Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's Adam Payne, County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Roger Distrudi. And as you know, every month we strive to bring a different program or generally department head as a guest to talk about the very important roles and responsibilities that they oversee. And today we've got a special guest for you. We've got Sheriff Todd Prebe. Welcome, Sheriff. Thank you. It's been, I think, five years now or? Going on the fifth year. Going on the fifth year he's entering or in his second term and it has been just an absolute pleasure to have Sheriff Prebe on board and we're gonna cover some ground today. And Todd, start by just setting the stage force a little bit. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to run for Sheriff? Well, I graduated from South High School in 83. Had an interest in law enforcement. I'm not quite sure where in that junior high years I had an interest in law enforcement. Had an uncle that was in law enforcement. And it got to the point where in the late 80s, it was very difficult to get into law enforcement. The lists were long, it was very, very competitive. So I took them up on the offer of going down to Dallas. And that's where I started my law enforcement career was Dallas, Texas. And I was down there for three years and really wanted to get back to my hometown. And that was my ultimate goal. And realizing that the experience would help me get there, it worked, I ended up number one on the list and was hired in Sheboygan, the city of Sheboygan in 92. And 96 is when community policing was starting to make its way within the police department and got onto a team of three that made that up. And just from there, kind of saw where I wanted to make a bigger difference. And I was really, really enthusiastic and really believed in the philosophy of partnerships, that being in community policing and seeing the benefits in that. I really wanted to make a bold difference, I guess you can say. And lead by example, when it comes to truly believing in a philosophy that would help sustain and maintain quality of life and public safety. And it got to that point that, you know what, I'm gonna run for sheriff and I can be that one that kind of like from that top down, you know, in that philosophy, you gotta believe in it to inspire others and really make a difference. And that's really why it is that I ran for sheriff because I wanted to, not that previous sheriffs did not believe in community policing. I wanted to keep that going and I knew I would. Take it to another level. Take it to another level. And you know, I fully expect the next sheriff will take it to the next level, but I'm gonna set them up as best as I can. How many years were you a police officer then at for the city of Sheboygan? What was it, 18 years? 18 and then three in Dallas. So 21 years before running for sheriff. Right. Yeah, and of course now entering your second term, you had no competitor. No, no. At which I think speaks well to what folks feel about the job you're doing and I know you're doing a good job. Tell us a little bit about what's your most proud of your first four years? Some of the changes or improvements you've made? There's actually been several, some on a personal level and some more as an organization or kind of like teamwork. And that's where you kind of come in and play too is the first one, the combined dispatch. I really think that that was a team effort. That I think is going to reap huge benefits as we move forward and what it is combined dispatch will offer the citizens of Sheboygan. And I don't see that as a personal victory. I see that as a team victory. The county and the city working together for the common good and we made it happen. And that is certainly one. There are some things that I take personal pride in and that is in the promotions and the hiring that we have done. I have found that it is important to me to make decisions that's gonna set the next sheriff in a good position because I truly believe that you surround yourself with good people, you let them do their work. And I wanna have, when I retire, I wanna be able to leave and feel really, really good about the difficult decisions in promotions, putting the right people in the right seats on this bus and then also hiring the right people. I refuse to lower my standards, our standards of what it is the public expects out of their law enforcement agency just to fill staffing levels. It's gonna be some challenges coming up but I do take great pride in hiring the right people for the right reasons and promoting the right people. For the right job. Got some good people, good people around you. Putting your inspector and I've had the pleasure of interacting not with all of your deputies but a number of your staff and you've got some good people. So let's set the stage a little bit more for the viewers on the roles and responsibilities of the Sheriff's Department. To most people that may seem, well of course they're out there doing law enforcement and pulling us over when we're speeding but there's a lot that goes on as part of the mission and roles and responsibilities of your department. Oh there is, you nailed it with the patrol division, the most obvious, certainly a responsibility encumbered on the Sheriff's Office when it comes to enforcing ordinances within some of the townships and the villages that don't have their own law enforcement. Of course we still have state law that we enforce the traffic and things of that nature. But one that is, several of them that people don't realize is that encumbered on the Sheriff is actually the role of civil process. Delivering paperwork signed by an official such as a judge, it's encumbered on me and who I delegate to actually serve those papers, lawful papers. We also have the responsibility of providing security for our courtrooms. That's encumbered on the Sheriff. I don't know how many people realize that but that is a constitutional responsibility of the Sheriff. Another one is, you don't think of, and that's the waterways. All bodies of water, river, Lake Michigan, the lakes, that is a responsibility of the Sheriff to monitor those and then also when it comes to drownings and evidence, we gotta try to save in a lot of cases is more retrieve. Another area, huge area responsibility, one that comes with most liability and that is housing of inmates and keeping a accurate registry of them. So that's a biggie that people don't realize that is encumbered on the Sheriff. Right now, approximately how many inmates are we housing and keeping out of the community right now? We're at about the 170 to 180 range. That certainly fluctuates. It will fluctuate throughout the year. You can almost predict where we're going to be. So we're actually doing quite well. And of course you've got folks who are following up on crimes and dealing with the drug abuse in the community and I just know there's a litany of things and that was a nice high end overview. In total, how many staff do you have under your direction and what's your annual budget? We have 172 employees and we're at 17.3 annual budget. So 172 employees, $17 million budget and this is broken into divisions. What are those divisions? There's five divisions. You have the patrol division, the criminal investigation division, support services division, corrections division and also the administration division. Beautiful, nice summary. Turn it over to Roger. Todd, good to have you with us and I know that you're building on the philosophy of community policing and there's a lot of good stuff going on. Why don't you just describe to our viewers what community policing is and how it affects us all? Community policing is a philosophy and a lot of people think as if though it's a program and it's really a philosophy, it's a way of thinking. And the way of thinking of community policing is focusing their attention on building partnerships within the community. It allows us to take more of a proactive approach to law enforcement. Law enforcement typically traditionally reactive, simply responding for calls for service. That doesn't help us to sustain and improve quality of life if you're simply always being reactive. And community policing and building partnerships allows us to forge those relationships where the issues don't solely fall on to the police. And we were really good about that, traditional law enforcement.  And what we're saying now is, is let's work together on our community issues. Help us identify what are your concerns in the eyes of the citizen because what we view as issues may not necessarily be a true concern to the public. And we work together to address those concerns. So it's a true partnership to improve, maintain quality of life and the sense of safety. Then what are your expectations of your staff and the people, the citizens out there? How can they help you? And how is the interaction there? Some of it, excuse me, is a public understanding that some of the issues that they have can be resolved by themselves. Let's take for real quick example and that being loud music next door. We've gotten to the point that we've always encouraged people if you've got a problem call us, but now they're calling us for things that at one point in time they were able to resolve on their own. And what we're asking the public to do is to make attempts to resolve the loud music disturbance that is created in the neighborhood.  