Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. This week we're going to do something a little different. Maybe six ish months ago I talked to you about how after Golden Demon I wasn't happy with my hobby and what I was doing and what I was focusing on and I said I was going to make a change and start painting some different things, some things that really ignited my passion. So today we're going to check in on that goal and see how I've done and look at some of the figures for both competition and display that I've been painting over the past six months. And spoilers, I've really had a great time. The strict techno mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V's time. Now I want to start this video by saying there is absolutely nothing wrong with painting for your army, for painting tabletop figures, I still have done that a lot. In between all of these other projects I worked on lots of games workshop figures and stuff for my army. I painted a few Skaven models, I've started working on my Tron Tau, you know all sorts of fun stuff like that. There is nothing wrong with those things at all and I still have a great deal of fun doing them. But what I wasn't doing beforehand as in the lead up to Golden Demon was I wasn't focusing on art that was really pushing me, that was making me happy, that was making me feel like I was growing and pushing myself and experimenting and just making something really cool and neat and unique for me. There's nothing truly unique in the world but it was unique for me. And so that's what I've really tried to hone in on. So today we're going to look at six pieces I've sort of painted over that time that I think are worth discussing and what I learned on each one. So I hope you'll enjoy coming with me on this journey. As we kind of just look at these figures I'm going to share them with you. Some of them I've shared out on social media here or there or you've seen them in previous videos but these are some nice shots of where they currently sit after all touch-ups and everything like that. And some of these went to Nova Open as well. So really well timing here. So let's just jump into the figs. First up is this bust. And this is a cool rat person bust. It's not actually scaven because I believe it's a 3D print of a kind. A friend gave it to me, printed it out and I just really liked it. Now this showed up in my OSL Glow video. All of these will be linked up above so you can find all of those if you'd like to go back and check out the original videos these appear in if they did at all. And this guy was just a really fun time of experimenting with extremely strong cross-directional lighting, both a normal environmental light and then also pushed with a strong direct object light, even if that object's off-screen. And it was really fun to play in this space where the figure on one side of him, you know about half this figure, is lit basically in one color. It's just green and then adding the yellow in for highlight. That's really all that's happening. Even though it's so incredibly simplistic in the number of paints that were used, especially on that side of the figure where that light is dominant, it still was incredibly fun and there's a lot of nuance and challenge to it. In the strength, the intensity, where you place the highlight, how you place the shadows, it honestly made me think a lot more about how I treat lighting in general. By scaling everything back to just a single tone, a single color, in this case the green, I had to think completely and only about value. Where did every highlight go? Where did every shadow go? All of that sort of thing. And in doing so, it focused my mind in a way that I find, oftentimes I don't or we don't maybe, because we're caught up in the colors that the thing is, right? Oh, this is a red cloak and so I need to use my lighter red color and is it going to be a pink red or an orange red or whatever, right? And in fact, none of that matters. The light is all that matters. And by stripping it down to just this sort of very simplistic image of just one tone, one dominant tone down here, it took all the color concerns out and let me focus completely on the light. So I feel like I really learned a lot there and I'm going to be playing more with these sort of heavy object source lighting color palettes in the future. Actually, I want to kind of switch one where the object source is the dominant light over most of the figure and then maybe there's a soft environmental light trailing off. So look for more of that in the future. Next up was the morrigan. So this is a really, really amazing figure. Again, you can find the video linked up above. I had an absolutely incredible time with this one. I love this fig. And if you watch the video where I talked about the skin tone, you know that one of the most fun things to do here was to sort of tap into my inner frazetta and really play with how we're introducing the skin tones. Using unusual paints, using a lot of pinks, a lot of greens, and a lot of blues. And what's awesome about this is now how different it looks. I love painting skin. In fact, you're going to see an absolute theme over these six figures. I'm going to tell you that right now. I've been on a real kick recently of just playing with skin tones in every way. And I love it. And working in these soft, subtle greens down in the shadows, I see now why frazetta did this sort of thing. It adds this earthiness, this very subtle naturalistic shadow, whereas things get toward the lower part of the miniature. They just feel more dark, a bit sinister, a bit more earthy at the same time. It really works. And at the same time, managing to like sap most of the life out of her skin, making her feel very pale as though she does live underground, sort of in the shadows, in this cave, sending out her ravens and waiting for some foolish adventure to happen upon her. This was another experiment as well in the object source lighting. This was actually a motivated light, since the object is in figure, as it were, with the blue. And so I carried a lot of lessons from the previous figure over to this one. And again, it was really fun to kind of capture those small, unique movements of the light and the blue and stuff like that here. But this was really, really fun from the silk of the pink in her robe down to like capturing the light in her hair, to just playing around with really fun stone too. And of course, that skin tone. I really, really enjoyed this one. And I'm definitely going to be doing more experimentation in the future with these sorts of earthy, yellow, brown greens in the skin and really kind of see how much I can get that kind of braum, frasetta, 80s fantasy look going. Pretty jazz because I feel like I kind of, I unlocked something in my brain when I did this figure. I really want to try to replicate it in some interesting ways going forward. Next up is Morgana Lefe from Mind Works. And this was another really, really fun figure to paint. Again, I did a video on the cloak, but this one was more about experimenting with a very, what do I want to call this, almost alien skin tone because she is cast in these grays and purples. She almost doesn't feel alive, almost, but there's still a little bit of those subtle red tones in there that I think keep her looking still living and making it feeling like skin, just something perhaps otherworldly and magical. And really the fun with this one was that reflected water. So I've never done the reflected water effect before like had, we can all picture it.  And I was really excited to give that a shot. I will be honest with you, I had no idea what I was doing when I started that. And so it was me just placing colors and working back and forth. And I think I came to something that I really like. And don't worry, I will try to make a video out of that in the future. The next time I sort of have an opportunity to make a figure standing by water, so we'll get there. But I will do a dedicated tutorial on it. But this one was really fun because I love crossing that alien skin, which felt so unnatural with this soft turquoise light reflection, which felt very natural, like something we've all experienced and seen and have knowledge of in the world. It somehow grounded the figure in a way that I think if she was just normal and had the skin tones and sort of look that she does, she wouldn't feel as natural. But because there's that element of her that feels completely, like, quote, unquote, realistic, I guess, I don't know, matching experiences we've all had, it somehow says it tricks your brain into going, OK, this is a real person because they're in a real environment. So I think there's more I have to think about there and things I want to experiment with in the future there. What I learned with this one is oftentimes the way that we set the base and use these other colors and tones in even minimal parts of the model can affect how we interpret the model writ large, like the whole thing. So very fun and a lot more to play with there. Next up was this girl I call her born of fire. This was another really, really, really great miniature. So this was just a ton of fun to paint. And here, as soon as I saw it in its sort of original art, which this is Night of the Zombie from Mineworks in its original art, it was very dark, very green. It was sort of like an undead necromancy kind