Discussing ideas and how to do them, not correct or not correct. Also, we cooperate a lot with books, books of people around the institute, especially Eingrang, the name of the person I am. She was a writer and also a philosopher. And we translated her books in German. Now we have five books of her. Three of them were translated, and two other are in German. But there are five. Now I'm working on one more, the operating zone. And also, one more opportunity is to attend activities that tend and tend to be out of places. Here, information about the next one. Next, we'll be in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.  Georgia was still calling you later than you are. How do you feel about that? I feel a big other international senior, educated for young people like you, as a student. The last time I was in Athens, I attended, I was very sweet, and I was in the last part of the session. There were very good sessions, many high level speakers, a lot of communication, and also, so exciting places. Athens, Amsterdam, maybe, maybe in the Netherlands. So if you want to have more details about yourself, you should go a little bit to the place, and go directly to the website, and then go check. A good point is that if your application will be good enough, I think this is going to be a good sponsor. Almost 100%, almost. So it's a good chance, very good chance, to go and attend such an interesting activity. But of course, to have good application, you need to know more about topic, about ideas, the concept, so you should really prepare yourself before you go to the application. So this is why we are here. We can give you some ideas, and also, we plan to continue activities in locally, the Georgia language, we can come and see again, and discuss one or another topic, which we can cover and have you cover. And so it's not only one, but it will be the challenge. How long do you want me to talk about it? Also, I can't think of any other. We are going to have the heads, related to this author and philosophy, which is objectivist, and we will have essay content. And we'll have prize cash money. So it will be one more motivation. So we'll fix rules in a few days, and other numbers, and of course, it will be... How much do you? Informal. So now, let's return to the today's topic. I already introduced a yellow look. It is economics and businessmen at the same time, practical businessmen, and he is also an outstanding speaker.  You have a lot of information, about many, many different stuff, even stuff. Originally he is from Israel, now he lives in America, and of course now he concerns about the situation in Israel, and last few videos about Israel, and if you are in the topic, you can read it and check his position. He will ask later, actually, the major topic. Come here, then. Yeah. Come here is a teacher. He works here in Georgia right now, and he is also focusing on personal development, people who will find themselves, achieve the goals, and navigate in the reality, so he is a specialist in this subject. Maybe he will check his website, and maybe he's actively sometime near future. Maybe he'll do the ice-cream. You're active. So, now, what you are going to do today? I was feeling the gap. Yeah, I know. Hello, I'm Tasha, I'm from the University of California, here, so the main issue, why our guests are here, so five I haven't mentioned the rest of the thing, but I would like to summarize. So, we've got a campaign, it's fair to know it works, in your general style, so that's why we decided to try everything is quite important, especially why. So, we want to be successful, to achieve everything we wanted, that's right, that's right, so we decided that this meeting should be connected to trying, trying, and trying. So, our guests decided that the issue would be number four, to achieve happiness. That's connected to our campaign, and I'm very happy that you are here, and thank you, so I will sit here, and I will listen to you, so thank you. Thank you, and I was very happy to organize seven, so we should find her. Thank you. So, now I will give floor to Kame, he will just give you a little introduction, and then, we'll have us, yeah. Also, in some words, thank you. Good afternoon everybody, it's really a pleasure to be able to be with you this evening, this afternoon, and what I want to do is I'm going to moderate for MC the event this afternoon, just so that there's some level of control. We'd love to just welcome you, we're gonna have our main event is the speaker by Mr. Speaker, Mr. Youngwood, he's gonna discuss things with us, and share some thoughts and ideas and philosophies for about plus minus 20 minutes, and then what we will do is we'll open the floor to a session of question and answer, okay?  Happiness, and you can tell me very quickly, is it an intrinsically motivated thing or is it extrinsically motivated? Very quickly, intrinsically or extrinsically? What do you think? The first one, always. The first one, intrinsically, personally, all right? Now, may I just see by show of hands, who doesn't really like to be happy? Oh, hands go up. We all love to be happy, obviously, right? There's something to do with the secretion of certain hormones and enzymes in our body when we are happy compared to when we are actually anxious and worried and those types of feelings, they are maybe. So one of the things that I'd like you to take away from this session today is there are going to be some new ideas, new thoughts about how we go about this journey of navigating to become really happy. We can't be happy all the time, naturally, but there are ways that we can deal with challenges and different types of obstacles that we face in life that will actually not deplete our happiness, that might be able to let us just navigate through them in a way that we've got the tool to be able to do that. So just if I may share with you my personal idea about happiness, and I haven't spoken to Mr. Harry Groot. In fact, I'm ready for the first time. So if there are any similarities or it's a pure coming to me, it just shows us that the stars are aligned. I think, and this is what I truly believe, that happiness is definitely personal happiness is definitely linked to your purpose. And for me, those are absolutely interconnected. You know, many people say, oh, if I had more money, I'd be happy. If I had a better car, I'd be happy. If I had something which was all outside of ourselves. But you know what? If you are truly living a purposeful, full life, then regardless of how much you have or what you might possess, you will be happy. That, I believe, is the most fundamental thing that is attracted to or attached to our sense of being happy. Now, I like the word joy, because joy and happiness to me are slightly different. They are linked, but they're slightly different. Happiness sometimes is determined by what we're going through and what we might be experiencing. But joy is a state of being. That's our absolute mindset. It's got to do with our emotional and psychological position at that time. So just a few thoughts that you might want to be pondering as you go through this afternoon session. We're really happy that you were here. And if there's anything that you might need, I think there's water outside for a little later in the afternoon to get thirsty. Right now, ladies and gentlemen, we also want to apologize for the slight late start. But without further ado, I'd like to invite or introduce you to our main speaker for this afternoon, Mr. Yamaguchi. Thank you, thank you. And thank you. And we're gonna, I think, agree on most things, maybe. We'll see. But it's interesting because joy and happiness, to me, are exactly the opposite, right? Exact opposite. Joy is the momentary thing that you feel. Happiness is what sustains you long term. So that's interesting. So thank you all for being here. And it's actually fun. And if you were refreshing right now to actually talk about happiness because the world is crazy and depressing and upsetting and maddening. And it's not just in Israel, but it's in Ukraine. And it's in everywhere. There's just bad things happening all over the world. And in that sense, I can't say I have much joy in my life. But I can say that I'm a happy person. And that happiness is something that pervades my life in spite of all the ups and downs and the horror and the frustration and the madness that goes on around. And I think it's a really, really important idea that we need to dig into. So I wanna start with this. I think the most important thing when considering happiness. And I consider happiness the state of a being, this long term state of being. Aristotle said in a sense that you couldn't actually know if you're happy until the very moment before you died because it's like looking back and seeing what kind of life have I lived. Now, I don't think that. I think you can tell at every point. But it's about a state. It's not about a momentary experience. So you might be able to have fun at a party but that doesn't mean that it's gonna add to your happiness or the happiness is the state in which you live on a long term basis. So I'll take, if you let me, we can do questions afterwards. Okay, thanks. I think the most important thing about happiness is the most important thing is to want it. Now we all say we want it. Everybody says, I mean you asked them and nobody raised their hand about not wanting happiness. Everybody says they want it. But are we really committed to it? And I think people all say we want it but are they willing to do what is necessary for it and as a culture, as a world? Are we oriented towards happiness? Do we orient the way we think about the world and we think about life towards achieving our personal happiness? And I think the world is aligned against us. I think our educational institutions are aligned against us. That's why I like the idea of having something at a university talking about happiness. And I think most importantly our moral code is often aligned against us. Our ethics are often aligned against us. Because most ethics, most moral codes, morality, good, evil, right? What is the good? The good is almost always defined as something outside of us. Something to be done to other people. How you relate to other people. And morality today gives us almost no guidance in terms of how to live our own life. How to live our life as individuals. I agree completely you will find happiness for purpose. But what is purpose? How do we define purpose? How do you discover your purpose? We get very little guidance in the culture. We get very little guidance from our morality about that. We're told by morality what's the most important thing in morality today in our moral code tells us what's the most important thing you should do or not do? It's all about how you do what? How you treat other people. But I think, I think, and this is Ayn Rand's kind of revolution, and this is going back to Aristotle. I mentioned Aristotle earlier. I think the most important thing about morality is how you treat yourself. Is what you choose to do with your own life.  