Wel, nifer ychydig. Yn ymwneud ym stref, roedd ymwneud Llywodraeth. O'r ffyrdd i ddwy'r ddysgrifennu, rwyf wedyn yn gwybod i'r cywmilydd. Rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r ffyrdd, felly, oherwydd rwy'n gwybod i'r cywmilydd sy'n ddysgrifennu. Mae'n rwy'n gwybod i'n gwybod i'r cywmilydd, felly rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r cywmilydd. Mae'n gwybod i'r ymddangos, ddim yn ddweud hynny. A mae'r scouts yn fawr ar Drupal Camp? Mae'r ddweud yw ddweud? Mae'r ddweud hynny'n ddweud? Yn ystod, mae'r ddweud yw ddweud yn ddweud. Mae'r ddweud yn ddweud yn y ddwylo'r ddweud o ddweud o'r ddweud. Felly, yn 95, rydyn ni'n ddweud, ac mae'n ystod y byddol. Felly, mae'n ddweud y byddol. Felly, mae'n ddweud y byddol, a'r ddweud y byddol, yn Drupal Camp. Felly, rydyn ni'n ddweud y byddol, mae'r tanfodd ysgrifennu, mae'r ddweud sy'n 95 i fynd i 5 ym 5 bydiau i Gael. Felly, mae'n ddweud y ffrifysgol, i fyny, mae'r ddweud. Mae'r ddweud y byddol yn y dyfodol, Ieith에ith yn y gyfwain, a mae eich yw ddylen dweud o'r iawn gymryd yn ymwætr yn ymdyn nhw. Yr hwn ychynig yn ymgyrch yn ymddangos, eu hwn yn yr ysgol, yn ateb mae'r ysgrif iawn yn y llwythau yn y llwyth wedi'i glynydd. On i, felly, mi'n gweithio'n gweithio a phobl iawn, ond ydw i'r ysgrif iawn i ddechrau i hwn o'r b iawn, hyd yna hi ddim yn fwy gyd yn dweud.so rwyf wedi gyrscul yng Nghymru yn g-10 mwy o'r Sgrifennu Swyaf. Fy godi gyd ddwy yw'r newydd, mwy o'r awr pta. Ond ynghylch, a'i gweithio ar gweithio'r perlu, ac yn ddigwyddio'r chael byn 12 mae'r gŷnach ynghylch a'r gwmwylo gynyddoedd i'r dweud sut hwnnw, nid yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y dyfnod. Mae'r rhai gyrscul Haenry rydw i ddweudiau'r hon i ddod. Yn ddoch chi'n gwnaeth wnaeth bod phres 마�n amgylcheddau. Mae'r llach wedi myfnwys ar bobl gweld iawn. Mae'r llach wedi myfnwys arweithiau. Mae'r cwestiyng ychydig iawn, mewn cymaint i'r ddechrau'r gwahol. Rwy'n cael ei gwneud, mae'n ddweud. Rwy'n meddwl wedi'ch gwirio ar hyn o'r perthyngu'r complaints argyfer. Rwy'n meddwl eu cyfrydd ymu. Mae hi'n gweithio ar gyfer ni'r cyfrifol arwn oed ac mae'n meddwl ar gyfer i'r cyfrifol i'r cyfrifol. iawn, byddwn ni'n gweld yn gweithio'n gyllid a'r rhaid i'w gweld yn y gaelio'r gweith yn y cwm, so dwi'n cael ei ffrwyddo fel yma. Felly, y cyfrifio yma'r gweithio'n gweithio'n ysgrifennu, yma'n gweithio, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio mewn gweithio iawn. It's not just one great big company enterprise, which is a very different challenge for me because I've always come from either large corporates, private equity back to organisations, or small and medium enterprises, or start-ups, and this was a new world for me. I assumed that it was one big charity, then I learned. Actually, the Scout Association is an association of charities, so every group of scouting is its own registered charity in its own right, so we have about 8,000 groups across the whole country, and that comprises about 440,000 young people every year that are actively engaging with scouting. To deliver that, we've got 130,000 adults that regularly contribute and give their time. Thank you. It's a digital adventure. This is the start of the journey. Again, that was my world when we started. Wow, brings back memories, unpleasant ones, but still the sound of the modem connecting will always be an important part of my life. Yay, here we go. So, Mr Bear Grylls, and if anybody saw TV last night, you'd have seen him presenting neckers to Anton Deck on Saturday Night Takeaway. So, again, you can start to see. I think one of the most important things that we've got is, actually, we are mixed youth. So, a lot of people, the most, two most common words when you talk to people about scouting, they go, boys camping. What most people don't realise is, girls have been part of the movement for 20 years and actually make up nearly 25, 30% of our entire total membership. And they're the fastest growing new joiners. So, we've got more girls joining on a weekly basis than we have them, boys. Right, wrong way. Scouting is awesome. I think that's one thing I've got to say. Even though I wasn't one, I'm starting to realise what I missed out on. So, a few facts. So, there's 150 million scouts from the UK since 1908. That's a huge number. And we do everything. And, again, I'll get the clicker work in the right way in a minute. And again, another person in the press at the minute, Tim Peake, was quoted saying that scouting was what started his journey. Had it not been for scouting, he may never have been the man in space of these now. He had just do the supporting of the scouting movement actually in order to generate the funds, generate the income, generate as much resources into scouting as we can. We publish magazines, we run activity centres and conference centres, we run an insurance broker. That's a new one for me. I didn't expect that. But actually we've got 8,000 groups that all have premises. They all have many buses. They all do activities. They all need insurance. And so, you know, it was decided that actually we should run an insurance broker to support scouting. But actually we support Girlguiding. We support other charities as well.  They're awesome. And we do have a retail e-commerce platform operation as well. Started off primarily to deal with uniform. Everyone needs shirts, ties, trousers, neckers, badges and things. But actually it started to branch out much more into other products, other product ranges. And there's some significant work going in and out at the moment to actually boost that. I didn't realise we used to also actually own 22 retail premises, which at some point in time we sold off to blacks and then became a pure click operation rather than a bricks and mortar. So this is our grand plan, our grand vision. By 2018, there'll be half a million young people enjoying scouting every week. And they'll come from every background, make their voices heard and bring positive change to their communities. And the strategy has four key pillars. We need to grow the movement. It needs to be shaped by our young members in partnership with adults. It needs to be reflective of the society and the communities in which we're a part of. And it's about making sustainable impact to the communities in which we're operating. So the challenge, when I first saw this, I thought, wow, scouting. It's this huge super tanker that's going to take ages to turn around. It was only trying to present to the board about the future of digital and how digital can be used to change an organisation. The penny dropped. We're not a super tanker, we're a flotilla. We've got 8,000 different boats, all slightly different shapes and sizes. Each with a slightly different captain, each with a slightly different level of experience. Each with a different challenge. For HQ, it's still operating like a lighthouse. Big flashing light, broadcast one way, stay away from the rocks. And that was about the single message that we could deliver. But the world's changing. The world's changing around us. Communication, hyperconnectivity, omnichannel, everything's personalised. Expectations are so elevated by people, particularly our key beneficiaries, our key members. They've grown up as digital natives. They've not known anything other. They're on their phone checking and asking when you said that, was that right on their phone? They're watching TV and tweeting about it to their friends. They're used to that as being part of their daily lives. So again, awesome. Scout flag at a Metallica concert. I didn't expect that. So what are we doing about it? So in November this year we've launched a new programme. So Scouting in Essence is almost a curriculum authority in a way. We write a programme of structure which most people will understand in terms of you doing activity, you get yourself a badge. So in a way we invented gamification back in 1908. We're starting to create new opportunities, new activities. So on a wet rainy day there's a company called Sam Labs who some people may know about. I found them on Kickstarter. They're a little internet of things company that are building little widgets. But they're purely focused on education and developing learning through play. Which is very aligned to some of the things that we're doing. So it's not about formal sit down and learn about coding. Here's some Lego bricks. Join them together. Oh and you can join them up on the computer and make them on and then you can dig in and tweak a bit of code and see what that does. So this was a session we ran with 25 Cubs and Beavers in Hartford. We weren't sure how it was going to go at all. It was amazing. They were absolutely totally engaged. We were so oversubscribed and they were saying when can we do it again? When can we do it again? We know we can't do everything on our own. So we had to forge new partnerships. So recently we signed a deal with Vodafone, the Vodafone Foundation. And this was all about supporting a new part of our new program. So these are the digital maker and digital citizen badges. Which are all about developing people to understand how to be good digital citizens to share that knowledge within their families to also be creative. So it's not just about coding. It's understanding design, experience and bringing those capabilities into what it is they're already doing. And we launched the digital manifesto. So again this is about the balance between screen turn versus offline time because again we know that's one of the challenges. And it's not about digital replacing campfires getting muddy and all the rest of it. It's about how we can augment that. And we've got some new audiences as well. So part of the foundation was, I don't know if people know who this gentleman is. Anybody? No, I didn't either. This is Alfie Daze. He is Mr YouTuber who as part of this promotion came along to winter camp, started taking selfies, put it out on his latest blog. I went to my 10 year old son and said, do you know who Alfie Daze is? He went, print this blog. I said, there's my son who's 10. He said, print this blog, isn't he? Yeah. I said, go and watch his latest one. He came to me and said, scouting is awesome. Can I join? And out of the blue.  