of feel in the art. And I just didn't vibe with that. I had done some other pieces, obviously, they were very dark, they were very sort of sinister. I really wanted to hit something warm. And as I sat there and stared at the figure and just like looked at it, I literally just turned it my hand for probably a half hour an hour, just literally looking and thinking, letting some music be on in the background and really just letting my mind wander over what this figure could be. And as I did so, what I saw was the shape of her cloak just hit me like this. It looks like a flame, almost like roiling up, right? As though it's like lifted either by heat or it itself is a candle flame, just somewhat blowing in an extremely light wind. And then like, boom, all of it snapped into place right there. The soft orange light from below, the bright intense light from above, as she sort of is just kind of born out of this lava, out of this fire and just springs into existence. Almost, what is it, almost like Aphrodite or whatever rising out of the clam shell, right? I think that's what that is. I need to restudy my Greek mythology, I guess, but similar-ish thing. And I really, like, I love the dynamism of the figure because even though it's very static in its pose, it has all, like it's just a person standing there with like a slight back bend. Because of that amazing cloak, it's doing so much work to shape your perception of the figure. So with this one working with that really intense light, really intense shadows. That was actually really fun here. Not truly cast shadows because they don't have like those hard lines, but really intense shadows are something that I think we often miss when we're painting. We tend to paint our figures as though they're under like a general diffuse kind of lighting. You're outside on a cloudy-ish day. Whereas here, if you know, if you go out and it's noon and it's a bright, sunny, perfectly blue sky day, take a picture of someone standing outside like that. You'll notice that they have really strong shadows, like under their their chin and, you know, under their arms. Those are like really, really intense, strong cast shadows. And I don't tend to play with that strong of shadows very much in my painting. And I want to start an experiment with that because playing with skin and playing with lighting has really been the focus of this six months. And having those really intense, hard jumps of shadows, just almost completely devoid of light, was I think it makes the other bright parts of the figure really, really striking and kind of keeping that balance between the intense, bright light shining on her face and her shoulder and down to the gold while still letting the lower part of the figure in her abdomen and her torso show some of that, but not much and mostly get swallowed into those shadows was really a fun back and forth balancing act. I mean, I glazed back and forth and back and forth on this girl for hours, just getting the colors exactly where I want them. And I had a lot of fun doing it because every time I would notice slight changes in the way I perceived the figure and the emotion and the overall scene I was setting. So this one was just an incredible amount of fun to paint. And so I was was thrilled how this one came out. Love the lava, how it looks kind of spilling over and love the like soft orange below, not much, just enough to show that she's born a fire. Next up is Northern Wind. This is from Big Child. This is one of my favorite busts like maybe ever. I really love this thing. The only thing I ever hated about it was the she was holding like a head in her offhand. And I just I hate figures holding decapitated heads. I cannot explain why. I just I don't like a second face, especially not on a bust. Humans are naturally drawn to look at faces and eyes. And so by putting a second head on the bust, you naturally sort of detract and prevent the eye from looking where you want it to. So I got rid of that and gave her a second weapon. And I like her much better with the two weapons. This one was a chance to just paint something I really wanted to for a long time. I've looked at this figure for years and one of the pieces I always of advice I always give to people is, you know, if you've got a figure, don't hold off on painting it until you're quote unquote better. You're always going to be better. You hope, right? You hope the next day, the next month, the next year, the next five years, you're better than where you were yesterday, last month, last year, five years ago. And, you know, I say, get into it. You'll learn and I'll admit this one was one where I'm not sure I took my own advice. Most of the time I do manage to stick to that. I just paint things and and have fun with them.  But this one was one where I just didn't pick up the figure because I just wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it justice in a way that I was happy with. But I finally felt in the middle of this period, it was time. It was time to do it. And I'm glad I did. I still think there's more I could have done. There's more I could do. But I learned a lot. And one of the things I was most happy with was honestly what I made a video out of. And that was the blonde hair. Blonde hair is really challenging. I've done blonde hair on plenty of figures, both display competition and tabletop before. And it's all fine. But I do feel like this one hit a new plateau. I'm really happy with how I managed to capture sort of the crown of light and the soft shadows. Just like the exact tones and paints and things that I used all seem to finally click into place for me. That and again, I think the skin and the way that that's starting to pop, like I really feel like I'm starting to get a good handle on that skin progression, that tan skin and mastering the volume overall of of how that should look as the skin and the light sort of dapples over the figure as it were, right? As it flows from the top to the bottom from the more intense areas from the higher value areas to the lower value, lower intensity areas at the bottom. So this one was a lot of fun. I, you know, I think overall it came out pretty pretty pretty darn good. And I was happy with it. And I know in a year I'm going to look back on it and think, Oh, God, I could have done so much better. And you know what, I'll buy a second one then and paint it again. And see if I can live up to my own shortcomings. This is the last guy I painted this as as I'm recording this video. You're actually going to see him in a future video. So he hasn't even actually come out yet. But this guy is going to be in on some skin tone videos and stuff like that. This was a very fun barbarian figure. This is a 3D print. And I really just wanted to, again, play with speed paints, which is actually what's used to tone this skin. Stay tuned for that one. That's going to be really exciting. And I wanted to see kind of how much I could push that barbarian, warm, ruddy, tanned, desert skin, right? To really show the full range of that color of someone, not only in a bright light, but who's regularly in that and where their skin is has really showing those rich, sepia, warm tones. And I really am happy with some of the colors and paints that I used here. I think there's going to be a banger video, so stay tuned. If you're interested in how I achieved this, like, really warm skin tone using Speed Paint 2.0 from the Army Painter, it's going to be coming up soon, and I'm really excited about it. So there you go. That's the six figures that I've six display figures slash competition figures I've done in this time. There was a lot of other stuff I painted, of course. But each of these to me represented a step on my journey. Maybe they were a plateau, maybe they weren't. I don't know. Maybe they were me reaching beyond and learning something new. But what I do know is that I had a tremendous amount of fun with each of them. And I think that what I want you to get out of this video is every so often step out of your comfort zone, paint something new, try something different, try a different scale, a different size, a different technique. Push yourself in some way and just see what happens. Not everything here worked out how I wanted. There was failures along the way. But each time I just kind of went up and over the top of it. And I think in most of them, I got them to a place where I was at least decently happy. Hey, do me a favor. Drop down below in the comments which one you liked or what you didn't like in any of them. If there's anything you thought I could have changed or you would have liked to see in these figures, I'd love to hear your feedback positive or negative.  So this is your chance to give me some feedback. So pop that down there. But if you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget we have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions about any of these figs. Hey, drop that down there, too. I always answer every question asked if you want to support the channel. Not only is liking and subscribing a great way to do that, but you could take the next step through the Patreon link down below. That's focused on review and feedback and taking your own next step on your hobby journey. We'd love to have you as part of the community. As always, thank you so much for watching this. I really appreciate it. I'll see you next time.


