erms and conditions around that. What we've been very clear about from the outset of this work is that it would be the service models, the patient requirements that would determine the shape of those negotiations and I think that's really important. That's really important partly because that's what we're here for and partly because all of the clinicians that I've ever met wanted to come to work in the NHS and do a good job. They want to be able to play the fullest possible part and we want to be able to give them a service model that they can pin their professional coattails to. Some of the work that has been seen through the task force have been proposals from the RCN about the extended role that nursing and medwifery staff could undertake as part of this work. You've already heard, I think, quite persuasively from pharmacy colleagues who've got a huge role to play in respect of this and a number of others who will come together, not least the ambulance service in terms of the paramedic cohort. We've got examples of that work happening all over remote and rural Scotland, from Bucky to Fort William to some initiatives in the island communities and to the model that the Cabinet Secretary described in Clackmannanshire, which just for general information is a facility now that has within it three GP surgeries, two inpatient beds and 24 additional services that are available through advance nurse practice and some work from social care partners in terms of psychiatry support and those kinds of things. So not just the tube that used to be a fence that you couldn't climb through, so that's really, really important. In Glasgow, the radiotherapy services have not really been redesigned so much as reorganised. It's been bringing together a group of disparate services that mean quite frankly that you've got a bigger rotor. So you've got the opportunity to run those services and make diagnostic support available to people in a wider range of times than just Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. Again, that comes back to your point, Mr Menill, which is not just about the mortality stuff but the sheer effectiveness and efficiency that goes together to make a better patient outcome. Can I just ask one final question? Part of the evidence that we also received this morning was that people are sicker at the weekend, which seemed to puzzle me slightly. Has any work been undertaken to see why people are sicker at the weekend? Surely weekends are good for you, not bad for you? I'm not so sure that I would say that the human heart necessarily knows whether it's going to have a heart attack on a Friday or a Sunday. I'm not so sure that I would necessarily say that people are sicker. What I would say is that on a number of occasions some of the services that might help patients who experience difficulties at the weekend are more difficult to access. Any of you that have been involved in mental health care perhaps might be familiar with that. There is some evidence. There was some evidence when we saw the spike in Lanarkshire's HSMR figures last year. There was some evidence posed about the availability of care home facilities at the weekend and access to care support.  So, I'm not sure that I've seen evidence that suggests that people are actually sicker at the weekend, but I think the infrastructure, which is why I made the point about the complexity of HSMR, the infrastructure that is necessary and various other factors. There are factors that would suggest, for example, that we with fragmented families, people go and visit their parents at the weekend and they notice that they're poorly and they've probably been poorly for a couple of days. So, there are a number of factors that come together in that respect. What we're trying to do through this work is make sure that the patient experience and the patient outcome is as good as we can make it and that we give the opportunity for the whole of the clinical team to be able to be involved in the decision making that essentially means that patients get a better outcome and reduce variation where we find it, where that's possible. Richard Lyon. Thank you, cabinet secretary. You said that the NHS is not Tesco. I couldn't agree more, but Tesco a number of years ago was now opening on Saturday and Sunday and are late and now most foot. Sorry? That was a few years ago. Yeah, a few years ago. Well, I worked in the grocery trade away at the very start of my career and never worked on a Sunday, but now you can get into most shops now, 10 o'clock at the right bit. That aside, Dr Surgey's shirt, generally on a Friday at 6 o'clock, don't open up again until 8 o'clock on a Monday morning out of our service, as they cope with it. We're coming up for Easter Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Easter weekend, which again, possibly out of ours, we'll need to cope with. So when do you think we'll ever get a seven-day service from our doctors that we could get an appointment on a local Dr Surgey or rather an attending A&E out of ours on a Saturday or a Sunday? Do you ever think we'll get to that? Yes, but it might be a multi-disciplinary team. It's not just about doctors. It's also about advanced nurse practitioners. It's about the role of paramedics. It's about that skill set that can build a safe, sustainable out of ours provision that doesn't rely on one health professional for its sustainability. Now, going back to 2004, when GPs were, when the responsibility for out of ours was removed from GPs and health boards took that on, what we've seen is a growth of various models that health boards have developed to try and provide that out of our service. There's a number of reasons, but the primary reason that I felt that it was important to review those set of circumstances is because, 11 years down in the line, boards are continuing to wrestle with how they provide a safe, sustainable out of ours service. What I felt was important was to look at how do we take a more coherent approach to that. Now, that might not be that the exact same model that works in Glasgow will necessarily work in mull or Tyree or whatever, but nevertheless, Lewis Rich's review will look at the urban and rural context, will look at who does what at the moment, but who could do what with the right skill set and training and support. In some ways, rural Scotland has got to grips with this a bit better. I'm not saying that there's not fragility in some areas there is, but some innovative solutions have been borne out of necessity in parts of rural Scotland. For example, the extended use of paramedics and the use of advanced nurse practitioners is something that's more well advanced in parts of rural Scotland, providing out of our services than perhaps the case in urban Scotland. Lewis Rich is getting ahead with his work. There's a lot of good people around his review group, and what we need it to do is feed into the agenda of seven-day working. The out-of-hours issue isn't just about GP out-of-hours. It has to look at in-hours services as well. It has to look at the ambulance service. It has to look at A&E. It has to look at NHS 24. Of course, it will be speaking and looking closely at working with all those organisations to make sure that the recommendations that come forward can help us to get on to a sustainable footing with out-of-hours services. I want it to be something that can go through into the long-term, and it's going to have more robustness and resilience behind it. I'll try not. I know that other people want that. I agree with me that if people could go to their local GP on a Saturday and a Sunday, that would relieve pressures on A&E and out-of-hours services. It might not be just a GP. It might be a GP if that's what's required. If someone needs to see a doctor out-of-hours, then clearly it should be a doctor they should see. If that is a requirement, but quite often someone can be equally seen and treated and satisfied with an advanced nurse practitioner or a paramedic. It depends on whether it's about getting the right health professional to the person and making sure that they get the right support that they need. That might be about bringing in social care support to the person concerned. If we look at how the service in Clip Manager operates, it's a multidisciplinary team that is a kind of rapid response team that is formed around that cohort of people who are the regular users of our services rather than the occasional user. That 2 per cent of people, remember, use 50 per cent of unscheduled care capacity. That is huge. There is a service developed specifically for them, which is rapid. It's responsive. It gets the right service to those folks. I don't want to be back looking at out-of-hours in a couple of years' time. I want to get a model that is going to stand the test of time that gives patients what they need but uses the skills of the wider workforce, rather than just being about GPs. Although GPs will always have an important part to play, it's not just about GPs. Just switching to the hospital-based service, you've made a decision on major trauma units, which are very much welcomed that that decision has been made, but it's really about the numbers of services that we've got. Your interim report refers, for example, that we're going to have four major trauma units. I know that the College of Surgeons said two. I think politically that would have been impossible, but four is the evidence base there for expenditure. The same with the mapping exercise that's shown that we've got 29 sites for acute general surgery, acute urology, 21 sites, and I'm sure it varies for the other things like orthopedics and the rest. If we're going to have a service that is effective, then if you take a population like Greater Manchester, they would probably have maybe two or three services.  But really, if we're going to have effective weekend working without having people that are present for elective surgery, then having people there only for emergency surgery on 29 sites might not be very cost effective. How is the workstream addressing this very difficult balance between what people want locally and what is actually effective, efficient, will save lives and is also sustainable in the long term? The work of the national clinical strategy will influence a lot of that thinking. That's not about the national clinical strategy saying, therefore, in such and such a location you should have. What it will lay out is looking at the evidence base around what the best outcomes for patients will be across various specialities. That work is an early stage, as you know, but it will be very important in determining some of those things. There are other ways of delivering some of the services. Part of the difficulty at the moment is around recruitment and retention of some of the specialities, particularly within our district general hospitals. Obviously, patient safety comes first, and we need to make sure that all of our services are safe. However, the way that we recruit and deliver services needs to change, and the use of the network, for example, shortly earlier on described how we were moving to sustain some of our services within our rural general hospitals by linking some of those doctors, particularly within specialities, to the teaching hospital, and various networks are being established around that. However, there is no reason, in my view, why some of that wouldn't work effectively within our district general hospitals, that you could have a far more attractive process of recruitment to some of those specialities if they knew that they would be working part of their time within a teaching hospital environment, while also providing support to the district generals. I think that there is an opportunity to do far more of that across Scotland. We need to allow the national clinical strategy to get on the way to help us formulate the thinking around some of that. Part of it is also about making decisions that can overcome some of the recruitment and retention challenges that we have within our system, and we need to be far smarter when recruiting to those posts that we develop. We recruit to a network rather than a particular position in a district general hospital, and the fact that we have vacancies still within some of those specialities that are incredibly challenging to fill means that we have to look at that in a very different way. You are right. Scotland is a big place, and Scotland is also a small place. In recruitment terms, from the pool of population, it is a relatively small marketplace that we operate in, and you will be aware of that. It is also geographically a very spread place, so we do always have to play access and the accessibility of services, particularly emergency services in life-threatening circumstances, into that space. The game is changing a little bit. We talked earlier on about Scott Star and those kinds of services around retrieval and those kinds of things. Cabinet Secretary has talked about recruitment. I think recruitment has got to have some regional context to it and some national context to it. If we are talking about profusionists, for example, where we have a tiny workforce, it makes little sense to me to have boards competing for that workforce. It makes much more sense to do that on a national basis and try and increase the numbers overall. So there are recruitment propositions that will come forward as part of this work. Cabinet Secretary alluded to the point that I made earlier on about the relationships between hospitals. We are also doing quite a lot of work at the moment