Good afternoon and welcome to the Cato Institute. For those of you who don't know me, I'm David Bose. I'm the Executive Vice President of the Institute and I'm delighted to have you all here today. We're gonna have a discussion and then we will break for book purchasing and book signing and lunch upstairs in the Winter Garden. As I probably don't have to tell the people who are here, Robert Heinlein is often called the Dean of Science Fiction Writers. If you saw Michael Dirda's review in The Washington Post a month or two ago, you recall that Dirda remembered him as the greatest science fiction writer in the world, at least to adolescent boys in the 50s and 60s who were probably the greatest science fiction consumers in the world. Certainly I remember that I had a lot of Heinlein books on my shelf before I went off to college and I still have those books but I probably read them less than I did when I was an adolescent boy. Heinlein set a high standard for accuracy or at least plausibility in his discussion of science and engineering in his writings and that was one of the things that set him apart and that made him a pioneer in the field. He was also immensely readable. Dirda suggested that his style was somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain, a very natural Americanism. In the invitation to this event, I wrote that Heinlein is the author of more than 30 novels, including Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and the Libertarian Classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So I was interested to get a note from Bill Patterson as we were discussing this event. He's written a foreword to the new edition of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and he says in there that Heinlein had left behind a three by five index card handwritten in a safety deposit box to be discovered after his passing in which he wrote, if a person names as his three favorites of my books, Stranger, Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers, I then believe that he has groked what I meant. But if he likes one but not the other two, I am certain that he has understood me. He has picked out points and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks two of three, then there is hope, one of three, no hope. All three books are on one subject, freedom and self-responsibility. Well, I'm not sure that I picked those as the three most important books. I probably picked them as the three that I thought were best known, but I'm pleased to discover that I did pick the right three. I was particularly intrigued by a line in I think the introduction, introductory matter in this new biography, that Heinlein's writings galvanize not one but four social movements of his century. Science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, which caused a little head scratching around here. The counterculture, the libertarian movement and the commercial space movement. And all of that certainly sounds right. He was indeed highly influential in the libertarian movement. There was supposedly a survey of early libertarian party members that found that 16% of them identified Heinlein as their chief intellectual influence. I'm particularly pleased to report that late in his life, Robert Heinlein was a contributor to the Cato Institute, one of our early Cato sponsors. So we are especially pleased to welcome here to this podium, William H. Patterson to discuss the first biography of Robert Heinlein. The book's title is Robert A. Heinlein in dialogue with his century and actually the title of the book that we have available out here also includes volume one 1907 to 1948 learning curve. This is going to be a two volume biography. William H. Patterson is the editor and publisher of the Heinlein Journal. He co-founded the Heinlein Society with Heinlein's Widow Virginia and he is developing an authoritative edition called the Virginia edition of all of Heinlein's books. Please welcome Bill Patterson. Well, thank you very much and thank you for the invitation to come talk at the Book Forum of the Cato Institute. This has been an important intellectual mainstay of the libertarian movement and I've been participating in as far as, as long as it has been around the current version of the thing. And so it's a great honor and thank you very much. Let's see. I kind of like to start off by addressing the point that had all the head scratching going on by showing you the tradition and the connections that led from science fiction to the policy think tank. It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that there's a genetic relationship although there was certainly a certain amount of incest going on in it. In the 1930s, if you're Mr. and Mrs. John Cue public, you did have an awareness of technology that your grandparents probably didn't because you had these switches that you could flip on your walls and light would appear instead of having to light a gas lamp. And if you were very modern, you had a radio and yes, you were aware that these were technology but they were kind of like the frills on your life. If you read something like a Babbitt, for example, that was written in the early 20s, you can kind of divine that the awareness of technology had slipped down into the furniture level. And that's what the texture of what technology meant if you were the ordinary man on the street. Well, all that changed in World War II because suddenly there was, I think, four million American servicemen that were placed into absolute daily contact with science and technology. And the awareness that it was something they used extended from their rifles, which were pretty much an inheritance to the new technologies of radar and sonar and even the analog computer, which did exist long before then, but the Northern bomb site was essentially an analog computer and aviators who used that for navigating and for bombing were suddenly aware of how it could be useful. And so they were kind of prepared when in May, the third Reich fell apart and Germany surrendered, the American occupying forces found these super weapons that were under development and some of them were very close, such as the jet. So if you look at the newspapers of 1945, which I had occasion to do, all during the summer of 1945, once a week or sometimes twice a week, you'd see these stories about German super weapons suddenly discovered. So there's kind of an evolutionary preparation going on in the minds of Mr. and Mrs. America to bring science and technology from furnishings to something they actually had to deal with in a conscious way. And of course in August 1945, when the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, suddenly there was a great demand on the part of the American public for somebody that could explain the meaning of this new technology, the meaning to their life. And among John Q. Public was also policy makers in Washington DC. The people they turned to were the people that had been developing exactly the technology, pardon me, the vocabulary of language and ideas for dealing with technological change. One of the things that characterizes science fiction and has for as long as there has been science fiction is a foundational awareness that things are not going to be the same tomorrow as they are today. And this is something that John Q. Public wasn't necessarily very much aware of before the war and started to be aware of after the war for this very reason. So for example, the New Yorker turned to its local boy John W. Campbell, Jr., for an explanation of what the potentials of atomic weaponry, then you find that in the New Yorker. Well, Robert Heinlein had came around at a very particular time in the evolution of science fiction and he had kind of started the ball of rolling on this development of a technology and vocabulary of ideas and language. So he was one of the people that was consulted for it. And one of the things that he was consulted about was that he'd written a 1941 story that dealt with atomic weapons. This is the very first one that actually dealt with atomic weapons in a recognizable way. And in the writing of this story, he realized that this possession of a weapon that cannot be defended against critically changes the nature of not only warfare, which was kind of obvious to everybody else since H.G. Wells had used an atomic explosion, but it changed the way that nations interrelated with each other. And essentially, cutting to the chase, he discovered the dynamics of what was later came to be called the Cold War. This is in 1941. And I think that phrase comes out of Winston Churchill's, which was very late in the 1940s, but at any rate, skipping a few steps, the think tank had been around for quite a while by that time in D.C. here. You may be aware of the Brookings Institute. That goes way back. But a new kind of think tank started appearing in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and on into the late 1950s, the Rand Institute being kind of the paradigmatic example of it. One of the people that started out at the Rand Institute was Herman Kahn. Herman Kahn was a fanatic science fiction reader, and in the course of trying to find old issues of astounding, he was introduced by one of his seminar participants, Jerry Pornell, directly to Robert Heinlein. And he had to have Robert Heinlein in the next Hudson Institute seminar. Well, Heinlein came and was absolutely enthralled by what was called at that time grand strategy. And so a lot of the, this kind of changed the way he thought about geopolitics, and some of his understandings got put into his next big book on the subject, which was The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So not only were some of the same individuals involved, but the evolution went from science fiction to the think tank back to science fiction. And one of the things I wanted to point out about those particular three books, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is that they are unequivocally a lot more, they are the possession of the America at large, rather than specifically the possessions of science fiction readers and science fiction fans. And that's one of the reasons why those three in particular stand out. So there is an evolution. It's sometimes not well documented, and I have to say that at the time I started writing the book, I thought the evolution was one of those historically uncontroversial things. And certainly some people seem to accept it, other people question it, and of course it's something to think about because there has been this evolution of ideas. And the way we think about how we live with technology and how we use technology to shape our immediate future, both in terms of policy and in terms of what again later came to be called futureology, didn't spring full grown from the forehead of Zeus, even though we did have to be hit over the head several times. It had an evolution and science fiction was part of the evolutionary forebears that went into this, I guess you could call it a tendez, of the way we think about science and technology into the 21st century. Now there are other aspects of how Heinlein worked in more broad terms than in the purely science fictional. For I have to say this biography is not the biography of a science fiction writer. There is a science fiction writer buried in the biography, but it is essentially the story of an intelligent and thoughtful man dealing with the things that all of us had to deal with in the 20th century and still have to deal with in the 21st century, which is a much bigger subject than the biography of a science fiction writer. In American letters, we have a long tradition of writers whose influence extended beyond the usual literary feels and going all the way back to the very beginning, Thomas Paine's common sense did something very unusual for the American public at large and it was to provide the language for what they were feeling, to provide the rationale for what they were doing in terms of the revolution. But even though he continued to write and to be influential in the evolution of freedom, it