Mr. Gregory Dunn, he is the president and CEO of Better Business Bureau here in Hawaii. Welcome Greg. Thank you. Good to have you on the show. So thrilled to be here. Wonderful. So to begin, tell us a little bit about Better Business Bureau. How long it's been in Hawaii and I'll let you start with that. Well, thank you. First I want to say congratulations to Reg because he's done some remarkable things for small business in the state of Hawaii. He really deserves the award that he's receiving today. Hawaii's Better Business Bureau has been in Hawaii since 1944. We were founded as a project of the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii as a way to try and put a stop to carpet beggars that were coming into the community and making false advertising claims and promises to community members. So we're set up to protect people. Wow. Since 1944, you said, because earlier on when we were chatting about the show, I told you that I lived in Canada for a while and first time I heard about Better Business Bureau was, okay, if you have an issue, you got scammed, you talk to them, but I had a chance to look at your website which has a lot of great information, but obviously you're doing much more than just looking at scams and all that. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the structure of the organization, how many members you have. Sure. If we look at Hawaii's BBB, we have around 2,600 members, 25, 41 members right now spread out across the state and they're anywhere from small business to large business. And those members are accredited businesses. And so businesses apply for accreditation to support the work of the BBB. And those businesses vow to support and uphold certain standards. Consumers recognize those standards and say that this business is exhibiting the accredited business seal. So I know I can trust them. I know that if I have a problem that they're going to work with me through a dispute resolution process, I know that I can count on that business to be trustworthy and to be honest in their dealings and their representations and then their advertising. So the BBB in Hawaii has been built around those tenants and our membership is very strong and committed to upholding those. So you said that these businesses to join you as a member, they have to fulfill certain criteria. So how stringent are they and how do you go and I guess audit these criteria? The criteria are fairly stringent. If we look at number seven, you're going to see seven or eight ways that businesses have to fulfill those standards. And we expel members all the time who are not living up to the standards. If a business has said in their agreement as an accredited business that we promise to engage with the consumer in dispute resolution but they fail to respond to a consumer concern, those people will have their accreditation revoked and we will end their membership and they'll no longer be able to claim that they're an accredited business. So within the last year, we've had eight revocations in the state of Hawaii that I can recall. Oh, so how does it compare to the other better business mural across the country, I guess the revoking members? The revocation number is fairly standard across most BBPs. We find that when a business makes the commitment that they follow up on it. So it gives consumers a continued high degree of trust because we have a good reputation, we do a good amount of vetting on the front end where when a business applies for accreditation, we review their professional licensing and make sure that they don't have a criminal record or a problem with lawsuits at the state, in particular with consumer-related transactions or even business-to-business lawsuits that may cause concern. We look at their complaint history, we look at customer concerns, other review sites that where people have comments about, ultimately we want to make sure that is that business a business that we want to have associated with the Better Business Bureau. It's not just about the money, it's not just about growing the number of members, it's about having the right members as a part of your organization that best represent the mission of the organization. I'm glad you brought that up, but before I ask you more questions about the benefits of members, remind me again, so how many members do you have across the state? Across the state right now, around 2,500, and they're split out across all the islands. So we have members on the island of Lina'i, and Big Island, Maui, Maui County, Kauai. The majority are on Oahu, obviously we have the largest business census on Oahu, but in the most recent business census we have around 33,000 total businesses in the state of Hawaii, and we have approximately 8% of those businesses are accredited businesses that support the work of Hawaii's Better Business Bureau. We're a non-profit organization and we rely on the support of our members and the donations of others to continue the work that we do for the community.  So how does that help you accomplish your mission then of BBB? Well, the BBB's overall mission is to build a community of trustworthy businesses. And so the 501C6 BBB membership organization, Better Business Bureau of Hawaii, focuses on developing the website, providing web content, information, developing our membership so that they can be better businesses. We've recently developed a suite of web products and mobile products that our businesses are able to deploy as a benefit of their accreditation to help them be better with consumers. We also have a 501C3 non-profit foundation. That non-profit foundation allows us to receive charitable contributions that are tax deductible that help us to do more community based messaging on fraud prevention and helping the people to avoid being taken advantage of by scams. We also work with the military community and that supports our military line efforts in helping service members and their families to better transition when they move to Hawaii and also help them to avoid being taken advantage of. Because we find nationally that service members are high risk population for being taken advantage of because many of them are moving to new communities where they don't know a lot of people and the scam artists take full advantage of them and try and get the money out of them as quick as possible. So other BBBs across the country, they also provide service to a lot of military service members. Interesting. Based on what you just said, there's so many questions in my head, but maybe let's go back to membership.  So I'm just curious, since we have members across the state and different islands, how do you service them as well? Do you travel a lot to go meet with them? Absolutely. For example, one of the projects that we've been working on for the last two years is a collaboration with the Lanai Chamber of Commerce. So with the closure of the two hotels after Mr. Ellison had purchased the majority of the island and renovating the properties, we worked with the Lanai Chamber of Commerce to provide tools for their members and our accredited members on the island to help consumers understand that the island was still open for business. And we were able to set up a landing page on our website. We funded it with Google AdWords that our organization helped to contribute. We received a grant from Google that allowed us to drive traffic to the landing page and help increase the exposure for the neighbor island businesses. And we helped them to come up with a way to increase their number of day visitors in particular, so by featuring golf and bringing the ferry over from Maui. So it was a very interactive process. So we do those types of things in bringing our expertise and our gravitas in the online marketplace to local businesses and helping to connect them with consumers in the ways that consumers are now shopping. People are utilizing mobile devices more and more. In fact, 78% of the traffic to Hawaii's BBB website in the last year originated from a mobile device. A consumer looked at either their phone or their tablet to access the information on Hawaii's BBB. So we're able to help our local small business owners and even large businesses like understand the change in consumer behavior, help them adapt to it and utilize the tools that the BBB has. You've touched a lot on technology and how things have changed, how business have to adapt. Actually, that's something when I looked at your website, I find it surprising. Surprising in the sense that there's a lot of information about technology. So how has that affected the issues that you may have to deal with at the organization? Well, it gave us a narrative problems.  We had to retool and train our staff. We had to help them understand in a better way their engagement points with consumers and businesses needed to be done in a different manner. It wasn't just about people walking in the front door and filling out a complaint form anymore. It was about people wanted a certain type of information and they wanted to receive it in a certain way. So we had to develop new channels that met the current needs of our community. So for us, we were able to incorporate a new database. We incorporated our new website. We provided new ways that business owners could leverage their accredited business profile and take greater advantage of the high ranking of the Better Business Bureau on an international basis to showcase themselves. Oh, that's great. But now you're talking about making it easier for, say, consumers to file complaints or it's really more the process improvement part. But in terms of issues, scam issues that you mentioned earlier on how a military personnel may be susceptible to that, how has technology played a role in that area? Well, in some ways, that's a more frightening aspect of technology. Used to be a criminal would use a crowbar and pry open your window or they would show up on your doorstep and try and con you into buying a used vacuum cleaner. Today, the criminals are invited right into your living room via your computer or your smartphone. Or in many cases, you don't even know they've gotten the information through a Trojan horse or a virus that they received from an email or via social media where they've they've taken some silly quiz on on Facebook and they've given away all of their personal data. Hawaii's BBB has been very active in providing messaging in the community. In the past year, we've had over one hundred and forty two million impressions of our nonprofit message of scam and fraud prevention just in our Hawaii marketplace with a publicity value of over four point two million dollars that would have cost us to buy the equivalent advertising space. And that's because it is such a pervasive problem. And our local news media has been very helpful in getting the word out to educate consumers on how to protect themselves. So we get the message out, but we still have the live bodies in the office that are able to answer the phones as part of Hawaii's partnership against fraud so that if a senior citizen falls victim to a scam or a fraud or is afraid they may, there's a live body for them to reach out and talk to on the other end of the phone. So we still have the live person in the human aspect while we're balancing the increase in the technology and the distribution of the content. That's really impressive. And I think technology is one issue that I'd like to continue after the break. We're coming on a break, so we'll continue afterwards. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii will be right back after the break. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Diveheart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Diveheart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Diveheart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Diveheart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search Diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. You're watching Think Tech on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts five live talk shows from noon to five p.m. every weekday and then streams our earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from ThinkTech. Welcome back to Business in Hawaii. My name is Alice Lee Hagen. Today, my guest is Gregory Dunn, president and CEO of Better Business Bureau here in Hawaii. Before the break, we were talking about technology and, I guess, some of the technology related scam issues. Now, you mentioned how you were able, there were a lot of, I guess, consumers that came onto your website. And I guess the value translated to about 42 million worth of, I guess you have to remind me again. So 142 million impressions of data. That's where our message goes out and is obtained by different people through various channels. So now I know that your organization's mission is really to create or to make sure that businesses who are here would provide trustworthy kind of business value to consumers. So when people join or when organizations join, what are the benefits for them? Because from my perspective, I say, OK, it's great. BBB is protecting consumers here. But what are the benefits for your members? Well, the biggest benefit for our members that I see is that we're helping to protect people from losing all of their money because if they don't have any money, they're not going to be able to spend it with you. So if you're looking for a transactional relationship where you want a quid pro quo, I want X number of leads in exchange for my dollars, you're not going to get it here. What you will get is feeling good about the fact you're protecting your community and you're protecting your employees. There's a little known statistic that if someone falls victim to identity theft as one of your employees, let's say you have an employee, one employee who falls victim to identity theft can spend up to 700 hours trying to restore their identity and prove that those charges weren't their charges. They don't owe that money and they owe that money until they can prove they didn't. So now where do you think that those 700 hours are spent? Certainly not at home. They're spent normally on the job while the person is at work. And those are nonproductive hours. Fortunately, with the BBB, we have people that are there to help walk them through the process of how to repair or prevent. In most cases, we hold the identity theft. And so you have to think of it as an investment into the community. So that's one of the main things from strictly an informational standpoint. Consumers are looking for data online. They're looking for who to work with online. Nielsen recently did a study that indicated that 83 percent of consumers believe the information they find on BBB.org because they know it's been vetted. It's third party independent verification. They also, those same consumers told them that they believed 58 percent of what they found on Angie's list. And they only believed 51 percent of what they found on Niel because they understand that those platforms are not necessarily as vetted. And because people understand that the information is more pure and is more resource rich on the BBB website. That's great to know, because as I said, I went to your website and I would never have thought that I would find information on, say, things like scams on Valentine's Day or how to protect your kid's identity. So this is great to know. And I hope that, you know, listeners or people who are watching our show right now, they will go and visit your website, which again, as I said, it's treasure trove of information. Well, one of the things that they can do is if they go to hawaii.bbb.org in the upper right hand corner, there's a little button that says scam tracker. And on the scam tracker, you can click on it and you can see where all of the scams across the state have been reported in real time. You can do a search to see if someone else has reported of getting a phone call from a certain number or a certain person has come to the door. So it's crowdsourcing of scam information so that you can participate in that and learn from it. Again, that's one of the things that our membership and our foundation hope to support. That's fantastic. Now, great, let's come back to you. How did you join BBB and what's your background? Well, I have a fairly diverse background. I have a liberal arts degree, which basically means I was going to go to law school and wound up not, so I have a degree in history and a background in business. So I've also run nonprofit organizations. And as we had discussed before, I was the executive director at the Atherton YMCA at UH for a while. I was also able to work with the Hawaii Nature Center and a statewide capacity as that executive director. And then I went back into the for-profit world as executive for Fair Horizon Capital and doing real estate investment for that firm. And then as the market began to shift and change, I was looking for a different challenge. And my predecessor at the BBB was retiring and the board was looking for someone that had both nonprofit and for-profit background to come in and take a look at the organization and see how the organization could be retooled to better fit the needs of the community. And so it was a really unique opportunity for me to be able to step into and sink my teeth into it. So now you said that you've been at the organization for the last four years. I'm sure you'll be there for a while. But looking back at those past four years, what are some of your proud accomplishments? I think the proudest accomplishments are the number of staff we were able to maintain during a period of very drastic change. One of the challenges in retooling an organization from scratch is you're inheriting a group of people that have worked together in some cases for the better part of 10 to 15 years. And you're asking them to rethink the meaning of their job. In many cases with nonprofits, people begin to believe that the program that they're providing equates to the mission. When in reality, your mission is why you exist. And then you deliver a myriad of different programs to achieve that mission. And so as you're moving people from one mindset to the other, it can be challenging to maintain the staff. But really, the proudest accomplishment was maintaining a very good core of the staff that believe in the mission and are serving our community incredibly well. That's great. Now, looking forward, you mentioned that BBB currently has about 2,500 members. Do you have some maybe ambitious goals in terms of trying to grow your membership? It's an interesting question. I had a board member ask me that just last week. So I love this because they were they were really surprised when I said that the net number of members that you have in an organization is not an indicator of success. An indicator of success is are you meeting the needs of the community? Are you meeting the needs of the members you have? You can look at the financial metrics that were run by and you can see that over the last four years, our budget and revenue numbers have grown every year. You can look at the metrics in terms of the number of people that have left reviews on our website have skyrocketed to the point where we now have have served 3,000 percent more pages of reviews this year over last year from people looking at the content and people visiting the website and becoming more engaged. You can see based on the increase in our public outreach and the messaging in the community where our, you know, when we started out, we had 24 appearances on television in the year before I started. And then in the last year, we have 462 media appearances in the calendar year. So you look at those metrics as as success metrics, not necessarily the number of members, because if your your metric is simply to bring on more members, you can decrease the membership cost and drive the membership number up or you can reduce your standards and bring in more people that are less qualified. We're about quality and we're about providing the services the community needs. Now, and I agree with what you just said. Increasing member doesn't necessarily indicate a success. But at the end, I also know that you're here to serve the business community consumers. So if you have more members, that means more of them in agreement with your mission. So at the end, I guess that would probably still be a goal. It would be a really good goal. And I'm not saying I wouldn't mind having more members and that that our board would love to see more local businesses agree to abide by our standards. But the challenge with the BBB is you have to apply for membership. You can't just write a check and become an accredited business. And you're held to standards along the way. So there are there are points where you as a business owner are going to be forced to make a decision about maintaining your accreditation. And that's something a lot of people don't think about. They think strictly based on a transactional level about what benefit am I going to get back in exchange for my membership dues? And the BBB doesn't operate like that. We're looking to build a community of trustworthy businesses. We want businesses that believe in it. Not everyone's going to believe in it. But the more people that we can help understand what we do and support the mission and subscribe to accreditation as a community promise and a commitment, the more work we can do in the community to help educate people. Now, we've talked mostly about your work here, but BBB is actually across the nation. I know that Canada has better business bureau. Could you talk a little bit about that or even around the world? Do we have better business bureaus in Europe or in Asia? So currently the International Council of Better Business Bureau is the master licensee for the better business bureaus around the world. And so we currently have better business bureaus in Canada, US, and in Mexico. Eventually we'll see BBBs in Asia or in Europe. A lot depends on the community needs and is there support from that business community to establish a better business bureau in their community? Mexico has recently said there is. So we've been doing work with the BBB of Mexico to help them look at how we in Hawaii have been successful in working in a high tourism market. To provide information and content. It surprises people to hear that we have approximately 23 to 24 percent of our web traffic comes from pre-arrival visitors. It's international traffic of visitors looking at wedding providers, hotels, travel, tourism, anyone that they're about to engage with. They find on our website and they look at the information and the people that have the BBB accreditation are viewed in a much more favorable light because even international consumers recognize the value of the accredited business seal versus just having a letter grade on your business profile. That's great to know. Now, we're coming to an end to our show, but one last question would be if there's one thing that most people won't know and you would like them to know about Better Business Bureau, what would that be? I would really like people to go online and download our various mobile applications and take a look at the information. It's not your grandfather's BBB anymore, particularly in Hawaii. We want you to engage with us. We want you to feel comfortable about engaging with the community. One of the things that is different about commerce today than what it has been so much more so in the past is it really is about your reputation and your BBB reputation is the cornerstone of your online reputation. The BBB content and information of our letter grade and the accreditation information not only shows up on BBB.org, but it also shows up on Google in terms of translating the customer experience stars over. Shows up on porch.com, yellowpages.com, home advisor. We recently signed an agreement with TripAdvisors. So the content and your letter grade and accreditation status is being republished across multiple platforms. So it's from a technology standpoint. The Better Business Bureau is on the cutting edge of content creation and providing various channels as a way for you as a business owner to highlight the fact that you're a trustworthy trading partner. Well, Greg, I certainly have learned a lot and I fully believe that, you know, the website really provides a lot of great information. Great to have you here as our guest today. So thank you so much for coming. Thank you all for having me. Thank you. You've been watching Business in Hawaii, Think Tech Hawaii. Stay tuned for our show next week. I'm Alice Lee Hagen.


