Well, it's a good morning everybody and thanks very much indeed for coming, not sure this is working. It's not, I do apologise for those online. Yeah, thanks for coming. We've got a full 60 minute session here today with Graeme from the University of Sheffield. Just a couple of housekeeping points, if you do have a question please put your hand up and I'll come round with a mic and hopefully it will be working. There is a Discord link, a there's a chat link in Discord in the workshop chat that takes you through to a Vex page. If you want to ask any questions on that that's mostly designed for those online but it's also available for those in the room as well. But also if you'll follow along as well, if you want to follow along with Graham there will be links as well to to join Wanda VR I believe. Yes indeed, indeed. I'm going to hand it over to Gwyddoch chi. Raid at 60 fan, yn ysgrifennu. 120 yn gwrthol 60. Gweithio fod yn ddefnyddio. Reu bod gwaith am fawr, a rwy'n dweud yn cael ei ddweud lleig ar gyfer cynnig. Dwi'n meddwl am yr oedd, mae hyn yn heriau. I fyddwch chi'n dweud yn eich erbyn i'r iawn a'u ymddurai'r lefion newydd mewn, a oedd wedi'u drafodod ac yn gwybod i'r holl gwerthu'r lleffiol Rydym yn fwy fryd dod yn gyfrybio'r ffordd o'r 360mm.  O'r gweithio hŵr am ydyn nhw? Fe hwn yn cael rherod ffordd yn sicr cerdd yn y gwybod. Mae'r gweithio hefyd yn mynd i cerdd o'r hiwn. Felly'r iawn ymddugol eich cyd-dddechrau maen nhw'n eich digwydd yr hynnt hynny o sut y Chyffordd y Dynarydd 2900 hannu am gweithio eich cyd-ddechrau? A odd o bwyd yn和io 50. Rwy'n credu y gallwn 50-50, ond yw? Yn ni'n deisbryd? Gallwn y cyffech yn ystod dweud y teimlo ychydig. Mae oedd ddweud. Da-dweithio, mae'n ddweud hynny. Mae'r cyffech yn ystod y bwysig dweud y dywed, mae'n ffrif clwydd yma, a'r ddweud hynny'n gweithio. Mae'n ddweud hynny. Mae'n ddweud. those who wish to have a go at signing up to the platform, because our partners in this wonderful, I've been very kind and giving us a kind of demo instance of the environment for us to use today, but to access it I need you to provide an email address which you're happy for me to sign you up to the platform. It will then send you an email and you would need to reply. It will only work on actual laptops rather than phones, so you may have to buddy up with a partner if you haven't got one when we come to the hands on bit. So we'll do that in a moment. But firstly I want to talk a little bit about 360 media and why we're interested in it and what we perceive to be the benefits of 360 media. A little bit about how we've supported it or for what we're doing to support it. And then we'll actually have a look at the platform and, as I said, you can have a go should you so desire. And as John said, if anybody has got any questions from our online community, if you can go on to the workshop chat channel in the discord, John's very kindly set up a link to our V box Q&A channel, which John is very kindly going to monitor for us. So here's the thing. If you want to have a go, I'm going to ask you to go to this Google form. Just need to put in your email address that you're happy to. So if you don't want to use your work one, you know, that's fine. I'll also make sure I clear them all out afterwards if you don't want them, your address to be on the platform afterwards. So getting into it then. We started supporting 360 media as a kind of general move towards supporting immersive and extended reality technologies. There's a few problems. Can you just put that link back up? Yeah, just check the people who are using it for it. Yes. Oh, have I done the sensitive as well? Okay, so I maybe have I done the school child era of just give me two seconds. I thought I'd actually set this up. Okay, I'm going to change the. All right, let's try that again. Sorry about that, folks. I'm glad you pulled me up there. Now this might not be quite as nice and short and does. I'll just put on what I'm going to do. So I'm going to post this into the discord as well. Welcome into sales for a moment. Okay, so this and now this isn't very pretty as it. So what I'll do is I'll just copy this out and put this into the discord channel. You want to read it out because it's a bit cryptic, isn't it? It's forms.gle. I think I'm still getting an error. Are you? Oh dear me. Are you going to put some Google forms? Yeah, I am supposed to be. I'm just thinking of obviously, yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry. I'm just to just manage to. Sorry about the slopes. Yes, that might be a good way of doing it. Actually, let me just see about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, I'm going to have to bypass that. I'm really sorry about this. What we'll do is John suggested if people don't mind. They could actually I'll tell you what the best way is really sorry about this. You could email them to me at this address instead. If you send me the email, what we'll do is we're going to have a little breakout exercise in about 10 minutes time and I'm going to register people and you should be able to sign up. Okay, really sorry about that folks. Let's get back to it. Okay, so if you want to just send any email address through to me for this address, I'll pick it up in our little breakout group. I'll just do it for you. Okay, moving swiftly on. So we introduced 360 media as part of a wider exploration of how we could actually start to support XR technologies and I think like most university sheffields had a sort of variable approach, a varied approach to this. And we've got some practitioners who are quite advanced other people who have heard about it would like to get involved in it, but haven't really had the chance to do so. Identify 360 media is a way of a good, good entry point because it has quite a low technical threshold barrier to entry. And I was wondering is anybody here actually got any experience of creating or using 360 media in their work. Okay, so you've got a few, a few people and is that using or is actually creating interactive environments. Creating brilliant. Okay, excellent. So, so to those people who have already been using 360, this is probably something you're already familiar with, but what we define as 360 media is where we use a single or multiple interlinked 360 images or videos. And the most commonly experienced example is probably Google Street View, which I think is a very popular consumer level technology that lots of people have done. And so, just to quickly show a kind of example of the sort of thing we might do and this is actually what we'll hopefully do in our hands on exercise. Here's an example of a very simple virtual campus tour, which we've created using the platform that we've been using, which is based around Wanda VR. And so this is what we'll actually do in an exercise a little bit later on. And this is what we also typically show when we're introducing our colleagues and to how to actually use the technology. So we start off with an entry point, which is a 360 photograph. This is actually outside the Sheffield University Students Union. We can create links that link various different viewpoints together. We can link static photos with video content. So this is a 360 video, which is effectively like an image, but has dynamic content. So it can be really good for dynamic processes that you might want to show. Also for guided tours. We can create pop-ups to provide supplementary information, which is great because it means we can actually build some interactivity in. And it also means in a complex environment like a lab or an operating theatre, we can present the space without overloading students with too much extra information at once. And then we can also include other forms of information such as video. So we can pop create a pop-up video so we can bring video content in. This is actually brought in from our video server on Calcura and we can bring in imagery quite simply as well. And again, we can make that interactive. They're actually quite a simple tour, but using those basic functional building blocks, you can actually develop some quite sophisticated levels of interaction by combining different scenes and different orders. Quite a few of those things can be made to be conditional. So, for example, the links that take you between scenes can be triggered so that students have to go in and they have to interact in some sort of way with another bit of the environment before those are revealed. You can create things like escape rooms and so on. Here's another real world example. This is actually a virtual field trip of a stone circle in the Lake District called Castle Rig Stone Circle. I should say my background academically is in archaeology. So I first got interested in VR and archaeology in 2005, which was a very different kind of landscape technically. But it's a typical use case for this kind of technology to take people on virtual field trips and so on. So we can do things like create interaction around the landscape to reveal the landscape features, provide supplementary textual information, and also we can link to a 360 video, which provides us with a more dynamic kind of encounter with the landscape. So this is what it's actually like to approach the Castle Rig Monument on foot, and that's quite an important learning outcome for students understanding about how prehistoric monuments are located in their wider landscape. So thinking about some of those pedagogical benefits and uses, it's very much about, or a starting point to think about 360, it's very much about what you might call location based study. So any study where location is the object of study. So for example, I've just shown you an example of a field trip where archaeologists like to take students out and look at monuments in the field. They are some of the primary things that archaeologists study, but it could be an architectural field trip to the built environment. It could be an engineering facility, and there could be many, many, many examples, but also where location provides context of the object of study. So it could be, for example, a landscape that's inspired a piece of literature or indeed a piece of artwork. Field trips are really important for many kinds of study as all the baratory work, but they're also quite arguably expensive experiences and ones we like to make the most of. So 360 media provides ideal ways of introducing students to an environment in which they're going to learn and or other forms of creative work. So, for example, I'm going to take students on a field trip to the Lake District. It takes quite a lot of time to organise. I'd actually like to make sure that when our students get there, they're kind of orientated into the space that they're actually going to be exploring when they're there. It helps them to get a better experience from it. Ditto, we have laboratory experiences which for students who first come to university, they may have done science or chemistry at science and school. When they actually get into a university laboratory environment, it can be quite overwhelming. And we know that when we take students into other forms of environment that they've never been to before, for example, in medical context, factory context as well, it can be overwhelming. So it provides us a way to provide an induction to environments in which students can learn. We've also done work which has been purely creative. So using the branching facilities of creative media, it gives people an opportunity to create immersive, non-linear narrative works. And I know we're building some work out with colleagues in our industry department where we're doing exactly that with them. So another way of thinking about it is allowing places, access to places that you can't normally visit. So we have a colleague, Tom Perring, in our geography department. Tom's a volcanologist, so he studies live volcanoes. That's what he actually does his research on. As I'm sure you can imagine, the kind of risk assessment of taking students to the side of a live volcano would be as long as your arm. And so there's various practical problems with that. So he's been out to South America a couple of years ago and made this video. This is the kind of volcano in Guatemala. