All right, welcome everyone to the 7th of June 2023 Aries Working Group call. This is a hyper allergic call and so the antitrust policy and the code of conduct are in effect. The link to the agenda is based repeatedly in the chat. If you'd like to view it or make any changes, I promise I will not do this forever, but for now for today as well, please do include yourself in the attendees list. It's really helpful as we try to figure out who is present for some of these important discussions and so please do. So if you can require say a login, but most of you will probably already have one and the login is free and easy to get. So if you go try to log in, you'll get instructions on how to do so. So grateful that you all are here. Anyone would like to, is there anyone here that would like to introduce themselves? Yes, I'm new. My name is Janelle and I'm an intern at Matrix Group International we're in Northern Virginia and one of my projects this summer is going to be exploring SSI and verifiable credentials so I'm just here to learn more. Janelle, welcome. Glad you're here. Thank you. Anybody else? If someone wouldn't mind adding Andre via his request in the chat that would be great. Perfect. So Janelle, you're dropping into the middle of a semi-large conversation today so there's a bunch of context but the previous several meetings do have call recordings available that we won't cover all of the context but if you end up confused today then hit those recordings. Anyone else of course is welcome to do so and our calls or the recordings are regularly posted for folks to follow along. So very much appreciate that. Announcements. We've got a dice Europe is happening like now-ish in Europe today in the next couple of days and then as well the other thing that's going on I think currently right now is the Diff's did hack XYZ hackathon as well is going on kind of right now as we speak. Stephen, I'll ask you later to give us a quick recap of the non-credits workshop because that fell off of the announcements since it actually happened but before we get to that any other announcements or work status updates that we want to share today? Sam, I attended the bifold and AFJ meetings recently and AFJ released zero or zero four days ago which has all of the shared components work in it so congratulations to that team they've been pushing pretty hard on that and bifold ran some tests of their code base against that and found one issue I believe and so we'll be looking for a fix to that and then they plan on issuing an update pretty soon against that I understand. Thank you Warren for highlighting that this move or this release for the AFJ community is huge as well as for all of us because of the work that they've been doing with integrating shared components so this is a big deal Warren thank you for for highlighting that all right so we have on our agenda today the main the topic will be an OWF presentation I see Tracy here and which is fantastic thank you Tracy for coming and then but and it's an open discussion but before we get there I wanted to see Stephen if you'd be willing to give us a quick update on the non-credits workshop done this last week. Sure we have a workshop hyperledger hosted excuse me on last Wednesday a week ago today lots of participants we had something on the order of 400 people express interest we had 200 people show up at some you know during the webinar and then at even at the end we had 70 people hanging in three and a half hours into it so which was great we went through a lot of the features of an on credits we used a tool traction that allowed for a really simple way to experiment with an on credits and experiment with with effectively areas tools as well and one of the the follow-ups is I think we're going to try to spin up an instance of that that the community can use at any time to to do experiments and have their own you know their own age and to experiment with an on credits but lots of new interest in in using using an on credits one of the sections talked about an on credits in W3C format and part of that was a demonstration that Patrick St. Louis put in from ID lab that showed an on credits credentials issued requested presented and verified all using W3C format using the chappy browser interface and a various one wallet for holding for holding the credential and and presenting it which was quite something something that hadn't been seen before and in fact the credential had both an on credits signature and a NIST signature on it which meant that it could be verified by either a verifier using an on credits with all of the privacy preserving features of that and with a verifier using purely NIST signatures and losing the the privacy preserving features but still able to present the credential and have it verified so that was a pretty neat work Rodolfo Miranda also demonstrated using cardano with an on credits so so basing the work on on cardano blockchain which was really cool so fantastic work by those two in presenting the material for the for the course. Steven thank you for the report I have a question yeah which format was of the credential was was in fact presented by the various one wallet a non-creds verifiable present presentation they presented a non-creds out of various one yeah that's awesome this is all Patrick's work really impressive what he did so yeah pretty neat very very cool thank you for that report are there any other changes changes or adjustments we want to make to our agenda before we get going here today on the main topics excellent at this point Tracy am I handing this over to you uh sure you can have this over to me let me stop sharing and I'll all right you have the floor all right so uh let me start by saying uh for those of you who don't know me that I am playing dual roles here um so I am the hyperledger foundation technical oversight committee chair and have been involved in the hyperledger community since 2016 I think it's been um so shortly after reform and I also am playing the role of the chair of the technical advisory council for the open wallet foundation so um let's just say that playing these dual roles is uh somewhat of a challenge to to be impartial one way or the other but I'll do my best to do that I do want to provide you guys with all of the information about where we are with the open wallet foundation uh so that you guys can make decisions based on facts um and uh really you know any sort of questions that you have I ask that you please stop me as we're going through don't let me just talk at you because that will never be a good sort of interaction that we have so please please please stop me ask questions uh I will try and keep an eye on the the hand raises and the chat as best I can um but if if something shows up and I'm not catching it please just interrupt me um happy to have you guys do that uh so this presentation here is a presentation that is on the open wallet foundation website I'm just going to use it as a reference point um more than anything rather than trying to to go through it because I think there's stuff in here that we can think deeper into based on kind of some of the discussions that have happened and where we're at right now so um just just to start with obviously its open wallet foundation is a sister project to the hyperledger foundation it is intended to be a neutral home for open source projects it is not intended to uh be a place for standards but rather the implementation of standards that are focused on the development of interoperable digital wallets um so just to level set kind of what this group is all about and what it's looking to do um so obviously you all know that today we have a variety of different sorts of assets um I also work for Accenture at Accenture we like to talk about identity money and objects as being pieces of um you know different sorts of credentials that can be stored into a wallet and the idea behind the open wallet foundation is to be larger than just decentralized identity and to focus on a number of different sorts of assets that we would have contained inside of our wallets now obviously identity is a large part of that um and uh yeah I probably should have said at some point I um when I was introducing myself I'm super super proud of all of the work that the decentralized identity community has done within in the hyperledger foundation specifically um I think this is a great community and I think a very welcoming community so um you know just just a level set that you know I think the work that you guys are doing here is something that is of extreme importance and um you know obviously it will be important as we look at wallets um one of the things about the open wallet foundation is it is based out of the EU and so there is a lot of discussions about uh really the the EIDIS and the EUDI architecture reference framework that is put out and so you know just to level set on kind of where they're coming from as far as you know what what we're looking to do with interoperable wallets um I think there's a lot of words done here but obviously we want these digital wallets to be flexible and we want them to be modular in the way that they are because what we're trying to do is build um the open source code that others can use to build their wallets on top of and so basically being able to have a modular components that can fit together in any way shape or form that people who are developing wallets for use can use and be interoperable across those different wallet platforms that people might create and develop you've probably seen this picture um obviously what's in the middle there is not fully baked in any way shape or form again just focusing on the fact that uh we do have identity money and objects that we would be storing in our wallets and that those things should be able to be accessible through many different means um be them the web mobile desktop headsets or hardware based um um so so that's really what we have here um so here's the the picture that I think is an important one about where it is that we're focused uh with the open wallet foundation it's really on that engine um so building that open source open wallet uh foundation engine that people can then build their proprietary wallets on top of um and then obviously you know um how it would work to become a committer you know this is uh something that's here but obviously we do not uh specify or define what those requirements are that's really up to the maintainers of each projects so very similar to the way that the hyper ledger foundation is working we are not forcing any sort of governance on our projects uh we really intend for the projects to govern themselves and to decide