Lionel Messi and Frankie de Jong on Saturday inspired FC Barcelona to a full new thrashing of Atletic Bilbao to win the Copa del Rey for a record 31st time. The Catalan picked up their first silverware of the season and gained revenge for their Spanish Super Cup defeat by Atletic Bilbao in January with a convincing victory. It's a great day for the Coulés of Barcelona because everybody is back involved with this team of players and we know the way to play this final was a difficult one. We had different extra times in different games we were losing in the last 10 minutes and we showed always the belief in winning this trophy and it wasn't better in the way down that we did today because the football was fantastic, the score is incredible and the players they deserved, the players, the staff, all the people around in and around the club it's a great day for Barcelona. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


The secretory IgA, SIGA, antibody class plays a key role in protecting the body from infections by blocking access of pathogens and their secreted products into the body proper. It also helped shape the composition of the gut microbiota by binding to gut bacteria and transporting them into the outer layer of mucus, thereby creating a barrier between the bacteria and the inner mucus layer. This interaction is mediated by the polymeric immunoglobulin receptor, PIGR, on the epithelial cell surface, which binds to SIGA and transports it into the outer mucus layer. Without this interaction, SIGA would be unable to anchor itself in the outer mucus layer, allowing pathogens to enter the inner mucus layer and potentially cause infection. This article was authored by Eric W. Rogier, Aubrey L. France, Maria E. C. Bruno, and others.


Although the levels of dioxins and PCBs continue to decline, there is one dietary source that still remains a threat—fish. Everything eventually washes into the sea. Yes, we can get some from eating horses, but most of human dioxin exposure comes from eating fish. The World Health Organization puts the tolerable upper daily limit of intake at one picogram, one trillionth of a gram. As you can see, just eating dairy, and we're already skirting with a max, and fish takes us straight over the top. Everyone agrees that the Omega-3 fatty acids like DHA found in fish are healthy, but given the industrial contaminants in fish, as a recent analysis in food and chemical toxicology concludes, so if people choose to get their recommended long-chain Omega-3 intake from fish, the majority of consumers would exceed the safety limits for dioxins and dioxin-like substances, like PCBs. And just like with eggs, in last year's update, factory-farmed fish have significantly more dioxins. In fact, for every toxin tested, farmed fish are at higher levels of DDT, and these other banned pesticides, over 10 times more PCBs, 10 times more dioxins than wild-caught fish. Aquaculture fish can be considered farmed and dangerous.


I really want to show you guys this because it's probably quite an insecure thing to do. Oh, a video. Hello everybody. Welcome back to The Average. I'm Steph. I'm The Average Art. That was really weird. I'm Steph, I'm The Average Artist and if you haven't been here before, welcome. If you've been here before, welcome back. Long time no speak, I think. I mean, we speak in the fun videos that I do but I haven't really filmed a vlog for since I became freelance. So I wanted to update you guys and how that's going and everything and what I'm doing this week and yeah. So what I've been doing is I have a contract with King who do like Candy Crush and all these really fun games and I had such a blast working with them. It was like a dream come true because I got to do like illustration as well as design work and it was really nice and everyone was really nice and it was really cool. But unfortunately they ran out of tasks for everyone for the freelancers so they couldn't keep me on until maybe the future when they might have some more work for me, fingers crossed for me. So I've been applying, applying, applying for different stuff and just haven't got anything back. It's been quite difficult. I feel quite panicky about it but as I've heard that's kind of the way things roll with freelance. Suddenly there'll be like nothing and then suddenly there'll be like loads of things. So fingers crossed for me that stuff's gonna come through soon. In the meantime I've been keeping myself really busy. I've been posting more YouTube videos, trying to make more content, trying to upload more to Instagram, trying to draw more.  So it's basically a hundred characters from The New Leaf and what's on it. I've added little details which I'm going to disperse through the illustration and I'll show you a clip of me doing that now. And I'm also going to be printing them out properly. I say printing them out properly because I've been using a home printer to print out my prints usually. But this time I thought what I was going to do is just send them off to Awesome Merch. If you guys have heard of that company it's a really nice company. It's a little bit expensive but I think I've used them before and they've been quite fast to send me stuff out.  So there's plenty of time for everyone to join up. You can join up anytime of the month if you want to. Anytime of the month that sounded. But yeah, so hopefully I'm kind of leaning on at the moment sponsorships for YouTube which I've got a couple of which is really lucky because otherwise I would not be able to pay my bills this month. And then also Patreon is helping me a lot. I think I've pretty much been surviving off Patreon this month. And then yeah, so I'm trying to push stuff and I hope that you guys don't mind. It seems like a bit of an advert but hey, that's what I'm doing with my time. So I thought I should let you guys know. I also was thinking what I'm going to do is every 10, no, every 15, first 15 people that sign up are going to get a free, one of my comics free in this bundle. So if you sign up for this month, you're going to get a comic, a random comic, one of my free comics, a print of Animal Crossing and some stickers hopefully once I get those done. So pretty good deal. So check it out in the linkers in the description. I hope that you guys go and have a look at least because yeah, it would really be helpful. I look at all these other artists who are just obviously surviving off Patreon alone and it's amazing because they can just sit and do whatever art they want and that just sounds brilliant to me. I don't have to go for emails every day. I don't have to scour LinkedIn and beg people for a job and not get any and get completely ghosted. So it will be really awesome for that to happen. I'm sorry if you can hear like a drill or something going on outside. I usually film these vlogs pretty laid back so I also had a free coffee from Costa so I'm going to get my free coffee, my poor budget coffee and yeah, getting on. What I do with my day is I start with a list and basically what I've done this month is like do a whole thing of what I need to do because I have got a couple of sponsorships this month for videos which is like amazing. Thank you to the sponsorships and just trying to budget them all out really. It's been tough and yeah, so here's the vlog. It's really funny because I think people go to other people's vlogs and they're just like la la la, beautiful artwork, beautiful story, happy vibes. You come here and I'm like and then this happened and then this happened and everyone's like is she okay? Like yeah, I'm fine guys. Okay, roll the clips. I just did a test print. Basically what I want to do is just see how it looks and feels. Obviously this is not going to be the final paper and I think it's going to be a lot brighter than this when it comes from like the professional printers but yeah, it's looking kind of good. I want to move the whole thing down a little bit so there's a bit more space at the top. Maybe shrink it down slightly, maybe shrink down these presents slightly as well because I think like they're taking up a lot of eye space if that makes sense but I think it looks pretty cool. What do you guys think? Yeah, just messing with the contrast now, trying to up the colors a little bit and then I'll send it off to the printers. Boom. I seem to get a little bit into doing shorts. I think they're supposed to help bring traffic to your YouTube channel but also they're kind of fun so and they're quick and easy to film. Right now I'm going to film like a satisfying art supply video using the Artex blending sponge, the jelly paints and masking tape, just like a quick fun video to show, I don't know, like fun stuff in art. I think it will be a cute video so just working on that right now. Today I'm trying to get inspired and I'm watching some masterclass videos because I have a subscription to masterclass. This is no sponsorship, I just like their work. I might sign up for some more classes at other sites and stuff just to get inspired. At the moment I'm just playing with art supplies trying to get into the groove. I thought about making this a sticker but I wanted to improve on the design because this was just like a rough idea of just like a little cloud character and then yeah just saying positive vibes because that's what we all need right now and yeah so I'm just messing with art supplies right now. I did a few different concepts or just playing with the idea of the sticker and yeah I quite like how it's going. I'm just trying to do what I always say to do which is like find the joy in what the process is and what you're doing so once you find that the rest will be easy so I'm just playing today basically which is really nice to have the opportunity to just sit and play with art supplies and different designs which is not really an opportunity that I've had for a while so it's really nice to sit down and just do that. So I didn't really want to show you guys this because it's probably quite an insecure thing to do but this is that giant sketchbook that I bought from Tiger probably about a month and a half ago two months ago I'm not sure now probably like two months ago. It's basically just this giant not great as in like the paper's not spectacular sketchbook so it's just like good for doodling random stuff so I've started to use it as purely just like breaking out of art block or just like warm-ups basically so you can see here like the first face I did I don't like it personally lots of people don't like it when I say I don't like stuff they're always like that's my favorite thing you did and that's fine it's just that this is my opinion from where I come from to say if that makes sense so I'm not like putting anyone's work down and personally talking about my own level and stuff if that makes sense I quite like her she came out really good I think this is probably like the best image that you'll see in this sketchbook because it buckled