We will open this morning's session with a talk by Dr. Soli Shahfar from the University of Haifa. He will speak to us on the topic of opening and closing the door, the state and the Baha'i schools in Iran. This will prove to be a very, very interesting topic and I for one am very much looking forward to hearing about it. Let me tell you just very briefly about Dr. Shahfar. You can read more about him in your program. Dr. Shahfar teaches in the Department of History and the Middle East, and is the Director of the Israel Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London and he's the author of The Forgotten Schools, the Baha'is and Modern Education in Iran. I welcome Dr. Shahfar. We very much look forward to your presentation. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here. I wish to thank Association of Baha'i Studies North America for inviting me here, especially Mrs. Khorsandi, Mr. Kiai, Mr. Moke, Mrs. Rohani and Mr. Jamshid Amini who helped me, invited me and became friends, I believe, at least at my part. Every time that I speak or deliver a lecture on Baha'is, on Baha'is of Iran I usually do, it's usually people automatically think I'm a Baha'i, so just for the record I'm not. Once or twice I spoke, gave a lecture on Zoroastrians in Iran and at the end of the lecture people would come and say, are you Zoroastrian? I said no. So then I decided that it is better to refrain from delivering talks on Iranian women. So I have a lot of slides and most of them are actually photos which I want to share with you because I think they are unique. So I will run with the text as fast as possible in order to be in the framework of the 50 minutes time allocated to me. So what we are talking about Baha'i schools, what are these Baha'i schools? These schools owned, established and run by Baha'is. What are the characteristics of Baha'i schools? They had raw religious studies in the curriculum. They had, but this was on Fridays when the school was in recess, either in the school or in the local mahal, not with the non-Baha'i students. So they separated the religious studies from the regular curriculum. They followed the curriculum of the Iranian Ministry of Education. They followed the local practices as to separation of the sexes, outdoor appearance, wearing chador and whatever is needed, or taking off the chador during the Ereza Shah period, etc. They kept relatively high standards in teaching, teaching staff, teaching accessories, enrichment classes, etc. Which made them, of course, of a more higher standard in relation to many other schools. They were attended by many non-Baha'is, some of whom from the local aristocracy, including the aristocracy of Tehran. Sorry. I'm asking actually two fundamental questions. How come in a state, in a Shiite state, which under the regime of the Qajars, there were so much persecuted these Baha'is from the, when they were Babis and later most of them became Baha'is, from the mid-19th century onwards, killing thousands of Baha'is, persecuting them. And they're very harsh circumstances. How come this is the regime that affords the Baha'is to open schools? It's a privilege, yes, to open schools. So how come? It didn't make sense to me. So then I started to think about it, how it could happen. And the other question is that how come a ruler like Reza Shah Pahlavi, secular, modernizing, reformist, which his views very much corresponding to some of the main principles of the Baha'is, he's the one that actually closes the Baha'i schools. So two fundamental questions that I try to give at least potential answers. Well, regarding the first question, the possible reasons for the opening of the, at least, first-run Baha'i schools by Mozaffar-e-Din Shah, which were afterwards followed by other schools. In my humble opinion, the main reason for opening those schools was connected to the process of reform in Iran. And in order to understand this, we have to look from different dimensions. Well, when I say reform, the field of reform is in general, but education in particular, I would refer to the both. State's role, what interest the state had in this? From the beginning of 19th century, Iran, we can say that the clash with the West was in the military field, as it happened with the Ottoman Empire. And as it happened with the Ottoman Empire, it was mainly with Russia. Two wars against the Russians at the beginning of the 19th century, losses of territory, losses of people, Muslims, to a heretic Christian Empire. The Iranians, like the Ottomans before them, they started to ask what can be done in order to bridge this gap, in order to bring us closer to this power of the West, in order to be able to stand before them. So the idea was reform, because the first clash or first, shall we say, encounter was in the field of the military, then the reform was naturally in the field of military reforms. But as Iran lost in other wars, after those with the Russians, against either local armies that underwent reform, or they were supported by European powers, or later in the clash or in the war against the British in 1856-57, they continued to lose. So the idea was then, if reform is needed, then it shouldn't be only limited to the military field. In other words, the secret of the power of the West is not only in the military, it must be in different things. So ideas started to shape in the mid-19th century regarding the education, the need for doing a new educational system. But this understanding wasn't an understanding that was shared by the then king Nasir Dinsha for the entire of the population. He opened the Dar al-Fonun in 1851 for the Iranian aristocracy. Most of the majority of the Iranians didn't have any access to this modern education. It was very limited to a number of very selected people. So we cannot talk about modern education for the entire people. Few schools, more schools in 1858, in the 70s and then in the 90s and in 1900, they were continued to open. But again, these were for the specific needs of the state, whether for cadres in military or in the bureaucracy, but it wasn't for the entire population. Section of the Iranian populations, even from the lower classes, had already enjoyed modern education from the 1830s. These were the Christians with the missionary waves of American Presbyterian and the French Catholics and the British Anglican churches moving into Iran and opening schools throughout the Christian areas of Iran. So the majority Shi'i population remained uneducated or at least uneducated in terms of modern education. By the end of the 19th century, the global circumstances, the fall of the technological transfer, or the technological modernization, mainly in the field of communications like the telegraph, yes, later the wireless radio, took Iran out of its occlusion and brought it more in immediate contact with the world. Ideas of the French Revolution that happened some hundred years before began to infiltrate gradually from mid-19th century but more so towards the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century. And all these things stimulated a process of reform. The bureaucracy needed to be reformed in order to become more efficient. In every field, not only education and military, in the field of, for example, municipal affairs, in the field of, well, the concessions actually were the concession given to foreign companies that were actually given in order to develop certain fields, whether it is in terms of communication, railways, telegraphs and so on or in terms of irrigation from the classical form of irrigation moving into new form of irrigation and so on and so forth. So the state had immediate interest in opening more modern schools. We don't know why yet Bahá'í schools, yes, but... And the role of the non-Bahá'í Iranian intellectuals and activists from more or less beginning of the 19th century, students were sent abroad to study. At first there were two students, then five, then 30, and the numbers grew. And the gaps between each delegation of students sent abroad was a long one, but still students were sent abroad. Those were exposed to ideas of the West, and some of them became intellectuals, yes, in the Iranian context, and they start talking about the need for modernization. One of those, for example, one of the more known ones is Mirzam al-Komchan, an Armenian that his father became a Muslim, and he studied in France, came back, and he started to talk about these ideas of need for education and modern education. Another one was Akhundov or Akhundzadeh, and there were many other intellectuals that were talking about this. So we see that actually the atmosphere becomes more and more pro-reform in education. Role of non-Bahá'í religious minorities, I mentioned the Christian missionaries that acted. So the Christians, the Jews also began, actually in the 1870s, they received the first permission, but the first Bahá'í Jewish modern Jewish school began only in 1898. The Alliance Israelite Universal, or Kiyach in Hebrew. And the Zoroastrians, Hatteria was one of the leading Zoroastrians, businessmen from India, from Mumbai, or Mumbai today. And he received donations from the Zoroastrian community, moved to Iran, and began to open also one of the things he had done, to open schools. But the Bahá'ís, of course, were the last. Role of the Babi Bahá'í reformist thought and practice, yes. The Bahá'ís for themselves, of course, is a central theme of education and universal education. In the Bahá'í faith, so they had their own reason of wishing to open schools. So the idea of reform and the need for schools, there was existent in Iran in different levels. Gradually, pressure started to come from the people, the Shiite people, the Shiite population. Not only the aristocracy, but from the below, from the grassroots level. Because more and more, on the one hand, the state needed qualified cadres for different sections. And more and more, with the processes that I described before, people understood that in order to get out of this dire situation that they have, their kid, usually their son, needs to go and study in a modern school, then have a profession, and then you can take them out of this dire position. So more and more, we see gradually more pressure coming from below on the government to supply new schools, modern