Like so just since I have the full five minutes just kind of recap why we're doing Mediverse and what Mediverse app is. So coming into this space it's kind of difficult to understand what all the different projects are in blockchain. There's no clear aggregation of all the different projects so the thought is create an overview for all the different projects and give the project teams the ability to kind of update the project as as they're going on and for the user to be able to search filter and see all the different projects have collaboration opportunities between projects and kind of line industry on on regulation. So let me share my screen now kind of give a quick overview of the development of Mediverse. Since we mentioned this a few times we just launched the beta over the weekend so we are now live. Anybody wants to go to mediverseapp.com. Can everyone see my screen? Awesome. So again it's any kind of blockchain or web 3 projects in healthcare and science. You come to a home screen and then you can search for anything that you want the organization project technology anything you want. If we search for something like who's using an area you can see all the different projects that come up. You can also do the different formation type what sector of the healthcare industry is a project claimed or not claimed meaning have we made the update or has a project team teammate of what kind of status it is. So let's go look at one of these bio that actually just created their project the other day. So it goes into a few tabs you can see what kind of organization again what sector it is you can visit their website white paper added to your list and this gives you an overview of what is the use case their methodology their mission basically again overview of the project. And then if you're interested in working with the team you can see the collaboration opportunities that they have here you can apply to join in contact a team or you can find a way to support them. You can see the different projects that are related so in the sector they have multiple projects for the team any kind of results and links they didn't actually put any in here but if they have anything so what is their latest announcements or anything else that they could they could put here and then the ability to claim claim their project. The thought behind this is eventually you will have enough in here that project teams will want to start claiming it will help incentivize them to claim it and then we could have other materials as well. I'm thinking I'd like to do something with regulation to help out regulation in the field both understand it and have a spot for regulators to go and kind of find out more about what's going on. I work for a large pharma company if I'm just in like a department managing projects I become here kind of learn more about the industry. We have some industry news which I steal here from Mike since he does such a good job at putting this all together and then recommend a content and I see on the list that Mike had put the decentralized science wiki on there so I've met with that team and hopefully transitioned some of that wiki over to many of our SAP and have a little bit more user-friendly version. So I'll stop there see if there's any questions or thoughts on it. I mean I think this is awesome Mike because I'm endlessly trawling through websites or Twitter to find out what projects there are so it's good to have something what made you do this? Is it because there was a lack of it in the industry? Exactly the experience you had I was trawling through Twitter trying to find out projects. I kept looking for it and I was like well I'll just I'll spend a few months building it and now now that it's built I'm going to spend a few months kind of seeing if it's going to pop if it gets used. If so I'll continue if not I'll kind of just kind of let it go but I think it's something that's that could be valuable so so trying it out. Yeah for sure. I mean I think it looks great. Oh thank you. I appreciate it. Sorry something just popped in my head Mike. I don't know if you connect with Tori Sinaj from Blockchain Healthcare today. She has peer reviewed research journals that come out often and we're showcasing two today that are part of the agenda here but it could be another pointer system where if someone wanted to peer review and you create a pointer system for it could be another feature added to Metaverse App. Who is that again? I will. Tori Sinaj will put her name in the chat. She's fairly active to connect on LinkedIn.  Awesome. Yeah let me know if the email otherwise I can probably just find her with the with the name that you put in the chat. Yeah in the British Blockchain Association the JBBA would probably be very interested in something like this too so oh god Naseem is his name who runs that. Yeah I have to think I have to forget I forgot his last name but I can put it in the chat a little bit too. Yeah great and then Bill asked if there's any criteria for something that can be considered for inclusion into the Metaverse App. My only thing is if it's a Web3 blockchain and within the healthcare space in somewhere that could be researched directly into healthcare so there's some kind of loose criteria nothing too stringent so if you want to put your eyeglass where that's company that's absolutely something you can do. Awesome any more feedback for Mike Pica? Daniela please. Hey Mike Pica not Mike McCoy. Mike P this is awesome where we would have and for those of you who don't know I'm Daniel Avarvos I'm part of the Hyperledger team if we'd be happy to help promote this through our healthcare members and just people in our ecosystem as well so I'll take a look at it. Mike if you can just give me your email address I'll connect with you offline and see how we can also promote this great stuff. I'll throw it in the chat right now that way if anybody else wants to contact me they can as well. Mike Pica's our MVP when it comes to health care SIG our most valuable Pica so we let him come in every week. Awesome cool we'll get into the industry news stuff now unless there's anything else anyone else wants to mention oh I did want to highlight an upcoming event so tomorrow on Twitter Spaces that's pretty much Clubhouse for Twitter at 10 a.m. Eastern there's a group called Web3 Women in Science it's from it's a collaboration of a lot of people that part of the D-Side movement now as well as some that are just working in healthcare in general and they want to be able to democratize access to funding and data and information when it comes to science so a great group of women that are going together in that space tomorrow 10 a.m. Eastern I highly encourage wherever you are in the world please give it a listen maybe you're doing heads down time or something or whatever but I really want to support that group they all are brilliant they do so much for so many people in the space give it a listen if you have the time to do so and then today we have the MicroStrategy World Conference they have their healthcare track going on today I believe it's going on this morning actually so give that a listen and then there's other events I have to add on here actually is anyone going to eat Denver I might actually make the trip and take some PTO and just head over to eat Denver so let me know if you're going or not hey Mike it's Erica I'll be there yeah I'll be there I just joined a DAO called Medigam and Delta and we'll be I'll be representing them and I'll be there it's my like fourth year attending so yay I'd be so excited if you can that's awesome what days like all right just generally speaking what days should I go is the first half of the week or the second half like it's no everything is on Thursday Friday Saturday usually like all of the presentations and the parties and all the like real engagement is at the end of the week and of course I already have a ski trip towards the latter half of the week in weekend where I'm like darling it'll be really tough to do both but um is it here or now it's in the boring New York areas and mountains not the very great mountains you actually have out in Colorado um so yeah a little bit of conflict socially oh man well regardless let me know if you come out yes I will have to I will have to hold you that we do need to meet in person for the first time so we do we do and I've never met Wendy in person I've had probably probably 200 calls of Wendy in my lifetime and I've never met her in person either so we will get Wendy with us and we'll all get together absolutely absolutely all right let's get into these topics um so one one to highlight uh for everyone the d-side wiki I find this I check this at least like two three times a week like there's new updates of different things coming on to it but it shows all these different dowel projects not only the ones that molecule and their team are creating but um open science dowel lab dowel genomes dowel genomes was genome.io they didn't ico raise back in the day but then they gave them money back and now they're creating a dowel to be able to utilize your dna in like a bank in the decentralized community research hub who we've highlighted and presented here before so psi dowel that's the um molecule one but tons of dowels tons of projects on here I highly suggest going through these and uh and giving a read there's also tons of informational articles like intros to what d-side truly is uh a whole bunch of things ip nfts and what that concept is so definitely give it a read definitely give it a a reference and uh I find it highly useful um next up uh absolutely has anyone else use the d-side wiki besides mike mike mentioned he has but um anyone else have they given a look before good it's informational you can check it out now all right it was hot off the presses yesterday blockchain health care today came out with a 2022 predictions uh article per say editorial with um I think it was one or two authors and as that's loading it's coming up but uh the the predictions were kind of interesting like peter wouldn't be so slow yeah it was from members of um university Arkansas people from avenue and pretty diverse group in particular so uh a lot of its editorial but in particular uh they talked about interop layers connection of internet and medical things um distributed files and replicated file systems as well as the expansion of 5g networks within uh blockchain