good evening and welcome to this this extraordinary meeting of South Cambridgeshire district council my name is councillor Peter Suntford I am the vice chair of the council I will be chairing this meeting in the absence of the chair of the council I propose to ask councillor Anna Bryddon to act as vice chair for this meeting could I ask for a seconder for that proposal Tilly Hawkins I think you were first hand up so thank you seconded by council Hawkins Can I take that decision by affirmation? Anyone against? Thank you. Councillor Bradner. Sorry members, there's a problem with the sound online. This meeting is being live streamed and recorded. We also allow recording, filming and photography so long as the meeting is not disrupted. Please ensure your phone is on silent. You should keep your microphone switched off until you were invited to speak. If participating remotely when you are invited to address the meeting please make sure your microphone and camera are switched on. Then when you have finished addressing the meeting please turn your microphone and camera off. Members attending remotely should indicate their wish to speak through a chat message in the Teams meeting. Those present in the Chamber should indicate their wish to speak by raising their hand. I will ask the Vice-Chair to note the order of speakers. The chat facility should not be used for any other purpose except where necessary to write down a simple amendment. Complex amendments should have been shared with democratic services in advance of the meeting. When we move to a vote on any item and there is not clear affirmation I will state that a recorded vote will be taken. Members in the Chamber will then vote electronically selecting for, against or abstain. The result will be displayed. This meeting is quarried so we will proceed. Item 1 on the agenda, Apologies. Are there any apologies for absence? Thank you, Chair. We have apologies from councillors. Hart, Hales, Handley, Ellington, Haling's, Leaming, MacDonald. Oh, my apologies. Sorry, I don't know where I got your name from. My apologies for councillor Ellington. Sorry who the record is here. If anyone else is here that is on my list, I'm very sorry, councillor Leaming, MacDonald, Stovart, Waters. Oh, it's going well. Drew, Wilson, Atkins, Ripth and Jacksonwood. Thank you and are there any members who are participating remotely? I can see that councillor Carla Hoffman is online. And councillor Fane. Don't go there. And councillor Fane is online as well, yes. Item 2, Declarations of Interest. You're ahead of me. Do any members have interests to declare in relation to any item of business on this agenda? Get to the Stovart. Chair, thank you. So I have another registrable interest as a board member of the SCIP partnership. I've taken advice from the monitoring officer. We've decided that it's best if I leave the meeting and leave you to the discussion. So I'll leave the meeting and wish you all well. Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you. Are there any other... councillor Batticharia. If an interest subsequently becomes apparent later in the meeting, please raise it at that point. Mr Maddo. Just for completeness, the director of Camborn Business Park Limited referred to a CBPL. That's everything. We're going to have a brief pause. Can we adjourn for one minute? Chair wishes to discuss the matter with the monitoring officer. Thank you everyone for your patience. We're now ready to resume the agenda. Next item, Exclusion of Press and Public. I would like to draw everyone's attention to the fact that the appendices in today's agenda contain exempt information. For this reason, the press and public will likely need to be excluded from the meeting during the consideration of those items of business. We will make that resolution when we reach that point and we will ensure all substantive votes are taken in public session. But, Chair, could I raise a point for the please? Councillor William. Thank you, Chair. Members might benefit from an explanation that we just had a declaration that the director of a company that stands to benefit, or at least is directly concerned in the matter before the council is present in the chamber. Councillor Stobart had to leave. I think it would be useful to get an explanation as to how this conflict is to be resolved. Sorry, we're going to have another brief adjournment to discuss this matter. Thank you, Chair. Mr Maddock will respond to Councillor William's point of order. Thank you, Chair. So, I've declared an interest as a director of Campbell Business Part Limities. My role here is effectively to support members in relation to the finances as they are pertain to the council. I therefore won't be commenting or feeling any questions in relation to Campbell Business Part Limities. Clearly, as an officer, I don't vote, and I'm not a member. So, I hope that that's acceptable to Councillor Williams. So, Chair, can I just... I think it's unfair that Mr Maddock has had to respond to that because it's not about Mr Maddock's birthday. It's about the office and the position he's been put in. So, I do think it's a clear conflict of interest, but it's not fair to put Mr Maddock personally in the position of having to respond to me because it's not actually about him. It would be better if the monitoring officer gave us his legal opinion on the problem. Mr Maddock's comments reflect the monitoring officer's opinion, but if Mr Murphy would like to add any further remarks. Thank you, Chair. I know Councillor Williams' comments, and I'll take them to heart next time, but I have nothing further to say beyond what Mr Maddock said. I think that is their declaration from an officer. Thank you. Thank you. I think we can now move on to item three on the agenda. Sir, the Cambridge Investment Partnership. Thank you. Councillor Bataigaria. Regarding the number two, I just wanted to ask that can I not give this meeting public? And if not, why not come on residents in the town, or the town members and the members of the public are not allowed to witness this meeting? Because it is the witness this meeting, and can I not add this report to my, can I add this report to my town council meeting? I mean the town council report. And if I write about this meeting to my town council report that I attended, how much transparent can I be on the report? Mr Murphy will respond to your question. Thank you, chair. Thank you for the question. A principle that I have repeatedly talked to officers and members about is that we want to be as transparent as possible and to do as much of our discussion in public as possible. We also have to be mindful of the law of the land, and the law of the land sets out definitions of information which is categorised as exempt. That means that in simple terms, we have to discuss them in private and exclude the press and the public. We have reflected, and something the chair may touch upon later when we come to the discussion, we want to encourage as much discussion as possible to be in the public section. Before I imagine, we will inevitably have to get into private because certain members may want to ask questions about the exempt information, as is your right, and I fully expect that there will be many questions. We will come back into public for the vote because it's very important that your constituents do see how people vote. As for your other question, and for your recording, as for how much you can report to your parish council and feedback on, I'd be delighted to sit with you tomorrow and explain, but the principle is that the paper is public, the vote will be public, and we won't have as much discussion in public as possible. But there are issues with the exempt information, and we must follow the law on that point. Thank you, chair. Can't do better, chair. Are you happy with that response? Councillor Heather Williams, I think you have a point. Thank you, chair. Just so we're all clear before we start, because this isn't the normal arrangement for things. How and when will it be made clear to us about, because normally it's you go into private session for an item, or you don't. Who's going to ring a claxon when it's time to go into private session? How's that vote going to be conducted? Because it does require a vote of majority of members to go into private section. How is that going to be handled? So we're all clear on procedure before we begin, chair. Thank you for your question. Alternate the chair will declare when we go into public session by majority vote, of course, of the members. But I will be taking advice from the monitoring officer. Thank you, chair. We don't know, and we're hoping that we're going to have the assistance of you, the members here tonight, because you will appreciate that we're following the law on the exempt information, and that is the point. We have to go into private session. I hope that members have come here and will have some questions in mind. I'm sure you have. I'm sure the chair and I would want to encourage people to think about what questions they have that can be debated in public, and there may even be questions on the private exempt information, which, if phrased differently, we can keep in the public domain, because that's what we want. But equally, there will be members. You've maybe got an idea of your questions. If you're certain that your question is about the exempt information, I'm hoping maybe with the chair's assistance, we can work out who has questions that we can do in public, and if we've exhausted that list, those remaining members with questions about exempt information with your cooperation, then we can go into private. I think it would be ill-judged if we started bouncing in and out of private, and also it would take a long time. So I'm hoping members can maybe self-asset what you have and what you want to ask and phrase things the way that we can do with all the public questions, and then move into private. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Mr Murphy. I think I can resume the agenda. Item three, South Cambridge Investment Partnership. Investment at Campbell, starting at page five of the pack. My vice-chair has helped me point it out that the restricted papers start at page 15. Correct. So there's a lot of restricted information. Before we start, I'd like to ask members that when we start the debate, we'll start with any discussion points that we can take in public. I prefer to minimise debate taken privately. So if you could prioritise your questions accordingly, please. This point I'd like to call on Councillor Bridget Smith, leader of the council to present the report and move the recommendations. Thank you very much indeed, chair. So I'd just like to begin by thanking both our officers and our consultants for all the work they've done to get us to this point. It's been a considerable amount of work, and I'm extremely grateful for it. It has been work of a very, very high calibre and a very high intensity. So back in 2018, when Liberal Democrats took control of this council, one of the first things we did was we, the Cabinet and members of the leadership team at the time, were piled into a minibus and bounced all the way round to Eastley, which is a council with an outstanding reputation for acting as a major developer and delivering housing. We'd heard a lot about Eastley, and we went down to see how they did it. Their record of housing delivery, of high standard housing delivery and of affordable housing delivery is noted nationally. So having seen them and talked to them at length, we came back enthused with their ambition and their vision, and as part of our, we now at the point with this council, with the significant improvements we've made with this council, that we are now confident that we are in a really, really good place to not compete with Eastley because they do things on an absolute mammoth scale, but to do what is appropriate for South Cambridgeshire. So, as you'll be aware from the papers, we were part of acquiring the land opposite these offices in Cambor, which is a very, very successful new town where it's quite difficult to buy the house for sale because actually people who come here really like it, and therefore our vision of delivering an exemplary development within Camborn I think will sit very comfortably within this already very successful town. So it was one of our overarching aims that this development should be built to the very highest energy efficiency standards. And at the time when we were working on this vision was before we were in a cost of living crisis. So, you know, it was, it's always been one of our ambitions that we are responsible for approving and delivering in our own right housing that's truly affordable for people to live in. They're not giving half their money to electricity companies that actually they are freeing up as much of their disposable income as they can to actually enjoy life rather than just have it all invested in the necessities of life. Since we've had the cost of living crisis which doesn't show any signs of going away any time soon this imperative to deliver homes that are affordable for people to live in becomes ever more critical. So the affordable rented houses will have triple glazed windows, passive purple membrane about which I now know quite a lot because it delivers fantastic levels of air tightness, mechanical ventilation heat recovery, nylon compact P, ventilation and heating systems, footable panels on the roof and upgraded cavity insulation thickness to the external walls. And the result will achieve 100% reduction against the government's building regulations part L 2021 baseline. And it's this council that will be funding the upgrade on those affordable houses because we believe it is right, it is a moral obligation that the housing, the affordable housing we are delivering is as affordable as possible for people to live in because actually it's going to be people on lower incomes who are living in those houses. So it's an absolute imperative that their lives are as affordable as possible. So the original reason for building to these very high environmental standards is that it's demonstrative of the council's commitment to being green to our core. And it's a really important signal to developers right across the district and all those developers who are eyeing us up in light of Michael Gove's Cambridge 2050 vision about what we expect of them, what standards we want in South Cambridgeshire. We want to get the message through them very, very strongly that we're not engaging in a race at the bottom when it comes to protecting our environment and we want this development to be an exemplar. So when people come and talk to us or talk to Michael Gove or his development corporation or whatever, we say, okay, if you want to see the sort of standards that we expect that we believe residents of South Cambridgeshire deserve, go and look at this development in Canborn because it will be exemplary and hopefully they will be knocking on the doors of people who will reiterate what a great place it is to live. So there'll be lots of new public spaces, a park, a new square, orchard and origin routes, which I'm looking forward to, to really sort of connect residents with nature within their community. And despite the government's recent lack of ambition when it comes to biodiversity net gain and the 10% that they're saying is all that developers have to achieve without exceptional circumstances, and we're told time and time again that the risk with only 10% is that the risk is it's missed altogether and you end up with a net loss. So by insisting that there is a minimum of 20% by diversity net gain, we want to deliver that ideally within Canborn, subject to some land transfers, so that's what we're aiming for. If we can't do it all within Canborn, then we'll be doing it as close to Canborn as we possibly can. So this development will deliver 40% affordable homes, that's 102 in total, of which 72 will be affordable and 30 will be shared ownership. A lot of people really like the shared ownership model. In my own village we can't deliver enough of them, it really works for our residents. Michael Gogh's own case for Cambridge has pointed out how high the housing inequality is across Greater Cambridge, and it does say, and we agree, that actually the people who suffer the most are young people. It's just impossible, unless you've got a very affluent bank of mum and dad to get on the housing ladder. So by building a really wide variety of affordable properties, and the details are all in the pack, we're building towards the needs of young people trying to get their first home and new families in need of more space and those who need accessible housing. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Smith. Can I now call for a seconder? Happy to second the motion and reserve my right to speak till the end. Thank you, Councillor Mills. Does anyone wish to speak on this item? Recognise Councillor Battagiorlia? Well, digital area. I'm just carrying a book here. I hope you all can see. Nearly 12,000 people, they spoke up their mind in 2017. There was a big survey in Cambon for a few months, and this is our parish plan, and this is a plan where people of Cambon they really put their minds out, what they actually want. So have you checked those? Have you actually checked the issues what Cambon people like to have it? I don't think so. There are 100 pages report on that, what they like, the survey, and there was... I mean, the people in Cambon asked for many things to upscale their life here. I do not think anything happened. But number 85, if you see here, they ask for business units, commercial units, industrial units, set up more business, they ask here, and strongly they ask for it. Instead, what they did not ask, extra housing on that business unit, that is happening. So what the people in Cambon they like to have, they like to ask, they are asking to the local government, instead of doing their jobs, they are just doing something what they do not need at all. They do not need something that is coming here and what they ask to the local authorities to have in their life to bring up their children, nothing given. So this is a parish plan anyone can see and look at into it. So it was a massive job happened that time. So a lot of information data and surveys reported there. Thank you councillor, next I call councillor Heather Williams. Thank you chair. Just before we carry on, I would like to remind the headline that was after the planning committee approved this, was 256 houses, despite ex-head teachers' warning of fatal accident waiting to happen. So before this proceeds, just try and remember the warnings we were given at the planning committee and I appreciate it has now got planning commission but there was very passionate representations at that meeting that this should not be going ahead and just because you can do something now you've got permission does not mean that you necessarily should do it and when these investment partnerships were presented to us it was how the council would have control it would be more about the more influence and yet what we see here is policy no more just policy level affordable homes at 40% something that you'd not expect to see if the council is involved you'd expect more. That was on the planning consent. There's reference to energy efficiency and chair I won't refer to the numbers but I would like members to look at page 25 for numerous reasons but a lot of the net zero cost are attributed to the affordable units and not the market so it would be good to know exactly how much is going to be spent on that market houses for greening purposes or perhaps they don't need to meet the same credentials as you're doing here so some more information around that because it's odd that it's separated for affordable but not market also on page 25 when we talk about the report I have real concerns about the quality of the decision that can be made today when I look at this so if you look at the rows and you look at the totals they're not in the right places it's in the wrong place I can't obviously refer you to which one perhaps you might want to get your calculators out because otherwise they'll probably say I've got to go into closed section but that's not for us to make decisions equally accessibility when reports come to us they need to be accessible and yet there are phrases in here which those of us that use it in our day to day lives or for accounting or legal perspectives yes but a lot of things parry palsy they're not things that are accessible to everybody so what steps have been done to ensure that all members here are fully able to make this decision and talking about easily perhaps there are two easily councils but should we really be taking the advice of a council that's been ordered by the government to reduce their debt and just before Christmas debt laden easily by our council votes for extra housing residents of Campbell don't want it I will share hopefully we'll be allowed to discuss at some point the rest of this pack because very little is actually