schools. So with this kind of pressure, I assume that, and with the inability of the state to provide those, to meet those pressure or meet those demands, the state decided to give the Jews, and finally also the Bahá'ís. Although I mentioned later that the Bahá'ís weren't given, as the other religious minorities, the permission to open schools as a community. But it was done by individual Bahá'ís, and not under there being a Bahá'í, but in Iranian, yes. Another reason is Mozaffarredin Shahís character. He was a weak monarch, sick also, but he had some liberal tendencies, he knew French, he was reading also French books. I donít want to say literature, I mean the French language in terms of such a level that he can read poetry, but he read French books. He travelled to Europe, he was kind of more liberal than his father, and it might be that he had less anti-Baháí feelings, then therefore he didnít care so much that the Bahá'ís will open schools as long as they meet those demands of no Baháí mention in the plague, name of the school, or the Baháí community being given the right. Whoever knows or familiar with the Qajar in particular, but Iranian setting, bribery is one of the main things to move things on. It happens today as well, it happened during the Shah, it happened during the Qajar as well. But could bribery be a possibility? After all, all these concessions given to foreign companies were part of it, they had actually a clause giving to the monarch some amount, considerable amount of money. But it is in my view unlikely that the Baháíís paid money as a bribery because of this is against their principle and Abdul Bahá actually speaks about that very clearly. So it is the most unlikely. Another possible reason could be the influence the Baháí could have through Baháí connections with western countries, mainly Britain, Russia and the United States. Britain and Russia were very influential in Iran during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In 1907, you probably know most of you that they divided the country between themselves into spheres of influence and they were actual rulers. We know of good relations that existed between the British and the Baháí leadership. The Russians, according to research we have been conducting in the Russian archives and found many documents that indicating that the Russians actually had a policy based on the Baháíís. In short, I would say that they regarded the Baháíís as a tool to pressurize the Qajar regime in order to get some concessions whether these are against the British or for themselves. But there was a school of, I wouldn't say taught, but the school in the foreign policy or more the imperial Russian strategist, part of them in the foreign ministry, part of them in the army that actually thought that the Baháíís could be used as a tool to pressurize the Qajar government given the fears that the Qajars had because of the Babi movement and the development of the Baháí faith and the growing community of Baháíís in Iran. Another circumstantial explanation could be a more lenient and relaxed atmosphere towards the Baháíís since the last years of Nasser Dinshah. Actually, Bahá'u'lláh himself admits that in the last years of Nasser Dinshah, things are relaxing, the persecution against them, at least from the point of view of the state. The state is not so active or even not active at all in persecuting the Baháíís. There is a persecution, is a olama and the clerics are leading it. It was such an atmosphere that even Bahá'u'lláh, there is a quote in my book that actually prohibits criticism against the regime. Another explanation is differentiating the Qajar state between the disobedient and subversive Babis versus the obedient and loyal Baháíís. The literature on 19th century Iran, you can see that there is a big confusion between Babis and Baháíís and in many instances you say Babis and they meant Baháíís. Yes, because most of the community, as I said, as you perfectly know, they became Baháíís. But by the end of the 19th century, there seems to be an indication that there was an ability to differentiate between the two. Therefore, okay, let the Baháíís have the obedient, yes, Baháíís have their schools and we, of course, continue to persecute the Babis. Well, as I mentioned before, and another reason which was more, I would say, to try to diminish the opposition towards the opening of Baháíís schools because the fact that Baháíís schools werenít registered under the names of the Baháí community but under the names of individual Iranians without the mention of their faith. What interest had the Baháíís in opening the schools? Well, first of all, the importance of education in Baháíís faith, yes. One of the pillars of the faith is the education. So therefore, there was a natural for the Baháíís willing to have schools. And given the circumstances as I described, it was understood by mainly Abdul Baháí that it was a right time to propel the Baháí community in Iran from obscurity into the open. And also, through that education and through that schools to secure the future growth of the Baháí community. Because in those schools, as you well know, not only Baháíís studied but also many non-Baháís which some of them converted. And so without such a framework, the growth of the Baháí community would have been much slower or even diminishing. This is more or less some of the explanation that I reached at or found as far as the opening of the schools. After Tarbiate Banín or Tarbiate Pesarane in 1898-1999 and afterwards other schools. Now I move to the other question is what happened that the Reza Shah, the reformist, the modernized, the secular, the anti-clerical Reza Shah is the one that actually closes those schools in December 1934. Well, the official reason is that the Baháíís did not observe the state guidelines. Namely, closing some schools on a date that was not an official state declared holiday. That was the official, but in my view you have to dig and there must be other reasons or other supporting reasons that brought the Shah to decide. So what possible reasons, other possible reasons for closing the Baháí schools? Well, it seems from the documents that I found that there has been a previous warning against the Baháíís a year before on the same 28 Shaaban, but this time in 1933 that the Baháíís closed those schools because it wasn't the first time that those schools were closed which enraged Reza Shah, enraged Reza Shah and it wasn't in his eyes the Baháíís who were not recognized as a religious minority they were considered as other Iranians. Therefore as other Iranians they have to obey the regulations then if the official or the public schools are open then they should be open. So that was a disregard of the regulations. In that case what made the Shoghi Effendi decide then leader of the Baháí community to, in spite of the warning to close those schools also a year later in 28 Shaaban of 1934 and there is a correspondence between the leadership of the Baháí community in Tehran and the head of the Tarbiad school with Shoghi Effendi are you sure that we have to close again because there was a threat, there was a warning it could be had a major repercussion, negative repercussions then I believe that Shoghi Effendi had a strategy what was his strategy he wanted to seek public recognition of the independent nature of the Baháí face in Iran and he found the time ripe to demand full religious freedom in matters strictly in his views related to their belief as other religions in other words the time in his view was ripe to say okay that's enough you played with us you disregarded our rights we are a distinct religion, we have rights and we want to keep those rights we will remain the obedient citizens of the state but in matters between us and our God we don't want our freedom so that was a major decision and this could of course have a negative reaction by Reza Shah who was a very fearful character my father was serving as a soldier in the headquarters of the military during his military service in Tehran and he always told me that whenever Reza Shah would come in the office everybody looked down and Reza Shah was a tall man so if you want to look at him you have to look up and people didn't dare to look at his eyes he was a very fearful character his career, military officer grown up in the service of the Russian Cossack Brigade and he learned what is Russian discipline he was a man with strong hand and he didn't in my view he regarded that decision by Shoghi Effendi as something very contrary to his policy another development which I think helped or assisted Reza Shah in reaching this decision of closing the schools is in the election of the First National Spiritual Assembly which happened on the 26th of April 1934 the Spiritual Assembly in Iran this was a major stage in the institutional development of the Baha'is of Iran as far as the Baha'is were communities in local places in distant places that's something but when they are organized with body and leadership outside the country and the elections and the national structure that was something else another explanation is the existence of anti-Baha'i elements within the Pahlavi state most notably Mohammad Ali Furughi Dr. Shahpura Sikh and Abdul Hamid Eshra Qawari believe also that Ali Asghar Hekmat then Minister of Education was also one of those anti-Baha'is they tried to convince the Shah that the Baha'i schools are a weapon to convert non-Baha'is to the Baha'i faith then make them bigger in number with the institutional development that they had they might become a threat to the regime so in the very suspicious character of Reza Shah this constant expression of fear or expression of anti-Baha'i expressions they probably played some part there is also Iranian political and activist and author Hassan Tabari in his memoir he writes that these guys Furughi, Hekmat and others like Sirus Ghani they were part of a mystic group of people who studied Irfan and regarded the Baha'is in a very rival competing way so they had their own interest to try to harm them something that I indicated earlier but another reason is growing suspicion of Reza Shah regarding the Baha'is especially Baha'i universalism versus Pahlavi nationalism the type of state that Reza Shah was trying to create