So, this is going to be a slightly harder talk than I'd imagined, for reasons that should be obvious. I spent a good chunk of my life working specifically on how we were going to handle climate refugees. I was expecting, you know, only order 150 million, 200 million people, and I was trying to figure out how we could use the existing set of technologies that we have, the social organizations that we've got access to, to manage humanitarian need on that scale. And after a long time working on that, what I decided was that global machinery was simply unable to conceive of taking action on that kind of issue, and I looked around for a new model of change, and the only effective actor that I could see in the world that was working with issues of that size successfully was Elon Musk. So Musk was doing work that basically should have been the job of some kind of world government or the United Nations or, you know, the great vision for the whole of humanity, but he was working on that as an individual. He just decided that the machinery was not there at the state level, it wasn't there at the global level, and so he just started building it himself and implementing. And I looked at that and said, well, you know, if it can work for space, maybe you can work for the humanitarian world as well. So I basically mothballed 12 years' work on emergency shelter, infrastructure management, you know, passporting for migrants, refugees, all this kind of stuff. I basically put all of that stuff in cold storage and started working out how I could build a business that would generate the kind of reach that I needed for the kind of change that I wanted to see in the world, and that was what took me into this blockchain space. I was looking for the tools that you could use to solve global problems in an environment when the nation state has turned out to be a very, very ineffective set of machinery at all. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology. I'm going to talk a little bit about what it does and where it's going. And then I'm going to try and tell a story about the kind of global long-term picture that we could get if this stuff actually works. So I could have a quick show of hands. How many people own any cryptocurrency at all, Bitcoin, Ether, anything like that? It's probably maybe one in five, one in ten? How many people have heard of blockchain and Bitcoin and all the rest of that stuff? Damn near everything. Okay. So that's the gap that we're going to try and close today. So where did I come from? Yeah, you know, all this kind of stuff, right? Started out as a technologist, then went into defense, security and resilience, tried to figure out how to do this kind of large-scale systems protection work, couldn't find the platform to do it, moved into tech, we really covered that. Was one of the team that launched Ethereum, which is also a useful detail. So the blockchain. The real reason that this stuff exists is the internet is very slow, right? It takes roughly half a second for a message to get all the way around the world. In computer terms, half a second might as well be a week and a half. You can do payments at the rate of something like 25,000 payments a second if you're a company like Visa. So the half a second delay in a message going around the world is basically 10,000 payments made. And if you're working with some kind of technology, which allows a payment to be made instantaneously, so I send you a message and the message is immediate payment, the risk is that I send a payment to Australia, and while the payment is on the wire and it takes a quarter second to get there, another quarter second to get back, I then pay the same money to a bunch of other people. And this is known as the double spending problem. I take my money, I throw it to Australia, while it's in flight, I give it to a bunch of other people, then it lands in Australia. And now we've got to decide who it is that actually got paid. And that problem plagued electronic payments for years, which is why the way that we handle electronic payments is credit cards. The credit card solution that we're using is there because this kind of more advanced system always had this bug that the slowness of the internet allowed for this kind of fraud, and it was a real problem. So there are a set of ways of looking at that that we've used as approximations to solve that problem. The first one of those, the one that's most common, is called HFT, High Frequency Trading. You put an enormous machine supercomputer and you say the transactions all go to the supercomputer, we clear the transactions in the supercomputer and the payments are made there. But then you say, well, where do we put all the machines which are instructing the trades? Where are your machines or my machines in that story? Because the closer they are to the exchange, the further forward they are in the queue of transactions. So what this results in is a situation in New York where you have the New York stock exchange and the commodities exchanges work similarly. And they're surrounded by rings of computers and supercomputers that are packed physically as close to the exchanges as possible to get the earliest response to news and to be able to trade immediately. You get some kind of fluctuation in price, all of this stuff is automatically triggered and the trading happens essentially immediately. And those kind of systems are, that's running the global stock markets, right? That's how everything is actually held together. Very, very, very odd. The other approach to this is Google Spanner. And Spanner looks at the same kind of problem of how do we synchronize all this trade? And it does it with atomic clocks in every data center that Google operates pretty much. And they very carefully measure the amount of time it takes for information to travel between the data centers. And they've got a bunch of software that does very advanced physical modeling. And at the end of that, they get the ability to keep all the machines that Google operates synchronized in a way that provides services like Google Docs. The ability to get, you know, collaboration where you're editing a document at the same time as somebody in Australia or somebody in America or you've got an international team all working on the same document. What's keeping all of that stuff straightened out is a network of atomic clocks in data centers called Google Spanner. So these solutions are widely used. A lot of work in the world is being done using those kind of tools. But it's not the only approach that you can take. The blockchain approach is not efficient. Has everybody heard these people talking about Bitcoin mining, a quick show of hands? Yeah, so everybody's heard the term. So Bitcoin mining is basically how we solve this problem about synchronization in a way that doesn't require a single corporation to be running the entire system. So the problem with the Google Spanner approach is Google Spanner is physically decentralized. The data centers are all over the world. But it's not decentralized in terms of ownership and control because it's all owned by Google. So the New York Stock Exchange example, it's neither physically decentralized nor politically decentralized. All of the power and all of the hardware are in the same place. So the blockchain is attempting to get both physical decentralization. So the whole thing is operating globally without a fixed center like Spanner. But it also wants political decentralization. So instead of having Bitcoin Inc as a company that owns all of the Bitcoin systems in the world, the thing is basically an anonymous, decentralized network. You take some computers, you put them into the internet, they join the network by communicating with the other machines, and you have a kind of collaborative consortium of unknown tens of thousands of people whose computers together form what you think of as Bitcoin. And that is called decentralization. It's a very unusual, it's kind of new human organizational structure. We haven't seen anything that really works that way before except possibly markets. And it has a very broad possibility for future transformation, whether it will be as revolutionary as people hope or not is an open question. But when you see something which is new at that fundamental level of human society and human culture and human technology, at least the possibility that something genuinely transformative will happen is realistic. There is a very real chance that this stuff will be epochal in its impact. But it's still in the wait-and-see phase. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it will happen. So this decentralization thing is hard to describe because the world that we're in is extremely centralized.  And you either are the owner, or you're renting it, or you're borrowing it. But for the most part, things have these kind of chains of custody that go from us to somebody else. Even things like your house.  If you're lucky enough to own your house, you may or may not own the land under your house. Even if you own the land under your house, it's still embedded within the framework we call the UK. And the UK has a single point of control, which is called the Krang, or the state, sovereignty. This sovereignty thing was more or less invented. And whether you think of it as something that comes with the first human cities, or whether you think of something that was ratified in the Middle Ages with the Treaty of Westphalia, however you think about it, the assumption that for any given part of land, there must be an authority that governs what happens there. And if there isn't, something is fundamentally broken, is an underpinning assumption that has gone from land where it might make some sense or might not, into every other aspect of life. We expect systems to have owners and operators. And when we come across a system that just works without an owner or an operator, we don't often perceive how strange and how radical that is. So all the way through the 80s and 90s, there was a near messianic faith in this thing that people called the free market. That there was going to be some kind of instinctive mass collaboration that would be facilitative by price signaling. And you could take a lot of the key functions of the state, you could hand them to the free market and everything would mysteriously just work. Now, I think we can all agree that that has been a project with at best mixed success. But it gives you a sense of why people are excited about this whole decentralization thing. The prospect that you could take the problems that the free market has been unable or unwilling to solve and you could deploy another thing, which is not a centralized control structure, but has the ability to do problem solving at scale and you could kind of push it into the gaps, is very exciting. And there's really been gaps that that might provide us a little bit of leverage and I'll talk about those a little later. Now, the peer to peer economy, right? This is a newish thing. It's always been there in a kind of informal sense in things like agricultural markets, people swapping goods and services with each other. There's always been an ability for us to seek solutions collectively without having to channelize ourselves down a specific track. There's always been that implicit thing and commons that you might find access to, things like academic libraries or academic knowledge. There's a kind of global