bear with me. I have very poor screen hygiene right now. I have too many windows open. Let me just clean that up really quickly. All right. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen just to kind of share a couple different talking points to kick off the meeting. Can everybody see the climate action and accounting SIG landing page? Okay. Great. Okay. Well, just to kick things off, what I oftentimes like to do is, well, actually, let me start off by doing the housekeeping. This is part of the hyperledger foundation. This is one of our five monthly meetings. And for anybody interested in joining hyperledger and getting involved, a couple of things to flag for you. It's good to review the antitrust policy that hyperledger follows. We also have a hyperledger code of conduct. This is an open source community. It requires everybody to collaborate and behave and treat each other with respect. So that is what the hyperledger code of conduct is all about. What I like to do is, before I hand it over, we've got a really great presentation today. Before I hand it over and introduce, or wanted to see if there's anybody who's new to the call. I would love to kind of have you introduce yourself and share a little bit about how you found out about us and what you're working on. I see, yeah, please feel free to speak. Anybody's out there? Okay. Sounds like we all have all current members. So that's fantastic. Okay. So I'll go ahead and kind of lead off introducing or really excited about this presentation. I was able to meet at New York Climate Week. And he is part of the lexicon foundational to building the ecological benefits framework, which is kind of expanding our ability to really kind of quantify the impact around biodiversity and a range of different ESG silos to really kind of, this is critical for having kind of a shared framework for understanding that impact, for providing value to that impact, and for unlocking the financial dollars from the climate finance folks out there to be able to fund different types of projects in a way that is responsible to the interests of their financial organizations and their stakeholders. So this is a big deal. This is some great work and I'll hand it over to you, Orre. Happy to stop sharing my screen so you can share your screen if that works for you. Yeah, perfect. And yeah, I'll just start without sharing my screen and then I'll move into sharing my screen. It's good to see some familiar names here in the crowd and hello everybody. So first of all, my name is Orre. I have been doing work in impact both in nonprofits and for profits, well over 10 years, both on the social side and the environmental side. And my background is climate science, water and geopolitics. So that's kind of a little bit of my background. I've been working with the lexicon for nearly a year and I've been part of this journey of the ecological benefits framework from the start. And there are some folks here in the room that have also been with us. So good to see those people here. I'll say a word about, oh, and also part of my background, working in the impact space has been basically focused on impact measurement and management. So very much in line with this kind of idea of impact accounting. And for the past couple of years, I've been trying to help organizations basically figure out how they can use Web 3 tools to better do impact. And I've been advising impact organizations, sorry, Web 3 organizations to do better impact. And vice versa, I think I got those mixed up. But so we'll jump in and I'll start by introducing the lexicon actually. The lexicon is 15 years old. It's a California-based NGO that works at the intersection of conservation, sustainability and food. What we do is we identify big challenges, identify the domain experts that can meet those challenges and then we ask them to come together and bring about solutions. And that doesn't necessarily mean create solutions kind of out of scratch, but more share ideas and disseminate the solutions that are already in existence and kind of find the places where we can work together. The lexicon also does everything from TV shows for PBS to information artworks that have been showcased in hundreds of places around the world, educating people mainly about sustainability and food. But the work that we're talking about today kind of began actually just about five years ago. And it was all under NDA work with Google for Food that essentially asked this question, which is how do we do food better? How do we basically describe our food systems in ways that don't appear on the back of the can? So we know everything about nutrition when we look at a can and we can see, you know, how much protein or fats or whatever is in it, but we don't really know where our food came from and who handled it along the way and what types of attributes that food system or the companies producing it have. So we had brought together some of the biggest food companies in the world, leaders in the space. And what we did was we asked them to essentially align around shared values and principles. And based on that foundation of shared values and principles, we created a shared language to describe a food system. So I'm just going to share my screen now. All right, here we go. So you can find this by the way on lexicon.org. Most of the resources I'll share, I can drop links as well. But essentially, we developed this way to describe food systems and their different attributes. And at some point, also Adobe jumped in and they said, can we design these icons and make them machine readable and give it to everybody to use? And that's exactly what we did. So, you know, anybody can kind of download these icons and their templates to use them in any way. It's all open source to describe a food system. And it was so successful that the USDA came around and they were like, can you do this for local organic food? And we said, yeah, sure, we could do that for local organic food. And did another kind of process with leaders in organic and created some more icons, which were at the time called food icons. Today we call them lex icons or lexic ones. And then after them, the global sustainable seafood initiative asked, can we do this for small scale fisheries? And so we did the same for small scale fisheries and created a shared language of icons to describe different attributes to do with sustainable seafood. And finally, also for regenerative agriculture, kind of expanding into this realm of agriculture and describing the processes that are to do with regenerative farming.  What's happening here? Because this has kind of expanded. And what we said is it's an accelerator for good ideas, but the word accelerator was taken. So what we describe is we're activating. So these are activators. And we're taking all these folks together and we're activating them in a certain direction. And we've done about 25 of these now. And it's always roughly the same formula, right? We bring together the stakeholders, the competitors, everybody who's a leader in the space. We come to alignment on values, on principles and language. And then we build a visual language that they can explain what they're doing with. And most importantly, we also set this free. So this is not something that is owned by the lexicon in kind of a commercial way. It's open source. It's under creative comments license. And sometimes it even spins off. I mean, region one is a different organization now, right? So it's always public good in the end. And then we were approached by Ripple, who asked us if we could do the same for carbon markets. And we said, no, we can't because carbon is working with these regenerative agriculture folks. We saw that it's not just about carbon. It's all these different elements, right? And if carbon is just a fraction of the equation, maybe we can do this in a more holistic way. And talk about air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. And once we look at it through that framework, that's how we kind of get to EBF, but I'm jumping ahead. Because a lot of the times when we talk about impact, this is what we are referring to air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. Most companies, you look at their ESG reporting, their SDGs or whatever they're doing, it usually falls under one of those six. So when we started the ecological benefits framework, the EBF, we said, we'll gather all these experts. And obviously, thanks to Ripple and other partners, we put a WED-3 spin on it. And so we actually started with five different work streams. REFI, payment for ecosystem services, technological infrastructure, MRV, which is monitoring, reporting, and verification, and working with case studies. And that allowed us to essentially build this language. So let me jump a little bit into the actual EBF and what it is and how it works. So yeah, so everybody kind of, I mean, it's at this point, it's kind of common knowledge that our status quo is an economy that's based on extraction. Our system incentivizes us to externalize, right? Externalize costs onto people and planet as much as you can to maximize profit. And sure, that works, but we live on a finite planet. And actually, it brings about some pretty terrible things, right? Some extremes, whether it's the weather that's changing due to the climate and its effects on water, on biodiversity, and what have you. And the responses that we've kind of come up are also quite imperfect in a lot of ways, whether it's issues with trust, whether it's poor governance, or just kind of not doing it right, right? So we've been kind of stuck in this cycle for a while. And we've created a lot of great frameworks to kind of try to deal with this, right? We've taken a market approach with carbon markets. We've developed a bunch of