Thank you very much for being here with us today. I am Sapna Jaswani, a technical program manager at Microsoft. With me here today is my colleague and team member, Prasad Gandham. We focus on making our customers onboarding journey to Azure easier. And today, we will focus on the same for Azure VMware solution.  Once you've decided on the budget and by when, top of mind are some foundational considerations. Like for example, are you looking to use this house as a residence or as an office space? Are you looking to buy in the United States or elsewhere? See responses to questions like these will inform you of the kind of plumbing requirements, electrical requirements and material requirements for your specific use case. Like for example, whether the electricity will be 110 volts or 220 volts. Where is it best to install GFCI outlets? Whether the building material can be concrete or something else because the property is in an earthquake prone area. Over time, some of these considerations have become best practices. And in other cases, laws that governments adhere to for their region. Using this analogy for Microsoft Azure, you've made a decision about when you want to move your workload and your budget. Fantastic, congratulations. Now come the foundational considerations. What's the best way to set up your networking stack? How do you ensure business continuity for your organization's requirement? What's the best way to monitor your workload? This is where Azure Landing Zone, previously also known as Enterprise Scale Landing Zone and referred to as ALZ or ESLZ for short, provides you with a set of scalable, compliant, secure best practices to accelerate the onboarding of your workload to Azure. Now you have an on-prem VMware environment. So we have built a set of best practices in partnership with VMware to accelerate your onboarding to Azure VMware solution, meeting you on your on-prem VMware platform. We will talk about how these best practices can be catered, tweaked, adjusted, leveraged for your unique scenario. Building on ALZ or without it, the Azure VMware Solution Landing Zone Accelerator, which is also referred to as Enterprise Scale for Azure VMware Solution provides you with a reference architecture and a reference implementation for your workload's unique foundational requirements to move to Azure VMware Solution. Action speaks louder than words, so with that I will hand over to Prasad for an awesome demo that will show you just how easy it is to migrate your on-prem VMware workload to Azure VMware Solution. Say goodbye to spending nights and weekends discovering this information, using trial and error to make it work. And say hello to automation that sets your workload up for success and the ability to scale. With that, over to Prasad. Thank you so much, Sapna. With that being said, let's jump right into the demo. If you would like to follow along with me, please open your favorite browser and go to aka.ms-avs-accelerator. Okay, ta-da, this is the landing page for Enterprise Scale for Azure VMware Solution. As you are ready to start your journey for Azure VMware Solution, you might have questions around how do I plan for network identity and operations. No worries, Microsoft has streamlined this process for you. In this page, we have outlined the design guidelines. Let's jump into the identity. In the identity, you might have questions on how do I plan for a password reset, great question. Here it is, you might be asking a question, what is the best way for me to integrate with Active Directory? No worries, we got you covered there too. Like this, we are providing recommendations on Run Command. Now, let's move to networking section, where as a foundation of the house, you are looking at plumbing electricity. It is very important to plan for your networking as well. In this section, we are covering few scenarios, networking scenarios, because every customer is different, every one of you is different, how you are going to plan for this. If you're looking at on the screen where we are outlining, where if you're looking to do egress or ingress traffic inspection using virtual van, we have a scenario covered that with the recommendations there. The scenario two, where we are talking about using third-party NVAs for the firewall and using the global reach or not using the global reach. So that is where we are recommending solution for scenario two. So third-party NVAs, you're saying that we are recommending third-party NVAs as part of our solution? Absolutely, Sapna. These solutions are designed with your success in mind, and if that is through a third-party NVAs, then the solution will recommend that. Thank you. That's pretty cool. Thank you. Moving ahead, I'm going to walk all of you through one of the scenario where we have outlined the architectural components. And in this architecture diagram, you could actually see Azure VMware solution following that enterprise scale for Azure VMware solution guidelines. And also, you could see that express route connectivity to your on-prem data center. Like this, our goal is to take that architectural complexity away from you and make you that successful journey to Azure VMware solutions. With that being said, your next challenge might be planning for your operations or planning for disaster recovery. We are providing that guidelines as well here. Now, let's jump right into the platform and automation DevOps section where we will actually meet you where you are when you are ready to do the deployment for Azure VMware solution. Let's jump right in where we will see building a private cloud and also we discuss about additional scenarios and modules. If you are following me so far, you can get it there by clicking on enterprise scale for Azure VMware solutions and automation section here. If not, no worries, you can go to a browser and type in aka.ms slash avs enterprise scale repo. This is a GitHub repo you would be seeing where the landing page will have two different scenarios outlined. One is the greenfield deployment where you would be doing an end-to-end Azure VMware solutions deployment for a private cloud creation. The second one is the brownfield deployment. The brownfield deployment is the one where some of you already have a private cloud configured, but you would like to expand your networking and you would like to expand HCX or Site Recovery Manager. We are providing you with that additional add-ons and we are providing you monitoring. Then the final section we are providing modules around networking. Now let's look at the deployment of a greenfield deployment. For that, please click on getting started. So that is where you would see the prerequisites, which would be having a Azure subscription and having a request for quota. Once you have those, just crawl down a little bit where you would see greenfield template. Click on that. It will show a ARM portal where you would see deploy to Azure button. It should open a custom deployment template for you too, like how you are seeing on the screen. Here, we are asking you to fill out few details. I already filled out some of these details as part of the demo where I provided the region where I'm gonna deploy it. And also, we are providing a slash 22 unique and non-overlapping address as it is very, very key to provide that. And as a customer, we are giving you that options as well to choose whether you would like to deploy a gem box or not and make a selection around whether you would like to deploy HCX or not. Similarly, same thing with Site Recovery Manager and you have that flexibility and power to select those. Once you fill in all these details, click on review and create button. Behind the scenes, it might take a few hours to actually complete the deployment. And you could see this progress in your deployment section in your Azure portal. For demo purposes, I have already created a private cloud and I'm gonna show you what that looks like. And here, I built it in Canada Central and you could see that we have few resource groups created there. And I'm going into private cloud resource group where I'm trying to get to my private cloud and I'm going to identity. So this is where I would get my cloud admin credentials and go to Boston host or a gem box to actually connect to vCenter. Okay, now you have access to vCenter connectivity. Ta-da, that easy that is for all of you to get started. Some of you might be questioning, hey, I do not want the portal experience. How do I achieve this using a CI CD pipeline or using Azure DevOps? Fantastic. Let's look at building a private cloud using Terraform. If you're following with me so far, you can get there by going to the Git repo. Otherwise, in your browser, type in aka.ms-vac-avis-enterprise-skill-repo. And when you scroll down, click on the green field deployment. And when you scroll down on that page towards the end, you will see few options, few options, Bicep, Arm, and Terraform. So in this case, we are gonna do the deployment using Terraform. And once you click on the Terraform link, it will show you all the detailed steps we would need to follow to do the deployment. The step one is actually cloning the repo. The way you could clone is using a Git clone command, as I am showing in the screen, where you would be typing in Git clone. Step two would be modifying the terraform.tfvars file. This is where, how I have done the custom deployment in the previous section, where we have asked you to provide the slash 22 address space and the region, you would fill out the same details around here. Once you are done filling up those details, please click on save the file. And step three, we want you to run easy account show. This actually shows and making sure you are in the right subscription when you are ready for the deployment. Step four, we would like you to change the directory to the terraform, how I'm doing on the screen by using change directory, getting into the terraform folder. This is where we are actually now action starts, where we are gonna run terraform initialize. This is the command, which actually creates that working directory containing terraform configuration files. This is the first command you run after writing a new terraform configuration or cloning an existing one from version control. It is safe to run and this command can be run multiple times. The once you are done with that, it should not take much longer. Next section where you would be running terraform plan, that is where a command creates an execution plan, which actually lets you see all the beautiful things which is creating behind the scenes. And you could see on my screen as well, the baston hose, the networking components, and the whole plan kind of shows you, these are all the resources are kind of getting built behind the scenes. The final thing is the terraform apply, which is a command that actually exudes the plan which we have built earlier. Again, after a few hours, you will see a private cloud created for you. Fantastic, you could see where all the private cloud resources are created. This is where we really want to meet all of you at scale when you're ready to utilize this and explore this one in Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. If you already have a private cloud, would like to utilize a brownfield scenario? Let me show you that too, right here. Here, I'm trying to create monitoring around Azure VMware solutions, which will create that action group and metric alerts for monitoring Azure VMware solutions private cloud using the automation. Part of the operations section, there are few guidelines published, and this is exactly doing what is there in our documentation. What a beauty, right? We're already talking about in the documentation, plus now we are actually providing you that using the automation where you could accelerate. If you, for following, again, I'm gonna open azuremonitor.bicep.json file. This is where we would ask you to fill in few parameters. One is provide the email address and provide that subscription ID, which you could get it from your private cloud where you could actually get the ID and copy paste here. Once you do that, change the directory to bicep folder and run the following command, which is same thing there in our portal, azdeployment using the group create. And this is the script which runs behind the scenes and creates that monitoring alerts for all of you. Once that is created, which for the demo purposes, I have already done this. Now I'll just quickly jump to azure portal where I am looking for monitor on the search bar. Once I open that monitor on the search bar, you could see in these all six type of alerts created in there in your section that enables your monitoring using one of the modules. So Prasad, you're telling me that for Greenfield, helping our customers with architecture at scale is what we allow for and enable. And in Brownfield, this customer, our customers would not even have to re-architect. Is that right? Absolutely, Sabna. That is the goal of it, is that if you already have a great architecture in place, we are just expanding that using this scenario-based approach. Wow, that is very cool. Thank you. Thank you. Now that we have covered referenced architecture and referenced implementation, you can share as the feedback to improve our documentation and automation at any time. If there is a networking scenario missing in our documentation, please provide the feedback using the feedback link shown here. If you would like to share the feedback around GitHub and Git repo, please open issues under Git issues. Thank you, Prasad. That was an awesome demo. It's impressive to see how we are helping our Greenfield customers and our Brownfield customers meeting them using the tools they use, whether it's Terraform or whether it's Portial. Pretty impressive. And thank you for reminding our customers to share with us the issues that they find as they walk on this journey with us. And then I would like to remind us that everything that you saw today is self-service. You can go to azuredocs.microsoft.com, the AKMS link that my buddy Prasad here shared with us, and you can pretty much self-serve through this architecture, through this design, through this implementation. And for those of you that are working with Microsoft account team, please do reach out to your respective account team, ask them about enterprise scale for AVS, and they will be happy to help you run this as a workshop, accelerating your unique journey to Azure VMware solution. We look forward to hearing about your successes, what worked for you, and where you would like to see more investments. And that's a wrap for today. Prasad and I would like to thank you for your time today and for joining us today. We look forward to connecting with you in the future. Thanks for the opportunity and have a great day.


