Mae'r gweithio'r cymaint, mae'n cyrraed, rhai'r gweithio'r cymaint, a rhai'r gweithio'r cymaint. Rhaid i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r cymaint. Rhaid i gweithio'r 28 o'r Gweithio, nes i ddweud, 22 o'r gweithio'r Gweithio, arweinyddio'r gweithio. Maen nhw i'w bellig sy'n ddau o'r newydd oedda, oes yr adeithaire, oes yr adeithaire. Felly mae'n cychwyn iawn i'r adeithaire, oes yr adeithaire a'i fael y cychwyn iawn i'r adeiladau felly gwybod. Llyfr modernом yn dylwyddoedd. Ryebch chi'n gweithio eich cyfrifadol, Llyfr möchte. Llyfr, Cymru yn hynny. Ond, riliad i'r gyfoedd, fel yr hyn yn hyn yn ymgyrch llawer, ond rhaid i'r cyfrifadol yn gychwyn ffawr. Diolch yn fawr, rhaid ar yw'r cyfrifadol? Felly rhaid i chi, Rhaid i chi'n gweithio? Felly, rhywbeth yw'r cyfrifadol? Rhaid i chi? Ier, yw'r cyfrifadol? Rhaid i chi'n gweithio? Rhaid i chi?  Felly, mae'r gweithio arall yn y cyfrannu cael £25,000 ar y gyrsdiwyr ar y hefyd o'r scim. Dwy'r 105,000 yma, ar gyfer y cerddig yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y cyfrannu i gweithio ar gyfer ddiweddau gwirionedd. If the scheme was to prove popular, there were a few possibilities as to how we could fund it beyond the current year, and we would look at these. You can see the proposed application form and guidance notes in the appendices. Luke leads on EV charging matters, and he will also be leading on publicising the grant and supporting parish councils and community groups, so they feel confident as to what is a suitable location for these and how to deliver them. I think I'll leave it at that, but very happy to take any questions, of course. Thanks, Siobhan. Colleagues, any questions for Siobhan? Or indeed that matter, they remember finance. Siobhan. I'm somewhat naive about things like electric charging points. So can I have just a little bit of detail to understand him? Do you have to get an electricity provider's consent for this sort of thing? There's three questions here. Is there a need for a legal agreement to put the point in against a public building? And how do you actually pay, is it by card to the provider of the electricity? Or would it have to go through, say, the parish council if it was a parish council building? Those are the sort of detail I was just worried about. Let me see if I can answer these in turn. So the kind of chargers that we expect parish councils to apply for are the ones that are known as fast chargers. And that is fast as compared to the much faster ones. So although they're faster than just plugging in your car at home to a normal electrical point, they're not that fast. And you wouldn't, in that case, need to do anything in particular with the electricity. You wouldn't need extra electricity. I think I'm using very un-technical terms, but I think you know what I mean. And you wouldn't need a legal agreement to put the charge point in. The way that they usually work is that in terms of payment, there is set up with a payment scheme so that users of the charge point usually through a phone now, it's done in a way which takes the cost of the electricity that takes what they're paying automatically. So then that money is then provided to the parish council minus some admin fees. I feel like I'm not explaining it brilliantly, but it's set up in a way so that the parish councils would be looking to cover their costs of providing electricity. Does that answer your questions? It starts to be on the road of understanding where we're going. I think we threw you in a deep end there, didn't we? What we'll try and do for the rest of the meeting on this item, especially as we'll find some really serious questions that you're going to hate us for. Hopefully Peter's got one. Thank you, Chair. Following on from Councillor Ellington's question and Sean's explanation, I don't think any of my parish councils were nowhere to start with procuring a charging point. I think we're going to have to play dating agency between the parish councils and trusted partners who can advise them. So whether that needs to be factored into the cost or whether the providers will do that as part of the service, I presume we'll be taking a percentage of the revenues further down the road. Yes, I mean, it's probably worth mentioning that we have a couple of parish councils who are sort of well on the way to getting these. And it is, as you say, it's a question of getting a provider of the charge point who then kind of arranges all of the payment system. And the kind of electrical connection and does the whole thing as a package. And we are very aware that support for understanding what is involved will be essential. And so I know Luke is thinking in terms of he's already organised one webinar, which was back in March as part of our planet environment fortnight, but he's thinking towards organising another session so that it'll be able to, so that the process will be able to be clearly explained and people will be able to ask any questions. Thank you. Thanks, John. John, I think you put your hand up and in down again. Did you want to come in on this? Yes, thank you. Two things. First of all, a slight amendment. Can we include town councils in the report as well as parish councils? You only refer to parish councils. So can we make sure that we ensure that it's town councils as well? I think this is an excellent idea. I think people seem to forget. I think most people will think when they think of the charging points in villages, they think that it's mainly for visitors. But actually, an awful lot of people living in villages don't have driveways, don't have the ability to charge their vehicle at home. And therefore, I see these EV charging points as really being very important to those who live in properties where they can't charge their vehicle. And this gives them an opportunity to be able to charge their vehicle. So, you know, it's not just for visitors.  So, no, I'm very fully supportive of this and I hope the committee agrees with me. Thank you, John. Siobhan, I have a question which I hope won't be horrible. How long on average do you think it takes to charge a car for one of the... They're not the ultra, as you say. And I'm looking at probably a colleague here, Jeff, who might well answer this question. How long does it take on average to charge the average car, shall we say? And what happens if you stay on the plug-in and walk away and leave it longer than what it was charged for? So, and I'm looking through the report to see if Luke gave this particular detail. I think it is about sort of six hours, that kind of length of time. It does depend upon the car. It's certainly a reasonable length of time for a full charge. But if you were to plug it in for a couple of hours, you would certainly get enough to take you a bit further. I mean, I think it is probably questionable whether many people will use these for their main charging point. I mean, there are lots of faster options that are available in service stations and other places. Your other question was around what happens if you leave the car beyond its full charge. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't cause any technical problems. Go, Jeff, because he's hopping up and down here. Well, I suppose there is an issue in terms of blocking access for people who would like to charge after you've completed charging. And I think some of the operators start levying a sort of charge once you reach full charge. If that is a penalty for lingering too long. That was the reason for my question, actually, because I know that Melbourne are interested in this. We were raised the other night at the Paris Council meeting, but they have a local bylaw that says there's no overnight parking on their car park. So if someone came along in the evening to plug their car in, they would essentially go... If they didn't have a driveway, so to speak, they would then go into penalty calls, shall we say, when they came back the next morning. That was the reason I asked because I think there are some wrinkles, if you like. Councillor Cohn, Martin. I just wondered whether there's going to be a problem in terms of organisation for the trust, community trust and so on, in terms of getting planning permission, because I suspect that they would need planning permission unless it's perhaps attached to the building, if you're putting a post, a pillar or something, a charging point. Where as parish councils, I think it's probably covered by the local authority permitted development, but for those, how long do you think it's going to take? Is it going to be a problem if you've got a 12 month limit on expenditure? Yes, I'm really wishing Luke was here because he would certainly be able to answer that question. I wasn't aware that planning permission would be required for them, but I can't be sure on that. I think that is something we'll just have to take away, but in terms of spending it within the 12 months, if there is a reason that it's going beyond that, then we're always flexible with that deadline. It's really just a deadline to help move things along. Brilliant. Thank you, Siobhan. John, do you need anything?  I'm fine with this. I think it's a really good suggestion. It's something that we need to be doing. I hope that this is taken up by other districts and also by the county as well, actually, because I'd like to start the county installing more EV charging points, for example, on their lampposts. Hopefully, this might give them a bit of a kick to get on with this. Fantastic. Thank you. Councillor Harvey, Jeff. Yes, thank you, Chair. Of course, I'm not part of this committee. I'm just taking an interest as one of the vice-chairs on the Climate Environment Committee, but I did have some other points just to feed in. I wondered whether there's a reason why I might have misread this. This would be constrained to being village halls or community areas, if you like. For example, in my village, the post office is quite interested in installing a charge point. That's one point. Leading on to another point, it's interesting because hopefully everyone has seen the electric post office vans, but in our village, it's pretty much a local operation. We have two or three local posters who do our village and perhaps some of the surrounding villages. They have to drive their van into Cambridge every night and then back again in the morning specifically to charge it up. I wonder if there's an opportunity to do something with Royal Mail here. I suppose the counter argument is that will complicate things and Royal Mail should really sort themselves out. It's just a point. Picking up on Peter Sandford's point, I do think there would be a lot of advantages from trying to sort of guide our parish councils and limit the number of people sort of contractors bidding for this because one of the issues is that there are so many people in this market at the moment that almost whenever you try and use a public charger, you've got a sort of 10 or 15 minute delay while you download their particular app, work out how it all works. I think really that the best system is the one where you just show it your charge card and it's all done modestly. That's how the one just a few hundred yards from the council officers here in Canborn works, but it doesn't seem to always work. I do think a sort of toolkit of some kind of information that we could give to parish councils I think parish councils really won't know where to start with this. I wondered whether this is viewed as a sort of revenue generating opportunity for parish councils and do we need a sort of overarching policy on that? I think it has to be a sort of central compromise between raising some money for community funds or not making the charge so high that people won't use them. The other thing, again, perhaps not going or trying to constrain a number of suppliers involved I think is maintenance because I noticed that the National Trust at Wimpall have now got about 10 EV chargers and they've got a solar farm and battery system supply though, which is great, but the reliability is really quite poor because I go there every week to do park run and every week there are new ones that aren't working and other ones which weren't working the previous weeks that have been repaired. So I think the overheads in maintaining charge points would obviously be much lower in aggregate if there were a limited number of suppliers involved in this. That's all I've got to say. Thank you. Very interesting points there. Thank you for those, Councillor Harvey. A few points. First of all, so far as opening the grant to post offices and small businesses and such like. The two thoughts there, one is that I think where there is a really good commercial opportunity there are other possibilities in terms of how these can be funded. But I think as a general thing what I would suggest is that we proceed with this for the rest of this current financial year but that when we're looking towards what we'll do in next year and subsequent years we look at that and we look at the arguments around including a commercial organisation and not and there'll be various considerations. I completely agree on your point that it's much easier where the system is that you just show your charge card and that if you have proliferation of different app-based systems that is not ideal and I think that this very much needs to be part of the guidance that we provide parish councils in terms of their options. You mentioned a policy so far as revenue generation for parish councils and I mean we may be wrong but I don't expect that these will certainly in the near future generate large sums of money. There are some costs in terms of maintenance costs that need to be covered and so I think that's probably not something that we need to look at at the moment. Again you know where there are really good commercial opportunities it may be that a fast charger isn't the answer you need a rapid charger and some other organisations are sort of in this field in helping set those up. So those were the thoughts I had I don't know if there are any specific points that you raised that you want me to come back on again. Through you chair, thank you very much for that. I've got a couple that's come out of it actually if I may. Jeff mentioned about the village post office in my opinion but is there anything stopping the parish council setting up the process and installing it wherever they like as long as they have permission to do so it doesn't have to be against the public building but it is the parish council that is doing it. So sitting in the notes businesses are excluded at the moment and I have been able to find what can't be funded but if this is for the use by public the parish council will pay for it for the public to use just in another location away from their own village, carpark or whatever is that doable and the other question if I may is I can't find in here what the average cost of one of these units is I think the average cost is about 8,000 at the moment in terms of where their place of the parish council would need to own that land or if they didn't own it I suppose there might be a possibility of some legal arrangement around it it would certainly be a complicating factor. Can I come in here? I think like we have with the community chest we have to be careful to make sure that the asset that we are paying for is going to be available for the community for as long as it exists and we therefore have to make sure that the land on which it sits is basically owned by the parish council or the parish council has a long lease on it rather than the parish council putting it up somewhere where then within six months it has to be taken away because the land is sold and the new owner doesn't want it so at the moment I think we have to limit it to parish council owned land OK that's great but I just want to make sure that we are exploring everything and certainly saying it out loud Martin please come for the call I think it's a very good idea I'm just wondering how long it's funding if you're going to continue this in future years would the funding from the