Coming up on D T N S live stream shopping may be the next big thing gaming sticks for video games streaming sticks for video games and what the heck is HDR anyway Patrick Norton explains this is the Daily Tech news for Friday, October 23 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang joining us host of AV Excel. Patrick Norton is back in the house. How you doing Patrick? I'm in the parking lot of the city museum and I'm full of joy. That's amazing. You're on location at the city. Yes, breaking news from the city museum. Should it happen will be covered immediately by Patrick Norton. We just fixed streaming sports on good day internet. So if you'd like that solution, get that wider show at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A California appeals court said Thursday that Uber and Lyft both must follow the AB five law and reclassify their drivers as employees confirming a lower court ruling from August. Once the ruling is formalized, both companies will have 30 days to comply, giving them each time to see how California votes on proposition 22, which would overturn AB five and make the whole ruling moot. Listen to our special with politics, politics, politics, also known as PX three and the latest episode of know a little more for more on AB five and prop 22. A group of companies including Microsoft, IBM, Nvidia, Airbus, Bosch and more along with nonprofit MITRE Corporation released the adversarial ML threat matrix. It's an open framework designed to help security teams detect, respond and remediate threats against machine learning systems. The matrix is available on GitHub and open for further contributions from the community. Huawei's revenue rose 10% in the first three quarters of 2020, slower than it had in 2019 when it rose 24%. Huawei said that COVID-19 and US trade policy have both put its supply chain under intense pressure and that the company will, quote, do its best to find solutions to survive and to fulfill its obligations to customers and suppliers. Google launched the Google Fi phone subscription program, which lets customers buy a Pixel 4a for $9 a month over 24 months. That's a total of $216. So it gives you a discount unless you pay it off early, in which case you have to pay the full $349 retail price. Also, even though it's called Google Fi phone subscription program, the Pixel 4a subscription does not include a Google Fi cell phone plan. But if you're a Google Fi subscriber, you can have that cost of the phone added to your bill every month. Nintendo reduced the price of a single replacement Joy-Con controllers for the Switch. The controllers have a history of failing and needed repair or replacement. So the price of a single Joy-Con, left or right, has dropped from $50 to $40. That's a bit. All right, let's talk a little more about Microsoft's little streaming stick. In an interview with Stratechery, Microsoft's Phil Spencer speculated on selling Xbox Game streaming sticks. Here's Spencer's quote. I think you're going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via X-Cloud. You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the game past subscription that gave you an ability to stream X-Cloud games to your television and buying the controller. That's what he said. On the other end of the scale, Spencer also mentioned the idea of Xbox Game Pass Platinum with guaranteed access to new Xbox hardware. It sounds like he means kind of a spin on Xbox All Access, which right now bundles in Xbox Game Pass with a payoff plan for an Xbox Series X. The Verge notes that Microsoft had a similar plan for an Xbox streaming device back in 2016, but it canceled that. Roger, I know you're an Xbox user and you were sort of interested in this idea of a video game streaming stick. The whole thing that Microsoft is, I mean, the very transparent about it is that they're shooting, and we've mentioned this before on the show, it's games as a service. So the whole idea is how do we lower the barrier for people who aren't part of our Xbox user base to play our games, use our service and earn that way? How do we do it? We already have a system in place. So why don't we roll out game streaming, which is basically what XCloud is? And then how do we take that and make it so someone doesn't necessarily have to buy for $500, $600 worth of hardware in order to access those same services?  I think it's a very shrewd move on Microsoft's part. Yeah, I mean, not knowing exactly what something like this would cost clearly would be much less than, you know, a console, one of the newest for someone like me who's like, OK, not much of a gamer. There's only so much space I have to put something, you know, the idea of kind of physical console stuff. I don't really like that. I don't really want that even if there was a great reason or a game that was drawing me in the whole streaming stick thing. In 2016, maybe Microsoft was like the world not yet totally ready for this. Today, people use them for all sorts of for all sorts of content. And I think it's I think it's a really good idea.  And then they moved to streaming. There's only in a select platforms. At this point, you can pretty much get Netflix on anything.  And it's there. It's it's second nature. And I think that's where Xbox wants to be where, you know, you're not thinking about how do I get it? Just like, OK, where when I sign up, I can play it on anything.  They get as Scott mentioned this past week, as long as they get the latency issues worked out. It's I think it's a winner. Patrick, what do you think? I know the the idea of streaming isn't is it new, like Sarah said, but it does seem like subscription services and streaming services are more and more viable. And don't forget, Microsoft has a partnership with Samsung, which is mostly right now around the S 20. But it could be putting a service like this into a Samsung TV to. It's it's been interesting because we've been watching these these cloud gaming streaming systems popping up for years. What feels like forever, but it's really only been like five or eight years now. I think the biggest challenge, even with somebody with it with the network. I mean, Google's probably got more money and more tools to throw at this problem. Anybody on the planet, including Microsoft and even Stadia still has some issues. I think it's the big challenge is like Roger said before, is if they can deal with latency issues and actually make the thing work the way we expect it to, which is much less of an issue with something like Netflix or another video streaming service where you're not sending, you know, commands and reactions and streaming where you're simply, you know, Netflix, you stream content into a bucket, the bucket gets kind of poured into your TV with gaming. It's much more interactive. And I often find myself kind of fascinated in the weird ways the internet behaves, even in places where I should have a really solid connection. So I, you know, I, yeah, I think that is a bigger issue for the kinds of people who are less likely to buy or get a free gaming stick, though. Right. And that into latency from what I can tell Luna and Stadia even and and X cloud have good enough latency that if you're a casual gamer and there's a frame dropped here and there may be occasional button press miss, it's not that big a deal. Right. But if it's the kind of people who are like, yeah, never buy a streaming stick anyway, I want to get an Xbox series. Having just played GeForce now, what, at least with GeForce now what happens is the latency is actually pretty good. It's just to deal with it, the quality dips. Right.  But overall, the I was always, I'm always surprised at how well it works. I mean, I tried game on was the one that we got way back at revision three and that thing was like playing through, you know, a rubber band. You know, you move the stick and you wait a half second later, something happens, but GeForce now I am really impressed. So I have no doubt that Microsoft can make this work. And people were skeptical about Netflix back when it was on the Netflix Roku player and it was buggy and it didn't it buffered a lot. You know, so I don't know. I feel like I will I will back ashamed into my corner is just I think it's one of those things where it's been such an issue for so many years. Kind of like VR where we saw VR headsets literally for a decade and a half. It feels like before there was finally one where it was an experience that was interesting. So, you know, as soon as they release it, I'll buy one and hopefully we'll enjoy the snot out of it. We wait with bated breath for a product and a ship date and stuffy noses. Well, also of interest, at least to some of you who like to eat ride hailing company grabs as its revenues for Q3 are back to 95% of pre COVID-19 numbers, despite continuing lockdowns and several of the Southeast Asian cities that it operates in. And a newsletter obtained by Tech in Asia grab president Ming Ma said that food delivery now generates more than 50% of grabs total revenue. Tech in Asia also notes that successful travel startup Traveloka says that it anticipates breaking even by early 2021 at the latest. Yeah, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what travel is doing to get around the reduced travel that's happening even in Southeast Asia. But this is the first positive response that I've seen where a ride hailing company that isn't having as many rides happen everywhere in the world has said, Yeah, we thought we could shift to food delivery turns out that works. And we're actually close to having all of our revenue back for ride hailing companies. I mean, the the issue that I've always had it was always dependent on where I was at the time. If I'm in the city and let's say I'm in San Francisco, right? And I'm hailing an Uber, you know, it got so ubiquitous that there'd be an Uber at my house within three minutes, you know, where it would be sort of an issue. But not everywhere. And, you know, you just kind of deal with what you what you got. When it comes to food delivery, it's it's even more of that kind of an issue. For example, where I live now, food is not just right around the corner. And it depending on what I want, it's like, if it was five minutes away, great, they're going to do really well in certain markets. You know, sounds like grab is like, we're doing really well in a lot of our markets where people find the the wait time and the convenience to be totally worth it. And we're doing pretty good. But there are places where ride hailing companies have struggled where food delivery struggles, food delivery services would struggle that much more because you're talking about things getting cold and kind of getting stale. I'm not. Yeah, yeah. No, they're they're they're doing well in, you know, Saigon, they're not doing well in rural Vietnam, right? They're doing well in Singapore. Imagine. Yeah, because it's a small city. So that's that's a that's a really good point. This won't translate everywhere. But it does. It does show that, yes, even with low margin food delivery, you can make up for low margin ride hailing blossoms, right? Indeed. Indeed. Patrick, any more thoughts on that? I'm staying out of this one. How about live streaming shopping then? The Verges Ashley Carmen has an article about how live stream shopping has become huge in China and US companies are trying to catch it on here as well. Amazon launched live for influencers in July. Instagram and Facebook launched live shopping features in August. Google has their own that's kind of on demand. It's not live. The idea with these is to make a more modern shopping channel experience with influencers as the hosts. Hundreds of millions of people tuned into shopping live streams in June in China. It's just keeps going up and up and up. Kim Kardashian partnered with a Chinese influencer on one of these streams in China and sold 15,000 bottles of perfume like that during an appearance. The numbers are rising in the US now to 40,000 people watched YouTuber Nikita Dragoon's live shopping event on Instagram. 