Good evening. Thank you for joining us at the National Archives. Now please welcome Jalen Charity for a reading of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. Jalen is a student at the Theodore Roosevelt High School here in Washington, DC. Good evening everyone. Thank you. It's an honor to be here this evening representing the DC public school community. As student body president, I recognize the importance of engaging in civic learning to encourage students to take advantage of the rights they are given in the very Constitution held in this building. Now I will begin my reading of the preamble. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to establish, abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Let's give Jalen another round of applause. Wonderful. And what an exciting evening in store for all of us. My name is Rodney Slater, and I want to welcome you to your National Archives. I'm honored to serve as the chair of the National Archives Foundation Board of Directors. The National Archives Foundation is a non-profit partner of the National Archives providing important and vital support for the civics and education programs that are sponsored by the National Archives, including tonight's conversation. The Foundation also supports the National Civics Initiative here at the Archives that engages students and educators and the general public to learn of our past and to illuminate the future that's before us. And by the way, that future is bright with students like Jalen and the others here in our audience tonight. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the generous donors and supporters of the National Archives Foundation that make events like this one possible. I'd also like to acknowledge Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who is the head of our civics committee on the board and we're so happy to have him here tonight. There may be other board members, but we would ask if you just raise your hands or salute in some way but we're just excited about all those who have come to be with us tonight. We'd like to thank them for their tireless effort again to support the work of this important fantastic institution. We have a wonderful program this evening. Today's or tonight's conversation is a partnership between the National Archives Foundation and ICIVICS and we're celebrating civics learning week, an annual event in March that brings together students, educators and policymakers and leaders in the public and private sectors to highlight the importance of civics education. This year's theme is 2024 and beyond civics education as a unifying force. Tonight, the archivist of the National Archives, Dr. Colleen Shogan and the U.S. Secretary of Education, Dr. Miguel Cardona will discuss the importance of civics education and the vital role that it plays in a healthy democracy and its importance as it relates to how we might prioritize civics education across this country for the better good of the country and the better good of our citizens to create a more informed citizenry. Again, this looks like a fantastic evening. We want to get our program started and what I'd like to do now is to introduce our program partner, the Executive Director of ICIVICS, Louise Dubey. Louise has served as the Managing Director of Digital Learning for WGBH in Boston, where she helped to launch PBS, the Learning Media Program. She began her career as an attorney in Montreal, Canada and holds a law degree from McGill University as well as an MBA from Yale University. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Dubey. Wow, it's been quite a day today. We started this morning fairly early. We had a great conversation. We had a particularly great conversation between Justice Sotomayor and Justice Cohen Barrett and I couldn't be happier. It was reported in the Times that they discussed the intersection of the Supreme Court between a kindergarten classroom and a marriage that could not end in divorce. So we'll hope to do as well tonight. So thank you so much for being with us today. I want to thank the National Archives Foundation and the National Archives for their incredible leadership and for their welcoming us today tonight. And again, since last year, they were the original partners with us. Not every archivist would choose to put civic learning at the center of what they do, yet the National Archives and particularly this archivist are doing that. And I'm really grateful to them to help bring life to the documents and to the civic life of our country. So with that, yeah. So this caps the National Forum today. It's my great honor to introduce the archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan. Dr. Shogan is incredibly talented, so I'm not going to tell you all about her because it would take me the whole night. She was sworn in as the 11th archivist of the United States in May last year after being nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Most recently, Dr. Shogan was served as the senior vice president and director, excuse me, of the David M. Rubinstein Center at the White House Historical Association. Before that, she worked in the U.S. Senate and the senior, was a senior executive at the Library of Congress. She taught at Georgetown and her research, interestingly, focused on the American presidency, the presidential rhetoric, women in politics and Congress. So she's a native of Pittsburgh and she holds a BA in political science from Boston College, a PhD in American politics from Yale University. We could not be in better hands for our nation than with Dr. Shogan. Dr. Cardona was sworn in as the 12th, so 11th, 12th U.S. Secretary of Education in March 2021. Secretary Cardona has three children whose grandparents is one of three children whose grandparents moved from Puerto Rico in the 1960s for better opportunities in the mainland United States. That experience and his bicultural upbringing has helped shape his passion to serve all students and improve their opportunities for success. Secretary Cardona focused throughout his career on raising the bar for equity and excellence in education for all learners, guides his leadership in the U.S. Department of Education in service of the nation's 65 million students. During his tenure, Secretary Cardona has highlighted the urgency of seizing the moment to intentional collaboration, particularly working with partnerships with parents, families, students and educators, and the opportunity we have as a nation. Not only to recover from the pandemic, but to reimagine higher performing and more equitable education systems that were better for all. Secretary Cardona was previously served as commissioner of education from in Connecticut. We are incredibly lucky to have a conversation between these experts who are committed to civic learning. So please help me give them a warm round of applause, Secretary Cardona and the Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colin Shogan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was a great introduction. Welcome to the National Archives and thank you for being here this evening for an engaging conversation we hope on civics and history education and some of the challenges that we face. So maybe, Mr. Secretary, you can just give us an overview of what you think the status or the condition of civics and history education is in the United States today just to kick us off. Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. This is a great place to be to talk about something that I love dearly. And, you know, I want to thank you. I want to thank the foundation iCivics. And, you know, I have to say I was looking forward to this visit and, you know, connected to the question of the state of civics. We have a lot going on in this country and I think it's time for a civics renaissance. And I think we have work to do to be intentional about reclaiming the narrative of civics and giving students an opportunity, an unvarnished opportunity to explore it. But so I was feeling good about that, but I felt even better when I walked in and I saw the face of a former fourth grade student of mine who's really leading the work in civics. Brian Kofa and Sesco from Merritt and Connecticut from my hometown. When I was a fourth grade teacher, Brian was a student and all these years I've seen him embrace civics in a way that really brought it to students. And when I was a commissioner, we partnered together, Sally and the entire team, to really promote a kid governor program. And I saw in the program a former student of mine bringing civics to life for students across the state.  I'm optimistic with students like Brian and all of you here who are really bringing an opportunity for students to engage in civics. More deeply, I'm optimistic that we have an opportunity to really double down our efforts and lift it. When I talk about well-rounded education, we talk a lot about recovery, but if we just focus on recovery, we're missing an opportunity to really provide comprehensive learning and comprehensive experiences for students. And I think civics has to be baked into the DNA of how we reimagine schools. Can you tell us, so I like that phrase, civic renaissance. Maybe I'll adopt that at some point. I'll give you credit, though, for sure. But maybe you can tell us, so, you know, I'm kind of curious about your answer to this question. What can the, as you as secretary of education or the department of education do to affect a civics renaissance? What are the policies that the federal government can help with in order to get from where we are right now to where we want to be? You know, we could talk about technical strategies, right? I'd like to think that we need an adaptive shift in this space. So with technical strategies, there are some things that we are doing. You know, there's close to $20 million in American civics and history grants. I civics is one of those that receive that and they're doing great work. We've, you know, at the direction of the president have increased, I use the word intentionality a lot. We've been more intentional about promoting voter participation of students. So this, I promised my team I would wave it. We're really engaging in strategies to try to get our students, even in higher education, more actively engaged in the process. It's their process by allowing them to do federal work studies to do this in a very nonpartisan way. This is really about giving them an opportunity to explore it. So between grants, technical assistance, resources that we provide, so those are some of the technical things. But I think adaptively we have to really, I think, position civics learning, civics education. And I'm not just talking about that class in high school that you take for a graduation requirement. I think that does a disservice to civics when it's pigeonholed into one specific task. I think we need to start thinking about how to create better citizens by engaging them in the early years and having an opinion or sharing their thoughts on what they see happening around them as they get older, engaging them in more specific leadership activities or service activities that involve civic engagement. And then as they get older and older, formalizing that a bit more, but making that part of the DNA of our education system, that shift is where I mean, when I say there's technical things, but there's that mentality that we have to embrace it a little bit more. So those are some of the