Hey everyone, it's Rachel Wolfson here. Thanks again for joining us for another exciting AMA. Today we have two very special guests. We are joined today with Amir. He is the CEO and founder at Lexit and Katya. She's the chief business officer and co-founder at Lexit. Hi Amir, hi Katya, how are you guys? Hi. Great, how are you? Thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for joining us. I'm really… I'm an awesome photographer. Amazing. Yeah, and I'm so excited to be speaking with you both today because obviously NFTs and DeFi, those are the two hottest buzzwords in the space right now and you guys know all about it. So that's really exciting stuff. Thank you very much. Looking forward to this. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So before we get into my questions, I'm just going to remind the audience to please send your questions our way. You've got two great experts here and just remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Okay. So first question, what is Lexit and how is it different from other NFT launchpad platforms? Well, lexit.com, we are a NFT launchpad with integrated liquidity DeFi pools. And imagine if I say Uniswap and the best NFT launchpad you could imagine would have a baby, we would call it Lexit. What he means is Lexit is a DeFi and NFT launchpad platform that enables you to tokenize your intellectual properties such as arts, music, films, inventions, collectibles to NFTs. Cool. And we make them tradable on the Lexit DeFi liquidity pools. Okay. Very cool. So let's dig a little bit deeper into those details because I'm sure it may be confusing for a lot of people. So let's better understand why artists would want to create NFTs on the Lexit platform versus other NFT platforms out there. Right. Right. So let's see. The thing is basically any decent coder can just go now and create a NFT or solidity on Ethereum. Now, you have an NFT, that's great, a good piece of code, but what are you going to do next? It's like as an artist or an inventor, you want to seek out and reach people. You want to reach out for funding to materialize your ideas into a product maybe or into something great that people can enjoy such as a book or a film or TV show, music or painting which you want to share across. So if you have this NFT now as a artist or an inventor, it's not going to carry you far away because you need to reach the masses, the people to actually know about you. And this is the big difference here that with Lexit.com you can really do that. We take you in and we're going to dig more into detail in the further questions, but you can actually do that and reach the masses and monetize on your intellectual property which essentially is backing that NFT. And furthermore, the next big problem is liquidity. You have to provide liquidity. If you as an artist or a project or a team of people want to make your NFT tradable, you have to go yourself to uni or to pancake swap and provide liquidity and we're talking about serious amounts of money here, six figures at least to do so. And I don't know many people who can do that. And we help. This is what we do. Got it. So that's the DeFi aspect in all of this. It's kind of rolled into one entire platform is what you're saying, right? Yes, pretty much. Got it. And I'm curious to know and I'm always, yeah, no, it's very awesome. I'm curious to know because whenever I hear about really cool projects like this, I'm always curious to know a bit about why these projects were created. Is it something, why did you guys create this platform? Is it like a personal thing or how did this idea come about? What's your story there? It's actually a pretty interesting story because that's actually how I met Amir. I was in Tallinn, Estonia in 2016 and I bumped into him and I met him and his crazy geniuses. And I think that's when he was, you were working on a different startup and you were... I just came up with the general idea, right? So yeah, it was like I was trying to actually monetize on computer code a pretty amazing GPS engine for mobile phones from a previous idea, a startup actually, an app we did, but it didn't work. So it failed like many startups do. But this code was so good, I thought, I'm going to find someone to at least license it or I can sell it to some of the bigger corporations, take the funds and start something great, right? And I soon realized, heck, there is no such place on the internet to do so. And it's definitely not on blockchain. And it was always on my radar and I was like, since 11 in that space, 2011. And I was thinking to myself, why isn't there a space where I can take my intellectual property, tokenize it, put it on a blockchain, make it accessible, try to monetize this way? I like a total different approach and mind that was like, I think a year before anyone before the term NFT was even, you know, coined, if you want to actually fit pretty well here, coined, right? We're all about coined here. And so it was really an exciting moment. And yeah, Katja, she was around at that time and she was so excited about everything what I was, you know, it was crazy talk, right? What are you trying to do? It's like, you want to do that? How are you going to do that? There are so many big corporations who do whatnot. And I said, there is a way, you know, blockchain can change a lot of things if done well. And so instead of going into the crazy in those ICO times, everyone was just talking about X this, X that, how to make money. And I was like, this is boring, guys. How about we think a bit further, how can we create something which has a real life application to it used on blockchain and can actually empower people? Got it. Yeah, very interesting. On that note, I just want to remind the audience, please send your questions our way. They know everything about NFTs. My next question for you guys is when we when we think of NFTs, a lot of the times we may think of artwork, but it seems like this expands much further than artwork. So, Amir, you've mentioned intellectual property a lot. Can you explain what type of NFTs are being placed on this platform? Yeah, yeah, definitely. See, we are opening next to this year and we say arts and inventions. So arts are encompassing music, paintings, drawings, collectibles, collectibles even very important writings. These are the things in arts, visual arts in in terms of, you know, videos and films and whatnot. So this is all intellectual property. Somebody created that and somebody owns that intellectual property. The copyright is a more popular term for that. And same goes to inventions, which is to us could be a patent that you have or you want to patent something you created and you need money for that because it's quite expensive. It goes quickly into five figures to just for one country. United States for a basic patent. It's like, yeah, I would all it's 20 K to start with around, you know, you need to specialize lawyers and whatnot. So you need money to protect your invention and in order to approach big companies to maybe excite them about it and to license it and to create a product out of it because that costs even more money. So you need funds to get started and for your filmmaker or your video game designer, you know, you have this basic idea, this 10 seconds video you created of it as a demo and you want to see if people like this idea for a video game and you need funds to do so just to get started. Right. So it is about providing access, access to people with great ideas, whether they are technical nature or creative nature in arts and entertainment and making these accessible to many more people who support you. But in return, obtain this NFT and might gain even profit from that personally. And this is what I like. I like win-win situations. Got it. So so it seems like once an NFT is created, is it placed in a liquidity pool? Is that what happens? Well, to be able to be more specific about that is a good question, Rachel. Now, the entity has been created. All right. First step is the artist or an vendor comes to us and says, I'd like to do this. This is what I do. First step is we are going to background check and vet and make sure that this individual company or party has the rights to that intellectual property that is going to be NFT or is the right righteous owner of this collectible. Like you have to provide proof of ownership of a collectible, something valuable process, you know, yes, yes. So once that is clear and it goes, we say, yes, we'd like to do that. So we do get keep a bit on that part, especially in the beginning to make sure that really good stuff is passing on the first launch path. So now we are signing a date on the launch pad. And now what happens is we are going to make it very public to the entire less than user base to anyone who's participating, who wants to participate. They have to apply whitelist also KYC. We have to do it the right way. There is no gray zone here to obtain this NFT or better a fraction of it, because this is now what we are, what makes us so different than many other NFT platforms. You see celebrities, NFT for one NFT, a dunk shot from a famous NBA player going for a lot of money, seven figures. Wow. Well, this guy or the team who owns the riots on this footage, they are already pretty well off, aren't they? I mean, they're famous, rich and famous, but is everyone rich and famous? No. So we are providing access to everyone. We are putting on an NFT into parts, we're splitting them apart, right? And make it accessible to more people to participate. Got it. OK, cool. And I'm