Hey, what's going on, guys? And welcome to Facebook Ads Friday, week 32. This is a series where every single Friday, I will show you two proven and profitable products. I'll also show you where you can source these products from. I will also show you how to sell these products. So once you've finished watching these products, essentially you'll have every step you need to take to go out and start selling these products yourself. With that being said, let's turn Australia into product number one. So product number one, I'm quite excited to show you about if you've been following the channel, you'll know that I play golf quite a lot. I love the sport. It's from a company called Battle Royale Golf. This particular post went live in October 5th of 2022. So it's been selling for quite some time, which is a great sign. The best products, in my opinion, are those ones that you can sell all year round and milk for as long as possible, and they're not gonna drop in and out of popularity. This particular post, then they are running this in a few different types of posts. This is actually one of the modest performers. However, I wanted to show you this particular one because of what the people are saying in the comments section. So this one has 2.6,000 reactions, 1.8,000 comments and 2.1 million views. I think it's pretty safe to say it's bringing a return, it's making the money. People don't tend to pay for an ad long enough for it to get that level of viewership unless it's making the money. However, the proof is in the comments. What we are looking for is hardcore evidence. People are buying this product and they're happy with the product as well. So Rob says, I look forward to both loving and hating this game with a passion when you get it so that would indicate somebody has ordered this. Tracy says we have this, it's great fun. There's another person who's ordered this product. Paul Franklin says it looks great but doesn't go to America. The company has got in contact with him, says they ship worldwide. John Richie going to get me one of these so there's intent to buy the product. Nat says he absolutely loves this game, just wishes the mat was a bit bigger. So there's another person who's bought this product. Andrew says I put it up on the wall and the stairs works great and the missus love it. There's another person that's bought this product. Bev says, so three hours ago, ignore the weeks and weeks and weeks you've seen on the previous comments. I'll show you the newest comments in a second so you can see this is working right now. That is one of the most important things about this series is every single product I show you will be working right now. I will never show you outdated and past products. So Bev says I've tried buying this product but get as far as blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically the most important thing we take away from a comment like this is there's another person who's wanted to buy this product. So I think it's pretty fair to say that people love this product, people are buying this product and therefore it must be a profitable one. That being said, what product are we talking about? So let's go ahead and watch the actual ad creative itself. So what we can see is two teams, two friends most likely having fun in their back garden. What's really good about this is you can buy little mats or it comes with a little mat to chip off of. So regardless of whether you have grass or a patio, this thing is usable which is great because then it accommodates for pretty much everyone. And as you can see, you chip the ball to try and land it as close as you can to the pin, to the flag and the closer you get to it, depending on where your ball lands, depends on how many points you get. Another thing you may have noticed is I'll just pause it right there, Battle Royale Golf matches the name of the store. And this, as you can see, is custom imagery. You won't find this imagery or this video content, I should say, on a supplier's listing. So they've gone to the extent, let's get rid of that awful video, they've gone to the extent of actually branding the product to set themselves apart from any competition. If me or you want to go out there and sell to the same level as these guys, it's gonna take a lot of time and it's gonna take a lot of money. And ultimately, that is how you become successful with dropshipping. You dropship a white label product to validate the idea works. Once you've validated that the idea works, you then progress from dropshipping onto branding the product, stocking the product, and ultimately offering a better service and becoming, quote unquote, a real business. So we saw the most relevant comments, so let's just jump back into it and go for newest. Six minutes ago, three hours. Let's open this up.  You get the gist. There's a significant amount of people commenting on this very recently, which would indicate they're spending a pretty decent amount of money, a pretty decent amount of budget on reading this as an ad, which is a great sign to see. It obviously proves that it's active and working right now. Let's jump onto the website then because it's not traditional or far from a textbook kind of layout. They have this really massive kind of add to cart button. Rather than a Shopify store, it actually reminds me of some sort of like ClickFunnels landing page. However, just to confirm if I open up my Koala Inspector, we can see it is a Shopify store and the theme they're using is called Refresh. As we scroll down through the page then, you'll notice that nothing, as I've already said, is kind of typical. They have lots and lots of imagery of lots and lots of different customers using the products in different settings and different locations. There's a heavy emphasis on that kind of social aspect and that social proof aspect by showing that there's lots of people who have bought this product and using it and happy in it and people using it indoors, outdoors. It does a really good job of accommodating. No matter who's gonna come across their ad, there will be something for everyone with this product. What's really good to see as well is even in their reviews, in their photo reviews, the mat being displayed has indeed got their logo on as well. What you'll see some companies do is all of the imagery on their store will show the logo on the actual products, but then when you go down into looks, reviews, or every review that app they're using, it's just imported images from their supplier so it's not actually a branded product that the consumer receives. They just give off that impression. So if we go back up, they are selling the products for 65 pounds by all means not a cheap product. They have a nice upsell offer here to bump up the amount of golf balls it comes with but for all intensive purposes, we're gonna work on 65 pounds. If we jump onto AliExpress, obviously we're not gonna be able to find the exact same products because they've private labeled it. However, as we can see, there's quite a few similar ones in the ballpark region of sort of 20 to 25 pounds. Given my experience, sourcing products in higher quantities from suppliers of Alibaba and getting it shipped to the UK, I would probably ballpark this product in and around sort of 15 pounds per unit delivered to the UK. So then on top of that, they then have to pick pack and dispatch to their customers. One thing I didn't actually go over or point out was this. So delivers in three to five days USA to UK. So they're obviously working with some form of a 3PL that has a warehouse in both of these locations. So working on sort of 15, 20 pounds delivered to their customers all in, I would say they're making a very healthy profit imagine of at least 35, if not closer to 40 pounds per unit, which of course allows them plenty of flexibility with their paid marketing. Moving on to the other end of the scale, we have a cheaper product. This is from a company called Toddler. I featured them last week with a different products. They sell different baby related items. Baby niches is probably one of the strongest niches on Facebook because their typical average user of Facebook tends to be sort of 45, 50 plus in and around the age range where they start becoming grandparents. So they're going to be the sorts of people that watch a video like this and say, oh, this is going to be handy for my son or daughter when they have their kids. I'm going to buy them one of these. So like I mentioned, company's called