היי, מי נעימי זרן כהן ואני אעבור על ברודקאסט אופטימל 2 ראונד npc. זו קבל של חוון גרעי ובסילס זיקס. הסטין הוא סטיור מולטיפארטי קומפטטיישן, אוהב שיש סטיור פרטיסטים שרקפו פרוטוקול כדי להסתכל סטיור פרוטוקולים על פרוטיינפוץ. הסטיור פרוטוקול תמיד תמיד סטיור, אולי אם סטיור פרטיסט קולוד ותשאר את זה. סטיור פרטיסטי מלכות כתובילים והסטיור. אבל בגלל, אנחנו אוהבים סטיור פרוטוקולי כדי להסתכל. כשאם כל אחד הפרטיסט יתקטה, זה נכון שכל אחד יתקטה. ובספר הרבה כבר, סטיור פרטיסטי יתקטה, שזה נראה שאין מה שפרטיסטים יתקטים. האנסט פרטיסטים יתקטים את הותפים. אףו, זו הוא כבר נראה שאינטרסיה ואינטרסיה הרבה כתבלות שמיילה, פרנסות ולא נכון דברי לא יכול להתעריא כדי אלגר. אז השטנדרטי הסבאות הולכת כפי פרסת הלאה כמו שהצלחת הלאה של אינטרסיה הרבה כתבלות הוא עמוד לסבאות סבאות. במסקרות, אנחנו רציחים לצד קצת הצדה, אבל אנחנו אומרים על האדרסיטה לבוא את הקרוביטציה, אפשר לצליח את התלווה של קרוביטציה. קרוביטציה של קרוביטציה עוד הרבה מטעות, שהגרוביטציה הכרוביטציה של קרוביטציה היא קרוביטציה של קרוביטציה של קרוביטציה. In that case, it is guaranteed that either all honest gets the output from the computation or if the adversary attacks and the honest part is a boat, they will identify at least one of the corrupted parties. A weaker version is security with unanimous abort, where again either all honest parties get the output or all honest parties abort, but they don't necessarily identify one of the corrupted parties as cheated. Even weaker notion of security is called security with selective abort or non-unanimous abort. Here we no longer have the guarantee that all honest parties get the output or not, it could be that each honest party on its own locally gets the output or identify that an attack took place, but honest parties cannot reach to an agreement on whether they all got the output or not. A central question in the study of secure protocols is how many rounds do we actually need in order to compute a function? Clearly one round isn't enough because corrupted parties can simply wait, get the messages from all honest parties, and then complete the execution based on inputs of their choice, and this will break privacy. In the recent years it was shown that in the broadcast model where every party can reliably send a message to all other parties, two rounds suffice to compute any function. The first protocols in that line of work used every cryptographic assumptions like obfuscation or fully homomorphic encryption, but two very elegant works from your crypt18 by Garg and Srinivasan and by Ben Hamouda and Lin showed that the minimum assumption of two round oblivious transfer suffice. This assumption is minimal because if we have the ability to compute any function in two rounds we can compute oblivious transfer as well. While the cryptographic assumptions needed for two round NPC is shown to be optimal, it is not clear whether the usage of broadcast is optimal as well. This leads us to the main question in this work. A broadcast channel is an expensive resource and realizing it using a broadcast protocol will blow up the round complexity. So do we really need that assumption? Can we maybe use point-to-point channels instead of a broadcast channel and still get two round NPC? Can we somehow reduce the usage or the reliance on a broadcast channel? We are not the first to ask that question. Patrick and Ravi showed that any two round protocol that achieves unanimous abort must communicate over a broadcast channel in the second round, as long as there are no trusted setup assumptions. This lower bound, however, doesn't apply in a setting where we have a PKI or a CRS. On the other hand, several works showed that in the honest majority setting, selective abort can be achieved by a two round protocol that only communicates over point-to-point channels. We are now ready to state the main result on this work. We give a complete characterization of the trade-off between the usage of broadcast by the protocol and the achievable security guarantees. All of the lower bound will show hold facing any correlated randomness that is given to the parties, and all of the upper bound hold against any number of corrupted parties and rely on the optimal assumption of two round oblivious transfer. First, if both rounds are computed over a broadcast channel, we showed that the original protocols of Gargantz-Rinivasan and of Benhamudanlin that only claimed security with unanimous abort can be easily extended to achieve identifiable abort and catch cheating parties. Next, we show that unless both rounds are over a broadcast channel, namely if the first round is run over a point-to-point channel, then identifiable abort cannot be achieved in general. On the other hand, if the second round is actually communicated over a broadcast channel, unanimous abort can be achieved. If the second round is over point-to-point, unanimous abort can no longer be achieved in general even if the first round is over broadcast, yet every function can be computed with security with selective abort. But in that sense, the first broadcast round doesn't really bias anything in terms of feasibility, and security with selective abort can be achieved without relying on any broadcast channel and only communicate over a pairwise point-to-point channels. In the remaining of the talk, we will give a high-level overview of the positive and negative results, and we will start with the impossibility results. To recall the lower bounds that we show, given any correlated randomness, if a protocol achieves identifiable abort into rounds, then both rounds must be communicated over a broadcast channel, and if a protocol achieves unanimous abort, then the second round is communicated over a broadcast. It cannot be communicated over point-to-point. We will start by describing the function that was for the lower bound. This is a 3-party function, where party 1 has 2 input bits x1,1 and x1,2. Party 2 has 1 input bit x2, and party 3 has 2 input strings x3,1 and x3,2. The function that they compute first takes the first input bit of party 1 x1,1 and xort with x2. Take copies of that bit and xort with one of the input strings of party 3, where the which input string depends on whether the second input bit of party 1 is the same as the input bit of party 2. This is a weird looking function, and I'm sure that when you first see it, the first question that comes to mind is why, why do we use such a contrast looking function? The reason is that the lower bound turned out to be much more subtle than we expected, and just we used several properties of this function during the proof. In the high level overview, we will use the following two properties. The first is that in an ideal computation of that function, if party 2 and party 3 collude, they cannot force the output to be the old zero string. Stated differently, for any input values of party 2 and party 3, there exists an input value for party 1 such that the result will not be the old zero string. A second property that we will use is that if party 1 and party 2 collude, they cannot learn both inputs of party 3 using their inputs. So by giving their inputs to their inputs to a trusted party, they cannot, they will only learn one output value that cannot reveal both inputs of party 3. To prove the first lower bound, assume that we have a protocol that computes the function with unanimous support, and that protocol communicates over a broadcast channel in the first round, but over point-to-point channels in the second round. Clearly, if all parties are honest, then all parties must get the output from the execution of this protocol by correctness. Now consider a setting where party 1 is cheating, but it actually plays honestly. Party 2 and party 3 are honest and their view is distributed exactly the same as in the previous setting, so they must also obtain the output from the computation, just like before. Now consider an attack where party 1 plays honestly in the first round, but doesn't send the second round message to party 2. Because the view of party 3 is identically distributed in both settings, party 3 must obtain the output from the computation. By the unanimous support property, party 2 must also not abort and obtain the output. Now consider another attack where party 1 plays honestly in the first round, but doesn't send a message to any party in the second round. Now the view of party 2 is identically distributed as in the previous setting, so party 2 must output a value. By the unanimous support property, party 3 must also not abort an output, and therefore we can see that if party 2 and party 3 join forces and collude, they can actually obtain the output from the computation by the first round message of party 1. That means that the colluding party 2 and party 3 can play the protocol on arbitrary inputs, see whether the output is supposed to be 0, and if so, continue playing with party 1 on these inputs. Otherwise, they can change the input of party 2 and play the protocol with party 1 on the new inputs. This would force the output to be 0. So cheating party 2 and party 3 can force the output of party 1 to be the all-zero string, and as we just saw, that cannot be done in an ideal computation of the function. To prove the second lower bound, consider a protocol for computing that function that is secure with a identifiable abort, but doesn't communicate over a broadcast channel in both rounds. For what we just saw, the second round must be communicated over broadcast, so we can assume that the first round is over point-to-point, and the second is over broadcast. Now consider the following attack. Party 3 is cheating. It plays honestly towards party 1 in the first round, but doesn't send any message to party 2, and it ignores the message it received from party 2 when it computes its second round message. It plays honestly otherwise. There's a dual version to this attack, where party 2 is cheating, and ignores the message from party 3 and doesn't send anything to party 3 in the first round, and plays honestly otherwise. Looking at the view of party 1 under these attacks, we can see that the view is identically distributed in both settings. That means that party 1 cannot abort. Party 1 must output a value. If party 1 aborts, it must blame one of the parties, and at least in one of these settings, the party that party 1 is blaming is an honest party. Now let's see what an adversary that corrupts both party 1 and party 2 can do. The adversary will emulate the previous scenario towards party 3. That means that party 1 will send their first round message, but party 2 won't. After party 3 sends its second round message over broadcast, we can see that the adversary received all of the messages that party 3 will send without playing party 2. That means that now the adversary can play in its head party 2 on two different input bits. By the structure of the function, we can see that in that case, the adversary will learn both of the inputs of party 3, both input strings of party 3, and this is something that cannot be done in an ideal computation of the function. There are many missing details in this high level overview, so I recommend looking at the paper for all of the nice subtleties. It's a nice attack. The second part of the talk is about the possibility, the feasibility results that we have. Namely, we show that given a two-round oblivious transfer protocol in the CRS model, every function can be computed with identifiable abort by a protocol that communicates over point-to-point in the first round and broadcast over the second round, and every function can be computed with selective abort without using broadcast, by a two-round protocol over point-to-point channels. We first recall the structure of two-round protocols. These are very simple protocols. At the beginning, every party computes its first round message as a function of its input and random coins, and sends the message to all other parties. Given all of the first round messages and its input in coins, the party computes its first round message as a function of its input and random parties. Given all of the first round messages and its input in coins, the party computes its second round message and sends it to all. Finally, given all of the first round messages, second round messages, its input