things. We have grants. We have technical assistance. We partner with many of you here in the room to provide programming to schools. And I think it's more important these days that we do it in a nonpartisan way because so much else about education has become divisive or partisan. We have to make sure that we preserve civics education as an opportunity for all students to benefit equally. So we have a lot of non-profit leaders here this evening, people from academia, people from the public history community. They want to be part of this and they are part of this because they're engaged in civics and civics learning week. So what would your message be to them as partners in this work? What can they do to help improve civic and history education? You know, I was a couple of hours ago meeting with the National Association of Elementary School Principles and the National Association of Secondary School Principles. So there was a room about 400 school principals who tell me that over the last three years it's been much more difficult to lead because of the divisive nature of our country, really. And local politics. So we look to partners like you to help guide schools in ways they could do it in a way that embraces different perspectives. I think, to be very frank with you, I think a lot of our educators right now are interested but are concerned to do it in a way that creates division or disruption in their schools. I've spoken to college presidents who take the word equity out of remarks because they're afraid that it could trigger someone to create a problem. I talked to school superintendents who, you know, their livelihood is at stake because they're trying to promote engagement. So it's a very fragile time right now. And I look to all of you to partner with schools to help provide that support, that guidance, that nudge that, yeah, this could be done and we can help you. And we could do it in a way that brings people together. I always say education should bring people together. But at a time in this country, to be very frank with you, it's, you know, our education system right now is they're reeling from some of the challenges that we've had over the last three or four years that have resulted in partisanship and division. And unfortunately, I think another thing that we've seen in our schools over the last several decades, I could tell you as an educator, is the narrowing down of what is taught. And that means that civics and even sciences are not as prevalent as they could and should be in our schools. So this is an area where I think partnership is natural, where when we're talking about civics, literacy and even numeracy could be woven into it. It could be brought into different levels, elementary, middle and high school. So those are some ways that I would like to see natural engagement. But I also think our educators need a little bit of support, technical assistance and guidance on how it could be done given the political landscape that many districts face. Let's talk, you had mentioned earlier in your remarks, you talked a little bit about experiential learning and that component as part of particularly civics education. That was how I was in part taught civics education when I was in the 90s, you know, when I went to high school in the 90s. So I had to go to a local town meeting as part of my civics requirement. And I went to the meeting and it was really interesting. I thought it was basically to satisfy the requirement. But it ended up, they were talking about at my local township meeting, they were talking about a stop sign that they wanted to remove and it ended up being in my neighborhood. They wanted to remove the stop sign and I had lived at that neighborhood my whole life and I knew it was a really busy intersection. I ended up standing up and talking about why they shouldn't remove the stop sign. And of course, you know, the next day my mom got all these phone calls from people saying, oh, your daughter was talking at the township meeting. So I mean, that was really actually when I look back on it, I mean, I remember it and I was probably only 14 or 15 years old and I remember that moment. So how can we reincorporate those types of experiences in civics education? Is that valuable or can we do that today given the divisive nature of some of the things you talked about? We can. Look, and you know, I think that's such an authentic story of how, what civics really means. And oftentimes we narrow it down to the, you know, remembering facts or specific discreet, you know, skills or information that you learn. Where, in my opinion, that is not only how you develop civic involvement but leadership in students and it's more authentic. So those should be embedded, as I said earlier, in the experience of children all the way through. When I was in a district, one of the things that I took a lot of pride in is giving structuring youth voice into the decisions of the school. And talk about empowering students. I often say students have a voice, we're just not always designed to listen. And, you know, teenagers have opinions on things that are happening around them. Oftentimes we're so busy with tasks that we're not engaging them into that authentic conversation or action to improve the conditions around them. So that experience that you had, I think, is a way to engage students. I think, you know, we need to see more of that. I think we've gone away from that. And sometimes the fear of the challenge makes people a little bit nervous. But that's where I think, you know, in partnership with colleagues here, it's something that programs can't be done. I'll tell you, when I engage students in that youth voice process in that district, I ended up implementing it in a way that when I evaluated the school principals, their evaluation included comments, feedback, ratings on the degree to which youth voice was part of the school improvement plan. So it was really well developed. And I partnered with Everyday Democracy, a civic organization in Connecticut with a small grant. And they helped develop that model. And then when that grant ended and when they left the district, that became part of the district culture. And that's what I mean by embracing it in part of the culture, similar to your stop sign story there. We've talked a lot about focusing on younger people, which is entirely appropriate. But we know that civics and even history education is really a lifelong venture.   So how do we approach that when post-secondary education? How do we continue to have adults engage in civic learning and even history education? You know, it seems like there are very deliberate efforts to rewrite history in some parts of our country. You know, revisionist history type mentality that is pervasive in some communities is concerning. And my answer to your question is the same message that I had to the school leaders earlier today. You have to be intentional and on the offense about promoting it or else you're going to be left with what happens when those who want to rewrite history have the final word. And I think in higher education, which is typically more likely to you'll find students who take up a cause or there are groups or organizations that really engage students differently. I think it's when we get out into the outside of the higher education space where it becomes very few are engaged in it and it's not open as much. Again, I think it's critical that schools model it, higher education institutions promote it and if you're promoting it from elementary school all the way up, the goal is to have people who are civically engaged as just who they are and that it's something that they seek as a part of their function being a part of a community. And you would hope what we try to do here at the National Archives, of course, we're the home of all federal records in the history of the United States. So in part of our civics and history education, we're trying to, for kids, for K-12, we're trying to enable younger people to look at our records and look at them critically and understand how to analyze an original source primary document. And if you learn that skill when you're younger, you should hopefully be able to do that as an adult and then be able to, if there are revisions to history, you can make, then you have the tools to make the assessment for yourself, correct? Well, that's the goal, right? I always tell my, I have two teenagers at home. Be critical consumers of information, even if it looks real. Look, let's face it, we're in an age now where, you know, you can read something and it could be disinformation, misinformation, you know, in this era of artificial intelligence, which is exciting. It's exciting. We also have to be more critical of what we're consuming. And I think that's a skill that's critical, it's really important. And what I'm finding is if it's not taught explicitly, it's almost like you're going to have to correct the wrongs when students fall, you know, victim to whatever, whether it's propaganda misinformation. And I think the same is true for adults. I don't know that we have a strategy for that. I'll be very frank with you, you know, the more you turn on, I don't have to tell this group, you could turn on one channel, you're going to get one perspective, turn on another, you're going to get the total opposite perspective. And it doesn't always seem like there's the middle ground. So I think we are also practiced that daily that we have to be critical consumers and look at biases, confirmation bias. And I think for our students, younger and younger, we're going to have to teach those skills. And we're going to have to support our educators to teach those skills. This is different. I think going back to the primary documents and primary intent, I think, is also very critical. But we have to be weary that we're helping our students be critical consumers of information. That's right. So let's talk about technology, brought up AI. But how can technology isn't, it shouldn't be juxtaposed vis-a-vis civics or history or, you know, STEM versus civics or history. How can we merge technology and civics and history in a way that can really pursue integrated learning where it's not either or? Right. And I think, you know, again, going back to students' passions, I know my daughter for a while wanted to be an environmental scientist because she had very strong feelings about what was happening. And she was using that interest and that STEM field to use her voice and engage in activities in her school. You know, they're not mutually exclusive. I think a good education system, a comprehensive education system, really merges it to where it's seamless. How many folks who are civic leaders take up a passion that brings them into the arts STEM? And I think we have to look for ways to make sure that our school experiences are blurring the lines between this topic and that topic. But the reality is our schools are designed the way they were two pandemics ago. 42 minutes here, 42 minutes here, and there's no cross. So I favor the interdisciplinary deeper problem-solving, the experiential learning, the problem-solving where you're going to have to use different skills and different disciplines to come to something. And then it's even better when you can apply it through some civic engagement. An example, you talked about the stop sign. My daughter had the privilege of being elected to serve as a student representative on their local