technology so they kind of all gave their their puts and their opinions on the topic and fire integrations and and all these other things um was everyone anyone else able to give this a read and and do they have any um any type of opinion on it cool it was also a motivational thing to get you to go to conv2x the symposium that releases in november and uh yeah as a decent overview uh moving on there was a lot of information coming out of the chronicle team and in particular with the meta ledger consortia so one they came out with the beginning of the week with their 2021 kind of annual report and it gave a lot of uh detailed stories and like customer client success stories and um I thought was highly informational so if anyone has questions of like they hear about chronicle they hear about meta ledger and they want to learn more is a very good detailed report on how and where to potentially partner or work with them but they also had some great news coming out so in the kind of web three more decentralized protocol of news they partnered up with parity technologies so parity technologies uh they are the company that uh creates god I'm not thinking of the protocols right now the two protocols they do or poke it out in substrate yeah sorry uh they're going to potentially leverage them for peer-to-peer communication when it comes to charge backs from consumers with life science products that they uh interact with and sorry my computer is so dang slow right now but uh that partnership is going to be very interested so meta ledger was developed using parity's original blockchain framework substrate that now also powers poke it out due to those relationships so it's kind of more like an update but they're saying at some point they want to be able to peg uh pricing discount or um sorry pricing reconciliation data into a public record to showcase that to consumers for more price transparency which I'm excited about I think a lot of us are is just general like healthcare consumers um but obviously the the the complexity the the technology behind that is going to be a never-changing thing so um yeah did anyone give this a read per se any opinions on it I mean do they have a network effect are they are they growing are they having a kind of an exponential effect on their network so right now they're kind of creating federated network partnerships where like they're adding in one member at a time to then make sure that the group in the consortia agrees with adding that same member into it and then they come into this private blockchain network they don't have an open blockchain network now though they use a private parity method or sorry private um substrate as they're like a hot okay yeah it's just like it's like hyper ledger uh per se um but at some point they want to be able to showcase price transparency in new and future offerings um they're just they'd have to get the whole private consortia then to agree upon publicly hashing and showing maybe accuracy scores or specific prices for certain pharmaceuticals or most likely how many times they're able to save money on charge backs and other details and information that can be released so that's more or less the goal I'll I'll definitely check out the report thanks Mike I mean with all these kind of dows and things um it's interesting to see what their governance setups are and how they actually get those together and what they look like in real life and because um that's that's like it's taken a bit of a bit of a time for a pharma ledger to kind of get that going and it's it's I mean I think in the industry I've underestimated how slow things take to get going um but uh but we're getting there so yeah I'll I'll um I think they have touch base um with uh my superiors that there was a call like a couple weeks ago so I I don't know what's happening in terms of both both the projects whether it be a collaboration or anything like that but um yeah I'll definitely check out the report thank you absolutely Daniel did you have a comment that you wanted to mention oh no I lower my hand sorry ah it was up from before I apologize Mike just imagine if you were held home that for 15 minutes you'd be so tired well you have oh you didn't you didn't know me in fourth grade I was annoying kid that did the same thing every single question raised my hand tried to be the fastest one all the time I was annoying so that's awesome all right and then the the last one I wanted to share in particular Chronicle they they added a michi pharmaceutical as a new meta ledger consortium partner as well kind of similar to I mentioned about the federated one-to-one relationships and how they're going with that so uh very interesting stuff one of the more interesting are I guess like public relative findings I found this week was with the University of Arkansas showcasing their pilot of using self-sovereign identity for digital staff passport at the UK national health service so one the UK is endorsed a separate service which is using blockchain for government documentation validation but then and yet I will preface that NHS in the UK has not endorsed this method this is just purely pilot and experimental they have not endorsed and said this will be implemented per se within the NHS but they gave a good framework into the principles the different methods how and what to build to trust and kind of talked about using ever name system and and using I believe they said it was in the areas or so on here as well and following sovereign network principles to be able to conduct this experiment the experiment is a little one we could say outdated towards newer I did or SSI technologies that are out there but they were finally able to publish a report and get it out to everybody to showcase it one for COVID-19 passport as well as to just use a blockchain to verify a physician's credentials within NHS and government entity we're all familiar with pro-credex in particular it's based in the United States that produces very similar method this is just how the NHS government could be able to utilize it as well just just another comment sorry I feel like I'm talking too much on the call you're not you're not okay so so basically when you when you work as a doctor in the national health service if you do a like a training program for example keep medicine that means you have to rotate every like three months and so what happens is you have to do your exams and depending on how well you do on your exams you have set regions where you can apply depending on how good the hospital the infrastructure or the hospital trust is in that regard that means you have to then do an induction every single time you change your job and the induction takes almost a week and a half you have to go through fire and safety you have to then you know how to pick up large objects with not hurting your back just basic stuff but with all your medical credentials right now when I was working as a doctor the only way to kind of verify those credentials was to have them in a big portfolio and they were paper and you literally lugged this thing around and growing your portfolio everywhere you go so it's it's definitely needed like the infrastructure I know this sounds amazing but some of the infrastructure in the NHS it's quite archaic when I was working as a trauma orthopedic doctor you know we were using fax machines we're using bleeps and so the NHS England and NHS Digital and the NHS England have now merged together with with NHS X and they're basically pushing all their funding because they've realised due to the backlog the only way they can kind of reduce the backlog because of Covid is technology and so I'm also opposed to another self-sovereign identity company they're called True and they're also using sovereign and essentially with these networks everything goes through the Royal Mail or the post office so you need to get your digital passport with a driver license and so you're going to see I think by the governmental organisations collaborating through the post office to offer the credential as well as any kind of NHS ID but yeah it's good to see it happening but on the ground level I think we've probably still got quite a long way to go but it's good to see I did not know this so thanks for sharing of course there's a guy named Graham you know Philip Graham I believe who's part of like a digital innovation group of NHS I forgot the exact name of it he's the one that's been shepherding and championing these solutions could be a very valuable connection for you yeah I think well they're so so in terms of timelines so we demoed the electronic product information use case and to the regulator which is the MHRA the Medicines Healthcare Research Authority sorry and they've taken five and a half months to get an email back to us to then link us to NHSX and so then I kind of went straight away I was like look we need to we need to get in there and I've kind of had a slap on my wrists for acting too too quickly and so yeah if you can pop that name in the chat and then I'm probably going to probably connect with him because we've got a call lined up at the end of Fed so yeah fantastic thanks for that yeah yeah I believe it's Philip Graham might be two L's on there but you know just try and trial and error with that yeah Philip's great though I know oh I was just on mute I interacted with Philip two years ago and he's great he's been trying to build this within the UK for years now um any other opinions comments questions on this from anyone all right we'll move on so I mentioned the government about the documentation technology that is within the UK so prescriptive health they're named a consensus consensus ag not consensus health or aquarium a consensus premier partner utilizing quorum as a blockchain service this is highly interesting so one some story behind it prescriptive health added on a employee named Corey Tadero Corey Tadero used to be a digital asset was kind of leading the product for digital asset when it came to healthcare and using their smart contract modular framework for like business and lay readers to utilize smart contracts easier I loved Corey and I think he does a great job in the space with anything he does now he's part of the prescriptive health team and now the prescriptives in a partnership with consensus in particular uh there's going to probably be some really cool things coming along so within their um prescriptive in place