up guys I am ripping off the band-aid here so these are some terrible sketches warm-ups that I did these are all like freehand with the ink pen which I'm trying to get better at drawing these were a practice for the patron print for October which I then went and did in my other sketchbook which turned out like this which I'm really happy with I really like the colors they feel very autumn in autumn in me autumn me or tunnel that's the word that's the word on search for but autumn in me that's not a word so there's loads of blank pages practice pages I did this last night some shoes and feet just practicing this was the print for September I really was trying to get the colors right and stuff so I was doing a lot of practice prints on the same piece of paper but I really liked the way that this came out and it's something I kind of want to I don't know play with in the future maybe I don't know why see there's loads of like empty pages because I just flipped around and page and do whatever I think here so for instance here I think I use the jelly wash here yeah so revisiting the big jelly paints and I quite like the painting but as you can see it kind of with this paper it causes a problem and they stick to each other I really like the texture here but unfortunately it's been ripped up a little bit but it's okay because this is my mega practice thing so now you will see how stuck this was like super just art blocky page so I'm not that bothered that this is going to be painful okay I'm sorry guys yeah it's completely stuck together um does anybody know any tricks to help look at these pages stuck together and yeah um so this was just for a short for youtube I had to think of the name then because I was like tick tock and I was like no um it's such a shame that it's ripped up but this was really fun because I lay it down the acrylic wash paints and then I drew over them with Posca and I realized that the Posca goes on really nicely over this smooth surface so it was really nice to just doodle I've also got song lyrics here don't read into them they're just song lyrics but it was just nice to like not think just write down put some song lyrics I like and some doodles this looks kind of bad and then this doodle page which I think I filmed but it's just like a massive thing of just going for it and whatever like I don't know it's a really nice way to just get into like meditating whilst you draw I guess and just draw anything random that comes into your head draw things that are on your desk draw images that are on your phone draw things that you see online um things that you like random shapes random it's just really good to like get the creative flow going and uh yeah really helped me I drew out a house because I was planning to um um make a little cat house which I'm half done but I need more time on it basically pesto it's not ready yet I'm a humble abode she obviously likes it do you like it pesto um I want to I want to paper mache it so it looks like a proper little house which will take loads of time but I don't know why I've given myself these projects um yeah and then I started thinking about doing stickers and then I ripped out this page because I like this sticker but I wanted to see more of it and then it became this doodle page which was another just like creative expression I think I was watching like a masterclass about graphic design and this guy who like does collages and how to like express yourself and put down things that express your mood and I think I was just really inspired to just do the long whilst I was listening to that but yeah this is my crappy sketchbook as you can see I just do random stuff some of it doesn't turn out good some of it's like completely random and I've got loads of pages so it's really nice to just have a place where I just exist and do stuff and it's really fun and appealing and it's no pressure so that's why I'm showing you guys because I think like there's a lot of pressure to have like these perfect sketchbooks and yes don't get me wrong I feel that way about my my sketchbook sometimes and my other sketchbook I'm pretty like try to be quite perfect in it which is bad because it can like stop you especially if you do something you don't like you feel like put off so it's good to have like a really rubbishy sketchbook which is what I have and I think if you know Franard she has a Patreon where she talks about her ugly sketchbook and then she posts pictures and I'm always like those aren't ugly so I feel like but for her they're probably like they're just rough stuff so she's probably that's why she calls it that so this is my ugly sketchbook I guess which is actually ugly but yeah um I think I'm gonna call it there for the vlog but bear in mind that if you please sign up for my Patreon or even look at it would be really helpful because oh my god I need help this month I have those comics so you can pick one of the comics and let me know if you've already signed up this month or you're already a past patron please let me know if you want one of those comics because obviously you are already supporting me so you get one as well if you want one and also um there's only three Emily's burnings left so whoever's first to say I want that one will be first so the first 15 people are gonna get a free copy of one of the comics that I showed you today and then also um people who already I've already said this whatever people who already a patron you can pick one if you want as well just let me know um but that's it thanks for watching guys and please like and subscribe and all that lovely stuff that helps me it's loads of nonsense I know I'm trying to really push YouTube now I don't know if you got your notice but I'm I am posting more frequently yeah okay well anyway I'm just talking a little rubbish now but thank you for watching and see you next time bye


Hello, in this video we are going to delineate a catchment using PC Raster in Python. This video follows a tutorial that you can find on GISopenCourseWare.org and is part of the course Programming for Geospatial Hydrological Applications. You can find the link in the description of this video. The tutorial is provided in a Jupyter notebook, but because we want to visualize the results in QGIS we are going to run the instructions from the QGIS Python console. This will work with a PC Raster in Python in a Conda environment, but if you have installed a PC Raster for the PC Raster Tools plugin you can also run QGIS without a Conda environment and use a PC Raster that comes with QGIS. If you have installed it through the OSDL4W installer for example. So the PC Raster Tools plugin provides a graphical user interface to the PC Raster Python operations and you can easily install it in QGIS and have a look. There are other courses and videos available and this will add these tools to the processing toolbox and these tools are named exactly the same as the operations in Python and if you click on a tool you can always click on the link to the documentation. You can find there how to write the syntax and all the parameters are documented in their examples on how to write this in Python code. But for this tutorial we're going to use the Python console in QGIS. We can launch the Python console by clicking the Python icon and we can open an editor by clicking this icon. We can rearrange the screen a little bit and here you see a Python prompt as you also have in the Jupyter Lab or if you just type Python at the terminal. We can import packages or libraries from the prompt and the first thing we need to do is to mosaic the tiles from SRTN and therefore we need to use GLOB and we need to use GDAL and GDAL is from the OS Geo package and we also need to import the OS package because our current working directory is where QGIS started and we can get that information with os.getcwd and we see that we are in OS Geo for W bin while we need to be in our data folder so I'm going to use os.change directory and there we give in a string with forward slashes the location which is pzraster tutorials slash pzraster catchment delineation slash data. Let's check and indeed we are now in the correct folder and we're going to create a list of input files with the SRTM TIFF files. So using GLOB.GLOB we can search for file extensions or patterns and here we look for TIFF files. These are the four SRTM tiles that you can see and this will generate a list so if I print the input files variable the result is a list with each element the string with the file name of the Geo TIFF. Now we're going to create a virtual raster we call the variable mosaic and we use GDAL build vrt and it needs the destination name we call it mosaic dot vrt and that will be our output it's a string and as an input we use our list of files the input files variable. We type enter it runs but to save it to disk we need to use mosaic dot flush cache. You see I made a typo here because it's case sensitive so I need to type it exactly in a correct way where the C has to be a capital. Now when I look in the browser panel I can see the vrt file and I can drag it to the map canvas so here's our mosaic. This is very similar to what QGIS does through the graphical user interface with creating a virtual raster. GDAL is used in the back end. The next step is to reproject and clip the mosaic to a smaller area fitting our bounding box polygon and we use this little script here which uses a function reproject and clip which needs an input raster an output raster projection shape file and resolution and it uses GDAL warp which has GDAL warp options needs the cut line ds name which is our shape file crop to cut line is true the format that we want is a geotiff we add a projection and spatial resolution for the output and you see then under below the function that the mosaic file name will be mosaic dot vrt and the polygon is bounding box dot shp that's provided epsg is then the projection epsg code utm zone 32 north on wgs84 the spatial resolution is 30 meters and the dm subset that will be created will have the name dmsubset.tiff and then we run the function with these variables as an input let's run the script and check if the output is correct it should appear in the browser panel sometimes you need to click the refresh button and there we see dmsubset.tiff and if we remove the mosaic we can clearly see the result of clipping a reprojection it's tilted because the projection of our project on the fly reprojection is in the geographic coordinate system epsg 4226 and i'm changing it now to utm 32 north and now we see that it's nicely clipped to the bounding box that was provided because we're going to use pc raster the next step is to convert the geotiff to the pc raster format and we use this script here which uses gdall translate i can copy the script from the tutorial from the jupyter notebook after running this script you will see a copy of the dmsubset which should be exactly the same but then in the pc raster