So good morning, everybody, also from my – and first let me thank the organizers for the invitation to deliver this talk. It's a great pleasure to be here, and it's my first visit to Vietnam also. Unfortunately, it's a brief one I should stay longer, but it's not possible. I should also say that the – by the way, that the – apart from the YouTube and so forth, the slides will be available on the Bank of Finland website after this presentation. So let me – here's the outline of my talk. I will just very briefly talk about the background, the historical background to the developments, then more in Europe and a little bit internationally. Then let's just brief summary. Then we look at the Nordic countries. I will tell a little bit about the Nordic countries in general and then about the financial systems during the regulation time. And then we'll look at what the main steps of regulation were and get to the main issues and difficulties there in the Nordic deregulations and the lessons. And then also, if we have time, a little bit about the crisis management. So there's a lot of material, especially in the first part on the slides, and I'll just go quickly over it. So the useful starting point really for this financial deregulation period is really World War II. There was great – in Europe in particular, there was great destruction on the war in most countries, many countries, and the economies obviously had to go back to basics in some ways, ask how to fund the reconstruction and industrial development. That was the main goal of the financial system. And the regulatory frameworks were tight controls, rationing credit controls on interest rates and so forth. And obviously also, after World War II, the public debt levels were very high in most countries. Then the process went on. There was a gradual lifting of financial controls that started already in the 1950s and continued until the 1970s in most European controls. And interest rate controls were part of this. They were lifted in – depending on – some timing was different in various countries somewhat. There were other deregulations also on the financial services and et cetera. I will not go into the details of these too much. The other front is the external dimension, of course. And so after World War II, basically there were fixed exchange rate dreams, tight capital controls as well. Then came the Bretton Woods developments, the institutions IMF, OECD. European Payments Union came already at the end of the 40s to handle killing of trade balances and some trade credit, obviously European Economic Community, OECD. And this quest for also which is important is the liberalization of capital movements. That was initiated already these ideas in the early 1960s. Some countries had, in fact, already – were already without capital controls and I'm listing some countries there. Of course then came the Bretton Woods system broke down in the early 70s and that created a turbulent period in Europe. Something called the European Monetary System was created in the late 70s. That was basically a fixed exchange rates but adjustable ones and some mutual support there. And then in the 1980s this trend towards capital account liberalizations was renewed in Europe in the European Union. And then the Maastricht Treaty in the beginning of the 90s made it really one of the corner stones of European Union to have free movement of capital. The banking systems and financial systems I already mentioned, that was a gradual process and let me not get into details, it also became important in the EU level earlier and in particular right at the end of 1980s there was EU legislation on single banking license and single permit or passport for investment services, single market for financial services, etc. So there was a big push for unified financial markets and financial systems in European Union. There was one exception though which was that the banking supervision was left at the national level. There were discussions about that in the 90s about that as well. If we look at this whole process in terms of the banking side in Europe, what is remarkable is that there were very few financial crises, very few banking crises. There were problems with individual banks so there's a list there on the slides, but there were four major systemic banking crises as part of this process. Three Nordic countries in the early 90s and I'll obviously get to the details as I promised and then the other fourth case is Spain at the end of the 70s or early 1980s and these crises are big. I mean there's this well-known book and work by Climb and Reinhardt and Ken Rogoff and that lists the big five crises in advanced market economies before the current one and the three Nordic countries are there, Spain is there and then the fifth one is Japan in the early 90s. So relative to GDP the Nordic crises are big and they hopefully provide some useful lessons. So let me then move on to the Nordic countries and the first question is obviously why are they important? These are small countries but I guess they are generally important for considered to be advanced economies with high welfare states but nevertheless strong market economies. In terms of the finance deregulation story of course it's the three crises that are important, make them important. So that's not entirely a success story but there are some success parts to it as well especially in crisis management. So anyway here's the brief background on Nordics. I'm excluding Iceland, I should say I'm excluding Iceland, that is a fifth Nordic country but this is Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. So altogether quite small population about 22 million and they've had widespread ties between themselves. For example a common labor market was established already in the early 50s. Sweden actually stayed out of World War II so they had strong, they were the wealthiest in the 1970s and Finland had the biggest problems with wartime. We were heavily involved, had to defend the country against Soviet Union and we suffered a lot but managed to keep the Soviets out of the country. And then, and so that's the setting there, as I said the tight capital controls on finance and also foreign payments and so forth were in place in all of these countries right after World War II. Gradually already at the end of 1950s the foreign trade and associated payments schemes were liberalized. So that was an early part of the liberalization but so that is worth noting there. More generally these countries of course are known about the welfare state being egalitarian, socially cohesive with a strong democratic tradition, a relatively big public sector and it has still a strong influence on the economy, it had much bigger influence at that time in the 50s and 60s and 70s. As I said they were tight controls so this financial repression was prevalent very much so and it was used as an instrument for growth and industrialization policies. You have to have obviously the reconstruction after the war, especially in Finland but also in other countries and this quest for faster growth. And that meant that there were these, here's some data on it. So the comparison is this backward constructed data that red line on Euro area which you can view as sort of a Western European average and here are the four countries. So you can see, this is an index number, zero is at 1,100% is at 1985 and you can see that on the whole these countries have been growing rather fast. You can also see in the early 90s the big financial crisis there, especially big in Finland and I'll come back to the reason, but also Sweden and less so in Norway but there were also aspects of the crisis in Norway there. It started already in fact in the 80s there. So that's the growth performance. These countries also had high inflation, faster inflation than in several other Western European countries. So here's the reference countries are Germany in light blue and United States in red and you can see in this long series of consumer prices that the inflation was notably faster in the three, four Nordic countries. Here is the currencies, how the exchange rate behaved against the German mark in this period from 1960 onwards and you can see there little clips there, upward clips there and those are the devaluations and you can see there was a trend that the country, these Nordic currencies weakened against the German mark and that continued until the 90s, mid-90s roughly speaking. And there were big current account deficits. So this is somewhat shorter series from 1980 onwards and you can see that especially if you look at the countries you can see Finland almost always with deficits until mid-90s, Sweden also not so systematically but tended to have deficits. Norway is a different story because Norway of course became an oil producing country when the oil in the North Sea and on the coasts of Norway was discovered and made use of during the 1970s and they tended to have current account surpluses already in the early 80s and then there was a breakdown of the OPEC cartel in 1986 which you see very clearly in the green line for Norway and they got into big current account deficits for some years. Denmark also had a tendency for these current account deficits but they started to correct the system earlier in mid-80s which is also an important observation to make. So that's the background and let me now get to the financial systems. So what, here actually we have an interesting difference which I think is a useful lesson which is that Denmark followed the Western European trend of gradually liberalizing the financial system already earlier whereas the other three countries, Finland, Norway and Sweden, pretty much kept trying to keep the tight controls on credit and banks until 1980s. So Denmark had this and they avoided a system that they had banking problems, some banking problems but no systemic crisis in Denmark. So that's one lesson by the way. As I said, there were tight interest rate controls by the central bank, credit rationing and planning, you know, more or less tight planning of credit flows in the economy by central banks. The banking systems in Finland, Norway and Sweden, so I'm now excluding Denmark mostly for my discussion, were dominated by a few large banks and there were then many smaller banks, savings banks and these were mostly private ownership, under private ownership. There were some then government owned banks but mostly private ownership and capital for the banks was raised from the private sector. The banks carried out in practice the rationing, rationing of credit to households and firms under the tight monitoring by the central bank. Exchange rates, you know, this was very much first the Bretton Woods then after that pegged exchange rate to currency baskets. Tight capital account controls were in place in the 70s and 80s. There were long-term capital movements required permits and they were not necessarily easily granted. No short-term financial movements were allowed. The trade finance as I mentioned was relatively free already from late 1950s and even foreign exchange for travel was rationed. I remember when I was a young man, my first trips abroad, I had to get a permit from the Bank of Finland to get some, you know, relatively small sum of money in foreign currency when I went on my trip. The non-bank part of the financial system was small so there was obviously a stock market, bond markets. There was also an insurance sector but