Imagine if one of the principles of morality was find a purpose. For Ayn Rand, there are three cardinal values in morality. Three main values in morality. Reason, which is our tool for knowing, our tool for knowing the world, knowing reality, understanding it, and evaluating it. Purpose, and the third, which I think is fundamentally crucial to happiness, is self-esteem. And I'll talk about self-esteem in a minute. So reason, purpose, self-esteem. Those are her three cardinal values in morality. And they're all focused on how you can make your life the best life that it can be. How you can live the best possible life in this world. And the goal of morality, according to Aristotle, what was the goal, anybody read Aristotle? The goal of morality, according to Aristotle, is achieving what he called eudaumonia in Greek. I'm mispronouncing it, because in Greek it sounds completely different. It means flourishing. It means success. It means happiness. Conventional morality, as we have it today in our world, doesn't talk about morality and happiness in the same sentence. Indeed, morality is often the opposite of happiness. Don't do what's good for you. Don't pursue your purpose if, I don't know, somebody else has a claim on your time. Don't be self-interested. Don't do what you think is good for you. Do what other people, what's good for other people. Focus all your efforts on that. Now, maybe other people becomes part of your purpose, but then it's your purpose. It's your chosen purpose. Morality doesn't tell us you need that choice. Morality tells us your focus, your orientation should be external, should be on the other people rather than on you, on what's good for you and what will lead to your happiness. So I think the first thing about happiness is that you need to want it, which means you need to want your own well-being. You need to want your own happiness. That needs to be a priority for you. It needs to be something you really are seeking.  Happiness is an outcome. It's a consequence of certain actions that you take, of the values that you choose, and of achieving those values. So let's talk about the three values that I mentioned, the three cardinal values that I mentioned, as I think is most important. First, I said, is reason. Why reason? Why reason? Why do you think reason is an important value? It's a tool to explain to all the objectivity, exactly, but it's the only tool we have. The only tool we have to know the world out there is to use our senses and to use our mind and understand it, figure it out and understand it. There is no other way to know the world. Everything that we have around us at the end of the day is a product of human reason. Somebody had to invent a light bulb. Somebody had to figure out electricity. Somebody had to figure out how to build a building. None of us have the gene for that. It's not instinctual. And through emotions, you will not discover how to build a building. Even when they went from caves, our ancestors went from caves to building little huts, somebody had to figure out how a hut would stand, experiment, test, do what we do with reason. This is our tool. It's what makes us human. What makes us human, what makes us different than animals is our capacity to think. It's our capacity to observe the world, integrate its information, come up with new ideas, test them out in reality, figure out what works and what fails. There is no other way to discover the world out there. And you're not gonna be happy if you fight the world. If you say, I don't care what reality is. I don't believe in gravity. I don't like gravity. So I'm gonna jump off the building and fly. That will end your life very quickly, not a path for happiness. The first thing you have to do to be successful in life is recognize reality, recognize facts, recognize what is true. If you can't recognize reality, you can't deal with the world. You can't function in the world.  And guess what? As much as you expect to fly, you won't, unless you invent a flying machine. But then again, you're gonna have to use reason to invent that machine, and you're gonna have to take reality into account. So a commitment to reality, a commitment to facts, a commitment to what is, one of the ways to deal with the stuff that's going on in the world, the horrible stuff that's going on in the world is to recognize that you have no control of it. It is what it is. You have control over your life. And one of the important things in life to do is to be able to identify that which you control and that which you do not. It doesn't mean you don't get angry with it. It doesn't mean you don't get mad, particularly when it's human beings doing this stuff. But I can't control it. I've got my life to live. I can't completely obsess about this. I tell people, one way to move towards happiness is to stop watching the news. You can't change the world in that sense anyway. Oh, listen to the news, but just a little bit. We become consumed. Our social media feeds are constantly bad news. And news is always gonna tell you all the bad stuff that's going on in the world. It's drama. They're not gonna tell you about the good stuff that's going on in the world. And there's wonderful things going on in the world. But we're not gonna get that in our social media feed. Only hear the bad stuff. So reason, reality, facts are so, that's the beginning point. That's the start. Purpose. You've gotta know where you're going in life. You've gotta have an idea of what your goals are, of where you're heading. And happiness comes from achieving those goals, from moving in a particular direction. Whatever that purpose you have chosen, you are going to take steps in order to get there. And the purpose is typically not an automobile or a bank account or something like that. It's typically some kind of achievement that is always gonna be further ahead of you. You're always gonna be striving. But as you attain the goals, as you attain the values in the direction, you gain that kind of satisfaction. You gain that sense of, I can achieve things in the world. I can be successful. And from that I think ultimately comes this sense of happiness. So purpose, purpose is crucial. Most of us, our purpose, and this is an ideal, is our career, is the work that we do. You know, everybody says the most important thing in life is family, and family is important, right? But I always judge what people actually think is important and what's not by how they spend their time. Most people spend most of their time at work, not with family. And we're rich enough that if we wanted to, we could work a little less and spend more time with family, but we don't because it's not about the money. So why are we at work all the time? What is it about our career that provides us with so much satisfaction? It's the, what's that? The outcome. It's not the outcome in terms of money. Yeah, it's the fact that at work we set goals. We move towards achieving those goals. We push ourselves. We try it, we use our minds to continuously further who we are as human beings. And that process, that growth that we get in our career is where we are going to achieve the kind of sense of satisfaction and happiness. So career and taking that career seriously, taking your work seriously, when you see people who are really happy, it's people who've chosen careers and work that they really love, that they really care about, that they're having fun, they're achieving joy while they're achieving happiness, right? They're moments of joy. It's hard, the work is hard, but the happiness comes from the satisfaction of knowing you're achieving things and knowing you're moving in a particular direction for a particular goal. And that happens to us primarily again in our careers. Now I don't want to scare young people because particularly in the modern world, it's not like you're gonna have one career and it's not like right now you have to choose what that career's gonna be and if not, life is a failure. It turns out particularly today that you can have a purpose and you can change purposes and you can change careers and you can change your work and you can adapt. And you know, one of the things to be successful in life and to be happy in life is to learn how to deal with failure.  At some point in your life you will fail. You'll fail in relationships. You'll fail at work. You'll fail, your purpose might be wrong. It might not be, you might think you wanna do this but you know, I've had five careers I think or five different things. I've loved all of them, not the same. It's like everybody says they love their kids the same but they don't really, right? I've loved them all but not exactly the same. But everything was a step forward. Everything was growth and that's what you want. You want to live a life where you're constantly growing, where you're constantly doing something that's even better. That's even in a sense more fun. That's even more interesting. That's more challenging. You don't get to be happy unless you challenge yourself. Unless you push yourself. Unless you try really, really hard. You know, in exercise they say no pain, no gain, right? If you're not, it's not quite with happiness. You don't have to suffer in order to be happy but you have to work in order to be happy. You have to put in the effort in achieving your purpose to be able to attain happiness. And finally I'd say self-esteem. Now what do I mean by self-esteem? Self-esteem is not somebody from the outside patting you on the back and saying good guy. In America there's a whole self-esteem movement where we give ribbons to everybody and we give titles to everybody and we treat everybody really, really nicely and we think they're gonna get self-esteem. You cannot get self-esteem from other people. You have to give self-esteem to yourself. It's self-esteem. Esteem means valuing yourself. It's really, really, really important to value yourself. You're all you have in a sense. You are what you are. You're one of a kind. You're unique.  