different acronyms to kind of describe these different elements of impact. And all these frameworks, all these approaches, I'll talk about impact in a similar way, but some are trying to name a goal like the SDGs. Some are focused on some sort of risk mitigation, which is usually ESG. Some are working on reducing negative impact. Few are actually working on creating positive impact, but they're all affecting, again, the same things, right? They're affecting air, water, soil, biodiversity, sorry, my screen got stuck. There you go. Soil, biodiversity, equity, and carbon. And they're all part of that kind of same, that same map. So we call these ecological benefits. And we ask, essentially, what if we could talk about our impact in terms of their ecological benefits, the focus on that? What if we, instead of naming what we're avoiding, we talk about the positive aspects of what we are creating. And the ecological benefits framework is the language that allows us to do this. So each of these benefits has a bunch of practices and attributes that are associated with it and allow us to explain a project or a company in terms of what they are doing. And then you might ask, well, how did you arrive at these different attributes? Why are they so different from the existing SDG frameworks or ESG frameworks or so on? And the answer is that it's a bottom-up approach, that we worked with projects on the ground to describe, we worked with projects on the ground to help them, essentially, describe what it is that they're doing. So we worked with 24 case studies. I'm going to show you a couple of them here. But these 24 case studies, essentially, allowed us to understand what it is that they are doing in their own terms and showcase that. So let's look at this example from Kenya. There's a project called Makoko Pamoja. It's a mangrove ecosystem project, which means essentially these folks are planting mangroves on the coastline of Kenya. And we use the language of EVF to describe what it is that they're doing. But the language is from them. So what do I mean by that? Oh, come on. Park you. Right. We can mute that person or pick them out. So if you look at the project and its actual positive impacts right here, we can see that the EVF has these two kind of different sides. It has a universal language that will always be the same across any project. So if we're looking at, for example, their effect on soil, soil has a very clear definition. But it also has a contextual definition that has to do directly with Makoko Pamoja and how they affect soil. And then if we look at their different practices and attributes, we see the same thing. So for example, Makoko Pamoja have a practice of forest carbon monitoring where they can describe, over here, we describe what forest carbon monitoring means. And then we describe exactly how Makoko Pamoja does it in their contextual frame. And this is kind of the power of this language, that it's an adaptive framework, so which means two things. It means, first of all, it's adaptive to the project to help the project describe its particular specific impact. And on the other side, it's adaptive because it keeps on growing because the definitions are informed by these projects themselves. We didn't sit a bunch of experts down and say, what are the things that a project has to do in order to be EVF, which is what a lot of things, that's a lot of how SDGs and ESG works. Most companies have to, or projects, have to figure out how to fit themselves into a bigger framework. And I've worked with hundreds of companies that come to me and say, I really want to describe my SDGs, and then they tell me what they do, and then we have to kind of contort ourselves to fit into these definitions of these very specific targets or very specific language. This is very different because it's bottom up. These projects describe what they did or what they do, and that is what creates the language. So we'll come back to that in a bit. But that's an example of just one project, and later I'll give you the links to these so so folks can follow along. All right. Just to ask, Jim Mason was also wondering if it would be possible that this video is going to be recorded and published to the meeting page. He was also asking if you were going to post this slide deck. I just thought I'd flag that as a question. So happily, all of this stuff is actually, we're jumping to the end, but that's okay. On can you change the future.org, you'll find all of these resources, including a slide deck right here. So the short answer is it's already there, and yes. All right. So just to kind of drive this point home of the adaptive framework, one of the things that we like to say that this isn't about creating a new standard or methodology. It's not about adding another acronym to the mix of the alphabet soup, if you will. It's about having a shared language that enables what already exists. So Bluetooth is a fantastic example of this. Bluetooth is an enabling technology. It helps products connect with other products. It allows different appliances from different companies in your home to speak to each other. And despite them being from different companies, LG would love to put Siemens out of business and they want you to buy their fridge or what have you, but they all support Bluetooth because it's in everyone's enlightened self-interest to have a shared language that they can all agree upon, at least this. How you want to use it is up to you. It's up to the people creating the product and it's up to the users. But it's a convenient digital handshake for different products. And what we like to think about EDF is a digital handshake for the planet. It's a shared language that enables this streamlining of communication of impact about a project or a company or an organization. And, you know, one can kind of imagine what if we took this language of ecological benefits and used it so that carbon markets can speak the same language as ESG and SDGs and they all kind of fit into this framework. And not only that, what if, you know, different investors can talk the same language as the nonprofits or the projects or the different companies? What if no matter what your project does, its impact, the practices, the attributes, they could all be communicated through this one language. So we believe that this is going to enable way better communication of impact, better flow of capital, and more clarity for everybody involved. And, you know, not many folks wake up in the morning and get excited about reducing their negative impact, but plenty of people want to do good. And when you do good, by extension, you're reducing the bad that you're creating. And all these folks that you see on the screen took part in this activator and built EVF with us. They shared their needs, their knowledge, their time to build this. And this is only partial, but we're inviting more folks and we're growing. And some of these, by the way, some of these actors are already using EVF. So I should mention that this was supposed to be kind of a little bit more under the radar at this point. But one of our partners that's here on the screen, New Day, are an impact investing firm from the Bay Area. And they saw this and essentially said, you know, this is a really powerful framework to communicate our impact to our investors. And our ESG framework isn't doing that well enough. And so they basically scrapped their previous plans and adopted EVF to be the language that they described the impact of their projects with, which also had us launch this, this announcement that they're doing this during climate week. So we're all kind of ahead of schedule and this is still being built out, which is also the good news because folks listening to this are welcome to join the second sprint of this activator. The first sprint is now over and the second sprint will begin soon. So we're still collecting folks to basically drill in. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But essentially, we're still evolving, is what I'm saying. It's still growing. And I want to show you what we have done. So I showed you these case studies. Let's look at a different one for a minute. This is a Cookstove project out of Sri Lanka, of Rohingya refugees, actually. Close some of these tabs because you don't want to be slow. And you can see how the language is being used here. We kind of show them. And we imagine a world where in the future, a project might say, we're looking for a grant to give Cookstove's to people. And the donor might say, oh, that sounds great. Why don't you fill in an EBF? Go to Can You Change the Future or wherever. And basically fill in your EBF, fill in a questionnaire that pops out on the other side this kind of fingerprint that allows anybody to understand what this project is actually doing, both big picture, so kind of what's its effects on air or on equity. And then very specifically, what are the practices and attributes that have to do with that. So we could look at it that way. While this will load, I want to show you this. One can look at all of the existing icons that are already out there. So if you go to the Lex Icons page, you can see that we have just on this page a couple hundred, I think something like 350 icons that have to do specifically with ecological benefits. There is over 3,000 icons that have to do with describing projects in general. And one can click on them, read about them, and so on. But more importantly or more interestingly, one can add. So if you feel like you have a great idea for a new term that you can't find here or practice or attribute that is relevant, you can click here and let us know and we will be able to add it to this language. The last thing I want to show before we jump into questions, which I see the chat is lively, but