they were kept small and there were no major non-bank intermediaries except some special finance companies and basically no activities of foreign bank banks. Supervision was a very traditional sort of way focused on compliance aspects in lending and accounting and so, you know, no fraud, et cetera. There was no risk supervision basically. This was sort of a traditional accounting legal, legalistic supervision activities. As I said, regulated interest rates so that restricted competition. So banks had to compete in some ways. These were private banks and there was kind of a market there so what they tried, they tried to provide all kinds of services and new branches and so forth even though these were regulated but not so tight. Also there was no, these foreign banks were not allowed to establish subsidiaries there. Of course the legal system in the Nordic countries was quite strong so there, you know, bankrupted procedures, et cetera were in place in place there. This overall created a very stable banking system. The loan losses were small and non-existent, no crisis with them in the tightly regulated area. Obviously these were inefficient banks. There was large personnel, extensive branch networks and so forth which turned out to be quite costly and which had to be wound down to a large extent or reduced when the crisis broke out. And it's of course these tight controls protected independent monetary policy despite fixed exchange rates. You have to remember that the fixed exchange rate in principle you don't have independent monetary policy but if you have tight controls you do and so that was also the traditional mode. Then came the deregulation era and the starting point of that was really the fact that as the countries grew rather well in line with Western Europe and in some cases like Finland catching up with Western Europe, the economy became more international. There was more international trade, firms became international and so forth. So that was one part of the story that the countries, especially the big firms became international that created pressures to liberalize. There was also of course the international organizations IMF, OECD and EU also sought liberalizations of markets and also capital flows. And over time, especially in the 70s and beginning of 80s, leakages and loopholes to these financial controls emerged there. Various kind of form of gray domestic financial intermediation started to appear. Again, the country experience is somewhat different but for example in Finland what happened was that we had a fairly extensive trade with Soviet Union and in fact that of course is not a convertible currency but then what happened was the two central banks, the Bank of Finland and the central bank in Soviet Union had clearing accounts. So they basically, the payments for example for Finnish exports were made to the clearing account in Moscow and then that came into a corresponding balance in the Bank of Finland and then the Bank of Finland paid in Finnish currency to the companies, for their exports. But you have to remember that also the Finnish currency had capital controls and in fact this trade became bigger and was fairly profitable. So the companies had to ask what would we do with these extra funds? We can move them abroad, we can't invest in abroad. If we have spare funds, which after our own real investments, then they started to put them into this gray system. So that was one example of why this gray financial intermediation inside these countries developed. And then because of these leakages and loopholes and this tendency to go for a more open financial system internationally, the liberalization processes were started in the 1980s. And that involves a lot of individual acts. Here's the example, a timeline for Finland. I'm not gonna go, you can't even probably see it, but you can look at the slides afterwards. Basically the liberalization process was viewed as small steps, a large number of small steps going on. So if you've read the details, the big parts here are basically it's 1986 onwards. You can see that the pace also to some extent tightened. Here you start to see a freeing of capital movements in the international part. And here you also see that the interest rate controls were abolished, et cetera, on the domestic side. So this was the way it was also viewed apparently in the Bank of Finland. I was not in the Bank of Finland at that time. So that's part of the story. So let's start to discuss what the problems in financial deregulation are. So the first thing to realize in financial deregulation is that's gonna impose new constraints on the macroeconomic policies. If you realize the financial system, and in particular the foreign aspects of it, the leeway of domestic macroeconomic policies is limited. There is what's called the impossible trinity, which is that with free markets you cannot fix the exchange rate, domestic interest rates and quantity of finance, which you could do under Russian system. And so that is you have to let something go there, something let go there. So that's an important thing to realize in deregulation. And that fact was not necessarily fully appreciated at the time. Then there are a whole lot of questions you have to ask also, of course. One is that what's the order of liberalization? Do you go for the domestic liberalization first or the international aspects? Usually one goes for domestic liberalization first and then international aspects, capital movements, but you could in principle go the other way. And obviously you have to then more specifically ask for specific markets in the financial system in which order do you liberalize them? These markets differ in terms of the asset, in terms of maturity, what sectoral finance derivatives, et cetera, you have to go through all of these as well. All of these as well here. So that's another important issue in liberalization. What about currency denominations? Do you go for domestic liberalization in domestic currency or foreign currencies and also about exports and imports of capital? Which order do you do these things? And then also, what if you get into difficulties? Is it possible to respond to pressures and can you perhaps even reverse that? You see what happened in the Nordic countries, as I showed you, it was a long process but it concentrated on the second half of 80s in Finland and similarly for Sweden, Norway a little bit earlier and Denmark as I said is a different case. They turn out in the end, they liberalized both the domestic system and the currency markets and capital movements more or less in tandem in a relatively short period. And one other aspect which is worth emphasizing is that you have to decide possibly about changing the taxation of finance.  Is that gonna be continued or not? In for example, in the case of Finland they did not do anything with that. So we ended up with various problems in the Nordic liberalizations and let me discuss those next. First of all there was bad timing, especially for Finland and Sweden. The big steps as I said were done in right at the start of second half of 1980s and then the business cycle suddenly turned upward internationally. A part of it was the breakdown of the old cartel. For Norway of course that meant the recession and Carinthogan deficit so that's a different development. But they were lucky, in the case of Finland and Sweden a big boom developed as a result of these deregulations and the international upswing in the business cycle for Norway as I said they had a recession, Carinthogan deficits and that cut that boom short. And so for Finland and Sweden, the boom led into a systemic banking currency and economic crisis at the start of 1980s. Finland, there were some special features. One was the fact that for Finland there was also the collapse of the Soviet Union in the beginning of 1990s which was a big shock to Finnish exports so that was an additional fact that that was not present in the case of Sweden. I mentioned Norway, they had less of a boom. They had a major banking crisis though so but I'll come to that in a moment. Denmark had some isolated banking problems but no systemic crisis. So that's the setting. So the timing turned out to be wrong. And as I said Denmark was lucky, they did it more gradually as part of the European process which on the whole was relatively problem free. The other things were, as I said, this deregulation was perceived as a number of steps in these steps of little acts of liberalization, that focus clearly was insufficient. There should have been better guidance to banks, other firms and markets about that the regime is going to change. You're going to change from ration system to a relatively free market where there's going to be competition with flexible prices. And that's a big change for this because there was little realization that this liberalization to market-based finance is going to change the risk setting for banks and even firms and even households. You know risk management viewpoint really became important especially for banks and that was not perceived early on enough. And similarly in financial regulation that was not realized. It continued to be compliance regulation. And in macroeconomics, the countries tried to held on to the fixed exchange regime and that turned out to be problematic with free capital flows. And in the 90s there was a movement to flexible rates and adoption of inflation targeting. So the lessons are basically this financial knowledge is actually very important. You have to realize that if you go from ration systems to market-based finance, that is a new way of thinking. Traditional ways of thinking can be a trap and the reform is much more than just technical lifting of controls. The big question is, do you go for gradual approach or a big bang? Mostly it's recommended to have a gradual approach but big bang can work. Market attachment UK show that you can do things almost overnight in the foreign, they liberalized capital control, capital movements overnight pretty much. And then this timing is quite an important issue in here. And you have then macroeconomics, you have to realize why I already said the impossible trinity, also the taxation issues. And certainly I believe that the flexible exchange rate regime is worth having before you start to open the capital movements. Otherwise you run into problems like the Nordics did. There are benefits to this but there are also limits, I think. I think, but let me not get into that. That's a big subject on its own. So in the Nordic country, we had a financial crisis as we saw it. And here are some slides about that. So here are, I showed the real economic developments earlier. Here are some financial aspects. So here are real house prices in the four countries. And you can see that especially in Finland and Norway, in Finland, for example, in 10 years real house prices doubled. That's the blue line there. And then in the course of the first half of 90s, they almost came back to the old level. Not quite, but almost. That's the blue line. Norway also had a big rise in house prices and a big decline. They came down even to the 1980 level. Sweden, Lesso and Denmark. So there are some differences there. Here's the share prices. Share prices. And so the important part is this period here. This is of course the IT boom. So you should not look at that too much. Too much so here. But again, you see that again, big boom for Finland in share prices. Also