Toddler if you want to check them out, December 23rd of 2022. So it's been going for a few months now. 2.4,000 reactions, 3.4,000 comments and 1.1 million views. Let's jump down into comments section then. Let's see what people are saying. So Kelly says she loves hers. There's somebody who has bought one. This person here says this is so helpful. Have one for my baby. Another person that's bought one. Carly says her uncle got her this. Another person that's bought one. This person, I love mine. Jasmine literally the best use it for herself as well. Another person. Janelle, my daughter is a wild one. But even if she moves this nail trimmer won't cut her. So thank you. I love this. Another person. Caroline, I love this. I just used my DeWalt Sander works great. There's always jokers in the comments section saying things like this. But you get the gist. As we move down, we can see just purchased. There's more, well there's loads of people I should say that have bought this car. I know the person I love mine 14 weeks ago. That being said, let's jump into the newest and just double check with ourselves. So 25 minutes, 29 minutes, 39, one hour, one day, four hours, five hours, six hours, six hours, six hours, seven hours. A significant amount of comments all within the last 10 or 11 hours or so. So it goes without saying. They must be spending a lot of money to reach a lot of people to get this amount of comments in such a short period. That being said, then what product is it that we're talking about? So let's play the ad. It's only eight seconds long. So blink and you'll miss it. You can see basically what it is. It's a nail file. It has a cheesy music over the background in case you can't hear that. I'm guessing because the actual product itself makes a noise. So they don't want to advertise that noise to risk putting customers off. But nonetheless, we can see a pretty effective product and judging by their comments from people, a very safe product as well. Let's jump onto the Shopify store then. So we're hit with a 10% off your order. Two options. We can go, yes, name an email address to unlock it, a very common strategy. Not a typical kind of textbook store. They haven't gone for a white background. They've gone for like soft, pasty colors, which is obviously in keeping with the whole baby theme. So they have different colors, blue and pink. That's a nice touch actually with the different backgrounds that changes to match. You can offer a two pack for no cost saving at all. So I'm not quite sure about that, but it must be converting. Otherwise why would they have it on there? It's something I do with a lot of my cheaper products. Actually try and bump up the average order value. They have this form of scarcity or social proofs. 88 people are currently looking at this product. Not sure if you noticed that, but it's just changed again to 89. So it kind of gives off the impression there's a lot of people looking at it. You can install apps like this for five, $6 a month if you want to put that sort of thing on your own store. Limited stock available, so some form of scarcity. And then as we move down, it becomes more textbook now. So heading, little paragraph. I've got some icons and a GIF. Heading, little paragraph. And then actually into some reviews. Some different sections just showing different aspects of the products. Worry free, trimming technology, hassle free, discreet. Trimming, six grinding heads for each need. So kind of different adaptability. So it does actually come with some adult attachments as well. And then it's got some instructions on how you actually use it and how it's powered. And that sort of thing. Some recommended products, FAQ. And that is it for its product page. If I'm not mistaken, they don't have an actual reviews section unless I missed that last time. We can also see the product in the images isn't branding, let's open up some of these. But it is extensive, so 99 reviews. That gives off a very healthy impression of it being an established and legitimate business. The product itself isn't actually branded. So if I were these guys, I know they sell quite a few products quite successfully. They've definitely been around for a while. If I was them, I'd consider private labeling them. Developing the product a little bit further and making it more unique and original to their own brand. Let's jump on to AliExpress then and see what we can find on here. So there's lots and lots of different suppliers. This is the exact same product, the exact same kit for five pounds. We saw a toddler, we're selling it for 20 pounds or two for 40 pounds. So like I said, they're relying on people buying a couple of these things to try and bump up that average order value to pay for their ads. There's a couple of different variations as well. They have this like rounder one which you can get for mega, mega cheap. So I think it's safe to say from what we've seen in terms of product costs that they're looking at in and around sort of 15 pounds profit if somebody orders one of these things, the second a customer buys two of these things that bumps up to more like 25 and even closer to 30 pounds and that'll be where they're making their money. And with that being said then guys, that pretty much wraps up Facebook ad Friday, week 32. If you enjoyed it, make sure you subscribe so you can tune in next week. Well, I'll have another two great products to show you and as always I will show you the product, I'll show you the creative, I'll show you the store and I will show you where to source those products from as well. Any questions at all on anything to help you get started on either of these products? Just leave a comment down below. I read every single one, so I will see it and I will definitely get back to you. And if you haven't already, make sure you check out my free training, I've just updated it and vastly improved it, at least no stone unturned. Take you through my proven four step select source build launch process for launching your product and profiting from drop shipping in 21 days. So make sure you check that out. Thanks for watching guys, have an awesome weekend and I'll see you in the next video on Monday. Cheers.


It's Friday, that marks the end of the first week for the cold quest so a lot of has happened, planning has been done, a lot of work has been done preparing what's going to be the work for the next few weeks but the biggest change is that now we have our own kids so we can finally not get locked out of this shady door. Awesome. Groceries are you spoiling us so badly. So this makes it look like we're actually eating ice cream every day but it's only been two days so far in five days so okay that's a lot. It's so healthy stuff. Besides all the ice cream eating. Developers having really hard at work. All these meetings are paying off because now there is documents that being written based on these meetings and more talking and more discussing so everything is now is much more clear. So Blender 2.8 is not only about adding new stuff it's also about cleaning it up and getting it ready for the next decade or so. That's why also Blender now requires a higher version of a PNGL to work properly so you can take advantage of all the new hardware or why all their parts of Blender that are not maintained anymore such as Blender internal or the game engine have to be replaced with something much better and newer. So following the tradition of the open movie projects where we'll on Fridays at 6 we will get together and we'll show maybe make a little presentation to the team just to keep everyone on track about what's going on what's the status of the project. So for the code quest we plan on doing the same but instead of starting at 6 we started at 4 because presentations will get a bit longer that was a great idea because actually it took us two hours. There was a short presentation for each one of the main topics of the code quest. Every topic on this list has at least one or two major UI tasks like workspace. The top bar for example that requires a design or the new tool system also requires a design and don't even talk about the asset management that it needs like a whole new editor basically. But there are also other things that we could do to make Blender better Blender 2.8 especially better more appealing more accessible and this we decided together with Wilhelm to add it as a new topic and we call it like graphic design or layout or ways of making Blender more delicious or how they say