and its coins, the party can compute the output. Our constructions are based on the compiler from the work of an antithile that we mentioned earlier. They worked in the honest majority setting and compiled every two broadcast round protocol into a protocol over point-to-point channel that is secure with selective abort, and if the second round is over broadcast, secure with unanimous abort. The main idea is to guarantee that if any of the parties is cheating in the first round, then no party will be able to continue with the computation. We adjusted the compiler to the dishonest majority setting. At the compiler level, it only required syntactic changes, but we had to work a little bit in the proof. The main idea is as follows. First, given the two broadcast round protocol, every party computes its first round message and sends it to everyone over point-to-point channels. In addition, a party takes the next message function for the second round, hardwires its input and random coins, and garbled that circuit. The input to that circuit are all of the first round messages the party should receive. After garbling, the party gets the garbled circuit and the garbled labels, and for each input wires, it shares each garbled labels using an n out of n additive secret sharing. Finally, in the first round, the party sends to each of the other parties the corresponding shares for each of the garbled labels of the input wires. In the second round that is over broadcast, first the party receives all of the first round messages, then it broadcasts the garbled circuit, and for each input wire, the corresponding share according to the messages that it received. Once receiving all of the second round messages, the party can reconstruct the relevant labels, evaluate the garbled circuit for each other party, to obtain its second round message. Using those messages, it can compute the output. The main idea of the proof is that if in the first round all parties follow the protocol and send the same message to all others over point-to-point, then the parties can later on reconstruct the labels for each garbled circuit, and the security reduces to that of the original broadcast model protocol. If however, one of the parties sends different messages, inconsistent messages to different parties, then no party will be able to reconstruct the labels for one of the garbled circuits. In that case, all parties will abort. As we said, a similar compiler was used by Anant et al for the honest majority setting, but also by Garg, Ishae and Srinivasan in a semi-honest setting. In both this work, the simulation used specific properties of the original broadcast model protocol, so stated differently, the simulation was not a black box in the original protocol. We proved the compiler is secure for any broadcast model protocol using a black box simulation. To achieve the simulation, we had to come up with a new simulation technique of receiver-specific simulation, and I won't have time to go over it now, so I refer you to the paper for the details. Also in the paper, you will see how to achieve selective abort using the compiler when working purely over point-to-point channels. To summarize, I will put the table of the result. Again, it summarizes the results very nicely, and I will conclude here. Thank you very much for watching.


Hello everybody, my name is James Carpenter and I'm currently in my second year in the Master of Archive and Records Administration program at San Jose State University School of Information. This video is to express my sincerest gratitude of being chosen as one of the recipients for the 2017 Arma International Golden Gate Scholarship. I am so thankful and so grateful for this wonderful opportunity to receive this scholarship. It serves as both motivation and encouragement as I continue to pursue my master's degree and obtain a CRM designation. As my first scholarship in my academic career, it has provided me with a tremendous opportunity to grow, learn and advance in the records management profession. I want to thank San Jose State University, the MARA program, Arma International, the Scholarship Committee, Arlette Wall and my fellow students and professors who have shown me continued encouragement and support from the beginning. Once again, thank you so much for choosing me for this scholarship. It is truly an honor and I really appreciate it.


Welcome, everybody, to this Day in the Life of a Leader webinar with Emily Berbinski. This is the third annual leadership series that is presented by the Leadership and Management Program Advisory Committee here at the San Jose State University School of Information. The Leadership and Management Pack is co-chaired by myself, Dr. Sue Allman, as well as Dr. Cheryl Stenstrom, who are here in the audience today. The PAC Committee has often told us as the co-chairs that they believe that leadership skills are really important qualities when they look to hire students. On their advice back in 2018, which is a little bit before my time here at San Jose State, the idea for this webinar series was born. There was initially a four-part series, and it was so well received that we decided to continue it on in a semi-annual basis. So Emily's presentation is our second one for this year, and we're really excited to have her. The recordings for these presentations are downloaded in really high numbers, which is wonderful, and we share them with our students, with our graduates, as well as other professionals in our larger community. And this will be available on the school's website after the recording is complete. So first I would like to give a brief outline of what we're going to do today. So we're going to have a conversation with Emily, where she's going to share her ideas and experiences about leadership. We'll have a little bit of time at the end of the presentation for questions. And in order to ask you questions, you can just use the chat box, which you should see at the bottom of your screen, the opportunity to do that, as well as you can raise your hand. You can see that there's already something in the chat, which of course I cannot access right now. So I will check it later, but you can hopefully saw a pop-up right there that happened. So let's introduce Emily to those of you who don't know her. So Emily Brubinski is the Interim Chief Librarian at the Mina Reese Library of the Graduate Center City University of New York, and I fortunately forgot to update this slide. As of March 16th, she started at the Interim Chief Librarian. She sits on the editorial boards of the College and Research Libraries and the Radical Teacher, and she edits the Gender and Sexuality and Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press Litwin Books. Emily is the ALA Counselor at Large and Chair of the ALA's International Relations Committee. Her research interests include critical approaches to cataloging and classification work, power, and the library classroom, excuse me, and the role of organized labor and justice movements. Prior to joining SUNY, Emily was a librarian at Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she was the secretary and then the president of that institution's faculty union. So welcome, Emily. It's really great that we're finally getting this opportunity to do this. I've been looking forward to talking to you for a while. So thanks for being here. Thanks for the invitation, Deborah. I was supposed to do this earlier in February, but I had an accident where I was out running and I tripped and fell on an iron fence, and you can still see the haircut I have from that. But I was in the emergency room with my phone trying to be like, how do I contact San Jose State? So I'm glad that I was able to get in touch with you and glad to be able to join you today. Yeah. So I just got a message. You actually are seeing my previous screen. So I'm just going to try and mix it out and then come back in and see if that makes a difference. There we go. Yeah. All, Emily, all the time. So I love that picture of you. That's why I used it. So let's start with the really big question. What does leadership mean to you? Oh, it's an interesting question and when Deborah reached out to me, I thought, well, I'm not a leader, right? Because I just work at the library and I have always worked at the library and never until March 16th have I been in a titular leadership role, right? Like I've always just been a librarian. But I do, you know, with the exception of my work in the faculty union. So I would say the way I think about leadership is completely, comes completely out of my experience in the union, comes completely out of my sort of labor struggle that we had at Long Island University's Brooklyn campus. So in 2007, was it 2016, I think, the dates are getting fuzzy now, now that time is meaningless. This is sort of COVID experience that we're all having. But we were locked out by management in a contract fight that we were having there. And I was the secretary of the union at the time. Didn't think of myself really as a campus leader. I was one of those librarians who was always the secretary. I don't know if that has happened to any of you, but you, I just found out that as interim chief, I'm automatically the secretary of this executive committee. I had no idea that was coming, but often not seen as campus leaders, but seen as campus document, documentarians. Right. So, but crisis produces leaders, I think, and the crisis of the lockout. I turned out that that was the situation where I could do a lot of good for a few different reasons that I think now are what leadership means to me. The first is I had a lot of connections. I knew a lot of people and I knew a lot of people not because I'm highly social because I'm actually really not, but because I sort of the library is a node on a campus sort of network where everybody, a lot of things ran through us. We emailed faculty every year to every semester to let them know about things that were happening. I'm going to move to another room because my partner is right there. Of course. Of course. Being loud on her own conference call. Let me just ask her. Let me ask her. Of course. Yeah. The great joy of doing a webinar in a pandemic everyone. Thanks for bearing with us. Okay. She's moving to the kitchen. We're also in New York. It's like, That's not helped. Anyway, so I knew a million people because I emailed people all the time to ask them, do you have books that you want us to order there? You know, can we come and teach your classes? Do you have students that you want us to work with? So I knew everybody from that. So I think a leader has a wide network. So the nickname I earned during the lockout, which was a lot about calling people on the phone and telling them where to show up was the switchboard. You know, one of my colleagues was like Emily is the switchboard. The leader is somebody who's kind of the switchboard. Everything kind of runs through you. And I learned a lot in that moment about the importance of being a strong sort of communicator and making sure that everyone knows what's happening and keeping everyone on the same page. So I think that's really essential for leadership. The other thing I learned is that leadership is not titular. Right. So you don't have to be president or chief or chair to be a leader. They have the same in the labor movement. A leader is someone other people follow.  You decide that we're going to... I decide I'm going to put my pronouns in my email signature to normalize gender difference in my workplace. So I might... If I do that, I'm a leader if my doing that produces a whole lot of other people doing that too. Right. So looking around as an organizer, as a leader, you're looking for people that other people follow.  