Thank you. So, as we're introduced, we're from Carnegie Mellon University. We're on the Open Learning Initiative. And we're going to talk a little bit about how we brought whole life into learning management systems. And this is actually a natural extension, I think, from where we started with the keynotes this morning and the discussion about data exchange and systems interoperability. We'll talk about some of the challenges that we've ran into. Oh, I'm sorry. Is this thing plugged in? Doesn't seem like it's on. Can you hear me any louder now? Yeah, use it. Is that better? Yes. Okay, I'll try to talk louder also. If you can't hear me, just like maybe down or something. So, first we're going to kind of make a case for why OER should be in the LMS. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the standards that are out there now. Our approach, and I'd really like to hopefully move towards a discussion with all of you about some of the opportunities and challenges that are before us in terms of increasing the reach and consumability of OER. Just a little context about who we are. The Open Learning Initiative creates courses which try to enact instruction and support instructors. We're here, so we're trying to provide open access and another piece of our work is to develop communities of use and research that enable ongoing evaluation, ongoing continuous improvement of the OERs that we create. And so for us, the OER is about, I'm sorry, the LMS is about increasing access. We want to make things convenient for students and instructors.  And actually our users request access to OER from the LMS quite frequently. Since access is part of our core mission, we believe that OER needs to be easier to find and that's being addressed with new standards in metadata and search, but we also think it needs to be easier to consume. And that means we consume the context where it makes sense for users to use it. And we think the learning management system as the, whatever you think of LMS is, as the information of the course is really the place that we need to make some improvements. Standards. So why not building blocks, modules, plugins, the old way of doing things? Well, simply there's too many platforms to target otherwise. There's lots of learning management systems. We want to hit all of them. And in the past, you know, we've seen this question we started with was, are these standards in name only? I think we all remember past conferences where we're doing the hack fest after, we have different vendors trying to get systems to work, or anyone who's trying to take content even just a few years ago and move your cross systems standards haven't been perfect. But they're necessary to provide confidence in technologies that can be adopted. So we did a survey and we realized that, you know, we're more than just a simple content package that needs to be encoded. We have consistent state, multiple assignments, learning analytic components that are becoming more sophisticated, which led us to the learning tools to drop our buildings back from IMS. What's really great about basic LTI is it's really simple to implement. It's the idea of your building tools, things like OLI, and you're bringing them into a tool consumer, things like an LMS. And this is the simple trust relationship between the systems, fields to identify the user, the course, the institution. It's simple but powerful. So I kind of put on this, it's the development systems. It's supposed to be easy to develop, supposed to be easy to consume. This pathway for more advanced features did that work in practice. Well, let's take a look at what we actually built. So we now have, this is the screen capture from Blackboard. So we actually went ahead, we implemented basic LTI on the OLI system. And what that gets you is we can now place a link to where we are from within Blackboard. And in two clicks, we can get to the course content. So the first click takes us to our research consent forum. We are a research project. We do collect data on students so we need their consent. And then students can jump right into the course. And so this is not, these two slides are actually, there's not a lot of magic here because it's all happening behind the scenes. What's happening when you click that link is we're actually doing a lot of work. We're figuring out who the user is in that LMS, we're creating their account in the OLI system, we're signing them in, we're creating their profile, we're dropping them into the right course. And all that happens transparently. And that's the power of the basic LTI standards. It provides a path from the LMS to OLI without actually having to deal with things like user registration, user signing, getting students in the right place, getting them in the right course. And it makes it really easy just to jump right to your content. You now have one click and actually as the students are working here, we're tracking their data, we know who they are, and they return their states persistently. So did it work as planned? When we ran to a number of challenges along the way, and I think rather than sort of dwelling on how we actually build things, I think this is really the area we want to spend some time talking about, because I think there's an opportunity here to improve the reach of OLI by addressing some of these challenges. And kind of on three fronts, technology, policy, and user experience. It really comes down to, we think, that standards today are designed primarily as a technology and not necessarily to serve user needs. We feel like current standards lean towards what content publishers are doing, what institutions are doing, but it's not enough focus on the actual instructors and learners who are consuming OER content or consuming content in general. The people that the standards affect, we're not actually getting most of the benefit, and we'll sort of draw out why. Versus sort of the technology issues, some products require an extension. So it's supposed to be easy to use, it has a wide band to reach, but in order to use basic LTA, we have to make sure that you have the right version of your LMS that it has the plug-in enabled that all the right features there. You might have to install some software. It's not, the technology is easy, but it's not automatic. We also ran to some implementations which we found to be buggy. We actually had to write some patches for the Moodle plug-in in order to accommodate the Internet Explorer. So it's hard to argue for adoption of these standards and tools if they don't work perfectly in every context as expected. And along the development side, the standard is actually way more flexible than a lot of the other LMS standards, which is a benefit, but also makes things complicated on the developer side. Our tools need to accommodate having zero information on the user, just a very opaque identifier, all the way up to all sorts of fields and information. We can handle lots of cases where the LMS is identifying to us, the person's name, their course, their context, and cases where the LMS is only identifying just a opaque identifier. And that makes it hard for us to build consistent experiences with the data that we get from different systems without the user is different. The other thing that came up which surprised us a bit were some of the policy and process issues that we hit on. So at any time we're bringing two systems together, institutions take a closer look. And we thought that since a lot of the institutions we're working with are already using OLI, they're used to having students register, they're used to having students' data coming to the system, that this wouldn't be as much of a question. But the fact it was, and there were questions about ownership, does it register our office, own student registration data? How do we find help for institutions to navigate this space about who to talk to in their institution and what policies they have governing what their LMS can connect to? If we're targeting instructors as the end user consumer of OLI who are adopting OER, we need to think about how to support them if their institution has all sorts of policies about data and privacy in terms of bringing things into the LMS. I also like to add that the institutions we have worked with so far, we're piloting this technology at the moment, have been very eager to work with us and we are nonetheless running into these process considerations. So imagine that you are an instructor at an institution that has not yet set up an LTI in their LMS and you have to figure out navigating your own university, who do I ask, how do I get this set up? So even these barriers as big as they are, we're in almost the best case scenario. Which is the other piece, I'll turn up the bill for which is the user experience component. So as John mentioned, one of the things that we feel is a problem with a lot of these standards including basic LTI is it's a technology and it's not really addressing the users and what they need to be doing in their workflow. I'm just going to yell at that, okay? So why is good user experience critical to adoption? Using a computer system is really easy for some but it's really not for a lot of people when you're trying to impose this and you're trying to improve your workflow. So for an instructor, they may not adopt a technology if it appears that it's complicating their lives. If it looks like it's a real difficulty to set up, they might consider it if they're highly motivated because they see the benefits but if they don't see the benefits and how this is going to improve their workflow, they're not going to be interested. Also about students, students who struggle with interfaces all of a sudden have a negative affect about what you're trying to teach them. Every time I go into it, I'm reminded that I don't like this experience. I'm just going to rattle through a few of the issues that came up. What we showed you with the two-click experience is really the best case. This is not reflecting all the possible situations. So roster management. Since we're relying on the LMS to tell us when students are registered until the student initiates an action, we don't know who they are. So an instructor now has two rosters to manage their LMS and their OLI one. Until we can implement grade exchange which requires more than what basic LTI can provide us, you now have two grade books and that's both for the student and the instructor. Logins. So we can automatically log you in from the LMS and at first we didn't even provide an OLI logout because what if we log you out but you're not logged out of your LMS and then you come back but then people were concerned that they don't have a way to log out once they're in our system. So we had to put log in back but now we have students who can be logged out of our system. Bookmarking. Basic LTI does not allow us to refer back to the authenticator to send back to us. So if you hit a bookmark from OLI but you're not currently logged in we have to kick you back to your LMS but your LMS doesn't have a way to kick you back to us. Desktop support. Where do the questions go? Do you have an OLI question or do you have a Blackboard question or a Google question? How do we figure out what that question is and what we want? Where do you have your account? Do you have an OLI account or do you have a Blackboard account? Well, that sounds like it should be an easy question to answer. You've got one or the other. Well, we have existed before we've done the Basic LTI so we have a lot of relationships with faculty who already have OLI accounts. The students already have OLI accounts. So for the case in Carnegie Mellon we have to support both. For existing users we have to support both. Right? Unless, of course, you're not using an LMS at your institution then you want an OLI on the account. Oh, but you just found out that you could hook OLI up to your LMS. Maybe I want to do that. Can you merge my accounts together? Yeah, we could do that but if you already got students who are registered now we're moving their registrations and now you've got to tell your students they need to go log in somewhere else. The point of all of this is that it's not easy to communicate to novice users about how they should be using this bridge between their LMS and OLI. So now suppose, okay, I've even decided I've looked at all this and decided that's okay I don't mind two grade books, I don't mind this monkey logout thing, I don't mind the account confusion I'm going to go to set this up. Well, as I mentioned before even in our best case scenarios you still need to find out who you need to talk to to get things set up at your institution. Then when you have it set up at your institution you have to go through something like this to actually configure the