it in Dutch, lecker. So we call it a lecker blender. We plan on releasing this document on the developer.blender.org site and maybe make like design tasks for more of the specific topics themselves so people and the community can give more feedback and maybe other developers such as the cork and maybe tackle them because some of them the tweaks are rather small but they will make a big difference. So during these videos you're going to usually see the same people and you'll see them a lot for at least three months so it's why not get to know them. So I went to each one of them and I asked them who are you and what's your role in the code quest. So if you don't know Brecht you've been living under a rock he's been involved with Blender since forever. During B-Bug Bunny he was working already on the heavy render stuff and memory efficiency and in Sintel he also worked in the render branch just to make the Blender internal support, irradiance caching and like the oil illumination which is what later made him make cycles. So yeah with all that experience it's a key player in the code quest. That's relaxing. What's your name or what's your role in the code quest? So I'm Bastia Montagne, I'm a developer mostly working on the data management and outside so mostly static overwrites which are doomed to replace boxes and then hopefully the asset management system. Bastia has touched every area in Blender in the last few years but is now focused more on the asset management and static overwrites to replace the old ugly proxy system in Blender. So very excited about that. Speaking of touching every area in Blender there is Campbell. Campbell and Winterface, the tool system widgets sort of the top bar and how that all fits together with William on that and I'm also doing some stuff with multi objects in edit mode and pose mode and that stuff as well. He's been involved also in open movie projects since B-Bug Bunny. So the audio is a bit crappy here, there's a lot of people in the room there, it was right after the weekly but he's Clemande, he's the man behind EV and helping out with the workbench engine and OpenGL and everything viewports related basically. That's the boss chair. I think you're taking the project manager role a bit too. Are you gonna get fired man?  Right so what's your name or what you're doing here in the code quest? My name is Dalai and I'm working, I don't even know if there's a title to it but I'm working on managing the project. Project manager. So let's do it again. Hi I'm Dalai. So basically you take care that everything stays together. I help to keep everyone on track, make sure we keep the same big picture in line and on mind for everything you do, make sure we communicate well for the other developers that are not here, for the people at home, people that have found the project. Yeah, community. Awesome. Thank you very much. It's office suits you really well by the way. Okay, what's your name and what are you doing for the code quest? Hi, I'm Jeroen and I'm working on the bug bench. Jeroen's also been around for a while now. It's mainly working on the compositor back in the days and now he's focused on the workbench engine. Who are you and where is your role on the code quest? Hello, I'm Joshua. Yeah, I'm the animation system developer and yeah, so I should be here in Amsterdam. Yeah, so what's your role on the code quest, what do you think you're going to be working on? Yeah, so this week I've been involved in heaps and heaps of meetings. Joshua, he's known online as Aligarith and it's the first time in Europe. So, so good to finally meet him. He's been involved with Lender since forever. He worked in the animation system. He is the original creator of the Gris Pencil tool back in the days. He's in so many areas that it's so nice to finally see him meeting in person. Really happy that he's around here for the code quest. So, what's your name and what's your role in the code quest? I'm Julian. I'm just here for two weeks and basically he's working on all kinds of stuff. Julian has been involved in the UI mainly. He has a project for big widgets, for the widgets, for manipulators. But also in the note editor for example, when you have two notes and then you add a third note in between them that they make room for them. They are animated. That's also by Julian. It's pretty nice. So, he's here for only a couple of weeks, but then he will continue working remotely. There. I'm going to pretend to be your height. So, who are you and what's your role in the code quest? Hi, I'm Sibren and my role, yeah. It's a limbic and file caches and physics and fracture modifier and cloud. Asset manager. So, I'm helping Bastian with a concrete example for the asset manager, the asset engine. The asset engine, the asset manager, but remote. Yes. Connecting to the cloud and doing multi-threaded stuff and changing the way we do things internally. It's not just a copy-paste of the existing Blender cloud add-on, but it's actually doing things better. Basically, with more insight in what we did wrong in the past, you can always do it better. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Hope to see you more, more of you in the future. Yeah. Thank you. And you're the door. Who are you and what's your role in the code quest? My name is William and in the code quest, I am the designator, user interface designer. William Rainish, our UI user experience designer. So, he's been also involved as an artist back in Bitbuck Bunny and Sintel, but also he's been a key part for the 2.8 project design and he even made some mock-ups back in 2003 about the Blender UI back then. And some of his changes, you can see them currently in Blender. So, he's full-time working on UI design and experience. Super important to have him here and he's talking with every developer to make sure that the UI is consistent all over the board. I guess I should introduce myself as well. My name is Paulo Asquez. I've been involved in open movie projects in the past for already the last 10 years, an open game even. And in the code quest, I will be doing this, communicating with the community and also working as a feedback mainly and designing user interface and user experience together with William. And you may have heard of these two guys over here. The code quest. Hi, I'm Tom Rosendau and I'm taking care of the lunch. Tony's taking care of everyone here, including Blender itself. He has the vision of what Blender should be since 20, 25 years ago and it's still valid and it's a very clear vision of where should Blender should go. So, I'm really happy to see him here full-time together with the developers working in the code quest on Blender 2.8. And secretly thinking about Blender 3.0 and the animation 2020 project. And Sergei, our very own Russian doctor, he's the best. So, who are you and what's your role in the code quest? I'm Sergei, I'm senior software janitor. Making sure there is no trash behind Blender. Relationships I guess too. Fixing all the relations. Motion tracking, cycles, compositor, you name it. He's done it and now he's taking on the most difficult parts in Blender. To my knowledge, he's the dependency graph. That's what he means by fixing relations is, yeah, it's dependency graph. He's the heart of Blender. It's a connection between everything, every tool, every animation. It's everything, everything. Good, great t-shirt by the way. Yeah, awesome. I heard that movie was great. Yeah. Thank you. So, pretty exciting times ahead. Next week, we'll see a week's worth of meetings down into documents. I'm going to share with the community and with the developers online just to see what's going to happen during the code quest and how it's going to happen. So, stay tuned, subscribe to this channel if you want to see more. Follow us on social media as well, we are all over the place. And give it a like if you want to see more of this kind of content. It's the first time that we're doing this kind of format. So, let me know if it works, if it's a nice way to communicate. I promise there will be more pretty pictures coming soon with more mockups. But now it's the first week, we're still planning and setting up everything. So, yes, thank you everyone for the support in the previous video. I'm very glad you liked it and yeah, see you next week. And there will be a live stream on Friday next week, so stay tuned for that. And we'll be a Q&A mainly, but more information soon. See ya. But, are you announcing a ready code quest 2028? Yeah, wow.