collaborative structure where we search for truth together through repeatable experiment in the scientific method or historical investigation. And that commons, scientific knowledge doesn't have a central owner. There is no ministry of science which owns the entire world scientific knowledge. It's kind of a collaborative endeavor and it is in some ways another thing, a bit like the market. It's this process that the whole of humanity is involved in and when it works well, you get partial cures for cancer and when it goes badly, you get scientific fraud. It's a thing that performs in some situations and not in others, but we still have a certain amount of faith in science as a process. So in the last 20 years, really starting with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Movement, there's been a movement towards a new way of producing knowledge, or at least the artifacts of knowledge. And they call this commons-based peer production, that's your high-benquist term. Stallman calls it the Free Software Movement. Open Source tried to de-politicize this Free Software Movement to make it more acceptable to companies and one of the fruits of the Open Source Movement is the Android phone operating system which runs something like 70% of the world's telephones. That's Free Open Source Software. I'm not even sure if it's technically Free Software, it might be. So that project has been very successful. You're all using Open Source Software every time you use the internet, for example, because most of the backbone machines that run the fiber optic cables and so on were open source. And the idea that this kind of peer production approach is capable of doing large-scale problem solving has been pretty well proven by Android and before that by the success of the internet as a medium. We know that together we can do this kind of work and it can succeed and it can change the world, albeit in small incremental ways. So we have the market, we have science, we have Open Source Software, and then along comes this thing that everybody calls Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is where we begin to see the real direct incursion of this commons-based peer production directly into the machinery of market capitalism. Somebody figures out how to use peer production to produce money. And not to earn money, where the money is produced by the Central Reserve Bank or it's produced by the Bank of England, not to take the money that somebody else has made in some kind of mysterious legal process, but to actually just produce money. And if you think about it, that's a remarkable thing. The idea that you would just have a group of people get together and create currency, kind of a surprise, used to be very common. That kind of stuff used to be how the world worked. There's all kinds of histories about large stone wheels and carved shells. Cultures have always had ways of creating tokens for trade because carrying stuff around has been too heavy. But it's not happened in a long time. And to have some people figure out how to do it at internet scale was really quite revolutionary. And this is going back more than half a decade now. It's been a while since that breakthrough was made. It's been incrementally refined. It's been polished. There's been a whole bunch of work on taking that license to print money and making it more and more and more effective. And this has produced the thing called Bitcoin. So let me explain a little bit about how the Bitcoin thing works, just to sort of give you some sense of the underlying architecture, the thing which is happening under the surface that produces this strange effect. So you have a global computer network, which is large. It's on the scale of the computer networks of Google or Facebook or Amazon. It's a thing that exists in the form of endless warehouses consuming enormous amounts of electricity and what it produces is a bunch of computing. There are no direct services produced. It's not like these computers are loading webpages. They're engaged in an enormous collective grind to produce security for this currency. And what they basically say is, unless you've got more computer power than all of the machines which are in the Bitcoin network, you won't be able to fake a transaction. You can't fraudulently spend other people's money unless you can do more computing than the entire Bitcoin network. And the expenses of the people running those machines are paid for using Bitcoin. So when the Bitcoin network was small and the money wasn't worth very much when Bitcoin was trading for two or three cents rather than $7,000, the machines that were securing the Bitcoin network were not very numerous and they weren't very specialized. It was hobbyists with a couple of decent machines sitting in a whole closet and those machines would produce five or $10 a day. And that was enough to pay the bills for the electricity and it was enough to pay for the hardware. It was a couple of thousand dollars worth of graphics cards. And Bitcoin rapidly moved from that phase to having custom silicon chips made and then the custom silicon chips wound up in very large warehouses with heavy engineered cooling. And every time more people wanted to buy Bitcoin or Bitcoin became more expensive, securing Bitcoin became worth more money. So people spent more money to secure it. And so there was a kind of incremental stepping ratchet where when Bitcoin was worth more money people would spend more money on computers to secure it. And then once people were sure that that new level security was in place, the currency would rise again. So this is a very, very capitalist system. It's very, very, very market based. And as a result, it's been able to compete very effectively in a market based world. It's not really a utopian project and a direct sense. It was a machine that was made to survive capitalism and it's done very well, but it's survived capitalism largely by being capitalism. And that's a really important thing to understand. A lot of people come to Bitcoin with a very utopian vision of how this is going to transform humanity. But it is unlikely that the cure for capitalism is more capitalism. You could suggest that there are certain misfeatures of capitalism that a better capitalism would cure. I think it's reasonable to talk about Bitcoin as being a potential approach to taking some of the problems in capitalism and getting rid of them. But the problems which are inherent to capitalism are unlikely to be solved by Bitcoin or things which are too closely related to it. It's a market system. However, what it has done is the entire kind of Bitcoin and associated world is currently worth about $200 billion. So in the past less than 10 years, $200 billion has been printed by a collective of nerds. And it wasn't that they made companies and then sold the companies for dollars. They skipped that intermediate stage where you make companies and they just sold the dollars. They just sold the Bitcoin. It's remarkable when you think about it.  And you sort of think, well, but can that possibly be right? And the answer is nobody's quite sure, right? It works, it's here, it's demonstrably successful by all the metrics that we measure these kind of projects by. But there is still this thing where you kind of stare at it and you're like, that can't actually be what it looks like. It's exactly what it looks like. And in the long run, we look back at moments like that and we call them revolutions. Heavier than air flight was impossible. It was impossible. Only birds and insects could have heavier than air flight. It was thought to be something that was forever outside of the reach of human beings. And I can't remember the exact quote, but the feeling that heavier than air flight would never happen was the common scientific opinion of the day. And then the Wright brothers, who haven't really been told it's impossible, go out there and they do it. And at that point, everybody's kind of looking around like, what do you mean it flies? No, it totally flies. You're kidding. No, no, they're really doing it. How does it work? It's basically like a motorcycle with wings. That can't possibly work. No, no, but it really does.  So that's sort of what's happening with Bitcoin. It's a revolution in that you stare at it and you keep staring at it and it doesn't get any more sensible and it doesn't go away. And once you've got a couple of generations of kids who've grown up with that thing always there, they're just gonna turn around and be like, but what are you talking about? It's always been this way, right? Because it's only the people that are in that bridge generation when something went from being impossible to being possible that get the experience of this revolutionary feeling of, I just don't understand and this doesn't make any sense. After that bridge generation, I know a couple of kids who are 15 or 16 and they've made, maybe one's 15, one's 18, they've made more money than their parents have made in a decade, trading what started out as pocket money. And for them, this is normal. Well, yeah, of course, we just keep a really close eye on the markets and every time we get some pocket money, we buy some more coins and pretty soon they're paying their way through university on the basis of trading peer to peer currencies. And for them, that's totally normal. They don't think of it as being strange at all. It's always been there for them. They hit adulthood at the same time as these technologies went mainstream. So for them, these technologies are mainstream. So as we move forward, what you're gonna see is a generational divide where there are people that just looked at it and didn't understand it and weren't curious. There are people that saw it come over the horizon and get very engaged and try and figure out what it is and how to use it and how it will all work. And then there'll be people for whom it's always been there. We used to talk about digital natives. Now what you're going to see are Bitcoin natives or crypto natives. And it's important to understand when you start meeting these people that they're not mad. They're just young. And we have to make allowances for the fact that for them, this is totally normal. The world has always been this way. Now, it gets worse. So now we have this system where we have a kind of global transactional logging thing. Everything is in this big computer network and everything's linked to everything else. The project that I was part of is called Ethereum. And Ethereum came along a few years after Bitcoin and said, well, that's really fun, but what if it was programmable? Bitcoin was like a bank account. You had coins, you could receive payments, you could send payments. Well, that's okay, but why can't I write a little computer program that figures out when something should be paid? Suppose I want a direct debit and I want to make a payment once a month. Well, why can't I have a program that does that? Well, when you just run it on your laptop, what if my laptop is closed?  