Over the past few years Salomon's Gypsy has dominated women's freestyle snowboarding. Its combination of state-of-the-art design, manufacture and class-sealing performance created a freestyle board that not only ruled in the park but also one that rules over the whole mountain. It's this unique versatile performance that made it one of the best-selling boards there is. Well, not once to rest on their laurels, Salomon have totally redesigned the Gypsy for 1718, stepping up performance and control to a whole new level and in one fell swoop redefining the freestyle snowboard market. Now heading up the new Gypsy is the state-of-the-art blood profile twin tip shape. This all-new profile reduces weight at the tip and tail, stepping up both control and feel. To this, Salomon then add their versatile rock-out camber. This combines rocker at the contact points, camber under the feet and flat through the middle to deliver great performance wherever and whatever you ride. Now new for 1718, Salomon have also added their unique quadrilizer side cut profile. This complex combination of quadratic side cut and equalizer straight lines steps up manoeuvrability and show that the new Gypsy delivers all of the control that you could ever need. Internally, the Gypsy utilizes the high quality Aspen Select Pops the Booster Core. This carbon reinforced wood core is profiled to give the optimum flex through the length, increasing control and feel whilst also powering up both the nose and tail. Now to ensure that the Gypsy retains that playful freestyle feel, the glass structural layers are formed from a more playful bias glass. But by adding carbon slingshot layers under the feet you get that playful freestyle flex without sacrificing any of the board's pop, power and stability. Finally, to give a fast ride in all conditions, the Gypsy utilizes a tough scented base.


Hey guys, welcome back to the show floor of KubeCon CloudBate of Con 22 North America from Detroit, Michigan. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day one, John, of the Kube's coverage. The Kube's coverage, not the Kube's coverage. The Kube's coverage of KubeCon. Try saying that five times fast. Day one, we have three wall-to-wall days. You know, we've been talking about Kubernetes containers, adoption, cloud adoption, app modernization all morning. We can't talk about those things without addressing security. Yeah, this segment we're going to hear container and Kubernetes security for modern applications because the enterprise are moving there and this segment with Red Hat is going to be important because they are the leader in the enterprise when it comes to open source and Linux. So this is going to be a very fun segment. Very fun segment. Two guests from Red Hat join us. Please welcome Doran Caspin, Senior Principal Product Manager at Red Hat. Michael Foster joins us as well. Principal Product Marketing Manager and Stack Rocks Community Lead at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for having me. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's awesome. Stack Rocks acquisition's been about a year. You got some news? Yeah, 18 months. Unpack that for us. It's been 18 months, yeah. So Stack Rocks, the 2017, originally we shifted to be the Kubernetes native security platform. That was our goal. That was our vision. Red Hat obviously saw a lot of powerful, let's say mission statement in that and they bought us in 2021. Pre-acquisition, we were looking to create a cloud service. Originally we ran on Kubernetes platforms. We had an operator and things like that. Now we are looking to basically bring customers in into our service preview for ACS as a cloud service. That's very exciting. The security conversation is top notch right now. Yeah. It's an all time high. You can't go with anywhere without talking about security and specifically in the code. We were talking before we came on camera, the software supply chain is real. It's not just about verification. What do you guys see the challenges right now? Containers, scanning is not good enough. First of all, you got to scan them and that may not be good enough. Where's the security challenges and where's the opportunity? I think a little bit of it is a new way of thinking. The speed of security does make you secure. We want to keep our images up and fresh and updated. We also want to make sure that we're keeping the open source and the different images that we're bringing in secure. Doran, I know you have some things to say about that too. He's been working tirelessly on the cloud service. Yeah. I think that one thing that you need to trust your sources, right? Even in the open source world, you don't want to copy paste libraries from the web. And even if most of our customers using third party vendors and getting images from different locations, we need to trust our sources and we have a really good, even if you have a really good scanning solution, you not always can trust it. You need to have a good solution for that. And you guys are having news, you're announcing the Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security cloud service. Yes. What is that? So we took StackRocks and we took the opportunity to make it as a cloud services. So customer can consume the product as a cloud services, as a SaaS offering, and a customer can buy it through Amazon Marketplace and in future Azure Marketplace. So customer can use it for the AKS and EKS and AKS and also, of course, OpenShift. So we are not specifically for OpenShift. We're not just OpenShift, we also provide support for EKS and AKS. So we provided the capability to secure the whole cloud pasture. We know customer are not only OpenShift or not only EKS, they have both. They have three cloud or four cloud, so they have Google Cloud. So it's not just OpenShift, it's Kubernetes environments all together. All together, yeah. Meeting customers where they are. Yeah, exactly. And we focus on, we are not trying to boil the ocean or solve the whole cloud security pasture. We try to solve the Kubernetes security cluster. It's very unique and very neat, unique solution for that. It's not just added value for another cloud security solution. We think it's something special for Kubernetes. And this is what Red Hat is aiming to solve this issue. And the ACS platform really doesn't change at all. It's just how they're consuming it. It's a lot quicker in the cloud. Time to value is right there. As soon as you start up a Kubernetes cluster, you can get started with ACS Cloud Service and get going really quickly. I'm going to ask you guys a very simple question, but I heard it in the bar in the lobby last night, practitioners talking and they were excited about the Red Hat opportunity. They actually asked a question, where do I go and get some free Red Hat to test some Kubernetes out and run Helm or whatever? They want to play around. And do you guys have a program for someone to get started for free? Yes, so the cloud service specifically, we're going to service preview. So if people sign up, they'll be able to test it out and give us feedback. That's what we're looking for. Is that going to be in the cloud? They can run it in their own environment. So they can sign up. Free. For the service preview. All we're asking for is for customer feedback. And I know it's actually getting busy there. It's starting in December. So the quicker people are. So my friend at the lobby, I was talking to him, I told you it was free. I gave you the sandbox, but check out your cloud too. Okay, we'll get that out of the way. And you also have the open source version. So you can download it in your own. People want to know how to get involved. I'm getting a lot more folks coming to Red Hat from the open source side that want to get their feet wet. That's been a lot of people are rarely interested. That's a real testament to the product leadership. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. So what are the key challenges that you have on your roadmap right now? You got the products out there. What's the current stake? Can you scope the adoption? Can you share where we're at? What people are doing specifically and the real challenges? I think one of the biggest challenges is talking with customers with a slightly, I don't want to say outdated, but an older approach to security.  And it's like, well, really what we should be doing is keeping things into low and medium vulnerabilities, looking at the configuration, managing risk accordingly, having disparate security tools or different teams doing various things. It's really hard to get a security picture of what's going on in the cluster. That's some of the biggest challenges that we're focusing, that we talk with customers about. And in terms of resolving those challenges, you mentioned now where we talk about ransomware, it's a household word these days. It's no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when? It's what's the severity? It's how often? How are you guys helping customers to dial down some of the risk that's inherent and only growing these days? Yeah, risk, it's a tough word to generalize, but our whole goal is to give you as much security information in a way that's consumable so that you can evaluate your risk, set policies, and then enforce them early on in the development pipeline so that your developers get the security information they need, hopefully asynchronously. That's the best way to do it, it's nice and quick. But I don't know, Doron, do you want to add to that? Yeah, so I think, yeah, we know that ransomware, again, it's a big word for everyone, and we understand the area of the boundaries where we want to, what we want to protect, and we think it's about policies and where we enforce it. So, and if you can enforce it on, we know that as we discussed before that you can scan the image, but we never know what is in it until you really run it. So, one of the things that we provide is runtime scanning, so you can scan and you can have policy in runtime, so enforce things in runtime, but even if you, one image got in the way and get to your cluster and can run around somewhere, we can stop it in runtime. Yeah, and even with the runtime enforcement, the biggest thing we have to educate customers on is that that's the last ditch effort, right? We want to get these security controls as early as possible. That's where the value's going to be, so we don't want to be blocking things from getting to staging six weeks after developers have been working on a project. I want to get your guys' thoughts on developer productivity. Had Docker CEO on earlier, and since then I had a couple of people messaging me. I love the vision of Docker, but Docker Hub has some legacy and it might not, it doesn't have the kind of adoption that some people think it does. Are people moving, because they want to have their own places, no one place, or maybe there is, or how do you guys see the movement of say Docker Hub to just don't use containers, I don't need to be Docker Hub. What's the vis-a-vis competition? I mean, working with open source, with Red Hat, you have to meet the developers where they are. If your tool isn't cutting it for developers, they're going to find a new tool. And really, they're the engine, the growth engine of a lot of these technologies, so again, if Docker, I don't want to speak about Docker or what they're doing specifically, but I know that they pretty much kicked off the container revolution and got this whole thing started. A lot of people are using your environment too. We're hearing a lot of uptake on the Red Hat side too, so it's basically open source. It all sorts itself out in the end, like you said, but you guys are getting a lot of traction there. Do you share what's happening there? I think one of the biggest things from a developer experience that I've seen is the universal base image that people are using. I can speak from a security standpoint. It's awesome that you have a base image where you can make one change or one issue and it can