was essentially in one narrow political context that Thomas Paine was influential. Perhaps I should not say narrow because the subject of freedom is certainly not a narrow subject at all. Another example that occurs off the top of my head is the Harriet Beecher Stowe in writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. The book was published in 1850 and it gave to the abolition movement something that it never had before and that is a concrete visualizable image of what suffering and degradation slavery imposed. This is something that abolitionists had known intellectually and certainly some of them had felt it but it allowed by providing this image around which the social movement which became a political movement of abolition it could crystallize and 10 years later there was the Civil War in which abolition was a major issue though not the only issue. There are other examples. Edward Bellamy in 1888 writes Looking Backward which what is the and I believe still remains the most widely read utopia in the English language. Immediately following that book's publication they're spraying up a national movement that's the name of the movement is the national movement. Supported by national clubs all over the country. It had the national movement it was very influential in radical politics of its time even though that particular area of American history is not well treated. Bellamy folded the national club movement into the populist movement and that is a little bit the populist movement is a little bit more better treated more widely treated in American history. And of course I think the last major example I'd come up with is 1905 Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle and the image he provides of the conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry galvanized public support for Theodore Roosevelt's Pure Food and Drug Act one of the quickest examples of outside influence in American history because they were both publication of the book and the passage of the Food and Drug Act happened both in 1905. So it was not something that took a long time to mature it happened almost immediately. Well Highline fits into that very select group. I said in the introduction that there were four and David has just gone over the four I cited in the introduction. I since changed my mind as to the fourth one the commercial space development is something that he put his life, his fortune and his sacred honor into. As part of his legacy they founded the Heinlein Prize Trust which gives an award patterned after the Ortig Prize that motivated Charles Lindberg in 1927. That was a 25 year inflation since then. The Heinlein Prize is a half million dollars and the first recipient was Dr. Peter Diamandis. Spaceship won X-Core and Ansari X Prize. So if there is anything like a space entrepreneur he's it. But still that has yet to bear fruit in the major way that it should have. But something that I didn't talk much about was that in 1979 he was roped into something that the Reagan transition team set up to look at American defense policy. Jerry Purnell and his friend Bessoni had in 1970 written an exploration of what do we do instead of mutual assured destruction. Mutual assured destruction was the defense posture that was defined by Herman Kahn and part of the Hudson Institute workings to deal with the fact that there were there was no defense against nuclear weapons. Well, Purnell in 1970 says on the horizon there is technology that will make defense against nuclear weapons possible for the first time. And this has immense consequences for how we deal with the relationships again of state to state. It has immense geopolitical grand strategy consequences. The Reagan defense team says yes, you're right and isn't it time. So they asked Jerry Purnell to set up a policy group specifically for reworking defense policy. Time passes, the leaves fall off the calendar. Highline is one of those people who in discussions and in the creation of white papers they go directly to President Reagan's desk. This results in 1983 in President Reagan defining the strategic defense initiative. Now, people have made a lot of fun of that and they've made a lot of fun of it starting immediately at the time of the speech. But simply redefining American defense posture caused the Soviet Union to no longer be able to participate in the Cold War. As long as it was a matter of manufacturing one thing, atomic weaponry and their delivery systems, the Soviet Union could participate in the Cold War direct head to head that had existed by that time for 40 years. But once the box is opened and once all of the investigations on the American side go to things like lasers in space and dropping chaff and all the other individual elements, many of which have not worked out, some of which may yet work out, but that doesn't matter. Once the box was opened and it became no longer a one product manufacturing problem, the Soviet Union could not afford to be in the space race. And as it turned out, the Soviet Union could no longer afford to exist. So in 1989, followed the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union falls apart and that's something the Heinlein did not live to see because he had died just a few months earlier in 1988. But if he could claim a legacy to have a nation systematically devoted to the brutalization of its own people disappear from the face of the earth, that would be a legacy he'd be very proud to claim. How close are we for a time? We have another five minutes or so if you want it. Oh, okay. Actually, I think I'd rather throw it open for questions. All right. Okay. What are you interested in talking about? Yes, sir. Hold on, go ahead and call on people and we will bring microphones and since the microphones, all right, there we are. While you're going over there, let me ask a question. Would Heinlein ever have become a writer if his naval career had progressed? Probably not, although there is a long tradition within the Navy of people in the line that produce monographs and so forth, he would certainly never have gone to fiction first. It simply is not something that would have occurred to him at that point. He would have something to say about strategy and tactics. And in fact, he did take the Naval War College's course in strategy and tactics while he was an ensign on board the Lexington. So he might have wound up in writing, but probably not the same way and we certainly would not have the fiction.  So he's a vindication of Aristotle's poetics, so there. Okay, yes sir. Yeah, I remember when the movie Starship Troopers came out and the post movie critic referred to the writer as the being of having a fascist view of life because imagine having to serve in the military before you had full rights of citizenship. And I wonder, is there a comeback to that? I mean, I personally thought it was a good idea, but then again, I went to Hudson High, so I understand that kind of stuff. But I wondered, is there an answer to this, the way liberals just throw out always the fascist because he is pro-military? Well, there are several ways that you can answer that question. One of them is you can't really answer nonsense. The second is, it's really not that odd. This is simply another way of talking about mandatory military service and things like maybe he's never heard of Switzerland, but that's the way it is. If you have to have mandatory military service, then your citizenship, full citizenship is contingent on that. In the book, Heinlein is entering a very long debate in American political thought about the nature of franchise. And it's not a position that he believed in in the sense of he was arguing polemically for it, but it's something that opened up the story possibilities of this young man's story. Because, as Heinlein said of that book, it is a partial and incomplete investigation of why men fight and that's certainly an important enough subject to think and write about. When you toss around terms like fascist with no connection to historical fascism, it becomes impossible to talk about it in a coherent sense. So yes, there is a way, a response you could make, no, it doesn't make it that much easier to talk about. So, yes, sir. I was wondering if you had any comments about any interpersonal interaction between Rand and Heinlein and what, if they had a relationship at all? They knew of each other. They didn't have, they never met as far as I can tell. There's no, he's never recorded any personal details. But as you're probably aware from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, he has profs saying I can get along with the Randite and prof is a professed anarchist. Heinlein, 1948, 49, he's putting together the ideas for a book that was unfortunately never written. He was going to do the fountain head, but instead of being in the world of architecture, it was going to be in the world of modern painting, sculpture and painting. That would have been a fascinating book for him to have read because he's coming up, growing up in the late teens and early 20s. He's really a disciple of Auguste Rodin. And Rodin had this very interesting, a late 19th century aesthetic theory that Heinlein, instead of falling in with the aesthetic evolution of high modernism, Heinlein did use some of the techniques of high modernism, but he's more interested in extending the theory that was around at the turn of the century, people like Satyana and Rodin, among others. And that's when you look at the art comments in Stranger in a Strange Land, he's really trying to develop those Satyana, Rodin art theories. He's not doing an engineer's aesthetic as one rather buffoonish critic had to say. And I feel I'm kind of moving away from your subject. We talked about Heinlein and Rand. On Rand's end, on a couple of occasions, she received an audience question or comment about Stranger in a Strange Land. And she had read it approvingly, in fact. In fact, she expressed amazement when somebody else in the audience said that he'd never read it. But that's as far as the direct connection between Rand and Heinlein went. They were aware of each other as, well, as taste makers within their own frames of reference. Take the microphone up to the back, and while you're walking up there, let me ask a follow-up question on that. Do you have a definition of science fiction? Is it any fiction set in the future? And does it include Atlas Shrugged? Some people do include Atlas Shrugged because it hinges on marvelous inventions. If it is science fiction, it is science fiction of the pre-Heinlein generation. And of course, Rand herself has said that she took the turn of the 20th century melodrama and expanded it to gigantic proportions. So this is very understandable, that it would be science fiction of an older type. Before Heinlein starts writing, the leading editor in the field with Hugo Gernsback was also the founder of genre science fiction. And one of the requirements that he made was that every story should have three patentable inventions in it. That was a requirement that was honored in the breach more than anything else, but nonetheless, it gets you the idea. So if Atlas Shrugged is science fiction, it is a pre-Golden age science fiction story. Now, after the first part of that question, science fiction seems to be undefinable. People have been working at this problem for at least 60 years by now, I mean, working specifically on this. And the best one they've been able to come up with, the one that seems to resist challenges most is science fiction is what I mean when I point to it. Which is not very helpful, but the direction that I'm taking this, I belong to the American Comparative Literature Association and at last year's conference in New Orleans, I presented a paper saying, look, there are these relationships of methodology between satire or what North Frey called anatomy and science fiction. And they are both what could be called cognitive. They depend on looking at ideas rather than looking at people. And so you see people through ideas rather than ideas through people. So that the