Alright, okay. Hello, everyone. I apologize. I cannot see you all very well because the lights are absolutely blinding. So, I'm going to do my best. This is the tag meeting. There are individuals here that are not part of the to see and not part of the tag. That's fine. We welcome you. If you find the content of this interesting and fascinating. Excellent. We're happy to have you. Hopefully you'll be contributing to our tags in no time if you're not already. If you find this. Yes. Oh, technical advisory group. Apologies. If you find this topic boring, you are welcome to depart if you would like or listen or just enjoy our pleasant company. We're all wonderful friendly people. But we're happy to have you so. Real quick. So, in the past, the to see has had these to see tag meetings at cube cons. I think we've had 2 of them previously maybe 3 and we spent a lot of time talking about the problems that exist within the tag contributor. So, we've had a lot of time talking about the ecosystem from a perspective of making sure that we have new tag members coming in challenges between tags that they may be experiencing. And I wanted to do something different based off of feedback that we've gotten. We wanted to be more decisive and more outcome oriented with this meeting. What I did was thank you Lynn and Nikita and Karina and several others that I spent the time and energy front loading a lot of the work and pulling content together that way we can try to get through these things and move forward with the next generation of what tags are. So, we're going to do a quick review of the survey results that were run. We're going to have a brief comment from Rianne who spent a lot of time going through all of the technical advisory group charters to compare and contrast the differences between them. And then there was a request at the last TOC tag meeting in March, which is still this month around, sorry, around what the expectations of the TOC are for tags.  And then we have some decisions and some groups that need to be formed as a result of this, both off of the survey results as well as off of some of the TOC decisions. Because ultimately what I don't want to have happen is I don't want the TOC to dictate outright what each of our tags should be doing. You all are the experts and the domain extensions of the technical oversight committee and we need to be doing a better job of leveraging you as such and therefore it's important that your voices are heard and your equal shepherds in your own future. So, let's get started. So real quick about the survey results. We put out a call to action to provide us with insights and some information around your experiences either a tag chair or a tag lead or contributed within that group. We know that it was a short turn around time so that's probably the largest contributing factor for the low amount of responses, but I do want to provide a reminder to everybody that your involvement and providing these feedback to these discussions and not only just making us aware of the problems, but coming up with recommendations and solutions that might work or are based in potentially some other groups work like Kubernetes we've seen a lot of input from the Kubernetes community that has been impacting to see processes and we need that feedback we need your active participation and I know that this is yet another thing that you all are doing, and we really appreciate it but if we want to fix and make changes to improve the tags and the tag experience. We definitely need that feedback and that active participation which will be important for the working groups that we'll talk about later today. There was a lot of feedback also that the purposes of the tags is not exactly clear it's different depending on which tag you're in and what the current leadership team of that tag is. In some cases we have tags that are very vibrant and robust they have a mountain of work that they can come through and not enough people to do it. In other cases the tags are a little bit, they need a little bit more direction setting they need better clarity from their TOZ liaisons on what it is that they should be working on within the scope of their charter. So we're hopefully going to fix that today. There was a clear need that there are opportunities to work across tags but we don't have the leaders to step forward and facilitate a lot of that work it's coming out of the existing leadership of the tags, which is becoming increased, increasingly as we have more and more demands on our time and less and less opportunities to actually provide that level of impact. So there's opportunities for improvement there. There is a noticeable call out that there lacks a leadership ladder within the technical advisory groups and more specifically within the technical leadership portion of CNCF outside of projects themselves. I know tag contributor strategy has had several discussions on adopting a contributor ladder for their specific tag. And I think that is exemplary and something that we should all start looking to do, including the TOC of identifying what is that path to leadership look like within cloud native. There was several comments around misalignment and misincentives for projects and this is something we've talked about in the past. Cloud native projects don't see an incentive and going to talk to a technical advisory group. That's kind of the basis of what that is. And because of that missed incentive and that misalignment. They're not seeing projects that come to the tags come back after they've had that presentation and they've gotten some form of feedback. They're not contributing that institutional knowledge that they've developed through that participation, as well as within their own project back to the tag to help improve that experience for the next project behind them. So we have some work that needs to happen there. And the chair and leadership expectations of being within a technical advisory group are not explicit they're not very clear and in some cases as a result of that they're not being filled appropriately. We have contributors that show up and they might ask questions they don't get responses and they'll disappear, or we'll have individuals that will attend a tag meeting but they're missing the leadership to facilitate that meeting or there is an agenda set. So people show up they don't see a lot of activity and they'll disappear and they don't come back so we have a lot of holes within the existing process that we need to start figuring out how we can close those gaps to be able to move forward. Are there any questions about the survey results that I have talked about so far. We got a mic. I can, I can wander around. Okay. Yes. Josh hold on. I'm coming. I'm coming. Speaking of low numbers of results. I don't remember seeing the survey when was it sent out. It was sent out. Two weeks ago, we posted it on the tag chairs channel and slack and to see channel. And then, and the mailing list so we tried to hit all of the communication mediums that we usually talk to you all but I know that it was a lot of traffic