impact a lot of different applications. That's one of the big benefits that I see in adoption. What are some of the business, I'm curious what some of the business outcomes are. You talked about faster time to value, obviously being able to get security shifted left and from a control perspective, but what are some of the, if I'm a business, if I'm a telco or a healthcare organization or a financial organization, what are some of the top line benefits that this can bubble up to impact? I mean, for me, with those two providers, compliance is a massive one. And just having just an overall look at what's going on in your clusters and your environments so that when audit time comes, you're prepared, you can get through that extremely quickly. And then as well, when something inevitably does happen, you can get a good image of like, let's say a log for shell happens. You know exactly what clusters are affected. The triage time is a lot quicker. Developers can get back to developing. And then, yeah, you can get through it. One thing that we see that customers compliance is huge, right? And we don't want to, the old way was that, okay, I will provision a cluster and I will do scans and find things but I need to do for PCI DSS, for example. Today, the customer want to provision in advance a PCI DSS cluster. So you need to do the compliance before you provision the cluster and make all the configuration already baked for PCI DSS or HIPAA compliance or FedRAMP. And this is where we try to use our compliance. We have tools for compliance today on OpenShift and other clusters on other distributions but you can do this in advance before you even provision the cluster. And we also have tools to enforce it after that, after your provision, but you have to do it again before and after to make it more feasible. Advanced cluster management and the compliance operator really help with that. That's why OpenShift Platform Plus is a bundle. It's so popular. Just being able to know that when a cluster gets provision it's going to be in compliance with whatever the healthcare provider is using and then you can automatically have ACS as well pop up. So you know exactly what applications are running. You know it's in compliance. I mean, that's the speed. You mentioned the word operator. I get a triggering word now for me because operator role is changing significantly on this next wave coming because of the automation. They're operating, but they're also devs too. They're developing and composing. It's almost like a dashboard Lego blocks. The operator's not just, you know, manually racking and stacking like the old days. I'm over simplifying it, but the new operators running stuff that got observability, they got coding, their servicing policy. The lot going on, there's a lot of knobs. Is it going to get simpler? What do you, how do you guys see the org structures changing to fill the gap on what should be a very simple, turn some knobs, you know, operate at scale? Well, when StackRocks originally got acquired one of the first things we did was put ACS into an operator and it actually made the application lifecycle so much easier. It was very easy in the console to go and say, hey, yeah, I want ACS, my cluster, click it. It would get provisioned, new clusters get provisioned automatically. So underneath it might get more complicated, but in terms of the application lifecycle operators make things so much easier. And of course, I saw, I was lucky enough with Lisa to see Project Wisdom and AnsibleFest.  Starting to see AI come in. So again, operations operator is kind of dev vibing an SRE vibe, but not that direct, but something's happening there. We're trying to put our finger on it. What do you guys think's happening? What's the real, what's the action? What's the transfer? What's transforming? That's a good question. I think in general, things just move to the developers all the time. I mean, we talk about shift-left security. Everything's always going that way. Developers have their hand in everything. I'm not sure exactly, Duran. Put your hands on the reaction. It's okay, say what you want. So I spoke with one of our customers yesterday and they say that they, in the last eight years, we've developed tons of code for just to operate their infrastructure. But if developers, so five or six years ago when a developer wanted VM, it will take them a week to get a VM because it needs all their approval and someone need to actually provision this VM on VMware. And today, they automate all the way, end to end. And it takes two minutes to get the VM for developer. So operators are becoming developers, as you said. And they develop code and they help and they make the infrastructure as code and infrastructure as an operator to make it more easy for the business to run, right? Make it. And then also if you add in data ops, AI ops, data ops, security ops, that's the new IT. It seems to be the new IT is the stuff that's scaling, a lot of data's coming in, you got security, so all that's got to be brought in. How do you guys view that into the equation?  I think there's a reason why those cloud security, or cloud professional certificates are becoming so popular. You have to know a lot about all the different applications, be able to code it, automate it. Like you said, hopefully everything as code. And then it also makes it easy for security tools to come in and look and examine where the vulnerabilities are, when these things are as code. So because you're going and developing all this automation, you do become, let's say, a generalist. You know, we've been hearing on theCUBE here and we've been hearing in the industry burnout associated with security professionals and some data ops, because the tsunami of data, tsunami of breaches, a lot of engineers getting called in the middle of the night. So that's not automated. So this has got to get solved quickly. Scaled up quickly. Yes, there's two part question there. I think in terms of the burnout aspect, you better send some love to your security team because they only get called when things get broken and when they're doing a great job, you never hear about it. So I think that's one of the things. It's a thankless profession. From the second part, if you have the right tools in place so that when something does hit the fan and does break, then you can make an automated or a specific decision upstream to change that, then things become easy. It's when the tools aren't in place and you have disparate environments so that when a log for shell or something like that comes in, you're scrambling, trying to figure out what clusters are where and where your impact is. Point of attack, remediate, fast. That seems to be the new move. Yeah, and you do need to know exactly what's going on in your clusters and how to remediate it quickly. How to get the most impact with one change. And that makes sense. The surface area is expanding. More things are being pushed. So things will, whether it's a zero day vulnerability or just, you know, an attack. Just to make, yeah. Yeah, you know that you automate, customer automates a lot of things, but it's good and bad, right? Some customer tools, they, I think Spotify lost the whole full zone because of one mistake of a customer, because they automate everything and they make one mistake. It scaled the failure. Exactly, it scaled the failure very fast. That was actually a cute con talk, I think. Four years ago, they talked about it. It was a great learning experience, but. It worked double-edged sword there. Yeah, so definitely we need to allow, again, scale automation, test automation, the way to, you need to hold the drills around it. Yeah, you have to know the impact. There's a lot of talk in the security space about what you can and can't automate. And by default, when you install ACS, everything is not enforced. You have to have an admission control. How are you guys seeing your customers? Obviously, Red Hat's got a great customer base. How are they adopting to the managed service way that's coming? People are liking the managed services now because they may not have skills gap issues. So managed services is becoming a big part of the portfolio. What's your guys take on the managed services piece? It's just time to value. You're developing a new application. You need to get it out there quick. If somebody, your competitor, gets it out there a month before you do, that's a huge market advantage. Do you care how you got there? Exactly, so we've had so much Kubernetes expertise over the last 10 or so, 10 plus year, or well, Kubernetes for seven plus years, at Red Hat, that why wouldn't you leverage that knowledge internally so you can get your applications out of the project? Why change your tool chain and your workflows a little faster and take advantage of the managed service because it's just about getting from point A to point B. Exactly. Well, in time to value, as you mentioned that, it's not a trivial term. It's not a marketing term. There's a lot of impact that can be made. Organizations that can move faster, like can iterate faster, develop what their customers are looking for so that they have that competitive advantage. It's definitely not something that's trivial. Yeah, and working in marketing, whenever you get that new feature out and I can go and chat about it online, it's always awesome, we always get customers interested. Pushing new code, being secure. What's next for you guys? What's on the agenda? What's around the corner? We'll see a lot of Red Hat at re-invent, I'll see your relationship with AWS as strong as a company. Multi-cloud is here, SuperCloud is, we've been saying, SuperCloud's a thing. What's next for you guys? So we want to, we launch the cloud services and the idea that we will get feedback from customers. We are not going GA, we're not going to sell it for now. We want to get customers, we want to get feedback to make the product as best we can give our customers and get feedback. And when we go GA and we start selling this product, we will get the best product in the market. So this is our goal. We want to get the customer in the loop and get as much as the feedback as we can. And also we're working very closely with our customers, we are existing customers to enhance the product to add more and more features. But the customer needs, it's all about supply chain, I don't like it, but we have to say it. It's all about making things more automated and make things more easy for a customer to have security in the Kubernetes environments. So where can your customers go?  Where are they going to be able to go to get their hands on the release? So we have, we have, just, you can find it online. We have a website to sign up for this, for this program. It's on my blog, we have a blog out there for ACS cloud services. You can just go there, sign up and we'll contact the customer. Yeah, and there's another way, if you ever want to get your hands on it and you can do it for free, open source StackRocks. The product is open source completely. And I would love feedback in Slack channel. It's one of the, we also get a ton of feedback from people who aren't actually paying customers and they contribute upstream. So that's an awesome way to get started.  Don't have to be a Red Hat customer. You're running a CNCF compliant Kubernetes version that we'd love to hear from you. All open source, all out in the open. Yep. Right, right, getting it available to the customers, the non-customers that they, hopefully, pending customers. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me, talking about the new release. The evolution of StackRocks in the last years of 18 months. Lot of good stuff here. I think you've done a great job of getting the audience excited about what you're releasing. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you. All right, for our guests and for John Furrier, Lisa Martin here in Detroit. KubeCon, CloudNativeCon, North America. Coming to you live, we'll be back with our next guest in just a minute.