in expanding the approach around clinical fellows, for example, to give people exposure, to give people an opportunity to look at things and to work in a specialist context. Perhaps even looking at some specialist GP stuff, there are now a number of universities who are starting to talk to us about whether or not there is a specialty about being a rural GP. That seems to me to make a lot of sense. You are right. It will always be a balance between the bigness that is Scotland and the smallness that is Scotland in terms of its population. Our role, I think, is to provide evidence about what is the best service for those patients, what is reasonable for us to be able to do in terms of that staffing model. I sadly cannot knit consultants any better than anybody else can. We have expanded that workforce considerably, but it is finite. Our job, I think, is to present Cabinet Secretary with evidence to options of ways that the service can be made more sustainable. It will be for others to decide what the acceptability of those options are, but that will be based on the evidence of what we have seen. We know vascular surgery needs a population of seven to eight hundred thousand people in order for it to be at its optimum efficiency. That would take you to an answer. Whether or not that is going to be an acceptable answer will be for others to decide, I think. If the outcomes are better, then it will be acceptable and we have to demonstrate that. I am very aware that the model in Scotland that we have adopted, which has managed care networks, is one—although the King's funder said that the jury is out on it, I am convinced that it is going to deliver in the long term, but that is at the moment about the elective procedures. It works well. When I had my cancer, it was operated on in Glasgow by the 4th Valley consultant going into Glasgow, and the team there of backup that he had meant that his skills were managed well. Two other health boards in the west of Scotland do not buy into that, which means that the outcomes, inevitably, I think, are going to be poorer. But that is elective. I do not know how it is going to be really difficult to get that into the non-elective, the unplanned emergency side. I just wonder whether you have got any examples at all so far of taking things of that sort. For example, the vascular surgery, which is the part of the most developed, is that working well with the five centres? That might be the best place to— It is working well in two areas. It is not as advanced in one area, but it is actually developing, and it is developing on a regional model. As for the network, one of the ones that is successful around the emergency side of things as opposed to the elective, is the network model in Fife and Tayside, which is part of that overall development, and also in the north, where they are coming together to do that. The west of Scotland is the area that had to look at where would be the optimal place for provision, given the paradigm of the population model to have enough skills and maintain and sustain the expertise. They are still looking at it. Again, that partly is about where health boards want, where the pathways naturally go for patients. However, it is being looked at, it is under way, and I expect to see more progress in the west, which is a bit further behind than the other two. We do keep asking about progress. That is in what particular field? We heard from Frank Dan, that the west was very good on it. That is in vascular. They do well, but there is more that could still be done. The national planning forum keeps asking about how it is getting on. That is very helpful. Just a brief for others. We have spoke lots about nurses and clinical profession, all of that, led. However, the whole question of slowing down those who are in the hospital and getting them out quicker is a tremendous burden on community-delivered social services. I suppose the question I want to ask is at no time that we actually considered health and social care service, rather than just a health service, because it seems, you know, in terms of, you know, it raises the obvious, and I think we all appreciate here about that, you know, how are they going to pick up this additional work? Will it be funded? But the other question, I suppose, is that lots of this burden has been taken up with a lower-skilled workforce who are working in very stressful situations, to also affect the outcome in patients that don't get to that hospital. You know, I don't want to be, but the 15 minute visit, the task-based approach, dealing with a myriad of people now, motor neurons, alcoholism, dementia, and all of the other things that is a big pressure on professionally trained people. You know, what in the workforce planning are we doing to reshape that workforce, develop that workforce and, you know, give them the status maybe that they are due, you know, in this process? Yep. Well, integration, I think, is the best chance we have of bringing those two systems together, and that's, you know, the course of travel we've decided upon is that, you know, through legislation they would be brought together, and I'm optimistic that that will remove some of the perverse incentives that we've seen within those systems of pushing in and pool. However, you raise a very important point about where within that team the care staff sit and, you know, there are issues around their paying conditions and training and career opportunities. So one of the things we've been talking to with COSLA is around how can we help local government and the sector to raise some of the standards and quality there, and those discussions are on-going about the best way of doing that. I think there are opportunities around career progression to remove some of the artificial boundaries between whether people can, with the right training and qualifications, perhaps move into jobs within the NHS far more easily from starting off perhaps in the care sector or, indeed, the other way around what, for example, nurses do within nursing homes, for example, there's the opportunity for those skills to be developed and to be far more developed than they are at the moment and to be more attractive as positions. So it is a challenge, I think, being part of a wider healthcare team will help. So the model in Clintmannanshire that we've talked about a lot today doesn't just rely on the care staff picking up the cases. It's also district nurses, it's also advanced nurse practitioners, it's also a range of other staff that are there to support someone with dementia or quite complex care needs within their home. I think that's important because you're right. Asking care staff alone to manage very complex care needs at home isn't a sustainable thing, which is why they have to be part of this wider team and to be supported. So that's what we want to see happen and we, as I say, we're discussing with local government about how we can play our part to make that more likely to be the outcome. The opportunities to develop that workforce and support that workforce better are there and, as I say, we want to play our part in doing that, shall we? A couple of quick things, if I may. Part of my responsibility is to lead something around health and social care workforce integration. So we have regular dialogue with partners from local authority, care home and other suppliers about what other things that we can bring together and one of the things that we're in the early stages of now is looking at that workforce planning, making sure that we've got data that allows us to compare apples with apples and so on. We've also just recently launched a career framework that does exactly what the cabinet secretary says in respect of giving an educational ladder for what are the better word to try and give people the opportunity to expand. Two other groups that we haven't really talked about that much have been fundamental into the taskforce work. One of them has been the representation around patients. They've actually been describing for us what they want to see and really what you were describing was about what it feels like to be at the end of a service. So that's something that has been really important to shaping up that work. The other, and I'm very happy to acknowledge the incredible contribution of our trade union partners, they've actually been prepared to look at some of these models, help develop some of these models. Now that isn't to suggest that I think we're going to hold hands and walk off into a glorious sunset in negotiation terms. There may be some very difficult conversations around that but actually these models are supported by the trade union partners and that's terribly important in terms of demonstrating the case for change. Yeah, they've got that sort of voice, but I suppose the general point that I was making, that we've got a service in the National Health Service, but we look at care where a lot of these people are going. You've got the private sector, the third sector, local government, different employers, whatever, whatever. That isn't a system. You're absolutely right and I'm not suggesting that because we've got these inputs that all of that will be very easy, it won't, but there are a number of things that we can do together that starts to make that feel like a real cohesive service for a patient or a service user. But those people at the bottom are the people who are dealing with me every day, they're not dealing with the social work manager or the district nurse team. Anyway, I don't think there's any other questions. We need to move on. Thank you all for that. We need to move on quickly to the next item of our agenda, which we hope to dispose with fairly quickly. We go back on the record then and move to agenda item number three, which you'll be grateful to hear is our final item on the agenda where we consider subordinate legislation. We've one affirmative instrument before us today. As usual, as a reminder, with affirmative instruments, we will have an evidence-taking session with the cabinet secretary and her officials who are with her now. Once we have had all of her questions answered, then we will move to the formal debate as necessary. The instrument before us today is a public body's joint work in Scotland at 2014 consequential modifications and saving order 2015. The cabinet secretary is joined by Alison Taylor, head of strategy and delivery integration, and Claire McKinley, solicitor, food, children, education, health and social care Scottish Government. Cabinet secretary, you wish to make a shorter opening statement. Very briefly, this order makes minor amendments to primary and secondary legislation, all of which are in consequence of changes made by the public body's joint work in Scotland at 2014. It also makes a saving provision to allow the integration arrangements already operating in the Highland area to transition into arrangements under the new legislation without a gap and at a date that is locally determined. The order will firstly ensure that integration joint boards, once established, have similar duties as health boards and local authorities, such as a requirement on them to give certain information to the provider of the patient advice service as a result of an amendment to include them as a relevant body under the patient's rights Scotland at 2011. Secondly, it will ensure that certain other pieces of legislation will continue to work properly when functions are delegated under the public body's joint work in Scotland at 2014. Thirdly, it will make the necessary changes following repeal of section 5A of the Social Work Scotland Act 1968, which made provision for local authority plans for community care services. That updates the statute book to remove or replace out-of-date references. Fourthly, it includes a savings provision so that the arrangements made under the Community Care and Health Scotland Act 2002 sections 15 to 17 Highland may continue until replaced with integration arrangements under the 2014 act. Fifthly, members will wish to note that the order does not take forward any new policy. However, I would be happy to take any questions on any of the modifications that it contains. Are there any questions for members? Does that suggest that the legislation that we passed in the public body's bill is not flexible enough to allow local arrangements to come into play where people can find a good way of working together? I know that Highlands is probably the only one that has gone down the road with integration, but is the legislation flexible enough to allow local arrangements to come into play where that works? It does. Alison, do you want to… Absolutely. The provision in terms of Highland is actually just there to make sure that it can continue to use the arrangements that they have already put in place until they move under the auspices of the new act. So it does not have any bearing on flexibility for local decisions to suit local circumstances. No other questions for members? Therefore, they move to agenda item number four, which is a formal debate on the second of the affirmative SSI, which I have just taken. I do not know whether that is my script or definitely whoever did that. Anyway, we move on to the formal debate. I invite the cabinet secretary to move motion S4M12645. Do any members wish to contribute to the debate? None. It remains for me to put the question on the motion. The question is that the motion S4M12645 be approved. Are we agreed? Thank you, cabinet secretary, for your time with us this morning. That concludes our business for today.