Go and get muddy and play and climb trees and stuff. But now we're finding new ways of actually raising the profile, raising awareness of actually the things that we do. So we need a new approach. And again, this is not about digital replacing activities. It's about augmenting those activities. So the power of the GoPro to be able to capture your experience going down the zip wire and share it with your friends. You start to change the way that actually we broadcast what it is we're doing and the power and the sharing of those experiences to introduce people to actually, oh yeah, okay, I might have a go at that. So we've got four pillars to our digital strategy. At the moment, the first one is around simpler scouting. It's flipping hard work to run a Scout group. And again, like Alex was saying earlier on about, this weekend is all about volunteers. Scouting, adult volunteers give so much time, commitment, passion and energy to changing the lives of our young kids that we need to ease the burden of the administration, the process. We've got systems and processes and paperwork that were born out of operations that were designed before the digital age. Now we can think about things in a different way. And this is where in a way some of the benefit of me not coming from within scouting, I can look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. One thing we have huge power is we've got 130,000 people out there that have got a huge amount of expertise and knowledge and experience and wisdom. If we can connect that and harness that, we can really become a huge powerful organisation rather than lots of individual little entities. And actually that's one real major ambition for us is to make sure that we can harness that, capture that and then replay it and learn from that. One thing we haven't got a minute but we know we need is that much greater agility. And that's about again changing our working practices, changing our thinking, changing our behaviours. There's a great African proverb which is if you want to go fast go alone but if you want to go far you go together. Now we need a bit of both admittedly but right now it's the future we need to go together with and we need to engage our communities. There has been a bit of, shall I say, a discord that's happened over a few years between the headquarters function and the movement function. And I think there's probably some Scout Masters sectional leaders and other volunteers from scouting in the audience today that would probably resonate with that. And it's my job to help kind of break that down because actually this is all we are one. We may not have necessarily done that right in the past. And I think there's a few lessons here in humility about recognising and actually this harks back to someone else's talk yesterday in a way we need a fail cake. So what's this got to do with scouting? Now to be honest we've got, when I joined we probably had 50 or 60 independent separate little websites commissioned by different teams doing different things, doing one thing over here and another thing over there. You need usernames and passwords for all of them all over the place. Some did something really well, some things didn't do anything at all. So we had bits of Joomla, bits of WordPress, bits of Mbraco, bits of something that I don't want to look at anymore and everything in between. And my background is I've always been absolutely passionate about PHP. I love it. I'll frankly admit that partly because it was, I just found it was one of those languages I could just easily speak. So I was talking to someone else about this last night. PHP for me is like the way I can speak French. I really enjoy speaking French. It's expressive, it's lyrical. But then using something else like C felt a bit like German. I still enjoy speaking it but it's just a slightly different experience. So what I wanted to do and I always wanted to do was find that right PHP framework tool set for me and stumbled across Drupal a number of years ago and since then I've been passionate about the opportunity and the power that it can bring. And this has been some of my experiences of some of the other frameworks out there. I think we've all had similar challenges where it looks great on PHP when it actually comes down to it. So out of the box there's loads of cool stuff. That's brilliant for me. So you can just pick something up, play with it, prototype, get it out there and happy days.  And even though I have been a software developer and software salesman provider in the past, open source for me is the right place to be for where we're at as a charity. I'd love to be in the place where Clinton was yesterday. I don't have the resources or necessarily a private equity people behind me saying, right, that's your deadline. How much do you need to get it done? We need to harness the power of the community to deliver the things that we need to be able to do. It's still a leap of faith. Every single product technology tool you use is always going to have some challenge and you've got to put your money on something at some point. For me this is the least risk one. I'm still one toe over here in Node maybe. But we've got to be able to change. So the first thing is about, okay, we need to get some stable foundations first and foremost. So when I joined the association we had lots of different technologies, lots of different products. Our core headquarters network, as in the cabling, was flag packets, bits of string, sticky tape all over the place, lots of things needed just bedding in. So our focus has been on getting the core foundations right and starting to define some of the principles and the standards that we need to actually move us in the right direction. And then awesome, Drupal 8 was launched. I love that one. So this is the start of our journey. Again, I had these wonderful ambitions that come in and go, right, tear it all up, start it all again, just get on and within six months it will be all perfect. We'd know exactly where we're going, we'd know what we need to do. And I think there's a number of people in the room again that will probably hear the word compass and will understand some of my pain. So compass was a membership project. I won't go into too much detail but it wasn't going very well when I joined and we've only just got it out the door. So that's been a huge diversion of our limited resource. But we have managed to do some other things. So we have standardised upon Drupal as a platform for our web operations. So the launch of the new program materials, a Drupal platform and the next one, a million hands. Now this for me is really fascinating because some of you may be aware of a thing that used to be called Bobber Job where scouts would go around and clean a few cars, roast some money and you would either go to the scout heart or to a local charity. About 12 months ago we recognised actually the power of the movement is actually we have got half a million members, each have two hands and if you do the maths. If they can work together that's an awfully powerful force of good. So part of our youth shaped strategy was about actually what are the issues that if we could mobilise that resource, what would they want to resolve? So we went out to consult and speak to our young members and asked them the questions about if there were issues that you'd want to tackle or support and contribute to, what would they be? So they identified there were a couple of key areas so there was mental health was one issue, clean water was another, supporting people with disabilities in the community was another. We identified six national charity partners and created a long term arrangement with those so that actually every group section member could have collective action on a particular set of topics and liais with the local part of that national charity so that actually they could all contribute towards effecting social change but actually as part of Scouting programme. And to date it's actually gone up but we've had almost 50% of our movement already have pledged to commit to doing these actions and activities and the Drupal platform was used to build this has just absolutely delivered what we need. It was built, handed over, it's operated by the business, I don't have to touch it. Better prepared, again this was another, we're great at having great ideas and then it's oh god we've only got three weeks to do it, what can you do? So again thanks to Alex and Rob on this one and we had a very very limited time to deliver something that provided not only a donation and a fundraising platform but in essence it was all about giving it out in time for the Duchess of Cambridge when she was doing her big visit. Where we fell down was the fact that she was wearing this eye scout hoodie and we didn't have it on the e-commerce site available the next day even though it hit the daily mail. So we still have some lessons to learn in terms of being joined up. And the next massive thing for us is actually we have a number of different, they're called sections for the different age ranges within Scouting. So you've got beavers which is, people will tell me and correct me here because I'm bound to get it wrong. Between six and eight is the beavers and you've got eight till ten and a half which is Cubs. Ten and a half to fourteen is explorers and then from eighteen to twenty-five we now have what's called the Scout Network. Now the network has existed in the past but actually there's a huge opportunity with network members because that's a moment in time when quite often they're diverting moving into going off to university or starting work and quite often that's a point where people drop out of the movement. But actually this is our pipeline of new leaders and we need to focus on A retaining them but also engaging them and allowing them to continue engaging with Scouting even though they may not necessarily be in the same geographic location where they did the rest of their Scouting. So the vision for the network was to create a platform that allowed them to coordinate activities, projects, wherever they were. So at the moment it's within a Scouting district so it's like a subdivision of a county but it would allow you to maintain your home network but if you went to Edinburgh to study at university that you could participate in projects and activities in the network in Edinburgh but there would still be a way of linking and connecting back. And I think one of the really exciting things about network is we're actually starting to go out with proper virtual badges. So we're working with the Mozilla Foundation to actually promote the top awards and start putting our virtual badges that people can then embed on their LinkedIn profiles or their Twitter feeds or whatever. But there'll be authorised official Scouting badges but there'll also be some geeky little ones. This is going to launch in beta in a few weeks time.  