and gives it way better formatting potential, I think. I assume Amy knows that this exists, right? Sorry? Does Amy know that this exists? Amy knows it exists. She's like, let me make it go live immediately. But I wasn't really sure who got to say that, because the domain we want to use is an existing domain, and it points somewhere, and people have already demonstrated that I can't just mess with it. Yeah, I wonder if I'm the right person to be voted on or something. Yeah, so I don't know if it's the TOC we need to ask, and I think we talked about the TOC talked about this this morning, I think. So maybe I should go and watch that recording. Or maybe it's your, I'm not sure who. Or do you think it happens at the board level? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, at the moment that, like I said, it just redirects to this. And what we need to make sure is that we don't redirect it to something that's broken. That's the most important thing. So if we switch it, it needs to, it needs to be done enough that we don't move backwards in terms of, you know, what's here. But wouldn't Amy know? Let's see if she knows what else needs to happen. So I'll follow up with her today and figure that out. Like I imagine if anything, it's just a matter of making sure it's clearly documented how to edit the site. Yeah, I wonder if it has to go through any like branding review or whatnot. You know, if they wanted that, maybe they should have paid someone to make the site. I mean, I did the same branding stuff that the Linux Foundation requires. Yeah. Is in this folder here and it links to our trademarks. If we need that to make it to UNCF cool, I think the UNCF is going to pay somebody because I don't have like extensive skills. I'm just really good at finding themes. This is the doxy theme from Google. And I'm like, this looks good enough. And I just went with it. But if we need to like really rebrand it, we should probably get a designer. Yeah, it looks cute and stuff. But if they want to have something that really kind of looks and feel like the UNCF, but they do have designers under stuff. So I don't know if that's something they want, you know, that it kind of reflects the brand. I mean, Amy hasn't said anything every time I show her the site. She's never been like, this needs to get spiffed up. But I'll, I don't know. We'll see. That's, I think that's the thing is no one really understands who owns the site and is to make decisions about it. Yeah. This is why I really didn't want to use the existing domain name. Wanted us to just make a new one. But you know, that's fine. We'll get it figured out eventually just move slower this way. I don't know. That's all I had. So it sounds like that's the work we have in progress is the contributor growth framework and the contribution ladder and the website. Is there like a link to the growth framework? I was just going to ask for that. It's like, oh, let me just put it. Hey, Charles. I just like you snuck in. I did. So I'm on dog duty this afternoon. So we're just chilling on the floor. Yeah. So that's why I'm off video. Fine. I feel like if you have a dog, you should always be on the floor. I just share the fun of cuteness and everything. Cat duty isn't as exciting. They just like fall asleep under a chair somewhere. That's pretty much all he does too. Okay. I just added the Google doggling. Perfect. My goodness. You even changed the default font. Wow. Oh, I have my it's like professional. I don't like the default font. Yeah. This is a good one. I'm going to have to remember Montserrat. I love that one. I have I have it like now it's my default. My Google Docs default font is that one. Yeah. This is great. Yeah. I don't know if that's the way of like I wanted to, you know, like give people mentioned who it was. So I don't know if this is the right way of doing it, but I just started. This is perfect. I mean, honestly, yeah, just PR this. Let's just get in there. This is really far along. Yeah.  Some things are kind of interesting because people contradict themselves a little bit like different people say different things. So it's like, hmm, so I had like I flack that. And so we have to see how we address that. But I wanted it to be like it's really like kind of like this is the advice what people had, but I also wanted to have like a section. These are the tools, efficiency tools that people use, you know. So one of the things that we had, like, how do you make the what's it called? The, oh, God, where is it? I forgot the word that I mentioned. Anyways, like, how do you make the whole thing like really the whole flow like really easy and like eliminate steps. And some people have mentioned different tools that you can use. And so ideally, I would like to have like one section where it's like, these are the tools for this, for that, for that.  And I plugged in at some point, it's going to, if when it talks about the ladder, it has a link to the ladder, which is like a very specific thing, right? Also, at some points, like if you want to have like recruitment ideas, like actual, like how to do that, it links to Paris's recruitment book and things like that. So, but this is more really high level, right? So, and maybe there are like different things that we can create that kind of plugs into that. I don't know if it's too massive. I was just going to suggest, because it's eventually going to be on a website where you have the freedom to break it up into maybe like us, its own directory with multiple like web pages inside of it. You know, like feel free when you submit the PR. If you want to proactively just make like maybe a page for the tools, it was like one thing that kind of popped in my head. I mean, definitely feel free to do that. It doesn't need to be a single doc, because when it's on the website, we'll be able to Oh, no, yeah. And like that's the easiest when you have a navigation and you can click and just see what you want to see. So otherwise, yeah, it's, it's, it's, I think that's easier, right? Like you click on it and then you can see it.  It's overwhelming, but not in a bad way. But just, you know, people will feel a little more like I can handle reading through this. Yeah, I was kind of picturing having like a little bit like the docs where you kind of like click on things and then it opens the different sections.  