All right, let's go ahead and get started. I'd like to thank everyone who's joining us today. Welcome to today's CNCF webinar Dapper Lego for microservices. I'm Karen Chu, community manager at Microsoft and CNCF Ambassador. I'll be moderating today's webinar and we'd like to welcome our presenter today, Mark Charmini, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. And before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. During the webinar you are not able to talk as an attendee. There is a Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Please feel free to drop in your questions there and we'll get through as many as we can at the end. This is an official webinar of the CNCF and as such is subject to the CNCF Code of Conduct. Please do not add anything to the chat or questions that would be in violation of the Code of Conduct. Basically, just please be respectful of all your fellow participants and presenters. Please also note that the recordings and slides will be posted later today to the CNCF webinar page. at CNCF.io slash webinars. And with that, I will hand it over to Mark to kick off today's presentation. Thank you, Karen. Hopefully, everybody can see the screen. So in today's session, we're going to do a kind of quick overview of the project drivers, what kind of drove us to create Dapper. Reviewed the key capabilities that Dapper has. We're going to do a short demo on a service composition using Dapper in a kind of event processing application. I'm going to cover the project status and roadmap on the end and hopefully there's going to be about 10, 15 minutes on the end to do a Q&A. So let's get going. So before I want to go into the actual over Dapper, I want to review some of the kind of things that drove us to create Dapper and what it's trying to solve. I think there's many different reasons for that, but I think they bow down to three things. I think too often developers nowadays, they're step one in writing any new application, they have to decide where this application is going to run because moving that application later to a different platform will often require complete rewrite. The other thing is that these total or complete platforms do help and they kind of solve holistically a lot of different problems, but because you have to kind of buy in 100% into using them, they tend to kind of evolve slower and over time kind of drift away from what's considered to be a modern architecture. And as a result, in the third point, in the average company today, I've spent over last year probably talking to, I don't know, 30, 40 different companies out there and developers in those companies. The average developer, the gap between what the existing application looks like and what it's considered to be a modern application in the community is increasingly larger and larger and it's not common to find companies that have, I don't know, 1500 to 2000 applications that they want to modernize, but they want to do it all in one split move. So these are kind of the things that set up the context for Dapper and the type of things that we would like to solve for the developers. So let's go into Dapper. First of all, just a short overview. Dapper stands for distributed application runtime. Yes, we've abbreviated three words into four letters. I know it was hard, but we've done it. In a plain English Dapper is really an event-driven application. It's portable runtime that helps developers build distributed applications, regardless when they run them. Whether it's a bare metal, cloud, edge devices, and I mean actually edge devices like Raspberry Pi or something, the runtime is kind of independent of that. It's an open source project. It's hosted on GitHub under MIT license and it has a very open governance. We just recently tweeted, recently wrote about it, about a transition to open governance and the commitment to vendor neutral foundation for Dapper. Throughout the presentation, you're going to see some QR codes they have posted in here that will have direct links to places where you can actually learn more about the thing that I'm talking at that given time. In this case, it's a link to our blog post that we just, that I just mentioned. So that's kind of what those QR scores stands for there. All right. A little overview of kind of where we are with Dapper today. Less than a year. It was October 2019 when we announced Dapper. So we've had 11 releases out of this AM, I'm happy to say. I think we've landed the 11th release of Dapper or 11 major release, so V011. There's a decent number of image pools that actually signals a real-life usage. So this is not just the kind of things that it's out there and sitting, but people using this in real life. We have 70 plus different components that cover pretty much the entire CNC of data and messaging spectrum of the map that you often see and more about those components in a minute. And there's a growing number of also contributors which validates the sense of broad community and helps us kind of drive the direction of the project as a consensus of the overall community. And of course, the all-important stars that we all know are the critical to any open-source project. I'm being sarcastic here. So what are some of the kind of principles that are behind Dapper? So first of all, no limitations with regards to the language or framework. If a new language comes up tomorrow, something like, I don't know, I can't even venture to think of what that would be, we should be able to run it. If you can start it, if you pass a process, we should be able to run it inside of Dapper. The other thing is that there is maximum emphasis around the reuse and of those building blocks as we refer to them. And again, more about those two, but those are a la carte opt-in mechanisms that you can use to kind of bring in certain capabilities that are common in modern distributed applications. When those building blocks are, when the available building blocks don't meet your needs or where you want to expand the functionality of that building block, Dapper provides a facility for you to kind of add an additional capability or expand or change the implementation, which is very important if you want to be able to kind of allow people to scale and grow their application with their demand. The core of Dapper is also this well-documented set of APIs that provide a parity across multiple protocols and runtimes. So GRPC or HDPE protocol doesn't matter the shape of the API, the functionality is the same, even though the protocols are different. And it runs, like I said before, runs great on Kubernetes as well as any other infrastructure where it can be like a standalone process. We've done this on bare metals. We've done it on Raspberry Pi. It's like I was talking about a data center, a customer's data center, wherever you can get Kubernetes, for example, we will do. And it's also supporting multiple architecture. So Intel, ARM, Maclin, Linux and Windows, you can get either the readily available version of Dapper or just compile for those two. And the last thing is Dapper really tries to meet the developers where they are. The investment that you've done in learning a particular language, Java, .NET, Python, whatever that may be, we want to make sure that you feel at home in kind of natural idiomatic, it's just a fancy term for natural to you that should make you effective on day one. There is no courses required, there is no certification, use it incrementally, start small, and then build from there. So hopefully that will give you a background where Dapper was going. Kind of logically, and we'll go deeper into each one of those, but logically, Dapper at runtime kind of exposes those APIs, like I was saying, HDPE and GRPC. These APIs give you access to the most common usage patterns that we've seen in distributed applications. And we generalize them into something that can be consistent to you as a developer, but yet flexible underneath. So you can plug specific implementation of that. And we'll talk about those in a second too. And we refer to those as building blocks. And you will hear me saying building block, building block throughout the presentation. And when combined, they're like an open programming model that you can start today with very small and then you move from environments, change your mind and apply these through configuration without rebuilding your application. So hopefully never again we hear about somebody needing to move 1500 application in one swoop move to a new platform. So more on those building blocks going deeper into there. These blocks are they're independent. So there's no dependency between each one of those blocks. So let's go through those one by one. Service to service invocation or it's basically a reverse proxy like API for communication between multiple services within your application. So if you're building microservices, you're building n number of different services inside of something that's considered to be an application. And for you to be able to dynamically discover those services and connect to them, that's where where dapper comes in. The other common thing that we see pretty much is state management. Think about durable key values, the object store like S3 or GCS that gives you this put get verbs capabilities that allows you to kind of query by state. The shape of those APIs is pretty consistent. Yeah, they have different functional capabilities, but to large degree, we can kind of give you a very consistent API to that to managing your state in your application. With regards to pops up, this is all about messaging within application. There is, you know, different perspective on what market market microservices should be doing. There should be service and to service invocation directly, or there should be asynchronous through pops up, dapper provides you both of those. So if you're looking for messaging between your application, a synchronous messaging between applications, you can use pops up that's built in, and you can plot the specific implementation underneath of that. So if you want to do like a fan outs pattern or a fan in, it's super easy to do that. And there's a exact, at least once delivery semantics, so you don't have to worry about kind of events being lost. Resource binding is kind of one of those bindings that one of those building blocks allows us to extend the functionality of dapper consistently. So think of those as a connector to the outside world, to other resources that are not inside of your runtime. You can trigger your code based on external events when they, when they run, when they kind of happen outside of your cluster or outside of your environment. And you can send data from your application to outside resources. Actors, and I will go through each one of those a little deeper, but trying to provide a little summary here. Actors very much like an independent unit of distributed state and single threaded compute capability. So if you're thinking of something that's going to require high density, that's a great, great kind of category for that. There are some concerns you have to be aware of around single threading architecture, but we'll talk about in a second. And observability, very much all about automatic kind of insight into what your application is doing. So capturing the core graph of all the invocation across graph, across dapper, and the telemetry with regards to those metrics that are related to how your applications are responding, how many times, how long did it take, and tracing of the invocations across multiple services. If you're talking about microservices, you probably have a call stack that involves four or five, 10, put in more microservices and being able to look at them as a unit helps you kind of debug those issues and understand the bottlenecks. And we have secrets we've all heard about, you know, these leaking all the time. What dapper is trying to do is give you very much opaque get API to the secret management that could be backed up by very robust set of secret management solutions. So how she called vault, Google KMS and many other ones. And each one of those building blocks has n number of implementations underneath them, which means that you can choose the kind of optimal