Have you heard about Ubiquis but are not sure what they are? Everyone's talking about them and how you need to factor authentication or to factor authentication in order to secure your accounts. In this video I'm going to show you what is a Ubiqui and how you can set it up without zero. Hello everyone, I'm Carla and in this video you'll learn what is a Ubiqui and how you can use it to add two factor authentications to your applications in out zero. A Ubiqui is a hardware device that makes two factor authentication a lot easier. All you need to do is plug it into your laptop and tap it and that's it. Ubiquis are also called security keys and are manufactured by a company called Ubico. There are other companies like Google also providing security keys but for this video I have the one from Ubico and that's the one that we will be using. ASMR, nice. But how does a Ubiqui actually work? Usually when you go on a service you are required to provide something that you know like your login credentials for example, email password. Two factor authentication adds a security layer on top of that by requiring you to provide also something you own. For example, a code from an authenticator app or a code sent by an SMS. In this case that's something you own will be the Ubiqui. Some of the advantages of using a Ubiqui over any other two factor authentication method like an authenticator app for example is that you login by just making a simple gesture. All you have to do is tap on the Ubiqui and that is it. Apart from that you can define as many Ubiquis as you want in your account. In fact it is actually recommended that you set up more than one in case you lose the main one. For the sake of this video I'm only going to be setting up one because I only have one right now but I highly recommend that you set up two if you can. Now if you're a developer you might have heard of something called WebAuthen. If not don't worry I can help you out with a brief explanation of it. WebAuthen enables browsers like Google Chrome or Firefox to create and use public key credentials to strongly authenticate your users on your web applications. We'll cover a bit on how WebAuthen and Ubiquis are related later on. But as for now let's go and set up our Ubiqui. Now how can you set up your Ubiqui? You can really do this on any of the mainstream services like Google, Facebook, Instagram and so on. If you're curious about where else you can do it, Ubiqui has an extensive list of all the applications that support working with Ubiquis. What we're going to be doing next is we're going to enable using security keys in your OutZero application so your users can authenticate using their Ubiquis. All you need to do to follow along this video is to create an OutZero account and you can find the link for that in the description below. So once you went and created your OutZero account this is what you'll see. This is the OutZero dashboard. You'll see here this is my tenant, the Ubiquis demo one and in order for us to enable the multi-factor authentication feature we're going to go to security, click on multi-factor auth and there are two things that we're going to have to enable here. We have the factors which is which kind of factor authentication we want to use. In our case it would be the WebAuthn with FIDO security keys and then we also have to set up the policies. Let's go ahead with the factors first. We're going to click in the WebAuthn with FIDO security keys and enable it in this table right here. You will see a message saying WebAuthn with FIDO security keys is now enabled and now we go back and we need to tell OutZero when do we want the user to be prompted with this additional step. You have three options, never use adaptive MFA and always for the sake of the video let's just you know require them to always prompt these to us. We are sure and then again we'll get a success message up here. So we're going to go ahead back to the dashboard and in order to test this we are going to do it with this awesome feature called the try your login box. Let's click try it out and let's go ahead and try both part of the process. So we're going to do the sign up and we're going to do the login. So the sign up will allow us to create a new credential and to register our Yubiki. So let's sign up with some test email. I've used many test emails and I have to create a very creative password and secure one. There you go. We click continue and up next we're going to be asked to register or to add our security key. In this case is our Yubiki where you can see it right here. The first step is to connect it to our laptop. So I'm going to go ahead and plug it in here. Once you plug it in make sure you see a light because otherwise it makes it not plugged in correctly speaking from experience. And then we have to follow the steps from the browser. So let's click in use security key. We're using a USB security key. And now I have to go ahead and do the authentication gesture which is just tapping my security key. As I tap it you'll see this will be removed. So I'm going to tap it now. That's it. And now we're getting prompted to give it a name. So please give it a meaningful name for you. In my case I'm going to name it you know my main most important key in the world. You know something meaningful for you. Alright and now we click in continue. And if everything went well this is the screen that we're going to see. Now what happens when we try to log in again? You must be familiar with the fact that most applications nowadays remember your devices for a certain number of days or hours. So if I click on try it out again and I want to log in it's going to ask me to verify my identity again because I set that up in the policy earlier. So I'm going to go and use the security key and this is how I log in done. That's it. No password nothing. This is one of my favorite things of using UV keys. And that's literally it. You have set up UV keys for your ulterior users. That's it. Remember I told you earlier that I was going to explain the relation between Web Authent and UV keys. Well in Web Authent there are three main components. The authenticator, the client and the reliant party. In this particular case the authenticator will actually be the UV key. In Web Authent when you create a new credential it makes the UV key create a new set of public key credentials. But if you want to learn more about this I highly recommend that you go ahead and watch Will's video called Web Authent for Developers so you can understand better how the UV key comes into play in the Web Authent process. So did you like this video? Do you think we should cover anything else? Let me know in the comments below. Goodbye and thank you so much for watching.


Staying in volume two, we'll come to our next part. Can a handrail have a break at a landing? Now, note that we're talking about the handrail, the thing that you hold to help you up, not the balustrade or the barrier, the thing which stops you from falling over the edge. Can the handrail break when you come to the landing in volume two? We'll go to the acceptable, sorry, I've circled them up there, so they've got these little breaks. This is actually a copy from an actual photograph that came to us. I couldn't use the photo because I couldn't get the permission, but you can see the construction we're talking about. Is that OK in volume two? Yes or no? I've got some yes. I've got a no. Is it OK? Surely we have to be continuous to get up through that. Let's have a look. So we go to 392 again, and the intent of handrails is to provide assistance and aid stability. That's straight to performance requirement P251V1. And we go to deemed to satisfy provision 3924, and the first thing to note is that handrails are required along the full length of the flight or the ramp. Where does the flight end? At the top riser or at the bottom. It doesn't extend into the landing. What's more, the requirements of A do not apply to a landing. So this design is OK. You can have that break in the handrail for volume two. Keep in mind for volume one, it could be that your stair needs to be accessible in accordance with D31, and therefore you get to 1428.1, which requires the continuity around the landing. But volume two, it's ugly. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't accept that. But you can do it.