And if you can't resolve it, certainly give us a call, but you don't help neighborhood relationships by having the law enforcement intervene to solve that when a neighborly phone call or maybe going on the door and introducing yourself and saying, hey, your music is a little loud. Can you turn it down? I've got to explain the situation. I got a newborn at home and this is a nap time keeping him or her awake does so much better for the neighborhood and it limits our contact. So we're allowed to really deal with the things that are really encumbered on law enforcement. Tough to warm up and feel good about your neighbor if their first thing to do is to call the cops on you rather than just talk to you directly. Exactly. It may only escalate the situation, I'm sure. And I think in a lot of cases that ends up is what happens. They end up not talking to each other, they don't resolve issues and it's the police always going back to the same location. So we can do things such as conflict resolution. We will do interventions, sit down with the people and actually work out what are their grievances and they have actually been very, very successful in really preventing law enforcement from having to go back to the same issue and we just get the neighbors talking. That sounds like a great initiative. Is there any additional funding or staff needed with this initiative? The beauty part about it is there isn't. No, that's great. And you include the public and they give you suggestions and you can improve on a lot of other things so that's great to see. And I know the Sheriff's Department helps local communities. We have Plymouth Falls and I believe there's a couple other ones that have their own police department but how do you help out some other smaller communities or towns and how do we help them out? Well, we have contracts with some of the villages. The most recent one was Howard's Grove. Excuse me. Howard's Grove has gone into a contract with us where there is a certain number of hours that monthly our deputies will devote time into the village of Howard's Grove and we'll use the guidance of the village board to let us know what are the concerns, what is it that you'd like addressed during that contract time and then the officers during that contract time they will concentrate on those efforts. The way we're going about with the philosophy of community policing that we don't stop at contract time and providing the services we provide throughout the whole county. It allows us to have concentrated time in the village of which the village is looking for and it enhances our ability but by no means that outside of contract time we're done going into Howard's Grove. We concentrate on our efforts. Where are the calls for service? Excuse me. And where do we want to put our attention and put forth the resources to deal with whatever issue seems to be going on at night? Are there any particular things in the field of law enforcement where there's bigger problems on the horizon or is there trends and is it happening in our area? Certainly the ongoing drug issue fuels a lot of our part one crimes and we were up a little bit in burglaries. The major crimes have dropped throughout the county with the exception of burglars that went up and that certainly we are led to believe that it is the ongoing prescription drug and heroin use that is fueling the burglaries and we are talking strategies to address the increase. We're always looking for ways to combat the burglars and this is where we may call upon the public. Most residential burglaries you will find nationwide. Most are daytime burglaries. Are we being vigilant as neighbors or watching out for each other? Just because it's daytime doesn't mean that the crime stops in a residential burglaries it actually goes up. There were a few years ago that we were concerned that we may have had to build another detention center and we've been able to hold off on that and you've been doing a great deal with having alternatives to help the situation. Maybe you could explain to everyone how that works and has it been effective? We have the alternatives to incarceration unit of which they will use the bracelet for qualified inmates that are released, excuse me, to look for jobs or maintain employment, things of that nature. We also now have introduced day reporting for certain qualified inmates again. They will be required to come in with a bracelet but check in periodically to maintain their sobriety and that they're following the rules that has been set on them and it allows us to keep our population low. So with those efforts and now with the increase of the volunteer work that is out there, there's more work release being done or requests to leave for work, we are keeping a good handle on our population of which in the future we're not seeing having to have an expansion because of these alternatives that are right now doing very well and maintaining a jail population that is manageable. You mentioned qualified individuals. Who picks those people? Is it the judges, the DEA and yourself or how it's said? It judges will impose on some and some of it is also through classification of inmates and depending on their offenses, what their history, if they have a history of walking out of jail or not returning from work release, they will not be eligible. So we have criteria that the AI unit will follow to see whether or not somebody will be released for work release or eligible for the bracelet or day reporting. So it's really a combination of working relationships sometimes between the judges and the AI unit. Thank you and thank you for helping keep the citizens of Sheboygan College safe. Appreciate it, Todd. Thank you. Sheriff, earlier you talked a little bit about combined dispatch and it was 2013 when Chairman Distruty and the County Board authorized that expenditure. I mean, as we all know, law enforcement is not inexpensive. Sheriff's Department is one of our largest departments at over $17 million annual budget and then of course you need the tools, the resources to be effective. And as we've discussed for years, combined dispatch was something that we thought would really improve or enhance our service and make it more consistent. And now this year, as you know, folks perhaps can't tell driving by the Sheriff's Department but on the inner walls, the remodeling has begun, the work is in progress. So please refresh folks' memory. Why is combined dispatch a good idea? Why did the County Board support this? What do you see as the improvements or enhancements that are going to occur? The number one will be situational awareness. If folks would remember a Bratwurst Day Parade where the County officers had a car chase, they discontinued the chase but the car kept on going and went east on Colon Memorial Drive right to the Bratwurst Day Parade. And it was the quick response of city officers that prevented from some serious, serious if not possible death related outcomes of this vehicle that entered the parade route. In a situational awareness environment such as a combined dispatch, the city officers would have been informed that we still have a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed that was heading to Erie Avenue, the parade route. It's things like that. We had another incident just not too long ago where a combined center, both the city and the County officers both would have understood what was going on at the time and would have been well-informed because some of the situations that law enforcement's involved in, ebb and flows from community village into the city back at home in the county, and this just really keeps everybody in tune to what's really, truly going on at real time. Another thing too is I have seen and experienced where comm centers are in need of supervisors, full-time supervisors. Patrol supervisors in the past have been dubbed with that responsibility of not only leading their officers or their deputies, but also supposed to somehow lead the comm center telecommunicators or the dispatchers, and it becomes very difficult. Having their own supervisors will make for much better cohesiveness and consistency amongst the shifts on how they do things. It will provide equity when dealing with in-house issues. It just makes so much sense to have devoted supervisors within that comm center, and it will also provide that. I can recall when we were talking to common council members and county board supervisors in the public, and for me personally, one of the most compelling reasons for it was you had the city's combined dispatch center, or city's dispatch center. You had the county's dispatch center. It seemed as though there had to be some efficiencies that could be gained if we were under one house rather than two over time with software purchases, what have you. We knew we'd gain some efficiencies, but the most compelling argument for me, and I think for many board members, is whether you're in the city of Sheboygan, whether you're in the town of Sherman, or out in the marsh, or wherever it might be, if you get in a car accident, or you have a situation where your loved one has a heart attack, or your child is choking, or whatever it might be, and you call 911, you expect the quickest response possible, and it shouldn't take longer to dispatch that because you're calling in an unincorporated area versus in the city. When people call 911, they're not looking for calls to be transferred from one dispatch center to the other dispatch center, ultimately to the ambulance or the deputy. They're looking for the quickest response possible, and as you know, as well as most people, seconds mean everything. A minute delay could be the minute between, the difference between someone out of dying of that heart attack, or getting the help they need, so I just recall feeling, passionate that if we can improve our response and save more lives, as well as provide a more consistent approach, no matter where you are in the county, you know when you call 911, you're gonna get the best, most immediate response you can get, that's a dollar worth investing, and I really commend the county board and the sheriff's department and the police department and all the good work that's gone on over the years to get to the point now where we have finally broken ground, the remodeling's begun, and I think we're looking at probably what fall of 2016 for actually turning the key on this and going from two centers to one. Is that about right, Jerry? Yeah, that's about right. There may be some adjustments. We don't know what the future will lie when it comes to the actual install of everything, but that's about the way it looks now. It's kind of, it's flexing a little bit, but we knew that potential was there. Right, Christy DeBlay, Sergeant DeBlay, right? You promoted her to be the captain to kind of help coordinate with the city and provide training and get protocols established and a lot of good work has ensued the last year. Please share a little bit about what's been going on behind the scenes to help prepare for the combined dispatch. Well, one of the things that we did was we brought on a project manager and that was the retired inspector, Bill Brockbauer. So he's been a great asset to making sure that things are being done in a timely manner. Sergeant DeBlay has done a fantastic job in cross-training the employees from both the city dispatch and ours so that they can flip-flop from each house, setting up the protocols, working with the department in conjunction with the sheriff's office and working on the protocols and fine-tuning various things as such as Mabus and teaching the city dispatchers how is Mabus dispatched. So when we go live, it should be seamless that everybody