So the idea of writing little computer programs that do things like standing orders and putting them in the bank account, kind of lodged with the bank, only there's no bank, but kind of lodged with the bank, gave rise to this idea of Ethereum. We're going to make a programmable blockchain. So you have this network, the big computer network is called a blockchain. You have the big computer network, but now you can write little programs that run it. And for historical reasons, these little programs are called smart contracts. And smart contracts are not particularly sophisticated yet. They're nothing like legal contracts. They're really much more like standing orders. Programmable payments or programmable money are good ways of talking about them. So the kinds of things that you can do with smart contracts that you can't normally do are relatively simple things. So for people who are buying and selling across currencies, you can do things like have an order that when a particular currency becomes cheap, you'll automatically buy some of it. But that system isn't run by a broker or a dealer. It's kind of inherent to the fabric which is carrying the payments. Really programmable money. You could take an example for something like take a gambling game. If two people want to play poker on the internet, they're either trusting somebody to sit in the middle of their poker game and take the payments from both sides and deal the cards. But if you're very, very, very clever, you can write a smart contract that basically generates the cards and takes the payments and transfers the money to the winner when the game is over. And that sort of stuff sort of has limited utility. There aren't that many people that enjoy poker. But the sort of seed of the idea is there that if you could do it for poker, maybe you could do it for auctions. And if you could do auctions that have this kind of automated logic and instant payment and all the rest of the attributes you get from these things, you begin to think maybe that's a part of the real world. And if you had a system where you had the ability to do an auction, but it didn't go through something like eBay, eBay charges quite a lot of money for hosting auctions. It's something like 10% of all the money that goes through eBay stays with eBay. And that's why eBay is an enormous company. Well, the buyers and the sellers are paying for eBay to exist in the same way that the buyers and the sellers are paying for Uber to exist in the same ways that the buyers and the sellers are paying for Airbnb to exist. So quite a lot of people who are involved in this whole space, blockchains and cryptocurrencies and all of these things are looking at those enormous companies as potential inefficiencies in capitalism that could be pulled out and replaced. If you have something that works like eBay but it's 10% cheaper, you will tend to shop there. If you have something that looks like Airbnb and it's 10% cheaper, you'll tend to shop there. And these things, because they're living in this global computer network rather than inside of a specific cluster of server somewhere, these things have a certain magical property which is that they're global by default. They're everywhere from the day that you launch them and the services are universally available. And this is quite interesting because you think about the edge of the network. We're not really very good at going beyond, say the two billion richest people on earth when we begin to talk about the internet and the services that it provides. But if you're in a position where some bunch of kids build a hotel rental website for California, but it's actually on the blockchain and it's global by default, it's just born global. And then you discover that folks in South Africa are using it to rent housing to each other and then the next thing you know it's Mali and then you realize that it's being used in villages all over the world for some completely unintended purpose. That kind of output and outcome is much more likely with the blockchain than it is with the conventional sort of website model. The fact that these networks are inherently global, the fact that all the logic is kind of buried in the payments architecture, the fact that there's no real recognition of international borders in these systems because they all operate embedded in the internet. They don't see the world as a set of countries, they just see it as an enormous global network. All of those things point to the possibility currently very far off, but they point to the possibility that you'll begin to see global service architectures that run on these systems. Not just the payments which we already have and they're being used very successfully in a lot of poorer countries, but also the possibility that the services which are built on top of those payments will turn out also to be global by default and that that will turn into a very substantial development bonus. Very early days, right? We're at the point where we've just about got the thing off the runway, we've given it a few kind of scoots around, but in terms of the size of these systems, 200 billion sounds like a lot of money, but the total value of all the things in the world that have prices is said to be $700 trillion. So we're in a position where we're only at the very, very, very beginning of this kind of digitization of money. This is only the start. Now, the last thing I want to talk about is the really ambitious global mega project.  Maybe we just want to look around. Maybe just we just want to say that we did it. Maybe it turns out to be possible to live up there and make a living up there and we could go out there and we could do a whole bunch of the nasty dirty planet destroying industrial engineering that we're currently doing on Earth and we could do it in a place which has no living things to disturb, right? And you sort of think, you know, actually if we had another planet that didn't have any trees or soil and there was nothing you could poison, maybe we could take a whole bunch of these filthy industrial processes and just do them there. And if we're going to be able to do that in 50 years, you sort of have to start thinking about it now. And it might require technologies like space elevators, but there are lots of people working on that kind of stuff. And, you know, one way or another, you go from the Wright brothers with this single plane that looks like a motorbike with wings to the entire international air travel system with tens of thousands of airports and hundreds of thousands of planes and billions of passengers a year that happens in 50 years. So for people today to be looking at Mars and thinking, you know, what if? I don't think it's going to take 50 years for Mars to get really interesting. I think it may only take 20 years. And half of the people in this room have a mortgage which lasts longer than that. So, you know, if you sort of think of this as like, could there be people living and working on Mars by the time I pay off my mortgage? Yes, there really could. So I think that we could do this kind of global project financing and organization stuff using these global payment architectures like Bitcoin and Ethereum and the other things which we're building. Everybody in the world that wants to see Mars happen puts some money into a hat. And if they successfully go to Mars and it turns out to be enormously profitable for some as yet unspecified reason, everybody that put money into that hat gets to take more money out of the hat. But it would have to be done in a really well-organized global way. And so much money is required that I think you'd have to be able to fairly easily take money from anybody on Earth for any reason who wanted to put money into those particular hats. You know, if we're passing the hat to build a spaceship to go to Mars, it's going to have to be a very big hat and it ought to be global because we're doing it together. It's a thing for the entire human species. You could say the same thing about climate change. We're having real problems financing climate change because everybody's pointing the finger at everybody else and saying, well, why don't you pay for it? But if we had clear global records about who was emitting the carbon, who was benefiting financially from the carbon being emitted, if we could visualize that whole carbon economy and with computers you could do things like that if there's the will to do it, then we could also start talking about having large scale global visualization of the mitigation efforts. When we're working on trying to stop these kinds of problems, we could have a global visualization of the problem and we could have a global hat into which the money is put to buy a solution and because of the extremely secure record keeping that these Bitcoin or blockchain systems have, that would allow us to clearly identify where the money had been spent. Same thing applies to things like the migration problem. If you want to be able to issue passport type identity documents to everybody on earth, if you've already got a system that's capable of storing data in this completely secure global way, you could attach the identities to those systems and if you've got the right kinds of security around that, you could have a global identity system that gave services to people that couldn't get those services from their nation states. So there are a set of very large global problems that are largely above the pay grade of the nation state. The sovereign entity that we're part of, the UK, really doesn't work at the global level very much. It's got a certain amount of outreach. I think their international aid budget's about 2%, but more or less the UK sovereign government exists to organize affairs that are in the domestic arena. We have a shore. If it's inside of our shore, we're kind of responsible for it and if it's outside of the shore, well, somebody else ought to be taking care of that, but the somebody else's are not doing such a great job on a lot of this stuff. So the sort of notion that you could build these kind of lightweight, large global systems is not fundamentally unrealistic. Wikipedia really did make a pretty good stab at organizing all of the world's knowledge into a sort of coherent, searchable, findable thing. It's not all of the world's knowledge. It's not perfectly representative. There are weird corners where it's got, you know, endless amounts of unnecessary detail on trivial things and big holes where it hasn't covered something important, but as a first approximation, it's not bad and their budget's only about $5 million a year. It's not a very well-funded organization. It's doing great work. So the idea that the response to climate change and space colonization and global sort of identity and care for poor people could be these enormous global machines which are largely run using the global payment infrastructures that are very lightweight and self-organizing and that are closer to, you know, Wikipedia than say the New York Stock Exchange, this doesn't seem unreasonable. So whenever somebody talks about Bitcoin or the blockchain, you hear people talking about this. Remember, we're still at the sort of motorbike with wings stage of the engineer. It's very early days. We do have prototypes. They do fly. They're carrying a few hundred billion dollars worth of transactions and that's quite an impressive thing. But compared to what we're going to see over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years, I think we're going to see this as the right brother's phase of the blockchain ecosystem. This huge global computer network that we're putting together is the next stage of the internet. It is going to solve problems that the existing generation of the internet can't solve and if we get it right, it might really help with some of the global problems that we're currently unable to face. Thank you.