consumers at the center of their health experience by naval transparency of their health plan data prescription drug pricing and it seems like they're trying to make the more like the pharmaceutical data information a utility through prescriptive health and using a quorum blockchain to be able to distribute that utility out to uh particular partners with individuals and prescribers and uh pharmacists be able to own the electronic prescriptions for the first time uh daunting task obviously a big ask that we all think is very valuable and useful um but I'd love to see the products that come out of this partnership in particular uh so this is separate from equidium and consensus health consensus health is uh doing and solving different problems not particularly a pharma and pharmacovigilance but more so on kind of patient ownership of utility and sovereignty there um whereas this would be for pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical manufacturers and partners to be able to utilize it as well um obviously there's more you can learn from in particular the teams like quarry and prescriptive and tony little who's the vice president of product at prescriptive as well um but uh yeah that's uh great news to hear anyone else have a comment or opinion on it um more of a question with this uh taking into account like insurance and everything as well i'm not sure so that's a question i obviously have um i uh i'm playing to me with quarry soon on it so um so yeah i'm not sure yeah i'd be interested to see how the insurance companies kind of react to the the transparency because we're interested in that yeah well i assume like the prescription drug pricing like obviously that'll affect the health plan too so i mean if they're trying to create conspiracy control health plan data they must have particular potential partnerships involved with that or or aim for that and also like the standard to become a premier partner in particular i think it's like pay i don't know 15 to 25 000 a year to utilize core and blockchain service like 24 seven support uh specific features that consensus will provide you um and that support that consensus support teams top notch i used to be connected with a lot of those teams so it's good service it seems they already have a app in particular connecting this through my rx.io i haven't checked out my rx.io but could be something to look into uh we'll move on uh and i said the university arkansas research was very beneficial but i thought this was probably the most beneficial sri international in partnership with the department of homeland security in the united states and the specific department when the department of homeland security called the silicon valley innovation program showcased this research that was originally written in october oh sorry that was originally written in october of 2020 but was released this past week in particular you have to download the link from anil john anil john is part of the dhs silicon valley innovation program uh of what they found in creating an ssi technology stack that could be utilized within government that meets fisma and nist standards in particular and i loved every second of reading this report so um can everyone see this by the way yeah okay cool um some of the what was the one i wanted to highly show everyone in particular um yeah they went over like security strength for like bit security oh the hash functions particular algorithms were interesting so if i go to five oh where was this one oh yeah so they applied like protection like where and how the security strength would last like you know pretty much like they would say like the security standards that would be acceptable until 2030 and 2031 and a lot beyond they would give you like criteria of whether that would work or not it just gives so much clarity in particular like what algorithms what protocols what hash functions you could be able to use in these uh in these type of formations and uh the different cryptographic hash functions uh like we're all familiar with shaw 256 in particular but within the shaw three family they gave the particular protocols and things that could connect into that um so personal story for me uh the cio of philadelphia is exploring a lot of uh blockchain and crypto use cases in particular he wants to use ssi for like small business certifications validation uh we are actually on the side looking at these uh protocols and features to utilize for doing that in the city of philadelphia and he he found this to be extremely helpful when it came to build in the architecture and other things within this as well as like block ciphers and what to utilize there and this is a highly technical document but really gets to the heart of how and what to actually build for a w3c uh efficiency and global standard um but yeah any comments questions on this in particular have they have they stated how they're gonna interact or um i guess i get get the adoption of of the of the identity like kind of regulatory agency so so the did in particular is like a hash that could be like if you follow the did standard you can tie into any like did title right or like did like id or or framework and just it's just like a pointer system to other ids that are validated and verified with an issuer holder and verifier in this type of network so in particular like let's just say you created a did united states for a passport and then i were to go to the uk in particular if they followed a did method as well you could just scan my did qr code and then it would reference to the did kind of like database validate that it meets standards or and follows the proof the proof then says yes or no this person is validated to come to the country it's simple as that rather than actually having to query like like you mentioned like the medical passport in particular you wouldn't have to have all the pages of individuals do that so we're speaking to like gs1 and glide the guys who set that actual kind of kind of standard so i just wondering if they've incorporated anything like that in the paper yeah and gs1 was part of the pilot program that the department of homeland security created back in two years ago um okay so i'm sure they had to say in the recommendations here how to build it um but for those that want to be technical and want to get oh and also one of the main features we had an individual named john walker a year ago i believe he might still be part of the linux foundation public health stuff i'm not sure maybe as a contributor um daniella you could probably verify that for me uh but he is working on the linux foundation cci and the gsnb project so he is on staff awesome and he gave us a good presentation on bbs plus signatures and schemes that make that more internationally interoperable um to give selective disclosure when a user holds a signature for multiple messages and only shares the signature that's approved upon by uh the group or the participants in that network um that's the proof point i was saying uh kirit uh so that um you can be able to see it and uh yeah like this was just highly informational for me at least too much to to cover in just a conversation but uh i highly encourage anyone that's thinking about d id's it's thinking about the centralized identity uh and wants to be able to have a global representation of it uh check out this paper it's gonna really help you out when it comes to your development of things any other comments on it or questions on cool i will move on so cardiff metropolitan university came up with a paper uh describing sharing to selling challenges and opportunities to establish a digital health data marketplace using blockchain technology this is more of an overview of specific technologies that was published just yesterday in blockchain health care today uh so within the pdf they showcase like despite the growing use of ehrs by medical practitioners and digital wearable or wearable digital gadgets by individuals 80 percent of health medical data remain unused because the interact problems and they kind of go over a lot of frameworks uh for that within this pdf was anyone else able to give this a read or um have any opinions on some of the findings here i didn't have a chance to read it mike but this is super interesting to me yeah yeah they wouldn't have had deep mind not initiated for the introduction gdpr or patients like me were within european they were just giving great examples technical challenges data ownership and access control we're pretty familiar with that uh gave a pretty decent architecture here of what it would look like i did i will admit i didn't go deep into this one far as far as the other ones are concerned but they gave an example of using a dap uh in particular tied to a public ethereum blockchain and then utilizing ipfs which is useful oh and using hyperlare as a composer for average man i haven't heard about composer in a while it's still out there pops up every once in a while yeah it's not actively maintained yeah i mean showcase med block in here too that's really cool yeah most of these kids here are great for delegated purpose stake it's beneficial but yeah if you want to learn and want to get kind of like a research material on ehr interrupt this could be a great reference for you to take take a look at i mean i in particular have spoken with uh individuals at ipfs and um they have uh they're very interested in like the portability of emr's and hrs and would love to propose solutions to like epic cerns of the worlds of like how and what they could do for this i think they just don't have enough healthcare knowledge within the team at ipfs to to feel confident in a presentation and a potential partnership yet um i have talked to them about shepherding that relationship and seeing what that would look like but um but yeah there's definitely interest there in those in those parties and creating these two models together so i don't know so mike that's super interesting you say that like i can't i can't identify of an incentive for someone like epic or cernar to ever put data on a blockchain it wouldn't be putting data on a blockchain it would just make it or not it's not putting it up but adopting web 3 technologies what i'm really saying so there's a couple like you can probably prove it to them by saying all right how many duplications do we do in the process of reporting to a medical record even think about like x-rays