is prepared and ready for when the lights go on and they're occupying those seats in that new center. She has done a fantastic job of researching those that have had combined dispatch, what did they do right, what did they do wrong and learning from those experiences so that we're not making the same mistakes. I can't say enough that we've done the right thing by having a project manager that doesn't put more of a workload on our current staff. We learned that from the Spillman project. It's nice to have him to coordinate that stuff and a fantastic leader in Sergeant DeBlay that is understanding what do we need to do so that we are ready to go live. And of course, you've got a very competent inspector as well that took over for former inspector Bill Brookbauer. Inspector Jim Rousseau has been a fantastic, what should I say, right hand man. Bill was fantastic. Jim is following the same path as Bill did and it gives me a lot of confidence as a sheriff that I'm surrounded by really, really good people and I feel blessed. I truly do feel blessed. And just to wrap, put a bowl around all this to refresh folks' memories. I mean, this is a major undertaking. It's been discussed for years. The implementation timetable is a good three, four year period. We're looking at over a $3 million improvement and remodeling and everything to create the new dispatch center in the Sheriff's Department. And then you're looking at another $10, $12 million for the entire new radio system, backbone, upgrading all the radios across the county. I mean, these are some major investments in law enforcement in our community to make sure people are safe. Yeah, well, my compliments to you. I know we only have about a minute remaining here, but I'd like to say how proud I am to work with Sheriff Todd Preby. And I know Roger said it earlier. He has really provided some excellent leadership. We've been fortunate in Sheboygan County to have some good sheriffs and a real strong sheriff's department. And Todd, as he said, has continued to try to make improvements and position the organization for the next sheriff to also be successful. And just to shout out to everyone in our Sheriff's Department and in the Sheboygan Police Department and all of our law enforcement across the county, we are so fortunate to have hardworking men and women in these roles and doing a wonderful job. So thank you. Thank you for joining us today. If you want to ask anymore about our roles and responsibilities in the Sheriff's Department, don't hesitate to contact Todd Preby or the inspector, Jim Rousseau. And certainly your county board supervisors if you have suggestions or ideas for improvement. Until next month, thanks for joining us.


Good day everyone. Welcome to open innovation in the financial services sector. My name is Leslie Hawthorne and along with my colleague Joe Giordano we're going to talk to you today about how co-creating open source software is a great benefit to your business. To briefly recap our agenda for today, we're going to of course give you a little bit of more information about us and why we're here to present to you today. We're going to talk about how open source software is ubiquitous across the financial services sector. We're going to talk about the process of moving from being a user and a consumer of open source software to contributing to open source software projects and the benefits of doing so. We'll also make sure to give you some concrete ways to get started contributing to open source software projects. And last but not least, we're going to give you folks some resources so that you can learn more about this topic area after our presentation today. So, a little bit about myself. I was fortunate enough to learn the best way to describe myself a couple of years ago from my manager here at Red Hat, Deborah Bryant.   So I've been doing that throughout my career in the tech industry a little more than 15 years. I've had roles previously working in open source at Google, at Elastic, and I'm actually on my second stint at Red Hat. I'm what we call a boomerang, someone who loves Red Hat so much they came back to work here a second time. In addition to my professional work with open source, I've also done voluntary work for several open source software nonprofits in board director or advisory roles, including the open source initiative. And I'm a proud contributor to Phoenix's open source readiness working group. How about you, Joe? Hi, thank you, Leslie. So my name is Joe Giudano. I'm a chief architect with the Northeast Office Regional Office of Technology. I've been with Red Hat for over seven years now as a solution architect helping customers get business value out of open source technologies and solutions and helping them with their business in digital transformations. I've worked at a number of different software and media companies over the years and have spent over 20 plus years in technology. I'm happy to talk to you guys today about some of the things I've learned and encourage all of you to start to participate in open source communities so that you can derive a lot of the value and benefits from them. Next slide. Very cool. Okay, so, you know, open source is everywhere in your business and your business can't function without open source today. In fact, you know, we've heard numerous times that open source is software is eating the world, right? So what Red Hat does is every year that we charter a state of the enterprise open source survey and we enlist the third party to do that. So the third party alumnus was asked to poll some of them customers, others not customers of Red Hat across 11 different countries. And these decision makers and IT leaders, you know, we asked them a number of questions around enterprise open source technology. And we asked them how important it was to their strategic vision in their organization. Not surprisingly, 95% said that open source is important to their organization, digging a little bit deeper. We see that, you know, 36% and 39% view it as extremely and very important. And that really makes up the bulk of 75% of the respondents. And that's up 16 from 69% of the previous year survey. So, you know, open source is really the technical side of open innovation in commercial and financial services industries. From open banking to PSD to open source development and standardization on open source is allowing, you know, users and FinTechs and other organizations to take advantage of the data and services that weren't previously available. There's a great, great quote that, you know, is talked a lot about in the open source community. And it's not a question of whether to use open source, but it's really more how do you do it more strategically efficiently and extensively than your competitors. Next slide. So, deriving some of the data out of the state of the open source enterprise open source report. And that, you know, it's really open source is being used across all facets of the IT organization as a field resource for reddit. I've helped numerous organizations implement tools like Ansible for infrastructure and DevOps pipelines, reddit runtimes to modernize their applications and open shift to enable it to deliver modern Kubernetes based container platform for their customers. They've worked extensively with a lot of large financials. One example of that is Deutsche Bank, who is a good reddit customer and has spoken at summit quite a few times. They were able to modernize their past platform from what they previously had and they called Deutsche application platform DAP to a Kubernetes based platform based on open shift, you in which they've named fabric. And they've been able to take advantage of a multi cloud architecture. They've really been on this modernization journey for a while with us, starting with open shift three. And they've implemented the platform, while also redefining their application development strategy and transforming their DevOps and RRE practices. So they've not only successfully implemented the technology, but they've transformed their organization. Some of the benefits that they've publicly highlighted are that they've cut end to end application development from six to nine months to two to three weeks. They've also significantly simplified their DevOps collaboration processes using flexible integration and an agile approach. And they've also optimized the use and cost of data center and cloud capacity by implementing microservices containers and cloud bursting technologies. Next slide. So taking a look at the benefits that enterprises considered to be the top reasons for them, you know, using open source software. I think that, you know, some of these are not necessarily going to be a surprise, for example, lower to lower total cost of ownership. But I, you know, when we look at the other two top benefits listed based on the Illumina survey that Joe referred to, you know, we're looking at higher quality software and better security. So the idea that because there is this community of people coming together to create value in the form of software, because there is that wisdom of the crowds and operation, there is a higher level of quality of software produced. And also this whole concept that is often referred to as Linus's law, right? The idea that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. So open source software is able to provide a more secure operating environment for the businesses who are using it. And it's 100 percent, you know, my experience that organizations not only derive these benefits through using open source software, but they derive even deeper benefit by being there to co-create that software because by being there to work alongside the folks who are creating the products that you use, you're able to ensure that your use case is attended to. You're able to find out more about ways in which the security may be vulnerable faster. And you're also able to leverage what has been created that much more effectively because your in-house team has been there each step of the journey to help create it. So hopefully we have convinced you that open source is important to you and let's talk a little bit about how you can move from just using open source software to actually contributing to it and making it better. So I think one thing that's really important to know when we talk about open source software, we're not just talking to you about the software stack you're selecting, right? Open source is 100 percent an innovation model, right? And when you decide that you're going to go in all in on open source