I'm Phoenix Fairy. I'm going to keep it pretty chill tonight because we are a small group of people. So if you have questions, you can ask me pretty much. I'll take questions at the end. But I thought I would talk about alternative controller games or how to deal with ridiculous problems you didn't even think were possible. So I'm going to tell you the story about how I started making this kind of stuff and how I ended up here. I originally kind of got into games as a musician. So I have arrived at what I like to call an anti-formalist approach to games. And my games are a lot more like a musical experience or a DJ set. They have these flows to them that go through time and sometimes they're rules and sometimes they're not and sometimes they're things you can discover and they're very free flowing. So my music project in 2010 was a band called Black Swan. And we thought it would be, yeah, okay, come on, get it out. I know, right? But it was a chance for me to kind of experiment with making music using machine learning.   And then we had been working to embed sensors in our live performance to make it so we could play music without needing to necessarily have a keyboard or anything in front of us. So we were using cameras to watch us. This was back before the Kinect originally came out. We were just trying to observe ourselves and then train gestures into our system. Meg was working on this thing called the Cabo, which I guess you can now buy, which has an accelerometer and a bunch of sensors in it with Keith McMillan. And what we were doing was hoping to use machine learning to say, okay, we want to build a control space where if Meg presses the bow down on her cello really hard and my hands are up, this kind of behavior would happen. So the goal for doing this is we really wanted to explore what it would be like to have the interface wrap around us versus be forced to conform to an interface, like Ableton Live. So when you're playing live, it's really kind of awful to be hunked over a laptop. That's not the kind of experience you want to be having with your audience or with your group of people who have come to see you play. And this has kind of become a manifesto of mine that I've taken into a deeper, I don't know, I think it might be something that kind of weaves through my experience of being a designer. But basically, I don't think the user should ever have to conform themselves to the affordances of the interface. I think it should go the other way around. So I was using machine learning to take things like gestures and train them into a neural network to kind of generate a prediction. So for example, if my hand was up, I would maybe want the, you know, animations to spin right. If my hand was down, maybe I would want them to spin left. And if my hand was somewhere in between, I would want to get like that nice, rich gradient. And machine learning is really good at doing that kind of thing. You can kind of have these nice in between places in your models. So we were using a neural network. And this is kind of a nice neural network display that I think kind of makes it pretty clear. So if my arm was raised and, you know, the cello is being blowed lightly, we would take that in as our input.  And we would associate certain inputs with certain outputs, like maybe a color change or volume in a clip being changed. And it really allowed us to create this really highly, almost random, highly responsive performance environment, which was really kind of nice. It allowed me to kind of have something to respond to versus just have that was preexisting. I sometimes didn't know neural networks will give you very weird valleys between, between classifiers. Sometimes it can be really interesting, particularly if you're instead of going for like a one or two, you're going for some gradient in between one and two. So we were, we were playing with that. So I started realizing that my kind of creative applications could really have this kind of wonderful sense of play. So does anybody remember this? Anyone here? This is an application called Auto Illustrator. It was, came out in the 90s on OS9. It was a random generator, kind of procedural generated Adobe Illustrator. And I loved it. I made some of the best art in this. It would do things like, you know, notalyze polygons, instant Bauhaus style, mutate into, colorize, and it, it was really random. Like parody was one of the options in the filters. And I really enjoyed how playful the interface was while taking something that I knew and really destroying it. So this kind of led to the very first game that I made that used my body in, or used a player's body in a kind of environment. So I made this game called Nightmare Kitty. So I was in a really good position when the Microsoft Connect came out because I had already been playing with camera tracking and machine learning in game environments. So when the Microsoft Connect came out, I kind of got curious what it would be like to try and create a game using body and position tracking and machine learning. So I could record different positions and associate game behavior with those different positions and then let kids play them. This one was something I was really interested in because this is kind of what it looked like when, when kids played it. And I really wanted to give them that feeling of feeling powerless and feeling scared and feeling small and then giving them an opportunity to overcome that by like standing up and going into like a very high power pose and feeling very strong. So I did that over and over throughout the game. And I really tried to like put my argument for what I wanted these kids to feel into the kind of physical form of the game itself. So I was like, I want you to feel empowered, but I'm going to do that through the actual physical shapes that your body makes over the, the, the place man of the game. And I started really thinking that emotions can really be triggered in response to an ecology. So this is kind of the big leap that ended up with me making hardware games. And I thought to myself, how can I build these like giant ecological spaces? So my first attempt to do this was night games. And this was a project where I essentially took my kind of performance environment and handed it over to kids. So I used a hacked PlayStation move and we managed to convince my friend Colin to dress up like a magic monster and hand out the PlayStation moves. And we had different gestures embedded in the kind of accelerometer gesture data of the PlayStation moves. So if you like would rotate it really slowly, you would get a really like slow spinning snare like but if you'd spin it really quick, it would be like, you know, so the different gestures would kind of change the sounds and like change the filters on the sounds in fun ways. There was also maracas and like ridiculousness. And I would have played you a video here tonight, but let's just be happy. We have lights. So this is a really, I got really lucky. I had a drum core come and play at one night and it was perfect. It sounded more amazing that had maybe ever sounded before. And I got a video that but it was really cool because I had all these instruments and these kids were just kind of playing this sonic environment in this very fleet free flow open ended way. And I was very fortunate in that I was working with like a very commercial controller. So this is probably the most spoiled I would be in every game in any game I would build up until now because all the problems were just on the software side. I didn't have any hardware problems. This was a beautiful thing.  These things are manageable. They've already been tested for children in violence. So as we will get into in a second. So I began to look at like how games could be ecologies. And I was really interested in how they could be ecologies versus economies. So often in games there's game economies, right? There's value that you can get for a token or a system. And I really loved watching these kids. They invented this entire, they did what children did. They were well rather what children do. They invented their entire rule structure universe around the kind of behavior of the PlayStation moves. So call and response was incredibly popular. Follow the leader was another game that I noticed kids were just like constantly. And I was really like, wow, how can I think about ways that instead of crafting rule systems around this, I can just embed triggers and sounds and, and little hints of animals or fun things in this world at these places so kids can find them. So I really wanted to start looking at games as a possibility space and the rules are kind of created by the play and response to the world versus the other way around. And I kind of see this as an ecological approach to play where systems can learn to adapt and players can evolve rules as the play experience unfolds. So I think that what this ultimately does is it creates a really empowered agency driven environment where people have control to kind of create their own kind of experience.  So now what if I actually build something? So I'm designed this and I thought, okay, I'm going to build a sonic world. I'm going to make a synthesizer and clouds. And I have this idea that the clouds would sing to you. And the synthesizer would be this fun thing, this dome you could play inside of and touch. And this tree would be musical. And it would light up at night. So this was my very first hope of being able to make this kind of musical world that was actually beyond just a controller, but could be like a physical space in the world. So I had this idea that I would break the sounds up by like height. So I started off with the rocks. There was a little rock that had a bunch of low sounds on it, like when you would shake it, there were clouds ended up swapping the clouds with the hut. But it was rocks hut. Then I think it was the tree and then the clouds and the stars was the kind of the way that I broke the pitches in terms of the tone. So the higher up you got in the interaction space, the higher that the tones you would generate were.  So this is the very first, what is that even? Oh, there's a beam. Okay. So I designed the clouds in Illustrator and then figured out how we 3D modeled them and then we kind of figured out how to get them flat and print them on a laser printer. So eventually they were these down here in the bottom and we sort of assembled them.  And I decided to build this geodesic dome, which was really, this was an interesting situation. I found out there were guilds in Germany. And if you're actually wanted to get like a ton of pipes and a lot of wood, it was actually a really big challenge. So I rolled up to the game installation and had a ridiculous time getting all these pipes. But I had a team of volunteers and this is what the synthesizer was going to look like on the inside. So each one of these is a kind of a touch trigger. So is anyone here familiar with conductive paint? So I painted my touch triggers and I wired everything up and in my house it all worked great. But there was a problem. They moved me outside at night. Conductive paint outside at night. Moisture. End of story. So about half the time this big, beautiful geodesic dome I made just did not work. And I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to have these rocks and I want kids to shake them. So I'm going to design all the electronics inside the rocks and seal them with earth magnets. This plan actually worked really, really well. This went great. They're very hard to get apart. They kind of like bite you. So designing the magnets to sit down inside a 3D enclosure to seal it. Really good idea. And I just lithium ion battery it. And so I 3D printed this enclosure, took a little bit of modification. And by the time we were done, I was really happy with the way it turned out. And I made them with glow in the dark filament, which was pretty ridiculous. And then they'd light up from the inside, which was fun.  