Hello, and welcome to the Eden Annual Conference 2021. It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome you to this event, which is nominally being held in Madrid, although in reality we're in the comfort of our own homes, which is a bit of a shame because it's, we have a nice balmy afternoon here, it's 21 degrees and really quite comfortable. And I much rather see you here with a glass of champagne or something equivalent in your hands than your faces on my monitor, but that's the way the cookie crumbles, as they say. Yes, as I said, welcome to the conference. I think it's going to be a very, very interesting and engaged conference this year. We've had the highest numbers ever, which I think is a reflection really of the subject matter of the conference. It's been a difficult, shall we say, challenging year for all of us with the pandemic. I think that's directly affected most of us and it's something we try to capture in the title and subject area of the conference. And I think over the next few days it's going to be really very interesting listening to our colleagues and sharing our experiences through this period of time. So without more to do, as I say, welcome. I hope you have a very positive and enjoyable time and I'll hand over to the president to welcome you as well. Thank you, Tim. I really do need the glass of champagne whether online or in face to face. So hello, everyone. Welcome to one more Eden annual conference. Unfortunately, online, but maybe this enabled us to be jointly in a higher number than maybe we could get when face to face. I was definitely planning to go to Madrid to visit again the Museum of Tyson Barometer, which is really something special for me. But well, I'll take advantage of that next time, Tim. So maybe another conference should be in Madrid, you know, because what they say when you're present in person it counts much more than online, but nevertheless, definitely. We have proved that being present online is just as good as a face to face. We can contribute, definitely. We can discuss, we can share, we can talk. We can have some virtual tours and see the cities and museums, but nevertheless, we are not there. We have seen that last year in Timshara, but definitely we have been able to organize one very good conference again this year. I'm very thankful to UNED for hosting this conference and for putting great efforts to make it really something special. The title of this year conference is lessons from pandemic for the future education. I think that in front all of us is a questions, how we can take advantage of how can we integrate, how can we build upon on the lessons we have learned so far and all the knowledge and expertise we have got so far. How can make it better for all of us based on this knowledge we have received? And during three days, but this one, first one we can count as well. During four days, you will be able to hear your colleagues and their papers, their opinions, ideas, results, research results, case studies, projects, all what have been done during this time to make our future better. Also, one of the question is why it is always everything so slowly in education? Why all these changes, which somewhere happening much faster are going so slowly in education? Why we are not eager to take new things much more quickly than in other things as in education? Actually, definitely something takes time so there's a reason why it's not happening so fast. But I'm certain that during this conference you will take home really good ideas, good know-how which you can build upon your further work, your further research, your further way of teaching or learning. And I'm very happy that we have really high number of participants as I said in the presentation report, 370 participants, 53 papers and additional number of other contributions. I think that in the beginning, these numbers state that this conference is going to be really good. And not to take too much time, I know that it comes to the end of the day and it will be definitely very nice to have the champagne somewhere in Madrid when sun is going down on the horizon and chatting with the colleagues and friends, being happy to meet them again. But we have to think about, we have to imagine this and I'm certain that we will be able to do that. So, Tim, let's say that we officially opened this year annual conference, Eden 2021 and we celebrate 30 years of Eden as well with these activities. So I'm very happy that we have started our conference now. For the next item on our agenda, as we definitely now have took some sip of champagne so it's easy and relaxing. We have presentation of Eden Senior Fellows and Fellows Award. Very important thing for Eden as we will, we always cherish our members. We always want to acknowledge their excellence and it is very important that we recognize their efforts and their work within Eden Association. So I kindly ask Secretariat if we do have a slide or something to share. Otherwise, I will just pronounce the awards. Okay, maybe we do not have anything in slides. Okay, so this year we have Eden Fellows and Eden Senior Fellows Award, which have been agreed with Eden Executive Committee and I'm very happy to say that this is the, first I will going to present Eden Senior Fellows. These awards are a system of professional acknowledgement and they took the first place, first time but they were held in 2007 in annual conference in Naples. So from that till today, over 100 Fellows and Senior Fellows Awards have been granted by decision of Eden Executive Committee. So really impressive number. So in 2021 annual conference, this is really nice occasion to present the award. So Eden Senior Fellow Awards are given in recognition of contribution to development of open distance and e-learning Europe and for valued commitment and support to evolution and progress of Eden. So these are Eden Senior Fellows for 2021. I will start from Tim because he's nearest to me now. Eden our host at UNED from UNED at this year conference but also the Eden Vice President for Open Professional Collaboration. And I would say my right hand, I have three right hands because I have three vice presidents. Tim is Senior Lecturer in Department of Computer Languages and Systems at UNED. He did the first degree in real time computer science at the University of the West of England and his doctorate in cognitive science at the University of Birmingham. After leaving England, he has worked at University of Granada before moving to UNED in Madrid. He's co-founder of the Atlas Research Group and has directed several national and international funded projects on applying information and communication technologies to languages for specific purposes. Tim is currently working in the areas of mobile assistant language learning and language massive open online courses and the role of analytics in these areas. Tim has also been a member of diverse scientific committees as well as his academic career. He has worked in different international companies as well. As Eden Vice President for Open Professional Collaboration, he has been providing valuable support to identifying and implementing the potentials and opportunities for development of Eden organization and the international institutional cooperation strengthening the outreach and impact of association, improving the efficiency and governance. So, Tim, thank you for being with Eden and for all your efforts so far. It means I expect you to work even harder after this. Thank you very much, Sander. It's a great honor to be part of this select group and to carry on being able to work closer with my colleagues and friends in Eden. It really is a great honor. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. And now, the second person who has received the Eden Senior Fellow Award, my dear colleague, Diana Andonev, from the University of Politecnica team Shwara, Romania, also Eden Vice President for Collaboration. It's my second right hand so far. So, Diana is director of the eLearning Center of Politecnica University of Tim Shwara, responsible for planning and implementing digital technologies, online learning technologies and the University Award-winning virtual campus. She's also associate professor at the Politecnica University of Tim Shwara in the area of multimedia, interactive and web technologies. Diana holds a PhD in designing eLearning spaces for digital students with Brighton University UK. She's author of 17 books, 100 research papers, 11 best paper awards and earmarks, over 30 research and educational projects mainly founded by the European Commission. She's passionate about ubiquitous access to technologies and how they can be used to improve people's life, actively promotes the US OER MOOCs and the open education principles, acting in several international associations, actively supports the startup movements and girls in tech, women in tech and STEM education. She also acts in the board of Romanian NGOs in Tim Shwara 2021 European Capital of Culture Task Force. She, as I said, is vice president for communication and communities and education chair in IEEE Romania section. She has been the engine of modernization of the communication of the association in both applying cutting edge technologies and building up contemporary system of information flows. During the decades of affiliation to Eden in different roles and capacity, she has enriched our conferences by countless papers workshop webinars courses. And as the host of Eden webinar series during COVID period and the first Eden virtual annual conference with background of her university, she helped lay down the basic of the new culture for Eden in online in virtual events organization. So Diana, thank you for being with us. And I hope you will stay for many years ahead. Do you want to say a few words? Yes, thank you. Thank you very much, Sandra. And thank you, Eden and European community for giving me this award. I'm really humbled by this achievement. I need to say my first Eden meeting was in 96. So it's a long time since I was with Eden and the conferences and from Budapest, Bernada and all of the European fact. I need to thank Antonio, Irina and Sandra, the three presidents which I served as executive committee and as vice president, especially with the last two and the entire executive committee and fellows and NAP committee, which was very supportive to all the crazy actions. If I can say that and ideas which I have thrown into the air and they catch the balls with the tremendous support of the secretariat, which was really great. And I'm really happy that I was able to do this. And I will be around Eden for longer. So you haven't got rid of me. This is only an encouragement. Thank you all. Thank you again. Thank you, Diana. Of course we count on you in the future. So I hope you will be there for us. And the last Eden senior fellow award for this year goes to Daniel Ellers from Baden-Württemberg Corporate State University in Germany, who is also the keynote at this Eden annual conference and really good friend for a number of years. Wolf is learning innovation expert, founder of Mindful Learners Net and Professor for Educational Management and Lifelog Learning and Baden-Württemberg Corporate State University in Karlsruhe since 2019. At the University of Bielfeld, he finished his PhD in technology and hence learning in 2003. His habitation was awarded in 2008 from the University of Duisburg-Essen. From 2011 to 2017, he held the position of vice president at the same university and has been responsible for quality and academic affairs. He also held position as associate professor of different German universities and associate professor of the Graduate School for Management of the University of Maryland University College in USA. Wolf is author or editor of more than 15 books and 150 scholarly articles with over 3,000 academic citation. He's trained coach, facilitator and expert for Mindful Communication. In Eden, he holds the fellow degree for as long as 2003 and he's member of the Executive Committee since 2018. He's keynote and author of several people's leaders of the workshop at the conferences. Wolf has been active around European innovation and movements in learning in particularly related to the quality. He serves for years as vice president of Euril Asse, the European Association of Institutions in High Education. In Eden, his recent contributions and initiatives helped substantially the structured strategy building and think tank foresight activities paving the ways toward the next generation of progress of Eden. So Wolf, thank you for all the contributions so far and I'm also very happy that you have been reelecting for the next three years in the Eden Executive Committee. So lots of work is in front of us. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you very much. I feel really honored and it's meaning a lot to me. Thank you very much. I'm also, I'm turning 50 this year and I think that's why senior is a good title. I understand now the meaning of it. Thank you very much. You're still young boy for me. I have passed 50. So well, I'm very happy to have young colleagues in the Executive Committee. So my congratulations to Eden Senior Fellows 2021 again and let's move now to the Eden Fellow Awards. We have a number of Eden Fellow Awards this year, five in total and Eden Fellow Award is an expression of appreciation of professional merit to Eden members who have demonstrated excellence in professional practice of open distance and e-learning and provided valuable support to the evolution and progress of Eden. Well, let me start first. First is, well, I know she's called Mayred but her name is very difficult for me to pronounce but Mayred Nick Jola Mitchell, if I said it correctly, please don't be angry with me. So Mayred is coming from Dublin City University in Ireland. She's associate professor and senior research fellow at the National Institute of Digital Learning and she's researching digital innovation and implementation in higher education. She's the institutional lead on micro-credentials and has conducted the first national micro-credential survey of employers and employees in Ireland. She serves on the National Steering Committee to develop and implement a national approach to the development and delivery of micro-credentials with other sectoral stakeholders. She is full bright scholar with the University of Notre Dame in USA and lectures in information technology in the faculty of humanities and social sciences in DCU. Mayred is co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Education Technology in High Education and on the board of OutJ and is an active reviewer for a number of journals. Formerly the associate dean of teaching and learning the faculty of humanities and social sciences. She has served on numerous European and national policy groups in the area of ICT and high education as well. Mayred has gained considerable experience managing and leading internal and external policy and research project and was appointed as university fellow in 2008 in the implementation of academic framework for innovation within DCU. Contributor to several Eden webinars, author of several conference papers and played important role in introducing her students to the Eden community. A general annual conference, her students received the Young Scholar Award. I'm very happy, Mayred, to have you in the Eden Fellows this year. Congratulations. Thank you very much, Sandra. Kermila Mahogot Agustal Ward, our father of Eden, big, big thank you and to all of the Eden board and to the Eden community. Obviously no woman or man is an island and I've really great appreciation to the team that I work with in the National Institute of Digital Learning. Big shout out to my mentor there, Professor Mark Brown and to all my colleagues because I think this is just the reflection of all the work that we do in the National Institute of Digital Learning in DCU. So, Mila Guilchas Agustal Ward. Thank you, Mayred. Irish is very good. I cannot repeat on Irish anything, but well, thank you. OK, so the next fellow is Giselle Ferreira for Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She is lecturer there and she worked earlier as associate professor at the... Sorry, university data, Estacia Dessa Alec as lecturer in the post-graduate program in education. She was faculty member of the Open University UK as visiting research fellow and lecturer, Department of Communication and Systems. She studied at the University of York and at the Open University and the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro. Giselle has been one of the most active members of Euroville Editorial Board. In the last years, she revised over 20 papers providing always height commitment, reliability, providing valuable guidance for the authors. She also contributed to several hidden conferences as authors. So, my congratulations to Giselle. I know she isn't there with us today. Because she has other important task. But my congratulations to her. The next fellow is our colleague Elena Calderola from University of Pavia, Italy, who is already an Executive Committee member. She is director of eLearning Center of the University of Pavia since 2010. And she has a master degree in political science and postgraduate specialization in eLearning management and digital communication. She is skilled in eLearning and environment books, learning spaces, blended learning, digital corporate training and online learning. Since 2009, she takes part in eLearning Task Force of Coimbra Group. From 2013 to 2015, she was chair of the eLearning Task Force and recently as well, she's a member of Education Innovation Group. Since 2012, she's member of the Scientific Board of the Italian eLearning Society. Since 2018, she takes part in Executive Board of Eden and she's contributor to several Eden webinars as pCAPT. She's member of four Eden Conference committees and author of conference paper. Elena has led one of the strategic Eden activities about Eden future and also with Ulf and also she, by her initiative, Eden was invited to contribute to project Child Central Asia on improvement of children care teaching as a template for upgrading medical education in Central Asia as Eden has joined as associate partners. So Elena, congratulations. Thank you very much, Sandra, and thank you very much to all the whole Eden family because I just consider Eden as a great family. I learned a lot and I really hope to give my best contribution, both as a Eden AC member and as a fellow. I found this environment, if I can say, like as a just-band team because I found a set of rules, a framework, very great organization, but in this organization, there is such an inclusive approach and the people in this way can really do and offer the best. So I really think my feeling is to continue in this way. Thank you very much for what I have learned and I really think to be able to do the best efforts for the success of this organization, both Eden and fellow. Thank you very much, Sandra. Thank you very much to all the Eden people. Thank you, Elena. It's always pleasure to work with you. So let's move on. The next Eden fellow is coming from University of Verda de Carvaluña. It's Teresa Romeo. She works currently at the Psychology and Educational Sciences Studies there and she does research in high education, e-learning and adult education. Their important current projects are Horizon 2020, demonstration of the scalable and cost-effective cloud-based digital learning infrastructure for certification of digital competencies and the Rasmus Plus expertise best practices in teaching in 21st century and the digital literacy and social-emotional learning for engagement and employment. Teresa has been author of high number of Eden conference papers and finalist in the best research paper competition. She has provided valuable support to the organization of 2018 Barcelona Eden Research Workshop. So Teresa, welcome to the Eden Family Fellows. Congratulations. Thank you so much. They are delegates, colleagues and the people who are watching us for streaming. For me it's an honor and a pride to recite the Eden fellow nomination. Yes, my international career in Eden context began in 2006. Since then I have participated in different events, conferences and workshops that Eden has been organizing during these years. In 2018 we were nominated for the best research paper award during the 10th Eden Research Workshop. My other colleagues and I are researchers in the EDULAR research group at WOC, as researchers and also as a professor at Open University of Catalonia. I'm very proud and satisfied with this nomination. And from now on I will contribute to online teaching and learning at my university and we will continue to share the results with Eden. Happy 30th birthday. Thank you very much. All the best for all and best regards from Barcelona. Thank you. Thank you, Teresa. Congratulations again. And last but not least, Dr. Daniel Dominguez. Well, you have to wait because we have four ladies before, so you are now in the role. So Daniel Dominguez is professor and researchers at UNED. His research focuses on technological mediation and theories that support digital learning and online socialization. In his recent work, he has developed, he has delved into analysis of social learning, open educational resources and knowledge management in digital and mixed environment. Currently he is a board of directors of cyber practices. He has been author of several Eden conference papers and a member of the Madrid Conference Committee. He also supported the PhD symposium and he will join us in the panel of the experts there. I know he was busy this morning, but Daniel, congratulations. Well, thank you very much for the opportunity. It would be a pleasure for me to contribute to this project. Eden is for sure a major player in the field of learning and digital education in general. So thank you for having me on board as a fellow and can't wait to start collaborating with the rest of my colleagues and with all of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Daniel. I'm certain we'll see each other in the next Eden activities definitely during this conference. I know you're on the board. So definitely this day as well. So my congratulations to all Eden fellows and senior fellows. I'm happy that our family is growing, that we have managed to have this culture of sharing, of knowledge and expertise and awarding those who are best of us. And now I am giving back the word to Tim. Well, after such long talk, and I have been speaking really a lot, Tim, you are able now to say a few words again. Thank you very much, Sandra. I'd just like to reiterate what everyone's been saying in the chat. To congratulations to everyone. It's a wonderful feeling. And I really look forward to working with you or continuing to work with the people I'm working with at the moment and work with the new people who've joined.  