You're not outside. So valuing yourself is the beginning of any process towards happiness. And what valuing yourself means is knowing that you deserve to be happy. That happiness is something that's okay for you to be. That you deserve it. And that you'll do the work necessary to achieve it. It's knowing that in this world that we live, this crazy, nutty, insane, in some places or sometimes even bad world that we live, you can't survive. You have that confidence. I can do it. I can achieve. I can pursue values and I can attain values. I'm not horrible. I'm not dreadful. I'm not committed to a sinful life. I'm not committed to unhappiness. I can actually attain stuff. I can achieve my purpose. I can pursue values in this life. Having that confidence, having that sense of yourself is going to be so, I think without it, you can't have a good purpose and it's very difficult to attain it. Because again, to have a purpose, to achieve something, you need to be acting. You need to be confident. You need to be willing to challenge yourself. And to do that, you have to have that confidence that you can actually achieve it. Again, the confidence doesn't come in a day. It's something you build up over life. It's something you build up by challenging yourself, succeeding, and in a sense, patting yourself on the back. Don't be afraid to say to yourself, even though I know there are a lot of people out there who say this is not good. Don't be afraid to say to yourself, you did a good job. Good for you, you succeeded. I'm pat on the back. I'm gonna eat an ice cream today to celebrate my own achievement. So, achieve, recognize their achievement. You know how, you know people, I know a lot of people out there who achieve great things and then they go, yeah, it wasn't me. It was luck. It was this. It was that they'll never take credit for themselves. Not only in public, but in their own mind, they will never take credit for themselves. Let me tell you, those people will never be happy. They'll find excuses always to be unhappy because they'll always deny themselves and they don't take in that sense their own life and their own progress and their own growth seriously. They're rejecting and denying it and putting it to the side. I think one of the ways in which we attain happiness is by recognizing our own achievement, recognizing our own goals, recognizing our own abilities. So, reason, this is our tool. Purpose, we wanna have something we're striving towards in every action in life.  A lot of people out there are drifting. Drifting is a person with no purpose. They're just, one day they do this, one day they do that. They do whatever feels good. You know, maybe they even take drugs because drugs make you feel good, right? They don't need happiness though, but they make you feel good. So, they're drifting, they're all over the place. There's no focus, focus, focus. Doesn't mean that's the only thing you're gonna do in life, but at least at every given moment, focus on something. Something is the goal. And then have the confidence, have the self-esteem. Have value yourself enough to want to be happy, to want to be successful, to want to achieve. That to me is at the highest level the formula for happiness. Those are the kind of things you should be thinking about. And, you know, we can get into kind of some of the details and of course answer your questions. So, thank you. Of course. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to open, if you direct your questions to me, you can ask them to do that, we're all in the same space, but I just wanna control the room, the room, okay? So, I think you had something you wanted to ask us. What's the difference between the happiness and the reality, and how can you know when you're young and when you're not? It's a good question. And I think particularly when you're young, it's very difficult because I don't think you have enough life experience and you have enough content to be able to tell. Ayn Rand defined happiness as, this brings in joy. She defines us as a state of non-contradictory joy. It's where you can have joy without the contradiction, without the stress, without the anxiety, that often comes with it, right? So, when you're just, you're at the state where you just feel comfortable in the world. You're feeling at home in the world. But that doesn't come immediately. That is something that you need achievements, you need goals, and you need to find your purpose, which is hard when you're young, right? This is part of the angst that we all face when we're young is we're trying to struggle and figure out what is our purpose? What do we actually wanna do with our lives? But at the end, what you feel is this, is just state of contentment. But it's more than contentment, this state of, I feel good about the world. I feel good about my life and I feel good about the world. I'm happy, you know, I'm using the same word. I'm glad I'm here on this planet right now doing the things that I'm doing. That's kind of the state of happiness that you would achieve. That makes sense? Does that help you? And we'll unpack it like this, please. Okay, if there's a follow-up question, I'll just take the one from the lane, you know. We don't turn our dreams into the goals to do the things that we want, but we'll truly be happy. Because if you don't feel the sense, you don't know what happens next. So do agree with that, or do you think that truly that happiness is like worry, just like fear at the moment, but also there's a lot of ways to feel happy, but for my life happens, I think that I do a lot of things to be happy. I do feel happy in this moment, and then I'm like, thank you just like. What I do is happy, but not happiness. I feel happy in this moment, but it's not like, you know, the happiness. Sure. So I think when you talk about I feel happy in this moment, but it's not happiness. To me, that is joy. What I feel right now is joy, but what I'm lacking is this constant, you know, the state of mind, which is, I think, happiness over the long run. And I think that, you know, that's absolutely the case. I can feel joy in the moment, but it doesn't last and it doesn't fulfill and it doesn't give me anything, and therefore it's not contributing to my long-term happiness. Oh, because first of all, all of us feel sad sometimes. All of us feel some anxiety and some stress. I don't think you have to feel it in order to be happy, but you're gonna feel it because you're alive and things don't always go your way.  And part of the question is what your attitude towards failure is going to be. For many people, failure is like an end. Oh my God, I failed, I'm incompetent, I can't do this, I should just stop, life sucks, it's terrible. I'll give you an example. Why do you think there are a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and in a place like Israel and not a lot of entrepreneurs in Europe? I mean, per capita, there's a lot more entrepreneurs in places like America and Israel and not a lot of entrepreneurs in Europe. Part of the reason is the attitude towards failure.  And don't try again, don't do that again, it's done, you're out, it's finished. In America, in Silicon Valley in particular and in Israel in particular, failure is something you learn from. Okay, I failed, now what? What do I learn from this failure? And I try it again or I try something different but I learn from it because the assumption, the psychological assumption is you're always learning. You're always figuring out. Success doesn't just come naturally. It is no way for it to happen. Now, so you're constantly learning, the same thing with sadness and stress. Why am I feeling sad? What is it about reality or the world? What is the reason? I'm learned from that. I don't wanna be sad to the extent that I'm causing the sadness, I wanna get rid of that, to the extent that it's external. Can I get rid of it? Or is it just stuff that I don't have control over and then you adjust your estimation of that? So the idea is that you're constantly evaluating based on the standard, is this good for my life or bad for my life? And if it's bad for your life, you reject it and if it's good for your life, you embrace it. And look, you won't always know. So as you said, sometimes you think this elite happiness but it doesn't, absolutely. Part of life is experimenting. It's trying different things. What did you say this program is about? Try, try, try, try, try. Absolutely, we wanna experiment. We wanna... It's not a fact. It's not selfish. See, I'm gonna say something very controversial. I think to be selfish is good. If selfishness is properly defined. That is, I think selfishness is taking care of self. That means it's taking care of your body. It's taking care of your mind. It's doing what's really good for you in the long run. Thank you. Thank you for that. We've got a few more questions and I'm conscious of time. So he had something. You wanna do a follow up quickly on this and then I'll come back to you. Would that be all right? Okay, go ahead, so I'll give you the floor. I wanna say I'm in a long word but we are thankful that you're here. Thank you. Five years ago, I was at school. We had a lecture at the University. It was so informative. I was filled with happiness when I was already in university. It was opportunity to listen to you and lie once again. Thank you. And it's one more question. I feel like there are some words that seem to be defined by the hard work and you want that to happen. I feel like it's quite hard to define what the objective will happen. For me, it stems from freedom and it's quite connected to freedom because I was written sarcastically, John Paul Sartland, he believes that every being except for human has the opportunity to not help itself accountable for the old head thing that happened to them except human because we may not be responsible for the bad circumstances around that but we're definitely responsible for the outcome. And as I was written in Sartland, I didn't have time, I just got into a lot of it. I didn't have time to hear about it but he's saying, it was a sighting thing that hear about the ways that suffering itself comes to life and it's connected to life and there's always suffering in our lives and we should have the tools to deal with it. And to go back to Sartland, we are responsible for the outcome of bad circumstances. We should, and what you have been saying was we have to have the tools to not suffer any more. And so to have the freedom, freedom is hard to have as much as tools to have the better outcome from the bad circumstances and to have as much as tools in it to be successful. And to success comes with the way to achieve success comes a lot of failure, a lot of neglect, a lot of going and fighting against the odds and I mean a lot of stress generally. And if life is