renewables fund be applicable to this or is this not considered really a renewable investment because it depends on who you buy electricity from what's the position about that? So the current funding is from the renewables reserve in terms of future funding that is one possibility but there are also some grants that Emma will be able to help me with the name of the grant it's the levelling up from money so there is a possibility of it being funded through that we'll certainly look at all the options Emma did you have that? Is that the right name? Is that the right name that Siobhan just said? I was going to say is it OZEV? No, OLED Do you have that? What's it called? The Ultra? It wasn't that when I was thinking of it there is some money that we've recently bid for in association with the other district council's government money it's quite a large pot of money and we're working out how to spend this and the name of it just escapes me at the moment but I know that the economic development team and I think some others from sustainable communities are looking at that. Okay, thank you very much. Jeff? Yes, thank you chair I'll talk about my own village again hoping that it might be typical of other situations around our village hall which I think would be where the obvious place to put it would be the only carparking actually belongs to the cricket club who are notoriously covetous of their carpark and I suppose would be sympathetic to this at all and the only option I could think that could work in Abington would be a charging post outside the village institute and I suppose that would involve putting a sort of conjure under the pavement to sort of reach it or possibly one of these pavement slots that they're using in Oxford so that the charging post itself is on parish council land but you can safely guide it to on street parking I wondered if that's going to be at all possible. Thank you. So that would, I imagine that would bring in some complications in terms of the county council meeting to give authority for that but it's something that I think we need to look into I don't think there's anything about the way that the grant is set up which would prevent that being the case but we certainly, if that works then I can't see why not. Thanks of all. Okay, Dan, we've had a good go at this I think. On page one of your agenda, you've got the recommendations so if you're all happy to go to the recommendations we'll go there and it's recommended that the grants committee, the advisory committee A reviews the proposed structure and the funding criteria for the grants that are out in the penalties AB and also agrees a recommendation to the lead cabinet member to finance to approve the establishment of the electoral vehicle charge point grant. So are we in agreement, disagreement? That's a unanimous agreement. Thank you very much. John, you have a green tick in that one. That's great. Thank you very much. Okay. We go now to agenda item number five. This is the community chest funding applications. Page 13 of your agenda to 24. Emma, is this you? That is, yes. Okay, so we have no applications this month but this paper is on the cost of living crisis adaptations to the criteria. So a little bit of backgrounds. So we know that obviously the cost of living crisis is having a major impact on individuals, families and businesses. This includes people with moderate to good incomes as well as those already in hardship. We know that the increase in day-to-day bills, especially energy and food, is pushing those struggling deeper into hardship and poverty. Those unable to keep themselves warm or feed themselves sufficiently may then develop health conditions which could then present more problems for our health services. So a motion was agreed at full council on Thursday the 22nd of September to declare a cost of living crisis. And one element of the motion was to ask the grants advisory committee to review the community chest grant scheme to consider having applications that demonstrate not only the well-being benefits to their community but also support for those on low incomes and make recommendations to the lead cabinet member for resources or cabinet as appropriate. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose time-limited alterations to the criteria of the community chest grant so that projects that provide benefit to residents and communities affected by the cost of living crisis can be considered. So the grants advisory committee is asked to make recommendations to the lead cabinet member for resources with the grant to the following four points. First one is expanding the criteria to allow parish and town councils of any size to bid for community chest grants that provide a benefit to those affected by the cost of living crisis. Second one is expanding the criteria to allow applications for revenue costs or overheads, for example, salaries, rent, advertising and promotional materials to be included for all projects that provide a benefit to those affected by the cost of living crisis. Third point, including a £20,000 ring-fenced sum for applications referred to in the previous two recommendations and it's proposed that this £20,000 would come from the integrated care system funding which South Cams District Council is administering and which must be committed by the end of March 2023 and that's for the purposes of delivering projects that provide a benefit to those affected by the cost of living crisis. And last and then the fourth point is reviewing these changes to the criteria at the end of March 2023 with a view to assessing whether continued funding is needed to support the cost of living work or whether the changes to the criteria should revert back to the current position. Regarding the extra £20,000 this ring-fenced funding like I said it comes from a successful funding bid made by the council to the integrated care system and the total award being £220,000 to develop a range of projects to mitigate the impact of rising fuel prices on health inequality. So communications and any decision to amend the criteria would include a press release and all other usual comms channels including social media, direct communication with parish and town councils and community groups and organisations. And just a few examples that we've come up with are projects like repair cafes, time banking projects, lunch clubs, community support initiatives that provide food, activities and support services setting up or running of a group or charity where people can obtain free furniture, clothing, food and toys and establishing or building the capacity of food hubs, food banks or community fridges. Guidant notes and criteria including the changes that I've just talked about have been highlighted in grey in Appendix A and this is to reflect the recommendations in this paper. All other criteria such as the upper funding limit, monitoring requirements and the need to return and spend funds would remain in place. And if the committee reject these recommendations we would welcome any alternatives to support the delivery of the commitment made at full council on 22 September. Yes, I'm not welcome any questions. Thanks Emma. It's later. Okay, so I just wondered if this is for the whole of Cambridgeshire is 20,000 enough? 