than the killing of a Purdue University students. Four University of Idaho students were found stabbed to death in their room. Shots were fired at the University of Virginia. This is a breaking story. From overnight at least three people have been killed. When you see reports like these of students being killed and shot when they're studying at university, what does it make you feel? You probably feel scared and you might even think that it's not a good idea to study in the United States or to live on campus. That's a totally normal reaction.  Not wanting to die is a perfectly reasonable thing, but at the same time, I want to know for real, are college campuses safe? It turns out that university campuses might actually be the safest places in the United States, with some exceptions, which we'll get into. But how do we figure out how safe a college campus is? College campuses are part of a greater community. So if we look at the police data from the area around the campus, we should get an idea of how dangerous that area is, and then we can compare that data with the statistics reported by campus security departments. And we can see if the campus is as dangerous as the surrounding area, or if it's actually safer or maybe more dangerous. So I took 10 universities that are located all over the United States to get an idea of just how safe their campuses are. For example, if I look at the data from the area around Pace University in Manhattan, that corresponds to New York's first precinct. They have about 27,000 people living in that area. And the Pace University campus has about 13,000 people. So that gives us a ratio of population, which we can use to adjust all the crime statistics from New York's first precinct. They reported 135 robberies in that area. So you would expect Pace to have about 65 robberies when adjusting for population. In reality, they only had one. The same thing happens with assaults. There were 121 assaults in that area. And so you would expect 58 to happen on campus. In reality, zero. This pattern holds true in most of the other areas that I looked at. You can take a look here, for example, at University of Michigan. Same thing happens with Pittsburgh. You have two assaults compared to 112 expected assaults. University of New Mexico was recently highlighted as one of the most dangerous college campuses in the United States. And if you compare it to the surrounding area, it is still way safer. 72 expected robberies and only two. What about a really dangerous city, right? Chicago gets a really bad reputation. In fact, I've had people ask me on this channel if it's safe to go and study at Illinois Tech. So let's find out. You would expect about 17 robberies, but there were only three on the IIT campus. And similarly, you would expect about 16 assaults, but there were only nine. I'm not gonna go through every single chart here because they kind of all say the same thing. College campuses are anywhere from five to like 60 times safer than the surrounding area. Okay, but like what about mass shootings, right? Like there's mass shootings all over the United States.  Like what if I just go to the United States and then I end up getting shot by some crazy person randomly while I'm watching a movie. Mass shooting is defined as any sort of gun violence incident that results in at least four people being injured.  Like that's a perfectly natural thing to be afraid of. But if you look at the data, it's actually not that bad. For starters, if we just focus on universities, there have only been nine mass shootings at universities since 1966.  So far in 2022, the Gun Violence Archive has reported over 600 mass shootings and those mass shootings in the United States this year have resulted in 642 deaths and about 2,500 people injured. But let's stop and analyze that number for a second. 642 people dead from mass shootings. In a country where there's over 330 million people, that is a very, very tiny number of people who are going to be affected by a mass shooting. Even if we add up both those numbers, right? The people who died and the people who got injured and we put them together and we say, okay, 3,200 people were victims of mass shootings. That's still less than many causes of death in the United States. For example, 3,700 people every year drowned. I don't see you going, oh, it's not safe to go in the pool, but what? You won't study in the United States because you're afraid of a mass shooting?  Do you also not eat?    And I don't want to minimize the damage that mass shootings have. I want to make it clear that these are tragedies and there are ways to prevent them which US politicians don't seem interested in. And I think it's horrible that we even have to have this discussion. But I also want to put it into context and give you some perspective. If all you read are news stories about mass shootings, you're going to think that there's mass shootings just all the time, everywhere, and that you won't be safe in the United States. And that's not true. The news loves to report on this stuff because it gets a lot of clicks, it gets a lot of attention, but it doesn't accurately represent the real danger which is actually very minimal. If you're one of like the 20 people who still here watching this video, then this is the part where we get to a bit of an uncomfortable topic which is sexual assault and rape. I feel like it's a conversation that needs to be had especially for female students.  But you might be. In fact, on some campuses, you might be more likely to be the victim of a sexual assault than you would be if you were just living in the surrounding area. There are universities that are much safer than the surrounding area. For example, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the University of Michigan is found, there were nine rapes reported and only zero in the university. So good job, University of Michigan. But there are also quite a few universities that kind of perform as expected. In Arizona State, you would expect about 39 incidents and there were actually 38. In the University of Miami, you would expect about 29 and there were 30. And for the University of New Mexico, there were 39 expected and 38 incidents. But there are also some campuses where the risk is a little higher than you would expect from the surrounding area. The University of Maryland is a good example. If we adjust for population, we would expect about eight or nine to happen on campus. In reality, that number was 28. And for a moment, I thought maybe this was just a big university thing because I noticed that a lot of the bigger universities seem to match or even maybe exceed expectations. But it's not because I also pulled data from a small liberal arts college, Franklin & Marshall. There were about two and a half sexual assault incidents that would be expected and the actual number was nine. Now, I don't want to speculate as to why that is, but I do want to take the moment to give you some safety tips that you can apply to make it less likely for these things to happen to you. First of all, bring a friend, have a buddy. The buddy system is really good at keeping you safe.  Yes, we drank beer, I liked beer, still like beer. These people are predators. They look for easy opportunities. So don't make yourself an easy opportunity. Bring a friend with you, go places with other people. You'll probably have more fun that way too. Whether you're going to a party with a friend or by yourself, make sure that other people know where you are going and what time they should expect you to be back. Just something as simple as letting a friend know, hey, I'll be back at 11, if not, call me. That could be the difference between you filing a police report or simply getting a ride home when your friend comes to look for you. Third thing, if you don't feel safe, get out of there. Mosquito, we should exterminate them all, frankly. If you don't feel safe somewhere, get out. Just go, leave, okay? Because maybe your instinct is telling you something and you'd rather be the person who was a little bit overly cautious and left the party early, but got to have a safe night's sleep than the person who had poor judgment stuck around and had something happen. Christ on a cucumber. If you don't feel safe, get out. Most college campuses, if you make a phone call, will have someone come out to walk you back to your dorm. And finally, big one, lock the door. You know, university dorms are typically locked at the outside by keypads, but sometimes people like prop the doors open while they're doing stuff, don't allow that. Close those doors. When it comes to your dorm room doors, make sure you lock those two and keep your stuff safe. One of the reasons I was able to get so much data about college campus safety is because of the Clary Act. Jean Clary was a woman who was murdered in her dorm room in 1986. And her parents felt that the university had been covering up a ton of security violations. So they started an organization to promote campus safety and they actually got legislation passed the Clary Act, which requires college campuses to report this information to students and their families. In fact, you can search basically any university's name and Clary report and you will find data from the last three years on all of the categories that I've covered today and more. So if you're looking to figure out if your college is safe, that's where you need to look. For me, one of the saddest parts of Jean Clary's story is just how avoidable it was if she had just locked her door. Her killer probably would not have come in and done what he did. She left her door unlocked because her roommate was supposed to be coming back later and didn't want to have to get up and open the door for her. And that simple decision made it possible for someone to come in and murder her. Now again, that's an extremely unlikely scenario, but just taking small steps to prevent those things can keep you off of these statistic lists. So overall, is it safe to study in the United States? If you're a dude, absolutely. If you're a woman, it's about as safe as it is anywhere else. You should just use precautions to make sure that you don't become a target for certain kinds of violence. But really, you have a 99.998% chance of being totally fine. College campuses, statistically speaking, are some of the safest places you could be. I've been to over 25 college campuses and at no point did I ever feel like I was in danger or that someone was gonna steal my stuff or that I had to watch my back. College campuses are very safe and universities take safety very seriously. Ultimately, I don't want you to give up on your dreams of studying in the college of your choice or going to the United States to study because you're worried about safety. There are way more things that you should be concerned about besides your safety on campus. Odds are, you're gonna be completely fine. If you're still here watching this, I just wanna say thank you so much for taking time out of your day to watch this video and if you're still here, that means the world to me. I hope that this video has reassured you a little bit about campus safety and maybe has gotten rid of some of that fear. Thank you again for being here. I will see you next week.