what it would need to become a committer or a maintainer of a project so you can see there's obviously many standards development organizations that exist they're developing many standards we would want to be implementing these different sorts of standards in the open wallet foundation uh within the engine so that people can again build their wallets on top of um yeah I mean similar to hyper ledger we're going to be a consortium of companies right now we have four premier members I think there's something in the range of 20 um uh general members and then we have a number of associate members that exist within the project uh within the foundation right now um and so uh I think we've talked about what that is obviously you guys know what open source is we don't have to focus on that um I think the general piece here is the focus on interoperability which is important for us we do want any sort of wallets that are developed to be able to communicate with one another exchange different sorts of credentials um and and be able to um really think about this from you know really the legal perspective all the way down to the protocol perspective and what that will look like so um that's kind of a focus uh these proposed initial building blocks were things that we were looking at before the foundation started um whether or not these are the things that people decide to bring into the open wallet foundation is completely up to people who decide that you know the open wallet foundation is the right spot for them to come in and and contribute code um currently we've had two uh lab proposals that have been approved by the open wallet foundation that is specifically focused on SDJOT one for Kotlin one for Python um and so that's where we're at right now as far as projects go um I think this page is something that we've talked about in a few meetings but I think it's worth spending some time on um just to contrast to uh the hyperledger foundation and what that looks like so obviously this piece at the top is one change um so as I mentioned we're um part of the Linux foundation Europe whereas hyperledger foundation is part of the Linux foundation um so this it would be where hyperledger foundation falls as a sister project to the open wallet foundation the uh we do have a governing board that's made up of premier members as well as a member from the general members elected members similar to what we have with the the hyperledger foundation uh I do also sit on the governing board as the TAC chair similar to how I sit on the hyperledger governing board as the TOC chair and so that's kind of the governing board makeup we do have uh new to the open wallet foundation versus what exists in the hyperledger foundation is there is a government advisory council so these are people who are made up of the different um national governments who are going to be helping to advise the open wallet foundation on different sorts of regulation that is related to wallets and how they're they're being used or how they're being regulated um so so being able to bring that kind of set of uh knowledge in across the different nations uh and the way that they're they're thinking about regulating wallets is is an important aspect and so that is one major difference uh between the open wallet foundation and the hyperledger foundation that the second minor difference I would say is the technical advisory council versus the technical oversight committee um I have to get my my P's and my C's corrected and uh what's in the middle there but um the the major difference at this point is that in the hyperledger foundation the people who are on the technical oversight committee are elected as people who are maintainers of the different projects um and so they're elected by those maintainers um and so I think that's a major difference right now uh and that the technical advisory council in the open wallet foundation is made up of premier members and two at large um community members that may change in the future once we actually end up with projects but I think to start with um similar to the way that the hyperledger foundation started with a number of premier members um you know it may very well switch um from what it is um a lot of the governing documents that we created in the technical advisory council for the open wallet foundation is based on what we saw with the technical oversight committee within the hyperledger foundation so they're almost directly copied from there there are a few differences and we can look at those specific differences because I think those might be of interest to this group just so that you guys can see the major differences I'm thinking about are just improvements around reviewing projects annually which is something that we're currently talking about in the hyperledger foundation TOC the other piece is just some some project life cycle changes and so we can take a look at both of those the projects again very similar to what we see within the hyperledger foundation where we'll be made up of a number of different projects so um I think the the rest of this probably not too important for this group they're really about member benefits and that sort of thing I think you know I'm going to pause here but I do want to also take you through kind of the governing documents and that sort of thing just so you can see the project life cycle but I think I'll pause just to see if there's any questions at this point yeah Alex hi thank you um very interesting I just found this slide set on this side as well one question which may be very basic but the slides imply that the um what imply they suggest that the focus is more on personal wallets as opposed to say business wallets or more abstract ideas it was can you speak to that though yeah so there there is definitely I think that sort of uh view but there has also been the same exact questions and commentary of that you just asked about how do we how do we extend this definition of wallet beyond just a personal wallet to think about organizational wallets to think about um you know different sorts of wallets that might even be for devices uh those sorts of things I don't think that there's any restrictions around us saying that these projects are only going to be focused on personal wallets I think that's just the in general the the way that the the slides have been written um you know I think it's going to be completely up to the technical advisory council as to whether or not a project makes sense to bring into the open wallet foundation the same way that we do in the hyperledger foundation where the technical oversight committee gets to decide what makes sense to bring in my my take on this is that anything that will help with the aspects of wallets and interoperability between those wallets is completely fair game to bring into the open wallet foundation we haven't put any sort of limitations at this point in in the technical advisory council about the sorts of projects that will be accepting so you know I think it's important to note that whereas hyperledger foundation has been around for a while it's gone through a number of different technical oversight committees and have some sort of um at least if not written down some sort of you know community based knowledge that exists about the sorts of projects that they would accept well hasn't happened yet obviously in the open wallet foundation because of the the newness of the open wallet foundation I would expect that as we get in project proposals and we see you know where those edges are of the sorts of projects then we can start to better define you know yes this makes sense or no this doesn't make sense but at this point we're not there yet perfect thank you yep all right if there's no other questions at this point I do want to just quickly run you through kind of this TAC website that we've put together just so that you guys can can have a look um so this page here uh is just an introduction to what the technical advisory council is all of the information that's on it is based on the charter that exists for the open wallet foundation so there's a number of responsibilities that the TAC has around um that that strategic vision that we were just kind of talking about for for the community itself making any sort of recommendations as far as what money we should spend for development sorts of resources or technical sorts of resources to the in this case it'll be the governing board um and then obviously electing that chairperson creating and maintaining our project lifecycle procedures and processes determining when that technical project should be admitted and any other matters that the governing board might be necessary again as I mentioned this is one change right now between the way that the makeup of the TAC exists in the open wallet foundation versus the technical oversight committee and the hyperledger foundation um about who is part of this um so uh yeah I think that's just an important call out right now again I don't see that this is probably long term um I do potentially see once we start to get a number of projects in that this may change but we'll we'll see how that all works out what people want to do um all the meetings are captured meeting notes recordings are captured in this meetings tab if you are interested in seeing any of the discussions that we've had feel free to take a look at that the governing documents again mostly based on what we've done in the hyperledger foundation that the main difference probably is around the these two the project lifecycle and the project annual review process specifically if we look at the project lifecycle um and we take a look at the different stages this is where you'll see a difference so we do have labs as a true portion of this project stages that exist um we do obviously in the hyperledger foundation have labs but it's not really part of the um the stages you can see you can actually come back to a labs stage if during the annual reviews that makes sense to do that um which is not the case there's no going back right now in the hyperledger foundation lifecycle um growth is very similar to what we have for incubation um but we do call it a growth stage because it's about achieving different growth metrics and then impact is when you've got people who are actually using your projects and there's some impact in the ecosystem um and so that's a bit different than than what we have in the hyperledger foundation um where we have a graduated and you can basically stay and graduate it it's possible to come from impact and go back to growth or to come from impact and go back to labs so just you know be aware that that is a difference in the way that