20,000 pounds is it enough to spread it around all of Cambridgeshire or... I think this is until the end of the financial yeah it's until the end of this financial year so I suppose like I said we would be reviewing it because we're obviously coming up so the first applications that we might potentially get would be in November so we just got November December January February March about five months worth so I suppose it's something that we would have to sort of review and see where we are really. Thank you. Sorry, do you mean South Cambridgeshire councillor or Cambridgeshire? We're talking about South Cambridgeshire. The 20,000 refers to South Cambridgeshire not Cambridgeshire. Though I feel it's a big area and you know things like mule and all sorts food is going up so much it's a large area 20,000 I'm just wondering if it would be enough. That's all, I agree with everything but I'm just that's the question I'm asking. But this, okay but this is for set up costs and for setting up schemes it's not for actually purchasing goods and well it's not for purchasing food I mean yeah I'm not sure what to your I'm not sure you if you read the report it's not exactly for what you're thinking it's for I think. Okay then that's good. Okay there are other, we are looking at other I mean obviously there are things like slow cookers and and white goods that could be purchased but this is really about the setting up the capital costs and maintaining the revenue costs of running a scheme rather than actually purchasing you know things like food and clothing or paying for fuel. One thing to clarify we are setting up a community so if from this would we be able to purchase food or that would have to just continue from donations so are you setting up of the hub warm hub comes from a different pot of money comes from a pot of money that Aika has so you should yeah yeah it's not warm hubs is not part of this as such that comes out of a different pot of money Okay thank you. Thanks Aika. John just a quick clarification so it's not for running I just want to make really certain through Emma if I may on page 13 of the agenda Emma on the recommendations bullet point 2 it says they're expanding the criteria to allow applications for revenue or overheads for example salaries, rent advertising promotion materials so as John rightly says it doesn't talk about for argument sake a lunch club it doesn't say that you're buying in the food but it might help contribute or pay towards someone to run it. Exactly right. For all the rent you know all the cost of you know the room etc. Okay thanks John Margin. It's basically the same point I was going to go on with but I think you need to be clear if you're really not going to cover food or food cost for instance because I would regard food in a structure which is providing food to people not as a capital cost but as a revenue cost because it's a cost we're just spending so if you're not going to cover that I think you need to make it clear that that isn't covered in the actual regulation associated with it. We can sort of clear that up yes and put that in the criteria of course. That's quite an important point I think actually so if we were obviously to make our recommendations as asked to do today would we make that recommendation for approval with the criteria that we're actually laying down that make it absolutely blindingly clear that it's not for revenue for food this is or that yeah. Okay Peter. Yeah thanks Jay. Page 16 paragraph 13 has a list of six bullet points which I assume would be the criteria we'd use for assessing any applications but the bullet point actually says low cost meals for those in need so if it's not going to cover food that needs to be rewritten. Okay. Can amend. That's a really good point actually Emma picked up at lunch clubs low cost meals for those in need. That gives the impression you're getting cheap grub. So the actual sort of you know the room higher if they needed to buy potentially sort of plates and things like that and all that kind of stuff sort of capital purchases that would be included but yes we can amend that to make it a bit clearer and remove that section yes. John just if I may thank you. Going back to Sinita's point with regards to is this enough if we're looking at this paper here now and some of the questions coming from colleagues to you throughout Emma is there any possibility of a small top up of this that would almost if you like leave some of these comments and bullets in place that there could be the main bulk of the application for argument saying would be for set up etc etc to do what's actually on the team so to speak but then there might be a small proportion of that that money that could be used to purchase some food items and stuff so that that can start the process off if you're with me because at the moment what we're saying or rather what you're saying is that this is not for the provision of food is to set up there is going to be an issue for argument sake on that page 16 paragraph 13 the bullet point 6 established building capacity of food hubs food banks or community fridges that's great I'll put a community fridge in but it won't be anything in it until we pay for stuff to go in it and then start the process off so I just wonder if there's any leeway in the calculation for the funding whether some could be added to the fund of the 20,000 make it slightly higher or whether or not we could work within that 20,000 to allow a small proportion of the grant application to allow for food stuffs I think that's very difficult chair how long is the piece of string how much food does someone assess they need to start off something this is a partnership this isn't we're not coming in we completely fund 100% a scheme we expect the community to be also putting something into this now we are picking up the big ticket items to enable something to be set up and I think it's fair in those circumstances that those communities that are taking advantage of this are able to meet us by at least contributing something and I think that needs to be because they know that they can judge for example how much food they require that that is their input into this we're not here to provide we don't have the resource to provide subsidised food for everybody we just do not have that ability to do that we don't have the money the open-ended commitment to provide people with food that is something that we must look to others to support us with but at least what we're doing here is enabling people who want to set up a food bank or a lunch club the ability to have a grant to help them with those as I say main items to enable them to run it I don't think it's it's not I think it's fair for us to then expect people to meet us and provide the cost of the actual food etc or the electricity to provide that themselves because otherwise it would certainly cost more than 20,000 and we don't have more than 20,000 we are ourselves in difficult circumstances inflation etc interest rates etc are causing enormous squeeze on this council's finances and we are what we're saying is look even in our difficult circumstances we're able to come and help you but we can't do it all I'm sorry we just do not have the resources to financial resources to pick up that's basically for government to sort out not for local government and what we're saying here is that we want to help and we will help but we can't do it all and this must we must be a partnership to deliver this we can't do it on our own we don't have the financial resources to do it on our own okay thanks that's really clear and that's not a problem I just think that colleagues colleagues have expressed concerns that the wrong message is being given within the paper so we just need to be really clear about what we will and won't do we've had quite a bit rounding discussion and perhaps the first things I was going to say have already been taken into account but I find my first impression was that this new grant I couldn't find how much we were actually saying we were going to give I read paragraph 14 as that's the community chest we're continuing to give 2000 it didn't say that the new grant was going to be 2000 and I think that needs spelling out if you see what I mean to me there were two grants being talked about under 13 and 14 two different criteria and therefore under 13 it would be good to see that say there will only be 2000 per project the second thought that I had was yes it's only going to run five months 2000 into 20,000 is only 10 projects and we have a lot more villages and village groups than that and we may be slightly overwhelmed by the number of applications and I was going to ask before John started his last conversation that under 8 it says that there was 220,000 pounds put into the ICS fund and I wondered whether we knew what that has