Patriot Prime Reviews is a channel for adult collectors and may not be suitable for children under 13 years of age. Viewer discretion is advised. Hey, what's going on guys? Patriot Prime here once again with another toyhacks.com sponsored review. But before I get started I need you guys to do me a favor. If you're watching this video right here and are not a subscriber of Patriot Prime Reviews, please consider hitting that subscribe button right now. It won't cost you a thing but will help me in my channel out tremendously. And help me reach my goal of 10,000 subscribers by TFCon in October. Now on to the decals. And the set we're looking at in this video is for Transformers War for Cybertron Kingdom Optimus Primal. And this decal set includes three decal sheets with a combination of foil and vinyl backing. Now this toyhacks review is going to be a little different because there are no decals for beast mode. Everything is going to be used for robot mode. So now without further ado, let's take a look at Optimus Primal's robot mode both before and after toyhacks decals. And welcome to Patriot Prime Reviews. Now in robot mode Optimus Primal looks great. Lots of nice paint details. Taking a closer look at the face. You've got red eyes, the white mouth plate, silver right there for the crest and the antennas. Down here on the chest there's some small red details right around the center circle. And what looks like blue-gray glitter finish right there on the chest. He's got red stripes along with some white paint there on the biceps. Down here on the waist the whole crotch area is silver with some blue right there. Moving on down to the legs the upper thigh is white, the knees red, blue feet and red pistons. Now of course on the back of Primal there's no real paint applications whatsoever but lots and lots of great molded in fur. And of course you've got his blasters or his shoulder cannons right there. Now I am going to go ahead and pop the wrist mounted guns because I do believe there are decals for these guns right here. So let's go ahead and get the one out here on the left wrist.  And let's see Primal back down he does have his swords. We'll take a quick look at these as well because I know there are decals that go on these swords. These are greatly sculpted. I love the looks of these. The nice markings there on the blade and the handles and like I said both of them are exactly the same. So let's get these in position here. You can get Primal straightened up so you can have one final look at Optimus Primal before and after. Optimus Primal gets quite a few new decals to help enhance his robot mode. The first ones you're probably noticing are these new blue decals right here on the chest. They're a nice shiny foil that really catch the light nice. He also gets a blue decal right there in the center with a maximal logo on there. Now you do have a few options for the chest. You also have red and black. There is a maximal or excuse me a maximal black logo right there. And you also have non logo circle decals blue, yellow, red and silver. I of course went with blue. I was torn between blue or red so I looked up an image of Optimus Primal from the old cartoon show. His chest was blue so that's what I went with. If I happen to look out and get that new Nemesis Optimus Primal I'm going to use the red decals for him. Now moving on and taking a look at the head Optimus Primal also gets a new decal right there on the crest. You also have options for that as well with a red one. There are new blue decals here along the side of the crest and down here along the sides of the helmet just in front of the antenna. On the shoulder mounted cannons there's a new red decal right there that covers up the pin. Down here on the arms he gets a little blue decal right there and two little red dots on either side of the bicep. That's on both arms. Moving down to the legs he gets new blue decals right there on the thighs and inside the legs right here new red decals. Moving on down to the feet new blue decals there on the toes. The wrist blasters also get decals. You can see right here if I can focus in there are red decals with maximal logos and that is on every blaster. Once again you have an option of plain red with no maximal logo. I went of course with the logo. On the back of Primal he gets these decals that make it look like he has jets. So he's got his jet pack. And inside the arm the shoulder pylons if you can see there are circuitry decals there and on either side. Now right there that was the hardest decal to put on this set. That's why I highly recommend you guys get these nice pointy tweezers. So that's pretty much it for Primal. His swords did get decals as I mentioned earlier blue decals right there on top of the blade. So there you go guys. Optimus Primal after. Now honestly I didn't expect toy hacks to put out decal sets for the Kingdom Beast Wars line. I just didn't think it was possible. But as this Optimus Prime decal set shows they can still knock it out of the park. I love the different options that you have for this set to really personalize Optimus Primal for your liking. Not to mention all the little details that really make this figure pop more in my opinion. Now guys if you enjoyed the video don't forget to like. Don't forget to subscribe and don't forget to click that bell icon to get notified when I upload new reviews. Once again this is Patriot Prime signing out. HUA 10000 by TFCon.


Welcome Treaded to another intraday wave analysis session with me, Patrick Munnally. We want to draw your attention to the Kiwi dollar on the four-hour time frame and we're previously looking at the descending trend line resistance that came in at the 7150 area. We've got a decent reaction 50 pit move off that resistance zone but we are holding up here now and we're starting to look like we've got an impulsive sequence developing here. We have one, two, three a potential wave four low in place here as we hold trend line support at 71 level. We would then look for a fifth wave extension to the upside and the quality objective versus wave one would actually put us up into weekly range resistance at 72.89 and a monthly range resistance 73.16 and these prior highs to the left here. So looking for bullish reversals 371.60 to set long positions. As always traders plan the trade, trade the plan


So glad to be here. I guess we'll do a round of introductions. My name is Ray Paik, and I manage the code contributor program here at GitLab. And I've had a great fortune in the past 18 months or so of people that have been contributing code through MRs to GitLab. And what I learned pretty quickly was that a lot of them are actually customers, or even resellers, which I find out to my pleasant surprise. So without further ado, I'll start with you, Pierre. I'll let you introduce yourself, tell us where you're from, and how long you've been a customer at GitLab. Yeah. So hi, this is Pierre. So I'm a continuous integration specialist in Group Rono. Basically, we were hired by Rono like three years ago. Tried to make the company evolve into a software-oriented company, a company being able to build software by themselves. Because before, they were just using contractors to do that. And we had to choose in the beginning what we wanted to use as a source control system. And we choose GitLab at the time. And so that's three years ago. And so we have been investing a lot in this. We have been doing a lot of tooling around it. And yeah, cool, right? James, sorry. I'm James Starp. I'm a principal software developer at T-Mobile. I work on a team that helps develop the software that our call centers run to manage our customer accounts. My primary focus right now is on reducing duplicate effort and improving the T-Mobile culture within development, specifically through inner-source. And GitLab has been a huge part of that. Cool. All right, thanks, last but not least, JB. My name is JB. I work with CreationLine, who is the primary reseller for GitLab in Japan. My role is I work as an agile coach. So I support teams and organizations to be able to adapt agile methodologies and mindset so they can be more impactful on what they do. And as you can guess, it eventually comes to how do we get to adopt DevOps. And I also support teams and organizations to adopt DevOps and also adopt GitLab in their organizations. Right, thanks. So it's good to have a representative from three different continents, which is great. And then I just want to show, I only have one slide besides our Facebook page, basically. So this is a dashboard that we have. Hopefully the URL is easy enough to remember. Go to contributors.gitlab.com. And you can see the, this is where people like Sid got their stats on how many merge requests are coming in and how many are making contributions. And if you look at sort of at the bottom right of the slide, it even shows if people are using their work email address to make contributions, you'll see organizations like CERN and Siemens and others that have been making contributions to GitLab. So I know this is an eye chart, but I encourage you to take a look at the amount of contributions that we're getting from different geographies and different organizations. So that was my one and only slide. And I'll start with a few questions. And I think I'll start with you, James, if you don't mind. I mean, tell me about your first MR. And what's your motivation for getting started? And then what was your experience like? Yeah, so my first merge request for GitLab was actually to improve the documentation around NPM repository hosting. T-Mobile's only had GitLab in place for about six months or so. And I've been one of the early adopters trying to lead the way. And to scale out GitLab adoption, good documentation is very important. So I was essentially one of the first to use that feature of GitLab within the company. I found some. I ran into some snags along the way. And I just thought, gosh, they could use some better documentation. There was the edit button at the bottom of the page. I clicked it, and the rest was history, I guess. The experience was really great. Just very easy to do. There was actually good documentation on the process. And the GitLab team jumped right on it. And my request only took a day or two to get in place, which was really nice. And then it was also something that was great, because I learned a lot from the experience as trying to promote inner-source within T-Mobile, seeing in action, working with a group of essentially strangers on making something better. I was able to take that knowledge, bring it back to T-Mobile, and share it as a good example of working collaboratively. So it was a really nice experience. Right. I'm Pierre. I guess I'll ask the same question to you. When was your first MR, and what do you remember about it? So the first MR was two years ago. Actually, when we started using GitLab, we missed some features and mostly some real-time features that we wanted to implement on multi-project. And we actually built a bot that is connected to the event, the webhooks from GitLab. And so basically, we needed a new information on, I don't remember exactly what was the information that we needed, but we needed the information. And so we just downloaded GDK and tried to start hacking on it. And we find quite easily the code that was managing those hooks. And we looked at the tests. And they were very nice and well done. And you can just easily understand it and add one test for your use case. And that's it. You send that merge request. And mine was a little bit longer to be approved because the owner didn't understand well what was my use