You have sound. Hey John, how's it going? Yeah, it's going okay way way better than earlier in the week We can now mostly breathe without choking to that. Oh, so you must be in California. Yes. Yes Yeah, we were where I'm at we were over 400 in the air quality nastiness index ouch and so are you Bay Area or down south? Yeah, I'm in the Bay Area. Okay Are you are you like physically anywhere near the fires or is it just the smoke that's getting to you? Um, I'm I'm really close to my blood. So yeah, there were some of the fires here But they were relatively, you know, they weren't the huge ones But you know where the way the air patterns have been it'll settle in and then everything just fills up. So Not good. Hey Mattias But John I'm right though that um, the fires were all started because of Lightning right it's not like the normal brush fires or someone being careless with a match or something, right? No, it was hours of Of lightning which we we got what two two weeks ago almost two weeks ago. Yeah Interesting Yeah, we don't get in count. Oh, you know, we don't get that kind of lightning storm in california very often So, you know, it's weird because it's like out here in north carolina, you know, we get you know lightning storms and stuff It's always accompanied by rain. So the idea of that a lightning strike can cause a fire from It's just kind of weird Yep All right. Hey clemens Hello And hey, tommy We have a very short agenda today That's great Yeah, I wouldn't mind eating lunch to be honest. So, you know Yeah, I don't like waiting till 2 p.m. Eastern today lunch. It's not fun. I get really grumpy then Hey, david Oh, good morning. If I could type your name, right? And ray Hello, hello Let's see Eric you there Oh, dog Hello Ann ginger Yes, I'm here. Hi, dog. Hello. Good morning Uh, klaus Yes, I'm here. Hi, dog. Hello Scott I wasn't sure if you're gonna bail out of the toc call or not. I assume they're still going Yeah All right, whoops ryan. Are you there? Yes, hello So just a heads up It's very possible the next Thursday. I may not be able to make the first 30 minutes of the call And so mark will be running it. So you get the joy enjoy him for a change Morning, lance Hello Hello Why since everybody's so early, maybe we should start at two after instead of three Hi, brane Hello, Doug Hi, sam Sam, are you there? What about christoph? Hi, how are you? Hello, good. All right, nick. Are you there? Hey, Doug Anybody have any exciting plans for the weekend? Are we waiting? I haven't thought about the coming weekend yet to have to say Far away Oh It's one of those we the air is getting better in colorado. So I'm gonna go outside I assume that you're getting california air We had our own wildfires as well. Oh, did you? Oh, that's not good. You Okay I feel like somebody joined that I'm missing them I guess not. Okay, let's get started It's actually last chance. Sam, are you there? Okay. Let's see Okay, community time anything from the community that people want to bring up. That's another agenda All right, coup con north america still looking for volunteers Just a reminder Okay sdk We had one call last week. I can't remember for sure what we talked about Anybody from the sdk team want to mention anything for the group to think about or to know about? Okay, not hearing anything We do have a call right out to this one to talk about the interop discovery stuff I don't think anything's really changing the doc since last week, but we can talk about it I don't think we've actually had a formal discussion on the doc yet So we'll do that right after this call I don't see tumor. So nothing from the workflow group So okay before we jump into the one pr that we have is there anything on the agenda people like to bring up Before we get the prs All right in that case scott, would you like to talk us through this poor request you have? Sure, this is the the result of the discussion from last week around dropping the types endpoint And then The other change It was It was claus had an interesting idea to change types inside of services to events Which then To remove the stutter inside of the type object from Did I miss one? Oh, yeah. I don't know what we changed it back. So instead of So it used to be types and type which is weird because it's the type of the type instead of Uh Now what it could be is it's this list of events and the event has a type which makes sense again And doesn't stutter. So I think this was pretty good compromise And so here's the pr, okay Uh, just to make you sure anything else. Okay. I think that was it. There was one question Um, oh, yeah, you would remove this section or this uh What's it called? Uh use case Yeah, I removed an endpoint that implemented that that question Or that answer to the question Okay, and there's one little typo you can just put aside from that Any questions or comments for scott in particular claus? Did you do anything you'd like to add? No, um, so Maybe the the second use case was about Getting a list of all available types. So for me the most important part is um, if I already know a type Where can I get it or? Yeah, from which services do I get it? So it's not exactly that use case that was listed here, maybe Okay Yeah, I think that use case gets uh re-introduced when we add the uh The the higher fidelity searching Yes I would agree Okay Any other questions or comments on this one then and thank you scott for doing this No concerns no questions Any objection to approving them? All right. Thank you scott. I think that's actually going to really clean things up quite a bit. So that's really good. Thank you Okay, um, I know jim has started to work on his protobuf stuff, but unfortunately he can't make the call this week um But he actually may be looking to do a dedicated phone call. Um Just let you guys know that that may be coming up And that's actually it our entire agenda today. Um Is there anything else people would like to bring up? I'm brian. Are you trying to say something? Uh, yeah, I'm just curious where that call will get advertised. So I don't accidentally miss it Yeah, I don't know. Uh, I you can assume that At least the slack channel. Um, but I'll also try to make sure he sends out a note to the mailing list That's awesome. Thank you. Yep, and it may not happen. It was just a I think a thought that he had Okay, uh lance your hands up Um, yeah, we don't need to discuss it here unless people really want to but I I posed a question in the cloud event slack channel And I'd appreciate some feedback if anyone Uh is interested in that Um, what is it? Yeah, did since we're off any other topics you want to just quickly mention what it is. Okay. Yeah, um in the javascript stk Uh, we are currently pretty strict about validating events And in fact, you can't create an invalid event if you try to it throws an exception in the constructor Um, we're looking at having a boolean value As a parameter to the constructor that tells it to be, you know, strict or loose And there's some debate over whether or not it would make the most sense from the stk perspective to Have the default be strict or the default be loose validate or no validation basically And I'm just curious what other stks are doing What are you what are you, uh What are you validating what's so are you validating whether all the fields have the right types? We're validating everything that we can Per the spec. So basically all of the required fields are there Uh, and whether or not the types for the the required fields are correct Whether or not the names for the extensions conform to the specification Whether or not the values for the extensions conform to the specification So but but you can add whatever you like in terms of extra extensions You can add whatever you like in terms of what I'm sorry. I missed that And you can add extra extra fields per the extension model Yes, yes, yeah, well then then I think what you're doing there is to Ensure that you have a valid cloud event And I think the the other most of the other stks are solving that by ways of using the languages type model and I think in javascript you're in the place where You are dealing with a bit of a weaker type model So I don't think it's wrong to go and and and do strict validation But I would do that as the as the default Yeah, the the type If you're using typescript, um, that actually does help some of that. Yeah, yeah, of course Um with the wild west of typing in in javascript as it is um, I think it's it's it's good hygiene to go and make sure that What what you're composing is Uh a valid cloud event and not just some something it looks like it Right. I I tend to agree. I guess my concern is that uh You know when I think about friction that developers might have when they first pick this stuff up um, they may not realize that the default is strict and uh, they may you know malform an event and uh throw it to the sdk and You know like get really frustrated Yeah, but that's okay. It's okay for them to be frustrated because the point of this whole whole exercise that we're doing here is interoperability So allowing them to create effectively garbage on the wire is Not the point of what we're doing this Right. Well, I mean We would still have a validate capability, right? You would still be able to validate the function. I mean validate the event um, and I think it also um I hear you. I'm just going to play the devil's advocate a little bit. Um, uh, it uh In a scenario where you're just receiving events Um, and you don't know exactly where those events are coming from or what the what systems are generating those events that those systems could be generating Events that don't conform to the specification Should it be that you? are You know just by default gonna throw an exception every time you try to receive one of those events over Let's say HTTP so there there I use there I follow the The smart eternal guidance of sam ruby and say Be lenient in what you accept be strict in what you sent Which means if you're parsing in a cloud event, then you should do the best you can to go and make make sure that you Can fit that into your data structure But if you creating a cloud event then that cloud event should be Precise as it goes on the wire So receiving so with receiving when you just parsing something comes off the wire. I think there's um You can be a little bit more flexible And in the javascript world for instance There is Like if you parse a date for instance, there's obviously smart libraries they go can do can go and take multiple formats And maybe you you don't want to have You don't impose that the time zone offset, etc. I mean there's all kinds of all kinds of weird things that people can do so Not necessarily reject an event that you can go and interpret, but I would be very strict in things that are going out And Scott your hands up We we talked about this but um in an sdk call several months ago for the go sdk because uh in go it's you can You can have direct access to the struct similar to how javascript works and so Um in go you you can construct an invalid cloud event up, but um So there's there's a couple layers the the client layer won't send It won't send an invalid cloud event. It it calls a validation method It double checks all the fields it double checks all the extension names It double checks that everything can turn into a string the correct way, etc at the at the binding layer We don't do that validation because it's uh, it's low level plumbing And so you you could work around the the sdk and send garbage on the wire if you really want it to but the event knows it's bad and it It I don't know what will happen exactly for for certain cases. We're missing required fields for there Um Okay, that's interesting. I mean so, uh You know receiving a cloud event in the javascript sdk is just