use case per service or per application of what you want to use to be implementing these building blocks. So let's kind of talk about the architecture. So regardless if you run on Kubernetes bare metal VM, dapper uses this notion of a sidecar. And yes, I know it's okay, sidecar is kind of correlated often with Kubernetes. But in this case, dapper uses this sidecar approach regardless where you're running. The app calls into dapper sidecar and dapper kind of execute the functionality on behalf of your application. This helps lower the utilization and offload IL often in some cases can actually improve the performance of the application. All services invocations are encrypted over MTLS with automatic certificate rotation, including situations where you upgrade the actual dapper itself. And with this release that we announced earlier today, we also added a specific identity for service invocation and granule access controls, including all policies, if you like regal. Yes, there's overlap with many mesh, meshes out there, as you probably have already realized. If you are, if you really, really are committed to using Istio or LinkerD, you can just disable the MTLS and use dapper in conjunction with those meshes. So how do I get one of those magical sidecars that does everything regardless where I run? Well, if you're running on Kubernetes, that's as simple as decorating a deployment with few annotations. And I bolt that text over here. There's many of those annotations you can add, but really only two are required. You say enable dapper. And then you also tell me, tell dapper what is the ID by which you want this application to be used, which comes into service invocation and many other things. Dapper will automatically inject a sidecar into the pod. So it will look very much like that experience that you had when you were developing using dapper on a local machine. It would, in fact, your application will know anything different. In a standalone mode, if you're running outside of Kubernetes or running any other infrastructure, you can run it using the dapper run command. In a self-hosted mode, as we refer to it, uses dapper run. And regardless of what the process is, as I've demonstrated 304 in here, it could be directly into a runtime. So go or node or dot net or whatever that might be. Or it could be actually an executable that's already kind of compiled into the machine code or something like that. It's a lot of flexibility there. With regards to kind of dapper on Kubernetes, I think this is a good one to go a little deeper, given CNCF and Kubernetes. We try to keep dapper as light as possible. So there's really only two CRDs. There's four system pods, although we can bring them down to about two if you're not using some of the features. So first one is the sidecar injector. This is what checks for the annotations and injects the sidecar into your pod. Century generates certificates for the sidecar and implements rotation strategy. The operator tracks deployments and deals with things like resource discovery and component registry. And actor placement deals with identifying or finding where the dappers are located, the actors are located, and then kind of providing metadata around us, more about actors in a minute because they can be rehydrated or all over the place, depending on where dapper is so optimal deployments for those. There's also health APIs and live probes that you would normally see in any kind of Kubernetes deployment. So let's go into those building blocks a little deeper and kind of show them in a real world like examples. So starting with the key value state management, it is distributed object store for your applications. What that means is that it outlives the session of the application. If your application goes out of scope, it can be restarted somewhere else and have access to the same content, same state. It has a concurrency configuration options per each operation. So you can do first or last wins if you're looking around have concerns around concurrency has similar configuration for consistency with regards to whether it's a strong or optimistic consistency and it's configurable retry policy, which means it's super granular. It's not only on the entire service, but it's an operation. It can be involved per retry per operation. It's configurable. We also support bulk and transactional operations for situations where you want to save a number of records, or if you are trying to retrieve a number of records, the back state for those is totally to you up to you. There's dapper supports. I think check this morning about 12 of those. So etcd, Redis, Cassandra, GCP, Cloud, Firestore, AWS, Dynamo, there's n number of those configurations and depending on what you prefer in your environment, you might use those, but the API which will be exposed to you to use the state in your application is consistent. So how do you configure that? You will see this throughout some kind of highlights here. We're using this notion of the components. Components are in representations of n number of components can be kind of implementing a particular building block. In this case, we see it's a component. I call this corporate DV, but it could be frankly anything. It's a component of a type of state. And in this case, it's a MongoDB. So dapper provides these configuration options for any number of those components that we've highlighted before, 70 or some before. What it gives you access to is some metadata that you can use to configure the actual service itself, including the database and other things. But once configured, one registry in dapper now is becoming available in your dapper API. So you can post to it by identifying the specific component and save the data to a particular collection in this case to Mongo database. The metadata is unique to a specific store. So in this case, this Mongo might have metadata that's specific to Mongo. If you were using LCD, there might be additional parameters there. And you will see the other options we provided. Moving on to service discovery and invocation. So dapper, like I said, is a reverse proxy for you invocation, but that allows you to kind of locate the services and invoke them using the assign ID. So in the previous example, we use, I don't forget what we use, but if you say, for example, my service is the ID of the application, you can start invoking from all you other services within your application and dapper will make sure you find the right instance. All of that is dynamic. There is no configuration for this one because as you kind of started the services within dapper, they all automatically are registered and the registry is managed for you. It works in Kubernetes. It works even across namespaces. So you can cross the boundary of the namespaces and you can invoke them over HTTP or GRPC. So regardless of what your application is running on, in this example, we have a HTTP application that it's calling into the GRPC application. The API is consistent for that application. Dapper does the protocol translation. So GRPC to HTTP or HTTP to GRPC. All of that is done behind a scene. Your applications don't have to be aware of what the target is using. Like I said before, invocations are automatically retried on a call level, which is more granular with what you get normally from the meshes. All traffic between apps is over in TLS. It's automatic, so there is zero downtime even during the cert rotation process and upgrades. And because now dapper also provides the X509 certificates, we can do a spiffy identity across clusters for service invocations. So if you, for example, have one instance of dapper running on GCP and another one on AWS, you can reliably and securely kind of connect them and invoke each other. Dapper also have options for policy through annotations, which kind of obfuscates a lot of the complexity, as well as for proper OPPA implementation for Rigo. So if you prefer writing applications in Rigo, sorry, policies in Rigo, you can do that. All of that comes with automatic telemetry. You don't have to create spans because dapper has the awareness of how your applications are invoking each other. That parent trace ID is automatically injected, and you can start kind of seeing the benefits. I'm going to show you this during the demo later on. Another popular building block pops up. It really allows microservices to communicate with each other. So the publisher has no knowledge of what the consumer is, and the consumer has no idea who published the data. And dapper uses CNCF cloud events as a kind of envelope for those, so wraps all those events for you. It provides at least once guarantees for your publishers. So some of the common implementations pops up inside of dapper. For open source, will be like Redis, Nats, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Hazelcast. There's probably a missing bunch of other ones. And for cloud search providers, for Azure, it's like a service bus or event hub. For GCP, it pops up, and for AWS, it's SQS, and there's a couple other ones for each one of those. But whichever you want to use, dapper provides you ability to scope those so your applications can be limited to which topics, for example, which applications can use each one of those components. Again, very much like we've seen before with a state, exactly same component, but this time instead of state, we say pops up. In this case, I'm using Redis. This is in the side of the cluster, so we're calling into a Redis namespace, fully qualified name. And the other thing you're going to see here, I'm going to talk a little more about secrets, but you actually see that didn't include the password for Redis, a reference password. And we'll talk about how dapper allows you to do it both programmatically and inside of configuration. But once registered inside of dapper, you get ability to share, post to these topics, and consumers can kind of subscribe to them. There's two different ways to subscribe to create subscriptions inside of dapper. You can do this programmatically, where dapper queries your app for well-known endpoint and for subscription. And this is kind of good for dynamic use cases, where you want to kind of respond with a specific configuration. And the app responds with an array of number of different subscriptions, where you tell us to which component and topic you want to subscribe, and what is the URL you want us to send, you want dapper to send the data to. That's great if you have awareness of dapper when you are writing this application. For situations where you already have applications that are aware of cloud events or are expecting cloud events, you can use declarative manner, which dapper provides a CRD for, that allows you to subscribe to create subscriptions through configuration. So your application actually has zero awareness of dapper. It just says, I know cloud events, give me cloud events, and dapper will send those to your application. Bindings, like I said, it's kind of a way to extend the functionality of dapper, and there's so many of these out there. I'm just going to list a few and I feel like I'm highlighting a couple of these consistently, but I'm trying to create some variety. We have two different flavors of binding. There are input and output bindings, and the output binding can be very directional. And I'll explain what that means. For input, you can think of those as triggers. So something will come from outside and trigger your code and bring some data, or maybe not. And so Kafka and all the kind of eventing systems out there are good use of binding, but we can also have APIs, like Twilio or Twitter and so forth. It really removes a lot of the complexity of your application, having to have the drivers or SDKs inside of your code and polling for that. Basically, application says, I don't know how this was configured, but give me that event and I will do something with that. Your application can be in gRPC or HTTP. It doesn't matter that event can be bound to you. And switching between these bindings at runtime is really as easy as changing configuration, and in some cases, relaunching the application. So dapper handles a lot of the retries and failure recovery for you. Again, none of that you have to write