It's another hot, sweltering day in Texas. I always suggest you hydrate, wail today, and put your sunscreen on, because it's going to be a doozy.  I'm supposed to be in the crisp, boundary waters, almost in the Canadian crisp air. You can smell it, you can feel it right now. So many big, brown fish, and then the virus took it all away. Today's video, Fish Free, sponsored by Mr. Cat Box. Let's go. Oh, yes, y'all. This month marks eight years of Mystery Tackle Box sending out Tackle Bundles of Joy to your doorstep. Congrats, MTV. And if you want to join the thousands of other danglers that get these boxes every month, it's easy to do. MTV is perfect for the beginning angler, trying to learn new tactics and new lures. And it's great for the experience.  Go to MysteryTackleBox.com. Shop the different boxes and the different plans. Don't forget to enter the promo code MONDO when you check out. When you do that, they're going to slap $10 off your first box and every box ships free. Just check out the Juicies in this month's box, like the Biospawn ExoPod for flipping and pitching. The Excite Bates Raptor Tail Junior. A boatload of crankbaits from Bagley, Castaic, Yozuri, and Lunkerhunt. And a roadrunner classic runner for those open-mourner suspended toughies. So go click that link in the top of the description and get signed up today. Now back to our sad story. Yes, my friends. It was going to be quite glorious week. I'm not even supposed to be here right now. I had a two-week trip planned to go up and fish St. Lawrence River to go up to Champlain, a lake I've never been to. It's been on my path. Never been to. It's been on my bucket list for about five years. Got the flights booked, making all the arrangements. We get to a few days before we're supposed to leave. We start poking around the internet, just making sure, you know, there's no special regulations or anything going on in these states that we're going to be traveling through. And lo and behold, there he is. According to these rules, if you're from Texas and you step off that airplane, you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days. Airbnbs around the areas will ask you to quarantine before you even get to their place. Then we're talking boundary waters. You cannot cross the boundary lines right now. Let's say you're fishing the Great Lakes and you go across into Canadian waters. That is no pass, go. Cannot go up there. And you don't want to be fishing up there for them brownfish all puckered up. You want to be, whoo! You know what I'm saying. Loosey goosey, ready to fight those little mouthy brown butterballs. We filmed Unthaught with me, Matt, Jeremy, that great northern dangle. We said, we're coming back. We got to come back here. And it was Matt's birthday at that time. And it was going to be my birthday at this time. And I was like, we got to go up to Champlain area and fish these other places.  But the virus stopped all that. And a glimmer of silk. Fishing freaks on the road. Anyways, and a glimmer of silver lining. It has been a good thing that I've been here for the last few days. I've been taking care of our daughter. I mean, she has been sick. Nobody worry. It's not corona. It's something else. A number of these thousands of other viruses that are out there. But she did get checked. No one's got it. So nobody worry. Stephanie was gone over the weekend. And she got sick. And then I was taken care of her. You know, normally I upload at least one video on the weekends. But I was taking care of her sick baby. I apologize. But baby's come first. Life throws curveballs. Everybody knows that. But I'm here this week. And I'm like, what can I do? What can I do? Interesting. And I found a lake. I found a lake within two hours from where I live that I've never been to. So this is going to be our little sense of adventure. It was supposed to be Champlain. It was supposed to be St. Lawrence River. It was supposed to be the Great Lakes and more. But we're stuck here in Texas. So let's go discover a brand new lake. What am I going to be fishing today, ladies and gentlemen? Grass, grass and more grass is what it looks like. First of all, let me say I feel like I've gone into a Texas time traveling machine coming out here, driving through Cactus and Scrub Oaks for many, many miles. And finally, stumbled across this lake. I wasn't sure if it was even going to have a ramp or anything. It was just one of those kind of deals. It's not a huge, huge lake. My gosh, I'm 30 feet of water right here. My feet opening in the grass. Rocks. I see fish on the rocks. Can you guys see this? Maybe not. Fish on the rocks. Big, deep trees. Suspended bass right here. The glare is going to be hard. I know it's sun. The water does look clear because of all the grass. It looks like there's coontail. There's matted hydrilla. Oh, this is beautiful. This is a little tasty. And we got trees. My gosh. Everything you need for a bass to live in. All right. Here we go now. Let's see what we got. OK. I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm just excited because this is a brand new lake. So many unknowns. Beautiful grass. Beautiful grass. I want to see if I can see any bluegill chasing my popper around. That's going to be a good signal for me. I think we're going to be going plastics. Maybe top waters at certain areas. Maybe they could school out here. OK. Now I can literally see the grass below me here. So we're going to see. We're over deep hydrilla beds. It makes me think there are some active feeders. So I'm moving bait. Should do OK here. It's so clear. OK. Got our first little chaser. I think it was a small bass. Oh. There's a bump. OK. Definitely just got whacked there. There's a group of schooling. It looks like a small group of bass. You can see the school of fish chasing those shad. Look at the shad freaking out. Nuts. Apologize. The GoPro is frozen still. It's like overheated or something. I was talking to you all for about a minute because I got a fish in one of these huge-ass trees down here. And for the first time ever, I could see the fish fighting like 10 feet down and I was able to wrangle them out of there. Not a big one, but sign of life. Mondo worm coming to the rescue here for a first bite. Just look how clear this water is, y'all. Watch this fish. Going down there into the trees, into the deeps. I'm just dropping into some magnum trees, y'all. Waiting to get another bite. Dang, that wasn't what I had on there. He had it. Just hanging onto it. Well, well, so far, ladies and gents. The new lake is kicking my rear end. I'm not even remotely close to the bite yet. I think the program, the real program, that's going to catch fish out here, I'm just kind of throwing out whatever looks good right now, but I'm going to take about 30 minutes and idle around and look at some electronic things now. But I'm going to look at some points and just see if there's fish on, there's rock out here, along with the trees and the grass. So I'm going to explore all these options and I really haven't seen any schooling activity at the surface. I've seen some looks like small fish schooling. Below the surface, way down there, but let's go see if we can figure these fish out. It's the exciting part about fishing in the new lake. You never know. Dog it. Look how chewed. He just ripped it. Why didn't you have all of it? Deep in a tree. That was a hefty one there. He had it up the tree. Oh my goodness. Oh, you fooled me. Outside of the mouth too. I put the absolute stick on you, sir. Apologize. You don't want to get on that deck. It's nuclear lava hot right now. I'm so sorry. I'm going to turn you to the water. It's like bite number five. Y'all idle around. Came to a point I've seen a nightmare. There's fish that are schooling out in the middle of the lake. There's trees out here. 60 feet of water, trees. And there's bass that are popping shad out in the middle over that deep clear water. It's like impossible to chase those things down. So I'm trying to stick with some structure. I just had a good bite on this tree over here and a flip to the next tree. Caught that one. I'm kind of working it up the tree. Throw in a Slim Shake. The bigger version of the Slim Shake and it hit it like halfway up and just sat there with it. All the bites have been like that.  Just sit there. Like I'm hot. Not going to do anything. I'm just going to kind of gnaw on my worm like a Cheeto on a Sunday afternoon. And then you just get them. But I've missed three so far. I would love for the schoolers to just come up here and start whacking something. I think I'm going to be wasting my time just chasing those things around. So if you guys are wondering about gear I am fishing a what's a 7.5 heavy. So this is our muscle rod. This is a green series muscle rod. Actually this might be gold. It's one of the prototypes. I believe it is gold. It does feel a little bit lighter than the other one I have on the deck. This is 20 pound GS Flurro. I've got a 3.8 oz. Tonks of weight on here. A 5-Ot hammer hook. Love these hooks. They're great for rigging all sorts of plastics. But I like throwing this Slim Shake. I was throwing the Mondo worm but this gets down there a little faster. There's no tail movement. Any time you have a appendage movement it slows your bait down. That can be good and bad just depending on the situation. This might be what I have to do. Just grind. Grind in the heat with these trees.  Oh, bastard's ate it right there in the grass. Oh my gosh, I watched him. What in the daaagum world? Oh dude, he popped out of there and chomped it. Oh, he's right there. He was sitting on top of the grass. That was wild. There he is again. What's he doing? Have we found something that these fish like? Oh, got you right on the grass line, little guy. Little guy. Why so little? Why not big? These trench rocks feel like some French fries that just came out of the fryer. If you ever want to get your plastics ultra soft just set them out in the Texas sun. This was right when it started getting a little deeper. Flipping on this little grass line here. Where the ghillie-ghillies live. Oh, there's one. Oh my gosh, come here, baby. Hit it hard. Dude, are you on a point right here? Let me just back up a second. I'm good. He absolutely smashed it. Smashed it. Another one about the same size. 15. Just a little suspicious that there might be another one here with the vicious attack of that one. Sometimes when they hit it that hard, they're in competitive mode. And it was on a point, like right on a drop-off. Oh, there's a bite. Oh, dog. Oh, isn't it, crappie? I believe it was, friends. You'll see that a lot of times. If you're fishing trees with plastics, if you get a hard thump, you need to pull up nothing's there. Man, I know I got a good bite. A lot of times it's cropping, especially if it happens a few times. They will thump it pretty hard. There's one right on the edge of those rocks. I thought I was about to get blundered right there by a big one. There is something weird going on here.  