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit more about the basic concept of volcanology and introduce a few things that might not be familiar to you. So there you go. So we can actually situate students in the landscape of the live active volcano, which itself is something that gives volcanologists lots of cues about understanding. Is it going to pop? When will it happen? Is it going to be a slow bird or all the kind of things? But as I said, pretty tricky to actually take students to. And the point being to actually in terms of how we might integrate this into the curriculum with either lab or fieldwork, for example, you can use it as a means of inducting students into an experience that they're going to have, but equally you could use it as a means of debriefing postfield. And in fact, if you take a sort of augmented approach, you could also theoretically on a mobile device, you could use it in situ as well to help guide students around that very vital immersion in the field experience. Other forms of experience we can capture that would be really difficult to do. So we have a tropical butterfly research facility under the main carpark at the university Sheffield. It's about 15 foot square. This is where people observe a butterfly behaviour. Our current buyer sciences cohort has got something like 600 students in it. So we probably would not in any way be feasibly able to run a first year practical with 600 students occupying a butterfly house like that if we wanted to, but it does nonetheless give students an opportunity to sit and actually record and observe their behaviour and give some sense of what it's like to be in this environment. So there are many, many, many possibilities for how we can think about deploying this. Just to recap, fully immersive. So we're looking at these on a desktop, but we can also consume these on a mobile device or a headset. And if you ever look at 360 Media on a VR headset, they do become fully immersive experiences. So you're not just looking on the screen, but you are in fact situated at the centre of this whole 360 media bubble. So if you're inherently interactive, you have to really do something to interrogate the world that you're in, and you can enhance that by providing supplementary information via interaction and so on. Although to counter that, there's also functionality that enables you to provide a guided narrative. One way, as I said, is to work, walk through with a 360 moving viewpoint, which you could give a guided tour. The platform we have here, you can make it automatically move from one location to another, and you could superimpose a vocal narrative over the top so you could actually provide a guided tour in that sense. It can also be able to use a collaborative, and in reality you can combine any of those in any combination you like, so it's quite flexible. So, to try and compensate for my slight organisation shortfall on capturing your number, I'm going to gather the email addresses that hopefully you've sent me now, I can set you up with the platform. But anyway, in the meantime, I've put a link here to a Jamboard, and I'll just invite you to talk to your partner, or for the next few minutes in the small tables, and think about what uses you might think we could use 360 media, either in your learning and teaching, or in your institution. So, just have a quick chat for five minutes, and then I'll be back right back with you. Oh, it's okay, it's okay, I'll put it back here. G.macilerni, it's not a joke, it really is Macilerni. Yeah, I know, it's great, isn't it? I still can't believe it, you know. I was telling somebody the other day, it's like, you know, we've had Fletcher's who make arrows since the medieval period, and we've had Baker's baking bread since the Neolithic, but we've not really had any learning people since about 1994, right? And yet I seem to have been born with this surname, How, How, How on Earth. I'm just going to blank this screen, has everybody got that? I'm just going to have to, I don't want to reveal your email addresses to the wider group. So, yep, yep, yep. I've also put a discord in the workshop. Yes, thanks John. I'd like to thank John Cooper very much, by the way, for keeping me on track. He wouldn't believe I actually do this for a living at this point, I guess. I did, well done. So you're going to do this for a while. I'm just going to... Yes, it is. Bitly forward slash alt slash c jam. This is the uppercase c jam. Yeah, we've got perfect that. Great. Right. ydy'r ffordd rôl yn gwneud yağlo swyddog. Mae'n gwneud i ni o'r fawr i ni o raises. A ydych yn chwarae fod ar y cyf wenyddi i ni. Mae'n gwneud i ni, mae... Mae'n gwneud i ni... Mae'n gwneud i ni! Mae'n gwneud i ni! Mae'n gwneud i ni! Mae'n gwneud i ni. Mae'n gwneud i ni! Mae'n gwneud i ni! Mae'n gwneud i ni! Diolch i ddechrau, John. Felly ddim sy'n ei ffordd iddyn nhw. Well, it's a good job. A going to the SQL. Okay, folks. I should now, everyone who sent me an email, should now have received an email from Wanda VR which will give you an invite to come into our demo space, and I can tell that by the general amount of activity both in the room and on the board, a we've had no shortage of ideas. Anybody got a specific idea, they'd like to pick, just qualify for them. I'm not going to do picking on people. It's not on day three of the conference, that would be beyond cruel. Anybody got an idea out there that they'd like to... More archaeology field trips, who put that on? I am picking on someone now, aren't I? Who's selected more archaeology field trips? Field trips? Intriging. Ghost of Graeme. Anybody want to comment? Anything out there? Online. Yeah, good question. Sorry. Yeah, we're very keen to use it in NHS settings, but it's just going to be very thorny with consent and that kind of thing, but we're certainly going to investigate it, because we've managed to get hold of some kit. Yeah, yeah. I think that's right. I suppose procuring the media, like any media procurement, there may well be necessary levels of consent that you take. You can edit images after you've created them, so you could blur faces out would be another approach, or you could get people to consent. One thing that, while we're on the topic of consent and data protection, a grey area for people is this idea of accidental inclusion. So, if I go as I was going to do, actually, or had thought about doing it, if we all went out on the street now with some 360 cameras and started taking pictures around the war at the campus, technically, we're not really infringing any passes by, pass-by-bies privacy, because it's basically accidental inclusion. If we asked several people to come over and sort of intervene with them and show real detail of their faces, that would be quite different. That is a question that can occur. Lots of good stuff. Our nursing colleagues are starting to make use of this. Lots of stuff about introducing people to environments. Fashion shows are a really good example from, I think, New York State, who have used Wanda VR to create virtual fashion shows to celebrate people's end of year work. There's a 3D dimension to Wanda VR, which I wasn't really going to very, very focus on, but I will mention it again in a little while. So, thanks very much for bearing with me and getting us up and running. I hope you've all got those invites now. So, we've seen the pedagogical benefits. There's also some practical benefits and practical in terms of people who are in central digital learning teams or distributed digital learning teams, people who are supporting others. Again, I think it starts off with this idea that it really does offer a low technical threshold, a low technical barrier to enable people to get into creating immersive technologies, which can also be horribly complicated if anybody here has ever tried to hand it using virtual reality environments like Unity or something like that. It takes a lot of skill, it takes a lot of time. The media itself can be produced using consumer-level cameras. So, most of the images that I showed you here were taken using quite a popular consumer-level device, which is about the size of a smaller than a mobile phone. It's made by a company called Insta, Insta Onenet, and these things are £300 or £400. We have an AV loan facility at Shefford, as indeed many colleagues will have where you can just go and sign one of these things out for a few days so you can actually get the kit to make the stuff. It's widely applicable, as we've said, and I think what's really interesting is when we take these things together, it enables us to start democratising the production of this kind of content, and I think that's really important. When we talk about more elusive concepts of things like digital transformation and moving things forward, if you can't provide a technology that people can have on their desktops and that everyone can have, you will always be putting barriers in people's... in terms of that. So, that's all great, but the problem was, and we knew all this a couple of years ago, but we had no platform for actually hosting it, so we needed to have an environment that we could say to people, okay, you're interested in using this technology, we're