format so far we have been using only gdall so now we have the dm in pc raster format and we can use that for further calculations first we need to read the dm to memory from the file but we see that we get an error and that's because we didn't import yet the pc raster package so the readmap operation is not known but after importing pc raster this works the next step is to calculate the flow direction after filling the sinks in pc raster this is done with one operation which is called ldd create and it has four parameters to control the filling of the sinks you can find that in the documentation here we will use very high values to make sure that all the sinks are filled so the input is the dm and then we use the high numbers here for all the parameters to make sure that all sinks are filled running this will take a while and you need to wait until you get back the python prompt here now it's back and you can visualize the results or continue the calculations we can also run the agila operation here from qdis and you will see what happens if we do agila flow direction it will create a pop-up with the map and the nice thing about pc raster is that the ldd data type is visualized as these lines so we can follow the flow direction and we can query the values here it says that pixel flows to the east and one to the southwest west north etc in qdis there are also tools to convert the ldd format to a grip file and to visualize it using the mesh styling functionality there's another video showing that sometimes you're also interested in the filled dm which is skipped in this step if you want the filled dm you need to use exactly the same function but then change ldd create to ldd create dm so i create a new variable dm filled and i change this to ldd create dm again this takes a while and then the prompt returns you can also easily calculate the difference between the dm and the filled dm and you see that in this way the python console is a nice raster calculator if you use the pc raster operators and you can visualize it quickly in aguila or report it to disk and open the file in qdis in the map canvas so here we see the areas that are filled and how much they are filled and these are obviously the depressions caused by the mines i'm going to save the flow direction to disk and i call it ldd.map ldd local drain direction that's the pc raster terminology for flow direction and then i can drag it to the map canvas and there is our ldd map you can see that by using the python console we lose our projections when we use pc raster operations when you use the pc raster tools plugin with the interface then we make sure that the projections are kept with the layers that you calculate the next step is to determine the rivers and we'll first use the strahler order method so to create the strahler orders we use the stream order operation input is the flow direction map let's write it to disk for visualization and we drag it to the map canvas this is an ordinal raster so we need to visualize it using the pelleted unique values renderer and we can choose a ramp from white to blue so the more blue the higher the strahler order and the bigger the stream and then we need to calibrate this with a reference layer to find out what the streams are when we find out how many strahler orders there are we can also create a loop to generate for each strahler order a raster so let's calculate the maximum strahler order by using the map maximum operation that will find the highest value in the strahler orders layer and when i visualize it using agila you'll see that this operation results in the same value for all pixels so the maximum value found in a raster is assigned to all the pixels in the raster that's a global function now with this information we can create a script that loops over the strahler orders so the maximum strahler order is this map maximum operation that we just used but we need to have a value because we cannot create a range with a raster so there is the cell value operation from pc raster which has as an input a raster layer and then the x and the y row column value and it will report the value at that position so in our case the entire raster has the same values so 0 comma 0 will do the job but the result is a tuple and we need the first element of the tuple so we also add a line of code maximum strahler order value equals maximum strahler order tuple and then element 0 and then we can create a loop for order in range from one because strahler orders always start with order one to maximum strahler order value but the range in python does not include the upper boundary therefore we need to do plus one so for each of these orders in this range do stream equals if then strahler orders larger equal than the current order then write boolean one for those pixels and no data for the other pixels and write this to disk and we create a string for the file names it's called stream and then we add the order number and dot map the first one for pixels with strahler order one or larger the second one for strahler order two and larger etc etc and we can use that then for the calibration so we can run the script and we will see in the browser panel that this results in stream with strahler order numbers and we can drag it to the map canvas we need to hide a few layers and we can add open street map in order to see how well this matches with the rivers on the map so under xyz tiles you can find open street map or use the one from the quick map services plugin and here you can compare the results with the rivers on the map and determine which strahler order threshold we need to use to determine or to calculate our rivers you can see that they better match upstream which is more natural than downstream another way of deriving the rivers is using the flow accumulation instead of the strahler orders so in that case you can use the aquiflux operation from pc ruster which needs as an input the flow direction layer and material layer and in our case we use a value of one which means that we accumulate the amount of pixels we can write this to disk and visualize it in the map canvas the values are quite extreme from very high to very low values so i changed to single them pseudo color and choose a way to display this better also here i use a ramp from white to blue and i'm going to change the bin max values and what works very well with these extreme values is a cumulative count cut where you see now the bigger streams in darker blue we also need to calibrate this result with the reference layer like open street map and then if you have determined the accumulation threshold above which you consider something a river pixel belonging to a river then you can use the if then operation and in this case we do it with flow accumulation larger than 9000 those pixels will get boolean one and we consider those as a river let's write it to disk and visualize it and we can also compare it with the straller 8 layer here we see the flow accumulation result and you see that it's a bit different from the straller order result but the larger streams are similar the next step is to define the outlet on the stream and we can find the outlet by tracing the stream downstream and see where in this case the rule gets into the most and we copy the coordinates from qjs we can open a terminal from qjs which ends up in the folder where we store our data and there we can create a text file you can also use notepad but here we use copy con creation dot text i paste the coordinates and i add an id value one so the pixel that we will create will have value one and use control z to close this editor to save the file and i can use the call to map tool i do dash n because i want a nominal output location dot text is the input table location dot map is the output roster in pc roster format and the clone which determines the extent and pixel size can be any of our maps because they all are the same dimension and here we see that it has been converted so we can check it in uh with map attributes and there we see that the minimum and maximum value is one and we can also visualize this in qjs to see if it ends up at the location that we determined we need to style it palleted unique values because it's a nominal data and we see there the red pixel which is our outlet so we will use that for the lineation of catchment so create a new variable outlet by reading the map from the disk and i can use that in the catchment operation to delineate the catchment i call the variable rural catchment because that's the name of this catchment use the catchment operation which needs the flow direction as an argument and the outlet pixel and i write the result to disk so we can visualize it in qjs when i zoom to the layer i can see here the entire delineated catchment sometimes you don't have an outlet coordinate but you want to delineate all the catchments in the dem then you can use the pit operation to find all the depressions that it will consider as an outlet and then you use the output of that to use the catchment operation to delineate the catchments belonging to those pits let's write it to disk and visualizing qjs you can use palleted unique values because they are nominal and here we see all the catchments and we can also clearly see the rural catchment in there there are also ways to delineate subcatchments and that's covered in other videos and tutorials there are also tools available additional tools available in the resource sharing repository of qji now we would also like to automate this whole procedure instead of doing all the steps with separate commands the command line so here we have all the different steps written in functions and we need to remove the change directory because we assume that we are already running this from the directory where the files are here we define the different inputs we need to adjust the coordinates to the ones that we have used you can simply use type and then in locational text to get those values I can copy them save the script make sure that you have removed all the outputs from the previous exercise so you start clean make sure then that you set the directory and then you can run the script and when it's done it produces the result with akila but you can also find the files on your hard disk and load it in the map canvas with catchment and channels so you see that by automating these things you can have workflows calculated really fast you can just play with some input variables to change the coordinates or the data layers and this is only a small step towards creating a tool in qji with an interface which is basically a python script with some additional elements belonging to the template of the framework of the processing toolbox in qji s