case. So I had to work a little bit more to make the owner of the code understand the use case and so on. But in the end, we managed to make the code merged. And since that, we have merged other merge requests on similar code for our bot. OK, great. Thanks. And next question I'll ask you, JB. And I mean, I was familiar with your colleagues, Hato-san, who has been very active in our community. And I didn't realize until one of my GitLab team members pointed out he works for a creation line, which is a reseller. So I want to ask you about, how do they get started at creation line? I mean, I don't think I see a lot of resellers do that. So tell me about how they started and how you decide to submit MRs and the process that you go through internally. Right, so I'm located in Tokyo, in Japan. And back three years ago, I wanted to join GitLab. There was no job position open for the type of role I was looking for at the time, especially in Japan. So I ended up working with creation line and get creation line to become a reseller. Because at the time, there was a very active reseller program. And I think it's still in place now. And I thought that was the best way at the moment for me to be able to work with GitLab. So we became reseller. And as a reseller, we go and consult our customers so that they can get the maximum benefit out of GitLab. And at one point, I think it was back two years ago, I was supporting a customer, quite a big firm. And they were developing their own DevOps solution, mostly based on GitLab, where they could use it internally for all their development teams. It had to be separated into multiple instances. And when they were doing this, they were trying to automate most of the work that they were doing. And they were missing an API endpoint at some point where they wanted to do some integration configuration automatically. And I told them, why don't you make a merge request? I was saying, OK, we are too scared about having these discussions in English. We are not very comfortable. They are Japanese speakers. They are not really comfortable in English. So then I told myself, OK, what do I want to try? I like writing code. Doesn't sound like too much of a challenge. And I did take my chance to get started writing a merge request for GitLab. And within a couple of hours, I got everything up and ready. And I got a lot of feedback from the developers from GitLab community, giving me opportunities to do some refactoring later on. Everything was looking fine. But they say, OK, why don't we do some refactoring? So it's like we have some candidates for that, which helped me to learn even more about how to write clean code on GitLab source repository. And after a couple of days, it got merged. And that's how I started to really think, oh, that's probably something I want to keep doing. OK, great. So I mean, when you work with your customers in Japan, is this something that you talk about, the ability to make contributions and some of the track record of your past contributions? I don't know if that's something that you discuss with your potential customers or current customers. I'm sorry. I mean, so I mean, I think this is pretty unique for a reseller to make contributions to an open source community. Is this something that you talk about with your customers in Japan or? Right, usually we're not supposed to be committed into pushing some code as a reseller, but it's just as we love writing code as individual contributors. So we don't do this as a reseller, we just do this as like individual contributors. And we just do this for passion of code. As you mentioned, another colleague of mine who's being MVP for GitLab, I think three times now, is just spending half of his time contributing to open source and GitLab, of course. And that is something that inside CreationLine we have been changing a lot. And we've been pushing as many developers as we can to spend some of their time contributing to open source. Because it's really important for us. OK, great. Thanks. And then I think I forgot to mention this in the beginning. Like in about 10 minutes, I'm going to open up questions to the audience members as well. So I don't ask all the questions of, I mean, if you think of any questions, you'll be given an opportunity. I think we'll have a mic that we should be able to carry over to you. So next question I'll ask this to you, Pierre. Like I mean, I think you've been most, if not all, of your contributions have been our runner project. You may have had MRs in like other areas of GitLab. But how do you sort of figure out like what kind of contributions you want to make? Do you look at our issue boards? Or is it mostly like way to enhance our product or features? So as I mean, a big enterprise, basically, I cannot commit sometimes to just go into issues to find out the issues that I would like to work on. I contribute when I have a task that my company really needs and we already look at the issues and the issue is not moving forward because it's so specific to our company. And then we say, OK, it's specific to us. We think we can do it without too much maintenance burden. So let's try to make a design and make a proposal for this particular topic issue. So that's basically how we decide on which topic we are working on. And basically, the last major question I was working on is on the support of Docker on Windows, which we have a lot of Windows tools and we want to actually run Windows containers. And this is really a very niche topic. There is not many people doing that. So at some point, we have to work on it and try to push it. So that's basically it. OK, great. Thanks. I think next couple of questions, I'll start with you, James. I mean, you've obviously, beyond that documentation, MR for documentation you made, you made other contributions like recently.  Yeah, so my main focus actually has been on documentation, because like I said, in order for us to scale GitLab out quickly within our organization, we want to remove as many impediments as possible from within the team. But as far as code contributions, I actually have two that are active right now. So they haven't been merged yet. But along the lines of documentation, one of the things we need for adoption is really good examples. So I have two projects that I'm looking to get added to the GitLab templates feature. One is an example of an NPM package, including the publishing and consuming the package from within GitLab CI using GitLab's NPM repository. There are a lot of little gotchas along the way. So having a fully functioning example, I think, is really going to help smooth out the experience for our teams. The other is a Gatsby-based template for static website or React application generator. So I think that'll be really handy as well. It publishes to GitLab pages. And Gatsby is just in general a very nice framework for generating React-based applications. OK, cool. And I think I asked you this question like last night. I mean, in general, like a T-Mobile, is it pretty straightforward to make contributions to any open source projects? Or do you need to go through a lot of review processes or compliance issues? Yeah, actually, our process is really straightforward. So there's essentially two paths. One is you can contribute to an existing project. The overhead there is very low. Pretty much as long as you promise not to betray any of our secrets or intellectual property or security-related issues, we have a very wide lane we can travel through to make contributions. If we want to open source something that is currently internal to the company, it's also pretty easy. Our process is still developing. But right now, it's essentially, there are a few emails that have to go back and forth. We have a meeting with some technical folks, usually the senior level ICs, our principal level, and our MTS level engineers, just to give it a review. And then we also have a meeting with the legal team to kind of go over what is this thing that we're releasing, what intellectual property might be involved before we release it so we can make sure we're not at risk. But it doesn't take long, actually. It's a really easy process to go through. One of the reasons I like working there. All right, great. So, I mean, JB, I think you mentioned not just GitLab. I mean, you and your colleagues contribute to a lot of different open source projects. So what are your motivations of participating in open source communities? And what do you get out of it personally or professionally? Well, I think mainly because we just love writing code. And being able to interact in a open source community is the best way for, especially for people who get started in development, to get to learn fast, to get to read some code, somebody else's code, understand design pattern, coding patterns, participating to open source community is definitely a way that will get you faster to a higher level. So there is definitely something that we recommend. Yeah, basically, we do like writing code. And that's probably the main motivation. And in the previous example that I mentioned before, if this is also enabling us to help our customers achieve things, then there's no reason for us to stop. Okay, great.  I mean, do you have other colleagues that ever know a system that are contributing to GitLab? And if so, do you coordinate a lot of your contributions or how do you sort of organize your work internally? Not really. At some point, we wanted to coordinate a list of issues. We wanted to push from the company because we have some issues that are created by our colleagues. But eventually, we didn't do that because it just works. We don't have to really have an enterprise and one voice. And it just works. So I have some colleagues that also send some small patches. It's never like a thousand lines of code. It's just adding a very small feature and it's a little bit like JB. It allows us to improve our software culture because we are mainly a Python shop in my team. And so looking at the Ruby on-rails code is quite good and it's, you know, as GitLab is open source code, you know, it's public. So you take a large amount of work to make it very polished. So it's very nice and it's really interesting to look how the Ruby community just solves the problem that Python is not doing the same at all. So it's, yeah, so we spend some time learning about, so learning from the culture of this project and we also spend some time making our own requirements fixed into the product. So that's the kind of thing you cannot do with proprietary software. With, I don't know, with other software, you have to beg to the commercial, to the sales people, I really need this feature and they say, okay, we will think about it, we call you later and eventually you have nothing or you have to wait a lot of time here. You can just do your small change and then it's implemented, you can even patch in production while waiting for the next release and that's just working fine for us. Okay, right. And I mean, in open source communities in general, I think a lot of focus right or wrong tend to be on code contributions but I think there are other areas where people can help us build great communities and I think, JB, you've been doing a lot of that through like workshops and like a meetups that you've been participating, so tell us a little bit about that and what kind of things that you do for meetups and workshops. There's a big community in Japan, especially in Tokyo around GitLab and every time we organize some meetups, as during the week it's after work, we still get more than 100 participants coming and participating, doing lightning talks, sharing about their