currently produced apart from allowing us to have 20,000 for this new grant and whether that might have a little underspend on it and we might actually find a spot or two to encourage more than 10 applications Emma, Emma, thanks Just in relation to your first point about how much could be applied for 0.15 of the main report it says that all other criteria including the upper funding limit monitoring requirements and the need to return unspent funds would remain in place so it's as it is broadening the criteria to include these projects and this is actually like we said it's a ringfenster amount within there so I hope that answers that bit Do we have any other points Marty? Coming back to the food element again it's just a thought but often presumably a lot of the food would be from donations these schemes tend to be like that and when you get donations of food you tend to get certain types of things and not others so you may find that you have a shortage or difficulty getting some form and there might be a case for saying small proportions of the funding was allowable for food that you couldn't get from other sources but I also realised it might be difficult to enforce that but it's just a thought that you might think about having some flexibility a little bit of flexibility in that to think about that but I understand by the limited resources you've got that may just not be possible just a concern Okay, thanks Marty Emma? I know that communities are very supportive of these and I think like we say in a lot of donations do come from individuals and also I'd just like to note that a lot of supermarkets donate surplus food as well so I don't think that would be a major problem I do know that because it Morrison's came on a very supportive of local initiatives as well so I think that probably and also if you've got a community fridge as well food can be kept for longer as well so we don't just have the non-perishables we have a mixture of food as well for a lot of these initiatives Great stuff, okay, thank you so we've had a lot of questions I think we've put John on the spot enough for the moment but thank you John to be fair we had to ask the questions I think and that was obviously picked up a few little wrinkles in the documentation that could be tweaked so if it's okay with everybody we can go to the recommendations now we've got four recommendations would you like to take them individually or one at a time I'm minded to to say take them all at once you've read them if you like I'll go over them again would that be helpful to go over them again yep or you can all read actually what would you like to do gang? no there's nobody there they're now avidly rereading their recommendations it's okay when it all goes quiet we get a picture of an empty room because the camera because you're all sitting on one side the camera focuses on the opposite side it looks like there's no one there I think what I'm going to do then is I'm going to leave my mic on and I'll soon come closer and we'll dance I'm looking at the gang in the shadows I think we're going to take them all together if that's okay we've made our points very clear and we've had very clear answers this is for a short period until March of 23 the end of the financial year so my recommendation to the group is that we accept the four bullet points under recommendations on page 13 and the top of page 14 which is the fourth bullet for all of those recommendations as listed are we in agreement? yes thank you both John and Emma for being so candid and I thank the gang down here for putting you on the spot which is even better and that will move on then so I think actually that was the last piece of business so the date of the next meeting will be 25th November thank you very much thank you all much obliged, have a safe trip home for those who aren't at home and for those who are stay safe keep warm


Hello friends, I am Dr. Punal Das. I am a consultant and head of the Department of Gastroenterology at Manipat Hospital, Dwarka. Today we will be talking about lower GA Bleed. Lower GA Bleed means bleeding from the lower intestine or which is known as Cologne. This includes this is the rectum, this is the sigmoid Cologne, this is the descending Cologne, this is the transverse Cologne and these are various parts of ascending Cologne and this is a part of the small intestine which is known as ileum. So whenever this bleed happens, this bleed can be of 2-3 types. One is absolutely red blood. Sometimes you just go to the toilet and you find that there is a large amount of reddish newly colored blood. You are shocked at what is this happening. Whenever we have red colored bleeding, we find that it may be due to the lower part of the Cologne which involves the sigmoid Cologne and the red tie. And the causes of it include small polyps which may be there especially in children. There may be some cancerous growth like here you can see and may be due to ulcers which also can cause bleeding. And sometimes just at the lower part of the anal canal we can see piles or hemorrhoids that can also cause bleeding, fresh bleeding. Don't worry, this is not something which is very dangerous. The second type is where its maroon colored you see blood clots coming out which is known as hematocisio. It may be formed the transverse Cologne and ascending Cologne. As we can see here there may be some growth or stretcher or cancerous or maybe polyp or AV malformation. AV malformation is bunching of blood vessels which may be there and sometimes it may be due to the ileal cause that due to some ileal ulcers it may cause hematocisio. And the third type of bleed which is absolutely black through the black terry stools which is very smelly and it sticks to the pot that is known as Malinu. These are all coming out from the lower intestine in our stools and this mean different things. Fresh bleed which is newly cut blood is most commonly formed the lower part of the Cologne which is known as rectum, sigmoid and anal canal. Most of the common causes of bleed which is absolutely red in color is most likely due to piles due to fissure or maybe a polyp which may be present or a ulcer which may be present in the lower part of the abdomen. Don't worry, most of the times these are non malignant and non cancerous. The next type of bleed which happens is hematocisio. When it is mineral or brown colored blood and blood loss there most of the time come from the right side of the Cologne. It may be due to cancer, it may be due to ulcer especially many times it is due to typhoid ulcers or Cologne cancer. This is something which you must be taking care of and you must rush to your doctor and please show them. The doctor might do some blood test and may prescribe one of the test known as colonoscopy. Colonoscopy is a very simple test which is a flexible tube with a light and gamma attached to it. After tube preparation it goes to the Cologne and it is almost entire part of the Cologne. It is almost 1.5 meters which is length and we can very easily know what is the cause of bleed. But one thing is there most important you must go to a doctor. He will find out it may be non cancerous in which case it may be treated only with medicines. Sometimes spines or something may require some surgery, small surgical procedures, very simple. Or sometimes it may be very obvious it may denote some cancer or something which you cannot ignore. So in that case the doctor may take a biopsy and you have to wait for the report. In short if you have in blood and stools it may be red colored, it may be brown clots, it may be black. If it is red colored don't worry it is from the lower part of the Cologne and it may be due to piles or fissure. Or if it is from the other part then it may be omnis and may be polyp for cancer. But first you must visit a doctor and if it is black it is normally due to the upper GA maybe due to some ulcer. So don't worry please go to a doctor and get the test done.