software, you're making a statement to your employees about how your organization is going to do its work, how it's going to produce value, how they're going to be engaging with their partners and how your organization is going to meet new challenges that are posed to it, right? Like thinking back to Joe's earlier example of Deutsche Bank and how they've been able to transform their operations and now can deliver value instead of in months, instead in days, right? And when you choose open source software, you're embedding that statement of purpose and how you are going to innovate into the set of tools that you are using that enable or disable certain organizational capabilities, right? You're choosing the tools that are fundamental to the rethinking of how you operate and you generate your value for your end customer. So, you know, I really love this quote from Greg Setel, right? And he says, for the past few decades, agility in the technology sector has largely meant moving faster and faster down to a predetermined path. Over the coming decades, however, agility will take a new meaning, the ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something that produces value. This change will be profound. We need to rethink old notions about how we compete, collaborate and bring new products to market. And the part about, you know, rethinking old notions is really striking, right? It indicates, once again, that the challenges that face most organizations are not really about technology. They're not about problems of finding or acquiring or inventing new tools to do the same work faster or more efficiently. It's really problems that cut to the core of how we operate and how we participate in interconnected webs of innovation and evolution that are happening in places that we may not have considered that may in fact be happening with our competitors. So now that we talked a little bit about that and Leslie, you know, conveyed, you know, that the benefits and started to convey a lot of the benefits. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, the different types of models of engagement with open source technologies, right? Because there's quite a few different models that we're going to talk about today and we want to focus on. So I've broken this out into four different areas and we'll start with the most widespread open source relationship model, which is actually the consumption model. And, you know, I have a very high degree of confidence today that if you're listening to this talk, your organization is using open source in some capacity. Whether it's enterprise open source from a vendor like Red Hat or, you know, open source from straight from the community that a developer downloaded and incorporated or a tool that your operations team is using. And you're seeing obvious benefits from this technology. And there are also some risks that, you know, we'll talk about, especially when implementing completely upstream open source projects in a consumption only model. And again, this drives the benefit of whether the thesis of why we want you to co-create. Next, let's discuss a little bit about open sourcing of specific projects. Now, what we've seen over the past few years is some of the financial services organizations and other companies have decided to fully release specific projects that they've developed into the open source community and try to develop a strong community around it. The code's been vetted internally. The organization has done their legal due diligence and corporate due diligence to make sure there's no proprietary secrets or special sauce in there. They've also, you know, a lot of these communities that have been full fledged open source projects being donated have seen mixed results with some really taking off and taking hold with others not gaining as much traction and we'll touch upon some of the more successful ones in a few slides. Next, you know, I want to highlight a way of contributing to open source, which is a little bit more private. And it's a really good way for organizations to get started with the idea of setting up reusability frameworks and setting up code sharing capabilities and this is called inner source and there's a few companies that are pioneering this. This is where an organization put structures in place that enable the sharing of code between development groups and other application groups. It could be within it or within the lines of business but the organization puts together a framework that makes people comfortable with the sharing. There's a good chance that a lot of the capabilities that developers are working on small functions and capabilities are duplicated throughout the organization. So there's benefits of normalizing this process and reducing the deduplication of efforts. This is probably one of the easier ways for your organization to start getting their code out there internally and it will enable your organization to share and improve and pull from a common repository internally. So lastly, I'll hit on the most mature model which is the participation in open source communities and this is why Leslie and I are here for you today. This is when you participate in a project that's outside of your organization. The level of maturity here is increasing. The risk slightly increases but will help you understand how to reduce that risk and it's still very rare in financial services. This is the model we want to encourage you, our financial services customers to drive towards and we'll talk about this and give you a roadmap. Next slide please. So I want to talk a little bit about differentiating between the consumption model and the co-creation model, right? So we'll talk a little bit about the consumption model and here I want to walk through why there are risks in a consumption-only model. Let's say you're using an open source project extensively throughout your organization and the auditors come to you and say this piece of software requires this type of transaction tracking capability or logging capabilities. And this, you know, you can't just rip and replace this software with something that has this functionality.  You can ask the community for a request for enhancement, which they may or not be able to accommodate. You might be able to ask a vendor that supports this software or another vendor that's willing to make the change and either carry the patch or get it merged into the project in some reasonable timeframe. You know, obviously there are probably significant costs to this. Or you can make the change yourself and carry the patch privately. So you have to ask yourself, how urgent is this change to your organization? Is it a security-based change? Is there a risk involved?  Does this change give you a major business advantage? Do you want to work on this change in private and make it something that you are going to completely keep? Are you going to fork the project internally? Are you willing to maintain that fork for, you know, some timeframe? Or are you going to backport the patches to the original upstream project as it progresses and have to maintain that testing and those capabilities, you know, release over release. And has maintaining this fork or carrying the patches at whichever you choose put your organization in a very risky situation. Are you allocating resources to this methodology or this development capability that if these resources were to leave, you'd be in a severe disadvantage or disabled state?  I've actually seen this play out in, you know, a few organizations. So as a real world example, there was a open source software project called Open EFS that was based on Open AFS a few years back. And it was a distributed file system created that created namespaces on top of NFS shares or NAS shares. And it helped solve a problem with software distribution that wasn't available at the time. There were a few contributors, but the community was fairly small. And a lot of organizations adopted it and would customize it on their own. The community itself stopped getting contributions about six to eight years ago.  So now as technology increased, it was up to the organizations to either keep continuously updating that software without a community and keep those patches and accrue more technical debt, or they needed to, you know, move off that piece of software. And as we all know in the software industry, if something's working, people are reluctant to make that change. And generally, we have a tendency to kick the can down the road and look at it at a later date. So, you know, the lessons learned from, you know, not being able to install this software on later operating systems because the supported libraries were no longer available or security vulnerabilities that weren't being patched because there was no community left. Put a lot of these organizations in a very expensive situation five or six years down the road.  So, isolation, software development, open source software development in isolation can get very expensive. Next slide. So, when we're talking about some of the ways that open source co-creation actually creates business value, I'm just going to go down the list of where we see value created at Red Hat, right? These are the reasons why we co-create open source software and where we've seen open source co-creation creating value for our customers and our colleagues, right? We've already talked about minimizing technical debt. Thank you very much, Joe, for Storytime. I always love Storytime. This whole idea of, you know, innovating to be able to try new things and then customize them, right, which you can't do with proprietary software investments. You can't extend those things. You can't make the software do additional things in order to meet your needs without relying on someone else's release schedule and timeline. And, you know, they may not even think that the feature that you're requesting is particularly important to them. And then there's also this, you know, dovetailing, right, winning with that, right? This idea of failing fast and experimenting in order to create value quickly, right? Being able to quickly spin up a minimum viable product and do some kind of user acceptance testing to understand if that software is actually meeting folks' needs, right? I could go through the list, but obviously, you know, all of you folks can read the slide. Joe, are you seeing the same things in your discussions with customers in terms of why they think that, you know, of our customers who are engaged in the process of co-creating? Are they seeing the same reasons for it adding value to their business, or are they seeing other areas where it's helpful to them? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we were talking about this, the agenda and the talk, I reached out to a number of different customers. And, you know, a few of them who participate in open source communities, you know, they definitely confirm that, you know, these are valuable benefits to their business. I mean, higher quality software, you know, bugs in production are expensive. You know, the innovation, the being able to try things before making a full-fledged financial commitment to them, you know, technology-wise, was really important to this organization. So, you know, again, part of my job, the great part of my job is really interacting with so many different types of customers in the field. And, you know, as talking to one particular open source developer who works in, you know, a financial large bank, he confirmed that all of these are benefits that his organization looks to when developing open source software.  They feel that, you know, the risk is much lower with open source software. So what they did is they actually set up an open source program office. The open source program office sets the boundaries and the rules around all the different types of community interaction that this organization and the developers in this organization participate in, along with an approval process for contributing open source software. This allowed them to really take advantage and make it a culture where it's permeated throughout the organization and encourage to contribute to open source software. Once everybody was comfortable in this organization, you know, and open source, you know, participation started to proliferate, they were able to move much faster and deploy different platforms without as large capital investment that they previously had. And then they were able to choose better platforms for their business. They started contributing code, enhancing those projects and really making those projects even more and more beneficial to their organization. So next slide.  But one of the great things about Phinos is it's an incubator where organizations can help or donate open source projects and work with Phinos for their open source strategy. And over the past couple of years, we've seen a few organizations listed here, you know, open, which gave and donated open source projects to Phinos and just outside to the community that, you know, previously we would have never seen before. So organizations like Goldman and JPMC and Capital One and Deutsche Bank have all open sourced, you know, projects that they've felt could benefit not only other people but even themselves for this open innovation and co-creation of software. So, you know, just going through the list at a high level, you know, a great example of the building communities are, you know, just the symphony community and the contributions that it's had over the past couple of years and Capital One's Higia platform, which has really taken hold and has established a really strong community with contributions from a lot of different organizations. So these organizations are starting to really see the benefits of participating, co-creating and open sourcing internal projects that they feel are widely used in the vertical and industry. Next slide. Very cool. So if we have not done a good enough job to convince you that there are many benefits to community participation, you can see several here on screen, but one of the ones that I tend to harp on since I have a long time ago background in human resources is this concept of attracting and retaining better talent. I think it's no secret that it is extremely difficult to come by professionals who have the skill set that we require no matter where we're working in the technology industry. And it's particularly important to realize the degree to which being able to participate in open source software projects has become a requirement of software development professionals now. There's this concept of GitHub is your resume. And for folks who are focused on making sure that they stay at the top of their craft, the latest and greatest developments in software are happening in open source. And people want to have the opportunity to work with technologies like, for example, Kubernetes or the latest and greatest financial JavaScript framework. So the idea that there is a benefit to participating in the community because it can help you to find the talent that you need because they're participating in that community right along with you. Or you're simply able to make sure that your staff remains invested in working at your organization because they're able to work on the cool latest and greatest technologies and not just in maintaining a back office system where the lights need to be kept on, right? So again, this idea that there's so many benefits to participating in a community and we want to spend some time now talking to you a little bit about how you can do that in ways that make sense for your business. So we wanted to start really with easy steps that your organization can take to start co-creating with the open source community, right? We've encouraged you to do it and we wanted to give very clear, very concrete steps that you can take to actually begin participating in ways that make sense for your business. So you can see if you want to take it even further. So step one is this idea of kind of follow along and learn, right? So nominate someone from your organization to do some research on a particular open source project, right? And do that by actively engaging by listening, right? You don't have to contribute code. You don't have to ship a feature. You can just kind of understand what's going on, right? Look at discussion forums. Check out what's going on with the project and social media. See what's going on on the project mailing list. Some projects have weekly or monthly community calls where they talk about all aspects of the project. So the community calls sometimes take place weekly. Sometimes they take place biweekly. Sometimes they take place monthly. There's typically an agenda published in advance. If you attend one of these community calls, you are asked to at least introduce yourself and let folks know what firm you're from. If you don't have anything else to contribute during the community call, that's perfectly fine. It's absolutely acceptable to just listen and learn. And this is an opportunity for someone from your organization to learn more about what's going on in the project in terms of technical direction, in terms of areas to contribute, in terms of upcoming events, which you may want to sponsor or send folks to attend to learn more. So again, it's a very useful way to literally have the opportunity to just reach out and understand what the different participants in the community are doing in a very low barrier to entry way. And that gives you a sense of what is happening in that project community. And that gives you a pretty good, you know, thumbs up thumbs down read on how healthy that project is, which helps you for your future planning and risk mitigation strategies. So step two, this is more the medium sized level of engagement, right? You can you can offer financial support to the open source projects that you utilize and this could come in the form of sponsoring their user conference. This could come in the form of an actual donation to a software foundation in support of the project's development. You know, it's, if the easiest thing for your organization to do is to write a check versus to donate employee time, there are lots of organizations who are in that position. Open source projects absolutely welcome financial support for their efforts. And you can also look at providing in kind donations for open source software projects as well and these can include things that are not readily spring to mind but for example, I know I believe Cisco offers WebEx free WebEx accounts to open source projects and other nonprofits. Some projects are looking for, you know, things like, you know, computing resources or a server space to host their mailing lists. Some organizations are looking at things like, you know, software license seats that may be possible because your company produces that software. So, you know, providing in kind donations is a is a again it's a low cost and low commitment way to support the projects that are making the software that your business depends upon. And where you can, if you have human resources to spare, it's great to donate the time of your employees who are working on, you know, non software development aspects of the project. Every open source project needs help with documentation. Many projects need help with marketing so that more folks are aware of that project and their capabilities. Lots of projects are doing various user events and they're looking for folks who can help them, you know, set up a virtual event or find the right speaker to address their user group, right? Those are all ways in which your organization can contribute to the health and success of an open source software project. But again, has nothing to do with contributing code or opening up your business to any sort of risks that's associated with software development and taking that software outside of your firewall. And then the advanced, the advanced level right is actually asking your software developers to engage directly with the project. And there are any number of ways to do this and it's very useful to make sure that you have an organization within your company such as an open source program office or an institutional review board who makes sure that there are very clear rules of engagement for your organization as you start contributing software to external open source projects. And it's also, you know, it make it very clear how you expect your developers to engage, but at that point, you know, let them go and just do something that might be fun, right? Lots of open source software projects will label issues and their issue tracker with things like newcomer or getting started or, or welcome tasks that are just to get people used to the process of contributing to the project. So they understand, for example, how to properly use the style guide or, you know, what does an appropriate commit message look like for the project? And give your developers the opportunity to go and do a few small fixes, see if they like working in that project community, see if they feel like they're deriving benefit from it. And if everything is going well after