5,000 items were added to shopping carts during the segment. All her branded products. So she was selling her own stuff direct to you. The people hosting live shopping streams already have dedicated fan bases that see them as friends. So the difference with QVC is with QVC, you got to know the hosts on QVC. If you watched it a lot, you might kind of know the celebrity that shows up. But these are folks where you feel like if you're in the influencers audience, if you watch their YouTube channel, you subscribe to them on Instagram, you follow their TikToks, you feel like you know them. So when they show up, it's not a stranger or a celebrity. It's a friend telling you like, hey, this beauty product works great, check it out. Also interactivity is key. You can take calls on QVC and they do that. But this is like live chat, people who are savvy about talking to a chat room while they're doing the live stream. For instance, Facebook and their best practices encourages folks to reply to everyone who DMs or comments according to Ashley's article on The Verge. So this is one of those trends that I'd keep an eye on. You're probably going to see this happening more and more, and it is a different spin on the old shopping channel idea. And also it's a next step from what a lot of influencers are doing on their popular channels already. You know, I actually sometimes there are people that I follow that I like and I trust. I don't know that I would consider them friends, but I like their content. I would like to see something like this. In fact, I would like to experience this in a shopping stream type of way rather than be like, oh, is this an Instagram ad? Oh, yeah, they tagged it ad at the end. Okay, it's an ad. So I think that this is, it makes a lot of sense. Sure, there's going to be people who are shilling things that they don't necessarily care about. And that's just advertising in general. But yeah, that kind of fun. Let's hang out. Let's be interactive. To me, it's this is not that different than watching somebody play a video game. You're there and you're you're hanging out. Patrick on a scale of one to horrified. How do you feel about this? Okay, so disclosure, I actually was part of a set of a whole bunch of people who who did technology on YouTube were invited out to do a series of QVC type trials. When Amazon was considering doing some, well, basically some programming like that. And it was really fascinating because one of the people there had been a long term host with a certain high profile comedian on QVC.  And it's all about kind of generating a certain amount of money per minute or second or however the metrics were running. So on one hand, this makes perfect sense to me. And it's it's if you're an influencer and you're looking for revenue streams. This makes perfect sense. I'm kind of curious at what point. They figure out how to generate more money per minute on this because at this point it seems like it's super experimental. And then Amazon will do what Amazon does. And they will figure out a way to turn it into this giant money generating beast of joy. But, you know, I think if you're an influencer and you can get involved with this and you can pick up commissions like why wouldn't you? Also, I'm curious why we're seeing Google's experimental arm put a on demand version out. And according to this Verge article, at least one person didn't find that it that it worked very well. Well, why aren't they doing live shopping on YouTube? Why isn't that like a product that they've launched? I'm a little surprised maybe it's in the works and it'll come out soon. I think YouTube's just a complicated beast to get anything up and running on in a in the way that they want it to. Well, we'll look for our live shopping channel soon. Don't forget, you can get masks, mugs and hats at daily tech news show dot com slash store. There you go. And Stoic Squirrel get in there and go do the shopping. Join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, we love having Patrick on because he can help us wrap our heads around the complex topics of technology, such as Dolby Atmos, HDR. You hear these things more and more, not even just on televisions and home entertainment stuff, but phones and all of that. So Patrick, let's start off with Dolby Atmos. What is it? Why do we care? We care because it's a really amazing experience. You know, Dolby Atmos or DTSX. And I also I need to do a caveat here earlier this summer this year. I did some writing for Dolby that actually involved at most. So let me disclose the fact I've also been shilling for at most out of because it's an incredible experience. So there's two things going on at the core of at most and DTSX is one is it's what they call object oriented audio. So instead of having like a front channel, a left channel, a right channel, the person who is putting the soundtrack together has like up to I want to say 128 sound objects and they can locate them anywhere in the listening room. And that gets really amazing because you can, you know, really have little tiny noises that have a really incredible impact because you have much more control over where they show up. You know, it's up above you. It's to the left. It's to the right. It's down. It's it's a really incredible experience. The opening of a certain movie about a certain pair of astronauts going through an asteroid storm and all hell breaks loose is one of the most incredible cinematic experience I've ever had because I heard that in a Dolby Atmos room.  It's incredible. So to do that, you need some stuff going on as one you need at most or DTS content. You need up basically height channels and that's going to be either two or four channels located in your ceiling or a couple of channels usually located on the top of your front speakers that bounce off the ceiling to you. And what it does is it adds a huge amount of sound above you. For me, it was really as somebody who was like, yeah, 5.1 is awesome. 7.1 is, you know, really a lot like 5.1 and nine dot whatever is really not doing a damn thing for me. At most I was in the room going, holy crap, I need this. And they're like, yes, this is years and years ago. They're like, great. As soon as it's available, you can buy it.  Right? Yes. Well, it also depends on the house, right? If you can put four channels, like I literally in the process of moving my system to HDR and 4k, I chose to buy an AV receiver that would handle four at most channels. So and then I had to track down speakers. So I've been in the process of as when you've moved to the new house finally, there were lots of delays in me getting like my home theater equipment back from California to the new house, including fires and plagues and locus. But it is incredible because in this case, I actually have the ability to do four channels directly above or, you know, in the appropriately mathematically proven spots for at most above my head. It's pretty incredible. I think it does a better job to have them above you than to have them bouncing off the front.  Now you mentioned HDR. Let's talk about HDR. What is the actual definition of HDR? It gets thrown around. So HDR is high dynamic range. You know, it's, goodness. Technically, when you say high dynamic range, you're just talking about having more luminance or brightness in a traditional TV. So traditional TV is 100 nits. We're now getting to the point where they have like 1000 nit televisions being sold. The super fancy monitors that people, the colorists use or the editors and the colorists use when they are when they are putting HDR together are running at a maximum of 3000 to 4000 nits. But there's, there's with, you know, technically it's the brightness, but we also associate it with much larger color gamut or much larger palette of colors, which gets even bigger when you get into the latest versions of HDR, which is HDR 10 and Dolby vision. But, you know, because we, we talk a lot about 4K and it's like 4K doesn't really do a lot for me. But HDR coming along with 4K is actually to me a huge change because your blacks are blacker, your colors are better. And the way our eyeballs essentially evolve.  But the difference in the colors and more importantly, the difference in the contrast and the amount of detail you can get in the brightest and darkest sections of a frame when you're running HDR is actually kind of incredible. I find the colors are particularly a big improvement. And again, those kind of details you get at the far end of the brightness and the darkness, the more amount of detail you can get in there is pretty incredible. It's the combination, right? You can have HDR in lower resolution content, but having 4K helps. Well, generally speaking, you're not going to get HDR unless you're buying a 4K screen. And, you know, I should also point out, you know, I wanted to get, you know, I wanted HDR in my, for my, in my living room, or I should say my home theater, right? Which meant getting a 4K HDR projector, which also meant upgrading my Apple TV to a 4K Apple TV that would handle HDR. Also, by the way, I needed a new AVR because I needed a 4K capable AVRs. And, you know, I also had to upgrade my HDMI cables because my HDMI cables weren't fast enough to handle 4K at the frame rate. I wanted to run it at. So this is also one of those things where you can get, you can get, you know, a television with a built-in app and get pretty amazing 4K streaming HDR if you're working with Netflix or Dolby Vision or Amazon Prime. To get the full experience, you know, you may start adding piles and piles of equipment onto your home theater stack. How important is it to get the right HDR? You know, there's different kinds out there and, and you mentioned Dolby, there's HDR.  Let's just call it an important flavor, especially in Europe. The two really competing, the leading edge ones are HDR 10 and Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision shows up in Netflix and Disney Plus.  