I can't look at it right now, is this simulator, which was a really interesting project that we kind of took to explain what exactly or how exactly EBF can be used. So over here, you can essentially play with what does it look like to use EBF. So for example, I will give this a second to load. This simulates how different buyers or users of EBF might use it. And maybe I should actually clarify a second before that, that we are not exactly just talking about a language because this language and these machine readable icons can be used in a very practical way. One can imagine this language is adopted to, for example, create an asset that represents that impact. And what if we can all co-create a way of talking about ecological credits or new tokens describing all impact regardless of what token or what chain or what credit, but we can talk about them in the same way. And so we imagine that that will be a pretty major use case that markets might adopt to essentially trade in these impacts. One can also imagine that you can bundle those tokens. So if you have a bunch of different credits or tokens that have to do all with air or water or soil and those different practices, you can bundle them into one of those tokens or even a whole EBF token. We're not currently building that, but this is a way to think about it. So let's look at, for example, this journey over here. We have six different folks that might use EBF in different ways. This woman is C.T., head of CSR for some big multinational corporation. And C.T., we can learn about her company and what they're all about. So this company is interested in biodiversity and carbon. And we can read about her story and why this matters and perhaps kind of what her risk appetite is and what kind of transparency needs that she might need. And then we'll look at what types of credit she might buy. So she might buy a carbon credit or she might need it to be retireable as opposed to something that you could trade and what kind of markets she's interested in. She needs a compliance market. She needs it to be on registry. She has all sorts of needs. And according to those needs and that profile that we just showed, she might choose that Cookstove project that we were looking at before. She might maybe choose to explore a different project called ReCEED based out of Brazil. And then we can read about the specific projects and how they use EBF to describe their impact. So C.T. described what she needed using EBF and the project describes what it does using EBF. And we can also look at that specific project's MRV, their monitoring, reporting and verification and how they do that and how that relates to EBF in different ways. And as you can see, there's icons all along the way kind of describing exactly what these different projects are doing or what these different buyers need. And we can look at the very specific ecological benefits and dive in. And all this stuff is just a lot of information that you can kind of sift through later. But what we kind of really want to show is that this is a tool that has different uses for different people from different sides of this equation. So the big multinational corporation might use it in one way, ReCEED might use it in another, but the fact that they all use the same language allows them to connect. And essentially, we invite you to play this game and see or the simulator and see how philanthropists might use EBF, how a retail buyer might come into contact with it, impact investors, institutional buyers and even government actors. I'm going to pause here because I've been talking for a long time and I'm sure that there's some questions. So I'm going to pause here. I'm actually going to also copy this link and put it in our chat, but it's really catchy and easy to remember. Can you change the future.org? And please feel free to visit there. So I'm going to put that in the chat now. Fantastic. All right. So I'll pause here if there are some questions, perhaps. Jim, go ahead. A quick question. So it's great what you're showing and I understand, I'll call it the challenges that you're addressing well because I've been in the space for a while in the carbon market for a longer time, but more recently in what I call the ecological green space over the last couple of years and looking at it, where are we now operationally on being able to leverage this stuff? So I've got in a sense a very large project I'm looking at trying to get off the ground and trying to figure out in a sense looking at what you have, what infrastructure is possible that we can get started with for our project in a sense tomorrow? All right. So there's two answers. The first is these icons, you can begin using them tomorrow if you'd like. And they have associated terms and definitions to each, right?  And you can use those icons tomorrow basically as a graphic file, a term, a definition and part of a larger language. In terms of the technological infrastructure and say, let's call it the edges of every term and definition, how it interacts with different systems, this is actually the thing that we're going to be working on in the second sprint. So I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is absolutely ready to be ascetized tomorrow and begin using it. But that will be true very soon once we finish the second sprint. Having said all that also, there are folks that are just already using this, right? So because of that first bit that I talked about, the usefulness of this is language. So whether it's that impact investing firm or we have a conservation project or company that facilitates these projects and a Web3 organization that are using this as the language to describe their impacts. So people are already using this, but they're using it, say, in the old fashioned way in the same way that you might use SDGs or ESG. The leveraging of the technological aspect will begin soon, but that is not something that's available yet. So in the past, I've already built marketplaces for carbon offsets, retail marketplaces, where you can buy and exchange, trade them, we can register projects and all that, put it all in the blockchain and so on. There are gaps in the industry, I'll say, around standardization. So it doesn't mean there aren't standards. What there aren't is, in a sense, as you already know, I'll call it wide acceptance of a common standard. So that doesn't happen, which is partly what your first part tries to address with the language issues, right? Get us all in the same language, the same terminology, so that we can at least use the same concepts moving forward, which is a great idea. So that's really, really good. The problem I have is I'm also trying to, in a sense, launch something as a real project now in, I'll quote, green forests. And in that space, I have all the same things you talked about MRV. And I'm actually looking at trying to build those things out today, and it would be great to find a way, if there was a way to align with what you're trying to do, but it doesn't, it's not clear to me that there is at this point, anything to do with what I call your phase two. So it looks like it sounds like, well, we can use the Lexicons and standardize on the terminology, which makes a lot of sense. It seems like we're going to have to move forward independently, because there's no way to sort of align, you know, in on the infrastructure efforts, I guess, which is the phase two piece. Well, I would invite you to actually join and see if this is exactly the way to grow together. So I'll say a word about the activators and how they work, because maybe that'll also clarify something. When we do these activators, when we do these big groups with the multiple work streams and aligning different actors, we come with a very, I'll use the word fuzzy idea of where we're going or not fuzzy, we have an idea of where we're going, but really the group is the thing that moves the activator along. And what I mean by that is that almost everybody in our activators are either competitors or folks that are working on very similar things. And so, you know, everybody's kind of like a little afraid to give too much or to push the group, but at some point, somebody comes along and says, you know, actually, I think we should totally do this in this direction. And it moves the group ahead. I mean, so everybody, yeah, people are essentially kind of, we're navigating together, right? So people who have ideas or who have things that they need this language to represent, for example, or they need it to work in a certain way are entirely self-interested. And it moves our group forward because they will say, you know, I think this language needs this technical aspect needs this clarification needs this terminology or what have you. And then, you know, unless that there's like an uproar from the group, we build it together. So, but week by week, the activator is usually, you know, meets once every two weeks. What we do is we need altogether, we have a conversation, we learn something. And then usually somebody will say something like, oh, but we need this new term or we need a map that shows us all these impact projects or what have you. And in that gap of time between the two meetings, we will build that we will create it. And we have a team of, you know, researchers and people who are experts that help us build that in between. So that's a long way of me saying what you might feel like you're missing is exactly the kind of thing that we will build in the next activator. And if you have ideas and ways that you'd like to push that forward, you're welcome to bring that in. Okay. So then you have some information somewhere about how to join the activator group or at least participate in meetings. Yeah, I'll put an email in the chat. Yeah, or do you think maybe we