So that would, I guess, would be the way I would open that question. Yeah. So how would you define a successful leader? Sort of as a bit of a follow up to that? Someone who gets everybody involved. So in the labor movement, you're looking always for super majorities that we're going to build a super majority and go on strike because they're making us work at the library even though there's a pandemic happening. Right. So that's like an organizing issue that I see happening right now is people organizing around getting and keeping your library closed, both for the safety of the workers and also to keep patrons from getting sick by coming to the library in large groups. Right. So a leader is somebody who can get everybody on board for an action. So if we're all going to sign a petition, a good leader gets everybody to sign that petition. And so I'm thinking about it in the library. So now I'm in this like interim chief role. Right. And my goal is to make sure that everybody in the library that where I'm now temporarily in charge stays connected to my, to each other and to the institution. I don't want anybody like alone in their apartments not showing up for meetings anymore. So right before this call we had our, we have a weekly staff meeting on Wednesdays. It's all staff are welcome. The meeting is not mandatory. Right. And so for me, a way that I can tell I'm a good leader is if a super majority of the library staff shows up to that meeting feels it's worth their time. It understands that they will be able to share concerns feels like it's worthwhile to stay connected to each other that I've produced a culture where everybody wants to stay involved. So like I'm on the call and I'm taking notes right like writing down what people are saying because we're talking about the website or whatever. But I'm also making a list of everybody who's not in the meeting. Right. So if they're not in the meeting why didn't they come to the meeting maybe it's because they have a kid who just fell on their bike ride. I think it's happening to me or, or they're not coming because there's something about the working conditions that are making them not want to get involved. So can you, I think a good leader a measure of that is the degree to which they can get everybody on board with something that's happening in the, in the institution. So just another quick follow up sort of thinking about your experience with labor movements and activism and things like that and how that might have influenced your leadership, because it sounds to me like that's where it started for you. So what drew you to those kinds of activities. Wow, it's like a good question. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I was on another webinar earlier this week where we were talking about closures. So how are, how are library leaders dealing with COVID closures and moving our operations off outside of the office and into remote locations. Right. And the question of how to do that. And I think there's one, there's one sort of, how did I get laptops into everybody's hands who needed them. That's like one question. And then the second question is, I think, gets more to the heart of like a leadership personality is like, can you acknowledge that we are in a crisis and that life is different today than it was yesterday and that that has like, that's a bigger problem than does Joe have a laptop, and if he doesn't, does he need one and if he needs one, how do we get it to him, right, which are definitely like super important leadership questions, but I think what drew me to it is that I'm really interested in the sort of passage of all of us in between sort of like right now I'm calling it like we're living in kind of a death world, you know, so it's like interesting to be on this call when like, I don't know how many people in the audience have lost people will lose people are dealing with sickness themselves or, you know, like the, I think, I'm really interested in those moments of transition and kind of what kind of lives we're having. So like the lockout was similar it was like a crisis situation there was like a before and after. And I think for me actually really thrive in that like moment of crisis. I'm a little less good at like making sure everybody gets their laptop. You know, and I'm glad that I work with people who are like just rocks all that amazing at getting people laptops. It's not my, it's not my skill set, my skill set is more like, hey everybody we need laptops and getting everybody to agree that we need them. And I don't know I just really enjoy it. It brings me a lot of pleasure. Let's get on to like the next one, if I'm able to. There we go. So how does leadership manifest in your day to day work life it sounds like maybe this has changed a little bit in the past month or so. Yeah, everybody's lives is really changing. Well, yes. Pandemic aside. Well now I'm the boss which I never thought I would, I would be and it's a temporary boss position. How does it manifest in my day to day work life it's really. I think leadership like the secret to it is actually kind of boring, and I don't think I actually has changed lists, a lot of making a list so like my notes from today and I won't like make you look at them but here's my note pad right and it's got everybody's I wasn't here at the meeting right so making a list and then making notes about who I need to follow up with so like I need to follow up with Margaret, and I need to follow up with Melissa, right, and then making appointments for tomorrow to follow up with Melissa so always about keeping the group whole and keeping the group cohesive and connected to each other. So I think that's like a lot of it. It's a lot of talking it's a lot of conversations, right so like leadership and the labor movement is all about the face to face conversation which we kind of can't have right now but it's listening to people mostly like so we use what's called the 8020 rule I'm going to listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time. Margaret Melissa didn't show up today and I think I know why Melissa didn't but Margaret I'm not so sure about and so leadership will manifest by getting the touch with Margaret, or getting in touch with someone who's in touch with Margaret and listening. You know, what's going on with Margaret and doing a lot of listening and then trying to get from those conversations a sense of what everyone needs to be able to live full lives and have meaningful work and to be valued and valuable in this moment of intense intense anxiety and precariousness and. Yeah, so leadership is a lot of listening and it's a lot of list making was making a conversation. Yeah, I love that I think this making is very under discussed in the literature. You know, colleagues of mine and friends of mine that I do this kind of have this kinds of conversations with and trying to get like a how to make a list workshop, accepted at some conference we have yet to be able to do it but I think really like making, making and keeping lists that you assess and act on is a sort of critical leadership skill that we. Yeah, we don't talk enough about. Let's see what we can do for that one. Totally agree with that. Okay, so we've already sort of covered this a little bit but let's talk about it maybe a bit more you can talk about it if you want to about sort of the kinds of advocacy and activism you do outside of the profession as well if that is something that appeals to you so how does leadership connect to your advocacy and activism work.  So, I don't know, there are things that I don't take a lead on, I think a part of being a good leader is is knowing where you can't act effectively and supporting others who can.  So, I think leadership is well due to right like from pets to aging parents because you know it's like, so I think leadership is also about limiting where we where we put our time and our effort so I try to put my time and my effort towards things that I can really stay committed to and do something about. So, you know, I want to make. I want to make a like space for people to do other kinds of good work. So I would say that's like one sort of outside of my job thing that I work on is the sort of gender equity issues in librarianship. That has been, you know, a big area of my work. And, wow, it's just again about list making and list so one of the things I had to do today was cancel an event that we had organized for the end of July. So, you know, we just don't live in a, in a functional state that can't protect us so that we can like gather together in a group at the end of July so we have to cancel it. I think people might imagine that as a leader, I just like cancel it but a leader is canceling it and then making sure that everybody gets emailed to let them know so communicating widely and broadly. Cancelling every all of the preregistrations and event bright, which for some reason takes like eight clicks apiece, figuring out how to give give refunds to everyone cancel the rooms that we've reserved and ordered. And then, you know, but I think the sort of leadership skill that I need help with is figuring out how to delegate some of that kind of work, figure out who else wants to take on some of those tasks in a way that can connect them. So my partner sitting over here on her conference call one of the things I've learned from her is the importance of organizing other people into doing those kinds of jobs and how meaningful it is when people can be part of something bigger than themselves. So her response to the COVID pandemic has been to develop a free online home school that I'm going to pitch to everybody at the end of the call to keep your kid occupied. Right. And she has gone from, you know, just me and her on the couch to she's got this like network of eight people who meet weekly to design this online home school it's just like taken off and, you know, to the degree that people don't even know they're really working on it like somebody emailed me and was like, Oh, it's so cool that your girlfriend's like working on this thing and I'm like, she is the thing right so I feel like I'm going off a little bit but that leadership skill of getting other people to feel connected to a larger project is important to And it has direct connections to sort of your roots with labor movements and activism. So that's wonderful. Yeah, so let's talk about always being awkward. Let's talk about your work with a la what your leadership roles with a la. Okay, so there are like two stories. The first story is I was at this summer camp that my girlfriend's been going to since 1978 and I was in the craft barn making paintings or amics and there was another person there at the craft bar and she was like a library and it just came up and she was making class jewelry and we got to talking and she was like, kind of a big deal. She was on the LA executive board. She was like, it's really fun. You should do it. So I ran for a LA council and, and, and was elected and it's been great and I'm coming to the end of my term this July, or this June. So that's like the fun story that the pepper stories I just I saw our professional association not acting in ways that I thought would be good for all of us right that it was a an association that sort of seemed to be about reproducing itself for the sake of reproducing itself. Does that make sense was just like a lot of committees that exist to our friend of mine had been like a note taking intern on a committee on the subcommittee of the committee and I was just like what is this even about and you know there's so many urgent moments for librarians but I think all of us understand and and and see is really critical and important that I wanted to be a part of those conversations.  