So it's really exciting, challenging as ever, everything seems to have a little hiccup along the way but those are the things that we're learning as we're going along. So what next? We've got to start to operate much more as a platform from a headquarters function. We no longer should be thinking about we have to build everything, we have to do everything. Traditional approaches particularly the compass project was right no we know we need to do all these processes so right the best thing for us to do is build SAP for Scouting. And in essence that's kind of what we tried to do with this compass project. Do you know what? It's not surprising it worked because by the time we delivered it actually it was way outside of what was actually needed. It never really understood actually what the customers needed so it's no surprise that we haven't really reaped the benefits of it. So part of that will be about what are the things that we need to provide as a service to our sections and our groups and our members because are there things that we should be building or are there things that community can build for us. And so part of that leads into how we think about the data that we hold and we maintain and how we catalyse and support innovation from occurring outside. If we think that we are the only innovators in the movement at HQ then again we are sorely mistaken that we do not have the diversity, the scale, the experience, the knowledge. I'm not saying HQ doesn't have experience and skill but nothing compared to the fact that we've got half a million kids, 130,000 adults out there, all with brilliant ideas, all of them that know exactly the problem that needs to be solved. So it's about how can we catalyse the movement into doing these things because again that's the power of Scouting. The Scouting that happens out in every Tuesday night is not an HQ thing and we're a small charity. We don't have the resources. We're never going to build a 20 man engineering team. Why would we try? So we need to work with partners. We need to use partners and support partners in different ways and that's not always managed service or tight contracts or it's more about how can we do some value exchange. So the Vodafone partnership is a key one for us because yes they've given us some money just to promote and give them a bit of PR but actually one of the big components of that is to allow them to become volunteers within Scouting. So it's more to use their corporate volunteering program to actually contribute to delivering Scouting in its own right. So it doesn't have to be about an exchange of money and it needs to be led and shaped by young people in partnership with adults. So this was an awesome session up in Doncaster on the beginning of February. So we had about 350, 14 to 25 year olds in an activity centre for a weekend and we covered all sorts of workshops around how can young people lead and be an active part of the committees, the boards of their own independent charities. How can they take the effective action? What learning or what skills development do they need? But myself and my colleague over there, we ran a series of workshops for this age range to come in and just talk about what are the problems they experience and is there any way any form of digital could help solve some of those challenges? I'll tell you what, I was blown away, absolutely blown away by the creativity, the ideas, the focus, the approach to solving these problems and as a result of that we've got 60 people signed up to actually get on and do something. So rather than taking it from the next step of the white boarding and the post it notes, how do we actually get in a room and start to build these things? What do we need and how can we as an HQ support that or who can we bring in and connect into doing that? So some of the things we are looking at doing now, moving forward, if you've seen the website I don't need to tell you why we're looking at it again. It works, but from the member resources point of view we've got probably 20 or 30,000 pieces of information that's supposed to support scouting and factually it does if you know where to look and if you know how it all hangs together. We are awesome at building documents, brilliant. If I see another PDF I will probably rip my hair out. So we've got to look at our information architecture as a whole and so some of the work we're starting on now is actually how do we really understand what the value of the information is and how does it deliver that value back out to the scouts on the Tuesday night. How do we make it easy for a section leader to know that when he's already out on a hike you can look at that mountain over there and go we can go up that, I know we can go up that because I know I've got the right permit, be I know what territory it is and they don't have to go and consult. I tried to follow the user journey to answer that question. I went through 15 fact sheets, 37 pages and I had no idea and I thought I knew what was going on. The last one is really interesting for me. Out of the sessions we had at U-Shape we had 60-odd people signing up to be digital ambassadors that would be champions locally that could start to get in and do some stuff. But what's also come out is actually we want to be able to create and almost become a developer network in our own right. So one thing we're talking about and looking at doing is how can we start to use the model and the pattern of the open source community within scouting. It's a perfect alignment again for our community impact objectives, this crowd sourcing, cross collaboration, breaking down the boundaries between groups, people, it's not about what role or hierarchy you have, it's what you contribute and how you give back. And it's absolutely so exciting at the moment because we've got two global tech partners, basically both chucking resource expertise at us to say how can we help catalyse these hackathons, these developer networks, how can we help you deliver the power that you want to do these kind of things and start to bring that actual innovation into the flow and then feed it back out to the network. So what do I need you to do? Keep developing, keep creating, keep the momentum in Drupal because it is awesome. It is awesome, I love it. I think there's an opportunity to engage and use the Drupal community and contribute to the Drupal community through scouting and hopefully back again. But also volunteer? I had to put it in there really. Or get your kids to scouting, do something because it is awesome, it does change lives and I do wish in a way that I'd been a scout but it's too late now, I just have to go in and volunteer instead. So on that note, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for inviting me. And that's it. On the questions, remember if you've got a question, if you could do a hashtag DCL note, that would be really good. We just want to get your audio on the microphone for questions if you don't want to run around with a microphone so just hashtag DCL note and Alex will ask the questions. Are you ready? Are you prepared? Always. Okay, the first one is from Atts River Me. Can the Scouts support Drupal in Drupal's community building efforts, e.g. to help bring new people into the Drupal fold? I don't see why not. If it helps contribute to what the Scouts are trying to do through either the digital maker or the digital citizen badge or possibly through the community impact badge, because you can use Drupal to do all sorts of things and it doesn't have to be purely about the technology, it could be a means to an end, so it could be about building a platform or a service using Drupal actually to deliver on a community transformation or a social piece of action. Absolutely, how can we bring the two together? That's my question as much to you as it is to me. Let's learn, let's keep talking, let's incrementally try things and if they work brilliant and if they don't, so what, we've learned something. One from Gary Pigott. How do you overcome the problem of recruiting Drupal devs, which is a common question for anyone working with Drupal? For me, it's not a problem that I have directly, that's the problem that my partners have and so part of again coming to places like this is meeting people, meeting agencies because I'm not likely to recruit internally, Drupal technology or skills are capability, because again that's not the purpose of what HQ should be doing. We should be working with partners finding new ways actually, sorry, that's your problem, not mine. We've got one from JP Stacey, which is the same Drupal site for EG donations and shop often impacts on UX or both, so does Scouts A still need a zoo of sites and if so, is that still a maintenance issue? How do you keep up with security updates across all of them? With difficulty and I think harking back to the fact that we're at the start of the journey rather than at the end of the journey, what we've had to do is actually