could make an announcement too. I'm worried that the chat might not show up on the video that we're posting. And so this will get a lot of views through our different channels afterwards. So this is a good opportunity, I think to potentially get some more people involved in the activator that's easy for them to figure out how. Yeah. So all you have to do really is email Sophie at thelexicon.org. So that's S O P H I E at thelexicon.org. And Sophie is organizing weekly calls to explain the second activator and and essentially see, you know, who can join who can't and keep everybody informed. So I encourage you to reach out to Sophie. I put the link in the chat again, Sophie at thelexicon.org. They see Elizabeth with her hand up. I'd like to see these tokenized so that I could maybe go on a marketplace and click on a food icon and trade some of my carbon credit icons for that so that you could just use these icons as a fungible token. Thank you over 100%. I'm with you. That that is that is part of the vision. I I know for a fact that there are folks that were in the first activator that are already working on things like that. So yeah, you heard it here first. I have a question. I'm kind of curious about your your successes and I don't want to say failures. I want to say learning moments for trying to build aware of really kind of build adoption in the marketplace. What is your experience been like what's worthwhile? And what maybe hasn't worked well so we can kind of learn from from that? Well, I'll start with with what works and it's not so much what works as it is the foundational kind of idea of how we work. So these activators I showed that slide before with like a bazillion logos. This is this is in our view the way to create adoption. But it's not even about adoption so much as as we invite all these people that like I said before might be competitors that otherwise wouldn't work together to do you know to create a shared language let alone think about shared values or principles. And because they are all building this together and everybody in the group is putting in their two cents when they want to right when they need to say we had a project that found it incredibly important to make a distinction about land tenure, for example. And they needed to explain land tenure because when you don't explain land tenure of a project, you're actually leaving out a very important piece of information that has implications on equity or social equity rather. And and things that matter, especially in carbon markets and and are not present in a you know you don't you don't you look at a carbon credit you don't know say the state of the land that it came from if it was a conservation project and and who's doing it and how did that happen and all that. So we've got a project that found it incredibly important to know that. And so we made it a whole module a whole kind of question set when they describe the project and and and so the reason I'm saying all this is because the folks in the group are saying are telling us exactly what they need. So the product in the end is what they need they are they're not it's almost like adoption is the wrong word they're they're building it for themselves almost right and so and and and when you're part of that group and you're seeing exactly where this is coming from and how this is being used and you can morph it to your own benefit then this just becomes useful right like it just becomes like the thing that you need and here we built it together and and the facilitators helped us you know make it happen in a sense so it's very much a group co-creation and and that's about adoption. About mistakes I mean I think honestly it's mistakes are also kind of built into that process we constantly bring up things to the group that are pushed it pushed back you know or or you know we'll come up and we'll say oh we think we should build I don't know a bundled token right and then folks will say oh well we think that this doesn't work or it does work and and so it's actually a process of a lot of mistakes all the time but again in in in this group that is able to kind of argue about it and and go back and forth and and by the way not everything are things that we solve we had a whole conversation and a follow-up conversation and and even a like a short webinar about practice-based versus outcomes-based right so our impacts are we representing you know the practices that usually create certain outcomes which is harder to measure but but you know is is more true to form for example for agriculture right or are we just measuring the outcomes which is incredibly costly and and perhaps you know a farmer in the global south is going to have a harder time getting the funds for the MRV that are necessary to show the outcomes that they would be paid for so these are these are arguments and things that we go back and forth and learn from and they're part of the process so yeah that's I think that's a and thank you thanks each of those corporates that you've listed on that placard willing to exchange their products and services for other uh credits supposing an amazon rainforest protector once needs a new smartphone because there's more rested so they all they have to do is click on the smartphone uh you know the the product and then any one of those corporations that provide smartphones will be willing to actually ship a smartphone to the amazon rainforest in exchange for the carbon credits that the amazonian rainforest protectors are providing uh it sounds like i'm not sure i totally understood but it sounds like you're you're uh describing kind of uh well how do we how do we give people the say technological infrastructure to do the monitoring or or you know who's paying for this and how does that all happen and i think that there are a number of different ways of doing this and there's different companies that do it in different ways so no my question was are all of those corporates that you have there you have their icons on that placard oh yeah sure we said all these corporations are interested do they each has each one of them signed a memorandum of understanding or a contract stating that they will provide their products and services uh under the system instead of dollars they're not going to they're not going to try to get dollars they're going to try to get carbon credits from the amazon rainforest for example i see what you're saying well so let me start by saying that the the folks on that on that list kind of with all the logos and all that are and this may be important to stress uh are people that are from those organizations uh in that capacity yeah but but we work with the the specific individuals right so uh usually uh more executives and and folks in positions that that can can use this or know what they want to do with this language uh there isn't an exchange here nobody's paying to be a part of this uh nor are they promising to use it uh it's it's very um it's it's a uh a co-creation process that everybody's invited to but it's not there's no exchange happening or promises made as to how or by who it will be used let me know when they do thank you all right uh i'm also curious uh who is the the rock star and what is the process for helping all of these different individuals reach consensus around an approach um that is uh i don't know that's an amazing accomplishment i'm very kind of curious to hear what your approach is we're gonna learn something from that yeah so uh you know some of the folks that that took part in this are here um and uh that i think that the the the process of the activator um is kind of brilliant uh and it is incredibly hard to do uh perhaps the rock star is Douglas Gayton who is uh head of the lexicon uh and uh and the leader of this process um or one of the leaders it really is a very big group effort but uh but Douglas is is the person that has done this uh you know 25 times and and uh has gotten the people in the room together um and he's always open about you know how we do it he says it right and he says and if you can do it too like do it uh you know uh but but essentially it's about uh aligning folks on their shared values uh which essentially means having a conversation uh about what do we all have in common uh what are the things that we all share um then having a discussion to see if that's actually true which takes a little bit of time uh and out of those shared values that we all have we created shared principles uh which was also a long conversation uh because you know we might all value nature or we might all value uh trust and transparency and all these different things and those might be things that are really important to us uh but then kind of forming that into a a principle of of what are we trying to do about trust and transparency right that do we think that it has to be you know in in all these parts so that it kind of evolves so we start with these values they evolve into these principles and once you have all these shared values and principles it's really much clearer how we create shared language because we can take that and say well we all believe this and and informs kind of uh how we describe these different terms these different definitions how do we uh what would have what is also the ethos behind it um and uh and that's a really really important piece uh i mean that that's that's the whole thing uh the rest is is the details and we build them as we go along uh yeah very good and i see jim asked here i think there are use cases here for both fungible and non-fungible tokens totally uh this is not necessarily uh ebf specific but you know this whole world of of credits and eco tokens and and all that gets complicated carbon is easier because it's fungible for lack of a better term right i can emit in new york