unending, I mean if suffering is perpetual, if it's permanent and it has always been destroyed with the fight that is quite bad, where is the part that happened? So I reject that. So I reject Kierkegaard and I reject Sartre. I don't think they're right, I think they're wrong. So I don't think life's about suffering. I don't think suffering is permanent. Certainly we all die, but death doesn't have to be perceived as the culmination of suffering. I think suffering is the exception, not the rule. I think particularly in kind of our modern world in which we're not struggling to feed ourselves in which we live pretty comfortable lives, suffering is not the essence of our lives. Indeed, I think the goal is not to avoid suffering. The goal is to achieve happiness, not the same things. So I wanna move towards the light, I don't wanna just avoid the darkness. Now maybe moving towards the light requires some avoidance of darkness, avoidance of suffering, but see Kierkegaard and I think Sartre implicitly assume that the very essence of life is the negative, the very essence of life is suffering, the very essence of life is darkness. We're always moving towards darkness. I don't, I assume that happiness is possible, that success is possible. It's just a question of how to get there and sometimes that success will require suffering, sometimes that success will require stress, but the essence, the purpose of doing it is not the stress and the suffering, that's the trivial part, the purpose is the happiness and the achievement that comes from that happiness. So Rand, Ayn Rand's whole orientation is positive. It's not about ignoring, avoiding pain and avoiding negatives, it's about orienting yourself towards achievement. So it's, I encourage you to read Rand's virtue of selfishness as a counter to Kierkegaard and Sartre. Right, we'll go with your question and then you for the question. You mentioned that you don't have a lot of suffering to achieve happiness and I think what is it? You have to suffer to know what is happiness and know what kind of thing happiness is all about. If you're not a sufferer and you can't feel it. I know that's what you think and I know what that's what a lot of people think, maybe even a majority of people in the world out there think I don't think it's true. I think it's way too negative. I think it's the idea that in order to experience pleasure, I have to experience pain, but that's just not true. We are born with the mechanism to experience pleasure just like we're born with a mechanism to experience pain and you can take a baby and before it's experienced pain, you can do something pleasurable to it and experience pleasure. Indeed, most babies experience pleasure before they experience pain. So the idea that we are determined by some negative mechanism, mechanism of pain and suffering I think is way too pessimistic. It comes from a philosophical context of a negative view of the universe and the negative view of man's place in the universe. I view it the exact opposite. We experience pain and pleasure and very early on we figure out we prefer pain to pleasure.  But healthy people prefer pleasure to pain and we strive towards pleasure and we can experience pleasure and therefore can experience happiness. In the context of yes, there's also pain but pain is not necessary to experience it and indeed, you can engage in an activity that has no pain involved and you're experiencing pleasure. Are you experiencing happiness? You don't have to inflict yourself with pain but again, we live in a world where people are not expected to be happy. People expected to suffer more than to achieve joy. That is kind of the assumption. I think it comes much from our religions. Our religions are very negative. We're born with original sin. We're born in kind of a context that is very negative to human life and human happiness and human success and I think that's what we need to break away from. That's just one theory. I think it's a wrong theory of human life. I think the orientation should be towards the positive accepting the fact that negative stuff happens. You can't avoid pain, right? I worked out two days ago and God, do I feel it right now, right? My legs are painful, okay? But am I letting that occupy too much of my mind? No, it's a consequence of working out fine. Go on. What I'm pursuing is the positive. That's the direction, that's your orientation, that's where you're heading. And again, you're never gonna avoid pain. You're never gonna avoid some suffering. Minimize it though. Fantastic. You have a question and then we're going over to the next. First of all, I want to thank you. Through? So my answer is no. You cannot achieve happiness through delusion and remember the three pillars of happiness, if you will. Reason, purpose, self-esteem. What's the first one? Reason. Reason is a negation of delusion. Reason says, facts, give me reality. I have to deal with this world as it is. I can change it. I can shape it using my reasoning capability and my physical action in the world. What's reality? That is. And that's not a delusion. And I know modern philosophy tells you it is, but it's not. We all see basically the same thing. We're all seeing the same thing. It's why when I pick this bottle up and you pick the bottle up, we all know it's round so we all pick it up exactly the same way and we all drink it because we all know it's water. You might think this is a delusion that it's water but it's a weird delusion that we all have it exactly the same. Nobody here in this room views this as Coca-Cola. And there's a reason for that because reality is what it is. And if you didn't have the tool to know reality and if we didn't all have the tool to know reality we wouldn't have survived as a species. A species that can't observe reality dies. Evolution takes care of that. So I disagree with most modern philosophers in that reality is what it is. And we have the tool to observe it and that tool is our senses and our reasoning capabilities. And delusion is fantasy. It's another world. And it will only, if that's your focus, if that's your orientation, then you will never be happy. Indeed, it is a guarantee that you will suffer because you live in an actual world and that world is working on you and you're working on it. And it doesn't care about your delusions. Your delusions will only cause you your actions to deviate so you won't be able to achieve purposes. You won't be able to achieve success. You won't be able to achieve your values and your goals. So very, very much leave delusions alone. I mean, you can do it like fantasies. You can engage in them once in a while and you can play video games and so on. But when you're serious about life, when you're serious about the world focus on reality and facts and what's going on around you. Thank you so much. Oh, just a second, sorry. We have, yes please. Yeah. I'd say this is the importance of having self-esteem. A building that confidence. Yes, once in a while life comes and bam, slaps you in the face, things fall apart out of your control or even in your control, you just fail. And this is what's important to know that happiness is still possible, that success is still possible, that the world has not changed. Yes, you know, you have not succeeded in it in this moment but the success is possible and you just have to get up off your feet and it's hard and start over in whatever it is. You know, again, we're going to fail. There gonna be things in life where we're going to fail at them and you've got to be able to have the confidence to start over and to engage and that confidence comes and it's having the sense of esteem for yourself. I mean, the way I think about it is my life is too precious. I only live once. Very short period of time, like I'm getting old and its time frame is getting shorter and shorter all the time. I don't have time to waste on self-pity. I don't have time to waste on being depressed. I don't have time to waste on suffering.  Get it over with quickly and move on, right? Accept the new reality, adjust to it and move on because life is too short and too precious and you only have one shot at it. So don't waste it. Everything in life is easy to say and hard to execute but that's what you just need to do. What I'd like to do is just thank you. I want to make a comment about that if I may. Sure, of course. But before I do, you just got a question that you have. Shouldn't there be a limitation to self-esteem? Yeah, I mean, I think limitation is reality, right? If you have a self-esteem that's detached from reality, you think, you know, you can be Michael Phelps in swimming, you can't. So that's a false self-esteem, right? If you esteem yourself where it's disconnected from the facts of reality, then you achieve this destructive egoism. But as long as you're attached to the facts, as long as you're attached to reality, as long as you're attached to what you're capable of, and if you want to be more capable, you realize the kind of work that you have to do in order to achieve that, then I don't see how it becomes self-destructive. The self-destructive when it's detached from reality. So narcissists, the whole idea of narcissism is detached from reality where the world centers around me. That's not egoism. That's narcissism. Everybody, what's that? Delusion. Yeah, and that's delusion, yeah. Thank you so much. I just wanted to respond. So first of all, I'd like to just comment that I've made here in today the first writing of what some of you do. So we might not share exactly, and I think we don't. We don't share exactly the same beliefs and on everything, but there are definitely similarities and things that we are definitely unifying on. One of the things that I wanted to just add to this is you have to be able to forgive yourself. Because what happens is, you mentioned we're going to fail. We're going to not meet the mark. Life is all about aiming and shooting for a mark, but you're going to miss it sometimes. And the biggest problem comes in where we beat ourselves up so badly that we are reluctant or unable to get up again and keep trying. And that's the point where you've got to say, it didn't work, I fail, or I miss the mark, but I'm going to forgive myself and you try again. You might pivot, as you said. You might just change directions, try to do something differently, learn from what you've not succeeded at and make a bit of time. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to kind of bring this to a close if that might be the case, because there is another event this evening, right? At the University of Georgia, where Mr. Yonan's book is going to be. Do you want it to start? Yeah, I can. Okay, take it from you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Today we have another lecture, by the way. It should be about self-fishing, as you already mentioned. If you are interested to listen about that issue, you are very welcome. It will take place in the University of Georgia, in Saqqa Square, room number 519, six o'clock. We are stopping at six o'clock. It will be like two parts. The first part will be panel, kind of included in some of our colleagues, and then break some food and then lecture of, yeah. Virtue of self-fishing is the title of our activity this evening. You are very welcome. If you have time, just join us in the place. Great, thank you. And of course, Skam, and try to apply. Thank you so much. Thank you. And by the way, I was just thinking that maybe, I can even text you more. You can. Thanks.


