Apples, especially their whole fruit form, are often recommended by nutritionists as a way to curb hunger cravings. In fact, one study concluded that participants who ate fruits in their complete form, not juiced or pureed, felt fuller and more satisfied. Can cats eat apples? The truth of the matter is, fruits are not part of a cat's natural diet. Cats are carnivorous and having too much sugar, yes, even natural sugar found in fruit, and a cat's diet can cause digestive or diabetic issues over time. It's ultimately recommended to not feed cats apples in large quantities, especially as a meal replacement.


I would like to invite everybody watching the live stream to also join me in the Q&A session. Some of you may have already scanned the QR code, but if you haven't, you can go to Slido.com. That's S-L-I-D-O.com and Slido.com and enter the numbers 0-0-6-1-7. So 0-0 and 6-1-7, that's today's date at Slido.com. So whether if you scan the QR code or whether if you are online, you can enter the questions and vote on each other's questions exactly like this. And as people have asked me questions, I will highlight them and the highlighted questions will become the topic of discussion. And after answering one question, I will just archive it and take it down so that we can keep interacting this way. So people raising your hand on this room of course have precedence, have priority over the online questions. So feel free to start asking questions now during my talk and just use the Slido platform to like each other's questions. So that was like the two minute beginning. Let's switch back to my slides please. Can I have my PowerPoint? So go back to the PowerPoint. Right. So my talk today is about finding facts in a world of disinformation, the search of collective solutions and emphasis on the collective. In open societies, everybody across different sectors have different roles to play. The government providing a safe and secure communication environment. The journalists providing investigations into what the facts are. And the civil society working on different issues, focusing on solving the issues in a way given different positions to find out common values. But this information crisis is a global threat to open societies exactly because it makes it very difficult for people to tell what facts are and participate in the collective fact finding process. And in Taiwan, we don't say fake news because in the Mandarin that we speak, journalist is literally news worker. So we have the same word for news and journalism essentially. So when we say fake news in Taiwan, it feels like accusing the journalist of producing bad journalism. It's very different from of course things that pretend to be journalism but really isn't. And misleading titles and all that. So when we say Jia Xunwen or fake news in Mandarin, it's very unclear what it's meant. And it feels like a thought on journalism. And because of my mother and father, we're all journalists. And because of filial piety, I have to pay respect to them. So I don't say Jia Xunwen. So in Taiwan, we say Jia Xunxi or disinformation. And disinformation in Taiwan, we have a legal definition for disinformation. It's not just a communication word, it's a legal definition. It's called intentional, harmful, untruth. And the harmful here is qualified to say basically harming the public, harming the public's ability to discover facts together, harming the democracy. It's not just harming the image of a minister. That's just good journalism, right? So it has to harm the public. And it has to be intentional, it has to be untrue. And that is the basis of our legal definition of disinformation. Now when we're tackling disinformation, we need to be very clear that Taiwan's core values are freedom of expression and the openness of society. According to the Human Rights Watch Organization, Civicus Monitor, Taiwan is the only totally open jurisdiction in this part of the world, actually all the way to Africa. And that is because whenever we see things like the disinformation crisis, we see it as an invitation for the sectors to work closer together instead of driving us apart. If we drive us apart, then there's a strong attraction for the government to infringe the freedom of expression using that as excuse, as we have seen in some jurisdictions. But in Taiwan, we always use it as an invitation to make the society even more free and open. Now I would like to explain our three methodologies to counter disinformation. The first one is called timely response. On average across all the ministries in Taiwan, whenever we detect a raising misinformation, it may not be intentional, it could be just a rumor. But if it's a rumor, it's not clarified within an hour, within the same news cycle, then the people who are intentional just manufacture disinformation out of it. So this one hour window is very, very important. When we see a raising rumor or misinformation, all the ministries are now equipped with dedicated teams to contribute our understanding of the context to the popular media in a way that is attractive, that is fun within one hour, so that people can tell the differences between the government message that has the full context versus a gossip which often lacks full context. But we're not taking anything down, right? We were just sharing our view of the world in a very timely fashion. So just use one example. And this is a funny one because this is our premier, our prime minister. So two photos of him. The larger one is when he was young and the smaller one is he is now. So he is now bald, but he has more hair in his youth, right? So basically the top says there's a popular rumor now. And the rumor is quoted saying, perming your hair will be subject to a fine of $1 million empty dollars starting next week, which is ridiculous, right? But we detect that it's been spreading. And so it says not true. And then the quote of a younger prime minister said, I may be bald now, but I will not punish people with hair. So it's very funny. And there's a smaller sentence that says what we have actually done is that by 2021, we're requiring the people who make perming and dyeing products to start labeling the ingredients in their hair products. That's all the government's policy. And it's very easy to communicate in just one sentence. But if you start with that sentence, nobody wants to read it, right? So you have to frame it in a way that's funny, right? And I didn't translate that to English, but the last part, the bald prime minister, what he's saying, the premier is saying here is that, but if you keep perming your hair many times in a week, your hair will fall off and become like me. So it's a humorous and expensive himself and it reached many, many people, right? Many people really just organically share these pictures just by the Facebook and Twitter and lines accounts alone. It reached a massive amount of people so that people become kind of inoculated. They still see the rumor afterwards, but their mind is already inoculated against the very existence of such a rumor. And we discovered that if we push this out within one hour, then it reached a balance. But if we only push it after 24 hours, then it's impossible. The rumor will already have reached everybody. So time is of the utmost importance here. The next thing, the second of the three, pro of counter-indice information is collaborative checking. So in Taiwan, the civil society, the social sector, there's a civic tech movement called GovZero or G0V. Basically, the social sector looks at all the government services that they find missing or bad or badly delivered. And because all the government services end in Gov.tw, so people in the social sector just register the same website but with something that G0V.tw. So if you change the O to a zero, you get into the shadow government that is done by the social sector. And so that is how people fork, meaning they're taking the government to a different direction, but it's always open source and free of copyright or patent restrictions. And so the people in the GovZero community develop this co-fact collaborative checkings like a wiki, wikipedia, where everybody can contribute that collectively identify the popular rumors and they work with the international fact-checking network through the Taiwan Fact-checking Center. And so this is a popular line bot. At the moment, I think 100,000 people have added a bot called Covax as a friend online. So the way it works is oftentimes this information works by provoking outrage, right? You see a picture. You think that you have to forward it out, right? So it basically says if you feel the urge of forwarding a rumor or misinformation, you can forward to the robot. The robot will not get upset, but the robot will rather go back to you and say whether this is actually clarified or not, whether this information or not, and all the clarification message is crowdsourced, meaning that people actually meet every week and talk