your application. It kind of keeps your code very lean and allows you to change your mind post deployment. Similarly, in the output binding, it allows you to kind of invoke from your code to the outside world. Just like with the other ones, we have a number of these out there for different systems and services. In fact, I just saw a couple of days ago, somebody just PR a iOS notification binding, so you can send events directly into your phone if you're using iOS. Just like with input binding, your code is free of SDKs. You can easily switch between bindings at runtime through configuration, and all the retries are handled for you. So regardless, if you're using input and bound to output binding approach, the configuration of that using component is exactly the same. And at this point, you've seen me show three different yamls that really differ very differently, very little. They only have some metadata that's specific to, in this case, for example, Kafka that differs and provides you ability to configure, but the actual notion of configuring your bindings inside of Dapper is super consistent and easy, regardless if you're running in Kubernetes or if you're running on-prem. That same file will work. So in this case, we have a Kafka binding that defines a specific topic. It could be n number of those, for simplicity of demo, just have one to which it's going to be used on the input. And for output, we also have limited which topic can be used to send data out of the application. We support consumer group. There's n number of other variables that Kafka provides, but that kind of is the extent of that. And then for input, your application would, in this case, the name of the component is MyKafka, your application, the route in your application would just have to expect to have a, there should be a routing application called MyKafka. And Dapper will post to that. You will also check before, for options on that, just to make sure that you actually have the route so it doesn't start flooding you with data before you are ready for that. And for calling outside of Ucode into the outside world, you're just using the consistent binding API with that same component and Dapper maps all of that for you. We touched on secrets a little before, but secrets are generally hard problem. And we've all heard about leakage credentials out there. Dapper provides you with this API that is consistent regardless of which backend you use. So I have logos for four of those out there. There's other options too. But the systems are backing Dapper's API behind the scene. So you can manage the rotation strategy and all that over there. And then Dapper gives you this consistent API that you can use both from within your code through the same API. So get, for example, MySecret, you will return the secret, but you can also use this inside of configuration. And we'll talk about this in a second. So in this case, we're using a HashiCorpVolt secret store. We've configured this with a few configuration options. There's a number of these again. I'm just showing a few. But you can now invoke that API in Dapper for secrets for specific password, and you will get that value of that. But you can also use this inside of the configuration. So what Dapper will do in this case, you will substitute these secrets, kind of inline the secrets for you. So your configuration is free of secrets. You can check it into repository. And as you deploy it to different environments, your entire solution is configurable at runtime. Observability is kind of a built-in building block. There's some configuration for it, but there's a lot of automatic things that happen. So I want to talk about a few of those. First of all, there's a ton of metrics that Dapper gives you kind of a visibility into with regards to the measure values and the counts around time series, monitors behavior of itself, of that sidecar, as well as of your application. And by default uses Prometheus and Grafana, there's a number of options to switch into CSP specific options like, for example, monitor on Azure. Similarly with distributed tracing, it profiles and monitors Dapper system services and the application. It's important for microservices because really, if you don't have distributed tracing, you don't know how things kind of work together. So I hope you identify bottlenecks. Hope you identify some issues and failures. And because it's kind of like a mesh-like architecture, it gives you these distributed traces automatically across the entire stack. So servicing vocation or bindings or state or whatever that may be, you get those traces automatically. And I will show you later, but all of that is by default available in Zitkin. If you're deploying some kind of open-source-centric solution in a CSP environment, you can use additional application insights on Azure, for example. And similarly with logs, you get FluentD and Elastic and Kibana, you can substitute some of those things and ship you logs somewhere else. Dapper injects a bunch of metadata into your logs, so you get the type and the host name and component name and app ID addresses and bunch of other things that give you kind of more context for actually what happened. Right, now Actors, a building block, like I said, is an object-oriented programming model like Aka and Orleans provides durable framework for hosting your actors. Dapper basically what it's functionality here is it's a self-contained unit of code that you deliver to Dapper that has both the state and compute. And Dapper manages the life cycle of that actor. It's based for use cases with minimal IOL because it's single-threaded. So if you start lacking, you will basically lack the entire solution. But there is a lot of benefits people can recognize through super high density. I think the numbers I've seen is like thousands of actors within a single pod, and obviously this can scale horizontally. And Dapper manages the state of your actors, offloads them when they're not used, all of that is configurable. It can rehydrate them somewhere else with the right state. But because the actor model is kind of a function of the runtime itself, Dapper supports actors only in Java, .NET, and Python. Every other building blocks up to now I told you about is 100% across all the different languages. So at this point you're saying, okay, this is great, but there is a lot of URLs and GRPC end points. Have we not moved past that? Well, yes, we've done. You can always use the row API if you want to. And in some languages, they're dynamic. It's kind of like a first-class citizen. Rest API is like in Node.js. It's something that you're already used to. But we provide also a five SDKs that we manage, the Dapper project manages currently. There's a number of those. I know there's a RAS, there's C++ and a bunch of other ones that the community manages too. So if one is missing that you would like to see, would love to kind of contribute and help working on that. And they give you this access to the same API. And when we go into demo in a minute, I'm going to show you how we can leverage that to kind of simplify the application. There's also integration into some of the frameworks. So for example, functions or Azure functions, regardless of running on Azure AKS or another cluster, you have access to those functions. And if you're kind of into the model of just programming only at the function unit, you can kind of integrate that very easily into Dapper and bind these configuration options for a different state and pops up very easily. Similarly with LogicOps, Spring Boot, ASP.NET Core and others. All right. I think at this point, let's go into demo. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start with a, actually no, let's do a slide. Kind of walk you very quickly through the demo so we know where we are. We're going to do way over engineer application. There's probably way simpler way to doing, but to show kind of the capability, I will show the three or four different components inside of Dapper. So first of all, we're going to use the binding for Twitter to create a subscription for a specific stream of tweets. And we're going to combine that within the application and then persist each one of those tweets into a Mongo database. Then we're going to add a sentiment analysis API as another Dapper service that's going to be using service to service invocation to score each one of those tweets sentiment. So we're going to find if they're negative, positive or neutral or mixed sometimes. And when we score those, the tweet processor will also publish them onto a topic. And eventually we'll bring a UI application that will show those tweets in a UI. Don't get excited. My UI foo is super weak, so it's going to be very rudimentary application, but it will allow you kind of see how we can subscribe to events and stream them in this case over WebSackets to the UI. All right. So let's now go to the application. So a couple of things I want to show here, and obviously there's a lot of moving parts, but the first thing is we're going to show the component for Twitter. You see that even though I'm running on a local machine, I'm using secrets. And it's because in this case, I'm using one of those developer friendly, quick and dirty kind of secret stores, which is a file store. So in this case, my secret store for dapper is defined as a file that I'm hosting in my machine. You can use environment variables as well. And on a local machine, it allows you to just kind of use those secrets. When later on, when we move to something like Kubernetes, and I show you how to deploy that, you will actually use the secret, the Kubernetes secrets, because that's the kind of optimal way of using there. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to define a state. In this case, I'm going to use Redis for state, as well as for pops up, so that nothing changes there. Super easy for your local development. And we're going to run that. The other thing to kind of point out here is I'm actually using the dapper SDK. This is for Go. The very same principle would apply for every single other language out there. I just can't write anything pretty much but Go. And even that is pretty weak. But you will see that I'm creating a service. The part I want to focus on is the odd of creating a subscription to a kind of binding handler is as simple as it's a method on the client. So you say, I want to subscribe to the tweets. Remember, we define tweets as the component name. And then just handle. And the handler is super simple. It doesn't do anything other than just publishing it to a topic that it's configured again through configuration. So this is as exciting as YAML can get. Let's go to Go. So first what I'm going to do is I'm going to launch locally the viewer. You will see the dapper went through its logging processing here. It started the application. It told me that HTTP API is on this port and the gRPC is on this port, which are configurable. And also kind of give you a nice check box here. You're good to go locally. And pretty much the same thing works for every single application. What we're going to do in here, we're going to actually start a gRPC application on a specific port. This is going to be the sentiment scoring application. And we're going to point to where the configurations are. Again, I'm just using Go itself directly. Similar. I'm on a Mac. So Mac asked me to make sure that I allow that to happen. And exactly same thing for the tweet processor. There are some old tweets in here. And we're going to start the tweet provider. And what's going to happen in here is this is an HTTP one. You see the same thing. And I use the term football. And for reasons that we are recording this tweet, I'm actually not going to open the UI because I'm embarrassed what could be out there. But I'm going to open one for dapper, for term dapper, that I'm actually already running on a server. This is deployed on Kubernetes. And I'm going to come back later, show you how I've done that. You will see a number of tweets. And if you're going to tweet, and please be nice, don't say something that will embarrass me. And so if you tweet something will automatically come in here. But what for each one of those, we can see, for