So I don't know, make it more, you know, bits by bit stuff. But I just started writing and putting stuff. So I don't know. So that's why I'm, but I think there's a lot of organization too much. I was simply saying that when you're put in your PR, if you, if you feel like you'd like to break it up. Yeah, we should. Yeah. Charles, we were just kind of going through what anyone had that was kind of ongoing work that they're willing to say that they're doing. I don't know if you've been on anything. I'm still, I'm working on them by working on them, thinking a lot about the contributor or the onboarding template. So I know what the basic framework looks like. And I myself need to put this into a PR, just like the first, like a draft PR, basically get that first round going through and then like start working on it piece by piece. But I actually got away from the computer more than I thought I would over the last couple of weeks. So yeah. So, but that's, that's the part that I'm working on. Okay, great. I'm just going to add that real quick. We have an issue where we're just tracking what content we want to make and who is actively working on it at the moment. So I'm going to put your name on the onboarding framework. Yeah. And this is, it's been an interesting day in terms of like contributor growth because in the governance working group, we talked a lot, as you know, about the contributor ladder. There was some in Paris talked about just the different categories of contributors. And so it turns out that we're updating our governance stocks today. There's a PR that came out like right after that, that I knew there was some work going on there, but I didn't realize that it was happening like today. So that is interesting. And then as part of that governance stock, there was a note in there about like, should we add a how to become a maintainer section, which ties in with what we're talking about here. So all this stuff is very timely for us right now. That's great. Can you give me your GitHub username just so I can tag you on it? Yeah, I'll type it in here. It's pretty easy, but there you go. Just see pretzer. Sometimes people misspell my last name. No, it's fine. I just sometimes people don't use the same names everywhere. So, you know. Yeah. So we've got a bunch of stuff in flight here. This is cool. Is there anything else people want to talk about? I just kind of wanted to get us on the same page as to what we're working on. Can I help with anything? I mean, I guess I might need to make like a few updates to the contributor ladder. But aside from that, I think that's more or less done. So, did you want to help on one of the existing ones that we're working on right now or did you want to grab another piece of content? So I assume the ones that don't have names are the ones that like haven't been started. Yeah. So like if we look at the issue, there's the reviewing.md who's won issue templates, like suggestions for our template repo of what you could put in the got the dot GitHub directory, basically. So is the reviewing one, would that be a template? Yeah. Yeah. It would be a template. Some projects smoosh it all together with the contributing guide or they call it something else. Like sometimes they recall, they call it like for the maintainers. Like everyone has a different name for it. But I think we named it after what Porter did it because I wrote this. And it's just guidelines for when you do a review. What do we expect out of reviewers? What should it look like? What's the process? Do you think that it should, do you think it should be separate or do you think it should be combined with the contributing one? Just in the sense that like if you're contributing, you might also want to know what the written process is going to look like on the other side. So I document it from both sides because they're different audiences. So like here's, this was the idea for we'd like to have something like this in the template repo. The reason why I didn't put it in the contributing guide for Porter is because people who come to the contributing guide are brand new contributors. And us extolling what a reviewer should be doing.  It kind of like makes that new contributor guide so big that it's overwhelming to have like, it become this catch all bucket for content. And at the same time, we kind of document it two different ways. We say if you're a new person, this is the process as far as you're concerned. And this is what you can do to move things along. If you need to ping someone, this is what you can expect. These are your rights basically from the contributor side. And then from the reviewer side, we put what are your responsibilities or like, you know, honestly like Porter, like we'll kick you out if you don't, if you're not a nice person, you know, character maintainer or not. You know, there's things like that in there that kind of lay all this out that, I think if a new contributor saw it, they'd be like, how much of this does it apply to me, et cetera? Okay. But I'm going to open to different structures. I'm going to share a link here that one of the people who does a majority of our reviews says that he loved everything that was in this code review. It's called how to make your code reviewer fall in love with you. So it's kind of the flipped flip side. Well, I guess not. It's from the contributor's perspective, but it also gives advice to reviewers as well. So he spoke really highly about it. I read through it and I mean, there's really some important points that resonate. The only reason I bring it up here is that maybe it will help shape some of the things we do. I'm not saying that we should like fully adopt this, but as we come up with templates, I think it might be helpful just for more ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I think that for the reviewing thing as well, this probably should have a companion advisory guide where we linked to stuff like this and we just talk about what we recommend in general that may not actually be in the template and maybe just be things that people think about when they're saying, how do we want to run reviews for our project? And then we can like, because I think I've seen something like this, not the same content, but the same like topic of just how do you do good reviews. And I think it's like five or six of them floating around that we could link to and be like, these are all great. They should give you some inspiration. Yeah. Is that helpful, Karen? Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of planning on just like approaching with like I did the contributor ladder and hoping up. Okay. My motto is iterate. We'll just get anything down and then more people can get ideas and expand on it. So, but no one's going to contribute if there's something there. They just will think that we don't do that content. So that's the first step is just getting it out there. Okay. And at some point, I would love you to have a look. So I don't know probably once we have the other info in there, but it's like if you want to have a look at the growth framework at some point, that would be like, yeah, the more people look at it. And for me, like I'm totally new to the open source part. Like, yeah. So any feedback would be highly appreciated. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Do you maybe want to link to it in the Slack channel and even larger group of people? Oh, you don't have to if you're not ready. But are you asking her to do this before she moves it to GitHub? Or do you want her to do it after? Yeah, after, right? Yeah, after. Yeah. I don't know if should we wait until because it is super long, but yeah, as I mentioned, Scott had already kind of gotten people from Link Container D and Prometheus to agree for an interview. So I'm wondering if we should get that info first and then see and probably then cut things that are not. So I don't know if it may, yeah, probably we should get that info in there first because people are not going to look at it twice. They're just going to look at it once, right? No, I was just saying like we can look at it and review the document that's there. And if you wanted more feedback than just us, you can link it there and get Josh and everyone else looking at it. I do like the idea of putting it in getting the PR in sooner and having people make comments in GitHub just for the posterity and you can tag people in GitHub as well, just as easily as you can in a Google doc. But either way, as long as we're getting eyes on it, that's the important thing. I don't want to burn the, and then after when we have the other information that people say like, oh, I looked at it already. So I don't know, but I don't know what the best process is. The more people can look at it and the more people can tweak and comment and the better. But I'm happy to do whatever you guys say is like if earlier is better. My experience is that people are more likely to leave a random little comment on the Google doc, you know? And they're less likely to do large edits in your existing pull requests. Does that make sense? Oh, okay. So you're saying sharing it before it's, but should we wait for a Scott's input first from his interviews or?  You're really, really far along. You have a ton there.  People are way more likely to look at follow-up PRs that are much smaller and targeted. Like, and here's the feedback we got from these two interviews. So we decided to update the doc in this way, because then it's a five-minute review instead of at the moment like it would maybe take an hour to read through. Yeah, we can color quote stuff that is new and say like, hey, here's the new stuff. Can you look at that? Okay. So it's easier the second one. That's what I'm saying in a pull request, we can put it out there. We can do a light review for major edits, like spelling stuff like whatever, like major problems, and then just get emerged. And then when Scott does his interview, he can do a second PR and more stuff.  It'll be obvious from the PR. Okay.  I don't know what farther along it's just kind of easier to massively change your text than a Google doc, I guess. In a PR, it's a little harder because you're like composing it. Composing in a text box. Okay. Let me think. And maybe, yeah, let's just brainstorm with Charles because Charles hasn't read the lightest version. So I just want to make sure it's not too long. Like, oh, this is far too long and it's not really useful before I put it out there. So I have some kind of feedback before it's... No, whatever you're comfortable with. I was just giving you an opportunity if you were ready to move it forward. Yeah, I definitely want feedback. That's for sure. Okay, but good. So does anyone have anything else? This is all I had, really. That's all I had was to tell you that everything is happening in my head and not on my computer. Oh, that's a question that I had. Do y'all typically put time, like milestones on things or timelines? So I can see... I say this as somebody who values... Like if I have an end date for something, I'm much more likely to like work on it. But at the same time, since we're... This is like, in addition to the work that we're already doing, I hate to put a date on something for other folks. So I think the solution there is probably me just putting my own timelines on myself. But occasionally, we do have dates. For example, if we need to get advice and recommendations to the TFC on, for example, graduation requirements, that's really more the governance working group though. I think they have a more of a fire lit under them to do that. Otherwise, this is all volunteer work so no one's getting me. Okay. Okay. Well, I will put it on my own calendar then. Yeah. Yeah. And if you ever want to collaborate with people, you can just say like, let's try to do a working session who's interested and get together for an hour, just randomly whenever. Yeah. I think what I'll do is I'll just dump what's in my head into a PR and then draw out a working group or working group with folks after that or working session. Yeah. Sounds good. This is a super chill working group. We don't pressure people. If someone wants to pressure, they're going to have to run the group instead of me. And then nobody will like them. I don't know, but it's not in me to push people to do free work faster. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That made sense as I was talking through it. So yeah, those were the only things that I had. So I continue to find this group useful. So it's great. Good. Good. I like that without pressure, we're getting stuff done, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And valuable stuff. I feel like all the things that are, that I've seen so far, the things that are in the pipeline, and it's all super valuable. So that's kind of exciting to get that all. And that website, which we all cannot wait to see live. So keep us up to date when you find out. Yeah. I know that maybe right after this meeting. If she doesn't know, she should know who, because like, yeah, that's the CNCF.  So that was exciting to see that one live. I'm sure you're, you can't wait. Well, it's just that I have forks right now of these content repositories. And I'd love to just have it be in the real repositories. So I don't have to maintain like merging and stuff like that. Because those people write new things. I have to keep on top of that to make the preview look right. All right. All right. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye.