forms of novel and romance see ideas through people. The forms of satire and science fiction see people through ideas. That's about where I am right now on that thought. Okay, in the back. Hi, I read your book. Tell me, you say in your book that Heinlein said that his evolution towards the free market took place when he read an article in 1954 about Pearl Harbor and once he started questioning the reasons why Pearl Harbor was attacked, he then started becoming more skeptical of government. I know this is in your second volume. Could you care to elaborate? Okay, well I will elaborate very briefly because I want you to read the second volume too. That's not quite an accurate representation of what Heinlein said. It wasn't specifically his evolution toward the free market that starts there, but rather his evolution away from the Democratic Party and his evolution away from being a New Deal liberal. And he resigned from the Democratic Party shortly thereafter and was independent for quite a while until he went to work for Goldwater in 1964, who was, interestingly enough, another New Deal liberal. The evolution toward free market ideas is much longer than is implied by the material you just quoted. Heinlein was always a libertarian even when he was a socialist and you'll find this in his correspondence. We've got three volumes of correspondence coming out with the collected works that will be finished this year and early next year, 46 volumes, the Virginia edition. American socialism before about 1935 comes from the utopian tradition and there is nothing inconsistent between utopian socialism and free market economics. In fact, if you go back and look at the socialist writings in the 19th century, there are two major sources for them. One is Noyes, who is the founder of the Oneida colony and the other is Nordhoff. The title of Nordhoff's book is the Communist Societies of the United States, but it was written before the Russian Revolution so he did not mean Marxist Leninism by that. In Noyes' book, and he'd collected firsthand accounts for everybody who had been involved in this huge wave of socialist experimentation dating from about 1840 in the US, one of the people that he has a firsthand account of is Josiah Warren, who may be more familiar as an anarchist. He's certainly claimed by the anarchist as part of their intellectual tradition, but Noyes felt no compunction about regarding him as one of the socialist experimenters of the mid-19th century. And indeed, he ran his colony on an accounting basis, just exactly the way you'd expect a hardcore free market anarchist to do things. Accounting systems were very big in America in the 19th century. This is the tradition that Heinlein comes out of, this utopian socialist. And I'll remind you, this term was the original socialism. It was invented in France by Henri de Saint-Simon, and the name socialism was coined by Saint-Simon's secretary, Auguste Comte, whom we may be more familiar with as the founder of positivism, logical positivism, which is a very French way of thinking about things. This tradition goes through the 19th century, but it was not particularly named. It was just socialism until in the 1880s, Marx and Engels write a book, The Anti-During is what it's called. I forget the exact title of the thing, but he takes all of the existing trends and he labels these utopian socialism to be contrasted with his own scientific socialism. But in that, he critiques Fourier and Robert Owen and Max Steerner and several others of what we call the utopian tradition. Well, the thing is, after the 1870s, the Marxist tradition took over everything in Europe. There was a very lively anarchist movement and working in this movement that kind of collapsed because of the persecutions among the various states at that time, and Marxism came out of the, Marx literally himself, came out the winner in that particular state of affairs. And of course, after 1917, after the Russian Revolution, there was one working socialism in the world, so that became a synecdoche for all socialism everywhere. But that evolution did not happen in the United States. The utopian tradition flourished, it became our native tradition, and although there was one European utopian socialist that everybody knew, H.G. Wells, the American socialist tradition that underwrote Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California program in 1934 was the utopian tradition. There is no incoherence, there is no tension between a free market and the utopian socialist traditions. I keep forgetting we have to get the mic to you. So growing up in the 60s, we were very enamored, of course, with Stranger in a Strange Land. As well you should be. Yes, and I remember all the water brother images, which are still kind of touch me. Could you comment how this all fits in some of the mystical nature of that, the spirituality of that, and maybe speak about Heinlein's own sense of mysticism or spirituality? Well, that's a very, very big subject. And at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007, we had a panel on precisely that subject Heinlein has mystic.  So we won't have the delays. And we had just literally begun uncovering the ground to uncover the ground by the time the panel ended. So I'm gonna have to collapse it for you. Heinlein was as much a mystic as he was a rationalist. And this is something, you know, if you're not in the positivist tradition, these are not, there's no tension between these ideas. The positivist tradition says only what can be seen and weighed and measured has any reality whatsoever. But if you're not in the tradition, and of course that describes Victorian materialism. So that's all over H.G. Wells as well. But if you are not in that tradition, then you don't have any problem with the idea that yes, the world operates as a rational machine, but between the gears and the cogs of this Newtonian machine, there's a lot of other stuff happening. And the world is much bigger than you can think about. And again, there is no tension. If you don't buy into this positivist tradition that came to dominate absolutely everything in the 20th century. I think one of the reasons that Heinlein is so, has always had such a strong readership and people have such strong emotions about him, which is also a little bit of why Rand was so popular. She said things that needed to be said and weren't being said anywhere else in certainly the popular culture. In Heinlein, very much the same way, when he sits down to write the juveniles, sits down metaphorically of course. His friends had said, what could you possibly do that is more important than influencing the minds of the next generation? And he took this to heart. The methodology he came up with, he later talked to his editor and said, what I'm doing is writing the Horatio Alger books of my generation and pushing the values of thrift and hard work and perseverance and all these things we find in Horatio Alger and we also find in Heinlein and particularly the juveniles. But the principal dilemma he had in the writing of it and ultimately the reason he gave it up was because he didn't actually sell these books to his boys and girls, the people that were reading it. The people that were buying these books were guardians of morality or the librarians. And you had to be able to get this across. Well, what was he trying to get across that he could not let the librarians know that he was talking about? If you can look at each individual book and there will be individual different facets of it. But summarizing the whole thing, what he's talking about is the dangerous and forbidden knowledge of how the world actually works. Almost uniquely in children's literature of the very early 1950s, you have broken homes. You have a codependent relationship between father and son and farmer in the sky where the father is trying to get away from his son's smothering.  If you think of the furor that was raised five or six years later when Catcher and the Rye came out, Heinlein's task in writing those juveniles was to get stuff that subversive and that dangerous and that unwanted past the librarians so that he could actually get to his readers. Where's the next? Yes. I view the Heinlein corpus as essentially one corpus. Yes. But the reviewer who you referred to already said the high point was the moon is a harsh mistress. I happen to think it was a high point. But I also really like what he's written since then very much and had written since then. And the reviewer seemed to trash all of that. Just asking for comment on that. Well, I'm not going to talk specifically about what Michael Durda had to say, but I am going to talk a little bit about what it represents. Heinlein was regarded for a very long time as the quintessential writer of science fiction. He knew what the conventions were. Hell, he'd help make most of those conventions. At various points in his life, he went off and did things that are slightly off the main line of science fiction and he was roasted. When he started publishing the post stories in 1947, the ones that did for Mr. and Mrs. America what the same thing the Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did, it gave them a picture of what life would look like and feel like to live in the next 10 or 15 years when we were going to have orbital industries by 1950. He brought that home to Mr. and Mrs. America by stripping out those highly involved and subtle and powerful conventions and going back to the perennial stories, the things that he had learned as when he was first studying how to be a writer, which is boy meets girl never goes out of style. So he wrote the post stories and he was roasted by science fiction fans. They were very disappointed that he had given up writing science fiction in order to write these pablam things for the Saturday evening post and then when he started writing and becoming influential as a children's writer the fans hated it because those stories again were too simple to have gone into astounding. And he and John Campbell talked specifically about this in the letters. Well this had happened several times in his career. Science fiction fans were dissatisfied with Destination Moon because it didn't have the high adventure of and the romantic colorations that they expected to find the space battles and so forth. Well by 1980, Heinlein is approaching, well he's in his 70s and approaching his 80s and something was happening with him that happens with a lot of writers, particularly powerful writers as they get older. They get more complex. And since Heinlein had always paid attention to the mainstream, what's called within science fiction the mainstream of writing, even experimental writing of the time, he began incorporating these things in the 70s and the 80s. There was a Greeley for Andrew Greeley for example and a couple of other people put themselves as creations, as characters into their own books. Well in 1970, Heinlein did this with I Will Fear No Evil. And in 1980, with the number of the beast, he and his wife show up as characters in the last chapter. Well this is simply a very ordinary, by this time very ordinary technique that was widely used in mainstream writing and the fans hated it. In order to get, how do I say this? The science fiction storytelling had a tradition of simplified straight through storytelling. And you cannot do these complex and intertextual books as the last five of the stories that he wrote were complex and intertextual. You cannot do those in a simplified, straightforward manner. So he began departing from the one true gospel and the fans hated it. And in fact they were very insulting about hating it. They were even insulting about the things they liked about it. So, but Heinlein knew what he was doing. He was writing something that was kind of a midway between mainstream literature and science fiction as some of the reviewers pointed out at the time. And one science fiction critic who was relatively sympathetic to this said that what he was trying to do was to complete an evolutionary arc that before 1926, when genre science fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback, science fiction was simply a part of literature. In fact, all of speculative fiction was simply a part of literature. And the fact that Hawthorne and Poe and so forth had written speculative fiction in one way or another. I mean, if you think about it, some conversations with a mummy, the case of Monsieur Valdemar, the man who was used up about prosthetics, all of these are science of the 1840s, science fiction of the 1840s. And it was just part of speculative literature. Hawthorne writes Rappaccini's Daughter. You know, if that's not biological science fiction of the 1840s, I don't know what is. But they were just part of ordinary literature and nobody took any particular notice that he was doing anything differently, that either of these guys were doing anything different about science fiction. It became a genre in 1926. It existed as a genre for a very long time. And in the 1980s, this critic concludes that Heinlein is trying to return science fiction to the status of a branch of ordinary literature, and at which point you can no longer use the term mainstream, it's just literature. So by bringing these literary values into it, the fans hated it, but he had an agenda. He was very obviously trying to write much more complicated things than he had been writing before. Okay? Yeah, sir, two questions if I may. One, a military policy expert said that all the weapons of the late 20th century and early 21st century are coming out of Robert Heinlein's writing. So besides missile defense, if you can elaborate on that a little bit, which systems you view as coming out of Starship Troopers or what have you. The second question is, who do you see as hairs as people today working in the same tradition? I'm thinking of Orson Scott Card. You may have other ideas. Thank you. Okay. I can't speak with specificity about which particular systems, it's not something I've ever studied. I do know that last week, before leaving Los Angeles, to come here, there was an article in well, heck, I can't even remember where it was now, but it was about the powered suit. Certainly the heads up avionics that started to become prevalent in the 1980s and the 90s was stuff that he talked about in Starship Troopers. But there is a bit of a misconception that I would like to clear up. There now exists a sub branch of science fiction called military science fiction, or Mil SF, or Mil spec in some cases. Starship Troopers is considered the fountain head of that particular genre, but that genre did not exist when Heinlein was writing it. Heinlein was just writing science fiction, and in particular he was writing a kind of an odd juvenile. Now, myself, I have a hard time understanding how he expected to sell a book with that opening in a chapter of an invasion and attack of an alien city, told in graphic detail. I don't know how he could have thought he was going to get that through the editors to say nothing of the librarians, but apparently he did. As to errors, there's always a problem with that, because take whatever position you want, like, dislike, think good, think bad. Heinlein was a phenom, he was unprecedented. Nobody else was doing the kinds of things he was doing, and that's why he had a unique position. So the question of errors becomes a rather a vexed question. I never saw anything particularly Heinlein ask about Orson Scott Cart. If I had to point to an error in one sense now, I'd say John Scalzi, and of course his old man's war and the last colony in the series that have derived from that are specifically in dialogue with Stranger in a Strange Land. So it's easy to point to this tradition that goes from Starship Troopers to Joe Haldeman's, yeah, Forever War, thank you. The title just flew out of my head. To John Scalzi's, the old man's war. It's easy to point to an inheritance of references, but Scalzi also seems to have that quality of grabbing the mind and tickling you. What he doesn't have quite so much is Heinlein's devilish glee in, well, as he said at one point, his mission was to find the toes God made to be stepped on, which he certainly did. There are certainly others. Scalzi's simply easy to point to. I would point to somebody else who's maybe not evident at all as an heir of Heinlein, and that is Charles Strauss. He seems to be doing things that are completely un-Heinleinian, but one of the things that Heinlein always made a point to do was to find the next thing, was to not do the same thing that he did last time. He complained all of his entire writing career, no matter what genre he was working in, about editors only wanting the mixture as before, and fans only wanting mixtures before. And certainly Charles Strauss, even though he's doing something that would never have occurred to Heinlein, which is to say combining military, well, not military, but intelligence, the intelligence community with the HP Lovecraft mythos is a very non-Heinleinian thing, but finding that next frontier is a very Heinleinian thing. Okay, who's next? Yes, Pete Kirxenhauser, and I also went to the Naval Academy. In fact, I read several of his books while I was there. My experience is that it tends to affect you powerfully one way or another, it affects different people differently, but I'd like you to talk a little bit more about how Heinlein was affected by his experience at the military or at the Naval Academy. Well, the short answer to that is he was formed by it. Yesterday I was at Annapolis talking last night about this subject and we had a mid come in. Now understand, this is 7.15 p.m., by which time the mids are all supposed to be furiously studying, but they had taken time out to come to this little lecture, and he was clutching a copy of Starship Troopers. So we wound up talking a little bit about that, but. Yeah, Potential Marine. I don't think he had yet chosen his specialization, but, and actually at one time or another, Starship Troopers has been on the recommended reading list for all of the military academies. Now it's still on the Marines recommended reading list, and I think that's the only one right now, but you know, you can never tell tomorrow. When Heinlein went into the Naval Academy, he was kind of a bright but very raw person from the American Midwest, Kansas City. And when he came out, he was of course by decree of the US Congress and officer and a gentleman. But at that time, the Naval Academy did not issue graduating degrees of any kind. The main reason for this, it was consistent with the entire course of instruction there is that the Academy considered that you were not educated at the Academy. What they did was to give you an exposure to the basics so that you could thereafter learn anything you needed to learn. And so in the, particularly in the juveniles, 50 years later, 30 years later, we find him saying things like learn languages, learn history, learn math, because these are the three-legged stool that supports all intellectual endeavor. And your learning never stops. Well, this is Annapolis. This is Annapolis at the time of his graduating class. Things changed a bit later. Annapolis had to start offering degrees in competition with other universities when, as a cost-cutting measure in 1933, they decided not to commission the bottom half of the class. So they issued degrees so that they could go into things like engineering. Next. Far back? Well, we have a microphone there and then we can take one up to the back. Okay, fine. Clearly, Highland was self-taught in his understanding of economics, which evolved rather dramatically in his lifetime. But I think particularly of beyond this horizon and the door into summer is having extended excursions into economics, but from really quite different points of view. Could you talk a little bit about how he acquired his early socialist leanings and how he evolved? What were the influences on his evolving economic thought? Those are quite different questions, as it turns out. He was attracted to socialism by reading the Appeal to Reason, starting in 1918.  So there's a little bit of precocity going on there. And of course, in Appeal to Reason, at that time you would have seen Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair and H.G. Wells and many names that later became familiar in other contexts. But the emotional impetus that drew it to him was a question about his own life. And that is, how could an intelligent man like his father who worked very hard, just barely scraped by, supporting a family of seven children? It seemed to him there was something wrong about the whole economic setup.  And this is an important distinction if you see it. If you are medically retired, you are part of the Navy forever. It's very different from being cashiered or discharged honorably or dishonorably. So Heinlein was a Navy man all of his life. It's a distinction that he certainly wanted made, so I'm passing on that distinction now. After being retired from the Navy, he went to work on Upton Sinclair's epic program, that's End Poverty in California. Now, Upton Sinclair had been socialist candidate for governor for the Socialist Party on two occasions, 1927 for New York and 1929 for California. But this time, the Democratic Club of Santa Monica called on Sinclair and asked him to devise a program to deal with the relief problem. The relief problem was there were a million unemployed in California and more coming as Oklahoma just kind of blew away, dried up and blew away, and the wheat fields or the prairies were no more. There were a million unemployed in California in a total population of six million. Nobody wanted to see these unfortunates be left to starve, but the economics of the situation where it was eating them alive and promised to eat them more alive in taxes. So the problem, the solution Sinclair came up with was to take the factories and farms that were foreclosed that the banks couldn't operate and the unemployed and put the unemployed to work producing their own subsistence products. So that was the socialist nature of the EPIC program. And that was what Heinlein was particularly supporting in the 1934 gubernatorial election. An interesting footnote about that particular election is going into it, the Democratic Party had registered only about a third as many as the Republicans and California was then a traditionally Republican state. But up to Sinclair, and this is the campaign that Heinlein worked at so hard, registered an additional 600,000 new Democrats bringing the Democratic Party into parity with the Republicans for the first time. And of course that really changed subsequent California history. Heinlein works with the EPIC program even after Sinclair has defeated, the EPIC remained in control of the Democratic Party but they went off the particular EPIC plan which the voters did not approve and were instead emphasizing more of the cooperative movement that was their closest dialogue partner. Well there was a weekly newsletter published by EPIC that ran a nice long multiple page review of a book that was just then being reissued in Canada and coming down called Social Credit. Now, there were problems with the basic conception of EPIC, one of them being that at the interface of these socialist communes and the free market economy relatively speaking on the outside of that, they would use script inside and money outside and the exchange, there was a problem that could not be solved of how you regulate the exchange between the script economy and the non-script economy. Well, this problem with the nature of money is what Douglas was particularly interested in in Social Credit. Now, I think probably the single aspect that most attracted Heinlein about it, and I should make a connection here, the economy that is portrayed in Beyond This Horizon is specifically a social credit economy. The book that Heinlein wrote in 1938 that was thought lost for a long time and not published until 2004 for us to living is also a social credit economy, but it's more closely related to its model and Bellamy's looking backward. One of the things that must have attracted Heinlein about the social credit ideas is Douglas's analysis of fractional reserve banking.  