All right. Good morning, everyone. How are you? So let's start. I'm Tom. I work for Semiotic Labs, and today I'll have the pleasure to present you our work on reinforcement learning in query pricing in the graph. So first let's me start with the outline. I will tell a few words about Semiotic, what we are doing, then I'll introduce what's really we are doing in this area, automated price discovery. I will formulate the problem. I will add a few words. When it comes to modeling, how we model that problem, then I'll brief you and through reinforcement learning basics, let's say, just a refresher for those ones of you who know or maybe do not know reinforcement learning. Then agent-based modeling is the core of that talk, and I will show how we're using that for testing system properties and for testing different behaviors when it comes to using single and multi-agent setups, and then I will show that actually we deployed that solution in production, what are the results, and finish with a small summary. All right. So let's start. The first Semiotic, Semiotic Labs was founded in 2020 by AI and cryptography researchers. We are focusing on applied research, and we are one of the core devs of the of the graph protocol. Also, we are developers of others, the optimal text aggregator. Actually, the lead of that product is giving a talk at the very moment on a different stage, so bad luck. Okay. So our expertise, we combine cryptography with AI. That's our core expertise, and of course, there's software engineering involved, and we focus mostly on building infrastructure. We focus on crypto-economics, today's talk is actually focusing on this, on crypto-economics. All right. So what's the scenario? So the scenario in here is that, I don't know which one of you know the graph actually. Who knows the graph protocol? All right. Okay. 50-50. Good. So basically, in this scenario, we just focus on one part of the graph system, right, of the graph protocol, but imagine that you've got some customers that are sending queries, right? And you've got indexers that are indexing blockchain and are kind of serving those queries. So between those guys, there is an entity called the gateway, which is doing, which is kind of acting as a query market, right? So depending on the price, depending on the quality of service, a given query sent by the customer would be distributed this or that indexer, and indexers earn money by serving queries, right? So they can control the prices of the service queries, and the core idea that I'm going to talk about today is basically wanted to have dynamic pricing based on query volume received by an indexer, and we call that auto-agora, and I will explain in a second why we're calling that auto-agora. So this is how we model the scenario, right? It's simplified from one point of view because, as you can see, as you can see, there are no, let's say, agents in here. We get rid of the customers for the purpose of that modding, of those simulations. Instead, we've got a traffic generator, right? Something that just says, okay, at a given time, this is the query volume that needs to be served, right? We also got query distributor. So something that basically look at the bits of the agents. So the agents are putting their bits, and then depending on those bits, the queries will be distributed across those different agents, and those bits are expressed in a domain-specific language called agora. That's why the product we call it auto-agora, right? Because it automates that bidding. Otherwise, the users will have to, the index sales have to basically create those price models manually, which is kind of a tricky, right? All right. So some assumptions, selected assumptions, what is happening in here. So this is only about how we generate that query volume. So we've got in here, so this is basically the shape that we model. So at the x-axis, there is this price, query price slash, this is a budget of a customer. That customer is saying, okay, this is how much I can pay for that query. This budget is unknown, right? That's important. It's not sharing that with the agents. It's not sharing that with the indexers. It's something that is setting on its own. So this is something that we want to discover, right? And the budget can move, right? From left to right, which means that if the indexer will set its price, its price will be higher than this. Well, if he won't be picked, right? Also, there's some kind of like a noise. We added a noise to that volume, to that query volume. And important is to know that there's a game happening, right? In here. And the game is, so agent's goal is to maximize the revenue, but gateway's goal and basically protocol goal is actually quality of service, right? We want all the queries to be served, you know, five nines and so on, right? So there's a game happening. All right. So if you know how you know that, let's now switch gears to reinforcement learning, just one-on-one most classical thing. So down there in reinforcement learning, we've got two main entities, agents and environments. Agents interacts with environment by executing an action. Then agents actions change the state of the environment. Agents get to reward and observations after... Oh, okay. And agent can up its policy based on the received reward. In short, that's reinforcement learning. So we're using different types of agents in our simulations. In here, I put two most important criterions. One are trainable reinforcement learning, online learning, and the other ones are like rule-based. So there are some predefined behaviors. And also we've got this second criterion. So agents can be stochastic or deterministic. In here, I put some simplified classification of reinforcement learning algorithms. And I highlighted the two that basically we'll be using in our simulations. So we'll be using vanilla policy gradients, and mostly most of our agents will be using PPL. Important. There is one important type of agents that actually we are mostly focusing, which we call them Gaussian bandits. So the idea that this is a trainable stochastic agent with policy that is represented with a Gaussian, and then when an agent is supposed to perform an action in something from that Gaussian, right? So imagine that there is a distribution, and when the agent is supposed to make an action, it's just something, right? And in this case, okay, the agent samples 0.8, and from that blue distribution, second agent samples 0.524, right? And why bandits? Bandit is because the agent is not building any internal model, an internal representation of the environment. All right. So going to the most important part, so testing properties with agents-based modeling. So in here, so I already kind of explained this, but in the first set of experiments, we focus on single agent simulation, just testing the properties of an agent, and this is a single Gaussian bandit with a modified PPL policy update rule. The query distributor is like a super naive, you know, let's say version of that, what could happen here is that we've got actually just, okay, depending on the price, this is just inversely proportional. And in the first step, we've got a fixed customer budget with some noise, of course, right? And what we are checking in here is the following. We've got market conditions, we've got two criterias. For every experiment, we've got some criterias, and a property that we want to test, whether the bandit is fulfilling, that that crater is operating the way we want or not. In this case, the criterion is customer budget discovery. As I've highlighted before, the agents do not know the budgets, right? But so we want to discover that. So first, so there will be lots of things happening, right? Because we are checking when the things there are in simulations. So let me try to, let's say unfold that and go step by step explaining what you will be seeing in a moment in those animations, in those videos that we captured during the experiments. So first, there are five plots, right, in a single video. First one is going to cut the most important. So what we've got in here is the, is that budget, right? The query volume plus customer budget. The solid red line is the agent's current policy. The dashed line is the initial policy that the agent is starting from. Second, in the second plot from, from the top, this is basically query volume served by the agent at a given time step. So what happened in here is agent actually didn't serve a query, right? Didn't get any queries because it's, he sampled somewhere in here, right? Like, few steps ago, he sampled some that, that the price was too high, right? So the agent didn't get any queries. So which, which also is shown in here. So this is the aggregated query volume served by, by a given agent in red and the blue ones shows basically how many queries were dropped weren't served at all, right? So you can see in here there's a tiny, tiny step, which is, which actually is associated with this. Then in the next plot, we've got agent's revenue and aggregated agent's revenue over time, right? So let's run our first, first experiment, right? So once again, what we are testing in here, what we are trying to discover is where that, that, where that, that budget is, right? So as agent is, is learning, right? So first, the Gaussian is, was super wide, right? Like it was like much, much wider. And once the agent, as you can see, it's sampling from time to time somewhere in here, right? Above the budget. So it's getting more and more sure that, okay, this is the max that I can get, right? That's the highest price. That's, that's the highest bid that I can make. So as you can see, the agent is dropping some of the queries, right? What is revenues is nicely, nicely growing? All right. So first property test, right? That was the static environment. So how about dynamic environment, right? By, by dynamic, I mean that the customer budget can change, can vary over time, right? So in this case, we are also testing the same property, whether the customer budget can be