for Sweden, these of course, where countries we'd had Nokia and Ericsson, respectively, and had a fairly big IT sector. Lesso in Norway, they had much less of IT at that time. Here's bank lending growth. You can also see that in the second half of 80s, a little bit earlier in Norway, there were big increases in bank lending and then negative lending growth, especially for Finland and Sweden, for about three years or so. And loan losses for banks. These are, you can see these are, again, the crisis period there and operating profits also turned negative in this part. So the crisis management, I don't have time to go into details of the crisis management, but there were also some interesting lessons. In the case of Finland, for example, there was no legislation how to handle financial crisis. So when it erupted in this one bank, Skopbank, which was the sort of central bank for the savings bank system, the Bank of Finland had to take directly over. You had to take over it and get by the old shareholders out. And then things started to happen. Then government set up a crisis management agency and various steps were introduced. One interesting feature is a bit of a novelty here, is that we have to recapitalize the banks in the case of Finland. There was some nationalization. The savings banks eventually had to be nationalized and actually split and reasonable parts sold unless others became losses. But for the other banks, Finland used something called preferred capital certificates to finance them. So these were instruments which were, it was like alone, but it could be counted as capital because they would turn into shares if not repaid in five years. So that's actually similar to what the tarp scheme in the US used eventually. There were guarantees and so forth as well. So, but it took quite a long time. The Finnish banks became profitable in 96 already. There was, as part of that, there were restructurings of banks. Savings banks disappeared largely with a few small exceptions. There was also a merger of the commercial banks, so forth. The staff in the banks was basically halved in five years. Branches were closed and so forth. So big restructuring was done there. Sweden, you know, a somewhat similar story. Let me not get into the details. They also said, they also did not have the legislation for crisis resolution agency, but that was already set up and public support criteria, which strict criteria also introduced. And so, and Norway, Norway had, they in fact had private guarantee funds for the banks and they were used, but they were not sufficient and they were exhausted. So the government had to set up a guarantee fund and a crisis management agency for this.  And then they actually took a very fairly radical step in the early 1992. They nationalized the biggest problem banks, including the biggest, three biggest commercial banks were nationalized. The old shareholders were wiped out. These were taken over by the government because the government basically said, these are bankrupt banks, we will take over and the shares are gonna be well. And so, they in fact then had an issue that the government became an owner of the banks and that's not an easy situation either if you have banks in the market system and how to run them, how to keep a reasonably level playing field against the non-nationalized banks with the non-nationalized banks, et cetera. But they sold them a few years, you know, gradually. The first one was sold about three, four years afterwards and so forth. The interesting thing is this figure which estimates, which provides data, this is not my data, but from a Norwegian publication, the gross fiscal cost and the net fiscal cost in the three crisis. There are of course no unique way to do it. You have to, which baseline relative to GDP you have to decide and then how long a period do you allow for recovering the initial public spending to the banking crisis. But one big lesson is that the net fiscal cost in the longer term is gonna be much smaller. So you can see that in the case of Finneady, basically have, in the case of Norway, the net cost was even negative, slightly negative. They managed to sell the banks at a good price eventually, the nationalized banks. And in Sweden also, it dropped almost to zero according to these numbers, these numbers.  And then it's a question, how do you sell them? How do you sell them? Obviously, how do you acquire them, but how do you sell them eventually and don't sell them necessarily too quickly? It's a difficult decision to make, but that's what this tells it, the net fiscal cost is quite a bit lesser. So let me then conclude with some general lessons from the crisis management part of it, which is obviously the first lesson is that prevention of the crisis is a big priority. As we saw, especially Finland and Sweden, the financial crisis can be very costly if it's a major financial crisis. It's not easy to diagnose the overheating situation, but there are some hints there, which you might want to look at. The crisis management part is if it comes to that, you know, obviously the first thing you have to do is that you have to maintain confidence in the banking system. The banking system, obviously nowadays, the banking systems are quite complex. They were simpler then, but there are two basic things which are important for the society of the banks. One is, of course, is the fact, is the ordinary lending and financial intermediation for standard loans to businesses and households. If that breaks down, then things are gonna be. And the other one is the payment system. If the banks really get into difficulty so that nowadays, of course, you know, certainly in the Western world, it's electronic payments. If that got into difficulties, then that would quickly bring the economy to a standstill if you can make payments through the banking system. That's their responsibility. So that is, that's an important starting point. And then it's, you know, in the Nordic countries, there was broad political support, was obviously debates at first, but eventually that came and relatively quickly. And then there were guarantees to banks' obligations in Finland and Sweden. Norway did not provide a general guarantee, but they made very specific statements to that aspect. This can be problematic if the banking crisis gets even bigger than the Nordic crisis, as we've seen in the Irish case, for example, now, or the Icelandic case where they did something else. The central banks, obviously, liquidity support, keep the banking system running, is quite important. We, the Fankö Finnen had a special problem which was the fact that there was no legislation. You had to directly take over a bank and put in new management to run it. The two agencies are important, crisis resolution, so the Ministry of Finance has to take overall responsibility here, and they have to guide the restructuring of the banking system, et cetera. And also, the government will acquire assets when handling this crisis. So asset management companies need to be established and to deal with these non-performing assets, and that's also something that was well-learned, I think, in the Nordic crisis management, and you want to keep it separate. You let the professionals run the asset management companies and then you have this issue, what do you do with the assets in the longer term? How do you sell them? What time horizons do you have, and so forth? And I think, as I said, the Nordic countries, even though they are often considered to be role models, the deregulation did not turn out well, as I've been telling you, but the crisis management has been a better story. So these steps here, that you have to restructure the banking system, make it more efficient typically here, you will need a fairly independent government agency to deal with this process, and you also need the asset management company, and the fact of general toughness with the banks and timely action. Clear, transparent, timely action is very important in managing a financial crisis, and I think these were some of the lessons that were learned from the Nordic crisis. Thank you.


I'm Scott Milne. I'm the Fisheries Apprentice. I've been here for around about seven months. I've loved what I've done so far, the amount of opportunities that I've been given. I've been selected as a finalist for Lantra's Learn of the Year Awards, which I've got in March. The thing that I love most about the job is being on the riverbank every day, which is something that I didn't get the chance to do before. Being out here in the banks of the teeth is excellent. I get to spend nine months of the year here, so it's a great job to have. What I'm really looking forward to next year is we know there's going to be more anglers on the riverbanks this year, which we hope in turn means promoting more conservation and better catch release methods.


I was a great leader on the ground in combat, considered myself one of the best, and got out. I got told, you know, things were over with and I couldn't do that anymore. I just didn't feel like I was a good leader back here. Felt completely out of place, and just pretty much stayed away from most people. Drank too much. What I was trying to do for myself, it just wasn't working. The concern is if I open Pandora's box inside of here, I may not be able to close it, and I may not be able to deal with the things that come out. But having the opportunity to look back on the experiences that we've had, the good and the bad experiences, allow us to grow, allow us to learn. War is life's severest school, and those who experience it, endure it, and thrive in it, have the capacity to return home, and be incredible leaders and fathers and mothers at home. So much more, you have a heart bigger than anything. Someone actually reached out for me, and then I got a phone call to come up here and check things out. If somebody believes they can change and they can grow, they will be successful. If they don't, they won't be. We see the potential and the possibility in somebody's life when they are the person they want to be. The meditations was good for me. Giving yourself time to reflect and remember and leave it there, to go back to your family. It made things a whole lot easier to deal with. Just having another family again has made a big difference.