experience, sharing about what kind of improvement we could bring to GitLab, which is very valuable. And that is something where CreationLine is also really committed to support, both financially by providing drinks or also organizing specific events involving the community. One of them that we frequently organize is a CI workshop where we help a lot of people who have never used GitLab CI before. We help them to get started writing their first CI pipeline so that they can build a container, push it to a container image, push it to the registry and then be able to pull it on their local machine and run their website. That is something that we organize once every quarter also. Great. Looks like we have about seven minutes left. I want to make sure that if there are any questions in the audience, I mean feel free to raise your hand and then William's got the microphone. Are there any questions from the audience? If not, I'll be happy to keep going. Looks like we have a question over there. Hey there. Just curious, it seems like a lot of you are contributing as part of your kind of professional roles. What can we do to keep you involved in the GitLab community? Should things change professionally? How do we keep people that start contributing to GitLab as part of their jobs in the community when they're changing jobs and things? I couldn't hear the question. Go ahead. You could. Yeah, I couldn't hear the question. I think. So I think like if I heard correctly, I mean how can we just make it easier in general for people to make contributions that right, John? And then or allow, give them more opportunities to contribute to GitLab as part of their job. Can you hear me now? Yeah, it's better. Okay, so my question was, you know, a lot of you are contributing as part of your kind of professional role right now. What can we do to keep you in the GitLab community should you change jobs in the future? Like what are the things that are gonna keep you engaged with the GitLab community over the long term? Yeah, so like I guess for example, even if you were to change jobs, you know, what are the things that we can do to like encourage you to keep contributing? I'd love to answer that one. Yeah, go ahead. So if I were to change jobs, you know, I don't necessarily know what I'm going into from, you know, source code management perspective, right? Certainly I'd like if my, you know, my next job, I'd love it if they use GitLab, but I don't know that that's going to be the case. So to stay involved, I'd really like to see GitLab be at the forefront of open source. I'm an active community member in open source in general. I contribute to a lot of small projects on my own time and, you know, I would certainly see GitLab being one of them. There's a network effect, though, that GitHub has, that GitLab just doesn't quite have yet. And I really, I believe that GitLab's approach that having that open source core and that an incredibly transparent way of operating, I think they will eventually become, you know, the place for open source. But I don't think they are yet. Once they are, I can guarantee I'll never leave it. Yeah, it's interesting to see that. So I don't remember what I was willing to say. Yeah, so I don't... Sorry, JB, do you have anything you want to add there? If I am to change my job someday, I'd love to join GitLab. I was still okay three years ago, I was still okay today. So I just hope GitLab is able to, you know, get a lot of people involved in different communities in different companies, but also make it easier to people in Japan to work for GitLab. That'd be great.  And I think we use like Kubernetes as an example, because it's sort of the guiding light these days. I mean, within Kubernetes, like people change jobs, while you still see them like contributing, right? I think that's sort of what we want to see. And hopefully, like you said, James, like GitLab is an open source project of choice where people keep on contributing no matter who their employers are. So any other questions? And thanks for repeating the question, so can I? Yeah, I'll add one comment that the interesting bit is that GitHub is actually closed source software. You cannot contribute to GitHub, but they host the most open source software. GitLab is open source software, but we actually host the most closed source software because of our prevalence with an enterprise. So, yeah, we'd love additional questions for our panel.  The thing is, we see a lot of open source projects that are actually using GitLab on premise to actually run their code because they don't want to have their own infrastructure. We see, like, we have Debian, Gnome, and very big projects. And so the thing is, it's not on GitLab.com, so it doesn't benefit from the network effect. And so that's interesting, and it's a little bit a problem for you because you don't have the network effect from the huge project that are actually using GitLab. And so this is interesting, I think. Yeah, I mean, we, I don't know if you know, like we, speaking of jobs at GitLab, one of the hires that we want to make is somebody who manages the open source program. We sort of been reacting to requests that have been coming in, but we'd love to have somebody with a strong open source background to work with other open source communities, like the big ones that you mentioned, on a more proactive basis. But a couple of minutes left, so I'm gonna ask like one last parting question before, oh. Ray, we do have just one more here, and I think we have enough time, we can jump into these ones. Thanks for this great panel. One question I have is, your contributions, do you coordinate them within your company, maybe with other people? Do you build missing features, or is it more? I'm sorry, you have to, I think you'll have to repeat the question, if you don't mind. Yeah, your contributions, do you coordinate those with other people inside your company, in the context of building larger features that you need, that GitLab doesn't have, or is it just your scratch on edge, and you do it for yourself? So like if I heard your question correctly, is it the discretion of individuals who make contributions, or is it like a more following like a corporate plan or strategy, is that correct? More than other people inside the company. Yeah, I think it's similar to, you know, there's a reason why I asked a question to you, James, about like how is it done at like a T-Mobile as an example, but you know, maybe like from Runeau's standpoint, like if you want to decide to make contributions to, I mean, let's say Kubernetes, like how do you need to get expressive permission from somebody to be able to do that, or is it like, it's a pretty easy, like it is at T-Mobile? Yeah, so in our company, we don't have an ancient software culture, so it's just building up. So for now, we don't have a strict process, we are currently building it. So we just let people that have open source background just do as they think it's right. So we want to have a better process than that. And so basically people who are contributing are just already like open source fans doing that for a long time, so we don't have to teach them the rules. And you know, not all the people that you have in the industry, they are willing to, it's not really easy for everybody to contribute because you know, they are shy, they don't know exactly how it will work. So people will judge my work, I don't know them. And so it's not quite easy to start and send your code, it puts you on the public. So that's why not that many people inside the company are doing it, this is always the same people. And we are trying to educate people on that and you know, inner source is also part of this culture. Once you start teaching people inner source and maybe when you have the inner source program, then people are starting to understand how it's good to collaborate and then they want to do that on the public. And then they want to start doing more open source contribution in the public. I don't know if you have some opinion on that. Well, I know a lot of our inner source talks kind of start with, well, what would GitLab do? Oh, okay. I didn't hear the full answer though, it's hard to. Oh yeah, my question was in your idea, the inner source program does that help people to contribute more on open source in the public? Yeah, there's certainly a huge spirit of encouragement for sure. There's a lot of kudos that go around if you do something either inner source or open source. We're very big on it in general. We actually have a formal recognition program that folks use, it's not purely for inner and open source but I know when folks make contributions that formal recognition program gets used a lot. Oh, thank you so much for doing this and whether it's getting the T-Mobile name out there or clearing some roadblock for some team, having a clear path for recognition has really I think helped spread adoption and encourage people to try. And I think I've seen wide range of spectrum. I mean, there are companies that are, especially in the heavily regulated industry, it's like you need multiple layers of permission to make contributions and you need to be on a specific list to be able to contribute to projects like X, Y and Z. But there are other companies that have, they not only have inner sourcing but they would have open source program office internally and they do a really good job of onboarding people on like etiquettes on how a process of contributing to open source projects in general. So I think like the mileage is very, I mean it's sort of like a hand wavy type of answer but I don't think it's, so it's interesting to hear perspective from even these panelists and how their experiences are internally. So I think we're like out of time. So thank you panelists and then thank you audience members for your questions and I think all of us will be around like the rest of the day so come feel free to grab us if you have any other questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this session as part of the formal program now of this World Economic Forum meeting on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia, where we're going to be focused on the very timely topic of the future of European integration. We obviously could not have a more interesting time to be able to hold this discussion. We have, as a theme of the overall WEF meeting, the concept of bridging regions in transformation. And I think that the EU stands inevitably at the face of its own transformation. It has been the world's leading example of regional integration for over 50 years now, but where it will be in the next 20, 30 years probably depends upon how it handles the particular crisis that is befalling it right now in the context of the euro, but potentially one that's going to spill over into many other political dimensions of the process of European integration. You could say that actually European integration took place in a relatively benign global and economic context for its first 50 years. The EU countries were at the top of the global economic ladder. But now the kind of structural challenges that have been eating away at its competitiveness for a long time, whether demographic, whether in terms of ability to integrate immigration, whether divergences in competitiveness, in educational attainment levels, in the build up of government debt, all of those structural challenges have coincided with the rise of other countries' economic competitiveness, with a rise of the rest, as some have described it. These have exposed the EU's vulnerabilities. We have five super panellists, four right now, but shortly I am told to be five very good panellists who are going to tackle this topic, representing in essence two of the EU's most strategic neighbors, one of which, in the case of Turkey, is in the midst of accession negotiations, and then three EU views, if I can call them that, each from a different perspective, one political, one business, and one from one of the more thoughtful commentators on European integration. Ehmen-Baj is the Minister for EU Affairs and the Chief Negotiator for the EU accession processes for Turkey. Vittorio Grilli is the Vice Minister of Economy and Finance of Italy. Daniel Gross is the Director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels, so Michael Rake is Chairman of BT Group, amongst other positions that he holds, both principally non-executive these days, Mike, yes, and then we will be joined by President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine. So, let me start off by giving an opportunity to each of our speakers to tackle perhaps one dimension of this process of European integration and how, to start with Minister Baj, if I may, with you, how the EU looks somewhat from somebody who's in the midst of a negotiation, a little bit still on the outside rather than on the inside. You could argue that the EU's relationship with Turkey has become hostage to developments within the EU, rather than hostage to anything that may or may not be happening in Turkey in terms of its ability to meet the kind of negotiating criteria, the acquis communautaires it's called, and that at the moment whatever you do, it's going to be very hard to take the process forward.  