link. There's actually multiple screens to set things up in Blackboard. You have to enable the basic LTI component. Then you have to register a provider domain not that anyone aside from maybe somebody in IT knows what a provider domain is providing credentials and secrets and those sorts of things. And then actually in the course, as an instructor you're thinking about adding, I want to add this to my course well I have to first bring in that tool to the Blackboard course and then if that's not enough I have to add a URL because that might not even be obvious. I know we are experienced as a URL but I'm thinking about it in a piece of courseware so you find that there's a little tiny checkbox that says this URL is a tool and you have to know what a tool means because a tool could mean different things inside the LMS system and to get all of that right is multiple clicks, multiple screens. There's no straightforward way to get set up and configured to consume in Blackboard and other systems are the same. We found similar Moodle, we found Sakai was a little bit easier but still had a lot of technical language. Well the point there is that depending on the LMS it is different. What they call these things what you have to go through is different. So imagine trying to provide instructions from our side, from Oli's side saying okay what LMS do you have, what versions do you have how's it configured, what have they done you know for the reconfiguration and so even though we can achieve these two clicks scenarios through basic LTI from a user experience point of view there are so many rattles that this can just fall apart through and I really believe that the difficulty there is that this technology solution not one that really pays attention to what's the user experience supposed to be like and I really think that's critical for adoption. So what's next? So things that we're working on we wanted to provide some more configurable entry points in dual life so maybe you could jump right to our learning dashboard which is our learning analytics. More other locations that are instructor configurable. We wanted to do grade exchange which we can do which is a larger spec but that's harder on the development side. We actually have to do all sorts of web service stuff to make that happen whereas basic LTI is more web 2.0 it's easier to simple requests. To a consumer we're actually thinking about a lot about bringing other tools into our environment but I think really where we want to focus sort of remainder of the talk which is why I know that we've kind of spent through things a little bit is to to talk a little about the opportunities going forward and so we see sort of two clear opportunities for OER and the LMS. One is enabling learning analytics to provide that data for continuous improvement and evaluation and to really as Bill just talked to us about is building a better user experience so that anyone not someone not an instructor has to find someone in IT to coordinate through your blackboard administrator to coordinate all these things that happen to be able to use a piece of OER in their LMS. So at the Open Learning Initiative you've probably seen this slide one of our core ideas is that we feel one of the most powerful features of web-based instruction is this ability to embed assessment in every instructional activity and then use that data to provide feedback to the learner, to the instructor to the course design and development team and to the science of learning however right now that data and there's others doing this but that data gets trapped in proprietary tools it's not it doesn't flow across system boundaries it doesn't flow across organizational boundaries it's locked out and inside of a lot we try to provide this comprehensive view of learning we call it our instructor learning dashboard it's a way where we take an outcomes focused outcomes centered approach to giving instructors information about their students learning but imagine if that could be extended to all of the resources that happen that happen to be in an LMS why can't I mix two OERs something like my math lab or my stat lab something I created as an instructor and have all that data flow back to one central analytics tool that provides me that comprehensive view and there's a lot of issues around around this standards for data exchange these are all things we talked about this morning licensing issues, platforms and tools policies but we really feel to work through all these things we have to think about LMS interoperability, systems interoperability and learning analytics as being automatic not an afterthought, not something you go back and put into a system that when you're creating an OER as the OER creator you shouldn't have to think about these things the tools that you're using to offer your content should do this for you all this stuff that we talked about all these technical issues should be behind the scenes so building a better user experience how do we get to that component what do we choose a familiar model what do we choose something that I bet everyone in here has in their pocket that they're familiar with which is the OER app store idea why can't we find OER within the LMS why can't we have one click access to take something that's a complex OER not something that's just a web based resource but something that has interactive learning environments of persistent states and logins and grades and sophisticated learning analytics and just add that to a course in a really easy way we also need something that provides a basis for choice so we can choose from the various things that are out there and that should have evaluation data and context of use and a way to bring communities to those resources that are being consumed and we think that an app store would be one way to do this so the question becomes why hasn't this happened and so I updated this slide with Sutter I'm sure everyone here has heard about the Pearson open class enhancement so we see publishers now moving in this direction but there isn't I know that there's some efforts there's lots of portals and aggregators and things here but we don't actually have in this community something that's pervasive in every learning management system that provides a really easy way to grab OER content again why hasn't this happened probably the same issues institutional policies about data issues always about consuming resources licensing data ownership technology standards and the message that we wanted to leave with is that we need platforms which make it easy to create share, find, use and evaluate OER and the user focus needs to be on the educators and learners who actually consume it not on all this sort of technical stuff that happens behind the scenes we're not going to have a lot of time for discussion but I also want to mention if you're interested in sort of the user experience perspective that we are bringing to OERs Renee Fish and I are talking tomorrow about that and we're also going to be touching more on the idea of OER convergence through learning analytics we're talking with my colleague Norma Beer about that also tomorrow we can kind of dig in more on the data standards issues there so we hope to use the remaining time for discussion because I think that the discussion was really stimulating this morning and so these are some questions that we wanted to pose to you we also want to show you questions for us but things like how does OER make greater inroads to the almas do you agree with this OER app store approach does this model extend replace supplement the content package idea that we've been using so far can open versus close free versus commercial exist side by side in such a system and what are the next steps to make this happen because I really believe that we all need to come together to make this type of thing happen to actually have a place to share the great work that we're doing share the evaluation results that were the context that we used, the pedagogical design it's really easy to consume in a place where educators are looking for resources replacing the resources that are working I just wanted to mention that Blackboard has responded to Pearson's open class by stating that they're going to implement some kind of OER resource within their system and yes I think the app store approach is a very exciting one but part of the problem as I see it is there's so many resources out there, something needs to come about that organizes them in a way that makes it easier to access what you're looking for I really like the OER Commons I think it's a step forward from Merleau in that respect although I like Merleau but it can be just overwhelming OER Commons is a little more I think a step in the right direction and so we agree with that view that it's a dynamic that's the idea of providing a basis for choice and one way to do that is to communicate the design intentions behind resources to provide communities where you can talk with folks who provide case studies of their use to share the results, the context of use data all those sorts of things along with the OER and then to try to pull us communities around similar OERs so that we can actually have convergence and to actually take care of advantageable power and analytics and I heard you talk a little bit about I think most of this in respect to higher ed can you speak of any situations where you've had K-12 experience with this or have you been doing anything from a K-12 perspective I mean the question I really have is addressing the first one and the last one I think reaching out to some of your K-12 environments it will help better perpetuate what's happening down the line but have you had any experience with the K-12 environment yet? Very limited there's a few high schools in the Pittsburgh area and elsewhere that we work with they're using our courses and we engage them with this question about do you have a learning management system and we found that actually they're using very different tools that we're not familiar with we didn't find Blackboarder or Sakai Mood would be as common I know there are schools that use those systems so I think from our side we reached out to familiar with the technology that's in place there high schools and it would be interesting to do you have some insight to talk to you about maybe how we can get on those platforms also I think a lot of it's hard to argue with some vision in particular but a lot of the trick part comes down to the issue of standards yes and I having bashed the standards a little bit in the open session I think it's worth taking a moment to defend on the other side so I haven't worked in textbook company and every single one of the issues that you listed as problems that you have with LTI in its current form of education are issues that we have as well and there are a couple more and so on and so forth but what really happened there from my perspective is that a group of folks got around the table to solve a particular problem and that problem was too interoperable it was placing a video conferencing inside the LMS frame and they solved that problem and it turned out that the way they solved that problem brings them hard way to solving the problems that OLI and that set the age and others in the content fields need to solve it but not the whole way so really there are mechanisms with the IMS including a thing called a profile which basically says you want to get certified for content LTI or operability you have to include data in these fields there are ways of dealing with that most important thing is that you get the right people around the table so it's really important right now for educational institutions and for foundations and for OER consortia to step up to this table and to be involved in working groups to articulate the use cases I don't think there's any barrier other than the usual barrier that it's hard to create standards that work for everyone I don't think there's any political barrier to solving the problems that you're having we just need to get the right people around the table I'd like to just push on that just a little bit because I agree with you and I think I agree with you in terms of that basic LTI original startup for a different intent I do see folks who have run with use in Sky 3 to bring in Sky 2 pieces in a very clean way using basic LTI but I also have seen cases where there will be a standard and then a publisher kind of extended in a use case and then they'll kind of tweak it in some certain way and then we'll get contributed back to the community for a while and standard take a long time to come out and I want to just contrast that with what happens every day in Web 2.0 someone will skunkworks project, call up with something, put it online it'll go viral, it'll take off