So if I want LA to be paying more attention to issues that face library workers as a class. The only way I can do that is to be in a leadership role in LA. Right. So it has, it has like work and that works for me so right now I'm the chair of the International Relations Committee is the committee I thought sharing that would mean that I could open up a conversation about the ongoing imperial sort of approach that LA takes to library work that happens outside of the US. Turns out that wasn't really the avenue for that you know but there's only one way to find out you know. But I think I really believe in associations I really believe in organizations I believe in structures and that if you can get into structures that already exist and begin to organize power with people that share your interests and concerns. Those structures exist to facilitate that organizing need all the time. There's money and infrastructure for webinars, you know so I'm also the chair of the information literacy standards and guidelines standards and frameworks committee right now through ACRL. And we're going to be doing a webinar in the spring about how to integrate social justice interest in standards work. And like it's just not a conversation that we're having that we're only having it because like that's my interest and I'm in that leadership role so I think you know it. There's a lot of like well we should just like not work within LA we should form our own association and I just forming associations is a lot of work. That association is already formed. The best thing to do is like go take it over and they can do it. Yeah. Was there anything that surprised you about taking on a leadership role in LA. Just how hard and that it is to crack. It's just incredibly hard not to crack it. It's just, there are. It's like it's got its own set of power structures that I didn't know anything about like it turns out that. Yeah, it's just it's it's really big and there are a lot of people in it and building majorities in a context like that when you actually don't all agree or share the same concerns is really really tough and hard to do. It takes an amount of bandwidth that it ended up not really having but yeah so that was a little surprising the essential the sort of conflict between different factions has been sort of surprising. But you know that's an association that's in a huge amount of crisis and I think it'll be really interesting to see how it comes out of the, you know, the financial issues that's been facing what it's going to like do in this moment where it had to cancel annual which is this big fundraising sort of events and like what that's going to look like. It's actually probably would have been a good time for me to keep running for LA council because this is a moment of crisis and I think anytime you have crisis, you have opportunity for new kinds of ideas and new kinds of leadership to come to the floor. So I'm interested to see what happens, but I don't think I'll be there. Was there any hesitation around taking on a role in LA for you. No. I mean I really like I really believe I'm right. I don't know. I think that's another like leadership thing like you have to really like believe you're right and your ideas are correct in the way that you would run things it's like the right way to run things and I just like you know I really believe that I'm right about a lot of stuff and that if I ran it it would be pretty cool and would do cool stuff and so I didn't have any hesitation about that. I also think that you get a nerd to risk a little bit when you've had to sort of roll with things and so you know I've had an incredible trauma and an incredible experience of sort of being bowled over by power. I've had other kinds of personal trauma in my life like we all do but I've had cancer. My dad was killed by a truck while he was crossing the street. So I think it has produced for me a sense that there's just not a lot you can do to me. So like if I'm you know I don't have hesitation that if I say something on this webinar I'll get in trouble because as my girlfriend always says if you're worried about getting in trouble you're already in trouble. There's like a kind of fearlessness you get when you sort of have brushes with death and horror and you know we're all getting that right now. I mean I don't know there's another webinar far in the future about how you know what COVID has done to our sense of our priorities. I don't know about everyone else on the call but it's just really driving home to me that life is short and that we need to put our efforts and our energies and our commitments into things that really matter. And you know for a minute there I thought Ailey would be the thing that would really matter to me so I didn't have any hesitation at all. Yeah I think you're spot on with that. So let's get into some more nitty gritty stuff which is are there specific skills you talked about list making that you feel are helpful in your leadership roles and how have you developed these. So maybe you can talk about developing your list skills here. This can be our attempt to convince some associations to take that. And I see Dale's got a question in the chat of what kind of training have I had or have I sought out in this position and I haven't sought out any formal leadership training. I have sought out labor organizing training through my through NYSA which is our New York State United teachers the teachers union here as well as an organization called Labor Notes, which has workshops on how to be a successful organizer things like planning campaigns, thinking about sort of long term goals and the steps that you have to take to get to that long term goal, which has mostly been about sort of, you know, those trainings are about claiming power from Union that you want to be run differently. Things like if I wanted to take over a like counsel right if I wanted to like fill it with all my friends right like skills that you need for that. But thing so list making and things like setting priorities on the way towards a big big goal. So like my big fat goal right now as a as an interim chief in this cobit time is that I might my goal everybody keeps their job. You know, it's like my only goal. I have like no idea how to be able to make that happen and brand new I don't really know anybody. I just, you know, but that's it. That's the only thing I care about. And so the training I've had has been about that about like if this is the goal what is the campaign that we need to get there and and and sort of, you know, I don't know, like people who do like project management that's probably something that they could speak to but the labor notes training does everything in a puts it on a keep going like this because it's a thermometer, you know, and you're trying to like those fundraising thermometers right where it's like starts here and then you get all red. So you want to fill it with power, right.  Because I was like, because like we're all going to be facing that right though I see Tiffany in the chat great goal Tiffany probably have that goal right like keep everybody employed. What leader is not thinking about that right now so one of the ways we're going to do that is make it so that they, if we're, if we all stick together they can't fire any of us or they'd have to fire all of us like what would that look like. And that's my first time saying this out loud but like, you know, that was what I wanted to build toward a unit that was as strong and tight that like when they came for our lowest paid person because I always come for the lowest paid person when they're trying to save costs. I'll never understand that it's like, you know, you'd have to fire like 40 of us to get like that one guy to fire that one guy and we're done having the conversation but anyway, like someone to make it so that if they couldn't get that the lowest paid person. And all of us to agree that if they come after her they're come after all of us we're all going to walk out. It's just like a lot of power building to get there. So that's all about lists. That's all about mapping relationships that's all about understanding who's connected to who in a workplace. So the training I've gotten has been union related on that. Yeah. Yeah. So, because like the leadership camps that they could go to they're so expensive I've never understood how anyone can afford to go. You know I work for a public institution and before that I worked for a resource for institutions just not in the cards at all. Very, very true. And this nicely leads into sort of the next question, which is what do you feel is most important for LIS students to know about leadership and this can also apply to new graduates who who might not have, you know, easy access to these these kinds of more formal professional leadership trainings that are very expensive. You're right. Lead, you know, it's interesting because I remember taking like a management class in library school. And it didn't talk about leadership and also didn't talk about workers talked about management it was like about reporting lines and that's important because like the nest I've stepped into in the last in the last couple of days it's just like I don't understand reporting lines and why they're so important to me to the boss, but they are and I got it right and I keep getting them wrong anyway. So like there's that kind of stuff but like whatever I got it wrong and now I won't get it wrong again it's like problem based learning you know it's like, if you'd given me a handout I wouldn't have understood it. So I think the thing that's most of the things that are most important one that you that leadership is about being someone that other people follow. So that you don't have to be in charge to be a leader. And you probably if you relied only on the people who are titularly in charge to make change no change would ever happen.  If you know don't look to those people because those people you know some of them are great like I think I'm pretty great I'm doing an interim but mostly leadership comes from all positions within an organization and an institution. So look for people that other people follow and then go and talk to them. You know I think that's really important. Management leadership are they separate concepts. Yeah, I think that they are. I think they are. Yeah, that the management piece is something that like you can just learn how to do. So I've been sort of stuck in these middle positions for a long, long time. I don't know if it's because I'm a rabble rouser I can't leave New York or what but you know I would get to the interview stage and the questions would be like have you ever managed a budget. I don't know I've never managed budget, but I don't know. I can use the spreadsheet and I have managed my own budgets like those management skills seem like things you can learn by doing them. Leadership is more a spirit of, I think, a sort of interest in in in wanting a bunch of people to do what you think is right. I think it really involves trusting yourself, trusting other people. And like the most important pieces to me. It sounds like it also is connected to having a vision. Sorry, I teach management leadership so I'm going to throw those kinds of words but it does sound like sort of having like a clear vision for what you want the future to look like as well as having really strong set of core values that help guide you towards that vision. Definitely. I should come and take your class. Yeah. You have a vision. Yeah. Yeah. You know, not everybody wants to have one about their job, which is like 100% fine. You know, like, that's fine. Karen, my girlfriend, incredible leader, never wants to be the boss.  Right.  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, there was a question I'm actually going to go back to it before we go too far too much further from from Diane I believe it was sorry I got your name wrong. She wanted to know a bit more about what you meant by mapping relationships when you were talking about skills. Knowing who people know and who they talk to and who they influence and are influenced by can help you will mobilize those people when you need them to be mobilized on behalf of some larger goal. So, it's not enough to know that, you know, Andy works in CERC, like you got to know who Andy talks to in CERC, or maybe Andy doesn't have to anyone in CERC. But maybe Andy works in CERC, but all of Andy's friends are in ILL, or maybe Andy works in CERC, but all of Andy's friends work in the mail room or they're in food services. Right. So understanding how Andy is connected to other people within the institution can help you understand what Andy might need to get his job done, what Andy might need to be convinced to come to your side. If there's something that you want Andy to do, you want Andy to wear a button that says ban the boss or you wanted to wear, you know, a button that says ask me for help. We're all available for help. I don't know, like whatever the demand is. So if you understand it, where everybody sits on that. And that's been like the thing that's been toughest for me in this new position. So I was at the Graduate Center for a year, and now I'm the interim chief, and now I'm not at work. So, like one of the ways that you can map relationships is do it like literally like a map, like a geographic map, where you see where everybody sits, you know.  