Board of Education Council. And, you know, so twice a month she would go to these meetings as a junior in high school and report out on things, but also comment when asked questions. And, you know, in high school dress code policy is pretty important stuff. I don't know. And if you have high schoolers and you know how the trends change like every month, right? So, you know, to have hoodies or not to have hoodies, to wear caps or not to wear caps, spaghetti straps or no spaghetti straps. So, you know, she really got into this. And, you know, her persuasive skills in her, it was almost, I saw the passion that she had and advocacy for equity. Well, you know, students that are built differently get in trouble more because they're built differently. And that's not fair because they can't control. And I'm looking at this girl. I'm like, wow, she really found a passion. She ended up presenting something to the board and the board policy. Now, keep in mind, I was the assistant superintendent in this district. I was a school principal for 10 years in that district. So, 25 years, my wife worked in the district, too. So, she's over here presenting why she thinks and this or that. And, you know, I saw a side of her, like the passion. This is, you know, we have to be just. And she used writing skills. She used in public speaking. All these things came together under this activity that she was asked to do as a board member. That's how learning should be, right? If you talk to our youth today, they have things that they're passionate about. We don't always have the platform for them to express it in a way that they're growing and learning. We need more of that if we expect them to be civically engaged when they leave our four walls. So, we have some questions from the audience. So, I'm going to take some of those questions now. So, oh, this is a good one. Brian from Connecticut asks. Oh, Brian, did you have a memorable civic learning experience that shaped who you are today? Good question. Yeah, that's a good question. You know, my daughter's story is one, but when I was a school principal, I was really passionate. I love that job. School principal is such a fantastic job. You know, you have families and students and you see them grow and you see siblings. I really love that job. And I continued my studies when I was a school principal and I was working on my doctorate. And I was wrapping up my doctoral program. And I was asked by the then Speaker of the House to serve on this commission a task force at the Capitol in Hartford, a legislative achievement gap task force to look at policies in the state of Connecticut to address the disparities and opportunities and outcomes and students based on race and place. That was a task. Now, I'm, you know, 35 years old, I'm a school principal and I'm thinking, what am I going to do in Hartford? You know, like, I'm out of my element. Like, what am I going to do there? You know, I kind of like, thanks for the recommendation.  I'm like, oh, great. Now I'm going to chair this. I have a senator. I had the commissioner of education on the task force. I'm a school principal in a town, you know, and I'm like, this is way over, like, I shouldn't be doing this. I was wrapping up my doctorate and my doctoral dissertation was using political will to address achievement disparities. Kind of meh, right? So the first couple of meetings, I was, I didn't know Robert's rules. I was just like, your turn, your, you know, but, but I knew education. I knew students. And as a first generation Latino who grew up in a school system that is 80% free and reduced lunch, I have a lived experience that I could bring to that table. And as the year two progressed, I felt comfortable thinking of myself as an expert in this area. And it was an increase in civic engagement that made me really feel like I'm doing more than just serving as that school principal. I love that job. But now I can help influence the state. You know, fast forward a couple of years, more like five or six years, and I became a nominee for the commissioner position and then the rest is history. So it was that increase in civic engagement that gave me the confidence and the wherewithal to think of myself, you know, to help more folks. That story is, is one that I think, or that experience and that civic engagement that I was pushed into. Here I'm going from my doctorate in this work and I still felt like, ooh, do I belong here? Yeah, I did belong there. And a lot of times, you know, civic engagement is limited by our own fears of the unknown. And I think that's another thing that I would welcome. You know, like the Roman historian, Levi said, we fear something in proportion to our ignorance of it. So when we don't know where we're going, we tend to fear it. How many of our students have great ideas and can really engage in civic activities, but fear what it is, you know, that was my experience as a school principal wrapping up my doctorate. It's interesting. Political, I mean, I'm a political scientist by training, but a lot of the political science research has shown that when you participate in non-political activities, so maybe volunteering for the PTA or participating in a civic organization in your town, organizing, you know, a recycling drive or a food drive or something like that, those skills are really translatable and transferable into political realms or governing realms. So it's really important, there's gateways for people to get the confidence they need to then be able to step into that sphere. Those skills are transferable. And then the confidence that you gain, you know, and you're right because I wasn't into the politics. I didn't really want, you know, I was a school principal, but I didn't, you know, and it was at a different time. It wasn't as partisan as it is now, but it was something I was going out of my comfort zone. But man, did I love it. And I think our students, too, it's kind of like my daughter, you know, if I were to tell her before, I want you to present in front of the board of education, no way. But now you talk about an issue that's important to her. She feels a little more confident. And those skills translate into civic engagement or other activities. Okay, so we have a question from Robin from Georgia. With the rise of anti-Semitism and other prejudices, what can we do to help educators address difficult historical subjects in the classroom in an honest and unbiased way? To protect them. Public education is under attack. There are folks who are looking to sow division to then sell a private voucher option as a better alternative. Public education is under attack. So teachers need to be given, I say the ABCs of teaching. They need to be given agency, better working conditions and competitive salary. But going to the agency, agency means trusting them as professionals. I think professional development, giving them the tools that they need to be successful. I think we need to have robust curriculum that presents the truth. And we need to help students become thinkers. And good civics education does that. Those are some of the things that I think we need to do to move it forward. This is where I think it really requires intentionality around a bipartisan approach. When we think about civics, we think of one side or the other, it's a losing battle. We really have to make sure that our students see multiple perspectives. I love debates. I love, you know, when schools foster healthy discourse, exchange of discourse, I love that. But we don't see as much of that as we should. With regard to higher education and anti-Semitism, anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia, that really spiked a lot after October 7th. We work to really put together resources to tell leaders, let's not shy away from this, because you're going to deal with the symptoms of it on your campus. Have the tools. Here are some tools that you can use. And yes, we have the Office for Civil Rights, but that to me, you don't lead through memos. You lead through capacity building. So if you go to ed.gov, you'll see one of the three buttons that we have there. Tools to address this. And, you know, there were leaders that were nervous about jumping into this, because it was such a very, it was a volatile conversation time. And, you know, as you know, many people lost their positions because of it. But there were leaders that took it as an opportunity to develop an environment of discourse that brought different perspectives and modeled respect on how to do it. I'll give one example. I visited Dartmouth University because I heard they were doing something right. They were doing a lot right, but they were doing something right in this space. They were doing something right in this space. And I talked to the president there. And I asked her, so what's going on over there? Why am I hearing, you know, across the country, I was hearing a lot of complaints, right? This university, kids were feeling unsafe. I visited universities where students were telling me that they felt unsafe. And we needed to promote what's working. So I visited Dartmouth. I talked to students. I talked to professors. And I talked to the president. Each of them were engaged in what they call now Dartmouth Dialogues, where they don't skirt the issue. They talk about it. They model different opinions. And they agree to have civil discourse and to model it for their Dartmouth community. As imperfect as any system will be, they were the closest to embracing this opportunity and doing it in a way that allows different perspectives. And there were different perspectives. When I met with the president and I met with students, they didn't all agree with her. And some of the students communicated that during that meeting. But they did it in a way that showed respect. And the way we want all of our, not only our youth, but adults to interact when they disagree. So it's difficult. There are leaders right now that are afraid to get in front of it. But I do believe it's our responsibility as educators and as education leaders to not shy away from that, but to use it as an opportunity to bring students together and to listen to different exchange and nurture an inclusive environment at a time when DEI programs are being abandoned. We need to be more proactive about inclusivity and respecting different opinions. I think you're absolutely right because, I mean, you know, our system of government is, it's a separated power system. It's actually inherently conflictual. So there is going to be debate. That's how it's set up. There's nothing wrong with debate or disagreement. This is the defense of our constitutional system. But it does matter how we debate and how we disagree, right? You know, I always said freedom of speech is really important. I mean, this country is the best experiment. And it's designed to have that balance. But we have to do it in a way, protect the safety of students. You can have freedom of speech and protect student safety.  It's not okay to feel threatened or unsafe on my learning campus.  