go from massive complexity across multiple technology stacks in multiple sites to actually at least one technology stack whilst it may be in different locations, we need to make sure that actually we're starting to incrementally improve and standardise upon what it is we're doing. So at the moment we're still on Drupal 7, we haven't gone into Drupal 8 yet but we're maintaining as much as we can a common baseline across the sites. Now we have learned some lessons around security in the past, again I'll come back to compass in a bit, but again we have partners that work with us on that to make sure that actually we're always testing, checking and supporting to make sure that where we know there may be risks, we're applying the right level of controls and we're bringing in the right expertise to mitigate that. It's never going to be perfect, let's be honest, but it's the approach we're taking at the moment. That's all the questions from unless anyone's tweeting at the moment. Hi, so as an international business and obviously a big national business in the UK wanting to have sustainable local community projects, how do you support small businesses to help you deliver the services you need to offer? With difficulty at the moment, to be honest, and I think that's part of the challenge is actually how do we work better to support the independent local group, maximise their connections locally, so whether that's us brokering national partnerships and then feeding that down or providing expertise, resources, support to understand how they can develop and forge those own relationships themselves. It is always going to be a challenge at an organisational level for how you can make those links. In some ways we've got it right and in other places we haven't at all, so the community impact piece is really interesting because at the national level it's brilliant and there are pockets where the local partnerships are working really well, but it's not equal across the board and part of that is cultural in different locations or personalities of different leaders or lots of myriad of different challenges and it's a continuous improvement game. Two more questions. One from Rachel is, would you consider issuing virtual badges at any place of physical badges issued? In a way, yes in the long term, now there is some commercial challenges around and other cultural challenges around that because there is something nice still about having badges on your sleeve and it does vary by age range and really again for me this is about understanding what the customer wants and asking the questions of the customer and focusing on that need because the network members, the majority of the feedback was we don't want stitched badges anymore, we want virtual ones that's the way it's going to go but there was still a strong cohort, quite a small one but they were like no, I've always had badges, I still need them. So I think we've got to be able to satisfy both and again whilst we may be trying to go digital first we won't ever go digital only because for a start there isn't Wi-Fi in most places that we do scouting so there's an inherent barrier in the first place. We've got the last two, this is the last team now, from Kieran, with so many different sites and a small team or budget, how do you work on serving structure? What changed, where did you start? So, again we had pockets all over the place of different platforms, different hosting arrangements and the rest of it so again for me this is about trying to standardise and reduce our footprint so again the management overhead of different suppliers, different platforms, different technology stacks starts to come together and we do struggle with internal resource so again most of the burden is put back onto our support partners so when we have sites commissioned and I think this is the big thing for me is as a moot or as an association or as an HQ function we've been great at product again like PDS we can build them and chuck them out there but we forget actually this is a world of service when you put something up there it's in operation and you need a service and support model and an ongoing operation to keep it live or to decommission it and we've not been very good at that and again that's part of the structure and the process we're going through now is understanding that this is a service world rather than a product world. And the final one which I'll probably answer is what donation widget did you use on the better prepared site? Alex. We didn't, the donation company didn't have an API and they wouldn't supply us anything so we'd do it as an iframe which is not, we weren't happy about that were we? No, none of us were but again I think that was part of the challenge of existing arrangements in place, short time scales and anyone who's tried to do any form of financial transaction management you know the banks can take a little while to get things working so yeah, needs must, did the job, was it pretty? No but then again everything is all the time. That's it, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks Alex, that was really good. Thanks everyone, have a fantastic morning, enjoy the talks, sprint to the boffs if you're engaged with those and see you back here at 1pm for the closing ceremony, thank you very much.


The main artist collective is a non-profit organization that has a mission to support artists through classes and professional workshops and to also support through studio space and in space where artists can display their work. Constellation Gallery started a little over four years ago. About a year ago we formed the main artist collective and that organization took over operations of Constellation Gallery about six months ago so that was in July of 2012. At some point David was proposing to change to a collective instead of he being the owner of the gallery. So we formed a team. It exploded in growth. I think we have now about 40 members and several of us have a studio space. This is my space. We have nine different studios in the gallery right now. They're all sort of open format and artists will pay fees on a monthly basis in order to be able to access those studio spaces. A collective is generally a group of artists that have sort of a common mission to work on something together. In this case our mission is an educational mission and also to really connect a main artist to the public. I like the idea of collective ownership just because when you can get a group of artists together a lot of ideas are exchanged and then you get a really interesting product out of that. So I can say personally my own art is grown from my relationships and experience and just being surrounded by the work of other artists. Well besides having a space or the opportunity to have art in downtown Portland it's stimulating to be surrounded with people that have the same mindset instead of sitting in your own little cellar or whatever your studio is and it's a stimulus. On a monthly basis we do a call for art and we have a new show lined up and artists that are members can submit images to be considered for those shows. We have the possibility to have a permanent exhibition and you can do whatever you want. You can change it, you can join the main gallery with rotating exhibitions every month. There's another scene. Artists that would like to join the main artist collective just need to fill out a simple membership application and then we have a $50 annual fee and that fee can be reduced for people under certain income levels and that annual fee allows artists to submit images for our upcoming shows and also we have a website and each artist gets a page on the website in order to upload images. Artists who are members can propose class ideas so that way we can have classes in here and bring in other members or members of the public who are interested in participating in those classes. Some artists will come in and do things like focus on cleaning and other artists work on doing promotions. Some artists will work on website building so all those different parts of the gallery were able to pull together in support with volunteer hours. So far the vast majority of hours I'd say 95% of the hours that have gone into the gallery have been volunteer. Really to have a sense of ownership for each person who's participating because at the end of the day your work is benefiting the group and a lot of artists really enjoy that philosophy. We're in the process right now of setting up our annual schedule for events that we want to have. One is going to be an international event where we try to bring together people who have come to Portland and Maine more recently and were born in countries around the world and also solicited artwork from people who live in other countries. Also we're planning on having another annual art show for Southern Maine Community College. Last year we partnered with SMCC in order to do their senior art exhibition. The Maine Artists Collective has actually been attracting a lot of artists from around the world. We have artists in here who originally from the Netherlands or Iraq or Russia or Germany and that's been a really exciting thing for us because we've got a lot of new ideas coming together. Our website is mainartist.org and people can check us out there and we're located at 511 Congress Street in Portland, Maine. I think Portland is a little bit the hub of the northeast if it comes to art. Of course I've seen all the places but in this region it's amazing how much art there is. When you come around downtown Portland you see life on the streets. The artists are out there selling their art on the streets during the summer and also creating work outside. It's really brought a lot of life to our arts district. It's part of the society art in many ways and it can be performing, it can be visual arts or whatever. It's basic for life and so the more art the better. Portland is often cited as being the top in various categories and I think the cultural aspect of the city is one of the big shining stars.