And so you can map where everybody is and who talks to each other. So in my library, there are clusters of people who you will often see in the hallway talking to one another.  And so I know that they're a unit. And if I can get one of them, if I can just like hang out with them long enough to figure out who is in charge of that little threesome and I can get that person on my side, that person will bring those other two along. So it's like, you know, you can either look at sort of a material practice, a lot of people really literally make a map like you get a big piece of butcher paper, you know, and you draw the office, you know, it's like, who sits next to each other and who spends what kind of time with each other and it can help you understand how power is working within an organization. So I don't know if that answers the question. It answered my thoughts about it. It's lovely too. I have a feeling everybody's going to start making maps now. So what are some of the ways you think students can practice their leadership skills in graduate school or at the beginning of their careers. That's a really good question. I mean, I think learning how to build power within organizations is like a life skill that will serve you forever and ever and always in every context. So even so I, you know, I know that San Jose State is not a an in person program, but you have student organizations right with student associations you plan events and you do things like that and, you know, I'm sure that San Jose State has like little pots of money that people can come together and distribute like for student groups like to pull in speakers or put on an event, whatever. Get involved in that as much as you possibly can. Because I think getting in practice, both making decisions about how to distribute resources, which at the end of the day is a huge part of the story right like if you're the leader, you get to decide where the money goes right so that's like a big step up to getting used to that sort of by getting involved in a student organization is good. And then also just like working with people to sort of implement a vision is, you know, we do that on different scales all the time like, you know, you probably do when you're planning family dinner, you know, we just had, we just had Passover right so like, but we couldn't be with each other and so the natural leader of the family, Sarah and Eddie hosted the online Seder and got everybody involved you know, like thinking about everything is sort of everywhere so getting getting involved in in organizations that put you into into roles where you get to distribute resources or make decisions like that I think is very valuable. And at the start of your career, look around, look around, there's always something that isn't happening or isn't being done. I don't know. My first job at a library school was at a an indexing company I worked for the social science index at the Wilson index. Did you do that? No, no, but I think it's neat though. I'm not surprised to hear that you get that given your interesting classification.  And we've been told that we cannot speak to one another because indexing requires quiet, right. So like, okay, it was a terrible job. Yeah, why they're worth there for six months or for 65 years I was a six month or anyway. But I think look for things that bother other people and see if you can figure out how to get people involved so that you could maybe change them. A more recent example of my at L.I.U. our boss would not let us turn on the scanning function of the photocopiers so that students could use it. Why I see your face Deborah I don't know that was my question to like what the heck, but like your shift would have gotten everybody together and I didn't do this because I was doing other things with God everybody together to pressure the boss to turn on those scanning function you know and so they're look for problems that you can with the help of others solve together. And that is a way to practice leadership skills and that's I think real where real leadership happens is like solving a problem like seeing something that you want to be different. Like I see Diane looking for community to bring positive change like you're going to need everybody you're going to need everybody on board and so look for problems and see if you can figure out ways to solve them. I think that would be my suggestion for like how to think about getting those skills practice. That is really, really great advice very practical to. Thank you. So I think this is our very last question and then we'll open it up for for questions from the audience which is, do you have any resources you'd recommend to students to help them develop their own approach to leadership. You've talked a little bit about this but just another opportunity to rethink. Number one is called No Shortcuts. I'll put it in the chat. This is a great book by the name just like totally but you're all you're all library people. No Shortcuts Jane McAleevy. She's a long time organizer who has a new book that's pretty good but I think No Shortcuts is better. It's a sort of story of labor victories over management and you know we look at the landscape right now and we're like has labor ever won but it turns out that labor has and this book tells you how and it's sadly there's no short way around it but I think for me it's been a really critical text for understanding the sort of list making and map making that goes into the moment of big victory which is what we're all after but you can't get there without the hard work that you put in up front. So that would be one resource. The second is a book called Secrets of a Successful Organizer. It's a how to build a union campaign from Labor Notes which is labornotes.org. This is a great book that sort of introduces this the idea of a campaign. They had to make an assessed list so thinking about they do a sort of bullseye format for that. So thinking about allies and pulling people together and looking for natural leaders and that that book is a great book. I keep a stash in my office and I will always send you a copy of it if you would like it I'm happy to drop one in the mail so if I ever get back to my office. I'm super easy to find online because there's only one Drabinski that's named Emily just should be an email and I will put it in the in the mail to you because I think it's a really great hands on guide to making change in organizations. Excellent. So there's just a few patterns to make sure. Oh, so this is from Lori. She says she's a novice critical librarian who's works in small rural community college which resources would you recommend that she taps into. Oh, wow. That's a good question. I mean, I think those resources are useful to everybody, but the resources that like it's really us like the people you have around you and your community. So like, is there anybody in in your small rural community college maybe in or out of the library. Who you think shares your perspective, your interest, your core values and vision as as Deborah put it.  Right. So I think a lot of it is looking for people who share who are mad about the same stuff as you. There's another easy way to think about it because it's not like because it's what I love about union work is that I don't have to agree with you to be mad about the same thing as you and to be interested in to have the same demand as you. So in the library. Sky Chuck was like a libertarian and like, wow, not a lot is more toxic to me than libertarianism as a political philosophy. But it just doesn't didn't matter because we would come around in the union struggle. Absolutely. He was as rock solid as anybody would make calls showed up to everything totally committed, you know, and having, you know, he's mad about the same stuff. So finding people on your campus who are mad about the same stuff. I think that would be my suggestion. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say this is from on it. Do you think it takes a long time to get into a position where you get to determine where resources go in academic libraries. Absolutely. Yes, it's very, very hard. It's very, very hard. It's like harder than a la to crack that not not I just sort of accidentally fell into it because I didn't accidentally fall into it I was like maneuvered into the position by somebody who was, you know, in my organization who wanted me to be in that spot and I think that's essential, you know, and it's like, that sounds kind of crass but I think that's how it all happens. I don't think anybody applies for this kind of a job and gets it because they apply for it. I think people are organized into these positions of authority by other people in positions of authority, which is why I think often the people in those positions of authority look the same as each other. Have the same interests, which are probably not yours. You know, it's like, I think it takes both takes a long time and it's not guaranteed because you'll notice that for some people it doesn't take a long time. I don't know if any of you have you if it hasn't happened to you yet it will happen to you in your career where you look around and you'll see that like this guy that was like, are you kidding me. Like he could barely string two senses together in class and like he never even had a library job he never even like he has never shelf the book and here he is like in charge of an entire system. Like that's definitely a feeling that that I have had and that you will probably have so some people it doesn't take them a long time, but for if you're asking the question probably will take you a very long time. It has taken a long time for me and I think it's a pretty temporary position. So I'm just intro until they hire someone else, although will anybody ever get hired again for anything. Very scary time. Yeah, and I can because I am a professor and I'm required to do this by law actually. There is actually studies and research and theory around exactly the phenomenon that you're describing about sort of like hiring like and why leadership and organizations tend to end up looking the same. Yeah, so just to just to let students know that that's what it's there. That's really interesting. I would like to read more of that because it's a it's a weird thing. Yeah, well I have a paper about it. Talking what reference work. So Julian just said I'm going to put this out there for a field that is dominated by women there are sure are a lot of men in leadership positions and I'll just let you respond to that.  What do people say it's not a female.  For female intensive. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting. Yeah, I don't, you know, I share your observation Jillian. I'm not sure I did want to say solidarity to Brianna that you've been a union steward. It's like, yeah, I don't think there's anything more meaningful or valuable than union work. Honestly, like it just for me, it's been the most transformative work of my life. I think if you have an opportunity to get in like work on your leadership skills in that arena, you will have a lot of satisfaction and I know that I have had that so I'm, I'm glad that you have that. Also, Brianna, and we should meet next time we're in the same place because there aren't a lot of us we organized a union librarian meetup at LA midwinter and I think there were five of us. And it was just so it did my heart so much good to just like be with people who shared my analysis because like that's an analysis that I didn't like get out of a book right like how I'm talking about leadership but it's produced by my experience doing new work. And you can really shape the work environment. You can really like your work can mean that somebody gets $1,000 that they weren't going to get otherwise and like then you're like, okay, my life was my life's done, you know, I would did enough.  