So you'd be looking at the table and thinking, God, why doesn't he shut up so we can indulge? I'm afraid I can't give you that. But I'll still, nonetheless, try to be as brief as possible. I mean, what I'd like to do next is briefly present my two colleagues, the Rapporteurs, for this conference, Kauranga, Rodrigo and Mark Brown. And before I hand over them to give us a bit of anticipation of what I hope to see in this conference. Let me very briefly present them. So I mean, Kauranga Rodrigo is an Indian fellow. She's the ex-Provice Chancellor of Technology at UNED, who's the founding chair of the Digital Inclusion Laboratory, which was co-founded by Vodafone in Spain, the sub-director of transfer research and innovation of the School of Computer Engineering at UNED and co-director of the InnoDoc Research Group of Innovative User Interaction to Accessible Digital Objects and Collections. She's also the member of the Advisory Board of Disability Care at UNED, a co-director of Empower, the Working Group Institution Support of ICT, Media and Educational Support Services of the EADTU and an Auditor of E-Excellence Quality, Assurance in E-Learning and MOOCs. And Mark, Mike Brown, he's Eden Fellow and Treasurer. He holds Ireland's first chair of Digital Learning and is the director of the National Institute for Digital Learning at DCU at Dublin City University. He serves on several international journal editorial boards and has published extensively in the areas of online blended and digital learning. And I've read quite a bit of what he's written and it's actually not that bad. He was president of the New Zealand Association for Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, the ANS, prior to his arrival at DCU and was until recently Treasurer and Executive Committee member of the Australian Society for Computers and Learning in Tertiary Education. He's a recipient of a National Award for Sustain Excellence in Tertiary Teaching and remains a member of the New Zealand Academy of Tertiary Teaching Excellence. And finally, he currently chairs the Innovation in Teaching and Learning Steering Committee for the European Commission of Innovation and the University's ECIU Board. Thank you very much to both of you.  Should I start? Okay, thank you very much, Tim, for the nice introduction. It's a great honor for me to be here today and I feel humbled to participate in this new edition as a co-reporter. So I believe that the pandemic has brought not only bad things but also good things to our lives and this sector. And I think it has highlighted the different learning modalities and the support that the technology can offer to this new learning paradigm. So nowadays, I think in learning is achieving broader scopes and up to this hybrid modes are not really new. So they are more on a systematic use of with new technological tools. And there is an emphasis on these video based campuses and new tools based on artificial intelligence that they could help us to achieve more personalized and more engaging and perform a better or more accurate assessment of our students performance and interaction. So the other lie in danger is that we might lose the leadership of this trend. So I hope not. And I'm sure that all of the papers included in this conference program are top 10 in all the areas and we'll show the added value that the research and the most of all expertise with this network of people and the high level of research groups that are involved in the conference. So I wish you all the week of fruitful exchanges with this virtual presensuality. So I promise that I will be there with you in all the sessions and try to do my best to narrate your main achievements and results. So thank you team for the opportunity of developing this new job for me. Well, I guess Tim, after that embarrassing introduction, I'm going to have to do a pretty good job in trying to weave together or tease apart all of the different conversations that are going to take place over the next few days. Because it is Eden's 30th year, I couldn't help but take myself back to, I wonder what the conference was like 30 years ago. I have, I didn't search to see if I could find a program. Someone must have been at that conference. I certainly wasn't. And I was looking at this year's program. It starts off tomorrow with a presentation, a keynote back to the future. Of course, the film back to the future dates from 1985. So even more than 30 years ago, but some of us are old enough to remember those times. And then speaking of old times in a really nice light, I can't think of anyone better tomorrow than Diana Loralad in terms of her contribution over the 30 year period to the field. It was, I think, 1993, if I recall correctly, that she first published the conversational framework in a seminal book that went on to be republished. So I'm really looking forward to hearing from Diana. When you look at the program, and I've tried to sort of glance through what I'm going to be able to participate in, because I can't be in all the sessions. I'm hoping that I'll be able to dabble with some of the recorded video over the next few days. Some themes, I think, would have been there back 30 years ago, but actually the vast majority are new. And we tend to think that the more things change, the more things stay the same. I'm not sure that's entirely true. For example, learning analytics, artificial intelligence, micro-credentials, they're all on the program tomorrow. Wellness, digital ecosystems, the concept of an ecosystem, I don't think was something we were talking about 30 years ago. And then there's even on the final day, if I checked the program correctly, a focus on creative industry. So showing how the field has moved both horizontally as well as vertically, if you like. Some things, though, given I said, don't always change, assessment shows up. And 30 years ago, we were putting students into large examination halls, getting them to write with their pens for three hours. Prior to COVID coming along, we were still doing that. I wonder if in the shadow of COVID, and there's a very strong theme around resilience that I've seen in a number of the papers and strands, I wonder if that's something we're going to challenge over the next few days, along with some other sacred cows from over the last 30 years. So I'm looking forward to the program. I note that there are many different nationalities represented, quite a few outside of Europe, given that my own background, as you heard in the introduction, is from outside of Europe originally. Maybe I'll one day be seen as more of a local. And I'm also looking forward, given the announcement of the Eden Fellows, the Senior Fellows and Fellows, and congratulations to everyone. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's meeting where we welcome the new fellows, but also plan for, well, not the next 30 years, but at least we hope to help us. I know it's a bit of a cliche now, but to build back better in the way in which we can contribute to a more fit for purpose, a more future focused education system post pandemic. So I'll stop on that note. And hopefully when I report at the end with my colleague, we'll have some very interesting observations and something quite tangible to contribute back. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Corbyn, and thank you very much, Mike. I think you've set our expectations quite high for your feedback in the final session, and I'm really looking forward to it. I'd like you to know if you live up to those expectations when we get there. So I think it's a good time to draw this to an end. As Mike said, I mean, he mentioned our first two keynotes tomorrow morning. We have the inauguration at nine and the keynotes will probably kick off about 9.30 with Francis Pedro and Daya Lurieland. So I think that's gonna be a very interesting start to the conference. I hope you thoroughly enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy also going and having a drink or two tonight in preparation for the conference. But please, whatever you do, don't send me your bar tabs. Okay, thanks very much. So that's it, have a pleasant evening. I look forward to being with you tomorrow morning. Thanks a lot. Bye now.


Hey everybody, this is Brian and welcome to the 77th Qtutorial with C++ and GUI programming. Alright, let's call this Line Caps. And yes, I'm still very sick, so please forgive me if I sound a little weird. Some people would argue I always sound weird, but we ignored them anyways. Okay, open up dialog.h and we're just going to add our includes here. And then we're going to, of course, override the paint event. You have no idea what I'm doing. You know, as I've said in other videos, please go back and watch the start of this section. It'll make things much, much clearer. But if you're just catching up, overriding the paint event, because every time the dialog wants to paint, we need to be able to tell it what to paint. And this tutorial, we're going to be covering what are called Line Caps. So let's just make a Qpen. Let's call it Pen. And we're going to give it the Qt, we're going to give it black. We'll say Pen, Set Width. And we're going to make these really, really thick, say 15. And we're doing this mainly so it'll show up really good in the video, because I know the video is a little blurry compared to what I see on my screen. Now we're going to make a Q-point object. I'm going to call this Start Point. And we're going to put this at 20, 30. That's X and Y. And we'll copy and paste magic here. Somebody had messaged me and told me the really cool shortcut. I wish I remembered. I think it was like Control Up or something like that. It basically redos the same line you just typed. But darn it, I forgot. I'm very sorry. So we're going to say Pen. And we need to set the cap style. And we're just going to say Qt Flat Cap. Now, what is a cap? A cap is the very end of the line. How Qt actually draws it. It has several different things it can do. So we're going to say Set Pen. And we're just going to add our pen in there. And then Painter. We're going to draw a line. And we're going to just give it Start Point. And of course End Point. Let's compile and run this real quick. Just so we can get some explanation going on here. Maybe once this builds. There we go. So we have our Start Point. And we have our End Point. And the cap is actually the very end of this line. How Qt decides to draw that. Now this looks like just a plain old boring line that you've seen a million times. But you notice how it's got the Flat Cap. Well, that's the default. It's the Flat Cap. So now we're going to go through. And we're going to actually create a couple more. And let's just grab these. Because we need to... We're just going to reuse the same points. We're just going to move them down the screen a little bit. So we're going to say Start Point. And we're going to say Set Y. And we're going to move it down to 50. And we're going to say End Point. Set Y and of course 50. Because we want them to be a straight line. And we want to give it a square cap. And you notice how we have to set the pen. Because we've modified the pen. We need to reset it. That way it copies that object in the memory. And we're just going to copy and paste this one more time. And we're going to put this at 70-70. And we're going to give this a round cap. Save and run. And with any luck it'll compile. And there we go. You notice that we have three lines here. And they each look a little different. Here's our flat cap. Which is the default. It just stops drawing. Our square cap actually adds an extra bit of width here. Or I should say a bit of length. That's square shaped. And then we have the round cap. Which is nice and rounded. Now all of the cap styles are in the acute help. But I just want to demonstrate how to use them. And basically what they very simply look like. So this is Brian. Thank you for watching. I hope you found this tutorial educational and entertaining. Keep up on that feedback guys. I enjoy hearing from Brian.