not restricted Campbell residents don't want it we shouldn't be doing it it is not a social benefit this is to make profit and this is why we should never have taken that gamble with taxpayers money in the first place by doing these agreements it's a conflict and it's just wrong thank you council of and of a council of and of a please thank you very much this is a really really good development, a really high standards exemplary equality I'm really pleased to be able to support this today I'm particularly excited that there's 102 council homes being added to our stock that represent an increase of 2% or so to our housing stock really quite a significant amount 105% or so of our housing register could be housed there that's a really big achievement it's worth reflecting I think on the role of the council as a housing in the commercial housing sphere and which underlined some of the debate so far on commercial developers and taking this on why should we I'm very clear that we have different objectives to commercial developers we can take a different view on what could be achieved in development that does make it worth our while both commercially and in order to achieve our objectives if we are clear about what our rejections are if we are clear about the risks and take them seriously and mitigate them and if we take the decisions very carefully and that's what we're doing here so I'm very confident that there were because there was raised it's not a perfect development there never are there might be some missed opportunities but overall I think this is an excellent development and I'm really pleased to be able to support it thank you councillor Sue Wellington thank you I suppose my first question is why are we having an emergency meeting this is such a big decision it has been obviously in the planning for a considerable amount of time and suddenly it gets sprung on us and trying to read 300 in some odd pages over a couple of days is not practical or reasonable and what's more I didn't get any papers so I had to read them on my iPad which is not even worse so that's number one number two is I would like to express serious and I mean serious concerns about the planning permission in that all the effluent and surface water that comes off this site will end up in Utenstrove sewage works which is my village and it is already known to be overflowing and they have not got adequate provision to deal with another 256 houses I mean the idea of cutting it all the way across countryside seems a bit daft to me in the first place but that's the way it goes so I would like to I will be opposing this proposal on the grounds of inappropriate permission for drainage and I thought we were all worried about fresh water and we'd refuse planning permission for a number of things and we haven't got enough fresh water but it's okay to have another 256 houses if it's going to give us a bit of profit thank you Thank you Councillor Wellington just to respond to a couple of points this is an extraordinary meeting not an emergency meeting also the planning permission was granted several weeks ago for this site we are not reopening that decision at this point at this point Councillor Smith do you want to respond to any of the comments particularly Councillor Butterchari is Thank you chair so why is this an emergency emergency meeting why is an extraordinary meeting it's not an emergency meeting it's an extraordinary meeting it's because we are about to go into pre-election period and we wouldn't be able to have this meeting and that the delay to the start of the build will cost money so that's why it's imperative that we reach a decision as soon as possible so that hopefully if everybody approves it or a majority of people approve it that construction can start this summer and I just want to pick up on Councillor Heather Williams comment about are members well enough briefed are they in a position to make this decision beginning of this week started with a member briefing firstly for the conservative group to which I think only three people attended but also for the Liberal Democrat group Liberal Democrat group so there was a detailed Councillor Williams that meeting the briefing that was held it was expressed at some of us because it has been rushed we found out as it was being declared about this meeting not an advance in the normal way so there was no time to negotiate dates of briefings so I think it's that should be knowledgeable that this was rushed we were given no notice and actually we have parish councils we have to attend as well well the Liberal Democrat group had the same notification and they managed to attend if I may how does the leader know how many people were in a briefing which was attended by conservative members and officers how has that information gone back to the leader which has been used for political advantage I doubt any conservatives passed that information so we know what the Lib Dems had please I can probably tell you that I think you're missing the point leader so it's important to me that members are fully breathed on this because it's an important decision to take tonight and it's important that members are breathed so I shall continue if I may please so there was an accusation that we were that this is all about profit actually I think this is probably in the confidential papers but in order to deliver the highest quality energy efficiency actually South Cambridge is forgoing some of its profit in order to make sure that the houses are built to the highest energy efficiency standards and I think just in my notes if there's anything else I need to respond to so what's in it for people of Camborn so what's in it for people of Camborn well the marketing suite will turn into a cafe and we're in discussions to make sure that well try and ensure that that happens as early on in the development as possible and I'm sure residents of Camborn will be really pleased to have another cafe in the village there will be cycleways which we know the school and the village as a whole are calling out for park place and play space which again you know I'm pretty confident that the town of Camborn want in relation to the business site you know the reason that the use change was there was a change of use of the site was that it's down to market forces to deliver the employment sites and you know nobody done it it had been vacant for years and years and no applications had come forward at all to build employment space there so that was the justification for the change of use to residential Thank you Councillor Smith Councillor Cohn indicated you wish to speak Thank you chair on a separate point actually thank you so on page 29 where we talk about the affordable housing I'll keep it general the leader of the council talked about it being really important to go over and above when it comes to green in those houses because it benefits the affordable element and the residents that live then within them do you think we should have taken even less profit and decided to put more green in measures on the private shared equity houses which do fall within affordable housing bracket should we have gone over and above for those houses because when you have your government ministers come around to show them what is exemplar or not you might not show them the only some of the affordable houses because many of them are not the standards that you've just alluded to it's only the rental proportion not the shared equity that have the net zero carbon benchmark element to them thank you okay so the Smith you wish to respond thank you so I mean it's a question about viability but really but if I start with councillor John Batger John Batger on the question of shared ownership and its affordability the reason that we haven't further invested there is because we took the view that they would become unaffordable there's a very significant amount of money we've invested in the rental properties but a decision was made that the shared ownership to make them affordable we couldn't go to that level but let's not forget that the face the building standards have increased and the standard is much higher and that also we do meet all those chair can I come I accept the points that councillor Batger has made and I accept that there are the set standards but the point was that we were going over and above which we are not in the case of the shared equity houses we have made the provision on the rental affordable housing could we not make the same provision on the shared equity ones that does not have to be reflected in the value of the house if the council went above and beyond like the leader said to meet that cost well let's not forget that the HR the housing budget has to actually meet all the housing costs within itself so everything has to come out of rents and so on and so the amount of money that we can invest is controlled by that but I come back the affordability we have to be in a position where we can actually sell the shared ownership which without going into the numbers is a key element of how we are actually going to pay for the the overall build so less profit to the council like we are doing on the rental side we could do the same with the shared equity the affordable housing doesn't reflect on the overall business in that we are buying the houses this is an arms length business that we are buying the houses from arms length but we still have an influence on the rental side I think I've made my point I just wanted to reflect that affordable housing as a term in the context of Cambridge housing prices is clearly an issue that we wrestle with £580,000 for the average house price in the city a single bed apartment in Eddington £4,000 so this affordability even on a shared ownership basis is a key issue thank you thank you councillor Dr Richard Williams thank you chair I just want to make a few points I do have to say that before I make my comments I think that the most extraordinary breach of confidence has been revealed in this meeting and I would like to put on record my serious concerns and how members of my group can have trust and confidence in officers if our supposedly confidential briefings are being reported back to the leader of an opposing political party that is extremely serious I can't quite believe the leaders let slip in a public meeting then that's what's happening but there we go I think that's going to have to be addressed later on I would also just like to make one other point to just refer to the council authority company review guidance which says quite clearly