going to enable you by providing a platform. So, for people again, for the benefit of people who need to do this kind of thing, we went through a product selection and procurement process, which started about two years ago and went through some stages. For us, ease of use was the primary product requirement. We really don't want people... If this is going to be a democratising easily accessible technology, then it has to be easily accessible. So, ease of use is really big. There's lots of products out there, by the way. We wanted to be able to link images and videos, they don't all do that, the one we went for did. We really wanted to have interactivity so that people could build things that you didn't just look like this, you could actually... You could actually build more into it. And this actually ended up being a biggie for us and a bit of a killer. It had to have what we call a multi-user enterprise architecture. It had to be something that everyone could have their individual accounts and have their workspace and actually just as you would with any large video platform. Many of the products out there were just designed for a small team to work in and there was no way of really sort of partitioning people's work away from each other. It had to integrate with a VLE and it had to meet what we call another NFRs on non-functional requirements for a system, so it had to integrate with a single sign-on. We definitely don't want to be in the business of running multiple account systems. It has to meet information security and data protection regulations as well. So, after a bit of a selection process, we appointed Wanda VR who would first map to VR our colleagues in Calchora as their strategic partner. So, the main functionality that we would appeal to us by this is that we could indeed fundamentally create these kinds of experiences like the one I've just shown you. They can be embedded in Blackboard. It's super easy to use as I hope you're about to find out. It could give the kind of interactivity that we wanted so we could build meaningful interactions. And it had to have this enterprise-scale architecture so everybody's got their own account. It links into our single sign-on system so when you log in, when you authenticate at University Shepherd, you get straight in. And a really key feature for us because, as people may have noticed during the pandemic, the rising costs of things like media storage and multiple storage estates are operationally expensive. The great thing about Wanda VR is it also links to our Calchora media hosting thing. So, the walk-through video I showed you with Castle Rig Stone Circle is three and a half minutes long and it's about six gigabytes. Now, that kind of data starts to add up in size quite a lot. You don't want to have to be kind of moving those into more accounts than you need to. So, anything we put into our Calchora system and we tag it with the appropriate tag, it then becomes visible to us in the Wanda VR environment. Extra things we really like about it. We can create quizzes and they will tie in directly to the Blackboard Grade Centre. We can do... Actually, we could do multi-user 3D environments now and we've had some unexpected successes with those and I think that's, again, something that can happen when you introduce technology. You might specifically think it's going to be used for one thing. People find some other really interesting uses of it as well. So, we've done a lot of work with, again, just in terms of the story of launching this and getting this out on people's desktops. We've done a lot of work on developing some web-based media. We've done a series of introductory videos, some of which are conventional, some of which are in a 360 version because we are now actively promoting it via a series of short courses. So, going a bit meta, have people now received e-mails invited them to the platform? Hopefully, you should have got something a little bit like that. Yep. I'll have a look at what e-mail address is happening. I'll just check I've registered you. Which one is it? I'm not sure. I'm just going to check one more address. Just one second. Ah, yeah, I've got it. Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I'll get started. I'll give people a chunk together and then I'll come round. If anybody's got any residual logging in issues, then we will get those sorted out. That's brilliant. I'll come and do yours in a second. So, what I thought we could do now was we'll spend a few minutes and I'll walk you through an example of how we would get people up and running on the platform. As I said, I'll try and go fairly quickly. I'm just going to walk through it and I'll let you follow me through because I think that's probably going to be the most effective way of doing it. So, we have a thing called this demo space and a space as an environment in which people can come and create individual tours and in Wanda VR, we call a tour an experience. So, is everybody ready to get in now? Yeah. So, you should all be able to do exactly what I've just done, which is to click on the button that says create new experience and we've got a number of different ones, including some quite cool 3D multi-user environments, but we're going to start off with 360 blank canvas. So, if you can just click on that, you should see something that looks a little bit like this. So, first of all, we'll put some media into it in a moment. I'm just going to start off here and I think this is good practice. Before we get too far into it, we're going to give it a meaningful title and I'd always urge you to do this because what's going to happen over the next 20 minutes is this space is going to fill up with different 360 experiences and if we all just accept the default 360 experience title, we're going to be in a bit of a tangle. So, I'm going to go with GM, demo, Outsie, 23. So, do something similar. We don't have to reveal your name, but something that is meaningful to you later. Once we've done that, we want to create our first image. So, if we go over to the right-hand side, what we'll see is the opportunity is an empty scene to replace. If I click on here and click on from this space, hopefully you should see some example images and these are 360 images from the Students' Union concourse. The reason why I chose the Students' Union concourse, is that it's not just about learning in a different way. Should you be planning to do something like this in the future? I could have showed many different things, laboratories, field trips, and all the way around the world, but that might disenfranchise some members of the audience from the others. So, when I'm teaching this at University Sheffield, everybody knows what the outside of the Students' Union looks like. They can actually concentrate on learning how to create a tour. They've all been here before, so it's kind of spatially meaningful to them. So, we're going to start off outside the Students' Union and what I'm going to do is give it a scene title outside the Students' Union, for example. And that's important because this becomes visible later on, both to us and to the viewer. Now, at this very moment in time, we already have made a very elementary 360 experience. So, if I click on Launch, it will open it in a new tab and away we go. So, we've basically got, if we did nothing else apart from this, we would have created a very simple 360 experience of outside the Sheffield University Students' Union. Okay. So, now what we want to do is think about linking it. Cool. So, what we're going to do now is we're going to link to an image and we'll link to a video. Down the left-hand side, where it says Presentation, this effectively becomes a list of all the locations or nodes, as I sometimes call them, in the virtual tour.  So, I'm going to click on the New Scene button and click on 360 Image, Space. And I'm going to just click the next one because that was the one that was in the tour and this is actually just about 30 foot away that way. So, what I need to do to get these two to link together is I'm going to create what we call a hotspot and the way I do that is to click on this little hotspot gallery here and there's a load of different ones but we kind of got into using this upward-facing chevron and we felt it. It looked most like the one in Google Street View and we felt that might be the thing that people, an end-user, might instinctively think, oh yeah, like an upward arrow, that could link me on to the next place, as it were. So, what we could do is we could click and we could resize them and we could change the colour and we could do various things like that. In order to get that to jump me over I'm going to allocate to it what we call an action. An action is just a little bit of functional interactivity. So, if I click on new action now the first one available is link and it says link to scene and then it asks me to select the scene. Now, actually what I didn't do was a bit naughty. I didn't follow my own advice which is to give things a good name and this is actually just coming up with some random name the image comes as it comes off the camera but we'll rectify that in a moment. Now, when I click on launch when I click on this it will take me to the next one. Now, again the importance of giving them a meaningful title which I am going to correct because this is a default numbering system that the Insta cameras use it's like a date stamp basically. Now, if that's what the end view, this is something coming on a virtual tour to a university shepherd it's not going to get in front of this it's not going to mean a fat lot to them. So, I am going to correct that now by giving that a better title and the theater. So, we've got two images linked however at this moment of time we don't have a link back to the starting point. Now, if you're going to produce a guided tour where people can freely navigate around the space I would say in most cases if you link to somewhere you should always be able to link back again. However, there's an exception to the rule. If I wanted to create something like an escape room I might want to force people in a certain direction and only allow them to link back if they perform some of the functions for example a quiz or something like that. So, you've actually got the capacity to build that functionality in the very short term I'll just pop it back in now I'll do another arrow and I'll get it to link back to where we started from. So, do that again click on new action click on link and because now I've labelled my scenes properly it's giving me a nice user friendly description to go back to and you can and you kind of have to get into this habit of doing something click launch test it go back to it