it'll be a simple web-based API and everyone's consuming it instantly and I just wonder why that hasn't happened in our space like why isn't there why aren't there organic standards that emerge why does it have to always be bringing people at the table and I'd love to be involved in those discussions we have use cases, we want to fix this issue but I also just I also question whether the process to date has been really serving us well so I think we get the time signal so maybe you could do one more question and you can couple of things one of the things from your discussion is do we really need to concept of Nell as it was pointed by this point the way to think about it I would just say maybe that was to be thought for just a minute and try to attack some of these problems that we're dealing with and another thing, dealing with standards and the processes historically you're absolutely right that has been the case there's a lot of reasons behind that I will say this however that the process is never, it's like all of them they're always wrong but they try to be as useful as possible and they are ongoing and I think there are faster venues and then people recognize that problem and are working at this point to try to work through this there are things in process that are attacking any type of venues that may or may not be a standard or maybe just a web service definitions, whistles, those types of things that are being worked at just to respond really fast and we can talk later if you have a chance but to push on where I will be usability direction on that I see the installation of LMSs in so many institutions all over the world as an opportunity to take advantage of something that's there rather than trying to develop a new solution that although it might be better will take time to get out there and so in so far as we can take advantage of an install base and what users are getting familiar with whether they initially have some trouble getting familiar with Blackboard lots of them are familiar with Blackboard now and so can I, if you're familiar with Blackboard get as good as I can so I don't have to teach you anything to pull my OER into it thank you


Hello. Hey everybody, thank you for coming. We attempted the demo gods here, and they're not playing along. So we're going to get started, but we're going to have to. OK, are you guys going to continue working on this over here? So we can do the slides? OK, so we've got slides. Welcome. Thank you very much for coming. We're going to be talking about VCPE today, virtual customer premise equipment. Let's just. So I'm Bill Bowman with Canonical, Managed Strategy and Content for our cloud marketing team. And with me is Rafael Gonzalez. He's one of our solution architects, a new guy. Hi, I'm Valentino Nario with Palm Grand. That was some introductions. Yeah. So I think we have the most colorful polos of the entire show altogether. So we actually thought we would have three microphones. So it's a little awkward. Bear with us. We'll get through this. So we're going to give an introduction here. I'm going to give you some context as to why is Canonical up here with Plumgrid. Plumgrid could certainly do a VCPE demo on their own, but we didn't feel that that would really give us the context of more of a real world scenario. Let's take these virtual functions. Let's do NFV. Let's do SDN and put it in context of OpenStack. So that's what we're showing here. We're going to do OpenStack, but we're also going to use some of the Canonical software along with that. So of course we have Ubuntu OpenStack running over here to run the demo. But we're also using Juju. And Juju is, I'm going to give you the quick overview of Juju, give you a little introduction in how it works and why we're using that to give you the context of why we're doing that with Plumgrid. So it's about application modeling. And it's about reusable components, reusable operational components. What that gives us is the economies to scale. And when we want to do the scalability to reuse, it requires encapsulation. And we're just going to skip straight through here to what we're talking about when we talk about encapsulation. So Juju, and I apologize, normally we do like 45 minutes on Juju. So this is going to be the really quick version. If you have questions, please feel free to ask. But Juju uses the concept of charms. And charms is where we encapsulate the intelligence here. So it's kind of like having a Debian package or a Docker image, but it's much more intelligent than that. What charms are is they're intelligent programs that go along with your applications to provide things like relations. And relations is how Juju pulls this all together. So what we have here is a Plumgrid charm. Over here we have a Neutron charm. In a full deployment, and Rafael will show you this shortly, you'll actually see tons of charms go in a bundle. But I just want to explain what the charms are and how they work to give you context there. So Rafael, you're going to be my Plumgrid charm. I'll be the Neutron charm. Because we are very charming. Rafael, what are you providing for me over there? Well, so as you said, the charm is an encapsulation, but it's not actually carrying any software, right? So there's no software in the charm itself as in the actual application package. It's more of a description of what the software can do, such as what relations it can establish, such as I know how to talk to Bill, and Bill likes to talk to me, hopefully, right? And then that way we can actually establish a relation, right? So when we talk about the various functions in OpenStack itself, such as the Neutron API, the Plumgrid components as well, they know about each other and they know what they provide and what they require. And so with the combination of these charms, we can then put a set of complex software together. So essentially it's the integration encapsulated. So Rafael's providing for me the Neutron API Plumgrid. It's a explicitly defined relation. And I, the Neutron charm, am consuming that relation. When I consume that relation, we define multiple actions and things. So we actually define the network ports, the network mappings, whatever's required to make Neutron communicate with the Plumgrid ONS charm over here, those are all defined in the operational and challenges of the charm. So that we don't have to manually configure that every time. So when Plumgrid goes out to do a VCPE demo, like we've done here, we use Juju to put these things together and we don't have to do that integration every time that we go through it. And of course you can have multiple different relations established and as long as they have the same name, they will try to communicate. One will be a provider, one will be a consumer. Right, so OpenStack itself is a set of complex services that need to be linked up together, along with an SDN, in this case Plumgrid. And so this takes most of the heavy lifting out of the equation. So getting your environment up and running quickly is the idea here. We're looking to deploying a Plumgrid solution with OpenStack as easy as possible to get up and running and not have to necessarily leverage significant expertise in OpenStack itself to get that running. Yeah, so essentially use more software and hire fewer consultants. And it drives the economic cost of an OpenStack cloud or large solutions down. Plumgrid isn't the only NFV charm out there. We have a whole ecosystem around it. We put some on the slide here just to demonstrate that it's a complete ecosystem and it's growing rapidly. So the other aspect of this, so Juju deploys that software. But the other thing it's doing for us here is it's an open source, generic, virtualized network functions manager. If you're familiar with NFV or VNFs, you need something to manage the VNFs. Most VNFs will have their own VNF manager. There are some other VNF managers, but they may or may not be open to everything since charms can go with any application. They can be written for any VNF. They can be written in any programming language, which allows us to give you a completely generic manager for all of your VNFs. Here we're showing you'd have virtualized infrastructure management. We're using OpenStack for that. We're using Juju for the generic VNF manager. We're not demonstrating orchestration today. That's at the very top. But then you'll also see that Plumgrid is over here in the NFV architecture and is providing both SDN and VNFs to us. So the VNFs are up here and the NFV is down here. So what we're talking about here is the age of big software. Big software is similar to big data. What we mean by that is we've taken software that used to be monolithic or run on a specific device or run on a single server and we started to break it out and it's gotten so big, much like big data, you can't do it on one machine anymore. There isn't one single box that's going to run an entire VNF solution. And when we start to scale like that, we see a phase change here. And it's about the scalability, the topology changes, and how do we manage these things if we start having more and more servers, we don't want more and more people. We need the people to have more and more intelligent software. And that's what we're seeing here with the phase change into big software.  So just for those of you that are not familiar with PlumGrid, we provide multi-tenant virtual network infrastructure for OpenStack. We have a new term plugin and we are obviously integrated with all the major distributions, obviously with Ubuntu Canonico. As they describe, we have the ability to be fully automated in a deployment with Canonico. And some of the key things that we provide from a networking functionality perspective is a broad portfolio of what we call virtual network functions or VNFs, from bridging to routing to netting to security analytics and also of interesting things there. We also provide this very strong micro-segmentation functionality and the ability to bring visibility and operations into your SZN layer in OpenStack. One piece of technology that I want to mention which sits under the covers of the PlumGrid solution, it's an open source component that we contributed back into the Linux community. It's now a Linux collaborative project and it's called the Iovizer. And you'll hear me refer to this over and over again throughout the entire 40 minutes because the Iovizer is what makes the whole VCP++ use case that we're gonna discuss today possible. It's how we bring programmability and extensibility to the Linux kernel. It's the ability to define from a high level perspective some programs that do things like bridging or routing or storage or security or something else that might come to your mind. And at runtime, insert those in the kernel. So this is just gonna give you an idea of how we make the magic happen. So as a very important piece of the puzzle. The other key thing that PlumGrid brings to the table is the ability to do what we call service insertion architecture or in an NFV world, service function chaining. So we define these bubbles that we call virtual domains that can be assigned to applications users. And instead of these virtual domains we can chain functions, network functions. We can build what we call topologies. And when your traffic will traverse these topologies it will go through all these services. And those services can be the purple services which is what PlumGrid provides and through the Iovizer itself or it can be third party components, can be any of the VNFs from the canonical ecosystem that Bill mentioned earlier that we can insert very easily inside one of these bubbles here. All right, so this hopefully kind of gives you the idea of what are the pieces underneath? And so we're here to show you obviously more on the VCP side. And Raphael hold this big box all the way here. So Raphael, what's the problem that we're solving today? Well, the challenge with the CPE is that normally you have a complex device that's sitting out somewhere that's necessarily out of your control, right? So how many times has your mom called saying that she can't get online, right? So perhaps not so easy to actually walk her through checking DNS settings or the actual wireless configuration on that access point. And so there are many complex services that actually run in that home router. So what if you could actually separate the control of the device with the actual functions? And that's what we're here to demonstrate today, right? So when we think about the VNFs which are running in that device, they are generally, so there's generally a control that you have to have over those VNFs, right? But the challenge is that you might not have that access to configure that device. And the person that's at the location may not have the expertise or