in a way that is very friendly among the fact-checkers. And anyone is welcome to join. There's food, there's excellent drinks and things like that. It makes this information a interesting topic, just like people talk about their favorite Pokemon, right? They may talk about their favorite disinformation campaign of the month and contribute into clarifying it on a shared database. And this then connects to the Taiwan Fact-check Center, which is part of the International Fact-checking Network, that looks at the most popular flag to rumors on the co-fact network and then do a thorough investigative reporting style clarification report on it. And that is our second line of defense that is from the social sector. And so Align, the company, of course, took notice into this and actually supported a lot the social sector's work of essentially, just like you can flag an email as Spahn, you can now very easily flag an uncommon line message as potential misinformation or disinformation. So that's our second line of defense. Our third line of defense then is election and referendum law because the payoff is especially strong during the election season, right? So we see that there's a lot of people who want to influence through precision targeted on social media through all the sort of political advertisement. And because Taiwan has one of the most transparent campaign donation law anywhere in the world, we publish using machine readable format like a database or Excel spreadsheets, each and every campaign donation to a election campaign. So in the previous election, we have witnessed that people who maybe have, you know, influences on election using money, they prefer to go through advertisements rather than campaign donation because this is too transparent for them. But now we're not actually refraining from just saying starting next election, advertisements are going to be treated as campaign donations. All the advertisers are then required to disclose the funding source of their, regardless of whether their institution, traditional media, social media, paper media or whatever, disclose the source of the funding. It's like anti-money laundering. Every part have to reveal their true funding that sponsors them. And if any of them tracks to a external jurisdiction, then it's actually, of course, election interference then. And so this is our third line of defense and it takes effect only during election and making it a crime if there's a foreign-sponsored propaganda to do so. And so again, we rely on independence media. There's many independent media in Taiwan that just looks at the campaign donation records and very soon the political advertisement records and do a thorough media charting, relationship, finding all the different connections and so on. And it's the greatest thing about those independent media is that they all work collaboratively on GitHub, which is a website the open source developers use now sponsored by Microsoft. But in any case, what GitHub is doing is that it makes sure that the methodology, the tools that you make to make those analysis is by itself can be verified. If somebody makes a mistake in making the charts or things like that, everybody in the social sector can come in and look at it and find out what is actually the best way to present in a fair fashion the political contributions, whether it's campaign donation or advertisements. So again, independent journalism that talks collectively to the social sector is of utmost importance. Now I talked about three defense. Now I want to talk about three proactive actions that we are also doing. So one of the proactive action is actually just open government. I'm a minister that across all the different ministries and I can talk about any ministry's issues as long as 5,000 people petition online to talk about it. So we actually travel to you if you can get 5,000 signatures online. And we have a team in each ministry to talk to people who petition even for cross-ministerial matters. And I personally, this is my office by the way, I personally in the office in the social innovation lab in Taipei City provide office hours. So every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., anyone can come and talk to me for 40 minutes. I'm very easily reachable on Twitter and so on. And so anyone can really have a real conversation and ask what are things going. And what I have found that it is much easier if we explain the why of policymaking, the context of policymaking instead of just policies. And so every meetings I chair even internally, I publish the entire transcript after two weeks of co-editing of all the meeting participants. And so everybody can go to the website, the address is archive, A-R-C-H-I-V-E, archive.tw and see that since I become the digital minister I have talked to 4,000 people about 200,000 speeches and that everything is transcribed just like the legislative and the judicial branches. And the great thing about that is that then people don't have to explain the same thing twice. Everybody can see the context of policymaking that reduces the rumors and the budget and everything is also open for everybody to have a conversation about. Now the second line of proactive action is that we work with the popular messaging companies. Line I think is also pretty popular here and they just announced that they're part of the digital accountability best practice. So they're starting next month I believe they will take the co-fact bot and the time and fact checking bot and two other bots, the four social sector clarifications and built it in into its own product so that everybody can just very easily long tap or signal a message and send a message into the fact checkers. And so you don't have to manually add co-fact as your friends. Line will facilitate that by having a function in itself. And line also many of you maybe know that has a separate section called line today. It's like its own small media. And in line today there will be a special column just for popular clarifications. And so people can go to line today and see what the trending clarification is. Basically making clarification a fun media message that people can just proactively check before they see the disinformation on their end to end encryption. And the great thing about this is that the state doesn't have to read your end to end encrypted message because it's technologically not good to do so. It's just a rumors. But when people start suspecting that there's a disinformation campaign going on they can just flag it directly online messaging and for the clarifications from the independent fact checkers to appear online today. And so that is our second active contribution. So this is our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen talking to the line bear. So I have two more minutes and then we go to questions. So I think the third thing is that we also use public funding to film a series of very impactful and highly acclaimed. I think it's 95% on IMDB and even higher domestically, a TV series. And a TV series called The World Between Us talks about how the media framing works. Talks about how people in the media and doing journalism is caught between the need of real time reporting and the racing against the tabloids and gossiping and things like that. Difficulty of doing proper investigative journalism. The usual framing of social issues into controversies and things like that. And it's really, really well made. It's supported by public money in the public television and it's very popular. And after that the discussion around media literacy become much easier. And so much so that starting this August we're making into our K-12 curriculum. So starting from the first grade, from the primary school, the students will learn about critical thinking and media literacy, not as a class, not as two hours every week, but across all the different classes. We have handouts to all the different teachers, whether you're teaching geography, mathematics, or sociology or whatever. You can work with the kids on how to discover independent information online. And also on doing the media literacy, referencing the public television into the idea of a collective understanding. So this is the film, The World Between Us. It's 10 TV series. It's really good, it was 10 episodes. So I hope that someday it gets translated here. And so just to recap very quickly, basically you will understand that I see the disinformation through a epidemic metaphor. And I personally have worked back 20 years ago in working to counter spam and junk email. So I see it in a very similar situation. The spam and junk mail was solved not only by government regulation or infringing on free speech, but rather by everybody like Gmail and Outlook, Hotmail, everybody agreeing to add a flag as spam button so that people can donate voluntarily junk mails to a spam house, to the domain blocking list, to all the different social sector, any of us, so that we collectively understand