Welcome to Texas Heart Institute Educational Programs on Technologies and Techniques. I'm Zvonmer Kreyser. I'm an interventional cardiologist at Texas Heart Institute and CHI Health, Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center in Houston. The title of this presentation is STAVER for Bicuspid Aortic Valve. What are the outcomes and what are the unmet needs? I have no conflict of interest pertinent to this presentation. Bicuspid aortic valve disease, pathogenesis, consists of development of valvular sclerosis in bicuspid aortic valve patients that typically begins early in life and progresses more rapidly than in tri-leaflet patients. Bicuspid valve disease can progress to severe aortic stenosis and as little as between 10 to 12 years while patients with tri-leaflet valves have approximately 20 to 30 years to progress to severe aortic stenosis. The eccentric jets that are caused by asymmetric bicuspid aortic valve leaflets lead to increase in wall stress and contribute to a formation of calcifications of the leaflets and also progressive dilatation of the ascending aorta. Now what is the prevalence of this disease? The prevalence of bicuspid aortic valve disease varies significantly according to geography. For instance, in the United States the incidence is somewhere between 1 to 1.6% in published studies while in Europe it is significantly higher and is occurring in up to 6.7% of patients. Now in Asia and particularly from this publication in China the incidence is close to 11%. So what are the unfavorable bicuspid aortic valve features that complicates tarot? One of them is aortic valve annulus that is more elliptical as shown here. Another one is frequent asymmetric calcium location as shown in the second slide. The third one is frequent extensive calcifications extending into the left ventricular outflow tract that can lead to a potential rupture during balloon dilatation of the valve. There is also more frequent association of shorter distance to the annulus from the coronary ostia as shown here and also frequent association of aortic dilatation of various types as well more frequent horizontal aorta as shown in the last slide. Now as far as the classification and morphology is concerned bicuspid aortic valve morphology severs and co-workers describe this clearly and this is the most commonly used classification in patients with a cuspid aortic valve. Severs type 1 occurs in about 7% of patients and it consists of two fully developed cusps without any fusion of raffae. Severs type 1 that is the most common type in their study occurred in 88% of patients and as we can see it consists of one fully developed cusp and two underdeveloped cusp and then raffae that occurs more commonly between the left and right coronary cusp in 71% of patients or between the right coronary cusp and non-coronary cusp that occurs in about 15% of patients and then less commonly between left coronary cusp and non-coronary cusp in 3% of patients. The least common one is the severs type 2 which is actually the most complex type of bicuspid morphology that occurs in about 5% of patients and consists of one fully developed cusp and two underdeveloped cusp and then two either complete or partial raffae. Now more recently there is another novel classification as far as bicuspid aortic valve pathology that was published by Ewan and coworkers in 2020 and as we can see he divided them in three categories that are predictive of mortality and morbidity as far as the classification is concerned. The worst one is one that's shown on the right-hand side in a red color that shows a scenario where you have severe calcification of leaflets and also fusion of the raffae where the mortality at two years of follow-up is somewhere close to 27% in comparison of a significantly lower instance of problems and morbidity and mortality in patients that have minimal calcification and no fusion of raffae that is shown in the dark blue line. More recently the technology has been developed to analyze patients with bicuspid aortic valve anatomy and to design a patient-specific simulation for optimal implantation depth of the prosthesis in an effort to prevent complications such as infolding and aortic regurgitation. So as we can see on the left-hand slide we have a severe calcification of both leaflets and fusion of the raffae that frequently can lead to complications such as significant aortic regurgitation at the end of the procedure. Now in the second slide we can see this valve which is a self-expanding valve is partially deployed and we can see a significant infolding that would lead to aortic insufficiency. On the third slide we can see actually the prosthesis that has been removed where we have significant infolding. And in the last slide we can see a simulation image where we can predict the severity of insufficiency that might occur if appropriate size of the valve and also the depth of deployment is not being used. So what are the outcomes as far as bicospid aortic valve anomaly is concerned? And here we can have a pretty extensive study from the ACC-TVT registry in bicospid aortic stenosis related to mortality and morbidity and incidence of stroke. And we can see here in a huge number of patients 2700 with bicospid and close to 8000 of tricuspid we can see that after using the propensity score matched pairs we can see there was no difference in mortality at 30 days between bicospid and tricuspid pathology and actually there was only a significant difference as far as stroke is concerned between two entities with stroke being higher for patients with bicospid aortic valve which is obviously related to a more complex aortic pathology particularly related to a fusion of the raffae and a more severe calcification of the valve. Now here is another study. It's a meta-analysis of bicospid versus tricuspid valve in a collection of 12 relevant clinical studies and we can see the only difference between two entities is incidence of residual regurgitation at 30 days which is significantly higher in patients with bicospid aortic valve. There was no difference in mortality at 30 days or no difference in mortality at one year and also no difference as far as the need for permanent pacemaker implantation is concerned. Now the CMS analysis in a very large number of patients also revealed from the Prompesti score matching for 3,000 patients that underwent surgical repair in comparison with 1,000 patients that had a bicospid aortic valve and underwent a TABR. And we can see here on the right-hand side that as far as mortality, stroke, and heart failure is concerned after two years of follow-up there was no significant difference between TABR and TABR. So when should we consider surgery for patients with bicospid aortic pathology? The studies have shown that patients that are younger less than 65 years of age should undergo TABR or surgical repair. Also patients that are candidates for mechanical valve would benefit obviously more from surgery and patients that have extensive coronary artery calcifications and disease as well as patients with a significant dilatation of the ascending aorta of more than 4.5 centimeters and patients with multi-valvular disease as well as patients that have unfavorable calcification pattern of the valve that might lead to a higher risk of annular rupture. And also patients that have a risk of residual paravalvular regurgitation. And also patients that have a challenging axis, particularly in patients that have hostile iliofemoral anatomy. So in conclusion, TABR and bicospid aortic stenosis poses significant challenges due to aortic valve disease complexity that I've described and frequent association of orthopathy and dilatation of the ascending aorta. However, the results have improved as far as TABR is concerned in this type of a pathology with current generation devices in term of procedural success and lower incidence of paravalvular leak. The association of orthopathy is, however, less of concern in all the patients at high surgical risk. However, it should be carefully considered in younger patients. The durability and long-term results of TABR in this pathology is yet to be defined because we do not have until now any randomized studies to compare either the combination of problems related to bicospid pathology or comparison between bicospid pathology and tricospid pathology. Thank you for your attention.