When you look at Europe right now, do you see a part of the world that is closing in on itself, or do you see a European Union that is still able to think strategically about its future, in particular its relationship with Turkey? Well, we had a similar discussion back in January in Davos, and I couldn't help myself, and I told the leaders around the table, European Union government representatives, cheer up. We have seen worse, and you have seen worse. You overcame your difficulty, so did we. This is going to be over. Unfortunately, we're in the process of trying to get it over with. But no crisis lasts forever. This crisis would be over too, and we should not forget that. Per capita prosperity is still the highest in Europe compared to the rest of the world. And when I say per capita prosperity, I'm talking about not only income, but income plus human rights, plus food safety, plus hygiene standards, plus hopes for future. European Union has a set of values which unite us, and those are the right values to carry on to the next generation. I always argue in my own country that EU is like our dietitian. Everyone knows they have to watch what they eat, and they need to exercise regularly to lead a healthy life. But sometimes they tend to forget doing the right thing. And sometimes you need the advice of a coach, or motivator, a doctor, a dietitian to do the right thing. 27 countries, those of them especially, who implemented the EU rules and regulations, became more prosperous, more transparent, more dynamic. And EU itself is a peace project. If the Brits and the French can live together under the same umbrella, despite centuries-long wars in their common history, it's because of EU. I used to joke with my French counterparts and say, so you can digest to live with the Brits in the same union and not with us, what's wrong with you? Because none of the wars we had in our history were as bloody as the wars among themselves. So this is going to be over, and by the time the crisis is over, we all have to be prepared. Yes, it is difficult. Turkey's membership aspirations have been hijacked by political ambiguities within Europe. Unfortunately, we see more and more politicians in Europe who try to exploit Turkey's membership aspirations for their domestic campaigns. But some of the things we have done in Turkey in the last couple of years are amazing, and we did it with the EU push. In a country where people would be afraid to admit they were Kurds, we now have 24 hours of Kurdish broadcasting on state television. The Armenian community started having masses at the religious Akdamar Church, which is one of their oldest churches in the world, after a gap of 88 years. The Orthodox community have started enjoying Sumala Monastery after 112 years. People of Roma origin have enjoyed greater freedoms. Our food standards have increased. We now have rules about the toys that our kids play with. The baby food manufactured in Turkey, welcome Mr. President, is all organic now thanks to EU rules and regulations. So what we try to express is it's not the rules of EU that created the problem. It's the fact that some members did not comply with their own prescription. The fact that the dietitian himself is overweight, is moody, has a few clock dark trees, doesn't make the prescription bad. The prescription is still the best around, and we have to focus on the process, on the prescription, not the dietitian, not his mood, not what's happening domestically, and this can be resolved. Well it sounds like we have to go outside the EU to get some cheerleading for the EU. So thank you very much for reminding us about some of the strong attributes which the EU still possesses, both intrinsically and from your perspective. But let me turn to one of the countries that is certainly taking on the diet with renewed vigor, Vitor Grilli, Vice-Minister for Economy and Finance in Italy. Clearly Italy is a country that right now is having to think very differently about its relationship with the EU. I think uncharitably one might say it was a country that it would appear from the outside, kind of coasted, went a little easy perhaps on undertaking some of the structural reforms that membership within a single currency might imply, which is now on a crash course. If I'm going to keep going with the metaphor that Mr. Baj started with a crash diet in trying to get itself broadly competitive. There has always been competitive parts to Italy, but to get its economy as a whole into a much stronger shape. How ready do you think the Italian people, Italian political parties are for some of the really tough choices that are going to have to be taken, not just in six months, but over the next two to three years of constant tightening of the belt? Well I think they are ready and they understand the challenge. That is in fact the whole idea and purpose of this government, the Monte government, to do in a rush, as you said, with a crash course in reform, what has been following a slow pace given the challenges that global economy is providing to us in Europe in general. And I think the proof is that in the last seven months we introduced a huge amount of reform, and especially in the budget, which has been identified, rightly so, as one of our soft spot, especially our big debt-to-GDP ratio. We introduced a huge tightening of the belt, as you said, to assure that starting next year we'll have a balanced budget in structural terms. And we did more because we were among the first to change our constitution. According to the fiscal compact, we introduced the constitutional obligation to have a balanced budget always, forever. And I think Italian understand very well that that's part of a necessary component to set the rules straight so that misbehavior is not allowed in the future any longer, and it's part of the precondition to keep building Europe as a part of a dynamic economy based driving the world. And of course, that means giving up part of old habits, or maybe sovereignty, depends how you want to call it, but they see as there is no way other than having common standard, common rules, and a clearly identifiable framework to move forward, which move forward means to build together the next step, which means looking at a common, better managed budget. Maybe common is a big world, but at least to have a much better understanding of, for example, a common area, like research and development, infrastructural project, things that we all know that are part of increasing our potential output, of course, and looking with a different eyes, also not just at the fiscal policy as part of discipline, but also fiscal policy as part of a component of a growing economy. Mr. Grilly, maybe come back to this point in a minute, because I think it'd be fair to say that, yes, Italy carries a large debt. On the other hand, you have a really relatively low deficit. A lot of your debt is held by Italians. There are very strong private savings. I think that the challenge of growth seems to be the one where the market's most doubtful. And let me just bring in, in a minute, we welcome President Yanukovych of Ukraine, and let me just say that very quickly. Delighted to have you with us. I will just go through two of the other panelists and then come to you, maybe at the end, to let you reflect on some of the comments others have made. Let me just segue from this point to Michael Rake. Mike, as somebody who's obviously led companies in the EU and chairman right now of BT Group, the big promise of European integration was that it would help deliver more efficiently growth across a group of disparate countries, which by themselves would be too small to be able to survive. I mean, do you, when you look at the European Union today, do you see it as capable of delivering growth? Are the regulations, the way they're designed, is the structure of decision making actually holding Europe back, or is it actually going to give it the opportunity to move forward? And I think of the services market in particular, but we've not had much progress yet in opening that up. What do you think? Absolutely. I mean, firstly, I think that what was said earlier, we need to remember in all of this discussion, Europe overall has been a huge success, nearly 70 years of peace and until recently, growth and the creation of a very large market. So, I mean, we need to remember that. And despite the fact that I'm British, I should declare right up front that from the beginning, I've been pro European Union. And actually, I may be the last one left, but I'm still pro Euro, so I have to be careful what I say. But no, from a business perspective, obviously, that was the opportunity. The frustrations are really the following, I think, is that we have not created, finished the single market quickly enough. This has been used by some major countries in our view and business's view as a form of protectionism. So we haven't seen services, telecoms and other areas advance quickly enough that would allow growth to occur. In some cases, I don't think there's been enough movement quickly enough to flexibility of labor, to follow some of the reforms that were necessary that Germany enacted so successfully. I think there's been too much intellectual discussion. You'd expected business to say that, you know, we focus too much on the Lisbon Treaty versus the Lisbon Agenda. The Lisbon Agenda, I can't remember, is 12, 13 years ago now. That was exactly to the point of competitiveness of how, in a high cost environment, with the kind of level of social security that we do want to maintain for our citizens, we remain competitive and use technology to do so. And we spent too much time on, as I say, the Treaty versus the Agenda that I think is very important. And I think, you know, if we look also at something else that frustrates business, although we watched it happening, it's been referred to and this comes back into the future, is the failure to obey the rules of mustrait. You know, and again, there was a lack of leadership, by example, by big countries who were the first to break the rules, which of course encouraged small countries thought this is a very good free lunch.  