and offset in shulanka and we can argue about if that's actually you know fungible but but for the sake of this argument let's say that that is fungible um i can't you know uh empty the aquifer uh in arizona and replenish water in uh poland and call that an offset so some things are not fungible uh and uh and i think that uh as we kind of go deeper into this world of uh offsets or compensation for for different impacts and so on you know there's a lot of different solutions that have kind of come up uh but what we find more and more and this is also informed some of the ebf is that the details matter right so uh so i i just kind of talked about the context and one of our principles by the way is context matters um but the the um the companies a lot of companies that are buying uh large amounts of credits uh are interested in the story in the storytelling so traders uh who are trading carbon credits on on markets you know there this could have been uh any other asset uh and and they're just trading uh but uh companies that are doing this for example for the benefit of their uh branding or public image or what have you really want to be able to tell the story and actually this is part of where ebf sprouted from because our first case study that we started off from before we even started the activator was we looked at biochar and we looked at a company called pacific biochar and uh tried to describe their impact in terms of air water biodiversity soil uh equity and carbon and um and the reason that that we chose pacific biochar was because they had a very big company had bought a large amount of carbon credits from them uh and they had to put out a press release to explain why they bought these incredibly costly carbon credits uh from the obscure process of biochar that you know not not as popular as one might think um and there's like a three page press release to to explain like why they bought these carbon credits um imagine that they could you know explain it through ebf be a little bit more succinct be a little bit more uh elegant and easy to understand uh and and this is part of that kind of thinking of um you know uh that that specifically with biochar that's fungible but if you are perhaps you know uh giving money to a project a conservation project in the amazon and this specific project works with indigenous people at the headwaters of the amazon and they empower the local population and so on and so forth well then a carbon credit doesn't really cover all that doesn't really talk about all that by does biodiversity and equity aspects and so on so there is a very big importance to being able to um add those layers of data and especially to things that are non fungible um yeah and so I'll say there's the thing I've learned over the years is there's really three legs to the stool so to speak that you sit on so one of them is economic obviously and we call it a value chain economy basically the idea of you define a micro environment as a value chain economy the second leg that you just hit which is important um certainly really important is the social aspect so you have to have a social leg to the thing so in my case we have the good forest project which is called the economic model um as a nonprofit then we move over and say okay there's the friends of the forest social side which is the social story behind that and then the third leg of the thing is education and the education one is sort of the leading one because that's the free part nobody knows what's going on to your point you have a lexicon but even bigger than that is just the whole education story behind it so education has to come out there that's one leg you've got the social aspect where you build a community and identity in there and the third leg is the economic model and if you have all three of those you can have a very viable um differentiated solution out there that is not just what I call selling carbon credits for the lowest price possible and if you don't do that you're you're as you said in the carbon credit market um just dumping carbon credits and hoping for the best yeah uh yeah I think that the it's it's it's all about giving a little bit more information creating value essentially or bringing value forward uh and giving it a name can just to hop onto that and I think that really kind of speaks to this idea of you know carbon credits and um you know co-benefits is another word of kind of broadly categorizing that term um and I know that there is a marketplace for co-co benefits um but I'm not sure where the financial industry is for being able to kind of price those so I'm curious uh is that um a space for uh clearly you've got your work cut out for you but do you think that that is a space uh for uh EBF and the lexicon to build potentially another activation group with the financial industry to be able to really kind of figure out um you know not to be crass but the entire point is to above a lot of this I think is to be able to unlock the financial flows to get to the places they need to be in order to do that the financial markets need to understand how to kind of properly price things um and so I'm kind of kind of curious where where you're thinking is is that something that you guys are talking about is there somebody else who's working on that well how's that space being moved forward cool how's that these are very different questions uh but but yes first of all this is something I think about all the time uh obsessed with this question and I will start off by saying that I don't at the moment I'm not one to say you know never or not but but right now this is not the focus of EBF and the way again to think about this is is as bluetooth right bluetooth isn't telling you what the you know how much a phone should cost uh or or what the or kind of it doesn't tell you how to use certain things it's just saying I'm a language you know use me and then uh yeah I don't know apple or whoever creates a phone and they use it in a certain way it adds value to them and then they end up charging you right so um so that's just a long way of saying EBF is is the language it's not going to be at the moment the the vision is not to say and we're going to figure out how to price every single impact uh that has to do with air water soil biodiversity equity and hard also though plenty of people are working on that I mean and in different ways right there there are folks that are trying to kind of just create a price uh there are folks that are training trying to create markets that would reflect a fair price uh there are folks that are trying to give nature sovereignty so that it can you know haggle with us uh so that's a that's like a whole nother hour uh a really fantastic and interesting projects that are trying to figure all that out uh maybe maybe we'll have you back and have a panel of people that'd be really interesting cool that'd be so cool we'll talk about it yeah uh happily uh but but yeah until then hopefully when when we do haggle about the prices and figure out you know what the value of each thing is EBF will be the language that that will describe it um and uh yeah that's it well okay well I don't see any other hands raised and running up at the end of the hour that was action packed really educational uh or that was fantastic you're really good at presenting this I can tell you've done it a lot I like the way that you've kind of brought it together the bluetooth um kind of concept I think really helped me get my mind around it so um I really appreciate your presentation I really appreciate the work that you're doing and this is uh this is definitely one for the books for for hyper ledger in the climate six super super interesting stuff I'm looking forward to sharing this video and building awareness for it because I think it's it's good work and we want to get as many active volunteers to participate in this next round as possible I'm so glad and it was interesting for me too uh I'll keep following along thank you so much for having me and can you change the future dot org okay yep thank you I've already got the link all right bye bye


Hi, my name is Thomas Maurer and I'm here with Michael Green, and we are going to talk about Azure Policy Guest Configuration to govern your hybrid environment. Hi, Michael. How are you doing these days? Hey. I'm doing very well. How are you? Doing well. I haven't talked to you for a while. I think I remember we had like two years ago, we had a very good conversation and then time was just flying. Man, I really miss conferences, like all the PowerShell conferences and Ignite and seeing people and sharing ideas, like I really miss this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. It's same for me. I get always so much out of it, you learn so much, right? I'm just having all the way conversations. But I hope that this event or these videos especially can help obviously, the audience a little bit to get back on track and that we can share a little bit of deep technical content and make it bring a little bit back of the experience. Let's do it. That sounds great. I know many people watching this video already know you. You've been apart from Microsoft for a long time and you worked on some pretty cool stuff. But for those who don't know you, what are you working on? Yeah. I've been at Microsoft 16 and a half years and I've worked all over the company, but for the last five or six years, I've been working on desired state configuration. So we can think about that as whenever you deploy a server and we'll go on and on in the details about this, how do you guarantee the end state? How do you know what state it's in? I always think about IT operations as what do I have, what state is it in and what's going to happen when I change it. So for servers, this is a really big