you've taken these first few steps, you can start looking at contributing, you know, on a wider basis, maybe an entire new feature, maybe resolving some outstanding issues that are also plaguing your organization and that you fixed internally and you want to contribute that change back upstream, right? So to conclude, we wanted to share some resources with you folks if you wanted to learn more about the subjects that we've been talking about. And just, you know, we wanted to be really clear that these are things we regularly use ourselves. So we hope you will also find great benefit in them. So I cannot say enough good things about the Phinos open source readiness working group. I'm a regular participant whenever my schedule permits. And the Phinos open source working group is a practitioner led group of folks who are all members of Phinos member companies. And they are sharing best practices and tools to help their fellow colleagues in financial services be able to successfully engage on their open source journey. We there's typically a weekly speaker. We've had folks talking about subjects, everything from, you know, open source licensing protocols to open data licensing. We've had discussions about how to create training programs for your employees so that they successfully contribute to open source in a way that isn't keeping with the company's open source program office or institutional review board's rules. So it's really a great opportunity for you to come and either share your wisdom or ask your questions or do both from folks who are also experiencing the same set of challenges and opportunities for success that you are. So if you're able to attend, highly recommend at the very least subscribe to the mailing list so that you understand what sessions are coming up and potentially can watch recordings or later write ups. Another area where I have found great values within the open organization community. This is a global community of individuals who come together again to share best practices and principles around understanding how we can change notions of how we work together. How we manage our teams, how we function as individuals who are leading projects and to move beyond the idea of sort of traditional hierarchical models into doing things more the open source way where there is an openness to new ideas where there is an ability to share wisdom even if it comes from our competitors, right, and to be able to build something that is of mutual benefit and value for all. And this organization, this open organization community focuses on principles of transparency, collaboration, community, inclusivity, adaptability, all of the people processes that we need in order to achieve open innovation, right. It's not just about tools. It's about the individuals who are using those tools and how they're working together to achieve new ways to create value. Last but not least, if you're looking for a quick write up on the business value of open source software for financial services firms, look no further than our fine friends at Phinos who have authored a white paper on that very same topic. This white paper, it runs the gamut of discussing topics that are relevant to financial services firms, everything from how to perform effective risk mitigation when using open source software solutions, risk mitigation when contributing to open source software projects, using your energies in the open source world as a recruiting and retention tool. So it's very useful. It's a quick read and it's basically brought to you again by practitioners within the Phinos member community. Full disclosure, yours truly is one of the authors. So of course I'm going to say that this white paper is great. And then last but not least, I thought really long and hard about including these these resources because they are very much directly from Red Hat. And I cannot stand the number of conference presentations that I've gone to where I have gotten sales pitches because it really annoys me. But I did decide to leave them in because these are all resources that either I have directly participated in or have had the opportunity to to benefit from. So I'm going to share my own experience and hopefully you will also find significant value in what I'm sharing with you. As I said earlier in the presentation, I'm a member of Red Hat's open source program office and we create a huge library of resources on creating and executing a successful open source strategy. We have documents that are available on our website, including like a, you know, how to start get started with a new open source project checklist. And our team has also created a number of presentations to help folks understand how to architect and approach having an open source strategy, including things like, you know, how to participate in an open source community and a beginner's guide to open source. So if you're interested in those kinds of learning sessions, if you are a Red Hat customer, you can reach out to your account manager. If you are not a Red Hat customer, but you're still interested in learning more, please email me, please email Joe. We're always happy to make sure that the right person is able to show up to share this knowledge with your organization because we very much believe in the value of open source. And so we're very happy to educate you whether you're whether you're our customer or not. Another offering that Red Hat provides is through our open innovation labs group. And this is open leadership coaching. This is, this is an opportunity to talk to one of my dear colleagues, Shabnore Shaw, who is an expert in industrial organizational psychology and her mission is to help business executives have like the really hard conversations about how they are working together amongst themselves to create the culture that allows their business to innovate and how to achieve digital transformation from like the perspective of how their people work together. Right. This is an entirely people centric point of view on how to do technological innovation. So if you have the opportunity to talk to Shabnore, please do. I have regular one-on-ones with her and I benefit from the wisdom that she shares with me every day. And then last not least this this ebook that that I have read personally and have read multiple times this transformation takes practice. And this is a guide to understanding the open practice library and the open practice library is a Red Hat curated set of DevOps and product product development practices and principles for learning about the discovery and delivery of software. And this is brought to you by Red Hat's Open Innovation Labs team. I've never actually worked with the Open Innovation Labs team on a project because I am not a software developer, but I did have the opportunity two years ago to attend a training course for folks who might want to participate in a lab session. And I have I have used what I have learned in that one week workshop on a bi-leakly basis ever since then. The Open Practice Library has any number of exercises that your teams can go through to understand how they wish to create shared value, a shared definition of success, how to create, you know, work sprints that are actually effective, how to uncover and discover. What are the the actual requirements for the for what are being built not only for the the team getting together to build it but for for their stakeholders within the organization and of course for the end customer. So I would like to recommend this and I will I will just conclude by saying that I tell everybody that the Red Hat Labs email list is my favorite one to subscribe to and the one that always leaves me smiling. So of course I'm going to say great things about labs. So folks, that's that's all we have for you today. We hope that what we have shared with you is beneficial to you and useful. Joe and I will be in the virtual booths for a couple times over the next couple of days and we also wanted to let you know that there are some folks from our labs team who are hanging on our booth if you're interested in talking more about our labs offering and the really the open practice library which is a freely available resource online and how you might be able to use that to consider your open source software journey and your work in open innovation. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.


Hello, hey good morning guys, thanks for coming over today, so I am Gorang and today I am going to talk about blockchain in education. So, you know when you speak about blockchain, the first thing that comes to mind is the beginning, which was bitcoin and blockchain has primarily been used in financial applications. When you say blockchain, people even include blockchain in the fintech space, but we at Atorus and Indors, you know when we started the company we thought let us use blockchain in a non-financial application and that is what we have been doing from the last 2-2.5 years, we have been using blockchain in education. Today I am going to tell you about my journey through Atorus and Indors. So, I have been, I am the co-organizer of the Ethereum Singapore Meetup. I have seen the blockchain and Ethereum community in Singapore, grow from like 4-5 people which was back in 2015 to hundreds of people, thousands of people right now. Any given meetup in the city, you get at least 100-200 people just in one day and if you have people like Vitalik coming here, it is like fully crowded, like you have to push people out, it is like that crazy nowadays. So, yeah without further ado, let me start with my presentation. So, yeah I am Gauram, I am the CEO and co-founder of Indors. So, let me start this through my, the first blockchain company called Atorus. So, at Atorus, we were working on smart contracts as a service. So, you must have heard about SaaS models right, software as a service. We gave it a little spin and we came up with SCAS which was smart contracts as a service. So, I started this company back in January 2016 and before that I had actually put my prenup on the blockchain as well. So, I am the one of the first few people, I am the first guy in the world to put my prenup on the blockchain. People have put their marriage certificates on the blockchain. So, I thought how can I be different? How can I be innovative? So, I put my prenup. It was not a legal document anyway. It was like a funny document.  