And we've got grass down there. It's that lovely hydrilla. You don't think there's an ocho Libre down there. Crazy. Looks awesome. I just don't know if it's going to be today. Well, fishing freaks, we have reached that point in the day where it feels like the sun is trying to take your soul. It's a staber. This water is probably 90 degrees right here. I can even see some bluegill up under that dock, but there we go. Got the best of me today. Oh, little Martha. Little Martha is back on the no good egg train, unfortunately. Excuse me, girl. Excuse me? It's about that time of day where everyone has done laying eggs. So I'm checking if Martha is laying a good egg or a bad egg. And I can already tell you it's not going to be a good egg. She's got the dreaded dimpled egg again. Why do you have to do that? So it's very sad, but I don't know what to do with Martha. If you have a solution, let me know in the comments. And I'm sorry and I'm upset that I'm not able to bring you guys some more awesome fishing from some of those places that I've never been that I've wanted to go up north that are really good this time of year, but they don't like Texans coming up there. They think we're super spreaders and I think the only thing we spread is Lone Star Spirit, but that's just me. Fishing freaks, it's been a strange year. I wish you all the best. I hope you and your families are doing the best in this whole strange situation we got going on here. I think today marks really one of my last bass fishing trips before I head into the mountains. I'm going to be doing a lot of trout fishing up there and doing some serious elk hunting that is coming up next on the agenda. Stay tuned, subscribe, hit the notification bell. Is that thing still going? Make sure to just click all the things that increase activity on the channel. Signing off from Hot and Steamy, Texas. Hope wherever you are, you're having a great outdoor adventure. See ya on the next one.


This study examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sub-Saharan African SSA communities in Antwerp, Belgium. The findings revealed that pre-existing disparities in health, sustained by intersecting socioeconomic and structural inequities, had worsened due to the pandemic. Additionally, the study found that the SSA communities faced unique challenges related to misinformation about the virus, prevention measures, and the lockdown. Furthermore, the study highlighted how the combination of social and economic factors increased the burden of the pandemic on the SSA communities. Finally, the study showed that despite these challenges, the communities developed innovative solutions to cope with the pandemic. This article was authored by Charles Dungu, Lazar Manirankunda, Marie Mudeck, and others.


Hi, everyone. I am standing between you and lunch and between you and cake, so this is an uncomfortable space. But I wanted to, first of all, take the opportunity to thank you for having me back. It was about a year ago, I think, that I was able to come join you and talk a little bit about my work at the foundation. And that was like, I don't know, maybe three months or so after I joined, even less. So I roughly didn't know what I was doing, like who anybody was. So hopefully this year you're going to get a bit more sense out of me. Not too much, but a little bit more. So what I'm going to do today is certainly reflect a little bit on where we were a year ago and what we are now, and also tell you a little bit about what's happened this past year at the foundation and how our plans have evolved. So I'll try and be quick. Hopefully there'll be time for questions. I'm planning on staying around for another hour or so after my presentation, so we can chat offline as well if anybody has any questions. So first of all, reflecting on the past year, I'm going to say that Cindy Ciccalezzi is now on the other side of the fence. So we actually have, for the first time ever, a bona fide product manager for Media Weekly. Yay. Huge difference as we begin really to look at what the foundation does with a broader vision, not just an encyclopedia, but much more than that. So this past year, the foundation has been a year of strategy making, we have many new people, including a new executive director at the foundation and also a board that has evolved a great deal from the recent past. So one of the things that we asked ourselves is like, what are we all about? What should we be doing? We had a strategy that saw us through to the year 2015 roughly and it was time to take another look and see what we're going to take, the movement, the foundation, what we should be doing to be responsive to the needs of our movement. So we spend a year, roughly, figuring out what our strategy should be. And you may think a year, really, yeah, because the foundation really represents a movement and we had a very, very broad consultation exercise with just about everybody who could speak to inside and outside the movement. So at the end of that year, we came up with a strategic direction that I want to share with you here and then I'm going to tell you what we're doing in order to start moving ourselves in that direction. So our mission at the foundation is, as you know, the spread of free knowledge to all human beings. We want to imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our goal. And for the most part, I think if you look back at the first 15 or so years of the foundation and the movement, we've not done too badly. When you look at the achievements of the community, they are quite spectacular. The encyclopedias are present in around about 300 languages. There are over 45 million articles. And when you look at the edits, they're in the billions. So we have clearly an active and thriving community of both volunteers, as well as committed employees that are bringing all this together. So if that's where you are, where do you go to next? So this past year, as I said, was a year of reflection with all these great achievements. We also found out that we have gaps. And I'll talk through some of these gaps real quick. First of all, there is a much larger ecosystem than the one that we either recognize or actively or properly or engage well with. And frankly, the fact that I come here once a year, that you guys don't see the foundation in the day-to-day lives more frequently than that is an example of such a gap. There's a larger ecosystem that we are part of that includes not only our donors and our readers and the committee of projects, but there are fellow travelers both in the knowledge, in the free knowledge world, as well as the creative community, as well as other tech companies, social development organizations. And of course, organizations like this that leverage technology that we use, that we build and use for our own purposes, but then also give back so that, you know, we're together we are better. So clearly we need to learn how to work better with the broader free country movement. And, you know, I hope honestly to kind of be able to stand here a year from now and tell you exactly what we've done in that regard to begin to create and to craft a more substantive and productive relationship with groups like the Enterprise Media Wiki group. So that's one thing we need to fix. What else is changing the world around us? Well, one of the things that's going to change and is changing is how the world population is distributed. So if you look forward to 2030, there will be roughly 13% more people than we have today, but all this growth really is going to be in Africa and Africa and Asia. And the implication really for this is that we need to be able to adjust and be present in this new context, new languages, and also knowledge formats. And while languages perhaps is obvious, but knowledge formats may not be, you know, we are very thoughtful about what knowledge even means, you know, is knowledge in encyclopedia, is knowledge of what sits, for example, inside of a NASA Wiki that tells people how to use a space station, is knowledge of what lives within an ESA set of documentation that tells you how to observe quality management processes. Yeah, you bet, all of the above. And we at the Foundation don't really spend too much time thinking about these different knowledge formats. And, you know, one thing I know is as you move, you feel the vision to a broader set, including, say, Africa, the knowledge formats that they will need to use to create and also benefit from are going to be very different than what we have today. So we need to think about that as we ready ourselves for the next 15 years. The other thing that is pretty obvious and, you know, all we have to do is look at ourselves in this room. The gender gap remains and it remains not only in the contributors to our technology foundation, which is maybe like not that surprising, but unfortunately is also very, very prevalent in our encyclopedia contributor base, which means, of course, that we have significant biases in our corpus, which is not great because we, you know, being as successful as we are and we are successful with the world's number five website, it means that we propagate these biases downstream and we propagate them by sharing that knowledge, but we also propagate them because our corpus is used and reused endlessly by other organizations that train their machine learning models on us, which also, you know, creates the opportunity for those biases to be force multiplied and have them cause even more harm. So another thing that we need to think about as we ready ourselves for the, again for the journey ahead is how do we respond to this gender gap? What do we do to begin to be a more inclusive and more diverse community? And perhaps the final gap and I'm sure there are many more, but the final gap that we thought about is mobile.  