Let's go ahead and get started. Anything to the agenda? Anything, any modifications? I'm just peeking right now. Good on the new business stuff. That looks good, Sandro. Thanks for calling that out. How do we want to phrase, Jamie, the conversation about moving the location of docs.okd.io, the actual content to an alternative location? Is that in the issues repo now as an individual issue? Well, there's an issue open for you to check with legal and whomever else at Red Hat to make sure we're not violating anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if you could put that in the issues section and when Michael comes because there's a little bit more to it than that. I just want to make sure it doesn't impact. Our access to the documentation teams resources for building that that it doesn't break their build chain or whatever. To. Hello. Hey, Michael. Let's let's drive on. Alright, let's bicycle on. So, let's see. Let me put in. I'll put it in current projects. The. Put repo transition. And the issue there. Alright, welcome to the documentation. Okay D documentation subgroup meeting for November 30 of 2021. Please make sure you put your name in the attendance section so we know who was here and in case anyone that needs to get information wasn't here. We know to get it to them in terms of the agenda. There's no updates on in terms of current projects on the agenda. There's no update to the charter update and placements sort of been plucking away at it and. Haven't really had time to complete that yet. Name and scope of the install and read me we talked a little bit about that in the main group meeting. And I think that some of that sort of hinges on what comes out of the repo transition. And creating a build doc hasn't happened yet. Vadim has been out for the main meetings and otherwise predisposed the past couple weeks. So once he frees up some time. Then we can run by run some of the ideas that we have by him and then move forward. Code of conduct Michael any updates on changing any references in the code of conduct to make it appropriate for O. K. D. Oh, no. Okay. And survey, I don't know if is treaty. I don't see treaty. And I would like to. I'd like to also have Jamie and I have access to the username password for the Twitter so that we can announce the releases. So, because treaty is on. I think Bangalore time or someplace there. So there's and I started the process, but I didn't get it all the way through with her to share that. My ask of treaty, if you're watching this afterwards is to share if we can figure out a way to share the username password for the O. K. D repo. With both Jamie and myself, then like when Vadim pushes out the 4.9 release, I'd like that to go out on Twitter. The Twitter handle there and I realized that I didn't have it. All right. But there was discussion on the survey at the main meeting folks are pretty much happy with it sounds like the question list is pretty much solidified at this point. So she's going to go back and rework all of that stuff and get back to us when it is solidified repo transition go ahead Diane take it away if you have any news. All right. Well, the legal has been eating Turkey last week too. So I didn't get anything out of legal yet, but I asked was going to ask Michael. Burke, because one of the conversations we had at the last working group meeting was about transitioning the location of the content for docs. Okay. Not changing the URL or anything like that. But if we move where that content is into a new repo, whether it's OpenShift.cs slash. If that has an impact on the build process for documentation, I don't want to mess up our relationship to the docs team because we like having our docs auto generated off of the upstream content. But I wanted to make sure that our request to move the repo for OKD content, not OKD code, but the content, whether it's guides or website or documentation would impact how you build the docs for us. Inexpertly entering here, I would say yes. Yeah. Michael, how does that process work right now? So is it just going to ask that? Yeah. Yeah. So, so the, is it the files are generated and then committed to the docs repo from from another location or they're written directly to the docs repo. How does that work? I'm not sure what you're asking. So when the, when you generate the OKD docs off of the OpenShift docs. Okay. Is that a one right process like you're doing it directly into the repo where it ends up? Or are there more? No. More steps. There are more pieces involved. Okay. Okay. So the build process in and within GitHub, I believe. And when they get transformed, is that we apply a series of diffs or there's just word substitutions or? I mean, it's diffs. Okay. So can I just ask, are we actually planning on transitioning the docs? Because at the minute that's actually managed by a different process and it's served from a different repository. It's served from a different mechanism that the OKD.io. We just have a link to the docs. It has its own identity outside of OKD.io. It's a separate web serving process. It's a separate documentation creation process. I expected that that just was going to stay where it is because it's so tied with the OCP process. That's what I'm getting to the bottom of here because there was an ask to move the docs.okd.io content into the repo that we end up in. Where we move it to and I want, and that set off a few alarms in the back of my head about process and builds and things like that. So that's why I asked Michael to come. This could be ignorance of my part when you talk about the moving the content. Is that the end product? The HTML pages or the source. Well, that's an interesting question. So those. Let me ask you this. The new stuff that's the new there's the new document format right that just came out. That you're using. Is that rendered to HTML or is it in like is it rendered to a middle product and then rendered to HTML. Or is it is it something that's rendered to HTML. In in 1 step. I guess is this is sort of asking the same question, but I feel like. I don't know that Diane, I don't know that anyone, I think we can sort of cut this off with the chase because I don't know that anyone really wants to. It was the docs. Okay, well, that's what I thought I heard on the meeting last time. So I wanted to clarify that. I don't I don't think any I think because they are 2 separate systems and I think it would be. There was a part 2 to the request that I heard at the last meeting and forgive me if I paraphrase this wrong correct me if I do. Another part of the ask was, can we add into the docs.okd.io links back to the guides that are in our there. So you have your regular menu system for docs.okd.io, which is goes to all the sections in the actual docs.okd.io and then at the maybe in that menu system add a link back to some of the guides that we're building in the make doc stuff that Brian's built out. Yeah, I got the same impression. I think it was Christian when he was talking. He was sort of saying that we should put the guide within the docs. Yeah, that was Christian was getting out. So in other words, Michael, it would be the the stuff that we create. Would it be possible to create as you called them before books. I don't know what they're called in the new language of the new system, but create links to our external stuff within the generated docs. Well, I know we could create a new book that contains all those links and put that book in the in the TOC on the left side. I don't think we can. I'm not sure if we can link directly from the TOC and left side to the other. Right. Okay. Yeah, that might be sufficient. Yeah, so I wanted to I was trying to do this in two parts is like one clear the air that we can't really move the docs. We have to keep that doc structure there. But the other one was to embed somehow link back out to the okay. D dot IO sites guides from the docs dot okay D dot IO. And if you can create a sample book in that where we put those things. How do we maintain that book? Is that something we're going to have to ask of you every time we want to change a link or anything like that? Is there a way. No, you can just generate a PR. Okay. All right, cool. Because I think that's that's what I was trying to tease out here in this conversation was the better way to go than try and ask them to break their build process or whatever. So, so what would be involved in in in creating a book of external links. So, we just give you a list of external links. Okay. Okay, we'll file a PR. Okay. Yeah, PR an issue or something. Okay. And that's a PR against the open shift slash open shift docs repo. Yeah, make sure you tag it, or at least in the title put okay D specific or something. I like that Michael actually wrote up a little document about how to do that. But I think we have linked. Do we have that linked now, Brian in the website. How you raise a an issue or a PR against the docs. The official box. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah, in the actual site. Okay, the IO. I actually call okay D. IO community documentation and the docs product documentation. So, but that's a terminology that's that's used within that site. Let's let's use that because I feel like some of the time is spent sort of trying to decipher what we're talking about. So product documentation, community documentation. Let's move that using forward to make things as as clear as possible as to which documentation we're talking. Okay. So, task for us is for the for this group, maybe at our next meeting, which won't be until next year to come up with a list of links. We will file a PR or an issue with the docs repo those and then Michael can then get those incorporated into the OKD documentation as a book is that actually the correct terminology still with the I think so. Okay. Let us know if you leave that's what we call it. Okay. Cool. All right. So now moving on to the survey repo transition. Are there any issues in the repo or Well, it looks like I kind of broke this up, but I don't see any issues with the docs that came in. Oh, actually, there is low contrast for text and background. Sandra, do you want to talk about that a little bit about what you put in? Yeah, I'm not sure if it's just my monitor, but the contrast between the text and the background, it's really, really narrow. I run a tool for testing for accessibility, the website that in return and the errors related to low contrast in several places of the website itself. So I would just suggest to increase a bit the contrast between the text and the background to make it easier for impaired people with Yeah, I think that's great.  Yeah, I tried it with the dark mode and with the light mode and they have low contrast in different places. I see. Okay. Depends on where you're looking at. Brian, is this something that you'd have time to look at the next couple months you think. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's easy to change colors. I'm not a web designer. So I put the caveat there that I'm happy that if anybody wants to come up with code themes font sizes. I can add them in very easily but I'm somebody with more of a UX and experience should probably do that. Brandon Johnson who's the contractor I have on on demand to take a look at it and give a few maybe examples in the draft over the holidays and then we could come back and look at it. It's a good thing. People with disabilities or visual impairments often say the same thing so it would not be a bad thing to do. There might even be a resource inside of red hat that Michael I don't know if you know of anybody yet but I could ask who does that sort of thing to make sure our sites are readable. Yeah, that would be very useful. Yes. I'm happy to implement anything that they can suggest. And but I just don't have the tools and the skills to do that side of the UX design. Yeah, well and I meant more along the lines of so if you find someone or we find someone you can just direct them what to do sort of. Yeah. So what I'd like to do ideally is Brian, have you sort of take point on website stuff, not necessarily doing the work, but in terms of getting people to the place where they can do the work, like and helping us find volunteers and stuff like that. So consider yourself a web manager. Does that sound. Yep, that's fine. And the, I think the other thing that we've, we put on to this meeting was the security. And I'm writing up something to press to post. I haven't finished it yet. I obviously turkey day, or day of giving thanks as it is more for me. I took a big chunk out of my time, but I plan on having that done before the end of the year, but we will have something up to address the security stuff. There's, I've got a template and then hopefully we can find someone that can like fill in the template and our ideas to put out a call for volunteers to help be our like security person to check off the box is basically from the template. Okay, and then the last one we, we deferred the decision on inclusive language, because Diane wasn't here last time just to run that by you. So everything that we've, we've done everything we can for inclusive language, but there are still quite a few uses of the word master. We really relate to the product because we control the control plane nodes, the master nodes. So there's usage like that that still flag up in the, in the tool, but we can't really do anything unless OCP decides to rename the control plane nodes to something other than master nodes. So we think we've done everything that we can from our documentation point of view, but it was just that there are still things reported in the tool, and but we can't really do anything about it. The other area was external gate repose that we linked to still have the default branch called master branch but again, they're out of our control, or their other repose like and Vadim's and install repo. I think the okay D repo the open ship slash okay D repo is still master and put from a documentation point of view where we're sort of clean in terms of things that we control. So are we happy with that or do you want to take the other action was the decision we put on whenever happy with that. But I think that is you've pointed out it is on the product side of the house. And I know there is an initiative to change that I don't know Michael if you're aware of that at all. But I think it takes a little bit of time and probably more time than we'd like. So I will see if I can get an answer from the engineering team on when that what that timeline is and bring it back to the group. Yeah. Yeah, do we have a dedicated list like of these things that we could like just point someone from red hat to the list and say, Hey, just so you know, there's these things. Yeah, so if you go into if you actually go into that. So two or three, if you go into that issue. And you'll see that the scan returns 66 cases. And I've highlighted all the places where. And, yeah. So I mean, I think we could put something in our main meeting, because I mean if you look through if those repose are okay D repose or community repose. And so. They are probably things that we can influence or 2 of them are. And obviously we've got the library. We've got the OCP. And then we've got our installer. So. So, why don't we do this? Why don't we just file issues on them? Well. Yeah, is that our problem? Well, it's no, no, no, but on the respective repose though, if you file. What I'm saying is that like, okay, so we're we're cleaning up all the okay D stuff. Correct. Yep. And I think that's done. And it really is a never ending thing like the wild fly project. Has, you know, master branch, etc. I think that's a red hat thing. You know, every single. Docs. Okay. Dio doc. For every version. And there's, you know, 10 of me and so on so on. So, like, you know, I would say push it to those people and let them clean up their things. Yeah, that's because we can't we don't have any control. But I think, I think opening an issue with those respective repose does that. Right. Yeah. If you open one with Vadim saying, hey, do change this. He's going to change it. Likewise, if we open one up with the open shift repo or the okay D repo Christian or someone can bring it up, push it upstream and try to get it. Oh yeah. No, I'm just saying that that all these people have have independent red hat direction to do that. So I don't think we need. As okay D to push them. To do that, I think that was it 3 that are in our control, like that Vadim could fix or that Christian could push forward. We could. We could put issues there and tag Christian and tag Vadim and ask them assign it to them. I'm rich bone, who is in is a red hat or who's one of who's the person who's doing the inclusive language stuff has a master plan and has been working with the engineering teams to get this worked out. I just haven't seen a timeline for when it's getting done. I would suspect that there is out there somewhere already an issue logged against the OCP product repose to fix this. But I haven't seen it and I haven't found it yet that we could add a comment on to rather than create open a new comment. So I think that might be the thing. And then I'm fine that needle in a haystack find the one for the overall product. And I'll see if I can dig that up and go fishing for that. And I know that there was an overall scheme. But that was probably six months ago when we brought this topic up the first time. I don't know what the date is on that issue, but it's it's an old one. I hadn't thought about it in a little while. So let me see if I can find rich and find out what what the prognosis is in timeline is. But we should fix what we can. And I'm right. I'm pretty sure that there's a an initiative within the engineering time to fix that it just impacts so many things. Excellent. Okay, so I'll raise the issues against the install the community and the OKD main repo, and then I'll close that issue for us. And then the last thing is not an issue, but it's a pull request. And we talked to think two meetings ago about the we do the reviews as to whether to accept full requests at this meeting. So I don't know whether we want to get into that now, or we just want to accept this. This is one of Sandro to put the content about. I had a guide for you for virtualization. And so again, I don't want to become normal business for us to review pull requests on the documentation and accept them or you want me to do that work offline. Is that a question for me? I apologize. I was. I think for all of us, I think, you know, let's look at the, let's actually bring it up. And just know what we're dealing with here. So. Yeah, it was really just to get a community ownership because I mean, I'm happy to go and accept it, but then it's my point of view of what's being accepted rather than the community's point of view on how our documentation evolves. Vadim just looked at this like four minutes ago, actually, and put in some suggestions. I would say let's do this asynchronously, as opposed to this meeting because it looks like it's actively being discussed as we speak, like literally Vadim just looked at four minutes ago. So let's do this asynchronously but let's get it done before the end of the week. Once everyone has signed off on it, then yeah, I'd say let's go ahead and incorporate it. So, okay, I'm going to push back for, do we want to have something like, are we going to sign maybe one or two assignees and let them do it just so it gets actually signed off. Who do we want from this group to be assigned to it. Well, I can be one of them. And when everyone else has approved it, I can approve it and push it because I have authority. I think that that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to be, I don't want to be the point for everything and I'm the point for a fair amount of stuff. You know, so let's have other folks jump in. And I would say that Brian is the point on a lot of stuff as well siren Brian, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I did want to say, Brian is the point on a lot of stuff too we want to make sure that we get some more working group people so that isn't just Brian and myself and and Daniel has started to do some work too so. So can I have one move on here please. I sent the PR so I can't be reviewing my own PR.  So Sandra, let's go ahead and add you. That way we've got one other person to help with that and you're, Sandra, you're very good with like documentation and and prodding us to get stuff in. So I think it'll be good to have you as an approver. Thank you. And I guess you can be added officially because you're a red hatter so there's probably no, no issue with you being added as an approver to this repo. I don't know. But I don't think that should be a threshold for some of our community to be added there. This is, this is a primary reason we're looking to move. So we have control over the approvals and we're not bound by red hat process for non red hatters.  If you want to add me there. Okay. We can, we can make that happen. Yeah, I'll also look at it. I was actually looking for the. To find the issue on the repository. If you look at the PRs, if you look into PRs it's under the PRs number 249. But not, not for the okay D1 right because I was there in there. It's open shift. CS is the organization. And it's okay D.io is the repository. I'll put it into the chat. So can you type in your, there you are. Nevermind. Looking for your GitHub ID. Easy. What's your get of ID Bruce. BD link. Yeah, you're not in the repo so it doesn't like you. I can't assign it to you because you're not in the repo, but if you just put a review in, I'll, if I look for that and then. Okay. Thank you. All right, very good. Anything else with that issue. All right, cool. Let's move on now to we've got a bunch of new business that basically relates to the same thing. So my recollection was that basically we were going to work on 4.9 stuff and at the beginning of the year. Actually get it posted. Because we were going to have to write that stuff out. So Sandra, we, we had a plan to do it. It's just not as quick as what we would ideally want because this is our first time actually syncing up. Well, that's not true. I think 4.4 or whatever. I think there was a big push to have things synced in terms of announcements via okay D resources and stuff like that. But since then there hasn't been. So this would be our first time actually like announcing and so the discussion at the last docs meeting I think was like, okay, we need a list of. Features and things that we can. We can forward the open shifts stuff, but also write up some okay D specific stuff. So that's where that is at for all of those. And I'm volunteering to write some stuff. And I don't know that anyone else has volunteered yet to help write some stuff for this. And I got volunteered to do the overt on somebody was volunteered. I'm looking at Daniel. Open stack. Yep. Yep. Yep. So, Dan and I, I think our planning on doing the open stack deployment stuff because we've beaten our heads into the ground on it enough times now that we, we kind of have a good grip on what you need to do for it. Yeah, so I gathered I gathered a list in the other. In the other meetings notes about just everybody who said they could they could do a thing. So the next steps are, how do I get in touch with people outside of these meetings, they don't all seem sort of black. Not so I responded to you a little bit in your in chat when you asked me basically we don't have a centralized like volunteer contact list. So it's basically the working group Google group and slack right now. And if we want to maintain a working group participant list. And then we could do that and we talked about this before it's just, I haven't had the time to set up such a thing where basically we list everyone who's actively involved with the working group and what their areas of participation are. Okay, I, yeah, I just didn't know if, if, if such a thing existed. Um, I had asked in the open shift commons. Okay D for group. Could we have an okay D guides channel made please. That seems like a reasonable place to coordinate that work. I think Diane your but you're muted. Sorry. Okay D dash guides or guidance, which would you prefer guides, I think makes sense. Okay, thank you. And the other thing I would actually say is, let's use okay D.io. I would actually, I think that that's a good idea is to actually have the discussions about the content on the repo for the content. Okay, then let's do that. That's fine. I was just looking for somewhere to organize it. Yeah, I would say that would be the best thing is to start a discussion there. And then we're using GitHub discussions, we might also want to set up. If we know who the people are doing different things. We might want to set up. I think they're called teams and get up of like representing the individual subgroups in the working group doing different things, as well as a catch all group did to hit everyone. But, but also as we make decisions documented in the D dot documentation under the subgroups. So, that's where people should go and look for what the state of a working group is what the projects are. That's what it's there for. That's why we change it to a dynamic content so people can easily make updates. Right. And ideally what would happen is that each subgroup. Their respective notes and decisions, then get presented at the main meeting as a bullet item. So basically everyone's sort of checking in each subgroup sort of checking in with where they're at. Okay, so you said on the okay D dot IO repo. The guides currently live in open shift slash okay D. So, um, I guess, no, no, no, they don't. They don't. Yeah. Who wants to who I, I will volunteer to archive those somewhere. Cool. Where should and we will archive those and remove them. And let's just get this done with. Um, yes, they are in the okay D dot IO repo. What happened is this is just before open shifts. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's where we're moving all of that stuff to and then once we figure out whether legal will give us permission, we will put it in someplace public. And for folks that weren't at the main meeting, we did register on GitHub. Okay D dash project, I think it is. Timothy did from the F cost group for us and then added myself as and Brian and I think a handful of other people Diane. And the team as as owners on it. And I reached out to the owner of the github.com slash okay D repo that is completely empty and been dead for a long time and heard nothing back. So, I'm also, there's a process in GitHub to ask for that back. Okay. We'll see if we can initiate that I'll give them another couple of days and hit them up again and if he doesn't respond or she doesn't respond or they don't respond. We'll see if we can get GitHub to give it to us to an okay D project is fine. As well. I just like short. Yeah, I do. I try to avoid dashes with things, but it's going to hurt these days. Okay. All right. So, yeah, so let's try to direct subgroup stuff to for documentation. Okay D dot IO in CS right now. And then at the main meeting will have everybody. So Daniel at the next main meeting. If you could update us on where you're at with things and then moving on we'll do that for all of the subgroups and Sandro, etc. So eventually we'll have like four or five subgroup updates in the main meeting. Right. And so Sandra does that answer your overall you listed the individual ones but we are going to be working on this over the next couple of weeks it just didn't come together as as fast as as we hope it will in the future. In the very short loop, I would recommend to send out at least a Twitter line about the children I release. And if there is a way for a big banner in the homepage, just seeing for the nine is out. Be great. Okay, great. We can do that. All right. And moving on now. So actually everything that we have on the list does anyone have anything else they would like to bring up. Well, just to note that on the docs.okd. You know, we should update that so that we have 4.9. You know that that goes latest 4.8. And then there's, there's no doc that you pull up that says 4.9. So, so actually, I don't even know what latest is. Okay, so hold on. So, Michael, how do you get notified that. Well, I guess we don't it has the process hasn't been defined. Has anyone actually said to you hey okd 9 point or sorry 4.9. Has been released. Can you update the docs has anyone like Vadim or anyone reached out to him has an email yesterday. Right, but did he go directly to Michael or put in a PR anywhere or anything. Not that I know he just sent an email. No, I know he sends his usual email of hey, this new version is out. So I think what we need to do then is as the group when we know that it's coming. Make sure that Michael is aware and then push a button and say, yes, Michael, please do this, like update the latest. Yes, I saw that email, but I couldn't remember if that was the 1st iteration of 4.9 or. Yeah, yeah, and Diane, I think you're right in terms of defining a new release process. I think we're finding out what needs to go into it now. Right. And then we write that out. I think what we're at right now, and I'll just say it out loud is we're at a tipping point right now. We have enough people. Who really are using OKD enough voices on these calls to actually not rely solely on the team to do awareness to socialize new releases and make sure the docs get updated. So I would say that 1 of the discussions we should add maybe to the repo is, you know, what is the new release announcement process rather than. Release process because that might scare the Jesus out of the team, but announcing a new release. So we put out a blog, we do this and do that, you know. How we do that. And I think that's we'll use 4.9 to. To figure out that process of what we what we want to do because like I was saying earlier about tweeting it out, posting it in a blog. Somewhere and getting into the docs doesn't automatically happen. Someone has to remember to do it right now. So. If you could take that on. I think there's there's two sides to that. There's the main release where when when there's a main 4.8 to 4.9 4.9 to 4.10. But then I actually think that as we as the issue has been resolved, we normally have a fort nightly or a a frequent point release within the 4.x. I think we should also have a release process around there just people know that the next update has been out obviously it's less of a fanfare, but I think it still needs to be communicated. I think is and I hesitate to even say this. I think that that's actually what I was thinking in the release process for each new release. Because it's a sub release for the nightly fort nightly. I almost think there's a way to automatically kick off a Twitter. Announcement to when the release is built. That we could add into the build process. I've seen it done. I said, that pushes a message. Yeah, something. Yeah. Sorry, go, go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. So there are two hooks here. One is the build process. The other is the okd clusters have an have a mechanism of checking for updates. Right. We can hook into that. I don't actually exactly know what that mechanism is. Is it is it an RSS feed or is it just they ping an API that we can get API. I'm pretty sure. So we could we could turn that into into release announcements if that makes more sense than than doing it in the pipeline. But I like doing it in the pipeline as a push operation. Yeah, we could talk chat with Vadim and Slack and somewhere and see if that's humanly possible. I've just seen it done for other. I can't even think of one off the top of the other other release processes that it just automatically pushes out to Twitter. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. I think if we just document what we want and then we can figure out how to get it make sure things get in. And they'll get missed and don't rely heavily on Vadim or whoever is in that role. Can we enable discussions on the okd.io repo? I just realized that they are not enabled. I think you have proofs to do so. If you can figure out how to do it. If not, let me know and then I'll figure out how to look after this meeting. Okay. Do we have anything else on the meeting? No. All right. We have a lot of work to do for us. Yeah. Thanks guys. Talk to you soon. Bye bye. Bye.


I'm very excited to introduce this lunch talk and our terrific speakers today, but before I do that, first of all, I just wanted to encourage people to feel free to tweet about this event on the hashtag BKC Harvard, and there will be opportunity for questions when our two presenters finish up, so I would ask that you think about your questions and hold them until they complete their presentation, and we certainly encourage and welcome those of you who are new to the Berkman lunch talk series to feel encouraged and empowered to ask questions. We love when new people come, and you're very welcome, and so please ask questions when the time comes. Now, algorithmic accountability and governance are things that are really important to the work that Berkman Klein has focused on for quite some time, so I'm quite excited about our presentation today on Algorithmic Consumers. Our two speakers are Michal Gal, who's a professor and director of the Forum on Law and Markets at the Faculty of Law at University of Haifa in Israel. She's the author of several books, including Competition Policy for Small Market Economies, and she's been chosen as one of the 10 most promising young legal scholars in Israel and is one of the leading women in competition law around the world. Neva Elkin Coran is a visiting professor this semester here at HLS, where she's been teaching digital copyright, and we're very pleased that she's been a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center. She's the founding director of the Haifa Center for Law and Technology, and the former dean at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. Her research has focused on legal institutions that facilitate private and public control over the production and dissemination of knowledge, and she's an expert on digital governance, and as you'll see in the next few moments, legal oversight of algorithmic decision-making. So with that, thank you, and I'll turn it over to you. So thank you very much for this opportunity to share this paper with you today. It's actually a paper. We forgot to upload this version to the website, but we'll do it right after this presentation. But it's also part of a project and a few projects that we have been collaborating on, and therefore we are very much looking forward to your input and reaction to some of the ideas that we want to present. We have actually presented this in various formats in the different worlds in which we reside, and we should probably thank you for just bringing us together. This would be the first time we present it together. So let me say a few words on the challenge that brought us together. Michale is a world expert in competition law, working on digital markets and two-sided markets and markets of free goods, and I've been working on algorithmic and decision-making, and especially on developing the legal institution that could help us oversight this type of decision-making. And in the course of a co-supervising PhD student of us that is working on the future of data markets and behavioral advertising, it actually occurred to us that maybe we have been focusing on the wrong issues. That is, a lot of the discussion that relates to behavioral advertising look at behavioral advertising as the problem, and in behavioral advertising we're looking at practices where some services are provided for free in order to attract consumers. Consumers are then provided as a resource where the activities are being monitored and documented, and then the data collected on consumers is being used in order to sell services at a more tailored to cater what is assumed to be their needs. And the question is whether this model is already outdated, whether it's at all efficient to use this system and the tool that we are looking at in order to convince consumers to buy where we can actually use data and machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to put together directly suppliers and consumers. So when we look at the literature looking at algorithmic consumers we often see the dark sides and we get some serious challenges and concerns regarding consumers autonomy and privacy and hidden discrimination and some of the risks for a collision and power in the market, but in fact a lot of this literature and some of it we've heard in this breakman talk that we heard last week, a lot of the literature focus on suppliers. And the question is whether we can actually focus on consumers, whether we can imagine a