we look at things within the open world foundation between the hyperledger foundation um the second difference is obviously this project annual review process where annually we'll take a look at each of the projects to make sure um you know whether a lab is active or we need to just archive that repo to make sure that first stage projects are actually making progress towards their impact stage and whether impact stage projects is maintaining their progress to actually remain in the impact stage so this is a a difference between the the two projects um all of these other things probably very much based on uh something you'd see in the hyperledger foundation was major maybe some minor uh discrepancies and differences but nothing that is major enough for me to remember at this point and to bring up uh to the group um questions kind of on this project lifecycle because I think this is like I said um a bit different than the the hyperledger foundation one okay if there's no questions on that just uh two other or maybe a couple other points we do have special interest groups we currently have an architecture special interest group that's been going on since before the open wallet foundation started um so we do have a number of things that exist in the architecture sake that we've been talking about we just recently uh brought in this credential format comparison that is based on some of the work that was done at the identity internet identity workshop as well as a rebooting web of trust back in 2022 so there's some some information on comparing the different sorts of credentials as well as the the rebooting web of trust paper that was written the other piece right now we've got a task force that's focused specifically on OID for BC looking at projects that might exist and whether or not we could find projects who are interested in contributing to the open wallet foundation and then just lastly working on this page today locally these are the two projects that we have in there their current lifecycle stage so I think with that I'm gonna stop talking for a bit because my voice seems to want to disappear at the moment I'd see what sort of questions where I should have focused that I didn't focus things that you're interested in and we can take a look at that thank you Tracy uh open for questions hey Tracy uh this is Helen Garno thank you so much for the great presentation I found it really informative to sort of see where it came where open wallet foundation came from and and the mission and all that in the overview I think I was at the in Dublin at the first sort of meeting before it I guess was officially launched and yeah it just it seemed like there was a lot of excitement and it yeah it sounds like a really cool program I was just curious one of the one of the questions that was brought up in one of the previous ARIES meetings was about the different foundations that to be a member that that all sort of deal with you know this kind of world of wallets and identity and governance and etc and to be a member for an organization especially a startup organization to be a member of say TOIP and DIF and Hyperledger and now OWF you know it could be that there is a kind of a financial drawback um in in maintaining a presence in all these you know kind of communities I was just wondering if there was ever kind of a thought to combining open wallet with another or like starting it within an existing project or an existing foundation to try to um you know mitigate some of the the kind of issues that that might come up might arise for an organization kind of spread thin um financially for you know joining these organizations or if there was any thought about you know um growing OWF within another foundation or project yeah um so Helen I I completely agree with you it's not even just startups that have issues that even the large companies have talked to a few I even been like well we can we can find the budget for participating in another organization so I think it's any organization right that the that we have to be concerned about when it comes to creating new projects or new foundations um in the Linux foundation so uh I was not involved in any specific conversations around you know whether or not open wallet foundation well maybe I should say maybe it was um I think I did mention it to somebody I like hey why is this not part of the the Hyperledger foundation um but I do know that there were a number of people who did ask this question right around why my new foundation why are we doing this separately and you know I I don't know that anybody ever got a great answer to that question when it was asked other than well there's a lot of interest in wallets and and so it seems to make sense to have this as a separate foundation um I will say that there are still ongoing conversations about basically the the number of digital identity uh or um what are they what are we calling it the trust ecosystem that exists within the Linux foundation um and whether or not there's something that we can do to have um you know a single cost for participating in all of these foundations versus many different costs now when we have this conversation uh we're going to need to to basically have a number of people come to the Linux foundation and say this is a this is a concern for us this is something that we want to change that we want to do differently and then we're going to have to figure out how to do that right um there's obviously going to be a lots of um questions concerns that have to be worked through things like trademarks things like governance you know each of these different foundations have their own governing board their technical X committee right whatever that AOS is right um so so you know how do we bring these organizations together so that now they're governed in potentially a different way um now we are we have been told when I have those conversations with people that this has been done before in the Linux foundation but it does require a lot of work to make that happen and so in order to make that happen obviously it's organizations coming together and saying here's what we think needs to be done and here's how we would do that right like take and make some sort of proposals it's that um you know we can go to each of these different foundations have this conversation see what needs to change um it's collaboration across these different organizations to do this so um I wouldn't say that it's impossible um but it will require a lot of work so um I think you know we're we're behind you with that sort of statement uh at Accenture as well right like we have the same question of how do we get a volume discount because we're involved in so many different things um you know at a minimum but uh obviously nothing's been decided there and it's really going to require us to come together as a group of concerned organizations and bring that to the Linux foundation with probably some sort of proposed plan for how we make that happen so I do feel like we need to mention that neither the hyper ledger or open wall foundation requires payment for anyone to be involved either to use or to contribute to the koto projects um the the membership has to do with uh sort of being involved in the sort of the higher level leadership and governance pieces of those which isn't unimportant but um but but neither organization requires membership to to be involved for example in this meeting um you know there's there's I'm sure there's a number that are that are not involved and that's that's a that they're not paying members um to hyper ledger or to the Linux foundation on behalf of hyper ledger and so that uh that's an important thing to recognize that from from the perspective of developer developer involvement both organizations have the same low barrier to entry which I appreciate yeah thank you for that Sam it was actually one of the first things that crossed my mind right now and asked that question and then I got lost in the answer of the question um but I think it's so important right to recognize that yes uh you can be involved in any way shape or form in the community without having to pay a dime tell me did that answer your question yeah yeah um yeah it does it sounds like there is a potential you know in the you know twinkle in somebody's eye somewhere um that this could get uh a little complicated um you know trying to as you as you described um so looking at the work now to kind of move things around versus later to move things around I don't know um I just again just trying to throw it all out on the table so we can see what we're um you know kind of looking at but no I appreciate your your description your answer yeah yeah I mean obviously as individual organizations we're probably not going to be able to make that change um it's going to have to require a concerted effort by a number of organizations to say this is this is what we want um and to make that go happen um more questions so maybe maybe just to add to this um I was thinking that at some point it might make sense to put together kind of a comparison of where the hyperledger foundation is at with kind of the project services that they offer versus where the open wallet foundation is at so as I mentioned right it's very early days for the open wallet foundation were you know um let's see February March April May so we're three plus months into this project uh or into this foundation there's still a lot that needs to be done um there's things around um you know do we use confluence uh uh to capture this information do we use a you know um github pages do we use the wiki uh so you know there's I think a lot of different sorts of questions around that um if we look at the open wallet foundation as far as you know we do have the github set up we don't necessarily have a rye in the open wallet foundation yet for those of you who know rye and have worked with rye with github and and the way that he works I've been doing basically some of that on the site um but I'm nowhere near as good as rye at doing this um so just you know fyi that is a thing that doesn't exist um you know there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to bring up this organization to the level that the the hyperledger foundation is um you know within the architecture sig we're actually using the wiki here uh in github uh to capture all the meeting minutes and things like that um so you know uh consistency across the way that we're working at this point is not necessarily something that truly exists and so uh you know I think it's worthwhile to just say that we're very early stages and obviously there's things that you can do in the open wallet foundation to help