I was convinced this thing would work. I did a lot of planning. So this is what the pads looked like on the tree once the tree was assembled. And this was the final piece, which given this was the very first big thing I ever built, I feel like it was a really close match to the model. But I learned a lot of amazing things about this. First of all, like things don't always go to scale. And one of the things that I had never actually accounted for before was the resistance of the wire over space. So these wires actually around this stone that was about about it was not this large, but it was like, you know, it's good, like, you know, four or five people could easily stand in it that much wire actually builds up a lot of resistance over time. So actually trying to conduct capacitive touching something without maybe not a good plan. But you have to be really adaptive in these game installation environments. So just took my my bear conductive board and literally copper tape it onto the side of the pads. And this actually worked. And I actually got my installation up running when this incredibly ridiculous manner where I just taped it on this side problem solved me gone. And this is what it looked like in the inside when people played it. So the lessons I learned are resistance of wire really freaking matters. Conductive paint and scale is an issue when it's moist. So always make sure that somebody is not going to move you into an entirely different environment. Because when you test and you stress test these physical games, something like just it being damp out can really kill all your stuff. And you really cannot be loud enough when you need you want to clarify your needs to someone like a games curator and arts curator about what you need. Just be really insistent, give them a tech writer, ask them to read it back to you, make them sign it and maybe go over it again like once a week for a month. And that's actually like a really realistic thing to do because I don't think a lot of people understand if you're building these big hardware projects, they just see the final thing and they don't understand like, hey, something like just damp will kill your sensors. So it's really important to kind of communicate that repeatedly to non technical people. Okay, so this is Babybot. I discovered this magic. This I'm going to tell everyone about this. This is heat shrink with solder built into it. This is magical. So you can just take your heat gun, line up all your wires, heat shrink them and solder them with your heat gun. This is really lovely stuff. It is worth the money if you're in a pinch and like a bind to build a project with a ton of knobs and a ton of stuff. So this is 100 pieces. It is absolutely worth the 14 pounds. Just like saves you so much time. So this is Babybot.  And I didn't really quite know how much soldering I was in for when I built her because I just, I did not click to me that every joint was going to have multiple sides and like it was going to take me forever.  So it actually like plugs into the wall and there's like a, you know, all those circuitry to make sure that all that is sorted is fine. So I installed her in this game installation and walked away. I thought there's no way children can destroy this. So wrong. So direly wrong. The inside was the most secure I'd ever made anything that I had built to date. There was hot glue. There was heat shrink. You know, the board was really secure. Like everything felt really legitimate. And what actually broke was the clock. So this is the clock for the step sequence are here.  They dislodged the wires from the knob on the inside, even though it was like bolted on the inside. So, you know, perhaps less knobs is the answer. So lesson learned, glue is not enough. You might also consider some sort of like super glue, hot glue, it's not strong enough screws and bolts are not enough. And children are insane monsters, which have they're capable of intense creative destruction, limit the part to make the interaction really simple. Also children don't understand knobs. This is a very strange concept to us because we grew up without iPhones, right? They really were like convinced the knob was only to be jammed. They didn't understand that it had a range. Like, and I watched kids under five and six really not understand that a knob had more than on and off. So that was interesting. So I decided to evolve it. So this is bop party. I decided to see if I could make different sounds by saying if I could get the kids to kind of touch each other and like grab hands.  And if you grab hands with someone, the little animals kind of come out. You can hear them. There's like a tiger that roars. And then there's like a little like laughing critter at some point. There's a ton of little animals. My friend Frida Aduban made the sound for this one. And it has an accelerometer in it. So when you pick it up, it kind of responds. And there's eyes and buttons. And the goal is to get you to reconnect the humans. So it's really fascinated by modular synthesis. So this is actually a modular synthesizer. The step sequencer will totally remove from the synthesizer, which is the head. So I was thinking I wanted to make a ton of them, but a bunch of children with wires after seeing how bop party went or how baby bop went. I knew I had to have a more like bulletproof way to do this. So I decided to make hand holding the kind of interaction model. So I can tell when two people are holding hands, when three people are holding hands, there's not much of a difference between after three, I can have like I've had up to eight people hold hands and it's not broken my interaction yet, which is pretty great. And then I can get really nice tight interactions for when they release hands. So if more than three people hold hands for more than like, you know, half a second of storm starts, and then if they hold hands for like a whole minute, it builds and breaks.  And I was like, Oh, I give them cute little faces. Right. And I'll CNC aluminum the size and sand them. They'll be really safe. It'll all work out. And then, you know, I designed them. They look like this when they were done. They had LEDs and buttons.  And I asked, why are you doing that? Isn't it? Don't they all just change like potato head? And I was like, no, I had to go to maplins and buy super glue and super glue on the faces of the bots. So that was something I learned. Also, I learned that people will use your your game like an exercise toy if they think that it helps them get fit. I had a woman, I had a woman because the accelerometers respond to motion and twisting. And if you shake them really hard, they would like respond differently than say, if you just turn them, I had like one older woman just like with full force, like doing like, you know, I was just like, okay, whatever, this is not designed for this, but we'll just go with it. So this one made it through the entire installation of about like it was at Somerset House in London about like 6,000 kids over a couple of days. I was pretty impressed with that. It's the last day when one of the accelerometers had been had been shaken so hard, it had come off the actual circuit board. I was just like, oh my God. So the lessons I learned are all cases must be a single unified piece. Children will shake loose hot glued circuit boards on acrylic, screw everything down internally, super glue always. So this is thromb. This is my new haptic grid.  So there is a haptic motor in each one of these. I've gone down to one haptic motor per hexagon because you can't actually delineate the four. It's something I learned when I was testing them. But originally it was 28 haptic motors on these hexagonal surfaces. And I was like, okay, all right, I'm making a circuit board. Y'all can't be trusted. Like I'm just going to burn it to circuit board. And this is what it looked like when people played it. So you would try and find a B. And this is my first playtest. And there's an idea is that there's a B that lands on the surface and you follow her to the pollen. And then you collect the pollen. If you go the right direction that she's telling you to go and you get the right pollen, you get the point. So these are the sort of boxes ended up looking like this. And this is what it looks like when no one is playing it. So I feel fairly, fairly certain this is going to be okay. So I'm going to get rid of that one final wire. You can kind of see it up here. And I'm going to run the entire thing just wirelessly. So no exposed wires.  It should last like, I think I haven't seen it die yet. And I left it on for about eight hours. So I think it'll be good for a whole gallery day. Like I think it'll manage to make it through an installation day. So what you have to really kind of aim for if you're trying to put things in game exhibitions or museums or art shows is that that cycle of business hours, because you can either do triage at the end of the business hours, or they can charge it, right? So with thromb, it's going really well. Nobody's tried to lift the hexagons off the floor yet. I might need to nail them to the floor or screw them into floor if I was going to put it somewhere like the science museum. But it seems to be pretty safe so far. And one of the things that I really thought about with thromb was how to hide the wires. So we draw, we dug channels in the wires all the way around. And even in the circle that goes around them, all the wires are dug into the channels. So like into the circles. And the other thing I really wanted with thromb is that it would be really easy to carry.  I'm aiming for a suitcase, like a carry-on suitcase.  So this is, it's adorable when people play it. This kid was named Casper. He lives in Belgium. So anyway, lessons I learned, all wires must go. Like if there's a wire, just get it completely out of the way. Like the install must include a way to make the wires secure and dock the electronics into lockable systems. It's actually really hard to get the middle of that, of thromb up, which all the electronics are hiding in that white centerpiece. It requires like you need something to actually pry it open because it's tight, it's really tightly cut around the rim. And wireless solutions will sometimes interfere with each other. So this is my new lesson is we have, we're sending just binary between the different systems of the wireless. And I really didn't think that I'm going to have to write the radios to not be receivable by each other because one of them is actually causing interference on the other one. So there can be interference on your radio channels. So other problems that have emerged. One is timing. Timing on microcontrollers can be really, really, really wacky. And you can end up with weird timer issues. The other one is portability. This stuff is really like if you want to be able to show your game, you need to think how can I get it in a suitcase? Like how can I make it cheap? Because nightgames, the first version, cost like 5,000 something to ship because it was so large with all those pipes and all that wood. Timing on the chips are not 5,500 rather. Timing on the chips, that can, like I said, it can be really, and also for time I mean like this stuff is going to take way longer than you actually think. Like when you go to CNC something, even if you've tested it on a laser cutter, it could maybe not work out for you. Like you could have forgotten to fill it.  And then all of a sudden you'll have to go back. So always give yourself plenty of time. The other thing is be just like ridiculous with your writer. Like, okay, I need this. I need these extension cables. I need this much time to set up and just iterate it over and over and over and be like, okay, go over that with me again. What do I need? When do I need it? Okay, if you can't get it to me, you have to let me know by these dates. You know, just be like really clear about it. And the other one is funding is a challenge for this stuff. It's actually really expensive to make this work. And I think that kids museums are a really good venue, but I'm in the process of looking for funding. So if anyone has solutions that has worked for them for funding, I'm really open to hear it because it's, you know, this stuff is actually phenomenally kind of crazy. So those are my problems and interests. This is me on the internet. I'm at Phoenix Prairie, but I thought it'd be really cool to talk about problems that other people had for like building physical installation stuff and just open it up to questions. Are people cool with that? Awesome. I kept this one really chill.  