And we had students experiencing that. And to me, that's a black and white issue. We need to protect our students, save learning environments. And we should promote students expressing their thoughts, but just they are students. We have to show them how it could be done in a way that protects the safety of universities, especially at this time when violence on campuses have become almost normalized in this country. That's another issue that we have to continue to work on. Right. Well, we have one more question. Molly from Massachusetts asks, how has social media and the shift to digital information changed your mission? You know, the mission hasn't changed. The delivery method has, right? Helping children reach their God-given potential, regardless of race, place where they live, whether they were born into wealth or not, that is still the mission. How we use technology and the advancement in technology becomes quickly a conversation about equity. If whether it's artificial intelligence or the use of social media, if that's the currency of communication and business today and tomorrow, and it's unevenly spread, I am perpetuating gaps. The key thing is to create guardrails that protect children and so number one, creating guardrails that protect children unlike what we did in the 90s when the internet came out. It was a free-for-all. So create guardrails, help students use the tools for good, protect them with the risks, whether that's misinformation, some of the vulgarity or some of the bad uses of it. So that's critical to it. Make sure that there's access, equal access, but also make sure that the educators that are working with students have the capacity to understand how to utilize it for good and for learning. That has been inequitable too. So I'll give you a quick example and it's more of a rudimentary example, but you could extrapolate it for AI, you could extrapolate it for the use of social media to brand or to become a business person. When I was commissioner of education four years ago today, what happened? March 12th, everything shut down. So I remember leaving the Department of Education seeing a colleague of mine and saying, hey, I'll see you in a couple of weeks. I never returned to that building because I got a new job six months later. So we walked out of that building. We were knee-deep in COVID. And one of the darkest moments professionally and personally for me was those weeks when I was on a call daily with the governor and other commissioners and we were hearing what was happening in New York, the epicenter. And I mean, it was real, it was scary. So my task right away was to do two things, make sure kids are eating and make sure they have technology so they can continue learning. So we used the bus routes to feed kids and we got food out there. And then we worked with philanthropy and partners to get laptops for every kid in the state and work on hotspots. Remember, we were handing out hotspots. So I remember about four weeks into the pandemic when the lights returned off, schools were shut down. Before we got the laptops in, I called the superintendent of a very wealthy district by the coast. And I said, how's it going? And he said, Mr. Commissioner, you know, we have, all of our kids have one-to-one devices. They come from homes where they all have broadband, you know, Wi-Fi. We have state-of-the-art curriculum online already. We did that about five or 10 years ago. And thankfully, many of our students have a parent that can stay home. I'm like, good for you. I'm glad to hear that's working. So there really wasn't a missing of the beat. I called another district, predominantly free and reduced lunch, high title one, four weeks, same day I called. I called that superintendent and said, how's it going? She goes, we're still trying to locate 25% of our kids. Instant. The gap was made worse. And then that went on. That went on. So I bring that point up to illustrate where we are with artificial intelligence, the embracing of the currency of communication of our students today. We have to embrace it, or else we're going to do what happened the first four weeks of the pandemic. Some kids are going to get it. They're going to be more marketable. They're going to have skills to navigate the 21st century. And other kids are going to be stuck with the abacuses. It's on us to embrace it, learn about it. We fear something in proportion to our ignorance of it. Learn about it and figure out how we can make sure that all students have equitable access, not only to the inputs of it, but to what it could bring. It is that, you know, as a father of two teenagers right now, my son is studying music production, social media, and marketing is how he's getting his name out there. I get how that works, and we have to evolve. Our systems have to evolve to meet our students, because they're going to do it with or without us. So I think, you know, the message there for me is we need to embrace it and learn how to use it for good, set some guardrails to protect our students, and make sure that all of our educators have similar access to capacity building so that they can use it in their classrooms. Because the potential is actually remarkable, right? We had ministers of education from, I think, 28 countries in D.C. last year, even China was here. So education is diplomacy, folks. So the minister of education from China was here, and Australia, and England, and we were talking, and AI became a really big topic. As a matter of fact, we're meeting in Singapore in April, and one of the topics is AI. And they're looking to us. What are you doing? They know that the president convened a group. They know that there's movement here. So we have to keep up, or else our kids internationally won't be as competitive. Yeah. It's an exciting time. It is an exciting time. Well, thank you so much, Secretary Cardona, for joining us this evening. To everyone who joined us, we have a lot of K-12 educator resources, our Civics for All of Us program, our docs teach, and it's all on archives.gov. So we are part of the Civic Renaissance here at the National Archives. I love it. So I invite you to check that out as well. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your conversation about...


Welcome to Toffy TV, where there's been a lot of speculation around about Marcel Brands' future, obviously he's out of contract at the end of the season. There's been some speculation linking him with a move to Manchester United to become their director of football, also where rumours of Roma being interested in taking him. Will the Athletic have reported that they expect Marcel Brands to sign a new contract that haven't and stay on at their director of football. Of course he's on the board as well. They just said basically that all of these links, not really sure where they've come from. He doesn't have an agent, he normally looks after himself and he's someone who likes to put down roots. With what's been happening recently, the scouting system has been overhauled, the changes of the academy, it does feel like he's just starting to get to grips with the job at Everton. A lot of his work so far has been about swapping the squad about, which is still a big part of his job, getting a lot of the deadwood out of Everton and obviously bringing players in. But obviously with Carlo Ancelotti now, maybe he feels like he's got to see through another contract, maybe the same contract link as Carlo Ancelotti's got left. Now he can really get that job done and start looking to bring in some top quality players for Carlo Ancelotti to work for. Marcel Brands was also part of a Q&A done through the club with some of the younger fans. He was asked which player was his favourite at the club and he said they're all favourites. But then he said I'm really happy with the development of Anthony Gordon. He said he's a young player from the academy so I hope he'll be the next one that can be the real starter in the near future. So obviously he's got a lot of time for Anthony Gordon and wants to see him break through. A lot of fans have been quite annoyed, I think, upset that Anthony Gordon wasn't brought into the team when Richard Ellison was suspended. He's not really been part of the squad really much recently. He's got a lot of game time at the back end of the season when we had more subs and 2020 was obviously his big breakthrough season. He came off the bench late on in 2019 under Marco Silva but 2020 was his big breakthrough year and I think Marcel Brands is probably hoping that in 2021 is the season that he gets himself on the bench regularly and becomes a possible starter in the team or pushing to be a starter in the team. Obviously him being a local lad and being from the academy will bring more for Marcel Brands because that being one of his main responsibilities. It will be interesting to see what happens. Everything had said that it will be probably around January time. Maybe there will be an announcement when everything will hold their general meeting in January. Maybe something will be said then when they do the virtual general meeting we'll wait and see. Luca Dean is back in the gym. Unfortunately it is only arm work but he's back working. He's been working with a personal trainer from Leil called Thomas Amir. He's been doing the ropes. Obviously he's still got the cast on his ankle and will miss two to three months. But he's trying to keep himself fit and ticking over so that when the cast comes off he hasn't lost too much. He's a professional footballer. He's got to get back playing for Everton. There's a Euros at the end of the season as well for France. So he wants to be in the best shape that he can be when that time is to come back. So we wish him good luck. We need him back as soon as possible. Spanish media outlet Leirezon claim that Isco will move from Real Madrid on loan in January. Everton are waiting. Apparently he has turned down a chance to move to Seville on financial reasons. He said Italy doesn't suit him and the Premier League is where he would best fit. Everton are waiting. We're waiting to see. Obviously he's been heavily linked in the last month or so and obviously the link is there with him. With Carlo Ancelotti there and obviously Hamill Rodriguez already being at the club. It's obvious why that link would be there. We're waiting to see. It's only four weeks. So we get to January. There's a lot going on in between now and then. And also finally, haven't been linked with Ivan Tony, 24-year-old Brentford striker. He bought him in the summer from Peter. He scored 13 goals in 15 games. And obviously Brentford have got a fantastic track record of bringing these players in. They showed Ollie Watkins a player who came in on similar fashion to Tony. They sold him for $30 million to Aston Villa and it looks like they could be losing another one. Maybe in January or the back of the season with I think a lot of clubs looking at Brentford and thinking that's the way we'd like to do things. And if we can't buy them and give them a chance then maybe we can buy them off Brentford. They have a fantastic scouting set up there. A lot of money ball system is used to bring them in. Be interested in seeing what happens with them and whether Evan are really interested in the player. There you go. Before we go, just to say to people if you can, look to download the last fan standing app. We are doing quizzes three times a week on the app. Me and Baz are doing proper Evan quizzes on there. So if you want to download it, I think it's available on Android at the moment. It's coming for Apple soon. So if you want to get your hands on it, please do. There you go. This has been the Ever news daily. Make sure to give this video a like, subscribe if you haven't already. And if you want more great videos, join us on page. The link is in the description. See you later.