For example, you have these sort of presets that help you interpret what shows up on the screen for the entire length of a movie or a television show. With HDR 10 or Dolby Vision, you can actually change those settings to be perfect for every individual scene. You're not compromising on the dark scenes for the bright scenes or the bright scenes for the dark scenes. I think it's great, but this is also one of those areas where we're still waiting for content to kind of show up. When it's all there, it's a pretty impressive experience. If you're upgrading to HDR, I'd say like go all the way to HDR 10 and Dolby Vision. The big challenge right now is that Dolby Vision is kind of everywhere, because amongst other things it guarantees the HDR stream through all the different streaming environments and playback environments, which is incredibly complicated. But Samsung is all about HDR 10. So this is yet another format battle that consumers can enjoy and savor moving over. But I mean, to wrap this up, eventually will one win or will they just both be supported on most stuff? I hope one or the other. Both are possible. Let's finish up, Sarah, with some trash trucks. Yeah, let's. Scotland's Glasgow. Lovely city, perhaps you've heard of it, is ready in a fleet of 19 hydrogen powered refuse trucks after being awarded 6.3 million pounds. That's about 8 million US dollars in funding under the UK government's 23 million pound hydrogen for transport program. The money is also funding a new hydrogen refueling station, which is part of the government strategy to make more use of hydrogen infrastructure, as well as deployment of new vehicles. Glasgow was to host the COP 26 UN summit back in November, but it was postponed until November 2021 due to COVID-19. So the trash trucks are clean in Glasgow? I mean, it's all the jokes, right? But this is really cool. This is great. It's, yeah, you gotta, you gotta have these vehicles, they can't not be on the road, right? So if they got to be on the road, the cleaner, the better. As long as they're not making the hydrogen from coal or something like that, then yeah, this is, this is great. Good for you, Scotland. Well done. Wonderful, wonderful place. I was supposed to go there in June, but I didn't. Oh, well, you know, let's check out the mailbag and do it. He writes in and says, I'm really loving Noah a little more. That's Tom's show that he's been doing for some months now. So we're glad to hear that, Mohan. He says, got me thinking since Mozilla recently laid off 25% of its staff and the rays of blink powered browsers. I think it might be a good episode, a future episode where browser engines are explained with Triadent, Edge HTML, Presto retired. Mozilla's Gecko used by Firefox and K HTML forked Webkit used by Safari and Nome Web, formerly known as Epiphany, and Webkit fork blink, used by pretty much every other browser, Chrome, Opera, Edge, and Vivaldi. Yeah, that's a great one. I actually wrote him back and was like, this is this is a good idea. I'm putting it on the list. I don't know exactly when I'll get around to it.  It just goes right into your Patreon feed. But if you're not a patron, you can get it for free. Just go to your pod catcher of choice and look for know a little more. As we mentioned earlier in the show, we just had one on gig, the gig economy and AB five and the Borrello test and all of that. Yeah, good feedback. And speaking of feedback, if you want to send us an email, you got an idea, you got something on your mind. Got a question feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send that email. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Martin James to Gratiae Daniels and Dustin Campbell. Shall we check in with Len Peralta, who has been drawing the show today? Len, what have you drawn for us today? You know, and let me just say before I start that last summer I upgraded my home theater to Dolby Atmos and also HDR 4k. And it is it's pretty phenomenal. But I that's not what I drew today. This week, Sarah, Tom and I shared a little moment watching Apple Music TV, and it brought back some good old memories of both the 80s and the 90s.  And there's also like a little tiny bug in the corner of the song called is the 80s all over again with the director being Tim Cook. So if you want to check this out, you can go to my online store and LenPeraltaStore.com. Or if you're a Patreon member of mine, patreon.com forward slash Len, you get this right now. You can download it. It's right there for you for the taking. So go check it out and definitely watch Apple Music TV with friends. It makes it so much better. We really did have a good time. It was really fun chatting with you guys while we were all watching the same thing because we could be like, oh, we're seeing the same video at the same time. How many of you watched it again after that day? Me. Okay, I watched it for like about five minutes to show my daughter. We can talk in the post show a little bit more. I'm like, I'm starting to have a little bit of an addiction and maybe it's like nostalgia is getting to me. But yeah, yeah, Patrick Norton. I don't know how much MTV used to watch back in the day, but I know you're a very busy man these days. What's new with you? Oh my goodness. Well, the best place to find out is either follow me on Twitter at Patrick Norton or head over to avxl.com or Roger Roger. Robert Herron and I, sorry, Roger popped up in Skype. Robert Herron and I talk about home theater and audio and all the good head phony stuff. And if you have a question about home theater audio, do me a favor. Ask at avxl.com and I will email you back in answer. Hey patrons, did you know your ad free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just good day internet or both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS, GDI or all. And if you want to change, change your tier. And then the next episode you get, you don't even have to change your RSS feed will be whatever you changed it to. You can check that all out at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Thanks to everybody who joins us live. Always good to have you. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back on Monday with Brett Roundsville. Have a good weekend.


kumpMm I Don't Feel Insecure Am I in Good Hands? Kšm I Right loved Anyway, Boss you are coming home to support Iあ you are a fama I am one of one of my biggest fans So I support my fans Yes Also I am part of the album And am been featured in the Album so we will be performing today All right so is it a songAs مurpI ya ia Europia wa ni Producer Ya, ya, ya. Also, nime, of course, nime kwa pia kwa production ni album. Nime kwa involved pia in one or another. Yes, yes, yes. So, I've worked on the album. I'm part of the album. I'm featured in the album. And I'm going to be performing today. For how long have you been in the gospel industry? Since 2005. 2005 nikiwa nasari, boss. Nili kwa nasari 2005. Kwa nili kwa nami akangapi? Kwa nasari. Ladies and gentlemen, nili kwa nasari 2005. Nikido goto because I've been mined to seven nili kwa four months. And you've been in the gospel industry for such a long time. Na tumiaona, the gospel industry, ike na na transition, ike change. So it's very rare sometimes to see people coming together just because of gospel. Now that it is happening today, how does that make you feel? I think it makes me feel good because this is what exactly if any gospel is hit back in the days. There was so much to gather next kwa na, so much support from each or one another. Tili kwa tunaskia msi akuna concert. Whether me kwa lika kupafoom, ama ujialiko. Uli kwa naji baratu me tokelizia kum support. So there was that support. These days wana jwa lazimatu kolum msi. Ndi akam, usipo inviteum msi. Akoji jwa na feel ni kama ujia mufanya. Like people have feelings these days. But back in the days. Wata kwa na mafilo? Wata kwa na mafilings. Rington na pa api. Rington, wajatone kama takuja. The last question is, tuliku jwa ukiwa in a gospel group ili kwa na ito a man of God. Kwa ni nimili achak tuangoma? Tili achak tuangoma because people grew in different dimensions. Una patam seka Tonya li grew in business. Kenji in TV production. Mimindo nili baki mostly kumziki. Are we ever going to expect something from the three of you? Definitely. I never say never. So if I say never, ita kwa na dangana. Ila for now it's both emoji. But then later on waka tuwa sewa misha maizakulea. Maybe ita kamba kama backstreet boys. Alright. Talk to Mashmwana. Ladies and gentlemen Mashmwana Niajai. I'm so happy for you. Because not many artists on the album. So for me seeing you launching your album and say it's growth. It's growth for the industry that you can showcase what you've been working on. So big up continue doing for you. Naga da takupare kufa. Alright Karibu we can't wait to see you on stage. Guys so I'm hanging out with one of the biggest gospel artists HK. Ukofiti? Kabisa. Una filaja kwa pa leo? Baridi. So we would want to know. You're a very close friend to Mashmwana. So seeing him with such a huge album na turn out. How do you feel as a friend? Very proud of him. It's a big step and all the best I'm wishing to him. To na expect album kutoka kwa hopkit? Yeah. I will hopkit. Runa una tupe ma sualinusunu suapa? Albami na kam. Na take two time but na kam. You being one of the artists in the gospel industry for such a while. Na tumiona gospel industry ikitransition. Na kuna time aku kwa na gospel shows. So how does this particular make you feel? Gospel aiko kategorize na how many shows we have. Gospel tu ni gospel period. Aiko kategorize na show who is doing what, who is there, who is not there, who is where. Gospel ni gospel. And it will be forever gospel. Tu kwa pa ju actually ni gospel. Did you take part in anything kwa album ya Mash? Advising. Advise peke ake? Advise peke ake. Anatuka wangaliya kwa kamera uongelesa Mash. Enye tuta angaliya? Yeah. Ongelesa Mash? Mwambiajyesi ni mkul. Amako stage. Nikona suongpi me toka like 3 weeks ago with Masterpiece. Nyindom fani investigation ni anyu poa. But can you see? One to make what you can undergo transition. And also jandrayangu me kwaiki badili kaki dogo. So kuna process before new consumers want to consume. But we'll get there. So many musicians want to kwa kwa kwa kwa. Nani wame doka? Nani wame doka? Nani wame doka? They like to write interviews. Sayi ni upkit. Sayi ni upkit. Tu kwa uongelesa tuwa sengenya. Personalis, uongelesa angi mwa boizu wangu. I love them the way they are. Whichever decision they make. Watoa kia muende sekulansaw. But for me I love them the way they are. This is what they are doing. Ongelesa Mash? Ongelesa Mash? Mash. Anaituwa izayaki bindiwo. Izayaki bindiwo. I'm very happy that you're doing this. And as a brother, I'm wishing you all the best. And I'm praying that God grants you so many hits in this album. That you live to testify of His goodness. All right, HK Karibu. We expect to see you kwa stage. No, no, no. I'm just backstage ni na jeshiangu kwa support boizu wangu. Hi, Karibu. Hi, guys. So I'm hanging out with Jabidi. Ukofiti? Ukofiti manze? Ukofreshi? Ukofreshi baride. Tenono mekam kwa support mash. Mi pi ani fan leo. Alafi ni kwa privilege manze kwa part of the album. So manze lyo ni mekam ni mi kwa jibamba. What was your role in the album? Kwa album ni mebaatika manze kwa kwa goma moja. Umebaatika? Na houta raskizia paliibo. So are we going to see you on stage? Tako kwa stage paliibo. Enaji tako mba. Na wekama msani. It's very rare sometimes to see gospel artists coming together. What does this mean for you? Manze tu tunaita jivituka izi mobsana. Kusapotiana. Kwa zianda kitu tunaita jilika. Io kachai li kwa kitambo, but kuna time li break up uivo naika tu cost. So sa izi tunaita jizi zahidi zahidi. Jabidi, tunaita expect album kutoka kwa kwa? Album di siya lazima. Ni manza kui tiz manze tango lastia. So di siya lazima manze. Natsukawa ungele se mashmoana pwa kwa kamera? Ya, big up manze mashmoana. Endelia manze evo kushikiliya God. Ko ziwa ziwa engi manze omibaki yo mechikiliya God. So big up manze kwa kazi fitu na fanya. Many fan manze na kuna wengine kama. Uiwa, kwa ni niya li kwa meji fitu? Nani, mi mi apa? Ni kwa ni meji fitu? Sai ni kwa. Sai ni mekuja manze. Uko freshi? Ni kwa freshi, ni kwa ni kwa fiti. Una expect kuna ni ni leo? Leo na expect. Tuya ni kwa na the whole gospel fraternity. Uana kuja pamoja kusapotu mashmoana. And more to everything. I just expect to see people will be happy na outwata praise God na sayawata feel poor. Jum kwa pa ni niwa willi? Tu na expect kitu from the two of you. Nakama hakuna mi na suggest? Expect kitu zingine mingi. Very soon actually. Keta kiesho maybe. So what's your expectation? Actually, I'm a kiesho. Tukuna studi ni tuwa wekatik. Ni kampani badut na dinlamadvat na sendoma CEO. So what's your expectation? Alright, thank you. We can't wait to see you guys on stage.