because it doesn't update anything until you do that. So, let's just check it's all going okay yep link back Cool, so now we've got two scenes that link together a mini virtual tour if we want to add a 360 video to that we just basically follow the same procedure we go we kind of identify where we want to be I think I'll launch it from there we go new scene and this time we're going to choose a 360 video and this one is an equally cryptically titled vid summing summing summing but this is what we call Western Park in Sheffield so I'm going to give that a name so wonder VR effectively treats video and images as the same you can link to them you can interact with them, you can label them you can create hotspots on them and I'm going to do another little hotspot here and you're going to guess what's coming next I hope by now I've placed my hotspot on the screen I choose a link and this time I'm going to link to my Western Park video okay so good so far and I would for completion place a link on the way back okay everybody alright with that so far I've got a chance to do that anything coming from online John? lots of people lots of scenes one question I've had one question I've had maybe other people have got any questions if you've got a video sometimes the sort of spaces that you can't drag content into it almost seems to be blurring out and sort of curving around is that a feature or? in this particular one? I've uploaded a video well you've just uploaded a video now yes probably have to look at the video if it's what we call an equirectangular video file which is the kind of video file there's a certain kind of aspect ratio that images and 360 images and videos use it should work unless it's not a complete 360 the other thing that you will get because video just while we're here 360 cameras often use very wide angle lenses and they can cause a kind of spherical distortion so that's something to be aware of so if I take a picture and I stick the camera here next to verticals when you pan and tilt around there's different kind of projections and it can go a bit weird the other thing to really watch out for is the budget cameras the consumer level ones are comprised of two lenses both very wide angle and using the software in the camera they blend the two images together at the point at which they blend the stitch line and that on some cameras can be a bit weird so for example if you're doing a guided tour or if you're walking around one is advised to not have an important picture like your face I did one just when I was testing one and I thought what's wrong with it I realised afterwards I'd held it in such a way that the centre of my face was smacking the middle of a stitch line and it looked like I had to put my head which isn't brilliant for a guided tour it might distract people by the way Graeme we've got 10 minutes thank you very much let me rush just a minute ask me again at the end but this is a real problem and it was interesting because we were talking about accessibility on a number of sessions for example I think on the Tuesday people were talking about providing accessibility statements and this is an area which we are actively working with Wanda to do so VR immersive technologies they have some accessibility fundamentally sort of existential limitations in them but that doesn't mean we can just ignore that so there's a number of approaches there is I think it's probably WCAG consortium are working on recommendations on how this can be combated the kinds of things will be for example keyboard navigation but we have to say we're not there yet the importance of an accessibility statement is it's an opportunity to be explicit where that limitation takes place so I realise that's not necessarily the best answer in the world but that's kind of where we are there's another view to this by the way which is to say that there may be some accessibility issues with some aspects of it but equally I can take somebody with mobility, severe mobility issues to places that they would never otherwise go so it's a little bit of a double-edged sword I think when we're talking about but it's really important and we shouldn't lose sight of it so thanks for bringing it up so what we're going to do now is oops jump the gun a bit I'm going to show you how to do these pop-up features so I'm going to create a little icon on here which is like an information circle again information circle icon is pretty good I think that's widely understood as meaning a source of information almost irrespective of language now so what I want to happen is I want to be able to click on this and I want a little box to come up with some text in it so what I have to do is I have to create the button and then I'm going to create the text box and in this case I'm going to create something that's called a card so I created the card it's come up on the screen did you see that by the way that's this button and then what you can do is you can put some text in so I'm going to say optical centre okay and say this is where you will graduate you said to the aspiring university entrant for he okay now in our original demo we clicked on that and this popped up but at the moment it's just there so how are we going to do with that click on it again and I'm going to click on hide so it's actually now invisible to the end viewer but what we can do is we can make this eye button make it appear and disappear so I'm going to go down to actions again because that's where the action happens and instead of doing a link this time I'm going to do show and hide and it says select an annotation and if I click on card optical centre and I use this show and hide toggle when I hit the launch button as you're all going to shout out for next time it will toggle the appearance and disappearance of this anything we see on screen can be made to be invisible and can be revealed by anything else on the screen so coming back to the idea of building up some more complex logic like an escape room out of some very simple components we can make links appear or disappear depending on whether we've clicked on one thing or another thing so again we can set students tasks we can reveal information to them on the basis of the performance and that can also be things like links to other scenes or anything else okay so one of the kind of links did we do we showed a video earlier on right so let's get a video up and this time I'm going to use a text box so go back to your first one click on the text logo here by default everything appears in the middle of the screen wherever you were this is obviously not very readable so I'm just going to put click for video I'm not going to bother click for video and I'll put the same again and I'm going to use the railway font because that's the San Serif font which is good for accessibility I'm going to make it a bit bigger because I don't think it's very visible at this stage I'll go to 48 the white's kind of okay against that grey background I'm just going to resize it like that so again this isn't going to do anything at the moment until I bring in a video and this time I'm going to click on the video button again click on from this space and click on campus tour and you can adjust things like whether you want it to automatically play whether you want it to play on a loop what the volume is and so on so I'm going to click on this I'm tempted just to turn it the volume off because hello I'm a journalism student I hear that in my sleep sometimes when I teach this course because that's what happens oh hold on what did I forget to do I wanted to hide it didn't I so it's invisible until I use this label so make sure your video is hidden click on on the text label click on the new action again and this time show hide and this time it's the video click on the launch button I hear you all shout third year journalism student I forgot the third year cheers Hannah okay so that's that and then the last little bit is to bring in the campus map so we're going to follow the same procedure we're going to bring the asset in we're going to hide it we're going to create an element to show and reveal it and Robert is your father's brother as this one so bring in the map resize it to taste oops put a label on screen oops sorry hide it put a label on screen just to say to everyone it is now 12 30 and officially the end of this session so we do understand if you want to get out there and go and get something to do if you want to wait till the crowds you can either sit here and listen to me droning on or you can spend 10 minutes in a cube of sandwiches it choices yours right it's probably not the best choice you've ever had but just for the sake of completion I'll show you that we now have it so that we show and hide the map no we don't because I didn't do that but if people do want to stop on I'm happy to wait on for a bit so okay cheers cheers thank you cheers cheers thanks very much cheers okay cheers so we will keep it to 10 minutes yep I'm happy to so if anyone's got any more questions I mean that's pretty much where we are with building a simple 3d experience 360 experience just in case just in terms of where we are now you know we are at that kind of driving adoption forward now and collating examples and that's pretty much where we are cheers thank you yeah you're great so the one other thing that people might be interested in actually which is quite fun is just there are other uses for the technology which some people have got quite excited by so there's a thing that you can do where you can create 3d environments and they just come as a series of templates and this is a little bit like how colleagues from Leeds were showing us yesterday which they did with the insect gallery and it's waiting for this to load up this is a multi-user 3d experience so you can actually share this with I think it's up to 30 students at the moment but they are increasing the capacity so this is Tom again my volcanologist friend who also teaches other aspects of physical geography and he's done a practical class with his students whereby he's taken a number of 3d models of various different rock types and he brings them in and the students go through and they work in groups and they have to identify the various different types of rock he's done another one on volcanology where the students go through and they're shown various different 3d environments and that links through to a quiz that they do on blackboard and they can do this multi-user collaboratively so that's as I said one of the unexpected benefits that we've actually received from the platform as I said we went into it really with 360 hosting in mind but it does they are also very much actively developing this multi-user 