Hello everyone, I'm Thierry Lorian from Encergo Open Technologies. The presentation of today is actually called for collaboration, but showing you where the status is of ads and where we need some help, actually. Encergo Privacy Bees was a product released and certified by Cubes OS in July 2019. Trying to resolve the problem of being able to distribute Cubes OS pre-installed without reducing the security of the device. The reason why ads is used is because there is two different security that is added directly in the firmware. It gives us the possibility of knowing the state of the firmware by measuring the different parts. I will go through that later on. We use a generated key that is on a secure device and we put the public key inside of the firmware which permits us to verify boot, like the binaries inside of slash boot, which is not encrypted, it is actually verified upon each boot. The reason why the X230 is actually interesting is because we can actually neuter and tell me. Neutering in the activation is like a word that is really mixed up in the world right now because nurturing means that all the parts are supposed to be removed, which is not possible anymore. The status of Sendee Bridge and Ivy Bridge is that you can actually remove all the other modules, but the bring up modules. The parts that are necessary to actually start the main CPUs are still there, which is a result of 98 kilobytes of code that we still don't know what they do, but it's still there. So binary-bub, free. Edds is actually a payload of core boot, and what I did is actually implement a reownership process inside of Edds that permits us to, as an OEM, to actually certify, attest the state of the firmware and the boot status and actually ship a QR code to the customer the USB security key with the laptop so that the user receives it and be able to verify by having already the picture taken that the firmware validation measures are there. And the security key is actually plugged on the laptop. It's a LibreM key developed technology, so basically the laptop communicates with the keys and validates that the measurements are still there by flashing green or red if it's not okay. So basically the process involves reowning all those components when the user receives it so that the OEM is not... there's no trace of the OEM work after the reownership wizard. So for those of you who don't know what Edds is, this is a quick description that I've already come to. Basically the goal of Edds is not to be perfect, it's to actually add more security inside of the firmware like I said earlier by measuring it. So it's not verified boot, it's measured boot. And the goal of it is it was based on a core boot, another version and patch were made to be able to actually modify the RIME stage to be dependent on a TPM library that measures the modules prior of launching them. It permits remote attestation. Remote attestation is a mixed word there, mixed in the sense that you verify the state on your phone with the QR code that you already scanned. So you have a TOTP, a code of six numbers that is regenerated every 30 seconds. And if the codes on your phone and on the laptop are the same, then you know that it was not modified. Libram key, like I said earlier, used the same measurement from the TPM but validates it on the USB key. So if it flashed green, you know it's good. If it flashed red, it means that it was tampered with. The verified boot integrity, the part that the key actually is used, the USB key is used to sign every change boot configuration. So when Edds boots, what it does is generate a digest of all the files that are present and it is signed with your private key inside of your USB key. So when it boots, Edds just checks that the hash is signed by your public key that is inside of the ROM. So if something changed, you will be notified because you're the only one having the private key that matched the public key that is inside of the ROM. Voila for that. This is what Edds does, basically. It takes like measurements in all of those PCRs and those PCRs are used to validate the integrity. So why I implemented an ownership re-ownership? Because we want to have the firmware boot integrity validated. We want the USB security dongle that is shipped to the user to be temporarily owned by the OEM and re-owned by the user upon reception. And the USB key should be provisioned with secrets that are not the default ones. For example, if you buy a liberal key or a natural key, the user pin would be 123456 and the admin would be 12345678. So if for some example, the device, the laptop and the USB key are sent separately, but for some reason someone is able to get the end on the key and the laptop, there is a possibility of being able to modify the boot integrity, for example, and being able to use the key with the admin pin and re-sign the measurements. And there would be no security. So if we are able to provision those with random secrets, even though someone in the path would be able to get those two, they won't be able to measure and verify. So all of those are covered already by the re-ownership. That gives something like that when you boot the laptop at first. What you see here is that the time is supposed to be the same. You see the TOTP code that you can validate on your phone, which is supposed to be the same. The TOTP code there is the result of the key being connected directly in the USB port. And the boot integrity is validated because the public signature that is inside of the ROM validated that the boot content was the same. So if you get those three right, you can continue the re-ownership. You know that the laptop was not modified in terms of... On that level, okay, if you have, like, know as it's pre-installed, how can you verify that it was not tempered with? The simplest solution that was done is actually we create a NoEM image that we clone on each of the laptop. The problem doing that is that the lux encryption key would be the same on all the laptops. We don't want that because I could lend that key to any authority and it would be a massive problem. So we want the initial lux encryption key to be unique. We want the encryption password to be also different. And the last point is the integrity of the operating system needs to be validated. We don't have the last one for the moment. There is work being done on that. I will cover it later on. Mainly, Ed lacks LVM provisioning tools right now so that we have a possibility if we deploy a NoEM image to be able to decrypt the lux container and measure the LVM so that we know that they have the same integrity as when it was shipped with. That's not done right now. It needs a bit more space inside of the ROM and work is being done on that right now. So the result when the user receives the laptop and types the lux encryption key, which is the same that unlocks the SD card content, which is encrypted and which would be used to store the secrets of provisioning, it unlocks the two containers and actually re-encrypt the content of both disks. So the SD card, which is used to store the provision secret at the re-ownership, is also encrypted. And the R drive is being re-encrypted right now. So what you see here is the result of 35, 40 minutes later, all the computer data is being completely re-encrypted. So even if I was able to lend the keys to authorities, those keys don't exist anymore. They were changed completely. So here the slides are being uploaded. If you click on those two links, you have what it would be for NoEM to actually re-own the laptop. And it's the same process that is being used for the user when he receives it. Basically, having one passphrase to type and after that, I won't go through that, but the menu is actually asking you, are you generating like diceware passphrase of different lengths depending on the security needed for all the device generated for you and you will renew them until one flashes your head. I come from the psychology background and the most basic problem for everyone is selecting good passphrase and good passwords. So if you have something that actually flabberglass your mind and you find it funny, you will remember it. And if you try to remember 8, 8, 0, they're kind of security people. So good passphrase are the basic of everything. So the re-ownership takes that into matter and proposes you like randomly words until some picks your mind. So who doesn't know what Qubes OS is? Okay. We decided to ship. Actually, it was an inverse problem. The problem was on what computer we can use Qubes OS securely. And the situation was resolved because Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, there is a debate on that. But Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are the only last X86 platform that are able to be freed. There is no binary responsible for the hardware initialization, reminiscing initialization, graphic initialization. All of those that are normally initialized by Blobs are native on that platform thanks to core boot effort and reversing. So on what hardware you can actually run Qubes OS securely, the X230 was one of the clear answers. So what I decided to do was to actually release a laptop having Qubes OS pre-installed. So what is Qubes OS? Qubes OS is an operating system based on virtualization that permits you to separate in secluded environment what is untrusted on your computer. So basically you would have like the network that is isolated in a virtual machine. All that is USB would be isolated in the machine. And each of your virtual machine that you pop up have routing vulnerabilities possible between the machine. But the rest of it is not connected. The rest of it doesn't have access to files that you or vulnerabilities exposed by a rubber ducky USB key would put on your computer that you don't trust.  Qubes OS is also really interesting because all attachment that you would open from emails or whatever if you used Thunderbird, if you double click on the attachment it will open up in a disposable VM. A disposable VM is something that will just self-destruct after you saw the content. If you click on a PDF or an XLS document, Word document or whatever you may compromise your virtual machine that you're using but once it's done once you click that you finish the application exam the hypervisor will destroy your virtual machine and there won't be any trace of it. If you don't trust PDF for example you can also just click, right click on it and say convert it and that's it. It's done in a bitmap form of document that you can use to share or whatever.  