the pattern of junk mail and do academic research on it so that we have facts about disinformation. And this is the same direction that Taiwan is going. And the public media, the social sector, everybody has a role to play in it. So that's my 20 minutes of contribution. And let's switch to questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Your Excellency. Audrey Chan. Can you please join me in the middle of the stage? Or you'd like to take a look on smartphone at the same time? Thank you very much, Minister, for your enlightening ask with what you have done. Can you just move to the middle of the stage? Yes, yes. So what would you like me to do to ask your question and integrate with the questions asking you? Okay, so let me flag up some questions. Okay. Yeah. You told us about your channeling of conversation, talking with people, and you tried to pave the way to encourage government, Taiwanese government, to have more conversation with citizens. How is it going? And what's the most asked question in ask authorization? Right, that's a great question. So I think the government is now having a lot more confidence. It used to be when we helped occupying the parliament in 2014 that people were very afraid of talking to 5,000 citizens. They fear that it will escalate and they will get misquoted, that they will get a lot of burden just by talking to citizens. But now, because the government itself has a system of, as I said, a radically transparent system of capturing the context of conversation, there is less fear about quoting out of context. There's less uncertainty because people have already voted on each other's questions, just like Slido. People are voting on each other's questions so that we only tackle the one with the most consensus already among people. So it makes sure that we don't waste our time answering a question that maybe only one person has, but rather focus on our energy and think that everybody cares about. And one of the most asked questions in our e-petition platform is about human rights. It's about how Taiwan can protect more of the human rights, like the referendum law that we just had a referendum, a real referendum. People have an e-petition that says, oh, you shouldn't have a referendum that impinge on the minority's rights. And when we find a petitioner, he is just 16 years old. Our environment is also very popular. A couple years ago, we have a very popular petition that says you should ban plastic straws in the takeout streams and things like that. And it's reached 5,000 people very quickly. And then when we meet with the petitioner, she's, again, just 15 years old. And caring about the plastic waste and things like that. And so I think the social justice environment are the two most popular things. And does it turn out that you also encourage other ministers in the parliament to be joining in a conversation and to respond to the questions from people directly? Yeah, very much so. I think that is why we have participation offices. So those are a team of people in each ministry in charge of talking to their ministers and figuring out a way to talk directly with people in a way that responds to people's e-petitions and people's ideas and things like that. And it's working really well. We have many ministries voluntarily sending people to my office to learn this art from me. It's not everybody, right? In town, we have 32 ministries. At the moment, I have 22 colleagues. So not everybody, like the Ministry of Defense have not sent anyone yet. But the ministry, they want to talk publicly and openly like culture, education, interior communication, justice, finance, and so on. They all have sent people to my office. And would you say that this is leading to open government of Taiwanese government of what you have been doing? Yeah, I think so. I think open government is not just about the government being open about getting ideas from the citizen, but fundamentally it's about trusting the people. If I trust the people, if people generally feel the government trusts them on getting their input, then they can trust back, right? So the government has to trust the people first. That is the idea of the government in Taiwan. And one line of your speech, you said that perhaps the government is so afraid that open society is become threat to the government. So how does that sentiment been reduced after you've been doing this quite a while? That's right. So I think if anyone here works in public service, so all my parents and grandparents actually work in public service, so I know something about how public servants think. So it's roughly speaking three things, right? The people in public service think about efficiency, how to make it more efficient to deliver service to the people. People think about reducing risk of how to make sure that their ministers don't get attacked from the population by some mistake in their policy. And finally, they also care about credit and personal honor, right? About doing the work greatly and getting recognized as great public servants. And before radical transparency, it's actually very difficult for the public service to truly innovate because if things go right, the minister can take all the credit. And if things go wrong, the minister can always blame the public service, right? So it's not in a very good position. But after radical transparency and direct conversation, if things go right, everybody recognized, the journalists recognized, the person who came up with the innovation and solution because it's part of the record. And if things go wrong, you can always blame Audrey. And so in this way, people are actually encouraged to innovate. So open and transparency also encouraged to have more trust in the government. Yes, it's radical trust, that's right. So let's now integrate with the live questions. The first one, what's your view on fighting fake news in our Asia style and the Western style, what's the difference? Okay, that's a great question. I think journalism in Asia and journalism in the Western world don't have any fundamental differences is about collective discovery of facts. However, in Asia, when we talk, for example, in Mandarin about gongshi, about consensus, it is actually of a different nature. And that is, I think, the main difference. Gongshi in Mandarin means roughly common understanding. So this is not something that is so strong, like a consensus you can sign your name on. But just something that is kind of, we agree to disagree, but there's something we can all live with. There's a general, you know, less violent debate. So we talk about deliberate. We don't talk about debate. And we talk about finding our rough consensus, not very fine consensus and so on. So we have a softer approach to consensus. And I think that helps, for example, the co-facts team, because in the co-facts social sector, of course there are people of different political inclinations, different fields, different expertise and so on. If they're seeking a very fine consensus, basically online, you know, the people with the most time wins, right? You can just keep trolling, right? But because what we are seeking is just a common understanding. So there's more tolerance in the common understanding of rough consensus. And I think that's then helps the journalists to add their own perspective into it. So this idea of a more, you know, rough idea of consensus, a more tolerant way of consensus making, I think is really good in Asia to get collective action going. Can we have more questions, please? Sure. So what do you like to deal with? How do you deal with media that spread fake news? Right, so everybody is media now, right? If you have a mobile phone, you are the media, right? So as I think it was McLuhan, right?  So if we see media, like social media or popular YouTubers or so on spreading information that is mistaken, we call out them on it, of course. I think the idea is not, we don't go to takedown. In Taiwan, takedown is something that is seen as a judicial branch thing. If there is a really infringement of copyright or whatever, there may be at the end, we saw in the takedown after filing lawsuits and so on, but it's seen as a judicial thing. And we're in the administration, so we're not doing takedowns. What we're doing is what we call notice and public notice.  