Welcome everyone to our panel session today on Ospos in academia or open source program offices in academia. And I am delighted to be joined here today with four great panelists who are all here to share their personal experiences, first hand experiences of running Ospos or Ospo like institutions in various different academic institutions. And so before I go any further I just like to introduce myself. My name is Claire Dylan, and I am part time executive director in inner source Commons, but more importantly I'm also the organizer for the Ospo plus plus network which is a community or network for those who are interested in creating open source program offices in academia or government. And I'm here today with Saeed Choudhury from Johns Hopkins University, please wave as I say your name so everyone knows who's who here so welcome Saeed. And I'm he's also joined by Stephen Jacobs from Rochester Institute of Technology Hi Stephen, Stephanie Leege from the University of Santa Cruz, and john wheeling from Trinity College Dublin. Lovely to see you all here today. So first we're actually going to go to each of our panelists and hear a little bit about their open source program office in their institution, how it how it where the origins came from and what it actually is responsible for. So say perhaps I'll start with you would you like to give us a lowdown of what's happening in Johns Hopkins University. I'd be happy to do that. Thanks Claire. So I lead the open source programs office here at Johns Hopkins University. I am based in the libraries, and the Ospo is therefore within the libraries as well. And we made that decision for two reasons. One is we believe that one of the important functions of an Ospo is the curation of open source software so that aligns nicely with the mission of the library to curate digital content. The second is that the library is one of the organizations that serves all of the academic divisions within the university so we wanted to make it clear that we weren't favoring, or, or maybe, you know, disempowering any of the particular divisions. You'd be surprised who's producing open software within the university, for example, we have the music conservatory where there's a very thriving active open source effort and community as well. Not surprisingly, one of the fundamental assertions that we've made is that open source software is a primary research object. And therefore it needs to be treated the way we treat open access articles and open data from a, you know, theoretical perspective there are obviously some differences that that span those three types of research objects. And that has the benefit of activating other parts of the university, like the research administration office, the provost office, the technology transfer office and so on. So when I say the Ospo is based within the libraries, it is working very closely with other units throughout the university that care about research research administration, and the translation of that as well. So, in addition to the types of things you might see in a corporate Ospo at the operational level, providing tools, services, community management, so on, to help raise the overall capacity of open source production within the university. We like to think that we're developing a center of competency and then perhaps eventually even center of excellence. There is the important three elements of the university research education and translation so we are also focusing our open source efforts in those three areas so direct support for research not only as a research object but as an object supports the research. In the educational sphere, we have been working with Steven Wally at Microsoft on a course called semesters of code, which is expanding into other places this fall including Ireland. And then we look at translation, which is how do you take the research and education and translated outside the walls of the university. So that is one of the places where we're connected technology transfer. But I will say we've taken a much broader interpretation of a translation. And there's a very significant component of partnerships and social impact in some of the work that we're doing as well and maybe we can talk about that a little later in the panel. Thank you so much Said for that overview. So Steven will come to you now and Rochester Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can give us an overview of your experience with open source program offices. Sure. So, um, it came to creating it's it's open programs office and we don't call it an open source programs office because we don't want to exclude the various other members of the campus right in fact what we refer to is is within academia and we're running a summit on open work in academia September 7 through 9 this year. You know we have as site indicated right you know we have people in music people and art people and all kinds of different practices that aren't generally considered necessarily software centers and aren't just open sourcing, you know, we cover help with CC licensing with over data with open science with all the opens right which is why you're referring to his open work so that we're inclusive across the campus. We come to this with 14 years of experience in teaching undergraduate students. Open source and engagement with the industry around open source so we have individual courses a three course collection that. In the broad sense it's called an immersion each student on campus needs to take one immersion that involves general education courses so that they're working outside of their discipline. And we have a five course academic minor in open source and most of that work is focused on being a member of community making contributions so and so forth rather than code right it's about how to become a contributor in two years ago, well really four years ago or so at this point we heard about what side was spinning up and we decided to do the same in terms of doing some kind of open programs office on campus mine lives organizationally under the VP research, and with all the entities on campus when we expect an open programs office to work with the it s folks and the libraries, etc, etc. We also have a fellowship program we're supporting roughly 25 faculty in building open community around their projects. That is built on a model we've run for officially branded for about eight years but really much longer called Libre Corps which takes our cooperative education students our full time paid interns and has them working on humanitarian projects that are open source. Those efforts in the past and things like contract with UNICEF to support their venture teams, build essentially summer work programs and charter schools teaching them to build 3D hands with the enable group, and that turned into a full time program within the charter school work with so we do that kind of work. And so it was taking that kind of structure of working with projects we built externally to RIT and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded us to bring that kind of work internal to our own faculty students and staff. That was brilliant and I'm hearing already that there's such a broad way in which you can actually interpret the responsibilities of an open source program office or an open program office in in academia, and what I'm loving hearing is as well this this idea of inclusivity and the diversity of the types of folks you have engaging with the program office as well. And so often people think about it just from a software developer perspective but it's wonderful to see this actually branching out and reaching so many more disciplines and we need more cross disciplinary innovation so that's all brilliant so Stephanie I'm going to come to you now so you see Santa Cruz, what's going on there. Well, hi Stephanie Luigi, I am at the assistant director of the Center for Research in open source software. And since January also the assistant director at our Ospo here at UC Santa Cruz and it's the first Ospo in the UC system, and one of the first at a public university. It really started because of our experiences with cross, which in and of itself is a research center. And that's, it's housed in the Baskin Engineering the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. And we started were particularly my, the director across and the director of the Ospo Carlos Maltzan started it in 2015 and it was a way of bridging a gap, the gaps between research and open source software. And it was really modeled and this is kind of important for how we kind of our history with cross is what led us to the Ospo that we have now. So we modeled the cross after the activities and success of Sage Wild, who is was a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz who created the open source storage system set, while he was doing his dissertation as part of his dissertation. And once he got, you know, graduated had a startup around stuff and sold it to Red Hat, he came back to UCSC really wanting to set up a some sort of system some sort of infrastructure to allow other students to replicate what he did. And he was able to do a lot of his work because he had the resources to keep working on his project and that was kind of what our focus with cross was. So he gifted Carlos and UCSC $2 million to get cross started, and we created as an industry collaboration research center so I use CRC. And it was really successful what we worked with a lot with industry members. And we really saw that open source projects are really a powerful catalyst for industry engagement. And we also saw like leveraging open source communities to significantly increase the impact of university research and a lot of what I think what Sahid and Stephen