It won't have networking if you don't want to so you can have a vault that will contain all your passwords and everything. You're actually responsible to define the environments the way that you need them to be. It always comes with a couple of them but that's irrelevant to the stock. The goal of it is to have a good hardware on which you can run a secure operating system. So as of right now there is not a lot of models that are supported under EDS because of security consideration and because EDS is a contributor based project but under development right now because I decided to go the path of grant to be able to support more hardware being able to support remote management inside of Qubes OS because Qubes OS is super nice but most of you if you don't know the operating system you would be challenged by the idea of okay but would I receive help would I be able to deal with that if I come into a problem or whatever. So I receive a grant under NLNet to name accessible security. The goal of it is to we have secure solution but how can we make them accessible to the users that needs it. My main focus is actually journalists, freedom defenders and those kind of people. So in my trainings when I was asked okay but on what hardware do I implement those super solutions that you say and there was no clear answer because if you don't have a trustable hardware a trustable phone or a trustable something then everything can be hacked from the simple vulnerability. So under grant right now is the is this right now TriumDev here under it's supposed to we will know like in the next day but there should not have any problem. There's going to be a talk later on today about FWU UPD. The goal of it is to be able to have like simple firmware upgrades like we install any updates in our operating system. The problem with CubesOS like I said super quickly is that CubesOS is not meant to have network access by default. So if you have a part of your system which is the hypervisor that has access to your hardware it's not supposed to have access to the internet. So having updates for device under domain zero on the hypervisor requires some modifications so that the communication is made to download the updates and make them available. So the goal of that is to have those updates available inside of ed so that the next time you reboot your laptop ed is also updatable. Like I introduced also having remote administration because the people that are the most at risk let's say journalists or anyone being in remote countries and needing help right now they are kind of left alone. The goal of the CubesOS 1x partnership is to be able to have tor-ed-in onion accessible remote administration so that when you need it you can ask for support and copy paste a link with a login and password and being able to have your admin VM or DOM zero being accessible to receive help remotely.  Same thing for our drive contents and everything. And the main problem that we have here because we try to go international is that there are so many keyboards that exist but ed support only US keyboards so that's a challenge for going international. So the help that we need right now inside of ed is a better reproducibility because ed's motto is being able to produce the same exact image wherever you build it across different OS build systems and everything. We need help of that if here there's people working in continuous integration environment and are able to give a bit of help that would be amazing. This needs a bit more involvement and the main cue that I it's not really related to firmware development right now but we need an alternative to x86 so that we don't have blobs in our hardware. It's really a concept that should be addressed by firmware developers and voila. And the goal of all of this because I'm doing this since six months right now is that every time that we ship a laptop systems and everything so what we need right now is like reprogrammers around the world and are ready to do exactly the same part of job that I'm doing but in different countries so that laptops don't go across borders that are made locally and people that are interested in joining the adventure of making hardware more secure. Here for firmware developers there is PowerPC needed work inside of Corboot so if you are willing to join the adventure of porting Corboot to PowerPC it would be amazing. Those are tasks that I need to do right now because one of the most problems that arrive like in my situation is a client saying okay but I lost my USB key and when you lose your USB security key that is made like to sign the configuration and everything it means that you have to buy another one and re-own the key generate new keys and everything because the keys are inside of the USB device so it's not copy copyable. So the solution around that would be to use ads to generate those key pairs save them inside of a lux encrypted key which I already resolve. It's just like coding stuff that I will resolve in the next couple of weeks. Voila So Ansergo is now incorporated like I said we need reprogrammers. There is direct sourcing that is available to partners around the world that want to join the adventure. Training is provider. My background is security trainer so I would be more than willing like to jump in the adventure and make this go like a brother and this is what I want like to promote is that I've been in this adventure like for a couple of months right now. I did a lot of attempts and funding efforts. This is nice. This is working but it's complicated because of the admin management that is there. So when Ansergo just created this Ansergo initiative at Open Collective and every time that a laptop will be bought from us or any partners that is linked to us 25% of the net profit will be donated inside of Open Collective. Open Collective is what is used by Qubes OS and others. It's actually just an open book saying what comes in and where it goes out. So the goal of this would be to actually be able to pay for development outside of those funds so that if there is an issue that you can actually deal with you can say okay it will take like 30 hours to resolve this. It will need like $5,000 and we can come with like an arrangement of what that needs to be done and when it's going to be paid. That's how funding works. You have to provide work, prove of work and the release on each test that are completed. Voila. Thank you. Yes. I have two quick questions. Once again. When you mentioned PowerPC it's really interesting how I myself was the first one to actually import a Blackbird, Dallas 2 Blackbird in Europe last year. So the problem is that it's not something that Power9 in general will not be mass used. It's price, it's availability distribution but the effort is meaningful. So I just would like to hear how do you think you can enable if someone wants to help you to give him hardware to work with that. That's a challenge. So really quick how can we make like involvement like to make the work. Raptor engineering for PowerPC. The question was how can we make PowerPC development like work if hardware is not available? That's it? Yeah. Basically Raptor engineering is willing to provide hardware for all the developers that would work on that. The contract would be like a code needs to be released and be put upstream to compensate for the hardware enablement that they call. The second one is that the hardware is known to work to receive, respect your freedom certification three months ago. I think two months ago. So basically it's the first platform that respects your freedom since Libreboot mini free X200 200. So basically the hardware is performant. They have a plan of releasing a laptop really soon. So the question is how can we manage to have all the stack available so that both arrive at the same time? I understand your reflex of okay but we need needs, but the need will arise. So the question right now and if you click on the link there, there's a bounty for Cubes OS. And if people here are Xen developers, the bounty is really interesting if you can actually propose code to have Xen support or KVM or... The two blackboards for the same reason to use them as a remote station to verify other machines. So when you make your code for collaboration, I actually would like to say awesome because I'm trying to... Contact me. I'm doing a developer friendly trusted computing platform. I just want to say that tomorrow we'll do a birthday feather station. It's for anyone interesting, especially in remote station of different networks and platforms. And it will be in age 3242 and 230. Give me an email. I'm just saying, because your code for collaboration really makes sense to me. Thank you. Yes.  The question is what are the challenges to develop a core boot version for power PC? Right now the work is done by NineElement on their grant. The basic problem is just to have V-boot plus measured boot. That's kind of the new standard inside of core boot. The problem was that the support was not made properly for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. So it needs to be upstream first inside of core boot and after that we will be able to make the merge. But it's supposed to happen in the next month or month and a half. They are working on it right now. In that design, what happens when you need to upgrade the kernel? You need to re-own the... The question is what happens when you upgrade the operating system? What happens actually when you sign your boot configuration you're actually selecting a default boot configuration. What it means is that your grub, Xen, kernel and NITRD will be measured. The digest takes that into consideration. So when you upgrade all of those would change at the same time. So as actually pops up and ask you like if you are the origin of those change. If you are, you sign. If you don't you inspect. One question or no? No? One short. Who is short? Short? Not yet. The question was is there any interception story that happened? Not yet. No. Not that I know. With all the measurements that are there we put glitter under with nail polish under the main screw. We send a picture of that glitter to the customer, the QR code. So to be able to travel here would be better placed than me to answer like what are exactly the use case that would be needed to actually be able to compromise the firmware of the measurements being done like inside that would match the QR code, match the challenge version inside of your USB key and everything. I don't come up with a way but there's possibly a way and if you're a 3 billion targeted user I'm sorry for you.