Okay, so welcome to the NFE Bake Off, so this is probably the first time we've had so many people from the NFE community, vendors in the same room together, so it's pretty exciting. So this would be a great opportunity for you to really get a good sense of where the community is heading, and for the people who were at the previous panel on the telecom roadmap, I think it'll be quite enlightening, so unfortunately we only have 40 minutes, so we're going to get going because I think we have a lot to cover, so I'm going to get started with some introductions, and the first question I'm going to ask is, who are you, and what is your company doing with NFE to get started? My name is Shrida Ramaswamy, I'm a principal engineer in Brocade. Brocade is a software networking view. Our company, as you might know, has a lot of different products in the NFE space, including an SDN controller, which is a commercial version of an ODEAL Open Daylight controller, and we have a lot of different VNFs that we currently support, like virtual routers to virtual EPC, VADX, and there are many others that we support today. In general, our company Brocade operates in the space of NFE in what's called the new IP, so we are very much in the space trying to yield this transition towards NFE from the old way of operating things into the new way. Hi, my name is Shrida Grawal, I am a product manager at Juniper Networks. I'm basically responsible for their virtual firewall product, so again, in context of NFE that would be one of the key VNFs that a lot of customers are looking for to deploy. And also, I manage some of their mid-range physical firewall platforms. With reference to Juniper's involvement with NFE, I mean, we were engaged very early on right from early 2013. We are actually kind of on the forefront, evangelizing where NFE and Etsy architecture is going, and again, we have a lot of investment in terms of engineering and architecture. Working with a lot of tier one and tier two service providers, really pushing different use cases with SDN and NFE. In terms of solution, again, broadly, we have kind of the NFEI components with our career grade switches, routers and firewalls. We have an SDN controller with contrail, and then we have essentially VNFs, so we have virtual SRX, which is our virtual firewall, and virtual MX, which is our virtual router, and we have a bunch of other VNFs in the pipeline. And finally, we have a complete manual solution as well with our contrail cloud platform. So again, we have the complete end-to-end solution, which is very open for our customers to really transition and move to NFE. I'm Bob Hattleton. I'm a cloud NFE software architect with Alcatel Wusent. I'm in the Cloud Innovation Center, where we work with all of the Alcatel Wusent portfolio products as well as third-party products and ecosystem vendors to deploy all sorts of applications in a cloud NFE SDN environment. Alcatel Wusent has a whole portfolio of EPC, IMS, OSS products, basically everything in the telco portfolio, as well as specific NFE SDN products like Nuage and CloudBand, and at this point, basically the whole portfolio has been refocused on NFE, and that's definitely the direction going forward. Hi, my name is Sudhir Ketamukka. I lead a product development team, primarily responsible for the net management and orchestration for the network functions in Ericsson. But having in that role gives me an opportunity to look at both Ericsson's own network functions and the roadmap, as well as integrating with various other vendors solutions. In addition to, I mean, I think, I don't know how we can give unique answers here about, you know, what our companies are doing, but you know, one thing I wanted to add is also a pretty big player in the systems integration space, working with some of the, you know, tier one customers at this point, but when it comes to the applications, yes, virtual router, virtual EPC, virtual IMS, they are, you know, pretty in a very good state with NFE, and all other suite is also towards the NFE direction at Ericsson. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Tarek Khan with HP's NFE business unit, and I think this is a group. Thank you, Beth, for organizing this and having this discussion. So my role within HP is to try to figure out how we can use cloud and network virtualization technologies and apply it to NFE. So kind of the, some of the discussions that are happening over here. And let me see if I can try to give a unique answer, where we know at HP what we are not doing. So we are actually not in the VNF business. We do have some VNFs, but that's where we feel the network functions, the innovation, that's where it's going to happen. And with the larger equipment providers and also smaller ISVs who are coming in. What we are focusing on is the platform. And the platform essentially goes from NFEI, both physical and virtual infrastructure, the virtual infrastructure manager, OpenStack being providing part of it, and the management and orchestration. So those are the areas that we are focusing on so that folks like Verizon and other operators can just focus on looking at what VNFs to bring in to the platform and be able to run it in their networks. Thank you, Tarek. I'm Prakash from Huawei, and I represent the R&D in the, what you call, the standards. And mainly, if I give you a one-liner for Huawei, we are a full solution provider for NFEI. So we do end-to-end everything. And of course, the biggest strength is 75% of the carriers in the world are our customers and they bring most of our revenue. So our revenue model is based on being open, and that's why we are one of the, what do you call, the members of the OpenFP, Open Platform for NFEI. Our participation in ITC is never questioned because we have been in almost every name you can think of NFEI, whether it's MAC, whether it is related to optical. So we have a wide range of product line. Currently, for NFEI, what we are doing is Open Platform so that we can establish the standards which will help us bring our product line, which are already there, but to make it interoperable. That is the main focus for us. And interoperability is the only word I would like to use here. Thanks. That's a great intro to my next question, which is by the way not in order. Just throwing you some curves here. So how does your NFEI products, and so obviously you all of you have some NFEI product in some form, incorporate OpenStack? And how does your company contribute to the overall community efforts? Just I think relevant to this conference in this community. So we'll start with that. Okay. Okay. So the OpenStack is the de facto virtual infrastructure manager for Ericsson, any solution that we provide. So we are adapting OpenStack, both for our internal IT as well as the network functions. From a contribution perspective, we have made contributions specifically in Nova Neutron and Cylometer areas. And these days it has been more in the OP NFEI. It's not a direct contribution, but what we are trying to do is stabilize those requirements for the NFEI and push that towards the OpenStack. And we partner with various OpenStack vendors across the industry. So yeah, OpenStack has been our cloud store, has been part of our cloud story for almost three years, three and a half years now. So Brocade really believes in enabling almost all their products orchestrateable through OpenStack. So we have the switching lines and rotors, the switches like the VDX and MLX and ICX, they are, you can orchestrate through Neutron. So we have Neutron plugins, something that we brought in. We also have all for our virtual assets, the virtual VNFs that we have. We basically have plugins enabled through Neutron. So we made sure all of our products are orchestratable through OpenStack. So that's something we made sure, this is an interesting and an important ecosystem for Brocade. And it needs to be, all of our products needs to be enabled. And beyond that, again, our HDN controller is something that's validated with Neutron. We strongly believe the Neutron, for the success of Neutron, and it would definitely enable Brocade products to be consumed through Neutron APIs. And beyond Neutron, we are making significant contribution in our involvement in the Tacker project, which is the HCMano OpenStack project that's gaining really big momentum in the last few cycles. So again, I'm leading the project, but we are actually really contributing to the project as well. So that's... Yeah, so again, from Juniper's perspective, we have Contrail, which actually interacts with OpenStack via the standard Neutron plugins. We have Contrail Cloud, where we have essentially a cloud management platform where we have Juniper's OpenStack, destroy as part of it, and we have made contributions to Neutron. From a VNF perspective, we have Virtual SRX. Again, we have plugins, Firewall as a Service plugin for OpenStack for that. And there was a talk this morning where we shared some ideas around how we can enable to provide very similar capabilities that customers have on Firewalls in a physical environment with OpenStack. So scheduling policies and doing logging and things like that. So again, we expect going forward, we'll be making a lot more contributions in the Firewall as a Service plugin, plug-inside. And I guess some of you might know that with Contrail, we have actually open sourced it. So we have open source, open Contrail, which again, we are trying to drive that option of SDN controllers. We have that open Contrail piece that we have. At Akuta Usent, OpenStack has pretty much become the de facto platform as with everyone else up here. And our cloud band node, cloud band management system are both built on top of OpenStack. NewAge works very close with OpenStack. All of our portfolio products are designed at this point to run on top of OpenStack. And in terms of contributions, in the last probably six months, we've really ramped up contributions to areas like Heat. Mistral is another project that we're contributing heavily to the Tacker project as well. And I believe if I'm not mistaken, we just recently started a new project that we're starting with a community for root cause analysis. And I'm going to mess up the name, but I think it's Vitraj. Thank you. And so I think it took us probably a little while to get started, as with any large company getting through the wires and figuring out all the different IP issues took some time. But I think at this point, we're really committed to OpenStack. Tar. Thank you. With HP, like I said, we focus on the platform and OpenStack absolutely is the platform. So we have a couple of different flavors, distributions of OpenStack. So for NFVs, specifically, we have a distribution of OpenStack that's just meant for network workloads, helium carrier grade. Within the OpenStack distribution, our, I believe for the last three or four releases, HP has been either number one or number two and number of commits, number of reviews. So we have been kind of integrated OpenStack in our DNA, changed all our cloud solutions to be to be powered by OpenStack, both private managed cloud and so on and so forth. And then around OpenStack, we have a number of solutions, SDN