knowledge on how to configure it. Or you may not actually want that very intelligent person at that remote location to hack into that device. So that's the value of the iOvisor with PlumGrid. And the other angle of this is obviously the business angle. If you are a telco and you wanna try to figure out ways to bring new services to your users, right? Having a device that sits somewhere out there that it's really hard to upgrade, it's really hard to add new software to this, it's really hard to add new services, really makes it not a good value proposition. So the whole idea is how do we shift this model of delivering these services to the end user in a way that it really enables new business models as well as obviously a lot of agility from an operational perspective. So new business and operations are obviously the key drivers for this revolution of the CPE model that we see here. So what we see as kind of the natural next step is to take some of the commonly known concepts of separation of control plane and data plane, which you've certainly heard of about, especially in the context of software defined networks. And we're gonna look at how we apply those to the CPE scenario. So obviously what is the definition of control plane and data plane? You have a function, let's take a router for example, right, there is one function which is a data plane which deals with forwarding packets, routing packets, right? And there is a function which is a control plane which is running all the routing protocols. So the whole idea of this separation is that those two functions do not need to coexist on the same physical device and can be split logically and you can have something running on one device, for example, on the cloud control plane and some other functions running in a data plane which can be a software data plane now can be a generic compute node that can perform these functions. So as we move to the application of these concepts to the cloud model and to the CPE model we commonly refer to this as the cloud VCP scenario. And this is kind of what the industry refers to when you talk about the VCP is the whole idea of moving some of the functions that we used to have in that home device over there and pushing those into the cloud, all right? So obviously this has a lot of benefits. You remember earlier we were talking about operations. Now they all sit in the central location, right? And also from an extensibility perspective, those are all software functions now. So it's a lot easier for an operator to start adding things on top of that. But so what's wrong with this model bill? So what we do see here is the model works when everything is in the same data center. But when we start moving these devices out and we're talking about customer premise equipment we've now designed a model where we're going to start passing a lot of traffic out just to come back because we haven't actually addressed what we're doing with that separation of control and data. We're used to having those control and data tightly linked in a LAN or a data center. What we see here is this is not a LAN. The LAN is in the house over there. This is some sort of wide area network and we're now creating a two great of a disparate distance between that control plane and data plane for it to naturally work with a traditional NFV infrastructure type architecture. So while there's obvious benefits in terms of that device in the home is now a much simpler device. It's just running one function which is just providing the layer to connectivity to your home. And you can have all sort of fancy functions there. You now have all this traffic that it's kind of thromboning back and forth. And so how do we go and improve this model? And this is really what the core of the presentation today is and it's how do we propose a model that can help improve and build upon this concept of Cloud VCP and help with some of the challenges that we just explained. All right. So if we go to the next slide, this is what we commonly refer to as the improved VCP model or the Tetris CPE model. So let me quickly, no slowly, sorry, not quickly, slowly walk you through this slide because there's a lot of stuff in there. And let me just bring back one concept that I described earlier, which was the concept of this Iobizer thing. So the whole concept of the Tetris VCP use case is that we want to do is to have rich functions running still in the home device so that you can have an optimal communication path for local devices there without having to actually connect all the way into the cloud while retaining the two key benefits of the Cloud model which was a simplified operational model and a much greater business agility. All right. So what we look at here is to say, well, I want to bring the data plane function all the way into the CPE device itself. And to do that, I need something that allows me to run all these functions on a very simple piece of, no, very simple component. And so the Iobizer, as I mentioned earlier, is this Linux kernel component. So it's something that runs in Linux. So every device that runs Linux, it's capable of having these Iobizer functions in there. So it enables me to have all sort of network functionality like switching, routing, nutting, security, for example, locally deployed in your home device. Now, if you remember, the initial CPE model had these same functions running there. But the challenge was that there was no way to remote control these functions from a central location. So the whole idea with this tether model is that you have the data plane implementation of these functions running in the home device. And you have the control plane of all these components that it's running in the cloud. And because of these extensible architecture that the Iobizer provides, when you, as a Talco, want to start adding new services, you can just deploy one of these VNFs from a cloud perspective. And that will magically appear on the home device. So the whole idea is to kind of bring together the best of the two worlds of the classic CPE design and the cloud CPE design, and merge them into a model where you have all these advanced functionalities running there and the remote control in the cloud. So to illustrate Valentina's point here, when we previously had just the CPE device here, it had all of the intelligence, the management, the operation, and everything. In a traditional NFVI architecture, we would simply separate data and control. But now, if I wanted to implement a virtual firewall, my data would have to go here, talk to the firewall, come back here. And that's the trombone, the back and forth effect. What we're doing here with the tethered model is when we implement the firewall, we actually put it here. But the control plane for it is still here. So we've split up those virtual functions. Essentially, it's like a split VNF. And it gives you a much more elegant solution. And it gives an operations provider the opportunity to generate revenue. And that's the economics here. We can provide new services and generate revenue on a box that traditionally was a necessity, but purely a cost. It wasn't a revenue generating opportunity. I know we're a big road, but if there's any question, you guys jump in and we wanna make sure that it makes sense for all of you guys. Are we clear so far? Not in hand? All right. So we're gonna jump into the live environment in just a sec here. And before we do that, we can just kinda walk you through what you're gonna look at so that you guys can navigate that. Thanks, Valentino. Yeah, let's go over there. Valentino, do you wanna take them through the color coding here? Yeah, so this was just one thing that I wanted to cover. So as you can see, should I jump down as well? Let's do it. It's fun. All right. So as you can see here, we're using two different colors for the different functions. So anything that it's purple, those are the functions that PlumGrid provides natively. So imagine that all those functions are completely distributed within your kernel. And those functions are switching, routing, netting, the SCP, DNS, and these sort of things. Anything that it's orange, those are the third party components that we integrate into our virtual domains abstraction. And those can be anything, can be an advanced stateful layer four to seven firewall, can be deep packet inspection, can be something that takes care of one optimization, can be anything that you might want to use in there, can be a lot balancer, so on and so forth, right? So that's the color coding. So every time you'll see us through the demo, looking at purple icons, those are in kernel components, and then anything that it's orange, those are part of the VNF portfolio that Bill was illustrating earlier that gets integrated into the solution. I was kidding. She made it. So Rafael, how are we doing on our demo here? I think we're good to show here. There's a question. Yes? Great, okay. So the first thing, are you going to put DHCP DNS in the home? Is that correct? I mean, the DHCP server? The question was, are we going to put a virtual DNS in the home? Or in the data center? Oh, yes. Yes. So the idea is that there are certain services that you want to run in the home. So something like a DHCP server, you want it to run locally in that device. And other things like DNS, the functions that you actually need at the device will run within the device, actually within the device. Right, so then my question goes to, if you put the DHCP at home, then your application at the data center, so you have to route traffic back to, I mean to the data center first. So then back to the home again, go to the NAT. So the function is actually running in the device, but the control as to how it was configured is happening in the data center. So we're not actually going to the data center for the DHCP. Yeah, but you can not put all the application data plan at home.  It's going to be a mixed bag, right?  Anything that is advanced functions, like for example, if you want to do, state we're following, if you're firewalling, if you want to do, again, as I said, deep packet inspection, those sort of heavy load applications, those will be running in the cloud. Yes, I want to repeat again. So if you put those applications in the cloud. And what applications do you mean, VNFs? VNFs, I mean, yes, then you will have to route all the traffic to the data center first, then back to the home, go through the NAT. No, so NAT, for example, it's running in the home device. So we'll go into the demo. Maybe it's going to make more sense, but functions like NAT, for example, will run inside the CPE device itself. So that means your traffic go back to the data center, back to the home, it goes through the NAT. No, no, it's going to run in the VCP device itself. So that's exactly what you see on the screen here, right? So those functions, those VNFs are running here. So this is my CPE device. Including NAT. Yes, yes, exactly.  It's all running in this little box here, which is our CPE device. Yeah, I'm personally, I work for Channel Mobile. I'm also working on this one. So I'm pretty working on detail of this. So my question in our company we are discussing here is some application, I mean, for the virtual CPE, we are sitting at the data center. For those applications, you route traffic from home to the data center, and you have to route back to the NAT to go through the, so that's kind of run trip, that's really cost. So exactly, that was our point. Right. So you're absolutely right. So if we go back to the slides for a second. Oh, sorry. What do you want to go? Yeah, there.  