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So the question for this is how can open source help to build as a sustainable world? and it's we've sort of looked in the past about economic and Environmental issues. We are now realizing this perhaps a biological issue that none of us have thought about prior to about eight weeks ago How can SMEs and organizations would generally leverage the skills future initiatives here and how can open source build? sustainable solutions I think it's an evidence-based discipline and and to discovery of Fundamental phenomena and principles and how things work and and building on that discovery that kind of knowledge We can then transfer into technology that can help solve problems So many of the things that we enjoy now we have to say because of science. So science is inherently important to us science is inherently Driving force in our civilization and and and the part about How science can come in? From the science center perspective we've been shouting this slogan especially about among our young people that made Made a power of STEM be with you We want to empower our young people to understand The importance of STEM science technology engineering maths and in recent time We are also putting on this notion of stem plus stem must plus something else values ethics Accountability integrity all these are important things that we should bring in and stem is now moving closer and closer to integrate with social sciences philosophy and thinking And we have to start from young And science center is really Putting in a lot effort to to want to raise the awareness a precision To empower our young people to know how to use stem for sustainable Development for the goodness of the world and There's reason why science center when we were introduced to force Asia We were we have been a strong supporter behind all this and early on we saw Mario very emotional. I'm talking about how Open source is a way to help to make so-called sound inaccessible science and technology discovery and IP especially I Know I came from a university usually or you must protect it. You know must you must make the IP Money-making machine, but now the world is telling us that that's not the only way of moving forward and sometimes science and Technology need to be shared in the open way so that we can actually help the world move on like the crisis we face now So, yes science center. I Identify with that that ethos That is important. This is an apparent parallel that scientists have known for centuries since the beginning of journals about the importance of Importance, but the fact that if you have not published What is you say you've discovered and how and what your evidence is and how you obtained that evidence? We're not only can it be reviewed before it's published, but where other scientists can reproduce it or Find holes in it to meet the one reputations Then science wouldn't proceed that for forcing to is that's how science researchers how science has proceeded software did not it was pure commercial Tool and it's the open source in the last two decades has drastically changed that and it's always the same idea It says okay if you're making software, it's the user for the thing you're using before But actually it then needs to be in the hands of others rather than everybody starting from scratch So it's yeah, I the parallel is interesting I mean I'm always conscious of time otherwise we'd see it for hours So That's one you've been Previously, you're not no longer right the the sort of driver here at li I don't even know how to pronounce the name of the company. We are not see us at origin. It is origin For the benefit of the audience the G has been replaced with a nine Or a nine in but okay origin very funky The name has been folded it's origami. Yes very good and Addressing skills gaps in life-long learning Life-long education is seen as a central success factor for society And it's great to see this in Singapore What impact could you observe or have you observed? About programs and initiatives for life-long learning on recent years. What what stands out? Thanks. Thanks for My perspective I used to be in skill future and had been started my career after my MOE stint In workforce development agency. So from that aspect the past 14 years. I've been working on workforce development as well as life-long learning. So in this perspective, I think Related to the question. I think life-long learning as we all would agree is increasingly if not More important than ever with the fact that Continue education is something that we all should Continue to aspire and and to to develop ourselves So from from that aspect in terms of the program that the past years You could have seen some progress or at least from the government perspective. I think skill future Initiative is one which we could probably take the opportunity to also elaborate the fact that the government in Singapore has been very proactively trying to put in place a system a national effort and a national movement to ensure or at least to encourage Every individual citizens and permanent residents to really adopt this life-long learning mindset In fact, life-long learning is not new. In fact, it's been around since we can remember The fact that even as a nation in fact life-long learning Nation-building is based on life-long learning if I may just in the if you may just indulge me I can kind of give you a bit of a brief history about Singapore since independence Till today we actually have been really adopting what life-long learning is about from learning To survive in the early days when we got our independence in the 60s all the way to early 70s and then if we actually go on the next phase of learning to Stay ahead as a as a nation as a country a small country. We have no natural resources Obviously the human capital human resource are the only resource that we have and if we don't capitalize on it and to ensure that workforce development is in place and every individual is a talent by their own rights and how they can be Develop and harness in terms of their very best then as a country We will be doomed so to speak and henceforth from there on we find that We move on to learning to stay ahead to learning to compete because as we learned about the tricks of things and we learned about how we can survive and how to stay ahead next is naturally learn to compete among the neighboring countries and even at the global stand Henceforth we can see that the next phase in the 80s to the 90s We also go into the phase we call learning for life and today at the latest phase Which is skill future. This is learning for a new world Obviously to this various phases of learning as a nation We actually kind of progress from a low-skill low-wage country to now to date as one of the developed country where we are adopting innovation based economy and Obviously trying to also stay to survive in the industrial revolution 4.0. So to cut yeah to kind of address the The question is that how this program actually help actually from from the perspective of a Nation you find that it works only because there is close Collaboration between the government and the private sector and if this collaboration is not strong You'll find that there's always this issue about you know policies not being disseminated right now very clearly to the man in the street and obviously at the company level you can see that if the bosses or if the Employers are not Vocators of lifelong learning then the staff in the way will not be able to really harness their potential and to learn what they need to learn to be Upscale every scale so that they can cope with the uncertainty in the economy and right down to even community if you can see There are successes in in Singapore in the sense that the communities are working together with the Community Development Council every region every districts are if you can see there are learning opportunities Where people work together with the businesses the education institutes as well as individual resident in a particular constituency So these are just some success story as I could see that how as a nation we can push this lifelong so I have a Sort of brought a context question And this is I actually don't know this because obviously I've lived in Singapore for a decade, but there certainly was a Cultural norm growing up in Australia that Education was the thing you did in your sort of childhood your teens and your early adulthood and then once you had whatever level of Sort of bachelor's or master's perhaps doctor that you pursued unless you were staying in academia You kind of sort of stopped at that point and then we did something real With the continuing professional education obligations that that members of professional societies have That's fine, but even those are fairly fairly modest Is there a change in Singapore in the mentality has that mentality exist in the past And is it now a need to teach people not just at Singapore as a society has to learn But that individual Singaporeans have to switch from I educated my childhood teens and early adulthood to it's a soul engagement throughout my life to learn new skills and your approaches Yes, of course, that's the change. In fact, they were also saying that because of this Especially now 4.0 where you know disruptive for technology things are just I mean new things are popping up and so on right So if if you get a degree and think you can set it out in a career and then for life That's that's going to be a miss note. Good luck. Yeah, okay fair enough Harish I have an entire suite of things I could ask you but I Look one of our own Areas of concern is this top militia. How can open source help? Make the world more ecologically sustainable what are the other things that open source communities and organizations can do Well, I mean, you know, you the answer is obvious. I mean if you don't do open we have a huge problem and we have seen it already Defaulting to open across the board. I mean doesn't matter what it is whether it is science research work publications People learning about stuff teaching one another the content is open the more people get it the better it becomes. I mean, we have seen it empirically it's not a Wishful thinking in that sense. So we know that works and this event itself in many ways Everything that we are doing here. A lot of it is built on open technologies of one form or shape or manner So having said that I think the the the question that you're trying to probably ask is about how do we sustain it? It's this is a bunch of connected questions, but yes It's it's it's economically How do we sustain the only way we can sustain is by educating by getting people to understand what is available? What is out there talk about different ideas and and the challenge that I think jidmeng has in in the university is You know the notion that I have to protect my ideas Otherwise, how do I monetize it? aspect which is going down a path, which is actually Sadly, that's not really the a fully thought through process. What do I mean by not fully thought through is because None of those researchers and People in the university