discovered by the agent, but in more difficult market conditions, let's say, right? So once again, we are starting, agent is kind of converging, capturing the, the, the right, the price, right? Which is kind of optimal. And then the price changes. So what happens is the agent is, is, is not getting, getting any queries, right? So it's saying, okay, I don't know where am I. So it's pressed the Gaussian and once the queries are once again captured, it, it moves to the left, right? So it's like, okay, I was above the budget, let me, let me go back, right? And that's happens, that is happening over time, right? So there are plenty of queries, queries dropped, but still we are, we are making some nice revenue, right? And we are reacting to the, to the dynamic, dynamic market. Cool. Second property, check. So in further experiment, we said, okay, so there are some subgraphs that actually have no queries at all, right? There is a moment where nobody is, is asking for queries. So what will happen then? So that's a different scenario. In this case, we call that the market conditions, basically, there's no demand for your services, right? So we wonder how we should add. So it will happen in a second, right? So there will be like three iterations. We are recording a few of those videos, but as you can see already, there's a hint in the right hand corner that something is not right. All right, Gaussian spread, this is great. And now times that 400, because every 200 steps were like, you know, related. Okay, so what just happened? There are no queries. So according to the design, the agents just said, okay, let me spread, right? So I can sample from wider distribution, but actually spread all across the, the, the price is domain. So we said, okay, actually, this is not a good behavior, right? We, if this is happening, then the agent can, can sample at the same probability, like super, some super small prices, price bits, and at the same super high, moreover, recover from that will take a lot of time. So we said, okay, can we improve that? So we implemented something that we called graceful init pool, which basically the idea is that, okay, there's this initial distribution that the agents is starting from. This is something that the indexer was, will parametrize the agent when, when, when, when the agent is deployed, and where, when there are no queries, it just slowly spools towards that initial distribution, right? And when the queries will appear once again, it will get from there and once again start, start something, I'm losing from time to time. The voice, I think. Okay, cool. So we passed that property. So now let's move into multi-agent simulation. So this was great. At that point, you know, we weren't, we weren't competing with anyone up till that moment, right? Now we are starting with, with some, we're competing with some deterministic agents. The idea is that right now, all the, all the indexers have that, that aggram models that is kind of fixed, right? They are not changing the models. So it can be seen as a rule base, right? So there's like, okay, that's my bit and I'm sticking with it no matter what, right? So this is what we are trying to model in here, competition with deterministic agents, and the property that we are testing is called discover of price bits of competitive agents, right? So we want to make sure that we, we also will, we can, let's say, compete with them and discover what are, what were their bits without actually knowing them, without having that explicit information. So those three lines in here, actually, those are the three, three competitive agents with deterministic policies that they are just set, and the blue agent in this case is the one, is the bandit, right? And as you can see, it, after a while, it set up like a price just below the, the, the cheapest agents, which means that it's trying to once again snatch the whole market if you will see a number of total queries, right? You can see, clearly see a difference, right? That agent is dominating, right? So I will say, okay, this is nice. Check. Cool. So how about stochastic agents? Similar experiments, we also want to discover the, the, the price bits of other agents, but their policies are stochastic, so we model them in a similar way as Gaussians, as Gaussians distributions, right? But they do not change, right? So we observe similar behavior, this is great, right? So the agent, our agent, right? Our bandit moves somewhere in here, and of course it's something, you know, the red, the red, the red agent stochastic, heuristic agent is also something from that distribution, so it's changing. But as we, we can see the agent can come, moved slightly below and trying once again to capture the market, right? All right, great. I think it's, we check that property. Awesome. So how about if we will right now compete with, like, make a competition where we've got plenty of those bandits deployed? And we hope that actually this is the most interesting, that's the most interesting case, right? Because we want autogoura to be run by all the indexers in the graph ecosystem. So same property, slightly different market conditions. All right, so what is happening in here? Sadly, it's not good. It's not good. So the agents are acting actually as designed, but as you can see, they're like fighting, fighting, fighting, going, moving, moving to the left-hand side, which means that they're lowering their prices all the time, right? And as you can see in here, oh, you can see the labels, but this is, this is the revenue that they're getting, right? At a given time step, basically it's going, it's converging to zero, which means that after a while, the agents will be basically serving for free, right? And so that's not a good situation for the indexers, right? Because in here, we're not even modeling the, we are modeling the revenue, not the, not the, we are not modeling the costs, right? So at that point, agents will be, well, indexers will be actually, well, paying for that instead of making money. All right, so we call this phenomenon or this outcome raised to the bottom and we run many simulations, we discuss that a lot. And actually we realize that, well, this is the expected behavior, right? In this setup. So we've got some agents that are basically trying to snatch the market, right? And they're purely driven by, by the, by the query volume, right? So if this is the case, and the environment just natively distributes, you know, the queries based on the price bit, raised to the bottom is the expected, is the expected outcome, right? So it can be addressed in many ways, but we look at the graph protocol, what are the features, right? And, and down there, and what are the assumptions? So one assumption is that all the indexers should have freedom with their pricing, right? There should be limitations to that. If they can, if they want to serve queries super, that are super expensive or super cheap, it's okay. And all the indexers should be able to make any profit. So the conclusion was that actually is the gateway, right? That the thing that controls the market should implement this kind of anti-dominant policy. And so happened, it does. It already does. So in our next step, what we did, we wrapped the existing ISA, right? ISA's indexer selection algorithm is one of the components of the, of the gateway, right? So we just wrapped it in here and using the simulation, we are once again testing the same conditions, right? Competing, you know, many Gavshans, many Gavshans band is competing with each other and the property, okay, can we discover each other prices and maximize our profits? So the outcome is totally different, right? We, by changing, changing the way the, the queries are distributed, actually reach a consensus, right? So that all the agents are discovering the market, right? What was the market? At the same gateway is looking, the ISA is looking at their, their quality of service at their prices and trying to kind of feed everyone, right? Not just, okay, you're the winner, you're, you're snatching all the queries, right? So this is really nice. So please note that the gateway also leaves some kind of budget, right? But it's designed such a way that actually it's, it's not enabling the agents to, to consume all the budgets, right? So the budget is, there is a portion that is left to the, to the, let's say, to the customer. Okay, so we're on some more simulations, of course, it's like, okay, free, can we run that with 10, 20 agents, right? Will that still work? It seems, yes, it does. So we are testing the same properties, right? We are just a little bit changing the market conditions, right? This is looking really good. If you look at, look at the query surf and the revenue, it's like, all the agents are, you know, are, are making, making money, which is the desired, desired behavior, right? And they're rediscovering the market. Cool. So what we also did, we, we start, we wanted to see whether, okay, so how about different initial conditions, right? So we are assuming that different, different index, okay, that's my mean price. That's my variance. I want to maybe move a bit more expensive or less expensive at the beginning. Wanted to see whether the, the, the system will kind of converge to that equilibrium. And it seems that this is really happening, right? So disregarding the initial conditions. This is good. We also run some additional experiments with, with recurrent stronger policy updates. So this one is our modified PPO agent. As you can see, it's much faster than, okay, the red agent is the vanilla policy gradients, like elementary policy, elementary update rule. And the other one is just pure, pure PPO, right? So our agent is kind of dominating and it's kind of interesting to observe that it's serving less queries, right? The blue or Cn line is clearly below, and this is the number of queries that are served, but it's making bigger revenue, right? So in short, it's making less work for more money. So policy really matters, right? All right. So having