Good afternoon everyone and welcome welcome to stocks will show live market review the qqq's thought I would do a video today, and I take the room today actually so people can hear what I said about the market this morning Although I have several market calls for the last Last week and week and a half in here. I almost did a video last night I was just too tired after I did the webinar, but I did talk about the market after the live webinar last night and This market is higher. It was this is new money coming into the market This is a time to be buying the market and it's when everyone is saying that it's extended and the move is up Is over and the people are thinking that they should sell out of the markets going to crash and there's just been so many Erroneous things that people are saying out there about this market. I have called this market amazingly well I will continue to do so because I'm staying in my own space and reading the gaps and reading the price action of What I'm seeing here in all the gaps that are in the market just like I do in my stocks You can learn the gap-winning system to trade the market and to figure out and calculate ETFs and what the moves are going to be doing So the reality is that The market is higher definitively higher Great call I made to see that the market would have a big green bar in it this week And I even said I saw that it would be setting up today and markets higher here It's going to make a new high now into the lunchtime period here now today and make its way to the next target 10350 was one of the targets the market hit this morning very quickly next target is 10375 and 104 for the QQQs and It's only Tuesday. It's only Tuesday. I had given 110 in the lecture I did last night and I think I said that one of the videos for the target that I have the cues will hit before the end of the calendar year You know after today we're less since there will be six dollars away from that there is a possibility that This market could just continue to rally actually till Thanksgiving. I Think it's a stretch to say 110 before Thanksgiving is it's only a week away But I think 110 before the end of the calendar year is realistic, but the market is just so strong So so strong. So 110 is the target in the QQQs before the end of 2014 However, the shorts aren't gonna let up They are not gonna give it up and they're not even giving it up now or this would look different. Okay So what I see playing out here is Not until 2015 are the shorts gonna give it up where people are gonna stop shorting this market and When the shorts finally finally give it up Well, it was gonna be a huge push for the market that will continue higher But in September, it's November two months ago maybe more than that I don't remember when I first did that video I said in the next four to six months and Marcus gonna make a big move a move that and no one's gonna be expected a big big move That's gonna carry through until 2015 and it's gonna carry through into all of the entire calendar year for 2015 markets gonna rally and be bullish That's what I'm seeing how it plays out unless something changes Which if it does I'll see it on the live day because I'm a day trader and I ring gas the live day And I read the gap in the market this morning is bullish And even though I know that many many people think this is extended and I understand why people think this is extended That helps me to see what I know clearer Okay, when I see what other people are looking at I get it. Okay But the foundational basis for my decision-making and calling this market long Which has turned out to be correct and is continuing to do so and hitting every target that I'm saying is Gaps, okay So I am reading the gaps in the QQQs to call this market and the numbers that I'm seeing for it to follow through I Know the market has run up here now for let's count the days. Let's let's just count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 25 days That's more than a month and there's less than five less than you can count on one hand of red bars in that market And in that 25 calendar days 25 calendar days the markets been green and it rallied up And it's had less than five red days in between which are barely of any significance And I know that means people think it's extended there for people say well They're afraid it has to come in it doesn't have to do anything Market doesn't have to do anything but trade Okay, that's a misnomer It's awesome misnomer that if something is going hard in one direction that it has to reverse that's a misnomer now The fact is that things don't go on a straight line forever. That's true but It's not about pullbacks It's really actually not the correct way to take an entry position in something or read the directional bias Someone was asking me today in the room a very important question about pivots And I said I was trying to think the significance that I even give pivots I guess I was realizing that I'm giving them less and less and less significance as time goes on because my read of price my actual read analysis of the price and something is becoming so Honed in so clear that I there's really I you don't need to use pivots They serve a purpose that you could use to help you if need be but it's not a decision-making process Now let's go over this market oops The market open open and rallying rallied up rallying and here it goes all the way up nice move in here this morning I said this morning and early very very early could have bought the market aggressively and I said you could have bought the market right out of the gate could have bought the market aggressively and you could have You could have bought the market today in a one-minute high With a 10 penny stop Look at that huge trade all the way up six our trade right up into 10 o'clock 10 15 reversal time. That is a gorgeous Set up Gorgeous, and I said that you could do that this morning in the room and a couple people did So a really nice bullish move here for the market look for follow through here this afternoon and we'll see where it goes We'll see just where it goes here and we'll watch it and do a recap Maybe later today or tomorrow the market is higher great call I made here in this market for the QQQs this morning great call I've been making the market all this calendar year and even last year in 2013 and The market's not gonna crash the market is higher I'm reading the gaps. That's how I know that I understand what people think is extended But they're not looking at the right information the information that I'm reading is accessible I'm seeing the same thing as other people as far as the quality of the information But I'm picking out of there the right things to look at which is how I'm predicting what it's gonna do before it Does it I'm able to do that because I'm looking at the same information as someone else But I'm looking at the right things and they're not looking at the right things so I understand what they're looking at but that's not what I'm looking at and That's how I'm able to call things so far in advance Like like this market this market call that I made I did the first swing trade letter was on the QQQs It's probably gonna be turned out to be one of the best calls I've ever made in in my whole trading career so far today Because I saw something that was gonna happen so far in advance Spectacular so for the people that signed up already for the swing trade letter for November that have gotten that letter And if you still want to sign up for November you can still sign up and I'll back date the letter for November because it's a monthly letter You know we'll see where this goes But so far it's hit all the numbers I've said and really just a fantastic call that I've made in this market So if anyone's interested in learning how to trade gaps or reading the market or reading stocks and gaps and learning How to trade as a day trader a swing trader email me at Melissa the stocks wish calm The class is this coming weekend November 22nd and 23rd only doing one more before the end of the year And if you want to learn how to trade before 2015 the time to do it is now the time is now right now When I'm here that I'm touching your life that you can learn to trade for me because there will become a time when I won't be having individual conversations with people and people will not be able to reach out to me and speak to You personally so the time to learn is now because I'm the one that created this information And I know how to trade and so take the opportunity and consider what I'm saying here with a level of seriousness Good job here today everyone that did the calls I made today, and I will see everyone in the room tomorrow morning. Have a great day


Hello and welcome to the session. Let us understand the following question today. Find the sum of first 22 terms of an AP in which D is equal to 7 and 22nd term is 149. Now let us write the solution. Given to us that D is equal to 7, 22nd term is equal to 149 and we have to find the sum of first 22nd terms. So we know that An is equal to A plus n minus 1 D. An that is A 22 is given to us 149. So we substitute we get 149 is equal to A plus n is 22. So 22 minus 1 multiplied by 7. Which implies 149 is equal to A plus 21 into 7. Which implies 149 is equal to A plus 147. Which implies A is equal to 149 minus 147. Which implies A is equal to 2. Now we know that Sn is equal to n by 2 multiplied by 2A plus n minus 1 D. Now Sn that is S 22 that we have to find out. So S 22 is equal to n is equal to 22 by 2 multiplied by 2 multiplied by 2 plus 22 minus 1 multiplied by 7. Now here we see that this and this gets cancelled by 11. So it is equal to 11 multiplied by 4 plus 21 into 7. Which is equal to 11 multiplied by 4 plus 147. Which is equal to 11 multiplied by 151. Which is equal to 1661. Therefore sum of 22 terms is equal to 1661. Hence sum is equal to 1661. I hope you understood the question. Bye and have a nice day.


This tutorial is to refill the non-refillable roller stamps made by PlusGuard your ID. It is not for the refillable roller stamps like this. This stamp has a removable cartridge. The cartridge is not refillable and will cost $8. We cut the stamp core open. You can see there is a sponge cylinder. A layer of rubber covers the sponge. To refill, we remove the roller's cover first. There are two methods. First, the rod comes off in two pieces. You can pull out the part with a more extended rod and fill in space with ink and leave it for 24-48 hours. Then there is another way. We used a rotary tool to drill two holes through the sponge. Then we fill it up with ink, using the precision tip. Now we can use the roller stamp right away. It will take about three to six hours for the ink to spread but you don't have to wait for it. I hope you enjoy this video. Visit us at www.bchtechnologies.com or our local store at Greensboro, North Carolina. Cheers!