was more than anything else a nation state a nation state that has wishes to break the sub-national loyalties and supra national loyalties sub-national loyalties whether it is to the tribal leader or to the village headmaster or some other level, sub-level sub-national level or to supra national level which is something to the religion to Islam, to Baha'ism, to Judaism he wanted to break and to create a loyalty of the Iranians to the state and through the state to the Pahlavi regime so he found this development of the Baha'is with the leadership outside and with the obedience of his Iranian Baha'i subject of Shoghi Effendi rather than Reza Shah in the example of closing the schools in spite of the regulation as somebody that he wasn't ready to agree therefore he started to identify the Baha'is as disloyal and disloyalty in terms of somebody like Reza Shah a military man with a strong hand this was, it had to be harsh reaction and this is a man actually that Ghatri agreed of his most trusted advisor Teimur Tash throwing him to jail and then executed him another explanation could be the Baha'i religious application versus Reza Shah's secular application of education yes, the Baha'is, you know it better than me of course the main application of education in religious terms and Reza Shah being a very secular might have seen that as something that is not in line with his own policies Baha'i contacts and good relations with Sforian elements if this played some 30 something years earlier for the opening, for the benefit of the Baha'is to open schools at the time of Reza Shah it was a disadvantage because again as a nationalistic person who tried to get rid not only of domestic strife but also of foreign presence in Iran and we can see this through different acts that he done for example the cancellation of all the concessions of foreign concessions in Iran gradually he cancelled everything there was only one that he renewed there was the oil concession given to the British that he cancelled in 1932 but then his government actually renewed this under different terms in 1933 but he cancelled the concession he created a very strong army at least for domestic purposes and he established the Air Force Navy which became in my view he had the intention of gradually kicking the British out of the south of Iran and gradually out of Persian Gulf something that his son managed to do in more or less in 1971 but it was of course after the British decision in 1968 to withdraw from the Gulf in this respect of course the British had a very negative image in Iranian society and they still have as you Iranians know here that everything that happens in Iran at least the older generation were always attributed to the British another issue is the size of the Baha'i community along with the geographical and social spread of the Baha'is versus other religious minorities other religious minorities were a small in number secluded in one place or in a ghetto in one section of the one geographical section in the country very distinct the Baha'is were in all social strata from top from the Khajar princes down to the grass root level and in everywhere in Iran so this might be this combined with what I described earlier institutionalization and all this supranational and versus the national could have of course helped towards that decision of Reza Shah and in line on to the same thing the large attendance of Muslim students at the Baha'i schools might have alarmed him that there is a potential growth of this community another explanation which is very which is indicated to by the studies done by Elisa Nassaryan and Hushangi Shahabi is that the Baha'is as the Iranians among you probably know it best they were a tool that could be sacrificed scapegoat in Iranian in the domestic Iranian power politics when for example the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 one of the first victims were the communists there were a large presence of Iranian students who were studying in Germany at the time some of them led by Taghiyarani they were communists and they were quite active so once the Nazis went up to the and seized the power in Germany they fled where they go back they go back to Iran and they renewed or stimulated the communist or dormant communist activity in Iran and in order to fight against the growth of this communist influence it could be possible that the Raza Shah wanted the support of the clerics because communism being atheists of course so a religious leadership could be a good partner for combating these atheists, these heretics so in that respect he might have wanted to sacrifice the Baha'is in order to win their support but in other instances we can see that for example in order to introduce social reform the Baha'is for example in the question of women the appearance in public for example the clothes the Baha'is were the first to be ordered to appear outside of their homes in western clothes without Shador and there are certain instances that I mentioned that the Shah actually protected the Baha'is in order to irritate the clerics so the Baha'is were kind of a scapegoat in the policies of Raza Shah another possible explanation is the Turkish model we know that many of the reforms introduced into Iran during the Raza Shah period was an imitation of the model after the attempts done in Turkey by his co-military colleague Mustafa Kemal at Atul in Turkey they done nationalizing public, religious, private and foreign schools with Baha'is schools being sacrificed first so it could be that this also played or influenced the Shah to do the same there was also a negative attitude of Turkish authorities toward the Baha'is which might have also influenced the Raza Shah I would now move, I suggest if there is questions because I'm now moving towards showing you a number of photos so we can start with the questions and then I can complete with the follow-up of the photos or you want me to show and then as you wish for me it's very important that they see the photos so I will go through them one by one this is the Ta'id boy school in 1908 it's written there, Madrasayam Obarake Ta'id in this sign I don't know if you see it clear, yes we have a number of Ta'id school photos as a graduation of intermediate students at the Ta'id boy school there's no date on that photo it's Mr. Etihadiye in the middle, seated the Ta'id boy school again you can see the sign of Madrasayam Obarake Ta'id there at the top graduation of intermediate students at the Ta'id boy school Hamadan founded in 1908 and the picture is from 1925-26 again Ta'id boy school again Ta'id boy school it's a picture of a larger group of Ta'id students in 1908 the foundation year again here now this photo I couldn't put my finger what is it exactly of course all the photos from the archives of the Baha'i War Centre they are copyrighted to them but this one is written there Madrasayam as you can see there is a sign on the right which is in Russian and it's written Ibrahim Yusufov so I'm not sure whether it is a sign of a street or it is a sign of the school so it could be if it's the sign of the school that it is somewhere in Russian territory which probably is either Ashkhabad Baku or some other place that there are Iranian communities in Tsarist Russia but again this is a school this is management community of the Tehran-Tarbiad schools in Baha'i Iran in 1938-1932 a group of pupils at the Tehran-Tarbiad Girls' School probably mid-1920s at the centre in Dark Dress Prince Ashraf Bahlabi Shia and Mohammad Reza Shah or Mohammad Reza they attended the Tarbiad Boys' and Girls' School respectively when a group of Zoroastrians saw this picture they said, why are you talking about this is not Baha'i this is Zoroastrian, the white clothes Zoroastrian thing the Tarbiad Boys' School Tehran seated at the centre Dr. Susan I. Mudi who was one of the main figures in the development of modern education modern Baha'i education in Iran student of Darse Akhlaq for girls Tehran 1939 of course after the closure of the schools English class, it's written actually on the board yes, Tarbiad Boys' School Tehran 1910 a group of Baha'i women and children attending the women's emancipation celebration Salve branch of the Ministry of Education probably meet 1930s because of the western clothes that the women and children wear Baha'i Girls' School probably 1930s because of Reza Shah and the clothes of course ceremony for granting certificates of excellence to the students of the Bashar Boys' School Kaushan 1930-31 you see the Pahlavi Kaq which is very typical of that period student and staff of the Baha'i Boys' School Kaushan 1909 which is because of their appearance of course also supports that date before Pahlavi period student and teachers of the second grade class Tarbiad Boys' School, no date here we have a number of those students of the Tarbiad Boys' School in Tehran during sport examination you can see that there are even officials of the state of the Ministry of Education among the present VIPs ceremony at Tarbiad Boys' School Tehran this is the cover of my book I chose it mainly because of the there could be no Ezraasian coming and telling us this is Ezraasian that's the Tabakol Girls' School Qazvin 1928 and again the Tabakol Boys' School Qazvin 1922 Tarbiad Boys' School student of the sport class Tarbiad Boys' School Tehran and then the sixth grade Tarbiad Boys' School number of fourth grade fifth grade, first grade of intermediary level again that's the Darse Akhlaq class that's the order of closure of the Tarbiad schools for boys and girls issued by Ali Asghar Hikmat to the manager of the Tarbiad Boys' School and now here there are some samples of Karnameh of certificates in Persian on one side and English on the other side you can see here the name of the pupil is Mirza Nureddin no the name of the father is Esmeh Vali on the left side is Mirza Shahab and Esmeh Shagaird which is the name of the student is Nurullah and of course we can see we can get an impression of what they studied we studied Quran, Sharia, Persian, Arabic, Arabic history of Iran, the history of the nation history of the Prophets the knowledge and the language which is important in our language mathematics, math, geography geography geometry geography physics, chemistry history natural biology math, calligraphy