Questions, thoughts, problems, Q&A. Just tell me things that have gone wrong. Here, take the mic. You know you want it. Do it. I have a question. And then you said you were working with neural networks. What were you using? Is it Wekinator stuff? Okay. Just a small anecdote. I have a colleague of mine who works in, they built huge installations for children's playgrounds, electronic installations.  It is crazy. Because they break everything. Yeah, everything, everything. The person I'm talking to now is a Taiwanese toy manufacturer and he's been giving me pretty good advice. Like you need to think like on the level of something that could almost go to manufacture for children.  Yeah, you, I've heard people, I asked one of my friends and he's been building to scale models. So he's been building like scale at scale hardware. So he has a set of hardware that never leaves his studio and he has another set for deployment. Just kind of interesting. Other folks? Yeah. Related to that, I think if you build something like this and you want it as a playground, and then it needs certification. But if you qualify it as an art installation, you sometimes don't need this certification. And it's, yeah, that saves a lot of money because it's over 10 grand for certification. Holy Christ. Yeah. At least here in the Netherlands. Right. So that's a remark. So sometimes it's safer than to go for art installation. But the responsible parties and the owners have to agree upon that you do this. Yeah, I think that that's probably very true. I mean, we're, I'm, you know, lucky enough that I've been only operating in the games context. So we have a huge amount of latitude that I don't think other things good. Because people go, oh, it's a game. And then they don't take it seriously and actually works to your advantage. Yeah, okay. And another remark I recognize the ink problem. We had the same problem. Mojter was the problem also. And then another tip for you. You said you used Illustrator to to unfold the 2D designs or the 3D designs. It's the very first thing I did. I know I now know there are better ways. Okay. Yeah. You use Blender. Yeah, we ended up going that route by the end. Because Blender Blender has a paper, paper model. We've learned. Yeah. I learned this after I did the first one, my friend suggested. Who? Say it again. Bit bar. Say it again for other people. Oh, okay. Oh my God. That's amazing. But still, still, it's the core. It starts from a 3D model. That's really cool. Other folks of my little bots. No, no, I have like bits of thumb in the car because it's I'm using it for my PhD. So I'm doing PhD research on haptic games. So I'm working with a bunch of designers to so Heather Kelly is the designer on thromb. So I'm building this with her to kind of develop a haptic platform for alternative control games. So I'm trying to meet other people who want to make alternative control haptic games and then figure out is what they need and then build stuff for them. So other folks, I build my own controllers like everything in bot party. I even built the sensors in bot party except for the accelerometer. But yeah, I mean, no, I mean the microcontroller like Arduino. Oh, Jesus Christ. It depends on what I'm building, right? So like I don't really have a favorite. I choose based on the implicate like the the ramifications having it. I have a whole box, you know, it's sort of the microcontroller box. I'm sure a lot of you have that box. Yeah, it's just like Jesus. I am a fan of teensies, but I have had some issues with getting the capacitive stuff working because you know the capacitor charges up like there's a weird delay. So I don't like that. I mean, other than those, I have a ton of those. But I've been having the USB ports fall off on those recently, which is making me a kind of bummed. And I think a lot of it's because my teensies get more abuse than normal teensies. Other folks questions, even thoughts or things you learned in your practice, you think other people I have no authority here really. Other people might want to know about. Go ahead. Go on. So I heard about the paper recently. I saw there's a multi touch capacitive surfaces with the conductive paint. You can do multi touch with multiple wires to with electric with CK, electric with CK. So it's a trick. It's like the very conductive paints very similar. Oh, does everyone here know about less EMF? No. All right. If you don't know about less EMF, you owe it to yourself. All the conductive materials, a lot of the conductive paints, a lot of the stuff that you pay a lot more for actually comes from a strange distributor in the United States called less EMF. They sell ghost hunting equipment, but amongst the ghost hunting equipment is all this conductive material and conductive fabric. And you can buy big gallons of conductive paint and like conductive lycra and like Velostat. I bought a roll. I carried it. If anybody's in London wants Velostat, just call. I bought a bolt and I carried it back from New York because the bolt was $50. It was just so cheap. Does people know what Velostat is? It's a material that changes resistance with force. So it's really you can make your own force sensors with it really easily. But it's really expensive if you buy it from like any like, you know, distributor, like Adafruit or something, but you can get the bolt for like $50, which is like this much fabric. It weighs like, you know, 75 pounds, you know, and they have like conductive lycra and like conductive shielding and it is kind of a magical place. Less EMF, L-E-S-S-E-M-F. Even with shipping it to Europe, you're still going to pay less. Yeah, particularly because they'll sell really nice. They have like conductive sample packs and stuff. You can call them and be like, hey, can I get some samples to test your stuff out? And they'll send you samples really cheaply, which is pretty great. And then you can see if any of their stuff actually works for what you're after and then, you know, it's worth it. Oh, just conductive lycra. And then the other stuff is Velostat, V-E-L-O-S-T-A-T. That's the resistive stuff, huh? Yeah, they sell it by the bolt. But yeah, they mostly target folks who like do ghost hunting, right? So they're terrified of EMF. They got to shield them. It's really good. But, you know, you need a lot of silver stuff to keep out the ghosts. It's most excellent. And they've got like every kind of, like they've even got like, like all kinds of fabrics and materials that do conductive stuff, conductive knit, like knit, like yarn and about kinds of stuff. You can knit your baby. Yeah, there's a lot of crates of people out there, especially in America, in rural America, some extra special fun people. Anything else? Y'all should go drink and dance now. It's late. Yeah, thanks. See you.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are wrapping up. We're getting close to the end of day one here at ServiceNow Knowledge in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. About 11,000 people. Wow, how the conference has grown since we first covered it four years ago. And really excited for our next guest so I don't think we've had on before, but we hear more and more about how important design is. And it was highlighted in the keynote today with the watch. So we're excited to have Troy Asmunon, product design and passion. And most importantly, you get to work close with Fred, he said. Yes, so welcome. Yeah, thank you. I think it's good to be here. Thank you very much. So we were talking a little bit about prior knowledges and heard back in the day, it was just basically a surf party under tents down in San Diego. So looking at your LinkedIn profile and your love of surf, you must fit right in. Yeah, it was interesting. I was working up in Hollywood for a couple of years and I wasn't really able to move the needle as much as I wanted to. So I decided it'd be best for me to come back home and work in San Diego again. And just kind of randomly really, an old friend of mine or colleague of mine was working at ServiceNow and he was telling me, hey, you got to come over here. Like you could be really, you could really make a difference here.   And he kept bugging me. And so eventually I said, okay, I'll come down there. And I submitted my resume and got rejected. And then later he's like, try again. So I said, okay, try it again. And then I got accepted. And then I started working there and then within just a few months I realized it was a great place to work. I've been able to do a lot of innovative things here and working with Fred and the Design Experience Organization and really the whole company's been, it's probably been honestly the best job I've ever had and it's on track to, I think I'm gonna be here longer than any place I've ever worked at before. I have kind of a short attention span but this is working out all right so far. Good, you've got a really varied background. Of course, we looked at everybody's LinkedIn page before they come on in and you did a lot of fun things but I think the surf shop in the Mildeyes probably had to be the most fun. Good, as long as you can handle the reef rash with the shallow reefs over there. But yeah, that's good too. But I think this has a little more staying power than just slinging surfboards. Absolutely, so we go to a lot of shows. We did about 80 shows last year and we'll do more than that this year. And one of the themes that comes up over and over again with successful companies is when the founder is still around. Especially a passionate founder and there's nobody like Fred when he stands up and demos a new product or shows some new code or comes out into the audience. I mean, the real passion that people have for him and what he's created is pretty unique and I think it's probably a really integral part of the success of the company and this connectedness that he has with his customers. And obviously, Frank's come along to kind of move the business needle but there's really something special about Fred and in fact, we were joking. He was coding during the keynote today. I think they've got a picture of him. So you said at the beginning, you're fortunate you get to work with him. Give a little insight as to what it is to work with Fred and how he brings that passion and his kind of unique twist and perspective on things into what's become a very big and successful company. Sure, so yeah, working with Fred has been a very interesting experience. He's basically a very, very, very bright man who tends to take a look at things from the final outcome that you will end up with and he starts there. What's gonna be the final outcome of that? And if he doesn't like it, he'll say that's not gonna work. We're not gonna get the final outcome we need. So he's a very results-based individual, more so than anybody else I've ever worked with and it's been a great experience. It is kind of unusual at times because he is so interested in the final results of the typical kinds of business sort of constructs of bureaucracy and so forth.  That's not gonna get us what we need. So I'm just gonna ignore that or just mow that down or run over that, whatever it takes. And initially what was interesting is when I ended up working with him, we ended up working in this small room together. It was random. I didn't interview with Fred. He had just been working with different people and he was like, yeah, I'm not gonna get what I need. Not gonna get what I need. And I think out of desperation, they probably hired me and said, let's try something really strange. And so they brought me on board and I pretty much stayed out of his way. He was, I didn't know him at the time. I just said, okay, so guys, he's quite a bit older than I am and he's really rich. I'm like, who cares? I mean, it's not gonna affect my life and I just kind of tried to listen and see what people were doing and then some conversations came up about design and user experience and I made a few comments that some people thought were thoughtful.  