Can you make such a concrete difference for other people. It's like a really, it's really satisfying. So we have about eight minutes left so I'm going to pause just for a minute to see if there are any more questions, because we certainly have time to do that. And I just wanted to say to Jillian that it is a great observation and you're right there doesn't need to be an explanation but I think there does need to be a bit more of a conversation about it. Because it's it's sort of a it isn't it's a weird weird part of our of our profession. So thanks for mentioning it. Oh, so this is from Jacob. How do leaders develop new leaders without falling into the hiring like the like hiring like trap. How do you Emily. And I don't know I'm going to read your paper Deborah do you know is there. No, I think you have their strategies. I think you have to actively know that that's what you're doing and look but no I don't. I have my first like sort of like issue with this this week the people in charge asked me to put someone on a committee that would make consequential decisions about what will happen in the fall. And I was like, Oh, I just like my impulse goes right to the, you know, the person I talked to most often during the day. You know, and I do think like being aware that you your mind will go to the person that you talk to most every day and that person will probably be someone who shares your sensibilities about the world.  And so I thought, like, I think that's a lot of it having a critique of that. Developing new leaders. That's a, that's a trick for me. And I, you know, if, if this was a conference called with Karen talking about her home school cooperative, she would have an answer to that.  Leaders need other leaders, and you need to be able to call on those leaders know who they are know that they have their units rock solid organizing pull them in when you need them and identifying those people and giving them the supports they need is like that's, I, you know, I want to make sure. There's many people's possible keep their jobs and then figure out how to how to answer Jacob's question sort of on my docket for the next couple of months. I don't know influential question, Jacob. Yeah. It's a really good question. Yeah. I do think it takes a lot of self reflection and awareness of who you are and what it is that you like and where your strengths are and then actively look for people who have the opposite strengths to you but that are complimentary at the same time and it's, it's, I don't think it's easy and any possible way just to do that easily. I do think like the insight from the union from union work that you don't have to like people is a good one, but like I don't have to like want to have you over for dinner. That's not like what this is about. And so, you know, keeping that in mind is useful. That is very useful and very hard to live sometimes. Okay, totally not related. This is from Sarah. What brand are your glasses. They're fantastic. And thank you for inspiring me. I got them at the mall in Manila, because my girlfriend was there on a Fulbright and then has to be a, what do you, a vacuum. Because of COVID, but I got these glasses home with me. So thank you. I was like, I put them on and you know, if you get when you get new glasses and you're like, oh, these are terrible as a crime buyers are more but she was right. They're fantastic. Yeah. This is from Dale. How do you develop a collaborative or facilitate a facilitative leadership model? You know, I'm not sure what those what that means. Deborah, what are those? Well, collaborative leadership is is a formal leadership theory where it's about sort of getting people to work together. It sounds a lot like what you do naturally actually. So how do you I guess I guess the question maybe another way of phrasing the question is like, how do you get people to work together? Oh, yeah, I mean, I believe that everybody wants to work. And that people are satisfied when they have work to do. And when they can be when they believe because it's true that the work that they're doing contributes to a larger whole. Here's Oscar in his Oscar you want to say hi to everybody. Hello. Hello. He's wearing my favorite PJs of his they say they want a pizza this with the slice of pizza. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, people want work to do people want tasks. So giving everybody work to do and acknowledging that everybody wants to work. It's like, you know, I don't know if you're not able to work right now because you're trapped at home. I think that's really challenging. Right. So coming up with tasks for people to do and sort of ways for them to report back I think isn't how do I elicit group responsibility and participation. I actually just don't even know yet. And it's very, very hard. I don't know. And, and, and Deborah, I don't have the interest in any research, you know, on how to do that in a, in a purely remote work environment. Because a lot of that what I would do is like, just pop by your office and say hey, do you want to pop into this meeting real quick because we're trying to decide how we're going to distribute limited supplies of hand sanitizer, you know, like something like that and then we would that continue to build relationships over time in that way and I don't know how to do it when we're all online. And everyone's grappling with so much it's like it feels unanswerable to me in this moment. Any of my students who are here want to talk about virtual team work. So, yeah, so John is saying just to throw this out there there's a big thing for me is creating a culture of accountability it goes a long way from people to feel empowered and accountable for their jobs, which makes them accountable to each other. Dale says interesting, we have incredible zoom discussions that used to happen in more isolated situations. Melissa says hi from Syracuse. And you know, and says and I think this will be our last question. Do you have any advice on engaging in a type of leadership that encourages and supports those and less represented backgrounds without tokenizing them. That is a huge question and a really good one. And you have a minute. That's a challenging one. Yeah, I mean I think tokenizing someone is about putting some aspect of their identity at the front of how you think about them and their contributions and their work in an organization. And I think that's, you know, not not effective right. I don't know. It's a it's a big question. I mean I think leadership that that looks really intently at what who people are and what they bring to an organization and what they care about and what they're interested in and try to sort of build work that allows people to be who they are seems to be really important. And I, you know, I'm at the beginning of having responsibility in those areas and so I don't really, I don't have an answer except that that is a really good question. I mean, I think if you bring everybody in, you know, then everybody's in right and you can really, you know, that that seems to be the challenge to make sure that you have a unit with a with a super majority of people committed to the to the work into the vision and that centers whole people, right. So that would be my initial attempt at a response which inadequate. This is a question I'll be thinking about too. So thank you for it. And that brings us to the top of the hour. Exactly. I would like to thank Emily for taking the time, especially during this crazy period of time to speak with us today and for these really great answers and these really insightful comments. I'd like to thank everybody for coming. The this was thrilling to have so many people sign up for this. And please come back again in the fall. We'll be having another webinar series. We're not sure who the speakers will be, but hopefully they will be as great as Emily was. Thank you so much. Bye.


Good morning everybody. I guess afternoon now. It's okay, I'm good. Someone's paying attention on the right-hand side of the room. Welcome to the Cisco Sponsored Session. Welcome to day one of the OpenStack Summit. My name is Gary Kevorkian. I'm with the Cisco Events Team. Welcome to the Cisco Sponsored Track Room. We're going to get right to the meat of the matter here. I'm going to quickly introduce Mike Cohen, Senior Director of Product Management at Cisco, and our co-presenter from SunGuard, and they are going to be talking to you today about ACI and group-based policy and the things that Cisco and SunGuard are working on together. So with that being said, oh, one last thing. See how unprepared I am. Really focused. At the end of the session, you all got cards. As you came in, we're going to be doing a drawing for a Polaroid snap camera. The Metapod Group was a lot livelier, so you guys really got some work to do. So get your cards filled out. We'll be collecting them at the end. With that, I'm going to turn things over to Mike and ACI, Group-Based Policy Cisco and SunGuard. All right. Thanks a lot, everybody. I'm Mike Cohen. I'm Senior Director of Product Management at Cisco. I'm joined by David Graczynski, who's a cloud architect at SunGuard Availability Services. And today our presentation will be about how together we've worked together using ACI and how SunGuard is delivering their cloud services on OpenStack and how they've designed their solution, including some of our technology. We'll start by giving you an overview of the ACI solution and how it fits in the OpenStack environment and how you can use it and leverage the benefits of ACI. At that point, I'll hand over to David and he'll be able to talk about the SunGuard experience using this technology, how they designed their cloud, the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and the end result and the solution they ended up designing and deploying now in production. Let me start by laying out some of the basic tenets of the ACI environment. ACI is built out of the Nexus 9000 series of switches coupled with the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller. The solution was designed to offer complete automation across both the underlay environment and the overlay environment to give you a complete data center automation and provisioning solution. It was also designed to give you deep visibility across the physical and virtual environment so that you can actually understand the operations of your cloud while it's running. But probably the most important part of the solution is this application-centric group-based policy model that we've designed into the heart of the ACI fabric. And really, the goal of that technology was to be able to deliver application agility, help you deploy applications more quickly, and really accelerate the time to move a new application from a design phase all the way to production and do it without compromising elements of security throughout the process. If we look a little deeper at what ACI offers, we can see it's a policy solution that scales across the physical environment, the hypervisor environment, including the virtual switch, the compute server environment, layer 4 through 7, storage, and even extends into multi-data center WAN environments as well. The goal of the solution was to be able to offer very deep security across the entire network fabric. The workloads can be placed anywhere and dynamically moved, and security will be applied as needed to the places where the workloads are instantiated. Moreover, the policy model is based on a zero-trust whitelist approach. And just this idea of using whitelist can actually solve upwards of 80% of your security problems right out of the gate. And again, one of the most unique and important capabilities of ACI is the ability to give you this physical plus virtual visibility, where we can actually show you at both a tenant level and an application level deep visibility and statistics about the workload, including health scores, latency, packet drops, where workloads are placed and how they're mapped across the virtual and physical environment to ease in your troubleshooting environments. And one of the key areas where we've invested in the ACI solution is around OpenStack and actually tying the OpenStack environment into our API controller. And one of the new technologies we actually offer now with our ACI solution is the addition of