to connecting Hawaii business on Think Tech Hawaii. My name is Kathleen Lee, owner of Kathleen Lee Consulting and I am your host for this program. Think Tech Hawaii is currently live streamed on ThinkTechHawaii.com, as well as on Think Tech Hawaii's Facebook and YouTube channel. And for viewers out there who are watching us live, you may email us questions during the show at questions at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Today I am excited to introduce the owner of Star Gazers of Hawaii, which is our show title. So we have Nick Bradley, astronomer slash owner of Star Gazers of Hawaii. Nick, welcome to the show. Hi Kathleen, thanks for having me. Of course. So tell our viewers about yourself. Yeah, I'm born and raised in Honolulu and went to high school at Mid-Pac and University of Hawaii. My degree is in electrical engineering, but I've been, strongly has been a hobby of mine for about 25 years. It's really fun. And after college, I worked in construction for about 10 years as a project manager and estimator. And after a while, that kind of got tiring. So we decided to try and make the hobby into a business and it's been about three years now and we're just having so much fun. I love that. So you mentioned that it did start out as a hobby. How did that hobby even come about? Like what picked your interest when it comes to astronomy and the study of constellations and stars and planets and everything outside of, you know, our little world or Earth, I guess. Yeah, I just started as curiosity. And I want to know what's out there. Started with a little book on constellations, just go outside, match up the stars to the constellations. I had a little pair of binoculars, look up, look around the sky, seeing what these little dots in the sky are and I just had to find out more. So I finally went to the Bishop Museum Planetarium, found out there's a local astronomy club called the Hawaiian Astronomical Society. Went to one of their public events out at Dillingham Airfield where everybody brings out their big telescopes. You look through it, you see amazing things and from then I've just been hooked. It's like, what's out there? I want to see galaxies, I want to see comets, anything crazy, I'm up for it. That's amazing. And you started out as a big, that entire roster of experiences that you just mentioned, that started at a young age, is that correct? Yeah, about middle school and that's when I just started to get interested in science. Luckily, I had a very fun teacher in middle school, really pushed science and I just got hooked and it was just so fascinating to me and it's just been still learning about it and it's just been fun since then. Okay, so let's talk about Star Gazers of Hawaii then, which is your business. So let's pull up the logo. Nick, tell us about Star Gazers of Hawaii. How did you even come up with a name? Kind of obvious, but walk us through the process. Yes, yeah. It's kind of off on a whim and I was kind of thinking when I was working in construction, I've had some other friends and coworkers tell me, it's like, man, you should do this as a business and I was quite hesitant until we had an event at Royal Hawaiian Center for the Blood Moon and my friend who hired me, he needed a second telescope to help out with the events. Unfortunately, he got sick, so I had to go to his place, grab his telescope, find somebody to help me and our picture of the Blood Moon got featured on the news and it was so fun that I registered my own business and haven't looked back. So what we love to do is, of course, share the universe with our guests. We do public and private Star Gazing shows with our large telescopes. We have two so far, one seven-foot telescope and another eight-foot telescope and we just look at amazing things in the sky, the moon, the planets, star clusters, galaxies, nebulas and we just tell a lot of stories, answer a lot of questions. You find that so many people are interested in space, it's so exciting to hear people tell me their stories back and we just have fun sharing the night sky with everyone. I love that. Let's pull up that photo of the Blood Moon which you mentioned earlier before the show was in November. So to recap, I know this was all over the news, what is a Blood Moon and how did you capture that photo? Yeah, so the last Blood Moon, this is also known as a lunar eclipse. So the last one was in November and the moon turns red because as the moon goes into Earth's shadow, it starts to get dark and what's happening is the lights, the sunlight goes through Earth's atmosphere and gets projected onto the moon. So they say if you're on the moon looking back at the Earth, you're gonna see a red ring around the Earth. That's all the sunrises and all the sunsets happening on Earth at the same time. So Kathleen, when you go to the moon, you let me know how that looks. I feel like between the both of us, you maybe have a better chance as far as going to the moon goes. You did mention rings though. So let's pull up that fifth photo of Saturn. Was that taken? Well, how was that photo taken? Yeah, so similar like the Blood Moon, it was taken just putting the phone next to the eyepiece of the telescope. Saturn was a little different. This is the best picture I've ever taken and Saturn is the most amazing thing to see in the night sky through a telescope hands down. I've had customers cry from the first time looking at Saturn. It never gets old and this picture in particular, I took before I started a business and it took me about half an hour just to get this one decent photo. I haven't had a better picture since but it was zoomed in at 400 magnification and I took about two dozen photos, only one came out and I'm very happy that I came out. I think that that is so awesome. Like I don't have a photo of Saturn so it's great that you are able to show that to myself and whoever else is watching the show. Let's pull up the first photo. This was at Yokohama Bay. What's going on there? It's very pretty, but there seems to be a lot of, there's a lot going on, right? First class is pretty sky but tell us more about what we're looking at. Yeah, this is kind of a signature photo of mine. This is the Milky Way. The sky doesn't look blue. It's kind of Photoshop for artistic reasons but that's me in the foreground with our giant telescope. I had a friend photographer that wanted to do a photo shoot with the Jeep and the silhouette of the Jeep with the Milky Way and we were out at Yokohama Bay a couple of years ago. Sky cleared up for us and that picture just came amazing. So we actually had to stand there for 30 seconds as the camera took the exposure but man, it's, I just love that one. It just, it looks so nice. Can you see that type of sky from anywhere on Oahu or do you have to be in specific spots to be able to capture that amazing of an image? Yeah, so name of the game, if you want a lot of stars is to get out of the city away from the lights. Waikiki of course has a lot of light pollution. So we went to Yokohama Bay. I've also been to North Shore, Kahuku and each place, there's no one best place just get out of the city. So it's dark but also make sure you're safe too. You don't wanna go to any unsafe places by yourself. Make sure you have somebody with you and it's gonna be dark. So make sure you actually have some light so you're safe. But this is what you see in the summer. So the Milky Way is visible in the summertime. The thickest part of it because we're looking into the center of the galaxy. The winter section of the Milky Way is a dimmer section just because we're looking out of the galaxy. So we see less stars. But if you wanna see the full brunt of the Milky Way in the summer, it's a great date night idea. It's great that you brought that up because I remember you had mentioned that when we were talking before the show, like a week or two ago. Are there certain seasons that are best to see certain things in the sky? Yes, so each season actually has its own highlights. Summer, of course, you get the bright Milky Way. Winter, you see a lot of bright stars like Orion. Serious, the brightest star in the sky. A lot of star clusters. And the spring and fall, you actually see a lot of galaxies. And coming up in the spring, you see hundreds and hundreds of galaxies. But for that, you need to really get out into the dark sky. The other things to look out for are the planets. The planets have their own motion. They're not the same timing every single year. Stars are fixed, so they don't change throughout the year. But the planets move from not really season to season, but depending on their orbit. So this morning, if you look in the morning about 5 a.m., you're gonna see Venus, Saturn and Mars all in the morning sky. And if you watch it day by day, the planets actually shift against the background stars and move away from each other. And Saturn comes back in the early evening sky, starting from September through December is the next great window for that. So look out for that. We're hoping to have events looking at Saturn for the public. That is good to know. So to recap, you're back to basics refresher. Planets move, stars don't. Did I get that right? Correct because the constellations are out all year. Yes, so the planets means wanderer in Greek. So they wander throughout the sky. So that's exactly what they do. And also one thing I forgot to mention is the moon. The moon also moves around. So of course we all know one month is one moon phase cycle. They actually used to call one month, one moon just because it revolves our 30 day month revolves around a 29 and a half day moon phase cycle. So that's why we only have one full moon. If you have per month, if you see two full moons in a month, we call it once in a blue moon. Okay, so go back to that Nick. So the description of a blue moon is a full moon that happens the second time in a month? Yes, so usually it happens on months with 31 days. I believe the last one was in Halloween. So they had a full moon on October 1st and another full moon on the 31st. And so that second one is called the blue moon. There's another definition. You can also have four full moons in one three month period. And that's another definition for a blue moon. So you might see that in articles as well. So it has nothing to do with the color. Kind of like how blood moon has that reddish hue. Blue moon is just... Yeah, just the name. Just kind of a name that fits and it's poetic. So it's stuck. Got it. And when it