So, we started Atorus. What are we doing at Atorus? To tell you that, I will show you a certificate. So, this is a BA degree, Bachelor of Arts degree of my co-founder David Moskowitz. Very valuable degree in psychology and that helps in blockchain rate. Psychology, blockchain very connected and this is his MBA from the same university. So, now if you look at these two certificates, what do you see? The second one is a fake certificate. And David could do that in 20 minutes in Photoshop. This is a problem not only at Atorus, but it's a worldwide problem. The Prime Minister of Moldova faced a scandal. The CEO of Yahoo had some falsified resume. Even at home in Singapore, IDA has faced this problem several times. So, we have been speaking with universities, employers, companies throughout the last two years and this problem exists in the industry, you know, across the industry, I would say. So, some big companies, some big software companies or even banks, they have a team of people sitting back in India, Bangladesh countries like that, where they just do background checks on the new candidates, on the new employees that they are hiring.  So, we thought let's solve this problem. How can we solve this problem? Answer is digital certificates on the blockchain. So, we have worked with Neon Polytechnic in Singapore. We did a pilot with them last year. They issued more than 500 diplomas on the blockchain. They didn't issue all of them. It was a small pilot for a small batch. But yeah, this was in production. We actually issued the diplomas to them. This was done in house in Neon. I can't go into much details about that. But the idea is that the digital certificate, we take the certificate, we hash the certificate and I put that hash into a blockchain transaction which goes to a smart contract. In that way, you can see that this certificate was issued to this person at this point of time. So, you have like a digital signature on the certificate which can be proven trustlessly. People can directly look at the blockchain. They can see who initiated this transaction. They can even match the hash of the certificate with the hash in the transaction. So, now if you look back at David's certificate. So, this was the original certificate, right? So, this hash, the hash of this certificate will go into the transaction on the blockchain. So, next time when David makes a small change in this certificate, he just changed the name of the course and the date. When David does this, the hash of the certificate will change as you all very well know. And this hash won't match the hash in the blockchain. So, that's how we did it in Neon. So, when we were working with Neon Polytechnic over the last year, one of the KPIs was that these certificates, these digital diplomas could be put on LinkedIn. So, when we started the project, it was fine. The students could do it. But as I was developing the product, LinkedIn suddenly changed their APIs. They changed the UX UI and it was not so easy to actually put the certificates on LinkedIn, the links on LinkedIn because now the students had to do two or three other steps, additional steps. And that set me back by at least 15 to 20 days in the project. That made me think that I started thinking, like, why are we giving all our data to these monolithic giants? You might know about it. Yesterday, it happened with Facebook. There was a big movement going on called Delete Facebook, Delete Instagram, Chimery Generalty, all these things are happening in the world. This is just happening right now. But we thought about it last year. We are like, why are we giving all our data? Why are we giving the control over data to these people? Secondly, these people, these companies, they monetize your data. Every click you do, every like you do, every share you do on Facebook, Instagram, anything, any network, you are making a lot of dollars for them. But as a user, what do you get out of it? Nada. Unless you are a big influencer on Instagram and you have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, you do not get anything out of it.  But a normal user, nothing. And third thing is about verifications. So you know, working with Neon, working with these universities, these certifications, you know, we started thinking that certificates are definitely important. Your credentials, your degrees are definitely important. But I think what is more important is your skills. Because right now, actually, Rick, our engineering manager is here, we were just discussing last week, Stack Overflow made a survey over the last, I think, one or two months. 100,000 developers participated in that survey. And one of the really interesting findings is that each developer, if we have our developers here as well, each developer, even I am a developer, we learn something or a lot of things outside our school or university. So we are a breed of people who constantly keep learning. We always keep developing, we always keep learning new things. And most of those things don't have a certification actually. So now Coursera sometimes gives you certificates, but most of the things that you learn as a developer don't have a certificate. They cannot be validated. And that's where Indoor comes in. So as a developer, so let's take a story of a developer called Alice. Alice has been a Java developer for seven to eight years. She has been working in a good company. She is doing well in her career. But now she hears about blockchain. And she knows that blockchain developers get paid more than Java developers in most cases. That's a cue that we are looking for developers. So Alice wants to come into blockchain now. So Alice starts learning about blockchain. She goes to all these websites like blog geeks. She reads the Ethereum Bitcoin white paper and she learns about blockchain. But still she can't come to Indoor and say that hey, Gaurang, give me a job as a blockchain developer because I don't know that Alice knows about blockchain. How does she prove herself? So at that time she could come on to Indoor. She could get validated and she could get a job. We will go through the story of Alice as I go through this presentation. So at Indoor, we are building a digital backpack. So with Atorus, we were putting digital certificates on the blockchain. With Indoor, we are going much beyond that. It's not just about one certificate.  Now imagine if we have a system where all your certificates starting right from your old levels, to your bachelors, to your masters, to your PhDs, and everything that you do outside of that, like your Coursera certificates, your Khan Academy certificates, any other MOOCs that you take, any other blockchain things that Alice learns, if all of that could be in a digital backpack like this, it could be put on the blockchain in a verifiable manner, in a manner in which it cannot be tampered with. And employers can look at all of that. That would be so awesome. As a developer, I would be really proud to show off my achievements. And that's what we are building here. That's what we are enabling. So we are doing all of this, all the skills validation, everything in a decentralized manner. The focus of Indoor is about skills validation. The data ownership, data monetization, it actually comes through the blockchain stack. We are not just using Ethereum blockchain. We are using the entire blockchain stack. You know, it's great speaking in a developer conference because you guys actually understand what I'm saying. So we are using the entire stack starting right from the authentication at the top level. We are doing that using decentralized technologies like U-Port, Sevek, AirBeds, which is also called Edge Wallet. Below that, we have the blockchain layer. So Ethereum blockchain, we are using smart contracts for actually validating the skills, keeping a record of all the transactions. It's like a ledger, essentially. Below that, we are also using a decentralized database like BigchainDB. We might be using BlueZell as well when they are ready. And we are doing our data storage, like file storage on IPFS. So now this is really interesting, guys, because this entire thing is called the Web3 stack. And, you know, being afraid of having a hyperbole, what we believe in, what we think is that the Web3 stack is actually replacing the entire Internet stack right now. So you could compare the Ethereum blockchain with your servers, with your logic, because Ethereum is a Turing-complete blockchain. All your logic sits there. It acts kind of like your server. You have decentralized databases, which can actually replace the existing centralized databases. And you have things like IPFS, which can actually replace Amazon S3 in a sense. And that's what we are doing. And that's how users have full control over their data. So on indoors, right now you can go and log in using AirBits, which is a wallet on your mobile. It's a blockchain wallet on your mobile. So now imagine it's so awesome that you can actually authenticate on indoors using your Ethereum public-private key pairs. So right through the stack, starting right at the authentication layer, till the bottom blockchain layer, so database layer, your keys actually control your data. And that's really awesome. The second part, which is about data monetization, that is achieved through a token model. So at indoors, we did an ICO last year, which was in August-September. We raised about 9 million at the time. And we have an IND token. So what we do is we reward the users from the platform for their activity. So the more active you are, the more rewards you get in the form of IND tokens. And those IND tokens come back in the platform as a loop, because our revenue, it comes in the form of IND tokens. And it's not just, it's kind of like Google, right? So Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, they have like credit systems, right? So you have to buy Google credits to actually advertise on Google, or you have to buy LinkedIn credits. So it's kind of similar in indoors, such that you need to buy the indoors tokens to actually advertise or participate in indoors as a company, as a business, all these things. So that's how we are working. But the most interesting part, and that's where I want to spend my time today, is about the skills validation. So we have multiple levels of skills validation. So now let's come back to the example of Alice that we were talking about earlier. So Alice knows Java. Now she is learning blockchain. But how do other people know? How do you guys know that she knows about blockchain? So she comes on indoors. She talks with AI chatbot. So we have AI chatbot. We have a blockchain one-on-one chatbot. You can go on indoors and check out or join our Telegram channel. She chats with a blockchain