I mean, we're not good at mobile. So this is what you see in red there is the number of edits that are done in the various wikis on mobile devices versus desktop. So, you know, we are by far a kind of laptop desktop bound community of contributors. And in reality is, I mean, it's not just the next generation, everybody is mobile today. So, you know, we are excluding a great deal of contributions from our products by not being present, well, but not being effectively present in the mobile space. And certainly as we look at our aspirations, you know, to grow in what we broadly call the global south, you know, we know that many of these people will come to us through broadband, they will come to us through mobile. They will never have an internet connection in their house, any more than they have a telephone connection in their house. So if we don't solve this problem, we will also exclude them from the movement. So this is something that we also need to work on. So, you know, as I say, there are many more gaps that we have, but in our minds these are, you know, some of the most critical fundamental things that we need to be thinking about as we begin to ready ourselves for the journey. So, what did we hear from our communities? What's our direction? So we heard that we are an infrastructure for many things. We're not just an encyclopedia. And again, you know, looking at all of you here, I can put a face to this statement. We are, you know, in many ways the infrastructure of open knowledge. So we're going to be a platform to serve open knowledge and we want ourselves to be deliberate about it, not like, you know, rely on heroic efforts by a few people to make that true. But we're going to be very deliberate in how we're supported by building tools for ourselves, our allies and our partners. And also we're going to do that by enabling the use of new forms of knowledge, as I was saying earlier. So that's one piece of our strategic direction. The other one that is truly meaningful to us also is knowledge equity. And by that we mean that we want to focus on knowledge and the communities that are left out by structures of power and privilege. We're going to welcome people from every background. And also we're going to work to break down barriers to access and sharing knowledge. And again, if you reflect on the mobile conversation we've just been having, you can see what significant barriers exist in communities that are not privileged in accessing our information if we don't, for example, have a workable way for them to use mobile devices to come to us. So these are the two key directions that we decided we need to march towards in order to build out the movement for the next 15 years. Knowledge as a service and knowledge equity. So we have truly a lot of work ahead of us. And honestly, even if it wasn't for our new direction, we would have a great deal of work ahead of us. I just stopped myself from using a cash word then. I was going to say something a bit more salty than what I said. But we have a lot of work to do. So when I squint and I look at the future, I don't know exactly what we'll be doing in the next 15 years. But there are four areas where I know we're going to have to make progress in order to move forward. And these are broad areas where we know we're going to have to do a lot more thinking and planning around in order to figure out the final plan. So first of all, looking at our infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I don't just mean the physical plant, but also I saw for our people infrastructure. We need to make some choices about our stack. And I know Cindy spoke to you earlier in the conference about the plans that we have to evolve our platform. This is going to be one of the most significant efforts that we undertake in the foundation this year. Fixing once and for all many of the gaps that we have. And then getting ourselves to the place where we don't have to do heroics in order to catch up. Like fixing some of the big things that went wrong in the past and then making sure that we keep up. So that's one big thing. We're going to work on tech foundation from mobile. And again, if you ask me, what does that mean? I don't know what it means today, but I do know it's something that we have to work on and fix. I know that we'll have to scale because if our ambition is to reach the next billion, how are we going to do that? Are our structures even fairly mundane things like our data centers? Are they able to take us where we need to go? There are also pieces that are perhaps not as obvious. Our ambition to operate in north parts of the world also implies that oftentimes we have to serve communities that are at risk. For example, you probably know that Wikipedia, in fact, all of the Wikipedia projects have been blocked in Turkey for over a year now. There are many other communities where this is the case. And our commitment is to every human being. It's not to every human being that lives in Europe. So we need also to make sure that we figure out some solutions to make it possible for people in those geographies to enjoy free knowledge. And one of the things that Dave is trying in the back there has been working on is an offline version of Wikipedia. I'm sure you had an opportunity to speak to him about it already. It's an example of the kind of work that we're going to do in that regard. So there will be a whole bunch of work around infrastructure. The other pillar of our strategy from a the technology perspective is open source. And I just wanted here to reiterate our commitment to open source. We will always, always, always, always make sure that the code that we build is openly available to others. And we don't do that for the goodness of our heart. We do that because it's strategic for us. And it's strategic for us because only 78% of core commits come from staff. The rest comes from communities like yours. So we benefit a great deal by supporting the open source movement. It's also is fundamental for us again, serving our communities in the global south. The foundation is not going to be able to go and put engineers in Kenya. We're going to have to have a community in Kenya that picks up the open source tools that we build and adapt them to their own circumstances so they can build their own wickets into the work that they need to do.  And again, as Cindy probably already told you, we are committed to media wiki. And we're committed to media wiki because honestly, we have to. I mean, you may dream big dreams but like 99% of our traffic, both mobile web and desktop, I serve through media wiki. So, you know, it's the lifeblood of our mission.  But we're here first and foremost for our mission. Plus it's like other things are cool too. You can do services in other languages. So it's not like this exalted state that if you're really, really good and you go to heaven, but all you have to do is speak Node.js. I bet you there's cobalt hiding somewhere in heaven.   Maybe the cobalt is like, or purgatory, or some place there. So building infrastructure, maintaining our commitment to open source, then enabling technologies. A lot of the things that we're going to do in order, for example, to force multiply the productivity of our contributors would be around building capabilities and tools that are powered by machine learning. So technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, content translation, recommendations, personalization, accessibility in general. Suppose that you have somebody who, you know, we cannot see. So having spoken interfaces, for example, we know that all that is in the future. And these are areas where we'll have very, very modest investments in the foundation today. So we know that we'll have to do something more in that regard. And the last pillar here is community. Again, you know, I find it incomprehensible that we would ever succeed in our mission, minus our technical community both inside and outside the foundation. So we're going to do everything we can to strengthen this technical community and also get them to the tools that they need in order to be ready for the mission ahead. So we're going to be more diverse and more inclusive. We also want to build strategies around the role of third-party users like yourselves. And also, you know, what companies should we be working with to create some of the technologies that we need to support the mission. And I mentioned machine learning a moment ago. You know, we have like 1.85 people, 1.85 people at the foundation working on machine learning today. That's it. Where the world's number five website. We have 1.85 people. I'd like to have more. And probably I can have five. I'm never going to be at the place where the Google, so the Facebook, so the IBMs, or the Microsoft that were last. So, you know, for us, it's fundamental to build partnerships with these people so that we can reuse technologies that they have and also influence to the extent that we can, the tools that they build so that we can bring them back into our toolkit. So these are kind of the four broad areas that as we started thinking about what the strategy means for us, I was contemplating. This is the time of year that we do our annual plan. So it's time to get started. So I wanted to give you a little bit of an insight into the kinds of things that we'll be doing this next year to move us in that direction. So here's the big picture of how we're going to do this.  The way the foundation works is we do our plan, our fundraising team goes off and does the amazing work that they do. And again, with the benefit of brilliant people like David's trying, every year they seem to be able to raise the funds that we need. We spend those funds and then we start over again. Well, now it's going to be a little different because we're actually going to plan a bit more long term. So what we're going to be able to do is plan not only for this coming year, but also for the next three to five years. And for us, it's going to be a little change in cadence. We don't know how to do that. We know how to plan on an annual basis, but we don't know how to do it more broadly. So we're trying to be very thoughtful about how all that's going to come together. So as we look at the big picture, like I said, we spent this past year figuring out what the strategy are to be. This year, 18, 19, and our fiscal year starts in July. This is going to be a transition year. So we know roughly what we need to head to. Every organization within the foundation is looking at its work and trying to figure out what do they need to do in order to start leaning in into that direction. We know that we can't move immediately, but we know how to lean in. And then once we have that done, the first year of the implementation of the strategy proper is going to be 1920. So what's going to happen this year is once we're done with our annual plan, which is kind of ongoing as we speak, as soon as we finish with that, then we're going to shift gears and start thinking about what the three to five year horizon needs to look like. And that's going to be kind of exciting and scary and unbounded because, again, we've never done it before, but it will be, I'm sure, a lot of fun. So as we started doing our plan for this year, our year zero, our goal is to tend to the basics. And I'll talk about some of the work that we'll have to do to make sure that before we kind of dream big dreams, it's like we need to first of all make sure that we have a solid foundation to build on. And I just wanted to give you just a little bit of a taste of what I'm talking about here. So the foundation, for the longest time, I did not have a great deal of engineering leadership, I want to say. And what that means is that really there was precious little attention paid to some of the fundamentals. And what's really happened over the years is that if you take, for example, our tech ops team, they're pretty much the same size as they were when we got started back in 1809. But if you look what happened to the budget of the foundation, it has climbed, which is great. And that climbing budget also meant that other parts of the foundation, including engineering, have also grown. So