Today I want to cover two questions you need to ask every real estate buyer or seller. What's up guys? Ricky Caruth here. Welcome back to my channel. So I haven't said this in a while, but the whole reason behind this YouTube channel and everything that I'm doing is because I'm on a mission to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. And I'm doing so through my absolutely free 100% free real estate coaching program. I'm the very first completely free real estate coach. I want to open up a completely new error of real estate coaching, a new breed, if you will, that shares everything for nothing. I've been selling 100 properties a year for the last five years straight going on six. I've been in real estate for 17 years. I went through the crash, lost everything, and came back. Everything I learned through the crash is the reason why I'm here today, and I just want to share it with the industry. I see so much out there in mainstream coaching that is hurting you guys. It's teaching you how to figure out what the client can do for you, and it's the wrong way to do it. In today's world, people want to know you care. People want to feel connected. They want to feel that you're honest and hardworking, dependable. They want to feel those things. They don't want to feel like you're there for you. They want to feel like you're there for them. What I'm doing is I'm teaching and coaching over 10,000 agents for free to learn how to effectively communicate who they are as a person to figure out what they can do for their clients and customers. All I'm doing is, as I put together exactly how I built my business, my entire program, I have a 90-day action plan that I think all of you should dive into. Don't do anything but this action plan for the next 90 days and see where you end up, and see if you don't start building relationships and find massive opportunities.  Closings are happening every day. Business is 110% unlimited and competition does not exist. Will everybody like you? No. Will everybody choose you to be their agent? No.  And every person that you create that relationship with, regardless if they want to buy or sell today or not, is worth 10 to 20 deals to you over the life of your career through repeat business referrals and referrals and referrals. So I wanted to get all that out right here at the beginning of this video. I haven't said all that in a while. All of this can be found on my website. Link in the description or go to zero to diamond.com. All spelled out. Create a free account. Jump into the free course. Start the 90-day action plan. We do live training twice a month right here on this YouTube channel. Sometimes the live training is me actually making live calls. I might be circle prospecting, calling expires, calling for sale by owners. Other live trainings may be on certain subjects, okay? Or I may have just a training session where I'll let agents call in and ask me questions. We also have a Facebook group. It's over 14,000 agents right now. We're growing very fast. There's about 50 to 100 agents signing up for the free coaching every day and joining the Facebook group and subscribing to this YouTube channel. So be sure to get involved. It's a growing community where the fastest growing real estate coaching program in the world and it's such a positive breath of fresh air compared to just about everything else that's out there. So if you haven't joined us, join us. We'll be glad to have you reach out to me if there's anything in the world I can do for you. I answer every single DM on Instagram, email, all that stuff. So if there's something you need, feel free to reach out and I'll get right back to you. So let's get into these two questions that I think are so crucial when we're talking to a prospect who is thinking about buying or selling. Okay, this could go for buyers or sellers. It's all the same. It's all just people. It's all humans that we're trying to help accomplish their goals. It doesn't matter if they want to buy. It doesn't matter if they want to sell. I think too many agents are trying to label theirself as a buyer's agent or a listing agent or if they've been handling buyers for a while, they want to transition to more of a listing agent. It's not the case for me. I find that I'm just a real estate agent trying to help people do whatever they want to do. A couple years ago, my listing to buyer ratio was about 80% listings, 20% buyers, but here in the last 12 to 18 months, that switched to about 50-50. 50-50 because the market has shifted and so my business has shifted. I'm going to go with the flow of the market. I'm not just going to be one dimensional. I want to help people do whatever they want to do and because I want to help people do whatever they want to do through whatever the market conditions are, that's what's going to enable me to survive any market crash because the relationships don't go away. Your ability to create the relationships does not go away. The properties do not go away. Transactions can go down and if you're transaction oriented, then that could hurt, but if you're relationship oriented, you're going to be the one still producing those transactions that are left at the end of the day. The first question that I ask a prospect when I finally come to the realization that they are interested in buying or selling a property is, is there an agent that you're working with on this? Is there an agent that you're going to work with on that? Is there an agent helping you with that already? I want to get this out in the open as quickly as I can. I want to establish myself as their agent in this transaction. If they don't already have an agent in mind, they may already have a relationship in place. And if so, then I can decide what kind of relationship I think that really is between that prospect and the agent. And if I want to continue trying to squeeze in there or not, or if I feel like it's a total waste of time and I just want to cut my losses right now and move on to someone else because their mom could be an agent, right? Their brother, their cousin, their best friend from high school. There's all these different scenarios. It could be the agent that sold them the property and they told you that this agent, how over the top this agent went for them. There's no way they're going to use any other agent.  They're obviously pretty tied to this agent and feel very deeply connected with. That means that agent did a really good job. That's what they're supposed to do and it's perfectly fine. Business is unlimited. You keep moving. You find someone else, okay? But I want to concentrate on these two questions right now. That's a whole other video. So we want to establish ourselves as the agent. If they say they don't have an agent they're working with on this, then it's time to get to work. You want to immediately start putting in place the parts of the deal that establishes you as the agent, the meeting, the appointment, showing of the properties, so on and so forth. Whatever their situation is. There's not a cookie cutter system by the way. A lot of people come to me and say, hey, my coach told me that I need to do 12 touches here. I need to do every lead I get. I need to do 12 touches. Well, that's not true. Every deal is different. When you talk to that prospect, it might be one touch. It might be 12. It might be four, okay? When are the touches? They might be spread out more. They might be back to back to back. It's different for every situation. There's not a cookie cutter system to any of this. So don't get caught up in that trap, okay? And listening to the cookie cutter trainers out there, realize that every situation is different. You need to go into it, listen to your prospects, figure out what's best for them, how you can help them accomplish their goals. So I think a very important step in the process for a real estate agent dealing with the prospect that has decided or you realize that they're ready to possibly do a deal sometime soon is to figure out if they already have a relationship in place and how strong that relationship is. Make a decision right there which way this is going to go, okay? Now we're ready to move to step number two or question number two. Question number two and this is a big one and it is why. It is why this prospect is thinking about buying or selling, okay? This is where we go deep into the relationship, okay? They didn't wake up one day and decide, I want to sell a house for no reason or I want to buy a house for no reason. I want to sell this lot. I want to buy this apartment complex for no reason, okay? There's always a bigger reason than the transaction, a bigger reason than the property, okay? Their mom died. Their kids went to college. Their, you know, their grandson moved. They lost their job. They got a new job and need to relocate. There's all kinds of bigger life things happening within this that's causing them to make this decision. The transaction and the selling or buying of the property is a secondary thing going on, okay? The primary thing going on is whatever that huge new life change or decision that they've made, okay? If it's an investment, maybe they're selling to get the money so they can do this, pay for college or pay some debt down or whatever the case may be. There's something bigger than the transaction and that's what you got to figure out. You got to figure out what's going on in their life that's causing them to make this decision, focus on that, okay? When you focus on that, when you relate to them on that level, we go so much deeper, so much deeper. The transaction is the surface, right? But when you find out why the transaction is happening, now we're getting deeper and we're going deeper and deeper and deeper. Now we're starting to connect. Now we're starting to grow. Now we're starting to really form that lifelong relationship that we want, okay? Because we want to help them for the rest of their life. We want to help them buy and sell their next property. We want to help all their friends and family buy and sell their properties, okay? We want to be their go-to and let them know that we are here for them and we're going to help them accomplish their bigger goals, okay? We're not worried necessarily about the house selling. Yes, we are. We're going to do a good job. We're going to make it happen. We're going to do everything we can do because that is happening because of this bigger reason that we're more concerned with. And when you show them that you care about their bigger reason more than the transaction, but you still go all out on the transaction, now we're building a business. Now we're really making it happen. So just to reiterate, the two questions that I think are the most important to ask potential buyers and sellers of real estate is, is there an agent you're going to work with on that? And there can be many variations of that. And the second one is why? Why are you selling? Why are you buying? What is causing you to make this decision? So I hope this video really helps you guys go deeper with your relationships, establish yourself as their go-to agent. If there's not already a deep relationship in place with another agent. And I hope it helps save you time. I hope it creates all kinds of massive business for you. And if there's anything I can do for you, please let me know. If you haven't clicked subscribe to my channel, please do so now. Click that bell and let me know if there's anything in the world I can do for you.