technology that would actually work for consumers and more importantly whether we can imagine a market, whether we can envision a market that would actually produce these type of algorithmic consumers that would actually work for promoting the values that we care about. So that is basically our project looking at the affordances that are provided by some of the tools that we're all using and that we see are coming and better understand how they work, what type of affordances that they offer and especially look at the market dynamics that they create. If there is one inside that, you know, that or bottom line that we can give you from this lecture, it is that the way these affordances will come about would probably depend on market dynamics and to some extent on the way our regulatory intervention would shape them. So if we take a closer look at some of the tools that we're using, some of the tools are actually here, you know, we use a lot of tools that would assist us in consumer, in executing online transactions, the ranking applications, recommendation applications, they always on devices, some apps that help predict the price. But when we talk about algorithmic consumers, we talk about a new generation of systems that actually go beyond this offering of more information or using information more efficiently and we look at systems that would actually help us identify our needs and help us select the optimal transactions and in many cases would also help us to execute these transactions. And our argument in the paper is that actually, even though these technologies do not reflect any major technological leap, they actually might be a game changer in terms of the market behavior, but also in terms of the legal challenges that they are posing. So if we take a closer look at this transaction or the way algorithmic consumers systems would perform, we see a lot of data sources, internet of things, a lot of sensors, wearables, detecting, some of our behavior signaling a refrigerator that gives a signal of that we are out of milk. The use of data analytics in order to provide some meaning for this type of data that is collected by these sensors and then the use of AI in order to make decisions regarding the best transaction and then the use of shopping bots in order to actually execute the payment, arrange the delivery that goes back to the consumer. So if we think, for instance, of a sensor that is linked to a pat and to a food bag and the sensor would detect some information about the health situation of our cat and also the quantity of food that we have in the bag, that could be communicated and linked to a lot of other, lots of other data that is collected from other cats and food bags around the region or the country, but also with other data sources that would provide some meaning to whether the temperature of the cat signal a disease or not, whether they need more nutrition and what is a price situation, whether we should switch from the cat's food that we bought in the past or something new. Once this information is being processed, a selection of the best and optimal decision could be made and the transaction could be executed by the system. Consumers in this scenario would only have to opt in to a system of that sort and then a lot of the other activities will be taken care of. So there are, of course, obvious advantages of a system of that sort. They're really trivial, but lowering the cost of that transaction and making it more quick and speedy, enabling us to address a lot more transactions that we need, enabling consumers to take advantage of systems that allow a more sophisticated analysis of some of the parameters and to take into account a lot of different parameters in their decision. I think some of the advantages are less obvious. For instance, the way in which algorithmic consumer systems can help us overcome some of the biases created by systems that are using all sorts of manipulation, helping us to be more rational in our choices, buying what we need rather than what we crave for. In some cases, not to go after the colorful package or the attractive commercial, but actually make a decision that is true to our needs. And I think also not trivial is the ability to defer some decisions to the system and leave a consumer according to their preference with the decisions that really matters to them. And so when we talk about information overflow, that could be a really important option. Not all of us want to make specific choices regarding paper towels and what type of, I don't know, the brand of sugar that we want to order. There are of course some downsides to that. We can see these systems becoming more vulnerable, make a bigger chunk of our life more vulnerable to cyber attacks. We could talk about it more in the Q&As, but the system could convey our preferences. But at one point, and the system will actually shape our preferences, taking nudging into account, how do we secure against that? There is always a fine line between the two. Of course, some reduction in autonomy. Consumers would opt for that, but to what extent they can leave some discretion, how much discretion consumers would have in using such systems once you buy into it. If we give up our decision-making capabilities and the ability to choose and select for the small decisions, are we going to weaken our ability to make the big decisions? Is this like a muscle? That's more for the psychologists in the room. There are some cognitive effects, of course. So if using every new technology, some have been documented in the literature just to write the shift from maps to GPS and the way it affected our brain and sense of location. Of course, the big elephant is privacy. We don't want to live in the matrix and we need to be able to protect against that. But the argument of the paper is actually that a lot of these downsides actually depend on what's going to happen in the market. In what type of market these technologies will evolve and how is market dynamics is going to facilitate diversity and creates capabilities for overcoming some of these challenges and others. We did not mention collusion, discrimination and power, but for that I will turn to Michal to continue and focus with you. Thank you, thank you so much. Okay, so what I want to talk about is to look a bit on how this technology might shape market relationships.  Of course, it's much more in the paper, but let me talk a bit about suppliers. How would it affect suppliers? So one of the things that would change is in what to invest. What would suppliers invest in a world where we have algorithmic consumers making some of the consumption decisions for people? So part of it would be investing less in marketing, which caters to irrational biases. Some of it might be less physical stores and investing more in virtual ones. Some of it would be investing less, maybe in translating your websites because the algorithm doesn't really care what language the website or the offer is in. Part of it would be in reducing the level of risk that buying from you would create because maybe the algorithm might be able to look at that parameter as well. Another thing is that it might affect how much to invest because if decisions become at least a bit more rational with regard to some products, then you can make different decisions than the ones that you made before. And another thing is that it might even create fairer contract. And why is that? Even today, there are people who are working on algorithms which can actually read the contracts which are offered by suppliers online and suggest how fair the contract is. And if you know that the algorithm is going to give points to how fair your contracts really are and put that in the decision algorithm, then it might lead us to maybe a bit more fairer contract than we have today in a world in which we usually just accept the contract which is online, not really reading what we are agreeing to with regard to many transactions. Now, let me talk a bit now about the interactions between consumers on the one hand and suppliers on the other. Now, I think that these interactions lead us to some of the most important things that come out of the paper because as Niva said, most of the research about algorithms in the marketplace has focused on suppliers and it has created or it has focused on some of the problems that algorithmic suppliers can actually create in the marketplace and are actually creating. So one of them is, for example, discrimination because if the supplier has an algorithm that knows what your preferences are, what your past choices were, who you are, if it has information about your digital shadow, that it might be that the price that different consumers are offered through this algorithmic supplier are going to be very different depending on the level of elasticity of demand of each and every consumer. And actually this is created, this is already created in the marketplace. You saw last week it was about almost perfect price discrimination with regard to at least some of the algorithms that are operated by suppliers. So one of the things that we suggest here is that algorithmic consumers can actually fight part of this discrimination. How can they do that? They can do that in two ways. One is that now you have an intermediate which buys on your behalf. And if that intermediate, if the supplier does not know who the intermediate represents, then it would have to change its pricing decisions. Another one is the aggregation of consumers by an algorithmic consumer because the way we envision the market or the way these algorithms already operate is that it's not that there's one algorithm per person, but rather there will be several algorithmic consumers which are offered in the market. They're already offered by Syria and others. And each will have, each will represent a lot of consumers. Now if that is true, then when you buy something through the algorithmic consumer, it can aggregate the choices of many, many buyers. So it can buy, for example, a thousand books of a certain kind. However, the supplier would not know who these thousand people are. So it cannot really discriminate and change the price according to each and every one of these consumers. Another thing that many people are talking about, this is actually a very big issue for competition law people. There's going to be an event in the OECD about this many competition authorities, including the American FTC are looking very closely at this kind of behavior is that algorithmic suppliers, sorry, have a tendency now to engage more in, I wouldn't even call it collusion, I would call it parallel conduct or in coordination. And algorithms actually make it much easier to coordinate between suppliers. And why is that? Because you can do it through the algorithm, you don't actually need to meet and sit together and decide. The algorithm, once it has a model, which reacts to other models in the market, can create coordination, a very high level of coordination in the market. It's immediate. Somebody reduces the price, there's a millisecond and the other algorithms also of suppliers reduce the price. So why would the first supplier reduce the price? In the first place, if everybody else is going to react? Okay, so things that for many years we assumed were done through human interactions and took time and sometimes we had, we could find traces and limit them today or can be done through algorithmic suppliers. And so algorithmic consumers can counter this at least, at least partially. This is really a partial answer here. But part of it comes from buyer power and calculation power that can counter some aspects by, for example, deciding that no matter what the price is, you're always going to buy a certain amount from a newcomer in the market. Or if the price, it rises above a certain level, then you would wait and not buy beyond that level. Now, if there are several algorithmic suppliers, algorithmic consumers, which many consumers buy, then they can overcome some of the collective action problems that arise in this, in this world. Another thing that is on the agenda today. And last week, there was a big conference about this in the University of Chicago is concentration of many of the markets. And here again, we believe that