So when you have, this is the model you're talking about, right? If you're running your applications in the cloud, you're absolutely right, that the traffic will have, if you have two devices connected to your metro network, if all the functions are running in the cloud, what's gonna happen is that your traffic's gonna go all the way to the data center, where you have your functions, like NATing for example, and then it's gonna go back to the metro network, and that's very inefficient. We're absolutely agreeing with you. So what we're going to show here is instead a model where we push the most commonly needed functions to the home device itself, right? So we completely remove the need to actually go to the data center. The only thing that's running in the data center, which might be a little confusing is, the actual control plane for those functions. Yeah, I heard the point, that makes sense to separate the data and control plane, one in the home side, the other one in the data center side, but you cannot do decouple every application. Absolutely, now. So that's the question goes to... Yes, absolutely. So that's what we're illustrating here, like if you were going to any sort of content provider, like if I was going to Amazon to watch a video, I would have to connect to Amazon's data center, and then it would have to come back to me. So yeah, if we're implementing deep packet inspection, or we're implementing a CDN, a content delivery network, it will have to go to the data center, but it doesn't create multiple trips. It goes directly into the service provider, and the data comes back. If it goes directly to the service provider for deep packet inspection, it's still gonna go out to the internet and come back through, but it doesn't create a double traffic, as opposed to the implementation where I put DPI in the house. Right, so any traffic that has to stay in the home doesn't have to go back and forth to the data center, it's isolated in that device, and any device is attaching to the CPE itself, unless they're having to go get content, as Bill mentioned, the traffic never actually leaves the home. Yeah, so that's... I wanna make sure, sorry, I just wanna give a chance also to the other gentleman there that has been standing for a while. I just wanted to, as we go through the demo, these are obviously at scale environments, so I wanted to make sure that we kind of saw how a stacking of a policy could work, so for example, a global and then a regional and then an individual, because you're gonna have a million, two million, three million users inside of these environments with two, three, four hundred possible variants of configuration, and trying to manage them on a per implementation basis is almost unmanageable, so just as we kind of go through the demo, if you could show features of a kind of policy stacking. Yeah, we can, we'll talk about it, we'll talk about it as we go through the demo. You wanna talk a little bit about your director then? Yeah, so I mean, the whole obviously, when you start looking at extremely large scale, there are all sorts of interesting challenges, right? But one of the things that, you know, I work a lot with customers, so we see some of our partners here as well, so when we jointly work with customers, we obviously start talking about what is your scale requirement and what is the architecture that you wanna leverage for these deployments, and if we talk about open stack specifically, right? There is a very commonly used model for scanning open stack, which is you start looking at what is the size of one cell, and that's usually your confidence level with a failure domain, right? So whether that failure is 250 compute nodes, or it's 500, or it's 1,000, whatever that is, right? That's one cell that you start deploying. Now, the beauty of such a model where you have open stack and where you have a software like Plumgrid running is that both of them provide a consolidated single API layer that you can use for the configuration of the cloud services, right? As well as for each CPE device. So for Plumgrid, each CPE device is this concept of a virtual domain, and these virtual domains can be templatized, first of all. The deployment of these virtual domains can be fully automated, so you can just scrape the creation of it, and it really has no cost to deploy 10 of them or 1,000 of them. Now, obviously, I wouldn't claim that a single open stack plus Plumgrid deployment will go to the level of scale that the global deployment of CPE devices requires, right? So certainly, as these technologies become more widely adopted in an NFV environment, we will see what we call either federations or multi-cell kind of deployments that will help you scale past the single cell limitation. Yeah, so from the NFV infrastructure perspective, we're talking at the infrastructure layer, we're using open stack to manage that. So most people here are probably familiar with scaling open stack and that sort of thing. When you go up to the application layer or the what are we doing layer with the Plumgrid stuff, that's where virtual domains map to your infrastructure and you get that manageability for scalability. There is a central point of configuration for all the policies. So your VCP device, we wouldn't go and configure each VCP device individually. We will have from this central control plane the ability to say, Raffles, CPE device looks like this and it's a template and I'm just gonna kind of, customize IP addresses and whatever it is, right? And build, CPE will look probably exactly the same just with a different IP configuration. And I have the ability to push both of these confects from a central point. So that's kind of the beauty of this central control plane which we fully embrace coupled with distributed data plane. Right, and that's what you see here in the screen, right? The first device in this list here labeled gateway two is this little guy. So as Valentino mentions, you can have templates for these. So if you have many of them, you have gateway X, you have a predetermined configuration for each of those devices and you manage them from the data center. And what the network looks like, at least in our orange box here, we're running OpenStack, right? So here we have the Metro network. This is where our customers will be connecting into and then they come into the data center where we can then do heavier lifting. So if you wanna do DPI, for example, that will be running here in this network or additional routing policy. You have that here and then you can allow that customer then back out to the world. So all of this is running in a data center and that's represented here in our virtual domain view here. And so here is where the CPE is connecting. Yeah, so that's the kind of uplink from the CPE device and then as you can see in this topology here, we have a couple of routing devices. Those are, you know, speaking of SPF and exchanging routing information and we have two third-party VNFs that we have integrated in there. One is actually a VM that is running web server and one is running a routing function. Just to show you, this could be anything, could be as I said, DPI, QS device, could be firewall, could be anything. And then that's your external connectivity out to the one network, to the internet, right? And then if we go down to the CPE device network for a sec, this is what we were looking at earlier. So this is what we're connecting into. So that little port at the very top is what this guy here it's plugged into. It's just a logical representation of your connectivity point. Actually it's the bottom one. The bottom one is the physical and this would be the wireless access on top. Yeah, sorry, the wireless access is the top, yeah. And so that's your DNS and ACP functions that are running there, your NAT function and that's your physical exit point. Okay, please. I guess I see, what's the business point of this of pushing more complexity down to a home device? Like you basically, I can see like vendors like Motorola, Surfboard, Modems in the old days being standardized, but from a consumer perspective, you're just giving me more things to hack around to change my QOS. And then secondly, I think, is it state sponsored telco that wants this stuff or what is it for economies of stale or money? Frankly, I don't want traffic monitoring at my home. I want to run my own DNS. So I guess what, can you give me the telco business case for this in a better sense? Do you want to take it? Yeah, so what we're doing here is we're actually simplifying your device. Okay, so because today you have a lot of functions that are running in the CPE device itself, right? So what we're doing here, it's one where it started analyzing what that device is which we're saying just run Linux can be, any device that is running Linux. Right, and this is the Ubuntu core running here. Okay, and so it simplifies the device itself, so the operational model of that device. So from a telco perspective, instead of me having to, which I'm sure you all guys have done plenty of times, right? Oh, my cable box is not working anymore.  Here, it's a Linux device, can get upgraded much more easily, can operate a lot more easily. So that's the simplification part. Let me just one second on the, just the user and then I'll let you jump in. The other thing that it's important here is that the control plane does not run on the device itself. So you have as the home user, actually don't get to hack more with that. So from a telco perspective, they have this central control plane and your Linux device, all these functions are running in the kernel and do not have access to those functions. Right, so you're talking about, perhaps you're very technical when you actually want that control. So from a telco perspective, they actually wouldn't want that, right? So let's say you're a business customer, we don't, you may not have your IT support, right? So we're gonna do that for you. And by placing all these functions in the kernel, it makes the device very secure. So you can't actually go in there and affect your QOS. If you want better service, then you go back to that service provider and perhaps they have different options for you depending on what services you want. But from a telco perspective, then they have the control. And then the value of placing those functions there also means that, as the gentleman from China Mobile, I think was saying, is that the traffic is not going back and forth to the data center as most other VNFs are designed today. We have the primary functions running in the device at home, giving you that service, but you don't really have access to it. And as far as hacking it, the Linux kernel is very secure today, right? So you're running an Ubuntu Core or perhaps we're now talking to some partners about having Snappy, if you have perhaps heard of Ubuntu Core Snappy, running on this device makes it very secure. And as Valentino was mentioning, also provides that telco service provider the ability to upgrade it as needed without you having to worry about that. Certainly this is the beginning of a very long conversation. I'd really appreciate this very interactive session. Yeah, exactly. We'd love to talk more. And this is certainly to provoke some thought. We wanted to show you kind of the industry standard is this VCP model pushing everything to the cloud. And we wanted to maybe be a little provocative here and say, maybe that's not the only model, right? We have some ideas on how to optimize some of these and use Linux for better deployments. Obviously container is coming up, right? So there's higher density VCP that can be easily accommodated with this very simple model that we're showing here. All the comments and questions are really good and really valid. I think that there are a lot of details of this implementation that we did not go over in the spirit of time to get through this session. We would be happy to discuss it further. There may or may not be things that are more complex. There may or may not be things that are more or less secure. But we do think if we go into the details of how this model is actually implemented when Raphael talked about Ubuntu Core, for example, it's a very secure platform. And the way we do that, we'll talk about that. But those details didn't make it in here.  The business use case might not sound the best to you as an end user, especially an end user that may be used to managing your own device. But that paradigm might be shifting. You could still put in your own management device inside your network and still talk to your outbound gateway. But you will still have some constraints or confines, depending on how the operators implement new connectivity to what you're traditionally contacting to the internet. But they're great points and really good questions. Please, can you just use the... So the customer-prem space, I mean, when we talk about customer-prem equipment, it's pretty price-sensitive. We're talking about putting a general-purpose platform in there, I see that. But, I mean, the optimizations for the customer-prem equipment has happened over years. And the price points have... The price point of what we're talking about does not increase your price point of the customer-prem equipment. And if there is a 10% or a 15% change in the model, the revenue-generating aspect of the model significantly makes up for it. The operational savings. Yes. This is a Raspberry Pi, so you can purchase this device for around $35.  So it actually is a quite inexpensive device that can have very sophisticated functions because you have the value of the Linux platform underneath it. We only have one minute left. Go ahead. No, I'll take this offline. Okay. Come visit us at the Arabus. We're both in the marketplace. Yeah, we actually had one slide. That's our last slide. Come see us. We'll have the demo running there so you can check it out. We'll also. Thank you very much, everyone. We really appreciate your time. Thank you.