per se right like how many times does someone lose like a cd or floppy disk of an x-ray but they don't but but they don't they don't why do they care the doctor cares the patient cares right this is pain for doctors and physicians but the electronic health record they'd like these these big ventures it doesn't matter to them right i have a doubly cynical uh take on this i agree with your turn uh the the modus operandi and healthcare uh the prime directive is avoid transparency at all costs exactly 100 this is not about decentralization per se or any particular efficiency that might come from using blockchain technologies um this is simply uh the epic model and the and the business model for their customers is that every day every morning they get up and figure out how little transparency they can have to whatever they're doing uh on the business side internally and the side effect of this is the frustration of the doctors uh at the cost of the systems and the fact that it becomes impossible to tell quality other than by price in health care you know you you're sort of driven to equate uh value with the cost of something rather than the quality of it because the quality is never transparent so anyway i'll stop there adrian adrian you and i need to have get on a call offline and have a conversation together because this is like this is where i live i'm working for a company right now we're pivoting we're we're going to build a web 3 e h r and we've i mean we've just we understand because we've been building plugins inside epics app orchard and it became apparent very quickly that epic has no interest in in fostering any kind of innovation in the health care space they don't want it to change because that's their business model that's what they're making their money just like you said they're essentially a holding data hostage um to further their business interests at the detriment of doctors burning out and and and patients receiving the care that they need and so i think um i i'd be very interested adrian to continue that conversation with you mike i don't want to hijack this conversation so i can talk about it forever but gladly you know how to get in touch with me um i i i don't hear uh maybe drop an email in the chat for me yeah it's just my first initial a gropper uh whatever shows up in the thing at gmail.com that will find okay perfect yeah first off i we all can agree that yes there's not a clear incentive right now for epic concern and these major EMRs and EHRs to partner and create full web three scenarios where you decentralize ownership of the record etc but there are ways to convince and experimental methods with these companies that when you do grant ownership and that type of framework to users that they may be more willing to add information and data they may be able to like create more like value in marketplaces that they can't even imagine now and stop the deduplication processes if they have sustainability goals in any of these groups that like epic or sooner right there are groups and there are people you can convince to become your internal champion to be able to want to build these things is kind of the preference though yeah that's an interesting perspective it's not an easy thing but it is a like you can't say that it's not an opportunity zone or a green space that that team could explore yeah there's certainly i agree if you might there's an opportunity for exploration there but i will say that we have some history to instruct us a little bit and that is that you know if you really think about the revolution that happened from web one to web two when we moved to platforms and the ability to interact with the web and these and data particularly to foster innovation uh EHR is essentially punted right i mean in many ways we have it really health care especially electronic health record vendors haven't really fully made the transition from web one to web two let alone web two web three right and there was a ton of value in web two that they left on the table because they feared losing market share right i mean you think about what i mean epic app orchard is a is a farce essentially it was a money grab you can't really innovate there and they're making money off of a of a pretended opportunity to develop apps against health care data so anyway interesting perspective if i could if we have a minute to talk about not EHR is our epic specifically but web three in the context of this group and and how okay um so let me be uh say two things first of all in the did uh in the standards work groups uh did verifiable credentials uh that you know where all this work is being done that the web three moniker uh is being debated uh for any number of reasons mall and uh moxie mount mulling spikes uh a thing and the response by vitalik uh you know are both worth uh well worth reading as an introduction so uh that's one thing that's happened in the last week or two and the second point that i'm curious about you know standards come up in this group all the time and we talked about them again today and the question i would have for people here as a sort of survey informal survey is how do we feel about sectoral standards as opposed to universal standards right so a web three approach you know would be definitely non-sectoral you could say that hyperledger itself it's not a standard but is a non-sectoral approach in a very different level uh but my observation is that for instance when it comes to blockchain stuff blockchain practices uh you see the finance people are trying to develop their standards and the health people and the identity people the ssi people are trying to develop parallel standards not and and the itf people are sort of standing back and saying well we're not going to play this game but we're not we're watching uh and so on so i'm very curious because you guys are all so much more into the business aspects of what's going on whether this relationship between web three and i can mention a lot of standards that are you know healthcare exceptionalism we all know what they look like i'm very curious about how your projects relate to this question that i just made in terms of web three if you want to be specific uh but not necessarily i will preface by saying the projects i'm a part of are not directly influenced or relevant for web three they're more b2b private permission blockchains um the ones i do personally as a as a as a like the dowes and the defi communities and the things i interact there like the dsi wiki groups and whatnot i'm fairly active in vita dow and some other ones uh i i would say that the standards when it comes to interacting and inter interloping with data and and different claims and whatnot is something that could be highly valuable for these different groups so um i would say to make money on my day job i don't focus on it at all but personally i do um hi this is vasha so just to go back to the the previous topic or rather the earlier part of the conversation um i i also read the paper and i found it super interesting as well um set my jordan and adrian i don't i don't disagree with your skepticism around ea charles and and the their lack of incentives um to share and and you know the the pro incentives to be world gardens of data but um i'm actually really optimistic about changes coming not because the ea char vendors have you know suddenly had a had a change of heart or something and um but because i i see a lot of um the changes that they've been forced to make uh because the onc's kind of dragging them kicking and screaming in that direction um so i wanted to kind of share that wherever i see changes coming is you know there's um october deadlines that are coming really soon uh for ea char vendors to make the uscdi v1 dataset available through both patient level and uh bulk fire apis um which i think is is a huge um huge area of opportunity for for doing exactly what um you know the the folks at cardiff had outlined um but i also think that there are um further opportunities coming um in in association with the tefka and the qualified health networks as well that's a little bit longer term but i i do think there's a lot of promise and and potential and opportunities that i'd love to uh continue um talking to anyone who's interested about it yeah varsh i'd love to connect offline um i'll drop my email in the chat and uh maybe maybe we can find a time awesome good i do want to like make sure we get through some of these topics just to highlight and then we can have it as an open quorum i found an interesting project called axon dow they reached out to me in particular i just want to know if they're scammy or not really uh because i don't know anyone that's in it uh this is maybe personal things but they're creating like the first medical investment dow um they reached out with a person named chris uh i don't know if anyone else is interacting with them in particular it was chris at axon dow.com and um yeah they've big ambitious goals are based in Wellington North Carolina and uh yeah it was this person i just don't know them yet uh could be something interesting so uh want to see if anyone else interacts with them but check them out uh they're fairly active on twitter and i looked in if you wanted to interact with them in their project uh based in North Carolina United States um another one that's a Wyoming based company using smart contracts to authenticate and incentivize healthy choices and behavior of its members uh called blue united another project to check out that i just got a google word for actually um and they are merging healthcare and blockchain to create uh to have smart contracts to authenticate and incentivize healthy choices such as steps and and certain foods i don't know how you're gonna verify foods ever but i think you can verify steps and other sensor tech in this space uh to validate that stuff so definitely give that a look there's also a more fun project like uh i i joined this thing called fan curated football and this is american football where it's seven on seven american football and you pay an nft to be part of this group where you get to be like kind of the general manager and the coach of the team you the fans in the community vote on the plays that the players on the field get to actually do and like me who grew up playing madden nfl like my whole entire childhood uh got really excited about this thing um so uh there's also talks that