black which is also very classical profession in Iran Rasm and Nagashi which is drawing gymnastics, yes, new elements it's the same guy but with the English translation that's another guy Agha Fazlullah and his father is Jenaab Agha Muhammad the same, he has I think better grades he is from the eighth grade so he's the what we said is already high school that's the growth of the tarbiyat into the high school level not only intermediate elementary and this guy is Agha Sayed Ali and his father is Marhum Hazrati something, I don't know, just not clear that's another one Saadate Mele Boy School Najafabad 1934 just before closure Saadate Mele Girl School Najafabad 1934 Saadate Mele Girl School Najafabad of course again the Yabba Haul Abha in the middle, yes so in conclusion what we have here the establishment of Baha'i schools in Iran served not only the Iranian states need in modern schools and education but also the Baha'i principle of modern universal education and the need to secure the continued growth of the Baha'i community the Baha'i schools form the environment in which non-Baha'i students and their families interacted with Baha'is and Baha'i principles and of course we get to know those and with some of course converting to the new religion non-Baha'is who attended Baha'i schools did it for a variety of reasons but mainly because in remote places they often were they I mean the Baha'i schools were often the only schools providing modern education while in the urban centers it was usually the superior standard of education and the Baha'i schools created an atmosphere of inter-communality the like of which had not existed in Iran at grassroots level thank you very much thank you very very much Dr. Shahfar for such an interesting presentation you've raised a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas and I know I for one have been very edified the most interesting question to me was the first one why the Qajars would even have allowed the Baha'is to open such schools in the confluence of all these strains was a fascinating and persuasive as far as I was concerned the need to reform Iran the pressure from people who wanted to better their economic conditions the whole concept of modern technology and the creation of the wireless and so on exposing the people of Iran to the new possibilities and then of course the liberal mindedness of the Muslim and the cleverness in allowing individual Baha'is to open schools and not the community so the confluence of all these things very interesting I think we may have time for one question so let's see who's going to shoot their hand up first okay the lady there let me quickly repeat the question for those who didn't hear in the back a couple of questions rolled into one the first is were the Baha'is schools actually closed first or were the Christian especially the Presbyterian schools close initially and were the Baha'is schools collateral damage and the second was the question about the view within the Russian foreign policy groups and where those documents came from thank you regarding the first question well there is an indication that already in the late 1920s there is a shot started to a trend of bringing foreign schools or non-state schools private schools under the supervision of the government for example in certain stage prohibiting the teaching of French language in the French schools to Muslim students so it's a gradual thing but regarding the closure as far as my research goes the Baha'is schools were the first after that of course there is even a document by the Americans diplomats over there saying what repercussions would be on the Christian schools so on the Christian presence in Iran and that's an indication that they have been closed later regarding the second question sources vis-à-vis the Russian connection those were found in Russian archives about five Russian archives different ones those who are dealing with specifically with what I said regarding Russians are from St. Petersburg from the Baron Rosen collection which we managed to get access to and actually get the whole all the documents relating to the Baha'is regarding the accessibility it is to be decided by myself and my colleagues in the academic committee of the Esri Center what we are going to do with these documents of course those documents will be published some of them will be published in two volume work titled the Baha'is of Iran, Transcaspian and the Caucasus which will be I believe published either 2010 or the beginning of 2011 so you could have access through that whether whoever has enough knowledge of Russian and enough knowledge of how to decipher 19th century old Russian that's something else we can talk about academic cooperation in the context of academic cooperation we can afford the chance to view them shall we go for more or is up to you one more question yes sorry this lady over here that's a big difference it's a nice try well my guess is like yours but I would say with the impact with the role that the Baha'i played in the number of fields whether it is education whether it is women emancipation whether it is in the health sector whether it is in business and trade and the various of subject socioeconomic subject I would say that probably the standard of education in Iran would have been much better today than it was and it was in relation to the environment Middle Eastern environment it is still high but I would assume that it would have been much much better and of course this would have reflected in many other things because education is a source of many many other things so it could have been Iran could have been more democratic today more respect of human rights and yes we can dream on what Iran could be but unfortunately Paya Makhavan knows it very well you folks can make a choice you can either have a ten minute break or you can continue asking questions they can perhaps those of you we could do it this way those of you who would wish to take a ten minute break you can quietly perhaps proceed out and why don't we have another five minutes of questions and answers since Dr Shaffar has come such a long way to be with us all right so next question yes this gentleman here yes in the white the Bioschools the Ta'id was in Hamadan the Ta'id Hamadan and I think I mentioned each school where it was yes the influence was of great importance because for example if throughout of course private papers of a certain Baha'i person that I found in United States National Baha'i archives there is a talk about those American figures that were involved in the Tarbiat or in other schools they are asking from their friends in either New Zealand or the United States to send these or the other accessories that they didn't exist in Iran which means that they were very much attentive to the and very much thoughtful of the need to have that standard as much as possible to bring maps for example or to bring certain books that didn't exist in order to read the story for example books in English so it there were certain Baha'i schools that had labs libraries that never heard of in other schools so it was very I would say positive impact and they were also very strict in the matters of discipline and in certain instances it's not only disciplining the students it's also disciplining the Iranian management committee of those schools there is actually you can read it in the book attention from time to time between the American staff and the Iranian Baha'i leadership because in their view the Iranians are not even though they are Baha'is they have in certain matters and there is kind of for example for the American female or American woman to be in this committee or to decide certain things yes there is also attention like that but I would say that definitely the impact is very positive I've been told we need to repeat the questions through the mic for the recording so the question that preceded this answer was there an influence what was the influence of bringing teachers and we gave the gentleman here that would be your voice because you are the were there I guess significant or any numbers of Zoroastrians, Christians and Jewish children who attended these Baha'i schools well Christians because they had their own schools and there were modernized schools they less tended to either convert or to attend the Baha'i schools but Jews and Zoroastrians yes there were growing numbers especially in the towns and cities that they were heavily populated by Jews for example Hamadano-Kashan or by Zoroastrian Yazd so in those areas of course they were heavily attended by those minorities yes please okay so this lady was wondering what Dr. Schaffar's motivation was in pursuing this line of research and what he's hoping to contribute in sharing this information with the world at large thank you I explained this quite in detail in the lecture that was yesterday so in order not to bore those who have already heard this I will just make it short the reason is that as a scholar specializing in Iran wherever I read a book or an article the question pops up Baha'is are the biggest religious minority how come they are not mentioned here how come they are not mentioned here and they are throughout the society I will say they are not a secluded minority in one place one geographical place they weren't involved in the government from top to top there were officials as I said before they were in the royal family they were from top to bottom officials here and there diplomats yes the representative of Iran in the United States the consul was a Baha'i and many others so they were everywhere so how come they are not there must be a reason in London in 2002 the theme of education then I started to ask this question regarding the schools and from the schools I started to look at the other things and the reason I'm doing this is I think as being truthful to your profession as a scholar you want to get to the truth I mean what's the idea of combining a pile of lies in order to satisfy this or another you want to get to the truth what were the reason you're asking why this thing happened so why this thing happened you have to crisscross a number of sources and try to create a balanced picture if you in other words only trust Iranian sources or sources that coming out of Iran then I probably wouldn't stand here before you wouldn't have invited me and my lecture would be how negative the Baha'is are but if you put it in a larger context you use as I did the Russian archival material British archival material the material in Haifa in the Baha'i World Centre in Vilmet and as primary sources memoirs of Baha'is, non-Baha'is you create you get a different picture and why I'm doing this I mean it's simple I mean of course somebody asked me yesterday this question are you not afraid of the repercussions that it might if you read the beginning of the book I actually I'm very critical of the Iranian historiography or the historiography on modern Iran because there is no mention of the Baha'is unless the scholar is a Baha'i as I mentioned here and there about some role that they played but you have to I don't want to say give me a medal or being a bold guy about that I take my chances at least you will invite me I hope not