in the past two weeks so it was probably missed. I mean, there are recommendations for better communication mediums with tag leadership. Let us know. I believe I also just heard that not everyone knows about the tag chairs channel over in in slack as well. And that, and that is an excellent step that we can take. So, like, well this is very uplifting. Yes. So there is a public tag chairs mantle channel in CNCF slack. I would like if you're not already in it, please join it if you're not a tag chair also please join it because that's one mechanism that the to uses to communicate and mass to the tags. It's easier if we have one to see member that's facilitating some project or activity that needs to happen, instead of having every liaison reach out individually to the to the tags but that's something that we can potentially codify within the to see but a set expectations better. And again it's a public like, please come in and come hang out and be useful. Yes, yes. I am by no means a member of any tag or to see but in a different open source project and also within our, my company. We have a slack box that automatically invites people based on a membership in other systems. So if you're a GitHub member somewhere or a mailing list member somewhere. It'll pull you in into the other channels where you might belong. That could probably help here as well. Yeah, we can look at that. Yeah. So, like, I'll put in the notes. It's okay. Thank you. So I wanted to mention, as we're thinking through all of this that this isn't just a problem with the tags, it's problem with projects, because people show up to a project and are, you know, advocating for the one feature that they want and then they disappear. And same with the tags, they'll come. A project will come and present or, you know, talk through something and then they disappear. So just overall ecosystem as. Yep. Talking through it. Thank you. That's a good call out. There's actually a lot of parallels to some of the stuff that we're going to talk about here from the survey results and like recommended actions the next steps that we see with projects too. So I'm hoping that if we can figure it out for us or get closer to figuring it out, maybe there's some opportunities to replicate that within the projects themselves. So think about that in the back of your head as we're talking about these things. Okay. Rianne, I'm going to have you talk a little bit about the review of the tag charters. If you don't mind. Thank you. Alright, can you hear me? Good. For those that don't know me, I'm Rianne Kleinons. I'm the program manager for CNCF specifically for tags. In a previous lifetime, I've been a systems auditor. And the easiest thing is to find fault with other people's work. So the point here is not to find fault with other people who work. So what I did is I went through all the tag charters and read me over the last few months. I compared what's in there. And does it make sense. Actually, we're going to have in the next session next door, we're going to have a talk about making people welcome in your project. And at the moment, if you've many of the tags and I'm going to point to nobody. If you go to the read me, it's a historical document of when the tag was created. It was in sync. Some of us out of sync. Some have the leadership in the charter in the tag, read me and some other place and not one of those documents actually matching up. So you've got lots of leaders listed and lots of places that's changed over time. So the purpose of the review was to see how can we help to make it easier and make it clearer for everybody. So what we came up with is a matrix documents so I cannot share all of these on the tag chair group that you can have a look and you can comment. So we had a matrix of what is in all the different documents and we came up with kind of a recipe. I'm not done with the what exactly it should look like, but the recipe for your charter and a recipe for what should you read become have in it. So your charter should only have things that never change. This is the things that we're going to do and not going to do. This is what we stand for the read me is this is what we do in general. Look at our charter. This is the meeting the leadership of the type of projects he supports are basically like a proper read me that is properly maintained and then we're going to remove duplicate information. We did not settled on exactly where it lives charters is most likely going to be deleted in your local directory and goes to the to see director because they actually have to approve it leadership. We're still deciding where but hyperlinking as much as possible. Some projects that name the or some tags name the projects and they have five or six listed from three years ago and they have like 20 now. So also landscape is actually now developed that you can hyperlink to specific tags so you can actually say here is our projects hyperlink landscape you actually go to the landscaping only see your projects on the landscape so making things. It's going to be a little bit of work in the beginning to just clean it up, but afterwards you're going to have to change your leadership in one place never change your your projects and basically everything should be streamlined and easily maintainable according to a template. Any questions. Thank you. So we're going to be introducing more consistency across the charters and we're going to improving the experience of newcomers to the tags by introducing more consistency within the read me is on setting expectations because that's the first place that they'll go to is probably the tag repo and they'll read through. Kind of what the tag is what it's doing when it's meeting or the people that they can talk to that are key figures within that. So that's the first portion of the advisory group. So hopefully this will help things, but it's by no means done we still have a lot of work before us. So at the last to see tag public meeting there was a request from Alex and several others thank you for having the to see actually come up with some decisions on what we expect tags to do and we've spent a lot of time both looking through the recommendations for charter alignment as well as our own experiences either contributing to a tag leading a tag or partnering with the existing tag leaders as to see liaisons on what it is that the tags are doing. And we've kind of come up with a few areas so I'm going to go through them one by one. This is traditionally what the TOC thinks about when we send projects to tags to do a presentation except what we have found and what we've heard is that it's more of the tag the project doing a presentation to the tag instead of a dialogue and exchange and providing feedback to the project specific to that domain area. We do know that there are some tags that are actively doing this they are participants in that presentation. They're asking questions. Wondering like why did you make this design decision over this one that's against a best practice for instance we know that those occur but it's not consistent across all of