deal. How do I put a server somewhere and make sure it's in the right state? Across the evolution of DSC, we've seen of course DevOps and shifts to the Cloud and all these different scenarios. So the whole area has just been exploding. And by the way, the DSC community is just going great. Like it's self-sustaining. There's a website dedicated to the DSC community. All the DSC resources are now in a GitHub organization that's maintained by the community. If you don't know, there's a monthly call for the DSC community. There's always like 20 or 30 people on it talking about new ideas, how are things progressing? So that is really going well. And then our team is focusing on kind of the commercial side of that. Like what are the hardest problems we can tackle? How do we make life easier at scale? That kind of thing. So it's been exciting. Like I can't tell you how fast we've been moving and we're about to go even faster over the next couple of years. So I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, so that is actually a great stuff. Like especially I love the desired state configuration part. I remember that when this came out and we saw the first stuff happening with desired state and DSC and how that helped to get these desired state configuration pushed out or pulled. That was like, I was like, okay, this is gonna be awesome. By the way, I'm just gonna put a teaser in here. Go out to the PowerShell repo, github.com slash PowerShell slash PowerShell and look in the issues list. Maybe just search for DSC. There's some pretty good discussion going on there. And you yourself can very easily start to uncover what the near future of DSC is gonna look like just by doing some reading out there. There's some really good conversation and there's also a monthly call for PowerShell. So that's a good place to plug in. Yeah, PowerShell 7, there's some cool stuff coming. Yeah, I love what the team is doing. Like again, and that is also some great things about like the latest things and happening in Microsoft that we actually do that openly, right? Yes. Everyone can be part of it and can actually go out. You don't need even to be like necessarily writing code or anything, but you can also just provide your opinion on the things the teams and the community is doing. There's a lot of that going on in that repo and it applies directly to what we're gonna talk about today because you can go in and influence conversations and shape the direction of how this type of platform would be used for things like governance without saying like, well, I don't think, I think you should have a comma here, you know, that kind of thing. It's more like, well, no, here's how I anticipate using it. My requirements look like this and then we can go build things like we're gonna show today. So I'm pretty excited about the way that things work now. It's really fun. No, that's pretty cool. I remember the times when I started in IT and I was like, well, I saw a bug or saw something not working the way I wanted to work for me as a customer. I was like, how do Microsoft care about me, right? Like, why would I even tell them like, but actually, and since I'm like, for the last couple of years and especially also since I'm joined, I see like we are listening and it seems like it's so interesting to see like how impactful the customer feedback is. So that's true. You just made my next point for me already. And that's like, how do we know what to build first and how do we know what's most important? So our team also did a lot of work in the area of Arc and it's really, we've heard very clearly from customers that it's not all in the cloud. It's hybrid, right? And we have to have solutions that span, you know, both things that are happening in Azure and things that are outside of Azure. So in doing that, we did a lot of research into like, what do people really care about? What are the problems they need us to solve? We did a ton of surveys, talked about it to people. And, you know, one of the things that we found is that this whole area of governance is overwhelming. Like, and when I say governance, I mean, whether you've got to prove to auditors that like you meet these certain requirements and your servers, but it could be like you're part of a government agency. It could be that's part of healthcare or you're processing credit card transactions or I find more and more like these large enterprises, even if they don't have to legally like meet some compliance standard, they're still finding it's like the path of least resistance or the easiest way to reach server security is to go find a good industry baseline and just use that as a reference for what their server platform should look like. So we're on a quest to like, we really want it to be when you are using Azure, when you're using Arc, that should not be where you like getting your servers to meet those requirements or at least understanding what state they're in. This should not be 80% of your work week, right? This should be something that is just part of your flow. It's just part of how you deploy applications and we really want that to be true. That's the journey that we're on. Now that's like amazing, especially I was just thinking like when you talked about this and companies getting like doing the compliance stuff, I remember like a lot of companies who were just working on prem, like they basically just lose like like something like group policy, right? And you were sitting out there building all these group policies for their environment. And it was just like a ton of work and it was pretty complex as well. It is obviously, if you build it in, it's obviously a good part, like it works now, right? One, you build it once, but now with that whole cloud and especially in a hybrid cloud world, things are really, really changing fast and you obviously need to tackle these challenges. Doesn't matter if it's in Azure or on premises or anywhere else, you will face these challenges and you need to have tools to manage that. This whole area, it's just turning into a scenario where we're finding that after machines are deployed into cloud environments, it's actually easier than the battles we were facing on premises because everything's addressable, right? It's all in Azure Resource Manager. So whether it's in Azure or outside of Azure, it's addressable via Azure Resource Manager. So now you can have Azure policy actually go, just sweep the estate and say, what's going on? How do I prove to auditors that everything is the way it should be? Well, if I just put the arc agent on the machine or if I'm deploying it into Azure, I can just use Azure policy for all of that. So if you want, we can take a look at this and kind of see what this looks like. Absolutely, I would love to see more about that. Yeah, so let me do a screen share. Yep, it's here. Awesome. Yeah, so I'm in Azure policy.  You can see I've already marked that as one of my favorites. So it's right here on my table of contents. And I've already assigned this policy. So I'm looking at, we actually have one that's the Azure baseline for Windows. So Microsoft has a policy in Azure that includes 29 different definitions. And we're actually using a lot of customer feedback on this as well. We're about to introduce some improvements in this area. But it just has something like 300 settings where it's saying, this is what Microsoft recommends as security best practices for your Windows environments. We also have the same policy for Linux. And this is, by the way, like such a, this is where we're at in time type of thing to say that Microsoft is using Linux extensively. We use it for our own platforms. We've got lots going on in the world of Linux. We've got big investments in this area too. And so we actually have the Microsoft recommended best practices for Linux. Because we're working with lots of different Linux organizations and we're able to produce things like that. So for this one for Windows, I've actually used the policy interface. I've drilled in a little bit and I can see I'm looking specifically at things around user account control. And you can see I've got two machines, one's compliant, one's not compliant. And so I'm 50-50 on my compliance rating. If I click details, I can go in and view from the portal exactly what's going on. But one of the things that I wanted to show because not a lot of people know about it yet is if we think about this, this Windows machine should meet requirements for security options for user account control. There's more than one setting that's being evaluated here. You can view that in the portal and that's all documented. But one of the latest things we've got available, if I go look at the docs for Azure resource graph, I guess I could zoom in a little bit and maybe make this easier for you. So Azure resource graph is like a big data platform where you can view all your information about Azure and we've got examples both in the starter and advanced queries. You can see we've got three here that are specific to guest configuration. So if I do find all reasons a machine is non-compliant, I'm just copying and pasting that. It's addressable actually from the policy page. If I close this, and you can see here's that full list of policies that were in that baseline. It's right here under resource graph. That'll take me to this page. And I just copied and pasted that example. And here I made some small changes so it fits better on my screen share. But this is really awesome. Like for all of these settings, and you'll recognize a lot of this stuff from group policy, here's what I'm saying is for this machine, go find everything that was returned that included Azure baseline. And I've got like, what's the guest account status? Who's allowed to log on locally? All these different things