calling the cloud event constructor And so from what I'm hearing it seems like receiving an event. It should be loose. Maybe when you're actually just creating an event Uh, you know raw or whatever It should be strict or another option would be to have it Be sort of loose or no validation upon creation But if you wanted to transform the event into a message To send uh over the wire at that transformation point it would be validated Yeah, that's what we're doing just because like there are cases where somebody wants to make a factory of cloud events and a They construct an archetype and then they mutate the some inner data But like technically it's not the valid to have a cloud event that doesn't have an id but There's some magic in the cloud the go lang sdk that will On its way through the client if the id is Empty it'll generate a uid for you and decorate that and send it out For marshaling json back into a cloud event It'll try its best if it finds json That thing could end up not being a valid cloud event you get back a thing It it's populated with everything we know about because of json But then you can call validate on it and it'll return you back all the reasons why it's broken okay Any other comments for lance? All right. Thank you lance. Thanks everyone. Yeah All right, any other topics people want to bring up Sanjay, did you want to mention something about your query thing or take that offline? I was just checking last time We were talking about that like clause and I had posted something on the chat, but I don't know if that was lost it was referring to something from graph ql and I don't know if we closed that issue No, I don't think we closed any issues. I did grab some of the comments from Or was it was it this one? I thought I thought Yeah, so I did grab some of the comments from last week. I may have missed yours Could you add your comment then to 686? Yeah, I will do that Okay, thank you. Let me paste a link into the chat that way you can add it there since that seems to be where the discussion is happening Okay Any other topics then? Okay, so um I guess the the general comment I should probably make is Please look through Obviously the the specs If you want to open up prs against them because we need things to work on obviously your next week's call But in particular look at the open issues for discovery more than anything else. We have quite a few open And they're obviously then begging prs to be written against those So please if you have time to work on those because if we don't get new prs It's going to be another quick phone call And we want to keep making forward progress Yes, sir There you go Thank you comments At least fake listening to me. I appreciate that actually I guess one other thing. Um, so brian you said that The last week and this week the aspect ratio of my screen looks kind of funky now I did join through another computer It looks okay to me Is anybody else seeing like a squished version of my shared screen or was it just brian? I have issues. Is it very funky? So what what do I need to do to fix that? Do I need to make it bigger like like this or what what what would fix it? Yeah This is better interesting. Okay Expand to meet their window instead of show the native Aspect ratio of your screen So I tried it both ways and it looked squished both ways for me in the view options huh Well, there's zoom has several view options. There's the hostile takeover of your computer mode Where are these options? I'm trying to see where there's Um It's an under a view options up by where your Top header is but if you're sharing you might you might not be able to see it. Yeah, how far is I'm looking at my other computer I said on my other computer. I see Choose. Oh, maybe you think it's me again. Maybe it's not a good choice So we just got are you saying that this is a user error on brian's part or or something I should be doing at my side Their side on the client because it looks fine over here. Although. It's not as good as when clemen shares Yes, I know he had a spectacular monitor. Yes I've got two view options here fit to window and original size and both of them looked squished before you made your window wider duck okay Well, it's maybe that client problem Okay, well either way it sounds like I should make it bigger no matter what Because you're you're happy with this size right here, right? Yeah, this looks great. Okay It's just a boatload of extra space on the left and right for me, but that's okay. Oh, I'll deal with it Okay All right Wonder whether you can split whether you can share all the monitors at once All monitors. I don't know anything. Do I even want to do that? I can share the whole monitor actually, okay hold on a sec since we're Obviously bored out of our minds here. Hold on a sec If I do this I got stuff to do Doug What do you come on me? Okay, just just indulge me for one more second here Scott.  Uh, this also looks good. Although now there's even more dead blue space off to the right, but correct. Yes because that's showing my whole screen. So yeah, I think I do that but then The text is the same size right or is the text not as squished anymore It wasn't squished before Yeah, the text is a lot smaller now for me Is it? Yeah Now you have to change the zoom level of Google Docs You guys forget this You could always window because you could not have those problems. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna I'll So so ginger you said it was squished for you are that the font was squished. What does this look like to you? It wasn't squished it's just smaller Interesting. So I like your original it was never squished for me. It was perfectly fine for me And like my view options. I have a whole bunch. I don't just have to I had like fit to window 50 original size and then I'll go up to 300 Yeah, this must just be a like web client deficiency in that case If this works best for most people like this is perfectly readable for me. It just looks a little funny. So Uh, I I guess we stick with this in that case. Okay All right, Brian what what browser are you using? I'm using chrome Okay Okay, I don't want to upset Scott too much. So thank you for the diversion Um, okay before we let everybody go and we jump over to the uh, to the interrupt stuff Let me just do a couple things. How many are you there? I am here. Excellent. And what about sam? I'm here. Excellent. Thank you. Did I miss anybody for attendance? Oh Vaibhav Yeah, I'm here. Okay. Thank you. All right anybody else Okay, in that case if you have no interest in talking about the discovery interrupt stuff You may go and have a good rest of your day We'll give everybody about a minute or so to to leave if they want and then we'll get started So thank you everybody Hey, sorry, Doug the discovery interrupt stuff. Is that specific to stks? No Well No No, it's just about interrupt testing the discovery and I don't think any SDK is doing anything with discovery yet Okay, so, um I did put this document out there. I think almost two weeks ago, but we haven't had a chance to talk about it yet on any phone call Does anybody have any Comments on this in terms of whether the overall direction seems to be okay so far Or anything they want to change Okay, um, obviously as I mentioned last time, I do think we need to fill out more information here But is there enough for people to actually start coding against it? Are there particular things that we need to talk about Now or is it just a matter of people finding time to start coding and finding gaps? Oh, you have a similar effort on the subscription and the schema registry like yet because I think I am Personally super excited to see those those things come together Yeah, so am I Will this force it to some extent scott? Yeah a little bit. I mean so like one example is the discovery api Leverages the subscription api and the subscription api can leverage the Um, the registry to validate that You know the shape of events Are are correct Correct Yeah, so for um Um, I really want us to so on the microsoft side to do work on this on the intro of things It's just that right now. I don't get enough people around the table before labor day because Right now everybody seems to be on vacation Yeah, I was kind of assuming it was either people are overloaded or on vacation with the two Well, yeah, it's both How will we do like This scenario looks fine, but let's Let's look like let's think about um introducing the other apis into a holistic setup So there's like this is the mbp scenario. We're focusing on discovery We should mix in subscription api and then once that's working we should add a consumer that validates that the producer actually is sending events that are In line with what the discovery api is doing What it subscribed to and the shape from the schema registry or something Okay Sounds reasonable. Is that something you could add to the document? Yeah, I can I can take a look at that. Okay. Thank you But I'm you know like I'm I'm suggesting a an evolution of the scenario instead of a rewrite once we introduce all the other The other apis we're working on Sounds good to me Anybody else want to chime in nacho Hey folks, sorry to join late a So I basically added myself there as interested participant I would definitely start looking at this more closely on the k native side It's probably starting next week and what I think Scott just mentioned of trying to Tie these things together like discovery with subscription with the schema registry That's something that was on my mind and I was starting to build a prototype Using sort of the k native primitives And build these apis on top of that So I think we can make some progress on this and I'm happy to help as well That'd be great. Thank you Okay, anything else Okay, so then I guess the next steps on this is I guess Scott you're going to make some modifications to the doc itself But is there anything else we need to do other than just people need to find time to start coding this I just want to make sure that no one feels like they're blocked my pr that got merged or approved today I have to make that typo correction that can merge and then we can code against that Cool Yeah, oh, yeah, and thank you for reminding me. I won't I won't merge your pr until you do the typo I completely forgot. Thank you for reminding me Okay In that case, I think I'm sorry was someone else clemens Okay, in that case, I think we're done record time. All right. Yeah Okay. Thank you everybody. We'll talk again next week. Okay. Bye. Have a good one. Bye


Thanks everybody for turning up, Joel Ben here, business analyst in the services team. The OAAI PMH provider which has been in the registry for quite a while now is just our implementation of OAAI. It works, we basically use it as the main method of getting data into the ANS registry but people can also use it to get data out of the registry. It obviously conforms with the OAAI PMH spec as everybody that's implemented it has to. People can use export records out of the registry from specific groups which have been recently updated since the last time they asked us for data and again it's just another way of providing things like peak lists or websites that display records from specific providers. So again just the address research data Australia.ANS.org.au. The web services themselves they're not as pretty because there's no real fancy front end to them. There's obviously the description and the use cases for each of the services, how people might want to implement them and the use of the points about them. There's a couple of in some of the services they're a little bit tricky. There's sort of some sort of FAQs or common questions about the services just to help out and a couple of example uses of working service calls and that's pretty much all I've got.