controllers, our NFV, our all the components basically work. Besides upstream contributions, we're making sure all our products are validated with OpenStack. Okay, so what we have, we have two philosophies. One is bottom up, another is top down. The pain point is in the top down, not bound areas. OSS, BSS carriers are really affected by that. So we are doing that through the TOSCA and various modeling and all that. So that service modeling aspect of it to bring down on the product. Bottom up, of course, OpenStack is the king. There is no question, Wim Leven and SDN is another part of it where we are participating both in ONOS and the ODL, ODL for Enterprise, ONOS for the carrier grade. And our product lines all are mapping so that we are able to do in an open manners. We work with Ericsson, we work with Brocade, we work with Cisco, every one of them, we are participating in the open platform for NFV so that we can bring all these together as a company which is having such a workforce and such a large 200 plus people of us are participating in open platform for NFV. And OpenStack is the major upstream for us. So you go back from six to seven, Diablo onwards up to Liberty. We have got at least one module to focus every time. So we started with NOAA, we have done with heat, we have done with neutrons, cilometer and currently we are of course bringing edge computing so we are participating everywhere. We want people who are good at leading to lead and we help them, not that we cannot lead, but we want to make sure we fill in the gaps especially like in open NFV we have focused on testing so that products can be certified, tested and can be released to the customer for usage in the green field as well as in brown field. So thank you. So I don't know how many of you saw the previous panel but this relates to it. So the telcos, me as a customer obviously, we are interested in NFV but as far as I know none of us have actually deployed it in production. So what do you see as the challenges as to why NFV has not been widely adopted in the industry today? So what is that? Akash? Yeah, sure. We are seeing the challenge coming. So when we started with NFV, at CNFV we said that okay, CAPEX, it disappeared, OPEX, it disappeared. So right now it is the how do we enable the value chain so that the carrier really gain out of it. So the challenge has been that we say something and then it hurts us the very next time. So when we say, oh, we will reduce the CAPEX, did it really? No. Yes, it did to a certain extent, but it is not the solution. OPEX, yes it did reduce maybe 15, 16 percent. Now the new services that can be brought in, that is the key. So even if we start with a POC, okay, POCs end in POC, they really bring people together. That's fine, but at the end of the day you need a carrier grade, mission critical platform plus the VNFs, whether it is a VEPC or whether it is a VIMS, whether it is for the mobile or even for fixed network. So that's the challenge we are facing and getting the standards and the de facto standards like OpenStack converge is the most difficult part. We are, that's a challenge and that's, we are trying to address to see that both of them move closer to each other so that the industry can adopt based on platforms that are there from like fusions we are from. Yeah, talk. I think like the last panel was talking about the issues are threefold. They are organizational issues to be able to introduce this virtualization. The organization, especially the large telcos, they have to change their organization. Most of them are in the path of it. Some of them have implemented it which absolutely is going to help, but now the structure is being put in place. They are technological challenges. There are some very specific technology obstacles need to be addressed to be able to not just virtualize because NFP is not just about virtualization. It's the orchestration and automation that goes along with it as well. So some of those gaps that we are trying to be able to address. And the third one is just the operationalization or the support, new support structures that need to be put in place. There's no certification or standard body that's defining what SLA now that operators are going to be running their platforms with functions coming from different providers to be able to figure out for the function provider to sign up for a five nines SLA, what does operator need to be able to provide to the function provider so that the operator becomes a provider to the function provider. So some of these things, operational issues, technology and organizational barriers are putting through. But right now if you look, there's a lot of progress. And I think a number of operators, what we are seeing is at the cusp of going into field trials or maybe into production. Yeah, I agree with Tarik and Prakash I said. And in addition to that, I mean, I come from like OSSPSS side of the business and operations like Tarik mentioned is a huge thing. I think we still have maturity that is required in the NFVI and the VIM layer support for the service assurance and the F CAHPS side. And one of the examples is yesterday or the day before during the keynote, we saw the statistics about adaptation of various projects in OpenStike. We see Cillometer has been one of them, one of the early projects, but the adaptation is pretty low. And when it comes to telcos, these kind of things are extremely important and they are the last ones to be looked at by any community. So there is some maturity required there. And from from Mano's standpoint, which is another area of interest for me, operators are mixing and matching things here. I mean, for good reason, obviously, I think that's one of the benefits of the whole... I think we have one of everything. Yeah, so exactly. And the standards are not matured, which means we test with our own systems before you go out. And when you try to integrate with other things, there are issues. And these are challenges. They are not complaints, but that slows down the process a little bit. So I think in reality, these are the challenges that everybody has to face. And I think we made a good headway in the past year or so. Hopefully, things get more standardized in the future. I definitely think standardization is a huge issue. We don't have Bellcore setting standards for us anymore, which is a huge challenge for the providers. I think one of the other major issues is interoperability with existing systems. So telcos have a huge amount of embedded OSS systems, embedded BSS systems. They're not simply going to rip all these systems out. So that means we have to be able to talk to SNMP. We have to be able to talk to Corba. We have to talk to all these technologies that probably were defined before many of us in the room were born. But that's simple fact of life. Telcos are not going to start from Greenfield. And so when you combine that with the need to do things like service orchestration, which does not have defined interfaces yet, does not have defined specifications, it's really kind of demonstrates how early we are in the process. Things are moving very quickly. And I think one of OpenStacks' strengths is also one of the challenges, because there's more than one way to do it. No matter what you're trying to do, there's more than one way to do it. And you have to decide, do I want to use heat? Do I want to use tack or do I want to use NOVA directly? Do I want to use containers? And as an architect, I have to go through and make all those decisions for every single project. And it's a huge challenge. Sometimes it's easier to have a small tool set and have more restrictions. But that's not what we have. We have many, many, many choices and that's one of the challenges. Yeah. So again, I think I agree with others. I mean interoperability and really carrier grade solutions that service providers look for, I think that is, that is maturing. And I think we'll see more adoption of NFE. I mean, firstly, on Juniper's side, we are engaged with the whole XCP, virtual CP. We are seeing a lot of interest and we expect some early deployments hopefully this year. Just talking about VNF, that's kind of my focus area. As customers are looking to kind of replace their existing physical firewalls to virtual firewalls, I think there is some more work that needs to happen to bring the same level of performance and functionality in the NFE environment. So for example, today virtual firewalls cannot get to that level of performance. So I think as an industry, we need to evolve to more of a scale up, like how do we get more from a single virtual solution as well as how can we scale out. So with an open stack, things like auto scaling and all needs to improve so we can distribute the load. I think many good points have been covered. So from a challenge point of I don't see this as a challenge. I think we are a lot of things work in progress. I think a lot of ground has been covered, particularly on the compute side. I think we have spent a lot of effort in bringing the feature set that's sort of career grade, if I may use the term. But we got to finish the job. I think we have a lot of effort went into NOVA in making the VNFs to be performed as well it's supposed to, so that it can match the performance of a physical. But we got to finish the job. I guess that's where we got to focus. I mean that's what I see as a challenge. And there is more work to be done in the orchestration. I guess again we have taken initial steps. I think we got to finish the job that we have started that things are in flight. I see more that as in progress than a challenge at this point. Thank you. So here's another one. I think we all agreed and again we mentioned this at the previous panel. There's some gaping obvious holes in the stack when it comes to being an NFE platform. So what do you see as the missing capabilities and what are you doing about it? So maybe touch base on the thing that I mentioned. So one thing again in the last three cycles I can see we have spent a lot of effort in bringing the NFEI aspects of the stack up to career grade. That amazing amount of work that went into Nova particularly. So what I see that's missing is as we go up the chain, it's not just landing the VNF, it's the orchestration piece that's quietly missing. So if you go see how the Nova compute is supposed to be geared for an optimal placement, there are like n number of knobs, you need to place it correctly before it would perform the way it would. So we cannot expect like every operator to go learn those n number of knobs. So that's where I think there's a role for an orchestrator to basically simplify these things. We sort of need an easy button for all these amazing features that folks in Nova and Neutron for things like SRV have done. But now is the time to make those features easy to consume for the operators. And that's where the role for an orchestrator. I believe we are taking an initial stab using the attacker project again using a standard templates. But I guess that's one of the significant gaps that we need to plug. Attacker seems a little immature, undefined. It's getting there. I guess this is something we are iterating really heavily these days. And in