that as you mentioned, you came from group policy. In the phrase column, I can see whether or not it was applicable. Then I can see like, what was the value it was expected to find? Cause this is ultimately some of these things, most of these things really are registry keys. What did it find? What was the comparison operator that it used? So if it's like, who can log on locally? I expected just administrators, but I found administrators, users, and probably backup operators. So compliance status returned false. And the challenge that I gave this team whenever we started looking at this is, hey, I've got two scenarios that we need to make easy here. One is I've got a problem. I think there's a zero day flaw and I need to go configure something that in the past was like group policy I used to manage it. And I just need to know across my entire estate in Azure, on premises, in Hyper-V, in VMware, in AWS, in Google Cloud, like no matter where the server lives, I need to know where have I gotta go fix this so that we're not vulnerable to this attack pattern. So you can use this and we'll take a look at like what that looks like, but you can use Azure policy across all these things. And you would just go in here. I mean, this results took 0.244 seconds to return to go find this information. It's just amazing. This is, to be honest, this what you just showed in the last couple of minutes, this to me looks really like group policies on steroids, right? Right, yeah. It's like centrally managed. I can use it for Windows. I can use it for Linux. I can use it wherever my machine is running. Doesn't matter if it's in Azure, if it's on premises, if it's like another cloud provider, it doesn't really matter and I can use it. What the great thing is I still, I just wanna make clear if I understood that correctly. So the rules you're just showing me, like this policy and all these settings, those are something we provide to our customers. Like if I'm a customer, I just get this, like, yes. Okay. Yes, so this one is, we think about this as built-in versus custom. And I'm gonna give you details how to create custom. And I'm also gonna give you details on zooming in on that group policy area. But this one, you didn't have to do anything. So you just go in, it's considered built-in.  You assign the definition, easy peasy. That second scenario, so one is go find all the problems, go find one problem across all my machines. The second scenario is find all the problems with one machine. So, you know, here you can see all the results. I can filter this. I can go to just where compliance status is false. I can export this. And now even as an operations person, I can go to the application team who hosts the server and say, let's have a conversation about here are the settings that need to be corrected and we'll come up with a way for how. And that, by the way, is where our team is exploring for the next six months is the how. And I'm gonna take a look at that as well. So you might have seen back on this page when I was looking at my results that I've got, like we looked at earlier, one machine that's compliant, one machine that's not compliant. And it's compliant with every single policy. So like I said, 300 settings or so are being evaluated, split across 29 definitions. For every one of these, you see one machine's not compliant, but a total of two machines. That second machine that's showing compliant, that has been enrolled in our auto-managed preview. So if you're taking a look, if you go back to the last Ignite session and take a look at the Azure Machine best practices, things like that, and we'll get some links available. So you can make the machine compliant with this. And by the way, this is just applying a DSC configuration under the hood, but it's using the guest configuration platform. So it doesn't interfere with anything you might have going on in Windows PowerShell DSC. This is using PowerShell Core side-loaded. So it doesn't interfere with anything that you're doing with DSC otherwise. And you can actually make your machine compliant with this environment. So we welcome taking part in that machine best practices preview and getting some feedback there. And then you mentioned group policy. So one of the things that really, we haven't had any Ignite events and things like that where we could talk about this. The last Ignite session that I did, I talked about, we wanted to start working on this area of helping people who, and they've been using group policy for like 20 years, literally just group policy has been around for 22 years in one month. And I know that because Server 2000 came out in December, 1999. And so people have all this trust, right? And they've got these complex environments around group policy. And they're wondering, if I start deploying machines in the cloud and they're not joined to a domain, how do I have that same level of trust as what I had whenever it was part of that environment? And so we have a page out here. If I scroll down under the how to guides under guest configuration, create guest configuration policy from group policy. And there's actually was already a community tool called baseline management. And I'm about to make a bunch of enhancements of this page. So maybe even by the time this goes live, some of these will have changed, but it tells you how to download and install the tool, how to do a conversion from group policy to guest configuration. And if you want to take the things that you're doing in your on-premises environment and make them part of this experience where you can see them in the Azure policy experience, you've got your data and resource graph, you can do that with the content that's coming from your own group policy environment as well. So there's a lot to see here. Oh, wow. Okay, so I'm just a meaty bone way because I think a lot of people that haven't heard about this, I mean, this is like, so we get these policies, but obviously a lot of companies have invested into group policies already. So we gave them an option to actually convert these group policies to Azure policy guest configurations, so they can apply it and use that new tool. So when I would be responsible to manage a compliant in enterprise, this would be like, okay, so where can I get this? And I'm sure there's a kicker.  And now the kicker usually is like, when I need to set this up, it probably takes me days. Yes, like five days, a couple of thousand lines of scripts you've got to go over. You have to extend your schema. No, no, no, that's all gone now. If you want, you can share your screen and we can take a look at it. This is really, really easy. Okay, we definitely can do that. So let me share my screen here. So we're gonna basically set up Azure guest integration policy in my environment with, let's say, in my case, my Azure VMs are pretty secure. We have obviously some baselines, but I wanna do that for, I have a couple of on-premise machines here, which are also secure, and I wanna see how that works. Let's make it like the most complicated, imaginable scenario, right? Like let's do Linux machines, they're on Arc, they're not even running in Azure. We wanna see what state they're in. Let's see if we can do that, so. I have all of that. So no worries. Okay, well, this sounds fun. Let's start by just clicking on policy. Okay. And I find there's a really good user experience here if you click on assignments. Okay, so this is like the usual Azure policy part. I know it from, we know it from Azure, right? And so I'm just gonna manage my assignments here. And let's do assign policy. Okay, perfect. And then, yep, for your policy definition, there's a nice search box that really makes life easy. And see that filter by name. Let's just type in Linux, maybe Linux machine. And it's funny, you know, since Arc, since we really started working with Arc, we can't say, we used to just say like Linux virtual machine, it used to roll off the tongue. And I could train myself to stop saying virtual because Arc, it might not be virtual, it might be physical. You can see we've got a bunch of definitions in here for audits. And if you keep scrolling down, you'll find Linux machines should meet requirements for the Azure security baseline. So let's just assign that. Okay, so that's equivalent to what I was looking at in Windows. Okay, okay, got it. So these are our recommended security baselines for the Linux machines. And this isn't making any changes inside the machine. This is just performing an audit. So there's no special identity you have to set up or anything like that. You should probably look at the scope. Like you can assign this, if you have hundreds of subscriptions, you can assign it to a management group and look across everything. If you want to go to a specific subscription or you can go down to a resource group. And you can even exclude specific machines if that's something that you need to do. Yeah, so I think for me, it makes sense to like, as I mentioned, we have, I have a resource group where I have all my Arc servers. Perfect. Yeah. I select that one. Okay. And what's next? Oh. Yeah, there you go. So by default, we don't include Arc machines. So we give you a dropdown list. So it's under your control. If you want to also include the Arc machines that you've projected into Azure, you just change this to true and that's it. Okay. So if I want to join my servers which, so this would, by default, it would only work for my Azure VMs, doesn't matter if it's Linux or Windows. But we're setting this to true now. It really goes out and does the Arc machines I just joined. Yes. Okay. So, and then I would just go and create this. Yep. Perfect. That's it.  