My name is Damien Murphy, Professor of Sound and Music Computing at the University of York, and I'm also Director of a project called XR Stories, Creative Industries, R&D Partnership, and my talk is about digital creativity and the future of storytelling, and it's an opportunity to reflect on some of the work that I've done at the university in collaboration with many colleagues around creativity, digital creativity, and that's led to the XR Stories project and how this is changing or shifting some of the research that we do and the culture of research at our institution and with four our colleagues, we hope. So just over six years ago, maybe five, six years ago, the University of York launched a new strategy and that's for research and that strategy was focused on seven themes of activity, multidisciplinary activity under which our work could become focused, and one of those themes was creativity, and I was lucky and privileged enough to be the research theme champion for creativity, and it was a huge opportunity to work with many brilliant colleagues over the last five years. I've just stepped down from that role and there's a new cohort of research champions who are taking over from now, and so it is an excellent opportunity to reflect back on what this theme has meant and what maybe has changed as a consequence of our work and endeavours over the last five years. And so when we set out to sort of explore the themes, creativity at York emerged from 50 years where we're still quite a new university of interdisciplinary collaboration and we recognise that creativity is a key driver of modern dynamic societies and it's at the centre of all aspects of our research excellence at the university. Certainly it was a theme that I felt all colleagues could be part of because fundamentally research, teaching, learning is a creative endeavour. In particular our research work is considered the nature of creativity, the creative process across linguistic and cultural aesthetic and cognitive dimensions, but in particular we were starting to realise back then there was a particular emphasis or interest in research at the convergence of technology, digital games, interactive media and how we could work with leading partners, individuals, creatives, organisations in the creative economy to try and deliver new experiences that would provoke, inform and entertain for the wider benefit of our society. And again this work was based on perhaps 30 years of activity in my own discipline which is sound and music computing and music technology and this was based on a collaboration between our music department and our engineering department based on a common language and a common interest in research, practice, collaboration between the two disciplines and how computers ultimately and engineering methods could be used to meet the needs of composers of many aspects of that 30 year period. And so that project music technology is one of the key areas that has sort of emerged from York over that particular period of time and indeed it's helped, it's given me my position at the university over that period of time as well. And perhaps more recently that's been made manifest in a fairly new department although it's 10 years old now, department of theatre film, television and interactive media which you can see on the right hand side there and indeed that's a fundamentally multi-disciplinary department founded on creatives, scholars, researchers working across theatre film and television, production and post-production and interactive media effectively computer science. And so it's a fundamentally multi-disciplinary department that brings together arts and humanities research practice collaborating with computer science and engineering to understand and inform new forms of creative research. And so I just want to talk about some of the particular interesting projects that I've emerged over the last few years as part of the creativity theme to give a wider sense of how colleagues and projects have identified with that particular subject area. One of which was an example of archaeological creativity and this is an 11,000 year old pendant, the earliest known example of Mesolithic art in Britain that was found at a site not too far from the University of York on the Yorkshire Coast or near the Yorkshire Coast called Starr Cart and colleagues in archaeology worked to interpret and explore and examine this beautiful piece of work which you can see here on the screen and it has these very, very fine indentations and engravings and they use 360 degree lighting techniques and computer visualisations in order to explore, visualise, render and make, you know, realistic what this piece of art looks like and particularly from the point of view of being able to talk about it and write about it in their publications and so there's a really interesting publication there in the Journal of Internet Archaeology where that piece of work is particularly explored and you can see some of the methods that they use to render the pendant beyond just traditional 2D imaging and 2D representation to explore and give the reader a sense of what it looks like and what it means and the importance of this artefact for our archaeological understanding of our country. If we move from the Department of Archaeology to the Department of History and the Centre for the Study of Christianity and Culture this small research centre uses computer visualisations, animation, film to reveal the architecture, culture and history of the cathedrals, churches and the heritage sites around the UK and that's about interpretation and it's about communication and understanding but it's also about what the methods and techniques used in deploying those visualisations ultimately reveal for the core researchers working in the history and architecture and the archaeology of these sites, what they reveal about those sites which is new and couldn't have been explored through without using these methods as part of their practice. And colleagues in archaeology are also using computer visualisations in a project called the Four Mountains Test and this is a means of simple and non-invasive detection of early onset Alzheimer's and it's based on sets of landscape visualisations that focuses on as you can see in this slide here an arrangement of four mountains and the test consists of giving the subject a set of four images in series where three of those images are the same mountain range but rendered using different lighting conditions to reflect different time of day, different seasons of the year different viewer perspectives on that particular scene and one on the fourth picture then is a slightly different change version of it but ultimately it's not the same landscape and this helps to give an early potential detection of Alzheimer's because the way that Alzheimer's affects hippocampus affects our spatial perception of the world around us and makes that task of identifying four similar but three the same one different images all the more challenging and so it's a really interesting project and that relates to how imaging can be used for diagnostic testing in disease and could potentially transform early diagnosis options for what is a terrible disease and you can find out more about the project at the link there on the Four Mountains Test. But we also work with our city and we work with cultural organizations and we work with artists and the York Curious Project was a collaboration between History of Art and many of the cultural centres in York to explore the city through contemporary art installations and the idea here was to move away from the traditional iconic aspects of heritage that exists in our city to think about its past and the environment in different ways through colour, texture and word and we work with again colleagues in history, archaeology and History of Art to explore aspects of the city in different ways and to build hidden aspects of contemporary art in the city for the visitors to explore in a different way and one of the other big projects at the university something called Digital Creativity Laboratory itself is a team of multidisciplinary researchers working in many different aspects of digital media and storytelling and this particular project which we call Viking VR they worked with Yorkshire Museums Trust as part of a big exhibition that in yourself was a partnership with the British Museum that explored and displayed contents from a number of Viking hordes as part of a major touring exhibition and there was a particular challenge set to the colleagues in DC Labs, Digital Creativity Labs as to how these artefacts these aspects in the collection could be translated into experiences and to use virtual reality to render those experiences for visitors as part of the exhibition and so the project brought together again archaeologists, animators, sound designers, user experience researchers scholars of literature to help bring to life the scenes related to these collections and the great Viking army when they were camped at Torxie and Lincolnshire around 872 AD and so it was a huge and significant and difficult project to try and manage and tell the story of these pieces in a way that was going to be meaningful and deliver effective and learning experiences that could work for hundreds of people through the exhibition a day and some of the challenges around that is how you deliver a virtual reality experience that's going to work in a museum context and so that enabled us to build these beautiful masks that you see on the right hand side of the screen which have a VR headset embedded within them and they could be used day in and day out and how they could then translate into new novel experiences that could be shared by all the visitors to the museum and give them shared experiences as part of that so part of the research was also in the user experience for this project because virtual reality if you strap yourself in a VR headset can be quite an isolating experience we wanted to make it a more shared experience so that families could explore it together so that was a very interesting and rewarding project to work on and so perhaps what's emerged out of some of these wonderful projects that I've had experience of working with colleagues on over the last sort of five years is they do all feature digital aspects as part of the core work and so that led then more recently to work on what would digital creativity look like at York and what might it look like in our future so we worked on consulting widely across our whole sort of community of researchers, scholars, professionals at the university to understand what part it plays in their work and with a view to looking to our future and our aim then now is to build a community of interdisciplinary researchers actively researching creativity in all its forms that's embracing and supported by core technology digital tools and methods that both inform and influence new research as well as enhance existing research output so it's about core research but also supporting existing research and to enable collaborative research both within for the creative industries, the cultural sector and all the relevant external partners where there are shared economic culture and societal goals for the wide benefit and public good because many of the projects that I've cited so far are all about collaboration and working with external partners and so the basis of this strategy then was four principles that we would like to work on in the future the key importance of interdisciplinarity in our work which was one of the original sort of aims of the original research themes we want to invest in skills training and support services to enable that change for as wide a part of the community as possible we feel it's important to have a place within the community a place where colleagues can come together and share their experiences and work on things together and articulate new questions of research around these experiences but of course there's also challenges around what we mean by a place within the university now and we've all been learning to work in different ways over the last 12 months because of Covid and of particular relevance to that as well is partnership as part of that partnership outside of our university and other universities and how the work that we do