Hey, welcome back, Motivation Monday, I'm your host, Cody. Every week I like to talk about something that's going to jack you up. This week is something a little more personal about me. The more I grind, the harder I work, and the more time I put in, believe it or not, the more excited I get and the better I get, whether I'm shooting video content, early on I may stutter, I may mess up, I may make mistakes, I'm human. Later on, after several videos, I get in a groove to where I can just do everything off the cuff, doesn't matter, any time, ad lib, the same goes in my work environment. Here at the office, I'm better at six o'clock at night, you have to know yourself. I'm better at six o'clock at night than I am at eight o'clock in the morning. All of us are different, but for me, the more time I put in, the more I focus on something, the more attention I give something, the better I am. Also, I'm better on the phone in the evening than I am in the morning, simply because I've been talking all day, I've been warming up, my words are better at night, I can just flow out of me. Everyone is different, realize what you have to do to be the best you that you can be. The harder I grind, the more excited I get and the better I am at certain parts of the day or after I've put in a little extra time, then I know I'm ready to pump it out and sometimes we'll get in here and we'll do more video because things will be rolling so well, so quick. I bet you're the exact same way.


Hello everyone and welcome to the 2 o'clock PM to 3 o'clock PM session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation, The Metaverse is Coming and OpenSim can show the way. Our speaker is Maria Korolow. Maria is a published author and covers artificial intelligence for CIO Magazine and cybersecurity for CSO Online. She has also been the editor of HyperGrid Business since 2009. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions and the full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets to at OpenSim CC with the hashtag OSCC21. Welcome everyone. Let's begin this session. Well thank you very much for that introduction. I love being here back on the stage again. As you notice this time I came more prepared. My jacket now matches my slides. I am like all about The Metaverse and the future today. So I have been covering this space like you said since 2009 and I love the idea of being in The Metaverse. If I had a choice when staying in The Matrix and not I mean I would totally make a different decision than they did in the movie. I think they were totally wrong. So when I first came in this was in 2009. I was at a conference that IBM was having in Second Life and it felt like I was at a real conference. That feeling of presence, that feeling of immersion, you all know it because you're here. For me that was the big eye-opening moment of I'm in a different place. I'm in a different place and this place is real and this place is valuable and this is going to be something amazing and what I thought at the time was that it was going to happen immediately. And I thought that The Metaverse was going to revolutionize how we shared experiences the same way that the internet revolutionized how we share information and I still think that it's true but the path to The Metaverse has been a little rocky and a little different from what I expected. So if you guys want to talk to me about this or write about it for HyperGrid Business, my email is right up there. I welcome your opinions, your essays, your contributions, announcements of what you are doing. So let's move on to what The Metaverse is in case you are watching this on YouTube or in replay because you googled what is The Metaverse? Let me find out. Let's go take you through it. The word meta means above, beyond or about the thing itself. It's something that's above our current universe, beyond our current universe or it's about our existing metaverse such as for example meta data is data about data. So The Metaverse can be interpreted in multiple ways. In the first kind of basic level definition is it's a layer of information that overlays our physical world like Google Maps or Pokemon Go or even cave wall paintings. This is something a level of information of data of meaning that we place on top of the world. So in that sense we have been building this metaverse since we invented language and that is the most generic sense of the word metaverse, rarely used. Another common sense of the word metaverse is shared virtual environments, desktop based environments like Second Life or Minecraft where like the one we are here in now where we're interacting with people via avatars in an immersive platform using our existing computers, existing phones, using screens and we've had this for more than a decade and this is a huge, huge universe, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, all these shared worlds, Roblox, they're gigantic, super popular with children and a giant billion-dollar industry and something that's being invested in continues to be invested in. So we may be seeing usage kind of leveling off in Second Life in OpenSim. We've hit record high numbers this year but we still seem to be not really taken off the way I was hoping to but it is a giant, giant, giant universe of content and for many people this is the metaverse. For me as well when I think of the metaverse I do think that the OpenSim metaverse is one kind of metaverse and finally we have the metaverse in the sense of the matrix, shared virtual reality environments. So this is where you would wear a headset or have a brain implant and you actually feel that you are literally inside another world where you can look around and it feels like you're someplace else. You've gone inside a computer, you are a virtual being and this is awesome and very cool and very compelling and we're just starting to see this happen. So I picked up an Oculus Quest 2 headset a couple of weeks ago and I've tried dozens of headsets, all the high-end ones, the HoloLens and Oculus and HTC Vive and everything that's been hitting the market for the past few years and this is definitely the most usable headset out there today. So if you guys are in a market for a virtual reality headset I strongly recommend the Oculus Quest 2 that just came out. It's about 200 bucks to 300 bucks depending on where and how you buy it and it's an all-in-one headset. So you don't have to plug it into the computer, it's wireless, you can move around it, it's got hand trackers so you move your hands and your hands move in world which is very kind of immersive and very compelling. But we're still not like fully there, it's still heavy and awkward to use, you can get hot in there, people can get motion sickness because the motion in world doesn't match your physical location, you can bump into things and knock over your computer and step on your cat. So there's downsides to it.  So for example, you might have a virtual cat sitting on your desk, it looks like a hologram like the Star Wars holograms and I think that augmented reality is probably going to be a big mass market introduction for the metaverse for a lot of people especially for virtual meetings and business events. Games like Pokemon Go have already shown that augmented reality can be very compelling. It kind of puts a magical layer over your existing world and it's very, very cool. Yes, there is a pass through camera and Oculus Quest 2, somebody just mentioned that in the comments, but it's black and white and very grainy and so for example, if you're having a business meeting in world, you can't use the pass through camera to send somebody an email or look something up on your calendar or take notes on your keyboard. The quality isn't quite that good. Okay, so moving on, we've had the idea of this entering the metaverse principle back now for what, 40 years almost? Wow, oh my God, that's a long time. So in the movie Tron, a guy got pulled into his computer. In 1992 is when the term the metaverse was coined in the novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. I highly recommend his books and this is the beginning of the cyberpunk era of science fiction where there's often a dystopian virtual world in which we're all inside computers or a lot of the action happens inside computers. And obviously we had The Matrix in 1999, you've all seen it, the new Matrix movie is coming out soon. I already said that if Earth is in a really bad shape and the aliens are providing you food and drink and keeping you in this wonderful virtual world, I would just ask to have to get building control over it so that you can create stuff in that world. Why not? Why have the aliens create everything for you when you can create stuff yourself? I mean, that's the main thing that The Matrix was missing is like individual creativity and world creation, world building. So if we had that whole setup would have been great. And I would like to see if they do that in the next movie, but I kind of I kind of don't expect much. Ready Player One basically took the movie Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and put it into a virtual world where though aces is basically like a 3D version of Second Life and the guy who runs though aces decides to leave it in his will to whoever solves a puzzle, basically an in-world puzzle, which is an awful way to do corporate succession planning. Just as Willy Wonka's method of finding a successor was just like ridiculous. And in this movie, as in many kind of things that are set in the virtual world, things that happen in the virtual world affect the real world. Like you have to solve something in world in order to affect something that's actually happening in your life. And I do think that's like a valid approach, but not necessarily the way they did it in Ready Player One. And also the idea of a single monolithic world controlled by one corporate company. Oh, I can't possibly happen. So then comes this year. So this year, if you guys have not seen Zuckerberg's presentation about Meta and you want to watch a horror movie, you go to YouTube and you watch that now. It is the creepiest thing I have seen online. And I've seen a lot of creepy stuff online. So the idea here is that Metaverse is going all in on Facebook is now going to be called Meta. And the Facebook itself is still going to be around, but part of the Meta brand. The Meta is going to be like the umbrella. They're putting 10 billion into Metaverse development. And they're pushing for Metaverse, for their version of Metaverse to be for socializing, for gaming. They plan to have some mind reading capabilities. And they want to use it for business. And Zuckerberg addressed the issue that maybe companies don't want all their users to have to use their Facebook accounts to do work. Maybe this is an issue. So he suggested that the answer to this is to create work profiles for Facebook users, which is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And yes, you do need a Facebook account to use the Oculus Quest headset. It is a ridiculous thing because of the privacy concerns are immense. You can't trust Facebook for anything more than kind of like a secondary marketing effort that you do. Unless you're the smallest possible company, you're not going to rely on Facebook to do your marketing.  