fact, we have a lot of interesting sessions that went. We have a lot of ground to cover, but I think we had a very good start with the project. Yes, I think, as you said, I think a lot of work has been done on an FBI side, but I think we need to move up and all of the other interfaces that we have defined, we need to start looking at a standard standardization and the standard protocols. So all of these service providers who are basically looking for an open environment where they can plug and play, it becomes easier to mix and match different VNFs, OSS, and VSS solutions. So that's one. Also, again, on the firewall side, I think we need to look at how OpenStack can easily plug and play with different kind of virtual network functions and the ease of how we can do deep packet inspections. All of that work needs to happen. Security too. Security is a key piece of customers moving to NFE. I think a lot of work can be done there to enable our customers to be more secure in these environments. There was a comment made at the last session about what can the telcos do to contribute back, and I think one of the things that the telcos can do is really help with standardization of interfaces, standardize how you want these things to talk to each other, how you want to handle alarms, how you want to handle measurements. The fact is OpenStack has a lot of overlap between projects today. We have an application catalog in TACR. We have an application catalog in Mirano. There's things that Solometer can do that Manasca can also do. There's things that Heat can do that Sanglin can also do. Those overlaps really need to be kind of resolved, or at a minimum, there needs to be some coalescence around one, I don't want to say one way to do it, but a set of requirements and required interfaces that we can start solving these problems using these different tools and understanding what the telcos actually want. I'll just give an example of two specific areas that I can think of. One from an operational point of view, like I mentioned before, resource management, resource reservations, et cetera. This is being driven through again OPA NFE, like I mentioned before. Hopefully, we will have solid requirements there and that will translate into the WIM NFEI as well. And operationally, Doctor is another project that Ericsson is pushing in the OPA NFE. And when it comes to the gaps, we talked about it, but the neutron support for various things like Layer 3 and MPLS, et cetera. From a contribution point of view, Ericsson is engaged in the gluon along with a few other vendors and operators as well. So the BGP VPN project is something that we are very much interested in and contributing towards. I think I'll kind of talk and maybe Bob going slightly the other way. So there's, of course, everyone says that NFE is introducing a big change. And one of the changes NFE is introducing is that it's making telcos move away from interfaces that are predefined, where people on the either side write solutions to it, to moving into an API-driven ecosystem. And what I would argue is that overlap between projects, overlap between different things is a good thing because that means the innovation is happening at different places and you're not just constrained by one thing. So I like what Tacker is trying to do, absolutely greatest thing. Talking about promise, talking about doctor, there's other ways of doing these things. I think what we basically need to be able to focus on is there's the steady state production environment that operators need. And that cannot be, you cannot be looking at the shiny new things that keep on coming out, which may be six months, a year down the line. Is that we need to make sure that the production, carrier grade production quality solution, which essentially comes down to, essentially the deafcore project, those are rock solid. There are some capabilities that are required, like EPA enhanced platform awareness is required to be able to get most out of the system. So there's some more work needed in NOVA and Neutron to get those things. I mean, I agree that resource reservation or a little bit better resource scheduler is required. OpenStack has already taken some steps towards taking scheduler outside of NOVA, the sole scheduler solver, some work over there so that this scheduler is able to schedule based on the VNF descriptors, the network service descriptors that have been defined by the VNF providers. Operators choose how they're going to deploy and once these core capabilities are there, then we feel that you'll really be able to operationalize and let the abstraction work the way it's supposed to. So from WHOA's perspective, we have been trying to solve issues and what we have done is one of the main things we took up is from service provider point of view, service bundling, service chaining, those are important for offering the service. So we have embedded ourselves into Neutron, we have got the port chain, the service chaining, which is one of the key pieces and over and above it we are trying to do the modeling, like modeling of network. So simple thing is, is computing the network or is network the computing? So Scott McNally, you remember the good old days, he says, network is computing and so that's the key and so SDN, without SDN you cannot do anything even though we have NFV but the glue pieces which can glue everything together is the SDN with open flow, without open flow. It's a question of software defined networking. How we want to do it? Netconf you use, you use Yang model, you use whatever TOSCA, but all thing is modeling it the physical, modeling it the logical, bringing together all these pieces, use all that is available in OpenStack, whether it's NOAA, Neutron, Cinder, Cilometer, whatever it takes to get the F caps that our people describe here, that's the key. So we are trying to solve the problem and that's the key message I would like you to carry. Any carrier they know that it's not going to happen overnight, but we should be persistent in resolving the issues that are pain points for them. That's the key message from us. Thank you. We have about 10 minutes left so what I'd like to do is open it up to questions and I've been asked to have everybody stand in front of the microphone otherwise you don't get recorded for posterity. There's a microphone in the middle. Hi, I have two questions. One, can you please talk about your current adoption or what is the trend that you're seeing in the next six months? Second thing is it goes with the deficiency or lack of capabilities with OpenStack. The HA is traditionally a problem and something that OpenStack is working towards it, but with this career grade 59 requirements, how do you manage that or how do you bring up 59 availability given the constraints of HA with an OpenStack? Thank you. I can take it up. We are having a project called Multisite and we also have been working with Ericsson, the Kingbird. So these will address the requirement because the topology, if you look at a carrier, they have everything in XML files and they have all geographical regions covered under different descriptors and these descriptors have to be either imperative or descriptive. You need to go through that and automate and that's the key and therefore we have a project called Parser to allow transfer between different formats and be able to ensure that those are applied and they apply to the FCAPS part of it so that you can get the besides high availability, you also have performance reliability and most of the mobile carrier always want 99.999% availability which is the key and that's what we are trying to start. So there's two components of it, the inside availability and you know multisite availability. So inside availability is as you rightly pointed out, OpenStack has not made a statement on how do you make a highly available OpenStack environment but there are people and you know us included who have created, put a framework around it and with our Helion carrier grade product you do have 59 availability within a single site and then when you go to a different other site then the VNF needs to be able to, today the state of the situation is that VNF needs to be able to provide that multisite high availability and but because OpenStack has not put a stake in this and in a couple of weeks we have the OP NFP summit where we're looking at different ways of going about doing it and I would put a plugin for OpenSaf, Open Service Availability Framework that has a very robust service availability framework and I would argue and would love the community to look at another open source project, OpenSaf, adopt it so that it's a common framework that we can use to protect the OpenStack platform and then VNF can leverage into the framework to provide availability at framework level as well. Just want to add a few more things. So high availability should be all about in the full stack, right? Of course we need the VIM, NFEI should be earlier available. There are efforts going on in the Neutron to make for example the Neutron routers to be in the HA mode and a multisite is another way of solving on the compute side. I believe there is also need for the VNF itself to be deployed in an HA fashion perhaps using, that's where things around affinity rules or perhaps anti-affinity rules or even that's where smart VNF placement might play a role in my opinion where you might need to place these VNFs at different sites perhaps for disaster recovery, right? And you add another question, I think we didn't indulge much on that. So I believe you would, my gut feeling is we will see a lot of these momentum around VCPI would pan out I believe in the next few cycles. At least there are tons of demos you might have seen in the last couple of summits. I hope that will be sort of the killer use case for NFEI in my opinion. I think that's what I would expect to see in this transition. Yeah I think just building on that in terms of adoption, I mean personally we are seeing huge interest in virtual CPI which is running those services in data center or cloud or for universal CP where those services are run on-prem on a standard 86 hardware. So again I mean we are, I mean obviously customers are in different stages it's a spectrum, so customers are still starting, they want to learn more about it, other customers, bigger service providers, you can name them, they are in more advanced stages. So we do expect some initial smaller deployments, prediction deployments this year. Well let me just add in the telco world things just move slow, that's just the way it is. It's slow because it takes us a long time because you know when you dial in your cell phone you want the call to go through. Do you want to say something and then I think? Yeah I just wanted to ask the HA question. Yes I mean if there are gaps, some of them have to be solved by the VNFs themselves. But if there are gaps I mean that's what we are filling in. I think the best way to do it is instead of doing it in a proprietary fashion if we can keep the spirit of you know stack and openness in mind I think that would be helpful. So with that I think we actually have run out of time so thank you and I look forward to more conversations.