can be part of the community renewal we would like to see post Covid so that gives a sense of where we've come from and some of the work that's ongoing at our institution around creativity and how that's informed then our strategy for digital creativity and maybe we'll come back to some of these points for the future as part of the Q&A but I want to talk a little bit now in the last five minutes or so a presentation about a particular project that's emerged out at this time which is the XR Stories project and this is one particular project that has a significant focus on digital creativity and the future of storytelling it's one of nine significant large investments or projects around the UK from AHRC to support and develop work for the creative industries working with universities it has a focus on what's called clusters of activity that's a cluster in terms of the creative sector within which you're working and the region in which that creative sector is particularly active and the map on the right-hand side of the screen shows the one, two, three, four, five, six, eight projects and then what's also called the policy and evidence centre which sits underneath all of the regional projects to try and draw together some of the evidence that we're gathering about how R&D in universities helps and supports the creative industries and XR Stories is focused on Yorkshire and Humber and their screen industries cluster which is a significant area and region of activity supporting the film, television and games industries across a diverse region of the country that we identify as Yorkshire but actually consist of many different counties and regions and at the heart of this activity at the heart of the screen industries cluster in Yorkshire and Humber are two organisations Screen Yorkshire that supports investment and production in film and TV in the region supported in turn by the British Film Institute and indeed the XR Stories project is a partnership between the University of York Screen Yorkshire and the BFI and you see there some of the brilliant content that has emerged recently from Yorkshire and Humber production companies and locations in both film and television and then also associated with the activities of Screen Yorkshire and the British Film Institute is one of the largest games networks outside of London and the South-East called Game Republic and again there's a huge community of small to medium to large companies working in the games industry around various sort of cities and regions of Yorkshire and Humber and XR Stories focuses all this activity to try and establish the Yorkshire and Humber screen industries cluster as the UK centre of excellence in immersive and interactive digital storytelling no less than the future of storytelling and storytelling is at the heart of everything that we try and do as part of the XR Stories project so what does the future of storytelling look like well from my perspective I can go back to my sort of idea of what the future of storytelling was like when I was growing up and for me it was books like The Choose Your Own Adventure series which then led on to the Fighting Fantasy series of books and ultimately these are books where you're able to to some degree choose your path through some form of branching narrative giving you the reader some kind of agency in the story to hopefully succeed in solving a series of problems and get the best outcome of course I was never quite satisfied with that and I would always be reading those books with a finger in each page I think that was trying to look at the best possible option to get me through to the end of the story and of course nowadays that kind of branching narrative based storytelling has been supported and replaced by technology so for XR Stories and the future of storytelling is about research in that particular area and colleagues work in industry in that particular area focused on two core areas which is virtual reality and related technologies and then interactive storytelling so I've already mentioned some of the work we've done for instance with Viking VR in terms of what VR technology might be or what it might offer in terms of interactive media that's still quite new outside of the games industry but probably the most famous example of this in television in recent years was Bandersnatch the Black Mirror series where you could again choose your own adventure or choose your own path through the story by making decisions at particular points and the XR Stories project is fundamentally for our companies in the region to support them in their work and endeavours in the future of storytelling through the research and development work that we're doing in Yorkshire and Humber universities so as an example of some projects that we've supported over the last two years so XR Stories is its midway point we've been two and a half years in and we've got another two and a half years to go one project is led by Opera North working with the University of York and they had a production just a year ago actually of Benjamin Britten's Turn at the Screw and they were interested and are fundamentally interested in expanding their audiences to bring in new and younger audiences into this old and traditional form of storytelling and so rather than doing the usual approach for a trailer for their production which would be a filmed version of production on stage they work with a number of companies and our researchers at the University of York to build this beautiful interactive immersive 360-degree trailer that allowed you to explore particular scenes from the opera and listen to the performers render that out in lots of different ways as of January last year when it went live it had nearly 100,000 views and most interestingly from those views 2,000 people or more than 2,000 people have booked tickets the trailer itself is about advertising but it's also a way of tracking data through to see who watches the trailer and then goes on to buy a ticket and can we understand the demographic of that audience to understand what the impact of such a shift in how we market ourselves is to the audiences that we get and so we did some work focus grouping this and of a group of young people 60% agreed strongly that the trailer made them more interested in seeing live opera and only 4% said that the trailer had not changed their idea of what that art form was about and for opera north it's been hugely important as well they've seen it as a completely new way to think about reaching new audiences it's led to a shift in their marketing outlook and to involve participatory techniques again to reach out to audiences and that's also resulted in the doubling of their investment in digital engagement particularly post-COVID when of course it's so hard for the live performance industry to again make sure that they're relevant and reaching audiences and continuing to do their work at a time when audiences are not possible traditional audiences that is the Rising Tide of the Humber is a project between the University of Hull and a small company called BetaJester and they've worked together to develop an immersive VR story world to visualize how historic flood affected the city in the 17th century it's based around the poet Andrew Marvell who wrote about the event 400 years ago and they've developed a 360 degree VR video as an immersive experienced and transports the user back to the time of the flood BetaJester developed a model in collaboration with maps, archival evidence, archaeological evidence and worked with the University's Energy and Environment Institute to understand what the flooding effect would have been at that particular time in history and the idea again is to allow users to experience Hull as it would have been in the 17th century and discover what caused the flood in the eyes and the words of the poet Andrew Marvell and finally from the XR Stories project as a brief introduction to what we're doing this is a project between again our colleagues at DC Labs at the University of York Bright White which were a York based interactive media company and the Science and Media Museum in Bradford and it's about it's called responsive interpretive storytelling and it's using a combination of vision, sound, AI, holographic display to deliver the right story about particular artifacts to the right audiences at the right time and in particular here the object is the BBC Marconi AXBT microphone which probably has a limited audience of interest in its own right but of course when one learns about the role that that artifact has played over the life and development of the BBC's broadcast to the country and to the world the stories it has literally heard suddenly it becomes a very very interesting artifact aside from its abilities as a microphone and from that then a whole possible world of stories and interpretation become possible and the audience is for those stories and the final thing that I want to mention is a project that emerged a little bit out of the creativity theme from colleagues at our library and IT service at the University of York which is called Digital Creativity Week and this was about engaging with students across our organization to engage with the potential for what digital creative tools mean for them and also engaging with the collections in our library and archives and also with the city and so the course of a week a whole cross-section cohort of students come together learn about coding learn about digital editing, image editing sound editing and the tools to author digital media content and by the end of the week they need to have found something that engages them that relates to the city and relates to our collections and they have to put on a series of art installations by the end of the week which is then open to the wider members of the university community it's a wonderful, wonderful project it's been a very satisfying thing for me to be personally involved with and to see some of the work that's emerged from that and everybody's had a lot of fun along the way so thank you very much for listening that gives a sense and a flavor of some of the work that we're doing at the University of York and have done and what XR stories might mean in terms of the future of storytelling and very happy now to have questions and have a bit of a discussion thank you thank you Damien that was really fascinating and just some really lovely examples of projects bringing digital creativity into practice there's some questions starting to come through now if anybody has any questions if you could note them in the Q&A function I'll kick off with a question if I might so how might we grow a wider pool of digital creatives who are able to embrace some of these opportunities that's a really good and interesting question it's something that we've reflected on a lot certainly because we felt as part of doing the digital creativity strategy work there was a sense of if you're inside the wall as it were and you understand the tools, the technology and the language around this idea of media convergence then that can be quite alienating to those who don't necessarily understand it as their core work and so I think collaboration and that interdisciplinarity part that I mentioned a number of times is core to that particularly around research and developing a common language and a common understanding of what might be possible and then the other part of that I think which has particularly come out through the aspects of the digital creativity week and also from our strategy work is developing skills around that actually you know coding skills as well and how understanding the digital language of code can ultimately transform what you're able to do and the questions that you might ask because there's an additional depth and layer to the understanding behind the questions that open up new worlds and new questions new avenues of research ultimately there's a question come through about digital poverty are there any issues around that here and can we ensure that we're not franchising some audiences? Yeah, clearly that's a huge issue and I think it's a huge issue that we've had to deal with in many aspects of our lives over the last 12 months in particular it's an issue that we've had to think about in terms of all aspects of our teaching and learning at the university and