Welcome to How to Build Local Communities and Meetup Perspective. I'm joined by Henrietta Dombrovskaya, Associate Director of Databases at Riviant Holdings, who will discuss how Chicago pug grew into the third largest in the Western Hemisphere, the effect of COVID-19 on local groups, and how Chicago pug managed. My name is Lindsay Hooper and I'll be your moderator for today's webinar. A little bit about your speaker. Henrietta is a database researcher and developer with over 35 years of academic and industrial experience. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently holds multiple roles as Associate Director of Databases at Riviant Holdings, local organizer of the Chicago PostgreSQL user group. And she's an active community member, a frequent speaker at the PostgreSQL conferences. She's the winner of the Technologist of the Year 2019 Award of the Illinois Technology Association. So welcome. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Hedy. Take it away. Hello, everybody. So thank you so much for coming. I am very surprised that so many people wanted to listen to non-technical presentation. And as Lindsay already said, I am the Associate Director of Databases at Riviant Holdings, but today I'm talking in my capacity of the Chicago PostgreSQL user group, local organizer. And first of all, this talk was originally prepared for the New York Peerja Conference in March. We didn't happen because everybody knew why it didn't happen. And it was originally planned as a short talk. So it will be definitely not the whole hour. But, you know, we talked about whether it's still worth presenting. And we decided, yes, it probably still worth presenting. So originally, why I actually decided to give this talk? Because everybody was asking about this. It was funny because when I started, I did not plan that it will be something unusual and unexpected. And when, like two years ago, I think Tomkin Kite said, you know what, Chicago Park is the third largest postgreSQL user group in the Western Hemisphere. I like seriously. And I went and checked and turned out, yes. And I think I checked it today. I think now we are actually, I mean, maybe not the third, maybe four depends on how you count, because there are some meetups which are not officially like postgreSQL user group, but they're still kind of all about postgres. And I think also I'm the only female main local organizer. I do not know what is good and bad, but that's the fact. So since we grew from almost nothing into something, actually, people regularly asked me, how did I do this? And in all the postgres conferences, somebody would find me, you know, during the break between meetings, or you know, what somebody told me, I need to talk to you, we want to do our local postgres user group. So how you did it? And I thought, okay, you know what, I don't think I did something special, except I really wanted to build the postgres user group. So to be fair, it's not like I started it. The Chicago postgres user group existed for a while. But let's just go through the stages of its history. So it was first organized in August 2011. And it was hosted by Innova International. And incidentally, I joined Innova in July 2011. So I was there when it started. So how did it look? So first meet up happened on September 31. There were nine attendees, okay, we sat around the table and talked. And then it was going and going for several years, several, meaning eight years. And that was kind of what was happening, except of, you know, when Bruce was presenting, or Drosselka was presenting, like our typical attendance was like less than 10 people with RSVPs going like from 10 to 15. So that was the situation. And then, you know, Chicago was the only postgres conference, which we had, and then I started to talk to community, how we can get the conference back. And I got, okay, Henrietta, how is your Chicago Pag is doing? I'm like, not doing, not existing. Okay, if you want conference back to Chicago, and you do not even have proper user group, like look at Austin, I looked at Austin, and I said, okay, you know what, I think I can do it. So I did that. It's not in 19, it was 16. Oh, nobody corrected me. Okay. So it was November 16, the previous time. So then in the end of 2016, I joined Breven Holdings. And our leadership was very welcoming. And, you know, they said, you know, yes, if you want to host user group, we can do it, we can provide you space. And I talked to the current local organizer, and that, okay, let's try to transition. And so this was first in your Chicago Postgres user group, January 18, 2017, the number of RSVPs jumped immediately. And the most interesting thing we had as many people as number of RSVPs. I'm not sure whether they were exactly the same people. I think somebody did not show up at people who did not RSVP come. So that was like, huge success. And yeah, it had been like, going on and on and on until pandemic happened. And then it was new story. But that's like our brief history. So now, first of all, we always have people, we always have crowd. And we actually are enjoying what we're doing. Now, the question is, so that's our exciting history. So how did we get there? And as I said, I was presented with this challenge.  And I take them seriously. And most of the time, whether it work or not work, everybody who knows me know that if I want something to happen, it happens. So most of the time, when people ask me how you did it, how you built Chicago Park, I like, I really, really wanted it. And I wanted it and it happened. But obviously, it did not happen with the like waving or the magic one. So what exactly? What exactly I did? Actually, I was thinking what went wrong. With the previous version of Chicago Park. And what I can do differently. And so we actually set with the former organizers, we like listed it. And we okay, so what will work? What did work? What did not work? What kind of change? And I listened to everybody. And again, did everything differently. Not even what we were talking about.  And the first thing I stopped. So I okay, so first thing I stopped, I stopped to wait for more people to show up. And I can tell you why I stopped because, okay, the fog meetup happens on the weekday after work. And in Chicago, the citation is that many people or majority of people who work in the city, they live in the suburbs. So normally, they want to go catch that rain. So they can get to park like relatively early. But then they are constrained from the like from the other side of the meetup. So if we're waiting, it's like, okay, there are like five people showing up, let's wait for a little bit, let's wait for a little bit. Then guess what? People who came on time, they getting bored, they do not want next time to come on time. And then when they finally start things, then they have to leave. So I started to like literally start on time. And this was very challenging. But even now, when we're going virtual, I start sharply at six o'clock. Again, that thing was before we did like, okay, we will start like a six, but it will just start like coming, talking, etc. So no, we start at the designated time, no matter what. I mean, I do not wait for like more than 30 seconds. And once actually know what I had, once I had that my speaker didn't show up. And I had five minutes to arrange new speaker on the spot. And when my speaker came 20 minutes later, I said, sorry, no, he got very upset. He actually stopped coming. But those rules are rules. And I think people appreciate it. Then I started to skip introduce yourself part. And that is in contrast to any suggestions, which you would normally get. Because normally people, yeah, that's a nice breaker, people should like start feeling comfortable. And you should start going around the table, introduce yourself, introduce yourself. So I stopped doing this, because I saw how it used to happen before. So first we wait for people, we wait like 15 minutes or whatever, nobody does anything. Then if there are like, you know, like, more than five people, it takes a while because each person is saying, okay, I'm so and so, I've worked so and so, my experience is so and so. And nobody remembers. So when you go around the table of 20 people, nobody will remember. I mean, okay, maybe somebody majority of people even would not remember who is who. And that doesn't help. It's not really a nice breaker. Because it doesn't lead to any conversation. Like literally face of time. And other people, again, who came there, say they came by six, and they need to take seven 30 train, and we have 15 minutes of wait in 20 minutes introduction, and then they will need to go with seven and nothing did not set yet. So I skip this. And we have other networking in the beginning at the end. But I mean, I found it to be completely useless part, which does not help with anything. The other thing I stopped doing, having meetups without agenda. So that was the other thing where everybody were guilty. Not always, we would have a speaker. And then instead of just saying, Okay, you know what, let's reschedule our back then local organizer with Okay, let's just sit and talk. That's like, seriously, you want to come to like some other place after work, after work day in the middle of the week. And the season talk about like, I don't know, about how database people are not appreciated in the tech companies. That's a topic. So not worth gathering. So I was making sure that each time I actually have a very specific agenda, and I have invited speaker. The other thing I stopped, I stopped to have a like specific date for the meetup. We're still meeting once a month. But we became more flexible with dates. And you know how it helps. Again, most of the time, people will tell you, you need to have specific day like we had a third first of the month, like at six o'clock that's a meetup. You know what happened? Some people just cannot make it on Wednesday, they have something else on Wednesday, they will never show up then. So we experimented a lot about what days of the week work. So what I found, first days do not work. Like, I do not know why, but everybody have like 15 different commitments on first day after work. First days are diverse. So Tuesdays and Wednesdays are equally good. Sometimes Mondays can play in though like less frequently. But what I decided, we made it like kind of lose. So we're doing either Tuesday or Wednesday, either the second or the third week of the month. And it might look like small change, but it really helped. Because, you know, somebody cannot make Wednesdays, they can make Tuesdays, somebody cannot make this, somebody can make the same date like next month. So it really, I think boosted attendance. And by the way, people started to pay attention to the meetup announcements. Because you know what, you do not want to know how many people went to the old place when First Meetup and Breven Holding was announced, when we just moved it to First Breven Holding's office. And how many people were keeping coming to all in our office, because they used to have this like first word of the month, it's in email, it's in invite, it's on the meetup page, people did not listen. But then after we educated people that you know what you need to read the announcement, then after Breven Holding moved to the new office, nobody went back to the old office, everybody read the mail and everybody knew where to go. So I think that was also good thing. So those are the things which I stopped doing. And on the positive side, what I started doing. So that's what I said, started being flexible between days of the week and days of the month. Have a guest speaker each meetup and announce it at least three weeks before the meetup. That is not easy.  