example, that I was very excited about the specific support and all parts. So I tweeted about it. And the tweet was identified positive. Joe beta actually sold that to and jumped on it. We see some people that maybe are less, maybe they were retweeting. So it's hard to tell if they were excited about it or not. But the sentiment is there. It's kind of not the function of that application. The one thing I want to show you is that in the entire code, there was no mention of any tracing, right? Our code was very simplistic. But what we were able to do is within your application, it actually create the map of these. So for each one of the services, we can drill down, identify what was happening. We can switch to logs. We can see metrics of the entire system. In this case, dapper and the performance characteristics of each one of those asset changes. So it's super transparent to the developer who just writes the logic of the application. They don't have to worry about the actual plan. Are we almost out of time? So I'm going to switch quickly to this. Actually, let's see if somebody posted something. Okay. Nobody did. All right. Oh, Brandon. So let's go back. The entire demo is 100% reproducible and it walks you through each one of the steps. You can go to this short link or just scan the barcode, the QR code. It will walk you through the creation of the cluster and if you don't have one, as well as configuring of the different components and deploying of the application. Let's talk about for integration very quickly or skip that even. A couple of things that the project is doing right now. We have a stable set of APIs with this new release. We've kind of made some changes in APIs. So at this point, the API is stable. We've delivered access control and service identity like I was already talking about. We've actually done a security added with one of the CNCF certified company and published those results as part of this PR2. So you can go to GitHub and find the reports about the security that we have performed. We have also announced a project transition to an open source governance to a vendor-neutral kind of way of looking at this project and making sure that this is sustainable over time. So what's next? Kind of by the end of the year, we're looking to release a release candidates of the 1.0. This is based on the feedback we've got from customers and users using this in the real world. We want to definitely start focusing more on addressing the friction from the real-world use cases. So as people kind of more and more are taking this to production deployments, they feed us information and we're kind of making sure that this is the highest priority to make sure that this deployment is successful. There is a fair amount of infrastructure work going on behind the project. If you're going to be sustainable as an open source project, you need to make sure that you have a good performance and performance automation. We have a lot of that too, but we want to make sure that this is all accessible to general community that you're going to be working on on Dapper. We're going to start also seeding the technical steering committee, just reaching out to the outside community and bringing and evaluating, kind of identifying who are the right people who should be on this. Then very much kind of focusing on ensuring the readiness for production grade workloads, which means paying a little more attention maybe to the operator and making sure that some of the metrics that the traditional enterprise or large-scale deployments operator would want to see as the focus has been definitely on the developer so far. All right, in closing, Dapper.io is a good starting point for pretty much anything on Dapper. The project itself, like I said, is hosted on GitHub, so GitHub.com for such Dapper. There is a chat on GitHub, as well as Twitter kind of monitoring going on. So looking forward to hear you. There's a few videos about Dapper that I've kind of collected into a playlist that you can access. If you can't find anything else, so if you need any other information, I've provided my email address, which might not be the wisest thing in the recording video, but looking forward to hear from you. Karen. Cool. Awesome. Thank you for that great presentation. We now have some time for questions. If you have a question that you'd like to ask, reminder to please drop it in the Q&A tab on the bottom of your screen, and we will get through as many as we can. So right now there are a few questions. The first one is, is Dapper production ready? If not, any idea when it can reach production-ready stages? We have a project starting this month and we're thinking of using Dapper for it. Yeah, so like with any open-source project, you're kind of working on the zero dot releases, right? And it's kind of assumed, I think that that's probably not production-grade, but what happens? Customers actually deploy this in production, so we have a few customers that went with Dapper to production. I would say, depending on the use case, if you're going to be running a monitoring system for a nuclear power station, I would probably wait a little longer, but if you're looking for some kind of monitoring application with ability to reprocess the data if we find something, that's definitely ready for that. So yeah, I think we're getting very close there. I think RC1 definitely is intended to be a production group. Awesome. Next question says, are you seeing a demand for streaming GRPC connections in addition to unary GRPC sessions? Yeah, no, we do get that question. We do see people asking for streaming support. I think we're trying to understand a little more the use case rather than just technology and what that would look like in a generic API. So if you're interested to kind of provide a kind of context for how this would help you in your use case, we would love to know that because that's kind of what Dapper drives this functionality by, what is the pattern and how can we kind of help developers in this case? Great. Next question, what are the main differences between Dapper and CloudState of LightBend? Oh, so the LightBend team has actually worked with Dapper team on a CloudState, and CloudState is one of the supporting components for state inside of Dapper. So I would say with regards to state, it's one of the options inside of Dapper. Sorry, I should have mentioned that CloudState was there. Cool. Next question, are there any plans to support distributed transactions across multiple microservices? Oh, I would love to know more about this. So the service invocation in a cluster can give you some guarantees of transactions depending on what you do. But I think I would want to probably understand a little more what that looks like if we're talking about like a secondary or a tertiary service invocation and having some guarantees around that. I think right now that's not supported or that's not an option. I think you can accomplish similar things through pop-up just by virtue of retries and kind of using this until you reject a particular message. But I would love to know more about it. If you have a way to open an issue inside of Dapper, I'd love to hear about that context. He followed up with such a saga pattern. Cool. I have to admit I'm not from the saga pattern. We'll look it up though. Ping me on email or Twitter and I'd love to talk to you more. Okay, or Stuart said maybe it's Sage and that they said okay to ping you. Cool. If anyone has any more questions, please drop them in. By the way on this transactional thing, there's probably a few members from the Dapper community who are a lot more knowledgeable than I am on this area and I'm probably cringing right now saying what is Mark saying? Please post it in Gitter as the topic and we'd love to have a conversation on that. All right, last call for questions. All right, well let's go ahead and wrap that up. Thank you Mark for a great presentation and Q&A. That is all the time we have questions today and thank you everyone for joining us. The webinar recording and slides will be online later today and we are looking forward to seeing you at a future CNCF webinar. Have a great day. Thanks. Thank you.


Talking about this reshuffling of polling units, it has had its toll on voters because many people now realise that their polling units is not as close to them as they wanted it to. They have to go a distance. And some of those places are not trackable. Because of the curfew, they could not really move as in vehicles are not on the roads. Most of them would be, they would not even be encouraged to want to go the distance just because they need to cast the election because, what do you think about it like, okay, why do I have to go all the distance when I don't even know if my vote would count at the end of the day? It's an irony for a country where we've been crying about voter advocacy. We've quarreled with the fact that many people don't show up, they register but they don't show up on election day. And for the first time in Edurans, they're enthusiastic to show up and then there's a glitch. And that glitch is also increasing the voter apathy. It costs the question a lot of things. Again, I think, yes, it does have its plate full but there's certain loose ends that should have been tied before last minute. I mean, and that's one of the things that Bayer was making reference to that, why wait? Bayer, I want to come back to you with a question that I have. I have spoken to a group of civil societies who have continuously questioned why I may cannot keep that portal open. We call it continuous voter registration but then they shut the portal down at some point because they want to get ready for the elections and in their words, clean up the voter register and allow INEC to work. But in other claims, I mean, section 10 of the new electoral act clearly states that the voter's registration should be continuous as long as you're 18, you should be able to register and get your PVC. Shouldn't that be an aspect where civil society and of course people of like mind should, you know, key into and continue to petition or more of the other lobby members of the National Assembly to make it a bill of sorts or restates it clearly so that people would be allowed at any point in time because even as we speak, sir, someone just turned 18. Absolutely. I mean, we're hitting all the right points in this discussion. For instance, if you give birth to a child, it's mandatory that you go to the National Population Commission, you present the birth certificate issued by the hospital, the one attesting to the birth of the child and you register that child and you get the birth certificate. It's seamless. There's no problem. You don't see people queuing up to get birth certificates. You don't see people queuing up to get ATM cards in the bank. Why can't we get voter's card? Why must we queue up to get voter's card? Once you turn 18, you should be able to walk into the National Population Commission office or the ILEP office, whichever one is close to you, register and collect the PVC. We must not wait until elections. I agree that ILEP will need to clean up and update register. So those, that still should not stop people from registering. You may just say, no, if you're going to vote in the 2023 elections, you ought to have registered by this date, okay? If you're not registered by that date, unfortunately, you won't be able to vote. But if you still want to register even after that date, you can, though you will not be able to vote in this 2023 elections. This way, the exercise actually leaves up to its name, which is continuous voter's registration. You are absolutely right that it's not being done. And we all, I don't think we should leave this to safe society groups. In the mosques, in the churches, everywhere, we should continue to impress it on the authorities. This is what should happen. Because in my view, it's going to reduce the cost of elections. When we wait until elections are one year away and then ask everybody now to come and register, you have accumulated millions of people who turned 18 three years before.  So I feel this has to change. And it's one of the major lessons we should take from the current elections.