those results, we are quite, quite happy with, with, with those. We said, okay, so can we deploy that in production? And actually that's our solution, you know, on a battlefield. So once again, there's there are many, there are many things to unfold in here. So let me try to focus on one thing at a time, right? So first, this is the mean. So this is kind of where the Gaussian is on that x-axis, right? So what happens is that the initial value was too high. So the mean was going down first, but then steadily it was going up, up, up. Good. So it was moving to the right. At the same time, variance was steadily going down, which means that the Gaussian was more and more narrower, which means that agents were like, okay, I think I'm there. I'm good, right? I'm more confident that I should sample from that our smaller distribution. So the outcome is that the reward goes up. Maybe you cannot see it in here like super nicely, but that's the revenue, right? That's the total revenue and you can clearly see that it's, it's going up. There's this tendency, right? So we deploy that. The results were great. So I think we are, well, this is the month where I should start telling, okay, if you're an indexer, please go ahead. There is a repository to download, play with it. And we, there are some additional materials. Okay, but you know, actually in a second. Okay, so let me first summarize. So agent-based modeling for crypto economics, that was the core of that talk in here is focused, we focused on the dynamic pricing for the applied to the graph protocol to, to automated price discovery. And we use reinforcement learning and multiple multi-agent simulation, multi-agent modeling for, for revenue maximization. So we can show how to use that for testing the properties of the protocol, right? We came up with that framework that, okay, those are the market conditions. Those are the properties and systematically started test, right? Our agents are solutions against, against those. And finally, we have deployed autoguera in, in, in production and have shown that actually it makes sense. So future works, of course, better policy, better updates, better policies, agents with multiple rewards of taking quality of service into account. We are not doing that right now. Just, we are just looking at, at the, at the query volume. Modeling and putting consumer agents into play, right? So that right hand side that we simplified actually putting that back in the simulation, it will give us some more insight in what is happening, right? So that's kind of, that will give us simulator with, with higher fidelity. And kind of redesigning the game, right? So in this case, there was no information that agents were like, acting totally independently. The question is, if you will redesign the game, redesign a little bit the graph protocol, would that kind of perfect information will help, right? There are some, here are some additional resources. So my friend Alex is he, there is, he wrote this blog post which describes more the technical side of deploying auto auger in production. He also gave a talk around this, about this during the last episode in June, I think. So there's a recording on YouTube. And of course, this is open source. So I encourage you, go ahead, play with it, right? All those visualizations are there. Basically, you can reproduce that and try to deploy your, your, your auto auger in production, right? Finally, I wanted to highlight some of the, of the other works that Samotic is doing. So there's talk actually that's happening right now that, that our friend Matt is giving the product and research leader photos, he's giving it right now. So that's, that's, that's said. And savvy is giving a talk today about our work and let's say our, our, our, our, our trip in the, to the Snarks world. And we are focusing on, on, on, this is more like cryptography. We are focusing on verifiable payments for the graph protocol as well. So if you're interested in those, those, those topics, please come to us. We've got plenty of positions open. We, if you're interested, please go ahead. Thank you for your attention. Excuse me, there's a gentleman who wants to be back. Hello, and thank you for the talk. I was wondering if the customer has a very, very low budget. Will you try to match it and make a loss or will you shut down? That's a great question. Actually, I wasn't showing this in here, right? Because it's shaking. Like I said, the goal of graph is to have five nights. So right now we are working with, with the guys that are, you know, implementing the gateway updating that a little bit because for now, if the customer will say, okay, I want that for basically free, the gateway will still try to distribute that. Right? It's not the best outcome, I would say, for the index. Right? But we are changing that. We are, we've got that tool right now, right? So you can think about, I was showing you that now we're working in this work, we're focusing on, on the agents, right? But we developed a tool that enables us to test the properties and the outcome of the whole thing, right? When there are different players in the game, including gateway. So great question. It's a tricky, right? It's a tricky thing. What do we want to achieve? We want the indexer to make money or we want five nights, right? The quality of service to be super high. I have another question. Sorry. Maybe more technical. When you showed the experiments, whenever the budget of the client was going down, the spread of the ocean was, was widening, but the mean was staying the same, which means that you are still sampling to the right side where you know it's not the right price. Would it be more effective to move the ocean to the left as you spread it? Yeah. So what's the question actually? Because you just repeated the behavior. That's the design behavior, right? If we overshoot, if we overshoot with the price, then we don't know what the reason was. There were no queries or we were too expensive, right? So we spread because we want to sample from wider distribution, right? All right. If there are any additional questions I'm here, I'd be delighted to answer your questions, but it seems that my time is up. So thank you for your attention.


Hi, my name is Ariana Jara, and today in Unpacking the Workbox, we are going to learn how to create an offline fallback page for your PWA. Having an offline experience is one of the requirements for some browsers to consider your web app installable. While it is possible to create a complete offline experience for your app, there is also the possibility of creating a simple offline page. And with Workbox recipes, you can serve it with as little as one line of code. Before we get into the code, we have to unpack Workbox encapsulation a little bit. So, bear with me. Workbox is a set of tools developed to make the implementation of service workers easier. And within Workbox, we have different levels of encapsulation for implementing a specific task. So, if we compare building an offline page with Workbox to cooking a bowl of pasta, one option could be to cook the pasta and sauce from scratch. That is the equivalent of implementing the fallback with just the service worker API. I'm not going to run through this scenario, but if you want to learn all the basics about service workers, visit this link. Next option, you could buy the pasta ready to cook and add your own sauce. That will be like creating the offline page with the Workbox libraries, which gives us flexibility, but the code can still be repetitive. Or you can go to a restaurant and order the bowl of pasta you want or prepare for you. That would be like using the Workbox recipe. You don't have that much flexibility, but you'll be done with your task with one line of code. Let me show you how to implement options two and three. The fallback page, not the pasta. For the longer version of the offline page fallback, we need two Workbox modules, Workbox routing and Workbox strategies. If you want to check all of the documentation about these modules, check it out here because I'm focusing only on the bits that create an offline fallback. The first step is to create our offline fallback page. The document we are going to serve when the app fails to get the response from the network. This page should be self-contained so that when we cache it, we cache everything that it needs to render. In the code here, we see that we use the install event to ask our service worker to cache that page to use it in the future. To understand more about the install event, you will need to check out the service worker documentation. Next, we create an object called a handler. This handler checks if the app is requesting a document because if the request that failed was for a document, it is then that we want to respond with our fallback page instead. As I was saying, this handler will only run if there is an error making a request. That is what the setCatchHanderLine does. It tells the service worker to use this handler if it errors on the request. This piece of code is better than implementing this behavior with only the service worker. But we can do better. With the Wordbox offline recipe, that same task looks like this. This line of code does everything we described under the hood. You still need to create the fallback document that your app is going to serve. And if you don't pass any options, it will assume that that document is called offline.html. The offline fallback receives a set of options. For example, you can change the name of your offline document and you can also add fallback options for fonts and images. Check out the documentation for more details. It is a good practice and a requirement for PWAs to have an offline page with your app aesthetics and using Wordbox recipe, you can get one with a single line of code. Check out Wordbox documentation for more information on modules and other recipes. You can subscribe for more Google Developer news and tips. Your comments and questions below are welcome. Thank you. Until next time.