All right. Smart Chris in the house. This is quite nerve-wracking actually. Smart Chris in the building. So for the last couple of years I've been doing a lot of workshops and facilitating conversations leading to an outcome.  In 1987 22 young entrepreneurs started an organization called the Young Entrepreneurs Organization in US and Canada. Within a few years membership grew to Latin America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa. In 1996 they created an organization called the World Entrepreneurs Organization. Then in 2005 YEO and WEO merged to form entrepreneurs organization. This is known as EEO, a global nonprofit for entrepreneurs. EEO basically works as a membership. There's over 15,000 members and to be a member you actually have to have a business that makes over one million dollars in revenue. So why am I telling you all this? Well it's because I will be speaking today at one of the events. I've recently started a business and my business partner actually started and was president of the Vietnam chapter. So he asked me to speak about remote work. Today I'm going to facilitate a conversation between these founders about the world of remote work. I don't know how long I've been doing remote work but I've definitely been working on a hybrid model since 2015. Maybe not on purpose but I sort of fell into not coming to the office just because my company trusted me. So how am I planning to moderate this conversation between these founders? Good question because I don't actually know. All I know is that it's going to be a workshop setting where we're going to discuss and ideate on a digital whiteboard which I'm familiar with. Lucky me but how else is it going to go? I'm not really sure and I think the trick is here is to let people speak more, run them through some workshop settings, some workshop activities and then we'll see how it goes and hopefully that will provide me a really good summary of ideas in the room. My business partner basically told me there was two groups of people in this workshop. One, big fan of remote work, the other not so much. So how do we get to somewhere that both parties are happy and both parties have ideas on how to improve their working culture? I'm not sure, big challenge. So let's see how this goes and I guess I'll walk you through how I do it and subsequently what actually happens. So yay! I think I figured it out. Here's the plan. All right, let's jump into the computer and maybe we zoom into my face. We start at zero. I want to do a quick introduction about myself just to gain some sort of credibility and command some attention saying, hey, I'm not a rookie. I've done this before. Don't worry, you can trust in what I'm about to do. This is always really important to have a strong ish introduction and to tell them what your skill sets are and I'm sure that some of these people aren't going to be impressed, but that's okay. Just say, hey, I'm here and I want to lead you through this activity. Then we go to a quick intro number one. This is just for them to get comfortable with me. Also added an icebreaker question. What was your first job? That could be quite a fun question to ask and that usually helps people get comfortable and everybody's had interesting first jobs when we were kids. Then we actually go to the goals of this workshop. We're talking about the remote work. So the goals is to discuss the pros and cons and also ideate on some actionable things that we can implement in a hybrid environment. And then we'll go through some workshop principles. These are the ones from design thinking and they're pretty good to get the group started on the structure of this meeting, set expectations. Then we have the agenda. Of course, we've got to go through the agenda, so we're not wasting people's time so they know what to expect. All of that good stuff. Then classic warm up, just a bit of brain dumping. How many uses can you use a rubber band for? Really just to get them used to the tool and warm up so they know how to duplicate posters, delete them, etc, etc. And we can make it a bit competitive for these business leaders. Then we're actually going to zoom into the remote work topic and I want to start the conversation here with remote working models. There's a bunch that's been adopted by lots of different companies, so it'll be interesting to understand what they're doing now and why they're doing that. Then we're going to speak about the benefits. I think always start on a positive note in one of these sessions.  Why do people do it and why do they think it's beneficial? Then we scroll down to here, which is tell us your top two. And this typically isn't what we do, but I'm trying to facilitate this element of discussion. So while they note down, I think it's important to let the group voice their ideas on the two top things they think are very beneficial. Then we group the ideas together in something called an infinity diagram. This is really to isolate the different themes and then we'll have the group vote using these sticky dots just to see what the general consensus of the group is in terms of what do they think is the most important. And this is just the FYI. We won't like ideate on that. What we'll do is move to challenges of remote work. And this is basically the same activity repeated, right? They brainstorm. They do a round table telling us their top two challenges. Then they group. So isolate themes yet again. And then they vote. And this voting is essential because we want to know what is the most challenging thing, what they're experiencing, right? And this is yet again based on the group. Then from there, we can pick the top three and have them use crazy eight a rapid ideation technique to then come up with ideas on how to solve that, right? One minute for one idea. And hopefully this is always a really fun crowd pleaser activity if they've never done it before. So it's pretty good. Then of course, I will summarize number four to six and the whole workshop itself. But to close, I would like to leave them with some nuggets and I found a really good article on Slack and it was talking about remote work. They did some research. So I'm just going to go through the research in terms of like the numbers, executive love numbers. So let's do that. Go through the remote employee index, what the employees think, because I think that's a different take on this. And then the top challenges, which the employees have reported, right? Not just the business leaders. And then there's some key takeaways from that research and of course, provide a source link. So then they could go and read that and try and implement some of these things that we've come up with. And hopefully that will be an hour, an hour, half of a good an hour is a bit of a tight squeeze. Let's see how it goes. I just did this really quickly. So I don't know if it's going to work. Never spoken to an EO group before. I'm a bit nervous just because I don't know what to expect from the participants. Usually I know what the goal is here. Today, I guess I'm just making up the goal. There was not too much direction apart from a moderated conversation in a workshop format. So if this works, feel free to use it. I'll leave a link in the description to this board and hopefully you can use that. I guess three, two, one, cut to the workshop itself. Hey, hey, folks. How's it going? While we're just getting everyone set up, maybe I can just show you the awesome tool that Dave was talking about, right? Did lots of these sort of collaborative sessions aim to bring a group to a certain outcome, right? Whatever that is or facilitate some sort of discussion where we can agree on some things. Tell me your name, what you're currently doing and what your first job was if you remember that far back. Oh, two paper rounds. That's good. Cool. Wow. Impressive. Today's discussion is about remote work and is in the format of this design thinking workshop style. Don't know if you've guys have done it, but typically before we start sort of this session, we go through some of the principles that I like to talk about when it comes to these kind of collaborative sessions. So what does today's agenda look like? Okay. So this activity is really, really simple, right? So as an example here, who has the most ideas? Blue. Daniel in the blue. If you guys want to throw some of these wild ideas, I mean, what's the, what's the weirdest idea you got, Daniel? Don't worry. There's no winner or losers here. It's fine. You're good. So let's talk about remote working models. There's a centralized one. Everybody's in the office and then you have the fully remote. Those are your typical four. There's probably things in between. It would actually be really interesting for me to just get an understanding of where you guys are that there aren't any office aficionados or office advocates here. Everybody loves the office. Is it just the situation we're in? As there's a lot of us that prefer the office, I think maybe the next activity is not to talk about the benefits of remote work, but maybe the challenges of it. Like as we're living through it, we won't go for number five, we'll go straight to number six. I want you to list out as many challenges as you found while remote working, like running your company, things you've had with your staff, just all of those challenges. All right, so five minutes on the clock starts now. Well, that looks like we should get back to the office as quick as possible. Right? How do we group them together into their sort of natural relationships? Right? And then basically force rank them or force prioritize them. All right, I think we're pretty good, right? We have connectivity. We have one about tools, also a culture challenge. We have one about trust. There's the collaboration issue. And then finally, we have the working environment. And I want you to basically vote on the most critical problems you see. Cool. Everybody allocated their dots. Okay. So these are the top three problems voted by this group here, brainstorming, no culture and not working. And then what we're going to do is this rapid ideation technique on how to solve these challenges. Well, for brainstorming, you could say, hire Chris as a consultant. You know, that's a legit idea. Okay. So, you know, this is obviously a really short workshop. It is what it is. We just had limited time. But basically, what we did was we spoke about the different types of, you know, working models, what we're going through based on the challenges. And we said brainstorming, you know, the coming together of ideas, because we're not in person, the fact that there is little to no culture as we are all, you know, but by ourselves behind a desk. And how do you know that people are being productive? The answer is you don't. But how, how then do you try and make that transparent for the whole company and definitely for yourselves and, you know, the bottom line, of course, right? Lastly, I really want to talk about this research that Slack does. And this is based on employee data, right? So us as business leaders, of course, there's things that we favor, but also it's important to, you know, hear what the employees are saying about hybrid or, you know, remote work. Most employees think that it's great for work-life balance, right? But their sense of belonging just sucks as we talk about this no culture aspect. So that is reflected in what we said as well, right? And then finally, the key takeaway from this research is people prefer choice, this flexible sort of thing. Remote work is net positive, basically higher satisfaction for the workers and the office workers, but it's not for everybody. It really depends on your seniority, your role. And then, of course, relationship matters, right? As humans, we kind of want this connection. So that is it. That's it in a nutshell. Thank you, gents, for your time. I know this was super quick and maybe a bit all over the place, but I hope you found it useful. All right. Well, that was a really, really quick workshop done in like 45 minutes. Overall, I felt it went well. People were participating. They got into the workshop and started coming up with really good ideas. We missed the whole activity of the benefits talking about the positive side of remote work. I think we probably should have spoke about one of the things that's quite worrying is that these business leaders have been forced to adopt a hybrid working model, but they're not really used to it. And actually they think it's affected their business, specifically productivity, culture, and collaboration. Business leaders are still lacking trust in their employees. A lot of, are they doing what they say they're doing? We prefer office more just because we know what's going on. I think a culture thing is really important. Your employees' well-being and satisfaction will lead them to a higher productivity. That's just a given. That's research based. That makes sense, right? Yeah. That just makes sense. That is it. That's me planning some random workshop with entrepreneurs organization group, the Vietnam chapter. If you want to see more workshops and stuff, then you know what to do. Smash all them buttons till next time. Some random design thing. Peace.