them. So one of the things that we would like to do is to formalize domain technical reviews by the technical advisory groups, so that the tag can fully explore the project in the context of cloud native as well as the domain that they're covering. It's to evaluate the technical merits of the project itself the design parent principles associated with it, and its inheritance is to best practices that have either been set forth by that tag or by the TOC, or just by industry proper. Part of this means we need to define what an expectation of performing a domain technical review actually looks like from a tag, and it's going to be slightly different for every tag depending on the domain area that they have. So we've already identified a few items that fall underneath of this to get started so when we talk about forming a working group around this concept to introduce consistency. We have some material to get started so thank you Nikita for putting that together I really appreciate your assistance in that. The next one is criteria and criteria related to reviews. I understand that we did not do a good job providing an update to everybody that we have changed the incubating and graduation criteria and when I say change I mean we clarified a lot of things that were undocumented expectations of projects. We also incorporated significant feedback and recommendations from the moving levels task force. So if you haven't been to the TOC repo to see what those changes are. I highly encourage you to do it the repo looks slightly different things have been moved around, and we've gotten rid of a lot of old content. So criteria reviews are intended to cover the domain specific criteria for moving levels. If you look at the current or the, the new incubating and graduation level criteria there's sections now, one of them covers governance for instance. The intent of these criteria reviews is to cover that particular area of the criteria and that review can augment the material and the content that the project is expected to provide the TOC with the next step is criteria criteria related reviews. These are not things that are explicitly defined as criteria for moving levels for projects. These are things that are related. They're around the edges of it. Security reviews are not a requirement of a project to graduate. However, a security audit is, but a security review like a joint review from tax security or a self evaluation. Those are things that can exist. Can assist in augmenting the content for the due diligence document. This is intended both to ensure that projects have better. Better feedback loops to tags, but also to ensure that tags are a part of the due diligence process.


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As a child on Gehenna, I remember the stories of the White Maidens, terrifying ghosts that would come in the night and steal away the witch-born and their children who had done terrible wrongs. It was said they could find the wicked no matter how deep in the hive they sank or to what forgotten spire they climbed. As I grew, I came to believe that such things were no mere superstition. But now that I am an officer in the Great Crusade, bloodied upon the battlefields of a score of worlds, I have come to find my childhood fears were true and quite valid. The memoirs of Lieutenant Colonel Godrun Keax retired, 227th Gehenna The Emperor of Mankind has many servants. Many are known well to us, some to only a few. In his eternal wisdom he kept and yet keeps those most precious of his subjects shrouded and hidden from the sight of the heaving masses of humanity. For their work is of such dread import that to know of their purpose would be enough to damn the possessors of such terrible knowledge. Better to leave these beings in the shadows, for by their very existence they challenge all the Imperial citizen knows and believes about the foundation of their reality. Know then that this is a record of the militant wing of the Divisio Astra Telepathica, the maidens of the Null, the Sisters of Silence. So much of what the Sisters are and were, and from whom or what they were formed, is either lost to us or sealed by highest Imperial writ. Special exemption from the Imperial household by way of the Lord Regent has allowed this humble chronicler access to what remains, but I shall warn the examiners of this record that concrete information, scant as it is in this dark age, is a challenging prospect to find with regards to the Sisters. Nonetheless, herein is contained what remains. The Silent Sisterhood is a paramilitary force, nominally under the sphere of the Astra Telepathica, but functionally operating very much under its own remit. What is notable about the organization is that, unlike other clandestine or atypical Imperial military formations that operated a diverse spectrum of operatives and warriors, the Sisterhood is comprised entirely of women and women who are all, without exception, untouchables. These individuals possess an incredibly rare genetic trait that renders them psychic blanks that exude no immaterial presence. All humans possess some degree of presence within the warp, that realm of pure energy that exists alongside or underneath or behind our own reality. To use an ill-fitting analogy, most of the species would appear to the entities of warp space as tiny, insignificant lights. A human psycher capable of mentally accessing the tides of the material, to wield it in this material plane as eldritch power, is a flame burning brighter and more intensely the more powerful they are. An untouchable simply does not exist in this fashion. They cast no shadow in the warp. The more melodramatic chroniclers who have recorded this effect call them humans without a soul. However one chooses to see it. This has the curious and ill-understood effect of making them walking anathemas to psychic beings, whether they be human or xenos, and ever more so to the predatory warp beings from the material. This condition, simply by the very presence of one such as the sisters, severs the psychers connection to their warp-borne powers, but it goes beyond it. Beings in the company or the vicinity of untouchables have been recorded to feel deep sensations of unease or revulsion. The effect appears to be unconscious, with some who recounted the experience, describing the untouchable as being somehow unnatural. In psychers, this goes beyond disquiet and has been known to extend from causing full existential terror to extreme physical pain. The presence of the psychic null gene in humanity is itself a bizarre mystery, as despite the term, no single genome of it has ever been isolated. During the earliest years of unity and the Great Crusade, numerous teams of Mechanic and Biologist adepts and members of the Imperial Archaeotechnologist Corps attempted to extract and exploit the effect, but were met with abject failure at best and disaster at worst, all of which to such an extent that the Emperor himself mandated a ban on all further investigation into human untouchables, save of course for his own work. Speculation was