universities across the country and wider and it's not something that we should shy away from but I guess at the other side of that in terms of it's looking at how we can support particularly our institutions those individuals who don't have access to such you know tools, technologies a place to do this and again that came through I guess in some of our work and what we didn't want to do is to create another sort of silo of activity that again is separating out those who are not able to access for whatever reason what might be again a really open door for their future potential and so for us again it was really core to work and engage with particularly our libraries and archives and IT services as being the central place that people can access to enable them to again find what's right for them and to get the support they need to be able to do this kind of work and that might be as simple as booking a laptop out of the day it might be learning how to code it might be accessing our network as best they can to enable them to do the basic work they need to do so it's not going to go away but at the same time I think clearly it's a huge issue that we need to get better at because we are changed by the last 12 months in terms of how we engage and work digitally with one another thank you thinking about some of the tools that you've mentioned are there any issues with long-term preservation yeah absolutely that's one of the particular challenge really is as so much of this is embedded in the tech sector and the provision of tools and technologies and software to enable this work to happen and that then is subject to the whim of the market and whether a company is successful or not long term so there's huge issues about how one preserves and archives both the content and then develops skills and tools and technologies that are translatable across different media, different platforms different software and so again I guess that's part of what we're trying to encourage in terms of digital skills is that we're not teaching people to use particular things we want them to have a common language understanding and ability so those skills become translatable and future proof them slightly and so yeah and there's also big questions in terms of how we then preserve and archive particularly all these new experiences that are being developed for very bespoke and not very common to the virtual reality and similar platforms and how then we think about keeping them for future generations and translate them into the next sort of media platforms that come along. Lots of issues around that certainly. Yeah thank you and there's a question from Kevin Grist that sparked echo of immersive storytelling where community groups and non-technical experts have had a major input and the question really is how accessible might this become in the future? Yeah let's see if I can think of a particular example I suppose at the moment in the projects that we're working on in relation to dealing with community we're sort of working with community groups to understand their stories and using those who are expert in the media to translate those stories into experiences. Again there are issues about how that technology then translates into those communities and so we get back to an access issue and how we enable others to explore that but I think it's also about translating the skills down to the individuals in the community so that they can don't need gatekeepers to the platforms and the technologies to tell their own stories I think that's really really important and that will only develop as the technology and it's still a very new medium it's interesting that for instance there aren't many examples of interactive film and television the Band of Snatch forms are great big high-platform high-profile experiment but it hasn't necessarily spawned lots of copycats and so there's still lots of risk associated with these new media platforms and these new storytelling experiences and what they might be so there's a long way to go I think before they become commonplace and so there's roles for us in the privileged positions in our institutions to bring as many people along with that story and to tell their stories as we can. There's a question about COVID and how do you think the cultural sector could benefit from some of these initiatives and tools you've described to help with their recovery and perhaps find new audiences? That's a huge question and a really important one I think from two of the XR Stories projects I can cite examples of the turn of the screw opera north project happened just before lockdown last year but clearly what they learned from developing a new form of interactive trailer in terms of engaging audiences has informed how they approach their digital strategy as an organisation post-COVID the example from the Science and Media Museum has asked to shift considerably because that was designed to be a live exhibition that was going to go up last year and of course that hasn't happened so it's still unclear as to how that project will actually roll out and become something and meaningful whether it will change to be a digital and online experience only. Another really interesting and quite high profile example of this that was in the news recently is the work of the Shakespeare Company and there's another big parallel set of projects to the AHRC Creative Clusters projects called the audience of the futures projects which are industry-led projects that are exploring again immersive and interactive storytelling and the Royal Shakespeare Company were have been leading on digital engagement with Shakespeare content and using digital platforms and clearly they had a plan to deliver something around I think it was a Midsummer Night's Dream last year but of course that all had to change and so but they've taken the learning that they were doing in the development of the digital aspects of that work and that performance to be an online only experience which is going live in March and there was a lot of press talking about it last week and it's very high profile very important events are going to get your tickets and go and explore what a Midsummer Night's Dream might be digitally and online so yeah I think it's hugely important and of course again we still want to go back to live shared experiences but new experiences are coming out of this and it will change how these organisations work and hopefully protect them somewhat against similar challenges in the future. Thank you there's quite a few questions that are coming in about in relation to the pandemic so how have you considered how to support digital creatives in the wake of the pandemic what additional support they might need? Yeah that's an interesting one and a big question I don't you know I think the work that we've done in XR Stories has been okay so an example here is the work that we've done in XR Stories and most of the companies that we've been working with so far are technology focused probably from more of the games industry than film and TV and they've been able to adapt quite well to the restrictions of lockdown and home working in a way that film and TV production again has been written about quite a lot in the press in terms of film and TV production has found more challenging and also the nature of the content that they produce means that there's a digitally online audience that they can market to and sell to that's already there but we're concerned that again it comes back to questions of digital poverty and the common language and understanding of what the potential is for this medium I suppose there is it's been harder to engage more traditional film and TV production companies in the opportunity that such digital media and virtual reality and interactive storytelling means for them and part of that is just the traditional production processing that comes from a commission for a particular program or series of programs and the very tight schedule that then is used to deliver that and to produce it for a particular platform or medium and so in the next coming year we're specifically addressing that by setting up a challenge that's going to be led by a particularly forward thinking media production company to directly challenge the film and TV production companies to think about something different here's some funding here's an opportunity to work with us and to work with our ideas you've got great storytelling chops as it were great storytelling ideas great writers great production teams how would you respond to this challenge which could potentially become a much bigger commission and so that's an example of again trying to encourage creatives to think new ways about what the medium means that then potentially leads them to new audiences and new ways of working and I guess that might not address the issue which might where the question might have been about individual creatives rather than large companies and I think there you know I guess I think from my own experience it's about building online communities of engagement and this is an amazing opportunity this platform here there's a hundred participants I can see and if we've done this in real life in a room somewhere in the UK it would maybe be 10 20 30 40 participants who travel to be able to go to it so there's you know things like zoom although far from satisfactory enable us to reach out to communities in a way that we haven't really had to think about before and I think again that will that will encourage and enable those communities to grow and to support one another and we're not just going to go back to the old ways some hybrid blended model in the future that brings the best of both I would hope thank you and this question about impact and have you done any work to capture the impact of these digital storytelling approaches yeah we have done some and so a couple of examples there at the Viking VR project so part of that was we did a big audience engagement piece to explore people's perceptions of the experiences to explore whether people had engaged with virtual reality technology at all whether this is because it was primarily aimed at families and so this was from I think we saw about 60,000 people go through the exhibition I can't quite remember the numbers but for the majority of people had the experience it was their first time of doing anything in VR and therefore we could get some really valuable feedback on what that experience was like for them or whether they'd returned to something like this and also it although I didn't mention it then it then did inform the next exhibition that was going into the museum and that had a VR aspect as well because clearly it worked really well engaging families and particular audiences and then the other thing of course is the turn of the screw trailer which we did do some data gathering around and particularly they were quite sort of clever about it and it's not just a novel means of engagement let's see how many people buy tickets on the back of watching this trailer and will that inform what we do in the future and that's a really good example of that and I think one of our stories projects is probably a little bit too early to tell now most of the first set of projects are just finishing so we're doing the work now to go back to them and do the evaluation and monitoring work that we need to do to understand what the impact has been from those projects both for the communities they've worked with for the organisations for the businesses and for the academics that have been involved with them as well lots of questions coming in now so there's one from an artist who's creating a geolocated audio installation with interactive sculptures and what would be your tips in terms of where to go for inspiration for projects and ideas? Go and look at Echoes XYZ I think it's called which is a company that does geolocated audio tours they're brilliant and they can help you turn audio content into something that will be interactive geolocated that anybody can use on their phone great idea, great project top tip There's a question about addressing the balance when is it a feeling or perhaps a misconception that digital creativity isn't very academic how can you address that perception? Yeah that's a really good one I would I think there's there's a barrier of perception there in terms of what it