that section 151 officers shouldn't be appointed as directors of companies because it can lead council owned companies because it can lead to exactly the sort of conflict of interest that poor Mr Maddox has been put in today so I would certainly urge the council to read that because it's quite clear that 151 officers shouldn't be directors of companies in terms of this development there are questions I would like to ask that probably to be asked in a private session because one of them refers to something on page 337 of the agenda so I just want to put that on the record I mean just generally it's all very well to talk about this is an example of our development that the council has gone above and beyond the council is only offering the minimum amount of affordable housing a lot of the material we have in front of us talks about profit and you're not supposed to use limited liability partnerships for profit as we've discussed previously all of the local members of Camborn were against this development including two Liberal Democrats and either of whom I think are here this evening the town council was against it it's a huge missed opportunity that South Commons council has brought forward a proposal that had so little support such a wasted opportunity Thank you Councillor Williams Thank you chair Councillor Richmond has been quite generous there because I would like to know immediately how the leader is obtaining things that are meant to happen in politically private briefings because I think that's that's a very serious situation and chair as you are meant to be independent in this I hope that yourself and the chair when he is better will look thoroughly into how all parties are being served appropriately because this is a very public way of displaying how they very much aren't and it's not the first time and we have had other things that have been out of line and un parliamentary as it were in relation to the housing it's quite clear from what Councillor Coen was saying you don't have to put the price of the shared ownership up you just have to be willing to take less profit and to be taking profit from affordable housing taking money out of the HRRA to give profit to the general fund through an arms length company is something that I think is actually immoral it's not the purpose of what it's there to do there are many other things many other ways in which this council has secured external funds over the years and on those now at least there is cross party support but this let's be very clear it's not wanted locally it's been forced on residents residents that have repetitively said no and yes chair you're right we're not here to rerun planning committee but as I said earlier just because you can do something doesn't mean you should if you start taking that approach to everything and it's happened a bit too much in this council for my liking you keep doing this that's a very slippery slope and I'd say that also goes for the impartiality of officers thank you councillor doctor buttercharya thank you very short very passionately I joined politics very passionately I came to the politics that I can change people's lives and you got that opportunity for many years and and you could have done you could have done a wonderful job that would have changed people's lives instead in the local newspaper last week we saw Cambon as a named as a toy town and the toy town it was named in the local newspaper because we do not have enough facility to run the town in eight years is a quite a long time when a whole generation can transform from one thing to another thing like the primary school children will go to the universities and to other cities and towns and they will not come back here for their for their living so how council is not paying attention to the public consultation and the town council itself and doing the things for their what they want you are coming up with a plan that Cambon town council opposed the town council are opposed the town clerk came here and represented everyone opposed so why we are coming up with a plan that Cambon town council Cambon people Cambon resident Cambon students, Cambon lives they are not liking it you just you just want to do it that's a question thank you I don't see any more requests to speak, Councillor Smith did you want to come back on any of those points well not really because I think it's perfectly obvious from the report why we're doing this I don't think it needs further explanation thank you which case Councillor Brian Millans would you like to close the debate yeah thank you chair so I'd just like to add my thanks to where the team involved several of them here Kathakonlin, Gerson Donaldson and Abe Wood, didn't hear this evening Peter Maddock and so on for their huge diligent work over an extended period of time bringing this to fruition and we are delighted that it's got to this stage it is something that we have wanted and planned for and worked very hard on delivering we've had several challenging issues of get over and the team has done a tremendous job in doing that as Councillor Van der Beyer said it is bringing a huge number relatively of additional council houses into our stock which is a real achievement I've mentioned the issue of affordable pricing and how that really is a misnomer in this part of the world but it will be an excellent quality housing into the area it will be the exemplar that we seek to achieve and I'm very pleased to recommend this proposal to the council this evening thank you Councillor Millans I'm assuming that no one wishes to discuss exempt matters on the restricted sections I hope that there is a request to do that J, you told us not to refer to it Does anyone wish to take us into private session and ask questions Chair, I would like to ask questions that are in the bit that we've been told we can't however I'm happy to ask those in public session No, I think we have to go into private session for those questions I'm sorry we do we do, monitoring officers advice we do in which case information we will need to resolve to temporarily exclude the press and public from the meeting this is in accordance with the provisions of section of 184 of the local government act 1972 exempt information is as defined in paragraph 3 of schedule 12a as amended of the act paragraph 3 refers to information relating to the financial or business affairs of a particular person including the authority holding that information I propose to resolve to exclude the press and public can I have a seconder for that please thank you can we take this vote by affirmation public session at the end to take the vote on this item can you give a sign of electronic vote please chair it's a motion that needs to be debated yes no, this is just to go into a confidential session it's a motion that's been proposed and seconded we debate whether we go into closed session or not as we have previously is anybody rejecting going into private session yes it's no, I said I want to refer to and ask questions in this document that we've been told we're not allowed to while in open session I believe that we can ask these questions as we own the company and it's owned by the public and the taxpayer I believe we can actually ask these questions, give some details in public I don't believe there is a need it's not a commercially sensitive thing as it is completely within the of the council we just heard it earlier, it's an armed council so yes I want to ask questions no I don't believe it has to be done in private session if a majority of councillers believe for me to answer the questions I've got here I have to go into closed session they'll need to debate that or not but my view is we do not need to be able to go into some of these details we do not need to go into closed session as the chair has alluded to I'll ask the monitoring officer to respond thank you chair my advice still stands we are following the law the law sets out a definition of what is exempt information information referred to by councillor Williams is considered to be exempt information accordingly it must be discussed in private we have to exclude the press and the public I refer you to my earlier comments chair I wanted everyone to discuss as much as possible in public but inevitably we have to go into private session to discuss the details in the exempt information my advice has not changed thank you Mr Murphy it's a matter of law so I think we can vote on excluding the press and the public at this point so vote green to exclude the press and the public or red to oppose the motion is that everyone? the motion is carried by 18 votes to 6 we will now move into closed session can you take us offline please thank you we've come back public now I apologise I asked you to second rather prematurely about two hours ago do you remember everybody remembers every word of it chair absolutely the recommendations are set out in paragraphs 1 to 6 on pages 5 and 6 of the agenda I'm assuming we're not happy to take this by affirmation I would ask Erin to set up a electronic vote please green will be in favour of the motion red against thank you Erin 17 in favour of the motion 6 against the motion is carried thank you we can now move on to item 4 on the agenda affordable housing acquisition 102 new homes at Camborn starts at page 341 on the agenda crack that's with a previous motion when we get into the debate please keep your public comments up front and then if we need to move into the private debate again we will do so can I call on Councillor John Lee, Cabinet Member for housing to present the report and move the recommendations thank you very much chair first thing I would like to make very clear that the housing department dealings with skip are no different to any other negotiation with a developer underlying any negotiation or any contract by affordable housing is underlined by one a totally independent valuation if the price is above the valuation that contract cannot go forward second firm element is a viability criteria which is there has to be a payback in a maximum of 45 years if either of those items are not fully met contract would not go forward so what we are proposing is that we should go forward with the contract because both viability and cost meet our criteria so I don't not sure if is the number of years that we anticipate the payback an exempt item it's a public policy it's a public policy ok so the payback period is 44 years so you appreciate that this is very near to the maximum why is it near to the maximum because we have chosen to actually invest