Mae, dydw yn gwasanaeth gyd ar ymygell? Ysgol sydd yn y baen g今日は? Mae'r cymdeinwch ar y cyforthol, ac mae ac yn ogylch i-drygu'n hyn ar taethau, ac mae'n rhagor i hynny, ac mae'n ddau mwylo'n sefydlu'r dydig i'r ddechrau. Ond lle mae'n gwybodio yw i'r gweithio. Fy fyddo gyda'r cychaf. Mae'r cymdeinwch ymddwch eu fideinwch.  In the first few months, I had a gail pregnant over there. Darrant illizarad. Darrant illizarad.  She was a nice person but she was fucking... Take one for the team, Dad. You tell her the truth now. You have to tell us. No it didn't.  James, you know what, if I could rewind time now and you know take one for the team, I think I would.


And when I thought about this theme, I really had only one person on my mind who I wanted to bring in and have talked to us, which is Professor Susan Crawford. Susan is a dear friend. She's someone who has sort of emerged in the last 12 years or so as one of the most important thinkers about not just how we run the internet, and she's had real experience with that, spending a lot of time on the board of directors of ICANN, but also what we can do with the internet. So she's someone who's been thinking not just about the sort of the hard architectural issues, the questions of how we maintain net neutrality, although in that case she literally is the person who has written the book that is probably the best introduction to understanding why the U.S. is in such a strange and such a poor position as far as our access to the internet, a book called Captive Audience, which if you haven't read, you really do need to get on your bookshelf. It's absolutely required reading for anyone who thinks about the political and civic significance of the internet. She's someone who's incredibly passionate about the open internet and celebrating it. She's the founder of One Web Day, which has been a holiday to celebrate the web as we know it, this open participatory civic space. But she's now moving in her work to thinking really more broadly about what happens when we do have this open internet, what can we do with it? And working with Steven Goldsmith, she has a book coming out this fall called Responsive City, and she's really thinking about the ways in which a city that is wired, a city that is filled with sensors, a city that is filled with people who can ask questions and who can share all that information, really change what it means to be a citizen. I find her inspiring every time I hear her talk. I'm so thrilled that she's able to be here and lead off this conference for us. Please welcome to the stage Susan Crawford. Well, I'm delighted to be here and to see so many friends this morning. And the idea of having a path to impact is incredibly attractive to me. That's, I think, what we're all trying to find. As I've been working so much on the terrible internet access picture for America, I'm seeking optimism. And I think one way to get there is to look at all the other communities that require open fiber in their towns. And they are journalists, people who care about the civic life of cities, and government. We all need this. So for the last year or so, working with Steve Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis, and former deputy mayor for operations of New York City with Mike Bloomberg. I have been working on a book coming out in September called The Responsive City. And here's the draft cover. Looking at all these ones and zeros on the cover and preparing for this talk made me think of a conversation I had last month with an anthropologist, Norwegian anthropologist who had spent years working in Malaysia with very isolated tribes in the 70s. And she's very disturbed about a turn in her field, in the field of anthropology, towards what people are calling post-humanism. The idea that the human is no longer at the center of discourse for anthropology, that instead we need to be thinking about the feelings of trees. And the feelings of every other element, putting humans as just a relative point of data when it comes to anthropology, not the center. And then she leaned forward and she said it's all tied to this idea of smart. And here is a gift for you, how she thinks of smart. It is simplistic, mechanistic, ahistorical, reductive and tautological. So all the stories about smart cities and smart ways of instrumenting cities to her seem fundamentally post-humanist, somehow mechanical and simplistic. This also rang true for me when I heard Dan Hill speak late last year in Amsterdam, who talked about what he calls the urban intelligence industrial complex. A group of companies that are working towards a vision of instrumenting cities, gathering data and then selling products that are based on that data. I think the post-humanist critique is right and something we really need to focus on when we talk about technology. I think smart, the criticism of smart is way overblown. And we wrote Responsive City, the Responsive City, to celebrate and capture what cities can do working with these other communities, the open fiber community, the open data community, the civic activism world, and journalists to make their cities better places for human beings to live. Because when we forget that humans are the reasons for cities, we operate at our peril. We couldn't actually measure what's wonderful about a city, the energy and the diversity and the joy that you get walking through a great park like Central Park here in New York City or Boston on this sparkling day. To have a physicist's view of the city to believe that everything could be measured and somehow tinkered with is clearly short-sighted and uninspiring. But there is something, there's a lot that cities can do using data to enrich the lives of the people who live there. Cities are capable of great things, of great changes using a little bit of technology plus open fiber to make lives better. And luckily for those who are really worried about the overblown vision of smart where everything has a digital point and we're all nudged in ways we're not aware of to change our lives. Cities are also incapable of controlling large swaths of urban life. So in working on the response of city, I met many civic leaders working inside the walls of city hall who see this balance between human beings and the instrumental use of infrastructure and all the things that make possible human lives in cities. Here's Brenna Berman, she's terrific, she's the CIO of Sacrago. And she is working on ways of using data to target just the inspections that city workers do to make sure that they're using leading indicators about the state of the world historically to focus their efforts. It's a very rigorous, very thoughtful set of work that Chicago's carrying out very slowly with a lot of testing, a lot of computer scientists involved. Behind her is the grid for windy grid they call it, sort of mapping in a human readable form of data. So you can see the city, they're also launching just this week sensors that are very carefully not collecting personalized information but aggregate information about the environment of the city. Air quality, pollution, right? CO2, NO2 sound, levels of sound, noise in other words, and temperature. And instrumenting the city in that way and then having the data come directly into the city's open data platform where it's available for use by researchers and by the city itself for changing its policies. If there's pollution here, why is it there? Can we tinker with that? Can we move with that? With fiber in place and sensors picking up this environmental data, there's a lot that the city can do. So there's Brenna balancing these human and instrumental interests. This is Mike Flowers of New York City who based on his experience in Iraq was able to understand the functioning of New York City government. It's tribal, it's incredibly complex, and there are wars, right? He saw that inside the New York City government and as a very self-empowered civil servant went around persuading people to share data with him so that he could help them make their operations better. And the responsive city tells the story of Mike Flowers and how he did this as an example of how data and technology can actually empower civil servants to have more dignity and autonomy in their jobs, which then helps citizens have more dignity and autonomy in their daily lives. Here's Bill Oates. When he walked into City Hall in Boston in 2006, as its very first cabinet-level CIO, he heard typewriters, 2006, right? So Bill takes this on and makes sure that there's adequate infrastructure inside the city of Boston's environment, but also works closely, very closely in cahoots with Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood, focusing always on finding ways to use technology and applications that will help citizens, very much citizen-centered governance, inspired by the mayor, Mayor Menino, who his leadership was absolutely essential. The 20 years that he'd been here as mayor made a huge difference to this team. It's all about people in the end, but it's not just people inside City Hall. It's also people outside City Hall. Here's Dan O'Neill, the indefatigable leader of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, who has worked, he's done many things in Chicago, but he's worked with nonprofits in the city to gather information about deteriorating buildings and get that data right into the city's open data portal through 311, and then have the city streamline its operation so it focuses on what those nonprofits are worried about and actually acts on them, that feedback loop of response between citizen and the people inside City Hall. A wonderful woman, Caroline Shannon, who has moved to the largest favela in Rio and with her husband Pedro de Cristo, is building what they call the digital agorah, a space with very good connectivity for people to work on civic issues together and to organize and to make sure that the city hears about their concerns, but a space, nonetheless, where people can be physically activist together. And here is the terrific Kathy Pettit of the Urban Institute. These are all heroes in my mind. I can't help smiling. They're terrific. She is working with nonprofits across the United States through the Urban Institute to help them build the capacity to use data to have an impact on policy. So you see this terrific feedback loop being driven by these individuals. So they're great. They're balancing concerns about sensitivity and privacy and autonomy and dignity with the need for the city to just do a better job because the city in America and around the world is at a very primitive stage of using all of this information. There are such barriers to adopting technology inside city halls still and enormous blockades in the form of procurement rules, you know, human resources requirements, they get in the way of this kind of agile development. It'll be very slow for cities to actually act on a lot of this input. So the fear about smart, the reductive, mechanic, a historical, tautological world is overblown in part because we have a long way to go before we can actually help change city government into becoming a richer place. So let's balance all of this. We don't want to value efficiency over compassion in the use of technology. We also, though, don't want to devalue efficiency. There's a lot we could be doing better, making the systems of the city run better for all of our lives. And here's the theoretical nugget, the one thing I want you to take away from this talk, which is that you