I'd been going through some stuff and I'd run out of shampoo at my house and I was just busy doing lots of stuff and getting my new job and I just didn't have time to get more shampoo. And so for a couple of weeks, I just kept using conditioner until my hair just started getting, like really just screwed up, right? Because that's why they give you shampoo, right? Because you need both shampoo and conditioner. You don't just use conditioner.  And that's how we ended up. I said, oh, okay, this is pretty funny. This guy's got a good sense of humor and then we started to talk a little more about better ways of getting work done, what could be more efficient. And it really started, for me, at least it's been a really great relationship because I tend to think about, that would be so cool or I'm very much on the more creative kind of dream side about stuff. And Fred really loves to actually build the stuff and really make it work. And so it's really fun going back and forth from like kind of too dreamy to just get something done now and finding that sweet spot in the middle where you actually go after something that you can achieve, but you think about it a little bit before you get it just completely done and move forward. Right. I imagine it's got to be a lot of fun because when we talked to Fred in 2013, we talked about kind of the story of the beginning of Service Now. Now he always wanted it to be a platform. But as everybody knows, nobody buys platforms, right? Because who's going to buy a platform from a startup? You buy an application to solve a problem if it's a platform that then evolves into other things. So be it, but that's really not the way to get started. So then he built the applications around what he knew which was IT service management. But now as things evolve and he's very flexible to opening up that platform as well as, as you said, what is the user experience? How do people interact with the application? He's not tied to some dogmatic feeling about how that should work. So for you to come in with a kind of a new point of view, really from a design centric and clearly what Apple has shown time and time again, design matters, UI matters, look and feel matters. Really great opportunity, I would imagine, to meld the two things together. Yeah, it was just one of those things, just auspicious timing. And you're right, design is so huge. I mean, people like to talk about Apple, but I think even more compelling is take a company like Hyundai or Kia. 10 years ago, if you were driving a Kia, you'd made a poor life decision probably or just getting off the ground. Nowadays, people like to tell you they just bought the new Kia. And it's not that the engines have changed very significantly, it's that they've got great design sense now and people want to be seen in the car and it feels better to drive.  I think the Kia fits my personality better. I identify with that product. Right. And then the latest fruition of that is the watch that you're wearing that was talked about in the keynote. So for the people that didn't see the keynote, give us a little story on the background of the watch, kind of the vision behind the watch and the reality of what you've got on your wrist right now. Sure, so I don't know if I should show this to the camera at all if that works, if it doesn't. Can you guys see it? Yes, no? Okay, good. Good enough. Lift it up. Whoa, hold on. I'm gesturing. He's gonna put a cool face on the front. Here we go. All right. All right, super. So, yeah, the idea with the watch was, you know, it's funny, the same thing keeps happening. Like when people first started getting the ability to browse on their mobile phones, they ended up, you know, people ended up loading up, you know, desktop friendly web pages. And you probably remember like doing lots of this side ways and in the corner trying to read everything. And then a few years later, technology caught up and you had mobile friendly web pages that where you just, you know, you're just doing the vertical flick, right? Right. And I think the same thing kind of happened with the watches, you know, the watches came out. I actually bought, I was a Kickstarter guy for the Pebble, you know, and then the Apple Watch came out. But the experience, you know, past the hardware hadn't really caught up. We're trying to fit the mobile phone experiences into the watch form factor and it's not ideal. There's less ability to gesture around on the device. There's less that you can see. You don't have the real estate. So my thinking here was, you know, especially with the new watches that have been coming out, they're starting to look really good. There are some really nice industrial designs on the watch front now that weren't even there a year ago. And that's gonna bring a different clientele into the smart watch market. These are people that they want to be seen with their watch. It's not just a tool. And so the question that I wanted to answer was, how do we make a watch face that you can monitor your work on that's so good looking that you wouldn't mind being seen with at a dinner? You know, and it has to be relevant as well. And I don't wanna reteach people how to use a watch. You know, we don't have to put them through an education camp on watches. So that meant going with the kind of natural, you know, round faced watch with some sort of radial way of displaying information. And that's kind of what led us to wanting to show this off today. And I firmly believe this way of displaying information on a smart watch is gonna be something we'll see more and more of in the future. Well, of course, and it goes back well beyond technology, right, back in the day when they started shooting film for movies, they shot them as if they were a play, right? Single camera point of view in the stage in front. And we see it time and time again. It takes a while for the way of consuming to catch up with the new technology. Yeah, people need to catch up with this new ability. That's exactly it. So based on that and some of your design thought, I mean, as you think of functions and applications for that form factor, what are the things that jump out that are just natural or appear to be natural? What are the ones that, hmm, maybe this isn't the best form factor? I think for me, so, you know, I need to get some feedback from other people as we keep moving forward with this. But one thing I see that might be very compelling is, for example, a lot of organizations use charts to determine velocity, you know, how long is it gonna take? For example, for you guys, maybe there's, maybe you have some sort of plan, okay, within five days we'll get all the cube videos cut and up on the website. And there's all these steps that need to take place in this order, this many per day for us to actually reach our goal, right? You have a burn down chart, essentially. Something like that I think can be very useful in this interface because you could track, you know, the expected velocity versus actual. And as it starts to come out of alignment you can actually see the circles start, you know, basically no longer overlapping.  My cube team doing the service now videos is behind schedule and I'm gonna have to get involved. I'm not saying that you're going to see it. And I'm looking at Patrick, pay attention. Wanna make sure you don't show up on the watch indicator. So, for example, what if you had several teams and, you know, you were worried about one of them? What if you had an interface on your phone where you could load up any number of faces for the different teams that you're monitoring? And the one that's worrying you right now, you know, maybe this next two weeks sprint there on or whatever, you're near the end of a release, you keep that right on your person and you can just watch and make sure, as things are going forward, that they're going forward in the right direction. So, stuff like that. It's very critical. It's in the forefront of my mind. It's one thing that's most important to me right now is the kind of thing you'd want to keep on your wrist. Much like in the old days, people would do with just the time, because there's no practical way to find out the time otherwise. And is the vision to build an app that runs on an Android watch or runs on an Apple watch? Of course. And we actually have a proposed design for the Apple watch already. It's ready to show. I just, you got to pick one. And I said, you know, this is a little different. People have been working with a round form factor. And I'm a firm believer in sticking with that, which was generated originally by sundials. I think that people respond better than that aesthetically. And so we showed that today. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think some of your comments, you know, there's been a lot of design work gone into watches for a long, long time. So, you know, why not leverage the work that was done before. Right. So, and I think kind of this new way to work and getting away from email. And you know, you guys are on a good track. So as you look at, you know, what are some of the things you look at from, you know, our daily lives are not work lives that you're trying to incorporate more into, you know, how we get work done leveraging service now. What are some of the, are there some big themes that you kind of work towards? Are there little itty bitty things that make big difference? How do you kind of slice that? I look at everything. You know, I go to a website to buy t-shirts and I might see an interaction that I like or user journey that just seems so elegant to me. And I take it back to the team and say, hey, everybody, try and buy a shirt here, you know, or maybe it's something on online banking or maybe it's something from a competitor or maybe there's a free product that does something that's similar to what we're doing in some aspect. And it just doesn't matter. I'll go in any direction, you know. I mean, I found some stuff on the Home Depot website, you know, a long time ago that I liked. So there's all kinds of crazy stuff. I take an influence from anything. One time, you know, talked about the Maldives, you know, there was one design that I was working on for something that we've released where I came up with the idea while I was trying to catch an octopus. The thing kept changing shape and hiding under a rock.   