Where's Jimmy? Yeah, where is Jimmy? Okay. Well, we've got loop here. I can replace it. Yeah, you're slated to replace it anyway. So, okay. So, what I... So, Kuhir is... Alright, let's kind of filter. Kuhir does not know what SPI is. Kuhir is a contributing member of SPI. Okay. And then, so there's like maybe five or six people that are not members. Why not? Yeah. Why not? Because no one's wearing the NMQ on it right now. We just fixed that. We've got new people. One of them is sitting behind you. So, okay. Well, maybe if all we accomplish is that you walk out and sign up for the contributing membership, then we'll have made a small success. So, I will do a kind of a little baby introduction to SPI and kind of how things stand and what our goals are and where we're going to go. And then I would like this to turn into a conversation after that so we can talk about the sorts of things that maybe SPI has done and people like and maybe some of the sorts of things that SPI has not done. Is there... Is not done or people would like to see it do in the future? I mean, so, I think that actually a lot of feedback that we've got in previous deadlines at similar meetings like this have been very useful to me and to other people on the board in terms of deciding where to focus. There are some things, I mean, clearly we can't do everything. So, people may suggest something that it's a really great idea that we can't follow up on. But I think that most people would agree that SPI has been on an upward track over the last couple years and it's been accomplishing more of the things that we want to do and doing better. So, software in the public interest is a non-profit organization that is founded to help organizations distribute open harbor and software. But in reality, we focus almost entirely on some of the, hey, you sit up at the front. Okay. Oh, we've got a lot. We have quorum, don't we? Almost. Almost. We're one chart. Yeah, but I don't think we can expect another. Okay, so... We don't expect virtual working. Yeah. So, for a very long time, getting quorum of the board was actually very difficult. And now we almost have it just sitting in this room. We really need to do a face-to-face meeting sometime. We almost have now. Yeah. So, software in the public interest is a non-profit organization that helps people distribute open harbor and open software, in particular free software. In reality, we focus almost entirely on supporting free software projects in a number of ways. The basic... So, I'll describe how that works. Software in the public interest was a non-profit organization that was created in 1997. And it was incorporated in New York State. So it's a U.S. organization. And it is what's called the 501C30, which basically means that if you're in the U.S. and you give money to it, and you give money to SPI, you can deduct it from your taxes. It's like the most charitable kind of charity. There are less charitable charities. I mean, there are some where you get to deduct less or deduct differently. But 501C30s are probably the most limited type of organization in terms of the types of things that you can do. You can, for example, advocate a particular politician. There are lots of limits. You can't run issue ads. If you give money to other organizations overseas, you transfer money, it has to be to an organization with a similar standing, or at least as charitable status in whatever the other rules are. It's a little bit tricky. But the benefit, of course, is that people have a major incentive to donate. Can I add that? It's not just that people themselves have a major incentive to donate, but often employers have matching gift programs. So if an employee arranges for some money to come out of his check, in many cases the employer will match it, doubling the effectiveness of the donation to SPI to size. So there's a number of benefits that in some ways mean that SPI has more resources in the end, because people are more interested in donating to that type of organization, at least in the U.S. There are a number of different non-profit organizations with similar or identical statuses in the U.S. and abroad. The major ones seem to be the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, and then there's Software and Public Interest. And then there are a number of these foundations, which are popping up for a project, which has been something we've been seeing in recent years. So, for example, the Good Own Foundation will create a foundation, and then Pachi will have a foundation, and Gen 2 has a foundation, Sloan has a foundation. A lot of these different groups are creating their own foundations for larger projects, these kind of super projects. The hundreds of contributors kind of level are creating their own foundations to support development. So Software and Public Interest was kind of like this. It was created by people that were involved in the Debian project to serve the Debian project, but it also had kind of a bigger vision, which was also supporting other projects and a wider variety of projects through taking donations and helping funnel that into development or development resources. People can donate a piece of hardware and write off that donation from their taxes, or a company can do this, and there's a number of benefits for this. Yeah, and part of the reason that that was the idea was because it's a non-trivial amount of labor, paperwork, and money to set up a five-year SD3 organization. So I think a large part of the original motivation as I recall from email threats anyway was... Do it once. Yeah, do it once, and then we can serve lots of these little open-source free software projects that pop up. And Debian was just the one with an instant need. But in a way, because Debian is... I find this kind of cool because Debian in many ways is like a encapsulation of the free software universe. It includes all of the projects that would be potential member or actual member projects are within Debian as well. So in this way, SBI is basically, as far as I know, unique. In that it's an organization that is willing to serve a variety of different organizations in terms of potentially holding intellectual property, things like trademarks. And we could do copyright assignments although we don't already. We can talk about doing it for some kind of shared resources, for example, the Debian website, or something like this. Things that are really kind of project creations, which would be useful because there have been situations where people might want to re-license, and it's not realistic to find every person who's made a change to a web page in Debian. This has been a little bit of... In order to say, hey, so do you agree with moving to a different license? I'm not totally sure if the existing Debian website license would be legitimate for packaging within Debian. That's the problem is that the Debian website license is one that people are not happy with and people want to change. So this is something that has been an idea from changing this to... Same goes for the trademark boxes. Yes, so we've got... So in holding intellectual property, we have holding money. These are the main two things. We also provide legal support because we have a lawyer. Yes, we have a... I guess he's been... We changed lawyers about a year ago, but we've got a lawyer who worked for a little while on our trademark license, and he's actually now in the... He's also a Debian maintainer. He works for a big law firm, and he maintains a couple packages and is in the NMQ, so... Which is probably pretty cool. I don't think any other foundations have lawyers that are possible for him, so... Well, as I understand it, Eben Moghlin got his undergraduate degree in computer science. I don't know that he does a lot of coding. Eben Moghlin, he doesn't do very much. Eben Moghlin worked with his... the general counsel for the FSF, and he actually worked sharing a desk with an 18-year-old... in a computer company. So... I mean, he's a real hockey player, too, but not in the world. So... But... So those are the two major ways. It's kind of like an umbrella organization for other organizations. In reality, about 90% of SPI is the Debian project. There is one board member who is from another project, so the member projects... Other member projects that are active are... Drupal. Or Drupal, OFTC, who is where our other board member is from. Our secretary is from OFTC. Drupal, OFTC. WX Widgets. Fresco. They're still hosted by us. And they still, like, ask things. They don't actually get a lot of money, but they do. We have to host them. I knew we still hosted them, and that project actually still said a number of things. So... We'll talk to Wiggy, and that's about it. Okay. That counts. And then the older... New step. So there's a number of these projects. Basically, the... there seems to be a project that is... big enough. Like Drupal or WX Widgets and a number of these things. They're big enough that they could really use some kind of... They have people that want to make donations of hardware of money and a number of these things, and they're really looking for a legal shell. But they're small enough that creating an entire organization would be a little overkill for them. On their web that they're actually talking about, doing that now, I'm very confused. WX Widgets? No, Drupal. So there have been a couple of examples of projects that have kind of outgrown SBI in the past. Yeah. Little ones, like, no. And the Open Source Initiative. And the Open Source Initiative. Well, there's questions whether it was kind of pushed out the door. Yeah, yeah, I know. Um... Yeah. So the open source... So probably the most famous baby SBI projects that have grown up are the Open Source Initiative and the Genome Project. Which were both... At least some parts of them were within SBI really on, and then they kind of were... One way or another. And wanted to create their own... When, you know, three quarters of the four bad SBI board vanished and left poor Ian as the long remaining board member, you know, the SBI was significantly disrupted for a couple of years. But one thing to underscore, now that I've made that understatement, I'd like to underscore that a lot of people have the perception that the SBI only really serves Debian. But unless $1,000 is a trivial amount of money, you know, WX Widgets had a fundraiser which they didn't actually tell us that they were going to do. But they did it after they joined us and they raised a pretty fair amount of money and we... You know, we got it to them. Yeah, cool. And we actually turned that around fairly quickly. Now this at this point is something like a year at 18 months ago. But, you know, that was one thing I managed to not screw up as treasurer, so... I'm happy about that. So yeah, so there's a number of... So there's a growing number of... And of these... Three of them are in the last year, I think, or in the last... I also point out that the other organizations that do things kind of like SBI and SBI do talk to each other. We have a lot of cross-connections with well, the FSF one is fairly obvious, I guess, but there's actually a meeting coming up just before the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland that I've agreed to show up for, to represent SBI where people from the Brown Foundation and I forget, there's this whole list of other nonprofits and not just from