3d functionality as well which is very exciting and then there's a final one which is a real R&D thing we're working this is a new technology under developing and it's enables you to have avatars that are powered by chat gpt and here's my alter ego Dr Xavier who's a senior digital learning advisor and so I'm going to ask a question and this will now actually bring in use chat gpt to answer any kind of question I ask it so this is actually I don't know whether this is from your knowledge based John but this is happening oh that's nice very good sounds just like me as well sounds just like John it's like all the actions but the next one select publish choose the publishing option thank you very much thanks for coming six move on to save one steps your video will be published you can actually talk to it it will talk back to you it's got speech recognition two way built in so you can actually interact with it gpt and teacher so that's where we are now so this is a new feature this is just like really just we're just been testing this out now we're working with some QA students they can ask questions shut up so this is something we've been working on over the summer mainly with some of our education research students sorry educational psychology students who have been building up avatars of learners with specific learning needs they've been training them with lots and lots of evidence which will be gathered from real learners with various specific learning needs which they then interact with and use as a kind of dialogue and training tool but that's just kind of as I said that's an R&D thing so watch the spaces for that and that really is the final bit of it apart from to say what we've not done yet is really evaluated it pedagogically we know that it kind of technically works and I think that's the big next step for us now is to really get those use cases evaluate with students how it's really benefiting their learning we've had some preliminary evaluation which has kind of gone well that's where we are now so thanks very much again for coming and stopping the three minutes extra or whatever it is that you've sort of, thank you any final questions for Graham any comments what we really wanted it's going back to that requirements again which is we really wanted something that was going to be very easy to use out of the box and it had to have that multi-user I know H5P has got that functionality but we are not really exactly it's a bit like that I think like a lot of organisations which I think we have an emphasis on getting solutions that don't really require an awful lot of local customization I think the H5P approach you could no doubt probably write stuff with additional functionality and we don't really use H5P for anything else I think if we were using it a lot it's great for building stuff isn't it other forms of e-learning content but we've not really been doing it we're not Moodle users no we're Blackboard users so yeah I mean H5P and Moodle I'm sure there's lots of great stuff there there's another product that a lot of people look at and we didn't do that because we didn't feel it handled the video as well the fact that Wanda would link directly to our culture storage estate I thought it was very appealing for us to simplify some of those solutions and you know seek integrations where we can rather than proliferations, consolidation I think is rather than yeah do you know what I mean there's lots of good reasons for that thank you thank you very much John thanks for staying as well thank you


Yn ymwybod, mae'n cael ei cyfnod. Mae nhw Adam Moss, yng nghylchedd yng nghylchedd ym Mhau Argynfod, Fyeth ymwinell, i'r ymdweithio i'r Argynfod, y Ddweithio Wyrddol, ym Pen sy'n gyfle, mae'r ddweithio i fynd, yn ymgyrchu'r cyflwynt yn gwneud. oedd yw'r gwaith o'r rai gyrdd ymlaen o'r gweithio. O'ch gweithio, mae'r ddechrau'r ddechrau'r ddechrau. Mae'n ddweud o'r 22 miliwn o'r cyfnod o'r ddechrau. Mae'n gweithio o'r region o'r 84,000 o tyfu. Mae'r gweithio gweithio o'r Code 55 miliwn, oedd o'r gweithio, oed o'r ddweud o'r rhaglen. Mae'n gweithio o'r region o'r 10,000 o'r ddweud o'r systemu yma'r ffordd, y bydren i ni'r ffordd. Fodd ychynig ar y cyfnodio a'r ffordd oeddion oedd ar gyfer cyfnodio. So nad ydym ni'n defnyddio'n ymddangos. Rydyn ni wneud i'r gyfaradau gael yna, yn ymddangos yng Nghymru, ond rydym ni ar gyfnodio ddannu 200 miliwn gael y keeperiael. Felly dywedai fel ynghyluon gyda gwirio sydd gennych y cyfnodio. Felly na'r ffynu'r eu cyfl Fanonwyr, mae'n bwrdd hwn i ddechrau, mae'r llwyfod honno, gan gwych, â'r ddechrau tylfonnyn, erioedlau'r cyfloldiadau, ac iddo ond fe y llwyffydd o organisations oelod. Yn 10,000 ym 10000 ym 10000 ym 10000 ym 10000 ym 10000 ym 10000 ym 10000 mae'r syfwng yma... byddai gydag i fancyddau yma o hwn y living i'r sgwrth. A fyddech chi wedi wneud ydych chi'n havnod, roeddwn wedi gynnol. Now, this is driven by Core Central Government Policy, so we want to move to 24-7 services, people work different hours now. It's not a case of if you can just go into an office or a job centre or something. We really want to make stuff self-service so people can use it when they want to use it, how they want to use it. Obviously the web is great for doing that. We want to provide a more streamlined and cohesive user experience. That's not only for our services But also when we can point you to services in other government departments that are relevant to you. We wanted to provide a greater capabilities to inspect and adapt our processes and the requirements and the needs of citizens in government. And fundamentally what else do we want to do? We want to save money for the taxpayer. We want to reduce our operational costs. So we had a great idea. Let's do agile! And that was literally it. That was the statement. We are now agile. So obviously you can imagine. There's a massive cultural shift there. It's not just as simple as saying you're now agile. As an organisation I can guarantee you there are people sitting in this room that have not been alive as long as we have outsourced IT development. You're talking 30 years plus of outsourcing. So you can imagine what happens when you say it to someone. You do an agile. You're now accountable for this stuff. You don't have a contract that you can point back to and a supply you can point back to. It's you. You also have a business which has been basically for 30 years educated. If you don't get it in the first release you ain't getting another one because it's too expensive. So there's some of the agile concepts. Minimum viable product. In DWP to a lot of people now that's maximum viable product. So it can cause quite a few problems, right? And then you've also got the other thing, right? Staff performance reviews. Everyone gets a performance review, right? But most of the time that's an individual performance review. It's a complete antithesis of agile working because it actually generates a behaviours that can incentivise the individual over the team. So what did we do about that? Well actually we've scrapped individual performance assessments. As of April this year we only do team-based assessments. The team succeeds or the team fails. There is no individual. How did we go about it? Well we came up with an organisational blueprint. And this is basically the thing that defines our patterns. Defines architectures, microservices, immutable infrastructures, container first strategies, sidecar patterns, all that sort of stuff. Include security patterns, encryption and transit, encryption at rest, different cyffersweets, the order of cyffersweets that we would use and which circumstances we would use them in. Different application patterns, whether we're doing asynchronous stuff, push-pull subscriptions, semantic version, infrastructures code, configurationers code, and then various development practices, life cycles, test driven development, behaviour driven development, pair programming, secure code and automation, all that sort of stuff we document in our architectural blueprint. One of the other things we do is create what we call a tech radar. And this is technologies that we're thinking about using, technologies we do use, technologies we kind of don't want to use anymore, and technologies we absolutely definitely want to get rid of. And you can kind of see it there in the radar chart. Stuff on the outside, stuff we're thinking about, we might look at as you get closer to the red dot in the middle, red dot, we definitely want rid of all of that. But the stuff on here, the life cycle for stuff on here is not linear. We might reject something in trial, C-Shop on Linux on this one from when I took this screenshot, for example, but actually we'd accept that now, because six months later the ecosystems moved on, the commitments from the vendors have moved on, so we'd revisit that decision and something that we've previously rejected, we may quite happily then bring back in. But we basically have one of these tech radars for pretty much everything, whether it's app steps, tools, languages, hosting, monitoring services, management, security tools, all of that will be on one of those somewhere. Now one of the things we thought about was, okay, how do we get rid of that 10,000 challenge? Continuous delivery. We'll just do continuous all the things, which is pretty awesome, right? We just choose a tool, we put it in, whether it's GitLab, CI, Jenkins, Go CD, something like that. Sorry, something like that. I was saving the mic drop for the end. So it's not a technology problem, right? You can put a tool in, you can do stuff with it, some of it will go well, some of it will not go so well, but then what do you end up with? A git big gap and hole in your systems, which if compromised basically gives right access to everything that that thing's got right access to. So for a really risk averse organisation, which we are, that's a bit of a problem. So you start looking at things, okay, so let's look at risks. Risk owners, we've brought them all back in house, they're naturally risk averse because suddenly they don't have a supplier they can blame.  But there are some things we can do around that to improve the situation, yeah? So infrastructure is code, awesome.  