Actually, you need to make sure you have a scheduler. And ideally, I'm trying to have line up for the next two meetups, at least talk tentatively with different people and see who has who is able to feed us in the scheduler. The other thing I started started to do meetups earlier, again, when we did it in real life, doors open and pizza arrive at 530. It works for people again, people were telling me it does not work for Austin, probably, I don't know, it does work in Chicago, because in Chicago, again, outside pandemic, people commute, people are done by 530. It's very good time for them to show up. They can eat pizza, they can socialize, they can walk around, introduce themselves, and then we'll have this firm start time. So that I honestly think it's like the most important part.  Looks like it's a big deal, you know, I cannot underestimate the importance of always starting on time. People started to come on time. I mean, again, in real world, but outside pandemic, I had, I don't know, maybe like, two, three people coming a little bit later and a little bit like five, 10 minutes later, and they would even email me and say, you know what, sorry, I'll be late. So I think that it was all good practice. So the other part which helped me a lot for the first two years at least. So, you know, friend of mine, the lady pay at Innova Jerry Severs, he's just awesome. And I told him, I need your help. So after each speaker, we have this like 15 minutes for Jerry. So anybody could just ask him anything. And he would do Q&A on any postgres topics. So that was like a month's help. And then we ended up this Q&A with Jerry, ended up trickling into the like the rest of the like networking. Then this unscheduled time. So we started to have this unstructured time after after. So again, here is an important part. People who need to go, people who need to leave early, they listen to the speaker, if they want and have time to go on, so then they can stay, but they're not missing anything from the talk. So this, like flipping the scheduler that was very important. Okay. Alright, so other things which I started to do, I started to do Chicago Pug Awards. And I have a little bit of funds on the Chicago Pug account. And it's like literally like 50 bucks a month on gift card. So I'm keeping track of all the talks. And I'm reminding people each time in the beginning of Pug that, okay, best talk award, so you need to vote at the end of the year in December, we vote for best award. Then I still never gave student talk award.  I'm asking everybody about this one did not play. Well, yeah, I'm still hoping. So diversity award is my award. So the history is that so everybody knows that we do not have enough female in IT in tech and that the situation in postgres is like worse than probably in any other areas. So my diversity award is that I'm giving it for first female speaker, which is not me. And actually, I was able to vote for this for two years in a row. So I didn't get the chance to do this year. So we'll see. But you know, I'm actively encouraging people to vote and especially like having female speakers huge, I literally have maybe one except me, but it's still big progress. Okay. So that's what I'm doing in the beginning. I'm doing this five minute intro, you know, people who come somewhere do not have Wi-Fi. That's a tragedy. So most important thing I have Wi-Fi. And then I have this list of Pag Awards and list of talks so far, then again, at normal times outside pandemic and we have upcoming conferences, I always list. So this is what is coming, deadlines, discounts, and watch for discount information for Chicago Pag members. Then I am giving the speaker intro. And I'm showing announcement for next meetup. So most of the time, I know what will happen next time, who will be speaking, what's the date? So it gives people time for planning. And each time, very important, I end each of my five minutes intro. Thank you so much for being a part of Chicago PostgreSQL user group. I wouldn't be able to do anything without you. Please support meetup. Please come with suggestions. Please let us know how you make it better, volunteer to talk, suggest the topics, etc. All right. So what else? What else I'm doing? Variety of speakers. That is part which is difficult to balance. So I'm always trying to invite great people, important speakers. And fortunately, I have connections like everybody knows me. And I can ask virtually anybody to come and talk. So that's great. But I also encourage local talks. So each time at meetup, I'll repeat people, you know what, whatever you are doing in your company, each of you are innovating, each of you doing something new and interesting. And there is nothing which is not interesting. We would love to hear your experiences. What you did with the super cool, please come and share. And I had quite a bit of local talks when people just tell, Okay, so we developed this and in course of developing, we found this like, you know, little cool tool, which helps us to do so and so great, you know, then companies and products, this tough part, because, you know, like representatives from different software development companies and stuff, they message me and like, can we talk? And I'm actually letting them talk. So one thing I'm not allowing, I'm not allowing active recruiting during meetups, but then people have, you know, opportunity to socialize and like talk and find people. But okay, if somebody wants to introduce their product, please, yeah, full speed ahead. So I am there always like, Okay, can we like buy your pizza, can we buy your beer? I like, you know what, we can buy our pizza and beer. But you know, if you want to contribute to the Chicago Park account, always welcome, not required, you can speak for free. Again, it's usually like nice balance. So I'm keeping track of, okay, so I have great public community speakers, I have local people, and I have companies and products. And sometimes for local speakers, I can combine two of the speakers during one meetup. It's also fun, you know, and then they invite their support group. So one company who did not have the presence in Chicago Park, they come and talk. So it's all good. All right. Other thing, all speakers are equal. That is also very tough part. So as I told you guys, it once happened that the speaker was late.  And I know that the second speaker will ready like, you know, he was ready to be second. And I did not want to reward this behavior that he forgot what time it starts like literally that's what he told me. So I quickly arranged one more speaker fortunately, again, I have good network, I have people who are able to jump in. And we had this new talk. And he like came like, sorry, nope, I can be second. Nope. Sorry, I have somebody else who is second. So you cannot be second. And other things. So as I said, I plan ahead, I try to plan like couple of months ahead. So and sometimes I schedule a local speaker.  So and so somebody from like, you know, somebody really like important will be in Chicago. So do you want an electric? Now what? Sorry, you need to notify me in advance. Because you know what? If I will tell somebody, sorry, I scheduled you.  And you know, my promises and everything. So I had the citations when I did turn big speakers away, when it was like a week short of notice. I like sorry, let's plan next time, let's plan ahead. I cannot do this. So I think it also helps, you know, building trust and good relationships. And once again, we encourage local talks. It's very important because people come there not only to learn from the great masters, people want to be valued, appreciated in everybody have something to contribute like honestly, everybody. And that important thing again, not for pandemic time, but seriously, I found it very important having something else except pizza. People love it. People love it, really appreciate it. I was always making sure when I order food, I have like healthy options in addition to like five different varieties of pizza or even more. Like, you know, it's really important these times. So pandemic. And then pandemic happened. So literally, I prepared this talk. So it was like 20 minutes talk and up pandemic happened. And the country's didn't happen. And my meetup was like literally, I think that it was like three days after we went to lockdown. So the speaker canceled the week before that. And first one I skipped. And I was trying, I was trying very hard to make sure we have something. But the problem in March was that some people were already working from home. Some people were transitioning. Some people were from the office. So it was like logistically, I didn't know how to do this. And that's, I was at a loss. And I thought I'm, you know, a failure, I'm bad leader for the community. And so then we like regrouped and started doing zoom meetups in April. So I did my talk, which again, I scheduled to schedule it and then we continued. So what were the pandemic challenges? First of all, it is difficult to talk on Zoom. And it's unbelievably difficult to talk if you did not have these chances before. Like now I'm talking. And I do not know what I'm talking too fast. Or like everybody already disengaged. I do not see your faces. I do not see your eyes. It's extremely difficult. So it even people who are great speakers, if they didn't have Zoom experience, they kind of like, do not perform this well. I performed horrible, by the way, in the beginning. Now I got some practice. So without live audience, you cannot adjust, like your talk, you cannot address directly. So like tons of challenges. Yeah, you cannot do beer and pizza. And I'm joking about beer and pizza, but joking, but not joking. So I still cannot really measure this impact. But each time I schedule next event, I like, sorry, guys, you I cannot send you beer and pizza. So it's effects. It's not a challenge. The other challenge, not showing up. So when you signed up for virtual event, and you know that the only thing you need is to dial from your home is very easy not to dial. When you know that you have to go somewhere.  