So basically we become media. We're not taking anything down from the administrative branch, but we deal with media by having our own social media and self-media going on in the government itself. But information is very powerful, Minister Audrey. And the government must have known that they hold power in terms of spreading information. Have you found the case of state produce or sponsor this information campaign to benefit the government? Right, so I think especially during elections, there's always a problem, right? Because when, for example, our president now running for her second term, right? The separation between the judicial branch, which always have to be entirely impartial, and the administration, which of course need to explain what the president really has done in the past four years, this line need to be very clearly marked. And so if the government actually have any information in Taiwan as any institutional or social media that is directly or indirectly paid by the government, we have a law that says it has to say government advertisement on it, so that people understand that this information comes from a government funding source. So when we say in election, we have to ask everybody to declare their funding source in political propaganda and so on, we're not holding a double standard. We hold ourself to that standard, and now we're asking everybody else to the same standard. It means you really need strong and objective judicial system, the whole institution. Yes, very much so. Yeah. Also, what's next? How to raise public seriousness about this information disorder? Okay, so because I said people who raise hand have a priority, I have to be accountable to my words, so you can have my microphone, okay. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yeah, sorry. I don't want to be undemocratic and grab it from the floor, but no, one thing I want to ask you about is I've read extensively that Taiwan is a major target of disinformation from mainland China. And also heart cyber attacks, it's not a secret. Yeah, so how would you quantify the disinformation threat from the mainland and how can you deal with it and how do you see it developing in the run up to the next election? Okay, great question. So the reason why of course we have to pass the political campaign advertisement act is of course even Facebook itself has disclosed that they receive massive amount of funding from the PRC government on those period of time, right? So it's not a secret, everybody can analyze the money that they spent during that election period. And so I think the disclosure of honest advertisement is the direct response to that. We are of course also facing heart cyber attacks. It's not just disinformation which is more on the content level and can be dealt with actually relatively easily by the social sector. Heart cyber attacks is much harder to counter by the social sector alone. We really have to have a really good idea of where the cyber attacks comes from and a good relationship with white hat hackers. And so white hat hackers, which is a technology that's like a jargon, it's people who can break into a system, but they tell you about it. Black hat hackers is people who break into a system but they don't tell you about it. And so the white hat people are the most treasured information workers in Taiwan. The president herself said that the cyber security is national security and we guarantee for all new government projects 5% to 7% of budget just for penetration testing and white hat hacker empowerment.  You get to meet with the president or digital minister quite frequently and so that you don't fall to the dark side which has cookies. And so a good relationship with white hat hackers is our answer of being literally on the front line of cyber attacks. And that applies to a degree also to disinformation but we emphasize more the social sector's role because the requirement of training is less than hard cyber security but it's very similar. I think the second question is quite crucial. Yes. How do you encourage public to participate in crowdsource fact shaking? Yes, so the key to get people participating in any activity like that are three. First that it has to be easily actionable. Actionable meaning that you can only spend a couple seconds on upvoting or downvoting something. You can maybe spend just five seconds to flag something as disinformation. So making it really easy for people to participate and instant gratification that is very important. Second is about connected. So when people do this fact checking they don't do this alone. As I mentioned the weekly meetups, the meetings with good food and drink and venue and things like that making it a popular hobby of people to participate that is also important in the environment. And the third thing is to make it extensible. Extensible means that people in social sector when they do co-facts and things like that everything is open source. So everybody can build another system that builds off on it. For example, there's another bot on the line system called the Mei Yu aunt, Mei Yu Yi. Mei Yu Yi is another bot that you can invite to your chat rooms on the line system and they see every message that everybody sent but they forget about it so there's no log, there's no analytic. It's all open source you can check or set up yourself but they compare every incoming message with a clarified rumor on the co-fact database and if it's already clarified they just add saying oh it's clarified it's not like that and things like that. And so Mei Yu Yi is really popular because then you can correct the mistakes that your friends or families made without hurting their face. If you correct them by yourself they will hate you but now it's just a bot correcting them so it's better I think. And so just more creative ways to make things extensible in addition of being actionable and connected. These are the three keys of public engagement. I got the signal, I'm so sorry I got the signal that our time is up but I just have two personal, not quite personal. The one is technology company like Facebook, Google, Twitter they are part of spreading this information what should be mechanism by the government or citizens in general to have checks and balances of them. Right so actually the German NetsDG really helped us because we talked to them and because all my meetings are publicly transcribed so you can actually find my talks with people from Google and Line and Facebook on this particular matter. And basically what we were saying is that we think notice and public notice, we think a code of conduct is a better way, a multi-stakeholder way. But please implement it correctly. Otherwise we may be forced to do something like NetsDG that force those social media companies to do the takedown censorship by themselves. So don't force us to force you to force others on takedown. So because then they will incur a large amount of cost in just implementing the system and so I think they see it as kind of a better alternative to participate in this best practice of digital accountability. That's a bit semi-personal. Did you enjoy being hacker or being minister? Which one is? I'm both, I'm still contributing on GitHub. If you go to my GitHub account I'm still coding, right? I'm still maintaining the civic hacking projects. So as I said, I'm working as a channel between the movements on one hand and the governments on the other hand. So I'm kind of at the middle, at the Lagrange point between the two to make sure that people can culturally translate each other's ideas and voices in a way that fosters understanding and common values. And we all know that Taiwan is the first country in Asia to have same sex. Yeah, to have marriage equality, yes. And you are transgender minister. Do you find having open source has also helped in terms of advocate people to really support any big cause or any big issue like to support same sex marriage? Yes, I think so. Having an open debate, a good petition system, a system where everybody can see everybody's arguments eventually led us to legalize marriage equality in a way that is very unique in the world. What we have legalized is that we have legalized the bylaws, that is to say the rights and duties and all the benefits of marriage, of performing marriage and being wed, but not of the in-laws. So basically in Mandarin we have 16 different words for aunt and uncle and things like that. And there's a specific chapter in the civil code that talks about the related parts of the in-laws. And these become kind of confusing to people who are more conservative when after marriage equality gets passed. So we have a hyperlink act that says we enjoy all the marriage equality couples, enjoy exactly the same status as heterosexual couples for the bylaws, but we don't touch anything about the in-laws. And I think that is the kind of rough consensus common understanding that across generations people can accept and we're very happy to export it for example to Japan or to other jurisdictions which share a very similar civil code. One last final question. Is your IQ 118? No, no, that's actually a misinformation. My height is 180 centimeters. And for adults IQ, the test stops at 160. So I don't know, I don't know what my IQ is, but I know that nowadays if you have some apps on your phone and you're allowed to bring the phone to IQ test, everybody is 160. So adult IQ is not important anymore. What's important is how we reach common understanding and common values. You are being modest. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you to our minister all day long. Thank you.