chatbot, blockchain one-on-one chatbot. This chatbot, it will ask her very simple questions, basic questions about blockchain. Like what is mining? What is proof of work? What is a 51% attack? And frankly, if she can't answer these questions, she doesn't know anything about blockchain. You need to know what is mining. She'll claim that you know blockchain. So Alice takes this question here, blockchain one-on-one chatbot. She gets a badge on her profile, which actually shows that she has passed this test and she knows a little bit about blockchain. But still she can't go and get a job because companies in the ICO space, they want there are three companies right now. They want a really experienced blockchain developer, a blockchain developer with an experience of more than 10 years. So what happens is Alice goes back. Now she knows a little bit about blockchain. She can start studying more. So she can start writing smart contracts. She can start writing, doing some consulting projects. That's our journey. We have all of us have gone through this journey. We are making it easier for you by the way. She starts writing smart contracts. She starts doing some small consulting projects. She starts helping some companies who are doing ICOs to actually write the smart contracts, audit them or help them with the security requirements. Now she has a repository with actual smart contracts. She can come back on indoors and she goes through a crowd-sourced validation. Now this crowd-sourced validation is really interesting. It has a lot of game theoretical aspects to it. So what happens is when Alice comes on the platform and she claims that she knows about smart contracts. So now she already has a badge. Remember? Blockchain one-on-one badge. She comes back and she claims that she knows about blockchain. She can write smart contracts. That's her claim. So this claim will go for endorsements to multiple people on the platform. So our platform, our algorithm, it will find the right people who are relevant to that claim. So it might find people who actually know blockchain or who have written smart contracts. Suppose it goes to 10 people for validation. Now this validation mechanism, it works kind of like a proof-of-stake algorithm in which the consensus threshold is really high. So we are looking at a 70% or 80% threshold right now. We are testing it out in the market right now. We are looking at a 70% to 80% threshold. And we also penalize the malicious actors in this case. So if there is a validator who goes and says yes, yes, yes or no, no, no, no to every validation, he starts getting penalized.  Anyway so out of 10, 8 people say that hey Alice can write smart contracts. So that's when she gets one more badge saying she's a smart contract developer. Now she can go out and get a good job. So she goes and applies for three interviews. Out of those she gets selected for two of them. Goes to the second round, third round. But at the end she gets rejected because she still doesn't have the expertise. So she could again come back on indoors and get validated by some expert on the platform. So we'll also have experts from the blockchain space. We already have people like Loilu, Benchan who is from BitGo. They are our advisors as well. So these guys can then go and validate her based on her skills, her expertise, and maybe that will help her get one more job in the future. So that's what we are trying to do at indoors. We have a combination of validation mechanisms starting right from AI to crowd-sourced mechanism, your peer review kind of thing. And also trusted validations like export validations. You know through the story of LS, I was trying to explain why skills validation is important and what are the benefits of that. You could get a job, you can get recognized by the community. Because you know people like Vitalik, they don't have a degree in blockchain, right? But he is the best blockchain developer in the world right now because he created Ethereum blockchain. And that was because the community believed in him, that was because all of us believed in him. And that was through the code that he showed, through the papers that he wrote, and through the talks that he gave. It doesn't have a degree, but still we all believe in him. You can show off your peers, you can get better, and you can also earn for being awesome by joining indoors. So that ends my presentation. We are a great decentralized team working across London, India, and Singapore. We get our job done, but we also have fun at the same time. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. Sir, this is the innovation platform life and where is the development at this time? Yeah, so we have developers, we have three developers sitting right here. We have developers across London, India, and Singapore. Most of the blockchain developers were in London. We just got our first blockchain developer right now in Singapore. We are on the mainnet already. So we are going in two directions. One is the skills validation and other which I didn't talk about was the B2B direction company pages. So that is already on mainnet. The skills validation mechanism will take a little more time because we need to figure out some things in that. Like what is the threshold for the consensus? Like how many people we should have in every validation all those things. So it will take some time. Yeah. So what problems that I have seen with the endorsement system is that it is usually the people who are met at public relations who are who get endorsed more than people who are better skilled. So how can endorse some of the songs? Exactly. That's a great question. See, that's what we're trying to address. You know, because right now I think that the endorsement system on LinkedIn is completely broken because I can go and tell my friends, I can go and tell my mother, father, sister to actually endorse me on LinkedIn. It's actually even happening right now that salespeople sometimes they just add me on LinkedIn. When I add them, I don't know that guy I have never seen him. He just starts endorsing me for all my skills and HTML, SQL, C-Charge. I've done this like four years ago. I haven't touched SQL because I've been working on MongoDB. So yeah, that's what we're trying to address. On endorse, the validators are chosen at random and every claim needs to have validations through this random set of people. So you can read more about it in my white paper. It's on endorse.io. Yeah, we are considering a lot of things. There are a lot of game theoretical aspects to this. That's what we are trying to figure out right now. So yeah. Duration of what? Yeah, that's the beauty of a smart contract, right? Like a certificate can be a lifelong certificate. It could even have an expiry date. And all of this is completely transparent on the blockchain. And I think that's why blockchain adds a lot of value in this case. Yes. You are making a parallel between LinkedIn and Facebook and decentralizing it. Have you looked into the intro of diaspora and see if there's lessons to learn from there? Sorry, can you repeat that last part? Did you look into the intro of diaspora, which was a decentralized social network? Which one? Oh, sorry, I am not aware of that. Yeah, I'll take a look at that. Thanks for that. Sure, sure. Cool. Any other questions? Yes. What? Yes, but it's only in the neons. This thing, private chain. So private chain isn't it's only in their campus, so it cannot be accessed outside the firewalls. Yes, they are talking about it and we are designing the system right now. I don't know when or how it will happen. Yeah. Any last question? Yes. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks for bringing it up. So first of all, yeah, I've been writing smart contracts since the last two and half years. I have seen the language grow solidity. I've seen it grow from a very rudimentary system to a much more sophisticated system. But definitely it's nowhere close to Python or Java or JavaScript because it takes time. It is going to take time and it's really complicated. So you're trying to put like a complete Turing machine on a P2P network, which is not easy. About the gas limits, so we have a repo. So my advisor, he has a contract for skills validation. It's called Open Voting Protocol. It uses some on-chain cryptographic mechanisms called ZK Snarks or Zero Knowledge Proofs. And in that case, it was running out of gas. So last year, it was actually hitting the block gas limit in October, I think September, October. But now with the new launch of Ethereum, which is Byzantine fork or Byzantine update, ZK Snarks are on-chain directly and that is actually helping us a lot. About the second thing, which is the development environments, it's really choppy right now that's completely true. And you know, writing a smart contract takes a lot of time. So the first contract that we put on the main net, it took us two months, two complete months. It was really writing a smart contract is okay. It's not very difficult. It takes around three to four days, maybe one week or two weeks. But after that, the testing phase takes a lot of time. Because when you put the contract on the blockchain, you cannot change it. Once you deploy it, you cannot change it. And actually, Rekha is working on an upgradeable smart contract system right now. Let's see how it works out. But most of the times it cannot be updated. So the testing takes a lot of time. You have to also do a smart contract security audit on that and pay a lot of money for that. Yeah, the testing is the thing that takes most of the time. And then you have to put it on the test net, then test it again with real people, then put it on the main net. So it's a long process. As opposed to other blockchain implementations that are more loose in terms of restrictions here. See, I would say that having the restriction is actually good. And there's a reason for that, to avoid spam and infinite loops on the blockchain. That's why we have the gas limit in Ethereum. And frankly, when I started learning about blockchain and writing smart contracts, Ethereum was the only and the best option. It was back in January 2016. I stuck with it. I love it. And I think the community support that Ethereum has is the most important thing. There are several blockchain implementations right now. Just yesterday, I was having a talk with a guy. He's like, yeah, I want to go to this blockchain. I'm like, dude, you go there, but community support is just not there for other projects as much as Ethereum, I would say. Cool. Thank you guys. Thanks for coming today.