Hello everyone, my name is Illa, very excited to be here. My talk is going to be about 6-Low Pan and Pica TCP and how to support new link layer types.  Bit louder? Okay, so what is Pica TCP? First of all, Pica TCP is a better TCP IP stack for the Internet of Things. It's mostly backed by Alpine Intelligent Systems, those guys. And it's developed from scratch with an I only Internet of Things revolution. The first commit was in January 2012 where the three key goals were to make a modular and a qualitative and portable TCP IP stack. So for example, portable, it works with various operating systems on various devices, like for example, which talk in some hours, supports Pica TCP as well.  And also, quality is a very high priority on Pica TCP. It's published under the GPLv2 license, but soon it will also be published under GPLv3, but more on that later. Then about 6Lopan, what is 6Lopan for those who don't know 6Lopan? 6Lopan stands for IPv6 over low-rate and lossy personal area networks. What's the name? I didn't invented it. It's an adaption layer, an optimization layer that doesn't really fit in the regular TCP IP protocol suite. It's squeezed between the network layer and the link layer between IPv6 and 802.15.4 link layer. This is how a regular standard 6Lopan stack looks like. UDP has a transport layer IPv6 with IPv6 neighbor discovery as well. 6Lopan, which provides a compression and fragmentation because those links, most of the time, have like an empty U of 135 bytes, for example, small anti-use. And so the frames have to be compressed and fragmented because IPv6 have 1,500 bytes in a single frame. So that's what 6Lopan provides. But most of the stacks are available. They only support like 802.15.4, which is really cool. And they also support Nomac that you just provide the 6Lopan buffer and do whatever you want with it. But I wanted to go a little bit further because there are a lot of new physical radios. Like radio standards like Bluetooth has a new standard coming out. Maybe you want it over any radio you want, IPv6 over those radio links. Then we should provide the capability to extend it further than only the 802.15.4 standard. So that was my goal really to do. Now I'll give you a small demo.  So unfortunately I couldn't finish a real fancy demo with meshing and everything because I'm still working on the meshing part, which is a mesh under topology. So it meshes under at link layer level. But now I have a virtual demo. So we have a virtual radio network in Picot TCP that can simulate radios. And just to give you a sense of the flexibility of 6Lopan and Picot TCP, I just started some time events that changed the MTU of the device. For example to run at 27 to 80 bytes and later on it changes to 200 bytes. So it's really flexible. So the 6Lopan in Picot TCP and that to that. So I'll first start this. So this is the radio driver. Wait, I'm gonna compile again. Because a radio driver sometimes is a little bit... Yeah, it's not the best. But it works.  Seriously. This is embarrassing. So the radio... Wait, maybe I'll... No, no, no, no. I'm not gonna do this. Okay, but I've added a PCAP driver that captures the device's messages that it sends. And so we're now probably going to see this one. So now first of all we have an MTU of 125 bytes for IEEE 802.15.4. So the fragmentation and the compression layer adapts to that. But after a while the MTU has changed to 80 bytes. Where is it? Ah, here. And then the adaption layer, yeah. It just compresses it and then fragments it further to 80 bytes. And then at a later point the compression doesn't leave it anymore. So it just... It has an MTU of 200 bytes and it fits inside an entire packet. And it doesn't need to fragment it and compress it anymore. So that's just to give you an idea about the compression, the flexibility of a 6-lopen. And so how does 6-lopen and Picatissipi look like? We have the IPv6 module, the 6-lopen module, which provides the compression and fragmentation. And then we have another module, 6-lopen link layer. And this allows to easily interchange the MAC layer, the link layer itself, to provide support for other devices. By the way, the same application is running at the moment on these two devices. Just a blinky application that... That's it. How does it work? So when IPv6 wants to send a frame, so we have the IPv6 module on top, the 6-lopen module and then the 6-lopen link layer module. So every module in Picatissipi looks like this. Every protocol has its own two queues, like the in-going queue and the outgoing queue. They can hold multiple frames at once. And then next to that we have the Picatissipi stack itself, with the scheduler and everything, and functions. So if IPv6 wants to send a frame, it sends it to the stack, which endures it into the 6-lopen queue, outgoing queue, after which at the moment, at some point, the scheduler calls a process out of the 6-lopen and decays it, and then starts processing it. And what does it do? It first gets the link layer addresses from the neighbor discovery table, from the IPv6 addresses, and then it immediately pushes the frame to the 6-lopen link layer to check if it fits inside a single MTU. And if it doesn't, the link layer is going to give back the available bytes, and then the 6-lopen adaption layer starts compressing and fragmentation. And then eventually when it does fit, then it endures it in the outgoing queue of 6-lopen link layer module. And then afterwards, the scheduler calls again the 6-lopen link layer module to process the frame, and then it goes to the device driver eventually. So that's how it works. The 6-lopen link layer itself is based on extensions. So we have several extensions that we can add and remove from the link layer. And so two are currently installed like PicoMesh, which is on which I'm working now, and 6-lopen link layer Mac, and they have to provide three functionalities, so estimation to see if they prepare the header for processing if the available bytes is sufficient for the 6-lopen frame that has to fit in it. Process in is just when an incoming frame has to be handled and process out for an outgoing frame. And so we define a 6-lopen link layer protocol structure to make it easily interchangeable for different protocols. And they have to implement these functionalities. So process in, process out, and estimate are just explained. And estimate is double, sorry. And then address from network because it has to translate IPv6 address to a link layer address. It has to get it from the labor discovery tables or something. It has to know the length of the address, the link layer address. It has to be able to compare the address and also to derive an interface identifier, IPv6 interface identifier from the link layer address, which can be derived from the extended universal identifier 64-bit or from 16-bit short addresses. So we define Pico link layer address for that so that it's a generic version of link layer addresses. Then Pico device, a 6-lopen device, just has two functions. It has to implement sent and pull to transmit the frame on the wire and pull to see if something has to be done or an incoming frame is... Yeah, there is an incoming frame or something. So if you want to implement 6-lopen for your radio, you have to write the device driver first of all. Define how you're going to use addresses like EUI 64 extended addresses or short addresses. Then write some helper functions. Register them in Pico TCP with that device, on the initialization of that device. Then it just works with that implementation of the link layer protocol and then you're done. So I have spent a while implementing 6-lopen and I have some thoughts about... Well, it is actually a good 6-lopen because it's kind of weird if you think about it that it says IPv6 over low-rate and lossy wireless networks, but for low power it's kind of weird because so the entire TCP IP stack says... Yeah, okay, here's my framing, here's my formatting, IPv6, etc.  I'm just going to remove it all and compress it and it's kind of computationally expensive to do so I find it kind of weird that it's... So low power, I think it's more easy to... But the good thing about 6-lopen is that it's standardized TCP IP future sets you can use. You can use fancy things like DNS for example or co-op or... A cool thing, I also worked on DNS-based service discovery on Pic2CP which is kind of cool if every device registers their own service and then now it's on the network through 6-lopen and that would be really cool and you have these sensors with their own service they can provide, announced on the network. So quite low power applications. Mestopologies with IPv6 addressing and also another application would be to bridge different radio links like I just said. You can also... Like this device can, for example, support IEEE 802.15.4 but another device with the same stack can use Bluetooth low energy for example. So that's kind of cool to have and with these different protocols everywhere this is maybe not a bad idea. So this is my final slide. Pic2CP is going to have a release next week which includes 6-lopen support and GPLv2 3-licensing plus GPLv2 2-licensing and that's it. Are there any questions? Don't forget to repeat the question. About the licensing and about the software and about the phone application it's not a problem. GPLv2 3-licensing because you static link inside the firmware how does it work? For example, we want to use it. We have to open a show-off application. So the question is how does it work with GPLv2 and GPLv3 licensing with static linking on embedded devices? What if applications have to use GPLv2 and GPLv3 as well? I have to be honest, I don't know a lot about licensing. I know. So I'm maybe going to give the word to Ferdic. Will you repeat for the recording then? In very brief, if you use the GPL version then there is also a commercial option available for people in the city where they can pay their license and then you are allowed to repeat for the source. So if you make money with it you can pay your license. Can you repeat for the recording then? So there is also a license for commercial applications and then if you pay for it you can use it in your proprietary application. So that's any more questions? Yeah. I have a question about all the compression schemes you are supporting. So there is the old HCE1, HCE2, there is IPHC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you are also supporting next set of compression? Yeah. So the question is there are different compression schemes in 6-Low-Pal like HCE0 and HCEUDP in RFC44 but they are a little deprecated so we don't support those. We support IPHC compression and next other UDP compression we support. It's also in the same RFC but there is also the generic which is coming out in, it's a proposal, RFC proposal I think. It's already available? It's already available? Yeah, okay, yeah. So the generic header compression we don't implement yet. More questions? Yeah.  Yeah, sorry. So the helper functions. Yeah, it's just in space. Yeah, it's the interface with a link layer. Like, yeah, sorry. And no, here. Yeah, it's the interface with the link layer protocol. So those, you can register them with the initialization of the device. So you can assign a different link layer protocol to any, I mean, to a different device. So that makes it, yeah. Yeah. Well, with a lot of people, I call TCP, do you actually do TCP? Yeah, we do TCP. Oh, yeah, sorry. So the question was, we're called Pico TCP. Do we actually do Pico TCP? Do we do TCP? Yeah, we do TCP as well. But that's not really advised with 6Lopan because they're lossy networks. They're connection. It would be better to use a connectionless protocol like UDP. So a standard 6Lopan stack most often uses UDP for that. Do you know about the footprint in memory and energy with some TCP instead of TCP? I wouldn't know. TCP requires somewhat more. But now with UDP we have, I don't know, around 100K flash. But that's with the buggy symbols in. So if we put TCP in, I wouldn't know exactly how much it would add to the stack. There have been talks about Pico TCP in this death room or in the embedded death room previous years, which focus on the TCP part and on the memory footprint and size. So you could check those and then you'll get a lot of figures and I guess also on your website. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they're not related to the 6Lopan. Yeah, indeed, yeah. Because we support other protocols. This is just the 6Lopan part of Pico TCP. It's only a small part. We do much more than only 6Lopan. Any more questions? Okay, thanks a lot.