were already talking about with that. But we also did start to realize that some difficulties of doing this as a research center, as opposed to a larger organization on campus. So we were really doing activities that just it makes sense for a research center to do. And we were lucky to find the Ospo plus plus folks you and all the rest, and really gave us an understanding of what we should be working towards which was creating an Ospo. And so in, you know, working with Ospo plus plus folks working with all the universities that already had Ospo's. And then, thanks to the Alfred peace own foundation we were able to start the pilot project starting in this last, this last January. Cross sits just sorry the Ospo sits, it's still in the basketball school of engineering, just like cross, but we really do envision that it will be in the Office of Research, ultimately, alongside research development and the tech transfer to those that are engaged with industry. And to say we've, I want to point out that we've actually had a lot of success working with those folks in over the last five years six years with cross and definitely they've been very supportive of the Ospo process or creating the Ospo. So that's been I think that's been something we can talk about a little bit to about having the champions that you find when you're creating your Ospo. Now our chief role at the moment is to really facilitate avenues to amplify research and research impact and leverage open source communities. But we also are really focusing on filling gaps that include like creating more opportunities for students to learn how to productively engage in open source and we're doing that through coursework, we have fellowships for postdocs and I will talk about that more during the panel discussions but we have postdoc fellowships that aim, aside from seeding communities or open source communities around open source projects, also teaching students how to productively engage and interact with open source. We also, you know, based on our success with cross we definitely focus on the promotion of industry engagement with academic research and open source ecosystems. And also really just figuring out and this is something I think that's key to what we're working on in the next six months is figuring out how to best assign value to open source in academia. And I think that that's something that's been missing, like understanding how how important open source is actually a value from a value perspective to to university research. And yeah, and that's it. I'm happy to talk about all other specific programs in the rest of the panel. Thank you Stephanie so you mentioned there as well, working with folks in the tech transfer office so I'm going to come to john wheeling next who has lots of experience in that in that area and I know john's open source program offices I think one of the first that has been in academia in Europe. So john do you want to give us a little overview of what's been happening with Trinity. Nice to meet you all. And thanks Claire for having me. I mean, it's interesting where I'm lucky that everybody else has spoken earlier so I understand where your positions and, you know, Saeed spoke in particular about, you know, research education and translation so as Claire said, we are also is definitely based within the translation side where I'm in the technology transfer office or knowledge transfer as we like to say rather not to exclude all the people in humanities side of research. I mean, like, I met Claire, two or three years ago on this topic, and I couldn't spell Ospo, and then when she introduced me to Saeed and I understood. Well, that's we've been kind of doing this for the last 10 years. I mean, I have, I also have to say this, by the way, I am a coder. So I think that gives me some validation when you come to open source for, I think it can be important thing to understand the culture. I did use open source as a coder. I think I brought that into Trinity 12 years ago when when we when I started working in technology transfer. But yeah, we have been doing a lot over the past. For example, we're very focused in our office and spinning out campus companies, the Irish focus in research and innovation is very much about creating economic impact through high tech deep tech spin outs. So, for example, 10 years ago we spun out a company called software radio systems which I had to convince the powers to that be to allow open sourcing of a major body of software radio that had been developed. But my argument was that there was like a new software radio already out there so we couldn't compete with this so we have to join join up and that company has done very well they've been around for 10 years they're employing 30 people. They're probably going to be acquired soon I suspect. But even other than that there is a gaze with students for example, we have a great dropout students which is always a good sign in our book in innovation but I know that can cause problems within universities but in computer science as you know dropouts can be very complex but there are two Ukrainian actually two Ukrainian brothers called the Zara brothers Zed or I and four or five years ago did a fork of Linux, which now is 18 million downloads it's called Zara and OS, and they're doing very well you know we, you know we don't we talk to the library about what they're doing we, we talked to computer science teaching what we're doing but at the moment we're driving it through our own actions and engaging industry a lot of the industry engagement that we do a lot of the big multi nationals now wants the research to be open sourced. It gets around all the licensing problems it gets all around all the confusion I know Claire when she was in Microsoft would have been familiar with that but the big, the big, the big the top 10 tech companies that's that's the way to work so that's been really fruitful for us to engage in that way. So what I'm hearing is that, again, a very broad set of responsibilities often tied to either the institution priorities, or in fact, where the idea comes from and the fact that that's where perhaps instantiated, but, but, you know, I suppose to contrast the work of an open source program office in academia it seemed to maybe what's happening in the corporate world it strikes me that not only are you all perhaps looking at you know what's happening within your university or academic institution, but but you're also looking at this educational aspect perhaps with an additional emphasis, because you're building the skills for the future there. And, but this idea of tech translation or technology translation or and is so such an important one and the industry engagement so what I'm going to ask for next is just to maybe have a think about, you know, trying to explain what's the kind of breakdown of the effort within your organization and what kind of skills are needed within a NASPO in an academic institution to do that work. And because sometimes just to see whether there are similarities or differences or to give people an idea about what's required to to actually make it work. And so maybe we're going up to the direction of this time john what do you think I think you know the whole thing about technology transfer knowledge transfer is it's all it's a people sport it's about engaging with people. And I think open source has been a very good way for us to build trust with researchers, because traditionally let's be honest. Technology transfer is quite a conservative business, and they would have had a quite a negative view about open source 10 years ago or maybe even still now let's be honest. You know a lot of them come from large sciences they're not familiar with software in itself and they just say why are you giving away from for free so I found it if we convince researchers and teachers that we're actually we understand it we see the business models behind the community models behind it. We see the societal impact of good open source software cove it has shown that with, you know, a lot of the apps the main cove it up developed in Ireland was all open source so it was transparent privacy issues are dealt with so huge advantages. I can give one example of one researcher that I've only I've been here 13 years. This researcher I know was really anti technology transfer, you know, he liked to open source, but he came to me eventually to ask a question about open source because he saw we had an open source and he was doing a real cool thing he was doing a python version, a scratch type version of Python, actually which is really cool but when he saw that I was actually open and supportive and that our office was saying yeah that's great. We support you we provide you with the tools and agreements that can work to engage with industry are to engage with society so you know but it's a time thing and it's a people team. And so what I'm hearing is that that kind of background knowledge of the of the subject matter so like understanding open source from a technical perspective to work with folks who may be coming from a technical background but adding in the knowledge about both the industry how it works and the eagles of how open source works are kind of key critical skills to make in that work. And yeah so so brilliant so Stephanie what would you like to add into that or to comment on in terms of the skills that might be part of your group there and cross. Right for our experience and what I think really interesting from how cross came about cross was built and how the Ospo has now come about is that we really have a total real mix of skills that have come into play. You know Carlos who's the director across and you know was hope one of the co founders of Seth. You know had a very strong obviously a very strong computer science technical background.  