can use data visibly to enhance and amplify the touchpoints of government and journalism on citizens. When you see something, when you see a visualization of what the city is doing, what a journalist is doing to report on the city, all made possible by use of data and fiber in a city, democracy is strengthened because weak and authoritarian governments operate because there's a very thin strand of relationship between the two of them. You give me money, I provide you services, and that's it. And where a government is uncertain and authoritarian, it will act through coercion and threat rather than through its citizens. So paradoxically, this visibility of government actually strengthens the ability of democracy to serve all of our interests. And that's why I'm moving into this new area because I think that without this kind of visibility, we won't have the enhanced trust in government that we'll need in order to accomplish great things for citizens. Because none of us acting on our own can provide a post office or build a road or provide fire service or policemen or schools. All of these are public goods, and we need to make sure that we have the trust, visible trust available for those actions to be taken. There are wonderful tensions in this field that are not gonna go away. We have decades to work through this. I hope it happens more quickly, but look at all this. We have all the centralizing push of urban data networks, data policies. But they make possible very fine-grain neighborhood work, both levels at once. This is very much a both and discourse. Same point about leadership, without Manino in place. The neighborhood-based efforts using technology are more difficult. You need a strong leader in order to keep the decentralized action going. Deep personalization is possible through these networks. We can maybe have our own vision of what the city is. But at the same time, we need broad civic concern in order to address the grand challenges ahead of all cities around the world. Sustainability and resiliency. Also, urban life thrives on inefficiency. New York is very inefficient. Stockholm's jealous because things run too neatly there. They wish they had the grit of New York. But if you have greater civic efficiency, the city becomes more livable, a better place to live. So we'll constantly be balancing these tensions. There is no one right answer. There's a tremendous amount of work to do, particularly on the policy side. We need to connect local organizing, all the civic energy of a place like Transparent Chennai, measuring and mapping affordances in slums, and then trying to get the government to act on that data. Right now that feedback loop is less available than it should be. We need to figure out how, if the math tells us that treating different areas will be fine, the outcomes will be good, how does that fit with our notion of justice and ethics? Lots of differential treatment questions coming up. And privacy and security, and privacy and security level, endless conversations about this, and we need people to dig into the policy in these areas. And the risk of meaningless engagement is huge. That you ask citizens to engage and then you don't respond, and then it's worse than if you'd never ask them in the first place. So lots of tough policy questions that the responsive city attempts to deal with. And here's my vision. Here's why I think all these things fit together. Civic media, municipal fiber people, and local government leaders. Because it's all about the layers of infrastructure that make the responsive city, not the authoritarian city, but the responsive city possible. At the bottom, you're always going to need open fiber, so that everybody has the unlimited capacity bandwidth they need to participate in the city and in their own lives. You need open sensors, like the city of Chicago, the sensors that are reporting data that people know about and that's made public. Open data platforms also, obviously essential. A new element for me that I'm now beginning to understand is the importance of shared screens. Not your just your own handheld device, but large screens that allow people to look at the same picture. Because the emotional heat of policy conversations go down. The heat of conversations diminish when you're looking at the same picture together. So screens everywhere are part of this new vision of the responsive city. And published algorithms. If we were inspecting data, finding leading indicators, trying to predict how the city gets better, we should know what those algorithms are. So there you go. That's the layered vision that puts together what's possible for journalists who are going to be collecting all of this data and reporting on it. Being part of our knowledge of what the city is doing. Plus the fiber people building networks, which are going to be essential. Plus the local government leaders acting on this to make lives better. Three suggestions when you're worried about the smart city or you're hopeful about the smart city. Always think that always ask yourself the question compared to what a city can do a better job knowing more about what it knows. People who want access to the internet can do better having fiber everywhere. How is this a delta? How is this an improvement? We should always ask ourselves. And I think we should be optimistic. There's lots of room for thoughtfulness here. The policy questions have not yet been cited. A lot of them haven't even been asked yet. So we need to build a pipeline of people who are trained both at MIT and at policy schools or at mixtures of the two so that they can engage in local government and be part or part of the citizen activist world and be able to serve this world with activity and passion. The responsive city ultimately is not post humanist. It is completely human. The human is at the center of our discourse as it should be whenever we talk about technology because after all technology is culture. Thank you very much. Susan, thank you so much. And thanks for that provocation. For people who've been following Susan's work for as long as I have, it's really interesting to see that something that came directly out of your older work, the importance of having open fiber of having broadband within communities now turns out to be the backbone of this very, very ambitious vision. But I'm going to reveal myself as one of the smart city skeptics here. In part because I'm a city skeptic. As you know, I live way, way out in rural western mass. But my skepticism about the smart city is really rooted in sort of Adam Greenfield's new book, Beyond the Smart City, or Against the Smart City. And he, I think, would ask the question, who gets to respond?  They are really amazingly creative people within city government. And outside. A few outside. How do people within communities respond? How do they use this data? How do they build on top of it? How does this become actually about the people that are at the center of your vision rather than just the people within the government? We are just at such a primitive stage in the development of this world. We don't even realize yet that there's no distinction between the electronic world and the offline world. They're the same. It's just a flow of information. We should be living on many layers at once, but because our infrastructure is so pathetic, we think of this as a special thing to be online. It's weird. So as this improves, new kinds of literacy emerge. Ways of dealing with visualizations and understanding them. Ways of interacting. If all of this or much of this information is open and many different kinds of people can chew through it and see pictures that relate to it, that makes possible engagement on a scale we've never seen before. And for slices of your time, slices of your attention. Right now, you'd have to go to a town meeting to participate, and it would take many evenings and you might get bored or wander away. Here, if this vision of what you'd like your city to be is actually apparent or something you can just touch as you watch by, you can give it five minutes. And participate. So I think actually the amplification of engagement is much greater given this ectronic layer than it has been in the past. And actually we're going to see some student work a little bit later today, Action Path from Airheart Grave, which works very much around this idea of trying to get people to respond in real time. You're sort of in the early stages of really exploring this new vision. Give me a sense of what you're hoping will come out of a situation like Chicago where you've got these very capable sensors coming up within an open data architecture. Things go wonderfully well over the next five years. What do you dream happens in the city of Chicago with that sensor net? Five years. Well, the city and its citizens with any luck begin to understand pathways through the city differently. They sort of start seeing the city differently as more is revealed to people in the city than had been in the past. Things like where energy is, hot spots to ignore or go towards. It's just that the city of Chicago is a wonderful place. Now it has even more vibrancy with another layer of information that people become so used to, it almost disappears. It becomes just another part of the city visible to them. That's my image, just more of the same. More of what makes Chicago great and energetic and diverse and interesting, plus a visual layer that's available at any time to citizens. What keeps me for feeling like I'm constantly under surveillance in Chicago? If we feel like we're suddenly seeing these patterns of energy, we're seeing the past that I want to take, and if this is open data, I assume that's also open data to marketers. I also assume that that's open data to anybody who wants to try to figure out how to target me as a high energy guy deciding to engage with a higher energy city. How does that avoid turning into the panopticon, which I know is not your vision of a successful responsive city in this case? This is where the role of policy is so important, and why the way that Chicago is doing this carries so much hope, because they're very deliberately not tracking individual people and not looking for identifiers that would tie a phone to a person. They're looking to just see levels of activity, and each new sensor will be looked at rigorously through a public process to say, do we want this one? Do we want to add it? What's it going to be collecting? And because, I realize this is a lot to ask, but because the information is public, people will see immediately if they're troubled about either collection or aggregation of the data. So my rosy vision is that the information is going to be collected. The city can be very deliberate about depersonalizing that information to make sure that it's not actually tracking a single person in Chicago to its credit is taking that step very intentionally right now. So in just a moment, I'm going to open this up to questions from the audience.  But before that, I wanted to ask a particularly pointed and maybe targeted question, which is, Susan, isn't this basically just the back door to your socialist utopian dream of fiber backbones holding together American cities, having not been able to vanquish Comcast and Time Warner in front facing mortal combat.  