While we're waiting for a couple more people to trickle in, welcome to Austin, everyone. How many of you folks are from Austin? Not that many. I spent about 10 years in Texas, and I just love the Tex-Mex here. Stephen and I were just talking about Papacitos. If you haven't gone to Papacitos, you have to go to Papacitos. Like a full 13% of the reason why I'm here in Austin is just to go to Papacitos this week. I'll probably go again. That's right. I still feel it from yesterday, but I'll go again sometime this week. I promise you that. So, let's get started. Today, you may have come here to hear about the future of the cloud or something like that. I'm going to talk to you about how to succeed with OpenStack in the enterprise. And as you can see, here's a picture of an IT admin. She's clearly very happy. So hopefully this talk will actually reflect the level of happiness that this IT person has in terms of succeeding with OpenStack in the enterprise. My name is Omri Gazeet, and I manage products and services for HP's cloud division, which is also the division that builds the helium set of products. And I'm going to do a talk in three stanzas or three acts. Act one is really about giving kind of a stark, honest assessment of where OpenStack is from a maturity perspective for enterprises that are trying to adopt it. And this slide looks a little bit the same as Boris's slide, which I actually liked from the keynote today. He talked about how there's completely do it yourself and then there's completely go outsource everything to AWS and there's a lot of white space in the middle. This slide's a little bit different from that though. There are really four different consumption models for really any type of open source software and OpenStack is no different. You can basically go all the way upstream and work upstream, right? That, there's a trade off there. It costs you hardly anything at all in terms of what you pay for vendors. But then in terms of effort, it costs you a lot of effort. And you can see the little muscle sign that my daughters like to use on their iPhone quite a bit to indicate strong. You have to be very strong. You have to recruit a whole bunch of upstream developers. And you have to do a lot of things yourself. So the next one, the next modality is consuming a distribution. And that is where Linux is today. No one really consumes Linux from kernel.org anymore. They consume a distribution. And we actually make one. We make software that you can use to run an OpenStack cloud. But as many people talked about this morning, it's not just enough to actually take software and run it. It really takes a lot of people in process to actually get an OpenStack cloud to work and a lot of people that approached OpenStack originally in the last two or three years as well, we'll just install the software and now we have a cloud. They didn't quite recognize the fact that they had to go develop a set of skills and experiences in order to actually run that cloud. And a lot of them got soured on OpenStack as a consequence. So even as a software vendor, I'm here to tell you, we're not quite yet to the level of turnkey where the cloud runs itself. You really still need to have quite a bit of expertise standing up an OpenStack-based cloud. Where we really feel like enterprises are successful today in their journey of adopting OpenStack is kind of on the right side of the figure when they consume a solution. That could be an appliance or it could be somebody helping you stand up an OpenStack cloud through professional services and or even helping you operate it, but it's still on your premises. We see actually a fair amount of success there, a lot of success. And moreover, enterprises that started kind of on the left side a few years ago had a bad experience are now coming back to OpenStack and trying to get again this time with the help of a partner. And that typically leads to a lot more success. And then all the way on the right side is when somebody is operating the whole thing for you. So in some ways that looks like a public cloud, but a lot of times that has a lot of unique characteristics. Like for example, the vendor can actually run your own cloud for you, a private cloud that doesn't have anybody else's VMs intermingled with your VMs. And that is actually very attractive to a lot of enterprises as well. So we see most of the success in OpenStack today kind of on the right side of this picture. And that's not to say that OpenStack won't continue to mature and grow and become more and more turkey. It's just that circa 2006, this is the state of the art. So the next stanza really is about some of the lessons that we learned building OpenStack based software over the last few years. The first lesson is really in deployment and life cycle management. What we did in our V1 product was we doubled down, we bet heavily on what was then the prevailing wisdom in terms of the upstream philosophy, which was build OpenStack on top of OpenStack. That was called TripleO. And we like to call these turtles all the way down, right? You're building an OpenStack on top of OpenStack and you could do that on top of OpenStack, getting that on top of OpenStack. You can run it arbitrarily deep if you want. And it makes a lot of sense from a computer science perspective, but pragmatically, practically speaking, it actually created a lot of obstacles to adoption, a lot of barriers. And that's not to say that TripleO isn't a great project. We have awesome engineers that contributed to that project and did really, really good work. Some of our best engineers worked on this. But when we looked pragmatically at how to deploy OpenStack and manage its life cycle, some of the big things that TripleO kind of had around it that got in the way were, for example, it was very opaque. You would go run the installer, so to speak, and then you'd end up getting a cloud. And it was very hard to change anything around that without doing pretty deep customization. And once you did customization, you lost the ability to update the cloud. And you certainly lost any kind of capability to do kind of minimal downtime or zero downtime upgrades. And so in RV2 product and beyond, one of the things that we decided to do was focus on Ansible as a deployment technology. And Ansible is not new, and it's an open source technology. One of the biggest things that we decided to do was focus on standard configurations, and that is basically pick the set of kinds of clouds that people could go deploy and really have them fall into the pit of success, so to speak. So we have a set of standard configurations, and you can actually customize those configurations by configuring them as opposed to making deep customizations that kind of throw you off from the path of righteousness, so to speak. And so just the fact that the entire deployment system is text-based, it's all yaml-based, means that you can actually go understand what it is, reason about what it is that the deployment system is doing, and you can actually go change what it's doing to fit your environment and still have a cloud that can be updateable. That is, every time we deliver updates, you can actually go take advantage of those updates, whether those be security updates or whether they be bug fixes. And it's possible to actually upgrade. One of the hardest things about OpenStack Clouds is upgrading from one version to the next. Most enterprises that we talk to that have taken OpenStack for a spin, they report to us that they have multiple versions of OpenStack kind of running side by side around different compute clusters. And with an Ansible life cycle-based approach, we've found that we actually have a very high degree of success upgrading our customers from release to release. And the last thing is you can really make it secure out of the box, right? Again, by having the standard configurations that turn on TLS for endpoint security, TLS for internal communication between roles, you actually get something that follows the best security practices. So you have a secure cloud out of the box. So second set of lessons are really about management. And life cycle management is also a kind of management. It's almost the day zero management, it's managing the actual life cycle of the platform. This is really about day one and