I am the sun, the star at the center of your universe. I am a wondrous threat made of hydrogen and helium, marvelled by poets and artists alike. Come too close to me and you will be scorched. Go too far away and feel the bitter coldness of space. It is I who allows you to see with such clarity, yet such is my brightness that you will lower your gaze at my majesty. You complain of my absence when I hide behind the clouds, yet can hardly bear my gaze when I return. At least for you, you may seek refuge under a shady tree or feel the cool water refresh your dry throat. But let me tell you of a dryness with no relief. Let me tell you of a day in which I was in anguish, wishing my rays would not touch the skin of Hussain. If he had looked up to heaven, I swear God would have put out my light forever. But he struggled and drew his last breath upon the earth that I had scorched and under the sky which I smoldered over. In agony I wanted to weep. I wanted to rip myself from the inside. All around me the skies turned red, as if it was my blood seeping from my sphere. All across the world they saw my tears. It's written in the history books how the skies turned to blood for the death of Hussain. I am the sun, once so majestic and proud. What I would have given to send rain down upon the body of Hussain.


Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining my talk today on designing metrics programs to respect contributor expectations and promote safety. My name is Sophia Vargas. For those of you I haven't met, I am a researcher and program manager in Google's open source programs office. And I'm also an active member of the chaos community, which is a project that focuses on discussing, defining, and building software to implement metrics around open source projects. Specifically designed to measure health and sustainability. A little bit more about me and why I'm interested in this topic. I have a background in market research, consulting, data analytics, program management. And when we talk about something like data collection and data practice and data policy, I want to expressly point out that I'm not a lawyer. So please do not take anything in this presentation as legal advice. Instead, consider it as awareness. What would I like to have known before and acknowledgment of when you should be consulting legal expertise in your practice? So bring us back to the question at hand. Can we measure the health of our projects? Well, we can. There are ways to collect data around our communities. And if we set goals around whatever health means to us, a growing contribution or converting more intermittent contributors to full-time contributors to maintainers, whatever it means to build health and sustainability in your community, can we measure that over time and track it and see how we're doing? But in order to measure that, we have to collect data about our community, about people. And often, people that can choose to be anonymous, people that can choose to identify who they are in a community call with their camera off or supply their work information and the location information in their GitHub profile. So we have a whole range of information about people that we are working with in these communities, but it's not necessarily consistent. So we think about collecting data in order to measure something like project health. We have to think about the individuals and the data we're collecting about them. And so how do we ensure that when we approach these types of programs, we're meeting people at their own privacy expectations in order to ensure their safety in any of the community? Because if you think about, there are some identifiers that are now at under attack in some communities and we would never wanna put our community members in a place where they could be subject to harm. So the first question we have is who's actually accountable for the data itself? Data could be collected by companies, by projects, and influenced by regulators and regionalities. And depending on where you are and where you're collecting the data, you might be subject to different rules and regulations. And say, I like this example, in the chaos community, we've been working on the DEI event badging program where we're encouraging events to have more diverse representation in their speaker profiles. And so in order to do that, we've asked the event leaders to share that demographic information with us as we review it as part of this badging program. But the more that we were doing this and more that we were collecting this data, we recognized that, well, we should actually be transparent with the community in terms of how we're using this information, how we're ensuring that their information is being used expressly for this purpose and nothing else, as well as how we're protecting and ensuring that this information is only staying with us in the trusted member of this community. So we thought this was a necessary addition to put on our public-facing documentation to ensure that anyone who shared their information with us knew what we were gonna do with it and how we were gonna protect it. So if you are thinking about collecting data about your community or a community that you're a member of, generally the recommendation is that you, the collector, are accountable. You might be working at a company, you might be working for a nonprofit, and yes, some of those, again, nuances and what's being regulated and how it's being regulated might change depending on where you work.  So when I think about data collection, I think about it in sort of three main buckets. We can ask people directly who they are, what they do, what they're interested in, what they're working on in the form of surveys and interviews, discussions and forums. We can go out and scrape data that's already there through crawling websites or pulling from platform APIs like GitHub and Stack Overflow. And then we can kind of fill in the holes from what we know or assume. And you can see I'm kind of sounding a little bit more skeptical here because this is never gonna be something that I'm gonna recommend, especially in the context of community health and metrics. I will say that there are use cases that I think this is a little bit more appropriated, say in an academic approach where we're looking at thousands of people and we're trying to figure out how to estimate various different types of identifiers in a population. In that case, okay, maybe that's okay because those things that are being labeled are never coming back to the individual. They're happening at an aggregate level where those individuals, yes, their identity might be assumed, but we're not actually labeling them individually because it's happening at an aggregate and systematic level. But in our communities, this is where things can start to get a little sticky. It might encourage you to assume information that people don't necessarily wanna share with the broad Republic because they've shared it with you as a trusted member of their community and maybe they don't want you to write that down in a place where they haven't agreed to that. So I'm never gonna recommend it in the context of gathering data about your community and displaying it back. The other area where guessing becomes highly problematic is that when we think about how we get consent about using this information, if you are guessing and you're not interacting with the person directly, you're not actually getting consent from them versus if you go up to them and say, hey, are you okay with this information being used? Then you've expressly gone out and asked for their permission to use it in this context. So again, never gonna recommend guessing in this context because it can encourage inaccuracy and potentially stereotyping. So if we are asking people, and again, form surveys, interviews, we can explicitly ask for consent. We can also allow for individuals to provide conditional consent. Say I only want my information being used if you have at least 30 people that follow my category because then I know that I have some anonymity in that. Or maybe we offer partial ways. So allowing respondents to opt out of questions that they may or may not feel comfortable sharing with us. The one challenge here is that later on, I'm gonna generally, my general stance is if you're running a survey, it should be anonymous. That can encourage more, reduce the fear of harm or retaliation, as well as allowing people to feel more open and honest because they know it's not coming back to them. However, this does present a challenge in terms of, say, being able to withdraw or alter submission because if it's truly anonymous, you can actually retract it anymore because there's no way for me to find which one is yours. So in theory, you could, say, add an identifier for surveys, but by some regulation approaches, this is not anonymous anymore because people can be re-identified by those values. When we're scraping data that's already there, I would say the general recommendation is as long as you are following all of the existing platform policies around data use and data use case, then you are essentially writing on the implicit consent that's already been granted by the platform. If you sign up for GitHub, you say, yes, I agree to your terms of service. So now that I'm pulling data from GitHub, I wanna ensure