Nobody is going to want to have their Metaverse presence be in Facebook. Maybe they might have an event in there for the public or something like that. But the privacy concerns are just enormous. In a virtual world, when you're wearing a headset, the company that's running the virtual world literally can see where you're looking. They can see who you're talking to.  And that's just ridiculous. We cannot have that. Please.  I'm going to go through it a little bit more. So, a huge flood of investment into everything related to the Metaverse. Nvidia's Omniverse has a lot of corporate supporters probably because of the whole Facebook privacy issue. They've got more than 500 firms signed up to this, which is kind of cool. It's still corporate control, but more decentralized, more distributed. The market size is projected for the Metaverse to start exploding next year. A lot of investment in Metaverse-related activities this year. It crossed 10 billion, more than double, nearly double what was raised last year. And there's lots of reasons why we're getting ready to prime time. We've got faster processing, cloud, AI, we've got the bandwidth coming down, the line, especially with 5G. We've got lots of virtual payment systems. And the headsets are slowly getting to the point that it's getting there. Yes, Unity is making big investments in the Metaverse. A lot of companies are. This is a huge thing. Headset sales are up. I'm being urged to hurry up on this. Yes, I love Unity. They do run a lot of the virtual world games and environments right now. And it's, Science Space runs on Unity, one of the platforms created by OpenSim early core developer, Adam Frisbee. Meanwhile, another big trend that's happening is the future workers virtual. 70% of companies are planning to adopt a hybrid work model permanently. 97% of people want some form of remote work. 58% of people would put their jobs if they couldn't work remotely. But there's an 18% drop in team morale and cohesion. We're working from home. And this is something that Metaverse could address because of that feeling of presence and immersion. And I strongly suggest that these companies look at how OpenSim works. Nobody owns the Hypergrid. It's kind of like the World Wide Web with lots of different servers, lots of different viewers. Even have a multi-grid currency like Globetts, kind of like PayPal for another payment platforms for the actual regular internet. We have multi-grid payments in OpenSim. Globetts owns the Globetts platform, but anybody else can set up a similar kind of payment platform. And I kind of wish they would. Globetts had some problems this year. We have a free open source virtual world server that anyone can adapt. We've got the dream grid in the pool. Check out where avatars can travel from grid to grid. We send messages from grid to grid, send announcements. Fully super simple. We need that. We don't have these things right now anywhere. Everything we have now is the privacy issues are and please, guys, invent a VR version of them.  If I can help, just let me know. All right, there's my email address and here's the link to the slides if you want to look at the pretty pictures again later. All right. And they're kicking me to get off the stage. But do you guys want me to take questions? Is there time? I don't think so. Nope, we are at time, but that was fascinating. I do wish you had more time to talk about it all. Thank you, Maria, for an informative and interesting presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you will want to check out conference.opensimulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule. You won't want to miss our next session, which will begin at 2.30 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled Charonet Creative HQ, Integration of NFTs, AI Art, and POS Blockchain in 3D Immersive Virtual Worlds. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC-21 poster expo in the OSCC-Expo-3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hyper-good tour resources in OSCC-Expo-2 region, along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC-Expo regions. Thank you again to our speaker and the audience.


My name is Mary Johnson and I am an Education Director at the Wisconsin Technical College System. I work with the Faculty Quality Assurance System and Professional Learning. I think one of the areas that is interesting and unique about our system is we are working specifically with faculty who are subject matter experts in their fields, but they haven't necessarily been trained how to teach. Our job, my job, is to help support our colleges so that their faculty learn what it means to be an instructor, what it means to share this knowledge that they have that they're so passionate about so that the next generation of students and of employees are able to go and be successful in those fields. I think about the work that we provide for the state of Wisconsin for the various programs that we run and the fields that they work in and how our employers are impacted. It's a beautiful cycle of learning and growing. And then I see the part of giving back to the students from our faculty and the way that they are encouraged and supported to teach what they know so that the knowledge they have continues and lives on. It's very important to me that the faculty we have in our classrooms are prepared, knowledgeable, feel comfortable and confident in what they're doing so that they can be able to support students in the best possible way. For us to have really strong student success, it starts with our faculty. I am successful when I see students walk across the stage and thank their faculty for the impact that they had on their learning and on their growth and on their future.


I don't think they're putting that one in the strategy guide, that one was a little experimental. Oh, it was a fake! No! How's it going everybody? Dottodoi here back with some more Dragon Ball Fighters Rank Matches. This time we are going back to the old point character, the old meta point character, Cell. Dude, who can forget the days when Cell was topped here? In fact, I hope we actually get let the intro rock, because it's been a long time since we've seen this. Not even that Cell is bad, it's just that other characters have, it's almost like power creeping. Cell got kind of power crept out due to some patches, but it should be entertaining. Yeah, that's what I'm saying, dude. I'm trying to see some old classic Cell stuff. I'm jumping with a medium. Oh, we already got him blocking, 6M, you were, oh! If you would have actually punished that, that would have been so good. Wow, this guy's defense is kind of nice, or at least I didn't expect him to block that 6M again. All right, but we are, what do you, wait, what is this, was that? Wait. Wait. Wait, I'm confused. What assist did I just get hit by? All right, questions for another time, I guess.  That's not the combo. That is not the combo. Didn't reflect that 6M, and that was the one that counted. All right, we got to remember the combos. I did the basic B and B right there, but I would love to, oh, that was sick. All right, get him back in that corner, beam assist. There we go. Medium. I didn't jump far enough. Tough. Yeah, what is that assist? Is that the spirit sword, or what is Vigino hitting me with? I have, you know what, I'm too confused. We'll ask another day. No, I didn't think you'd shoot. Okay, let's just get him out of there. Hopefully he doesn't switch me back in before I get the chance to feed him a beam. Oh, there it is. Wait, what? Wait, how is it going up, or am I, am I losing it? I don't know. Either way, I'm going to throw a quick beam to sell here. All right, that got me punched in the face. Might not have been worth it. Hopefully sell enjoyed his lunch. Oh, nice conversion. Yeah, I think I was losing it. I think I just didn't see Vigino jump off camera. So that is Vigino assist, which is, you know, has been in the game for a long time. To me, it looked like Vigino was hitting me from something below. What kind of read was that? That was a read and a half. Oh, I didn't jump. Oh, you're lucky. You're lucky you got me off hit, man. I was about a combo that made a death. Two bars. Can he kill here with Vigino? Yes, he can. That might be a one bar affair. OK, well, he's used to now. Yeah, here comes the second bar. That's going to take out sell. And to be honest, his team is still decently healthy, at least more healthy than Krillin, which is a shame. I'm going to not jump. Yeah, I was a little worried about getting read. Didn't get read, though. So that's fine. Vigino going up seven bars to spend. I'm going to spend it. I'm going to spend it. I'm going to spend it. Why not? Why not spend literally seven bars in a combo? That's not going to kill either. Far from optimal. But the 2M on top.  The 2M is what did out of all the bars we spent, a kick to the shins is all you really needed in the end at the end of the day. Keyblast. Keyblast is going to counter. Keyblast there. All right. Well, you know what? I'm often known for my reads and then not trusting in them. All right. That's going to take game one. Man, that was a lot of fun. I'm sad I spent most of that round being confused at what a Vigito A assist was. It really looked like he was like hitting me with a one touch spirit sword from below. But I just couldn't believe it. That's not even an assist. Damn, I got careless. Not sure what the choun- The chounsou face didn't make a lot of sense there. But I'll read. I'm just too tall. And that was nice. Oh, I didn't confirm. Oh, why we take that? I think it was Big Bang to stop the Super Dash. I can respect it. OK, I was not going to do anything off that to it. OK, 2H works. Check on with something more standard. That's fine. I'll take this. Didn't do that right at all. No. OK, we're out in front. We're out in front. I thought I spaced that properly, but that was rough. Dude, I got to try the cross-up one. The cross-up one is so dumb. Three bars does he spend it? Going to spend a level one. Probably going to do another level one just to get Vegeta out of there. Yeah, I agree. I don't know if I push it past that. Yeah, I like that. No Super Dash. What an extension. Get him back down there. Someone say I should have switched out, but I was saving it for a guard cancel. A little expensive, maybe. But a bar is just one bar. We got to flex these bars. Oh, that's it. Yeah, that should be death. Actually, can I build enough bar? It should be death. Come on. Stay under that. Stay under that threshold. No, he kind of got away. This Yamcha has to be fast. That's not going to do a pull-through cell damage. All right, we're going for the mix-up then. Teleport cell. Oh, the overhead. Go. A 6M, but from behind. Think of something more terrifying. You know what? I'm teleporting right away. Woo. I'm out of here. ZL. Oh, he reflected that. If you would have punished that, I would have been so... Nice challenge. Damn. All right, that was good. Cell's probably dead here for this. All right. Does he still going to need two bars, though? Or can he combo? This might still take two bars. Yeah, the vanish ended up costing him there. I think maybe he needed to get me to the ground. To be honest, I don't remember. But I'll still take it as a win. In my mind, he only needed two bars there. Oh, confirm off that. Yes, we take those on the back. Oh, don't you forget about the dive kick Wolfgang fist. To be honest, I still don't know how to come on that in the corner.  