Anything can inspire anything else. You just have to kind of break down the barriers and just explore the space. Right, this is awesome. The other piece I think that's interesting on design is kind of the expected behavior. And it's funny, you said the octopus. I don't know what the Snapchat little critter thing. Yeah, I think he's a ghost. His Audi has a ghost, but he's got little legs and things. But, you know, when we use popular applications and they become kind of part of your, you know, five main things that you interact with, then it kind of, I think, builds in kind of an expected behavior because of the other things that I do. It should kind of work like this. So I would imagine those are again or some design elements that you can pull from kind of what we expect things to do. No, you're absolutely right. So, you know, the consumer space is where a lot of the money and energy goes into now just because literally everybody around us has a computer in their pockets, right? So the market is so huge that it just makes sense for a lot of the money to go into that consumer market instead of the business market, you know? And so that's where a lot of the experimentation, a lot of the risk is being committed to. And we see what works there, especially in our industry, we see what's working outside because, you know, when we hire a new employee that's in their 20s, let's say, you know, they're not coming off of using, I don't know, Bugzilla to find a date or something, right? I mean, they're using Tinder or, you know, they're using Snapchat and these kinds of experiences are what they regard as the baseline. It's got to be at least as easy as Tinder for me to say if I like or don't like something because I use that every day and that's working and it's better than anything else. The best you've had is the best you know of, right? And so that's the big challenge for enterprise software in particular is to be good enough that we're not so bad to people that they wanna go use something else and say I don't wanna use enterprise software, I'll just use a free app somewhere. That's what we're competing against. And it's really challenging too because when you're building a platform, you're not exactly sure how people are gonna use it. You can't for sure know who your user's going to be. It's not like building Tinder. With Tinder, we know you're trying to date people, but if I was just building a swiping app to decide whether you wanna do stuff or not, I don't know what you're gonna use it for. Launch a nuclear attack. Swipe left, swipe right. Oops, wrong one, now you need a confirmation box. What if it's just swipe left or right for some person I like or don't like? Well, I don't want a confirmation box. So there's these challenges you have that are inherent to building an enterprise platform which means that you have to build in a lot of additional kind of reference material to kind of help people as they customize the experience, make it something that their end users aren't gonna throw up their hands and say, forget it, I'm not gonna do this. Right, and it's funny how the best stuff suddenly becomes baseline in an instant, right? It's no longer best of now it's baseline, now it's table stakes. And yesterday. And it's funny, the design, my favorite little design example, I used to share with my kids all the time, is should the song pause on Spotify when my phone rings or should it keep going so it picks up right where it was at the end of the ring? There's no answer, right? It's a design question. It's not a math problem. That's, you're going to options and you pick which one. There you go. So last thing before I let you go, which I think again is a fundamental shift between what was before and what is now is this whole idea of training and adoption and how long and how hard it should be for people to figure these things out. The kids today on the apps that they experience in their life, they don't ever go to training, they never look at a manual. They don't even think, I don't even know if they would know what that means except for in the context of when they go to school. So again, another design challenge, but you're talking about much more complex software than liking, not liking sharing with my friends. So how are you kind of thinking about the concept of training and self-service learning? Well, I think it's contextual. It depends on which product you're talking about, what kind of user you're talking about. But in a lot of cases, that's one of the things I really love about a mobile interface is that it really forces you to make the hard decisions. It's like going on a camping trip and you can only bring what you can carry on your back. Right, right. So a lot of the options that people don't usually use, that 80% of options you don't need on a desktop interface, you just, you don't provide an affordance for them on the mobile interface. You have to go to desktop. And in a way, that minimalism drives a better design because you really get to the meat of the problem. What do people really need? And so if you approach it from that perspective, like we call it mobile first, right? That's why you call it mobile first. You design from mobile first. You design so a user manual is not going to be needed. Excellent. All right, so we're running out of time. Give you the last word. As you kind of look out into the design landscape and you said you look at a lot of things, what are some of the things that have been intriguing recently, some new things that you're like, wow, that's pretty creative, that's pretty innovative. I'm not sure I can use it or not, but it's certainly kind of something to keep an eye on. Okay, yeah, I can mention something. So one thing in particular I worked with. So there's this product, I don't know how specific I'll get, I'll keep it vague. So I was using this product to find out pricing over time for some sort of good or service. And normally in that situation what you do is you want to buy this product at a certain date. And normally what you do is you pick the date and then you go through a list to try and find the pricing. And I recently saw this design, I really loved it, and instead of doing that, what it did was it would take you to a list of that stuff on a mobile device, but then it would also show a trend line underneath over time of the pricing on a Sparkline graph so you could immediately visually say, ah, that's close to the date I was hoping for the pricing to be at that level, I'll just touch that point on the Sparkline and bam, the list updates to show you those lowest prices of all of you, the best deal. That's what it's all about, right? The ability to get people the information they need so that they can make a decision as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. And in the right density, that's the other thing I was thinking.  Yeah, you want the ability to customize the experience for you. All right, well Troy, thanks for spending a few minutes with us, we'll have to come down, we haven't been to San Diego, we'll have to come down to San Diego. Go surfing. Visit the office, go surfing, you pop the tin up, it's a little adjunct event for Knowledge 17. We'll have to talk to the team and get that on the plan. Thanks for stopping by. Sounds great, thank you. All right, Jeff Rick here with Troy Asmoon. We are at Service Down Knowledge 16 at Mandalay Bay. You're watching theCUBE, we'll be back on this next segment after this short break. Thanks for watching.


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started. Okay the recording has started. All right hello and welcome to the Hyperledger technical steering committee meeting. Everybody is welcome to participate in our open-source community and this call as long as you abide by our antitrust policy and our community code of conduct. We should check both those out in detail but in short the latter is be polite. All right we have a lot of things to discuss today or at least we've got some discussions that I anticipate might take a while including our ongoing discussion about expansion and convergence. So what I'm going to try to usher us through the first several topics here with the hopes of leaving as much time as possible for that discussion. But we do want to make sure that we've got everything covered so feel free to speak up if we're moving too quickly. First up for the announcements the election is underway. If you have contributed this year which is something like a commit or participating towards a work product in a working group you should have gotten a form in email or you should have subscribed to the contributors list and you can see all that at the link in the agenda if you are missing something. Last week we heard about the new meeting to get the marketing team and the contributors together to make sure that the projects are being conveyed in a way that the contributors to those projects are happy with or vice versa that they can help the marketing committee better promote those projects. So make sure that you're taking advantage of that meeting. Link is there for that as well. And then we've got a boot camp coming up in Russia. I guess I could have put these things in a slightly different order. We've got the maintainer summit first in Minneapolis followed by the boot camp in Moscow the following week and links are up for both of those. Last week we also took ownership from each of the the TSE members took some ownership to go reach out to different maintainer communities to make sure that they're all recruited to participate. Saw some threads for some of those. So thanks for following up on those. We are looking for more input on the agenda for that summit in particular and you can feel free to add that directly to the page for the maintainer summit. And then the last announcement is kind of a pre announcement that the diversity stability and inclusion working group has started designing the community survey. We want to use that to baseline the diversity and stability and inclusion status of the community but also looking at maybe getting the developer survey questions that we've done previous years integrated with that. So looking for some initial feedback on that and we'll bring something for review probably in a week or two. It's sort of just started at this point. All right. Do we have looks like we've got the rest of yeah okay got everybody else here so great just in time for the voting topics. So composer maybe about a year ago started signaling that they wanted to wind up new feature development and they formalize that now in a note that you should have seen on the TSE list looking to move the project formally to deprecated status. In the policy that we ratified recently projects their maintainers can request to move to deprecated status and the intent is that after six months then the project would be end of life and archived. In the note to the TSE Simon noted that they might want to continue to merge fixes beyond the six months and I see no issue with that. So open it up to some brief discussion here if anybody has any objections to allowing composer to move to deprecated status. So my I guess it's a clarification to me end of life means we're not doing anything with it. I'm fine with it going to deprecated status but if they're still going to fix certain you know issues that that are found then it's not really end of life right or is it think stages. The first is deprecated where the intent is that the maintainers are trying to fix at least emergency issues and the community can be moving off to other tools and then the second is end of life to where there won't be any more changes to that project. So is it correct to say that the plan is to deprecate it and then wind down towards end of life in six months but with Simon's note that they might take longer than six months meaning they might fix things longer than does that six month window. Right is Simon on himself or Caroline or Dan all right I don't see them on but yes that's that's what I read from the email that they want to move immediately to deprecated status which is effectively what they've been in for a while now but they want to keep composer in deprecated status for about six months but they just want to keep that end date loose so if they need to merge in an emergency patch they can still do that. Any issues with that? Well I'm fine with it going I just if we declare it end of life then we shouldn't do more to support it at all I think by definition so is end of life a separate voted on step as well? Yes versus okay so then yeah no I'm fine with this. Okay I think we said that we had to take a vote is that sound right Arnaud? Yes I think that would be good. All right so let's do just a voice vote then who's taking minutes this week by the way it's like Dave's on? Yeah I'm here are we doing this roll call vote? No we'll just we'll just do a voice vote I just wanted to make sure that yep I yeah we're freaking this is being recorded yeah and Ry is here so he should be recording it so the votes will be captured and reflected in a minute. Excellent all right so all in favor of allowing composer to move to deprecated status. Any opposed? Any abstaining? All right that passes okay on to the Gardner proposal and where we left off with Gardner sort of dovetails into the subject that will follow this which is the TCF proposal there's some observation of some functional overlap there with Gardner being an oracle and TCF having an aspect that is potentially like an oracle and there was a request that those two communities talk and come up with a plan so my understanding of that plan is that Gardner would like to create a lab for the Gardner code base and then also simultaneously to join the TCF community and work towards integrating components that come out of the Gardner code base and otherwise working to improve and create the TCF code base. Is there anybody from Gardner