going to ask you about the Lexi coin shortly, but we've got a few questions from the audience coming in. So obviously I want to take those because that's important. Let's see here. So Kumar is asking how the Lexi, how is the Lexi of 2021 different from 2017? Because the name remained the same and Amir's passion is the same. Did anything else change except the concept? OK, all right. In the very first 17 project, which had a legacy coin, and I want to just say here publicly, too, the legacy coin, anyone who ever uses credit card or anything else on an exchange or pre-sale to obtain the legacy coin, you will be swapped. Anyone who paid for a coin back in the days will be swapped. I just want to make that very clear, all right? But with that later, it's not important now, but it's important to me. So the difference right now, Kumar, and this is a very good question and I'm happy to answer it, is I was in 17 with the team and we had another part of Lexi, which is M&A, Verges and Acquisitions, which is a very complex process to put on a blockchain. And so we soon realized we should stick to the roots of the project, which is intellectual property than NFTs, and extend that to the best possible platform to make it work. You know, as soon as we realized great tokenization, we figured it out how to split, how to do that, how to distribute. Like all these aspects were clear, but then we realized to really empower the people, you need to give them more, right? The NFT issuer, the guy or the company or the lady who's doing it, they have to have the possibility to liquidize some of it, right? To fund themselves and to really get kick-started because nothing in this world is happening without putting down some dough. We know that, right? So we have to support them. So we ditched basically the M&A part for now, we'll see, and focus entirely on our intellectual property, NFT launchpad and the DeFi liquidity pooling. Got it. Cool. On that note, Amir and Katya, I want to talk about the Lexicoin because that launches tomorrow. Congratulations. So, yeah, maybe explain what the Lexicoin is, how people can obtain it, what you guys are thinking because it launches tomorrow. I'm sure that's super exciting for both of you. It's, I mean, like it's been a rough patch, right? It's been a lot. It's, yes, we are going to be tomorrow available on PancakeSwap and then on the 28th on BitMart, so which is exciting. It's been a roller coaster of a month, sleepless, nice, but we're super excited. I want to make it very public right now. We're live on the internet, right? Guys, this lady just basically works four full-time jobs and I'm not kidding. Whatever I throw at her, she's just like, I did it already. I was like, no, I'm serious. I want to say thank you. Thank you, Amir. Thank you, Katya. Thank you, Amir. And thank you, Rachel and Cointelegraph. Yeah, of course. We're very excited about it tomorrow and how it started was, as a matter of fact, the plan for an IDO and everything was there, but it was planned for a bit later. But what happened is weeks ago, essentially, like not even eight weeks ago, I had a phone call with an associate and friend of mine who has always been a strong supporter, Tim Frost. He's the founder or co-founder. There are some other founders, too, of the Yield app. And guys, check out Yield app. It's an amazing, amazing app, very simple to use. Yield app from Tim Frost. So I have him on the phone and he's like, Amir, what's up? He has his D-boys, he's a six foot ten guy, you know, ex-MBA player, great guy. Anyways, he's like, what's up? What's going on? And Lex said, what are you doing? So I'm telling him what I just told you guys, what we're doing. And he was like, I've got to get you connected to a few guys. And all of a sudden, I'm in a Zoom call with the four guys who call the shots at BSC Pat, which is, well, the hottest launch pad on the planet. And those guys were listening to me, probably thinking with a British accent that this guy's a looney or something, you know. And what they told me, we have a huge queue here, but basically pick your date. And I was like, holy crap, I'm actually not ready for that. We thought we have a bit more time, but it worked. So we were pushing like crazy. And yeah, tomorrow is the day to get it out there. Cool. And then we've got a question from the audience. Ayaz is asking, what's the starting price? One one dollar USD one dollar. OK, USD. Got it. Got it. OK. And then my question is because, Amir, you brought up Binance Smart Chain. I'm wondering, can you guys discuss why you chose to do it on Binance Smart Chain versus Ethereum? I don't know if there's any specific reason, but I've been hearing a lot of people launching on Binance Smart Chain lately versus Ethereum. And yeah, just interesting. Yeah, the thing is we all know currently there's a lot of projects switching from Ethereum in your city, 20 to Binance Smart Chain, which is a fork and essentially the very same thing, except a few benefits at this point. I want to express my gratitude to the entire Toronto team around Vitalik, who created Ethereum. You guys are trailblazers. You opened up a new world, smart contracts and anything related to that. And we're very happy that this ever happened because you did set a new direction for crypto in general. But the reason why we switched from ERC 20 to BAP 20, well, one of the reasons is, yeah, the fees, they are an issue. And yes, Ethereum is coming up with significantly great improvements, which wouldn't be an argument anymore. But the main reason is that I really was convinced that BSCPad is the right partner. You know, those guys really run many successful launches. And I just felt, OK, if we're doing it, we're going to have to do it with those guys. And well, they're running on Binance Smart Chain. And I was having a discussion with our co-founders here with us three. And it wasn't a live decision, believe me that, because I do love Ethereum, right? Could be faster, but it's a great, bloody thing, right? And so we came to this decision that let's swap over to BAP 20 on BSE. And let's do it. Made sense. Got it. Cool. OK, awesome. Audience members, just a reminder, please send your questions our way. My next question is, because we were talking about the Lexi coin a little bit, what are the uses when you have that? How do you use it? How is it used in the ecosystem? I'm sure there's many uses and I think it's really important to talk about that. Well, I mean, the reason why, first of all, I'd like to just scratch a bit. Why an IDO in the first place? I mean, the project and we want to be enabled to hire up the best people we can get our hands on, right? Because you need smart, very smart people and these people are very sought after, you know, they have, you know, have wages to pay. So we do have to make an IDO and we have a very small allocation for liquidity ourselves of only 2 percent of the entire total supply. That's very important to understand why are we doing this idea? But secondly, we'd like to get the Lexi coin out there in as many hands as possible and create awareness about it, which is then leading to the launch of the platform and we hope to increase this awareness among inventors and artists of all kind to realize what actually of an opportunity Lexi.com is for them. And together, because we can create the greatest tech, the most beautiful platform, the easiest user interface and experience, but it's not going to be worth a dime if it's not being used. And so we have to create awareness. And it's a good thing to create awareness for the coin launch, meaning that people are interested maybe in increased value in trading it. So you are in the, you know, in the bus, hopefully. Got it. OK. Katya, did you want to add anything to that about the Lexi coin? And yeah, no, Lexi coin, it will be definitely the practical purpose that will that you will need to participate on Lexi on Lexi. So almost like the central enabler to all our products and services and and also there will be announcements coming up. I don't know how you can be heard. Yeah, you can even add something. Yeah. OK. Yeah. So how far do we go? How far do we want to go? Well, we will be introducing upcoming staking programs and by participating also in our DeFi liquidity pools as a form of reward for participation as well. So there's going to be a lot of announcements that we're going to be having in the coming weeks. You know, as much as our IDO is going to be tomorrow, we're just getting started. So it's it's going to be definitely the central enabler for everything. And or anyone who is now thinking about, hey, I should try to get on BSE pad and do it, try to do it, whitelist yourself. And anyone trying to maybe obtain some Lexi coin tomorrow at Pancake Swap or two days later on BitMart, I want to let you know one thing. Now, we talked about the NFT launchpad. And the only way to purchase any NFT on Lexi.com on the launchpads is going to be via the Lexi coin exclusively. No Bitcoin, sorry. And it's on purpose. Why, of course, we want to, you know, increase adoption of Lexi coins. So if you ever want to obtain NFTs on Lexi and you want to get those Lexis fairly cheap, well, I can't say that. No, I can't give any recommendations on trading. Sorry. Yeah, that's interesting. For the NFTs that are on the platform, can you talk about what those NFTs are? Oh, in term, I mean, it's leading. This is a segue, actually, to to the third pillar of Lexi itself. Right. We do have the NFT launchpad. We do have to defy liquidity pooling with later on various combination of