they will connect like wearable data and understand like when certain players have their heart rate like very excited and very low to like understand like when someone's cool under pressure for the sports and stuff it's an interesting concept uh i didn't highlight this but it definitely like i went down the rabbit hole i'm like went to their discord and thought it was hilarious so uh check it out if fan curated football uh if you want to con yeah fan created football there's another paper that's relevant uh tokenizing behavior change pathway for sustainable development goals by frontier this is a collaboration of a lot of research institutions uh so if you want to think about the behavior economic incentives when it comes to utilizing these things i know within gaming blockchains it's a big thing but in particular this could be a huge entity of why to get patients and users to want to validate and use these type of protocols i found this research to be relevant to help you think and uh put together the crypto economics and what could be relevant as well as uh insect id there's a researcher that just finished his time there with insect id who now is going to block daemon actually uh who create a framework to evaluate blockchain interoperability solutions is in rafael i believe and very valuable research uh check it out yeah rafael uh based in uh somewhere in the EU i forget he's in portugal yeah he's in portugal he's fantastic he's a lead maintainer on some of our projects um we actually have an interoperability post coming out today that um he helped author as well so um it's coming up in one one hour on the paper ledger blog but yeah rafael and the team what they're doing there um it's really great work yeah he's great too i i have a couple calls with him and he's fantastic to riff off ideas with um vantage market research claims blockchain healthcare markets going to reach 1.2 billion in 2028 uh so if you want to look at market research data buy their paper there um consensus health and a bunch of others came together i believe formal ledger two or no no this is highlighting uh debi buchi being uh made their chief data officer consensus or sorry equidium health now um to help blockchain is transforming healthcare uh vita dal came up with a discussion panel on the quest to quantify biological aging um a 16z had a work called the future of work it's not corporate it's thousand crypto networks here's a bunch of informational kind of like crypto theses and things to look out for as well as something i wrote called how to dial with people not just protocols i'm going to try and write and create everything every two weeks that's kind of a personal goal i have for 2022 that's something related to blockchain crypto healthcare etc so look out for my content to follow that smash that like button i'm just uh one of those youtube influencers but now um tons of mic where can i pay my subs you're gonna have to get yeah let's get a lightning channel going let's let's let's put this out exactly exactly no but um tons of promising like the material out here for anyone to learn about the space and also margarita colangelo is a fantastic researcher both in like bio blockchain ai found really interesting stats of like who's funding blockchains per se um and like the united states in particular if you look at this graph it's kind of wild like 11.1 billion dollars has went into blockchain and crypto uh like projects and like second place is like at i think 1.8 if uh if i want to go yeah hong kong is like 1.8 and there might be someone else that's kind of oh yeah uk is 1.9 but it's staggering the amount of projects that are based in the us that are uh raising money for blockchain crypto in particular and and some of these other hubs like i would assume israel would be higher france is pretty high actually paris is pretty big hub uh hong kong definitely uh singapore i thought would be a little bit higher um yeah it was just very interesting to see what projects are in the world are getting funded so we are at time want to respect everyone's time as well uh are there is is there anything else anyone else wants to mention uh before we head out as usual mic my favorite thing to do on at 7 a.m on a thursday on uh on a wednesday yeah for all our peteers like thank you very much for for joining us i know it's way too early and for anyone else thank you for joining us for an hour long informational session on everything blockchain health care um we'll see you in two weeks if there's anything else uh you want to connect or present or showcase to the group feel free to message me like you want to be creative and you you have a project like metaverse in particular that you want to showcase to others or you want to showcase your project and updates or things like that like feel free like this is an open community i don't want to just have me talking about different things i find in the world uh in links uh for every two weeks but um yeah please feel free to to add into content we do as well um yeah so that's it i appreciate everyone for the time and uh we'll see you in two weeks thanks thanks thanks thanks back absolutely


Item number SCP-2483 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures SCP-2483 is temporarily located in Isolation Zone 3H and Site 24's External Environmental Lab, or EEL. Under Order from O5 Command, no Foundation personnel are currently authorized across the boundaries of the zone until safe transport procedures can be finalized. Any personnel found violating this order face serious repercussions, given the space it needs. Description SCP-2483 is a playground swing set, made only of metal and fitted with four plastic swings, five of which are broken. The object is in brand new condition with considerable rusting marring the metal in numerous places. Bird excrement occasionally materializes and dematerializes on SCP-2483's pristine surface. SCP-2483 constantly generates a reality-distorting effect, which can alter its size and number of swings, as well as any audio, video, photographic, or written documentation containing information about the object. Events for SCP-2483's physical form changes can result in damage to its environment or even living creatures. The effects on SCP-2483's documentation vary and depend on the medium, ranging from slight visual distortion to alteration of both electronic and physical text. SCP-2483 also has a strong psychological effect on those in its vicinity, which usually results in an affected person becoming increasingly concerned with SCP-2483's emotional well-being. Footnote 1, hypothesized to be anywhere from 12 to 26 meters in diameter. The exact nature of this secondary effect is not currently understood, though it has consistently dissipated if exposure to SCP-2483 desists for longer than 48 hours. Previously affected persons will lose all knowledge of SCP-2483 until they come within the radius of its psychological effect again or are exposed to any form of its documentation. Amnestics have no effect on persons affected by SCP-2483 because one day no one will remember it. SCP-2483 Incident Log May 12th First anomalous effects of SCP-2483 experienced by the Acquisition Team at the time of the object's recovery. Agent Nyholm was injured when part of SCP-2483 materialized inside him, which he and the other team members could not explain. Agent Nyholm's injury was treatable, but resulted in the loss of his left, right arm. This is not helping it. May 17th D-137521 attempted to use the only unbroken swing on SCP-2483. I think SCP-2483 gave him an underduck. He'll never come down. Footnote 2 Running under a person as you push them on a swing. May 19th Researcher Alstrup attempted to clean SCP-2483 in preparation for testing. He cried so much, and there was nothing to be done. May 28th SCP-2483 shook violently for approximately 14 minutes before uprooting itself from the ground and falling over. Four members of testing staff attempted to relocate SCP-2483 to another area of the eel, and I was the one who had to tell their families what happened.  It just wants to disappear. June 24th Use of an emotional discordance unit, EMDU, for experimental testing on SCP-2483 has been approved. Footnote 3 Experimental device used to quell severe emotional distress, usually in reality benders. It doesn't want to feel like this anymore. It doesn't want to depend on us. It doesn't want to be changed. June 28th EMDU has deployed the Site-24's eel and activated within 1.5 meters of SCP-2483. The object did not show any visible reaction. SCP-2483 will be monitored for further incidents to document the effects, if any, the EMDU has on it. This won't work forever. November 31st First notable incident recorded since EMDU was deployed for daily use on SCP-2483. D-137521 materialized on one of the object's wings while testing staff was activating the EMDU at its scheduled time, and dematerialized 5 seconds later. Staff reported that D-137521 looked so happy and frightened and miserable. December 6th EMDU was damaged when SCP-2483 became unstable and I don't understand how this happened. How many swings did it really have? I think it has 10, but I wrote earlier that it had 8. Is SCP-2483 getting bigger? It needs to leave. It needs to leave everything behind. It is tired of trying to be what everyone wants it to be. December 11th SCP-2483 only has one swing and it is broken. Like broken light. Why does it feel like this? December 25th Testing staff involved in the incident on May 28th appeared unharmed within 6 meters of SCP-2483. This is all it can give. January 14th SCP-2483 shook violently for nearly 24 hours. All 7 of its swings appear to be broken now. Testing has been suspended as we cannot keep doing this, SCP-2483. January 29th SCP-2483 has been moved to isolation zone E-3 in lieu of moving it off-site. It's for the best. It doesn't want to be remembered. It is broken, and you cannot fix it. You can only break yourself upon it.


The study found that the vaccines offered in Kazakhstan had high effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 infection. The study also showed that older individuals and those who received their first vaccine after the variant surge had higher risk of breakthrough infection. This suggests that targeted booster vaccination campaigns may be necessary to reduce this risk. This article was authored by Delyarin Abirova, Delyarin Abirova, Roberta Horth, and others.