Sounds good. So thanks very much for joining and everyone stay after the video. Video is about half an hour and then we'll have a question answer section with Mike and David. Okay, I'm going to start sharing the video now. Hi, this is our dev talk. The topic of our talk is using containers and VMs on free public CIs for fun and world conquest. Just a brief intro. My name is David Davis. I'm a software engineer at Red Hat and I work on the PULP project. My name is Mikey Paolo. I'm a service reliability engineer at Red Hat and I also work on the PULP project. Okay, so a quick overview of our talk. First, we're going to talk about PULP, which is the project we work on. It's sort of needed to understand our presentation. Next, we're going to talk about the problems we faced working on PULP when we used hosted CI environments. After that, we're going to talk about what do you use containers or VMs. And then we're going to talk about the different solutions we tested and what our results were. And then lastly, we're going to talk about some tips for using VMs and containers with hosted CI environments. So a quick rundown of PULP. PULP is a software project. You use it to organize packages of software into repositories. It has a plugin architecture and we support a bunch of different content types. You can see some examples here, Python, NPM, RubyGems, even Docker images. And you can create a plugin for any content type and extend PULP to support that content type. Lastly, PULP is entirely free and open-source. It's on GitHub. So if you want to check it out, there's only right there. So what are hosted CI environments? So these are typically free for open-source projects. They're public. They provide a way to build and test out your code. And also these hosted CI environments, they let communities fork and test using your CI configuration. PR uses the same CI environment as you to test out your tests and stuff like that. So for PULP, we use two different CI environments or hosted CI. We have to experience with both Travis and GitHub Actions. And so overall, they're pretty similar. They do have different cloud backends. One uses Google. One uses Microsoft Azure. They have the same operating system for Linux. They have similar specs on RAM and disk space. Their virtual CPUs are also similar. We ran P7 zip benchmarks against them, which is a good indication of CPU speed. Those were pretty similar. The one notable difference was the disk performance. It seemed like GitHub Actions was almost three or four times faster in terms of both rate and write than Travis. We speculate that probably GitHub Actions is using SSDs while Travis is probably using hard disks. So what's the problem with hosted CI environments? Some problems that we encountered is that there's a limited number of OS or distros by default. Also the environment is preconfigured and it comes with a limited set of software packages. There's also typically limited hardware resources, which can make virtualization hard. And then lastly, you can't reboot or replace the kernel when using a hosted CI environment. So to solve some of these problems, you might turn to containers. So when would you use containers? Containers are pretty lightweight, so you probably want to use those. Some cases where you would want to use them. Suppose you want to test against a bunch of different distributions of Linux. Containers provide a great way to do that. Sometimes you might need tools like DNF, which aren't available on all distros. This is actually a use case for us. We have an RPM plugin and we want to test using DNF to install packages from pulp. Of course, people who doesn't have that, so we use it. We spin up a Fedora container to test that out. You may want to use certain versions of software. You can put that into a container and not pollute the host OS. That's a good use case for containers. Also, we had a case where we're using a Python package that's provided as an RPM and it gets installed system-wide. So we use a container for that to install and test out that package, which we don't package ourselves. So when would you want to use VMs as opposed to containers? One of the big use cases that we ran into is that we wanted to test against kernel modules or modes that require certain kernel parameters. A couple of good examples are SC Linux and app armor. Also, we support FIPS 140-2. This is a government standard that forbids the use of weak cryptographic algorithms. And since Holstein-Rail actually provide a mode that you can enable with a kernel parameter, and it will actually the use of some of these algorithms. Of course, you can't do that on using a hosted CI unless you use virtualization. Another good example is there are certain types of projects. Maybe you're working on a bootloader or a kernel module and you would have to use VMs in order to test out those things. So let's go into the nitty gritty details of virtual machines versus containers because this affects whether we can run them at all in these CI environments and how we have to go about running them. So like we mentioned, we prefer containers over VMs. We only use VMs when we can't use containers. And the containers have a number of advantages. Because the container, the all the instance, all the multiple objects that are running share the same hardware and the same kernel, there's no performance penalty for running them. You get 100% individual CPU performance and if a process needs RAM, it seems like the other process. Whereas in VMs, you have like a 10% CPU performance head on average. And on top of that, the host and each guest have separate unused RAM. So you could have one guest that's swapping heavily and slowing down the entire system, one other guest has a gigabyte free and the host has two gigabytes free. And there's little you can do about that if your VM is already running. Also, virtual machines require a special hardware feature. This was implemented about 15 years ago. But rarely can you run VMs on top of VMs. Rarely is nesting as it's called compatible. That hardware feature is just not exposed to the guest or exposed to another guest usually. So it's important to note that both Travis and good at actions, they are running in VMs. Technically, they're cloud instances and they are ephemeral and have temporary state. But for the rest of the administration, they're referred to them as VMs. Next slide. So as we mentioned, we love running containers on these virtualized CI environments. And that is our preferred approach. And because containers on virtualized and actually always work, there's no reason why you can't run a container on top of a virtual machine. Our preferred container runtime environment is Podman. But the environments do bundle Docker. You can use that too. Docker does have disadvantage like a daemon that lunges root, but this is a temporary scratch test environment. That's not as much of an issue. But any other container solution nowadays will work because these containers just use standard features in the Linux kernel to run. Now, virtualization on containers can work as well. It depends on whether the containers have privileges to run them. But that's not relevant for the rest of the presentation, though, because we wouldn't test these CI environments used virtual machines. At least the ones we've tested are limited to virtual machines. Next slide. So we have good news, though. We discovered that KVM actually works on top of Travis. The nested virtualization works there. We tested it on Ubuntu 18.04 and we tested it on Ubuntu 20.04. This was a surprise to us because Travis doesn't advertise the fact that they support nested virtualization. And although a recent Q&A said it's not possible, but we ran all these commands. We ran commands like KVMOK and more detailed commands to see the capable use of the virtual CPU. And it was there. And we've been running it successfully in our CI now. Unfortunately, this does not work on top of GitHub Actions, though. GitHub Actions, they may in the future use newer instances that do support nested hardware virtualization, but not yet. Next slide. So you may be wondering if, you know, is there