algorithmic consumers can solve at least partially part of the problem of this concentration in important markets. And I want to talk especially about certain markets, because today, there's a handful of digital intermediaries in the with mega platforms, which control effective points of access to potential users in many markets. And if you think about it, think about smart devices. So we have the iPhone and we have the Kindle, for example, we have operating systems, we have iOS and Android application stores, we have Apple Store and Google Play. And I can give several more examples of these mega platforms, which control a lot of information and create highly concentrated market. And once access to such platforms is essential for suppliers. And consumers, they have a lot of power, which can be translated into harm to consumers. And that is part of the work that was presented here last week. And part of the problem is that they control big data, they control a lot of the data, because we do a lot of our searches, or a lot of our digital activities through these agents. Now, this has led some authors to decide that to have a bleak world view in which these mega platforms are also going to control the digital butlers. And they are going to operate in their favor, rather than for consumers. And what we're saying is that we should not be so bleak, and we think that technology is a bit like a phoenix, which reinvent itself time and again, sometimes, of course, with the assistance of correctly structured regulation. And so that degrees of power and methods of control might change. And let me offer you just a bit of the thinking that we, just a bit of what we're thinking here. So part of it is, of course, the counter power of algorithmic consumers that can create other sources of supplying consumers with at least some of the things that they look for in search engines, for example. Part of it is the locus of data. Because once you think about search as the main gateway to consumers and to suppliers, that creates one world view. However, we're not there. We're already in a world of IoT. We're already in a world where we have sensors, billions of sensors all over the world. And it is suggested that we are going to have many more. And so we're going to have many more sources of data. And some of them are going to be to provide even better data than we have today. And if that is true, then it might be that the control over data and over digital shadow and information about our preferences is going to be much more dispersed. And so algorithmic consumers can use that information and operate in a world which is much less concentrated than we see today. Some regulatory implications, I'm going to go very fast through this because I've already taken a lot of time and we want to hear your questions. Because there's so many things, interesting things that this new technology creates, questions, many intriguing questions. For example, in contract law, issues like can an algorithm operate in bad faith? Like in tort law, who is responsible for and harm, which is created by an algorithm? For example, in consumer law, what should be considered manipulation in such a world where algorithms talk with each other? Corporate law, for example, when is an agent within his duties when he's not following an algorithm's advice? And of course, one of the most important things here is competition law. So let me talk a bit about some of the challenges that arise in competition law, which is my area of research. So one of them is access to users. Because if the way to access users is through these intermediaries, and they are concentrated, then algorithmic consumers might be good technologies, but they might not be able to access users. That might be one thing that we would need to think about. I think more important is access to data. Where is the data located? Who has control over the data? Will the IoT create more data which is more dispersed? And so the data which is created by searches would be of less importance in this in this world, just envision the world in which we have a sensor on our glasses, which allows the algorithm to know what exactly we're doing with every minute, and then a sensor on our body, which allows the algorithm to know some of the reactions that we have to the real world. Okay, we're already, you know, the technology is already there. Exclusionary conduct, I think is a very big challenge. And this is something that we would need to think about. And part of it, I can talk about it more and we can talk about it more in the Q&A, but part of it is what happens if an algorithmic consumers decide not to buy from a certain seller, or for example, exclusionary conduct by intermediaries, because they would like to control the algorithmic consumers. If you think about it, and if you look at their, at their investments, these large firms eBay and Apple and Google have invested a lot of money in the past two years or so in creating these digital butlers, so that we should use their digital butlers rather than other firms, digital butlers, because they do not want to lose the gateway to consumers. And finally, buyer power. What happens in the world where these algorithmic consumers might be very big and strong? Should we rethink some of our policies? I would say yes. If you want the answer, let's wait for the Q&A. Why? So thank you so much. And actually, the paper is going to be published. We are, we made a mistake not putting it online, but you can definitely find it in S.R.N. And it's going to be published in the last stages of being edited for the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. Thank you. I wanted to thank you first. This was really interesting. And one question that I was thinking about is that it sounded like a lot of the benefits that you were talking about rely on having a robust and independent market of algorithmic consumers. And it seems like in some cases, the, the algorithmic suppliers have recognized that possibility and have tried to sort of also create the algorithmic consumers. Like if you ask Siri for a ride, it will only give you the options that they have allowed people to plug in. If you ask Alexa to buy you cat food, it will only search on Amazon for the preferred cat food supplier. And so my question is, you know, what are sort of the necessary ingredients, or the next steps to try to create this more robust market of algorithmic consumers so that people aren't necessarily locked in to into Alexa, which is then tied into the Amazon ecosystem or like, you know, examples like that. I will start with your concern. Do you like it that you can only buy through Alexa, the things that are available on Amazon? Probably most of us don't, right? And so I think that in a lot of these discussions, we underestimate consumers demand, right? And so that we look at, for instance, some of the privacy issues. And we think about the situation where a lot of data is collected, and there is no no one is catering for privacy. But some companies do cater for privacy. Maybe we don't like the idea that privacy is for sale. Maybe we want privacy to become a public good that everyone would have it. But there is a market for that. So once you create some demand for appliances that could talk to different consumers, and that would be very beneficial. And I think our prediction is that as we move to the Internet of Things, there'll be more pressure. I mean, right now, the choices are very limited that you can make, right? So when Kindle for Amazon is only governing your books, and then Alexa would also govern your music selection. But once it will become a market of commodities. And as Michal mentioned, a lot of the information, the data, the collection of data would be more dispersed and would be owned by more of the locations on the ground. It would actually matter not only whether you hold a lot of data, but also whether you own the infrastructure. And we assume that that would encourage more competition. So one is from the demand, and one is from the sources of the data. Let me just add to it from a point of view of competition. Because I think that the question you raise is an important one. And I think that's where regulation comes in. Because we think about, we should know what technologies are out there. And ask ourselves, what are the kinds of barriers that firms are likely to put up so that we would not get to where we want to be? So one of the methods of course, is for firms who are currently controlling the data and have a lot of power, like Google, to try and stay in the market game and not lose a lot of the power because of the IoT, just like Niva said. So one of the things that they're doing is trying. As a Siri, what it does, it ties in all the free services, which you are already using, and a system which you're already aware of, and a lot of free suggestions and services, together with this algorithmic consumer. And the question becomes, I think that we should look again about whether this kind of tying should be allowed under what circumstances it should not be allowed. What are the pros and cons? Should we ensure that there's more information? Would information solve the problems? Consumers knowing that the algorithm does not work in their favor. And so all these questions are questions that I think are important to put on the table. Adrian Gropper, I work for an advocacy group, patient privacy rights, directly in the space. And I'd like to hear how we, you think we might solve the regulatory capture issues that I face all the time to sort of oversimplify it. The consumer side is not organized. And a lot of what happens with respect to the regulations you're alluding to is effectively unable for either the patients or the physicians, in my case, to participate in. So I don't think that there is a ready-made solution for capture. But I think that the argument that we are trying to make is that consumers can also use the technology on their favor. And here it doesn't necessarily have to be market players. That could also be like NGOs, right? And so some of the information that Michales mentioned could actually come from NGOs. And you're right. They're always underfunded. They're not well represented. And they're sometimes not even invited to the table of the regulatory decision making. But using this technology would not make them weaker. That could make them stronger. So use it in collective action. That would be one option. It's not going to solve the problem of capture. There is no, unfortunately, at least not in this particular technology we can see a future with no political capture. But I think I'm not necessarily make things worse, maybe a little bit better. So Urs, I'm the executive director of the Berkman Center. So thank you so much for the talk. My question is also linked to last week's presentation in one way or another. And that is the takeaway last week was, well, competition law, because that for look at privacy. And now I hear a little bit, well, but you know, despite all these privacy issues, look at competition law, and we can help on that side. So I'm puzzled in a way. And my question is, as you were addressing Ryan's question about the market conditions on the one hand side, then looking at the regulatory responses that can be helpful to create the market conditions. Where do we stand with some sort of repertoire of frameworks and theories, either understanding markets or regulation, and how up to date are these frameworks and theories as we deal with some of these opportunities and challenges that you mapped out. Are we well equipped to make these determinations where the markets work and where not, and what types of regulatory tools we can use and whatnot intervening in these very new types of ecosystems to describe. It's a bit of a meta question, but I think an important one. Very good question. Do you want to start with the competition, Lanie? Sure. One of the exciting things from an academic perspective of this world is that many worlds come together. You can actually not speak about competition law and disregard privacy or consumer protection or other things. It all has to be combined. And this is one of the challenges that we're facing, that how do you combine all these different issues? And one of the problems with