discouraged. Hypotheses range from ancient Xenos tampering to arcane experiments conducted in the Dark Age of Technology, but nothing concrete has ever emerged. Human psychic untouchables simply are. A crucial value to the Imperium lies in their utter immunity to psychic powers. Their minds cannot be undermined, corrupted, or changed. They cannot be puppeted, nor be shown horrific or tempting visions. Nor can their bodies be possessed. As maidens chosen specifically for the strength of this gift curse, taught to hone it, and equipped with an array of the finest anti-psych weaponry the Imperium can devise, the Sisters of Silence are the most perfect hunters of the arcane humanity has ever developed. Their very presence utterly anathema to the witch, and a lethal toxin to the demon. Their every skill razor focused to the destruction of both. The origins of the Sisters cannot be rendered as a date with any degree of accuracy. Debate indeed exists as to their presence during the Unification Wars. Certainly, untouchables were employed by the Emperor during this period, as it would appear, lone assassins and operatives. The enemies arrayed against the would-be Master of Mankind were diverse, and many abused sorceress warp powers in their desperate attempts to quash the Lord of Lightning. These were themselves put down by the Emperor and his thunder warriors through sheer brute force, but often at a shockingly high cost of life and material resources. Prior to the launch of the Great Crusade, the Emperor ordered the formation of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, an organization that would act as the communication lines of the Imperium. With no technological means of communication available to humanity, all such secrets having perished with the downfall of the species at the end of the dark age of technology, mankind now relied upon astropaths, psychic individuals whose minds are deliberately sculpted to be able to send and receive messages across the vast interstellar gulfs that would soon separate the planets of the growing Imperium. But while communication was indeed the paramount concern of the organization, there was simply one segment in a larger group responsible for the management of all human psychic resources, the Divisio Astra Telepathica. In order to provide the manpower required to outfit each and every crusade expeditionary fleet, Mechanicum Basilicon Astra Armada, Rogue Trader Militant Convoy, or even simple bulk hauler flotillas, the system of administration to rival the Adeptus Administratum itself was required, with hundreds of thousands of functionaries and techno magi developing specialized facilities, codes of conduct, logistic accords, and even academic faculties. All of this was meant towards the correlation, development, and utilization of the greatest concentration of psychanalore humanity had ever amassed, and all of it under the most rigorous of secrecy. That the human psychic existed was not unknown to the species, and while the Imperial Truth, that secular philosophy by which the Emperor had founded his regime, denied all existence of the supernatural, psychers blurred the lines between what was comprehensible science and ill-understood arcaneity, to such a degree that extreme measures were required to sequester them from the general population. Key to this Divisio's initial work was the means that would become known colloquially for such a dread process as the Great Tithe. Every human psycher upon Terra itself, outwards into the great dark of the Sol system and outwards beyond that, were now under the direct purview of the Divisio Astra Telepathica. They commanded the full scope of all mutants of this variety in the species, and quite literally none, save the Emperor himself, could assay their harvest. No matter the consequences of one's birth, no matter the circumstances of one's birth, be it nobility or peasantry, vast wealth or direst poverty, and one's psychic abilities manifested, you were beholden to the Divisio. To this end, the Astra Telepathica formed the League of Black Ships, so named for their unmarked ebon hulls, to carry out the footwork of the Tithe, harvesting psychers from all worlds within the Imperium's borders, and transporting them to Divisio facilities for processing, training, or internment, depending on their abilities. As a task, it represented one of extreme danger, given the quarry in question and their uncanny natures. Because of this, the League formed Hunter Seeker Cottress to serve aboard its fleets. These teams were formed of trained Divisio soldiery with attached psychers fresh from the Scholastica Saicanna, where newly minted battle psychers were developing. They proved, at least initially, successful. However, as with all military formations in humanity's great endeavor, the challenges they faced only became more numerous and more dangerous as the sphere of Imperial expansion pushed ever outwards. Psychological breakdowns were becoming too common and too regular to be ignored by the Telepathica's new Divisio Investigatis, not to mention the attrition rates in combat losses. The role was too specialized to be entrusted to the soldiery of the Imperial Auxilia, the enemy often too powerful or insidious besides. It is unknown whether Astartes were considered, marked with legions like the 15th and 5th displaying marked talents in Saicanna and the 14th and 7th in its suppression, but was quite likely sidelined when the Divisio was forced to consider the idea of an Astartes whose mind could be usurped by an alpha level psychic threat. A new solution was needed, and as the War Council debated the matter at the highest of levels, a tragedy was set to unfold on the world of Pentecanes. Pentecanes was a poor but relatively stable hive world, only several weeks coreward from Terra, offering the Imperium a stable fleet anchor and mustering point for outward expansion. The world's population, barely at an industrial level of development, was nonetheless billion strong and proved an ideal recruiting ground for Exertus Imperialis regiments. The petty kingdoms of its past had been put down under Imperial rule, and a stable world government of the new regime was looking forward to building the planet up to a prosperous frontier outpost. However, the tides imposed by the Imperium began to take a toll on the population, whose best and brightest were scooped up by the Exertus Imperialis in their tens of thousands. Society began to fester, with corruption and vice creeping into the slums of the world. Despite the best efforts of the local iterators in promulgating the Imperial truth, a cult calling itself the final banquet, led by a holy family purporting to work miracles, began violently spreading to the worst of the planet's hive sinks. Word reached the governor, who informed the black ships immediately. The Imperial truth, brooking no tolerance for religiosity in any form, and the rumors of troublesome phenomena were doubtlessly signs of rogue and lightly dangerous psychers at work. A similar pattern had played out across too many worlds encountered by the great crusade