HBCU Digest Radio welcome back. I'm your host, Jared Carter. Today we are certainly privileged to have with us a great friend of the HBCU Digest, a friend of the show for many years. Dr. Tony Stewart, an acclaimed actress, a acclaimed trainer of the theater arts, the Dean of Alabama State University's College of Visual and Performing Arts, and soon to be retiree. So Dr. Sewell, we're talking to you in your office, you haven't left, you've cleaned the stuff out. But you still hang around. I mean, why now? Why now? And I think before we get into it, people got to understand that what you've done, not only in your individual career as an actress, but in the HBCU space of having developed that Alabama State of All Places, a performing arts program that is the target of people on Broadway, the target of people in Hollywood, and every other theatrical, and in education, and in equity theaters. How have you, I mean, we could talk all day about how you did it. But when you look back on this, are you surprised at what you were able to do? I'm grateful. Because when I visited Alabama State University, while in town, to film with James Earl Jones on Saturday night with Connie Chung, a television special, to talk about the life and contributions of a Reverend Jones who preceded Dr. Martin Luther King at Dexter Avenue Church. One of its members, Dr. Ralph Bryson, who was an extra in the group, and a professor at Alabama State University of Great Note. He's a Kappa man who is known to the world of Kappas. He came up to me and he said, I know who you are, and I want to take you somewhere and show you something. And he was referring to knowing me as being noted for being the first African American female to receive a PhD from Florida State University because he was an avid reader of the Chronicle on Higher Education. So I went with him to the campus and he pointed out the theater, and I was amazed to see a beautiful theater, intimate theater, with all the bells and whistles, a dance studio, two large dressing rooms, mirrored dressing rooms, costume shop, scene shop, green room, black box. I said, I've never seen such a facility on the HBCU campus. And in 1990, it was the only one. There was a legitimate theater and no one had really said a lot about it in the circuit of the National Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts and of the American College and Theater Festival. No one had mentioned this. And I was amazed. So he then took me to meet his president. And to my further amazement, it was Dr. Leon Howard, who I had worked with at Jackson State University in Mississippi. And Dr. Howard said, Tommy, we have a theater here, but we're in the process now of eliminating theater on this campus. I thought, no, you can't do that. That facility is wonderful. He said, well, can I talk to you more? And the rest of it is history. They were trying to leave you in the whole time. That's right. So my husband and I have to interviewing at other institutions, basically five or six others, which were predominantly white. We found ourselves being drawn to Alabama State because at one of the interviews, one of the university administrators said to us, tell us who we're competing with, because we really want the two of you. My husband is a PhD as well in education administration. So we started naming the schools. And the first one out of my mouth was Alabama State University. And the administrator said, no, no, no, no, no. We don't want to know about the little penny any schools. We want to talk about schools that are in the top 10 that we're competing with. And it took my breath. So I said to him, let us get back with you. And when they flew us in and they flew us home, when we got on the plane, I told my husband, I said, you know what, you write down what's on your heart and I'll write down what's on mine. And when we got home, he asked me, he said, did you hear what that man said? I said, yeah. I heard him. I said, he said, penny any. I said, Oh, Alan, that hurt me so bad. And he said, well, what did you write down? And we both wrote Alabama State University. Now, mind you, Alabama State University was not the biggest bitter for us. It was it didn't have the biggest package for us. But it was a step up from what we were where we were working and what we were doing at the time. And we were at Jackson State and my husband was working as the it worked as financial aid director. And he was the human resource director. And I was an associate professor of theater and speech. He became the vice president of student affairs at Alabama State. And I was invited in as the director of the theater arts program. It wasn't a department yet. As a matter of fact, there were no students. But the facility was there. There was one young lady that had her minor in theater. And she was very good. And she stayed with me. And we recruited the rest of the story because when I left as department chair in 2000, we had 2010, we had 128 theater majors. We were accredited as a department of theater. And when I became dean at Alabama State in 2010, we became accredited in art. And we were already accredited in music. So our college is one of the few HBCU colleges in the nation where all departments within that college of performing arts, that they're all accredited. Talk about that a little bit because I don't think that you get enough credit as a as an academician. Everybody in the HBCU circle knows you as, you know, this wonderful artist. But you indeed are an architect of the academic rigor of that program. Was that something that you developed over your time and learned, hey, this is what we ought to do? Or was it was it something that you recognize accreditation? It's value in in delivering a quality product to the students. And you just said, hey, as we go along, let's let's go for this benchmark. Both. You hit it on the mark. Both of your questions are the reasons why we became accredited. The students were flocking here. And our administration early on said, you don't really need to be accredited. Look at Sybil Marbley at Florida A&M. They didn't worry about accreditation because she had such a dynamic program. And I was very familiar with her and had even traveled a couple of times and been on the airplane with her and sat right next to her while attending Florida State. So I admired her work. And I knew that I learned that the business industry across the nation admired the work at Fair Mew from the College of Business. So I took that into consideration and I didn't worry about accreditation at first. I worried about trying to get the right people on board so that we would be as strong and recognized like Dr. Sybil Marbley at Fair Mew in business. But then the more we worked, the more we knew we needed. And the standards for accreditation require you to have more up-to-date, more of the right people on hand. The programming must be directed and have a vision. And you need to align yourself with the needs of the students. And it's all about what the students need so that they can succeed after they leave your university. And that to me became paramount. The students were talented. The students had a good foundation given to them here. But they needed more than that. They needed finances so that their productions and when they worked on a production as a technical person, as a costumer, as a set designer, they needed art cad and they needed whatever technical material and programming on the computer that would prepare them so that wherever they went after leaving Alabama State University, they would be strong and proficient in it. So the standards of accreditation require you to have art cad. Requires you to have the right amount of space for a movement class and to have rehearsal space and to have the right teachers with the proper credentials. We found ourselves having to change out some of our faculty because they had had a couple of hours in, let's just say lighting, but they didn't have everything they needed to really pass on the fundamental information. So luckily, I had worked in children's theater, created dramatics, acting, directing professionally, and in the classroom. So I was able to cover a lot of areas, but I wasn't enough. So that's why I went to the administration and said, may we please now look at becoming fully accredited so that we will be a force to deal with. Our graduates have always received scholarships for graduate schools. As a matter of fact, at one point, at one point in time, we didn't have to send the students off to audition at URDA or at SCTC because the schools came to us wanting to see our students before anybody else could see them at URDA or SCTC. The Southeast and Theater Conference is a place where students would go and show themselves and audition and showcase their talent in hopes that their transcript and their recommendations would make them eligible to even be admitted into a graduate program.  Don't worry about going to URDA. We want you. And those students now have increased the number of master fine arts of African American students. And we have some European American students as well with their MFA's and all of them, they went on to graduate schools. And there was a time if we had 10 graduates, nine of them were in graduate school. And they were there on scholarships.  It's almost, it almost has a diamond in a rough quality to it. As renowned as you are, it almost is like, you know, where it, you know, this, this is an anomaly. And it almost is like that program is a reflection that this, this program in Montgomery, Alabama is churning out great artists in theater, dance and, and music and visual arts. Did that, did, did you ever take pride in that? Or was that a point of frustration that you had such a great product? And whether it was geography or just the HBCU label or that it never, it never rose to the level of a USC or an NYU, even though its product was on par with that. And in a lot of cases above those schools. Well, I took pride in the fact that many of the students were very much like myself. They were diamonds in the rough, whether they were in art or music or theater or dance. They had something, but what they needed was to believe in themselves. And yes, we've had to make do too long. But when you think about the genesis of this university, Alabama State University was founded by five former slaves. These slaves put their money together and started a school. And on that premise, I've always tried to continue to tell our students how, I said five was nine, tell our students that you've got to believe in yourself because somebody believed in you before you were born. You've got to believe in yourself because Rosa Park was right here in Montgomery and she sat down so that you could stand up. You've got to believe in yourself because Ralph Abernathy was born right across the street here on this campus. And so was Nat King Cole. You've got to believe in yourself because the foundation has been laid for you is your responsibility to build. And that's not just at Alabama State, but our young people need to start thinking about that right now every day. Even this generation of young people starting now need to know that somebody has prayed for them. Somebody has always believed in them. Somebody has hoped for them. I know our generation seemed to look like it's all about ourselves, but it's all about ourselves shining so that our students, our children, and our grandchildren will have a reason to go on for tomorrow and not commit suicide, not take drugs, not run from what they think they might become, but be who they are. Stand on your own ground. Exist at this moment. It's so important to take advantage of every moment and know that right now I'm a child. Now I'm a teenager. Now I'm a young adult.  