Hello. Great that you're all here. It is very crowded in this room. I didn't expect that. I think that is a big hooray for how politics and technology are more and more things you can say together in one sentence without getting weird looks. So my name is Sasha. As some of you know, I do stuff on the internet. And in the next 25 minutes, I hope to give you a bit of an overview, actually, of the things that have happened since the summer of 2013, what has not happened since then, and what I think should happen.  This is where technology fails. I will probably miss some things or under or over represent some things, but never mind. We will have big five minutes of discussions afterwards where you can get back on me for that. So let me start with a short introduction of myself. I'm one of the co-founders of Greenhost, that is a Dutch internet hosting provider based in Amsterdam. We work a lot, and I work a lot with civil society groups and NGOs. And as such, I have some close experience on how people deal with surveillance, both on and offline. Not only technically, but also socially and more important, so also psychologically. In a way, I feel that most of my work is actually trying to translate between the tech and other fields. The idea for this talk has been running through my mind for a long time. And I hope and think that this might be the right time. The title of this talk, Long War Tactics, is actually a reference to the closing keynote that was given by Dimection at the first noisy square at Ohm in 2013, just after the first Snowden revelations came in. And of course, just after or at the end of Ohm, which had, as some of you might know, some controversy of its own. To lightly touch upon that, for those who do not know it, the concept of the noisy square village was first conceived after some disagreement around Ohm and sponsorship, to a point that, for instance, CCC decided officially not to be present at Ohm, at which moment a group of people, including myself and organizations, decided that it would be great to have a bit more of a political voice and accommodate for some more focus on that by trying to house a specific space for that. It must, of course, be said that this, of course, only worked through the support of the main Ohm organization, be it sometimes reluctant, but most of the time actually enthusiastic. So looking back, I see that since then more self-organized stuff is happening. Stuff is organized like Camp Zero, Backbone 409, interference, and even noisy square returned at some other places, be it not as oppositional as it has been before, but more as a safe place within a safe space for like-minded tech activists. So to get back to a dimensions talk, that addressed some of the most pressing issues around the surveillance state, the surveillance state, and people, agriculture, and technology. Most incomplete, not in order and out of context. I think the main things are you cannot be apolitical because then you are aiding just the status quo. Put the user and their environment in the middle. The tool is part of the systems, and tactics are needed. Be nice and do not fight each other. There is a thing called institutional logic, and you should know about it. Surveillance is not a zero sum game, but it is more economic in nature. Well, just by pointing out these five things, I think you can already see that in the past two years. We didn't succeed in taking all those things really too hard. And so I'm wondering, did we get any further in these fields? Did our tactics actually work? So as for being political, I think that we've not only seen a raising number of hacking events that were addressing the political stronger than ever before. We can also see, for instance, that the political track, at least in my perception, at Congress has been bigger every year since the past three years. On the other hand, we must be careful. The fact that it is the case does not say that things are completely well. Congress might be bigger every year as well. That might feel good. But not so many of us, as a reference, the yearly Dutch household fair gets about 200,000 visitors a year. So another thing is, I think it is important to note that we should, as tech activists, be very aware that we do not separate ourselves from that larger hacker community that is already not so very large, as I just pointed out. So I think it's great that our initiatives, like a noisy square, as long as the point is to have interaction with the whole community at large. But we should be very fearful to go beyond the point in which you have a conference within a conference or people not talking to each other. OK. So a last point on this that I want to make is that I think if we speak of a war, a war should be fought on many levels. So it shouldn't only be the tech. It shouldn't only be the political. It shouldn't only be the legal. It should actually be on all those points. And all those points are actually maybe not equally, but they're all needed to actually get us a step further in getting away from this, this surveillance state. So looking at the bigger picture of the internet, I think it would be good to also dive a bit into tech. There has been happening a lot in the field of technology that is related to what we're here for. So I don't think we're here yet to live the cypherpunk dream. We don't have accessible crypto for everyone. Actually, we're more at a point, still more at a point where we're living the cypherpunk's nightmare and are only trying to mitigate that a bit. On the other hand, the last year has been very interesting. We saw some bugs with OpenSSL, then some bugs with OpenSSL. And there might also have been some bugs with OpenSSL. Well, but after being a hard-blad and shell-shocked, there were, of course, some other security issues like with web applications like the root kit with CMS functionality at our office is known as Drupal. And with Xenhypervisor. The most interesting, however, I found about this year was that we saw the emergence of the pop star bug, the bug with the sexy name, which I think helped a lot with the widespread pickup in the media because CVE something dash something dash something is apparently only sexy in very, very, very small circles. Some other things happened. I am not an actual user, nor am I actually very fond of WhatsApp. But their cooperation with whisper systems to include better end-to-end encryption I think is an important step. We need mainstream apps that are used by large groups of people for other reasons than having military-grade security. Because that is the way to make stuff safer for everyone because then that traffic also doesn't stand out or even installing a certain app on your phone doesn't stand out in the crowd or at the border crossing. On the usability front, oh, by the way, this is not a WhatsApp endorsement. Use text secure. On the usability front, mostly we're still at the point where the inmates are running the asylum, although they're not programming visual basic anymore. But there are changes coming. I see a movement in the direction of having more research towards users, actually co-developing with users or for some developers, like just sitting in the room with the user. And those are great things that really helps. On the other hand, we should also not overdo it. I think some applications at this point are at this point so much broken that it doesn't really help to try to do ethnographic research in how users perceive that interface different in the Middle East. We should probably first try to fix the interface in the first place. As for instance, with Skype, nobody usually asks that question. And I can assure you that that is used a lot over here. Still, in our discussions, I think we are far away from looking at security in a more holistic way, as the user interacting with its environment doing a task, which it wants to finish. We also forget that mass surveillance and the NSA and the CIA and other agencies, like GCHQ, and some would say Tor, but I think that's another discussion. That's a joke, by the way, are not usually the main perceived threats to people. And probably in a lot of situations, not directly into their threat profiles.  We can't really fix this because now we have a secure operating systems, but we actually still own your hardware. And oh, now we have open hardware. But who is running that plant and is the stuff on the silicon? Well, actually the thing that I send out as the chip design. So I mean, and we can even go deeper because then we have the machines that make the chips and the machines that make the machines that make the chips. So as another person once said, it is basically turtles upon turtles all the way down. So for instance, let's look at, let's say, Assyrian media activists. Assyrian media activists, for instance, in Aleppo, is in a situation where a computer is a tool to get a message out. And not necessarily an easy tool to get a message out, but because you need all these kind of things. You need the internet, which means that you need electricity, which means that it also helps if you're not shelt at the same time, et cetera. So that is a very complex situation in which, oh, use this much slower, hard to use app, and you will be more secure, a thing that anyone will buy in at such a point. So we really should look at the whole picture and how we can fix it. So a digital security tool that is not the tool to always do the job, and is not part or integrated with the tactics to do the job or with the workflow of a person doing the job, will not be used or it will be used in the wrong way and be unsafe in that sense. So there are other bad things. Endpoint security is actually worse than ever. Not only activists, but also intermediaries and geos have been targeted, for instance, by the Assad regime, using spearfishing and as such, getting rootkits on their computers and listening to their Skype logs and other things. And Skype logs also means history for months or years. So even the first ISIS attribute to malware has been reported on. So this is for a lot of people a more serious problem than those more abstract, but still for other people, very real threats of surveillance by the NSA.  