for this to be misguided itinerant preachers. The signs pointed towards a rampant and degraded form of sorcery, redolent of the Age of Strife, which simply was no longer tolerated by the Imperium. The Divisio Investigatis of the Astra Telepathica dispatched a troop cadre to put down the banquet, but within hours of landing in the slums, all contact was lost, and the hive was erupting in unspeakable bloodshed. It appeared for all the worlds to be a plague, but one of the mind, not the body. Citizenry were killing each other with want and abandon. The emergency deployment of Imperial Auxilia regiments to cordon off affected areas did nothing to stem the tide, merely adding to the conflagration as these soldiers too succumbed to the madness and turned their weapons upon their comrades and civilians alike. The governor himself was shot by his bodyguards as he attempted to murder his own children. Imperial Authority Planetside broke down within a matter of hours, leaving the captain of the orbiting Black Ship, Gaigan Dantes, nominally in command. Land strikes and orbital bombardments, however targeted, would ultimately be ineffective. The Ligioni as Astartes were petitioned, but the closest force belonging to the aggressive Sixth Legion was days away, and even then, Dantes had no assurance that they would have the ability to weather the madness spreading across the planet. It was then that the Black Ships realized that there was one force retaining total combat effectiveness, despite the storm of insanity around them. The 5th 913 indentured irregular infantry, designated so for being from the Thirteenth World brought into compliance by the Ninth Expeditionary Fleet, were a primarily female force from a feral world that possessed some technological aptitude. Records from its time prior to Pentecanes show a number of nebulously defined disciplinary complaint issues raised against it from other regiments barracked alongside. However, as the plague spread, the 913ers were not simply weathering it, they were actively fighting back, seemingly immune to the psychic storm itself. Dantes drew the only conclusion available, based on his astro telepathica training. The regiment, known to themselves as the Daughters of the Crow, were comprised, in large part, of psychic blanks. Making contact, the Divisio Investigates provided orbital and aerial support for the regiment as it began to push into the slum identified earlier in the battle as the lightly placed that the family was residing in. There, the 913ers battled the Cabal itself, a Gestalt hive mind of alpha level psychers, putting the creatures to sword and flame. With the source of the corruption cut off, the plague evaporated, freeing the population and affected auxilia regiments from its grip, but leaving millions dead. Anarchy continued to reign, with the arriving Sixth Legion task force bringing the planet ultimately back into compliance, albeit with an even higher death toll. By this time, however, the black ships had long departed, and the Daughters of the Crow had gone with them. This account is generally accepted as the origin of the Sisters of Silence as we know them. It is certain that within years of the stated date of Pentecanes' fall, roughly four decades since the Crusade left Terra, the first of the Silent Sisters were seen fighting alongside Imperial forces, or scouring worlds for their psychic crop at the behest of the Divisio Astra Telepathica. There were some chroniclers who doubt the veracity of the story of Pentecanes. The tale, to many, seems too perfect an explanation. The presence of a huge amount of bearers of what was an incredibly rare human genome on a world beset by an extreme psychic threat does indeed stretch credulity when the odds are considered. These self-same theorists are wont to whisper that Pentecanes was in fact a contrived affair, a dark experiment to test the efficacy of a new, specialized formation of untouchables. It is worth noting that verifiable fragments do, however, match the account. Pentecanes is indeed a hive world in close proximity to Terra, but remains to the present day a haunted place, ravaged by some ancient capitalism, with the population well below what is expected of a world its size. Additionally, the Silent Sisters do bear distinct hallmarks of descent from a techno-barbarian culture, much like the one from whence the daughters of the Crow were drawn. And on that note, there exists in the cartographic imperialis, nor anywhere else, no record of Planet 913. The 9th expedition brought a 12th and 14th world into compliance, but of 13th, no record is excellent. It is, it must be said, not uncommon for the most covert or esoteric imperial organizations of this time, especially those to whom the emperor vested special attention in order to combat Psycana, to have deliberately occluded origins, lest any knowledge of the role the arcane played within the early Imperium make its way to the general population. The order Illucidatum and the Ordo Sinister, both of whose roles complemented the Silent Sisterhood, albeit on vastly different ends of the destructive spectrum, are similarly excised from histories of the time. One suspects the hand of the master of mankind, or at the very least members of the imperial household, in this affair, pruning the threads of the past in order to ensure that there were none for inquisitive minds to pull too strongly on. Yet others insist that the Silent Sisters have always been with the emperor since the very first days of the Imperium, even as he yet strove to unify Terra. As one discussed earlier, it is confirmable that nulls did indeed exist under the raptor and lightning banners of unity, but what little is known of their role paints them, as I said, as assassins or covert agents deployed by the emperor or his vizier, Malkador. Certainly, clade colexus of the officio assassinorum made and yet makes exclusive use of untouchable agents, so that it is possible that such blanks as fault during this time were simply the proto-agents of that now long-established foundation, and their necessary occlusion has led to wild speculation that the emperor has always had the silent sisterhood at his side, waiting perhaps for a critical mass of female untouchables to be properly formed and deployed. Should this indeed be the case, the great crusade was fundamentally necessary for their origin, as Terra itself, despite its heaving population, simply could not provide the quantity of untouchables necessary. Whatever their deliberately murky origin, it is verifiable from numerous accounts that the Sisters of Silence were present abroad in the Imperium at least four decades after the crusade's departure from Terra, somewhere in the late 830s of M-30. They were immediately to become synonymous with the Divisio investigates of the astro-telepathica, to the extent that they completely aggregated all of the functioning paramilitary roles from the original hunter-seeker cadres. The Divisio's armed men were retained as crew members and auxiliaries aboard the Black ships, but the presence of so many nulls aboard put