Hi Stampers! Welcome to Watch It Weekly Wednesday. I'm Jill and I'm really excited to show you the abundant beauty decorative masks that are in our new mini catalog. They are these masks. We have seven of them in the packet for $10.50. They're such a great value. Here are the ones right here that are backgrounds. We have this one that is just a bunch of leaves and then we also have one that is snowflakes and then this herringbone one. I want to show you how you can use these masks with so many different ways. The blending brushes are right here and with this one right here with all the leaves so that was done with the blending brushes and I love how you can just circle around them. These are raised up so it stays in there. Another way you can use these masks, here's a snowflake one and I use the paste, the embossing paste that we have and it does, it dries really quickly and is raised up so that's a great option for your cards if you like that dimension. The herringbone is another one and I just use the blending brushes with this which makes a great background for your cards. Now let me show you the next one is my favorite is the sunflower. It comes with four different masks and this is the flower one it's named number one then the greenery, the leaves number two, the center of the flower and the definition on the centers.  So let me go ahead and show you how this works. I love to put a little bit of adhesive on whatever I'm blending on so it doesn't move.  The cool thing about this is I'm going to go ahead and tilt this right where that I want that to be. So now I can line up all the different ones with this but I'm going to go ahead and tape this so when I'm blending with the colors it's not going to move. This is the lemon lolly and I'm using the smaller brush we have two sizes a large and a small and I'm just going to take this and go ahead and swirl it around. I like to take the inside of the flower and really get a lot of color on the inside. First and then go on the outside bigger and the reason why I tape it down is it helps to not move the actual mask. I think I want it a little bit darker. You can even take some daffodil delight and make it darker in the center also if you want to double your color. Okay so there we have the one. I'm going to lift this up now I'm going to take number two and line it up with that little V and guess what it fits just great with our greenery and our leaves. So I'm going to take that and go ahead and tape it down. We're going to use the brighter green the parakeet party on this one. I always like to take my blending brushes and all the greens use one blending brush. It doesn't really matter if you go lighter and darker I just kind of clean it out by swirling it around with the color.  So there's our leaves. Okay love it. Then the center is the next one we go ahead and line that up again with the little V that we started and I already have adhesive on there. Now I'm going to also do the green on the inside. I just want it lighter. Just going around in a circle. Okay lift that up. Oh my gosh it looks like the daisies from the grocery store. Okay so we're going to go ahead and put this down. Now this goes on the center and you're like okay how is that going to work because it's the same color. Well I'm actually adding another layer of green so it becomes darker. It's the same green but you're covering up some and you're adding some. Look how amazing that looks. Okay so that's how the mask is just by itself where you're lining them on top of each other. So I've done one here with this color combination. This is the mossy metal Cajun craze and Crush Curry. That's what made this one and run it through and just give it a little texture with one of your embossing folders. So same exact mask just done with different colors. Let me show you some other ones that are done and just done with the different color. I just used the solid part of the mask instead of the definition so you can pick and choose. This one I love. It's got the texture from an embossing folder with those same color combinations but I added a little early espresso to it to make it a little bit darker. This one is basically done on some watercolor paper so you would go ahead and do the same thing that I showed you just spritzing it with water after and it just blends and runs the colors together. This is done on a piece of vellum and the vellum right here if you can see I stamped just the same behind it and did this with regular ink just on the vellum and I spritzed it with alcohol and it also gave that texture little bubbles and it dries super fast. Now this if you notice when we're doing this they're spread out so I went ahead and blended this with our colors and I went ahead and used crush curry and a little pumpkin pie on the center and in the center where it's darker I used the Cajun craze and then I added mossy meadow to and then I added mossy meadow to the actual leaves on this one and then I cut them all out and made it really you know a lot more advanced cards so you can do it super simple or you can go ahead and cut them all out. I hope you've enjoyed seeing the abundant beauty decorative mask with our blending brushes and other options that you can use with these masks. If you'd like any of these products the link is below on these products. If you'd like any of these products okay if you like the link below if you like these products if you like these products click the link below and we'll see you next time on Watch A Weekly Wednesday.