And I think also, you know, one sense, and I'm not an economist, is to some extent some of the smaller countries were brought in for political rather than economic purposes. So that's the sort of summary of a lot of good that's happened, but there's a lot of things that have not been focused in the right way fast enough to deal with the fact that Europe was going to be always a high-cost economy in that sense, facing, and we've known that for a very long time, huge competition from the south and from the east, you know, in a globalized economy. And I think coming to your point, I think it is very, very difficult and we all understand that for politicians to deal with this, it requires huge courage to say the truth, to say it very clearly, and then to follow up on it. And we see politicians under huge pressure. But I think unfortunately the misleading, you know, the errors of the past, if you will, by successive governments and successive countries, and I don't exclude the UK from this by the way, we've made lots of mistakes, mean that this requires huge level of leadership now to bring this together and notwithstanding all crises end, but this has to, there really has to be leadership about agreeing what it means to be in the Eurozone. What are the disciplines and how are they enforced? And I think that unless this happens and we get clarity around that, there is no confidence at the moment. Businesses have cash, but they're not investing because they don't know the environment they're going to be investing in and that hits jobs, it hits youth unemployment, which is a huge issue for all of us, and it's unsustainable to have these high levels of youth unemployment. Therefore, there's a real urgency to deal with this, to get the confidence back, to allow businesses and particularly SMEs to invest. And my last point very quickly, because it's very badly misunderstood, deliberately probably by the press and many commentators, is the whole financial regulation sector needs to be, we need to be really clear about a level playing field. We need to be really clear about what levels of capital liquidity are necessary and the implications of certain states, certain countries, including the UK, taking positions which could be hugely damaging from an economic point of view. Now, it's getting the balance right on financial regulation is a hugely important issue that politicians are going to have to get their minds around. So whereas our regulatory environment has been part of what's made us attractive to go back to the opening comments, the danger is that still in particular areas we may end up over-regulating or regulating to a European standard that detaches us from the rest of the community. Let me turn now to Daniel Gross, head of CEPs in Brussels. Daniel, one could make the comment that there are, in a way, two tiers of European countries right now. Maybe they meet somewhere in the middle, but those that have become structurally competitive or remain so over the last five to ten years, and those that are on a crash course to try and do it now, there surely is a risk that these two groups cannot be brought together fast enough at the kind of pace that the market seemed to be demanding, and certainly that membership of a single currency demands. There was a survey done by the voice of Europe on behalf of the World Economic Forum's remodeling Europe initiative where the participants, and I think these were fairly EU-knowledgeable group, but 61% of them expected a multi-speed Europe to have emerged with a kind of more federated core and a less integrated periphery in the coming years. I mean, do you think that's the inevitable outcome of where we are today that it's being impossible to hold Europe together at a 27 or a 30 or 32 over these coming years? Europe has always tried to do the impossible, keep 27 member countries together with very different starting points and aspirations. Of course, within the Euro area we have this North-South divide, which is not new. Ten years ago we had exactly the same thing with the opposite sign. It was a famous cover of the economist ten years ago which said Germany, I don't know, the sleeping, not the sleeping giant, but an economy we can't get itself to move again. And then certain reforms were done, certain adjustment mechanisms worked, and then 10 years later now everybody exaggerates, I think, in the other direction. Germany is not as strong as it appears and the others are not as weak as they appear. But as you said, the adjustment is working. Costs are falling in the periphery, increasing in Germany, and if the other countries had 10 years to adapt like Germany had, then I think we could just sit back and say, let's wait it out. But we can't because the financial markets don't give us the time and that is the nature of the crisis right now. We need to have a bridge towards this future which we can see coming but which we need to finance. And I think that is what also the people are expecting. They're feeling this crisis in the air and they have lost faith in the leadership of the people and sometimes of the institutions. But if you look more closely, actually, they have not lost faith in the project of role. As a matter of fact, the support for the EU remains strong almost everywhere, not necessarily support for EU institutions, which let us think what they're doing. Support for the euro, for example, remains strong, very strong in Germany and Northern Europe in general, contrary to what many people expect. And therefore, I think politicians also perceive everywhere that there is a project which people want to preserve. They're willing to make sacrifices, as we heard also in Italy. Even in Germany, people say, we want to keep this thing going, just do it. And they have to find a way to do it. Now, we have seen so far, they always do it in the last minute, when there's absolutely no other way around. And I think in that sense, your motto here of cheer up might be useful. This crisis is, I think, now finally coming to a breaking point where our leaders are taking the steps which will allow us to go over it. And then it's not all nice and gory, but then at least we know where we are going. It might be very tough 10 years for the countries which have a high debt level. But once the people there know the way and the financial markets know which way things are going, then at least the temperature can cool down a little bit and things can proceed. Daniel, thanks for those comments. Let me turn now, Mr. President, to you, President Yanukovych. One of the questions that was highlighted for this panel today was the soft power of the EU. And as I think we know, soft power is meant to be the power of attraction, rather than the power of coercion. And I'm just wondering, how does this look, how does this conversation where we're talking about the EU and the uncertainties about its future, is the EU as attractive? Does it have the ability to make a country like Ukraine want to rethink particular policies that it undertakes in order to be able to gain economic benefits and benefits to its market? Do you think the moral power, the power of attraction of the EU is as strong as it was a few years ago? First of all, I would like to greet all the participants of this seminar. I'm very happy to take part in today's discussion. The constructive nature inherent in this meeting and this useful opportunity for a candid exchange of opinions and open talk on common problems is useful for every one of us, because the problems that we're talking about are common. Ukraine is not situated on an island. There are also problems in Ukraine related to the crisis, and we have passed over the most acute period of the crisis in 2008 and 2009, when the economy of Ukraine and the GDP fell more than 15 percent, the output production fell more than 25 percent. And I should say that that was a heavy blow to our economy and social welfare in the country. Considering this fact, I can say that the economic structure of the country is export-oriented, more than 60 percent of our products we export. As far as 2010 is concerned, it was the year of the initiation of the reforms. We have initiated reforms and at that time when in Europe and the world over, there was the crisis in place, we have started reforms. These reforms are profound, they are meaningful, and they touch upon, first of all, the economic field. We had to find the recipes to cure the illness and how we will manage to curb the deficit. It was not less than in Greece, it was about 15 percent. Our experts have been working with all the world organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and we understood perfectly well that reducing the social standards for our citizens is impossible. And I absolutely agree with my colleagues from the United Kingdom that the dependence of the politicians on the people, on the electorate, on the voters, is huge. And besides, there is an understanding that there should be the social justice. We saw what a gap between the poor and the rich there was, and it was necessary to implement the reforms even at that time and to deal with that gap, the huge gap, the pensions, first of all, between the big pensions and small pensions. So the gap was more than 100 times. And I should say that the pension reform was also at the basis of the program of 2010. We managed to go through this period of time softly, and we raised the pension age, both for women and men, for the retirement, and it was not an easy road for us when we looked at the ratings. They were falling down when we were implemented on popular reforms. And as for the tax reform, it was also difficult enough, the adoption of the tax code, which was not adopted for 20 years in Ukraine, and we had to adopt it, and we did it. The budget code, the customs code, all that work was done. These are huge reforms that we managed to translate into life. Recently, we have adopted the criminal procedure code, which was an embarrassment not only for Ukraine, but also for the international community. One could talk on end on this topic, but without changing the approach, without changing the criminal procedure code that existed in Ukraine since 19th or the 20th century, the way could not be gone forward. This code was not good to live by, and we understood that. And in the end, together with the experts from the Council of Europe, we came up with the criminal procedure code that was adopted after that, and in the nearest time it would take effect. And that is why that we managed to embark on this road, and the road was radical, I can admit. And that was our success when we managed to breach the deficit. And now for the two years and a half in a row, we have the deficit of tooth, and 0.5% were managed to raise the level of economy. And for the two years, consequently, we managed to secure the increase in the output production by 5.6%. As for the European integration, we understand that it's not only the accession to the elite club, this is the homework. And we understand pretty well that much depends on Ukraine, what we do and how we will do that, how we will go this way of the European integration. We have worked out a very ambitious project, and virtually we have completed it. I mean the preparation of the agreement on association between Ukraine and the European Union, which envisages as a component of the agreement the establishment of the free trade zone, and we understand perfectly well that it is a unpopular decision, the expansion of the European Union at this time, and it slowed down a little