in carbon reduction standards there is a substantial figure for each of the 72 houses flats mostly and some houses that is incurred by bringing the standards up to the passive house so as we were speaking about earlier you can see that we have invested to the maximum that we possibly can in these circumstances and whilst we still meet our obligations as far as the criteria is concerned bearing in mind that the housing budget is a closed one and the rental income has to pay for all the costs involved the other side of this is how can we afford to pay what we are proposing to pay the answer to that is yes underlying we have significant funds coming from the right to buy and the sale of shared ownership this would cover something of the order of one third of the costs the rest would be found by internal borrowing first and if necessary we would go to external borrowing so this meets all their criteria it's a a good deal in terms of carbon reduction we are doing all we can and in that case we are an exemplar project before I move the recommendation I'd like to take the opportunity chair to thank Kirsten Donelson and her team who have done a huge amount of work to bring this project to this stage and there's still plenty of work to do for them so thank you very much to her and her team so given all those circumstances I'm delighted to move the recommendations chair thank you thank you councillor bachelor do you have a seconder? I'm going to second and reserve my I'd like to speak at the end or somewhere in between I'll try and keep you to the end this time councillor Melons thank you councillor Heather Williams thank you chair so I do think it's a shame that it is at the high rate I appreciate the environmental standards given that the company has the partnership in skip you'd think they might be able to do better on the price however when it comes to who is going to deliver the affordable services I would always prefer that the council and the housing department deal with affordable units over other providers as is here so I am supportive of I don't support to be clear the fact that this is happening but that vote's already happened you're doing it so I'm being practical here they're going to happen you've had the majority vote so if they are going to happen I'd much rather they were run by our council department than somebody else but just to be clear chair I'm voting on that way and I'm saying what I'm saying because that's what I believe not because you have brought me into line as it was mentioned earlier on the debate by a member opposite I think that's derogatory and it's not the chair's job to bring us to heal or bring us in line it's the chair's job to ensure that there is fair open debate thank you thank you chair a lot has been said this evening I don't want to repeat but I just need to say this there are a lot of young people and families who would love to be able to live in houses of this type of standard but I don't want to repeat but I just need to say this there are a lot of young people and families of this type of standard that we're building on this site and the fact that we're going to have 102 affordable houses of which 30 will be shared equity especially when house prices are so many times the average rent we are investing one way or the other in providing affordable homes for people in our communities and I declare I have children who will be wanting to live on their own in the area who can't afford it on what they'll be earning so this is a good thing it really is a good thing and I just want to say thank you to everyone who's been involved in bringing this to this stage it's been a lot of hard work and as you know I've been in the industry as well so I know what's involved so thank you and I will be supporting this and definitely our housing department should be looking after these properties for the good of our future generation thank you thank you anyone else who will seem to speak oh Councillor Warren I'd like to just add to what um Councillor to me has said just to ring to the room the fact that so many young people nationally over 50% of young people aged 20 to 24 and now tending not to be able to leave home or returning back to their parental home after university or going to work and find themselves returning to home now and I think in Cambridge we have as we all know a double situation where there was a lot of new jobs arising in the area we've got an economic growth in the area from an employability point of view but we still have people coming into those entry roles that can't afford to live here so when they do come back they live with their parents they're very frustrated and on those grounds I think I really fully support us doing this I'm really pleased to see the young people will get the opportunity for affordable housing in addition to that I think as a single parent as well I like to see the fact that there's going to be affordable housing in the area for single parents so that we don't dissuade them to come to Cambridge which is a fantastic place to live and it's got great employability opportunities so on those grounds I do support this motion Thank you I can't see any other speakers so can I invite Councillor Millans to second Thank you Chair, it seems as though we're all in agreement that the acquisition of these 102 houses to the council is what we would prefer to do so with that I think we ought to move to the vote Thank you I agree and we asked in a public session the recommendations are set out in paragraphs 10 and 11 on page 342 of the agenda Erin could you set up an electronic load we can do it by affirmation if you agree anyone against by an agreement the motion is passed, thank you all that concludes our extraordinary meeting thank you all for attending next meeting with the annual council meeting on the 23rd of May


I'm Gub Sheep, and today I'm going to be talking about Dark Forest lessons from three years of on-chain gaming. So first, real brief introduction. I'm Gub Sheep. I've been working with the Ethereum Foundation since about 2018 on various education community and applied ZK research and development projects. I co-created Dark Forest and spent a lot of 2019 to 2021 building the game out with various friends including Ivan Chubb, Alan Luo, Bryce Huang, Robert Cunningham and more. And currently I'm working on applied ZK research and development and other applied crypto experiments with Zero X Park. So to give a little bit of context, Zero X Park is a research-focused organization that supports a network of teams that are all aiming to push the envelope on what is possible to build on blockchains or with new cryptographic primitives. And a lot of these experiments started with Dark Forest, which is a part of the Zero X Park community. So today's talk is nominally about Dark Forest, but the subject or the question that I'd really like to answer, looking back on three years of running this game, is what can projects like Dark Forest teach us about innovation and crypto more broadly? And to answer that, first we have to talk a little bit about what Dark Forest actually is. So summed up in a sentence, Dark Forest is a decentralized MMO RTS game built with ZK snarks on Ethereum. Now that's kind of a mouthful, so let's take a look at a few screenshots to understand what this really means. So first off, Dark Forest is a massively multiplayer strategy game that takes place on an infinite procedurally generated universe of all sorts of different types of planets and space entities. The most popular Dark Forest game mode is a week-long battle royale contest where thousands of players, bots, AIs and even smart contracts compete head-to-head for galactic supremacy. Players are dropped into the universe on a tiny home planet and they must harvest resources, conquer nearby planets and interact with their neighbors either through alliances or trade or negotiation or even war in order to expand their empires. It's a hardcore free-for-all space-themed strategy game and rounds can get pretty intense. The thing though that makes Dark Forest different from your typical strategy game is that it's entirely run on an EVM compatible blockchain. This means that all of the game state and all of the game rules are actually stored in smart contracts rather than a traditional back-end server. And every single move that any player makes is in fact an on-chain transaction. Because the game is so complex in comparison to a lot of modern Ethereum applications and production, each move can take up to millions of gas and players over the course of a single round can end up making thousands or even tens of thousands of moves per game. The other key mechanic of Dark Forest that is shared with a lot of other strategy games is that much of the intrigue in the game comes from the concept of hidden information or information asymmetry. The overall Dark Forest universe is practically infinite and it's teeming with thousands of adversarial players, bots, scripts, smart contract players, et cetera, et cetera. However, individual players upon joining the universe only have access to a very small slice of the total universe map. And this is exactly what gives Dark Forest its characteristic or namesake sort of Dark Forest feeling. So at first it might seem kind of paradoxical that we can have this on-chain application where there's so much complex private state being mutually moved around by different parties, especially because blockchains are systems where all information is public and transparent. In other words, any data that's stored inside of a smart contract is something that anyone can access. So how can we put a game where different players know different parts of the map on the blockchain? Well, the answer is that this is exactly what ZK Snark's enabled and thanks to the work of the IDEN3 team with SIRCOM and Snark.js back in 2019, these kinds of applications or incomplete information games first became possible to build on-chain. Okay, so hopefully that gives a little bit more color into what Dark Forest actually is. Next, I want to take a step back and just talk a little bit about how our thinking about the game has evolved over time. So we started working on Dark Forest back in 2019 and it started off as just a pie in the sky experiment. You know, let's build a ZK game where every single WASD move is in fact a blockchain transaction triggering a ZK Snark proof verification on-chain. Now, at the time, this seemed pretty ridiculous. Blockchains are super slow and super expensive databases that of course could only be used for