the U.S. but from other countries we'll all be getting together for a couple days to figure out what, if anything, we could share. Sure. Also, SBI and the Open Source Initiative have had mutual observer status at the past and we're talking about re-establishing that as well, which will probably happen. It just occurred to me you didn't introduce us. I'll introduce the other SBI people. You can set up actually and introduce yourself if you have any questions. I am Jimmy Capilowitz, I am the SBI treasurer, I've been a board member since I became treasurer in February 2004. That's like a thank you, let's jump. I think you should know how to make it. I'm Ian Jackson, I've been on the board ever since I can remember and I'm basically just being a pain in the backside. Hi, I'm Brandon Robinson, first while SBI treasurer, I'm now the deputy treasurer. I still get a lot of the mail and the checks and I try to deposit those on a regular basis. Let's see, I was actually re-elected to the board last year. Was it? Was it? I think so. Yeah, Bdale and I ran at the same time and we both got elected on the board. That's who I am. Yeah, I'm Gideal Garvey, I've served as an advisor to the SBI board for a while and then officially as Debian's representative during the time that I was DPL and then served as sort of, I went back to an advisory sort of status after I finished my tenure as DPL and then finally got around to thinking that maybe I'd actually run for a board seat and have been on the board now for a little over a year I guess and continued it as sort of, you know, trying to provide a little adult supervision. So the board, so SBI is a membership organization and there are two classes of membership. There are contributing members and non-contributing members. There are not very many non-contributing members and I have the numbers up here. So let me find the exact numbers, but there are somewhere in the range of a contributing member is anybody who is, oh, there are a lot of non-contributing members. We should mention the other board members too. Okay, so I can't. There's John Goersen who is the president and you're the vice president and Jimmy's the treasurer and David Graham of OFTC is the secretary and we've got Bruce parents he was elected to the board in the same round as myself and oh that's right, we've had two of those options, okay. That's right, Joey Schultz. He's also been on the SBI board for a very long time since before me or VDL, I think. And then, is there anybody else? Or is that... I have the list, so I'll everybody on the board except for David Graham is involved with Debian and David Graham is involved in OFTC and I am also an anomaly an OFTC staff member although I do very little for them. Yeah, for those who don't know OFTC is a largely an IRC network that's an alternative to freedom. That's actually the fullest. That's everybody. And then there are a couple advisors Gregory Pomerance is the legal counsel but that's okay because he's usually at work when we have meetings anyway. And then Jeff Watt is Jeff Watt is at least in theory, well he is actually the genome foundation so this is another way of kind of trying to keep that. He talks to various of us at different times but being an Australia the time sinker. Sure, I talk to Jeff Watt all the time but not only probably every couple months. And at various times we've had kind of a serving board member from OSI the most recent I believe was Guido Van Rossen by the author of Python and he was affiliated with OSI for a time I'm not sure he still is but while he was he sat in on SPI board meetings. So SPI is a membership there are two kinds of numbers that are contributing numbers and non-contributing numbers a contribution contributing it refers to contributing in any way in the software community not to pay money there are no dues to become a member SPI to become a non-contributing member you just sign up is that correct? So if you want to be a non-contributing member you just go to the webpage and sign up and evidently almost 300 people have done that contributing numbers there are also about 300 contributing members and contributing members are people who have contributed in some way to the free software community if you are a member of the W project or another member project it's automatic You're automatically eligible you do actually go to the website and sign up you don't get automatically subscribed to mailing lists and stuff like that but if you're a WN developer then you're automatically eligible for contributing membership and I suspect most people who are in the new maintainer queue because of the fairly high requirements these days most people in the MQC who seem to have sponsored packages and stuff then you're probably also contributing substantially to become an SPI contributing member so if that's something you'd be interested in doing and you're not yet a WN developer don't let that discourage you I mean basically the process works something like I'm a contributing member I work on these projects and then there's a little bit of googling and if it looks like you don't work on those projects like you know I work on Python and then you search the Python mailing list and there's no message from you maybe I should ask you again for some more information but if it's clear that you're contributing in some way then it's like it's pretty easy compared to the Debian NM process it's pretty lightweight we have a recently chosen new membership committee so for a long time it was Martin it was Martin Mechelmeyer and Peter Fossberger who ran the kind of maintain the websites for voting for this whole membership process also the guidelines for joining and then so there was voting stuff and then they in April of this year the two of them said you know we've done this for a long time and we're going to move on to other stuff and so we have a new membership committee so there's a little bit about a hitch in there but so there are a few people equating a couple dozen people but the new membership committee is Graham Wilson Luke Klauss Klauss and Michael Schulteis Schulteis Michael Schulteis is a co-worker of mine I just don't know how to pronounce his name but in the Michael Schulteis he's also a Demian cool so that's our membership committee and actually Luke is also our lawyer an application manager for Demian which is a little bit funny let me mention the main benefit of membership is that it renders you eligible to vote in the elections for the board of directors I don't think Mako explicitly said that but we've mentioned elections to the board and that is how you get a vote is by becoming a contributing member of SPI right and those will happen I guess every year or every other year depending on what people are being elected we didn't require any of this here because nobody's seat was expiring it's for a three year term so I think you probably should be if you're planning on running for the board you should also probably be a contributing member Bruce parents didn't bother and it didn't stop him but it has a rule but you can't vote for your soul I'm kidding and there will be elections next year for a number of seats actually for four or five seats so thinking about this in the future would be good so let me look and see if I have anything else that would be July 1st of next year when that happens because by our bylaws on July 1st no matter what day of the week it is if it's Saturday, Sunday doesn't matter annual meeting is July 1st so if you want to influence the outcome of the next board election you've got just about a year to I think that's dark denomination period I think you can nominate through July 13th or so thank you so in any case Jimmy's got the details there so in any case the last thing I want to say before I kind of open things up is that so one problem with SPI which is actually a problem with the way that businesses work internationally and charities work internationally is that SPI is more useful in the US than it is outside of the US and there was a strategic decision or perhaps not a strategic decision to make it a US organization a lot of people do that but there are still people who want to give money in charitable organizations that don't live in the US and and working with that can be a little bit and just people who want to give money to Debbie Inouye can I come in there and say that the relationship of SPI with say Debbie Inouye indeed with any other project is not exclusive so there are other organizations for example there's FFIS there's the Debbie in UK thing that's new max setup and given that you have to have an American organization for American taxpayers to get those tax benefits there has to be an American organization and that's what SPI is but often it doesn't make sense for people outside the US to deal with American organizations because it's just just too much and also local charity laws are quite often extreme if we were trying to set the same thing up in the UK Debbie Inouye we've set up as an informal society and we have a bank account well we may have a bank account if the bank ever gets a fucking act together they you know in the UK to deal with full on charity is so difficult to actually have the aims that we have well it is in the US too we have to have all of these things as well as that there are some fairly strict rules about what you can do and not do the same thing but it's quite difficult to find the slot of the sort of charity that you are that you can possibly fit into because there are about five different types of charities so SPI is a little bit there are a few things that this is true so it's not only a specific relationship that hold assets for the Debian project or for other member projects for other member projects internationally I've been trying to report on some of those in my DPL reports to date and it's interesting I just want to underscore Ian's point because it's interesting as we as we move DEBCOP around from place to place we seem to find new organizations to become affiliated with and hold assets with like I don't think Linux activatory had very much a relationship with Debian until now and I'm hoping that will be an ongoing thing and the same thing with the well Brazil Linux association software that's right the project in Brazil last year because of DEBCOP 4 so that's been a nice side effect of having DEBCOP globe trot a little bit is that we are accreting accreting yes that's very good thank you so there's also money being stored or beginning to be stored in Linux Australia that's there already yeah and the Christian sort of keeps holding money for Debian in Italy as well and there's money in the UK and there's money in other places so SPI occupies a special place it has an international it has an international award and it tries to represent a larger member of a broader section because there are some things that SPI does that other organization doesn't like holding for example the Debian trademark when the Debian trademark is registered it has been registered internationally like in Europe and Brazil and in Japan and in those situations if someone else registers it our lawyer contacts them and if otherwise we will register it ourselves so this has been something that SPI has in terms of this relationship and it also holds the most money and it also holds the most money for Debian except for Debcombe Debcombe so maybe you might share