competition law, especially in the US, but less now in Europe, and actually you think that Europe, in a way, is leading here over the approach taken in the US, is that Europe is starting to think about non-price factors which come into a competitive decision because we all talk about a comparative advantage in the market. A comparative advantage doesn't necessarily come from price. Price is only one of the parameters that we take into account as consumers when we make our decision. Another one, for example, might be the level of privacy which is offered by a certain firm. And so one of the things that the Germans and the French, the German and the French authorities have started to do, is to look at privacy as a quality issue and then take that into account with regard to competition law decisions. And another example is, for example, with regard to free goods. This is an area which I've written on with Dan Rubenfeld. And there one of the issues is, if it's free, then it doesn't affect the market price. However, it might affect the quality of the goods. So we need to change our tweak in a way, what we already have, and start thinking about new tools. Sometimes all we need is to change a bit. For example, for anybody who knows competition law, there's a small, there's a SNP test which focuses on price. And one of the things that we can do is change the focus, not only on price, but quality parameters there as well. However, some of the challenges will have to completely be rethought and you can't work within the framework. And one of them is what I alluded to before, is a legalistic coordination or a legalistic parallel pricing through algorithmic suppliers. Here I think that we would need to really rethink our tools because the ones that we have, the assumptions they're based on, do not work anymore. So we assume that most markets are not concentrated. But we don't need concentration anymore for coordination in a legalistic world. We assumed that reaction would be slow so that if somebody changes the price, it would take time for others to change the price. That's not true anymore. So some of the assumptions that are, that our regulation is based upon, would need to be changed. So this is a bad practice that both of us are answering each question because we're not going to hear a lot more questions. So I'll just be quick. I absolutely agree with you. This is an excellent meta question and I think it's true for all the shift to algorithmic decision making. And I think it's just to, the way you link privacy and competition is also important and I think that here, again, Europe was leading in its thinking. So for instance, the idea that you bring back the power to the people, the privacy probably in Europe would have to be reconsidered. Just the idea of having an autonomous choice. I mean, in the system that we are describing, it would be meaningless to talk about an autonomous choice to decide what to do with your information because once you sign up to Alexa or to the algorithmic consumer that would work in your favor, you have given up. The use of data, at least by the provider that is collecting it in order to refine your preferences and make sure the shadow of your, the algorithmic shadow of ours is actually making precise prediction of what it is that we need and we want. But I think in Europe, there are some thinking, there is some thinking about, for instance, data portability that is built into the new privacy reform, data protection reform. That is really important. That could actually create competition that is what we want, right? That people could, when they are fed up with Amazon and want to switch to the company that we don't, we cannot even name because competition will emerge, then they can go with their data and that actually that data would be compatible to any of the standards that would be available. This is something that, this is how the regulation can actually take care of competition where the data is the engine and the asset that is actually working this economy. So my question is to what extent should suppliers be able to discriminate between algorithmic consumers and human consumers? And as I asked that I think about, for example, ad blockers where developers of ad blockers try to seize consumer surplus against what publishers wish. So I could imagine the same way a large supplier like Amazon may say, we're not going to allow algorithmic consumers on our site, only humans, as a way to protect their own profit margin. That's an excellent question, you know, for regulatory authorities, right? This is like probably something that you don't want to allow, right? If your assumption is that this is good for competition and for consumer welfare, you don't, you know, you would probably hold this type of practice illegal, this type of exclusion. So thank you, this is fascinating. But I do think that, you know, going back to Ryan's question, there is kind of a lot of optimism in the way you describe this brave new world. And I'm just kind of wondering, so you present these algorithmic consumers as a counterweight to the algorithm suppliers in kind of balancing the playing field.  And, you know, and maybe I'm just more pessimistic in nature, but I see them controlling the markets. And so, so I'm wondering where this optimism comes from, on the one hand. You know, on the other hand, there are some kind of regulatory responses to this, so we know when we're talking about intermediaries in other contexts. So for example, there are intermediaries in other countries that are supposed to say help us consumers choose between cell phone plans, which is a very complicated choice. And in some countries these intermediaries have to be certified by the government, and the certification is based on the fact that they are not beholden to the suppliers, to the cell phone companies. They have to be independent in their business model. So maybe there are other regulatory ways to separate the algorithmic consumers from the algorithmic suppliers, but I think if we don't do that by regulation, then it's going to be very difficult. Just the other kind of final point, going back to these cell phone decisions, it's really difficult for consumers to choose the right plan. And now I imagine that this market for algorithmic consumers will work well. As you imagine it, if consumers will be able to choose between different algorithmic consumers, between different algorithms. And I'm wondering, do you think consumers have the ability, the sophistication to distinguish between the different algorithms to choose the one that is better for them? The choice of algorithm seems to be several orders of magnitude in terms of dimension more difficult for consumers to figure out. So how they deal with my preferences, what information they have, who are they beholden to, what is their business model. I can think of at least 20 different dimensions, and I can't imagine how a consumer would be able to choose effectively between these different algorithms. So fascinating, but I'm still pessimistic. I mean I don't think that, I think it's well, first of all, I think it's always better to be more optimistic, especially nowadays. And so I think, and also just in terms of strategy, right, to be, this is a technology, it's out there. The genie is not going back to the bottle. The question is whether we can use it for consumer benefits, or whether we give up on that. And in some, you know, you'll see that in the paper itself, sometimes we call it algorithmic wars. And we think about this as a competition between algorithms, you know, pulling into different directions. And I think that, you know, some of the problems that you mentioned are valid. I think that it's when you think about consumers making a choice ex ante, thinking what would be the best way, you know, which would be the best algorithmic butler that could serve me, I think that could be very complicated and sophisticated. But then if you think about the experience and the ability to check out and in, you know, to this system, then you think about a competition that is more vibrant, and actually could be more effective, and actually that's what we have seen in self-encomment, you know, between mobile companies, right?  Let me, I'll just be very quick and point a few things. I envision a world in which algorithms help us choose the algorithmic consumers. So you will actually have an algorithm making all the comparisons and telling you, or in, you know, this, this is best, sorry? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So this is one of the things that might be in this world, and another one is of course information. There, as long as you have enough information about different, and you have different examples of what is the best choice for you in that world and what the algorithm chose for you. If there might be some method of doing it, maybe through algorithms as well, of providing you with this information, then you'll know, Siri is not really good for me, or it's not good for me with regard to these decisions, but it's good for that. And you're completely right that right now the firms that are investing in these algorithmic consumers are not necessarily maybe the ones that we would have wanted to invest in that. But does that mean that others will not invest? I don't think so. Hi, Vivek Krishnamurti with the Cyber Law Clinic. So a question and a comment. So the question is this. Do you envision this working across all markets for all products, or are there certain kinds of markets that are particularly well suited? So I think about the market for toothpaste versus air travel, right? There are 36 varieties of toothpaste at Target, right? And how do I choose between them? It's bewildering, but it's also hard to get to reveal my preferences, right? Whereas airfares, it's a market where information is a lot freer, where the goods are more comparable and that the distinction between the goods can be more readily drawn. So I can more easily see an algorithmic consumer acting as my fiduciary, that's the comment, on airlines than on toothpaste, right? So the second is if you're going to interpose a new kind of intermediary that's going to make these choices and collect a lot of information, from a regulatory perspective I would think that it would have to be a fiduciary. You would have to have a legal responsibility to optimize my welfare and not someone else's to prevent capture and to also have the benefits to consumer welfare that you're proposing. But then the question is of cost. How do I, how does this fiduciary recoup the cost of the service that it provides? Is it going to be skimming a percentage as a fixed fee? I mean there's some interesting economics behind how one pays to get to this utopia, which I agree is a better place than we are now, but there's a bootstrapping problem seems to be there. And just to piggy back off that, there was a question online on Twitter, do we need a fiduciary duty for algorithmic consumers, otherwise they will make profit-maximizing decisions? For example, Alexa would focus on Amazon. Okay, good. Let me pick up on your first question first and do we envision this operating for all markets? I think you can take it to even, you know, you talked about toothpaste versus airfares. These are easy examples. Let me give you, I think, ones that I think are more problematic. Would we allow the algorithm to choose, for example, our president or our representative? Maybe it can make a better choice, I don't know. But anyway, or our business partner, I would think that in some spheres that would be problematic. And I would even say that in some spheres we ourselves are not going to exercise that. And let me give you another challenge here. Would we allow children, very young children, to make their decisions through algorithms, algorithmic consumers? Or is it skilled making a choice? Is it really something that we want the children to learn? And so that we would prevent the use of these algorithmic consumers from a certain age with regard to at least certain products. So this choice of where exactly we apply these algorithms that make choices, autonomous choices for us, is, I think, an important one. And there's the next paper, which is already written, but not online, which deals with these