the line at the bottom shows you the growth of, the blue line is the growth of staff. The red line is the growth of engineering at the foundation. Now, if you are Mark Bergzema and your job is to support everything that people build and give you to support, you're sitting there with the same people 10 years on, and now you have two or three times as many engineers building things and dropping them on your plate. And all you can do is try harder to support them all. There's been virtually no investment in our capacity to support all these good things that these new engineers build and throw over the fence. So we have very significant gaps. And I don't want to go through all this miserable list here, but things like doing data backups. You would have thought, for example, like we have exquisite backups of our visions, and we do have backups. But I tell you that the percentage of backup jobs that succeed is not where I would like it to be. It's not where we would like it to be. I mean, things like, we have like two data centers. So you would imagine that we can serve traffic out of both. So one goes down, use the other. Or if we have too much traffic on one, we can all balance with the other. Well, not so much. No. Actually, we have two data centers. Only one of them is active at any given time. And if we need to switch traffic, we have to do some manually. So the world is number five website. That's not really what you're going to be. So there is a whole bunch of fundamental things like, we don't have a staging environment. So our engineers are in the position of doing whatever testing they can do, and then they throw their changes to the whole of our traffic. And again, for the scale that we have, that is totally unacceptable. And you may think, how the hell did you get here? I apologize for the salty language. And I don't know how you get to this point. I think somebody wasn't paying attention. But we are where we are. So again, from my perspective, even though I would love to start doing lots of work around machine learning and building out capability in enabling technologies and so on, I know that the first thing I would need to do is fix this gap so that we can continue operating as we grow. So this is the kind of the first priority. And hopefully some of that is reflected in our programs for this coming year. So this is a bit of a night chart and I don't expect you to read it all. But I wanted to give you a sense for what our work and the technology department looks like. So we have a whole bunch of programs. All the work that we have is programmatic. In other words, every single piece of work that we do contributes to the mission in some obvious and defensible way. And our programs come in four flavors. So we have foundational programs and these are all about building the core platforms that we need in order to get our work done. So any work that we do, for example, in media, we give it fall in this category. Then we have sustaining programs and these are all about operating the infrastructure that we have. Then we have programs for supporting our community. A lot of the work that we do in this space is really forward-looking, understanding how communities work, experimenting with new tools that we could give them, for example, to increase the capacity of editors to both write articles, also to check revisions to articles and so on. And then the last kind of packet is work that we do to support the technical community inside and outside the foundation. So this is broadly how it comes together and you won't be surprised to see on the pie chart on the left there that most of the work that we do is in the sustaining category, certainly for this coming year. Hopefully as we begin to redress some of these gaps, we can also redress that balance and perhaps do more work on our platforms. I would love to do more work on both our platforms as well as our communities. Now, I want to like to do a quick run-through, do a little bit of a deep dive in some of these programs to give you a flavor of what we will be working on. And I want to start by talking about our two top growth priorities and the first one is addressing the infrastructure gaps that I talked about just now. And the second one is to support the evolution of our platform in order to fix this divergence of the WMF stack. And again, I'm sure Cindy spoke to you about this already, but you know, we're at a situation where we'll have two APIs to maintain, we'll have two parsers that we'll have to maintain, and like you know, I could go on and on. And you know, we don't have the time or the resources to be doing that. We'll pay a very heavy tax for that kind of divergence. Here's a quick tour of some of our programs now. So the foundation will have programs that are executed in one department, in which case here you will see them as labeled as TPs. We also have programs that we execute in collaboration with other departments in the foundation. Those are called cross-departmental programs, CDPs. So we have one such program this year and we'll continue it next year on privacy, security and data management. And this is something that we're doing in collaboration with our legal team. This year we'll be expanding our team. And we have a very brave soldier here, and Brian, that is part of that team. Hopefully he will get some buddies to work with this coming year. So we want to be able to do things like provide a consistent and stable level privacy in all products. This is becoming more and more important for us. As some of you know, we shoot the NSA for privacy in the upstream surveillance that they have been doing. We also want to comply with upcoming legislation in Europe, GDPR. Some of you from Europe will be very familiar with this. It's something that will be kind of really fundamental for us to get right. And I know it's something that also you probably as users of media and wikis in general are thinking about. That's something that we have within our sites that this team will be working on. And in general, we want to be able to build our capability and our capacity around incident response, threat modeling, our ability to do code reviews and so on. So this is an important foundational piece of work that we're going to be doing. Oh, look at that. Okay, somebody did this slide. That's fun. The second one is platform evolution. And this is work that we're doing with our audiences department who used to be the product organization. So they're responsible for building or user-facing features. A lot of work will happen here. Again, Cindy talked about this already, but you know, some of the highlights are that we're going to have a new API team and a new documentation team. And that, I think, is great news for those that use our APIs and also those that want to use our code because all of a sudden actually you will have some documentation to look at. So hopefully this will fix things like fragmentation, maintenance burden, developer impedance. You know, can you imagine what it's like when you bring a new person in that's never looked at this code? I mean, it takes many, many months for them to get up to speed. So hopefully, we'll address that. And our third CDP is around knowledge integrity. And this is, again, a fundamental piece of work for us for whatever reason Wikipedia is seen as a fairly independent and reliable source of knowledge on the web by many people. I don't know if you kept up the news, but only this past week YouTube decided to put links in their videos that contain conspiracy theories to Wikipedia so that there is an alternative point of view to those that are taken by conspiracy theories. Facebook did something similar about six months ago, which is all to say that there is no better solution today. People come to us to verify knowledge. So this notion of knowledge integrity, how to make sure that one piece of, one-on-one claims supported by evidence and by citations and how they're all linked so you cannot be saying one thing over here and another thing over there is pretty fundamental. So we're going to start, we're going to get started this year with doing some research to understand how our readers access sources and also to help contributors improve the quality of their citations. We're going to do some work around our infrastructure, primarily to create tools that link information to external sources, catalogs and repositories. Also preservation is really important, so we're working with the Internet Archive to make sure, for example, that we minimize the number of dead links in our articles. We will be doing outreach to work with others that have similar objectives and then also want to raise awareness of the processes that our Wikimedians follow in order to verify information. And then I'm going to run through again very quick through some of our programs, so there will be a whole lot of work being done under TPN on reliability performance and maintenance. This includes hiring an engineer to support media Wiki related incidents, which we don't have today. In fact, I don't know if this was the case last year when I was here, but when I arrived at the foundation, there wasn't even a media Wiki team, which is pretty remarkable. So we'll now have a small team and Cindy is part of it and we will be growing that team. We'll be doing work around cleaning up our deployment pipeline and this is, you know, both to accelerate deployment of code production but also to solve the stage and problem that I mentioned earlier. So I'm very excited that we will be seeing some of the fruits of this work that actually started last year come into effect. Another little thing that we have to do this year is migrate our runtime back to PHP 7 because Google decided to stop supporting PHP in the HHVM space, so this was a bit of a curveball, but we will respond to it. We will work to address our infrastructure gaps, a whole bunch of work that will need to be done here all the way from having a proper login infrastructure to having proper backups to having a proper staging environment. We'll do some work around developer productivity because you'll be surprised to hear, I was surprised to hear all the tools that our developers use internally, they're all been developer volunteers. It's like a single tool that was professionally developed and that creates a great deal of delay and friction and deployment of code. Code health, we started a program last year to begin to tackle tech debt and we'll continue doing it this year by focusing on simplicity, testability, buildability and readability of our code. This is the last thing I wanted to talk about here, technical community. It's interesting that when I go to the foundation, people were talking about three audiences, one of them being ad owners and it's kind of obvious. The other one is our readers and the third one is our contributors, folks that go and edit. Guess what's missing? There's a vertical that's missing here which is developers. So like what happened with that? Well, somebody