trading pairs, not just Lexi coin. You can do completely different things. Even third party projects who want to provide liquidity for their own coin, they can come to Lexi and open up a liquidity pool not related to the NFTs on the platform. So we are, in a way, competing with UNI and PancakeSwap, too. But that's what it is, right? Crypto has to be open, open-minded. That's what we believe. Decentralize and give everyone a fair shot. So this is what we want to take advantage of, too. But it's important to understand that the third pillar. OK, we started doing it. We realized that tokenization is possible. The defy pooling, OK, good, too. But then we realized it's going to be tough in the future to meet the increasing demand on performance on the protocols available right now. We need more hash speed, way more, we realize soon. And so it began long ago. Farad Zeba, our CTO, was creating, together with me, an architecture, and then he started developing it. He's our chief choreographer and CTO, and he's really smart. This man is so smart. And we created an alien, essentially. We must have some habitat of the dark side of the moon or something. I don't know. He's just crazy, crazy. And he's such a nice and funny guy, too. So and we realized we need more performance. We need more flexibility in the protocol to do so. We need a bit different consensus and how to do things to make it to high performance. Yeah, you're hearing right. We started doing it and the Lexnet is in a prototyping phase right now. And it's very exciting. It's a highly performant, but fully cross-chain oriented new protocol, which is going to power Lexit, which is on top just essentially a decentralized application. And next year, we're going to open up the Lexnet for anybody for free without any licensing or any sort of source. We're going to open source the thing and make it available to anybody who wants to create great dApps and use this protocol, which is driven again by LexiCoin. Got it. Very cool. OK, we've got a couple of questions coming in from the audience. So I'm going to take some of those. So we've got a lot actually. So Jonathan is asking, he's asking a few questions, but one of his questions is, what is the percentage for staking? Not yet determined. OK, we are announcing it. We will come up with the staking before you want to explain that. Yeah, she's the business. Yeah, so we're going to we're going to announce that within the month. We're just kind of crunching some numbers, but it's we're going to tear them in, you know, within three months, six months, 12 months. And we're going to see what makes sense. But I think it's going to range. I like ranges between four percent to, let's say, 15 to be in the safe side. But it's we'll get to that. But the announcement should come up, I think, for weeks. Yeah, probably like that. Right, look for it on Cointelegram. Yeah, look, follow us on Twitter. Join the Telegram. Exactly. Yeah, Jonathan is also asking, what is the starting market cap for the IDO estimated at? Right. Well, since it's public now, six hundred and fifty thousand lexicoints, each one be USD. That's an initial, you know, second zero point zero of six hundred fifty K USD market cap. But of course, there is a few parties in liquidity. We have a lock up for all presale, for instance. We did a very successful presale, sold it out. Very, very nice. Thank you to all presale back as you guys are amazing because they are locked up and everyone knows what that means.  So it's a strong commitment here. And because they know they have to wait for a bit of time to get that. And additionally, they'll be on a vesting schedule, linear vesting over months and months. So that's very good to anyone who's participating right now on the initial IDO because I believe in the whole team. We discussed that and we said, if we're doing it, it has to be a fair launch and also very important for you guys, we are upgraded or contract of lexicoin and the contract address for you coders is public. You can read it up. You can check the code yourself. We have a comprehensive anti-bot protection. So there's a thing called front running, which is essentially automated trading by computer programs bots who are, you know, pumping up the price of a coin. And then, you know, on a peak, they just cut it off and sell off and wipe the order books. So that's not going to be possible. You know, if we have this pattern in the trade, they're going to be kicked out. So pretty good. Fair launch. Got it. Nice. So I want to kind of direct the conversation a little bit back towards the platform side of things. I'm curious. So obviously, this is a very unique concept. NFT is in DeFi. Are you guys the are do you have any competitors in this space? Is this kind of the first platform that actually takes both of these concepts and combines them? I mean, I would say we don't, right? I don't think we do, but, you know, there's I don't think I haven't seen a platform that has NFTs and DeFi on one platform. No, we're trying to create that one stop shop. A user-friendly experience, right? So I don't know if you can elaborate more on here, but I would say no. I can say that one of my daily routines in the morning is to Google. If there's anyone coming up with something similar, just to motivate myself to be better, you know? So no, at the moment, we don't see. They're great NFT launch pads out there and, you know, open C whatnot. And they're really, really doing tremendous good work. I got to say, and you guys are also highly regarded in with another team because you are part of the space and we try to find a way to put NFTs, which are fairly simple mechanism in itself, right? But enable so much. This is incredible. It's like water. Water is such a simple thing, but, right? All of life. So and NFTs are kind of an amazing, amazing vehicle to accomplish new use cases and monetize things in a totally different way. Which is good. It puts people, you know, to work and creates opportunity. And hopefully as many, many, many more people will prosper out of this. And thank you to all of you. And if you launch without there, you are inspiring, but we are different. Right.  Have you heard of centrifuge? They're more on the enterprise side of things where they're taking business things like invoices and tokenizing those, turning them into NFTs, putting in a liquidity pool. So based on that, because obviously it's different, but somewhat similar. Would you guys, I'm just curious to know, would you be merging in the future into the enterprise space where you can tokenize invoices or things such as bills of lading and turn those into NFTs and then have a liquidity pool?  Yeah, see, the thing is with the base technology and the base frameworks of centrifuge, we are aware of them. We could technically do what we do in a way, but it would completely go straight from the business model. And same to us, you know, enterprise, there has to be good solutions for them too, but we don't think so. You know, we are very happy with empowering anyone with a brilliant mind to reach the masses and to find its way out there and not saying it's boring to do something else. But I think it's, listen, arts, let's take just arts for once. What is art? It's the very thing that makes you and me, the listener and viewer a human being without music, without literature, without feelings expressed in carvings or in a sculpture with just, you know, apes, OK? So I think it's such an important aspect of human nature, arts plus inventions, building things that make us safe, not freeze, fly to Mars with Elon Musk and never come back. Don't ever dump Bitcoin again, dude. I'm kidding. So, you know, this is important to us. And so we are very committed to that empowerment of everyone who has the merit and the talent. Yeah. And we want to focus on that. And we want to focus on bringing opportunity to anybody and everybody with true talent. There's so much hidden talent and all over the world that normally goes unnoticed. Bump down the queue and or even they don't even have the courage or support to make it to that queue in the first place. So I think with Lexa, what we want to bring is equality to the industry and not not not have the privilege, I guess, decide whether you're entitled to your own success. So we want to focus on that creative side.  Totally. I mean, yeah, affordable. No, this is very important. Rachel, this is such an important thing to us. Yeah, I really imagine that once we are up and running and there might be a few kids somewhere, say Manila, Philippines, who are not raised in a wealthy environment where they have a father and mother who can support them in their dreams, you know, because that's the reality. You, Rachel and us here, we're privileged people. We live in a privileged environment in safe countries, fairly safe countries. And but this is the exception. This is 90 percent of the population on this planet don't. That's the hard reality, the harsh reality. And the least we can do is to give give everyone a fair shot. And I want those kids, Manila, to know we're with you guys. Code your thing. Make your demo. Come to Lexa.com. Try to NFT. Try to find a way to monetize. Convince us and you'll get launched. Let's go to Nupita. Stay Neptune for Nupita. So I love that. That's amazing. And you know what? That's what blockchain is about. I mean, I I have, you know, I focus a lot on enterprise because that's kind of what I've been doing over the past years in the space. But blockchain is about inclusive, like including everyone from around the world, having that open nature, allowing opportunities for everyone in underdeveloped countries. And so I just love what you guys said. You know, obviously, I think enterprise use cases are extremely important. But what you said for your business use case is so important for creatives and artists anywhere in the world. And that's what blockchain is about. So I love that. Yeah, thank you for recognizing this is important. That's what that's what honestly pushes us every day. So and we're super excited. It's going to be a really fun ride to do this and create this opportunity for so many people around the world. Absolutely. Right. Thank you for this recognition. This is very important. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I'm going to take a question from an audience member. The crypto investor is asking. So if I was Disney, could I sell Mickey Mouse through your platform? I mean, it's a funny question, but actually, you know, it makes sense, I guess. Yeah, you want to go? All right, well, dear crypto investor, very, very. You're on our telegram, I know. Anyway, if you were to own the rights on the fictional character Mickey Mouse, which I loved as a kid, but then he creeped me out and I was afraid of him. Kidding. I love him still.  OK, anyway, so if you were to own the rights and copyrights and reproduction and rights in making prints of anything of sorts. Yeah, sure. If the Disney cooperation would come around and say, hey, let's a team pretty impressive. We have a few ideas where all ears. Yes, essentially, that's possible because it is intellectual property, even if he looks funny. Mm hmm. So based on that question, I have another question. You briefly mentioned there's a KYC process where you just kind of do due diligence to make sure that that property is actually that person's property. Can you talk about what that process is like for KYC on the platform? Right. It does depend a bit on what is the intellectual property. Say it is a painting, a talented painter is coming along and saying, I have this painting. I own it to copyright. They have to provide proof as far as possible that this painting belongs to them, a certificate, for instance, or they purchased the painting and somehow they managed to even purchase the copyrights, which in some countries isn't even possible. So based on your country where you're from and the regulations and laws from your country, we will take, you know, an evaluation and vetting if this is actually yours. That's the first step. The second is at the same time, basically it's a KYC, meaning a full KYC. Like if you open up a bank account, you have to provide identity, proof of address, who you are and everything. So we have to make sure that you are not on any embargo lists and any, you know, any sorts of which would prohibit you to participate. If you're passing all this and you're the owner of this intellectual property, then you pass the most important gate and then you come to the evaluation side of things where we, you know, try to deem if that's something interesting to our community at this time or not. And we are aware that at some point there might be a lot of applications coming in. So we are working on AI powered systems to kind of filter out a bit for us because it would be humanly really difficult to do it, you know, at some point, probably. Yeah, but yes, guys, you need to tell us who you are in real. And if you really own it, we need to know else we can't do it. And we're going to take it very seriously. Yeah. And I think she is frozen. Yeah, I may be frozen, but I can still hear you. Apologies if I'm frozen. Yeah. Oh, I lost. We lost you for a second. Yeah, yeah. So you guys can talk to you that you're going to take it very seriously. Yeah, you didn't really, you didn't lose me that much. No, no, for us, it's very important that we do take this very, you know, very seriously and we're going to in place a very strategic partnership. We have our CTO, a Fair Hatsy, but that's creating a whole process around it. And it's we're very, you know, we're going to put a very strategic process in place. It has to be a fair play, right? And we try to reduce the space that actors have on the internet. It's not easy, but we want it to be a fair place and that nobody is going to be, you know, damaged materially or in any other way. Yeah, got it. Yeah, that's obviously really important. Another question that I wanted to ask was the physical aspect of NFTs. So let's say you have an artist with the painting. They you tokenize that it becomes an NFT if somebody wants to purchase it. Would they also receive that physical item as well as the NFT? Or are you doing anything with physical is what I'm trying to ask here. Right, right. Yes and no, it depends what the NFT, the copyright or item owner wants. So if they say, for instance, I have footage of something rare. Nobody has seen before and I just want to provide access. So the NFT could be a key to to provide access to that footage on a stream or anything of sorts. But it could be that an artist who is a painter or a writer wants to sell indeed the copyright and ownership to so title of it to somebody else. You know, as an NFT, that's possible, too. There would be a transaction happening in between those parties and two. So there are multiple ways of doing so. It all depends on the item and what is the purpose of the NFT? Because that's the most important question is to us, right, especially for Katya in a business segment. If you want to NFT something, right, you've got to tell us. Yeah, right. What do you want to do with this? Does it make sense? Do we think that when we do have a lot of experience in the segment, do we think that this is something that interests people? You know, of course, you know, and that's going to be part of the exciting part because we're going to we're going to explore all the different unique ways that you can NFT and tokenize something. So it's going to be it's going to be exciting. Maybe you can tell them a little bit about our exciting partnership. Like this is very exciting. Yeah, yeah. So of course, yeah, no. Well, there's, as I mentioned earlier, we are going to announce many strategic partnerships and, you know, offerings that we're going to have in the near future. But one of them is Toasted. So they are a media company based in Amsterdam and they hold thousands of never never seen before footage of backstage videos, interviews, studio sessions, all the way back from Amy Winehouse Coldplay Beyonce and we're super excited. We were actually the other the other day with all the founders looking through some of the videos and it's it was it's crazy. So crazy. It was an epic moment. It was an epic moment. And right now what we're doing is actually this week we're sitting down with the CEO, Paul, and we're going to explore unique ways of how we can tokenize all these never before seen footages and provide many innovative use cases for you guys. Offer a nice deal to the artists themselves, you know, there's going to be so many different people that are going to benefit from this that we're just so excited to show you guys for when we're going to launch the fans of the emotional connections. Right. It's it's going to bring back and we're going to throw. We're going to bring campaigns to it. It's it's works. We're going to work. Yeah. Excited. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm excited to hear more of that. That's really cool. I hope I see some, you know, old music collections that I listened to when I was a kid, you know, Britney Spears or something like that. Yes, a child's tent. That's good. That's enough to me. Yeah, there's going to be a lot. There's a lot of really exciting. I'm very excited. That's like my part of my big part of my role. So I'm a big fan of some of these things, like a huge fan of some of these artists. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, you've got to pinch yourself. You might have a shot here of, you know, yeah, building this into your your start up with your partners is just mind blowing. It's fun. Yeah. Let's see. Yeah. It is mind blowing, but I wanted to ask you both because this is such a unique platform that you've built merging NFTs with the DeFi space. Do you think I mean, right now we've seen this NFT boom, everybody's excited. It's kind of going mainstream. Christie's, you know, they're doing auctions of NFTs. But do you think that this is the future of the NFT space? I mean, obviously, it's not just going to stand still at what it is today. But do you think that NFT and DeFi is the future of the NFT space and could even potentially go mainstream moving forward? What do you think? Go ahead.  Absolutely. See, as we speak right now, not far away from you, Rachel, a bit more south in Los Angeles, the big seven media corporations are tossing in a lot of money into blockchain NFT solutions to find a way how to build it for themselves, what they always do, each for themselves, competing with another. This is not how we click, right? We're crypto and as crypto, we are open minded. We were inclusive, right? We want to create something that anyone can use. And yeah, those guys are doing it not just for fun. They are realizing quickly that this is a very interesting vehicle, NFT, to open up entirely new revenue streams, you know, to access content and entertainment. Just one example of the entire NFT space, right? So I think that what's happening right now with the big auctioneers like Sotheby's and whatnot and the big, you know, ball players, videos of slam dunks and whatnot, well, this is fun in a way. But really, to me, it's just a way to raise awareness. And I'm grateful it happened.  