beyond management. And in V1, really management is all about event collection and creating the console experience so that IT admins can have the visibility and the control over their IT environment. And in V1, community development is an iterative thing. We had the state of the art in OpenStack at the time was a thing called Solometer, that was also an event collector, although for a somewhat different purpose. It was focused on collecting events for the sake of metering. And the upstream community continued to be a little bit confused about what Solometer could be used for. And there are many in the Solometer community that wanted to extend it towards monitoring scenarios. We also had a project called Horizon that was a tenant console, right? That's the console that OpenStack developers can actually go up to and provision themselves resources. And it had some admin functionality that was a little bit bolted on the side to it. But again, we were thinking at the time as a community, we want to go evolve Horizon to be that management surface area. And some of the lessons that we learned is that we really need to treat IT and operations as a first class persona. And so that's why we invested pretty heavily in Monasca in Ops console as the IT Ops versions of those things. And that's not to say that Horizon isn't a great project, it is. We continue to invest heavily in it as a tenant console. But we have, for example, Ops console as the operational console for the operations persona. And likewise, Solometer is good for metering events. But Monasca is where our focus is in terms of providing deep monitoring. One of the lessons I remember we learned pretty early on, especially from deployments. I see some people from the engineering team in the crowd. I see Rajiv over there. He remembers this lesson. We basically had a single database often that kind of the people in the field that would deploy the software, they would use a single database, single MySQL database for both the OLTP store that kind of stood behind Nova and some of the operational services and for the event collection store. And same thing with the messaging fabric. And of course, those things are very different use cases. And we found that the cloud kind of ended up grinding to a halt very quickly as that database started filling up with all these events. And we were like, what's running this cloud? Is it like hapsters in there? We basically realized that we have to have a very different approach to these two very different operational environments. So we have a separate management plane in the product today that is underlined by a scalable store. We built Manasca with InfluxDB as the default provider underneath, which is a much different kind of database than MySQL. And the product that we actually ship provides Vertica free of charge, which is our columnar lightning fast database for being able to do real time queries. And that helps quite a bit when you actually build the technology on top of the right storage techniques, you actually get a much better experience here. The next thing you want is you don't want just an event store, you wanna be able to create standing queries on top of the event store that really tell you when things go wrong. And Manasca calls this an alarm engine. So we have that, again, as part of the community, we've built that into Manasca. And as part of the product that we deliver one of the things, one of the biggest lessons we learned was we wanna actually take the common kinds of failures and encode them and create prescribed resolutions for them. So that when we know some pattern often occurs in the wild, we wanna make sure that we have some prescribed resolution for that. And the ultimate in that is kind of this closed loop analysis. Those prescribed resolutions can sometimes drive the underlying lifecycle management to reconfigure your cloud. So that, for example, when you run out of capacity in certain places, you can actually go create new capacity through the lifecycle manager. So we really love that closed loop analysis. The monitoring system feeds a set of intelligent choices that drive the lifecycle management system. And then when you look at ops console, really all that is, is a visualization on top of Manasca data, right? So it gives you all the kinds of things that you would expect there. It gives you the ability to look at all your alerts and create new alerts and configure them. Time series visualizations of what's going on in your cloud. So that's really kind of the state of the art in terms of what we've been able to move forward in terms of the operations persona. Now the third lesson is insecurity. By the way, before we go to security, virus.exe, network access point over here, I love that one. That's the one that I want to connect to my laptop, virus.exe. There's always somebody that makes that kind of joke at conferences. But a different joke was in V1, really security was left as a best practice, right? And we wrote a really good white paper along with the OpenStack security upstream team about how you create a very secure OpenStack environment, right? But it would still read the white paper look. And going forward in our products, we really kind of tried to go in code security all the way inside the product and have it configured as secure by default. So TLS for endpoints, TLS for internal communication. Barbican is a very important project for us because it allows you to basically have an enterprise secure key manager that can manage all your secrets in hardware. We have one of these at HP called Atala, but Barbican is a very generic project and you can plug in any hardware based or software based ESKM underneath there. And so once you have that, now you can actually start doing data arrest encryption for your Cinder volumes. So all of these patterns start flowing from having some of these security capabilities built in. Another good one is Bandit. Bandit is a static analysis tool for Python programs that we helped develop along with a community in the OpenStack security upstream working group. And one of the cool things that we did was we actually put Bandit as part of our CICD pipeline. So that as developers are writing code, we run all of these the static analysis when we find all these insecure patterns for around SQL injection and whatnot. And we're able to actually fail the commit before it ever makes it into the product. So again, just being able to start using some of the tools that have been around and bringing them together to make the entire thing more secure. Audit logging, another very important one, very important part of PCI compliance. So again, having those foundations in the product enable you to run a whole bunch of different workloads on top of the platform. And that's really what we're looking for. We're not just trying to run kind of the non-production, the non-critical workloads. We're really trying to run all of your mission critical workloads as well. So with that, I want to transition to act three of the presentation, which is really about workloads. Let's see how much time I have, plenty. So platforms are about workloads. Platforms that don't support any workloads are not very interesting or valuable or useful. And in 2013, when I got involved with the OpenStack project, it was right around the time around Grizzly and Havana. Back then, the prevailing wisdom was that the kinds of workloads that you wanted to run on OpenStack were cattle. The idea that you have these, you build software, you build your services with failure in mind. It is failure of hardware, failure of the underlying software. You want to build it for resiliency. And back then, again, the pattern that we were trying to emulate with the OpenStack community was to try to replicate what AWS had. The AWS ethos really is about stitching together a very resilient platform based on a set of services that AWS provides. And we were trying to do the same thing. They had things like CloudFormation, we wanted things like Heat. They had things like Elbas, we wanted things like Elbas and so on and so forth. That was the pattern, that was what OpenStack was really gonna be good for. And then in 2014, something interesting happened. We started seeing, it became vogue to start running cloud native platforms on top of OpenStack. So