drive the direction at this point versus it having been pretty set in stone in the hyperledger foundation but on the opposite side of that right um hyperledger foundation is obviously a lot more mature in what it offers than the open wallet foundation is so completely um you know just something to be aware of I guess uh and and be uh cognizant if if if you decide that the open wallet foundation is the the right place because of the the wallet aspect of things um that you'll be helping us truly build this to to a place that is um is where we want it to be. Tracy I very much appreciate your presentations any the the next thing on our agenda is some open discussion is there any final comments or questions straight for for Tracy before I move to that segment awesome Tracy thank you for that uh and I I appreciate you being here and presenting and and with that we can go ahead and move to a little bit more of the open discussion piece of things um the um zoom has not yet added my other favorite feature is when you flip back and forth between sharing and not sharing that it remembers where you position things but one can only ask for one feature at a time um any any thoughts generally about this topic as an open floor issue um I have a couple of my of my own I have been trying to figure out what to do about this issue and it's complicated there's enough facets in this conversation to excite a diamond dealer and and and there's it's it's complex and there there are there are not obvious straightforward things um involved yet there seems to be a reasonable amount of pressure to understand what the relationship between areas in the open wallet foundation is and so um and having having something um would be would be better than having all this discussion and simply uh reaching no conclusion um I have been uh thinking about that and one of the realizations that I've had is that there's um there's a whole lot of similarity that that hasn't really been sort of openly discussed that we all know but we haven't really been talking about and and there's a couple things really obvious uh one of them is uh completely compatible goals the there's there's there's very close alignment there the licenses are compatible in the sense that it's not like this is a code license issue or or or that in including the open involvement practices of both organizations are are are very compatible from that perspective indeed the the the actual uh technical or or legal limitations behind uh use of code from one organization and the other organization are just non-existent uh it is um it is very uh it's very compatible from that perspective um now these are things that we know but it's occurred to me that they may not be very well known particularly by the business folks that are sort of evaluating and trying to understand what's going on and so in my effort to try and think of something that we could do um uh partially to add a little bit of resolution and be able to move on with the other uh very important work that we've got um but also to sort of add some clarity to to things um one of the things that I have thought might be possible is the the drafting of a collaboration agreement between the Aries project and the open wallet foundation and that agreement is going to be I think incredibly light but can highlight the things that I talked about that are that do that already exist um in the ability to work back and forth and to use code across organizations and various projects etc and um and and and to highlight those things I think it could also potentially involve sort of the regular sharing of information between groups to sort of keep uh the the information flowing uh that way those of us that are unable to attend all of the meetings can still be sort of apprised of what's going on and understand where our attention might be usefully spent um and and and that we could uh and we we could make that happen that that doesn't practically um mean anything but it provides a couple of things one is is that it clarifies what's going on in the minds of folks that are kind of looking at what's you know at the situation and wondering what's going on um but it also allows for the consideration of involvement to happen at a at a far more granular level part of the difficulty in this process is that is the sheer surface area of of Aries as compared to the um to the youngest of the open wallet foundation presents a fairly daunting task I think I think really um sort of helpfully highlighted by Tracy um in that there it's going places there's things happening but it is not clearly at the stage that Hyperledger has simply for a sheer amount of time and an effort um that has been applied in the Hyperledger Foundation and in one of the opportunities there I think that this would be uh I think a relatively simple thing to to craft um and while I'm sure it will be a little bit less far than some would like and a little bit more far than others would like I think that as a community I I think that um we can probably arrive at something of that nature and and and I think what that does is it adds some a little bit of sort of time local resolution to the issue and and allows for a further conversation to happen at a more granular level as there is specific interest in in specific libraries or you know specific you know areas of of collaboration there I think that that could be useful and and and we can and we can address those at a at a smaller level um rather than sort of at the overall Aries level this certainly does not preclude anything in the future should there be a proposal um for something of a large-scale uh thing but certainly allows for sort of the work to sort of move along and continue um in in the in the work that we have been doing um and so that was one thought that I had um any any thoughts or feedback either on that approach or or other approaches that we could take as a community Alex your hands up yeah with the caveat that I'm coming to this quite fresh and without your guys's depth of experience understanding of the nuance with that said the thought came to me just today yesterday that the location or the housing of Aries and where it lives or where it technically fits under any issue around that might be mitigated to some extent or a greater extent when we better communicate out our value and what we offer and how Aries has evolved from its original definition and its many facets and we communicate that better and that might make the issue of where it needs to be perceived to be under less of a thing because if people can easily find the great work that's being done and they get what it is then just thinking out loud what is just back to the curious about the practical benefits um that that come from from moving or changing or whatever so as not to say no or yes it's just I think that um I just been looking the last week at the some of the key materials like the landing page on the hyper ledger site for Aries is it's not just underselling it it's missing a massive opportunity that we can take advantage of to better promote the amazing things that Aries is and if that's all ramped up and people can find things easily and get a sense of what's going on the great work that's happening will this be the same scale of question as to where it needs to actually be housed uh Alex thanks for that thought I feel a little bit guilty about this um because not that I'm paid for this or elected for it really but serving is is somewhat of a community organizer for the Aries project I feel like our focus has been on on the doing and not on the marketing and and open source is often called the duocracy and that that is true but I think that we have suffered as a community because we have not accurately represented ourselves in the minds of others and and even though we have sometimes been aware of misperceptions have not done a sufficiently good job of of of taking advantage of the opportunities that we have as you describe to make sure that the online assets properly represent what we are and I definitely think that that regardless of any other location change uh that that increased attention to uh to marketing and to uh awareness of of projects is something that I have personally learned is more important than I had previously been giving energy to um and not that I can be blamed for the success or failure of the community but I feel like um my own personal realization about that has has been um sort of quite stark in the last little bit um and I and I definitely uh I'm looking forward to better opportunities for for that kind of activity in the future. Well I think the little I understand is how much you've done some there should be absolutely zero employee or gil on your side as to any um positioning but then now's the opportunity now there's great things to be said I was just shaping up some stuff which I shared with a few of you last couple of days there's a lot more to do I think there's a lot of opportunity to to sing the praises now and I think now is the natural time it's come up more because of things moving really fast it's not necessarily a technical proving ground the same way anymore there's going to be a fast moving of solutions and standards and people having their favorite solution to all the needs that are emerging very quickly because it's not going anywhere it's not going away so um I just think of an acceleration of interest is happening right now and lots of things lots of irons in the fire so I don't think it's a missed thing as much as now it's an obvious chance let's do it let's more it's the it's the best marketing position to have when you've got something which is great which can be marketed more clearly as opposed to trying to squeeze the last few drops of juice out of something that's that's not up to the job so we're in the former which is perfect Alex thanks for making me feel a little better Tracy your hands up yeah Sam I wanted to ask about the collaboration agreement that you suggested um do you have collaborative collaboration agreements with any um sorry zoom is telling me it looks like I'm done talking but I'm not um so do you have any collaboration agreements with anybody who uh any of the other foundations I guess is is the thing that we can base this on well we don't because it's a little weird um normally collaboration agreements are done at an org level and aries is is not an org so much as a project so there are agreements for example between like hyper ledger and diff and and I know those organizations in the open wall foundation but the the issue at hand is not how necessarily how hyper ledger feels about the open wall foundation but how the aries project specifically does so