Banks can lend out multiples of their actual holdings. And at various times in America's history, the level of the fractional reserve has been moved up and down. At that time, it was something like 60 to 80%. I forget exactly. It's about 5% now, which means banks can loan out 20 times more than they actually have in reserve. Well, the thing about the fractional reserve system is it's a wealth sink. That is to say the banks have all this 20 times more paper they can issue. It's at no actual risk to their reserves. But all of those loans are repaid in real wealth representatives. So banks tend to collect real wealth on this basis of this paper that has no risk attached to it. So consequently, banks tend to collect wealth. It's a wealth sink. When Abraham Lincoln found out about this, going into the presidency, this scam has been going on a very long time. He said if the American people ever found out how their economy was run, there'd be a revolution in the streets by morning. And that is the sentiment that informed a lot of Douglas's thinking about social credit. So if you want to see a model of a social credit economy, read beyond this horizon, because that's what he's talking about. Social credit was an idea that still had a lot of attraction for him. Douglas's idea was that instead of pouring all this money, this wealth sink into the banks, take the excess of wealth and redistribute it as a dividend, as a social dividend. And that's the economy you see illustrated in Beyond This Horizon. I think I've been wandering just a bit, but did that essentially address what you wanted to hear? Okay, how about next? Let's take the last question back here in the back. What do you think he would have thought about social media and whether or not he would have seen it as a boon or potentially distracting or just kind of pernicious medium or tool? There's a very simple short answer to that, all of the above. Heinlein, having seen a lot of technological innovation over his day, Heinlein knew how that every technology has its aspects of a boon, its aspects of being a curse, and it really depends on what you do with it. Toward the end of his life, he was fascinated with the potentials of the internet. It shows up as a research tool on Friday, but this was before social networking was invented. I think he would have had probably the same attitude that he had toward film and radio and television is that it's pernicious and it's a boon. Okay? All right, thank you very much. And now let's adjourn upstairs for more questions and discussion over lunch.


Hey everybody, it's Greg back to hear it in this video. We're gonna have a closer look at the Aputure Amaran HR672S. So we're gonna do things a little differently. We're gonna look at the different lighting patterns that you can create with diffusion and without. Then we're gonna look at some of the potential uses that you could use this light for in your work. And then we'll talk about the specs. So first up, we're gonna look at this undiffuse. So what I'll do is I'll place this light about six feet away from me at about 45 degrees from the camera and down. So we're just gonna have the one light and then what we'll do is we'll add the plastic diffusion, the clear one first. Then we'll try the Easy Softbox Plus and then we'll try it with the grid. So you'll see a number of different lighting patterns. And lastly, I'll just get a cheap $20 shoot through umbrella and we'll see how that looks as well. And then we'll get into some potential uses and how you could use this both in the studio and on location and then some of the specs of the light. All right, let's get started. All right, we're back. And so what you're looking at right now is one HR672S with zero diffusion. So you can see it's very much like a spotlight. Look behind me, you'll see very dark, harsh shadows, harsh light on my face. Now, if I take a meter reading, it's about F7. So my settings are ISO 400 on my camera and I'm shooting at 24 frames per second. So that means my shutter speed is set for 50 and it's about F7 is my aperture and the light is six feet from me at about 30 degrees from the camera. So you can see that's very bright. Now, if you want it to be brighter, you could bring it in closer. If we got into three feet, it would be a lot brighter. So you could use this outside and indoors as well. Now, what we're gonna do is we're going to add the plastic diffuser and I'll let you see how that looks. All right, so now what you're looking at is the plastic diffuser. So I haven't moved the light. It's about six feet high, six feet from me, 30 degrees from the camera at full power just like it was before. I'm gonna take another meter reading and we'll see how that goes down. So it dropped down to F 5.6. So whenever you add diffusion, you're gonna reduce some of the power but you could see it's spreading the light a little more.  I'm pretty close to the background. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put on the optional softbox. So this is the easy softbox plus and you'll get to see how it looks when you use the softbox. All right, so what we're looking at now is the HR672S with the plastic diffuser plus the easy softbox plus. So you can see that it's a softer source of light. If you look behind me, the shadows should be a little softer. The light is spreading out a little more. And if I take a meter reading, we've dropped down from F 5.6 with just the plastic diffuser to F 3.2. So I've opened up the aperture a little bit. Now again, we're about six feet away. So if you want it a brighter light source, you could bring it in closer, bring it in three feet. It's gonna get more powerful. So let's do something different. We're gonna put a grid on this and then you'll see how the grid restricts the light. It's a 35 degree grid. All right, now what you're looking at is the 35 degree grid in place. Now I'm gonna take a meter reading again. Now that's further dropped it down to F 2.8. But you could see if you want it more power, you could just bring the light in closer. I just want to show you how the power reduces as we go through different types of looks and different types of diffusion. Now this is a much more sort of zoomed in look for the light. So if you don't want your light spreading all over the place, you would use the 35 degree grid, which comes with the Easy Softbox Plus. So the next look I want to give you is just a cheap $20 shoot through umbrella just to show you that if you have something like that lying around, you can also use that as a diffusion source. All right, what you're looking at now is the HR672S with a cheap $20 shoot through umbrella. So with the mounting bracket that it comes with, you can use it with umbrellas. So you can shoot through an umbrella or you can turn it around and have a balanced light source off an umbrella as well. Now you can see it's a much more diffused light source. If you look behind me, the shadows, they're much softer. It's a wider light source. So you can use a number of different modifiers to make this light look completely different. Now if I meter this, it comes in at about 2.5. So the aperture is about 2.5 at six feet away. If you want it to be brighter, you can just bring it in closer. So you can see you can get a number of different looks in the studio and as well on location. It's daylight balanced at 5,500 Kelvin. So it works just as well in the daylight as it does indoors. So let's go over some of the specs and then we'll check out some of the uses for this light. The light comes with a handy carrying case, which makes it easy to pack up and take on location, whether you're shooting outdoors or whether you're shooting at another studio. It also comes with two clear diffusion panels, one for daylight and one for tungsten. There's a look at the front and it's small and compact. It's about the size of an iPad. So it's easy to take on location. There's the manual dial. There's the channel group and the plug. And there's where you put the two supplied batteries. There's the batteries. There's the angled bracket for mounting an umbrella. And then you can see here, there's the remote control. And you can see with that bracket, you can position that light just about any way that you want. There's a look at the back without the batteries on it. There's a look at the clear diffusion panel as well. Now here's the optional softbox without diffusion. There's the diffusion panel that you can use for a different look. And then you can use the grid as well for more focused light. Now here's a look at the back with the batteries attached. Hey, everybody, it's Craig back to here again. Thanks for watching this video. If you found it helpful, give me a thumbs up for this video. And I'd like to know your thoughts about this light source. So post your thoughts in the comments section down below. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video.


Okay, it's one o'clock. We're going to go ahead and get started. This session is on the Drupal 8 group module. What can the group module do for me? So before we get started, we wanted to do a quick little survey. We know this is a virtual event, so I wanted to just kind of get an idea of where everyone's watching from. So I've seen a couple of DC Baltimore, which is surprising. Oh, Costa Rica, that's awesome. Quebec, Florida, nice Oregon, so from all over. I think that's one positive thing that comes out of having a virtual event as you can really join from anywhere. Illinois, a lot of California, probably missing it, having it in person, of course. The next question we'd like to know is who here has used the group module in Drupal 8? Does anyone have experience at all? It looks like a variety of some, a few, some not at all, some in D7. Tried installing it and got lost. Well, hopefully we can help you out here. Okay, a couple of people want to. Okay, our next question is actually who has used organic groups. It looks like I'm already seeing some people who have used organic groups. So the group module is kind of an alternative to organic groups. So it looks like people have used organic groups. I think I even used organic groups in Drupal 6, but obviously I'm more of a fan of the group module at this point. All right, great. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for your feedback. So as we go along here, feel free to post your questions into chat. If you could post, if it's a question that we want to address at the end, if you could kind of preface it with a Q dash in front of it so we can easily pull those out. We're going to basically wait until the end to answer all the questions, but feel free to answer or ask them as we go. So just to start off, my name is Deborah Fuzetto. I'm a technical architect at Forum One. I've been working with Drupal since 2006 and have been building websites since the mid 90s. I live and work on my 60 foot aluminum sailboat called Heavy Metal with my husband and two teenage boys. My passion is Drupal and sailing. My name is Mark Mayan. I've been making websites for somewhere around 15 years, which scares me every time I say it. I've been working with Drupal for quite a while and I've been working with digital agencies a good portion of my career as well. I really have been getting into machine learning in the past year or so. I have a strong interest there and I also am pretty interested and have some domain knowledge around DevOps stuff as well. Since they're kind enough to employ us, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Forum One. Thank you Forum One for employing me. They provide some great benefits. They've been really good about COVID. Everybody's remote at the moment. I'm a technical architect here. They're often hiring, so check the website if you're interested. Things change daily, weekly, so I'm not totally up to speed on what we're looking for, but definitely check it out. Another thing that I really enjoy about Forum One is that they don't kind of accept every single client. They often accept clients that have an ethos or a mission, which really makes me feel good about the kind of impact that they bring. And speaking of which, here's some of the clients that we're going to be talking about today in some use cases as well as some just broader broad strokes clients that we work with on the whole. Feel free to ask me any questions independent of this if you're interested about any more information about Forum One, but I'm going to toss it back to Deborah to give some broader broad strokes information about group itself. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is what a group is in general. So according to the dictionary, a group is defined as a number of people or things that are located close together, kind of like these awesome little finger people, which is kind of they are the little logo for the group module. So people in groups interact and engage and identify with each other. The group members are share common interests, and they come together to work on common tasks for agreed purposes and outcomes. So don't do for a group what a group can do for itself. This is a quote from Emily Axelad, and this quote is originally intended to address meeting effectiveness. But in my opinion, the quote is saying that you should take advantage of what a group can do on its own. Groups can be more effective than individuals. And because groups offer more perspectives and ideas, groups can have more creativity together. So how does this relate to the group module? Well, the group module, it creates collections of your content and users on your site and can grant access control on these collections. This can allow you to create communities for people with similar interests or needs and can control how and when people have access to content. There's many use cases for the group module, and we're going to talk about some specific use cases in a bit. The group project page also points out some typical examples for the group module as well. So a group in Drupal is an entity making them fully fieldable and extendable and exportable. Groups work well with views and rules and other Drupal modules. And the group Drupal 8 module also uses the plug-in system, so it allows you to easily extend its functionality. So the group module itself comes with several sub-modules out of the box. And I think one of the most notable ones is group node. The group node module is one that you'll definitely want to check out. It provides functionality around content types and allows you to add nodes to a group and share access to group members. Our use cases will show how this sub module is in use. So the sub-group modules also allows you to have a group belong to another group, which is an interesting idea. I've never actually used it, but I can definitely see some use cases for that. The group member profiles provides the ability to show memberships of a group in a curated way by creating multiple fieldable member profiles, which can be attached to a member. So there's also a lot of contributed modules that can be added to expand what the group module can do. One of them being the group media module, which can associate media elements with a group. Another really useful module is the entity group field module, which is useful because it provides a computed field that allows you to know what the group associations are. So a lot of times when you're editing a node out of the box, you can't really see what group this node is actually associated with. And this module allows you to present that. So you always can know what groups are associated with an entity that you're editing. Another module group outsider in, which we'll talk about again later, it addresses how the outsider and the member roles play together. So the permissions model of an outsider doesn't quite work quite right without this module. With advanced outsider permissions, you can apply permissions to a Drupal role, but once that user becomes a member of the role, those permissions are overwritten by the permissions of the member and that person then loses those permissions. With a group outsider in module, this basically takes care of that. So there are two modules that are associated with group menus, and I'm going to let Mark talk about them because he has most experience with and has actually helped create one of them. So the group menu module is very traditional in the way menus are handled in Drupal 8. And so far as that in the normal Drupal 8 ecosystem, when you create a menu, it gets exported as configuration. The group menu module does the same thing. I worked with a client and got the ability to create a different approach, which was with the group content menu module. With the group content menu module, you're able to create menu types, much like you are with group and also node. And those group types allow you to do all the things with menus that you can do with content types, so you can field them, etc. Also, each instantiation of a menu instead of being individual config is actually content itself. And I think that that plays a little more well with the group module because group entities, which we'll talk a little bit more about, are content. And so there's nothing for the menus to get related to that make them kind of belong to a group. And so I think that group content menu is an approach that I like a little better, but I'm biased because I got to participate in its creation. Next, I just wanted to give some overall architectural concepts of the group module. As I've kind of hinted at already, there are group types. They work similar to bundles. As bundles work with node, you can instantiate new group types like an organization or a department or an office, etc. And those group types are individually fieldable. And those group types also have the ability to associate permissions with them, which is the great things about it. Next, the group entity is a standalone entity. It implements the entity class. And so therefore, you get a lot of the nice things that come along with entity. One of the more interesting nuances of the group module is this group relationship entity, which is the connector between how group relates content to node and also relates to users, which is in the form of a membership. So when you become a member of a group, you kind of create one of these relationship entities, which ties together the user and the group. Each of these relationship entities are also fieldable. And so let's, for instance, say that you wanted to display a little moniker on a particular group of, you have been a member of this group since XYZ time. Well, you retrieve that timestamp from this relationship entity. Another kind of powerful thing about the group module is it's extensible and well implemented out of the box roles and permissioning system. Deborah started talking about this already, but an anonymous user is exactly as it is in Drupal, which is the anonymous role, anybody that's not authenticated. An outsider is somebody that is authenticated, but isn't a member of the group. The advanced outsider roles, which again, Deborah is going to get into a little more depth about, are basically instantiation of Drupal roles, but in the context of a group. And you can create your own custom roles, which I'm going to talk a little bit more about in a little bit here. The permissions documentation for a group is really good. I saw somebody already ask about if we'll make these slides available so you can click on this link that I have in here. I'll work on that and figure out how to get that done. The next thing I wanted to talk about is some challenges that you'll need to be aware of when you go to use the group module. Right now, it's a module that has 400-some-odd files, I believe, and so it's a pretty robust module. And so that means that whenever you go to upgrade the module, especially with a major version release or something like that, there's going to be some things that you're probably most likely going to need to address. Paying attention to patch notes and update notes are important to see if there's commands in need to run, et cetera, stuff like that. Alongside that, it's a very robust issue queue because people have really started embracing this module, and that means that people are finding more and more use cases. And so an example of this is the integration with the group module with media that started as a patch and got spun out into its own unique module. So we're going to talk about some more patches in a minute. The other things to note is that when you're like in the context of a node, there's not like an administrative way out of the box that shows you how that node relates to a group. And so there's definitely some user interface updates that need some help. Just my personal opinion. So next we're going to talk about some of those patches. One of the things that I've had to work a lot with on clients and their needs is the needs around editorial workflow. In the permissions grid, which you'll see some screenshots of in a little bit, there's not the same Drupal permission grid transition granular items in the permission grid. So like for instance, if I want to change something from draft to published, that's a transition. And that transition is listed in Drupal's permission matrix, but not in the group permission matrix by default. This patch is going to help with that. Same thing with the lightning scheduler. If you used AQUIA's lightning functionality, it provides all sorts of things. But one of the things it provides is the ability to schedule content to transition from one state to the next at a particular time. And those transitions also have their own separate permissions. And so I've got a patch for that. I don't have it in the GitHub repo that I shared some code samples with for this, but I can get it in there. And so I'll share it in there at the very least. There's also some token module patches that allow URLs to be a little bit more robust. In the case of using group menus in any consideration, there's no easy way and token to establish a path auto pattern that says XYZ group and then all of its supported content as an additional path. There's no way to figure out what the parent group is. So this patch helps with that. I've also attached a couple patches that help with the administrative experience. So next, I want to talk a little bit about some differences between DA group and organic groups. I saw that in our little survey there that people are very somewhat familiar with organic groups or many of you are. One thing that's nice about DA group is that it does instantiate its own entity, as I said a little bit ago. You don't have to relate this functionality with node or with taxonomy in order for it to work. I'll also caveat by saying I have not used the organic groups DA implementation. So if any of this has been solved, I apologize in advance. There's also innate operability with core and a lot of core concepts. It instantiates the entity class. And so you get a lot of the nice to haves there. It works well with views, even though there is some additional functionality that I have implemented, which I'll talk about to make it work a little bit better with views. But on the whole, clicking around in views, you see a lot of things that you're accustomed to in the group context. And from my reading of the contrib space of group module, I definitely appreciate that translations has been taken into account. I'll caveat that by saying I have not done a multilingual site with groups, but from my eyes have read the code that says they at least tried. So there is that. It's also written up first. So it's been very easy for me to extend it. And so I have definitely appreciated that, that it's kind of a ground up approach and with the eight and mind. And I'll also say that, you know, there's no, there's no like seemingly stable release organic groups yet in the D8 space, while D8 has felt stable and does have a stable release. So next Debra is going to talk about her use case. I'll pass it off to her. Great. Thank you, Mark. Great. Thank