Okay, after work, I'm going. Then you kind of already made up your mind. You didn't have time to turn on it didn't have time. And you know, people skip virtual way more than the skip real life event. And you might think why it's easier, actually, just to turn on but somehow psychologically, people, I mean, I saw it that people feel like it's easier to skip virtual event and relevant. And the other thing, it's just difficult to keep attendance high, because many people are like, either out of work or overwork like one of two. So people who are out of work, they kind of like feel depressed, do not want to go to meet up. Especially there is no networking, and you cannot really find, you know, potential potential next employment. And then, like, overworked, all the others are overworked, including myself. So then you do not want to do anything after work. For example, because work doesn't attend. Okay. So those are real challenges and we're trying to work with them. But in addition to challenges, we also have some pandemic gains. So you can invite any speaker, you know, you do not need to worry. Okay, does do they have engagement in Chicago? Can you like plan around their travels? Or if they don't, you need to like book hotel for them? No, you just need to be approximately at the same time zone. So I was able to invite some great speakers just because it's so easy now. Okay. And also people from anywhere in the world can dial in all the the time zone is the limit. So my some of my former coworkers who moved away from Chicago, but they still miss me top they started to dial in. And that's great, actually. And yes, the reduction, of course, obviously, because I mean, my company was awesome, paying like most of the costs associated with running Chicago Park. So yes, virtually, it's easier the only thing I need my paid zoom account. So there are some gains. Okay, and the takeaways. So again, I heard lots of discussions, what will happen when it will be all over, and it will be over if you think it won't I mean, I'm firm believer it will be over. So what will happen? We will be life definitely. So as soon as life events will be possible, we will be life and Chicago Park is never going to become virtual. That's for sure. And I can bet on that. But we still want to zoom meetings. And you know, you know what, previously, again, multiple citations when somebody with message me and say, Oh, can you please do live stream? I cannot attend. But I would love to see it like from, you know, remote parts of Illinois from like, okay, from St. Louis and from whatever. And I like should you know what, I think it would be great idea. I just kind of do not have capacity mental capacity to set up live streaming. So now we have it. So definitely, I think that great advantages of having live stream in addition to live event. So we will be definitely doing it. And the other thing we might consider having online speakers, even when we will be live, we're still thinking about it. Because you know, previously, I was like, like, categorically against having somebody speaking from Skype or from zoom when life attendees are here. But we might be doing it. I mean, like honestly, we'll still like have to decide. So again, we're running good. I think we will end up 2020 strong. Definitely all this online events are put on hold. Definitely we miss the ability of socializing life. But I think overall Chicago Pug is doing great under challenging circumstances. So takeaways. Get to know your community, you know, this thing about like people working in the city, living the burbs, it's not everybody's dynamic. And I spoke to other meetup organizers. So you need to see what is your community, what's their normal typical work schedule, or computing or not, and plan events which work for them. Listen to your community, like, get feedback constantly, each time, after meetup, before meetup, in between the meetup, it's very important. And respect your community, respect, including like, you know, starting one time, providing vegetarian options, not letting people disrupt all the citation, be respectful for the speakers, be respectful for your audience. And be thankful for your community. For me, it's a big part. I'm always having this slide. Thank you so much for being a part. Thank you for coming. Thank you for participating. This, this meetup is live because you are here, you're coming. And it time and effort, you know, it's surprisingly how much time and effort it takes, because even scheduling speakers, when you need to work around other people's schedule, when somebody say, maybe yes, maybe no. And I do not want to have somebody just in case, because nobody likes to be stand by speaker. Nobody wants to be like, you know what, if so and so would not appear, I will ask you, it's miserable situation. Nobody wants it is disrespectful. So all this planning, making sure that you have a speaker, and you don't have two speakers who competing for one time slot, that's a lot. Lots of like politics, lots of psychology, lots of everything. But I think all these is just, you know, is paid off. So I think that I think we're really doing a good job of this. And also for me personally, it's a big commitment because again, when I started it in 2017, I thought, okay, so after it will be like, going rolling, then probably, I would not need to like, do it all the time by myself. So for me, I'm planning all my personal things, all my personal trips around Chicago, I mean, I cannot tell I need to go somewhere when Chicago bug is scheduled. Now, when I had back surgery in 2018, I had one bug in the body brace. So I just had to be there, like two weeks after surgery. So I take it seriously. And I think that's why people also take it seriously. And come. Okay, and that ends my presentation. The yep, the sit and questions are welcome. Awesome. So I have three questions here. And then if anybody else has any more, please feel free to put them in the chat now. First question is, what are the best practices for starting a new meetup? That's a great question, because I, like in some sense, I did not start new with that. I just took what was there. But you know, what I think it depends again, where you started, because, for example, if you know, I think it all starts from people. If you know people from your place, your city, who spoke or participated in some conferences, what I would do, I would try to find them, I would try to reach out. Advertising in other meetups normally does not help because normally people are very local, even now that we are going virtual. So I would say, start from finding people, start from the company. So the other thing, you know, need to research which companies in your area are using Postgres, and maybe, you know, you know, somebody or somebody from your network, not somebody like try to reach out to specific people. So it's all about people. And when you have a group, you know, when you have like five, 10 people, then you can start a meetup on meetup page and then see how things will go, you know, then ask everybody to advertise. So I'm always copying my meetup advertisements on my LinkedIn and on my professional blog. And hopefully it will, you know, get some traction. Great. Another question. They're starting to come in. Can you say a little bit about your company's support? Do you have to keep asking for it? No, actually, no, that was like, awesome. Because my company, first time I talked with our CEO, and we're a small company, when I started doing it, we were a company of like 15 employees. So that was big, big ask.  And she said, Yes, you can do this. And she was always given space.  No, I never asked, you know, what's also really remarkable. So when we moved from smaller office to the new office, and there was a big space, like around the kitchen area. And like my CEO said, you know what, that will be a great place for your meetup. I was thinking that you will need it. And we have speakers, and we purchase microphones, and we purchase bigger screens so that you can continue holding your meetups. So I like, I never had to ask a second time. So like one ask, and I was supported all the way. That's incredible. I've been in your shoes before. And not every organization is that that giving. So good on, good on Bravian Holdings. Another one, do you have any recommendations for soliciting feedback from your attendees? That is that might be challenging. There are questions on meetup page. So what I was asking at the beginning of this meetup, please rate our meetup. So they can come. So after the meetup is over, you can set up a magic email. How was the meetup? And then you can like kind of prompt them to rate meetup. The other thing I did, it takes a little bit of effort. But again, it's worth I was putting together the service. So again, you can do it at meetup page, you can put together survey with questions. And then I was sending it through the meetup messaging. Again, it's all built in. So you can mess if you are organized, you can message to all attendees or to everybody who are subscribed for the organizer messages. And then so have a survey online and like explicitly send it. So again, it might not work. Sometimes challenging but just keep trying. Great. And we have one more question. So finally, do you have? I'm sorry, do you use the same speaker format for every meetup? IE do you ever do panels or fire side chats? I okay, I was planning to do this. So normally we have several events with one meetup. So most of the time I have a speaker. And it's maybe a long presentation or maybe several short presentations. Then we have this Q&A for the panels. I was thinking about this. I mean, I love panels, I think it's like very productive form of holding meetups. It's a little bit more challenging, like in general, because, you know, the world of politics is small, and it's difficult to put together, like, so several people who, you know, people would come and talk to, like, it's one place, it's one time. So I think it's good. And I hope that when there will be like, not online, but like life again, I will be able to do this. But panels, I've been participating in a couple of panels on other meetups. And I love it is great. I like literally didn't get yet for this format. Fantastic. So those are all the questions that have come in. I want to say thank you so much, Heddy. This has been fantastic. Particularly as an events person myself, lots of really solid key learnings here. Additionally, I want to say thank you to all of our attendees. You guys are wonderful. Keep coming back. See, Heddy, I'm following your advice. Yes, we wouldn't or couldn't do this without you. So regardless of where you are, if it's morning, afternoon or evening, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And I will see you back here next week. Thank you.