wasn't paying attention. So we have really an audience that is not currently served. It's our intention to start building a fully fledged technical engagement team. We will not be able to make all the investments that we need to make in that this coming year, but we're going to get started and we'll continue building it out in the out years. And that really is fully consistent with our strategy. So remember I talked about knowledge as a service has been one of the key tenets of our work and this is text that I've taken right out of the strategy. So we say we will build tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia. Well, like you can't do that if you don't have a dedicated team to do it. The other part about knowledge equity, we want to be able to break down the social, political and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. And again, how are you going to do that if you don't have an organization that is focused on creating and enabling a support in that community? So the goals of our kind of budding audience here and our technical engagement audience will be to reduce barriers to technical attribution. We will focus to start with on contributors that are creating bots and tools. We're going to be able to attract and retain contributors to our flash projects. And also we want to promote the use of software resources that extend the user experience beyond that provided by the core software. We want to support the use of Wikimedia services by foundation staff, community members and third party consumers. We want to accelerate the onboarding process for new technical contributors and we want to support the technical engagement with open knowledge producers and consumers by foundation teams. So this is a whole bunch of work. So when you begin to look at what this team will have to look like, I think now we're like maybe one quarter staffed. So there's going to be a lot more resource that we'll need to procure and apply to it. But I am completely kind of dedicated and determined that this will be one of the areas that we will be seeing significant growth in in the out years. So stay tuned on that one. We may well come back to you to ask for your input, for your advice, for your wish lists as we go forward. And with that I wanted to bring it to an end and see if there are any questions about anything that I spoke about. Thank you very much for that. The knowledge integrity I'm very interested in because infuriatingly, if you're writing a paper you're not allowed to reference Wikipedia, they're absolutely strict on that. And actually a lot of times I think it's more of a reliable source than some scientific papers in terms of the collaboration that's gone into it and the referencing. And it seems a real shame that there's no way of sort of looking at the articles and going, actually that is suitable to be referenced. Is there any thoughts on that? Yes, plenty. First of all I understand why our content is highly variable. The areas of it that honestly are better than any textbook university level it would be and there are others that are not. So I think for us to become sightable resources would have to be pretty uniform with the quality of what we have. And honestly I don't know that we're ever going to be that because the whole point about Wikipedia is that you start with something that is a seed and then others come together and make it better. So maybe there's some way of creating a grading scheme on articles and maybe some of them, maybe they're five stars and they are corable and so on. I don't know. But what I do know is that, and this is my experience as a researcher, so I started life as an academic, I used to publish papers, it's linking knowledge that really matters. So knowledge is integrated to flows out of not necessarily peer review because you can easily have a peer review article that is full of inaccuracies and we all know that that happens. It's actually the ability to link that piece of knowledge with other related pieces of knowledge. So one of the things that we will be looking at, a great deal as we get started this year is this notion of linked knowledge. In fact, just earlier on I was looking at the first deck that our product manager is beginning to put on that. And that I think there's something really fundamental in that. So there's a web of knowledge out there where one thing is implied by the next and so on. So my vision is that we have a kind of a collection of linked knowledge that where the connections really represent the relationship between the different pieces. And if there's something, if you can start from node A on the graph and reach the terminal, all that means that argument is consistent. And I know this is not a vision that will be realized in a year or two, but I think that's what we want to aim for. I will also say that sometimes knowledge integrity is in the eyes of the beholder. So I recently joined the board of directors of PLOS, the Popularity of Science, which as you know in and of itself is creating a very different way of publishing where the bar is about sound science versus necessarily peer-reviewed science. So I think broadly there is a movement to really comprehend what the internet and connectedness has given us in terms of knowledge, which transcends the Elseviers and the journals of the world so far. So I think I can stay tuned. I think this is a very, very important piece of work that we have to do. There was an area that you haven't discussed and maybe it's outside the scope of that, but it occurred to me that if you're looking at the foundation for free knowledge, that there are organizations that actually make paid for knowledge become free. And the one that's most immediate is the public library. And the public library basically buys books and makes them freely available to people. But it's also happening on the electronic content. And I wondered if you had looked at this whole distribution of paid for content. In other words, all the current periodicals are all online. They're all produced in electronic form. They're not available immediately. They're behind the payroll though. On the internet. But you can actually go to your public library and you can get a subscription to this service, a free subscription to this service that you can get from home. And it's very limited. But this is the sort of transition that says, wait a minute, now all this information that's edited and published in Time Magazine, it's all available. It's all out there. But it's not freely available. It's bounded in many cases by copyright rules. In cases where it's bounded by copyright rules, in some cases where copyright is more friendly, organizations like the Internet Archive actually do precisely that. So they have a list of books and I've seen them, I've seen the machine that they use in order to digitize that content. So I think there is definitely a movement in that regard. We at the Foundation have worked really hard this past year on liberating citations. So something like 46% or something growth and the overall number of citations that can be made available openly has happened. I think there's a movement. And again, the plus, the public library of science is an example of people coming together and saying this old model doesn't serve us well anymore. Yes. But it seems there's a transition happening there that could suddenly make a huge amount of knowledge available, which is quality knowledge has never been made freely onto the Internet. And you want to be able to be there to catch it, right? When the speaker opens up on the scale of the infrastructure, you can actually grab it. And the copyrights are quite tricky because the copyrights are often geographical area. So they get a copyright to distribute in the United States. And then you look at the Internet mechanisms and can you actually control that in order to meet the copyright? And of course you cannot, as you know. If there's a way of doing that. There is a way of doing this. And it depends on how you distribute the access to the service. And one of them is through the public library. And the public library issues the grant to the person as long as they live in the United States. And it can be done through the U.S. public libraries. And that's how they meet the copyright. So I completely agree with you. And as I was saying, one of the things that we have to explore is partnerships with institutions like that. Because there's a much broader ecosystem around free knowledge that we don't work with today and we should because that will further the mission significantly. Question back there? Both the philosophy of the Wikimedia Foundation and the nature of media Wiki as a tool are consistent with the sustainable development goals that were announced by the United Nations a couple of years ago. Is there any conscious emphasis within the foundation of what can be done to advance or at least support progress to those goals? So you know there's this saying that the tide goes out and sometimes your pants are down. So this is all the situations. I don't know what these initiatives are. So if anybody send it, do you know anything about that? The sustainable development goals of the United Nations? I am not familiar or aware. Again, I will say what I said earlier. There are significant gaps in our understanding of the free knowledge ecosystem and how to best work with it. And I will put this in that category. Thank you for pointing it out. Even if you're doing things as a foundation that really are consistent with that. How does Wiki data fit into the Wikimedia Foundation goals? So Wiki data is one of our most important projects. It has been growing very very quickly. And actually one of the kind of strategies that we're working on as we speak more or less is what should the strategy be for Wiki data? Because it's been around for about five years. Some people will say it's getting to be ready to graduate. And the question is what job will it do? So will it be there primarily to support the encyclopedias? Will it be there to support institutions? Will it be there to provide APIs for others? Will it even be there to provide services on those APIs for others to use? And honestly we don't know the answer to that. What we're doing is continuing to involve Wiki data and the structures underneath it as part of a grant that we received from the Sloan Foundation called Structure Data Uncommon. So we're trying to marry Wiki data with Commons. So we're doing that fundamental work. And in the meantime we're also trying to figure out this more strategic question about what do we expect Wiki data to do? Because one of the most obvious things is that one of the most obvious questions is that of sustainability. So Wiki data is of course its own very vibrant community, but it is funded virtually exclusively out of Wikipedia proceeds. And one of the questions that of course you have to think about is if that is the case should the primary beneficiary of the Wiki data product be the encyclopedia? And