issues. So if you want, you can send us an email and we will send it to you. Now with regard to fiduciary duty of the algorithm, some people have even taken it one step further and said that the algorithm itself should be given identity, given a legal identity. I think that's taking, I would not go there. I mean, I would say, I mean, I think about who created the algorithm, who operates it, who uses it, who controls it, but not necessarily the algorithm itself. Because I think that it completely glures our roles as humans and using it and creating it. However, I think that we can think about systems where the ones who operate at least algorithms in certain risk, high-risk markets, would have to have a certain kind of insurance. So I would go with the insurance rather than the fiduciary duty of the algorithm. Can I just say just quickly that fiduciary yes, and I think that that's a very good framework legally and that goes to a lot of, you know, my own thinking about data and the way it has to be handled. And I think that with respect to the cost, just very quickly, we're talking about algorithms. We sort of so, we became so cynical that we forgot about open source and that this is something that can actually be developed, bottom up. And so we look for the Amazons of the world to create these things for us, but this is something that actually has advantage to the crowd in combining data and creating the code. So I would also think about, you know, the role of the society in here. Hi, I'm Kristoff. Actually we could interrupt you just for a second, Kristoff. We're going to stack three questions. We're going to throw three questions, the last three questions. They're going to come from you, Ron, and you, and then answer them. Can you do that? Do you mind? Okay, thank you. Hi, I'm Kristoff Graber, faculty associate at the Berkman Client Center and visiting from the University of Zurich. So first, thanks very much for studying what happens when the genie is out of the bottle. So you are very optimistic, as it has been said already, and it appears to me that your optimism relies very much on the work of regulatory authorities, including competition authorities. But as Urs has already mentioned, the problem, one of the problems is to make sure that we have a comprehensive view of the values and interests that are at stake. You mentioned also an example of how privacy issues can be reformulated within a scheme or a logic of competition law. But beyond privacy issues, there are many more issues. First, I mean within the competition law framework, in a broader perspective, you have the company, the business interests, you have the consumer interests, and then beyond that privacy interests. But that is not all, as we have seen last week, there are also freedom of speech interests and even democracy interests. So how can you make sure that all these various and heterogeneous interests are in a way taken into account in a comprehensive way in your model? And to take it a slightly different direction, my name is Caroline Troh and I'm a researcher up at the Fletcher School at Tufts. It seems like the assumptions that we're going to be basing the algorithms on, or the algorithms we're going to be working on, are going to be key. And just turning it over to machine learning might seem more attractive than relying on psychology studies or current science, and I'm thinking especially because of the current replication problems in various psych studies. But machine learning can sometimes just entrench current biases rather than moving things forward in a positive way. So have you seen good mechanisms or systems to interject when algorithms might be quietly, maybe not obviously veering off course? And can they even do this without divulging some of the private details of the people that they're trying to help? So they, you know, just, do you want to take another question? Okay, so with respect to machine learning and the use and the use of data, the collection of data, the basic principle of these systems is that they would work as shadows, right, of they have to have access. And actually for us users to make this more useful for us, we would want to have it, we would want to make more information available to a system of that sort. And it has, and that actually creates also a market dynamic that would require some trust and that is a force that I think again tend to underestimate to what extent consumer trust is important for the companies that are providing some of these devices. And I think that, you know, if your business model is based on trust, because that would make the machine better, because it has to be trained according to your preferences, I think that sort of ideally would create some partnership right between the, you know, consumer and the the companies that are serving this type of need. To the extent that I heard you, your concern, and I'm not sure that I understood you correctly, with respect to some past dependency in machine learning, I think that's a big issue. And I think I would assume that people would have different preferences in that, and that is a type of thing that we see now with the consumption of news, right, and the extent to which our filter bubbles are actually created based on their consumption of data, you know news and blog posts in the past, and some people have some preferences to open it up and would look for apps that would enable them to do that and to see some news that they were not aware of before, and I think that we would see the same with respect to consumer preferences regarding commodities. Do you want to relate to that or to to the first question? Yeah, I would agree with everything that Niva said, and I would think, you know, last week I gave this presentation or something relatively similar in room, and a computer scientist stood up and he said, we computer scientists can create an algorithm which does not rely on past dependence. It might be that, at least with regard, that you can maybe devise some algorithms that can do that. Right now, if you're only relying on the existing data, I think that would be problematic. However, I can envision, you know, I'm just, you know, thinking about the technologies that we already know, I think that part of it can come from other, the solution might come partially from other sources of data sensors that provide information about your reactions to the real world in real time. That's a different kind of data than data about what you did yesterday, and that might change at least or at least limit, okay, part of the past dependence. So that's my answer here. Okay, it's a big question of democracy. How do we address the crisis of democracy? We started the semester with your presentation on this particular issue, right? Well, as I think that that was, you know, as I address the first question, algorithms are not going to solve the problem of regulatory capture, and they are not going to solve the problem of democracy. I think that there is, that we need to adjust our thinking and I think that a lot of our discussions regarding algorithmic decision-making looks at the way it is being abused by the big players and is sort of in the defensive. One of the purposes in this paper was to start to look at this as an opportunity and make and get and take a more proactive approach to the, to some of the challenges. And I think that always to think about how we are going to limit the way Amazon is going to use it and how are we going to limit the way in which Google is searching for our data is good, is good.  I think that in order to save democracy, and if we look at the big picture, we need to really think about proactive strategies and one of them is to offer alternatives. And let us just be reminded that 20 years ago, if we had this conversation, we would look at Microsoft as the evil. And Google was a very small startup, it was not even a startup company. And, and so I think that we need to bear in mind that a lot of these market players are changing in their status and power and there is a role for us in creating more dynamic competition in order to facilitate this type of change. And so it's not a solution, but it's a direction or a strategy of how we think that we should go about this. So thank you again. Thank you so much. Thank you.


وَأَقُولُوا فِي القُرْآنِ مَا جَاءَتْ بِهِ آيَاتُوهُ فَهُوَ الْكَارِيمُ الْمُنْزَالُوَ وَأَقُولُوا قَالَ اللَّهُ جَلَّ جَلَالُوهُ وَالْمُصْطَافَ الْهَاديِ وَلَا أَتْ أَوْوَالُوَ الحمد لله رب العالمين والصلاة والسلام على عبد الله ورسوله نبينا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه أجمعين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاتهً كهرتك بأول çبيت-ipe السلام عليكم ورحمة الله في الحمد لله للمادراسة الأم Geshand Мы في رقمه قبل نائس اليوم، وجدون لي ب to a� Certain dua Subhan Allah سumi Allah أو جميعنا كل من the good. There are many different kinds of good of this world and give us good in the hereafter, the many different kinds of good in the hereafter and save us or protect us from the punishment of the fire. This is one of the supplications that the Prophet ﷺ used to say the most frequently. We also have another supplication that he used to say extremely frequently. This we can find from the Hadith of A'isha in Musn al-Imam Ahmad The actual Hadith is found in many other sources of Hadith but I particularly want this narration from Musn al-Imam Ahmad in which A'isha, she said رضي الله عنها دعواتهم كان رسول الله ﷺ يكثيروا يدعو بها supplications that the messenger of Allah ﷺ used to frequently make dua with she said يا مقلب القلوب ثبت قلبي على دينك or turn of the hearts turn my heart or make my heart firm upon your religion A'isha رضي الله عنها she said قالت فقلتوا يا رسول الله إنك تكثيروا تدعو بهذا الدعاء she said all messenger of Allah she said you frequently make dua with this dua فقال إن قلب الأدمي بين إصبعين من أصابع الله عز وجل فإذا شاء أزاغه وإذا شاء أقامه he said the heart of a human being is between two fingers from the fingers of Allah عز وجل and if he wishes he will cause it to deviate and if he wishes he will cause it to be upright This dua يا مقلب القلوب ثبت قلبي على دينك it was the one that A'isha رضي الله عنها she said I used to hear the Prophet ﷺ making it so many times this dua or turn of the hearts make my heart firm on your religion and this also shows us that our greatest concern and our biggest goal should always be to preserve our religion in terms of our worship of Allah عز وجل alone that's more important than anything we could ask for in the dunya it's more important than any of the other dreams we might have for Allah عز وجل to keep us firm upon the religion of الإسلام to cause us to live by it to cause us to die upon it this is from the greatest from among the greatest of the gifts that Allah عز وجل gives to the servant in this world from the comprehensive supplications that the Prophet ﷺ used to make is a supplication narrated by Abu Dawood and Tirmidhi and Ibn Maja رحمهم الله تعالى from the Hadith of Abdullah ibn Abbas رضي الله عنهما he said كان النبي ﷺ يدعو the Prophet ﷺ used to make this dua رب يأعيني ولا تؤين عليه وانصرني ولا تنصر عليه وامكرني ولا تمكر عليه واهدني ويسر الهدالي وانصرني على من بغى عليه اللهم جعلني لك شاكرا لك ذاكرا لك راهبة لك متواعة لك مخبطة إليك أوواها منيبة رب تقبل توبتي واغسل حوبتي وأجيب دعوتي وثبت حجتي وهدي قلبي وسدد لساني وسلو السخيمة صدري هناك مختلفات أو مختلفات هناك مختلفات here and there but the dua عبرولي my lord again beginning with one of the names of Allah الرب with Allah's ربوبية with Allah's تربية the factor Allah عز وجل we mentioned these before my lord seeking العون من الله seeking help from Allah عز وجل and seeking help from Allah سبحانه وتعالى is a great act of worship and it is one of the acts of worship which we are strongly encouraged to do and which we are strongly warned against any deviation from making it for Allah عز وجل alone إياك نعبود وإياك نستعين you alone we worship and you alone we ask for help and we ask Allah to help us to remember him at the end of the Salah some of the scholars said before you give the Salam we say على ذكرك وشكركة وحسنة عبادتك والله help me to remember you and to be grateful to you and to perform worship of you in the best way so my lord help me and do not help against me do not help against me and ultimately if Allah عز وجل helps a