bit, not only for Ukraine, but also for Turkey. And in our point of view, that was a mistake and decision, but the post that exists now will be favorable either for Ukraine or for Europe. And we believe that if Ukraine can go to the Europe now, then Ukraine will have to bring Europe inside. I mean that we will have to have the necessary standards and the harmonized and approximated legislation with the standards of the European Union and the rules that would be attractive for our partners in the world. And we understand it very good that only in innovation and investment model for the development of Ukraine will bring us the good prospect and will give us the opportunity to raise the level of economy. And it means the living standards of people and to reduce the gap between the poor and the rich. Thank you so much. For those comments, and as you said, I think structurally Ukraine may have needed to do these steps in any case, but it's interesting the EU itself is now, we're both talking about raising pension ages and so on. I'm interesting to see whether, I don't know whether Ukraine's pension age is higher than some of those in existing parts of the EU. I want to make sure that we have an opportunity to get questions from the floor. So let me turn now and invite you to share some questions with us. Please try and make them short and to the point. And do let us know who you are. If you want to address the question to one particular member of the panel, please do so. Otherwise, we'll pass them around. And if we do have questions, we'll take two or three questions in one go. And I've had one person who very, I've seen a couple of hands go up already. So I'm going to take them as I see them. I've seen one question here. Yeah. Then please, so here first. Charles Grant from the Center for European Reform in London. I have a question for President Yanukovych. You mentioned the association agreement with the EU, which would do a lot to open up your economy. The EU is refusing to ratify that because of the situation with Mrs. Timoshenko. At the same time, Mr. Putin is asking you to join the customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus. Given that the EU is closing the door to you, shouldn't you perhaps think of turning east, given that I gather Mr. Putin is offering financial incentives to Ukraine if it joins the customs union? Is that the way forward? I'll give you a chance to get to that question in a minute, President Yanukovych. First, a question down the front row here. And we're going over there, I think. My name is... Yep, you're on. You're on. My name is Hussam Mahmoud. I'm the CEO of Aldaha Agriculture Company. We work on the security food program of the GCC countries and mainly the EU. I completely share the enthusiasm of the Turkish part in the European Union, and we're looking very actively on acquisitions in the south of Europe to secure the foods for the GCC countries. I would like to know what's the point of view of the panel on this point. Thank you. Great. That's on foreign investment and how attractive parts of the EU are looking now for acquisitions and foreign investment, correct? Yeah, sorry? Yeah, and what are the risks? No risks. Keep investing. It's good. Yeah, here. Thank you. Ilya Kasych and Theros Moscow, Russia. Obviously, Europe is now having some hard time trying to figure out an elegant solution to the problems it has right now. However, it still has the absolute authority to adopt new members. And with that regards, the question I have to all the panel is if you consider adopting new members, wouldn't this be considered as a red flag that you want to share the burden that you have with the new members? Thank you. Explain that bit again. There'll be a red flag. What do you mean by that? Sorry. Will this raise any concerns that you actually want to transfer the burden to the newcomers? Okay. I think generally most EU members have worried that actually enlarging adds burdens to the existing members rather than the other way around. But that might be for the panel to comment on. Let me take those first three questions and then we'll see if we get a second round. President Yanukovych, you had a very specific question targeted at you. I'll come to you last if I may just give a chance to talk around these topics in a minute. Let's look at this question first of all about how attractive Europe remains for foreign investment. It's very interesting. I saw a poll actually by a different group by a consulting firm recently which asked US and Chinese business leaders about their thinking about investing in Europe. 6% of US business leaders were planning to invest in the EU. 63% of Chinese business leaders were planning to invest in the EU. That's quite an interesting contrast there. We totally agree. How do you see foreign investment as a potential agent or driver of change and what are the risks that they face if they take the step? Maybe you could do the positives. I'll let Mike or somebody talk about the risks. The real business can talk about the negatives. Of course, the difference between the US and Chinese attitude can be already in the fact that US is already in Europe massively and China not yet. So at the margin, the kind of argument are different. Of course, Europe I think is very attractive still, but it has to prove itself, has to prove the case. Right now in the midst of this volatile financial environment, I think there is a lot of fog that doesn't really allow to make a clear, cool-headed judgment in some cases. But I think that going back to some of the points that were made before, really, Europe has a lot more to offer in the case, for example, of guaranteeing a true single market, especially in the service sector. And I have to say that right now the boundary between manufacturing services is becoming more and more blurred. And I think that when a company think of the US market versus the European market, I think one question that I myself heard from some investor around the world is, if I go and set up a business in Iowa, I'm pretty sure I have a 400 million market to access with no problem. If I set it up, say in Milan, is there really a 400 million market or 450 or not? And it's true that in Europe there are still barriers. Some are visible, some are less visible, and which segments the market, segments it geographically, segments it from a sectoral point of view, segmented from a gender point of view, segmented from a generational point of view. So the view from outside is that it's still complicated compared to other areas of the world. And right now it's not very difficult to find very attractive economic area in the world that can make a clear, better case. So I think it is up to us to remove this barrier. And I think it's not such a difficult thing to do. Mike, do you want to say something on foreign investment and risks perhaps? Yeah, I mean, I think it's obvious that the combination of the failure to do was some of the issues we talked about in the Lisbon agenda and competitiveness have moved and the crisis we face, the financial crisis move from low growth to no growth. It's a simple fact that the vast majority of global investment has shifted, stayed the same in America, United States, moved to Asia Pacific and emerging markets at the expense of Europe. That's clear that's happened. However, I do agree that the Europe has got attractiveness to it. I think it comes back to the question of creating confidence by getting past this immediate crisis. Those who take a longer term view tend to, like the Chinese, tend to see that more clearly. The only other thing I'd add, the only other thing I'd add, Robin, which is quite interesting is hedge funds. You should always watch. I don't know everyone likes hedge funds, but it's quite interesting that there's a lot of hedge funds really beginning to go for distressed assets in Europe and buying them up and also buying good assets from distressed banks, of which they're going to be a lot potentially if we're not careful, so as they reduce their balance sheet. So that's an indication that potentially prices are a point where business will start to invest, providing they don't think we're about to go for another cliff, which is confidence. I kind of think that's where it is. Thank you. Edmund Barsh, what about this question on enlargement, potentially being a burden, a way of saying, come in, join the EU, and then you'll have to carry the load with us, whether on budget, whether on structural funds or whatever. I mean, do you see things that way or do you worry that if you get beyond the dietitian and have to actually join the practice? I think we have to make the distinguishment between joining European Union and joining the eurozone. Turkey is in the game of trying to become a member of European Union, not necessarily the eurozone. Although if you joined the EU, you would have to commit to join the eurozone at some point, I believe. Well, we're following the earlier candidates, United Kingdom, Sweden, they're still working on it. I mean, we have a long way to go. We're ready to join European Union tomorrow. On the eurozone, we will have to look at the options. However, I never see the EU as a pure political or an economic union. As I mentioned in my introduction, it's a peace project. And there was a saying by Churchill about the Americans, which is now accurate for the Europeans. Churchill said these Americans always do the right thing after exploiting all the other options. Now we see that in Europe. But here in Turkey, and in response to the investment opportunities, we follow the advice of Peter Drucker, who said the best way to predict the future is to create it. We have incentive packages for investments. And believe it or not, 85% of all global investments that poured into Turkey last year came from EU member states. 65% of the tourists that we entertain in this country, and we gain around 30 billion euros, come from EU. 50% of our exports to EU. So the butterfly effect is more evident than ever. Nobody has the luxury to say this is a European problem. I don't care. No, this is an international problem. And we all have to look at it and try to find solutions together. Daniel, do you want to comment at all on either of these points or on the enlargement question? I mean, do you think there is any appetite at the moment within the EU for enlargement, even the Brits who have traditionally been very pro-enlargement at a popular level, actually has become, if you look at most polling, one of the most anti-EU enlargement of all EU members. How do you see this? Is this a separate debate at the moment? Well, this is actually the strength of the EU. There's very little appetite for further enlargement, but it's actually happening with greater these days. Because the EU has a certain inertia. The machine works. It set itself a goal with greater. It worked on it for 15 years with endless grind. And people think it will never get there. In the end, it usually does get there. So I'm pretty certain that it will be further enlarged once. And the new countries, of course, will benefit financially, but that's not the main concern. The main concern is that they can actually get up to the standards that the EU is setting for itself. And the dietician is becoming more and more, say, hard with himself. So he's expecting the people who join to be also better performing. And that process is ongoing. It's not much noticed by the people in Europe, but it's noticed by the people who want to join. Except, of course, for those bigger ones, where the people in Europe do notice. And that's a problem with Turkey. The smaller guys can just slip in under the