an end to the department's utilisation of battle-sikers, who now found themselves destined for usage in select Exertus imperialis regiments. The function of this new militant arm of the telepathica retained their military bearing, but additionally were expanded, further into actual investigation, making them warrior-trackers as well as jailers, for when not in the field to seek, capture or destroy psychics, they were tasked with staffing the telepathica's many psychercontainment facilities. Their status as an all-null formation was an incalculable boon to the Divisio's work, as now it was possible for psychers to be more readily, efficiently and safely apprehended, and delivered into their hands. Existing within the overlapping fields of military efficacy and genetic suitability, the sisterhood rendered what had been an increasingly impossible task almost seamless. The colloquial name springs primarily from their trademark vow of silence, to be explored in a later record, but also the sheer remorseless efficiency with which they prosecuted their rule. Ghosts persistently moving at the edge of the Imperium's vision, arriving and departing from theatres of war or compliant systems, under the unassailable codes of the imperial household itself, all to execute in perfect silence the most crucial of operations. They rapidly became, to the wider Imperium, figures of both admiration and no small amount of dread. The still maidens in imperial gold were only ever whispered about, as those who asked openly about their nature soon found themselves rapidly silenced. Such, as was the case with all psychana in the Great Crusade, was the cost of secrets. The return of the silent sisterhood to prominence amongst the Imperium in this most darkest of millennia is a welcome one, for with the opening of the Great Eye and the creation of the Great Rift, mankind finds itself plagued ever more with the powers of the immaterial, and not since the blackest gauge of the siege has the sister's roles been more vital. The later history of their order is a sorry one indeed, for in the aftermath of the emperor's ascension and the reorganization of the Imperium, rise to prominence of the imperial creed led to a renewed hatred for psychic nulls. Barely trusted at the best of crusade times, the new imperial regime, with the adeptus ministerum leading the cries, relegated the sisterhood to ever more remote operations, until, finally, ministerum troops purged the somnus citadel upon luna, smashing the order's headquarters and scattering them to the furthest corners of the galaxy. These remote vigils retained the order's equipment, traditions, and training as best they could, harvesting female nulls from the local volume to keep the old division operational, even seconding themselves to imperial forces, or carrying out pregation operations outside of any chain of command, simply at their own behest. It was not until the return of the primarch that their role changed. Gulliman, who had fought with their ilk during the great crusade, was well aware of the tactical advantage they represented to the Imperium, immediately ordering their reunification. The somnus citadel was rebuilt in its totality, its residence having preserved an albeit degraded form of the original order since its fall. The dispensatus anethema, as the primarch's decree became known, reinstated the order's primacy amongst the astral telepathica, although it must be said tensions yet remain between the sisterhood and the wider organization, with many within the sisterhood alleging that the telepathica simply wished to turn them into over-trained black ship jailers, wasting their talents and lethality, and, they claim, shackling them once more. The wounds of the ministerum's betrayal do not easily heal, and were rent open yet once more during the recent coup attempt by the Hexarchy. Yet, despite this, vigils of the sisterhood are being founded now across every segmentum, with somnus forming the nexus, yes, but no longer the sole base of power. These new vigils retain the panoplies and heraldry of the originals, heresy, era codras that purport to be their founders, restoring the ancient traditions of the oldest and most venerated hunter seekers so that they may bear arms in the era endometous. They are, now, as an order, primarily fleet-based, detachments seconded to endometous crusade fleets to allow them to better combat the resurgent arch-enemy. They have also begun to liaise with imperial navigators in order to better plot courses through the ever more turbulent warp. This particular aspect of their role is a relatively new one and ill-understood, but has seen with enough success that the sisterhood is actively exploring its development. After millennia in isolation and still bearing the scars of their outcast, the silent sisterhood is once more at the fore of the imperium's drive into the outer dark, torchbearers of immaculate stillness, striding quietly but with iron-clad resolve into that great night. Appended to this record shortly will arrive a deeper exploration into the organizational structure and panoplies of war that the sisters of silence possessed. Until then, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at OculusImperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.


It's year four of the pandemic and if there's one thing that has changed during this period, it's the fact that a lot more people are trying to be aware of, trying to find out more about various aspects of health care from medicines to even issues related to policy. We've seen of course health workers coming out onto the streets in larger numbers to defend their rights and there's been a lot of discussion on issues such as vaccines, diagnostics, the right to access to health care. All these have come to the fore and that's maybe one of the few positive things that has come out of this pandemic. But there's still a lot of aspects which are really behind the veil, so to speak, which are discussed in board rooms which don't really make it to the news so much but which have a huge impact on our lives, on our health. Today we'll be talking about some of these aspects. We are joined by Jyotsna Singh or the People's Health Movement. Jyotsna has just been to the World Health Organization's Executive Board Meeting which took place in Geneva. Thank you so much Jyotsna for talking to us. Always a pleasure. So Jyotsna, just to sort of set the stage, could you maybe take us through why the Executive Board of the World Health Organization, why is it important? It sounds very bureaucratic, it sounds like a committee, but why is it so important for you and me and for all of us? Absolutely. So the thing is, WHO holds two meetings a year which are very important because they're open to everyone to witness. It is live-streamed civil society and health activists and other stakeholders in health can actually go and be there. So it's like a gala ceremony, so to speak, where the governments are there, the health ministers and if not the ministers, the health secretaries are definitely there. And then you have that space