you, Mark. So I'm hearing an echo. Is everyone hearing that? Maybe that's better. Okay. Anyway, so it's common to want to have, so content ownership is basically the concept behind my use case, because it's common to want to have content owned and displayed by different groups. So an example of this use case could be for an organization who has a high level association and associated chapters. So the association provides like an overview of the content where the chapters are more specific to their locations. All content on the site is owned by a group. So basically in this use case, you don't have the ability even to really add, you know, content the regular Drupal way. So we actually wrote some custom code to alter the route that doesn't allow you. It basically will restrict you from adding content the regular Drupal way. In this case, we are also using the group module as perspective. So it's the chapter editors who belong to the group rather than the visitors of the site. And that belonging to that group gives you access to be able to add or edit content within that group and media. And it does not have access to anything else outside of that group. So the visitors of the site don't actually have to join the group to see the content. In this particular case, we use geolocation to geolocate the user based on their IP address to set a chapter based on their location. And the users can see chapter content from other chapters, but they are more led towards the chapter that is as nearest to them. So this use case had some very specific requirements. One of the requirements being that the association group, the kind of main level group had full ownership over the content, even the content that was owned by the chapters. So even though the association wouldn't be a member of that group, they needed to be able to have full access to the content, to be able to help the chapters create their content and edit their content and make any changes that were necessary. So the group content also had to have specific page elements. So like breadcrumbs and a custom footer for the group pages in addition to local menu, but they shared the main site menu. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of the challenges that I had around these specific page elements. So the groups also are not able to add existing content from other groups or media. That was another requirement that they had. And also, yeah, so they couldn't use content or media from other groups. So in anything that they added to their group was not available to other groups. So and again, the admin role, the association would be able to override any other groups that they are not a member of. And another requirement was that the chapter itself would have a landing page. So this would be like a kind of a group landing page. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how I did that. So the solutions to meet these requirements were not really very complex. I did have the need to have individual group types, one for the association and one for the chapter. So you pretty much need to have a different group type when you're considering different entities that are going to be available to a group. So the association, for example, has access to all content types where chapters only have access to some specific content types. I also implemented the group media module, which allowed me to associate the media with the groups and also configured outside permissions on chapter groups to allow association users with admin roles to have full access over the group content. So the group view is what I used as the landing page for the chapters. And because the groups themselves are entities, you can add as many fields as you want to the group. And that allowed me to have a very robust landing page for the group. So this screenshot here is how you would be configuring your group content. So this is for a specific group type. And you have basically all of your plugin information here. And your examples of plugins are like your different content types, your media types, could be your menu, it could be your users. And you can also write custom plugins to put here as well. And for each one of these, for each one of the types, you can either enable or disable based on the needs that you have for your group type. The next slide here is showing how fields are added to a group type. And you can see that this is similar to what you would do to a content type. So you have your managed fields area where you can add as many fields as you want. I basically used these fields to not only manipulate the landing page, but also to be able to enter content about what would show up in the footer. There's also external URLs that are used for like donation pages. Each one of the chapters have different external URLs for donation pages that can be defined in the group on a field that I can access within other components. And you also have your form display, just like you would with content types, where you can manage different widgets for each of the fields and also your managed display, which displays how the fields are displayed to the users. So permissions were a very important part of this use case. And there's basic permissions that were set for members and the anonymous user. And the advanced outsider permissions were used to grant access to the association over chapter groups and content. So the next slide here, you can see a screenshot of your basic permissions. You can see here you have your anonymous, your outsider and your member roles. These are your group roles. And you can assign what access they have. Are they able to join the group? Are they able to edit content? Can they view the content and other things through basic permissions? And then when you get into your advanced permissions, your advanced outsider permissions, this is where you're going to see your actual Drupal roles. And this is where you can grant access to a specific role that kind of overrides what access you would have as a regular outsider on your basic permissions. So moving on to the challenges for this use case, I would say probably the one thing that we struggled the most with were around permissions with media. So the media, the group media module works very well out of the box to allow media to stay within the groups. And chapters couldn't see media from other chapters. But when it got into your outsider role, there were issues with being able to, because your outsiders are not actually members, I don't think the group module, the media module takes into account that these outsiders have the ability to add media. And so they have the ability to add media, but then they can't go back and see the media that they've added. So we had to write a little bit of custom code around that in order to kind of override that. And I think that the group media module is maybe a little bit immature and has some work to go with working with all the other things that are going along with the group module. So the other thing was allowing access for the association for all chapter content. So we've talked about this a couple of times. So I used the advanced outsider permissions to grant access for different roles to be able to manage the content and the media within the group, even if they weren't a member of the group. But if they became a member of the group, they would lose all permissions and not be able to really do anything other than what a regular member would be able to do. So the group outsider in module basically comes to the rescue there and allows you to still maintain those permissions, even if whether it's intentional or unintentional that the user would join the group. So breadcrumbs and path aliases were also a bit of a challenge in my situation. So again, the path auto patterns that you define is really kind of a site wide. It doesn't really do it per group. And they're really not the same. They weren't the same for the association as they were for the chapters. So there was, we had custom aliases that were created when pages were created. And also we had to manipulate the breadcrumbs in order to display them at the correct level that we wanted to display them at. So in this particular use case, I did not use any of the group menu modules because the chapters themselves do not have access to manipulate the menu. And all of the chapter pages were inside of the main menu. So if you were to use your breadcrumbs based on your menus, it would show all of the hierarchy previous to the chapter level. And we really want to just start at we wanted to just start at the chapter level. So there was some manipulation that had to be done with the breadcrumbs in order to get what we really wanted. The other thing, and I had mentioned this before too, is that on the chapter pages, they wanted custom footers for the specific chapters. So, you know, on the site overall site, there was an association footer, but on pages that were chapter specific, they wanted to also have a footer that was very specific to the chapter. This was not really very easy to do out of the box, but what I ended up doing is taking the information that I needed for the chapter and adding fields to that group type. And then at the front end layer was able to determine if it was a page that was owned by a chapter, then I could pull out the values from those fields and build out the chapter that way. I also mentioned that I use the group view page as like the kind of landing page for chapters. So if you were, whether you were geolocated or you were just wanting to go to a specific chapter, you would have a landing page that would have information about what the chapter was about and what other content was in the chapter. It worked great except for the, you know, you couldn't really create a draft of it. So because it was configuration for the group itself, it wasn't really, you know, it wasn't really a, there was no really revisions available. So you couldn't like create a revision of it if you wanted to make changes to it. It was like, if you wanted to make a change to it, it just had to be made. It wasn't, so it's not really treated the same as like regular content. So I think all in all, the group module was a really great solution for this use case. And even though it required some custom code and additional module, it was a really easy solution to implement. So now let's hear about some of Mark's use cases. Thanks Deborah. So a lot of the challenges that I faced are, you know, similar but build upon things that Deborah covered. I'm going to try in my use cases to build on the things that she had described and only kind of described the things that were unique to my experiences. So one of the clients that I got to work with was a local municipality. And as you'd expect with the municipality, they have a police department, a fire department, a parks and rec, etc, etc. And so listening and tailoring, listening to them and tailoring to their needs was pretty interesting. The types of things that we needed to address was a relatively complicated workflow process. They also needed scheduling, which I talked a little bit about earlier.  