Configuration is code, similar thing. Improves the transparency and repeatability. It's easy to statically test in advance. And then of course if we move to immutability, we get rid of a lot of complexity with things like patching and server drift and all that sort of stuff because you just destroy it, rebuild it, okay? But when you're doing that you need to think about chains of trust, okay? So this is all the way from pre-development, all the way through to production. So you need to be asking yourself, is it enough to say, my staff wrote this thing, is it enough to say, this module has 30 million downloads per week from NPM or Maven Central or whatever it is, is it enough to say, but it's not used in production? Because some languages, Node for example, the default action will be to install all your dev dependencies unless you tell it not to. People, so people write, so one of the points there we said was, is it enough to say my staff wrote it? That's a decision you have to make because you need to engender trust. So trust goes two ways, so developers are typically privileged users in an organisation, they get more rights to things than other people do, right access for example into production. So you need to protect the environment from them, doing something wrong either maliciously or accidentally, but you need to protect them too. So make sure your policies and intent, specifically the intent, are really explicit and you're really transparent about it. Think about your disciplinary policies. If someone releases a piece of code that has a vulnerability in and it causes you a major problem, are you going to blame that individual or are you going to blame the process that they went through to get to that point? Because you can pretty much guarantee that one person might have wrote that code, but that's not the failure in the chain that let it get all the way through to the point where it became a problem with you. So think about how you're going to deal with things like that. Devices, so everything starts with a device. Most of our developers are on Mac, we do have a few on Windows for various other reasons. None of our developers have local admin access on their device. And we got a lot, a lot of grief when we said we were going to do this and I do mean a lot. And we said, OK, we're doing it anyway because there are a number of risks that this mitigates, mostly that you can't take off all the monitoring we need to do. So you can have pseudo rules. Sudo rules give you exactly what you need, we just have to be explicit, we're making it transparent. 18 months later, we have five pseudo rules in the system. But for two years before that, everyone needed admin access. So this is something you might want to look at. There's a bunch of tools there we use to manage it. There's a few security ones missing because security through obscurity, I had to take them off. You can look on Gartner, there'll be no surprises in what they are. But yeah, have the reality that developers, if you put a restriction in place, they're going to work around it. They're going to work with them to come up with an answer that actually works for you. So you can achieve your objective without some backdoor processes that completely undermine your nice pink and fluffy world. So we would really say consider auditing and monitoring rather than a more traditional blocking and whitelisting of things. Connectivity, that was the second stage. So we do all of our connectivity. We basically replaced a lot of connectivity with Zscaler. For those of you that aren't familiar, you can think of it kind of like a VPN, but for outbound traffic only. So it's all kind of centrally controlled and there is no inbound connections. And that does, we basically have private access, which is the equivalent of an on-premise VPN, and we have internet filtering and stuff all built in through that. It's all software as a service and all runs in a cloud, and we just connect it to everything basically. Dependencies are always a good one. So open source is fantastic, right? There's loads of opportunities for it. Increases your transparency. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You should have a faster time to market or your MVP. Consistent and reusable, but as with anything, there's challenges. Modules that quite innocently are doing something else and then someone compromises and suddenly they're stealing credentials or other interesting files. That happens fairly regularly in the NPM ecosystem. Other things, slightly less malicious, but that you mightn't be happy with. So modules that phone home with usage statistics and give details about the environment they're running in, you mightn't be happy with sharing that if it's passing out the patch levels of your systems and stuff like that. And then the other one is good one is CVEs and how do you do continuous vulnerability monitoring? Source code controls, so we use GitLab. We've talked about the people, we've talked about the devices, we've talked about dependencies, so we can now comfortably code stuff. GitLab, why did we choose GitLab? Well, Git is just kind of the thing. It's why, wouldn't you? Don't want to go back to the days of SVN or worse. You know, some of the old Microsoft stuff. Source safe, anyone? No, thanks. But yeah, so lots of people want distributed version control, right? But then they never ever use it, because they use GitHub or they use GitLab, which is the central point of control. Not really a big deal. The one thing I would say about that, and this came up in one of the sessions earlier, actually, where someone said, you know, we're not backing it up, we have no disaster recovery. Well, you do, because every single laptop that's called in that repo has a copy on it. So if you ever do find yourself in that situation, just remember, you've probably got a developer code somewhere, your job is just finding it. The real beauty of having a centralized system like GitLab, it's a single source of the truth, but you have to enforce it, right? If you're an organisation that's run in GitLab community edition, and you're offering that as a central service, great, make sure you keep in pace with what the developers do, because if you're not, you can guarantee they'll spin up their own instance of it. I know this because we have 17, and we're trying to pick that problem currently.  But when you're doing that, remember, one size does not fit all. We have a lot of code. 55 million lines give or take. Lots of different languages. 50-something on that slide there. That JavaScript line, this is all scaled properly, by the way, that JavaScript line, that represents about 9.5% of our code base. Guess which one's bigger? Language you haven't probably used for 30, 40 years. So it's quite naive to think you're going to have one tool, a process, or method of going from A to B for all the things. So just accept you're not going to achieve that. If that's your objective, you've already failed. So start thinking, what's going to give you some value, what's going to give you your most value, what's your real pain points? Is your pain point connectivity? Do you have a classic walled garden approach where you have air gaps between your environments? Where actually, connectivity is probably the thing you need to crack to give you a lot of value to move to continuous delivery. And then from there, build on that and start looking at other things. The cloud, it's great. Other people's computers, I think we've heard that one far too often. But using the public cloud, it may shift your risk profile. It's conceptually, it's different to on-prem. You cannot control all the things as much as you might like to think, so you cannot. Depending on the provider you're using, you might have additional risks that you now have to consider. The US Patriot Act, for example. So most people will say, oh, that's OK, I'll just run it in the UK data centre. That doesn't necessarily help you. Go have a look at the US Cloud Act and have a conversation about your UK data centre. So there's lots of things that can trip you up there. Automation, we like automation. Automation is good. It's repeatable. You can automate lots of things. Testing, unit testing, static tests, dynamic tests, environment testing, using terraform, using vaults for credential management, that sort of thing. Deployment, we tend to favour Ansible, you may be a popup shop, you may use other things. Test that as well, use something like InSpec to test it all. When you're looking at your automation, start concentrating on what's the low-hanging fruit. Because there'll always be stuff you cannot automate.  There are things in accessibility tests you will never be able to automate. Why? Because you actually need a proper accessibility user to do it. There's some security tests you're never going to be able to automate because it's not what the tool is doing, it's what the person is doing. Think about things that can adapt and respond. Perspective, so look at things with different lenses. Don't just look at it as, I am a business and I need to achieve this. Look at it as, I am the Chinese agent and I really want to compromise your thing because then I get this technology for free and I don't have to invent it. I am one of your competitors and I just want to steal all your stuff and rebrand it and sell it as my own. So start, if you're not using them already, start thinking about using things like threat models. Threat model is great. Microsoft do an absolutely fantastic free threat modelling tool and it will, you can draw an architectural diagram and it will start generating threats for you, some of which you might not have considered before. A lot of them around the boundaries and system interactions that you may not think about necessarily. Transparency, obviously I keep saying this. Think about the things that you need to demonstrate, how you will do it and how you're going to prevent repudiation. Dashboards and information radios can be quite useful. We've seen some products earlier on that do this sort of stuff.  