where you can directly talk to them, talk to the WHO officials who end up guiding a lot of policies what we witness in our countries and have a chit-chat and see where, in which direction is the global health governance moving. So these two meetings are, one is the Executive Board which just happened in Geneva in the WHO headquarters. The other is World Health Assembly which is a much bigger version of this meeting which happens in the month of May. So in an Executive Board meeting, it is a limited number of countries who are part of the Executive Board of WHO and only they have the right to vote and things like that whereas in WHO it is all the countries who have equal participation. So these are the two and, I mean in between there are a lot of meetings that happen but everybody is not a party to it, it is fewer number of people. So that's where they become important. So just now in the EBE meetings that took place and you were there, you talked to people over there, what do you think are some of the main things that you know, off the top of your head, what are some of the main things that sort of struck you as themes that were significant at this point of time? Right. So Executive Board meeting, it discussed around 23 or 24 agenda items this year starting from social determinants of health to universal health coverage to budgets and the WHO is looking for more and more money and funds. So all of these issues were discussed there, behavioral science was another one. Some of these issues are going to be reflected in World Health Assembly also. So this was more, this is like a preparatory meeting. So that definitely was there and but if you, I mean there are many interesting things that happen when you are there. You can see how the international politics plays a role in itself because the Russia-Ukraine war was a theme that determined a lot of discussions throughout. So the Director General had made a report on health emergencies in which there was a mention, I mean it was a detailed mention, not just a mention of the war in Ukraine and Russia completely disagreed with it. It said that we won't let this report pass because it is so one-sided and you could see the EU and other NATO countries coming together and saying no, we agree with the report. So that is one thing that you really see. The other part would be I think the way national politics in the countries also get reflected in these discussions. For example, I mean it was in one sense amazing to see the Brazil declared, Brazil is back, science is back. Obviously taking a satirical jab on Bolsonaro's government who was very unscientific, so to speak, in dealing with COVID-19, calling for hydroxychloroquine as the treatment for COVID and etc. So all of that you see U.S. for example, the kind of a stances it takes now compared to how it was doing during the Trump administration is different. U.S. clearly said that we stand for the rise of LGBTIQ plus communities. Trump administration was very much against it. The new government also said Biden's government, the language is much softer in favor of sexual and reproductive rights, which was the opposite during Trump administration again. So these are the kind of things that you really witness. I believe you said Columbia also, Columbia also had an interesting intervention. It did. So one of the civil society constantly has been saying and we have been raising our voice, saying that civil society is getting excluded more and more by the WHO. And the amount of time that is given to us, where we are made to sit within these discussions, all of that has come under attack by the civil society to WHO. Columbia and obviously there has been a change in the government recently. It's so openly and a beautiful statement by Columbia saying that we need more of civil society in the room and they should be included more. So all of these things, when you witness it tells you what is happening in the nations also and how it governs these global governance issues as well. So just of course now the meeting taking place, like I said, this is the fourth year of the pandemic. Various countries have taken various stances on how they view what the state of the pandemic is so to speak. But generally I think it's, there's a general feeling that the pandemic is now maybe a bit on, there's a bit of a downturn so to speak. It's not over of course, but it's not as pressing an issue as it was maybe in 2021 or even early 2022. But the pandemic definitely must be casting a shadow on the world health organizations, deliberations, on the deliberations of people who work in the health sector. So how did the EB actually, you know, how did the pandemic sort of figure in the discussions of the executive board? Throughout. I think when the countries make their interventions, if you read all the reports that are presented by the director general Dr. Tedros, there is a constant reminder about COVID-19 pandemic and what we have learnt. The entire question of equity comes up again and again in all the deliberations that happen. So one can see that. But I think the question is that, has WHO and have the developed countries actually learnt from the pandemic or not? That is a big question mark and I think the simple answer is no. So WHO is also discussing the pandemic treaty. It is called the Global Architecture for Health Emergencies Preparedness, Response and Resilience. In short, pandemic treaty that is being called. There's a parallel process going on which is amendment to IHR which is the International Health Regulation 2005. So when the agenda of health emergencies come, you can see people are responding and the countries and civil society is responding to it. But it is important to mention that these two processes are happening simultaneously throughout the year in WHO. There is an intergovernmental negotiating body that has been formed to discuss the pandemic treaty. And maybe if we can spend some time on these two things. So IHR 2005 has been in place since 2005 as the name suggests. But the developing countries actually started to ask for amendments in the light of the pandemic because one realised that health emergencies is not only about pandemic. It would also be about the recent earthquake in Turkey and Syria or floods that we witnessed in Pakistan. But pandemic of course was at such a global scale. And there was such lack of equity in the response and how the developed countries and their big pharmaceutical companies and everybody dealt with it that there was a need to make some amendments. So these proposals have come and if you see India, Bangladesh, the Africa region, 47 countries are represented by that. They have made a detailed plea that how IHR should be amended so that if we are in a similar situation later, people do not die of something for which the vaccines and medicines exist in some other part of the world. The point is, and then we talk about pandemic treaties or how it came about in the middle of the pandemic. European Union and many other developed countries, they proposed that we need to be ready for future pandemics. So we were