You know very much on the technical side a lot of our our fellows who are the ones that are the incubator fellows postdoc all computer science or in some part part of you know the engineering school. And then you have me come in and I'm like a social scientist who you know doesn't know Python from whatever you know I don't have a technical background and I have learned a lot over the last six years, but I came in with more of a community you know like a community building skills and and those type of activities that I had from my previous work in a completely different field, but it really helped that I understood one how academia works because I've always worked in academics in an academic setting. I know how do how researchers need to function and and then also how communities get built around research and I think that that was those are I think that both of those are important and having the technical skills to understand kind of the coding and the individuals working on the developers that you're working with, but also having the ability to create and sustain and maintain communities and knowing when you don't knowing who to look for when you need help on those is also really helpful because I didn't come in with an understanding specifically of open source communities, but that's something that I've gained and working with folks through Ospo plus through a lot of different groups. When it comes to the licensing and a lot of the other legal issues, we work with a great advisory board. And that is, I find really critical having a good advisory board and a good set of folks in the office of research. Our advisory board is made up of key people for like experts in open source, experts on both open source projects but also the legal aspects and entrepreneurship as well. And then our, you know, I don't feel like that are from our perspective the Ospo has to have all of the legal understanding in in house specifically in the Ospo. As long as you know you have your kind of champions in your office of research or you have a really good set of advisors that that I think we what I figured has been a really useful thing to have for our Ospo it's not that you actually have to have like the director assistant director has to be that you know, voice or knowledge having some understanding of it is of course important, but always knowing that you have someone like in the office of research are on your advisory board that you can talk to and under to get a good, a really good expert understanding is I think really critical. I mean that's such an important point I mean, like thinking about one of the principles of open source being collaboration, it just goes to show that you're actually making that work in action because you know, because you're working on the skills of collaboration and community building you're able to pull on those resources and contributions from all over the organization, which is, which is fantastic to hear. And also, I suppose promising for people to get started that they don't have to actually have baselines and all of these things because there's often people to help right so. And so, thank you, thanks for that. You don't have to be everything all the time. Yeah, exactly. And we know there's few enough people who are who are good enough and even the collaboration skills. So, thanks to that Stephanie Steven what about you. Who are you working with who's part of the organization, what kind of skills do they have. So I have a solid advisory board, you know, as Stephanie says the person who runs your Ospo and academia needs to be the kind of jackable trades that Stephanie kind of laid out right the, and it's especially key now. You know, not only in software for a long time. The open source community has understood, they may not have done a good job of it but they've understood how important community development outreach, all those soft skills all the organizational skills all the communication skills. And there seems to be a much larger shortfall there in open science that there's this you know, neither an open source nor an open science open scholarship of an academia whatever open you want to call it. Sticking a license in a folder and putting your stuff on it and having it out on a website somewhere does not improve your impact or your translation. You need this person who understands where all the parts fit in and has the ability to roll it X to call if they need to. Like, I have written code I know how to write code but I'm a filmmaker and a media critic by training and every all the other work that I've done has always been collaborative. The artists and programmers are often not by training collaborative. And so being able to teach them how to pull the parts together and how to do the outreach how to set up the infrastructure to support that outreach. And that's really what we've been doing with our, our fellows for the past two years and and our fellows projects run the gamut of computational astrophysics to sign language early child education for deaf children around the world to a database of Victorian autobiography called the Victorian autobiography information network or vein, which is my favorite project with my favorite acronym right so it spreads. It spreads across the gamut if you're in an organization that works within academia and not only there but in terms of understanding your licensing and who you're working with right at. We have this kind of spectrum of people we work with right you know if you're at Google, right, everybody is an employee, and in theory, everybody follows the policy, right, boom, and university staff, same thing but you have these other two use cases right you have faculty, which kind of are but kind of aren't employees in the same way that staff are, they are mandated to distribute their stuff in some ways, but the university and often they would like the entrepreneurial opportunity as well so kind of gray area you have to work with them on and then at our university, unless the work that students are working on is paid for by a grant or by the university, they own it. So, they're an entirely different licensing keys my my students can roll in and I come out of the game program within our college computing. They can roll into a lab use all of our hardware all of our software all of our networks all of our software software licenses build their games. And then as long as when they incorporate they pay for a corporate license for the stuff they've already built. All they owe us is a thank you know, right and so there be holding to licenses in a different ways that varies a little bit but you have the spectrum of people where you can't just write one policy for all. You have to tell people about what would be the best practices for x y and z okay for software you want to use these licenses and you want to release things this way and if you want it to be permissive look to this stuff right. What about your data what about your hardware open hardware open data. If you're CC licensing your artwork or your humanities work right one of the licenses you want to use there and why so it's in many ways. By its very nature is much more spread out and as john indicated and as I'm sure Stephanie and say you can assert you know there are a lot of people reluctant to do things this way at this point in time. But nobody no longer really has a choice, right, unless you are self funding your own research out of your grandfather's inheritance, but it's a science foundation or somebody else, your stuff needs to be open. And as we see from recent in us. We see from recent solicitations from the NSF and from guidelines from the NIH and those places. They also acknowledge at this point sticking in a folder somewhere. You got to have data plans you've got to have, you know the sustainability written out as an open thing so it's, it's becoming more and more important. It's more and more important to refactor your tenure and your promotion policies around this stuff right it's most of the work that needs to be done in an open project doesn't end up as a peer review journal article in nature. Right, it doesn't so how do we recompense support promote and grow the careers of people who don't follow those traditional policies how do we adjust our policies to support it. So I'm beginning at this point I'm beginning to like really begin to think that you all are doing amazing jobs because again the scope is so much broader than some folks that might be working in a in a more boxed corporate environment. And, but the, but the breadth of the types of scenarios you deal with of course is so broad compared to again a corporate environment where it's kind of like what we build this so likely speaking most people are doing these kinds of of engagements and of course, to your point, in many respects you, you don't have the way to either dictate or put governance policies in quite the same way as an organization might so the challenge is even greater for all of you. And so hats off to the to actually succeeding in that kind of environment. So how do you handle that that broad and breadth of everything we've talked about so far in terms of what you try to achieve. I try to get lots of sleep. So, I'll build on everything you've heard so far and try to do that university and industry comparison throughout so there. I will make the case for having some core technical skills in your Ospo right so we do some of the things you would imagine in any kind of corporate setting we have DevOps people and software engineers so on supporting the software engineering practices and trying to raise the collective capacity and understanding around that we support the university's GitHub account we're about to sign the room for GitLab we run the detergent analytics and so on so tools that people need. And sometimes it's as simple as you don't have to pay for your GitHub account we can we can cover it through the hospitals. All the way to are you aware of what you're doing with your software who's using and who's committing how long it takes to do certain things. So those are very similar I think across any kind of entity that's thinking about software whether it's university government or industry but you know I've mentioned this before universities and companies of CIOs right. And again, they're probably thinking about a lot of same issues. I'm not aware of any company that's running a hospital like Johns Hopkins I'm not aware of any company that has students that you have to protect their student records right so CIOs and universities are very common things with corporate CIOs but they're very unique aspects just given the mission the players the actors in a university setting. So you heard about this the level of autonomy is quite impressive within the university, particularly for tenure faculty members so when we first started the hospital here. I met with a faculty member who was a chair of a committee looking at at basically tech transfer issues. And he said nobody tells me how to manage and publish my articles nobody tells me how to manage and publish my data. What makes the university administration think they can tell me how to manage and publish my software. And it's a perfectly good question in university setting that I don't think is true in a corporate setting. You can tell your employees this is what you will do. If I tell a faculty member what to do their software to be a very brief unpleasant