All I really want are nice open data and sensors. Is this not sort of the back route to the fight that you've been fighting for about 10 years? I love this. Well, actually, I'm winning because around the country, thank you, around the country many mayors are looking at opening up their own wholesale fiber networks, not actually entering into the market themselves, competing and providing services, but providing passive infrastructure so that other companies can build on top and provide competitive services. It's the Stockholm model. We're going to see a lot of developments along those lines coming up. So having won that battle and everybody in America is on my side because we're sick of very high prices and the sense that connectivity is a luxury, that's the essential problem in America that it feels like a luxury. Now you need to think about why. Why are we doing this? And I always think about humans. That's our point. That's why we do anything, right? And so humans want to be in each other's presence. They want connection and having served briefly in government, I can see the possibilities of real infrastructure provided by government that helps people's lives. And so putting all these things together, I think we're actually at a nice tipping point in America for these issues to work together. There are enormous synergies and journalists are also assisted. So I don't see it as a backdoor. I see it as a natural evolution of taking a technocratic concern, why is it so expensive, and making sure that the human story is always at the middle of it. So I'm going to open up the conversation here. I know that there's a lot of questions on the vision of the responsive city, Susan's work on a variety of different subjects because we are within an academic institution and because there are a number of people who have the word PhD after their name, I always feel like it's necessary to just remind people that we're doing open questions. A question is an interrogative statement. It ends sometimes with a raised voice. And one way you can know if you are asking a question is if there is in fact something Susan could respond to after you were speaking. If you find yourself giving a speech and saying, I guess that's not a question, you have failed. And keep in mind that I am the person who is going to be running around with the mic asking the questions. I am large, I am grumpy, and I take this issue very seriously. So if you have a question that is actually a question, please put up your hand. And I would love to have you ask that question to Susan if I have not now intimidated you all into silence. Anybody, please. Wonderful. Wonderful. Great. And if you would do me the favor of just introducing yourself before you ask the question. David Matthos and Sky Truth, I'm curious about, so what about places that don't perform well, so that somehow the sensor network shows that this place has low energy or it's bad? Obviously that becomes a place that you target additional efforts, but doesn't that kind of confirm, these places are good, but I always kind of knew that part of the city was bad, so I'm not going to have anything to do with that. Well, it depends what you mean by bad. If a section of the city is getting inadequate resources from the city, the city can then target it, right? That's one thing to do. If pollution is bad, it can act on it. If it's low energy, there isn't enough foot traffic, maybe the citizens learn about that. It's amazing what people do when information is visualized to them. We only make progress when we see something, just thinking about it. So I have this idea that people in Amsterdam talk to me about this a lot, that making neighborhoods more visible to themselves could, in itself, be a tremendous assist to cities. So we've got a question over here from Alberto Ibarguan. Yeah. Unlike Ethan, I really do want to believe you, and I am an urban, I am a fan of urban, and I agree that Chicago appears to be doing things right. But it could so easily not do it. What do we do to protect against, say, coming back to the first mayor daily, who might very well have wanted to have the name and background information on all those protesters in 1968, or anybody else? How can you protect against feeling like we're encouraging Big Brother? This is where the pipeline is so important, because training the next generation of students who then see it as part of their lives to go and serve in government, and understand that they can have tremendous impact, particularly in the city. Federal-level work is wonderful, I also recommend it, but there's something about working in a city that allows you to see the impact of your work that's extremely exciting. Getting more people into local government who understand this balance, who are sensitive to the risks, and great potential, human potential technology is the only answer. Making this a kind of a voting issue, you need to get leadership in office that understands technology and doesn't see it as alien, and then getting people inside to serve who are open to and ready to act on all of these questions. We're getting there. I believe my students are part of that cadre, I'm pushing them out, go do it. There are lots of people here who train people who are interested in being in that pipeline, so that for me is the only answer, is training. Good, so we're warming up, I've got at least three hands up, and we're going to work our way through them. Carolina Rossini, public knowledge. So Susan, you said at the end that technology is culture, right? And unfortunately, here in the US, the culture is very permeable to surveillance. I'm sorry to touch on the same, but we are in that moment, right? A couple of months ago, I was in Boston, and the taxi driver driving around MIT said and there was where the police officer was killed. And now I realized yesterday that now the park is named after him. So the culture in the US is permeable to that. So are you seeing the limit very clear there or not yet? And if we think that a lot of laws are actually secretive, how much the individuals can actually impact on setting that limit? Great. Well, again, these things don't happen by magic. There isn't some exterior spaceship that lands on a city and makes it tilt towards only acting in surveillance. This is all about policy. This is about who's there making the decisions about what's going to happen and how the information flows are going to work. Information is going to be collected. We can't stop it. It's a tsunami, right? And it's too attractive to too many people. We can't get in the way, but what we can do is be really careful about who gets access to it. Our forensic abilities to track abuses inside government and go after them, say, oh, yeah, you can't do that because that's destroying the trust that people have in government. So looking backwards forensically, being careful about the policies that shape the amalgamation of data, that's the answer. Because we have this problem in America. We sort of seem to think that our terrible internet access situation happened by itself. It didn't happen by itself. It happened because of policy decisions along the line. So we're permeable to surveillance, but we're also permeable to democracy and the ability to make decisions based on deep ethical and human concerns. We can do that. We're capable of it. Hi. Ellery Biddle from Global Voices. Hi. I wondered if you could just talk about, there must be political barriers to this, right? Like I think of Chicago also as this very cronyistic place of this sort of scary power field, and so I wonder what, these are all brilliant, amazing ideas to think about, but then I also think of that as a place where people have very set political agendas that might not always allow this kind of stuff to happen the way that you want it to. Right. Well, that's another version. That's a terrific question. It's what Alberto said a minute ago. How do you keep the tilt from going the other direction? Again, civic involvement. Waiting for people who care about these kinds of issues and can hang on to it. Politics are everywhere. Making things visible actually helps. You see corruption, right? You see influence in ways with data that would be impossible in an analog world. And finding leading indicators is part of what the data job does. So just as people say, oh, the internet is a terrible problem for the police because they can't see everything, that's actually not true. They're seeing much more, right? Here, too, politics are a problem for setting up the right kinds of policies in these areas, but we can see what's happening. And that's what gives me optimism. And that gives me the sense of responsiveness that builds trust and, in another feedback loop, builds engagement by people in government when only 20% of people vote, we have an enormous problem. Because that's that very thin strand of relationship, that sort of lack of awareness of the role of government in your lives. Get more people involved, have them, seeing what the government is up to around them. And you've got a richer ecosystem that doesn't allow for just coercive power. Hi. Hi, Kelly Vareya, Longview. My question is actually pretty similar to David's question. I wanted you to elaborate a little bit on your theory of change, I guess. Because I think when I listen to his question, asking about can you, basically, a lot of these places, you can actually see, like, physically see in the physical world, you can see manifestations of the problems themselves. And I know that's definitely true for me. I live in a neighborhood that has the worst indicators in Manhattan. And I feel like if we had this additional data, it just makes me wonder, like, what else we would be able to gain from that? Because I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who visits the neighborhood and anyone who lives there that this neighborhood has problems. Right. Terrific question. The gain from it is the comparative visualization. So problems here, another area of same geographic qualifications, but treated differently. Or outcomes are different. What you're looking for are outcomes, this is sort of the technocratic way to talk about this, where are things falling apart. And being able to see that another area of the city is getting a disproportionate share of city resources, getting less attention, getting less funding, that helps. That builds, so you're not just complaining about how bad things are in your area, but you're saying, and look at these other places, we'd like to be treated like them. And we want to see change that makes that possible, a level playing field. Data helps that because people respond to visualizations of data in ways that they don't respond to just pictures of buildings. It's a layer of factual persuasion that isn't available with anecdotes. It moves mountains sometimes, just showing a picture of reality using aggregated data changes people's minds in ways of telling a story right now using a picture of a building wouldn't. Benjy De La Pena from the Knight Foundation, so hi. Two-part question. The first one being, who decides what we respond to? So the thing with data visualization and big data sets is it's not neutral. There's an editing process. You decide what we respond to. And there's a historical basis to responding to the wrong data, right? So the most measured thing in cities is vehicular traffic. And so we do everything to try to expand vehicular traffic, which urbanists know it's just about the worst thing. And historically, redlining was data driven. And the algorithms that the RAND Corporation put in place in early New York in the 1970s to make fire control more efficient led to the