that I am actually following those terms of service, say, I'm not using your email to send out marketing content because that is explicitly prohibited in GitHub's terms of service and data policies. So as long as you know what those policies are and you comply with them, then you can essentially borrow that consent that's already been given to the platform, which has also allowed individuals to only share information conditionally, say there's some information that's only shared with org members or some details about interactions that are only going to be org members. And some information, you don't have to necessarily volunteer. You don't have to put your name, you don't have to put your geography, you don't have to put your company on GitHub. So there is an element of allowing individuals to share as much information as they want to on that platform. Where this breaks down and gets more ambiguous is that when we start to aggregate data across platforms because there is no mechanism to allow for consent to aggregate this into yet a new dataset that will have net new information in it. I had an example in here earlier just as I was trying to cut down time, but if you look me up on GitHub, you can see where I work, you can see where I live and generally that's enough information to find me on LinkedIn and see where I work before, see where I went to college. And at a certain point now you're aggregating a lot more information about me in one place that I haven't necessarily expressly given permission to. So this is a case where if you are planning to do this, it's a good idea to bring it to your project leadership and you're bored and discuss your approach first, what you want to do with it, why you want to use this information and give the community an opportunity to provide feedback and or opt in or out of this. So a little bit more about survey sampling and here's where I'm putting my market research hat on. If you've ever run a large and comprehensive study, the thing that really qualifies what we can do with the data is the sample size, how many people did we get and what portion of the thing we wanted, who do we want to know about is represented in that sample. And typically this allows you to say, understand how you can extrapolate the data. So say the US Census has information about all of all the people who live in the United States, well that supplied that information, but it's such a massive portion that they can kind of extrapolate what's happening in the broader community because they know they have representative sample. But in our communities, we often don't know how many people are there or present at any given moment in time. So it gets a little bit fuzzier when we think about open source communities because we might not really know. We might think we have a majority, but we might not. And so just think about that in terms of what it actually means, how you present the data, what things you can conjecture based on that data. And recognizing that it's always gonna have some sort of inherent bias. It is incredibly difficult to remove bias from a survey because at a certain point, I'm only say recruiting participants of the Kubernetes community. That's just one community. That's not everyone. And so we're inherently narrowing it down to the populations we wanna talk to. But to say if we only recruit on a platform like Slack, then we're also limiting who we talk to. And recognizing that where we recruit is also going to affect who actually is exposed to this, who can take the study, and again, acknowledge who you're able to include in this type of exercise. And generally respecting the norms, there are some channels that are not meant to be recruited from. Say if it's a channel dedicated to something like issue triage, they probably wouldn't appreciate having a survey placed in there that's not about issue triage. Generally market researchers have lower limits that they are more or less comfortable with talking to represent data in percentage forms. And from a conservative sense, this would be a sample size of 50 people. The less conservative sense, maybe it'll go down to 30. But below that is when the numbers sort of start to break down because representing it as a percentage starts to become more misleading and you might start to be able to figure out who people are based on how they respond, just the smaller and smaller the sample gets. The challenge is, yes, you might not have 30 people in your community. That's actually quite large number for some open source projects. So it's just an acknowledgement that you might not be able to present the data in the same way. And it's gonna take a lot more care and consideration in how you present your findings to acknowledge that you're not actually inadvertently exposing someone who thought they were anonymous. To build on some of the other best practices around surveys for questions, please only ask what you really need to know. It's really easy as a researcher to just kind of keep shoving in more questions because wouldn't it be nice to know that? But it's just gonna make things longer and the longer they get, the more likely people will bail. So generally, don't exceed 10 minutes. I know I wrote 25 and 15 here because that's usually, again, what market researchers say, but I think that's still too long. The shorter the survey, the more likely people will finish it. In addition to that, it's really easy to ask for too much information than you actually need. So one example that came up recently in my world was asking where people lived, which is a sensitive and protected category. And when I dug into it with the project leaders, the things we really wanted to know were what languages are people working in so we can prioritize translation? Okay, that's a different question. Or what time zone should we be prioritizing for meetings? So maybe asking what time zone you like to work in, which may or may not correlate to your geography, and what language is your primary working language or do you feel comfortable working in, those were much more pointed, much more to the point, much more actionable than asking for something like geography, which is a lot more sensitive and potentially not even getting to the things that you need. Limiting open-ended questions is really easy to slide in a few more extraneous details that can expose who you are. So it's helpful to remind participants to talk in generalities. And again, you as the data owner are accountable for ensuring that you redact anything that someone has said that might help re-identify them. Rackets and buckets can help to make things more general. So something like a category like age, instead of asking for someone's age, ask for someone's age in buckets. And this way you're reducing specificity while still providing the analysts some things to run distributions and analytics on. In very small populations, you might wanna group more things together, especially things like underrepresented groups, which yes, that might limit your analysis potential, but if you only have two or three people identifying in these different underrepresented groups, that's not a large enough sample to really learn from. So you can talk about these things in general, but then maybe if you only get a handful of folks in the back end, if you're gonna display the data, group it together. And that way, again, people's identities are a little bit more protective. Allow people to opt out of anything that is sensitive, say potentially all demographic questions. And where no possible borrow from existing lists. I've written, I don't know, hundreds of surveys and I still struggle to say, comprehensively list out all the various different types of titles someone can have in a technical profession. It can be massive and if you wanna keep your list to like say 13 to 14, which is sort of like standard size of a survey question, it can be really hard to do that. And so just look at another survey. See how someone else has done it. It's much easier to react to a list and make it better to fit your case than it is to write a list in general. And this can get even more problematic when we start to think about, again, those sensitive demographic questions. So here I'm recommending looking at the Open Demographics Project that has been crowdsourcing how we provide a comprehensive set of categories around demographic and identifiers. So these can be really helpful places to start by looking at existing studies as well as looking at projects that are focused on this specifically. In interviews, most of the time these are definitely not anonymous. There are people talking to people. So then again, it's on the data collector to ensure they're redacting and abstracting away any of the details. So typically, again, you can ask participants how much about themselves they're willing to share. But you can also just fully abstract that in your findings. Participant X said that. And if you wanna include more information about who you spoke with, then maybe you have a table that says, I talked to 10 people and five of them came from large tech companies and five of them came from these different particular regions. But because that's separated from your interview kind of like participant X, Y, Z, then there's no connection back to those identities. Typically in larger studies, we'll see an abstraction like job title in a role in industry. So I might be a program manager at a large tech company. And I'm okay with that identifier because there are thousands of us at Google. So I'm not really inadvertently exposing myself by referring to myself in this category. However, if I said program manager at Google and we knew it was an interview from say chaos participants, you know exactly who I am now. So acknowledging who is present in the study, who is present in this space, what lists are public can help you identify how best to abstract this. And if you're concerned at all, again, just revert back to full abstraction. A little bit more about passive data collection. So again, pulling from existing information sources, you have to acknowledge that there isn't always a place to opt out. If your platform, sorry, if your code base lives on GitHub, then your participants have to opt into GitHub in order to participate. And so there