Good afternoon everybody. I'm Tommy O'Brien comedy alive from T F N N headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. 1 p.m. Eastern time on Friday three hours left to go in the trading day and we got markets in positive territory but off the highs Dow Jones up 72 points trading at 25,000 989 S&Ps up 11 trading at 2796 and you've got the Nasdaq up 10 points trading at 2794 quite a day to the downside for gold negative $16 1299 30 dollar index with some strength as would make sense with gold pulling back you get the dollar index up 327 ticks trading at 96 370 notes and bonds 10 year note negative 8 ticks 121 23 30 year bond negative 18 ticks 143 29 let's start it off we'll jump over to the futures market take a look at the Dow and as I said markets in positive territory but off of the highs 10 a.m. this morning basically the highs across the board we got an ISM number manufacturing that disappointed at 10 a.m. and all the markets kind of pulled back we're trading at 26,131 in the Dow we trade down to a low of 25,911 currently trading just under 26k Nasdaq 100 much the same there's 930 and there's your 10 a.m. Volatility 71 52 now about 20 Nasdaq 100 points under that level trend 71 33 S&P 500 trading at 2795 10 a.m. This morning we're about 12 points higher at 2807 crude oil quite a pullback for crude you have crude trading from 10 a.m. This morning 5750 we trade almost $2 to the downside to 55 57 crude under $56 looking at that April contract there's your gold decline again 10 a.m. This morning trading at 1313 we trade down to 1299 53 almost at session lows and euro us dollar we've seen a little bit of volatility in both directions you get the euro trend at 113 65 in terms of movers and shakers out there on Friday Tesla down 8% Elon Musk announcing last night after the market closed that they will have a new less expensive version of the model 3 at about the actual $35,000 they had first talked about when talking about that car they are also going to be closing basically all of their stores doing all of their business online and they are not going to be profitable for 2019 on the flip side of that footlocker earnings almost 10% cop sales up up 5.4% and gap gonna spin off old navy and the market loving that up 18% stay tuned folks Steve Rhodes coming up right now with the traders edge have a great Friday


inclusivity value policy that we adopt as a community that says in each of our individual roles, whether it's a staff role or an elected role or an appointed role, these are the values we bring to that professionalism. And if we adopt that as a policy that's then provided to them as they're appointed, this is our expectation of how you're going to do the work. It's not necessarily changing our vision statement, it's more saying these are the guiding principles, open meeting law, ethics, inclusivity that we expect you to bring to the table when you do the work. And I see that it's becoming the lens of how they do the work. Yeah. I don't know if that was your intention but that's how I heard. It was really supposed to be an indendum to this or a preamble, one or the other. I don't know, there's part of me that was like maybe we have each person sign that pack, that recognition as an exercise to talk about. I mean, that's down the road, but just that thought popped into my head from the content of the conversation discussion that I think you guys did the best you could to work that into this document, but if we missed an opportunity to really address that, I don't want to, you know, because that was really a lot of our conversation that day. Yeah, I mean, I think what I would, I like that use of a framework to incorporate that value through a policy or whatever the specific vehicle is. And I think part of what we talked about was counsel having the benefit of some training. And so I'd like to seek the advice of the professional in terms of what's the best way to, you know, really infuse these values throughout this organization and is it through a policy statement and then if so, then what, right? Because the risk you run is, words on a page don't actually get translated into action. So I think to me, that's the more, the really interesting conversation is on how do you support people so that they go outside their comfort zone and seek input from people that don't. Look like them, look near where they are, et cetera. So I think it's like a, really good idea and I'd like to get some guidance about the best way to have it really be meaningful. And that's something how am I? Yes. Great that we would come back to the group with some ideas for folks that do that work with us. So maybe we'll just hit pause on that and let you guys have your conversation and when you're ready to talk about it again. Sure. So we'll turn back towards the document. Is there any big glaring holes, any big misses, any wording that folks? I think for me, the bigger, the language around under economic vitality, consider how, consider how, consider R. I'm not sure what that, what it means to consider. So, are we saying that we want to prioritize city, I mean, there's no direction necessarily there in terms of should we be using city resources to create opportunities for local and own businesses? It just seems more like, do we do that or not, but not an objective. I will, not that you pointed out the words consider, yeah. We could, yeah. So I guess how I was intending them and Heather if you have different suggestions to jump in was you have set a goal for us so now we need to develop a recommendation for you of how to do this. So when I say consider how, what I mean is put together the recommendation of how we do this. So maybe it's just recommend how we use city resources to consider, okay. And I would actually skip the recommend piece. Let's presume that we're gonna go through the process of you guys considering it, giving us a proposal, discussing a proposal and getting to an ends and we're gonna do the thing. We're gonna use city resources to create opportunities for local businesses. It's for an application for a job. I tell somebody, let's use some active verbs, like manage, execute, but I mean, right. So use city resources to create employment, opportunities for residents, expand available goods and services for residents versus consider. Yeah, we were actively trying not to be that strong because we don't know what that looks like yet. So we were trying not to box you into a, you have to approve this recommendation that comes forward but we are going to give you some options of how you can do that. But if you would like it to be strong, we certainly can make it strong. Well, I think with those particular ones, they're all pretty consistent things that we've said are good and that we're striving towards. So I don't think as an ideal that there's anything controversial there because it almost sounds like we're saying, we're gonna consider whether or not we're gonna use resources to create employment opportunities. That was not my intention. No, I understand. The board's my thing. Well, and again, I just think that the value of this document is that we're really clear with one another about what is intended. So that's why I asked what it meant. I'm happy to use strong language, given that it is an annual document that we revisit. And if it turns out that the recommendations are totally unworkable or foreclose other options, we can change. Other concerns, comments, submissions, additions? I think by and large, you did a wonderful job. Obviously, you guys did a great job before the meeting, after the meeting, during the meeting, but this is great. I think it's extremely helpful and reflective of an agreement we have about what type of work is being done. Any questions, concerns, comments from the public? Seeing and hearing none, this is on as a discussion approval item. So I will open it up for, we'll discuss it today. You wanna discuss it? Well, actually, we gave you some amendments, so we'll leave it at discussion and hold on for approval. Can I put it on the tax rate meeting? Consent internet. And if people see stuff on there from a word perspective, could we just put an addendum in there that there's gonna be a follow-up conversation on the net word that I used earlier that you guys helped me with? My notes have in the focus on the strength of Winooski's diversity connectedness for you all, elected and appointed officials, implement an inclusivity statement, and how we decide to do that. We can decide. Perfect. And if you have other wordsmithing things, we do want this to be clear, so please feel free to email them to me between now and Friday as well. Thank you, thanks for all the work on that. Item L, approval, municipal bond post issuance compliance procedures. This is where the stuff really happens. So you have a document, the post issuance compliance procedures. This is actually presented to us by our bond council, Tom alone. He recommended that we adopt these procedures as a method for tracking the compliance with federal laws for tax-exempt debt. This is something that the Vermont Municipal Bond Bank likes to see adopted by communities that have met with them. It is something that we would need to maintain over time as laws change, but is highly recommended that we approve it. It would be included in the bond documents if we do. And considering we are finalizing our headworks bond documents and considering Main Street and the pool, we thought it was important to have these in place. The federal funder, I cannot agree more. Any questions, concerns in regards to the document? I'm assuming these are been vetted by bond council. Bond council, et cetera, yeah. And there will be certifications that they will sign over and over again during the federal signing process as the various components of impart this policy are in place. Mm-hmm. And bond council will alert us when the procedures need to be updated if the law changes or is that something you all take responsibility? Angela? I guess not my mom. Yeah. Whoever we appoint compliance officer, I'm gonna guess it might be me, but yeah. Yeah, thanks for your work. Questions, concerns, comments in regards to the postpon issuance compliance procedures? Any questions, concerns from the public? Seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval of the municipal postpon issuance compliance procedures. So moved. Second. Motion by Nicole, second by Christine. Further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye, those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you, Angela. It should be noted that Thomas Maloney, I think is new to Paul Franken-Collins, our bond council, and we have been working with him fairly closely over the last six months, and he is fantastic in giving us really great guidance. We are very fortunate. That's awesome. Great. You should watch the videos. They say the nice things like that about you guys all the time. Yeah. Item M, approval, debt service coverage ratio amendment. So this is a change to the 2014 bond bank purchase agreement with TD for the TIF debt. So there was a financial covenant that was approved in the original document that was very complex. And we've been going back and forth for a number of years since the inception about how to calculate it because the bank can't calculate it out of our financial statements. Some of these numbers don't exist in the way that our financial statements are presented. And in addition, with the way that the current language is set up, we are unable to use money that we have set aside in prior years to pay down our debt because it runs on net operating. So revenues minus expenses, if that's ever negative, we don't meet the one-to-one ratio under the current definition. We've talked to the bank and they agreed that that was not the intent of the language, that it is not feasible for us to not be able to use reserves to pay down this debt. And we've come up with a much simpler calculation that uses fund balance. They don't commonly have debt service ratios for municipalities in this way. So it was a little bit of tweaking of language that they commonly use. This is language that they presented to