CD, continuous delivery, treat it like any other product. Don't expect you're going to go from kind of nothing to the Ferrari on day one because you're not. Use the information you've already got. If you've got threat models, you've got different perspectives or postponers, identify what your real MVP is, what's your real pain point where you're going to get that most value straight away so that you can implement that. Start getting that return on investment and more importantly start bringing the community of people who are probably terrified about the fact that the developer can write something and two minutes later it might be in production. You can start bringing them on that journey because they can have as many checks and balances as they want as long as you automate it. It's when you start putting manual process and you start getting human error. Obviously if you do this you can iterate it. You can become more stringent or robust as you go along. You might decide you need to loosen something up. It's perfectly fine. Many bosses and end bosses. Think about your hard controls. Many bosses, the stuff that you should be doing. Stuff you're seeing your developers going to give you grief and not doing. Ultimately stuff that you can go, meh, doesn't really matter this time round. I'll let you off the first time. Maybe the second time. The third time I'm going to crucify you. You've got some flexibility on it. End bosses. This is the stuff that for you is not negotiable. It's either done or you don't pass go. You don't get that $200. You need to be really clear about what they are. They may vary by team based on the maturity of the team. You may have much more stringent controls in for a junior team than you do for a more experienced one. Or the other way around. Remember if you're doing this people are emotional. Try and codify it. If you codify it, it's repeatable, transparent. But it also gets rid of the perception it's an individual attack. My senior developer really doesn't like me because every time I submit code it gets rejected. There's tools out there that can help with that. Danger is one we're looking at. But there's plenty of others out there. Continuous doesn't always mean it has to be automatic. There is nothing wrong with having a manual process. As long as what it's doing is automated you can have a manual process to kick it off. That's perfectly fine. You may need that separation of duties, for example. You may need it because you have a risk level that says actually this is our core business database and we want two or three pairs of eyes on anything on that before it goes through. Even though we've got this whole pipeline that does all those checks as well we still need that additional thing. It's perfectly fine. Make things transparent. It's an older pipeline of ours but you can see we've broken things down into parallel stages, various different things, building things various different compliance checks or commits formatted to the style we do. Have we suddenly included a GPL licence that we really didn't want to? Unit tests, code quality, security tests all that sort of stuff. The great thing about this is you can just keep building it up and building it up so you can build it up and roll it out to everyone at once. But you can see there you can have the flexibility to say we'd really like these things to pass but actually we'll let the pipeline keep going if they don't because it's a slightly softer control. Accessibility testing for example you do get false positives in automated testing of that. You do get some really hard positives as well. Then you can see right at the end we've got pushing AWS that's a manually triggered task. So we want someone different to go in and press that button but it's all fully automated, it's all part of that pipeline. When you do this though think about how you're going to evolve it. This page from about.gitlab.com is great for that because you can see their future roadmap and all the little things that are on it as on our roadmap are really good to look at and say is that something that's going to give you value? Is that something that you want to add into your pipeline or consider doing? Because it may be something you just haven't thought about before. Are you doing security network monitoring? Are you doing monitoring of container networks? Make sure the ingress and egress of them is correct and not just the entire platform. Have you got them boundaries right? This is a really good thing just to take a look at it and say is there anything on there that actually we need to start thinking about that because we haven't come up with that problem yet. So things like that, you can look at all the Gartner reports and stuff like that but I actually quite like the layout of this one. And that's pretty much it. So do we have any questions? Don't start your penguin. Honestly every talk I've sat next to this lady all day and you can tell when the speakers come at the end and she starts. You can go right now. We have a question. I was just wondering about the interactions you have with security and compliance folks around this stuff. So you talked a lot about building that stuff in but in terms of the kind of objections and making the case for why these processes need to be automated. So it really depends on the security folk to be honest. A lot of it can be quite challenging. You know there are a lot of processes that are processes and they're there because they're processes. When you start unpicking some of them and it's like yeah we can automate those bits we can't automate those bits. Those bits don't actually add any value. Why are we doing them? That bit in particular can be quite challenging because then you're talking about changing an ingrain process. You know don't get me wrong we've got some really switched on security guys who are completely up with all of this sort of stuff. We have some really switched on security guys that are not up with this at all and mediating that discussion can be quite a challenge sometimes. It's an entertaining one. You know when you start having debates about cipher suits and stuff like that and why we're using a weaker one before we use a stronger one. And actually a lot of the time it's because we look at it and say that's wrong. We want to use the stronger one because of this. And then the security guy comes along and says yes but you have to talk to this other thing and the thing you don't know about this other thing is it has this limitation on it which means you can't do that. We have a lot of old code, you can't just say we're going to run everything over TLS 1.3 and use the latest elliptical curve cipher suite because actually that will just block everything for certain things. So a lot of it's getting that understanding and being able to have that conversation but being able to have that conversation in a way that is not adversarial and it's actually looking at it from the point of view okay so the thing I'll always do when I was a security human and say I want to do this, this is what I've thought about what have I missed and then we'll start a conversation based on what I've missed and I tend to find that works better than going along and saying I want to do this how do I do it because actually they can see and then I've put some thought into it I've put some consideration around what it is that I think is a risk and then they can start adding the value based on their experience of the rest of the estate and all the bits I don't get to see and say okay but you need to consider this, this, this and this and a lot of that will depend on your environment you know if you're a new start-up you're probably always in the cloud and you're probably doing zero trust by default and all this sort of stuff if you've got kind of a more heritage estate or a more on-premise based estate or a classic walled garden where you've got all your controls on the outside and nothing inside so you know depending on where you are in your journey as an organisation and what you have behind you may impact some of those decisions Very good thank you two more questions I was just going to ask you showed a lot of languages up there obviously you've got a very large engineering team what was the experience like when you brought GitLab in possibly enforcing this on top of the engineers to say actually you've got to use GitLab and use the CI tools as opposed to giving them the freedom to pick the right tools for their own sort of engineering experience So there is some conflict with that so what we tend to find is if it's a really experienced engineer and we've hired in from outside they'll ask those sort of questions if it's a junior engineer or an apprentice engineer we've actually brought on and we're training up we tend not to get them to be at a bit of a GitLab CI versus Jenkins in particular you know we do have another team based in London that is purely running on concord CI for example and that's quite where the team is at a maturity level where actually they can articulate why it's the right solution for them then I'm quite happy to have that discussion when it's just I used this thing in the past I've learned something new that's a very different conversation because that's not really the sort of engineer I want So yeah so basically the Jenkins things they all pull from GitLab so they're all integrated with a concourse the concourse one is slightly different because a lot of that stuff is just pushed directly to GitHub because that's a very mature team so a lot of that's just tied directly into GitHub but everything is proxied on premise we use like Nexus repository manager through that because that's part of our chain of trust and digital signage and all that sort of stuff in terms of the asset but the code itself it's pretty much everything is through GitLab very good we only have like one minute quick question you mentioned you like you love automation, automate everything just curious if you've done any work in terms of building some of the some of the security tools into your deployment into your commits if there's any thought of integration in that area? Yeah so we do have some built in so if I went back to the pipeline slide on our security side we've got things like black duck we've got things like check marks you know we do run Clamia V we run claw, we run a whole bunch of tools and a whole bunch more on that particular diagram one of the things we do tend to find is sometimes the integration can be a right pain in the butt to be honest check marks is great but it's kind of fire and forget so unless you constantly poke in the developer and saying have you actually checked the outcome of that report and you have a check further down your pipeline to go back and say what was the status of that sonar cube scan for example because a lot of the security tools they run asynchronously so if you have a synchronous pipeline and you're running an asynchronous tool at some point you've got to get that signal back now that was a conversation I had with GitLab actually around how we can do this and we have got some example code repos of how we can use the multi pipeline feature to fire off an asynchronous tool and then fire a result back into a pipeline and then potentially make a decision on that further down in the pipeline I think we can probably share those that would be a good idea but yeah we do have quite a lot in there well thank you thank you very much