things like OpenShift and Cloud Foundry started being interesting workloads to run on top of OpenStack. And the kind of requirements that we had on the underlying platform actually shrunk, instead of having to kind of take a dependency on all these higher level services, these cloud native platforms, all they needed was compute, networking, and storage. And there started to be a debate about what the best kind of approach for building cloud native workloads were, much ringing of hands ensued. But in 2015, another interesting thing happened, which was OpenStack started getting pulled the other way from running cattle to starting to run pets. And we started seeing features like live migration being kind of the most emblematic that landed in OpenStack and started becoming really usable. And all of a sudden, people started talking about running pets on top of OpenStack. And two years before that, it was like, if somebody said, I'm trying to replace my VMware environment with OpenStack, the community would tell them, you're doing it all wrong. Like OpenStack is for cloud native workloads. But in 2015, not so much, the platform started becoming mature enough to be able to do that as well. And of course, in 2016, we now have, over the last year, pulled OpenStack even further along kind of that additional features and functionality that enable even deeper scenarios like low latency, high performance scenarios around carrier grade. So OpenStack now supports a bunch of different workloads and that's not a bad thing. That's actually the way that you know that a platform is mature, is when it actually supports a bunch of different workloads. And so we actually love this. We don't think that there should be any hand wringing at all in the OpenStack community around the fact that OpenStack now supports a whole bunch of additional workloads. In fact, there's a lot of synergy there. So with that, I wanna go focus on, again, that debate between building cloud native applications on the left side, using a cloud native platform and using the Cattle approach. Now, I would say that neither is wrong, neither is right. You're gonna have success potentially with the different patterns. But if you look at the AWS approach, the whole ethos, again, is DIY by stitching together a set of services. And the approach on the right, what we think of as a Paz platform or a cloud native platform is delegate all of these things to a platform. So for example, if you wanna deploy an application and version it, that'll be cloud formation or heat in the AWS approach. For load balancing, you would have ELB or Neutron, Elbas, and so on and so forth. For services, you would have RDS in the AWS environment, and we replicated that with Trove. Queuing with Zacar and queue, and so on and so forth. On the right side, the Paz basically takes care of all of those details. Now, you have a trade-off there, right? You have a prescriptive system for doing things in a certain way, right? And so that takes away some of your control.  And if you look at how startups were successful with AWS, they built a bunch of platforms, right? In Netflix, that's a whole platform that they built on top of the AWS services. The state of the R in 2016 now is that we now have cloud native platforms that are mature enough that you can actually get out of the business of doing a lot of this undifferentiated heavy lifting. Just take the notion of zero downtime deployments. That's a very sophisticated capability, right? And a lot of startups have actually had to go build very sophisticated pipelines to get there. If you have that from a cloud native platform, then it actually starts making sense to take advantage of it. And the enterprises that we talked to that are most successful with their journey to cloud native development and cloud native transformation often choose the Paz approach. Now, you may ask, what about containers?  Aren't containers and Docker gonna replace Paz and kill that off? Well, we find that it's almost the analogous conversation with Dockercoin the term container as a service, CAS. And with the CAS approach, it's almost like the AWS ethos, except substitute the word container for service. A lot of these capabilities in Kubernetes and in the swarm stack are delivered through containers. You wanna do auto scaling. Sure, we have one of those. We have a container that can actually monitor all those things and scale out all the things. You wanna do log aggregation. We have Elasticsearch and FluentD and Kibana all wrapped up in a container that you can actually go deploy. But you have to stitch all these things together. Likewise, things like load balancing, you have a service in Kubernetes. Or in swarm, you just basically deploy a container that will do load balancing for you based on one of the technologies to do load balancing, right, Nginx and so on. So again, if you look at the Paz approach, all those things are built in. So at least in my book, the answer to the question is almost the same. If you wanna go get, fall into the pit of success building cloud native applications, I think you really wanna go take the Paz approach because that saves you a lot of the undifferentiated heavy lifting. Now, our Paz is perfect, hardly, hardly. A lot of the Paz's have actually started well before these technology layers solidified. So the good news is that the Paz systems out there are starting to react to that. And so you see OpenShift and Days and Cloud Foundry all take a dependency on Docker and RunC as the bottom layer. You don't have to go invent a new containerizer or a new wrapper around LXC, right? You don't have to do that anymore. That exists in the open source community and it's fairly mature. So let's take advantage of that. And some have even gotten to the next level and said, you know what, we're gonna adopt Kubernetes as our scheduler. Cloud Foundry still has Diego, OpenShift is now built on top of Kubernetes. So we're seeing the layers of abstraction move up. But that doesn't change the fact that you really do want an approach that kind of abstracts a lot of the heavy lifting, undifferentiated heavy lifting from you. Good, so just to bring that last lesson home, kind of that lesson is use the platforms Luke, use OpenStack to run a wide variety of workloads. It works. It's mature enough to now do not just cattle and not just running cloud native platforms, but you can actually run pets on it. You can do live migration with it. You can even run NFV workloads. I see some members of the NFV team, Rajeve for example, is over there. He's the dude that you wanna talk to about how to go do very high performance, low latency kinds of scenarios. But if you wanna go build cloud native applications, the moral of the story is also use a cloud native platform. So use OpenStack, but also use cloud native platforms. If you wanna hit the pit of success or fall into the pit of success, so to speak, building cloud native applications and microservices. Great, so of course this would not be a vendor sponsored talk if I didn't have a slide on the product that we actually just are announcing and are about to release. We have a product called Helion OpenStack 3.0 that encodes a lot of the things that I talked about in this talk. It has a lot of the capabilities and incorporates a lot of those lessons. Now I'm not gonna say anything more about this product in this talk. There's plenty of other talks that you can go to. If you wanna learn more about things like Monasca and some of the underlying capabilities that I described, it's security. We have a lot of community talks here. We have about 45 or 50 talks that we're participating in. And we also have a set of talks tomorrow that kind of go into more detail around the kinds of things that we're doing. So things about security and patterns there. Life cycle management and so on and so forth. There's a bunch of great talks. I think it's in this room, right? In this room tomorrow. So pretty much a day full of talks there. And the last thing I wanna say is I wanna kind of give a shout out to the folks who've created a really nice experience across the street in the textile building. It's at the corner of Third and what is it? Third and Trinity. We have a whole experience there that allows everyone to take a deeper look underneath the hood and see what