are the ones who potentially may be turning it into a commercial operation. They are not the ones They will depend on somebody else to do the job for them in the meantime between them creating whatever that was created and They hide it that they keep it to themselves and it goes out in the industry the lag period is indeterminate We have no idea if it ever goes out there So if I use that as the starting point so when I talk to Organizations and a lot of startups that I help consult with as well from an open perspective, right? They say oh we have Stuff that our VCs have asked us to pattern to protect from an IP perspective blah blah blah We don't share ideas. We want to keep it for ourselves and so on So in the end I my question to them would be so you are a so this is a startup scenario a startup You create stuff and you want to patent it. You're gonna spend a lot of money The people who end up getting the money who'd probably be the lawyers and Assume $60,000 goes to layers. It's a lot of money. They are the ones going to get the money While while you may have gotten a piece of paper saying that this has got a patent and it's got x number of years or whatever What are you gonna do with it? Oh? We're gonna keep it or are you my question there? Are you going to actively license it to somebody else? Oh, we haven't talked to that yet Yeah, because the unestated business model is it's all gonna get piled up And we still a lot of money so you're not openly sharing with it So the the the startups that I help explain to them I say why don't you just go ahead and open it up and the point about it is not about holding it back? It's but if your ideas are in you and you don't execute on it. It's useless You may have the best idea in the world Execute they say oh, I cannot present this at this event. I cannot present it in the universe I cannot write it in the paper because somebody's going to steal my idea if the person stole your idea and Executed on it kudos to him or her by you not sharing it You have you have you couldn't execute so you failed it and so that's really but and that's also the broader problem that Getting a thing out into the world costs resources, which generally means you've either got to have enormous grants from somewhere Or you've got to build a business and in practice The execution on those two things is usually that the more uncertain That's right task and so the idea of I've got an idea and it's valuable So yeah, I've seen that it's a toss up because if you are not If you don't get it seems to be an aha moment that happens with people about sharing It is when you share it For whatever it is that you shared and then you benefit from it somehow not directly That's sometimes where you say oh that was good that I did that It takes some time for that because As as as a as a as a species we share a lot of things we grew up sharing things That's how we've always been Somewhere in that system The the sharing stopped And that became a problem, but why was it stopped and why what was the motivation for the stop Wasn't it's kind of forgotten in in the midst of and more is better I'm reasonably certain that patent trolls are responsible for a lot of this not directly but because their existence creates an aftermarket for patents Spoken investors who are very very keen To have the patents because that gives them a thing that remains if the business fails And You only have to think a very short period realize what the value of that is the only value that has So the investors perspective is if I put in you know jamie denbuck's into building this business and It collapses then I walk away with nothing But if patents were secured then I've got a thing that's valuable Why is it valuable because I can sell it to someone for money what who can you sell it to for money a troll? The only people who buy generic patents who that's where the problem comes in Yeah, but that's what I'm saying but the so the it's not just this It's a bit like the arguments about copyrights and music. It's not in fact about benefiting the creators Sorry, I'm becoming a panel member other host But it's actually often this secondary market that that no one thinks about that Is changing the behavior of investors not for their own benefit Because they want something to monetize if the business fails and that distorts All of the behavior of the technicians. It's it's a sorry It is it is sustainability That is some area aspect of sustainability that doesn't feedback positively into the rest of the ecosystem Anti sustainability. Yeah, it's actually a negative Thing into the system. Let me invite audience members like these three rather interesting gentlemen here Do any of you Have questions you'd like to pose in this sort of broad area about how We use openness Finuppas also for in particular but openness generally And the the access of access to it in educational setting To address questions of sustainability Is this No, okay, maybe if I were to pause a question Sorry, oh dear. I apparently I have an urgent message. Oh question. I see yes because we have people remote God, it's like we have all this technology that's an open source and we have forgotten to use it To work out which phone has it I Too much technology sometimes right so We're all into it here we go question could Could the Singapore government open source the government code Especially when it was done Using public funds, but this is not a crazy question. This comes up a lot Um, I think actually that when I might start what have you this seems very close to your Yeah, it is close to my heart. Uh, I can't speak for the government And I don't know whether you can speak for government, but as a citizen As a tax-paying citizen I want the code that government writes that is built using tax payer money to be open sourced Very simple All of it Sorry all of it all of it Subject to national security requirements So I I don't want necessarily to say oh everything the ministry of defense does or defense science technology agency does or Any of the defense or security related stuff necessarily to be opened up But anything that is done from a public perspective for example Parking.sg As a as a it's a it's an app that allows you to Pay your parking Fees wherever you park in Singapore great open it up Let me add some stuff to I don't know what I want to add, but maybe I can maybe I can't but maybe I can check I don't know what it is, but do it. It's easy to do After all it was built using offer source tools at least one of lta's was the the on-demand bus The question I don't recall I know there was some something But again, it's got to do with I as a taxpayer as a citizen I think we should because it is our money that have went into it. However You know, I I can only speak as an individual And naturally I'm biased because of what I believe in and I think this makes a lot more sense. However, I pass it on to I'm not speaking on behalf of government but I came from university and I understand the discussion The protection of IP and the value of a pattern and so on and regards to this perspective for whether whatever that's funded by the government should be Given out for open use and so on I think there's there's a fine line to to draw right because somebody got to pay for this development and some development costs a lot of money So I guess there there should be some kind of value to say How much is in there and who is paying for it? And how can you in a way balance the At a science centre, we always talk about how do you balance doing good and doing well Doing good means you do for the goodness of the larger community But you must do well because you must be able to bring in money to sustain your doing good If you continue to do good, but you don't do well very quickly you run out of money You run our resources. You can't even develop new technology. So how do you balance that? So is this about perceived additional costs involved in making source code open or is this about giving up the opportunity to commercially exploit something it is both it's both because to to sustain that Creativity the innovation you need investment And somebody's got to pay for it And if the product turned out to be something that can benefit everybody, but there's no return one way or another So so The next question would be then how do you measure the return? Is the return in terms of dollars and cents or Or the return in terms of the wellness and the sustainability of the ecosystem So that you don't have to go and do damage control. So if let's say the return is everybody's very happy And so so you don't have to you can't buy happiness right money cannot decide Strong social capital So how do you count them? How do you put a value to The innovation that justified that huge sum of money coming in So that's one aspect another aspect is would somebody then use your your technology and they are clever enough to twist it around To make it something that you're to pay for them to sell you back I think that is another equation That's that's exactly where we turn the opportunity into how you make it available the licensing model the open source licensing model So, you know what we can do like for example, I mean I just cite a very simple example happened a few years ago Where the prime minister he wrote a a bit of court I believe it was in python if i'm wrong or not wrong on how to Play And yeah for his wife And he published a code. So when when he published the code I saw it and I said Firstly, there are few issues with the code Okay, because he didn't put a license statement on it I said, please put a license there. How am I supposed to share this? How am I supposed to use it? How am I supposed to fix it if I want to fix it? Eventually he did publish and I put it on to he didn't put it on to any specific Repository so I put it on my repository and make it a public site and put his email response to me As part of the repo as well to say, okay, this is the prime minister's code This is the code And then he said this is on mit license fine So the point about is we need people at Government level at the highest possible level understand some of these things because at the end of the day, it's about licensing When you create something as you just mentioned that what if someone takes whatever we have we have all created collectively created and then it turns it into A solution now it cost me a lot of money to even use it and then they close it up Well, the starting point is what is the license that you create that you put your whatever your creations on in the first place Uh, I personally, you know, I'm biased towards a a A a gpl type of license because you cannot close it up end of story Any other license is not necessarily in my favor in the long term It is in favor of whoever expands on it and then, you know closes our parts parts of it, which is Yeah, it's still open part. It's not So that is an argument and discussion that we have to have