Thank you. I'd like to welcome you all to this session. I feel a little bit like I'm preaching a sermon in a European cathedral here with with a number of us in this large room But nevertheless, I thank you very much for coming out this afternoon And I'm going to be tag-teaming this performance here with my colleague Kate Murray from the Library of Congress So we'll take just a moment to introduce ourselves and we'll launch right in here. My name is Chris Prom I am an archivist at the University of Illinois and also a faculty member for the past All about 18 months or so. I've been Co-chairing a task force on technical approaches to email archives along with Kate. So Kate if you just So I'm Kate Murray and I work at the Library of Congress and I specialize in digital file formats And I've been working with email and related personal information management formats for a number of years and Yeah, I'm happy to be co-chairing this with Chris. So why don't we just start our presentation? Sure, so this is a topic of deep interest to me as an archivist We have email collections at the University of Illinois that we manage and in addition to that I wrote a technical report about email archives several years ago So the purpose of this task force which is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the digital and our partners the digital preservation coalition in the UK is to assess current tools methodologies approaches and Conceptual models that can be used to acquire Born digital correspondence and to manage it as an archival resource or as a curatorial resource in in repositories We would of course like to thank both the Mellon Foundation and DPC for supporting the work The charge of the group as you can see from this slide here essentially is a technical charge We very explicitly ruled out policy development and legal analysis and things along those lines Both because they're very difficult, but also because they vary considerably from institution to institution From case to case and more to the point from continent to continent As those of you have been following the news for the past few days know The European context for information policy and personal information management is quite different than the US Perspective so we were really interested in assessing Technical approaches that can meet a wide variety of operational contexts and legal contexts We do have a quite broad membership Composite of an executive committee myself Kate a few other people and then a larger group which helped to author a report Which will be issued relatively soon and we've been we've been very Pleased with the group the group has really done some excellent work Which you'll you'll hear about in just a moment would like to note in particular that we've had some representatives from industry engaged in the project Particularly from Google and Microsoft who have both brought a interesting and complimentary Perspective on on the types of issues that were we're dealing with in in archives in addition to that the group has had some Friends some people who have been given early access to the report and really offered us interesting and useful feedback You know these range from state archivist groups the COSA and Agara Through and including institutions like NHP grant granting agencies like NHPRC One particularly fruitful avenue of feedback for us has been two breathing days Which we held in the United Kingdom where we presented our work initial versions of our work at the UK National Archives and then again at a at a conference facility in central London back in in January One of the outcomes of the report is actually quite a bit of supplementary documentation Which we believe has considerable value in its own right In authoring a report of this nature Obviously there are many resources that are developed and are useful, but just can't fit into into the report itself So we've gone ahead and made those available on our project website. These talk about things like email user features Privacy issues guides to email standards things that are really really hard to track down that you can track down if you want to by reading IETF standards documents or things along those lines, but but just are hard to find in one place So those are those are a useful output put from the report and we'll continue to to support them Just to give a quick update current status We did submit a manuscript of the report to clear who will be acting as publisher in late March And that's currently going through editing and we expect it to be published in You know early June probably by the time everything said and done Meanwhile, we're are continuing to discuss potential follow-on work from the report Which is really the purpose of our of our presenting here to give a summary of the report and more particularly to focus on the recommendations from the report Leaving considerable amount of time for discussion questions and commentary so that whatever work is brought forward from the task force Report can meet the needs of the community as optimally as necessary So with that brief introduction, I'll turn turn things over to Kate who will describe Some of the main body parts of the report before we turn to the recommendations So the record as Chris just mentioned I'm we're just gonna do a high-level overview of the sections of the report the The first section of the port addresses recognizing the value of email and both Chris and I sat in the executive roundtables around researcher use of email of yesterday and today and These topics came up and certainly in mind and perhaps in Chris's as well, but You know what data lies within an email collection who might find it useful and why is accessioning problematic So we discussed those in the first section. So just a little bit on this image It's Rodin call to arms and what we really wanted to get across in the report Is that email is really technology bound right and the technology needs to be active and focused with care and feeding If it doesn't the data within will remain inaccessible and unaccessed and until these bonds are broken So the the call to arms is now the time to act is now and the people to do it are in this room and lots of others That are not in this room So some of the things that need to change We need to embrace email as a complex research data object We need to harness new technologies like NLP natural language processing and machine learning We need to encourage content creators to take active role in its preservation Even for personal papers and we need to build towards greater tool interoperability and towards deeper community integration and engagement So in the sections second section of the report we talk about the email life cycle And email really has comes from two perspectives. One is a records management perspective, which is typically well Integrated if you're in a large institution. The other one is when email comes in through gifts and Personal papers and those are really two completely separate things if it's in a records management It's part of typically a formalized record management program But if it's coming in through a donated materials context the email is usually outside of records management record-keeping structure Typically without organization or conscious retention about conscious attention about what has been retained or deleted This is a representation model That we're using to demonstrate how that a life cycle applies to email in general As it email moves through the life cycle from creation and appraisal to acquisition and processing to preservation Discovery and finally access we encounter lots of different players with different needs and many technological challenges Decisions have been made that have strong implications at every stage further down the chain and along this life cycle various players from The correspondence to the collectors may decide to keep or weed any of the messages or attachments or any of the associated data that travels with them So the third section of the report we dive deep into really what is email from a technical perspective and how it works and Given its ubiquity, you would think that it's well understood or documented But in fact, it's really not not as well documented as one might hope At its heart email is a transaction right in the case of an email We take the message component That's the actual email message but that also might include attachments and something that came up in my executive round table this morning Links to External data right networked data and how does that? Factor into capturing email. Are we now doing web archiving in addition to email archiving? And as well as other features beyond text So it's really kind of difficult sometimes to draw the line around the box of what is email It's really not as obvious as you might think it is I'm gonna turn this over to Chris. Okay, so After reviewing essentially what email is from a documentary point of view and sort of to set the stage for Challenges that can be and approaches that can be used to capturing it the report includes a brief assessment of Current trends both in industry related to email as as well as in repositories as well as in archival repositories so There's a good section of the report that talks about what's happening in the broader community because obviously email services are a very very big industry There are you know, lots of things that go around a goal that are the lots of services sold around Authenticating email I'm trying to prevent spam and phishing attacks and all of those kinds of things and these abuse prevention technologies Can both assist and complicate the fact of or the attempt to preserve email or make it accessible over the long run another area of really strong interest to us are Tools that focus around compliance business compliance and legal discovery because the industry has Developed for various obvious reasons for any of those of you who have been following the news Recently will know Means to look into and desire to look into what's happening in any kind of a communication technology email being a primary one of Those the problem with a lot of these tools is that while they're very useful for legal discovery They're also very very expensive and they provide many features that could potentially be very useful to archivists or curators who might want to for example Redact a collection or identify or classify correspondence that really is out of scope for Public access or really any kind of access because of legal restrictions or what have you but they're just simply beyond the reach of most Most archives so you know much like the lawyer in this joke They're they're very very useful, but they're also potentially very very expensive So one area for potential work within the community is to develop open-source versions of some of these tools are to work on business pricing models that would complement, you know, what? High-priced New York law firms pay for these tools one of the more interesting Moments in the in the work that we did was hearing from a lawyer actually who was involved in the LIBO investigations Leading to very large fine for Barclay's bank and for some other banks and he pointed out that they're essentially in the same type of business of telling a Story as historians are trying to piece together evidence so these tools have a lot of potential use but perhaps in a slightly different way The report also Spends a fair bit of time assessing repository challenges specifically around capturing email materials Because they sit in a variety of systems. It's very very difficult. They come from You know outlook they come from a lot of different Services and they all need to be handled somewhat differently Also around ensuring authenticity tracking processing actions Kate has already mentioned the difficulty of dealing with attachments and linked content I know in the executive roundtable session that I attended yesterday There was very interesting discussion around the fact that maybe within email collections