This is some serious money we're talking about. To me, a million bucks is a lot of money personally, you know. And I'm thinking to myself, it makes no sense.  Yeah. So I think that the future is wide open and that the possibilities are almost limitless, you know. So let's let's do it. Yeah. And we have a great team of developers and internal team that are every day looking in new ways, how to create a more user friendly platform and to make it more mainstream. So it's it's really exciting. So that's definitely we think it is the future, but I think it's we're just it's just the starting. Yeah, right. Yeah, I agree. It's just getting started. And that's why projects like Lexet are so important. I just want to remind the audience. We've got a few more minutes, so please send your questions our way. What questions from the audience? No, no, nothing against yours, Rachel. I was just going to say, I mean, my questions are boring. No, no, no, I like I'm joking. Speak at my questions. I have another one based on what you guys were saying, because we all tend to agree that this is the future of the space, but we're just getting started. What are the biggest challenges that still need to be overcome in order for this to go mainstream? I think education is definitely one big thing. We need to and that's one of the one of our goals is to continually continuously educate our audience so that the 12 year old one day will understand, but also are the elderlies every single generation. I think that's one big challenge and simple ways and user experience. I think it's definitely a big thing. We want one of our biggest goals is to. I don't want to say it to be Apple friendly, but it's, you know what I mean? So it's just going to be easy to do so that when you go on Lexit, it's you get it right away. OK, I could do like that, right? So I think to make it mainstream, we definitely need to continually to educate and then also provide user friendly platforms and maybe not so many of them. Just like I said, I'm kidding. Yeah, crypto is just such a great space and blockchain technology itself is so exciting to so many people. But guys, let's not kid ourselves. There's so many people out there like 99 percent who don't yet know how to open up just a simple wallet somewhere. You know, we need to put way more effort in building solutions and making people understand our solutions in a simpler way in order to have this mainstream adoption. It's not enough that someone knows over my bank account. I now can buy crypto with my credit card and I have Bitcoin. You know, no, we all know this this field is way more diverse in ways how to utilize blockchain technology, right? Now, we are one of the many cases out there. We're quite unique. Yeah, NFT launchpad with DeFi liquidity. We are basically, you know, this is it's a it's a crazy cool thing. I've got to tell you that. But there's so many other great ideas and we have to make the people understand how do they work? In simple examples, not saying they don't know, but if you don't have the information, how would you know, you know, how to react, how to use it? So we need to educate, as Katya said. Yeah, and to that say, to be able to diversify and to have to give opportunity and equality to everyone, we do need to continue to educate. And that's one of our goals. And I know my goal for sure is to continue to do that and to provide that so that it becomes user friendly and easy to use for everyone. Right. Adopt. Yeah, and that's now I will try to sabotage me. Update, automatic update. I was like, no, no, no. No, they're listening. Yeah, really, really, guys. I'm kidding. But based on what you both were saying, first of all, I agree 100 percent. Second of all, Katya, and you mentioned that's one of your goals is education and educating people on this new space and this unique platform. Do you have any other goals that we can expect to see in the next six months or so? I mean, obviously educational content. Yeah. But what else can we expect to be from Lexit? Yeah, of course. Well, we're going to build our office. That's definitely. And then look for more strategic partnerships as toasted. So anyone listen to this? Give me a ring. But we're hiring. But yes, definitely building our, you know, our home base or headquarters and also making sure that our we're all ready for our launch date for our launch NFC launchpad for August. But we have many goals. That's just one of them. That's just one of them to make sure that we do diversify. I mean, you can find the roadmap, for instance, anyone who wants to dig into it on Lexit.com. And there is white paper and there's a roadmap, one of the last slides. And you can see what we intend to do if you really want to know more details about it. Yeah, but it's quite some work. But we think we can we can keep the pace and we're going to have a bit more sleep in the next weeks, hopefully, because this campaign whoop. Yeah. Yeah. But our goal is definitely we're supposed to launch a Q4 beginning of Q4 for our NFT launchpad. So we're just going to what we're going to be doing for the next, you know, whatever, three, four months is to make sure we have everything in place for that to run smoothly, successfully with all our partners and new partners to come. Cool. And you mentioned you're building an office out of curiosity. Where is that? Is it US based or is it Europe? Or I got to tell you something. I have I have two wonderful sons. I say I can keep and 11 and 13 and I'm traveling a lot and they live with my ex-wife, which is a wonderful woman, Mia. And they live in Hamburg. So we basically could have chosen any spot in the world to build the base and because we work decentralised like a blockchain currently, except as a CEO, CTO Ziba, Farad is with me all the time. I don't let this guy far away. Yeah. Yeah. And so I asked the team, my co-founder is like, hey, guys, I'd like to pick Hamburg, Germany, because my kids are there. Yeah, it didn't take them 0.1 seconds to say, of course. And so I love them for that. Yeah. So it's going to be Hamburg, Germany. Yeah. That's going to be our headquarters next month, actually, like in two weeks. Awesome. Cool. But I'm assuming even though that it's based there, you're going to be global. I mean, people in the U.S., people in Asia, people anywhere could basically work for Lexit. And after, yeah, we are going to work. We're hiring globally, for sure. And after we launch our NFT launchpad, we're going to definitely go on a world tour to promote and close partnerships. So we'll be everywhere. Asia, Australia, the U.S. It's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah. So we're excited. Awesome. Well, I hope to catch you guys in person soon if you make it to the U.S. or if I... Oh, we will. I will take you to the U.S. California, San Francisco, a plant. So we will be here. Awesome. I can't wait. We don't have any other questions from the audience. So on that note, I just want to give you guys a minute to just let everyone know how they can be in touch with you. Just say your telegram group, the Twitter handle again, maybe an email, because I'm sure people want to reach out and find out more. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Our Twitter is at Lexit, co. So yeah, capital Lexit, C-O lowercase. Yeah. So you could follow us on Twitter. You can go on our website also, www.lexit.com. It has all the information, our telegram, our Instagram, and also you could subscribe to our newsletter as well. Or just Google that thing here, right? Yeah. And then do you want to add anything? Well, no, that's pretty much it. I mean, I'd like the lady to have the last word. Yeah. So thank you. Yeah. No, thank you so much, Rachel and Cointelegraph. It's been really great. And thanks for everyone watching. We love you guys. Yeah. Cool. Well, thanks, Amir. Thanks, Katya. It's been a pleasure. I can't wait to meet you guys in person. And I'm really excited to hear what's to come with Lexit. Thank you to our audience for joining us today. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel for future AMAs. And we'll see you guys next time.