And so going around and capturing leaves or snow removal or whatever, those are very cyclical things that they have to deal with every year. And so tailoring needs around those kinds of requirements was very important to them. This was a space where we did use the group content menu module. This is the client that actually funded its original contributed space. It allowed the ability to relate several pieces of content together so that, you know, for instance, your parks and rec department can put all their parks in a singular menu and make things a little bit more navigable. And then they wanted to use groups purely in an administrative capacity really, like there's no front end group entity view mode for this particular client. They just wanted to be able to segment different users into groups and allow them to administer content in a safe space where they can't break out of the rest of the system and edit pages that they're not supposed to. So as that follows on, that they had like 200 some odd contributors that are going to be working on content and they belonged to a couple dozen different groups. And so it was a pretty robust experience. They also had a need to be able to authenticate via SAML on ADFS. And while we didn't use any information at the point of authentication to power groups, I definitely see a lot of potential there where if they wanted to expose to me who, you know, what group they belong to, we could have done some interesting work around automatically creating groups and associating with them rather than content administrators having to do that. So I think that there's, you know, this gave me an insight into like some cool things that you could potentially do in the future. As I already talked about, the group menu solution is what helps some of the groups relate content together. And then they really wanted to focus more on the administration experience more than anything else. We used large chunks of their existing website to theme the front end. This was really a lot about tailoring the back end. So this is where they started where a lot of content administrators, well, the content administrators were at the municipality level. And basically all these content stakeholders would make email the content admin, their like forward content edit changes, which made them very sad over time. Because as you can imagine, that's pretty grindy. And where we arrived at was to push all of that kind of work down to the individual department level so that these content administrators could log in and manage their content effectively. This opened up the people at the municipality level to kind of focus on broader challenges, which made them happier. Some of the customizations that we did for this client as it relates to group was that I wrote a little views plugin. Like if you can imagine the default Drupal content listing interface, it lists all the content of all the content types. And they wanted a similar experience for group members. But rather than seeing all content, they only want to see content that pertains to them. And we needed to write a few different not rights, we needed to create a few different view displays that had the same sort of functionality. And so this plugin kind of takes into account the permissions that a user has, and only exposes content to them that they have actual access to be able to edit. I also had some UI enhancements around routing. There is a check box on the settings page for groups that allows you to like tell it to use the administrative theme. But it's actually not ubiquitous. There's still a few different places where it by default, it wants to drive you to the front end rendering of what a group looks like. And so for this client, since they're only really using it administratively, we overwrote some routes with a route subscriber to take care of those needs. If we have time at the end and people are interested, I can get into these GitHub links, but I can see that we're already 35 minutes in. So I'm going to keep going for now. My last use case is with the Fairfax County Public School system. They're unique in the fact that every user is an authenticated user because what we built for them was an intranet. And so similarly to the municipality, they have departments and organizations and needed content contributors to be able to work on content with a complex editorial workflow. One thing that is implicit, but I'll say explicitly, is that these were some of the nicest people on the planet. I can't tell you how much of a difference it makes working with people that want to work with you. And the solutions that you can come to when everybody's kind of working together towards the same goal. So I feel really good about what we got to accomplish with the school system. Again, they had a lot of contributors, a couple of unique challenges for this client is that we do have a search API and solar integration. I will say out of box group worked really well with the search API, the ability to just include it as an entity and do all the things that you're used to with Node, which pretty much they're right out of box didn't really need to do anything special to get things indexed into solar. They have some complex workflow requirements, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in a minute. Again, they also really focused on the administration experience. We also migrated content into group. And the migrate module by and large did exactly as what you'd expect since group is an extension of the entity plugin. Pretty straightforward, pretty typical migration stuff worked really well. One difficulty we did run into was this client wanted authenticated users the ability to favorite and subscribe to stuff. The views and its basic nature doesn't want to display more than one entity type on a given view display by default, but basically the end run we did there was to use search API instead. And search API really doesn't have any problem rendering more than one entity type on a particular view display, which is super great. Same thing here also with the SSO via SAML. The SAML implementation was pretty straightforward. If they had exposed more information to us through their HR system, I think we could have done some cool things with relating people automatically to groups and creating groups automatically. This next slide, I just wanted to show quickly how complicated their workflow really was. I spent a few sessions with them gathering requirements about their needs and what kinds of emails they wanted to send and what happened and who could do it, et cetera, so forth. But the really interesting thing about this is how this came together from a group role perspective and a Drupal role perspective. So the custom roles that I created for this client were contributor, reviewer, editor, and department administrator, which do mainly the things they sound like they do. But the interesting thing was because everybody was authenticated, we couldn't use that kind of anonymous outsider paradigm that Deborah was talking about. I had to create some custom Drupal roles, one for member, one for reviewer. And basically, once you became a member of a group, we just wrote a little custom code that added the group member role to your user entity, which gave you the kind of basic administrative experience that you need in order to do lots of things in Drupal, like seeing the administration team and being able to access some pages and et cetera, so forth. So these are some of the customizations that we worked on for FCPS. We created some custom routes much like the municipality use case. We extended the replicate module, which allowed group entities to get replicated effectively. As I already mentioned, there was that Drupal role component. We did the migration, as I also already mentioned, and much like Deborah's use case, we did a lot of work around making group entities view modes pretty. And it's cool because you can bring together, because you're in a group context, all sorts of events and news and information, onto that landing page that gets users to content faster, which is what we all want. So that's all she wrote for us, guys. Let me know what kinds of questions you have. Yeah, I think I want to start off by talking a little bit about, there was a question on whether or not, I think there was the code that I, the custom code that we had for the media module, what is it contributed back? And we didn't contribute it back because it was really just a series of form alters, really, because I think that what really happened was, since the user did not belong to the group, it didn't know where to get the group from. So there was a lot of form alters to determine where you were adding the group, and then you would pull in the group from the content as opposed to the user. So I'll see if I can maybe get that on the GitHub repo as well. I'm not sure if it's something that can really be in the form of a patch. I think it's maybe something, because I think that maybe has to rethink the whole way the group media module works. So some other questions, let's see here. There was, there's one, did you see or did you use out-of-the-box workflow module and content moderation, or was it custom? So we did use the, for the use cases, I was describing, we did use the out-of-box workflow module. The only customizations we really did were tailored to the client. They weren't tailored around groups. They were tailored to the client and so far as the emails needed to go out and some things needed to occur in the background when certain transitions occurred. But we didn't certainly write an entire implementation out-of-box. I definitely leveraged workflow transitions to accomplish a lot of my goals. There's been a couple of top questions around performance too, and I didn't really come across any performance issues around groups, but there's a question on what things or steps to better avoid to do with the group module, and are there any recommendations in regards of the number of group roles and users or content entities assigned not to exceed? Again, and then a related question is how does groups play with the dynamic page cache? Immediate response to that personally. I will say that for that municipality example, we are getting to the building and performance stage now. We're remediating some issues around using Google's Lighthouse Reporting to lighten up the page weight, but we are going to be using flood.io to do actual performance testing as well. If you send me an email with your performance questions, I can follow up with you about what kinds of performance considerations I had to do to make flood.io performance testing happy. Another question was what patch do you use for content moderation roles permissions? I think that that was listed up in the patches slide up there, so when we and all those are linkable and you'll be able to get that patch to be able to have the permissions for those transitions. Let's see here, would it be possible to defer the job of a group's landing page to another entity, like a user or a node? The group landing page is really, you can make it as more of just a back end. You could really make it anything you want for a landing page. I'm not really sure why you would want to direct it to a user, but definitely a specific content type or specific content might actually be a better landing page for a group than using the group view, because then you do have revisions and you can put things in draft mode and things like that. I'd say I would prefer to use, in my experience, I would prefer to use the group entity view mode as the landing page if I could. I totally agree with Deborah that if you need workflow and editorial, you have editorial needs that you do have to take a different route, but I think that the group entity view mode does a great job of working as a landing page for my use cases personally. Okay, so we'd be very interested in eventually seeing your custom code view display, view display code and get how to limit admin content list by group slash permissions. Is that one of the examples? Yeah, I'm going on mute because I don't want to have the echo happen, but here's the GitHub link to where I put those code snippets. Feel free to check out that GitHub and it has those good snippets that I had linked in the presentation. And definitely we'll figure out how to get the slides posted because there are some good links to the contributed modules and the patches. I mean, I don't think that there's any implementation that wouldn't require at least one of the patches. They're pretty useful patches and eventually will be brought into the module, but have not been yet, so you'll need them. Joshua, beat me to the punch. I'll figure out how to get the slides exported and just add to that repo that I just linked so that you can get the presentation. I'm sure that there's going to be a bad camp distribution path as well, but I'll add it to the GitHub. Any last minute questions? I think we're basically at time. Nice seeing familiar faces. Have a nice one, everyone.