Take no compromise, no wooden nickels. Nobody telling you that you are no good at it because you are good at it. You are there and you've been blessed to have this child or to be in this position or to make it to be that young adult for a reason. Everybody has something to contribute. And why are you going to shortchange yourself from contributing? Yes, I take pride in every step of the way, every step of the way to where we are now. And I take pride in being able to retire and say, okay, I feel pretty good. And I'm going to do something else. I'm waiting on that sign. That sign from God. He will lead me or wake me up. And I'll say, ah, okay, that's what I'm supposed to do now. I was going to say that's a couple of movies on Netflix probably. Like that. You, one of the things that really marked your work with the students at Alabama State is the acting, the quality of the acting, the quality of performance. And you've talked to me in previous times where we've done the show about the being method. Talk about how you infuse that in your students and how much work it took to get them ready for Broadway quality and stage quality performance with that particular method of acting. Being is a technique introduced by Frank Silvera. Frank Silvera was known for his role on High Chaparral. And as Frank Silvera told everyone that he was African American, he looked like Chinese. He could be Mexican. He could be Asian, white. I don't think he ever really played a black role, but he lived his life as saying and knowing who he was. He was from Kingston, Jamaica. And so Frank Silvera said that America had its own acting method because we are a melting pot. So Frank Silvera started the American Theater of Being in Los Angeles, California. And he produced and directed the play, The Amen Corner by James Baldwin on Broadway. And it was the first all black African American play produced, directed, publicized, managed, written by African Americans, starring actress B. Richards. Vantyle Whitfield was the managing producer, Nat King Cole financed the show. Frank Silvera directed it. James Baldwin wrote it. Whitman Mayo was in it with B. Richards. Art Evans was in it. Art Evans was the youngest child actor to be a part of the American Theater of Being Company. Marlon Brando joined him after they left Actors Studio when he announced in an Actors Studio meeting that he was black. Marlon Brando joined him with the American Theater of Being. And I was his last student, a young man named Henry Brown that lives in California in the Santa Barbara area, who is also an actor. And I, we were his last students. Frank Silvera took me to Hollywood, introduced me to Jack Roberts at 20th Century Fox, who was a casting director. And Jack Roberts became the head of casting for the Screen Actors Guild. And he told me that I had something unique. Frank Silvera said, when you are being, you are in a complete and perfect state lacking no essential characteristics. In other words, you believe in yourself, you trust yourself, you know how to step into the moment and wear the shoes of that character.  In other words, it's an existentialistic journey.  It's pure, it's real, so real that it becomes something that becomes communal to those witnessing it. So they experience it with you. So that's what I've taught. And in teaching it, you have to help your students, your actors to strip down all of the layers of their personality.  And it takes time to do that. That's why it was so great for the stage being. And it's also good for the camera, but you need to be able to free yourself, peel. Sometimes when I go, you know, now auditioning and I'm here on campus and I've been in a heated meeting where two faculty members or a student is upset and I've got to go and audition, it is very difficult to suddenly get to that audition room and peel what I've just left. And I had a secretary once every time I would go to L.A. to audition. Soon as I get off the plane, she's calling, calling, calling. And I say, what's going on there? Oh, doc, listen, this so-and-so just call it. And all of a sudden, all of that is poured into me.  And I've got to try to find a way to peel it off before I walk into that audition. And then I walk into the audition suite and there's some personalities that I've met before. You came all the way here from Alabama. There's another layer I got to peel off. So sometimes it would be very difficult. But that's what I would teach. I would teach them about peeling and teach them about feeling and teach them about what being really means. And it's something that you can't just talk about. It is a process that you have to experience. Be richest used to say, take note. And she didn't want you to write anything down. Neither did Frank Savera. He wanted you to hear, to witness it, to experience it, and to see it in your mind so that you can go back to that place, to the core of your being. The word dictates itself. The word reverberates on itself. The word is like a seed. There's nothing more can be from that seed but what it is. So you go for truth.  Is going on and still going strong. But what are you going to miss the most about the academics out of you? I think I've played in this game so long. I don't anticipate missing. I really don't. I might be in for a shock. But because I deal with existentialism and existing now, what was was and what is to come is to come. So for me to to sit back and reflect and miss something, I've done all I can. I love Donna McClurkens' song. After you've done all you can, stand. When you stand up, it's most times you're getting ready to go somewhere. Yeah.  So I don't anticipate missing because I try to play this act out all the way. Every day. All the way. Sometimes when I really needed to sleep or go to the restroom, I sacrificed because I was needed to hold firm and give. And I tried to do that. So for me to miss something, I hadn't thought of that. Well, you know, there's a certain rhythm to working.  You miss Lois. We got to, I have to say a special shout out to her because she's been so helpful to me over the years. Yeah, I'll call Lois. Lois is not going anywhere. She ain't going with you. So with that, with that in mind, I do have, I think I'll tell you what, I can say this. I would love to see all that we can do about having a resource center for being, having Be Riches and Frank Sovere and my information available for persons who want to study it to complete the book about being. I'd like, you know, things like that I hope to do. I'm so busy looking forward. I don't know how to look back. That's your page taught me that. Yeah. He said, don't look back. Something might become, you know, something might be crowding on you. Well, and that actually leads to the last thing I want to ask you, because how did you, you know, particularly with artists and people who live in the creative, we, you know, we can get kind of singularly focused on one thing that drives our hearts to do something and you have kind of done both.  If somebody was following you and they said, you know, I really want to be a singer. I really want to be an actor, but I know that I should have some kind of educational grounding. If I would encourage that, would you encourage that? Yes, Lord. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's part of the satisfaction, the yin and the yang of my personality is that, that active role as a professional and it all started at the same time and the active role as an academician. So that's why I feel so fulfilled. And now I want to, I'd like to give a lot of attention to as much that I can do now that I couldn't do when I was trying to do both. I just didn't even try to be considered for a leader leading role anywhere. I just, you know, it was just not possible because these young people are here and they need to take a test and you know, they need to prepare for an audition. So I would be happy when I worked on it. He did the night Carol O'Connor was so good. He and Ed letting when we, I talked to them about I need to teach my classes on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And if you can, if you can arrange my shooting dates Fridays and Saturdays and Mondays week, this will work.  Not right now. Not right now, I would say. And they laughed at me. And now when I think about the bank, I laughed at me too. My love was stronger than my income. But they went along with it because it was economically great for them. And for me, I was thinking, well, whatever I make with, he is good. And then I have my salary at the university. That'll balance me out. But that was not always wise. But I don't regret it. All for love. All for forgetting those. All for the love again, and helping somebody. The eyes of my students, that's the thing that really haunts me. If anything, when I see young people and I look into their eyes and I see emptiness, then I probably will think about what else can I do. But I'm hoping that I'll think and believe that my students will pick up the baton and carry it on for generations to come. We had a summit in October, and we hope to have another one every other year, where we certified those who have truly made great strides with their careers, the ones on Broadway, the ones who filming, the ones who teaching, the ones who have made a full circuit of their life's work, is acting in equity theaters. We had them to come and review the being process again and certified them and gave them credentials that they can hang on the wall to say that they are practitioners of being. They can now teach it anywhere. They can open up their own studio anywhere. And I'm hoping that I'll be able to refer those eyes that doubt when I see them to those particular students, and then we'll have another group. We'll have about 15 every other year that will be certified in being. So, I hope I have answered your question, because I just don't anticipate longing when I have so much, you know, I have so much I'm doing. I'm a museum director now. I've been directing for the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Rosa Parks Museum, and the Children's Wing here in Montgomery, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And some of the museums have offered me to exhibit some of my paraphernalia, my artifacts on a wall in those museums. So, it's going to take me a while to archive and catalog my information. So, I'll know where it is and my children will know when I'm no longer here where those artifacts are. Right now, I'm looking at about four different sites that might house a wall in honor of Tania Stewart. So, that's exciting.