proposals on and or TCF that can say if I've got that correct? It's Eugene Jarmusch from TCF I think so but I think there is somebody from Gardner as well. Yeah this is Ekin here I'm from Gardner and yeah yeah this is what we agreed on doing this week with TCF. That's wonderful well I'd be happy to sponsor that lab if you still need a sponsor and the process for creating a lab is posted up on the GitHub site there for the labs but we can also direct you to that on chat or the mail list as well. All right that sounds good yeah yeah definitely that'll take the kids up and how to get that lab started would be nice to you know maybe some sort of introduction the process like one-on-one as well or like somehow like that. Yeah absolutely so we can set up time to do that outside of this meeting. Well I think that's great that both of your communities were able to get together so quickly and show some quick collaboration. Yeah it's very excited we're very happy that the Gardner team to work together and yeah we're excited about TCF and the value that we can create together. All right thanks. All right without further ado then we can move on to the TCF proposal so Eugene would you like to take us through a summary of the proposal I think most or all the TSC has reviewed that over the couple weeks that has been out there. Sure so proposal obviously is online and the idea here that we're trying to address the scalability and privacy issues using the different trusted compute options starting from the Intel HGX and then adding additional components what is we're trying to do also trying to make sure that we use these trusted compute options to afloat execution from the blockchain and the most specific examples would be the example genomics that can run days or it can be IOT streams that can produce the volume of the data that too many to process on the normal blockchain and that is type of usages that we really care about we also want to present preserve the computational trust and we believe the trusted compute options and including ZK, MPC and ET environments provide a good way to instant computational trust to these type of use cases and the finally we trying to be to drive adoption of the standard base implementations because we believe that this is one of the major obstacles for adopting the DLT technologies in enterprise world so we're starting by implementing the specification that's called off-chain trusted compute specification developed using the enterprise Ethereum Alliance and using the trusted compute work group so that is pretty much kind of like the high-level summary and we do have a pretty good community that already interesting in the this project I think we have total 13 sponsors and practically all of them committed real resources to work on particular areas of interest and the good news that they focus on different areas so we can build up community make it productive I believe pretty quickly so that pretty much all I have for now and feel free to ask questions okay thanks for that Eugene one thing that sticks out to me is that I think this project has the largest sponsorship of any that we've seen so far if not the largest certainly close to the top so I think that speaks a lot for it Eugene can you talk a little bit about what the sponsorship commitments are to the project so we have a number of different commitments for some companies has been involved in these work already that for example like I exact the the initial code base that has been committed to hyperledger lab is actually came from three sources it came from the initially from the PDO project private data object it came from the then it was taken private and the Intel made the necessary adjustments and modification to turn this into TCF but also during this stage had the I exact as a contributor so I exact current level of contribution primarily focused on what we call a proxy model integration for the Ethereum and the they also working on the use case a vision the heavily promoted vision the call trust in tokens the chain link is a company known for town crier is going to work on the attested oracles the the gardener that we mentioned during the previous topic of that is actually they're going to work on some debugging tools we have IBM contribute as a contributor who is interested to integrating TCF with fabric Intel could obviously going to work on the core components we have an interest from Alibaba they want to provide the goal and environment by do also wants to integrate the MSAT environments we have a BGI the company from China working on genomics and they want to continue on that and also contribute to hyperledger fabric will have the contribution from can sensors but this is mostly on the architectural side because they very active in the EA we have collider collider is a company that provides manageability solutions and they're going to work to provide manageability solution for hosting trusted compute service and cloud services we have Microsoft that provided the Azure resources for the hosting T testnet and we also in discussion with them only some number other topics are there for integration for example for EA we have a certain there which is the bank federation that I'm going to work on a number of finance related use cases and finally we have we pro who is going to contribute to developing new form of the more trusted compute options like ZK and MPC okay that was quite a mouthful Nate did you want to pop your question out here to the to the group John take the lead on this question but as we've been diving through this project proposal it really clear that it seems to have pretty broad base support especially from the traditional smart contract approach for those of us who kind of sitting out a little bit outside of that smart contract approach I'm having a little bit more trouble understanding how it overlaps with both the transact project as well as with Ursa relative to both the aims around multi-party computation and zero knowledge proofs but also around how low level is the the component and how reusable it might be relative to to what we're doing with verifiable credentials and other mechanisms for creating at the stations so I can take just a piece of that anyway the so TCF sets up a lot of potential off-chain workers and it accounts for zero knowledge mechanisms but probably not yet in real specific detail so I think one of the ways that that I foresee interacting with this project and Ursa is trying to take what we're working on in Ursa and make sure that that can be leveraged in TCF and supply any requirements that that we can provide to make sure that that can be described through the TCF interfaces so if if TCF is an interface-based system what does that mean relative to hyperledger transact so that is a little bit different approach as I understand so we are looking into this area and my understanding then Tragnzact is mostly focused on the executing the smart contracts on chain and they may or may be a trusted compute options or they just can be a regular environments while the trusted compute framework focuses specifically on the only on the trusted compute execution options and executing these smart contracts or workloads we call them the off-chain so that is I think that is where the difference how to converge them we would have to look more closely and that maybe another way of thinking of it is the transact is about the sort of what you're executing and TCF is more focused at least in this incarnation about where where do you get the resources to do the execution so so Nick what would you how would you describe any convergence that might happen there you might very well have a way of running an instance of transact inside one of these trusted execution environments that are allocated so if you think of the the TE what what you are running inside the trusted execution environment that you're receiving is independent of the specification of TCF so you could put a transact instance inside there if you wanted to and and I'm saying that in the most absolutely general terms possible because I have no idea how to make that happen but but you might imagine that or you might imagine taking a wasm or EVM and running it inside there as well so it's it's less about so TCF is less about what runs and more about how to allocate the resources and get the results back in a trustworthy way yeah and I guess my concern here is as we get into a practical implementation that they'll both solve the easiest parts of the problem and they'll turn out to be the same parts of the problem but if we're kind of visualizing that there's overlap either in the personnel or in the approach in the sense that they're at least theoretically something they can come together I don't think I have much of a problem with that I don't see any theoretical problem I see a lot of a lot of engineering issues in order to make it work and and I will say from our side you know the work that we're doing and on the PDO is really the research that's feeding ideas into things like TCF and so you know trying to come up with for example a wasm contract interpreter that could run inside an enclave that could be you know a stepping stone towards a more general execution environment and those are the kind of things that we're worried about yeah so how I think of them at a high level is transact as a library that facilitates integration for contract interpreters and TCF is in a way a set of contracts that facilitates discovery and dispatch of workloads to off-chain stuff and that off-chain stuff is where maybe there's another potential integration point that really Mick was talking more about that if you're going to treat that off-chain execution environment as a smart contract interpreter then maybe you would leverage the transact library in how you construct that but I see them as occupying principally different areas I think so the other end of the integration sorry for this as well is and the bit that interests me about TCF and Gardner is scheduling your off-chain computation from a smart contract so requesting some work to be done and that happened I think the other perhaps dividing line maybe to draw there is that this is a kind of this is an asynchronous model you wait to get the results back whereas transact is synchronous so just a question because I'm not a big security guy but is this reliant on SGX or is it one option it's a one option okay because SGX hasn't been accepted by the upstream kernel right by what it's has it been accepted by the ups in the upstream Linux yet yeah there are definitely Linux drivers for it there's Linux drivers for it but it's not upstream Intel offers drivers right not let's go too far down I yeah I was gonna say I don't know that that's a I hear what you're saying the installation process of the management processes are pretty straightforward so yeah GCF is a spec in the talks about how you could do off-chain trusted execution either through a trusted execution environment or through empathy or nizek so yeah so yeah so mark just to remind you that one of the contributors one of the sponsors is specifically focused on adding the zero-knowledge pieces of this as well and there are other TEs beyond SGX that would be potential places where you could hardware-based TEs where you could do this kind of execution as well. The spec is actually pretty general. Do we have any contributors or maintainers looking to support anything up in the SGX? I think Eugene mentioned one of the companies is is actually focused on doing the zero-knowledge group yeah the Russians on it and it's still very early clearly the first implementation will be from the SGX side of things but that is also clearly not where we want to stop. Okay thank you. So I had a question. Sorry I have another question to just follow up with that. So I think it's still very early to talk about you know the release of this framework someday but what would you envision the release of this framework would contain would that be SGX in the addition to zero-knowledge or in addition to other trusted framework implementation or you would come out or would it be okay for you to come out with only one