OK, that's good. Wonderful. So maybe we should go around to a round of introductions. Deb, you want to start? Yes, hi. I'm Deb Roy. I'm on the faculty of MIT. I currently serve as executive director of the MIT Media Lab and also director of a newly formed center for constructive communication, which is going to be my main research home going forward. Very nice to meet you. That's awesome, yeah. Nice. Hi, I'm Wes Chow. I've been working with Deb in various capacities for a few years now, from, I think, close to four years. And so now I run an engineering group inside of Deb's group that looks at the research that the center is doing and helps to play it out to partners and collaborators. Excellent. Thank you. You can get your emissaries back down, and I'm now, I think since we talked last, I'm actually now the associate director of civic design at the center and I'm joining. So we've actually connected even more. That's excellent. So I'm Audrey Tang, talent station minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement. I totally agree with this idea of a kind of norm-based struggle. And my current work mostly centers around what I call people-public-private partnerships, meaning that the social sector sets the norm, the public sector amplifies the norm, and then the private sector implements the norm. This is rather different from the more traditional, so-called public-private partnerships. I love that, I love that. Well, I wonder if we can start there, which I'm kind of introducing, starting to work there during C3, but we're up to. Happy to. Audrey, I have a few slides just to increase the center briefly and then show you one particular project we thought might be of interest. So that's OK. Please do. Please do. I mean, and show you a bit. So the new center we announced in January of this year is called Center for Constructive Communication. Can you see my screen there? Yes, very clearly with the three circles becoming a triangle. Great. And the challenge that the center is setting out to work on is one of social fragmentation. So we observe that in various realms, including politics at the workplace, on the airwaves, online, on the streets, and sometimes even at home, we sense an alarming social fracture. And our aim is to make a problem that's easy to recognize, possible to understand, and hopefully, in some ways, address. We got into this space, which is, of course, multi-dimensional and complex with work we've been doing over the years and analyzing social media. So I'll just show you briefly two examples. This is a snapshot of Twitter users during the 2016 presidential election. These are accounts that we believe are primarily humans, not bots, that were actively tweeting about the election, where the graph is formed by finding mutual follows, which tend to be people who know one another, more likely to know one another. And the color coding shows followers of candidate Trump in red, candidate Clinton in blue, and candidate Sanders in green. It's a picture of a fragmented network, very weak on activity, relatively speaking, between. By the way, can you see my mouse? Yes. OK. Well, your cursor, not your mouse, but yes. You can see my pointer. And I now realize I must be very precise with my words, too. And then we also became curious about the location of journalists. So we built a database of the journalists who had written at least one story about the election in a national-scale publication in the US. And shown in blue are verified in yellow, unverified location of the accounts of the journalists. Again, all trapped in one side of this fragmented network. So this image became for us kind of iconic, though, the problem of fragmentation. One more example, just to give you a sense of what we're doing that led to the center. This is another data visualization. In this case, in orange, the retweet cascade shown over that plays out over time of how a piece of news, which fact-checkers later found to be false, propagates through the Twitterverse. And in blue, a story that's fact-checked and turns out to be true. And what we found, and we published these results in 2018, is that the general pattern across the entire history of Twitter, we built a database of many, six major fact-checking organizations took all the news stories they had fact-checked and looked systematically over the history of Twitter and found, in general, that false stories have a huge advantage. They tend to spread much faster and much further than true news. So these are some examples, which, as we started thinking about the conditions on the ground, so to speak, of being actually immersed in the actual day-to-day conversations of Twitter and other social platforms. And also, we started looking at top radio, just the different public spaces that tend to be where public dialogue plays out, that there's an awful lot of shouting at one another where people tend to hear the most extreme points of view that are reactive and often disconnected from everyday life and lead to a divisive kind of environment. And of course, the business models of both mainstream media and social media tend to reinforce and reward extreme and reactive content. And so we became interested in thinking about designing new spaces, even if they don't have the scale, of course, of the dominant platforms, which were designed for listening where nuanced, reflective conversations grounded in our everyday lives were more likely to flourish where you would end up with a connective rather and divisive kind of spaces. And that's what we mean by the word constructive in the name of our center. These various terms kind of get at what we're interested in. I mean, there's sort of three main ideas that kind of flow through many of the projects that are now, that we are working on in the center. One is to find a rebalancing of the role of machines so that there is more agency and control put back in the hands of humans where AI and machine learning we see as power tools that can be used to equip people as opposed to what's happened with a lot of the social spaces today where the AI, we think, has too much agency over what we see, what we're exposed to and who we connect with. So it's kind of rebalancing. Second is to think about rather than the online spaces as being sort of alternative realities to find ways to weave them back together with in-person connection. And even though the internet has this incredible global scale and speed and reach, can we leverage that while creating solutions and spaces that are tuned to locally differentiated needs? As Wes mentioned, we have an engineering team that Wes leads together with a group of researchers, graduate students and faculty and postdocs and so forth. What's interesting is that we can translate research concepts and kind of exploratory research into relatively robust tools that are engineered so that we can actually deploy them with partners outside of MIT and run scalable field pilots. So it's this combination of three different skill sets that makes the center, we think, quite unique within at least the academic arena. And with all this, what are we trying to build? We're trying to prototype a better future for communication, media, and social networks. And in terms of the human impact that we come back to over and over, it's to surface under her voices, to bridge divides across different perspectives, and to put all this to work in systems that ultimately we hope can build social trust. So there's many projects we're working on, and I'm not gonna go through them in detail, I'm just gonna highlight one for you in a minute. But we are thinking about projects and sort of tools and designs designed for families in the civic space, which is what I'll highlight for you. We've started doing some work in thinking about how tools can be used to inform public health communications. We'll continue to do work in analyzing and modeling media dynamics, and we started to take interest in some of the work that's coming from actually our civic space to look at what we could also do within organizations, companies, for example, where very similar kinds of social conflict and fragmentation are showing up. So just two, actually, I guess I have a one slide summary, which I thought you might find interesting. We have a team, and Wes is actually a contributor to this team, that's in the research design phase of thinking about and designing concepts for a pro-social media platform that's designed for early teens, explicitly designed to promote positive identity development and self-confidence during the most formative and vulnerable teen years. So we've been working with teens and designing reps, and plan to launch a kind of initial pilot platform early next year. So that's sort of in the works. The second example is what we call the Local Voices Network, and here I'll take you in a little bit more detail. And the goal here is to surface under her voices and experiences for listening, learning, and constructive action. This is actually a project which is being operated by a non-profit, a 501C3 non-profit called Portico, I'm co-founder and chair of Portico, which grew out of the predecessor to the center, and it works in partnership with the MIT Center to actually operate this project. And so we are the research partner and Portico operates the network and supports partner projects. So the idea was to merge facilitated dialogue and technology to create a kind of scalable system. That's the idea of the Local Voices Network. So on the facilitation side, we've worked for several years now to develop and sort of test and iterate on the design of a conversation format, which at its heart is really designed to allow participants in small groups to share hopes and concerns. It could be in general about life in their community, or it could be about a specific topic like public safety or health, that is grounded in sharing experiences they've had that relate to either the hopes or the concerns. And I'll play you some examples in a minute. We also have designed a piece of hardware, we call this the digital hearth. It's a battery operated self-contained device that is designed to actually record a high quality audio recording of small group conversations and also, so there's a primary layer mic, there's a microphone array and there's also a high quality speaker so you can play back excerpts of voice from other conversations. And this is a controller where the facilitator will pull them up on the computer and control them hard. So we launched in 2019 in Madison, Wisconsin with a key collaborator, is Professor Kathy Kramer, who's a political scientist who's done some very innovative work in developing deep listening methods for understanding public opinion. So she partnered with us and helped shape the local voice network design and then launched it in her own town of Madison where we started inviting community partners into training sessions to both learn how to use the technology and also to learn how to, that the facilitation sort of structure of these conversations and then to invite people from their networks into small group conversations which could be recorded. And of course, with the pandemic, we were unable to do the physical meetings so we switched to Zoom. In general, when you talk to people after they participate in one of these conversations, they tend to report that there was really a space for deep listening where they could listen and learn and speak and be heard where there was a space for nuanced conversation. In general, people sharing experience is not a place to come and to argue your opinion on something but rather to share your lived experience as it relates to certain topics. I thought I'd just show you a little bit of just some of the tooling. So what happens once a conversation is uploaded either from that device or from a Zoom recording is it goes into this web-based tool and there are different collections like that different partners collect. I'll just go to the Madison pilot as an example. So we can see all the conversations that have been uploaded in this collection from Madison. If you click on into one of these conversations, it takes us into a detailed viewer for that conversation. You can see different topics, housing, nurses, homelessness, prison that came up, racism. If I click on one of these, I can drill in and listen to the specific parts of the conversation. I've been dealing with racism for the longest and I turned the other team. So we can navigate into conversations and then in any particular conversation, we can, if there's a piece of the conversation that we want to lift up and share or you sense making, you can just select this part of text. The speech is automatically selected with it and then we can add a note, add tags and this lifts up and stores this piece of audio. It keeps the pointer back to the full conversation but creates a new piece of data that can then be used upstream. I'll show you a second one example of what that looks like. One other, just a couple of other things. There's also an automatically generated index. So if you're interested in housing, we can see different terms that our system has clustered that are related to housing and then we can go into specific conversations where there is particularly, here's of course, these are housing advocates. So it was actually a topical conversation and two topics of interest. There's also a search engine so we can do just keyword or sentence based search. So those are some of the tools and let me just put these pieces together now. Just give you a sketch of one recent case study that we are quite excited about. This was actually in Madison. So just to show you