this would be a little different because this has never quite come up the same way before okay even if it's less of an agreement and more I don't even know if like legally we as a community can sign an agreement exactly but but I definitely think some so something published is what I mean to that effect well here's here's one of things that I've realized the maturity of the open wall foundation makes it largely an inappropriate move to to suddenly decide to move everything over it's a herculean amount of effort to one degree but the other side is is that is that it's a little unfair for both aries and the open wall foundation to to make such a rapid move so fast but what I don't want to do is necessarily foul things up by kind of saying no or simply not doing anything and then and then sort of like leaving people unsure of what the goals of aries really are and and and because the goals are so aligned I think that making some noise about uh to Alex's point to making some noise about what we do believe in at this moment I think could actually be a really beneficial thing for both aries and the open wall foundation yeah anything that we can do that you know help with the work the collaboration across the you know open wall foundation aries I think is important for us to do regardless of how we move forward so uh you know happy to help with in any way I can with that very cool so I realized that it's hard to talk about something in the abstract and given a time machine I would have loved to approach this uh this meeting with maybe uh somewhat of a draft of an agreement or some sort of statement that we can make as a community I have that on my list to attempt to draft such a thing I I am without the authority of course to say something on behalf of the entire aries community without a significant sign-off or or approval or at least non-objection from the aries community and so I will commit to having such a thing present at our next meeting hopefully in advance so that we can gather some feedback and and improve it and and then at some point obviously sooner is better than later you know reach some some unified thing on it if someone has a better approach than than this I I'm all ears I'm just trying to figure out the sort of the right thing that we can that we can do to to sort of take the next step or or move forward in a way that that helps us as a community to to to sort of manage the issue and the public understanding of what's going on we are out of time I appreciate everyone being here please jump on the aries channel if I can be helpful or or if and then as soon as I have some sort of a draft I will circulate that also on on the the discord channel for aries and so please keep an eye there in advance of our next meeting Tracy I appreciate you coming and presenting today and and I look forward to maybe finally having an idea about something that we can do and we will see you all elsewhere and all the other calls we are in together and and next week thanks everybody thanks Tracy


Yes, there's no slides, doesn't it? Okay, let's talk training infrastructure as a service. This is a really cool feature of Galaxy that we've built. It's something that I designed, developed when I was working at usegalaxy.eu to support all of our training needs. We ran a lot of different training events and we found that sometimes the cluster would be full, sometimes someone would have launched a large number of jobs and that our students would sit there waiting and they'd have no way to run their jobs and they just have to wait. And the teachers would be very confused and worried because the teachers never had any visibility into the cluster or how things were behaving. So the teachers would say, well let's keep waiting, maybe we take a coffee break, maybe something like this. We don't know, we just don't know. And so we built TIAS to address this problem. TIAS sequesters all of the jobs onto separate infrastructure. So if you have two compute nodes, you can say use one as TIAS and say if the person is doing a training, all of their jobs go to this dedicated compute node or a compute cluster. And we use it for that purpose just to say all of these jobs can run immediately and only the people who are waiting are the other students in that class, which makes life a lot nicer. So this tutorial obviously requires, you've done a lot of things before, it requires that you have a setup galaxy, you have a working galaxy, you have a job configuration file, you know how to write dynamic destinations and perhaps that you've also run jobs in Pulsar. So let's get started with this really quickly. This is how TIAS works. All of your users of Galaxy, they'll go into the same Galaxy server, they see the same interface. But what happens on the back end is that some of those jobs are put onto a different queue or a different cluster or a different node. All of these are options, it's up to you how you configure it specifically at EU. What we did was we said, okay all of the jobs should go primarily onto our dedicated compute nodes. But if those are full, then we'll let them execute on some of the main cluster as well, if they're spaced. So all of the users see the same interface. They have all of their histories, they have all of their data sets, they have all of their normal permissions to access data sets if you're teaching with restricted data. But in the back end, secretly hidden from them, their jobs are sequestered onto this special queue that should be a lot faster. So let's get TIAS set up. First we'll add our requirement and we'll install it. Next we need to set up some group variables. So I'm going to open up my group var server and at the bottom I'm going to paste in all of these TIAS settings. This will set up the TIAS directory into slash OPT, TIAS. It'll set up a user, it'll pull the latest version of the code base and it'll set an admin user and admin password. Additionally we need to make some more changes. We need to grant some permissions on the database. So at the start of the tour, at the start of this week, we set up these PostgreSQL users and objects and here we set up the TIAS user. But now we also need to grant them some privileges. So we set up the Galaxy user in the Galaxy database. Now we're adding this TIAS user and we're going to add these permissions. This is a nice thing you can do with this role. You can say that this user only has permission for a very, very limited set of things that they can do. So for instance here the TIAS role can only access, can only run the select command on the user session and job tables. So they can't change anything in any of those tables but they can read the data from them. And this is nice to prevent them, prevent any errors in the code from becoming bigger problems. So we need to add the role to the end of the playbook. I'll add that down there. And then we need to add the configuration for the service to the nginx role. Templates nginx. I'm just pasting that in before the very last bracket. And this will say, okay everything coming into the location TIAS gets redirected to the service. We serve our static files and then we also redirect things from join training. And that's it. We're ready to run our playbook. We'll let that run in the background. So now that TIAS will be set up there will be a couple of new routes that it'll be available. There is the TIAS new route which lets you register a new training with the server. There's the TIAS administration page. There's a stats page so you can see like the overall statistics of the server. There's also calendar page. I'm going to show you the EU calendar pages and stats pages quickly. So here's what the EU TIAS looks like. You can see that most of our trainings are in Europe but we also support some in US and EU. That one's bright blue because it's actually part of France. We've provided VMs for a massive number of days, massive number of compute hours and provided. We've taught so many students and there are six events today. You can see where all the events are from. And over on the calendar page you can see how many events are running on any given day. This can give you a snap in if you're running a lot of these events. An idea of when are good times to make changes to your server or not. So I'm going to pause for a second to wait for that to load. Okay and looks like that it's finished. You can see the TIAS got installed. All sorts of different configurations got installed for it. If we run systemctl status TIAS we should be able to see that it's running and working. Let's have a look at the nginx configuration. Okay let's see how that looks. Looks like Galaxy is running and then if we access the new TIAS route we should see an information page about what TIAS is and how it works along with an apply now button if you want to register a new training instance. Some of these are templated variables so we've just written default or admin at local host. You can customize this to your needs. There are a lot of different variables that can be set. So I'm going to register a quick training. My name's Helena. That is my email address. I'm going to do a testing training or let's call it GAT since we're at the admin training. And here we can write something about our training that would be helpful to the administrators who are going to judge this training and say if they're going to support it or not. Some admin training will start in January and end next year. Normally you'd specify shorter dates of course or whoever's registering for it it will. And I'm in the Netherlands currently. So one of the things that TIAS does is it just handles where the jobs should be dispatched and if the training is enabled or not. If you are an administrator though one of the things you need to know sometimes is how many resources do you expect this training to need. And you need to compare this with how many resources can you expect this training to require or how many that you can offer. So you can have some questions here for your training or your trainers who are going to be submitting these forms saying oh I'm going to be using this URL for my training material. And then you as an admin will know okay if you're using this training material these are the tools these are this is how much memory I allocate to that tool and you can start to think about how many resources you might want to offer them. I had a very important question how many people will give a training identifier like get and we have some questions about advertising which is a common requirement. Again all of this is just defaulting to use galax.eu but you can change this as you like and when you then you click submit and it'll tell you congrats you've