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Mr. Igor Bosk of the ILO for South Asia joining us to talk about migration and migrant labor. Thank you for joining us. Mr. Igor, could you please tell us a bit about the current international climate regarding migrant labor? It's always important to look at migration in the context of where the jobs are and why people are migrating. So in recent history, as you would have seen, there's been a significant amount of migration happening around the world in different types of directions, but often approximately two-thirds of the migration is actually for work, which means that people are looking for normal livelihood opportunities, that they're not able to meet those needs back at home, and they need those types of opportunities in places where they go. So the challenge here is how is it that this migration can actually be empowering? And that means basically how are the working conditions for the migrants and what can be done in order to improve the outcomes for the lives of migrant workers. So there's been talk about the global compact for migrants. I'm not very sure on the exact terminology, but could you shed some light on that? Sure. In the last couple years, there's been a lot of discussions about trying to come up with some sort of a global compact on migration, and there's been lots of negotiations, particularly recently. There's already a first draft, a zero draft, now there's a first draft. And so there's going to be this document that is going to be a legally non-binding framework. However, in a context where there have been limited instruments looking at migration, such an agreement is very important because it will start shaping the way policymakers start looking at mobility and labor migration. And it is all the more important because currently that particular draft is still of course a draft, but there is still a lot that can be done to ensure that the link with employment is actually represented so that migrants can actually find the types of opportunities that are necessary and that the document doesn't look at migration as an objective per se. If there are enough working opportunities that are decent, then of course migration will tend to be much easier and regular. However, if the working opportunities are not as good, then of course there will be more irregularity and therefore it is very important to look at decent work as an objective that has to be well articulated in this document. In the context of South Asia, in terms of the out migration and in migration, which side does the migration tend to favor? South Asia is by far one of the biggest migrant-sending regions in the world and it also is the biggest receiver of remittances. So remittances play a very important role, especially for the livelihoods of people who are migrating and their families back in their home countries. And therefore it's really very important that these types of agreements like the Global Compact actually represent as well the interests of countries that are sending migrants abroad. And part of the motivation behind this Global Compact is coming from countries that are developed and that are seeing a rise in political trends where politicians don't necessarily look at migrants in a positive way, as a result of which it is important to also look at the working conditions of migrants. If migrants are actually going to countries for different reasons, then what can be done to actually uphold international labor standards? And are there protections, I mean international labor standards, meaning protections for migrant labor in say other countries? There are labor standards for migrant workers. Now one of the challenges is that many of the countries of destination where migrants go and work to as a majority have not necessarily ratified those conventions. However there are fundamental principles in rights at work which are part of the International Labor Organization's standards and those have certain principles which are supposed to be universal and apply even for countries that have not necessarily ratified. These include issues like for instance the freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining and organizing, freedom from discrimination, freedom from forced labor and child labor. Those are fundamental principles that are very important to uphold in order to ensure that the working conditions improve. So in the case of say countries of origin, what steps can a country of origin take to ensure the protection of its citizens who have migrated? The most important thing is countries of origin have a better bargaining voice when they talk as a group. And so if countries like for instance of South Asia and other region they talk in one voice with countries where migrants are going to then of course that is different. Now what tends to happen is that there is a series of bilateral agreements or memorandums of understanding between different countries which leads countries to have different types of agreements on how their migrant workers are protected or not. And so you will have a certain hierarchy of migrant workers who will be often doing similar types of jobs in destination countries and yet the for instance wages or the working conditions would differ not because of the qualifications that they have but because of the color of their skin, because of their gender. And those are the types of things that international labor standards are useful for addressing. And that's why we try to advocate for that. So in the context of South Asia, what steps have say some of the governments or taken in regards to protecting their citizens who have migrated? So I mean there are a variety of instruments that are used by different governments. India has an emigrant act that from 1983 if I am correct to be verified. Many Nepal passed recently a foreign employment act. Bangladesh has a similar type of a mechanism. Now legislation of course is important but what is particularly also important is to make sure that there are mechanisms in place in the countries of destination through embassies that enable migrant workers to protect themselves and uphold their labor rights so that they don't find themselves in these types of discriminatory working conditions. So that is something which can always be improved and we in the ILO work in countries of destination with different constituents including trade unions and employer organizations as well as governments to try to improve that. So does the ILO also look into the concerns because from various countries there are concerns about illegal migrants who are snatching away the jobs, the common refrain, but does the ILO's guidelines also look into the working conditions of these illegal migrants? Because like you had earlier said if the opportunities exist back home they wouldn't really travel. Absolutely and the working conditions are one of the main sectors which the ILO focuses on. I particularly looking particularly at the issue of vulnerability to forced labor and in connection with the other fundamental principles and rights at work. So for instance to give a practical example we do work in countries of destination specifically on the working conditions of domestic work, the working conditions of garment workers and other types of workers. Now each sector has a very different dynamic and so it's important to understand that dynamic. For instance there's a lot of discussion around domestic workers and the rights of domestic workers and their working conditions. However what is often not understood is why is it that there's increasing demand for domestic workers around the world? That happens in countries like in the US, in Europe, but in West Asia as well as in the main cities of India and other countries of South Asia. And the reason for that is that you do have first of all a pattern of urbanization that's happening that is related with an agrarian crisis in most countries. You have an urban middle class that increasingly needs to rely on some type of assistance in the households and that is often linked to a certain degree into the cities capacities to provide for certain services. If there is good transport, if there is good healthcare service, if there are good childcare facilities, if all those types of services are there then of course households have less of a need to rely on domestic workers. However if funding for such type of services diminishes then of course the burden of the cost falls on the households and therefore there's an increase in the demand for domestic workers. And so that is one of the primary reasons of looking at that. So there are all these economic connections which are important to understand and grapple. Otherwise simply addressing particularly the rights of domestic workers is not enough. Of course it's very important. There is a, the ILO does have a convention for domestic work which is convention 189 that guarantees decent work for domestic workers. But you know it should, the labor standards should be seen as a comprehensive framework that have to be analyzed from different social economic angles. You did mention in this context about internal migration as well. So you would say that the factors of external migration and internal migrations are almost the same. Or is there a difference? There are differences but there's a lot of also similar dynamics. I mean in the, as I mentioned it's important to understand why migration is happening. Migration is often happening because there's a process of economic transformation that's happening in countries and areas where people are migrating from. Where there's a complete transformation of the type of agriculture that was there. The rule economy that was there is changing and the traditional means of livelihoods are no longer working. As a result of that people end up migrating and in South Asia you still have very low, very low levels of urbanization compared to some other parts of the world. So you can expect a certain continuation of this type of flows from urban, from rural to urban areas. So what's important to look at is how is the agrarian crisis, for instance, can affect working conditions in cities of destination. Whether it's within South Asia or whether it's in other countries, for instance in West Asia where many migrants from South Asia go to. And so the more you have migrants flowing into these areas the more of course you're going to have also an economic pressure and a depression of wages and working conditions can be affected. Which gives rise to also sometimes xenophobic types of feelings about why all these people are coming into our cities, why they're coming into our countries from people that we have never seen before. And that is why it's important for policy makers to look at the connection between what's happening in the agrarian context with the working conditions in the emerging sectors often related to the service area or to manufacturing in this process of structural transformation that's happening. Thank you for joining us Mr. Igor. And thank you for watching NewsClick. Keep watching our videos.