might be areas where you're now starting to aggregate information that may or may not be identifiable because you know your community members. So again, this is an opportunity to bring this back to the community, to acknowledge what you're doing and what you're trying to do with it and allow for feedback on how this information is being portrayed. A lot of things are outdated on GitHub. Just acknowledge people don't go in and change things immediately. So if you're looking at prior or historical logs, they may or may not be showing accurate information. And there's always gonna be information that's missing because again, you didn't go out and ask people directly. One of my favorite examples is there's a lot of effort to assume what company you work for based on the domain of your email, say the DevSath project does this, and it is helpful to know where people are coming from. But we don't know if people that are identifying as working at Google are actively doing this work during their time at Google. A lot of people are actively volunteering in these spaces and might identify that they work at a company, but that doesn't actually mean that they're doing this work on behalf of their company. And so there's a lot of nuance that's lacking from these platforms and that's just again, the information that you have to go directly to the community members and ask them if that's something that you need to know. And we already mentioned it, but being considered across, consider it with cross-platform data aggregation. Now I want to spend a little bit of time talking about another program in the Chaos Project, which I've mentioned a few times, stands for Community Health Analytics and Open Source Software. So again, we think about metrics, we design metrics, we build software to collect these metrics. We launched another program last year where I already talked about the Event Paging Program. We have now the DEI Project Paging Pilot, which is a way for projects to highlight the efforts that they're taking to promote diversity, equity, inclusion in their communities. And the reason why I wanted to bring it up in this context is when we think about measuring something like how we're doing in DEI, we often revert back to representation and identifiers in our community. And everything we've talked about today acknowledges that these are highly sensitive and protected pieces of information. And in fact, pieces of information that could cause harm depending on where you live in this country. And so it might not be prudent for you to go out and collect this, especially if your community is small. And so what I like about this program is instead of looking at metrics or presenting metrics that look at representation and actuality, instead, they encourage projects to write intentionally how they plan to work on things like project accessibility or communication transparency, what they're doing to welcome newcomers and provide an accessible experience for newcomers and how they're thinking about increasing diversity in their leadership, which is the most visible part of that community. And these are things that projects can report on, create metrics to measure against, and they have nothing to do with collecting protected information categories from their community. So I really like this as an approach for particularly small communities or ones where you're sensitive about collecting this information. And again, if you have a community of two people, you're probably not diverse because they're just two of you and you can't really be diverse with two people. And that's okay, but you still have an opportunity to say, hey, I want to make sure that my project is friendly and welcoming to people that may or may not look like me or identify with the things that I represent. So with all these things in mind, I think mostly we want to take a step back and ensure that we choose the methodology that not only meets our goals, but fits the shape of our community. So some general principles, we've mentioned this a few times, but where and all possible, preserve anonymity. This can really help to encourage honesty and again, reduce that harm of fear of retaliation. We already mentioned this already in terms of the accountability piece, but really try to limit access to the raw data because typically the raw data is gonna be the identifiable data. Again, even an anonymous survey, if you only get six people filling out your form, you might be able to figure out who those six people are based on how they respond to the things. So you as the data owner, collector, analyst, are responsible for ensuring that the way that you portray this information again respects that privacy and anonymity that was presented at the front of this program. You can use a third party to help remove and reduce risk here, but it's generally not something I'm gonna recommend because this costs money and these people don't have any context about your community and may not be able to know how to interpret the results in a way that's helpful and relevant. You can also try just limiting your retention period. If you finish your analysis project, delete the data, which can sometimes be a little bit scary because you're like, well, what if? I wanna go look at that thing and you're like, well, okay, maybe after a year we throw it out because then we're gonna run it again, we'll have a whole new data. So save your aggregate results, but don't keep, limit the retention period. And again, it might be uncomfortable, but the longer these things stick around, the longer that they might get shared to more and more people that may or may not respect the intentions that were initially outlined for this project. Reviewing and complying with all applicable policies, there are many policies that should be considered here, not only happening at the foundation, the community level, but the platform level. And again, if you're a company, then the company level or any regionality that you're subject to. It's always the best practice to have somebody else look at what you're doing. So auditing, reviewing and testing, your methodology can come from your project leadership and community members. If you're doing this on behalf of a research institution, then you can lean on your institutional review board. And again, consulting, legal and privacy experts, one applicable. And always communicate what you're trying to do, how you tend to use this information, what you're expecting to do with it, and what measures you're gonna take to ensure the privacy and protection of all those who participate. I wanna close with some general considerations. Typically 100% participation is never gonna happen. And that's okay. I think in most surveys, like if I get 10% of my population responding or my outreach list, that's actually pretty good. So again, expect less. And when you get data, be thankful for that data. But then also recognize what and who is potentially missing from the sample. You're never really gonna collect everything. So what does that mean about what you can infer? Again, thinking again about that initial recommendation of understanding the sample you collect and how is representative or not of the community. And remembering that no data is data. And that if you don't collect any information about some folks, that could mean that, yes, maybe they're not present, or two, maybe they didn't feel comfortable sharing. And maybe that's something else that it's willing to explore, understand why or why not this information is being exposed in this collection practice. Always recognizing that externalities might impact your results. So you probably don't wanna run a survey during a release. It seems simple, but I've seen it happen. Don't do that. People are busy already and your people are your most valuable resource. Be respectful of their time and acknowledge and figure out what cadence makes the most sense for your community. And please don't over-survey. I say personally had four surveys in my inbox this month. That is too many. And so I only pick and choose the ones that I either have to take or that I want to take. And so again, be respectful of your community member's time and maybe only do this once a year unless there's a really, really good use case. For additional thoughts and best practices around data collection and research in open source communities, I'm referring to a piece of research that was published last year by a couple of fellow researchers and colleagues around best practices for open source ecosystem researchers. I wanna close with the fact that data is a tool. It is not innately good or bad. And it can be used for both positive and negative things. So you again have to assume the responsibility to use data wisely. And so kind of the general principles I like are being incredibly deliberate. Data is a tool that can be used to elicit a change. It can be elued to elicit a change in behavior. But is it the behavioral change that you wanted to encourage? My favorite example here are leaderboards. I know I've heard a lot about desktats this past week and I love the project. I love what it's allowing the broader community to track and to be visible of. But it does also encourage some behaviors by saying this is how we create our nominations list for our leadership by how these contributions are appearing in this particular aggregation tool. And so you're essentially encouraging people to ensure that they have the right and highest level of stats in order to do that. And those may or may not be the things that are really needed in the community. So when we do display a leaderboard, is that again, is that the behavior that we want to change? Or maybe we don't necessarily want to always show all things to all people. Because sometimes your community leadership needs to know information, but it isn't necessarily helpful to show it to the broader community. So being really deliberate about what we show to whom that can really again elicit the change that we want and the behavior that we want to influence in the community without again encouraging unwanted or changing the behavior that weren't intended. And it's really easy to cherry pick data, pull it out of context, use it however you want. I've seen this happen numerous amounts of time. And so try to fight