Don't let those legs get you. That should kill. Confirm it. Two, three, yes. That's a death as well. Yamcha leading the charge. All right, come here, Vegeta. I'm about to hit you with this. Oh, yeah. No. Yes. Another kick to the head. Has has has every round ended with just me sparking and then going into a two H. That's tough. All right, one last gate. Well, actually, we might end up going, damn, I got careless again. I think at this point, he's just throwing the chow to stay about me. Nice. Oh, no, he could have gotten a double Sunday. You know what? I should be grateful. Cells just got to take this one on the head for the team. He's flying. Lock the six and we don't want to take that. Oh, no, Tex. No, Tex. That's cool too. I didn't vanish. Okay. Oh, that's fine. That's fine. All right, even I'm going to keep it real. I got to get out of here and I got to eat this bean. Oh, the two H my hand was too small. So get back out here. Oh, we're sold. I've gotten way too. Get that out of here. I like how it flew. I like how it flew backwards, even though he made no physical contact with it, at least in the at the speed we could say. Damn it. Get off me. One, two, three, one, two, three. Boom. Boom, boom, boom. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Okay. Cell is so low on health. I feel okay. He's going to teleport behind me. Very hit player of you. That was a very hit player thing to do. You know what? Let me get the solar. Come on. Yeah. This animation is still kind of sick. Simple, but clean. Very hit player, very hit player thing of you to do. I lived. I lived, but barely. Let's go. He's going to counter me.  I've seen the future. Okay. It wasn't the way I saw it going, but you know what? This is probably for the best. The counter would have hurt my pride too much. Is this the end of hit? Three bars? If we get four, then yeah. Okay. Well, that's it. Sayonara hit. I wonder if that could have been done in two, but that's fine. I'm not again spending the extra bar. Like I said, flex the meter you have. If it's for the kill, it's always worth. Oh, my goodness. Speaking of getting killed, I thought I was dead. All right. Let's play a little bit of a slower game. Let him come to me. Psych. Okay. He blocked it. You know what? I wanted to play the slower game, but I think he played it much better than I did. Crouching, looking for the opportunity. I like that style of play. That said, I think he's going to rush him now. Oh, okay. He didn't confirm it. We're going to spark here. Very lucky. Very lucky. Very lucky. Love to see it. Love to see it. That should be it. Yes, the double jab overhead. And also, yeah, I noticed how close we were to the dragon balls. That's kind of why I was going for it, but at the end of the health got too close. So I just was like, you know what? I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to let it slide. All right. One last match with cell. All right. Here it comes. The final game. I'm a 2M start. No, I'm going to read the grab. No, wait, wait, wait. I'm so close. So close to greatness. That's fine. Let's sell do the work. No key. Last forgot that part. Oh, nice air to air. But I got to get back at you. I got to let you know who's in charge. It's sell down tech. No down tech. No down tech. That's fine. Beam assist to get rid of hit. I couldn't confirm off that either. Damn, this jab is short. All right. Going for something else. Yeah, we didn't want to take those lights for some reason. It probably would have killed regardless, but I was not feeling it at the time. He's in start. Do we beam here? Always throw it out twice. No way that was sick. Damn. Oh, wow. That sucked. Oh, and I got reset. That's death. Damn it. Now the games. How did the game get even? Wow. That shows you how fast life really came at me there. And I flew overhead. Dragon rush. Okay. Raw level three. Don't question this strategy. You need to see how it ends. Okay. Now question the strategy. I don't think they're putting that one in the strategy guide. That one was a little experimental. Oh, it was a fake. I don't know why the way I said the no in time with the elbow to the face was really found me. Oh, that one was not fake. That one crossed up to two H. Okay. I got short arms. I got short arms. Please don't judge me for him. Oh my goodness. We're just all right. Yeah. Counter counter this. Oh, don't punch me in the face though.  Dying brother. There we go. That's going to be it. Hopefully right. Oh my God. We need another bar. You know what? No, I'm not. I'm not having this. Resets. All right. Sparking is gone, but that's fine. We have to take these kind of L's into H three bars. Here comes the mix. That's it. I'm going off them. Although a couple of beams in the combos just makes the world feel right. Destructo disc three of them. All right. Well, I only got to throw two, but I was going to throw three. That's going to be the end of the video.  The blue Vegeta was nice. Of course, thank you to my opponents for the games and thank you all so much for watching. If you guys had a favorite moment, of course, let me know down in the comment section as always. And while you're down there, hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you are a fan of this stuff and want to support it. Also, you can check out the videos that should be on your screen right now if you're interested in watching more right away. Other than that, I've been Dazzledoya. Thanks so much for watching this video again and I will see you in the next one.


That's not what I wanted. There's better ways to do that. Big time, I'm just glad I didn't take a flight. Your other flag's up too. Yeah, I just watched that one go on. Run your own trap over. Oh yeah. He almost ran it up. Try to wear a jack trap. You might have tweaked that. Just a tad. Yeah.


In the Zaporizia region, Ukraine liberated more than 200 square kilometers of land. Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have liberated two square kilometers from Russian invaders in the Bakhmut direction and more than 12 square kilometers in the south. The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian Defense Deputy Minister Hannah Malia on Telegram. According to Malia, Russian troops continue focusing efforts on the Kupyansk, Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdeevka and Meringa directions. Fierce battles are underway. Last week, in the above directions, over 170 battles took place between Ukraine's Defense Forces and Russian soldiers. In the Kupyansk directions, Russians were storming and seeking weak spots in Ukraine's defense. They were actively conducting offensive actions to the south of Novo-Selivsky, trying to push Ukrainian units beyond the barrier frontier of the Oskil River but had no success. Our Defense Forces are strongly holding back enemy troops, Malia stressed. In the Lyman direction, Russian occupiers also tried to conduct offensive actions in order to push Ukrainian forces back near the Serebryansk forestry. All the enemy's actions were unsuccessful. In the Bakhmut direction, last week Russian invaders were making every effort to stop Ukraine's offensive, but the Defense Forces were gradually advancing. The total deoccupied area in the Bakhmut direction is now 37 square kilometers. Two square kilometers have been liberated from Russian invaders over the past week. In the Avdeevka and Marinka directions, Russian troops were focusing efforts on conducting offensive actions in order to establish full control over Marinka and encircle Avdeevka, but had no success. In the south, Ukraine's Defense Forces continue the offensive operation in the Melitopol and Burdiansk directions. In the Zaporizia regions, Malia, Tokmak, Robotin sector, Ukrainian warriors have succeeded and are gaining a foothold within the recaptured frontiers. Here, the total deoccupied area is now 204.7 square kilometers. A total of 12.6 square kilometers have been liberated from Russian occupiers over the past week. Demining efforts continue in the aforementioned areas.


The Presiding Officer has today launched the Scottish Parliament's Festival of Politics. This year's theme, be inspired to see the world differently. The three-day festival takes place in the unique setting of the Scottish Parliament from Friday the 14th to Sunday the 16th of August. Well this year's festival is about inspiring people and trying to bring people into discussions about migration, about democracy, about freedom of speech. And I think it's an action-packed programme that most people will find something that will really intrigue them enough to come to the Festival of Politics. This year's highlights include a keynote speech by the popular political philosopher Michael J. Sandell on public service and the future of democracy. And a talk by the leading historian, Sir Tom Devine, on Scotland and slavery. There'll also be discussions on subjects from food, workers' rights and free speech to the experiences of Muslim women. We've got a festival Youth Café for the first time ever. And I think the reason behind that is because we were all witness to the great involvement in the democratic process by young people during the referendum campaign. Our brand new Festival Youth Café will also have a number of workshops taking place on subjects such as filmmaking and cartooning. Young people can test out their music skills in the Buzz Project bus that is kitted out as a state-of-the-art recording studio. You can get further information about the Festival of Politics and book tickets through our webpage and you can keep updated via social media.