registered training. So let's go approve that training now. So I'll go to the admin interface of TIAS. The password was the username and password we set in the group variables you can see in the end of the group for our Galaxy server we said admin and change me maybe you changed it. It would be a good idea and then you should be able to log in with that. Okay that didn't work I'm going to debug this quickly. Okay I just typed the password in correctly. Oh look it works okay so this is the default Django administration TIAS is built on the Django Python web framework we just did that to make life easy for us. You'll find all of your trainings under trainings here here you can see the identifier of the training the the keyword that'll be used to reference it their email address of the submitter if you need to contact them with questions you can see things like how many days since the application was received how many days until the event so if you have events in the future you can approve them in advance and the state has been processed yet has it been injected or approved if you click on the GAT on the training identifier there they'll be taken to this page where you can see information about the training and if you need to change anything for your records and then at the bottom you can decide if you want to approve or reject it so at the EU we get a large number of training requests and then we get to approve or reject them and email the administrators accordingly so I'm going to mark this as approved then I'm going to go back to Galaxy to actually join the training so part of TS is this URL slash join minus training and then an identifier in our case the training identifier was GAT so I'm going to paste that in and it gives me a message congratulations you're registered in GAT so what's happened here is that my user has been put in a group named training minus GAT in the Galaxy database itself and then we'll be able to make decisions on where jobs should run based on that training group membership additionally we get this really nice status dashboard which is not working yet so let's go see it in the admin interface first and under groups we'll now see training GAT and this has one user my admin user the TS join site so we just went to join training GAT and you notice we didn't have to log in or anything what happens with TS is it knows who you are because it's running underneath Galaxy's path so it has access to the Galaxy session cookie and it's taken that session cookie and decoded it and figured out my username and then registered my username in the database with that with that training next we will set up my jobs to run somewhere special so you can see how that let's get that job configuration sorted out so we're going to create a new dynamic job rule i'm calling mine hogwarts.py you're welcome to call it whatever you want mostly this naming convention is just taken from edusegalaxy.eu i called it the sorting hat that decides where which house or which compute cluster the different training jobs should go to i thought it was very clever at the time so we'll see what happens here is that in the sorting hat we get the app as well as the user information and if there's no user or the user is anonymous we'll just send them to the default destination of slurm however if they're not anonymous if there is a user we'll collect all of their roles and if any of the roles start with the training prefix so we know it's one of the training events then we're going to send them to the slurm2c destination or pulsar or something else and this just lets this starts to give you an idea of how you can use this so you can use this dynamic rule and say if they're one of the training jobs send them to a different cluster you can get more fancy of course and say if they're one of this specific training event send them to this specific cluster something like that with easegalaxy.eu we use htkondor for our cluster and so we can label individual machines for individual purposes we label some of them as okay training gat they'd be labeled and then we send specific condor information in the job configuration and there we say okay this needs this extra requirement it's required that it should run on the training job or the training cluster things like this are possible but they're also very cluster specific so you'll have to make a decision per how your cluster looks and how you want it to behave so i'm going to open up the galaxy servers and we need to add our new dynamic rule again make sure these minuses match up they may or may not have the training materials because they get updated to different times and just make sure that they're all consistent otherwise you'll have issues i am going to double check my job configuration to make sure that the slurm and slurm2c destinations are still there and functional they look good i didn't change that in a different training and now in the job configuration we need to add our new destination so this would be a destination i'll just put it down at the end with the other dynamic destinations and indent it properly okay and this is just another of the python destinations so like the admin only destination we wrote before now we have this sorting hat destination and then i'm going to make that the default so all of our jobs will go through the sorting hat way back up here at the top the default destination should now be sorting hat and so we've defined one python function that will decide where all of our jobs go and all of our tools should go through there and say okay does this need this cluster or that cluster when you are doing this in production though one common thing is that the upload jobs are a little bit special right they should stay on a local cluster they shouldn't be sent somewhere remote that can be an issue sometimes and say pulsar so let's run our playbook it's a little playbook galaxy.yaml and this is set up galaxy to start processing these jobs in a different way and then we can get started running some jobs plan some uploads and whenever this is finished running then we will kick off the jobs and we can see where they get sent the upload jobs should be sent to our default slurm cluster but with one core while other jobs should be sent to another location because i'm a special user and i'm in the group okay you'll notice this big error message this is a consequence of how jango works in jango there is an easy way to create a new user you run a script to change the password and create them but if you run it again it'll fail because the user's already created so we have a task that we've defined in an ansible to create this user and it'll try and create the super user every time but because the email address or the username is not unique it'll fail so we allow this task to fail and you notice that with the ignoring statement the ansible said okay something went wrong here clearly but i'm going to let this fail so i've added some jobs do you have the digest tool yeah i'm going to run the digest tool on some of our data sets select all the hashes i like to use this tool for testing it's just an easy way to say okay did it are things working i'm looking at the information for one of my uploads one core was allocated so it was definitely sent to the one node slurm cluster one core slurm cluster and then we see some other jobs that are waiting to run okay and in the background the singularity container is being unpacked to run these jobs that's the delay here once that's complete these jobs should get sent off to the slurm two core cluster and we can already go ahead and look at it and you'll see the native specification down here at the very bottom saying two cores per task oh no error occurred if you've never seen an error before you must provide an input file name okay something is going wrong there on some of them uh the data sets may be missing or something anyway for some of them it worked that's the important thing and now i'm going to show you the tos dashboard so we've kind of skipped over this at the time let's come back to it now this is the tos dashboard this is something that's available to everyone so the teachers and the students in the training if they like can see this dashboard and get information about how their students are doing for something like when you're in a pandemic this is incredibly important incredibly useful for remote teaching we developed this actually as a result of a remote teaching project where we were teaching students in classrooms across europe and we said well we don't know how the students are doing we will tell them run a step we'll tell them run the upload job or something and then we have no visibility into how they're doing as teachers so we developed chaos to work around that this will give your teachers visibility into how students are behaving they'll get this nice dashboard with an overview of how many students are registered so they can tell if not all the students are registered in the tos yet they can say oh you need to register so your jobs run in time other you're you don't have to but if you don't your jobs are going to be slower they can see this overview by tool they can see okay for that digest command that i just told everyone to run two are in okay but three are in error state so maybe i need to like discuss this tool more or help students figure out what went wrong you discussed that with the class or for the loads jobs that they're all in the okay state they get a really quick state overview of how many are in each state and then they get this job queue view this tells the teacher a hashed user identifier that changes regularly but it's consistent within this interface so this teacher can say oh these students got this result or i can see if i have 10 students i can see oh that 10 times the fast queue tool has been run and maybe one of them failed or one student is failing consistently something like this they can see how long ago that job was created if it was in an error state or if it's okay and the job runner id which if they need help debugging they can always pass this to one of the cluster administrators or the galaxy administrator to figure out what went wrong additionally we also show a workflow invocation queue so if you make a workflow i'm going to make a really quick workflow with just this digest tool again because i'm such a fan i'm going to give it an input data set and now maybe it'll run digest twice especially for bigger workflows that have a lot more steps like this it can be a bit harder to see what's going on in the interface with the workflow invocation view for the tutorials that use workflows you can really easily see oh this many students have run the workflow they're supposed to run now okay let's click run i'm going to go back to the status page and you'll see okay two jobs have been created now one's running one's okay you can see in this interface the new jobs being created running and being marked as okay and down here at this bottom you can see the workflow invocation queue so for some of the tutorials that are on the galaxy training network we tell the students hey upload this workflow file and then you can do part of this training in a faster manner than having to configure all of these tools over and over again and with that you've set up dios so this has the tos service at slash tos which has information there's the new page for registering new trainings for your teachers there's the admin page reviewing the trainings going through reviewing approving canceling etc and then there is the join training page which lets the students join the training in the status page which lets teachers see how students are doing and because this page is public of course that's why the user identifier is hashed and we can go back to the join page just see yeah this is how tos works it's one of the best things i did while i was at use galaxy ready this makes training completely changed for teaching especially especially in a pandemic or in remote teaching times when you need to see what your students are doing and be sure relatively sure that their jobs will run on time so as always please give us feedback let us know what you thought of this content if there's anything we need to change etc thank you so much and enjoy your weekend