radar screen. Turkey is just too big and too important to be getting the treatment. The danger of being a strategic country. President Yanukovych, interesting question that was posed to you about either or. Is there a choice at the moment for Ukraine, especially given the position that the EU has taken vis-a-vis the Timoshenko imprisonment? Thank you. Well, if you look at the geographical position of Ukraine, it is between two big conglomerates between the European Union and Russia. If we look at the trade, the European Union has 26 percent of the trade turnover with Ukraine and to Russia goes 29 percent. Other CIS countries have 9 percent. And by the way, Turkey takes nine percent of the trade turnover. Only Turkey. This is one of the biggest trade partners. And that is why Ukraine having its national interest should take into consideration all these factors. But nevertheless, our strategic decision was made either by my political force that I have been cheering. And where I worked for more than 15 years, the first program was the program of my party. And at the basis of the program, there was written the accession of Ukraine to the European Union. And that is the European integration. Time has passed and for more than 20 years now Ukraine is an independent state. And around this factor, the talk is all about where Ukraine is now. Ukraine, first of all, must be a reliable bridge between Europe and Russia. We don't have to make problems. On the contrary, we need to establish conditions and terms for the movement of goods and finances. Ukraine is economically developed country and it is beneficial either to Europe or to Russia as well as it is profitable for us that our partners are fine. And that is why when we are talking about the place of Ukraine on the political world map, I should say that the country is in Europe. And it is a natural movement, the European movement, which is intrinsic with Ukraine. But today we are closely following the situation with the economic unification and the customs union. It has existed only for one year and it is difficult today to say what the situation would be there. And by the way, Ukraine is an observer in the Eurasian community. We are observers as well as other CIS countries. We are closely following and it is up to us to think how on the new conditions to move forward when the customs union is in place and then we will have to think how to build relations with them. The traitor Noah, which exceeds 30 percent, well, it make us to be very, very pragmatic on the matter. And that is why we do not change our priorities. We keep a close watch and today I admit we have the program we are working with and I mean the program on European integration. We have the agenda of approximation of the Ukrainian legislation to the European one, as I have mentioned before, on every standard. There is the Council of Europe that we have obligations and commitments before and we are implementing this program to fully fulfill all our commitments and obligations and this is our duty. I heard you say that you will have to be very pragmatic, but that your country is in Europe and I don't know, I'm going to balance between those two. We literally only have four minutes left and I have three, oh no, no, no, everyone's putting their hands up. So I'm not going to be able to take everyone's hands. I'm going to go with the three hands I saw go first and you have to ask a very quick question. I'll give my panel a last chance, but we must finish in very little time. Sorry, there was a lady here in front row. Yes, maybe not anymore. Yes, please, yep. My name is Magliana Kunova and I'm President of European Policy Centre, General Think Tank in Brussels and former Commissioner in Borosso, one on consumer policy. So if I'm to choose the only one topic, it would be about internal market and growth. Most of you gentlemen quite rightly said that we are short in delivering from the internal market. There is hardly a presidency without putting in the core internal market. Just remember the Czech presidency, the slogan was Europe without barriers. And where we are now? Where is the service directive? Where is even European consumer policy? We are into 27 mini markets. So in short, my question is could some of the countries follow up? The idea of more federal Europe because of the internal market knows not as the opposite of it. And just a small remark to our Turkish Speaker, Mr. Minister, I was chief negotiator for Bulgaria for good nine years. Twelve countries entered with the obligation to become members of your area. So be vigilant. Question here at the front very quickly. Microphone here please. Thank you. Thank you very much to all the panelists. And my question is to the Minister from Turkey, Mr. Vagis. My name is Florence Eid. I'm the CEO of Arabia Monitor, a research firm that focuses on the Arab countries. As part of the work we do, we've been watching carefully the initiative by the Gulf States to form a union. This is a project that's been underway for a while. It's recently been accelerated. And it has recently included an invitation to Jordan and Morocco to join the Gulf Cooperation Council. Independently of the invitation to the new members, potential members, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the GCC common market project and perhaps the creation of a common currency. I'm sure you've given some thought over the past few years on the pros and cons of forming and joining a union. And if down the line one were to envisage the materialization of the invitation to countries like Jordan, Morocco to join the union and perhaps become an even larger union, this union would be at your doorstep. And given Turkey's role in the Middle East, I wonder if you have thoughts on that. That's a provocative question. And last question here at the front. I'm sorry for all those other people who put their hands up. Last question here. Salman Rasul, Afghanistan Foreign Minister. My question goes to my European colleague. Turkey is a regional power economically, politically and strategically. Turkey has very strong relations with the Middle East, but also with central Asian countries and South Asia countries. My question is Turkey being part of European Union in the longer term will be great access for European Union. The way that Turkey has this relation will be very beneficial for the future of European Union, especially after 2025, which the world power will be in question. And the question will say the same for Ukraine, which will be in the longer term a asset for European Union. That's my question. Thank you. Well, look, we've got three broad issues here. I don't expect them all to be covered, but let me just give each of our speakers a chance just to say one sentence, just to close this off. And let me run in reverse order. Daniel, I'm going to start with you, because you're going to be very succinct. And any of the issues you'd like to pick up, there's obviously the question about the internal market. But any last comment you'd like to share with us? The internal market always moves more slowly than business people want. But it moves. It has moved always, and I think it will continue to move. So over the next 20 years, you'd see a much more integrated internal market. At the same time, we also see, I think, a eurozone, which will be much slimmer in terms of its public finances, therefore more agile, and in the end, therefore stronger. You think the eurozone will still have 15 to 17 members then in 12 months from now? The number of members, I think, is secondary. But I think by the year 2020, it will have more than 20 members. That's an answer. You heard it here, exactly. No, it was a good point. 2020, you said, more than 20 members. Okay. Let me come this way, stick with the EU for a second within it. Vittorio Grilli, any last comments you'd like to make? Either, I think this question really to you, this value of Turkey as a member of the EU, this is not really a question to Minister Baalj.  Well, you know, on Turkey, Italy has always been a great supporter, and so we certainly think that would be a great value added to the European Union. More in general, maybe, which is also to do with the internal market and so on. I think, but on Euro area, some country maybe felt that Euro monetary union was a happy ending of a 50 years journey, and they didn't realize instead that there was the beginning of a new stage. And actually, they didn't realize that the monetary union meant that we put a lot of things together. And actually, we switched gear. And switching gear means that I agree with Daniel that internal market progresses slowly, but progresses. And I think unfortunately, monetary union, I think fortunately, meant we switched gear. So the velocity, the speed with which further integration happens as to basically increase. That I think is one of the main problem and main challenges. Thank you. Last comment, Mike, for you. Very, very quickly. My conclusion is the European Union needs Turkey. More than Turkey needs the European Union. Don't tell them that. Oh, too late. Iman Baj, a question to you on that. GCC, does that hold Siren Voices for you? Well, first of all, as far as the internal markets are concerned, I think it's time to internalize the international markets. Enlargement is like riding a bicycle. If you stop, you might fall. I think the solution is to go beyond the borders and have a longer vision of expansion. As far as the GCC getting stronger, we would welcome it. We would like to see all of our neighbors in the neighborhood live even more prosperous than they do with standards to make sure that the people live in higher standards. That's why we're trying to join the EU, despite all the difficulties. And as far as joining the Eurozone, not the EU, I'm Turkey's chief negotiator, Madam Commissioner. If you're willing to negotiate the terms, let's sit and negotiate. As many people have said, though, Mr. Baj, it's never a negotiation during the EU. It's just how long it takes to accept all the nasty things that are being thrown in your direction or good things. It's time to change some of the rules as well. Unanimity is the reason for the crisis we have at hand. And I think we should start by changing that all. The unanimity has forced Europe to a crisis. It's time to really look at the bigger picture. That might be a different speed here. President Yanukovych. I am convinced that the enlargement process is a good prospect. And we are in favor of the prospect to have the prospect built for Ukraine and Europe. And this stage is not a simple one. But possibly this will benefit both Europe and Ukraine. The pause, I mean, in relations. And we will make the full use of this pause. And we will be building Europe in Ukraine. So succinct at the end. If I'm to take one takeaway from this, as we're always meant to have these at the World Economic Forum, I think it was the comment you just made, Victorio Grigli, about the Eurozone joining the Euro has been a switch of gears, literally a switch of gears in velocity. And I think most or many Eurozone members have not appreciated that shift and that change. The question then comes to Daniel's point. Even if one or two people drop off at this higher speed or can't quite achieve the balance, the likelihood they'll try and get on again and actually continue this process of growth of the EU and deepening of it, I think that's a more likely outcome in the future than one of disintegration. I put my money on a little more integration and a little more enlargement in the long term than the opposite. But please give a strong hand to all of our speakers here. Thank you very much.