with us exactly how much we don't know exactly how much money but somewhere in the order of so SPI holds somewhere in the order $50,000 in gross assets of which probably at least 80% the reason we don't have a precise figure and I'll go ahead since I was an earlier treasurer and I'm closer to that fuck up the reason we don't know the exact numbers is because a lot of the early paperwork having to do with the bank accounts that SPI was holding at the time was lost by a previous treasurer, no not me I made different mistakes and so for some very old money we simply don't know how the donations were earmarked we had two different bank accounts with American Express Insurance Bank but one of them got defrauded so it's I think the key is that you do know how much money you're holding but we're not sure what the split was intended to be yes exactly some of it's money but we're not entirely sure what it's for some of it's part of the SPI general fund and some of it's for Debbie when the original screw up the records happened there was a vote it was an SPI vote so just stood up the funds as 80% Debbie and 20% a 5% rule I think it was 95 and 5 and so is there any reason there isn't just a vote out from the side there's exactly this much for Debbie and now not being 100% accurate in our record keeping since then unfortunately I think we have been pretty accurate since Brendan we don't know exactly what the donation what the earmark split is of the donations between them and now I think we've got all of the information but it hasn't been added up right and so it doesn't appear in our look at our financial statements and you can't tell by looking at our financial statements even since then so it's not just one lump sum that's originally one thing that's been happening recently is Jimmy's been doing a much better job than we've seen previously really in getting something like something approaching a normal financial reporting so the other financial reporting is getting better when we're handling it and it's about to get better when we're not handling it because we're hiring somewhere hiring a bookkeeping service in New York City that is just basically going to take to answer your question specifically I don't think another vote is required because what you may have missed and the noise in that discussion is that the combination of that vote and the information that we have records on since then should be sufficient to get those numbers figures don't appear in the financial statement is that a reasonably easy thing or very healthy I think it ought to be easy that it hasn't gotten done I think it will be done so we're working with the bookkeeper for all the information on this here I suspect it will be done in the next month or two so we're going to be so we've got this bookkeeper and we're going to be the idea is sending them anything with a number on it and then they're going to be splitting things up by member project they're going to handle a lot of this stuff and then they'll say here's the PDF with all your information we've been talking about doing this for years it's great that we're finally getting the silly bookkeeping stuff done by somebody who does that professionally because treasurer after treasurer has crumbled under the burden of having to do all the bookkeeping themselves we're not good at keeping things and that's fine everybody thinks it should be a cakewalk so anybody who fails is just a screw up time and again with our treasurers we've just seen that a volunteer can't do it so we said we've got SPI has some general funds there are people who donate money to SPI and don't say give it all to Debian they want to support the organization generally and it seems to make a lot of sense to spend that on making ourselves a more responsive and responsible organization so the two developments recently are in terms of bookkeeping and such is basically a decision to go ahead and hire a bookkeeper in New York City to kind of step together and kind of a little bit of a volunteer from Luke here who's evidently an advanced accountant you'll also explain exactly what advanced accountant is it means that it means when you come to the books you don't get caught he managed advanced accounts obviously accounts that have been offered to someone so we have also a little bit of new blood in a couple different places in terms of that since we're kind of there's not that much time left if people have questions or comments or I think there's been loose hints of where we're going we've seen more new member projects in the last year and a half than we had total member projects before and I think this is going to continue because as we continue to do a better job of keeping getting money sorted out and have quicker turnaround and things like that will become a more attractive place for a lot of these organizations I think of this size I don't think we're going to be having the next Debbie in size projects joining up and that's okay we can kind of another way that Debbie and developers can kind of work with people in the free software community to help I was just wondering might it be a good idea for all the organizations such as SPI FFIS and anything else that comes along agreed to have their membership be mutually members of the elder group so we at least have one it's interesting different people have different impressions when I was WN project leader I asserted that we should just take everyone who's a registered WN developer and declare that they were a contributing member of SPI and there was lots of discussion slash concern about well that would mean they were automatically added to another mailing list that maybe they didn't want to be a member of and in general the perception was that having a larger number of members who weren't necessarily committed to the organization and who wouldn't necessarily show up for elections and make qualms and things like this probably wasn't the brightest idea so at the end of the day we ended up with an agreement that anyone who was a registered developer with WN would be immediately granted contributing member status if they asked for it and so I suspect that the reality is that if you showed up at any of these other organizations and said I'm a contributing member of SPI they would go wonderful we're glad to have you here but my suspicion is that the same kind of criteria might apply perhaps they could be like FFI's criteria for membership do we know? yeah I mean there might have to be like the lowest common denominator kind of level of membership but just so that we can claim you know like bigger numbers like you can see that let me follow up on the details there are also some people who simply didn't want to be affiliated with a U.S. corporation even if it was non-profit even if it was affiliated with Devian and I think one concern that other organizations might have especially if they're smaller is you know they don't want to be swamped with a glut of Americans you know potentially dominating their organization I mean they're trying to set up something local so and this is something that we'll see we've seen with money so for example the money that is put together in the UK is as far as I know spent in the UK you know this is certainly the case in Italy for example as well when they get money at Italian booths you know at booths or something like that they will spend that money to help buy CDs or a banner or something for the Italian booth and that's totally okay that's great and that kind of local support and storing funds is great and I think that the role of SPI and you know Devian is to coordinate that I think this is a question that I'll inject a question at this sort of forum of organizations that's going to be convening before us by the way there will be another meeting of this sort of group of groups before the Aus-Kahn Europe thing later in the year so I don't know if I'll get to that one or not yet we'll see whether this one is sort of repeating I'm kind of related to that I think there's also kind of little amount of fragmentation going on in the US because I think I've read in like LWN or somewhere that now there's like an open source legal center or something there's a very different organization I remember thinking around that time that well that's kind of something like what's the key to that Software Freedom Self Law Center is basically people from the FSF who kind of created another organization that is now kind of FSF is now outsourcing a lot of work too but there's a good amount of kind of legal work that the FSF used to do for itself that people in the FSF want to open up to a wider variety of primarily volunteer projects a simpler way of stating it is that it's attempting to provide legal base resources to the projects and that's a little different volunteer projects I mean it's a law firm if we didn't already have a council willing to represent us in the same way that some other foundations have chosen to talk to SFLC we probably would as well I think that we probably will eventually as well I think we have a relationship with them at the very least before the Software Freedom Law Center was created they approached us and said hey this is what I'm doing he is in regular conversation I've been involved in the Freedom Law Center he is in regular conversation and I think that if push came to shove and SPI finds itself with I don't know or even just in a situation where Greg wants some help because someone says you're infringing on this patent or something I am relatively confident the Software Freedom Law Center would become involved in one way or another one of the things we've done over the past year that brings to mind a service of process one of the things SPI has done over the past year is we actually have a professional company serving as our registered agent what that means is we have a legal address for the service of process which means if somebody sues us it's not showing up in a Debian developer's post office box which was the case for a lot of years and in fact because the address hadn't been updated it would have been Tim Saylor's mailbox in Boston Massachusetts and who's heard of Tim Saylor in the past five years so that's one of the things we've done and so CSC, Corporation Services Company is somebody we have we're retaining to serve that role for us and they're in New York State it's one of the small but significant ways in which we've been making progress over the past year and I can see how other projects might need that kind of service too so if like SPI could become the one stop administrative support for free software projects got this position like I mentioned earlier there are a number of other projects that either do the scale or due to personal or political considerations have decided they'd like to run their own corporations and have been willing to do the paperwork for the US registration process we've ended up even just in the US with a half dozen or eight interesting foundations and if you had in the sort of significantly large enough to be worth inviting for meeting there ends up being a list of almost two dozen around the world but I think we're invited to participate in this upcoming meeting my hope actually is that if nothing else we'll figure out how to share some best practice knowledge there are people for example who've done a lot more work on researching trademark issues and trademark