our OpFlex protocol and more importantly our OpFlex agent, which is now runs on the KVM hypervisor and can work directly with OpenVSwitch. OpFlex is a really important part of our architecture because it allows us to extend our policy domain and extend the policy control of APIC outside of the physical fabric directly into the hypervisor. This is where we get our physical plus virtual integration. Using these two components, we're able to offer a fully distributed neutron networking solution where we can handle not just layer two and layer three networking but also offer things like distributed DHCP, distributed metadata services that are critical in the OpenStack environment and we can offer through our collaboration with the OpenVSwitch and our network fabric. But on top of this, we give you all the visibility characteristics ACI can offer and make those available and easy to correlate back to the OpenStack environment which you've created. So now we're acting as an operations panel for OpenStack and we're working with a number of OpenStack partners so that we can take these solutions to market. One of the key areas of contribution that we focused on with the community is around group-based policy and you'll hear more about group-based policy as David goes into his talk because it's been part of the technology that SunGuard has deployed. The inspiration from group-based policy came from work we did with ACI. We had done a lot of thinking about policy, how to think about applications, describe applications and they were part of our design when we ultimately made ACI but the policy model itself actually has nothing to do with any of our products and we realized it would benefit the entire community to actually have it exist as a capability with an OpenStack that can work with anyone's neutron plug-in in any environment. So that spawned the project around group-based policy. A complete open source implementation of policy that can be used for capturing network intent. If you look at the ACI, if you look at this group-based policy model you'll actually see that we've introduced this concept of a group. This is a little bit different than a neutron network. It's designed to fully encapsulate the properties of the network endpoints within it and we use something called a rule set to describe how those endpoints will communicate with each other. So the group-based policy model is something that we've been working closely with the community around and it's something we use very much in our ACI products. Of course we have numerous solutions and we also support a standard ML2 plug-in but we find many of our customers are interested in thinking about policy differently and using it as a way of deploying and accelerating their applications. So now let me talk specifically about ACI and OpenStack and some of the benefits that can be accrued in running these environments together. The first one I mentioned is this idea of being able to do distributed scalable virtual networking really taking all the components that you would run in your neutron environment and being able to distribute them across both your compute nodes and our network fabric. This includes things like layer 2, layer 3, distributed metadata, distributed DHCP, distributed NAT so that we have no single gateways or single points of failure in our environment. We're able to offer hardware accelerated performance and we can do all of our VXLand tunneling at the top of RackSwitch without paying a cost inside our servers for this capability. We also give you this operations and telemetry. So from OpenStack you can correlate your OpenStack groups or your neutron networks directly into a view of the APIC and we can use all the APIC troubleshooting capabilities to manage and monitor that environment.  That includes tying in things like physical servers directly into your neutron networks through a single API. We have a number of capabilities around service chaining. Some of them were developed through the community of group-based policy. Some of them are specific on top of APIC and we give you a number of options about how you deploy them. Finally we can offer you an added degree of security where we can actually enforce security not just at the V-switch layer for the overlay but also at the physical switching layer. So we can actually even be resilient and secure in the case of a hypervisor being compromised. At this point I want to hand over to David and I want to give him a chance to talk about how SunGuard is using ACI and OpenStack and talk more about the challenges they've had and how they have solved them in building their OpenStack cloud. How's everybody doing? So as Mike said, my name's Dave Grisanti and I'm a cloud architect at SunGuard Availability Services. I'm going to talk a little bit about GVP and what SunGuard is doing with OpenStack. So a little bit of background about SunGuard. Most people have probably heard of them. We're big in the DR market. That's kind of the bread and butter. But there's a lot of other companies, you know, we're getting into the cloud space and have been in there for a while. But in the last year or so have made a big push towards OpenStack. And Cisco's been a big partner in that journey. So I'm going to go over a little bit of what problem we're trying to solve and what our typical customer looks like. So our customers are in the 80% is kind of what we call them. So they're not people who tend to use something like AWS like a traditional public cloud. And they may not necessarily be companies who need a ton of day-to-day hand-holding and only want a public cloud. So we're looking at, you know, larger IT companies looking to control month-to-month spend, term and commit usage-based billing, much more of a pet versus cattle model. Things like SharePoint, SQL Server, SAP, Oracle, bigger applications that are running on legacy IT infrastructures that are looking to help SunGuard help them move to the cloud. So again, shrink-wrap applications, limited automation due to time and talent. But they still need access to non-cloud and non-internet SunGuard services. So there's a lot of people looking for what we call hybrid. They may need connections back to their physical data center, back to COLO stuff that SunGuard may be hosting. And one of the differentiators that we're looking for is offering this mix of managed and what we call self-managed. So self-manage is more or less public cloud. So we give them an area to play in for dev tests with APIs, and then we have an area where SunGuard manages, which is where their production workloads are running. So by utilizing one platform, OpenStack, to give them both, you know, we get the best of both worlds. So their platform expectations from this is cloud-native and traditional networking models. So we've got some people who still are running static IPs on all of their VMs when they want to move inside and some that are, you know, happy to get a public IP address on the internet and host their application there. And also looking for above-the-hypervisor services. So VPN, firewall, load balancer, and through the use of ACI, using service and servicing or service chaining with these advanced services. So a little bit about what Cisco and ACI bring to the table for us. So policy-based automation, GVP and API offer managed, you know, pretend network service and service chaining, like I mentioned, with the above-the-hypervisor services. Distributed neutron networking, multi-hypervisor is a big thing for us. So right now we're KVM only, but in the future we're looking to offer VMWare as well. We offer that in a lot of other environments at SunGuard and it's a big thing that customers ask for. They're comfortable with it and they're used to a lot of their VMWare environments. And also just standardizing networking at SunGuard on this platform and also on ACI is a big thing for us.  We were a big ACI user, even pre-Cloud Stack, so that was something that we chose to stay with as we moved into the open-sex space. So I guess concentrating a little on the SunGuard customization is just from the open-stack side. We chose to utilize Horizon. It gave us a lot of the, just out-of-the-box APIs talking to all the open-stack services. Then we decided to add branding and billing on top of that and also integrate some custom features in the UI without having to necessarily change the Horizon codebase. So that's been, you know, an interesting project, keeping with everything upstream so we get all the advantages, but, you know, being able to add our own dashboards. And then one of the other big pieces is Keystone V3 and multi-domain support. So I'll talk about this a little later, but we're running Juno now, all components, except for the UI, which is on Kilo. And one of the biggest challenges I think we had was getting all the multi-domain support into V3 support to work the way we wanted it to. So mostly we used upstream patches to get that working, but we did have to make some changes to Django OpenStack Auth, which is the authorization piece in Horizon, which handles Auth through Keystone, and also some things within Keystone itself to get our single sign-on working. So one of the big things from the beginning that we wanted was a truly single sign-on, you know, UI. So this morning during the keynote, I was showing that like, you know, username and password box and you see that and you say, what am I supposed to do with this? I don't know. Our customers expect to see the same single sign-on UI they get for all the rest of our portals, and we were able to offer that, but it took some beating against Keystone to get it to work. And then the multi-domain support in Horizon same way. It was kind of there with managing project and domain tokens, but we did have to make a couple changes, pull in some patches that aren't entirely upstream yet to get all that working. But in the end, it got us what we needed. And another kind of key feature, I mentioned the deterministic billing and usage-based billing at the beginning. We've chosen to rebrand the word projects and call them workplaces. And along with all of the virtual resources that come with projects in OpenStack, we give the customer this concept of budgeting that ties back to the metered billing. So in this example, you know, we see a couple of workplaces that represent either different kind of verticals in the company or maybe different departments. And admins within the projects can set a budget and then they can track their spend day-to-day as it moves towards that budget. The budget's not intended to prevent them from doing anything we use the quotas for that that are available in OpenStack, but it does give kind of an IT admin a good way to say, you know, I have five companies or five, you know, groups within my company, I can spread my budget across them and track how they're spending money. And getting this piece, not necessarily the budgeting, but getting the control for IT admins was a big part of Keystone V3 and the multi-domain support. So it's not really shown here, but one of the big things we wanted to let companies do was manage their own projects. So in the traditional V2 model, you know, there's one kind of OpenStack administrator sitting behind the scenes that's creating projects and assigning people to them. And again, something that was mentioned this morning. In our model, we kind of added another layer in between the OpenStack admin and the product admin, and there's like a domain admin that can add users, create projects, assign users to those projects, and that way they don't really ever have to call us. They've got full control to manage all that stuff themselves. And then, you know, because it's multi-tenant, there's isolation between projects within a given domain and other domains. And then the lifecycle of the workplaces is not always like this, but typically, you know, you use workplaces for DevTest and then you're using one that's, you know, a kind of lockdown managed by SunGuard. So we made a couple changes with the policy engine in OpenStack tool, not changes, but just customizations of the policy files to allow us to block certain APIs from certain workplaces so that customers can hand control over to us