But on the other hand, numerous efforts are building more capacity towards better usable products. A lot of times there might be an overemphasis on general purpose computing, I think. There's a lot on let everything work on everything. A mentality still that I think is really nice with general purpose computing. But on the other hand, it is great if we have tools that can actually do a very small task and don't have the attack surface of a CPU. And don't get me wrong. You don't have one CPU in your laptop. You have a CPU. You have a chip that does your network. You have a chip that does yours, your keyboard. You have all kinds of chips that are random purpose computing chips that you can write nice firmware for. So sometimes less is more. And I think sometimes we should more live up to that and see if we can separate things more. Talking about separation, we also saw a movement to more two-factor. Two-factor all the things, right? It's very important. Google has started with popularizing two-factor authentication and also opened up some middleware to make sure that other people or to make sure that there becomes a new standard for two-factor authentication that is actually usable outside of the enterprise but also for normal people. And I think this is really important. It is also important, like it or not, that Google did it. Because Google did it, it is a broad solution used by a lot of people that give some traction and that actually can change something. So what you should do is implement that in all your server apps anyway. So two-factor all the things on the other end. So enormous amount of key material is actually not on the user's computer but is actually on websites, our private keys for SSL certificates are keys for DNSSEC or other stuff. And those keys should actually also all be stored on two-factor devices. At the same time, we don't have a two-factor device yet that we can actually open up. We need that black box of which we know the content. We need that two-factor device for operators that actually does what it does and not the stuff that is created by government contractors at the two-factor devices that are put into providers and other spaces. There are luckily some projects on the way. Most notably, people are working on using the Novena board for that. That's Randy Bush and others. And they're currently housed at cryptec.is. So if you want to fund something before the end of the year, go to their website. It's cool stuff. So we talked about turtles, turtles, turtles, which brings me to the next point. And that is we can't fix it because security is not an has never been in any way a zero-sum game. I, of course, do not have to tell you that absolute security does not exist. What exists is an economy of security where costs play a significant role on all sides of the equation. So let's shortly revisit economics and politics. So there is this thing called institutional logic. That means as soon as you start an institution, it will, at some point, start to fight for itself separately of the reason for which it first came into place. It would change their mission. It would change their structure. It would do everything to not get less power, but get more power. Sometimes that works into our advantage. For instance, the European Court of Human Rights is a very good example where this kind of institutionalization actually led to a lot of good changes in European law. Sometimes and a lot of times it is not to our advantage because it means that institutions that were a long time ago actually started with a totally different idea or very much smaller and with a very specific task now become bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and at some point become more and more and more self conserving. So and that is also the case with some parts and that's also the case with some parts of government, of course, and especially with things like security agencies who will always want to have more budget and more power and more control. So what we should do is make sure that we support the right institutions because sometimes we're just not big enough to win the fight on our own. Sometimes we have to find the enemy of our enemy and befriend them for a while, of course, because it's always important to know when to back step them. So we should bend the rules or if we can actually rewrite them. We should also do the following.  But in a way, it's not so real as in that it is cyber real because usually people, if people talk about cyber, they mean I don't know what I'm talking about. But so we should change this narrative because there's a lot of money that is lost at this point and that money is lost with companies and other institutions. But there's a lot of money lost by companies who get hacked, cannot release films. I don't know if stuff happens apparently. But which I think could only be an economic game for some movies. But in the end, it means that what we should do is try to emphasize that narrative, the narrative that we need to secure people. We need to secure the endpoint. We need to secure the endpoint because that is where we actually lose the most. This is where people, their identity gets stolen. This is where trade secrets are stolen. This is where people own banks and other stuff that is actually the core of the current infrastructure. And I'm not necessarily, I mean, you can think about society as we are, as it is, as you want. But in any way, I think it would be good to look at where we can look at where we can actually change this economic narrative in a way. Or this narrative about surveillance and security in that security equals freedom. And security equals this kind of like my ability to have privacy on my equipment and my ability to not get hacked as a business. And also the ability for people to communicate in a secure manner. So I think that is a very important narrative. And it's also a narrative that already has friends. Because security firms and antivirus software companies are already making a lot of money. So it is easy for people to see that this narrative actually works. So go to your local politician and tell them that this is the way in which they should end. Or in which they should add to the cyber debate. Another thing is why not engage with venture capitalists?  Why are you using that? Why are my friends, my non-tech friends using this? Why? Why?  But so maybe we should engage with those people because that's a small group to look at. And they might see that if they change a bit of their strategies that we might have better effects on this. OK, so another thing is adopt a journalist. Or a parliamentarian, or a judge, or a technologist if you're any of the other categories. Let's not say that we're here with all techies in the room. I think we're a mixed audience. So but do it because that really, really, really helps in letting people understand and also helps in getting people saver, especially with journalists. The internal debate, I apparently only have five minutes left, which was your question time. But I have a few things that I want to say to wrap stuff up. I will be available afterwards for questions at the noisy square upstairs and debate as well. So internally, unite, be open, listen. Also, don't think that white hats exist. They don't. Not such a thing as a white hat.  Then there are enough people who can say that a person is not a white hat because I think there are a lot of people that think they are a white hat that are hacking people's computers for governments. They're working for the government, right? So they're white. So everybody is shades of gray. There might be black hat hackers, but that's another discussion, I think.  So please don't. Do not save others. Help others to save themselves as much as they can, because otherwise you will never build societies where people have agency, and you will be needed more and more. And you're not scalable. You're only with a few of you, and so am I. So another thing is, and the last thing I think is, you can't save others or try to help save others. If you don't save yourself first, so please have a cup of tea at the quarter to a tea place at the top floor any time you need a bit of self-care. And also take care of each other because this, especially if you're a tech activist, it can be quite a hard time every now and then because you're at the point where you realize that this is a very long, long, long, long war, and we can only win battles every now and then. So then the how you can help. Co-design with users. They're here. They're everywhere. They're users. They're friendly most of the time. They want to use your stuff. So educate users. If you're talking to them anyway, team up with that journalist, I think I made that point. Let's all help to improve laws. Push for more secure standards. I don't have to tell you which the standards are. I don't have to tell them why they're all problematic, but still we have to push for them. So challenge your management. I know that not all of you is working on their own projects. Some people have a day-to-day job. You are important for your organization. So if you can do something within your organization to actually help push for any of the other things or just make the world a slightly better place, maybe just host a tour exit note or something else, that is a great step. And you can do it. Also, don't trust me for having good ideas. I don't have any. These ideas are all copied from others. So please have your own great ideas and share them with everyone, including me, please. So that was actually it. The last slide I wanted to show you was Tachnir Square. I can only show it shortly, I think, because it's sad. I didn't see it, but it's at Getty on the bottom, so I will remove it from the slides I upload. But it was Tachnir Square. And that was just to remind you that revolutions, in the end, do not take place in silent circles. They take place on noisy squares. Thank you. Thank you very much.