solution provider? No the one solution provider probably won't work because even the specification and its current state calls out for these three different types of transaction options we expect that to continue to grow and one of the key objectives for the release of the TCF would be to make sure that we support all of them or at least most of them so that is the criteria for the release well let's call that product release of the TCF. Great thank you. Okay my question yeah thank you. It's kind of it's a little bit what was discussed earlier but I'm wondering let's imagine we have a network with lots of participants that's what we want to have on networks and you've got one participant who has chosen to do their trust would offload in SGX and you've got another participant who's decided to do it with zero knowledge and those participants want to do business together or transact or operate on the chain in such a way that they both end up executing their contracts or they move something between them or whatever so they have to trust the operation of the entire chain and both of those contracts into the operation. What's the plan for how person A or party A would validate the attestation and the quality and the security of the TEA chosen by party B and vice versa is there ever any suggestion or intention that all system participants should be able to deep quote all as all trusted aspects of the system because the diagram on the wiki only really goes as far as the contract owner trusting the offload of a bit of their contract to their chosen enclave technology but of course not everybody trusts the same stuff. What's the thought about mixing and matching here? So the it's a very dry document but there is EA specification and from that EA specification the summary would be that is a specification itself treats all trusted compute options identical and treats them as a black box as long as party A and party B agree that two different trusted compute options equally suitable for them they can execute their workloads in those options obviously the workloads going to be different so how are they going to know that there is going to be a published information attestation reports about the each of the workers so they can know that they can trust those workers and once they execute it there is a mechanism how they it's called a seeds how these receipts recorded on the blockchain and the boss parties can acknowledge they agree with the results. So fundamentally the is the assumption that they have to be mixed and matched freely for the execution obviously since we don't have real implementation for multiple options yet we will have to finalize the details of the specifications and obviously the implementation to make this real but that is definitely the intent to mix and match them as needed. And just to be clear on that Eugene what you're saying is that the trust relationship to really punted to the parties that are trying to agree with one another rather than being formalized in the specification right? That's correct so certification is kind of dry specification and it leaves a significant room for the interpretation and so in the application specific implementations so obviously we cannot define everything in this back. Okay I think that runs the course of the questions that we've seen so far in the interest of time and getting to our expansion and convergence like to move that we take a vote on the TCF proposal. Somebody like to second that? Second. All right let's go ahead and do a roll vote as this is a project proposal. Do we typically do roll votes for project proposals? That's my recollection. I'm getting to the I'm getting to the list. The list is at the end of the page. Otherwise you can just click on the technical steering committee on the left and you'll have a list of people. So Brian is pointing out something good that we should probably approve condition on a new name from the marketing committee or a new name in general? Yeah so I think what we decided is that we don't approve views that'll be worked out between the marketing committee and the project proposers. Okay Arno? Yes. Bow Wow? Yes. Ben? Yes. Chris? Chris? Yeah. Dan? Yes. Hart? Yes. Kelly? Yeah. Mark? Yes. Mick? Yes. Nathan? Yes. Silas? Yeah. Motion passes. All right congrats to the TCF team. Excellent thank you guys. All right now on to the main event in some sense. Expansion versus convergence. We've had pieces of the discussion over the last year and the opportunity to bring in Bezu is sort of crystallized some of the possible outcomes of of those two options. I've linked in here some of the thoughts that have been captured on the mail list and back to the notes from last week. I think we may have even talked about it some in the week before that. So want to open it here to some discussion so that we can get all of our thoughts on the table and then ideally we'll be in a position to vote on Bezu after that. So I guess can I start? Yeah I was gonna I was gonna help tee it up in case people would put your word to get going but please. Okay I'll get it rolling and I'll sort of bring back you know or bring up the the points that I was trying to make and some of the more recent comments in the thread. You know I think that you know it's fine if in fact you know Hyperledger is going to have a feel that's more like Apache than say Cloud Foundry right. You know where there's multiple projects some are competing or you know overlapping in their capabilities and you know maybe you have different constituencies or what-have-you versus projects and sub-projects that are really coordinated and organized around a common framework or something like that right. Because again when you think about okay so let's just consider from a sort of a marketing perspective if you will Apache markets Apache and the Apache way they don't market Hadoop open whisk you know Kafka rabbit whatever that's you know those are the projects are not the thing that's important the important thing from an Apache perspective that they communicate when you know they have their annual conference or at various other venues they're promoting the Apache way right how they help projects incubate how they help you know drive very rigorous IP licensing regime over the code base so that the code bases can be trusted makes it easier for people to consume the open source that comes out of Apache because they can trust that it's not gonna be wackadoodle from an IP perspective and the fact that they have you know a ton of volunteer mentors in the community that work with the projects as they come in and ask you know seek to be incubated and and work through their incubation stages to become active such that it scales to I don't know it's close to 300 projects I think Brian maybe you know more than I do but it's about 300 or so projects now but again you don't see Jim Jielski or Sam Ruby or you know anybody else running around promoting Kafka for instance right that's interrupt that's not quite true we do have the concept of hats horn this is Jim Jielski speaking by the way and so for the projects that I am involved with I do a lot of promotion about those projects just right but you just said you're wearing your whatever project hat that's right yeah well that's that's a clear distinction from wearing your hat in your formal role on the on the Apache board or in the leadership right okay I just wanted to clarify the confusion that the ASF as an entity does not provide services or promotion to the projects beneath of it well but they do so conference itself you'll see that the number of sessions which are specifically about Apache itself the Apache way is very very small regarding the actual projects that are being promoted but I'll let you finish yeah but my point though is that okay again there's no overarching architecture you know technical steering committee what have you that says how the projects have to relate to one another or any of that right there's it's definitely the whole function of the ASF is to provide a safe place to collaborate and build communities around projects that's it right I mean you know at one point you know it was Brian and a few of his colleagues building you know the HDP server but it's grown into all kinds of stuff areas that had nothing to do with the original purpose of the ASF in terms of what projects it was hosting and and and in fact many of the projects have sort of competing marketing endeavors to sort of you know Cassandra is better than spark or whatever you know and and that's fine right but Jim you don't have to run around and choose sides right you know or try and make you know sort of arguments about what you should you you know should you use spark in this circumstance or Cassandra or Hadoop or whatever in some other circumstance you're neutral on that point unless of course it's a product that you're working on in which case you're speaking on behalf of the project I guess that's my point right when we have a lot of the messaging that comes you know Brian you know when you go and talk and you present here the collection of projects that we have but then there's this sort of inherent need to try and rationalize them against one another when in fact it's just a collection right if that's the case you know they may be organized around a common sort of a theme of blockchain but boy I tell you I it just I don't know how you get to the point of trying to do the reconciliation of saying without necessarily getting you know into sticky sort of situation about recommending what people should do and yet I think they come to expect well hypervisor should be sort of telling us what to do this is this is the problem that I have again I'm not I'm fine if that's what we want to be but if we are going to be like that then we have to provide a means where basu can sort of market itself and fabric and sawtooth and what have you and yeah there may be projects that are designed and intended to be you know like Ursa and transact and TCF and so forth that could be used in multiple contexts but you know what do we do with the top-level ones hey Chris this is Brian since you call me out specifically on this again I'm not calling you out I'm just making that observation it's it's a challenge for sure I don't want to minimize that and it's a challenge that can only be really met by working with everybody on the different projects to describe people articulate the unique advantages of the different projects and the more that they directly overlap obviously that's that's hard right and ironically the more we work towards convergence the less those differences may be right but but we're up for it I think you know we I think we went down a path pretty early on that was a middle ground between you know Apache you know having having a really expensive from it anybody can come in or or any of the kind of single architecture kinds of projects out there including the Linux kernel right but but this is not out of trend with where you know the cloud native compute foundation goes or you know some of the newer projects CDF continuous delivery foundation those sorts of other examples I gave and I think we're not alone in trying to figure out the answers to these questions but that this picture of a portfolio organized community like hyper ledger is is becoming more than norm and we're certainly eager to learn from others on how we can be both champions of the broad as well as champions of the specific and anyone who's heard me talk has probably heard me go into you know advantages of many the specific platforms including fabric and I don't plan to let up the gas on that so I think I think let me just wrap up with convergence is is a process it's not an end state and I I feel like as long as everybody is committed to other projects coming in are committed both that they are distinct in what they offer like they are actually offering something new and genuinely committed to participating in convergence related processes no matter what the end state ends up being then the night that's that's all we need to be able to go out and be a champion for each of these projects and I think I think to be able to pull together as