Hello again people. So, this is to quickly summarize what the advisory board working group has been doing over the last year. There are a couple of us, as you can see, acting as contact points to various organizations. Adriana, Lace, Cornelius, David, Ike, Kai, Lydia, myself and Tomas. Our goal as advisory board working group is to make sure we maintain good relationships with our partners and other organizations we are close with and make sure there are open channels of communication between us. We already mentioned earlier that we are now at 16 members of the advisory board. As I mistake here actually, Slimbook was already last year a part of us, Taxidon joined us as we already mentioned. What we do is that we mostly organize advisory calls. We try to do at least two calls throughout the year and make sure that all the organizations that are part of our advisory board or at least most of them join us. So, we exchange information, we update them on various fronts. They let us know any developments from their side or ask us questions. So, as we also mentioned, we act as contact members for them. They are our patrons and also other organizations and communities we are affiliated with and they are part of our board, of our advisory board. As members of the advisory board working group, we are there for them to ask any questions and if they want us to act as intermediates to introduce them to various KD projects or contributors, we are trying to help them. So, over the last year and since the previous academy, we held two calls with them in September and May. Our main topics were included updating the advisory board contacts for regarding our two major events, Academy and LANS and LANS and of course, all the other spins that took place. We gave them updates on things like the acute development and how this is going, the KD goals and the plans to do the new ones now. Everything related to the EV and our developments around hiring and our partnerships. We also discussed with them about the fundraising projects. We wanted to start helping. They gave us their feedback because as you know, most of these organizations face similar challenges with us. Many times, they solved it, sometimes with different ways than us. So, it's always good to exchange opinions and insights regarding this. We did also discuss with them our plans about the Making a Living Initiative and all the new positions we want to start. And what we tried to do this year is also to invite some groups from within KD. So, our advisory board members can learn a bit more about what they do and maybe try to interact or take advantage of them in a good way. So, this year we had KD Promo joining us and KD Eco representatives to discuss about what they are doing. In the next year, we want to at least within the year do another advisory board call by the end of the year. So, we inform our context about everything that is going on. And of course, we want to continue to maintain active channels of communication, as I mentioned with them. Try to get money signed from them. As we mentioned also earlier, our organization is growing. Several of the organizations and companies within our advisory board are maybe bigger than us or they have already been through this process. So, we try to learn things from this and other fronts. So, if you want to reach out to us, you can send an email here or, as Alice mentioned, do podcast here at the academy. We're available. And that's it from me. I think then next is David for the community working group. Questions are at the end. So, if you have for a specific working group, just wait for the end of the segment. Hello, I'm representing a community working group. Next slide. Okay, here we are with Valerie, everyone knows. Ashiba is not with us. Andy is not with us today. Me, Andy is hiding somewhere. And Thomas left, unfortunately, yesterday to pursue some other tasks. So, our role is to make sure that the community is working well together, either to help resolve conflicts or get rid of trouble for some people. Last year, about this time, we had a fairly dramatic incident and lasted quite a long time, which escalated even to a police. Fortunately, it's not been initially for a while and we don't need to worry about it. But Thomas did a lot of work here. So, at the end, give him a round of applause. Rest of the year, at the end, rest of the year has been relatively quiet. We've stepped in occasionally, but it's good that we haven't had to do too much. There are some problems that we need to focus on. The biggest problem is we don't have a good handover between people leaving. We don't have a good archive of where this has been a problem in the past and this has been repeating offenders. We also have found that people tend to go to assist admins when they want something done, because they're good at getting things done. We need to work on that relationship. We also need more members. We also need some nice younger blood, because the biggest problem we have is the fact that everyone has got new channels that we're not on because we're old people on ISV and mailing lists. That's where we're finding our problems. That's wrapped up. I'm having bad members in the other area. Go. That's what I just said. Keep going. And if you contact us at the community working group, try. Also to us at our academy whilst we're still here. Hello. I'm here for the KD3Q Foundation and the working group associated to it. Who are we and what we do? You might know what the KD3Q Foundation is and if you don't, you should look it up, because it doesn't have time in this learning talk to explain about it. But basically it's me and Olaf doing some work with counterparts from the Qt company, right? So we make sure free Qt will stay free and staffed. Then we have the working group people, which is David Redondo, Felic Latron, Chris Delo, David Edmondson, Eke Hein and Martin Donald. So that's great. One of the issues we had in the past with the free Qt Foundation, it was very sandalone and siloed work and now we have people in the working groups to help us. So this is amazing. What we do it last year, we've been doing monthly calls on MeetKD.org. That's for the working group. So that's great. I am now the chairman of the free Qt, KD3Q Foundation, which I'm not sure if it's good or not, but that's how it goes. We have worked with the Qt company in making sure everything that we used in Qt 5 was available on Qt 6. It took a bit of going back and forward, but that kind of worked very good. So that was well. As usual, the Qt company is not very awesome when they do messaging about things they are newly releasing and they want to group everything together, and this is Qt, but then they say this is not Qt. So yeah, we made some discussions with them about how they should do their messaging if they're not wanting our agreement to take effect, or if they do, that's fine. But yeah, they need to fix a bit of that. And then there was an issue with the Qt multimedia license they wanted to do for 6.4. We went a bit back and forth because they wanted to change it from LGPL to GPL, and yeah, that didn't end up working for us because there's lots of people that use it. So yeah, we told them, sorry, can't do, and they fixed it, so that was good. Thanks for that. Lessons learned, yeah, we live in a bit of a different world that the people in the Qt company that we are talking to in this level, right, there's like very high management people, so we use different words and different living scenario. So that's not always easy. We're working on it. A good thing is that I'm not, I am not the chairman, that's a success, it seems. Is it? I don't know. I mean, I now need to learn Norwegian, which is not great. Anyhow, the Qt multimedia thing was disagreed and we fixed it, so that was good, and the working group is being super helpful, so kudos for that. Right. Where do we need help? So yeah, we are, like we need to talk to the Qt company, the more backgrounds we have, the better. So if you feel that you have a different background than the people that actually are in the working group, just join us. I mean, it's one hour every month to talk to us, some months every year when we skip it, because there's not much to talk about, so it is not a lot of work, so that would be good if you join. If you can read law and Norwegian law on top of that, you'll be amazing.  We have Frederick, that he can read a bit of Norwegian, but yeah, not a lot. And yeah, just talk with the Qt company people and have established relationships with them. We have David, which is now the maintainer of the Wayland thingies, so that's great. Make sure, I mean, we always do that. We are nice people and they are to most of the degree, they are also nice people. But encourage to do that more often. So yeah, keep doing that. Key goals, so yeah. Yeah, there's, sorry, there's a missing line after Norway, that should be a new paragraph. So yeah, Lars used to live in, Lars from the Qt company, right, used to live in, well, does live in Norway. He knew a lot of Norwegian. He's not part of Qt company anymore, so he's not part of foundation anymore, so we need to figure out, yeah, the whole Norwegian thingies, right, if we need to go to the city council to do something that's going to be a very expensive flight for 30 minutes sign or something. There is a new member from the Qt company coming, because Lars left, that's still not happened, because there were like the holidays in the middle and what not. So we still need to do that. And yeah, try to help them to be understanding of what they can say it's Qt and they cannot say it's Qt. I mean, they can say Qt is whatever they want, right, it's their product, but they need to understand the consequences of saying that. And that was me talk to us. There is a very weird email address to talk to us, right, so it's KDEV3QGG. And if not, you can ping us in Matrix or IRC, or here it's, I think it's only me and David Rodondo, so I mean, we can do that. We are nice people, he's nicer than me because he's younger. So yeah, thank you, and next. Okay, so let's do the reports for the fundraising working group. What do we do? We basically do the, try to identify opportunity for fundraising, like for the current life case. We try to maintain the infrastructure, as well as the CVC-RAM infrastructure, but as well as the new donor box, a system that we are just spoiled by the board reports. And the other coordinate with the promo group to reach more people. So we are, are we? It's me, Kenny and Lise. Yeah, but if you want to join, it would be great because more people is always better, often. Yeah, what did we do last year? I mean, the board always spoiled a bit, a few stuff, but we basically, like, work it on the Canon Live in the company. We already reached 11k e-holes, so quite a lot. And in, like, only after months. Yeah, we also said that maybe the solution to CVC-RAM donor box, what we are doing with Canon Live, and we meet, like, every month, approximately, and meet to talk a bit, to see what's next. Yeah, and our point is for the near future, that's moving to the donor box, because currently, the KDE itself, the donation for KDE itself, are sealed on CVC-RAM, and we want to move that to donor box with the experiment with Canon Live works. Yeah, so for us, it's like, it's super charity because it requires paper, stripe, we don't need to maintain it ourselves, and it's like, it costs a bit of, it's not completely free, but it takes a bit of percentage of the donations, but it's like a lot less work for us. Yeah, like I said, there's a Canon Live campaign, what is the test, sort of, before we move everything from KDE to that system, and we need to do a bit more planning for the actual immigration, because we need to try to convince the people who donate to CVC-RAM to donate to us with donor box, and a few of our administrative tasks, like the KDE membership is also stored in CVC-RAM, but we want to move that to KDE-LAB anyway. And, yeah. And our next steps is like, since the KDE non-discusser act, analyze, yeah, as I already said, particularly, yeah, if you want to meet. And, yeah, if you want to reach us, we have like a public channel where we basically have all communications almost, and then there's also like a private channel where there's more specific information. But, yeah, if you want to join, there's a medicinal, I forgot to put it there, but... And if you want to have a both first day at four in the afternoon, so if you want to join us there, and talk with us, that's your opportunity. And, yeah. And if you want to email us, there's an email address. Okay, and from the CISADME working group, the CISADME working group works on all the server infrastructure for KDE. KDE mostly makes desktop applications, but we also need servers for the websites and hosting the code and all that. As an example, we had 48 terabytes of network traffic in Novost. On average, we did with 185 web requests for a second. As you can see from the email rate, running an email server ourselves is a lot of trouble, but we have to if we are going to deal with these kind of numbers. Our current members include Ben Guxy, Nicolas myself, Bushan, Kenny Coyle, he mostly works on the academy stuff, but he helps us with other services. Harold Ceter was already helping us with a few things, but this year he has formally joined