against that by always including your bases, your sources, your methodology, how a sample was collected, when it was collected and having sort of a referenceable information sheet around your data. Don't release data without this please ever. People can understand where it came from, understand how to interpret it. Cause even if you're taking those things into consideration, having as a researcher, I always look for it before I interpret any data. I want to know how many people were present, how people were participating in it, how they were allowed to participate in it, when it was collected. These are all the things that helped me understand what I'm looking at and how to interpret the results. Not everyone will do this, so please include it all in one place to again not leave room for misinterpretation. Thank you, that's it. I actually cut this down a lot, maybe too much, but I honestly don't mind having a short talk. You can follow me work on LinkedIn. I've kind of left the other platform that we don't speak of anymore. And in addition to that, we just recently launched as a team, a publication site. So I work on a research team of two and we've been slowly but steadily publishing research related to open source ecosystem and related best practices. And we're finally starting to put that in one place. So if you're interested in seeing some of the papers that I've written as well as my colleague Amanda Cassari, that's now available on our website. And I'm personally always open to feedback. So I put this QR code up, it'll take you to the app that allows you to rate the session and give me feedback. And with that being said, thank you for your time and I'll be around for the remainder seven minutes and 30 seconds for questions. Anyone? Yeah, please use the mic so the recording can hear you. I just got a question. I think this is around the same topic, but for us who are like maintainers or dealing with open source projects, I think I'm currently like a product manager right now. Getting like signal and feedback from just usage of usage of one of the projects has been tough. And this seems to be like two camps. Some people, hey, telemetry is evil to try to embed in a product project. But it's super helpful. Like if you talk about like enterprise apps and how to get, you know, to not have to reach to people and just have that data come back to you just easily. I was just curious, what's your perspective or just kind of like your outlook on those? Yes, I have many thoughts and actually an active project looking at this right now. So I'm glad you asked. Yes, we're talking about usage and how that can serve as feedback and mechanisms for project leaders as well as project leaders of how people are using what and how. And so I think, yes, there is generally negativity associated with adding any kind of telemetry to your project. I would say there's sort of a double standard here because if project were released with telemetry, people don't care as much. But if you add it, that's where we start feeling like we've overstepped the trust of the community. And so right now I'm looking at a project to try to assess the usefulness of approximate information around usage. So one of the most popular ones that's come up is say number of people viewing your documentation site because the assumption is that if people are regularly reviewing your documentation, they're probably using your tool. So that can be one where you can sort of track activity around documentation. You can look at how many people are posting questions on things like Stack Overflow, how many people are generating issues in your GitHub repository, how membership to mailing lists is growing, changing, activity in your Slack channel is growing and changing. People like downloads, they're real flaky depending on where you're pulling them from. So like sometimes downloads can be indicative. Sometimes I don't know if you're installing like 500 things on your machines inside your company. That's not really necessarily a good signal. And actually one of my favorite download debacles was an individual from the Bazel organization that pulled download information across their versions because they wanted to know which versions were still in use. And the data was a sine wave. It was not going up or down. It was doing this. And we're like, oh, because they're being pulled into ICD systems, this is like automation. This is not people. So there can be a lot of funkiness and noise inherent in any of these signals. So the general hypothesis we have now is that if you look at the signals that are available around approximate usage indicators, then that can at least give you a sense of trajectory. It might not be an actual value, but you can generally see is this community growing? Is it shrinking? Like in trying to see, I didn't really learn from that. The other element that you can bring in that can add an element of relativity is looking at similar metrics for similar projects to see like in other projects in the CNCF community, maybe that'll give you a better signal of whether or not you're growing with them or growing apart from them in ways that again, it's relative, but it provides a little bit more context to say like, okay, we have a number. We don't know if it's real. Is it more or less than another project in the CNCF that's similar to what we do? And that gives you a little bit more context for how to talk about the information you have. So nothing is perfect. Nothing is actual without adding some sort of phone home virtual enemy directly in your project, but again, that's generally not recommended. So I would suggest looking at that and I guess stay tuned because the research community is actively thinking about it because I would love to be able to demonstrate which metrics are better than others to try to understand usage trajectory. Okay, we can talk offline because I guess, we try to like, there's battles as far as saying, which features do we think are important? So there's a lot of assumptions made by the ambiguity or we think or some big well client comes and says, oh, I need this. And then you find out, okay, they're the only person that has that feature, so. It can happen. Absolutely, let's chat after. Pretend for a moment that you're joining a small company building an open source product who is firmly in that guess category. What are your first couple of steps? About who's in your broader community? About collecting this kind of information and putting together surveys and... Yeah, I guess I would always start with the existing information versus going out and asking people first. So what I didn't say in terms of order of operation, if you're gonna run a survey and you're again thinking about how many people you're trying to reach, we don't even know, we don't have any information about who they might be first. And so starting with what you can already measure by say what's happening on GitHub, who's interacting on GitHub, who's interacting on Slack, who's interacting on Stack Overflow, who's interacting on Discord, wherever else your community members are active. So you have a general sense of, okay, is this like a three people? Is this 10 people? Is this more than 20? And you kind of like can get a better sense of your population size. And then I think if in smaller spaces, I feel like I really like the discussion forum format where instead of going out and asking people directly, which can be kind of intense, that especially if you don't really have a long history with them, in a forum it allows for a general conversation and people can share as much information as they want, but also hear from others, which I think also encourages other people to share. They're like, oh yeah, I do that too, or I wouldn't have thought of that, but now that you're saying that you're using it in this case, like now I'm interested in that. And now you as the person listening acknowledge, oh I now hear a use case and hear that other people, that's resonating with them. So if you can bring your community together in sort of this forum environment, which can be virtual, it can be physical, depending on how your community gathers. I like that as sort of like the initial starting point for this, especially, and I would say for discussions and initial discussions, keeping things really general, just like maybe about use and interests and direction, just so like before you're getting into any kind of demographic information, because I think that that only comes into play when things are getting larger, we're thinking more about your community population. And so that's kind of where it would start I guess.  I typically never record these sorts of things, but I will take a lot of notes. And so like I think we ran a session like this for another community and all of my indicators were like talk, like I took the person's name and took their first initial and then put like a one, two, three, and that's how I recorded people's names and there was no list of who people were. And so then like if you were there, you could potentially remember who it was, but that way how you recorded that information didn't actually say it to anyone else who wasn't there. And so it did preserve some of the known inaccuracy for the people present, but also didn't create more details that were willing to be shared outside of who was present. There's also a lot of popular forums that exist with Chatham House rules. Are people familiar with that concept? Yes, for those who are not, it's basically saying that there will be no notes or attribution taken in a conversation. So there will be general notes taken, but you will never actually be subject to the things that you say. So that basically allows people to be freer in their comments because they won't come back and say, oh, someone from Google said that. So that won't happen when you all kind of agree to this. So setting a kind of like code of conduct or practice happening specific to this forum can also help the participants know how much they can share and how much they will say will be attributed back to them. What was the term for that? Chatham House Rules. Chatham, C-H-A-T-A-M. Was there an H in there that I forgot? Possibly. All right, I think we're at time. I'll be around for the next two days, but thank you. Thank you.