at government level. So another was the quote put out by government But it's also a project by project different projects have different economics and different different Yeah, because the starting point is different. I agree. But the thing is anything that I mean going back to what you just said that there's a cost involved in creating it agree But the cost was from where from tax dollars So it's your tax money my tax money and people around this room tax dollars to pay for that not something else So now for example, uh, all of nasa's imagery and and mission data Not all mission data, but certainly imagery collected during the Apollo program All of it is in the public domain But more than that everything that nasa does for that matter is in public domain Turns out there may be some Special values of the word everything but The overwhelming majority yes Is for the greater good and from their point of view, it's it's more than the united states It benefits all of us in many ways. I mean gps is another example of it. Yeah, you know, uh, we can use the data for free No issues there, but the point of I'm trying to make is that uh, opening it up Because of the source of funding to create it in the first instance Is my argument By opening it up. How are you making it available? We don't we shouldn't be in the business of we as in in this case Government for example should not be in the business of trying to create a license for whatever use what is already done It's already been thought through there's enough experience with people The legal community has been switched on to to us to an extent that is that they can understand some of the nuances They're also just significant internal costs. So look at things like one map Uh, which continues to persist in using the the nokia Engine at enormous cost. Yeah, and the reasoning is oh that way we get to keep everything secret because that way we can make money Wait, what? It's that way you can give money to nokia. I don't this doesn't seem like it makes any sense but talking to a group who implements stuff for one map for multiple government bodies on a contract basis They are pushing for Up in street map and the response is always this whole honor. We have to protect it You're just protecting your ability to give money to nokia Sorry, I don't want to beat up nokia. You're just putting to your ability to have to then go and buy a really costly commercial tool so it's It's not even It's not even that you should argue about where to draw the line. This is an example where so far as I can tell The things are turned on its head a lot of times. I've noticed that The aha moment happens like in that scenario could happen When nokia disappears, yeah, okay at which point Oh What do I do? I'm stuck. I can't fix this. I can't update this. I can't do whatever it is that I need to do That's the other it's a it's a hedge against. Oh, I'm stuck That's nothing new happening. It's it's the mother of all hedges against supply chain risk Like you don't have any brilliant. Is this an area that you would like to weigh in on? Yeah, perhaps from from my own personal perspective is that I may be wrong because the open source community I mean the awareness of the use of open source perhaps in Singapore is not as strong as in elsewhere And henceforth, I thought one idea is that if practitioners or open source subject matter experts can actively Profile their contribution or maybe tap on existing Government funding in terms of like innovative fund where institute for a lot of learning always every quarter or half a year Have this invitation to get people to come and provide solutions learning solution For example, and they can actually come together and create Open source solution perhaps and that can offer to the companies out there And then they give something like 200,000 as a development fund So I suppose there's also the awareness of what can you tap on in terms of the schemes the government already put in place likewise Even encouraging SME to go into nationalization internationalization Obviously, there are also SMB and startup trying to leverage on some of the funds to produce produce solution for for any particular industry needs that could also be an avenue for People to explore using open source solution rather than you know the more traditional That I suspect is probably going to be a more bottom-up thing as it was in corporate America 20 years ago I think if for example, even when I was in lifelong learning institute We have a fund because encourage learn SGC fund or go that cannot monetize monetize your product But essentially is to encourage others to to know about what's open source What are the magic that you can generate and ideas like what uh, mario has mentioned You can start to proliferate these two that more and more people can come together And with a common consciousness the government may take notice that actually there are a lot of potential in open source And they can actually help these people who are passionate about this area to really do something At this point in time, I suspect I made the wrong that they do not see that that that active You know kind of promulgation of the idea of open source and how we can help SMEs who are fund Straded and so on and now government cannot really help everything But if there are people who actively create open source solution and SME can use it almost for free if not for a low cost I'm sure there will be traction there as well Places to improve We've got about eight minutes left Questions anyone none Okay, sorry a question only please. I'm not I go with three panelists Is so is it appropriate? Is it feasible? to Put open source tools and systems in the hands of students when they're learning about I think this is I think this let's start with tit man certainly open source Can be and I think it is open to to students who who can't appreciate understand How to use them? So that that's back to where we say we need to start young to empower them and let them Understand and open to this open source so-called And I also want to build on what that's one say Sometimes that is the communication is the understanding If we could let more people understand what open source all about And in a way also show that young people can also understand it's not about how old and how smart you are It's a matter of understanding how to use it You empower them to go in there and open up their mind open up their world open up their applications And I'm back to the point a little bit because we need to talk about the business model that value protect or not I also want to build on what does one say Probably the open source community should also educate the larger community because There's this fear that yeah, you want me to open to you, but you're keeping something in secret Right, I let you know I even contribute in open source, but you are the one monetizing it without me knowing Right, so that could be also that mistrust so-called. I think the starting point for that I'd suggest the whole discussion by itself is This One of the major areas where open source has been successful Is all of the plumbing For any given technological artifact There's a bunch of stuff That has to work technically But in commercial setting does not affect the decision of customers to buy And often this is the overwhelming in software the overwhelming majority of the software is in this category And in that environment the not invented here syndrome is is really harmful And so it's that if nothing else Corporate in that space, and this is what I meant by bottom up I think you'll find it's already happening It was 20 years ago. It's happening in corporate America that You know Bill Gates was saying no customer has ever asked me about Linux and then it became apparent that every single 1400 company This is the same year was using Linux in some mission critical role at which point the world just went Oh Wait and the the the mine shift occurred and occurred very quickly But it was that was actually more a grounds up thing a bottom up thing that engineers getting a job done We're just picking up open source components To get it done and of course feeding back fixes because it just makes their their life easier So that is a sort of strategy for getting it in Happens by itself and is working, but the there's high level Yeah, how to address the hey, are you treating me? Am I missing something? How are you profiting? Yeah, that's a that's a real one. I think that is a very valid extremely valid constraint and concern as well I I let me I'm not going to toot the horn for red hat, but I work with red hat But I'm not pitching that in any sense, but there are some learnings and lessons that I'm more than happy to share Everything that red hat does It's it's it's all open source stuff. We work upstream. We call it upstream. We work upstream Every single product that we ship there is an open source project and an open source product A product is what we ship to our customers The product is based on an open source project and it is a two-way street Things that happen in the project goes into the product improvements in the product goes back to the project so it's a two-way street and The key message there is that we work upstream. We want to make sure that a project is successful And then we do what we need to do to make it work for the customer But in doing that we are part we are we are opening up everything to say. Hey, look, Mr. Project This is what we're doing with the project. This is how we're fixing it This is how we're doing whatever we're doing and we tell the customer This is coming from the open source project, but we are accountable to you This way you can come to us for any kind of liability We our neck is on the line for that and that's why you pay us for that And so this way it is a very transparent model and I feel I feel very happy to be in that kind of a space because It resonates with my own personal ethos as well. I'm not screwing the customer in a in a in a bad way I'm not doing bad things to the to the community. I'm trying to make sure everybody's success So it's win-win-win everywhere. So that's really what we need to do There will always be somebody is going to say, oh, you're hiding something Please tell me where I'm hiding. What am I hiding? Please show it to me. Then I'll try and unhide it We haven't so that's really the the message there, but again, it's not easy thing to do We stumbled upon it by magic Oh, that's how we can do it. But it's it's applicable Yeah, it was one of those things that happened You bring the business model out of a hat Well, that is indeed what happened, right? So it happened in 2001 when when when the when the dot com happened uh dot com boom and bust happened How do we make money? Yeah, so trying to figure out. So this is what happened. We've got a wrap As ever panels go fast too fast. I hope this has been interesting. I have a round of thanks for my panelists