if that's the case then the next thing that you have to think about is how does that work with the community of contributors that are putting together Wikipedia? So it's a complicated question, but it's very much something that we are really all over at this point. Both Wiki data and also I want to say Wiki base because I talked earlier about linked knowledge and we'll look at Wiki base as really the foundation around which we can start building this kind of knowledge web if you like. So you mentioned some of the technical changes coming forward and like the change back from HHVM to PHP7 or I know Kubernetes was up there on the slides and lots of businesses either have their business relying on MediaWiki as a core of their platform technologically. Of course there's consultants, of course there's other third parties who are trying to keep up to date with MediaWiki evolving over time. What would you say is the best way to gain visibility into those changes and also to have a voice into those in that direction? That's an excellent question and one that I would pant over to Cindy and not put Cindy on the spot but this is precisely why we have a product manager and a product manager that we're going to pick because she had very strong links with this community. So we're going to make sure that what you think what you need is represented as we figure out a roadmap so please be vocal and I think Cindy is the right kind of point of contact for all this but also it behooves us to communicate back to you because I don't know how much of the work that we do is visible to you through the year. I mean I'm sure it's nice to see me once a year but you know you need don't stop in the interim and that's you know that's part of the outreach that we want to do with this technical engagement team right so and also like so they want to engage but what are they going to engage with? One of the kind of key outputs of the platform evolution, CDP will be producing documentation and keeping it up to make sure that you know people that rely on our on our code base are actually served as well as we are and again you know we're not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts we're doing this because you know that community makes significant contributions back in the code base that we leverage so we know we don't have to hire another 20 30 engineers. Did you want to say something Cindy? Basically well first of all yes what you said absolutely and I think I've said this before several times this this week I've said it in previous meetings like this absolutely I'm here available for everybody for bi-directional communication both you know to the foundation as well as back I participate we've I don't know if we've talked enough about the media wiki stakeholders group this week but I participate actively in the media wiki stakeholders group we have a monthly telecon where we get together we talk about these issues and others and absolutely feel free anybody to reach out to me personally at any time with any questions any comments any feedback any desires and I'm here for you all as and I understand the domain that you're working in and the constraints of it and it is my goal as it is your goal as it is the foundation's goal to make this a active and fruitful collaboration thank you was there one more question over here on day one of the conference we were all asked if we had to change the media wiki logo to something else what would we what would it be uh so what would if you had to change the logo what would you choose so okay so I'm an engineer right I mean and I didn't go into engineering because I was good at art so I don't know I like kittens probably would be a kid no maybe the goat I don't know the goats that uh that Brian Davis came up with that's kind of cool so maybe the goat don't quote me on that though but I I don't know where the sunflower sunflower came from and what was what's the provenance of that is but it's very striking visually um so we'll we'll leave it to the product managers to figure out if a new visual identity is needed in this uh you know in this view yeah yeah so I it's not what you're saying is it's not just me that is challenged visually there I mean the reason why we came engineers is because we were not good at much else really all right so um without maybe I will just thank you so much for your attention and your your hospitality I'll look forward to continue working with you for the rest of the year and suddenly if you're kind enough to invite me next year I'll come and board the pants of you next year as well thank you


Everybody with a smart phone knows that protecting your device in a nice case is a good idea and most people equate protection of their phone with Otterbox, but I'm here in the Otter booth and I'm really glad I stopped by because when I think of Otterbox, I think of these big tank covers that look like you should be in your Jeep and your truck with your belt on and the whole thing, but these are really, really beautiful cases we're seeing here. So I'm talking to Beau Pascal and he's going to tell us about the new case lines. So we are really trying to branch out. Otterbox has always been known as kind of the more rugged case. Everyone's very familiar with our belt clip. It's more for outdoors, but we are finally branching out. This is called our symmetry style. So it's going to be a little more slim, streamlined, just a single piece. Some people just prefer more day-to-day drop protection rather than just all-out protection. I'm not dirt-bikey with it, I'm walking to work. Not everyone's a professional athlete. So these big cases for just day-to-day drops and now we have plenty of styles to fit your lifestyle and what you like, all your tastes. For the audio-only listeners, we're looking at like a dark red leather. We've got geometric patterns. We've got all kinds of starry, crazy sparkly stuff. We've got cases with a little cover on it. I mean, these things are beautiful. They look really nice. They don't look like, forgive me, but they don't look like an Otterbox. They look like a really pretty glamour case, but still protects your phone. We're really just trying to bring awareness that we do make more than just the big guy. So this is a really nice one. People like the Folio case, with everything very professional, just black slim cases. All right, so now we're going to, you've got an arrangement with another company. We're going to trot down here. Let's do. All right, who have we got here? So we've actually just started a partnership with Disney. So as you know, Disney also owns Lucas Arts. So we have Star Wars cases, and Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, and the classic Castle. That is so adorable. So you can protect your phone, but still be adorable at the same time, right? Exactly. You got an R2D2 case? If you guys want to come over to this side, we'll show you the Star Wars cases. So whether you're a fan of the light side or the dark side, we've got everything for you, from Darth Vader to Rey from the new Star Wars, and then the classic Storm Trooper. Oh my gosh. Yes. And great for Star Wars fans. Oh, this is fantastic. Yeah, I have, I know my friend Pat Dengler will be buying one of these immediately when she sees it. There you go. Yeah? Great. Are these available now? These are available now. So you can find them online at Otterbox.com or any major wireless carrier, Best Buy and Target. Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much, Bo. This is perfect. No problem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


We are a German network for nearly 100 private postal partners. The network itself was founded in 2010, and we are responsible for all logistic processes for all central IT solutions and also for the billing processes between all the partners. The partners are responsible for the local structure and their local customers, and we all together are responsible for processes and we define them together. We deliver letters and also direct mailings, and in addition now we are also expanded our portfolio to e-commerce letters up to 1 kg. After the liberalization of the German postal market, a lot of private postal companies were founded. In our network, everyone works according to the jointly defined processes and these are permanently adapted to the current requirements and changes. The network takes care of the super-regional and also now the global postal volumes. Together we are providing universal service in Germany in addition and parallel to Deutsche Postage. This year, MailLines was instrumental to harmonizing market participants through a deanspec process, postal service providers, software and hardware suppliers and also customers. It was mainly initiated and accompanied in the operative working groups by our partners and us. Taking into account existing national and international standards, including those of the Universal Postal Union, processes and data were further harmonized. The deanspec provides a comprehensive overview of harmonized access specification to the German postal network. Absolutely. Germany has already liberalized the National Universal Services to be provided by all postal operators domestically. Access of UPDOs from outside Germany to our German network is a consequence of the liberalization of the German postal market. This opening gives designated operators shipping to German alternatives to Deutsche Post and we hope that many designated operators will take advantage of this opportunity. Soon we will be compatible with UPU systems and standards, for instance, to admit. We would also like to thank Germany and the responsible Federal Ministry of Economics and the regulator Authority for the support and endorsement of our membership. We are ready for intensive cooperation with the UPU and we are also in a position to contribute our expertise to the relevant UPU working groups in the future. We hope for an intensive exchange with the DEOs, the members of the CA and all the other wider stakeholders. We realize that we have a lot to learn but our whole history is one of learning and involving. We also hope, of course, that based on our membership many of the DEOs will realize that there is an interesting, cheaper and high-quality alternative for sending commercial-letter items to Germany. High on our agenda is operational sustainability. We know that the UPU is a unifier of networks and solutions and we understand that regional and local solutions only work when they are linked together to global and worldwide efforts. This is an extremely important topic for mail lines and all the partners on the network. Germany is a country known for its regulation. For years we have been working on measures to optimize our ecological footprint. This is essential in order to be competitive. The topic of measuring CO2 and GHG is becoming increasingly important and the global OSCO system, which we only want to use, will pay a significant role in making our contribution to climate protection.