us. It has been brought to Kate Cronk or Kate Dingle for review and she's said that it looks fine to her. And just to be clear, it doesn't change any of the finances of the TIF district. It's solely a clarification of how we calculate the debt service coverage ratio and how they are able to replicate that based on our financial statements. Well, my bifurcating the senior to the total debt service coverage makes sense. Any questions, concerns from council? We're still at a one-to-one. Questions, concerns, comments from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval in regards to the debt service coverage ratio amendment relative to the tax and permit finance and bond. Motion by Nicole, second by Hal, and further discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor if they say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Happy birthday, Angela. Happy birthday. Thank you for spending it with us. Thank you for spending it with us. It's the worst birthday present ever. Second session is gonna be better. All right, item in, discussion of the goal update for a safe, healthy, connected people. So I'm gonna take some liberty here and say this is our last official goal update of last year's strategies and priorities. We'll stay on the same schedule, rotating as you saw in the last memo. We've provided here, we can talk through it if you'd like, or we can simply answer questions. Anything you wanna see in the one-minute version of what we're most proud of? Just for folks at home that don't look at the document. I think one thing I'll say is that we did arm wrestle before, so I'm gonna play police chief here for the next few minutes. But Noah, Rick had asked to share that there's just been a really solid start to the community outreach team effort. And I would say as a community services director too, that's been a really nice tool in the toolbox for us to deal with some community members who are struggling and need some softer supports. And then also he is getting very close with his strategic plan that he's been working on. I've been kind of part of that team as well. That's been really cool to see the type of thinking going into the police work here. So on Rick's behalf, those were two updates he had asked to share. We'll bounce over to you. Yeah, we listed some pretty specific stuff in there. I guess I would overall touch on this process of this document. For me, it's huge. I think it's allowing, it's a roadmap that keeps us focused. And I think as we see these continue to come back to council, it's very useful for us. Hopefully it is for you and the public. Again, very useful process. So if I can brag on the Chief for a minute, I think, and you haven't seen this yet, you will with the wage classification study. I think the work Chief Audie has done over the last couple of months to put into place a pay scale for the fire department that didn't previously exist, that's linked to capacity and linked to training that's been achieved by our officers is a huge step into professionalizing the department. We have more people trained on more things now than we have in the past 20 years. And that's all been done as we brought on a new truck. So it's a huge step towards the professionalization of that department. And I've been really impressed by the work he's done. Thank you. Seven years of the city. That'll be six in July. Six. Seven. Seven, right?  There's a lot of people who have here, but just to focus on the three of you who have achieved in there too, for a long time it felt like it was all cultural work and now you're seeing that cultural work trickle down into operations in a way that is really exciting in the projects that you're getting done and the changes you're making and then the service delivery that the people are seeing as a result of that. So I just wanna, when I was reading through this, I was thinking back of what's happened the last six or seven years, all of us together and just how proud we should be about not just the individual little achievements here, but what they represent from a larger cultural shift you guys have really driven that is really, really impressive. Thank you. I'm very proud of the work you've done. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. A lot to help from the others on the team. Yes, yes. Yep. Well none of you can do anything without Angela. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's where it all starts. It's a long line in the morning and then just. That's it. That's it. I'll use it here before Ray, but. And this is the questions regarding the report we received. Any questions or comments from the public? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And the last item on this evening's agenda is executive session pursuant to the Vermont Statutes 3131E regarding pinning litigation in which the city is a party and or the negotiation of real estate purchase release options where the tax increment finance district that to discuss in public would put the city at both a little compromised legal positions from a confidentiality standpoint and also a negotiation standpoint compromised by the state's position in that place as well. So that is the reason for the proposal of executive session to take tonight. In tonight's executive session we're proposing to bring our city manager, Jesse Baker, also Angela. And we'll also be joined by the city's attorney, Robert Apollo from Paul Freckin Collins. Any other folks you'd like to bring? Okay. That concludes tonight's regular agenda. The council will not take any action during executive session. We'll come out on executive session only to adjourn. So that completes tonight's regular informal agenda. Again, council will reconvene only to adjourn. No additional actions will be taken this evening. So with that I would entertain a motion to adjourn the executive session as described. So moved. Motion by Eric, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed opposed? Motion carries for now on executive session.


I think I had a curiosity about this world like a lot of people do because I think I remember hearing people tell me God is all-knowing and all-loving and all-powerful. That sounds cool. That's really cool. And then like everyone I went through experiences and perceived things like my grandfather being diagnosed with cancer and kind of dwindling down to a walking skeleton from a very large happy man like Santa Claus to a walking skeleton who can hardly just feel a little bit of skin on the skeleton. I was like my perception of chemotherapy and losing his hair and pain and that's just one example among many things where I reached a point where I said to myself, there's something fishy about this world but I don't know what it is. Everybody seems to be playing the emperor has no clothes on.  All-knowing, all-powerful, inefficent, wonderful. So there's a contradiction. Where do we go with pain and suffering and conflict and war? God is love. So I think that I kind of got taken down into my mind where I got quite stirred up when I watched my grandfather get strapped up like an animal at the end of his life. And put in like a straight jacket because he was going through so much in the hospital and it was quite an intense scene to watch. I remember I kind of went home that night and the last time I saw my grandfather and I was like the shootout at the okayed-for-route, God and David. How could you let that happen? How could you have anything to do with what my eyes saw when I perceived in the hospital when I had a real deep thing? There's really this sense of, oh my beloved, I have nothing to do with what you perceive. You're looking through a darkened glass and you've got a problem going on. And the spirit was like saying, I'll help you if you're willing. So that kind of lashed me into esoteric writings and philosophies, psychology, all kinds of deep, deep searching and ponderings. And then it seemed like during those ponderings I would have this intuitive something right in the core of my chest. It was like somebody had to tickle a little feather and they were tickling on the inside of my heart. Whenever I would read a book or hear a song or something, there was this tickling going on that I was aware wasn't intellectual at all. It wasn't a theory or anything. It was this intense experience that even though I was in ten years of university and I was very well read and did much searching, the tickle was very intense at certain times. In that sense it was like that was my touchstone, that was my inroads to spirituality. Follow the tickle. A simple, follow the tickle. And then the tickle led me through humanistic psychology and transperson psychology. It led me to that book, it's back on the table back there, the one with the sparkly reflections on it called A Course in Miracles. And when I opened up that book it was as if I had waved like a giant tsunami of love just washing over me. And it was this feeling like my life would never be the same and it was a self-study book so well that's good. It was one form of the universal curriculum that there were thousands of pathways to God. Well that's a good start. Picked up a book that doesn't say it's the only way. Thank God. There's a little bit of open-mindedness there. But it did say that it was a required course and that free will meant that I could not establish the curriculum but only the time I take it was voluntary. So I thought, well it's saying it's a pathway to God and if I'm choosing to really give myself over to it then I just might arrive at the destination. And it said the same thing that Jesus said 2000 years ago. The kingdom of heaven is within you. Don't look outside yourself to try to find the truth. You've got it. You've got the answer.  And I said okay. So when I started working with the Course of Miracles the tickle, oh it would not stop. It was like I was just kind of lifted up by the tickle and it moved me so deeply that I thought well one thing's for sure I'm going to give myself over to this pathway that has dropped in my lap. Because I want to be happy. I want to know joy. I want to know happiness. I want to know everlasting life. And I was quite, I was raised in Christianity. I was very well versed in Buddhism and Hinduism and many different philosophies. But I'm ready for the experience. I'm not ready for comparative religion here or becoming a philosophy teacher. I want happiness, joy, love. So I poured myself into it for about 8 hours a day and even when I would get into ego resistance my eyelids would get real heavy. Like I had little lead weights that were on. I would read the book for hours of time and then the lead weights would come down like no more.   And so I would just go within and the boys would say take a nap. Have a snack. Have an apple. Go for a walk. Go for a swim. Very loving. Just ease up on yourself. Don't push it. Don't force it. Be soft. Be gentle. So I would. And then I'd come back and ask a question in my mind. I'd pop the book open. The answer was right there every time I'd pop the book open to exactly what I asked. But I was so excited with the answer I would read on until my eyes would be heavy again. So I would average about 8 hours a day. That's about a lot. I could handle. The ego could handle was about 8 hours a day. And then after about two and a half years an interesting thing started happening. I heard the voice of Jesus speaking to me in my mind in conversational tones and directing my every move. Talk about an easy life. Go here. Go there. Oh, you forgot your keys. Pump on the gasp. That's good. That'll start the car. Don't forget to pump the gasp.  Turn around. Look over there. Call so and so. Don't forget the numbers this. No, I said 7-7-4.  Well, life could get pretty easy. Especially if you had, we'll call it the master psychologist. One who had gone through the temptations of the world and come out through the keyhole and basically said, oh, really, it's all good. And be of good cheer for I've overcome the world, the ego thinking of the world. The world's your friend when you're friendly. It's just a matter of learning how to forgive and be truly friendly. Then the world becomes your friend.