so they can't, you know, destroy VMs or stop VMs or make any changes in workplaces, but other ones are open. So there's kind of a control at the workplace level with policy and with roles. So as I mentioned before, so the tool set for us is Juno, except for Horizon, which is Kilo. Most of the components we're using are the standard ones, Nova, Neutron, Glancinder, Keystone, obviously, Solometer, we are using Mistral. I'm not sure how many, not a ton of other people are using that in Heat. And the biggest change with Neutron is the group-based policy piece that Mike had mentioned. So that's reducing a lot of the traditional API calls, building standard Neutron networks, making security groups. Your interface is really the GBP model, that abstraction layer on top of Neutron that allows you to build much more of an intent-based networking model instead of necessarily having to understand how Neutron works. And from the Cisco side, so APIC ACI integrated GBP, VXLAN on OVS with Plex Control Plane. So I mentioned this that we were an existing ACI customer, but we also are able to get a lot of run-of-scaling problems using VXLAN and OVS and take advantage of a lot of the features that it offers on the hypervisor like NAT and pushing a lot of the policy down directly to the KVM host. And from the advanced services side, we've got three pieces now that are kind of a mix depending on what type of workplace you're running. So ASAV for the premium firewall, BIOS for the open source firewall, and then we're using HAProxy for load balancing on both the managed and self-managed side. So what did all that get us? So an OpFlex-enabled, APIC-controlled ACI fabric orchestrated by OpenStack. It's kind of our buzzword. So that kind of covers the networking and the OpenStack piece. One of the other things I wanted to talk a little bit about and touch on is, I guess, our sense of HA, which can mean a couple different things, but our controller architecture on the OpenStack side is a little different to the standard model that's, you know, if you buy Red Hat's OpenStack and you just install it, you're going to get something much different than what we put together. So we did this for a couple reasons. You know, isolation for security to isolate certain services to the public UI, but traditionally you get, you know, the controller model is three controllers with all the services running on the same three controllers. We split this up so we can isolate some of the services available from the public internet and then things that only need to be accessed from behind the scenes. So you'll see over on the left, on the public side we've got the public UI servers, that's where Horizon's running, and we've got an onboarding application for our customers that's running there, Puppet for our managing our guest VMs for customers, and then public API servers are running. As many of the API services we can run independently. So some of them can't be separated, things like Keystone and Neutron and Heat, but where we can run public APIs and give customer access to them, we're running those on the public side. And then from the control side, we've also separated Rabbit and the database from the traditional OpenStack services. And then even our own Sun Guard controllers that we're using to do some of our managed services, those are also separate. So this is nice because it gives us much more control over the network design, the network flow, but it also creates a lot of challenges, most of which is centered around logging. So debugging when something goes wrong is a pain sometimes because we're running the API on three different internal servers and three different external servers. You've got to really understand the data flow when you're seeing a failure. The UI is calling the public APIs, could fail there. Is it sending off to some service that's only running on the internal controllers? So we're taking this as is now and looking for ways in the future to improve it and kind of get around some of our operational challenges, but it was something that I wanted to point out and just briefly mention. Okay, so I wasn't sure how this was going to come out. Colors are a little funky, but I think you can read it. So this was kind of our reference architecture for the three different, not types of customers, but maybe the three different types of workplaces that we have in the services that you can offer and something that we're doing with ACI. So the gray is a self-managed customer that only needs access to the internet. So on the bottom you'll see their firewall, their repair, and any GDP groups behind that. And then they're connected up into the fabric through on the shared L3 out, which is represented by the internet there. And then that's connected up to a shared segment on our core. And then the yellow is a similar customer. They need access to the internet, but they may also need access to some hybrid services, so something back either in Sun Guard Colo space or something on-prem on their side. So they get access out to the shared L3 out for the internet and then independent L3 out that we create for them for hybrid access. And then the last one is a mix of all three. It's internet, hybrid, and then also... Yeah, then it's Sun Guard managed services. So basically that's us being able to offer you know, antivirus, patch management, all of the Sun Guard managed services piece, and that's also shared. And then the other big benefit of ACI here and what we're doing is that we can kind of break these lines or add them without touching the customer's environment. So if we build the gray customer first and then we say they want to become like a yellow customer, we can add a hybrid in later. We can change the routes for the VMs behind their firewall so that they can go back to their data center without actually making any changes to their firewall, making any changes to their VMs. Same thing with the managed services. If they decide at some point that they want the services or we need to start monitoring their VMs for them, we can make those changes and get access without necessarily touching their environment. So I touched on this with the controller architecture, but I just want to touch a little bit on the team at Sun Guard and how we're supporting it and what we look like. So we're building and supporting a bunch of labs and five production sites right now, soon to be seven or eight. So we've got a really good team, multi-disciplinary. We've got a mix of software people, systems, both on the infrastructure side and the network side. And everyone works together. We're not necessarily separated in silos. And having people from the software side that understand how Python works and how OpenStock works has been a huge help in kind of jump in and fix things, especially when it came to a lot of that Keystone stuff. I worked on a lot of that. I've got more of a software background, so that helped when necessarily we can't just ask someone in the community, we can ask them for help, but they can only go so far. It makes a lot of difference when we can make code changes and present them back ourselves. And as I mentioned, just having all those controllers finding the source of the problem is different. The spirit controller architecture makes that more challenging, but our team does a good job at isolating problems. And then just to show our common and contributing back. So we've not been contributing a ton of stuff back right now. We've been working on most of that stuff through Cisco and through One Convergence is another one of our partners along with Cisco that's helping us with the above the hypervisor and advanced services. So most of our interaction is through them, but I think as we kind of build this stuff and we get out of site build mode and back in more into building the platform and adding more features, we'll definitely be looking to start contributing. So I mentioned... Yeah, this was saying, where are we now? I mentioned the five sites before, so North America and Europe, and hopefully seven sites globally by 2016. And one last thing before I stop and we take questions. On Thursday, we'll be doing a hands-on lab, specifically with the L4 through L7 services with the help of Cisco One Convergence and going through a lot more of how this stuff is built and showing other people how they can use it. And we'll, at the very end of that, do a little demo on the HA piece with the ASAV as well. Stop there and take questions. Oh, I said to remind people, use the microphones on the left and right, and there might be a microphone being passed around. And they've got Qs. They've got As if you've got Qs. That's the way it's supposed to go. So questions from... Are you using the dynamic SDN capabilities among the sites, the five global sites, or just within each site? In ACI? Yes. Just with... Yeah, we're not doing it. There's nothing cross-sites. Yeah, everything's isolated to a single site right now. I guess I didn't even mention that really with Keystone, but all the customers right now are represented one site. At some point, we're going to look to give them access to multiple at the same time, but everything's isolated to one. So what's your migration path going forward to other versions of OpenStack? Is there any reason to do that? There's definitely a reason to do it. So we're already feeling pain, but there's a lot of features we need in upcoming ACI releases and in just upcoming OpenSec releases. Controller architecture makes upgrading a challenge. So yeah, it's something that people that are also at Sun Guard here at the summit are looking at, kind of hoping to pick up tips from to do the upgrade. But yeah, I think... And I don't know how incremental we'll really do. We may just jump to Mitaka. But yeah, we definitely need to move beyond Juno. Have you had a lot of requests for customers who want to span multiple, I guess maybe your data centers, but connectivity among those data centers from an HA perspective and those kinds of things? We've definitely had requests for connecting... Most of the customers that come to us now want to be on OpenStack or in a virtualized environment, but they also want connection back to some physical piece, whether it be because they've got a, you know, load balancer with a lot of custom rules and stuff that they want to just move over and they want all traffic to be routed through there. We haven't really had any requests for HA across that. It's mostly like they'll have an isolated... They'll have an application running in the cloud and then maybe some stuff running in their office they want to keep connected. But nothing crossed the two, and at least not yet. I was curious what your process looks like for pulling in upstream patches, running in this production hybridized environment. Who signs off on that? So I guess from the... I guess we kind of treat them differently. The UI piece we control entirely ourselves. So any changes that, like if we see a bug in Horizon and we want to pull it in, I'll usually just find it, pull it in, and we'll push that out with our next release, have QA test it. And especially since we're running Kilo, we're a little bit ahead of where we are with the rest of the components. From the rest of the component side, we are getting, you know, packages from the vendor we're using for OpenStack. Assuming it's approved by them, we can usually bring it to them, get a service exception and have them sign off on it. But from our side, if it's something we think we need, we kind of just sign off on ourselves. We don't need a ton of approval outside of that. But we are using a supported version. It's not just pure open source. Anybody else? I guess you guys covered it all. Mike, Dave, thank you very, very much. Thank you.


Hi Tom, this is Ashley with Oxmore Toyota. I received a message through TrueCar Consumer Reports about your interest in a new 2016 forerunner. I have already sent over an email with a little bit more information about our dealership but I also want to send this quick video greeting that way you can see who you'll be working with. If you have any questions please feel free to give me a call. My number is<PHONE_NUMBER> or you can also email me back. Thanks, bye.