from automation to community, a deep dive into SIG contributor experience. And a reminder, we do have a code of conduct in place, so please be respectful and excellent to each other. I know the one for Kubernetes basically says to be respectful of your fellow attendees. I would assume this one's the same. There is a closed captioning available if you are on virtually, so hopefully at this point you've figured that out. If not, here's a little bit of information about that. I'm not going to sit here, though. I'm going to move on. And we will introduce ourselves. Priyanka, would you like to start? Hey, everyone. My name is Priyanka. I work at SUSE as Kubernetes Integration Engineer and been part of the project, Kubernetes project, for a while now in SIG release, and now in Contribux area. Hi. My name is Madhav. I work at VMware. Currently, I'm our technical lead for SIG Contributor experience. Other than Contribux in the community, I work a little bit on API machinery and architecture. And I'm Kazlin Fields. I'm a developer advocate at Google Cloud, where I focus on Google Kubernetes Engine and open source Kubernetes, and recently nominated as one of the new co-chairs of SIG Contribux. And I've been working with open source since 2020. And I am also the sub-project lead of the contributor comm sub-project, which we'll talk a little bit more about later. But before we start, we have a very important thing that we want to make sure that everyone is aware of. If you haven't seen it yet, has everyone seen this so far? Yeah? A few people haven't. A few people didn't raise their hands anyway. So now, hopefully, you will be aware, we are making some changes to the way our registry works. If you have been using kates.gcr.io to get Kubernetes-hosted container images, we do need you to move over to registry.kates.io. This is a new community-owned URL for you to be able to get your container images from. It helps out the project a whole lot in terms of back-end infrastructure and billing. So it'd be really, really helpful if you and if you could tell all of your friends to please change any references to kates.gcr.io to registry.kates.io. We have frozenkates.gcr.io for some images at least. And you should not expect it to live forever. You should expect that you will need to move to the registry.kates.io registry at some point. There's a lot more information on our blog about the redirect and the changes that we're doing here. Don't expect it to go away on its own. Please make those changes yourself. They will save you in the long run. If you'd like to ask more questions about that later, we can talk about it more later. But first, let's actually get into the meat of our presentation for today talking about the Special Interest Group for Contributor Experience in the Kubernetes Project. How do we do the work that we do, whatever that work is, if you are familiar or unfamiliar? The way that we do all of our work really is through subprojects. We break all of the stuff that we kind of own in the project down into these subunits. And Priyanka is going to walk us through the first set. Yeah, so the first subproject we have is community. And this project owns and manages the overall community repo we have, which also include our community groups, documentation, and any operations there. Next, we have community management, which also manages all the operations and policies that we have for the upstream community, communication platforms. Then we have documentation, contributor documentation. So we also manage and maintains rights, documentation around contributing to Kubernetes and subprojects in general, and which also includes everything within here, Contributor's Guide, Developer's Guide, and the website we have for Contributor. Okay. This is a really interesting part of the community that we sort of help maintain called DevStats. If you don't already know, DevStats, as the name suggests, stands for Developer Stats. It gives, if you go to that link, it's a Grafana dashboard with a bunch of developer metrics of the CNCF, or more specifically, the Kubernetes landscape. So we have things like distribution of contributors across companies, distribution of contributors across projects, very, very interesting things, like what's the median time for a PR to merge in Kubernetes. Spoiler alert, it's three and a half to four weeks. So if you're frustrated with how long it takes, it's normal. We have a new subproject called Elections, and we have Josh Berkis here who's the lead for that subproject. The Elections subproject is critical to our community because it helps run elections in the community, maintains documentation for it, and also maintains the tool that runs these elections securely and confidentially. That's called Electo, so that project always needs help, so if that's of interest to you, reach out to Josh Berkis or on the CIC Contributex channel. We have the Events subproject, which is responsible for all the events that the Kubernetes project specifically does. For example, the Contributor Summit that took place yesterday. We have GitHub Management, which we'll be talking a lot about today and giving you some insights into how we do things in the community, and maybe you can adopt that for your projects as well. So, Managers, Controls, GitHub Permissions, Repos, and Groups. We try to automate all of this in a way that is consistent for users across the community so that it's scalable, it's secure, and overall a good contributed experience, as the name of our group is. Handing it over to Kaslin. We also have a subproject for mentoring within the project. If you checked out the keynotes earlier, there was a shout out to how important it is to do mentoring in open source projects. So our mentoring group helps to interface with the CNCF with some of the mentoring programs that the CNCF is involved with that Kubernetes also participates in, things like the Linux Foundation Mentoring Program, which LFX Mentorships, I think is what it's called, and Google Summer of Code, so programs like that. Also having some mentoring activities within the contributor community, like having mentoring meetings, and helping folks get involved like that. This subproject is in particular need of help, so if you're interested in mentoring, definitely reach out. We could particularly use some help with kind of coordination activities that that group needs to do, so if that sounds interesting at all to you, please let us know. We also have the Slack Infra subproject, so this is gonna be the group that does a lot of management and maintenance of our Slack tooling. We have an enormous Slack instance, because we have so many contributors. We have all sorts of automation going on in it, so there's a lot that's involved with Slack Infra maintenance and management. And of course, contributor comms. I mentioned this earlier, but the contributor communications group is all about making sure that folks within the contributor community understand what's going on for the community and also making sure that folks outside of the community hear about the awesome work that contributors are doing. So we run a Twitter account at Kates Contributors. We recently created a master non account which we're working on getting set up, and we help with emails. Sometimes messages go out on Slack via the Slack bot that we also work with Slack Infra on. We have a variety of different ways that we get in touch with the community. If you're interested in that, join us. Fridays at 8 a.m. Pacific. So I wanted to talk a little bit more about mentoring. We also got a shout out, which was lovely in the keynotes, about the concept of a ladder for contributors. So here is a bit of a look at the ladder that we have for Kubernetes contributors. So a lot of the folks that come in to contribute to Kubernetes are folks who just wanna do one thing and be done with it and not really do anything else. Or honestly, most of the folks that I interact with are folks that are trying to figure out how to get involved with the community. Usually takes a few tries. The first time you go and find a good first issue and maybe it was labeled as a good first issue but it wasn't a great good first issue. All sorts of things can happen. So most of the folks who contribute are non-member contributors. They're not members of the Kubernetes org. It's their first time attempting to contribute. Maybe something will go wrong, maybe it won't, maybe they'll do what they came there for and move on. So a lot of folks stop there. But if you want to continue and become a member of the Kubernetes org, then of course you'll become a member contributor. There's a process to apply for org membership. I don't think there's an actual requirement for two pull requests. We used to use that as like a general baseline. But really the idea of applying for membership is that we get a sense that you're here to stay. You're not one of the folks that's just there to do one thing and go away. You're looking for a way to get involved with the community. Once you can show that to folks who are already in the community, they can help you get org membership by sponsoring you. That's kind of the general concept. Then once you've been a member for a while and you start taking on more responsibility, you'll become a reviewer. Someone who has privileges on certain repos to be able to review submissions to those. And then of course you become an approver. So a reviewer can give like an LGTM. And an approver would be someone who says, yes, this is ready to go in. And can be that final last step before a change actually happens. So there are two levels there that you might not think to separate. And then above that is sub-project owner. So this is another level of responsibility where you may be in charge of group activities like running meetings and organizing tasks and activities for the group. So it has a bit more process to it as well. So you can kind of see how this builds a ladder of starting out, contributing, and becoming a more ingrained part of the project. Here's a little bit more about the mentoring sub-project that we mentioned earlier. They do group mentoring cohorts theoretically. They try to help encourage other SIGs and working groups to work mentoring into the way that they do things. And they also help some folks establish shadowing programs. So one of our most popular teams to work with is the release team, because the release team has a wonderful shadowing process in place. More groups within the Kubernetes project are trying to establish these shadow programs as well. We also have a few projects submitted for Google Summer of Code. We always try to get involved with that mentorship program. And there are some other programs that we also try to be involved with, like Outreachy. I mentioned the Linux Foundation one earlier. We also try to run a Meet Our Contributors kind of office hours session where folks who are new