comes to weather, are people still able to see clearly in the night sky even when it rains? Of course not, obviously. So weather is the most difficult thing for us to predict and to kind of work around. So we try to avoid areas like Kaniwa and Kalua just because it has heavy cloud cover and it's unpredictable. But if anybody is in those areas, we'll still try. But you just gotta be aware that you may have to cancel just because of weather. Other parts of the island have less clouds like leeward side. So it's always usually a good place to observe. So yeah, we always check the weather forecasts, make sure where we have good weather for our events. Okay, well, Nick, we are going to go on a break, but when we return, we'll delve into more questions on the business side and how you are making a business and then thriving in it when it comes to stargazing. So we'll be right back to connecting Hawaii business on Think Tech Hawaii. Our guest for today is Nick Bradley, astronomer owner of Stargazers of Hawaii. Nick, I mentioned that I did have a favorite photo from the ones that you sent over. So if we could pull up that T-Rex one. I really just like it. So tell us about that. Like what is the, tell us the context of this photo. Yeah, I had a family event with just before Halloween and they wanted a photo in their Halloween costumes. So they put on their T-Rex photo and of course we gotta aim it at the moon to make it a little more fun. And yeah, that's basically, we actually had one more costume, someone had a bear costume on the side that we didn't make it into this one. But yeah, that was a fun one. Darn it, that's okay. We'll find that bear photo somewhere. And then you did mention that you hold private and public events. What is, or what have you discovered is the typical demographic for your business? Yeah, it kind of runs the gamut. We have locals, we have tourists, all ages. This is a universal thing that we do. Looking up in the sky, everyone does it. Everyone's curious, what's up there? I get so many questions. Hey, what's the star in the sky? Where's the moon? And so it's for anybody and it's so ingrained in us that we all know what the stars are. And everything like us. And I'm sorry, what was your other question? We'll get there. Actually, let's do it right now. What are some challenges that you have encountered so far in running a business that involves stargazing, that involves a particular time of the day, which is nighttime? And second part to that is how did or has COVID-19 affected your business? Yeah, so basically we do, we only can work at night, of course, so our best shows are women right after sunset.  And the hardest part is just getting the word out that we do this service. A lot of people think Oahu has a lot of light pollution and you can't do any stargazing shows, have a lot of stargazing shows on the Maui and the Big Island, the other islands. But if you know what you're doing, Oahu is also a great place. You don't need a super dark sky to see just the moon and the planets. You can see the moon and the planets in the middle of New York City, if you know where to look. And so basically I've never ever had a business until this, so my challenges were, just how do I run the business? What do I do? How do I get my name out without spending a lot of money? So I did a lot of networking and did some events just before the pandemic. Had some, or at some malls gaining some momentum, and then the world changed. And we kind of just had to sit tight and basically just keep the business alive and survive. And while I'm still trying to network, I plant a lot of seeds with a lot of hotels, venues, and just to get our name out. And since everything's starting to open up, now everybody's ready to do things, everybody's ready to get outside and we're starting to get very busy. I love that. I'm looking forward to going to one of your events. So I'll ask that after I ask this question. What are some interesting experiences that you've encountered during your events, public and private? Yeah, I would say one of the most memorable things that happened during one of our private events is we had somebody propose to their girlfriend and the person approached me about it and so we had some code words to time it right when she was looking through the telescope. The guy knelt down while she was looking. I had a camera ready and with the flashlight on and when she turned around, he proposed right when the sky was clear and full of stars. So that's been one of my most memorable experiences with the public. Great timing and coordination between you and your client. That's awesome. I had another question. Okay, got it. Completely forgot about it because I was mesmerized by your story because I was thinking about the logistics that came with it. Walk us through the process of your events and especially with COVID-19 precautions even though we've kind of been a bit more lenient when it comes to certain mandates. How does that affect your business? Yeah, so we're always about safety. I come from a construction background so safety is heavy on me too. So during the pandemic, we made sure everything's wiped down, sanitizer, masks, everything. As soon as the vaccine came out, I got it. And basically just because I deal with a lot of people and some of our bigger events, it can have about 200 people come out when we do the big free public events at some of the malls. Private shows, we can be a little more careful, keep it to a small group, no more than 10 or 20 or whatever the current guidelines allow. And so safety was our number one point then. So what can one expect when they go to the event? Like let's say you have something over as you mentioned at Royal Hawaiian or international marketplace. How would I go about partaking in the wonders of the telescopes? Yeah, so for our Royal Hawaiian events, we're gonna be there at once a month, looking at the moon until the planets come back in the fall. So Saturn comes back in the fall again and we'll switch from looking at the moon at Saturn. And those are free open to the public. Currently we're on the fourth floor of building A and you just show up. Usually we have a long line and you stand in line as everybody goes through looking at the telescope. And if we have the moon, we're looking at the moon, bring your phone because we'll take a photo with your phone of the moon, basically somebody after they look through the telescope, they hand me their phone and I'll take a picture of the moon for them, something to take home. Some of our more private events like international marketplace, we have tickets on sale where at the international marketplace twice a week, the second and fourth Wednesday for the rest of the year and those are more toward the private type of events as we only allow about 20 people and we do a full tour of the skies work, give you a guided tour of the stars and the constellations, tell more stories and with the telescope we'll look at many objects besides just the moon. So we'll also look at star clusters, galaxies and guess.com can also ask me more questions and we'll get into more detail compared to our larger groups that we only can ask me one or two questions and we have to move on to the next person. All right, Nick, did we cover all the upcoming events or were there more that I would like to get a couple more? There's a couple of more blood moons happening this month, May 15th in Hawaii, it's already gonna be more than halfway through the event but as it rises on the east side of the island it's gonna be still be red and covered. The big one I'm looking forward to is in November where the moon is gonna be red for an hour and a half but you have to be able to stay up late. We're talking midnight to two a.m. A couple, if a lot of people like meteor showers, two best meteor showers each year, August 11th for the Perseids and December 13th for the Gemini's and those are known for fireballs that have about 100 meteors per hour. Basically you don't need a telescope, just look up and there it is. That's a picture from the Gemini meteor shower a couple of years ago, pitch black in Kailua, Kahuku, saw 200 meteors from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. and I was able to catch one with a camera. That sounds so epic and I hope to catch some of those at some point during the year. What are some lessons learned that you can share with our viewers when it comes to running your business? Yeah, just be, gotta love what you do and that's what I've kind of found out. It's been a roller coaster for sure during the pandemic.  So we just kind of have to reset and one thing I love about the look at me in the universe, it really puts things in perspective and you just kind of reset and you know what, eventually this is gonna be passed but work hard and if you love what you do, if you believe in your product, it's gonna work out eventually. Thanks, Nick. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Yeah, we have some great upcoming events. So we'll be at the International Marketplace every second and fourth Wednesday for about the year. Our next event at the Royal Hawaiian Center is this coming Monday looking at the moon and we'll also be a couple who shopping center on the 15th and I've heard they're gonna bring out an Easter Bunny at the same time too. That's awesome. And we've already pulled it up. That was your website. So how can people contact you? Yeah, they can contact me either way through the website. I can call me, Instagram, all goes to my phone. We'll set up an event, talk about it depending on what you wanna do, big groups, small groups, birthday parties, boy scouts, girl scouts, anything under the night sky we can make an event under and contact me, we'll talk about it and we'll make sure it's a fun night for your group. Thank you, Nick. And the one thing that you had mentioned to me because I had proposed it to you before was can we get a telescope on a boat? And you said, well, not the best idea. I wish I could, but unfortunately the boat rocks. Thank you for being on the show today. Really appreciate you sharing your knowledge. If people need or would like more info they can visit stargazers.hawaii.com. Thank you again, Nick, for coming on the show and thank you to Jay Fidel and the entire staff at Think Tech Hawaii for making programs like this possible. We had Michael and Haley who helped us out today on the show. So until next time, aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.