licensing than we have I think there are things that we have figured out that maybe they haven't and so we can share some of this stuff with everything some of them SPI has been butting its head against this problem for nearly a decade and that's much longer than some of these other organizations I mean there wasn't any such thing as more KDE in 1997 so hopefully we do have something to bring to the table since BDAL has been affiliated with them for a while I think he's in a good position to share some of that expertise we'll see how that goes I don't know how that process is going to work out but it's just actually someone's taking the effort it's actually the folks from the Ganone Foundation that triggered this meeting to happen and the O'Reilly folks agreed to provide a place for the meeting to occur before Osconn it's funny for me because I'm not actually going to Osconn but I'm going to Portland for this meeting so we'll come back with something called the Portland prospectus editorial changes editorial changes in the SPI editorial changes we could deal with some editorial changes are there any other questions if you want to get out well actually I've just been informed that we actually have more time because the next door it's not happening at all or it's not happening here after lunch but there's something going on yeah I mean if you people may want to go to the office what time does the next talk start in every room 10 okay so we've got about 5 minutes does anyone else have a question that we're trying to answer right now questions concerns no other questions has this been helpful do you feel more informed about SPI than you did before yeah where do you get the main funding donations we have no source of revenue apart from charitable giving on the part of businesses at mostly individuals so for example about a year and a half ago I went through the little bit of paperwork to arrange so that any accurate employee in the world who wants to donate to SPI can do it through the normal animal giving process through the web interface where you decide how you want to do it I'd like to put a check for you so when it shows there's like one or two people who did it last year I'm hoping it will be more this year as a lumped deposit or something or some annotation as to the names of the people and just as a funny interesting anecdote, Microsoft has a charitable giving program with matching and there was a Microsoft employee who has donated out of their paycheck not being considerable some of the money I think it's in the hundreds of dollars and it's funny because we keep we keep faxing back Microsoft keeps telling us you need to send us information so we can we can't match this and we fax it and then about a month later we get another letter saying you need to send us information or we can't match this and we fax them something so I think we're much too small and insignificant to actually be harassed by Microsoft in this respect but it's kind of funny to see that so maybe someday we'll actually get some money directly from Microsoft that would be pretty funny so what do you think is every year's interest or something like that where SPI should be more active or where people would be needed to be more active but it would be are there any obvious stuff that should be done but isn't done because nobody there's a lot of people who come to SPI and they say I have this really cool new idea for something to do a new SPI should do and well that's obviously just not going to work and anyway SPI only does boring things I mean basically SPI does accounts and historically very badly so if you've got some good thing you want to do then by all means come and talk to SPI and we can put you on our list of projects or something it doesn't really it probably doesn't buy you anything I mean to answer you concretely something that needs to be done is a revision of our bylaws because the bylaws we have they suck they are internally inconsistent and they're awful and before you make what may be the obvious assumption they were lifted wholesale from a boilerplate set of bylaws that I believe the legal firm that originally helped us to charter SPI set up so these are like real professional businesses bylaws that are really inconsistent and they suck it's not like some one of our volunteers I think Ian Jackson if he took the time to do it would come up with something far superior we're not creative enough to make this up yeah so the interest in that sort of thing would be wonderful to have that work done and the other thing is I think it would actually be really interesting to see SPI specifically represented at some of the more interesting conferences and events particularly the ones that have a banner or one other sort of thing like this it's my perception that our pure organizations in other countries will usually show up and have a banner and answer questions from people and get an exhibit and things like that I don't think SPI's ever at least it is something in general of one page introduction to SPI like we can like have a flyer another thing is if people have ideas on how despite the fact that we are primarily useful for U.S. donors there are still lots of non-U.S. donors who want to donate to us and if people have ideas of how to do that without relying on something such as PayPal I don't mind the payment service but PayPal is known to be sketchy so if there are banks but they're not a bank and they go to court so if there's a legitimate reasonable payment service or some other way we've also talked about getting a merchant account with a bank a more legitimate bank but that hasn't happened yet well then PayPal because we're pretty happy with First ID no I'm talking about something like Echo like I mentioned online but yeah they may not know that this is probably going to be an administrative nightmare but could the people in particular countries where if you've got a lot of people who don't want to file it then it's customary it accumulates in the local country if you actually want to get that into the state if you do it in one go so Debian becomes an international courier basically because we go all over the place all the time that does turn out to be pretty hard because of various countries laws regarding it depends on the organization that it's coming from because it's relatively easy to get money in it's not as a past problem but for other charitable organizations we can look like it's a feeder organization but I think that I think that maybe another good thing that could be really useful is kind of helping codify and map out some of the relationships between the US and other organizations like what is the relationship between Debian, between between I don't know these you're saying that none of the all the money comes from donations yeah I mean we don't sell anything in the UK in the UK it's got a few thousand pounds that's all from profits made at stores and experts not that we actually try to make profit so how does that work in the states who gets the money well in the past this hasn't happened lately because what's happened is a bunch of shitload of CDs on people Debian doesn't actually distribute any CDs anymore but what used to happen was we would we would offer t-shirts at various booths like say Linux world on both coasts and in exchange for a donation you would get a t-shirt so the revenues in excess of the costs would be donated to the Debian project and those would come through SP Debian sold that Debian sold those CDs? so the way to so you it happened in in Boston they were going with what you should oh okay okay I was a little angry about we just didn't have enough money I think that money often goes to SPI the money to go to SPI the one from Boston certainly isn't really I walked out with like $100,000 in cash I sent it to Matt I sent it to Matt I sent it to Matt okay because Matt had purchased all the t-shirts so I sent him the t-shirts he took out whatever I sent him a check he took out whatever thank god the funniest check link that I ever got was from Plantatoms after New York one year and the memo field of the check was Linux world aftermath aftermath that's very cute so I think I have to hear it after like I said in the email oh nice basically I didn't want to do that because it's too easy to get lost and it's something you don't want to lose I know check books I have them no I thought that's what you were talking about no his universal power adapter yeah


posing. Our core question is a simple one, which is if there is a growing sense that we need to be allocating money for particular purposes in different ways, whether it is to pupil equity fund, whether it is support for early years, then I think that that does raise a question as to the core funding formula. In a sense, if the core funding formula was designed to reduce inequality and improve outcomes in the way that the policy framework is now designed to do, you could argue that you might not need to have separate revenue streams in additional funding or nonspecific changes. The more you add on to those bits, the more it seems to us reasonable that you ask the question about the core formula in the process. I suppose that is our core point. Time is almost upon us. I apologise, Mr Whiteman, that you will have to be brief, but I am really hoping that we can get this session finished at quarter past, Mr Whiteman. Okay, thank you. It is a brief follow-up on that. I mean, I think that that is helpful. I have been engaging with this as a result of the proposed cuts to City of Edinburgh Music School, which were previously ring-fenced in 2009, and then Concordat said that they are all wrapped up now in the settlement. Where they are in the settlement is a little bit unclear, so exploring that in the future would be useful. I just want to ask a very brief question on Exhibit 5. You talk about budgetary pressures, single-state pension, living wage for care workers, annual increases in costs and so on. Is it your impression that those pressures now are significantly greater than they have ever been over the last decade or so? Just to get some relative impression of the scale of the pressures now being faced? Others might have a more coherent view than I have on that. I would not say that. I mean, financial pressures cost pressures to be more accurate of one sort or another and every day and every year factor of local government life, so we have not looked at this to see whether, in 2016-17, they were more or less severe than in previous years. But what I think I can say safely is that they are not out of line, they are not extraordinary pressures, so even if they were consistent with previous years, against a backdrop of reducing resources, they become harder to deal with. I think that is the core point that we are making here. That was very brief, Mr Wightman. I appreciate that. Any other questions from members? As always, it was very helpful, a really challenging report. It gives us better skills as MSPs on this committee to better scrutinise the budget when the numbers do come out as well, so we very much appreciate that. We look forward to working in partnership with you in the months and years ahead. That is the end of this particular evidence session, so thank you very much. However, when I will move to agenda item 3, which the committee has previously agreed to take in private, I will now move into private session.