how these pieces come together. Once a small group dialogue has been recorded, it goes into the indexed search engine and so do a couple of different ways that you can then access the conversational data. One of the things that the hearth or through Zoom, a host of a future conversation can actually take one of those highlighted pieces of audio which might be a story for example that someone has shared of what they've experienced. Perhaps in a context that this group has never experienced personally and the host can bring that voice in, introduce the person and then play the audio. We call this cross pollination and then the host, then people in this conversation can respond to that person and in this way we end up with a conversation network. All of these conversations are being archived and we have, and I'll talk about data permissions at the end, but with access to this collection of conversations what we can do is by taking, this is again just depicting the speaking pattern of one conversation, we can take a collection of conversations and do pattern analysis which is what we've started experimenting with. So you might for example, and the example I'll show you relates to public safety and policing. So say we identify all of the segments of audio that are related to public safety and policing and then we might up wait and prioritize the subset where it's people who are sharing firsthand experiences that they themselves have experienced, not something they saw or heard about but they themselves experienced. And then prioritize those pieces of audio, we can sort them using our tools powered by people into themes such as power, trust and fear. And Caesar, can you give me some advice? Have I gone too long or do we have time for a three minute audio sample? It's done, I think you just do a little bit of the audio. I think the more important thing is just to report out because you're gonna do the piece from the police, right? Yeah, right. So, okay, let me just play a little bit of the audio and then I'll skip, so Audrey just, you can get a sense of the texture of the speech and then I'll show you what we did with this. It's hard to get away from how powerful, you know, the institution and the badge and having a gun is and how much that emboldens individuals. Well, I mean, growing up, one of the first values and principles that I was taught was to never trust the police in any situation of such a sense. And then that was kind of proven to me around the age of 12 and 13 when I saw a family member be shot in the back eight times. So what we then did for this particular case is we had an opportunity to work with the committee that was charged with hiring the police chief in Madison. There was under a racially charged situation, the previous police chief very suddenly quit his job, wrote a blog post on a Sunday night that I'm not coming in Monday morning. And so the Madison Police and Fire Commission reached out and said they were interested in running a different kind of search process and they wanted to hear from community voices to get input into the process. And we were already, we had already started this pilot So we did this analysis and for each of the themes where these purple blocks again, represent multiple different stories from different conversations that all fit a certain pattern, which we summarized each pattern and translated them into a recommended question that could be asked to the candidates for police chief. So for example, it seems that police fear some of the communities they work in and the communities fear the police in return, what fears have you observed in the communities you've pleased them. So what Cesar referred to, Audrey, is we created a report that actually went through each different theme, provided us a text summary where the words and phrases of the text summary actually pointed to examples of the actual audio snippets. And then next to the summary, we provided one or two recommended questions. So there was a report that had these multiple themes. What actually happened was that the police and fire commission chose several of our questions and explained beforehand where the questions came from that they were rooted in conversations from the community. And they used those questions in a series of public interviews with the final four candidates. And in fact, Sean Barnes, who was shown here during one of these public interviews was ultimately selected and sworn in as the new police chief earlier this year. So just to summarize, the idea here was that this very important and publicly visible point in the process of selecting a new leader, the questions were actually grounded in Community Voice. And because this tool that I showed briefly is available for other members of the Madison Public to access, it creates a transparent kind of extension to the normal public square that is more inclusive because a lot of people who would not feel comfortable going to the town square may feel more comfortable going to these small group conversations, knowing that they're being recorded and that there will be a durable voice record just like this conversation today. And that by being able to see where your voice goes and know that in this case, the interviews are being run by, in response to these patterns, it creates that kind of accountability, a kind of mutual visibility that we think is really important. And so let me stop sharing. That was the example that I wanted to... This is Drew, so thank you for listening. We, I'll just note one thing that we're in the midst now of discussing internally, which is the data model. What we're thinking about is having a model of a kind of a data trust where the nonprofit cortico serves as the data, the trustee of the data, and each of the different partners that gather people in their community own that collection of conversations and under certain conditions, other partners that are gathering similar kinds of conversation can all listen to one another. And as for that whole system is, this sort of steward of the data is the nonprofit. That's sort of a model that we're trying to clean up and put into place. So that's a sketch of our center and one of the major projects. And I will just mention that just by total coincidence, just earlier today, we hosted a talk and then had an in-depth discussion with Colin McGill. And I mean, those are two conversations that started at different moments with different people in our team. I mean, I had reached out to Colin and such a strange coincidence that both of these conversations are happening today. But we have been exploring, Colin and I, possible connections between Local Voices Network and Polis where it might be that the cold start problem of where do you get seed opinion statements? It's very interesting to us to think about these participant-driven, small group conversations as a source for potentially getting statements that can seed Polis. And actually, we just after the conversation today with Colin, I had a conversation with one of our collaborators, Kathy Kramer, and she also thought that once Polis is able to help identify some statements that may have either be divisive or connective, those could be a very interesting prompt for LVN conversations to, you know, sort of the kind of different ways these could be connected. So we're taking real interest in Polis and also very interested in, of course, your binary use of Polis and what you've done in the Taiwan. So I think I could keep going and going, but I better stop talking. That's fine, it's fine. I enjoy listening. That's what we're here for. Thank you. I have three very quick kind of clarifying questions. One is that does it depend on the equipment that you mentioned, or is it okay if we, for example, just import this GC conversation into the system? We just need an audio recording. The hardware device, because it has a microphone array, makes it easier to separate speakers because we want to have the kind of association of speakers to the different ribbons, but it does not have to be zoomed at any high quality audio recording. Okay, so even if it's in a single track, you just do a speaker recognition to tease it apart. But of course, if it starts multi-track, like some podcast recording software to begin with, then of course that simplifies your work. That's much, much better. Okay, okay. Yeah, because that's what we've been experimenting with. So the second thing. So you mentioned that you would like to work with the nonprofit as a quote unquote data trust where they do cooperative stewardship. Does it mean that the software code, because like Polis it's now running at Polis the GOV, the TW, which is our own data center with the entire stack, including the data and the source code, we hire professional penetration testers and things like that. So it's just like any other open source free software labor project. So is your software designed to act like this, like in a self-hosted situation and with many forks and the upstream and things like that? At the moment now, but it's an interesting model where definitely as we're getting to know Polis and Colm just learning about all of that. Currently Wes, I think it was a fair to say Wes was the head of engineering at Portico before coming over to the center. So it was quite familiar with the slides. Wes, any comments on that? I think you're muted. Yeah, we need to unmute, yes. We use a fairly standard containerization and deployment strategy. So it wouldn't be a whole lot of effort, I think to start up another instance of the site and the infrastructure. I mean, it's not a trivial amount of work, but it's doable. But it's not designed to work in like a federated way where we then join audio as a higher note or something, it's just, it would be separate. No, I mean, the project management side because when Polis open sourced, the kind of first major contribution, I think was from the Canadian government where they did this automotive English French because for federal conversations, they're required to be bilingual. And then we adopted that and then contributed to like the English Mandarin, auto translation stuff and so on. So my point is, as long as it's open sourced to the data steward, the data steward it will be motivated to do customizations to usually begin with maybe in your context English Spanish multilingualization. And so the management, the governance model changes. Previously, it's kind of a software as a, sorry, service as a software substitute, but now once it becomes self-hosted and people start modifying it, you'll be working with a more kind of co-governing relationship of the project itself. Because that's kind of a logical consequence and is it aligned with your values? Yeah, I think the product engineering team is receptive to making the code open source. I mean, yeah, I don't think there would be any objections. I think to this day, it's really been a matter of like prioritizing the work stream and making it open source. Sure, of course, of course. Yeah, because once it's open source, it doesn't have to go to GitHub immediately, right? Open source only means when you're, when the people using your software ask you nicely, you provide a copy of the source code. That's the original definition. So, right. Well, ideally, we would make at least some kind of a commitment to help people fix problems and stuff. Yeah, that's right. So, and once you do that, we'll be happy to provide the same service we did provide to Sandstorm, Polis, and so on, which is world-class penetration testers to make sure that it's cybersecurity-wise, it's hardened. And so that's something we can do right away once it's open source, not on GitHub, like open source by commitment, okay? And the third thing is a very minor thing. I witnessed that in the deliberative space, around two thirds of people say hopes and fears. One third of people say hopes and concerns. Is there a conscious choice that you went with the hopes and concerns? Oh, well, there's an interesting DNA to the conversation structure. There's a nonprofit group called the Public Conversations Project that started maybe 30 years ago. Caesar, is that true? No. You know the history better than me, with kind of a family counseling kind of approach to having difficult conversations. And that group helped design the first iteration of our conversation. It's now essential partners. And then eventually the executive director of essential partners became the CEO of Quartico, the nonprofit. And so we did that work with them. I believe that the basic framing of hopes and concerns either came from them or from Cathy Cramer, one or the other. Yeah, so your question is why concern versus fear? Right, because concerns is more like that we're co-creators here, right? It's on the table. Hopes and fears is like there's a power imbalance and we're here to try to write that power imbalance. So it's rather a different approach to study agenda. Yeah, that's it. Okay, no, just a random question. Okay. Yeah, so I was just thinking in another project we're testing out with us with a technique I've been using, when we start the conversations, we have a framing. So the framing we're using this one is we ask people what's their question about the future of America. And people start the conversation and see what their question is. And then the next question is, what's your experience in your life that actually got you to that question? And we use that as a vehicle for opening up kind of the conversation. So it's not waiting either way, it's just like, you know, you have something you have a question about and you have some experiences and then what we try to do in some of these efforts is connect people who have similar questions to share their experience so they can have a broader view of how the thing they're interested in actually its experience in the broader has really different entry points to it. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, that's very clear, thank you. Yeah. Cool. Anything else you would like to bring up? I asked my clarifying questions. Oh, you moved it. I was just gonna say that I'm definitely curious about your experience with Polis. We've read some of the case studies of how it's been used in Taiwan and we heard quite a bit more about the tool and plans from Colin. I was curious, or kind of current status, is it a remate in you as a tool? Yeah, it's part of our public infrastructure, right? Polis.gov.tw means it's a kind of permanent part of the governance mechanism, right? We run the penetration testing, we work with Colin to fix cybersecurity issues, we wrote our own terms of service, which I believe is already deployed now. And so in all senses, we are now a kind of co-governing node of the Polis ecosystem because everything that our public service needs to run Polis, they can just do so, just like launching a, I don't know, Google Forms survey or a survey cake or something, but understanding that a cybersecurity situation is better, right? So it's now a kind of general purpose tool for all the public service to use. And there's a public instance also at polis.tw, where the civil society investigative journalist and so on also can use. Of course, it doesn't carry the same .gov.tw like government initiative status, but maintenance and code-wise is the same cybersecurity-hardened coding infrastructure. And in your experience, has there been certain patterns of where, what kind of situations it is most used for or helpful and also where you have observed the biggest pain points? Well, what's difficult about using it? I mean, we ask, call them the same questions and I can share some of the things we learned, but I was curious what you had. I mean, we have a national level regulation that says when to use tools like Polis. And so, and we have teams in each ministry and competent authority that says that the training is, which training is required to run such issues. So I'll be posting that into the chat. I believe there is a entire website about principles of processing collaborative topics. And so things that have complex stakes, diverging views of multiple stakeholders and enthusiastic publish participation that results in the need of interdepartmental collaboration. These are where Polis shines. I'm posting the link here. On that website you can, under the Collaborative Meetings menu, see the process toolkits, the guidelines, all the past 100 or so collaborative meetings, the directions, the national regulations that enable this 100 or so person collaborative facilitator in the government structure. So I'll not be reading it out loud here, but we do have a pretty well-tested process in the past five years that runs these things. You know, what's fascinating for me about this kind of here is the different systems for actually integrating something into a governmental infrastructure. It's just very different in our society, right?  And that's not a good thing, it's what I'm saying, it's not a good thing. Yeah, but our GovTech is actually civic tech just implemented by government contractors. So that's the fundamental difference. In the US, I understand the USDS is like us, right? It's the GovTech and the 18F was more kind of connected to the covert America, covert all and so on. But I don't think there is a single case where the civic tech side wrote this specification and did a reverse procurement where the government has to implement it. So it only flows this way and not that way is what I mean. But in our case, it's almost always flows this way. I'm pasting a link in a recent SMS based check and trace system that was co-developed that way as well on our blog. So I think that's the main kind of infrastructural difference between our polities, which is why I'm very excited to try out the kind of quality enhancing topic to address your question about the pain points of Polis is that when something is very enthusiastic publicly and we get like 300, 500 statements, like each person only goes through some of them and currently it's just showing things randomly. And so people's average experience degrades slightly the more statements they're in. But if we do have this kind of quality highlighting mechanism, then we actually uplift the experience every time that's the rough consensus or good enough consensus is reflected back into the Polis system. So Polis become the connector between the in-person conversations, just like machines should be the kind of in-between of humans. So it's not about placing machines in the place of facilitators, but placing machines across time and space for different facilitators to work together. What do you mean by lifting up high quality and I don't understand that part? Sure. So part of our use in V-Taiwan in Polis is to invite the people who have received a high resonance across different groups in Polis and invite them to the meeting place, face-to-face in person, or at least through high quality broadband video conference to share the full context that led to them, their kind of eclectic interpreting statements that get so much support. So in a sense, this is more like trusting the persons who posted these ideas that resonate with all to kind of serve as advocates to contextualize this. But your system, as I understand, flips this around. In small group conversations, I can talk for hours, but the moments where I behave in a pro-social way can be highlighted and say this moment of yours resonates with other moments of these people. And so it highlights the statements, the commonhood of the statements like a common, how might we question? That could be fed into the Polis conversation so that in the Polis conversation, we start with the arguments that already have good enough resonance and then the Polis situation will begin to innovate even more because we spend less time to go through the parts that checks the kind of missing contacts, missing pieces and so on. We start with kind of, by definition, more resonating statements. And then once we get the good enough consensus around that conversation, then we set that as a topic for more small group conversations to work with. So in the beginning of each Polis conversation, people don't feel that they are spending a lot of time to weave through the points that has been iterated before. Got it, got it. Yes, that's very much the kind of concept that we discussed with Colin. I had to discuss with Colin earlier today and he's very interested in exploring as well. Do you have a sense of what kind of people today, what are the characteristics of citizens who are more likely to engage with? Sure, people who are 16 or 17 years old or 60 or 70 years old, these are the two age groups that are the most active on our participation platforms. A, they have more time on their hands and B, they care about the next generation, kind of by definition. And anything regarding, are people who, interesting, I was just thinking about how else to kind of other dimensions, major dimensions, like education, gender, but actually what I started thinking about... We don't see much of that. In Taiwan, we do have universal broadband and digital competence education and healthcare as a human right. So we don't see much pattern differences between the conversations that had on the rural or urban areas. Of course, they may bring different viewpoints but the participating activity is very similar. And I would think, I've found it always fascinating in the United States, some of the patterns around the spoken word versus the written word and the relationship to level of education and literacy rates. I don't mean necessarily functional illiterate, but if you are less comfortable with the written word or the preference for radio as consumption, since everything is text based, is there any selection bias there, people who feel more versus less comfortable expressing themselves in writing? Well, there are just like in participatory budgeting process. There are people who are more effinent with text that participate on the discussion board stage, but there are people who are more comfortable with the spoken word. So they do that on the kind of collaborative meeting stage, just like the PB process. We always have a in-person plus video conference collaboration meeting stage that holds ourself to account to explore the agenda that's set by the Polish stage. So there are people who wait until that moment to join and previously they mostly just observe. Of course that's quite natural but when it comes to the kind of selecting the cases through e-petition or in Taiwan we have referenda, right? Then because really just pressed like, which is what a referenda petition as a contentment is, it is so low threshold, everybody does it anyway. So what I mean is that we create a space for the modes of conversation that are tailor made to the people who are comfortable with that conversation. So for example, we're held town halls where I travel to the more rural or remote areas and join them where they are as a facilitator. But then we video conference in the central government people but it serves explicitly as a kind of expert, consultative expert role, meaning that they don't share anything until asked but they provide the contextualizing information to the local people over a video conference without having to travel over Taiwan and so on. So we designed a space always to put inclusivity first and people who are not comfortable with some mode of conversation either just trust their friends to speak on their behalf in that mode or they wait until the part in the process where their preferred mode shines. I know we don't have much more of your time. And there are a couple of things that I can't see here that I just want to kind of test it. One is actually a question that when folks who were going to have this conversation there were a whole bunch of folks there. I want to be there, I want to be there. And the question is, can you be open to maybe some time in the fall, some time actually every open conversation? Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, it would be great. We'd love to do that. And then it seems like in this conversation about a poem or something, what Congress is dealing with, what you have in place here, actually maybe a kind of three way way to work together in the pen, thinking about this information or something like that will be in the poems in some place that takes to that or we'll see or something, maybe the meeting viewers or ours. I don't know if it will or not, but maybe it's also a place where we can kind of test out some, possibly working together. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Because now I understand we can retroactively feed existing audio recordings as long as it's quite high quality into the system. Instead of running new consultations, one of the first things we can do if we have access to the system is just to put the 100 or so collaborative meeting which are all recorded in rather high quality and see if it works. And then, because the majority of our conversation was in Mandarin, we will also be testing the multilingualization and internationalization capabilities. Very interesting. Who there works, anything else you want to say as well? It's just a small part of my question there. So these conversations that you're referring to, on average how many participants are there? So the small groups are always like 10 persons per table ish with three to maybe five tables. So a small room basically, but for each collaborative meeting topic we may hold multiple such rooms and sometimes interconnected in the kind of informed stage. And then we break out into multiple rooms and we almost always have a video recording that has separate channels. And sometimes we also live stream it and then their live streaming may be played in some other room which then have their own conversation. That's done as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to be with us this evening. And I think this is just the first of another conversation and we'll reach back out to Francis about the exclusions in the fall. Yeah. That would be great. Dan, anything you want to say to the closing? Just thank you for your time. Fascinating to hear about your incredible work and I really am excited to welcome you into the MIT community sometime in the fall to share this for the larger group. Thank you. And I notice on the chat there's a question about digital divide and I will just very quickly say that in Taiwan because Universal Broadband is a human rights we don't have that much of a problem there. I understand theoretically in politics with a digital divide it will be democratically illegitimate to run this as part of a democratic institution but we simply don't have that problem there. And in the 20 or so percent of people who've never installed an app for public tool purposes that's exactly why we made sure that you can use toll-free numbers as a mass-based system showing up in person and things like that instead of interacting through specific apps. So I personally have flip phones running the KaiOS. So anything that phones can run is inclusive but bandwidth is unlimited data plan for just 16 US dollars per month. So we're pretty good there. Yeah. Wow. You guys see. Again, thanks so much minister and fastest thank you for everything and talk to you soon. Thank you. Live long and prosper. Bye. Take care. Bye. Bye.