servant there is nobody that can that can harm them or that can get in the way of they are objective that Allah عز وجل helps them in and if Allah helps others against you then there is no one that can help you you have no welly no one that can support you besides Allah سبحانه وتعالى so we ask Allah to help us and not to help against us وانصرني and give me victory ولا تنصر علي and don't give others victory over me and نصر generally speaking is victory on the battlefield that's the usual meaning that it comes with and it can be broadly or more broadly considered to be for Allah عز وجل to give you victory in a broader sense وامكرلي وامكرلي and plot for me ولا تمكر علي and don't plot against me and Allah عز وجل the plot of Allah سبحانه وتعالى has to be understood correctly because plotting could be understood in a positive sense and it could be understood in a negative sense the way we understand it about Allah is only in the positive sense and that is that whenever the enemies of Allah plot Allah عز وجل has a plot which overcomes their plot وقد مكروا مكرهم وعند الله مكرهم they plotted their plot but Allah was in control of their plot their plot was it didn't escape the knowledge of Allah or the power of Allah so Allah سبحانه وتعالى knew of their plot and Allah turned it against them وامكروا وامكر الله و الله خير مكرين and they plotted and Allah plotted and Allah is the best of those who plot i.e. in response to his enemies he causes their plots to fail by plotting a plot which is greater than theirs and that is perfection as for scheming and plotting in general then that's not what we say about Allah عز وجل instead we limit it to the meaning which indicates perfection because all of the names and attributes of Allah are attributes of perfection وَلِيْ اللَّهِ الْأَسْمَا أُلْحُسْنَا to Allah belongs the most perfect name so his names and attributes are perfection so plot for me meaning that when my enemies try to harm me and plot against me turn their plots against them and don't plot against me don't make me from those people who my plans fail and Allah turns the person's plans against them so plot for me and don't plot against me وهديني and guide me and guidance is of course one of the major things we ask for as Muslims إهديني الصرات المستقيم guide us to the straight path اللهم إني أسألك الهدى والتقاة والعفافة والغينة while I ask you for الهدى guidance أنا تقى أن تقوى أنا أفاف and chastity والغينة and richness either financial security or just not having a need of anyone besides Allah so هدى or هداية is a very common theme in these comprehensive duas وهديني ويسر الهدى لي don't just guide me or Allah make guidance easy for me make guidance easy for me there are some people who get guided but guidance is hard for them they have to struggle and strive to be able to find it and maybe they lose it for many years and then subhan Allah at the very end of their life Allah makes it easy for them so we don't just ask Allah for guidance but we ask Allah to make guidance easy وانصرني على من بغى علي and give me victory over those who transgress against me and that's a more specific kind of نصر than the نصر which is mentioned earlier on in the du'a which is more general victory over the enemy but victory over those who transgress against me and subhan Allah transgression could happen from a Muslim or from a non-Muslim even though it's more common that it would happen from a non-Muslim it can happen from a Muslim Allah said وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني وإنطائفة تاني للمساعدة الله. لذا المساعدة could also happen from the believers as well. We ask Allah to help us overcome other people's transgression. And when people transgress against you, whether that's bullying, whether that's someone taking your rights and oppressing you, it's one of the hardest things to bear, right? It's very tough for a person to bear that. So you ask Allah to give you victory over those who transgress against you. الله مجعني لك شاكرا. و الله make me from those who are grateful to you. In some of the narrations, شكارا, those who are extremely grateful. لك ذاكرا, those who are always engaged in your remembrance. لك راهبا, those who are fearful of you. لك متواعا, those who are obedient towards you. لك مخبطا إليك أواها مونيبا. Submissive towards you, repentant, turning towards you, turning back towards you in repentance. You ask Allah to make you grateful. و إذ تأذن ربكم لإن شكرتم لأزيد أنكم. و لإن كثرتم إن عذابي لشديد. و عند الله يكلاد أن إذا كنت تأذن ربكم لأزيد. سأعطيك إذا كنت تأذن ربما أن my punishment is severe. لك مخبطا من those who remember you. لك مخبطا من those who are fearful of you. أبداك لك. سبمسive, repentant, turning back to you. رب تقبل توبتي. My Lord, accept my repentance. وغسل حوبتي and clean my sins. وأجب دعوتي and answer my dua. سبحانه وتعالى can you imagine that we actually ask Allah. We make dua for Allah to answer our dua. We make dua for Allah to answer our dua. That's how much we need Allah. We even need to ask Allah to answer our dua. وثبت حجتي and make my proof or my argument strong. And that has multiple aspects to it. One is that your actions are based upon حجة. They're based upon دليل. One of them is that when you are explaining whether it be explaining Islam to someone or whether it be explaining a position you've taken or explaining a concept that you have حجة with you.  وهدي قلبي and guide my heart. We've already asked Allah for guidance in this dua specifically for the heart. Guide my heart. وصدد لساني and correct my tongue. Remember the Hadith of Mu'adh. Does anything cause the people to be dragged along their faces into the fire except for the harvest of their tongue? Correct my tongue. Make it right. وَسْلُلْ سَخِيمَةَ صَدْرِ And take away the… If you like, سخيمة الصدر could be the enmity. All those bad kind of feelings that I find in the chest like enmity and jealousy and all those kind of negative horrible sort of feelings that fill a person's chest take away all of that enmity and perhaps even jealousy and all of those sort of negative and horrible feelings that a person has within them. And that is… There's an example of that in the Quran when the believers they used to say ربنا غفل لنا ولي إخواننا الذين سبقون بالإيمان or Allah forgive us and forgive our brothers who preceded us in faith ولا تجعل في قلوبنا غلا للذين آمنوا and don't make in our chests any resentment towards the people who believe ربنا إنك رأوفا الرحيم our Lord you are the most kind and most merciful. So this is from the comprehensive دعاء سبليكيشن that actually the scholars they say that it contains 20-something requests 20-something requests to Allah سبحانه وتعالى and one of the most amazing things about دعاء one of the most amazing things about دعاء is that when you make دعاء the more you make and the more you ask Allah the more Allah loves you whereas with people the more you ask people the more they dislike you and they get bored of you and they get tired of you so never ever feel tired to ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى never feel sad to ask Allah سبحانه وتعالى because Allah عز وجل loves for you to ask Him and Allah سبحانه وتعالى loves for you to beg Him and this is a sign of إيمان and a sign of closeness to Allah سبحانه وتعالى so at the end of the day this is something that we should be developing as part of our habit that we ask Allah as much as possible and we remain in a regular state of calling upon Allah عز وجل for all of our needs whether they are needs in this world or those of the hereafter that's what Allah made easy for me to mention and Allah عز وجل knows best وصلاته السلام على نبينا محمد وعلى آلية وصحبه أجمعين السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته how can you do a two second action right now that will give you a share of the reward of everything we're doing on this YouTube channel simple like this video and click subscribe why it will allow YouTube to recommend our videos to other users and imagine the huge amount of reward that could be waiting for you on the day of judgment if you did that with a sincere intention of spreading the Deen of Allah you'll be rewarded for every single person who benefits from one of our videos as a result of your like or subscribe that's an easy two second action that you definitely don't want to miss out on do it now click like and subscribe and don't forget to make that intention


Well we think electric transportation is a win for everyone, it's a win for the environment, it's a win for our customer. We just want to get the word out to everyone and show everyone it's more than just a couple of cars.


Hi, and welcome to this introductory video on the activities of ITUT Study Group 3. We're here in Geneva at the headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union, the ITU. I'm Laura Cervasteva, and I'm responsible for coordinating the work of this group. But first, what are study groups exactly? Well, study groups are the building blocks, if you like, of the standards-making process of the ITUT. This is where our members agree through a process of international consensus, achieved in rooms just like this one. On the development of global standards for telecoms. Now good example is the standard for video compression, which was developed here at the ITU, and is now widely used across the internet. So what does Study Group 3 do? Well, interestingly enough, the origin of the work of this study group actually dates back to the early days of the International Telegraph Union, as it was known in the 19th century, and to those very early negotiations on interconnection of telegraphic networks and the settlement of accounts between countries. So I suppose in this way it can be said that Study Group 3 is part of the very DNA of the ITU. Study Group 3, or SG3 as it's known, is home to the series of standards called the D-Series recommendations. It's responsible for tariff and accounting of international telecom services, costing methodologies, and related economic and policy issues. And yes, you'd be right to think that the mandate of the group is fairly broad. Now the standardization sector of the ITU has a number of technical study groups working on a wide variety of subjects, from e-health to cloud computing. But Study Group 3 is the only study group that's working on policy and economic issues, and it's also the only study group working on the financial aspects of telecommunications. The group is responsible more specifically for fostering collaboration between members to establish rates for services that are as low as possible. So it won't come as much of a surprise to you that tackling the high rates for mobile roaming is a key part of the mandate of SG3. In 2012, we adopted a standard, a recommendation on mobile roaming. But roaming is just a part of the group's work. SG3 is now tackling a growing number of issues. Just some examples for you. We've been working on the economic issues surrounding the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, dispute resolution mechanisms related to telecoms charging and invoicing, alternative calling procedures such as callback, hubbing, and the economic impact of those, and international internet connectivity, which as you know still comes at a very high cost in some regions and continues to have a negative impact on the ability of people in developing countries to access the internet. So those are just some of the topics that we're working on. But I'd also like to tell you that in addition to the vital standardization role that it plays on the global stage, Study Group 3 also works very closely in the regions in order to bridge the standardization gaps, so to speak, and enable developing countries to reap the benefits of the technology revolution. Study Group 3 has four active regional groups. For the Arab states, for Latin America and the Caribbean, for Asia Oceania, and for the African region. So in summary then, Study Group 3 is a long-standing global forum that's dedicated to improving our understanding of the financial and economic aspects of telecommunications, and particularly in the light of the rapid growth we've seen in the industry, notably in mobile, and the shift to IP-based and future networks. So that brings a short introduction to an end. We hope to see you at one of our SG3 meetings in the very new future.