to the community can meet folks who have been involved for a while. Like I said, getting to membership is all about getting to know someone in the community and showing them that you're there to stay. And we need help. I mentioned that already. All right, and so that's all I'm gonna say about mentorship for now. And now I wanna start with the deep dives into a GitHub management update. So we've recently made an update to the way that we do our issue auto close workflows. So there's a lot of automation in GitHub, like we mentioned, for managing all the issues, because Kubernetes is such a huge project. We're getting so many issues, so many PRs all the time. We need some automation to help us manage all of this. So we've recently made some changes to the way this workflow works. Here's how it worked in the past. Basically, you submit an issue. That immediately, through an automated tool, gets the tag needs triage. That says, okay, SIG just got this issue. You need someone to look at this issue and see if you actually wanna do it or not. So it's kind of a holding state. Then, hopefully, someone will look at that issue and add the label triage accepted. That just means somebody looked at it. Hopefully, they'll do something with it eventually. So in the past, at this point, if the issue has triage accepted on it, if it just sits there for 90 days and nothing happens, then it would go to a lifecycle stale. That means it's been sitting around for a while, nobody's doing anything with it. You might wanna take a look at this again, theoretically, if anybody ever thinks that when they see stale. And then if there are 30 more days of inactivity, then it will go to lifecycle rotten. This thing has been sitting there for way too long. Somebody needs to do something with it, or it's about to be closed. And then another 30 days of inactivity and it will be closed. So the issue with this, that sounds pretty reasonable, but the issue with this is that a lot of issues in the Kubernetes space do take a very long time to deal with. For example, Kubernetes enhancement proposals, CEPs are really big issues and proposals that take a very long time to talk through and decide what to do with. So sometimes this isn't enough time for us to work with an issue. So we needed more control over how this worked so that some of the important issues that just take a really long time don't get closed while we're still trying to work on them. So here's the new process. Still needs triage gets applied immediately to a new issue. And hopefully someone will add a triage accepted label to it once they've seen it. If triage accepted is added to the issue, then we aren't going to market as stale or rotten at any point. That way it doesn't get auto-closed. If you have accepted this item and you say that you're gonna do it at some point, it can stick around forever. If it does not have triage accepted, then the same way that things were working before would kick in. After 90 days, it'll be stale. After another 30, it'll be rotten. And after another 30, it'll be closed. And then assuming that it has triage accepted and we have another label that defines the priority, what is it called again? Priority. Oh yeah, priority important long term. So we're saying this is something that's important and we're gonna get to it eventually, but it's gonna take a while. So after one year of inactivity, then triage accepted will be removed from that. So you can see that we're just delaying the start of the closing process. If you say it was important, then we can delay this process where we'll close it for at least a year, really a year and three, four months. And there's also another label. Priority, thank you, important soon. So important long term, obviously something that's gonna be around for a while. If you say you're gonna get to this relatively soon, then that's what we expect from you. After 90 days of inactivity, then we'll remove triage accepted and you'll start into that rotten stale closing workflow. And if it has, thank you, priority critical, what was it, urgent. So if it's urgent, then that means that it needs to be dealt with in a very short timeframe. And if it isn't dealt with in a very short timeframe, then hopefully it doesn't matter anymore. So after 30 days of inactivity, then remove, it will remove triage accepted and go back to the regular workflow. And then there's also priority backlog. After one year of inactivity, something on your backlog will go back to the regular workflow of potentially being closed. So this is the new workflow. I think there's one more thing here, yes. So essentially, if it doesn't have triage accepted, then it will be closed at some point. And we kind of use that triage accepted flag as a way to manage how quickly that closing happens. So, yeah, question. Oh, what did I say? So if you remove triage accepted, it just kicks in. Any issue which is labeled with the priority label that is not backlog, those won't be auto-closed. Only the issues with either backlog or no priority, those are the ones that are going to be auto-closed. And yes, if it's important long-term or important soon or critical urgent, those will not be auto-closed. Because for some reason they are marked the way that they are. And the prompt to re-evaluate the priority is essentially, you know, you get a notification saying that it needs triage. And then as part of the triage process, you re-evaluate your priority then. Good catch, thank you. It will be seen again, I'm not sure. So, yes, important just alone. That was my mistake that Tim was pointing out. It doesn't go all the way back to the closing workflow. It just starts changing the status, right? But it maintains the important label. It just might also get the sale label sale, right? Just it will never reach closed. That was my mistake, sorry about that. Oh, some additional labels that are also affecting this new workflow, good first issue. If it has good first issue or help wanted, then they will be excluded from the lifecycle process so that those can hang around until somebody gets to them. And thank you for Tim Alcler and Ben the Elder who made these changes. Yeah, so on to the next deep dive, right? So as you might know, it's annual report season in the community, all sick chairs are sort of busy cramming up info about what their sick has been up to in the last year and preparing annual reports. So as contributor experience, we sort of try and make the process of annual reports seamless for SIGs. So before we start talking about what we've worked on to do that, let's give a little bit context about what annual reports themselves are. So the Kubernetes annual report is a document that is worked on and produced by the community every year. So every SIG and working group puts together a bunch of information about what they've been up to along with questions that are asked such as how many reviewers and approvers does your SIG have? How many sub-projects does your SIG have? Are there new sub-projects that were introduced? So the point of having these sort of questions is to try and get telemetry on what the health of your SIG is essentially. There's still a long way to go in order to accurately gauge what the health of a sub-project or a SIG is, but this is a great starting point. So why are they important, right? Another important, really I think noteworthy section of the annual reports is the health wanted section. So every SIG sort of lists and notes down things that they think they need help in based on what their experiences have been in their past year. And an indirect consequence of the health wanted section is that since these annual reports are then ultimately published at the CNCF level at a CNCF.io slash reports, one can use these annual reports to say that it can go to that employer and say that, hey, I'm using Kubernetes, since we do care about Kubernetes and this particular area of Kubernetes, like let's say SIG X, has needs help in these sections and we do have expertise in them and we face problems in them. Why don't we go ahead and contribute to them? So this also helps you sort of convince folks to let you contribute upstream. So that's an indirect consequence of this. Yeah, with that being said, let's let with a little bit of context on what annual reports are, let's talk about the process of generating annual reports and the automation that we worked on towards that. Thank you. So currently we have a tool called annual report generator, which sits in Kubernetes slash community repo. And that is a tool we use currently to generate templates for our annual reports. Simple, we clone our Kubernetes community repo, we go inside that and we run this make target, make annual reports equals true. So what it does for us is it creates a lot many things. So it creates empty annual report templates for SIGs and working groups that we have under Kubernetes org and those empty reports template looks like something like this. And it also create issue templates so somebody can use those issue templates, open issues and use them to get some help from the community to start filling the annual report. We have some automation here. The templates that we just created here for issues, we can run this command to actually even automatically bulk create issues, GitHub issues, and that would look something like this. Now, so far in our templates, we had a lot of sections, but from our previous generator tool, we did not have much information already filled in there, but since there is a lot of information like enhancements that have been worked upon or