Our boys just made it inside of Walmart. It's been quite some normal How long has it been since we've been at Walmart man people like probably like a month like the two of us It's a woman at the same time probably like a month or maybe not. Yeah, man It's been a while for me though Like I think the last time was probably when we filmed like that rod and real one. Yeah We know we did a hundred dollar fishing Walmart challenge. Yeah, pretty sure that was the last one Eight up. When is the last time you probably want me right three years ago? Three years ago, man So guys we are gonna be trying to find some live bait in here. This is actually a Walmart I haven't been in but man, do they have actually a lot of stuff This isn't the normal one that we usually go in but look at all those do that's how big right take one of them out Boy, I kind of got to see one of them. Oh my gosh Dude, that is a rod and a half, bro That is ridiculous look at that you can touch the ceiling with that boy I just love how they make these like huge ones and look how like poorly they're made Seriously, I could like break this so easily. What are these snappy right now? I think this clearance. I don't really know what an amazing clearing section bro. They got one crank bait They got both me and two buzz baits, but what else? That's just about it Yeah, I don't know what this I don't know what's going on We got clearance rack at my Walmart like two years ago. They'd always have clearance lawyers And then I started my YouTube channel and they took it down They're like, yeah, screw this norm guy. He's not filming no videos in here.  He's doing some boom boy boom boy Yes, sir. I don't know if that really competes in Norm's 40s last episode. I Knew he was gonna do it. I can't take this guy anywhere I could have gone for six honestly no spot either. No spot No spot like seal like tape Okay Have you ever used it? I've not I've thought about it, but I just never really came to ever do anything with it Yeah, we can make a whole boat Like together, but we could just make a whole one out of You understand how much how much of this stuff you'd have to buy to make a full-on boat a full-on three-man John Really yeah, let's be real if you're making a whole boat it would how much money's worth do you think it would be? No, what do you see more than that? way more than that Yeah, but you need like the 20 of them Yeah, it's gonna be a big chunk of change I don't know if you guys want to see us do something with the flex seal Whether it's making baits or whatever it is leave a comment down below smash the like button Let's find the words Can you buy for me? Actually, what are you talking about? I can't see it. What's you saying? What do you hold dude? Where you were you grabbing all this stuff?   I got a big head actually kind of looks on the beat It actually looks kind of slick dude So this is the deal bro if you buy me the jacket you got to buy me the hat too And I totally think that's perfect for you homie. How about you try this one on? That's the new fishing with norm hat right there. I do need a hat to hide this haircut my barber Hacks me up. I've been telling the boys the video cry. Yeah, well, it's actually a girl She spent literally 30 seconds on my haircut No, not actually like a minute and 30 seconds. She was dumb before I even knew it started I still gave her a tip and then I looked at it in the mirror Like what did she do norm? That's it bro. That's it. Hey bro. So I can see yeah, I mean you kind of got it crooked. All right. Oh Okay, I like it.  Oh, they're right here dude. They got them They got the glow worms. This is the green ones.  Oh, yeah, you want you one norm. Do I want to eat one? Yeah Heck no What a yeah, you would not not these ideas. Yeah, I want to eat those are chemically infused Yeah, I don't know about that artificially chart screws. I'll eat one out of the dirt I'm done like dirt like in the woods like legit. Yeah, you got all natural bro organic No GMOs So we need some very other ones pick out some up there if they have I got it because those aren't those the regular ones that they make Like they got the regular glow worms like the like the purplish ones The the green ones are the only ones that are really like popping.   See if they're see if they're in there. Oh You're making a mess those are big ones, too. Those are big ins that'll be perfect juicy So we got the big ins we got we got the big worms the regular worms first of the glow So we're gonna see if the glow nests makes a difference. What do you think? I'm gonna catch one. What do you think? You catch one of the glow worms. Oh, yeah, boys. All right. Let's go. All right. Hey, dude. What you doing boy? I'm gonna get Rigged up and we're looking for hoax and bars cuz I found it found it Tie up on the old spinning rod right here.    It's the power bait, but you guys said you like that someone's not coffee flavor No The power base. Oh, that's a different.  I started off So yeah, I'm gonna let these boys go at it This is the big question which one of you guys are using the glow worms and which one of you guys are using the regular I think you want to use the glow worms, right? Yeah, okay Okay, that's cool. I'll use these just to mix it up. All right. I would use it if I've got first pick I would do that No, you want to I know you really wanted to the store you're talking about them. No, it's okay.  Let's see. Oh, yeah, boy. They hype or two. Oh, I want this one bright green worms Yes, sir. Look at that. Look at that. I got flickering. Oh, yeah.  Yeah, I'd break them in pieces.  I'm surprised. There's not a bigger warning label on there a dub given the first Yeah, wait, hold up. How do I get the small rod like how did this end up happening? Do that rod sweet, bro?  There's like a knot all the way like deep in the school though There's a nest in there, bro. Yeah, a nest They don't even understand the squirrel even that good of a joke we're hyping it up. It's not even funny Kind of maybe they'll find it out someday. Yeah, they'll figure out the squirrel That'll be a million subscriber special. What's your strategy a dub. I don't have one. I haven't even seen a fish yet I see his water. That's it. Just water You getting the bobber popper bro The bobber popper boy. You got him. Oh my god. I'm one on the glow worm. That is a baby That's perfect bait size like a huge worm, too.  That's perfect for a bass. That is bad. Oh That's bass candy, bro Really pretty we're gonna go ahead put him back. Well, that's one on the glow worm norm What do you got to say about that man?  Look at this. Look at this guy, man No, I'm trying to you know how to wiggle your worm, bro What'd you say about that, bro? He's already got you one to oh what you gonna do to redeem yourself, bro I'm fine with that. I'm sure I catch one. I'm using a little baby worm They're like, I mean this dude is I don't even know if the fish can see that thing is that small He's down one. I'm gonna see how a dub just cast it in the juice spot, too This rod's so cool to be honest with you. Yeah, oh the double of the double up, bro Small look at that.  Oh double up. Dubs I thought I was gonna tie up with a dub on the regular worms glow worms sticks it through dude. That thing's so cool Look at that. Dubs with a dub Oh Very beautiful. Look at him. Dude. Those are those would be two great pets for a fish tank. We got to do that some time That's Jimmy right there, bro.   Let's go. All right. Still two to one now. Still one ahead Look at them. They went together Little worm on there. Dude. I want to catch a bass now. We got to cut.  I'd be surprised.  That's crazy Do this thing cast so good. Yeah, it's actually really cool He's getting the norm yeah the norm lingo you heck or He got bit. I saw exactly where he got bit. I've never seen two people take bluegill fishing so serious Yeah, that was close. I have never seen two people take bluegill fishing so seriously Oh, I kind of get rebated up man. He's not in the right spot. It's not the right case I didn't say anything don't look over here. So we're here at the bluegill national championship We got a aid up here in the lead. I think what is that three to one you to all my fans? I love all of you. He's not doing a little wiggler technique here We's actually moving on bobber on top of the water bringing the worm with it The bobber attracts those fish in to see what's going on. They say a little tasty Chartreuse live worm they came up and they do this thing. I don't just like that Noah's over here He's in the squat position The only thing he could improve on is maybe wearing camo so the fish can't see him But he's got the right idea. He's popping up.   Oh my god? Yes, dude? That is the lucky worm You missed another fish right here We've got a cop another one and take the lead the glow worms man the glow worms I think got a little advantage. They ain't got nothing on these regular ones.  We already caught three fish We taking the lead with a bass boys, so we cut a warm mouth three blue kill and then a bass Let's go look at this eight up trying to get it. What you saying, bro?  You ain't got nothing. Where's the dub, bro? Hey, can you bring those other worms over? I'm having a good time just watching this right now I've never seen a more competitive blue-gill fishing competition Adam. It's probably burned 90 calories running up and down grabbing more Worms why you should leave the worms there? Oh? Yeah, okay.  You gotta learn how to wait. No, he's getting one right now. Probably. Oh He's getting tickled Yes, sir, how does it even turn into a competition? We're just coming out here to catch fish.  I'm just saying So this point folks, I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna be fishing today. I'm just holding the camera That's why I'm here. I guess it's boys have caught like seven fish. Oh, you got him. You got him a dub Maybe five to four. No, no, no, there's another one No Six four, baby. Oh, we came off too quick for these Are you serious this game over I'm sorry, what is it seven four are you? Seven four, but you you don't bro. It looks like low worms taking that L today boy a dub is taking the L Oh, he didn't he didn't say that a job Oh