Remember a Hallmark card when you carry enough to send the very best. The Hallmark greeting cards bring you Lionel Barrymore in Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin on the Hallmark Playhouse. Hallmark brings you Hollywood's greatest stars in outstanding stories chosen by one of the world's best-known authors. A distinguished novelist, Mr. James Hilton. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is James Hilton. Tonight on our Hallmark Playhouse, we tell you the story of Benjamin Franklin, dramatized from a book which won the Pulitzer Prize, Carl Van Doren's Fine Biography. Perhaps there's no American in history whose interests were so varied and whose character was so intricate as Benjamin Franklin's. Certainly he was the first American who, by his own personal contacts, made Europe aware that here was a great nation destined to be greater. Scientist, diplomat, philosopher, patriot, and world citizen, Franklin's life is a kaleidoscope of changing scenes and vivid happenings. To take the exacting role of such a fascinating, even fabulous personality, we have none other than Lionel Barrymore. And I think you'll agree that the choice is most fortunate. And now a word about Hallmark cards from Frank Goss before we begin the first act of Benjamin Franklin. When you're looking for a way to say something to someone you care for, look for a Hallmark card and you will find the right words. Because Hallmark cards are designed to say what you want to say, the way you want to say it. And in the good taste you demand of anything that bears your personal signature. That's why Hallmark on the back of a greeting card has come to mean you cared enough to send the very best. Our star Lionel Barrymore is appearing tonight by arrangement with Metro Golden Mayor, producers of the Technicolor musical The Great Caruso starring Mario Lanza and Anne Blythe. And now Hallmark Playhouse presenting Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin starring Lionel Barrymore. He was resting quietly at the moment. A short time passed he had been in great pain, but that had dimmed and was gone.  Around his bed his daughter and his grandsons watched him anxiously. He smiled once and they smiled back reassuringly, but he didn't see them. He was smiling at memories that crowded his room. I've lived upon this earth 84 years and three months. It's a long time. For 84 years I've been living, thinking and working. Now I'm worn out with this. Clock can't be rewound against running down. Soon it'll be silent all together. Strange at these oldest moments of my life I should be remembering some of the youngest moments. Yesterday when I was a boy I walked down the streets of Philadelphia for the first time munching on one loaf of bread and carrying two others under my arms, dreaming of the future and the mysteries of the universe. Yesterday I was a young man in love and loved and Deborah was beside me. Deborah and I and the world were young together. I'm Deborah. My father said you're going to board with us. What's your name? I told her that my name was Ben Franklin and that I was an apprentice and that I was going to work in Andrew Bradford's printing shop. And as the days and the months went by I told her of my hopes and sometimes of my dreams. I loved her then with the love of a boy. And when her mother said that we were too young to think of marriage I parted from her with the sadness of a boy. I went to England, worked at the printing trade there and when I returned to Philadelphia I was a man grown and I loved her as a man. I've missed you Ben. Over and over I've asked myself will he return? I was so afraid you never would. I see myself now sitting at her feet telling her of my plans. I'd open the printing shop of my own and I'd write pamphlets and publish them and some day I'd publish my own newspaper, my own almanac. I'd explore literature and science and she'd be beside me. All these things pass through my mind as I waited for her answer. I shall be honored to be your wife Ben. I took her to wife September the 1st 1730 and found joy and satisfaction and great happiness. 84 years and three months lived long time. But yesterday I was young. Deborah what is that husband of yours up to? What do you mean? Why that almanac of his is the talk of Philadelphia. Oh you mean poor Richard. I'm afraid I've married a man who's full of nonsense. And great sense Deborah listen to what he says within these pages. Fish and visitors smell in three days. He does not possess wealth, it possesses him. The rotten apple spoils his companions. The absence are never without fault or the present without excuse. He that takes a wife takes care. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. In the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith but by the want of it. God helps them that help themselves. Yesterday I was young, savoring life, tasting it, finding it both palatable and unpalatable. Living moments that would remain among the most cherished of my memories. You're very quiet Ben. You've been staring at that baby for almost an hour. What on earth are you thinking about? I don't know what I answered. I do know that no words could express my thoughts at that moment. I held my son within the circle of my arm, Master Francis Franklin. I teach him, guide him, love him. He take my name on into the years beyond me and see things I'd never see. Be a part of the future we were working for. Have children of his own. Here was the living proof of his mother's and my love. Given breath made articulate. My son was a year old, two years old, three years old, four. Filling the house with his bright noisy laughter and I grew four years with him. Writing, working, studying, finding something to occupy me everywhere I turned. Life was rich, full, exciting, gratifying. There was no hint of tears then. And I had no time to pause and think that tears must always come. When sorrow entered our lives, it entered with swift, blinding pain. The baby is ill. I sat by my small son's bed, agony and terror moving inside me. He was four. He walked in my image and likeness. He was my son. Papa, Papa. His hands burned into mine. But my own were chill as I gripped him. Papa, it's dark. It's so dark, Papa. I tried to light the darkness for him while we waited for the doctor. I had him bring more candles. More candles, more candles. It's getting dark, Papa. It's getting dark. I lived for the coming of the doctor and died when he turned from the bed. Smallpox, Mr. Finley. Smallpox. We'll do what we can, of course. My son died on November the 21st, 1736. And grief entered my house and my heart and left a particular loneliness that would never quite be appeased. Left a particular heartache that would never, never quite leave me. Then it's almost morning. You must get some rest. You've sat at that window the whole night. Then... I tried to answer, but the words caught in my throat. I'd been writing. I handed it while I'd written. A false report has been circulated that my child died from being inoculated for smallpox. Inasmuch as some people are by that report deterred from having that operation performed on their children, I do hereby sincerely declare that he... that he was not inoculated. Oh, man. There was young, studying life, arguing about it, philosophizing, exploring it. In 1746, at Boston, I met a doctor, Spence, who showed me some electrical experiments. I bought his apparatus and gave up the entire winter to the study of electricity. Ben, dinner is almost ready. You could wait for a while, Deborah. I think we're going to have a storm. Well, my dear, I guess it will have to. But why are you waiting for a thunderstorm? My dear, I want to fly a kite. Fly a kite? Yes. Dan, I don't know. Stop looking at me like that. I may not be as crazy as I sound. I've made a kite of a large silk handkerchief and two cross sticks. I have some wires connected to the end of it. I'm going to see if I can't pull lightning out of the clouds with it. I'll go to that science or witchcraft, Benjamin. My dear, I don't care what it's called if I can just do it. Excitement of that memory. Of standing in the rain, watching the kite mount the sky, of seeing the electric fire drawn to the wire on the end of it, the string gripped in your hands, and the mysteries of the infinite sparking and cracking at the other end of it. The incredible, breath-stopping excitement of standing alone on the brink of discovery. Well, Ben, now that you've proven your theory about electricity, what do you intend to do with it? Is it of any practical use? Is it of any practical use? Gabbra, this will be the means of protecting houses and ships from being struck by lightning. Well, how can it be? I am going to publish the report in the Almanac. If people will take an iron rod and drive one end three or four feet into the moist ground and leave the other end six or eight feet above the highest part of the building and secure it to their houses and in the manner I tell them, they'll never be struck by lightning.  