anything we can run besides virtual machines and containers, especially if I want something like a virtual machine on GitHub Actions, which we prefer anyway, because it's faster. So anyway, we're also wondering what did people do before hardware virtualization was introduced in 2006 or so? Are these old solutions actually a more elegant solution from a more civilized time? Are they like Lightsaber versus a clunky blaster? Next slide. Well, the answer is, unfortunately, a resounding no. So in the Linux world, the term Plan 9 is used because it was the name of another open source operating system. And the movie Plan 9 for Outer Space, that's the same name, Plan 9, refers to one of the worst movies of all time, possibly the worst. And one of the reasons Plan 9 for Outer Space is so bad is that it's convoluted in complex plots. Basically, aliens want to invade the Earth, and rather than using something simple and straightforward and efficient, like shooting us with laser guns or propelling an asteroid at Earth, they just decided to raise an army of zombies and have them do the work for them. It's convoluted in complex. So if our preferred plan, Plan A, Plan 1, is containers and our backup plan, Plan 2, is virtual machines, well, let's see how bad the plan's 3 through 9 are, or how decent they are. Some of them actually are decent, acceptable as I'll explain. I don't want to grip on all these solutions, but still. Next slide. So virtualization has been around longer than 2006. VMware basically, well, IBM invented it in the 1960s, and then came to x86 computers and similar platforms in the early 2000s. So the early and mid-2000s approach was software virtualization. And there still is an open-source implementation of this virtual box which can run in a harder virtualization mode, and by default does, can still run in software virtualization mode. And basically, the way this works is that most of the time when the software virtualization runs the code inside the guest, it runs it as is. It just passes it directly to the CPU. It has no translation to do. But for some of the instructions, instructions that run at its ring zero, it has to translate those into instructions that the host can run or can run safely without clobbering itself, its own OS. So because of this, there is a performance hit. And in order to overcome that performance hit, these software hypervisors do a lot of tricks. They do some of the tricks that include patching the binaries that it's running to replace the more efficient code paths. When all these tricks work well, you have about two-thirds of the CPU performance that you originally had. So we tried this on both CIs, and it does work on both CIs. However, we soon discovered that it's even slower than the two-thirds performance. We discovered that we assume that's because all those patching and other tricks have not been maintained over time. It has all these other limitations that they never bothered to implement in the software mode, such as only one virtual CPU and 32-bit guest only. Nobody uses 32-bit CentOS 7 and 64-bit CentOS 8 doesn't exist. So that's not a OS you really simply want to test against. You only want to test 64-bit CentOS 7 and 8. And then on top of this, we discovered that this feature was actually removed in VirtualBox 6.1. Like the command line argument is there, but the GUI grays it out and throws an error basically saying, you know, feature not supported. So the last version of VirtualBox to support this was VirtualBox 6.0. However, it is no longer supported. When you combine the fact that this old version of VirtualBox is no longer getting support, it's not getting any micro updates, any patches. The fact that it actually requires an out-of-tree kernel module, that means that any day now, Ubuntu is going to issue their own kernel update and you're not going to build it or compile it on Ubuntu anymore. So we do not recommend this approach. Next slide. So let's go a little bit further back in time. In the early 2000s, before any open source hypervisors existed, there is emulation and the most mature emulator by far is QMU. Now basically the way this works is that all the code running against and the guest CPU has to be translated so it can run the host CPU. In fact, the host is basically just breaking down every instruction and re-implementing every instruction. So at best it has a one-tenth of the CPU performance of the host and this all the supplies, even if you're emulating XG6 on top of XG6. So this is, it's a lot of work to emulate. It's a lot of performance penalty but it is actually very elegant and works really well actually. QMU on top of get-of-action Travis works exactly as intended, which is one-tenth of the CPU performance. However, originally you do get all the benefits of that, like QMU shares code with KBM basically. So you have multiple virtual CPUs, 64-bit guests, you can use all the other features and like options to KBM that you would only pass. And it's also very simple for us to to configure a vagrant to use QMU. We'll cover this later but because it's so slow and it's basically your last resort. If you're running a small utility like say a boot loader, it's fast enough but if you're running a fronter boot like a Linux distro, it'll be painfully slow. You don't want to have like a 10-minute or so just a boot into your OS or more even more than that. Next slide. So it's worth noting that there have been other solutions over the years that are various types of software virtualization but these two mature open source ones both require the host to run a special kernel. Therefore, we cannot run them either get it back into Travis because we can't replace the CI's kernel. Next slide. Okay, so now that we have our preferred solutions, any container runtime or KBM VMs on top of Travis specifically, let's we now need to actually run our test code against them. And like with most CI environments, you're generally writing scripts. So we do a way to program access these VMs and containers to run our scripts against them or individual commands against them. We'll cover how to do that and we'll also cover our tips for optimizing performance because as mentioned previously, these environments have very limited resources, especially RAM, only seven or eight gigabytes. Next slide. So to access containers, this is the first four point is very well known. There is the PowerMan run and the Docker run command that you can use to start your application. You can also just run commands individually. This is designed around the premise that your container runs only one process at a time. If you need multiple processes running, you can share file systems directly or you could also between them or you just run the containers independently. They don't share data on disk. But say you do have a need to run a process inside a container that's already running. Say you have the daemon already running, you ran it with PowerMan run, but now you need to launch a test suite against the system that say looks at the local disk to verify the data there correctly or needs to use IPC, for example. Or whatever it's maybe alternate, but it's the most efficient way to do it for your use case. So there is another command that may not know about which is called PowerMan exec and Docker exec. It just launches an additional process or an interactive shell in the container that's already running. Next slide. So how to access virtual machines? Now this is a little bit trickier. So the fault behavior of a virtual machine as used with like Burt Manager or LibBurt with a VNC connection is virtual keyboard, virtual monitor, and virtual mouse. That's not something you want to script against. And so the most elegant way to access it is to use a bunch of the utilities that are called CloudInit. Now these are meant for cloud instances. And the containers, the VMs are created with the CloudInit utilities on them and they expect some configuration so that the SSH client can access it. Fortunately, we can use these KVM style cloud images as LibBurt KVM VMs.  