critical financial applications or transfers. And games require pretty much the opposite. We did some benchmarking and we estimated that on Ethereum Mainnet, a move on Dark Forest could cost anywhere from 10 to 100 US dollars. And players might need to make up to thousands of moves in order to meaningfully interact with the game. So we originally built the game not because it was necessarily like possible or feasible, but it was an intellectual experiment to learn more about the tech. And obviously from a cynical or skeptical point of view, it would have seemed like pretty much a useless thing to do. But if you fast forward three years, a lot has happened since. Over 10,000 players from around the world have participated in Dark Forest rounds running entirely on-chain. They've collectively spent trillions of gas on Robson, Xdai, and Gnosis chain. And a rich developer ecosystem has emerged for player-built third-party plugins, alternate clients, GPU miners, player corporations, data marketplaces, chain analysis tools, and more. And we've seen some epic on-chain dramas featuring deception, betrayal, universe-wide alliances. One of my favorite examples of this is using running rivalry between these two player alliances. OrdinGG, a group of Ukrainian and Eastern European players, and DfDow, which is both of these are basically player groups that have teamed up using various crypto-native governance mechanisms in order to play the game. And one of my favorite sort of, you know, summaries of this story is this thread by Will Chang on Twitter where he basically, if you find this thread, you can read about the story of bitter rivals, the betrayal, redemption, it's kind of awesome. And beyond Dark Forest, we've seen this entire ecosystem of next-generation application-level R&D in the broader 0x part ecosystem, and beyond sort of emerge oftentimes taking some degree of inspiration from Dark Forest as key ideas from the game have clarified and been built on top of and extended. So the first question that we're often asked is why build games on the blockchain to begin with? And I think the answer to this question is pretty revealing about what crypto games can teach us about innovation at the application level more broadly. So there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about things like GameFi or Play to Earn or how crypto can help to financialize games. But to be quite honest, for me personally, these ideas are pretty much the least interesting parts of the possibilities of crypto gaming. I think that there's a kernel of some interesting stuff there. However, I think also 90% of it is a lot of times inflated by hype and speculation. And instead, I think that crypto-native games are powerful because they have this property which I sort of in my own head label as permissionless interoperability. Dark Forest is an Ethereum smart contract, which means that anyone, player, bot, script, or smart contract can interact with the game programmatically. This has led to some really interesting emergent behavior, which I'll show in the next couple of slides. So the first thing to note about any crypto-native game is that it is pretty much necessarily client-agnostic. Because the source of truth for the game rules and state is the blockchain itself, the game doesn't care about what client you use to read its data or interact with its API. In the first releases, we provided an out-of-the-box web client for players to use, and we noticed that players quickly got to work hacking the client to build automations, different kinds of data visualizations, or new skins. So Ivan and a number of other contributors released a plugins tool chain that allowed people to build and share snippets of JavaScript code that would allow them to customize or modify their front-end gameplay experience. And today, there's nearly 100 open-source plugins that players can use to remotely generate snark-proofs, outline enemy territory, or even wage automated war, and all sorts of different functions. So this has been fascinating to see over time. One step further than that, you have the idea of third-party client implementations. So again, dark forest or any crypto-native game starts to look more closely like resembling a protocol or a set of rules, digital physics that various people will subscribe to via whatever client they want. And this is an example of a client that Georgios and Koby Gurkin built for dark forest originally built in Rust. Now, the advantage of this is that it allows you to play dark forest in your terminal and it offers better performance perhaps than the typical vanilla JavaScript web client in that you can generate snark-proofs and explore the universe faster. However, this comes at the cost of having a nice visual UI. Finally, one more thing on the client side that I want to explicitly point out is the level of complexity that we began to see in automations and bots programmed by players to play the game. Again, all of that kind of activity is fair game on dark forest. Some of the most smart contracts simply specify the rules or almost the physics of the universe and subject to following those rules, you can do almost anything you want. By 2022, some top players had built tools that allowed them to almost entirely abstract away the base level gameplay mechanics of dark forest. Rather than making individual moves, players were instead operating these more complex dashboards of higher level heuristics and strategies, things like press a button to distribute silver to all upgraded planets in this region. Scripts would then translate these higher level strategies into base their moves, and at this point, players were basically programming their own gameplay experiences. You had players building third-party tools that became a part of their first-party player gameplay experience. So, so far, we've only talked about client-side programmability, and we've seen plugins, third-party clients, automations, et cetera, but I think that the true promise of crypto-native games comes even one step further. While all of those previous things are kind of reminiscent of things you might see in the modding ecosystem of games like Minecraft, et cetera, crypto-native games do allow you to do something that is fundamentally different, and that fundamentally was not possible in the same ways before. So, to illustrate exactly what's going on here, I want to bring up a hypothetical example. Say you're playing a traditional multiplayer RPG game, and you want to see a new feature added to the game. So this might be a game like RuneScape or World of Warcraft, or you might imagine like a multiplayer version of Pokemon or something. And let's say that you have a new feature that you would like to see implemented into the game, like player-to-player trading. So, in the traditional paradigm, here's what has to happen. First, I'd have to go to the core developers of the game and make my feature request, and maybe they decide to accept it or maybe they don't. Then after that, the core devs have to introduce a new data transformation on their proprietary backend and API routes on their web server that trigger these data transformations. And finally, they have to go to their canonical game client implementation that's distributed to everybody and add in a new UI component, like a button or something that, when clicked, triggers this new, or hits this new API route. Contrast that with Dark Forest, where in Dark Forest, any player can develop an escrow or marketplace contract that talks to the core Dark Forest contract. They can then deploy this contract to the blockchain and maybe it says something like, all right, if anyone deposits one ETH or contract, it will programmatically talk to the Dark Forest contract and trigger a release of like 100 silver from my planet to yours. Afterwards, they can write a JavaScript plugin that allows a web client to interact with this marketplace contract and distribute this to any player who wants to opt into this new core gameplay feature. In this way, players can add entirely new features to the game without having to go through specially permissioned developers. So, the broadcast market, which you can see on screen was the first example, actually, of a feature developed in this way. It was built by Blaine Bublitz and Jacob Rosenthal. And what it allows you to do is, it allows you to ask for someone to broadcast or share with you a certain set of map information for a fee. Now, this was extended earlier this year with Night Market, built by XeroxSage and PRXYZ, which is a trustless, ZK-enabled marketplace for you to exchange encrypted data with other players on the map. Again, for a fee. And we've also seen several groups build out marketplace contracts for in-game items, as well as some interesting experiments into player corporations or other coordination constructs. So, on the screen here, you can see a contract called Astro Colossus, built by DF Dow, Dark Forest Dow. So, this is really cool. Essentially, the Dark Forest contract does not distinguish between players as EOAs, externally owned accounts, or smart contracts. So, a smart contract can play the game just as much as a regular player can play the game. And the Astro Colossus was essentially a smart contract player that anyone could contribute to or pilot. And in just 48 hours of its operation, it reached, you know, among the top 50 places on the leaderboard with contributions from dozens of players.  