the team, so that's great. And there's other people who are involved in specific services, such as Luigi Toscano with the translation management server. Yes, Bernard takes care of the 3DSD CI nodes and probably a few more that I'm not remembering now. One of the things that we completed this year was the implementation of the GitLab CI. We got all the platforms that we had on the old Jenkins system. We are still missing macOS, but that was not in Jenkins anyway, but we plan to work on that in the future. This made CI finally available for work branches and merge requests on every platform. Moving away from Jenkins also gave us more flexibility and made it easier to deploy new CI workers. That was actually a pain to do if we wanted to add new servers for Jenkins. The Windows jobs are now using Docker, which makes it easier to replicate that environment locally outside our servers and also makes it easier to add new official servers. And to replace the build.kd website where you could see the status of each build, we have a new dashboard using Grafana and Prometheus, and this should allow us to have better insights about notifications when something isn't building or seeing the history of past builds. We also got a new API documentation website with modern tooling. The old one was actually still using some tools from KDE4, which is kind of terrible. About authentication, we started with a service of our own which was made by KDE based on Blender ID. This would have been good to use, but there were some concerns about having to maintain that kind of stuff ourselves. There wasn't much activity in developing it. I would say maybe part of my responsibility that I couldn't quite get involved, but we realized that GitLab actually gives us more stuff what we needed, so it can act as an authentication provider, so why not just use that? Personally, I'm not entirely sure if this is the best way to go, but it's still a step in the right direction. If in the future we decide to go back to my KDE or something like that, it will be much easier than if we were still on the old KDE identity. Half of the work will already be done. We also upgraded some servers like KDE Identity was on an old operating system. Where we need help, well, with our goals that we'll show in a second. We got rid of build.kde.org, which was Jenkins, but we still have our other Jenkins instance, which is the binary factory. Ben already has the overall design for how this will work, especially in terms of security, because we have our code signing keys in there. We have to actually start working and implementing it. We have some servers on a really old version of Ubuntu which will reach end-of-life next year, so we need to upgrade that. There are several websites using Rupal 7, and that's also approaching end-of-life. This is in particular something that people outside the KDE, the ASCIS admin team can help us with. Finally, our form software is really old, and I also tried to get the configuration into a nice git repository so other people could contribute. When I looked at this, how everything was set up on the server, I didn't understand that rat's nest that is probably been there for years. There's plugins that I have no idea where they came from. And also the interface is a bit aged by now, so it seems to be confusing for end-users sometimes. We need to evaluate what we're going to switch to. Flarm is apparently a good option. Some people have also experimented with discourse. There were some concerns about the way discourse was deployed, but I think we can actually work with it anyway. I guess we need to think of what our needs are and compare the different options that are available for the form. And that's it, I guess. If you want to contact us, we are on the KDE CSADMIN IRC and Matrix channel, or the CSADMIN NAT KDE, or private mailing list, all of the team will get it. Thank you very much. Great to see you again from this side of the room. I am here to talk to you about the financial working group, and now I need to figure out what the right button to press is. That's the right button, great. All right, so broadly speaking, our mandate is to make sure that the financial situation of KDEV remains secure and that it is monitored and that we allocate our financial resources with some intentionality and with an understanding of the past and an awareness of the future. A big part of that is actually informing you so that you are aware of our financial situation and what we can do with our resources. Thank you for attending and listening in. We are currently relatively few in the financial working group, but the working group is, I would say, of very good health. We have regular meetings. We have a very equal distribution of work at the moment, so that has worked really well in the past year, and I would like to thank Marta until very much for the help also in putting this document together. It's a bit of a slow button, though. Fascinating. Lydia, your button is very laggy. I should. I like keyboards. It's much nicer. All right, about the past 18 months, there's actually not that much to say. It was a relatively uneventful time financially speaking, which is good because nothing scary happened. Also, we didn't have any big positive surprises, however. We still were dominated by the pandemic. We had put forward a budget plan that saw us outspend our income. We once again failed to achieve that goal because we didn't have a lot of opportunities to spend money. We did not see a return to physical events in the last year, and also our hiring was a bit slower than we had planned. Although it has recently recovered, so we will be catching up to the plan there. Overall, events were again relatively uneventful. Costs were down since events were mostly still held online, and we had already built the infrastructure in the preceding year, so we didn't have any great additional costs. We have charts and pie graphs that you are about to see, and what you will see in them is that the percentage of our personnel spending seems to have grown, and this is largely due to some changes in how we attribute these costs. In the past, we didn't actually put, for example, health insurance and other related costs into that pool, but now we do. We talked a little bit already during the report of the BART about our roster of donors and supporters. We opened up GitHub for recurring and one-time donations and have seen a great response there that has increased our donation income. We have gained a patron, we've lost a supporter, but overall that's, well, financially speaking, still a netwin, and you already heard about this in the last Academy in the early months of 2021. We had a very large one-time donation from Pine64, who remain active in the community and are also an Academy sponsor again. Now, visuals. We will see we have about 240,000 euros on the income side in 2021 and about 218,000 euro on the expense side. So once again, our reserves have grown. We now have accumulated once again very large reserves that we really need to do something about, as we cannot afford to have very large reserves as a non-profit organization. We actually should be accumulating them. As you compare these two slides and the revolution over time, we will also see that overall, the volume of money in and out, if you discount the year 2018, keeps growing slightly, so our financial footprint is increasing. And this is the split. You can see we are absolutely dominated by staff and contractors and by events, which makes sense. Infrastructure does pop up, but it's not a massive cost for us. And that's the footprint of our organization in one slide. Budget plan. So for 2022, we expect only modest growth of our income. Some of our historically always around income sources continue to decrease, in particular the partnerships that we have with Google on their programs. We have Blower Engel also again in this year, which is slightly larger footprint than in the preceding year, but largely income and expense cancelling out each other as per the plan. We are still working on dissolving the KDE League from our American satellite organization that we had, and we expect to receive some remaining funds from them that will show up in our income. The big takeaway is that this is the year that we do expect our expenses to rise sharply, as we've foreseen and in fact planned for multiple years in a row already. This is the year where we have returned to physical travel, and we also have, at the same time, hiring going on and hiring now also happening in a more successful way than we had last year. So that means all of these things are coming together in one point where we will very likely manage in this year to actually outspend our income, which is great because that's been the goal for a couple of years. And it does mean, however, that now is also the time to think about the midterm future. We need all of these activities to be sustainable. In a nutshell, don't join my working group, join the fundraising working group because they have very few members as well. And a couple of years down the road, we will need their work output more than the one of the financial working group. Project-specific fundraising can take a very large role in that and is also something that this working group plans to help with. Project-specific fundraising means that we have income that is earmarked for a particular purpose and that the spending and the use of which is regulated by a group of people outside the financial working group. And that means, first of all, that we need to mark transactions as such, that we know what the money is that is coming in for the project, but we also need to give visibility to the folks that are running that project. So what we would like to do is improve our financial dashboard infrastructure and also give other people that are running projects access and CDEPR and downcharge and see how much money they have in the KDEV bank, so to speak. All right. 2022, I already mentioned a little bit of that is also generally stable. Our sponsor response for Academy is back to pre-pandemic levels, both the number of sponsors and also the pricing. We are hiring very actively now. We have several positions to fill over the coming months and also going into 2023. We see a very slow recovery on the sprint expenses side. We've had some sprints that cost money, but not a whole lot, meaning sprints that are physical. We are very heavily encouraging a return to those, so we have a lot of opportunities to help the fundraising working group. I think it's a fun topic to work on. If you want to contact us, we also do have a mailing address. I have not included it in the slides so that you visit the wonderful KDEV website and learn about all the working groups and then also find our email address there. Thank you. Are there any questions to any of the working groups that have presented right now? I don't see any hands right now, but we have some questions in the chat over here. Could renting KDEV build infrastructure to third-party projects be done for diversified income? Not sure who the question is for specifically. Can we rent our infrastructure for income? If I understand right, the question is, can we build infrastructure on the market as a product and make it available to others? It's a very good question. I think I can at least contemplate some of the aspects that we need to look into. For example, the legalities and the non-profit offering service. There is a lot of paperwork and overhead with such a thing. And this would be a lot of paperwork and effort spent not directly on our own products and initiatives. I'm not sure if it makes sense as a priority, at least. I also think there are likely other funding sources that make more sense. Especially when it comes to our built infrastructure, what I with sort of my EV board had on would like to see is our partners, for example, hardware companies in fact helping more build the infrastructure and providing test machines. Any other questions from the room? Yep. This is for Nicolas. You mentioned about the forums that obviously are very old fashioned and we have used them quite a lot and we found them quite inadequate for all. You mentioned this course, which I know well, what was the other alternative you offered? You talked about? Yes, the other one is called Flarum. I haven't looked into it myself. Mostly, Ben Cooksley was researching it a bit. So, I'm sorry, but I don't have much answers about what it's like. But it seemed to be a good option according to his initial research. One more online question. Some companies expand their offerings by making variant of apps aimed at different users, such as Premier Elements. Could KDE EV sell commercial free open source software licensed for KDE apps aimed at professionals? So, I think this is being done in scope of one of our elected KDE goals, which is, of course, all about the apps and KDE is supporting that also by having hired Ingle recently to support getting KDE applications into app stores. I think that is definitely also aimed at professionals. I think a good example where professionals are willing to pay for it via an app store because they know it supports development of the software and they have the funds. Any other questions from the room? I don't see anyone, so thank you again for the representatives of the working groups.