a technical community as a portfolio okay thanks Brian thanks Chris I think there are some other viewpoints that were being discussed on the list more on the the technical aspect as opposed to marketing and so maybe if if those individuals can speak up at this point particularly on that architectural convergence front looks like Hart and Nate are battling for who can make the longest paragraph on chat yeah and I'll go ahead and summarize what I've sort of said is that sure if we have more projects and you know more things going on in hyper ledger it might increase fragmentation and make it harder to converge within hyper ledger but it's naive to think that if we don't include projects that they're just going to go away they're still going to compete for contributors for users for everything else with this outside of hyper ledger potentially in a much less friendly way and we will drive more convergence in the space as a whole I think if we accept worthwhile projects and that that's just my opinion in a very brief summary and my paragraph reflects some of that same sentiment that we're really trying to get the best folks at the table to collaborate on ideas because it's not just about the projects we have in the greenhouse today it's about getting the right people to talk about things so that we get the right have projects in the greenhouse for tomorrow and you know my hope with that is that we get a lot of quality contributors that will help think about things differently and help us move forward in the convergence efforts that we've been working on yeah and I want to follow up with with that with an observation that today and I said this before blockchain technology is in its infancy we need we need more innovation we need more creativity in this space and and you know because of that your competition is good you know I I model a quote from the godfather you know keep your partners close but keep your competitors closer so so today we see well you know we bring in another competitive framework but but you know it it's good for us you know competition drives us better you know competition help us or at least you know it forces us to do better so so because of that in my mind and I on the other hand I also believe in the people right you know packages dropped in I heard 26 developers or so so there's a lot of people here and I believe that they will contribute in other common projects like OSA like transact like the project that we talked about and voted today so to me it is a number game a bigger community is likely to be a stronger community so you know regardless of the the technical in the innovation that they have today even though I feel like you know not a whole lot of that coming into and on framework that we have evaluated but the people behind that would really enrich our community and because of that you know I I am favor of having more competitors rather than that all right thanks for that Ben Mark's got his virtual hand up yeah so I guess I think it's great that we're having this discussion and I guess a question for Brian and Dan since Dan's our representative on the board is how much of this is really a technical steering committee decision and how much of this goes back and it's a board decision as it impacts the direction of hyperledger itself well I think our precedence up to this point is that we that we accept a variety of overlapping projects with an ever-raising bar on on what on what differentiation means for those it would be nice if the board could have weighed in on the the long-term picture that they would like to see as far as expansion versus convergence that's certainly something that I think I would still appreciate hearing from the board but I think we'll need to resolve this immediate question before the board next meets on the 16th and probably would not be able to give us feedback I'm guessing for yet another meeting after that and I won't speak for the board but I mean Mark you've been on those calls as well as you're a representative of the general members to it and you know I think I think they they want to be supportive of all the convergence efforts and want to figure out how and we're trying to work to prepare for them options for the next budget cycle and how to or if we want to you know specifically resource certain convergence efforts and what that might mean you know how do we just help the community move further along on that but I I do think they expect us to figure out this kind of meta road map kind of story in the technical communities I think they they believe there's strength in that obviously they're concerned about whether we get overloaded from a resource and staffing and marketing point of view as well but you know a pretty and just for the sake of everyone else a pretty regular part of the board meetings is a pipeline a sense you know a report to the board of you know here's the projects coming down the pipe that we know of you know sometimes we don't know of them but you know every board meeting we have a conversation about kind of what that pipeline looks like I and you know there hasn't been any pressure to say no on the basis of lack of resources I but yeah again I don't I won't I don't want to speak for the board on that front but I have not heard anything negative about the principle of trying to attempt to both expansion and convergence simultaneously okay yeah thanks I just wasn't sure how much sports business I could discuss on the call so I this is on I have to say I totally agree with Nate on the point that you cannot force those things I mean this is open source people will do what they are interested in and you know the TSE for sure has been very supportive of collaboration across all the projects from the beginning right and I don't think that has changed and you know we have now seen a few projects and I think everybody welcomes that but it's not like we can sit there and say hey you need to collaborate with this guy and conversion and so and so what I do find an interesting question is you know we keep coming and VPIN keeps bringing up the role of the working groups and then Mika said before you know the working groups have no teeth and it seems to me that you know there's actually a link to what might you know the role that EA might play in some way there is you know if we were to define some standard modules that could be used by different frameworks for instance should we have some kind of specification that says this is the standard API for this or the standard protocol whatever the case might be and you know who is in charge of doing this unless we had a charter where people say hey this is where we're going to define these things and if you care you should participate I think the working group will still suffer from lack of you know recognition and support and I think we discussed some of that last week or no as well and you know it would seem you know maybe we don't call it a working group but we discussed how while everybody has their own language programming language and there's no clear APIs for a lot of things and it's sort of when you pull something out of Project X to make it a separate project that can be reused I haven't necessarily seen and maybe I've just missed it but you don't really you know you define what the API is so if it's back into your project you don't really work with the other projects up front to come and say okay you know what's the best API to get reuse here and I had asked them you know well could the architecture working group be used for something like that and the answer was that's not really what they do but I think you know if we want to do a lot of reuse and convergence it would be great to have some type of team to go off and you know maybe try to figure out common APIs and things like that and how to use things and people migrate to that over time. Okay I have to say I mean I mean this very you know I spend a lot of my time working on standards and the way those things happen is not by force right it's people get together and say hey we all have that same problem can we all you know come up with common solution that we can all then support and remove a pain point for everybody and so to me again this is this notion you have to make it possible but you cannot force it in this case we would have to have some kind of shorter for working group to say hey this working group is going to define how to do this or how to interface right this kind of component what what's expected of the component what kind of behavior and and so on and then you know if there is enough people who feel like yeah this is valuable then we would have a support and people would engage and create this and then support them in their framework and then there would be a win for everybody but we don't really have that mechanism today and I don't think the kind of working groups we have today have this kind of support. Okay and with that we're down to the last five minutes here for me what I've been thinking is that Bezu or Pantheon would be successful with or without hyper ledger I think it's got enough backing behind it so the question for me is really would hyper ledger be more successful with with Bezu with another stack and I think what I what I hear that's persuasive to me in this discussion is that we're more likely to have the kinds of collaborative discussions with that community if Bezu is a part of the hyper ledger greenhouse or open range land as Nate is alluding to there but I think either way uh we owe that project a vote and so I move that we take up a vote now on Bezu. Would anybody like to second that? I second that. Okay um Arno. Yes. Fawao. Yes. Ben. Yes. Chris. Yes. Dan. Can I pause longer for more drama than than Chris provided? Yes. Hart. Yes. Kelly. Yes. Mark. Yes. Mick. Yes. Nate. Yes. Silas. Yep. It passes unanimously. Fantastic um so that went quickly enough we have maybe a couple minutes uh Mick wanted to give a quick update and then I would like one or two minutes at the end for something. Yeah I'll make sure that this is really quick um so I know I've been so there've been a number of discussions about okay not sure who that was um there've been a number of discussions about kind of futures of working groups um some have been on the mailing lists we've been trying to capture all of the notes um on the working group task force page um we've got at least a start uh a couple of the proposals just wanted to invite in particular um kind of the working group leads to go and I take a look at that um and make sure we get some feedback on it uh so um I think at a minimum the convergence that we're having right now is that the working groups have to be much more finely grained in their scope um focus much more on specific tasks or problems rather than general areas um and then the question becomes can we take the other role of working groups which has been to foster discussion and either leave that as the role of the working group or move it over to um to more structure so that's essentially where the discussion is going at this point um please weigh in on the ideas that we have out there okay thanks and I moved on so quickly I don't think I gave a uh congratulations to the Bezu team so congrats for that uh and uh so as we close up this meeting this is the last meeting of this technical steering committee uh as the vote concludes next week a newly enacted collected group will take over here maybe we'll have some of the same faces maybe some different ones but I would like to uh at least personally thank everybody who has served on this technical steering committee uh I think over the the year or years that we've been working together on this we've found good ways to collaborate uh especially where some of us have started in maybe more adversarial competitive positions we've arrived at more collaborative competitive positions and I think that's to the betterment of the whole community so uh thanks to each of you for the extra time in your day that uh this committee is consumed for you and thank you Dan for being such a capable chair thanks everyone's out first all right and with that we will draw this meeting to a close thanks everyone thanks