It's super interesting to speculate on how these kinds of things might evolve going forwards. And finally, new tools like those being built by teams like Lattice will make it easy for players to even add in new rules or resource types to the game. So, this is a screenshot from a mock-up of what it might look like for players to introduce plugins and third-party contracts that add in their own game modes, side objectives, or even resource types. So, to sum it all up, what does permissionless interoperability mean? Permissionless interoperability means that players can build the game experience, not just the core developers. And this unlocks a massive range of new kinds of affordances in games built in this fashion. Okay, so I think that's mostly my answer to question one. Why build games on the blockchain? In other words, what can blockchain do for games? The second question that I think is also very instructive to ask is, why build games on the blockchain? In other words, of all of the things that you could build on the blockchain, why bother with an application that doesn't have any obvious practical use case? And, you know, the text in the purple is sort of my, like, broader interpretation of what I want to answer this question for. And I think it's a big question to ask any R&D-facing org which is working on things that don't have a concrete practical use case. So, I've got three reasons. The first is that games and other experimental applications of this nature are technically demanding yet low stakes environment for us to rapidly push forward infrastructure without putting massive amounts of capital or social stake at risk. In the process of building crypto-native games and game infrastructure, the Dark Forest and Xerox Part communities have uncovered bugs in core infrastructure and motivated significant optimizations to, you know, things like NetherMind or Optimism Cannon or Akula or Aragon, et cetera, et cetera. This progress can happen rapidly and iteratively without putting hundreds of millions of dollars at stake as in DeFi. So we can move forward the ecosystem very quickly. We can move fast and break things, again, without suffering enormous consequences where people's real livelihoods are at stake. This is very reminiscent of, I would say, gaming's impacts on the early days of personal computing and of the internet. Games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom massively advanced the graphics industry and stretched networking infrastructure to its limits back in the 90s and devs were forced to invent new techniques and optimizations, many of which we still use today. So the second reason is that games are a leading indicator in technology and player behavior in today's games can help us predict user behavior on tomorrow's digital systems. To draw a parallel back to the early days of mobile computing, another recent platform that has been hugely impactful for all of our lives, interactions such as swiping and rotating were initially popularized by, you know, someone would even say, invented by games like Cut the Rope or Angry Birds. And while these apps were just games, these interaction patterns that they pioneered have become ubiquitous across everything that we do on mobile apps today. So we've seen a few examples of this, a few early examples in crypto gaming. Thanks to the community management efforts of folks like Jordan Spence, Classic J, and Ivan, we've seen various crypto-native player cooperatives emerge using new crypto-enabled mechanisms such as voice voting and value distribution. The lead of D.F. Dow, Tony Goss, sums this up quite nicely in an article, the crypto-gaming governance thesis, in which he argues for the values of the value of games as a sandbox for innovation inside digital governance. And then the final reason that I would say that games are good for blockchain is that games are inherently playful. The crypto space currently is dominated, I would say, by technologists and financiers. And a thriving indie-game community can potentially help to bridge the gap between crypto and more creatively-leaning folks, such as artists, writers, thinkers, etc., introducing critical dimensions of intellectual diversity that crypto doesn't currently have. And I think that this kind of diversity is crucial for any intellectual movement or counterculture. Historically, many creatives have been extremely turned off or outright hostile to crypto due to the hyper-financialization of things like NFTs. But by really showing what the technology makes possible and what permissionless interoperability makes possible, we've been finally getting some indie-game devs to come around. So, for example, the Lattice team out at the autonomous world's residency has been pulling together a community of artists and creatives in London to introduce proper game devs and creators to blockchain technology. So now I want to zoom out even a bit more. What are some of the lessons that we can learn from Dark Forest and crypto gaming, which we've talked a lot about in this talk, that are even more broadly applicable to innovation on blockchain technology? In my head, three things really stick out.  So much innovation is the result of people being willing to work on seemingly blue-sky moonshots that seem impractical at the time and that are conceived, and for which we can't really predict what the outcome is going to be. So, to give a historical example that I think sums up this principle very nicely, I want to take us back to the 1970s. So, up until the 1970s, computers themselves were commonly conceived of as these like monolithic room-sized beasts, only accessible to select few organizations like government agencies and university labs simply because they were so expensive. The idea of the personal computer as a tool for personal expression and liberation was something that was not on the map at all, until researchers at Xerox PARC basically put together the Xerox ALTO which was the first personal computer somewhat resembling what we think of as a PC today. At the time, the ALTO seemed like a colossal waste of resources and money. It was one of the first devices to have a graphical display, like a monitor, and that took up two thirds of the memory of the entire unit. And in a world where memory was really scarce and really expensive, this seems extremely frivolous. Also, it cost like $20,000 per unit in 1970 dollars, which is pretty terrible. But Xerox PARC, what they were doing was they were looking at Moore's law at the time and they correctly predicted that all of these resources would become more accessible over time. And they decided to skate to where the puck was going. And in doing so, they quite likely either altered or accelerated the trajectory of computing technology by potentially even decades. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in later decades cited Xerox PARC as the inspiration for so much of their own commercial visions for personal computing technology. Now, on a much smaller scale, again, we mentioned how three years ago Dark Forest and various other experiments started as Pine the Sky experiments.  Another interesting that I've taken away from watching Dark Forest evolve is a mental model which I think of in my head as a dichotomy between systems and tools. So to give an example of what I mean or to explain what I mean by systems versus tools and the particular usage here, I'll give a few examples. So this is a screenshot from battle.net which is Blizzard's launcher for a number of very popular AAA games such as Warcraft or World of Warcraft, Starcraft, etc. Each of these games has a clearly defined canonical game mode, set of rules, ranking system, you know, methods of interacting with the game. It's a pretty prescriptive thing that tells you exactly how you can and can't interact with battle.net and it's a very well engineered, very large monolithic system. Similarly, this is a screenshot from the Facebook homepage. Facebook itself is also a monolithic system and they've specifically engineered ways that you are permitted to interact with other participants and components of the system. How you can log in and authenticate, how you can message other people and even what API routes you're permitted to access and how frequently you're permitted to access them. In both of these examples, battle.net and Facebook, we see monolithic systems that are disproportionately engineered to serve the goals and visions of a particular group. On the other hand, Dark Forest has found many of its coolest and most unexpected outcomes as a result of building tools for users. Tools, as opposed to systems, are small, modular and accessible things that aren't overly prescriptive in their use. A tool invites a user to uncover their own visions and use cases. In our case, the Dark Forest Plugins tool chain and many of the other developer tools that we built enabled people to do all sorts of those crazy creative experiments that we saw earlier in this presentation. This also means that tool builders have an enormous leverage in these kinds of early technology ecosystems. For example, Blaine Bublitz built the Dark Forest Plug & Dev server, which again enabled a ton of innovation, and the folks at DFDAO have been building out custom infrastructure that allows anyone to modify and run their own Dark Forest rounds with custom rule sets, leading to things like the Dark Forest Arena Grand Prix and more. Now, I don't think systems, at least as I'm referring to them, are necessarily better or worse than tools. They're quite necessary for the world to function. But there's a time and a place where you either want to be building systems or building tools. And early on in a technology's life cycle, before you can predict all of the serendipitous innovations or second-order effects of the technology, I think it's important to focus on tools, because tools empower people, future generators of innovators, to express their own visions that are unpredictable to us today. With crypto-native gaming, I think we're also just getting started. And I want to shout out, again, one particular team that will be releasing and demoing a lot of really cool stuff this week. So the Lattice team has been building out a tool stack for various crypto-native games and crypto-native applications. And if you're curious, their sessions are on the DevCon schedule. So the final note that I want to end on is the importance of playing what some people call the infinite game. So this is a term coined by James P. Kars, a religious scholar in his book, Finite and Infinite Games, which I highly recommend to anyone who's never heard of it. In this book, Kars basically puts forward the idea that there are two kinds of games, finite games and infinite games. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning. Think of a sports match, or a political election, or an MEV arbitrage genre. Conversely, infinite games are games that are played for the purpose of continuing the play. To me, this means engendering innovation, experimenting with new rule sets and ways of collaborating, and developing new tools for continued creative expression. I think that Dark Forest has done a good job of representing what it might look like to participate in the infinite game that is Ethereum. And I'll wrap this up with a quote from Tony Goss at DFDAO, where he outlines the philosophy of the DFDAO player group, which is to play Dark Forest is to build on Dark Forest. So thank you everyone, and if you're curious about any of the other work that we're doing to build on top of these communities, you can check out these sessions. But otherwise, yeah, I think that's all I've got for today. Thank you.