we've actually done. So with that, I wanna thank you all for coming to this talk. I encourage you to have a great time at the OpenStack Summit here in Austin. And I'd love to take a couple of questions if you have some, because I think I still have a little bit of time left. No questions at all, there's one over there. So the question was, where can we find the Ansible Playbooks? And there is a repo on GitHub. It is, so anybody in the audience know, it's like github.com slash Healyon OS, I'm pretty sure. How do we do federation, do you mean identity federation? So it's interesting, so we actually ran a public cloud, and probably most of you know in this room, we kind of got out of our public cloud business late last year. But we had multiple regions, we had two big regions for example in the United States, and we had a single keystone that, a single logical keystone service, but we actually replicated databases between these regions. So we have a set of patterns that we know about that have kind of been very successful for us. The underlying OpenStack technology continues to evolve there. And we think that it's pretty ready to be able to do federated identity. But that's not something that we've actually built out of the box. That's something that you still need to do a little bit of configuration tweaking for. But we'd be happy to talk to you offline. In fact, if you go to the textile building, that's where most of the engineers are gonna hang out. And you can actually ask a whole bunch of technical questions there. It starts tomorrow, and it's really just right across the street, literally right across the street from the convention center. Sorry, HPE-Healian-OS on GitHub. Fantastic. The tweet machine is here. Mr. Steve Inspector. Any other questions? Fantastic question. When are we releasing the new version of the Healian Development Platform to go with Healian OpenStack? So one of the things that we did when we shipped Healian OpenStack was we shipped a product called Healian Development Platform. And the philosophy there was to build the best kind of IaaS plus Paz stack with Cloud Foundry being the multi-vendor open source ecosystem that we wired into for the Paz layer and then open stack for the IaaS layer. As we kind of switched to being a much more multi-cloud kind of focused in our vision, we decided to make that Cloud Foundry layer be essentially working on top of every IaaS. So it should run on top of AWS, it should run on top of Azure, on top of OpenStack, on top of vSphere, etc. And so we basically refactored the product. So there won't be an HDP as you know it that has things like Trove and Q and all of that that runs on top of Healian OpenStack 3.0. We sell a product called Healian Staccato, that is kind of the heart and soul of development platform. And Healian Staccato 3.6.2 runs today on top of Healian OpenStack v anything. And we'll run on top of Healian OpenStack v3.0. We're also in the process of basically taking all the greatness out of Healian development platform, things like the code engine and some of the other things that we're working on. And taking them and effectively shipping them in a new package that we codename the cloud native application platform, right? And so that is an upcoming release sometime later this year. But for now, the idea is to go run Staccato on top of Haas, Healian OpenStack to get that integrated IaaS pass experience. Other questions? Going once? Going twice? All right, thank you very much. Oh, sorry, one more. So the question is about integrating OPNV. And the answer is we have a whole product on that called Healian Carrier Grade. That is the product that integrates OPNV and NFV elements into OpenStack. And go find, again, the team that works on Healian Carrier Grade at the textile launch tomorrow. Well, thank you very much. Much appreciated, guys.


Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev met Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen on April 19. Aliyev praised recent opening of his country's embassy in Israel and positive development of bilateral ties. He said the two countries stood to benefit from cooperation in business and economic spheres, including green energy, smart technologies, and agriculture development. Israeli delegation included representatives from 20 Israeli cyber, homeland security, agriculture, and water companies. Cohen also co-chaired a business forum in Baku with Azerbaijan economy minister, Micah Yil Jabarov. Several executives of Israeli companies already in Azerbaijan took part in the forum.


Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Lauren Oland here in sunny Miami, Florida for Metro Connect USA 2022. Joining me today, we have T5 data centers. We've got Craig McKesson. He is the Chief Customer and Marketing Officer, Craig. We have Peter Allman, the CFO for T5 data centers. Welcome both of you. Thank you very much. Good to be here. Peter, let's start with you. If you could tell our viewers a little bit about T5 data centers and what you do. Yeah, we're a full lifecycle data center provider where we will provide development services. We will also do the construction on it and we will provide facilities management once the facility is up and running. So really providing everything that a company could need for data center, for data center really soup to nuts here is what we like to do. And I think our view is we really do it best and braid. We focus on the quality, the sustainability, and really what the customer wants us to do for them. We're very flexible and do whatever they want. Wonderful. Now Craig, I understand that you've reached a major milestone recently. Can you tell us more about that? We did. As Peter mentioned, one of our key differentiators in the marketplace is our facility management and operations group. And our tagline is forever on. We've actually expanded that to forever safe, forever on. And as part of our facility management group, we've actually just reached over 2 million work hours without a lost time incident across our portfolio of data centers. So on the FM side, we actually not only operate data centers on behalf of T5, but also enterprises all over the United States. We're currently operating about 55 different data centers around the US and about a little over 500 megawatts of power under management. Well, congratulations as well on that milestone. That's wonderful. Thank you. So let's talk about T5 data centers for data center and security and full life cycle solutions within the data center. Tell us more about the data facilities management practice if you could. Yes, as I mentioned, it actually, the root of our facility management practice actually started with our customers asking for us to come into their facilities and take our processes, procedures, training, all of those things that really keep their facility up and running 24 seven, 365. We saw an opportunity there to branch out and really grow that platform into what we believe is the leading FM services platform in the industry. Lots of momentum coming from T5 data centers. Peter, could you tell us what else you have planned for 2022 and beyond? Yeah, we've got a bunch of projects in different stages, really focusing across the whole market as I mentioned before, whether it's enterprise, hyperscale or government and federal requirements. We've got a couple of data centers which will be ready to roll in Silicon Valley, Chicago and Portland. And then a new project we've gotten Augusta, Georgia looking really for hyperscale fed requirements next to the army base there. And I think we're really excited about the opportunities there that we can work with the customer, find the right solution and build that solution for them and run it going forward. So really everything across the country, we've got opportunities across the board this year and we're excited about what we're doing. And we'll be watching. So Craig, where can our viewers go to learn more about T5? Well, we're very active on our social media platforms. Obviously on LinkedIn, so you can visit our company page on LinkedIn or at our website, www.t5datacenters.com. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Peter for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you, thanks for having us. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.