experience for me. And depending on the nature of the faculty member maybe for them or maybe not maybe they might enjoy it. So they're just simply needs to be an acknowledgement that the culture the mission, the level of autonomy the types of players in the university saying is fundamentally different. The power of persuasion is essential in a university setting you cannot show them say this is the way it's going to be and Stevens correct the federal funders and even some of the private funders are moving in direction of requiring more public access they call it to people not necessarily open. But even those policies leave a lot of room for interpretation and universities to come up with ways about how they're going to do these things. And in reality, most funders work with the university community to develop those policies they don't make them on their own and suddenly announce them. I've heard from many program officers that we don't want unintended consequences we know there will be some. But to the extent we can work with the universities to figure those things out the better off we will all be so I do believe the gospel has some common foundations, primarily at the technical the software engineering type level. But as you move further and further up towards research education translation community building. It's very different in a university setting and I'm sure it's very different than the government saying and the reason I was drawn to hospital plus plus quite frankly is people with those backgrounds. People with the the scars that you get in trying to quite frankly, you know nudge the culture in an organization are the ones coming to these events sharing the stories and so on. I wouldn't presume to tell someone in corporate America how to do things because I've never worked for America. So, if you want to get things done in the university. It requires a very specific kind of understanding of the culture and context. I think a little. Right. Well I said policies have to be changed in academia that's three to five years if you're lucky. Right. So, at the moment, at Open RIT, you'll find suggested best practices listed on our website that when people come to us we steer them to here's what we suggest. There's a license that how you structure your repo is how you engage with people outside the university but we cannot say that that's policy now and it may never be policy depends on the university we don't get to make that choice. Right. So, if I can also just jump in there. Steven's correct that's typically the pace at which things move in the university, but there are external drivers or shocks as a system of the NIH has announced a data sharing policy effective January 2024. And I've been involved in a lot of conversations with a lot of people about updating Hopkins data retention and sharing policy which we're doing in roughly a year and a half a year, depending on how you, when you think we started federal agencies are going to start thinking more about open source software policy. So we have an opportunity to interact with them influence that process and accelerated but once the federal funding agency makes that kind of announcement, universities will have to respond and we do move faster than we typically do so there's opportunities there around open source software policy development. Thanks everyone for that. If I can just like kind of summarize then where we're at because you know what I'm hearing is that the requirements for folks in open source program offices in academia and has the base basics that oftentimes is there in the corporate world but actually some additional context that needs to have that folks need to have an understanding of in order to be effective there. And I think, I think we're all lucky though that the corporate world has done so much background in terms of the actual like resources that are available for folks that you know coming from groups like the to do organization where they're actually building an awful lot of resources that can then be leveraged in the context universities, and what it sounds like there's a lot additional stuff that can be layered on top of that for the specific context of academia, and to be able to to help your own journeys. And congratulations to you all on the work you've done so far to help all those areas and thank you so much for sharing your stories with us here today. Fortunately, we've come to the end of our time. But I want to thank again, Stephen and Stephanie Saeed and john for joining us here today and and I hope that everyone in Austin is having a great event and we look forward to hopefully catching you up in person next time. Thanks everyone, and goodbye for now. Bye bye now. Thanks, Claire. I think on your own or I'll type them for you I have a hand. Sir, do we have a microphone, or just just shout I can hear you. All right, so what is that question or right. So, I'm requesting two points, one of opportunity and one of apprehension around the differences in ecosystem role of academic auspice and academic open access community organizations such as like student organizations etc. Do you have more or you want us to talk about those or what. I'd love to hear your thoughts and the very like educated perspectives that you have in the states of maturity in your organizations. So what are the states of maturity of of student engagement and what else. There's between an Ospo and an academic student organization and kind of what that difference in the ecosystem looks like what opportunities and Ospo affords that a student organization does not and vice versa. I have typed it in kind of sort of mostly. Thank you. We engage with students as part of the Ospo again because of that situation that we have where students on their IP right. I don't have policy written yet because policy only comes from a very long academic process we have our best practices that are you can see on our website. And we point students specifically to the IP policy that says you know you guys own your stuff unless we're paying you or funders paying you. That said these kinds of things about licensing so on so forth we recommend that you follow them for you know your own good health in your project right. You know we often advise student production teams to incorporate you know and within RIT we have the Magic Center which is where a lot of the student productions come out of. And if they want to publish we're a studio and they publish through us they only take like 3% if they make money eventually but then they don't have to get incorporation you know processes and get lawyers and all that self done for pay fees. They're umbrella so that protected from being sued personally if there's an issue with the game or whatever so similarly the Ospo says look you can do what you want. If it's a non university funded thing but you really ought to think about using these licenses and having these read me's in your projects and so on and so forth it's insurance for you right. So I hope that answers the question there. In chat what I see Saeed saying is one of the interesting challenges in university setting is balancing the creativity of student groups in the operationalization of software engineering practices. The Hopkins Ospo has engaged student groups offering support for their work without constraining or dictating what they do. Having said that it's important to note that an institutional policy or funder policy needs to be considered for even student work. So Saeed and I said the same thing in different ways and I see there is a one minute sign so one quick question. Yes. So this might be a no op question but are there differences that you see in in the role of Ospo's in in academic settings between public and private institutions. If Stephanie were here she would be able to answer that better probably because Stephanie is the one of public university. Saeed and I are both in private one so let's see if Stephanie is still here. If I've tried to ping her directly we'll see if she pops up. I will say while we're waiting to hear back from Stephanie if this is a discussion that interests you. RIT is doing a summit around those issues September 7th through 9th. I've got handouts in my bag happy to pass one on to you so you can see what we're doing. Claire says I would note that there are major differences between all of the Ospo's we work with and I'm going to ask her. Are you saying that as Irish Claire or as international Claire? Saeed says public universities typically need to account for state guidelines or policies more than private institutions. Tony Wasserman who's in the virtual space says there are differences different meaning Saeed says but even public universities have to respond to federal private funder policies and guidelines. Claire says she was speaking as international Claire not just as Irish Claire. I think we're booted. I'm happy to continue conversations in the hallway. Thanks all. Also if this is of interest to you I've got a session tomorrow about the fellowship program run out of our Ospo and happy to talk about that.


The Air National Guard recently tasked the 149th Fireways Civil Engineer Squad to complete an innovative readiness training exercise with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The IRT program is a Department of Defense initiative exclusive to the United States and its territories that delivers joint training opportunities to increase the pilot readiness. The project aims to build 14 houses for use by Cherokee veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. So we got here, we had one house that was about 25% ready. It had exterior walls up and some trusses. So we finished the entire roof for one house to put all the shingles, everything, and close it, watertight, put doors, windows in one house and then we did another house. It was just a foundation, concrete foundation. So we built all the exterior walls, interior walls and next couple of days we'll be doing the trusses and getting that ready for the, to do the same process for that house as well. Aside from achieving their construction goals, the CE Squadron has greatly benefited from their time at the project site. Well, we're getting a lot of training, you know, this is a good time. We have a lot of structural stuff going on here and that's good cross-training. I myself am an electrician but, you know, being CE, we got to kind of know each other jobs here and there, so to be more equipped to handle stuff, especially in the deploy setting, you know, so it will be very quick for our unit to get the mission done. Reporting for the 149th Fire Wing, I'm Tech Sergeant Samasa.