means and possibly a barrier of not feeling comfortable in a domain you're not familiar with and being a bit fearful of what you might learn about yourself and the outcomes of working in that new area I can give an example from my own practice which I haven't mentioned previously which is a project with a colleague in Department of History and the work that we did around St. Stephen's Chapel which is part of the Palace of Westminster which was the original seat of the House of Commons which burned down around 1840 and he worked on a project that was looking at the history and the archaeology and the architecture of that space over a considerable number of period of years and as part of that process some beautiful 3D models generated by our colleagues at the Centre for Study of Christianity and Culture but from that we were able to ask questions about the nature of how parliamentarians sat and engaged in that historic House of Commons chamber and from that then we started to realise there were questions about how women engaged with political debate at that time when they were otherwise excluded from particularly the public gallery in the House of Commons and there was a study a project that emerged from that about listening to the commons which was all about particularly how women used to gather in the ventilator space around again listening into debate and what their experience of listening to those debates were and so my colleague John is a historian Tudor historian and suddenly he's working in areas of visualisation oralisation, sound, acoustics that he never would have thought of before and suddenly I'm also as someone who's working an expert in sound I'm working in the politics of women engaging with the political debate at that time and aspects of women's suffrage and the last 200 years of women in politics in the UK and all of this went into the Voice and Vote exhibition in Parliament a couple of years ago which was a tremendous privilege again to work as part of but there was that research relationship between myself and my colleague John and the colleagues who worked on that project was all about communication understanding, shifting perspectives and a lot of talking before we could understand what we could each bring to something new so fundamentally it comes back to the idea of collaboration interdisciplinarity and communication establishing a common ground and from that then new and really exciting opportunities can grow. Thank you. A question about libraries and what libraries might do to transform their offer in support of digital creativity you talked a little bit there about the York example and the great digital creativity is there anything else you think we can do? Well I think one of the interesting things that came out of our digital creative strategy work was where would we want this work to sort of who would we want to own it and if we want to really, again I might hate to use the term develop some kind of levelling up agenda for our institution to bring as many colleagues along as possible with the opportunity that we see a certain number of colleagues have benefited from so far and we felt that the library was actually key to that and key to the strategy was to put in place a project manager and a project manager who would be responsible for building the links between these different communities both within and out with the university and also a research technician or a research engineer who had expertise and a background in the social sciences and the arts and humanities but had the technology and digital skills to be able to translate the ideas that colleagues might come from those disciplines into something where they could again interface with aspects of the collections or the archives or the technology to help those ideas along and to encourage those colleagues to sort of benefit from those findings as well and so for us it was you know it was central that the library is a central part of our university a core pillar of what we offer and to put those individuals in the library means they become for the whole community it was fundamental, it is fundamental to our thinking around how we have a shift in our own home as it were Thank you How can we ensure that storytelling stays at the heart of the work of this work that engenders engagement rather than a focus on doing cool things with tech? Yeah that's a really good question Storytelling is at the heart of everything really and you know the work we're doing about storytelling ultimately there are many more different stories to be told about that work and as human beings telling stories is fundamental to what we do and to how we communicate make sense of the world, explore the world and communicate the world to the people around us so I don't think that's ever going to go away and again maybe it relates back to one of the other examples I gave of how we engage with film and TV companies to take on or explore what this technology means for them and fundamentally it's not even the film and TV production companies we need to gauge with, it's the writers the writers are at the heart of the whole process and the writers who come up with the story ideas and articulate those stories and see them through to whatever final platform they're delivered on be that a book or be that a film or a VR experience they're key to the whole process by again informing I guess we're thinking the production companies they can then inform the writers and the writers can see the opportunities of this medium but without the writers it's just a bunch of technology the stories are at the heart of it and that will never change Have you done any work looking at sustainability of some of these projects or any successful strategies to ensure that projects become more embedded and sustainable That's a really good question and in particular for me and for colleagues who've been working on this at the University of York there's quite a sort of a blurry line between our take on digital creativity and research in that area and digital humanities and in that it's all part of the same piece and I know that there's certainly a lot of work being done in aspects of digital humanities to think about what the impact is of increasing levels of digital technology and our digital footprint and AI engines and data storage and all that means in terms of the wider sustainability and impact of our work in the world so it's not something that's a core focus of for instance XR stories at the moment or the work we're doing as part of our strategy work at the University it might come through as particular sub projects as part of that but I know it's certainly a significant issue in the field more generally and more widely and it's one that we certainly need to address. There's a question about promotion of these projects. What channels have you used? Is it primarily social media or what other solutions have you tried? Yeah that's another really interesting question I think social media of course is really important most of the examples that we've cited so far were ultimately designed to go to a live audience be that a festival be that in an exhibition in a gallery somewhere or be that on a screen for a shared experience and so again that's been had a huge impact on how the projects and the organizations and the companies we work with have responded to that challenge you know a big platform for the creative clusters projects on behalf of the UK and AHRC and so on was the South by Southwest Festival in Austin in Texas because that's one of those big festivals where you know there is a big convergence between technology and storytelling and new experiences and that was a really important shop window effectively for some of the projects that we were developing and the companies who developed them and again that was this time last year when it was one of the first big sort of cultural flags that basically said this is going to be a serious situation that we're dealing with when South by Southwest cancelled around this time last year and so that's again had to mean that they had a huge impact on the companies from the UK and from exiles always were going to go there and so they've had to all shift and pivot on to sort of online means so again I think there's issues around how we promote this how we make it accessible how we engage with those audiences how we preserve those experiences more generally for future people to explore them and experience them and I think a lot of the projects and the companies that we're working with at the moment are thinking about that. Question from an archivist commenting this fascinating possibility for exhibitions but then there can be reluctance amongst some archive was non-traditional solutions from the archaeology case study or any others is there any guidance on making a case to explore this? Yeah that was again a really good and relevant question the Viking VR project was a really good case in point there and that was a huge risk for the Yorkshire Museum to take on what was going to be a really high profile exhibition for them and to give a part of that exhibition floor space away to a digital medium that had never been tried in the context of either that kind of exhibition or the Yorkshire Museum before so it was a huge risk and but it was a risk worth taking and again it was down to a long period of collaboration and communication between the digital creativity labs team at the university and the team at the Yorkshire Museum particularly the digital officer who again those two individuals understood what the potential was here and it was a case then of really sort of taking a long-term planning view on it and really sort of risk checking it at every stage of the process and making sure it was going to work and it was going to deliver and it was going to work day in and day out and it wouldn't stop people going through the exhibition because it was a huge bottleneck for instance and the project almost fell down at the very very last minute because the paint on the masks that we created was not antibacterial and we had to try and source antibacterial paint that was going to be health and safety compliant and put up with 60,000 people over three months going through and handling them so those things it almost all came down at the last minute. I love the spread of questions here so a question for writer are they at a major disadvantage because not many of them have coding skills? That's a really good question I don't think they are because anyone at no point would be want to disenfranchise or those who can't code or can't answer the digital natives or obey with this technology because there's still so much that can be brought to the table in any kind of collaboration or research project but I think there's other advantages that can be brought if you're able to at least appreciate and communicate in that kind of side of the language and the technology and what then it offers that's new to your own practice and so I think that's probably the best sort of way of thinking about it really it's not to replace and it's not to demean anything that an individual brings to again a particular collaboration or a project but it's what can be added to your skill set already and your practice and your experience that you would not be able to have done before that opens up new individuals avenues for you as an individual so I would I don't think you're a writer is at a disadvantage to learn and understand for instance what non-linear narrative might be and how that might be realised for different digital platforms would potentially be a really exciting thing to explore. Thank you. One final question what was Upper North's conversion rate with their traditional style trailers? That's a data question I don't have to be fair but I don't think they tried it before I really think the nature of this type of trailer was to explore that opportunity whereas previously it was a pretty traditional example of let's shoot the production on film on stage make a short film of it cut it up for about a minute and make it available so people got a sense of the excitement it's going to be like don't think they tried it as a specific digital marketing tool before I could be wrong and I'm happy for my colleagues on that project to tell me that I am wrong but I think it was quite a new thing to try this out.