still struggling. The developing countries were still struggling with the current pandemic. And the developed countries had, they had, of course, they had vaccinated majority of their population and they had the audacity to go ahead and start discussing future pandemics. So there was at that point of time also a lot of opposition that how are you discussing the future pandemics can we deal with this one. So it was a problem, but well we have it now. So we have to discuss it. And there also if you see there is a zero draft of the pandemic treaty that came about a few days ago earlier this month. And if you look at the preamble of the zero draft, it has all the correct language in it. Equity is there. They talk about health workforce and how they were overburdened and they should not be. It recognizes very clearly that the internationally we failed to respond to COVID-19 the way we should have. It says that 70% of the health workforce is women and we should be taking care of that. It talks about community and community participation, everything. And then when you start to see the actual language which will determine the policy, none of these things appear there. It looks like there is no learning from COVID-19 at all. You are talking in the preamble about intellectual property barriers, but you are not giving a solution to it in that. So it is a huge problem the way zero draft is. The proponents of it, the people who have written it have clearly not really taken into consideration what the poor countries have gone through during the pandemic. So the point is that we need to see the IHR amendment process and the new proposal of pandemic treaty as parallel processes and look at both and fight for equality in both. Because the IHR is going to be the founding principles and the pandemic treaty is going to be a part of it because it is one part of the entire health emergencies domain. So we need to look at both. Both are not in a good shape at the moment and we can see developing countries fighting for it. It is just that the kind of experience we have had through trips waiver where in the World Trade Organization despite so much of push, the gain was much less. It wasn't just nothing but it was much less. Learning from that the developing countries I think will have to put forth, I mean they have to set red lines at a very different level. But because if you see the developing countries are asking for in IHR amendments, health system strengthening. If you see what the developed countries are asking for, it is asking for securitization. So this is also a classical debate in public health where the developed countries say surveillance. They focus more and more on surveillance which means we will know when the pandemic is about to emerge. Developed countries are saying and have been saying that we need to focus on response also. If in a poor country it has happened and you know there is a possibility of an outbreak, what do you do about that? Developed countries can immediately go on producing vaccines and hold the vaccines. What will happen to the rest of the world? So surveillance and response have to go hand in hand together. We do not see that. We see 80% surveillance, 20% response. Huge problem. The other problem in these drafts that we are facing is there is no, you do not find access and benefit sharing. Now what is it in very short that if a pharmaceutical company is able to make a vaccine or any medical product using a pathogen that has emerged in some other country and the country has shared it and that is why this company is able to produce it, right? Then the sharing of the benefit should go to that community as well. For example, Ebola. If you have got the strain from West African nations and you are sitting in a developed country, you cannot say I will not share the vaccine or the know-how with the Western African nations and I will use it only when Ebola comes to my rich country. So that access and benefit sharing should happen. It is not happening. That discussion has been going on for a decade in WHO. It should also get reflected in this. So the health system is strengthening, access and benefit sharing, equity. These are the three things that the developing countries are fighting for in these two mechanisms and there is a lot of opposition obviously to that. Long road to go for many of these countries. It is interesting that you mentioned, when you started, you mentioned something about the behavioral sciences, which when you hear behavioral sciences, you always go, okay, the alarm needs to sort of sound at this point. So could you maybe just take us through how that came up and who is behind that as well? Absolutely. So this was one of the agenda items and many eyebrows were raised. What is this about? And one did not know where this agenda item came from. But well, it is not as simple. So the thing is behavioral science, so WHO, SPHM, we have a position that the vertical way of dealing with diseases is problematic. You have to look at social determinants and the structural problems. You cannot go disease by disease. If you strengthen public health systems overall, you fight all the diseases together. So that has to be the approach. Now this behavioral science is even a further attack. It is actually putting the entire onus on the individual to do or not to do to make healthy choices and not make unhealthy choices. So and this push seems to have come from the World Bank and etc. Because the World Bank and OECD countries for the past one decade almost they have been working in the field of behavioral economics, which says that you work on people's behavior. And then so in a supermarket, put healthy items at a more prominent space and put the junk item at some other place. The point is there should be no junk material or unhealthy material in the supermarkets and that regulation has to come from the governments. So it actually takes away your entire focus from regulating the market and the TNCs, the transnational corporations and ensuring healthy food. So no regulation, but you leave it to the individual. And then if you don't make the correct choice, boss, we try. So that is coming and this kind of an approach is going to be a problem. And we know that the World Bank policies and the way World Bank deals with health is a huge problem the way OECD countries look at it. And if WHO starts to get influenced by that so much that it has an agenda item and they're spending time on it, then we really need to sound caution there. Absolutely, definitely not a very positive or quite an alarming trend in fact, actually, if you think about it. Thank you so much, Jyotsana, for speaking to us, for giving us, I think, a very concise and clear idea of what actually happens in these meetings, breaking down some of these technical aspects. So thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. But keep watching NewsClick and People's Dispatch for more such videos on issues such as health, on issues such as policies in various aspects of life, but in a language in a way that all of us are able to understand and act upon it.