Basically every single distro creates them. They make the list as open stack format, for example, but they're perfectly usable in KVM. So you would start out this out by running a CloudInit command called cloud local DS. This actually creates a virtual floppy disk with a config file on it. Config file with settings like here's the IP address of the VM and here's the SSH key I want to use to access it. And then you call the virtual install command from LibBurt to install the container, I mean to install the VM with those booted with a floppy and it boots up, uses IP address and installs the SSH key and then you can just SSH into it. You have a fixed IP address. You can access it that way. That's the simplest way to do it. There are guides online for using CloudInit with our local DS with all the commands spelled out, but it's not too bad. It's only like four or five commands total. And once you have that status connector, of course, you can run individual commands against the VM or you could install, pass over a script and run that script. Next slide. So there is a more convenient way to do all to create these VMs and it involves less scripting on your part and it's also has lots of cool features to make things more convenient for doing other stuff against it. It is called vagrant. The famous of vagrant is that it helps you create a development environment for your application, which could also be a test environment, of course. It has a Leverd plugin. It creates the virtual machine. It does provision it with a prisoner code such as Antibode code or Chef code of Povet and also facilitate all the SSH access. So the advantage to it is that it's very convenient to use and has some features you might like. However, I always hesitate to increase the VM usage on these cloud instances. It uses a different set of images called vagrant cloud boxes. This may be disadvantageous or may be advantageous to you. It depends on what that is and images are to your liking though. That's worth knowing that PULPS, the CI that PULPS is developing actually does use this. Next slide. Previously, I mentioned that the virtual memory on these CI instances are very limited. It's about seven gigs on each.  Even if it's containers, it can still just kill the process running a container that you may rely on.  But we recommend creating this swap file on the as well. This is we recommend creating a swap file on Travis. X swap on the first place on Travis. It's worth, you may be wondering why swap files. Why don't you have a swap partition on your hard disk on your developer system or a server? Well, swap partitions are preferred, but swap files with a performance penalty do work well or the only way we can create swap space on these cloud instances because there's no blank virtual hard disk for us to access. GitHub Actions actually already uses slash mount for their four gigabyte swap files. We just create another one that's, you know, take up the remainder of slash mount. That's our recommendation. And once again, GitHub Actions will have much faster swap space if you do end up accessing it. Next slide. Another performance tip we have, which applies equally well to containers and VM images is to pre-build images with your application's dependencies. So why pre-build with dependencies? Well, with most software projects like pulp, our dependencies, which are in our case a mixture of C libraries, usually from RPMs or devs or the OS and Python dependencies change rarely. They'll change like every few weeks or once a month or so. In contrast, our code changes constantly. So we want, whenever we want to do a pull request, we don't want to spend time making it always wait for it to install all the dependencies. We just want to install the current version of pulp itself and test it. So therefore, we recommend using a type of CI job called a cron job. Technically, it's not the cron like you used to, but it's a CI job that's scheduled some of the cron. And with those, so in those cron jobs, you'll build a container image or VM image and you'll push to the registry at the end. So the registry would be quay.io or docker hub, bacon cloud, or directly your own place for storing VM images. Here's the URL. And then for containers, of course, pulp can also serve as a container image registry. We highly recommend using pulp as well. So I throw that out there. A little bit of self-motion. So with containers, this is a very well-known process. You can typically, the advice is to create a container file, aka docker file, or use any other solution you want with a very flexible pipeline and with the pipeline build command. But say you're just trying to do something quick and you have some other reason why you need a running container, the bunch of running processes, and then you save the current state of the container at the end. Or you can also use the pipeline commit command. It basically takes the container's temporary storage, never changes it made to the slash file system, and it creates a new container image based on that current state of the container. Similarly with VMs, a vagrant box repackage is a great way to, well, with vagrants, the images you use are called boxes. And if you're done making changes to your vagrant dead environment, you just want to repackage command and create a box based on the changes you made at runtime. Very similar to pipeline commits. Another option that was missing as well is if you want to robust where to create virtual machines, according to reproducible logic, hacker is an open source utility that can do this for KVM. Next slide. So our final performance tip is if you need to run Kubernetes. So remember, Kubernetes is a container infrastructure and it has a running daemon on a particular node that controls the rest of the nodes, even if it's only one node. This daemon is quite CPU and memory heavy. So we try to multiple lightweight versions of Kubernetes, and either they wouldn't work on because they were on GitHub actions because they were actually using virtualization. That's how Minikube works, for example. Or they were not as lightweight as K3S. K3S turned out to be the most lightweight. So our recommendation is that if you are testing against Kubernetes, like you are developing a manifest or an operator for your application that use K3S for this. At install time, it'll default to using a bundled container D, but it also offers, lets you specify when you use Docker and the ECI environment to actually preinstall Docker. You just enable that as a service in your CI config, and so you can do that as well. Next slide. That's the end of our presentation. Any questions for the Orange and for World Conquest? Thank you for an excellent presentation. Welcome back, Mike, and I'm adding David as well. So if anyone in the audience would like to ask questions, please do so. Mike and David, do you want to add any comments or thoughts? I would just like to point out, we've been developing our CI a little bit more since the presentation, and it's been a lifesaver of being able to one CI test for SC Linux in FIPS mode, which we had a requirement for you now. Yeah, very much, very much so. Okay, if you have any links you want to share, feel free to do that, or anyone if you want to share contact information, or how anyone wants to get started, or anything like that. Let me think for a second. I could definitely share the instructions on like using like cloud in it. That's something we referenced there. There's also, I'll dig up that link right now, but there are multiple and sorry environments out there. They get hub accidents and Travis still have these getting started guides, but you'll be adding the virtualization container there on top of it. Okay, well thank you very much. We certainly appreciate the presentation and it's very well done. Yeah, I'm sharing the link right now. Yep, and thanks David for pasting the link to pulp. No problem, yeah. Yep, thanks very much. That's great. Okay, well, thanks guys. I certainly appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for having us. Yep, absolutely.