Hello, hello, writers! I'm Kristin Kiefer, author of fantasy fiction and creative writing resources, and you are listening to the Well-Sturried podcast, where I share insights, encouragement, and actionable advice designed to help you craft sensational novels and build your best writing life. Always in 30 minutes or less, so you can get back to writing, of course. Ready for the show? Let's get talking! Hello again, writers! I'm your host, Kristin Kiefer, and today is April 9th, 2018. Today's episode is titled An Introduction to Worldbuilding, and if you'd like to read along as you listen in, simply head on over to well-sturried.com slash worldbuilding. Now let's dive in. Eager to immerse readers in your story's fantastical world, whether partially or fully fictional, developing an effective and engrossing story world is no easy task. After all, a story world is more than just a fictional setting or society. It's the cultures and capabilities that impact every aspect of your character's stories and your characters themselves. Like any part of the writing process, effective worldbuilding takes time, intention, and attention to detail. In today's episode, I'm going to break down each of the major elements you should consider when building your story's fictional world. But first, let's discuss how writers approach the worldbuilding process. Two ways to develop your story's fictional world. For some writers, worldbuilding is an exciting and engaging part of the writing process. For others, it's just a means to an end, a task that must be completed if they're to write the story they long to tell. This preference often determines the way a writer approaches worldbuilding, determining whether they'll develop a world to serve their story, or a world in which many stories can be set. Though there's no wrong way to go about worldbuilding, many writers adopt one of two methods. First, the inside-out method.  With this approach, writers typically craft the most integral part of their world first, then determine how that element will impact other aspects of their world. Say, for example, that you'd like to write a story about an organization that can control time. With the inside-out method, you'd first determine the extent of the organization's abilities and operations. You'd then consider how the organization's power impacts the physical and societal landscape of your world, and in turn, your character's lives. Approach number two, the outside-in method. With the inside-out method, a writer's story idea drives their approach to the worldbuilding process. The opposite is true of the outside-in method, in which writers develop an extensive fictional world before or alongside their development of their story. When working outside-in, writers typically begin with the most foundational aspect of their world, its geography. Hills and plains become countries, become societies, become cultures, become religions, and so on. Writers who use the outside-in method may or may not have a story idea in mind when they begin worldbuilding, but one thing's for certain. They're passionate about the worldbuilding process, and the level of detail in their fantasy or sci-fi epic is bound to prove it. No matter which method you choose to employ when worldbuilding, it's important to consider all aspects of your story world as parts of a moving whole, each influencing the next. But what are these aspects exactly? Let's discuss five elements to consider when worldbuilding. Every story world may be unique, but the general aspects that define a story world are not. No matter what type of story you're telling, here are five essential elements worth developing. First up, geography. Geography is, of course, your world's physical landscape. When developing this landscape, consider key geographical elements such as one, boundaries, where do your world's continents and countries or planets and solar systems begin and end? Bear in mind that both natural and man-made boundaries are rarely uniform. Your world's territory should vary in size and shape. Two, water. For most real and fictional creatures, water is life. Identifying your world's water sources, oceans, rivers, springs, lakes and bogs is therefore key. Consider how these water sources influence the land and the people who live there. Three, natural features. As you created your world's boundaries and water sources, you may have begun to develop other natural features such as mountain ranges and deserts. Now's the time to expand these landmarks, filling your world with planes, hills, forests, cave systems and other natural features. And four, climate. As you develop each of these geographical elements, bear climate in mind. Which regions remain hot or cold year round?  Are some areas battered by wicked storms or tornadoes? How does a region's climate affect its natural resources and the creatures that live there? The second essential world building element is cultures and societies. Our world is populated with thousands of cultures and societies, both modern and ancient, each of which can inspire their fictional counterparts. When developing your world's cultures and societies, consider these five key aspects. First, power. Societies rarely exist outside of a hierarchy of power. Government plays a role in this, certainly, but don't forget about the role of privilege, prejudice and suppression. Power structures typically revolve around gender, religion, race, sexuality, health, physical and cognitive ability and beauty. Who will hold power and privilege in your world's cultures and societies? How do these elements determine social classes and whose outcast? Secondly, government. How are the people within your fictional societies governed? Do they live in a democracy, monarchy, anarchy or dictatorship? What laws govern the land and who creates and enforces these laws? What rights do citizens bear, especially in regards to their participation in society and government? Thirdly, religion. Religion often directly impacts a society's laws and social norms. If religions exist in your world, consider not only what the religion preaches and who and how it worships, but also how its tenets impact every other aspect of your fictional culture and society. Fourth, we have art and entertainment. Cultures are often defined by the ways they express and entertain themselves. What types of art are a fixture within your story as cultures? Who creates the art and how is it valued? Which sports, races and games are beloved? Are there professional artists and entertainers? How are art and entertainment practiced in everyday life? And finally, fifth, we have relations. Cultures and societies rarely exist in a bubble. After developing these aspects of your story world, consider how they might interact. How do different societies rely on one another for commerce and trade? Which laws and norms are practiced in one culture but reviled by another? Which cultures frequently come into conflict and why? The third essential element of world building is history. The present is nothing without the past. To lend your world a sense of depth and realism, consider developing historical events that continue to impact the world in which your characters live, such as, first, power shifts. Social, political and religious upheaval often have wide-ranging impacts on the world. Are there any particular past events whose consequences directly affect your characters everyday lives or the adventures they experience? And secondly, traumatic events. Traumatic events such as war, famine and plague can also leave a sizable mark on history and your characters. These events may lead to a power shift within your fictional world or they may impact laws and social norms, religion, social classes, technology, etc. Our fourth world building element is magic systems. Your world doesn't necessarily need to have magic but there's no denying that magic systems, extraordinary skills and superpowers are prevalent in fantasy and science fiction. If your characters wield any of these powers, here are 10 questions you'll want to ask to develop an effective magic system. 1. Who can wield magic in your story world? 2. How does magic manifest? What can and can't it do? 3. Can magic be controlled and developed? 4. Is there a cost to using magic? What impact does it have on the user? 5. Where does magic come from? What's the source of its power? 6. Are there items such as wands or staffs that are needed to use magic? 7. How is magic governed and how do religious leaders view magic? 8. How does society as a whole view magic? Is it feared, banned, or even revered? 9. Are there different types of magic? 10. How can those with magical powers be defeated or destroyed? Our fifth and final essential world building element is technology. Technology can be just as complex an aspect of world building as magic. Whether you're basing your world's technology on a specific era of human history or developing a futuristic world, here are 10 questions to ask yourself. 1. What technologies do people use to communicate? 2. What technologies do people use to travel? 3. How do people use technology in their everyday lives? 4. What technologies exist as a source of entertainment? 5. How much do common technologies cost? Who can afford them? 6. What types of technology are used in combat? 7. What resources power common types of technology? 8. Who creates and regulates the use of technology? 9. Does the government use technology to track or control citizens? 10. What positive and negative consequences does technology have on your character's lives? With all that established, let's move beyond world building basics. World building can be an incredibly complex and personal process. Depending upon your story and preferences, you may wish to develop some of these aspects in greater detail and or craft additional elements such as fictional languages or creatures. Here on the podcast, I have individual episodes about developing fictional cultures, magic systems, and those languages, so be sure to check them out.  If you're feeling overwhelmed by the world building process, then take a step back. Remember, you only need to develop your world in as much detail as your story requires. Bigger isn't always better, and complexity doesn't always serve the narrative. Focus on developing the aspects of your world that directly impact your characters, and you can't go wrong. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Podcast Writer. I hope you found it helpful to your writing journey. If so, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode, and to give the podcast a quick rating or review. Doing so goes a long way toward helping the podcast reach new writers, and lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm creating. You can also give me a shout out directly on Instagram at christen underscore keeper. For additional guidance as you work to craft sensational novels and build your best writing life, be sure to head on over to www.well-storied.com, where I share blog posts, workbooks, e-courses, and other helpful resources for writers. Again, that's w-e-l-l-s-t-o-r-i-e-d.com. Thank you again for tuning into today's episode, my friend. Until next time, happy writing!