fires of the Bronx. So who decides what we respond to? And then second-part question, which you just said, about the 20% voting, particularly in local elections, I think 20% is actually high. How will all of this get more people to actually get involved? Let me start with the second part of the question first. I think the suggestion is, we have to test this rigorously, the suggestion is when you have a feeling of agency that you can affect what happens in your local neighborhood, that your city government is helping you affect what happens in your neighborhood, you become more engaged. It's all driven by agency and trust. If you think that there's this far away city government that has no effect on your life and there's no point in your voting, you're not going to vote. So we can improve on the status quo of low voting rates, I think, if you increase the sense of agency autonomy, dignity, involvement, and impact. And you can use data to measure and depict that in ways that you can't use pictures in the analog world. That's the theory. I'm actually saying one about this. I think that, especially here in Boston, where the mayor managed to touch so many people, both by shaking hands and by using technology, there's a feeling of enhanced trust, which we will see lead to higher levels of citizen engagement in voting. And in other ways, it's not just voting, it's also going to a neighborhood watch meeting or showing up and picking stuff off the street, all kinds of ways of getting engaged. On the first point, it keeps being the same answer for me. Who decides? That's where policy comes in. What if we have a city that understands that transportation is infrastructure making possible human lives and not the thing around which we organize the city? You'll get different desirable outcomes and then people manage the city towards those outcomes. What's interesting is in America, we went towards the auto 40 years ago and ripped up infrastructure that had been devoted to carrying people around. Now we're putting it all back in. So we've learned and the impact of design and urbanists on cities is growing all the time. So policy is always the answer to who decides and visualization for me is part of the answer to who engages. Hi, I'm Rebecca McKinnon with the New America Foundation, etc. Hi Susan, sorry to keep carping on this question. But your your antidote to the big brother problem is policy. Civic engagement, political engagement. So what is your advice to citizens of Bangkok, of Kiev, of Istanbul, of Riyadh, who are very much hoping that their city governments don't implement these systems anytime soon? I think there, the answer has to be the same. It comes from activism, protest, which gradually changes structures of government over time. The protest gets stopped thanks to the surveillance before you can even engage. You find as new America is helping people find ways to get around the blocking of the protest, other methods of communicating that make it possible. Look, these are extraordinarily difficult problems. And the internet and the availability of open internet access is actually an instrument of democracy so that people can find each other and work towards collective solutions to very difficult problems. I think from an American standpoint, the best thing we can do is try to make sure that communication isn't as open as possible. But that's a sovereign country. What they're gonna do to decide their own policies is up to their rules. We can only operate on our own. I know that's not enough of an answer, but I think you push openness as much as possible. And then look for those increasing returns to everybody that come from open internet access. Hi, Susan. Catherine Dignasio from the Center for Civic Media. So I wanna ask a question about the, so you showed the critique of the smart city. Sure. And sort of equating that with posthumanism. And so in my mind, the posthumanist turn has actually been more about trying to be inclusive of all of the agencies that are operating in the city. And in a sense, the caricature of the smart city is about the total human centeredness of the city, it's about the domination of the city by humans. So I've seen the posthumanist turn as being turning us towards environmental issues, turning us towards these deeper understandings of things like climate change, where we can understand agencies beyond the scope of human timescales and things like that. So I'm wondering why, why is that part necessary, I guess? I got you, and these are contested terms, they go back and forth. So I was just trying to get everybody's attention with posthumanism, like what's that and why is she talking about that? Because the I worry, I deeply worry about a sort of physicist's view of New York City, that we measure everything and therefore we understand the city. And that seems to me to be so alienating and sort of discouraging, like, forget it, I don't want to have anything to do with that. And then I look at these other stories of what can be helped and encouraged, and I'm trying to push towards that. So it's really a very simple look from me that actually, when it comes to cities, humans really should be at the center. And not treating them as censors, because that's not a great idea. But using what we know to help their lives be better. Better sense of well-being, health is huge here, better resiliency in the city, so it's going to survive the next disaster. Better sustainability, so people understand what their energy practices are and how they might change them. So for me, the good parts of that vision outweigh the risks of the use of the collection of data. And that's the only story I'm trying to tell here. So one of the things that I most admire about really engaged scholars who are not just writing and trying to make policy statements but are actually trying to change the world, is their willingness to think in public. And so I'm really grateful for Susan both for giving us this provocation, but also really setting the tone for the sort of conversation that we want to have in an event like this. So Susan, thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. It's a great honor. Thank you very much. Thanks so much.


We're going to go ahead and get started. So today I'm going to talk with you about policy. Policy is becoming pervasive across our industry. Many products, inside and outside of OpenStack, are exposed policy today and more are working on it, as we speak. My name is Peter Bland, and I work on a project called Congress. Tim Henrichs is also on the schedule, but unfortunately he had a last minute conflict, so he wasn't able to make the presentation. He will be here tonight and later through the week, though, so we can catch up then. So in this talk I'm going to try to discuss and describe the policy problem, what it is, why it's important. I'll just describe Congress, which is a system or a framework for policy-based management across cloud infrastructures, and discuss how Congress complements existing policy infrastructure and enables cross-component policies in OpenStack. So what is the policy problem and why are so many people interested in it? Well, the answer is based on a very simple observation.  So governments pass laws, industries gather together and describe best practices, the organizations enter into contracts with each other, and also we'll have meetings to discuss best practices. Some of these rules and regulations impact IT systems, some don't, but people who are responsible for cloud services and IT systems need to be aware of the rules and regulations because there's penalties for breaking them. There's government legal penalties, financial penalties, sanctions from other governments, for example, and public outcry. These are all things that people who are managing large infrastructures worry about on a day-to-day basis. So here's some of the IT-specific use cases in the cloud and some of the things that we hear from our customers of how policies affect them in IT. At VMware, of course, we interface with IT operators and cloud operators on a daily basis. When talking about policy with them, we can distill the conversation into two main themes. One theme is everyone has a different perspective of what policy means, and that's mainly affected by what they see in their day-to-day operations, what they care about, what they're afraid of, and what is really on their front burner constantly. The other trend we see is that everyone tends to agree that most policies span the traditional silos you see in clouds. So most policies aren't purely compute or purely storage or networking-based. They're actually more generic and span the entire cloud. So one example I like is the series of geofencing problems and policies. In some countries, for example, Singapore, Japan, there are laws in place that say that data that originates from a citizen of that country cannot leave the geographical boundaries of that country. So it's easy to see from this policy, one that is very simple to describe in English, but it also has impacts of where the VM can be placed by the compute management stack, where the disks' arrays can be, and what kind of network policies need to be in place. So this is an old problem, and it's actually being addressed today. I'm told that there's a long and interesting story about how that happens, but at its core level, it boils down to the fact that we throw a lot of manpower, time, and energy to solve it. So lawyers, government, organizations, auditors, IT professionals, everyone involved with the entire end-to-end process are responsible from distilling these high-level goals all the way down into low-level policies or configuration that happens in the underlying systems. So in some instances, the policy might turn into configuration files and might turn into actual physical topology of networking gear. We get turned into ACLs on firewalls and et cetera. But we can see that the actual enforcement point is very far away from the top-level desire or stated policy that we're trying to achieve. So OpenStack actually improves on this to some degree. So with the invent of, let's say, logical topologies in neutron or even group policy procedures, we're actually getting closer to what the policy writer wants. So the one challenge remains, however, in that these remain policies at individual silos. And while those address concerns at that level, there is a higher plane where we want to be able to go to to analyze and describe policies that go across the entire system. Another point that I want to bring up here is that while OpenStack improves things because we're software-defined, it also hurts a little bit. And that is, if you look at the way policies were traditionally enforced, the people in the manpower who was implementing this had time to do it. So for example, if I wanted to get a new system to run my application on, I had to submit a ticket for the system to be ordered. And I'd expect that to take a couple weeks. Well, that system also facilitated someone to sign off and say, does he really need four processors? Is that a reasonable amount of RAM for that? Now in the world of self-service and software provisioning, I expect that operation to take a couple seconds. And there's no way for a human to get involved with that. So these are all challenges that we see in deployments that people are trying to grapple with today. So now I want to get into Congress and introduce where we feel that that fits in the organization or in the in