Of course I am. Why else would you have married me? Well, I married you because... Because I was smart, brilliant, well-read, literate. Not on your life. Well, then it must have been because I was bright, dashing and witty and charming. Yes, my dear. Because you were bright and witty and charming. And completely irresistible. And besides, who would have the courage to decline an offer of marriage from Benjamin Franklin, the most distinguished man of his day? Flattery will get you nowhere, madam. No, not one more farthing. I'm very proud of you. It seems to me that everyone in the country turns to you for advice. Everyone, madam. Advice is the easiest thing in the world to give. Good advice is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to get. And yours is always good. Well, by all means only.  I love you very much. My dear, I love you forever. Yesterday I was a young man in love and loved. Deborah was beside me. Deborah and I and the world were young together. The second act of Benjamin Franklin's starring Lionel Barrymore. Perhaps no American has demonstrated the power of words as well as Benjamin Franklin. In his many letters and public writings we can almost trace his success to an ability to express ideas and feelings to others. Yes, Benjamin Franklin certainly knew and respected words and their power over the minds and hearts of people. The makers of hallmark cards know and respect this power also. Though a greeting card is not intended to present history-making ideas, the words on it are certainly important because they express the feelings of one person to another. And it's this quality of making the person-to-person feeling really felt through the use of words that distinguishes hallmark cards. That's why you can always find a hallmark card to say what you want to say, just the way you want to say it to your friends and loved ones. And it explains why, through the years, more and more people have come to prefer hallmark cards. They have found that you can always look to a card with hallmark on the back for a warm, friendly person-to-person greeting. On those occasions, when you want your friends to know, you cared enough to send the very best. Now back to James Hilton and the second act of Benjamin Franklin starring Lionel Barrymore. The old man lay staring out the window. The curtains moved softly in the breeches. He watched them and thought of other nights. It seems impossible that I've lived 84 years, that the days and weeks and months of those years have been lived and are gone. Here, here, then yet I'm tired. When sleep comes, I'll welcome it. It'll be good to sleep, knowing that when I wake, Deborah will awaken me. Deborah, I think I've memorized every expression of her face. I see her now as she looked the day I told her I must go to England. Why must it be you? Well, someone must present our case to Parliament. Taxation without representation is unbearable. You know that, Deborah. Is there no one else to go? You and I are growing old then. We have little enough time left to... Well, come with me. How can I? We have a new house half built. There's a family to take care of. You're affairs to watch over too. I'm needed here. Oh, I'm needed there. Then you must go. And I will pray to God that he'll watch over you and keep you and bring you back to me. Leaving the wife that I cherished, the country that I loved, I'll try to explain to Parliament the attitudes and thoughts of my countrymen. Will you tell the Parliament for the record your name and place of abode? Franklin, Philadelphia. Do the Americans pay any considerable taxes among themselves? Oh, certainly many. And very heavy taxes. Are you not concerned in the management of the post office in America? Yes, I'm Deputy Postmaster General of North America. Are not the colonies, from their circumstances, very able to pay the stamp duty? In my opinion, there is not gold and silver enough in the colonies to pay the stamp duty for one year. Do you not think the people of America would submit to pay the stamp duty if it was moderated? No, never. Unless compelled by force of arms. Have you not heard of the resolutions of this house and of the House of Lords asserting the right of Parliament relating to America, including a power to tax the people there? Yes, I've heard of such resolution. Then what will be the opinion of the Americans on those resolutions? They will think them unconstitutional and unjust. The right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament as we are not represented there. They'll oppose it to the last. Tell me, Mr. Franklin, what used to be the pride of the Americans? To indulge in the fashions and manufacturers of Great Britain. What is now their pride? To wear their old clothes over again till they can make new ones? Well, you've won the day, Mr. Franklin. The stamp act has been repealed. Mr. Franklin, do you hear what I'm saying? Yes, I hear you. Is something wrong? I've just received word from home. My wife is dead. I've been largely in the service of my country. I'd won the day, but not the battle. Other taxes were levied. War came with all its hardships and heartbreak. But when it passed, we were a free people and liberty was ours. Then our problem became what should we do with it? How should we handle it? How could we ensure it for those who come after us? Mr. Franklin, it is a great pleasure to be a guest in your house again. General Washington, my house is always honored by your presence. I'm happy to know that you are to attend the Constitutional Convention, sir. You are in the opinion of all of your countrymen, the greatest man of your age. Oh, you're far too generous, sir. But I realize the affection that prompts your words, General, and I thank you. You will have a great deal to contribute to the convention. No, no, no, no, no. The great contributions will be made by younger men than I. I'm 82 now, General. I can dream of the future, but I can really speak only of the past. My presence at the convention will be only a brief triumph over my years. I think you are the wisest of us all, and you have all the garnered wisdom of the years behind you on which to draw. Oh, I'm a spectator now, General. This is my leave taking from a life of action. Younger men will have to carry out the plans that are made, and I have great faith in those young men. They know the value of liberty. They fought with a sword to obtain it, and they'll fight now with words to keep it safe forever. The fires of freedom that were kindled at Valley Forge will never be allowed to go out. They'll be fan brighter and brighter with the passing years until this country will stand proud and indomitable, a citadel of free men, a hope for enslaved men everywhere. In three months lived, and now the sands are running out. Clocks running down, the last friends have been greeted. Almost the last word said, surely it's time now to remember the words that I wrote yesterday when I was very young. To be put by for these moments, when I was very, very old indeed. Thank heavens for whatever wit and knowledge possessed me at 22 to write my epitaph, the words with which I'd say farewell at 84. The body of B. Franklin printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding lies here. Food for worms. But the work shall not be lost, for it will appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the author. James Hilton will return in a moment. Soon you'll be wanting to send your congratulations and best wishes to the young graduates you know. For graduation day is one of those memorable occasions made more memorable by the thoughtfulness of friends and loved ones. It's one of those occasions when the Hallmark card is particularly appropriate, a card that will express your thoughts and your thoughtfulness perfectly, saying just what you want to say the way you want to say it. So just as you look for Hallmark cards on those other occasions when congratulations are in order, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, remember to look for Hallmark graduation cards. You'll find the words of congratulations seem warmer, more personal, more what you'd like to say. And remember, in addition to the words inside the card, that familiar Hallmark on the back is recognized everywhere as meaning you cared enough to send the very best. Here again is James Hilton. Lionel Barrymore, it's always a great occasion when you visit the Hallmark Playhouse. For besides giving us magnificent entertainment, you're one of our favorite people. It's good to see you again. Well, thank you, Jimmy. Thank you. You mean I wasn't invited to pay Benjamin Frankenstein, but because I happened to have been born in Philadelphia. You were? Yeah. I didn't know that. Who? Well, you were invited because you have the sharp wit and good humor we associate with the name Benjamin Franklin. In addition to your acting ability, of course. Now, there's a diplomatic statement if I ever heard one. But speaking of my birthplace reminds me that I had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. And that's something I don't speak of very often. And I must say it was a pleasure to receive so many beautiful birthday cards. You will be interested to know that you may notice that most of them are Hallmark cards. Well, that's good to hear, Larry. And I'm sure I speak for the makers of Hallmark cards and for all of us when I say we hope you'll be enjoying Hallmark cards for many, many more birthdays. Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you. What are you having on the Hallmark Playhouse next week? Next week, our story will be George H. Chamberlain's Scudder Who, Scudder Hey. The story of a boy who, by learning love and patience with animals, grows up to apply the same lessons in his context with the world. And to play the part of the boy we're happy indeed to welcome Don McAllister. Our Hallmark Playhouse is every Thursday. Our director-producer is Bill Gay. And our music tonight, taking from the music of the period was conducted by Bernard Herman. And our script was adapted by Gene Holloway. Until next Thursday then, this is James Shulton saying, Good night. Collector to give you expert and friendly service. Remember a Hallmark card when you carry it out to send the very best. The role of Deborah tonight was played by Lorraine Tuttle. Barbara Jean Wong was the child. Ted Osborne, Washington. And then write the Englishman. This is Frank Goss saying, Good night to you all until next week at this same time. When Hallmark Playhouse returns to present Lon McAllister in George H. Chamberlain's Scudder Who, Scudder Hey. And a week after that, the story of Johnny Appleseed adapted from Bright Newell Hillis' The Quest of John Chapman starring Lou Ares on the Hallmark Playhouse. This is KMBC, Kansas City, Missouri.