We use ARGO for a couple of use cases of which one is to maintain a couple of large CI-CD clusters. And today I will be talking about using customized KRM functions to enhance ARGO-CD application deployments. So I'll be explaining how we used ARGO-CD config management plugin to do a computational transformation using a Kubernetes resource model, so KRM function. And I'll also be pitching what we could have done, namely what if ARGO-CD meets ARGO workflows to run these KRM functions as containers. The examples I'll be showing, you can find them back on our Nokia's GitHub space in the ARGO-CD KRM plugin examples repo. Okay, so first the basics. Config management plugins in ARGO-CD. So ARGO-CD comes with a set of built-in tools, but what if you want to run your own tools, then you need a sidecar. The sidecar is described in a plugin.jammel, and the plugin.jammel describes the init, the generate, and the discover stage, where the discover stage says if this file is detected, please don't run the ARGO standard tools, but run my plugin container. You have to tell ARGO to, well you have to tell your sidecar to have an ARGO entry point, the ARGO-CMP server, in order to communicate with ARGO-CD. So once you've done that, you're on your own. You cannot chain it with the built-in tools like Helm and Customize. If you want to use them, you have to use them again. And also the Helm chart for ARGO-CD, it has no structure to say, okay, define my plugin.jammel and this needs to be in there. It's just a plugin.jammel, so the best thing to do is to embed that in your plugin container image. And also the sidecar, you have to really define the whole sidecar as an extra container. We also wanted to use Multisource, which came into Beta in 2.6 in ARGO-CD, but it's Beta, so it's better than nothing, so it has no support for CMP yet. There is an open issue. Okay, so what did I mean with computational transformation? We wanted to do something very simple, check some into some jammel file somewhere. And we tried to do that with Helm, and it has a function to do that, but apparently it doesn't work for Helm dependencies. You cannot do it properly. The same for Customize Go plugins, very nice, but they are not portable. So if ARGO changes the Customize version, we have to compile that plugin again. So that's how we got to KRM functions. KRM functions are defined in a spec. It's donated to CNCF6CLI, Customize is already using that. And it's basically you have input items, which are KRM objects, and you have output items, which are KRM objects. Then you have your function and a set of a configuration for your function. Now, we got lucky because Customize, like I said, has already alpha support to run these KRM functions. So we started using it like that because KRM functions need an orchestrator. Okay, so we're ready. We have our plugin. We can put everything together. But then remember, we cannot chain things. So we got lucky again. We started from Helm chart and Customize has support for Helm charts. So we could do in a quite nice way our Helm integration. We didn't need to write first do this with Helm and then do this with Customize. It was just one step. And then there was also the issue of no executable permissions because the KRM function isn't executable. It needs to be really set as an executable, and that was not done by ArgoCD in the KITS repo that was pulled in. This is now resolved. You can configure that, but still it's a bit of a security question if you do that. Okay, so now done. We have our plugin and it works nicely. But with all the steps that we had to do and the fact that we had to use Customize to inject a simple checksum using a KRM functions, we were also thinking what if we want to run these KRM functions as defined in the spec as containers. Containerized KRM functions. And we were not the first one who were thinking that. So there is an ArgoCD issue open for that where there is a proof of concept to do this with Docker in Docker and Potman. But again, why would we do that? We are running in an orchestrator called Kubernetes which can run containers with can run pots. And we have a good orchestrator called Argo workflows. So what if we let ArgoCD translate a customized style of chaining things in a Jamel file? It doesn't have to be the customized Jamel. And ArgoCD translates that to an Argo workflow. That means we could get a secure and hermetic set of transformation and generations like in Customize using Argo workflows. And as the picture describes there, the workflow is started. First you have, for instance, a Helm step, then you have a function, a KRM function. And at the end, the output is KRM. To check out this medium post from somebody else who actually thinks in the same direction. Okay, so like I said, all the sample code of this idea is in this Nokia kit of space. We're open for feedback because that's why I came here. And, oh yeah, we are hiring. Thank you.


you have to be really willing to look at yourself under a microscope and ask yourself who do you really want to be? Does this action this feeling this thought whatever line up with that version of you that you want to be?


That just to make sense, you know what I'm saying? Not saying that anybody's emulating anyone, but just to make it, you know. Make it make sense. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101. Yeah, we gonna talk. It's something else, man. When you, when you, Boss told me to ask y'all this one. I talked to y'all, Boss said, ask him, man, what did Boss mean to no limit, man? When it, when it comes to Boss? Boss, I don't first, I'm first to say this. Boss is a true and is a true counter-suit. Shout out to Boss, man, shout out to Boss, man. Love that dude. True counter-suit of music. True counter-suit. True counter-suit of music. And a businessman of, you know what I'm saying? So he was P's right brain. Cause they, they were in school together, you know, from, you know, elementary and stuff like that. So Boss was, you know, Boss was like, hey, you know, P would consult with him. Boss would tell him how he felt about it. And then P would go with it. You know what I'm saying?  But Boss was, you know, like, you know how, how a baby and, and his brother, you know. Slim? Yeah. As that's really, you know, he would be the, he would be the slim and P would be the baby. That just to make sense, you know what I'm saying? Not saying that anybody was emulating anyone, but just to make it, you know. Make it make sense, make it fit. Let me ask you this, man. See, big court, how did he, when you seen him rapping and dealing with his thing, being an outside guy from Kansas, I don't know why you hanging in Wichita. But anyway, just how, what did you think of his style of rapping, who he was as a person, as it became the No Limit team? He was dope, man. They came in his group called CCG. Correct. When I first met him, you know what I'm saying? He was just cool, you know what I'm saying? Just like he is now, you know what I'm saying? Really? Great, great person, man. Great heart, you know what I'm saying? He wouldn't always have big. Big big. He swore when I, when I saw him next time, I say, boy, you think I swore. You know, I saw like him in the videos and stuff later in the kind of find out, because he used to have the mask on at first. Yeah. Because in the find out, I find out like through the grapevine, you know, that's cool, you know, that's cool. And when I saw him at the No Limit, we did a show for the, like a reunion show for the Essence Fest in 2017. And it was like when we saw each other, you know? Well, you know, from day one, he always been a real, real good dude. And he, I understand guys from Kansas City for me, you know, living in Wichita. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I used to live in Ogden. Oh. Man. Yes, I did. I was over there before Riley. Yeah, we on boss talk one on one. One on one. Yeah, we gonna talk.