clouds. So Congress is a new cloud service whose sole responsibility is policy in the cloud. If you give Congress a policy that's important to the cloud, it can monitor the cloud for violations. It can enforce that those violations cannot occur or it can correct them after the fact. And to do its job, it relies entirely on the other services that exist in the cloud today. So one of the key tenets we wanted to achieve or thought was critical to achieve when we were designing Congress is to ensure that it worked across any cloud service. Conceptually, the way we do this is we provide a plug-in interface across any cloud service and a common data model in which it can communicate data up to the service. Each cloud service from Congress's point of view exposes the policy-relevant data that it knows about in a form of tables. So if you're familiar with databases or SQL, this should be fairly straightforward to you. This may or may not be the way that the data is organized internally in the component, and that's the job of the plug-in to do that translation. So these plug-ins can either be tightly or loosely coupled with the component themselves. They can use the component's existing API to query the data that it has or they could be tightly integrated and push the data up to Congress via triggers whenever that policy changes. But the important point here is that there is a common data services framework where all of the data that is available in the cloud is put in a form that can be reasoned about consistently. In addition to being able to interoperate with any cloud service, we also feel it's critical that we support any policy that the cloud operator wants to use. So at lower levels of... or kind of domain-specific levels of the system, you have policy languages that have nouns in them that make sense within that domain. So for example, the term VM is actually specific to compute storage array or network subnets. All of these are specific terms that at a higher level would be very expensive to express in a kind of cross-cloud policy system. So instead, what Congress does is it treats input data as a series of tables and uses a policy language based on a form of data log, SQL, first-order logic. These are all kind of systems that have the same base principles. So Congress achieves... enforces policy by reserving a few table names and by carefully crafting the data that gets pushed up into those tables, you can both monitor the state of the cloud as well as affect... and by populating data into those tables we can control what those components are doing. So using these reserve tables, Congress does really two things. It monitors policy and how the state of the cloud is in compliance or out of compliance with the policy, and it enforces policy. So I'll go through this in more detail. Monitoring is achieved by simply evaluating policy over the current state of the cloud that Congress sees and populating through the policy statements, populating the special table that describes policy violations in the cloud. Enforcement is a bit more involved because there's actually two ways that you may want to enforce data in the cloud. One is to keep violations from occurring, and one is to resolve violations after they occur. So to permit violations, Congress expects that the services who are making changes to the state of the cloud first ask Congress whether that would result in a policy violation. Clearly, this involves an actual change to the component itself, component being an application or a given open-stack component. One of the reserve tables in this case is permitted actions, and permitted actions would list the kind of, given on the current state of the cloud, list the operations that would be allowed from that point. To correct violations, Congress can identify violations and populate another table, which is actions to execute. So actions to execute correspond to operations that should take place to remedy the existing policy violations. So these can boil down to bash scripts or API calls at the end of the day, but from Congress's point of view, what it is doing is looking at the data exposed from the cloud services, identifying the violations, and then using the policy it knows about to know what changes it needs to make to those source tables. So let's go do an example. Before we get there, I want to dive down deep into an assembly-level view of the grammar of the policy language. So if you've studied policy languages and undergrad or post-grad, I'm told that this is pretty straightforward and obvious. I did not study, get a PhD in policy languages, and Tim isn't here, so I guess we're out of luck on that one. However, my goal of showing this grammar is to reinforce that there's nothing domain-specific in this policy language, and that has benefits and drawbacks, which means it has a place where it makes a lot of sense to apply this and places where it may not make as much sense. The policy language gets its power from the objects that are exposed to it from the cloud services. So I can declare things only based on object names or resource names that other components expose. So if Nova exposes VMs and VM owners concepts to me, I can now write policies based on those concepts. So jumping back up, let's go to an example, and this is an example of a policy that we've gone through with a customer who has a very large open-stack deployment and actually has coded up this in Python. It's very rigid, and we're going to describe how we could achieve that same thing using that same goal using Congress and a policy-based framework. So the policy is this. Every network attached to a VM must either be a public network or if it's a private network, that private network must be owned by a user who is in the same group as the VM's owner. So why this example? Well, this is important because this policy actually crosses three different services here. We have Nova who knows about VMs and their ownership. We have Neutron who knows about networks and their ownership, and we also have some LDAP server who manages group membership. I specifically put LDAP here instead of Keystone because that is specific to this customer's environment, and it's an example of that in all installs we're not going to be pure open-stack, so we need to have a system that can be compatible across both open-source and proprietary solutions. So to enforce this policy, Congress can do three things. It can do one, two, or three of them. It can monitor, which means it's just watching to see as VMs are deployed, do they obey this policy? If it's deeply integrated with Nova, it can also let Nova know before Nova is to deploy a VM that that would not be within policy, and it can correct problems after the fact. For example, if an LDAP group membership changes, it can enumerate all the possible ways that policy could be brought back into compliance. I like jumping back to the low-level view in the assembly language where you can see that as we've added cloud services here, we've actually increased the namespace of the policy. So in this case, we've included some tables that are exposed from Nova and Neutron, and LDAP, I'll get a little bit more into that later. But the point is that these data represent principles that the policy writer knows about. Congress doesn't actually know what a VM is and doesn't really care. All it cares about is that the VM owner says that these two, the joins of these principles shouldn't be ever be seen in the cloud. This next rule down here is interesting because it's actually an intermediate table in the data model. So what we've done here is we've taken an LDAP data model which just has users and groups, and we've created an implicit, you can think of it as a view in SQL terms, or a join, but what we've done is created a view or a rule that indicates that two users are in the same group. This functionality is very useful when you want to take low-level services and create concepts that are more relevant or more directly associated with how the user wants to write policies. So I don't have to go to LDAP or my LDAP server and implement a concept of same group. I can actually write a policy rule that implements that for me. So how does this work in the cloud? So in this example we have three VMs, VM1, VM2, and VM3. VM1 is connected to a private network. VM2 is connected to a public network, and VM3 isn't connected at all. We also have five tables down here, four of which are representing input tables that are coming up from plugins and various cloud components, and the fifth is a reserve table in Congress. So you can see that we've defined an fictitious LDAP server here, which has four users in it, and all of those users are members of the group Congress. We also have Neutron providing ownership of networks. We have Neutron providing lists of networks that are public, as well as Nova providing VM ownership. In this case if you think back to the policy I presented and you look through this data, you can do the quick join in your head and realize that there's no violations in this case. So the result of that is that in Congress of course the reserved errors table won't have any rows in it. But Tim wasn't able to make this meeting and maybe someone got mad at him and directly went to the LDAP server and removed him from the Congress group. He said, you're no longer here. Maybe we could have prevented that from happening, maybe not, but the result is now there is a violation in our cloud state as compared to our stated policy. And so in that case what Congress will do is represent that by adding a row to the error table. And so this is again a low level view of the system. You can imagine putting kind of nice, more user friendly interfaces on top of this. You could add alerting systems. Maybe we could start sending Twitter feeds of violations, etc. So why do we think Congress is a good fit for OpenStack? Well I think the first reason is pretty obvious. Why we got involved is we got really pulled in by our customers. We have customers who are happy with OpenStack. They love the power and flexibility it provides. And because of that they're getting pulled into deploying OpenStack into more and more tightly regulated environments. And as this happens they're feeling the pain more about trying to manage these cross-component policies in a consistent and easy way. There's also an interesting aspect of policy in that since it's a interface level with the user this provides a place where vendors can achieve lock-in to some degree because when you define the policy language if that isn't an open framework then you can actually create lock-in just by the fact that you create experts on your policy language and prevent others from implementing that. So we feel strongly that it is very important that we have a community-based project such that no vendor can control the policy language including VMware. This is actually critical to achieving the goal because policy is really best achieved when everyone is cooperating on it because then we can all leverage the other systems that are part of the entire cloud I guess. So that brings me to the last point. So having Congress support a project means that future projects can leverage the data exported by those previous projects. So let me give an example. If we look at something like neutron it's clear to see that there is value in integrating external data from the system into neutron. So for example if I know that a VM is vulnerable we may want to add that to a security