You have very very interesting documents that are attached and those might in themselves be preservation objects worthy of attention Because as a transaction as a report is sent from someone to someone else There's a bit of evidence around that and the report itself might have value But how do you how do you preserve it? Then security and privacy issues and also processing at scale are some of the challenges that Libraries and archives would face when dealing with email collections So one key section of the report is about potential solution and and some sample workflows The there's nothing necessarily new here about the various preservation approaches The first one would be bit level preservation Which I describe as you get what you get and you don't get upset And I would say that for the most part with email collections. That's what people are implementing So they are ingesting the email collections, you know, maybe they bag it they ingest it But there's no access to it. There's typically no processing There's no appraisal to it because they haven't built up those tools yet format migration is a big part of email archiving mostly because tools such as E-pad and and some other tools are format dependent. So there's a lot of format migration that happens And emulation I would say for email archiving. It's really an opportunity. I think where emulation can really shine, right? So if you're looking to Explore email in its native Environment I think It's a great opportunity for emulation to do that In the report we have a number we did an extensive review of tools from both within the culture heritage community and Other communities including legal discovery those tools are a Review of those tools are on our website, but one of our recommendations is going to be to move them to copter to help Keep them more current And we also have a sample workflows from each of the different preservation options that you can adopt from organizations such as Stanford and Harvard The Smithsonian and others So the really the meat of this report or the meat of our talk today is really about the recommendations and the next steps So we have organized our recommendations Into sort of two categories community engagement and advocacy and another one around tools and tooling and then we further subdivided those into What we call sort of low barrier Activities and then higher impact activities So the first section that we're going to talk about and remember I said on an earlier slide is the people that should do This work is you and me you the royal you which would include myself so we have a number of What we call lower low barrier activities that can sort of self organize and members we should say members of the task force are Hopeful that we'll be able to participate in this work as well. So the first one is about assessing institutional readiness and What we would like to do there is to Make a Version of the NDSA levels of digital preservation Specific around email so it would help individual institutions understand where they fall on the spectrum. Are they are they just? Are they ready to ingest email at all? Are they bit level preservation ready or or are they further along? on the spectrum The second one is and I would should also say that we heard a lot of echoes around this in our executive in my executive roundtable and probably Chris did as well the need for Skilling up of existing staff and new staff to deal with email collection. So what are the issues around? What makes email challenging? What makes email special and how can what tools are available? and and What what do folks need to know in order to be email archiving ready? We have heard the next one quite a bit that there's an issue of trust with donors Donating their email collections to institutions and one of the recommendations from the task force is to develop sort of a template to Have staff be able to talk with donors about what those issues are to sort of take that fear away to understand what is Possible to redact and what is possible to what tools can do around sensitivity review? To help demystify the email process for donors. There's We didn't mention this earlier, but email is really a Domain in which the personal and the private and the professional intermingle, right? You typically my boss is in the audience Of course, I never use my work email for anything personal but people often use Email for multiple purposes, right? You might be talking about making a lunch plan or or you know, and your next email is about You know some some major events at work, so There's really an intermingling of those and I think that's partially the fear that donors have And sending their email along I mentioned earlier the idea to move our assessment of email tools into copter and Finally another one is to develop a format comparison matrix for email formats There are certainly models for this in my day job I run the Fadji the federal agencies digital guidelines initiative group And we've done a lot of work on the audio visual working group of that and we've done a lot of work around format comparisons and I Think it would be very interesting to lay out a format comparison matrix around popular email formats both proprietary And not proprietary So some of the higher-impact activities for community engagement It's really around sustaining the email archiving community. So We're not ready to move yet for potentially to consortial activities for Some of the open-source email tools, but we really need to think about how we can sustain some of the tools that are already out there Another one is around Planning specification for beginning of life cycle tools and in the US certainly the state agency State government repository programs have taken the lead in customizing some of the enterprise level tools that have been effective for capturing identifying and managing records But the wider community can learn from their experiences potentially through a summit or a collaborative knowledge sharing project a Big one is sort of developing criteria for what makes an email authentic, right? So if you're If the email has gone through format migration or has been ingested What are the key components of that email that says it's that it's at its essence what it's supposed to be what it declares It should be one of my favorites my standard joke around these things is that because I Another part of my day job is the sustainability of digital formats website at the Library of Congress In which I read the RFC's so you don't have to write I've read the RFC's for mbox and they are unclear, right? They don't specify all of the different versions of mbox and there is no RFC for eml, right? It's based off another format so It would be great to notch up the standards documentation for these email formats Get another one is and I'll talk quickly is To improve PDF as a as a a viable function for email. We all have in our Email systems export to PDF, but if you export to PDF you typically lose a lot of your head of it header metadata You potentially lose some threading. You might not have your attachments, etc. Etc the PDF community especially the PDF association is super keen to help us with this problem If we can define requirements for what makes a What is authentic about a peat? What is authentic about an email that could be translated into the PDF format gosh? They're all over that because that's a huge new market share for them And some of the members of the task force including the Library of Congress and the National Archives a member of the PDF Association and they're very keen to work with that and and finally to demonstrate email as a research Source of research data we call this sort of our data challenge In which we would work with some potentially work with some organizations who could provide Open full access to email collections invite some scholars and some digital humanity people into do research And then have them write about what their research experience was And the the research that could not have been possible if they did not have access to an email collection And Chris is gonna wrap us up right and then as Kate indicated the second set of recommendations is really based around tooling and tool support Some of these for instance can be really high-impact activities. So for example the PDF one that Kate mentioned if vendors of tools were able to You know produce better PDF files when people print them from outlook or whatever the filing of those would be much better There are still a lot of archives that are are following a sort of print and file approach So there are a lot of things that can be done in in that respect But on the low barrier side of things one of the first steps would really be to test the existing tools that are out there and Say exactly and find out a little bit more about how they do at retaining data or not retaining data there's just a real basic level of Of sort of basic research knowledge that we don't have about how these tools work when you move Things from one format to another Which leads into the second point about improving tool Format identification characterization and validation tools So if you take a message exported from outlook as a pst file run it through Some of the tools that exist such as e-pad or tomes or some of the industry tools Do you really know what you got out on the other side is the same thing as what you put in? So that's again a real basic research question around which we'd like to do some additional testing Then some of the higher-impact activities. I think these could be really interesting research projects Bringing multiple fields into play including curatorial practice in archives as well as computational Approaches machine learning approaches and artificial intelligence approaches one of the biggest needs actually are for improved tools around sensitivity review I think those of us who have worked with people in universities who have email they'd like to preserve or Legal counsel who would like to see a lot of email go away know that one of the biggest concerns is trying to Filter out things that might need to be restricted for for legal reasons or what have you and the tools are pretty good But again, there's a real lack of knowledge around whether they're better than a human or not better than a human I would think that if we can do facial recognition Technologies as well as we can we can probably do good sensitivity review around text-based collections as well So there's quite a bit of opportunity there for additional work Another really interesting Theme that focused in discussions of the group as well as in the executive roundtables yesterday and today Was the desire for a self-archiving tool? So as people leave positions as they move from institution to institution They may have a desire or a need to take records with them for their own You know Institutional more personal memory or to pass on to somebody else and there are a lot of very idiosyncratic practices that take place around this and in addition such a service if it's scoped properly I think could be of Quite useful for people who want to maintain a record of their own Correspondence under their own control it wouldn't necessarily need to include just email records It could include other types of documentation as well whether they're taking place from slack or You know Twitter or whatever uses an API So I think there's an interesting project potentially there and then one of the biggest is Developing standards for tool interoperability one of the points Kate mentioned is that there are a variety of tools out there They all require rather complex workflows to chain together That it's it's possible. It's doable, but it's hard. So Simplifying it through interoperability is really one of the main themes of the report So that's the report. We'd like to leave a few minutes here for questions and comments We really hope to see the reports work brought forward in some way by the community So we just open ourselves up to your questions at this time