Appalachian Wireless proudly brings you unlimited data. Unlimited data is only $80 a month for a single line. Four lines as low as $200. Better service? Bigger savings? That's today's Appalachian Wireless. An East Kentucky network company, get a speed slow to 25 gigabytes per line to 512 kilobits for phones and tablets. And 15 gigabytes for motors. See store for more details. With the issue of school security on the forefront of everyone's mind, the Floyd County Sheriff's Department is doing something about that. As they have implemented their school resource officer program, which will place an officer in the county schools all throughout the day. You know, it's not just a strictly police presence kind of thing. It's more of a positive interaction that we get to have with the students. Also, you know, we get through the security stuff on the side as well. And another thing too, by having some of our units in the schools right now, it frees up our other units that are working the road to go to the middle schools, elementary schools. That way we can try to cover everything. Students here at Floyd Central say they appreciate the officer's presence.  And we've been kind of weary because there's been videos where they're just like, you never know, it's your school until it happens. And it's just, it's reassuring having somebody here who has that kind of authority. We also have that feeling of comfort where we can just walk up to him if something's bothering us or if something needs to be addressed. We know that they're there that we can go to. Sheriff John Hunt told EKB News that more of his deputies will be taking the 40-hour course to get their school resource officer certification. Reporting from Floyd County, I'm Shawn Allen for EKB News.


You can survive without food for three maybe four weeks You can survive without water for seven Or maybe ten days It doesn't get more basic when we're talking about basic needs food and water are really leading there My name is Ella Madde. I'm a founding partner at a venture fund based in San Francisco called 50 years And today I'm going to tell you about the all the problems with the current food and water systems we have And how Winston Churchill Can help us solve them Let's start with water We use fresh water for drinking sanitation Agriculture the core problem is that just there isn't enough of it In fact according to the World Health Organization millions of people lack a basic drinking water service and in low and middle-income countries over a third of Health care facilities do not have clean water and soap for hand-washing So globally over two billion people use drinking water that's contaminated with feces and on top of Being just disgusting it helps spread Diseases such as diarrhea and polio which then in result kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of people and it's just in It's not just in the developing countries in the United States Alarming levels of bacteria and viruses and even poisonous lead are found in water on a regular basis and recently a Saudi came out showing that almost all of us tap water is contaminated with micro plastics And yes, we don't fully it know what micro plastics do to us, but we know they stay in our body So we're about to find out So the state of the art of technology in water handling Is pretty lame we Have fresh water from open water sources or we dig it from the ground using pipes And then we use other pipes and trucks and ships to move that water around so water might be cheap But moving it around is very expensive and because we use fresh water On such a massive scale. We're depleting the current source. We have faster than we can replenish them In fact just a few years from now half of the world's population will be we'll be living in water stress areas Let's stop here and move on to food The good news and food is that there seems to be enough of it. The bad news is that it's not Distributed very well and it's killing us and it's killing the planet 10% of the world's population is still undernourished in 2017 and again. It's not just in the developing countries millions of Americans We're food insecure And we're food insecure as well last year and that includes 10 millions of children and In addition to that we actually need to start making more food to meet the demands of the growing populations So we clearly should have a really good technology to do that, right? Well, that is a state-of-the-art technology in protein production in 2017 it literally has not changed in thousands of years and I was Not going to guide you through Terrifying pictures from slaughterhouses to show you how we actually extract the protein But looking at the math alone can make you question if this is really the best we can do We put 30 calories in we get one calorie out. This is the current food system For beef and that's in addition to land use water use the time needed to raise those poor animals and All the ways that comes from animal agriculture In fact animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than all sectors of transportation combined. That's Ground transportation water transportation planes all of it and We were able to on the way create another problem, which is not just a problem It's actually an existential threat to the humanity itself because we're feeding animals antibiotics that end up in their bodies and in the soil There is a new class of bacteria growing that's just resistant to common antibiotics and that might not sound as dangerous Until you think that antibiotic resistance may be the largest killer in 2050 why because we need antibiotics that work for even a simplest surgery and When we don't have working antibiotics Children immunocompromised individuals and air daily can die of common cold and this is real because we're not Getting much better We're not creating more antibiotics right now so you can ask what the heck does Winster Churchill has to do with all of that well in 1931 he wrote this amazing essay called 50 years hence and In that essay he was looking at all the developments that were happening in science and he was looking at all the Developments in engineering and he was thinking about the state of the world So he starts that essay by saying that the great mass of human beings is only dimly conscious of the pace Which at which the mind kind mankind has begun to travel and Then he talks about what's going to happen And he makes the brave thesis that by observing science we can predict and also design the world and Applying it to food He said 86 years ago and I'll read it in hall We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or a wink by growing these parts separately Under a suitable medium So in 86 years ago he essentially predicted cellular agriculture what's only becoming possible now and He doesn't start there in that essay written I'm reminding you in the early 30s. He was talking about using bacteria and yeast as Platforms for making proteins and other materials. He talks about Harvesting solar wind and even nuclear energy He talks about advanced nano engineering and putting together atoms directly to make novel types of material he talks about Climate control and geoengineering he predicts wireless communication Genetic modification end of disease. It's pretty mind-boggling how just looking at Where this what was the state of science in the 1930s and reasoning from there? He was able to predict those things and a great part about that essay is at the end He talks about the immense powers that scientists and us technologists have and he talks about that with the great power comes great Responsibility and we should all be taking a principled approach to our work and in fact we named our firm we named our firm after that essay So since 2015 we've been we've been investing in brave Technological solutions to the world's biggest problems and in the last 32 years in the last two and a half years We we invested in 32 companies including the now famous Memphis meats, which is growing real clean meat outside of animals a Company building novel proteins with plans and a company using Computer vision sensors and machine learning to reinvent the way we farm So the less in the last almost three years we've learned some lessons from Winston and from the entrepreneurs were able to back first Yes, look at the past But remember you're in the business of building the future So apply scientific rigor and the principles engineering the problem solving and specifically to solving the biggest problems in the world and We see that the best entrepreneurs start with first principles and they don't settle for small improvements For the five ten percent improvement they the best entrepreneurs Imagine the world what the world could be and they find a way to take to work backwards from there Finally take responsibility For the world around you and if you're working on something impactful Remember about all the impacts it can have So let's get back to food and water Some interesting technologies in water we can talk about industrial desalination different types of filters from From nanofilters to UV and micro microbiological solutions for purification we can even Think if chemical synthesis of water would be Would it be a viable solution at large scale, but I want to tell you about a new type of porous crystals called metal or granic frameworks and they're really excited because with them we can be taking water from air so there's a mind-boggling hundreds of millions of billions of liters of water in the air in the form of vapor and That water gets replenished daily and it's just there. So I think the type of Revolution that's been happening for fossil fuels when we're taking stuff from the ground and moving it around and pipes and ships and trucks To solar where we just harvest the energy that's there is going to happen for water a a small Cube of metal or granic crystal of a size of a of a of a Sugar cube Has an internal surface area of a football field So those materials can absorb crazy amounts of water and there's no reason to to doubt that in a few years This is how we will be getting our water even in the driest places on earth Let's get back to food There are multiple ways in which we can fix the existing food systems And some of them are just getting ready for scale And I think the food system is about to see a massive transformation You're going to hear about different types of plant proteins that some of them We haven't used before and for some of them We're going to use new applique some of them. We're going to find new applications for we can harvest protein from insects for algae and mycelium which I'm personally very excited about we can Get novel ingredients and and protein to eat from yeast fermentation and we can feed methane to bacteria To make stuff for us But I want to draw your attention again to cellular agriculture to this new idea of instead of Using animals as bioreactors to make food Using their cells directly in that way you can farm the cells outside of animals in a matter of weeks Not days and reduce the land and water and energy consumptions by You up to 99% So here I want to finish by quoting Winston We know enough to be sure That scientific achievements of the next 50 years will be far greater more rapid and more surprising than those we have already experience and to that we at 50 years Channel our inner Winston and we say bring it on Thank you