group or add ACLs to block access to that port. Now anyone of the OpenStack developers can write a single integration with another system and query data from neutron or another system. But what we can't do is query data from systems that we don't even know about today. So I'm really looking forward to going to Paris and hearing about all the new things that are coming out in OpenStack being developed over the next six months and let's imagine that a new component comes out that does something magical. Say we can predict attacking IP addresses on the internet before they even send packets to us and someone deploys us. I don't think that's going to happen but if it did it's clear that the neutron project would be really interested in getting that data so that it can proactively put ACLs in the network. Well one way to do that is for the neutron team to learn about this go back to their code and an interface to query the API of this new system and do it. However if neutron is Congress aware and this new system that comes up publishes its data to Congress as well then the actual integration of those two features could be done by simply adding a policy statement by the user that says that attacking IP addresses should be blocked. So where are we at with Congress? We have a base design implementation proof of concepts that have been done. We're actively developing the system. This is a very small snippet of the roadmap which is actually posted on the wiki. This includes some things we've prototyped and implemented other things that are on our immediate and slightly longer term roadmaps. But the point is that this system is actually very early on. We think it's important to work with the open stack community to vet both the design and the roadmap of our ideas before we get too far and so that's why I'm talking to you today. While we can take the system and show some demos the real power of the system comes in when the community actually interacts with it and agrees that this is the right way to go about it. So a lot of things on this roadmap are things that we want to discuss further with the community and that's why we want to keep this conversation ongoing. So Congress is currently a project pushed in Stack Forge. You can see that the way we develop is actually very much in common with any full-fledged open stack project. We have IRC meetings. We communicate on the open stack dev mailing list. We do everything out in the open for community involvement. And then the big point that I want to point out here is that we have thanks to the generosity of the open stack foundation they've created this open source sessions this time around and we have a room on Friday for the community to discuss this project and how we should take the next steps on it. So here's some kind of quick references to it. We do have our code hosted up on Source Forge. The Wiki is kind of the holding ground for our kind of state of where the project is at and stuff we're working on right now and links to everything else. We also have some other corollary information there. And so that was the key just of it. I guess I talked pretty fast this time. These are some other talks that VMware is sponsoring at this session and I know that the majority of them have already happened but as you know a lot of these talks will be up on YouTube so that you can watch them in the future. So yeah key takeaways here is that we have that Congress is applicable to any cloud service and any business logic or any policy. Enforcement of course we continuously monitor the cloud status. This is in support of operations and administration of clouds. And then also Congress can work at an immediate level where you simply are polling data from existing services but then can over time become more tightly ingrained as services closely interact with the system. So with that I think plenty of time for some questions if there are any. Yeah, you might want to use the microphone. Hi. So you mentioned becoming Congress aware. Could you give us a sense of what that involves? Sure. So as I said let me go back a few slides here. So the way that Congress views cloud services is as a one or more tables of data and so for Congress to interact with the cloud service it needs that view of the data and we have a plug-in interface that basically describes how the data needs to be formed. That plug-in can either be integrated with a given component which basically means it's part of that source tree or it could just sit outside of that component and pull data from it using that component's APIs. So that's at the base level for Congress to be able to monitor violations. For if you want to take that one step deeper and actually do proactive enforcement in that case the component would actually need to know that Congress is there and know to query Congress for policy violations before certain actions are taken that you may want to prevent in the system. Does that make sense? So my question is with the data that you're getting so are you taking any steps to verify that those components that are giving you data are trusted because otherwise I would just lie to you and tell you I'm good if I wanted to circumvent it. Well, I mean if you wanted to break the state of the cloud you could just do it anyway and not tell Congress is what you're getting at, right? I guess if one of the policies you had the one on there with the networking like I guess I could modify the neutron service and have the plug-in do bad data even though it's not actually doing that. So I'm just wondering if you're verifying the things that are giving you data. So as far as that goes the system trusts the data that the plug-in provides so if the plug-in isn't trusted because you allow users to access NOVA or an external system then, yeah, you could actually fool Congress. Congress only knows the state of the cloud to the extent that it is informed by plugins which it implicitly trusts. So the part about Congress which is to enforce policy isn't there some overlap there with the traditional role-based policies that the different OpenStack projects support? Right, yes. There absolutely is and I think that the key point there is that the two types of policies are actually they actually help each other out they each fill different roles. So if you look at a language you'll say the group policy language because I'm familiar with that one there's constructs in that language that are domain specific so we have a concept of networks, endpoints, ports and so on that are relevant to networking. If you use that type of policy language in Congress and Congress was meant to span the entire cloud of services you'd see that the number of kind of primitives in the language would be extremely huge and kind of unmanageably large. So that type of language that's domain specific doesn't really work at a cross component level. Now if you go the other way around and you look at Congress and then try to write some of the neutron based policies that you could write since it is such a high level language it would be extremely challenging, it would require a lot of work to actually describe those component, those concepts down in a terminology that the cloud can understand or that the individual vertical can understand. So there's actually a cooperation of a high level overarching policy and a domain specific policy and these two policies can communicate with each other. So for example we might be able to expose vulnerabilities that are referenced kind of like Congress can communicate with a IDS vendor to understand vulnerabilities of a given host and change group membership based on that and a group policy object in in neutron can have a policy that says anything in this vulnerable group has these network restrictions in it and where that line is drawn I think is best agreed upon by the operator and kind of depending on their individual environment of where it's the least painful to write that. First question is are there any of the core projects currently taking steps to integrate with Congress or is this sort of like the first introduction like is there any patches to know the integrating with Congress. So we first kind of started talking about this with OpenStack in Hong Kong and we have an unconference session just to kind of bridge the subject with people and we've been having pairwise conversations with a lot of the community since then. But this is the first point where really broadcasting to the entire community other than on the mailing list to get it kind of out there. So at this point we've written a couple of very rudimentary plugins that simply using the existing Nova and neutron APIs queries data out of them where you can write policies but the projects themselves have not I would say probably don't even know that this project exists or understand why it's valuable and that's why we're here today. So kind of the point of that is we want to we feel like right now is the right time we have the right we have the vision enough well formed that I think we can describe the concept to people but I think it's not it's not baked enough that the community can't take the time to actually make sure that it fits out all of our needs. And the second thing is it might be more of a comment but have you heard of CADF there was a talk earlier in the week it seemed like the two CADF and Congress might be able to play off each other like you effectively just listen for CADF events and make policy decisions based off of those might be. Right so I actually went to that talk and I thought it was very interesting and they're focused on an audit level framework which is a piece of this where we can see that Congress may kind of put out audit events that are exposed via CADF and your point that we could perhaps ingest data through the CADF format that's certainly something that could be done because data as long as it's translated to a common format is data I think in most circumstances we might want to go to a more direct route for efficiency reasons but at a conceptual level I think you're right on. It's a very interesting topic I just wonder if there is what's the relation between Congress and Kingston. Since Kingston we have the identity and the role so is there a possibility to export that into Congress or vice versa? Yeah so that's a really good question and of course Keystone does mention policy as part of their charter as far as what my understanding of Keystone is and where it's at and I am no expert in Keystone so I'd be happy to talk with more specific Keystone devs afterwards but Keystone is more focused on the RBAC use case role based access control for a given component whereas Congress is more focused on the cross component interaction and kind of doing a common data layer and then a policy based layer on top of that for queries so Keystone's policy is more focused for a specific component and roles and using the kind of taking the identities one step further into roles whereas this is a more abstract or high level concept of cross interfaces I should add that we of course will ingest data from Keystone just like any other service because it does have valuable policy relevant data in it so we have like I mentioned the design summit on Friday and as well as Tim and I will be around the conference up until then we'd be happy to have any other conversations you might have and we'd love to have any your involvement with the project thank you very much so folks the vSAN session is going to start on time at 5.20 as scheduled