That's the end of the demo. Right. Okay. I'm like, okay. So, but one interesting point, by the way, I mean, for me, obviously, worked a lot with Arc before. Can you explain a little bit for like, for people who haven't worked with Arc enabled servers yet? What they are and how we connect them. Like, how do they show up in the Azure Resource Manager? You bet. So, Arc is this really cool way of saying, what's going on outside of Azure? The whole idea, and this problem has existed for a long time. I mean, even across all the time that we've been working with System Center, people have been giving us the feedback. Isn't there some way that I could get the Operations Manager and Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager and like all these different things to be managed just in a single way? Like, I have these individual installations. And so, we kind of took that to heart as we were looking at, how should we think about doing hybrid? And we also looked at, how did the existing hybrid services work? So, if you're looking across Azure Automation, Azure Monitor, they all had their own way of handling hybrid. It was like, if it's a Windows machine, okay, well, go get this URL and this key and here's a PowerShell script. However you wanna do that across 10,000 machines is up to you, right? You go figure that out. It's gotta be a better way to do this. Well, what if, because it's not so hard to do these things in Azure. Like once you've moved the machine into Azure, like you just go to the VM page and you say, I want to add this into monitoring or I go to the Azure Automation page and say, I want to add this to my configuration plan. So, my plan for how I'm gonna configure machines. So, how could we do that if it's outside of Azure? Well, the answer was it's so easy to do when it's in Azure because it's addressable through the API, Azure Resource Manager. I can just make a call and say, onboard this machine to Azure Automation or onboard this machine to monitoring. And so, what if we could do that outside of Azure, what that looked like? Well, we'd have to have some way to communicate with that machine. Okay, well, let's go back to our first problem. Let's solve that. Let's put one agent on the machine and it's just gonna be responsible for orchestrating everything. Whether you wanna do monitoring, patch management, configuration management, it's just gonna make sure that that's taken care of. And then part two, let's now project that as a resource into Azure. And that's how we'll actually solve part one because now we can use virtual machine extensions. Now we can just, we've got a path like literally an address path in rest to say, this is how you get through this machine. And I was working with a very large customer and somebody actually gave me what I thought was really insightful feedback. They're like, you know, when we were doing this on-prem all of these years, I had to think about, well, okay, how am I gonna run a script in VMware? How am I gonna run a script in Hyper-E? How am I gonna run a script if it's a physical machine? Like, what are all the different ways that I communicate with a machine? And then of course, you move to the cloud and it gets a little easier. What if you're multi-cloud? What if you're hybrid? How do you still do it? Well, this solves that problem. You don't have to move the machine, but you have a direct line of communication no matter what platform it's on. And if you use things like Azure policy, like what we were just looking at, you can just make it dynamic. You deploy a new machine, it just gets added in the scope and you're doing it automatically. It's pretty cool. This is really, really cool. I mean, I like that it's like, as you mentioned, I think that is a very important point was, it shows up as Azure resource, right? It's not just something we connected somehow in there like you would think of, right? It's so funny the first time you stand it up because it's a machine running on your laptop usually for the first time, right? And you put an agent on it, like you're doing a little proof of concept and like, does this really work the way I thought? And then you see it show up and it's in a resource group and it's got tags and there's an owner, right?  Like the machine's not in the cloud and it's just magic. Like I really love it. I think it's great. Yeah. Now I love that. Like, again, the example you just brought up with like, I actually joined systems which are not in Azure to a resource group, right? And then I can all the magic with the policies, for example, like I just, like Dewey just did assigning these policies to a resource group and suddenly I get these applied to my servers and like running here underneath my desk or in my data center or wherever they are. There's been so much stuff going on the past couple of years like all of this new innovation in the area of hybrid management and it's really great to have a chance to go through it. And then, you know, hopefully there'll be upcoming conferences in person and at some point in the future we'll all get to do this face to face again. But yeah, this stuff is super, super exciting and it's amazing how fast it's changing. So absolutely. So this is now, this is now, I know you're probably not gonna answer my question now but since we are talking a little bit about the future. So, I mean, again, this is great. You showed me how I now can take Azure as a control plane. I can actually go out and audit and govern and see like my whole environment, like all my servers from a single control plane in Azure using Azure guest configuration policies. What is next for that? What is coming? I wanna know. Yeah, no, I get it. So I mentioned earlier, like we want this to be easy, right? So we want people to be able to say, if I'm managing the machines across my hybrid environment using Azure, it was easy to meet these governance requirements and knowing that that's like the highest priority to go solve because I'll tell you, we've been looking at this configuration management space for a long time. And as you get into these deeper and deeper specialized scenarios, like the work, even on the part of like building specialized things in every single environment just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But together we can tackle this biggest problem, which is how do I make it easy to just meet these regulatory standards or to pass an audit and stuff like that? So we wanna seek out that problem first and then we'll continue to expand in the configuration space. So when I say make it easy in the past, I've said make it easy to know what's going on across my environment. And now I'm saying I wanna make it easy to pass that audits. I wanna make it easy to get all of my machines no matter where they're at into a state where they're meeting the requirements for governance. So over the next six months, one year, things like that, then we'll start to pull back the covers a little bit on what that's gonna look like, but I'm pretty excited. Like this is gonna be a really fun time. Yeah, I can imagine. I really really like these features. Again, there's still a lot of customers who haven't really seen the stuff we just showed, right? That's right. And all the time I'm talking to someone who is responsible, especially for the people who are responsible for compliance. As you just said, like when you need to pass an audit, there's so many people like you have servers out there, systems which no one really knows about suddenly and they're not managed. No one knows if they're, like for what they're used and no one can know if they're not on the patch. Everyone has this horror story that they've dealt with in the past about this server that showed up out of nowhere. You know, it's been in a closet running for 20 years and nobody knew, like that kind of, it's so funny. But yes, you're absolutely right. Like we're still solving a lot of the same problems that we've been chasing for a long time and now it's finally getting easier. Yeah, no, that's awesome. I'm really looking forward to what the team is doing there and what you're coming up with. So obviously you showed us a couple of different cool stuff where people can go. So if I wanna learn more about this, where do I go? What page do you recommend? So I've got another one of those AKAMS short codes that we're also fond of. It's aka.ms slash GC, like guest config, P-O-L, like policy. So GC-P-O-L. And that will take you to the starting of our docs page. And people, it's funny, like even at Microsoft all the time, they'll say, hey, where's your internal spec on this? I'm like, uh-uh. I put everything I can into that. If somebody asked me a question and it wasn't in the docs, step two was I go put it in the docs because it needs to be as transparent as possible. And we've got pages out there also on how to write a DSC script and create custom audits from that, how to do the same thing for Linux using Chef InSpec, how to convert from group policy. And as you can imagine, we've got a whole bunch of doc updates that we've gotta do this next six months or so around things that are happening in PowerShell, around DSC, things that are evolving in guest config. So check back to that GCPOL page over the next three, four, five, six months and you'll be seeing some new stuff. So it's pretty exciting. Awesome, awesome. So thank you very much, Michael. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Again, I learned a lot during that session. For everyone here who wants to join more, learn more, obviously check out the link again, aka.ms, G-C-P-O-L, I hope I pronounced it correctly. And if you wanna watch more sessions of our event for our ITOps talk, All Things Hybrid Event, check out aka.ms slash ITOps talks where you can find more sessions and more videos and all the good stuff. Thank you very much again for being here in the show. Hopefully see you in the future. Thank you for having me.