how many projects that were added or retired last year or previous year, those kind of information, the community felt we can use some automation there to improve our annual report generator tool. So that's what we did. We tried to do this time. We have done some automation on auto generating list of our kept. So all the kept Kubernetes enhancement proposal that have been worked on during the previous year, annual year, so three cycles. We tried to grab all that information and put that in our annual report templates automatically. So here we see, for example, we have API machinery here. We can see these are all the kept work done in 2022 and across all those 124, 125, 126 releases and they're also categorized under what milestone they graduated to during that time. We also added some automation to grab a list of which of the sub projects were retired under a particular sake, which one are continuing and which one are new. So we have some examples here for that. And before we move to the next example, there is also some work being done for the reviewers and approval count. Thanks, mother, we'll also be including that in our generator too, thank you. Awesome, thanks. Since we are, I think, about nine minutes left for the talk, I'm gonna try and make this very quick. So before we start, there is, we have amazing automation in the community that folks have worked on, but there are some problems with it. The way that Kubernetes PRs are merged as of today, we have a set of reviewers and we have a set of approvers that can do these things. So that information is encapsulated into an owner file, which is, it looks like that.  If you look at the current approval process, it looks like this. If those are the set of files that are changed in a PR, and let's say X, who is our owner in package API, says slash approve, everything in API gets approved. Now if B says slash approve, everything in registry even under apps gets approved. Now this might be fine, but what if B only has expertise on testing, but the remaining expertise on apps and the file first.go lies with A and C. That essentially does not give enough confidence for B to approve a single file which reduces velocity of PRs, which aggregates approval privileges onto a specific set of people as well. So what we sort of are trying to work towards is a granular approval mechanism. So we can, oh yeah. So to illustrate what I mean, we have changes that bump dependencies in Kubernetes. And whenever a dependency is bumped, you can see that's the size of a PR. So 32,000 additions and things like that. So dependency bumps are huge. And dependency owners are root approvers, which means they sit at the top of the Kubernetes wrapper and they have approval privileges over everything in the Kubernetes wrapper. So if they sort of approve a dependency change and if that same PR is making another unrelated change, that'll also get approved with that. So what we're working towards is sort of like a granular approval mechanism where you can do slash approve files and you can approve a single file only, or you can approve a set of files that match a particular reg X or just a particular directory if you want to. What this sort of does is it breaks down approval privilege among set of folks and gives more confidence to people with certain set of expertise. So what that looks like is something like this. So if B comments, since X commented approve, let's say API is approved. Now if B comments slash approve star underscore test.go, only test will be approved. Now if C comments slash approve everything under registry apps, you see one.go is approved and apps is fully done. And the plugin is now tracking what directories are approved and what is left to be approved. And unless everything is approved, the PR is not eligible to be merged. And finally, A comments approve, everything is approved and you're good to go. So this is something that we're currently working towards. The work on it is more or less done. If you find the final things to iron out then hopefully we'll have this feature for our users to use by next KubeCon. Yeah, and finally we have our declarative team management that we are doing for GitHub, Bianca. I'll try to be quick. So PeriPollos is also another plugin to our very own CI CD system we have called Proud. How it works is we take the traditional approach here of Kubernetes, how things work in Kubernetes. We have a declared state and Kubernetes try to match it, observe it and tries to match our declared state. So similarly, what we are trying to do with PeriPollos is the same, but for our GitHub resource permissions, everything management there. So this is one example where we have a Yaman config file we have declared so and so should be the members of such and such GitHub organization. So PeriPollos will read that config file and it will try to match it to the actual applied configuration in GitHub. So if there are some members there who are not already part of the organization it will try to invite them or promote them to the specified permissions. And same we repeated for all other GitHub stuff as well for GitHub teams or other metadata. So that's exactly what we discussed. PeriPollos enables the declaration of GitHub org, settings, teams and membership in a Yaman format and then GitHub is then updated to match what we just defined in our config file. So this is how a config file looks like at the very top we have the org's key and under that we give the name of the org and we define all the org settings there. And under that we also define our members or say these many we are adding them as just members or so and so we are listing them as admins. Plus we can also define teams here so we can collect people under certain team and we can say ABC or here like and Jane they are part of team one. And along with being members, being part of team one they also have access to these specified repos here. So they have admin access to some repo and read access to other repo. That's how it's written here. So we don't have to create this file on our own. It can be very tricky to generate, create it. So we have this PeriPollos tool that actually can create this file for us. So all we have to give is the name of the organization and a GitHub token. And if we have admin access for that GitHub organization it will dump the org config for us. And then we can make changes in our old config to however we like it and ask PeriPollos to match it now what we just asked. So the present state, we are already using PeriPollos but we are not using it for defining repo permissions under teams. So there is an issue open there for a while now which is asking us to also automate that manual part since PeriPollos has that capability already. And along with you starting to use the repo setting repo permissions under teams, they're also asking to propose a restriction model. So for example, if we have ABC folks under a team have access to say Kubernetes repo as we do not want them to use their privileges to maybe escalate anything. So we have a work in progress solution PR open that's going to implement that start using also automating to use team repo permissions using PeriPollos. This PR also adds a binary called restrictions that will give us this restriction model. Yeah, so this is a restriction file we are calling Kubernetes six dog teams.yaml can only specify permissions for website and not for test infra because that's not just defined how it's defined there. Yeah, so we're almost at the end of it. If you'd like to get involved with some of the work we're doing if you think something can be done better if you have ideas of your own feel free to get involved with us. We have a Slack channel, we have an email list we maintain meeting notes and the regular weekly bi-weekly meetings as well. Tips for your first sick meeting. I just want to highlight two things. Just be stubborn and that's the best way to go about it. It might not be the best way forward. Sometimes time zones might be an issue but it's okay. There are folks who've done the work who've been here and we can't wait to welcome you. There are lots of things that you can do that don't involve writing code there are also lots of things to do that do involve writing code. There's a huge variety of opportunities available. Here are some important areas that we need some help with mainly mentoring. Like I said, we could really use some coordination help there if that's something you're interested in. Here are a bunch of folks involved with SIG contribex that you can reach out to. If you want to ping us directly I know I'm open to pings directly I'm at Caslin on Slack. You can also ping us all on SIG contribex the channel. Thank you and maybe this is you next. Feel free like all of us are stepping into leadership positions with the intention of being replaced. So you know, come replace us as soon as possible. Awesome. Yep. So Josh who is here might not be on the name might not be on the next one. So, you know. Emeritus is the goal. Emeritus is the goal. Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much and folks have questions. Thank you. I thought you had a question, sorry. I know there was some confusion about the life cycle things. If you still have questions, let's talk because you know, like there's obviously better ways to do it that we didn't think of and our contribe doesn't think of. So let's please talk. Okay. If there are no questions, we are around here or outside if you want to chat. Happy to chat. Thanks. Thank you.


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