What's up guys welcome to today's vlog today I've got two things to focus on one is a new scissor and two is a new haircut and the haircut that we're gonna focus on is a layered medium length cut so I really dig this one because it's nice and thick so it removes bulk from thick hair but it also adds layering and keeps some long layers on the top so I think a lot of people have a challenge when they have really thick heavy hair and they want layering in it I think we cut the layers way too short so what I did was created a technique so that on top we extend those layers into the back so it's almost like a disconnection through the back so you could see how these layers become disconnected but stay nice and long so you could curl them with an iron or whatever but we remove weight by creating concave layering underneath so I think you guys are gonna dig that also I got a new scissor that I used to own a long time ago but I ended up giving it away so today I got that scissor back it is the Mizetani Acro type K scissor and this is one of my all-time favorite scissors it's in the medium price point which is what I like about it and I got it in a five and a half inch so it's got a lot of power a lot of precision this thing cuts hair so smooth we use it for the wet cut we use it for the dry cut glad to have this thing back in my collection so I think you guys are gonna like that as well seeing that so make sure you comment below let me know if you have any questions about this cut and let's get started here we go okay so I really want to start off by going a little more in-depth with the scissor because I get a lot of emails about people asking which scissor is best for different scenarios this is a great scissor all around everybody wants the all-around scissor not a lot of people can invest in multiple scissors for different reasons so the great thing about the Acro type K it's a medium price point it's still not a cheap scissor but there's so many great benefits about it you can see the the finger hole one key thing that I look at it's got that little groove in it so I'm showing you that right there that allows you to have your finger outside of the scissor and do different cutting techniques but the metal just glides through the hair it's so soft the feel of the cut a lot of people like that feeling so it works with dry cutting it works with wet cutting it's just such a great all-around scissor I like using the five and a half inch I feel like the blade is nice and strong but you could get it longer than that and you wouldn't have any issues whatsoever super powerful scissor so the way that we section off the hair it's asymmetrical so we go from the parting so the partings on the left hand side that's where your guest would wear their part and then we extend that down a more of an asymmetrical triangle so we go back to the midpoint of the crown and then straight over to a to the high point of the temple area or the bridal ridge just a little bit below that and that's how we create that section that entire triangle is going to be our heavy side so that's something we want to keep in mind right now we're working on the weak side which is the smaller side because it's on the part side so I'm going through I'm going to create consistent concave layering and the reason I decided to go with concave layering is it gives a lot of movement even though this is the weak side we're going to do techniques throughout this haircut to give it balance and shape so we start off creating the concave layering adding a lot of layering and movement to this haircut also I'm not picking my length right now so a lot of people go through and cut the bottom first that doesn't mean that I don't do that but in a lot of cases I go through and I create my interior layers first I create I take out the weight that I want in the haircut and then I go and I cut the length later also a lot of people a very popular haircut right now is those really blunt ends and I think what happens where people fail when they're trying to create that haircut is they go through and they cut the blunt ends first then they layer off of those ends which just breaks up the ends what you want to do is you want to go in create layers and then bring that baseline up just a little bit and what that's going to do is give you a more blunt look a blunt edge a thicker edge to your haircut so you're going to see the end starting to get a little bit weak during this cut but that's not where those ends are going to be we're going to bring this haircut up quite a bit now we get back to the layering one thing with this is that we're working basically around the clock so all the way around the head everything's coming straight out using the previously cut section as a guide I'm only taking about an inch wide section I'm not too worried because we're working with longer layers in this cut and not a real tight short precision cut I can take a little bit wider sectioning so I'm not really worried about that affecting the overall shape so about an inch wide section allows you to do the haircut a little bit faster and I just go through I take a little bit the old and a little bit of the new and you'll always notice that I'm pushing the new section into my guideline so I'm never bringing the guide towards me so all of my combing is away from my body and going towards the guide so I push the hair towards the guideline a lot of people will shift that guide and then what happens is you start diffusing your guide you lose your guide and then you you end up with an unbalanced haircut in the end result so you can see those sections are not skinny it but it doesn't matter and because we're working with a little bit longer hair and as long as I can see my guide then then we're good on that portion so just again working my way around the head pulling that hair straight out from the head shape and creating those concave layers collapsing the shape concave is basically above 90 degrees you're creating a very extreme kind of dip in the shape of the haircut so you're cutting short to long and this is really removing almost a maximum amount of weight you could even remove more if you want if I kick my elbow up even further but I just want a nice soft consistent feel to the layers the comb I'm using in this cut is the ys park 334 comb I like this comb because it's it's great for longer hair because it's a little bit of a thicker comb so if you guys are familiar with using the 339 comb that's a nice small comb it's great for getting into those tighter places or cutting precision cuts because the comb doesn't get in the way but when you're working with longer hair and thicker hair a 334 comb is great because the bone of the comb is a little thicker the entire comb is a little thicker but the length of the comb is similar so if you like a shorter comb which I do that one works really well so we went around we cut that entire shape around the head shape and now what I'm going to do is start to cut my base you can see how far I'm bringing that up I wanted this to be a medium length haircut if you didn't want it to be a medium length and you wanted a longer cut you can absolutely cut this base longer I just really wanted that blunt edge so bringing it up it allows me to get that shape also I would just cut this straight across if they have shoulders obviously this mannequin doesn't have shoulders but if they have shoulders which most of your guests will you can cut this just a straight line across the back and then I'm gonna comb down my new section which with the mannequin she has a medium density so I could see my guide through there you might have to take that in a couple sections depending on your guest but now I'm going to go through and cut straight across now this works if it's above the shoulder if it's not above the shoulder I'm going to show you how to cut it on this side that way so if they have a shoulder and the hairs in the way just elevate it slightly just to get a little bit of lift I don't like the turn the head move that some people make it's not my thing I think it works for some people some people have the guests turn their head and then they have a more of a flat surface to cut on I think a slight elevation works just fine the other thing I want to point out is that there's going to be shorter layers on one side right now because we went higher up on the head shape so that created those shorter pieces that side is done now we're going to work on the opposite side the heavy side so I let down that triangle so don't be concerned about whether the lengths match up on the on those points because they're two different points of the head so now this is going to be also concave so we're going to cut from the shortest point I'm bringing that entire top section straight up off the head and then I'm going to continue my way throughout the head shape over directing everything to that guide which will then become a stationary guide we're cutting concave because we're cutting that short to long again so you see my finger angle pointing from almost my fingers almost pointing down at the part and then the back of my hand is straight up in the air so we're cutting that short to long which is going to create a lot of layers on the top of the head but push length to the opposite side and that is really the goal because when you look at thicker hair people cut lots and lots of layers on and then people have troubles trouble styling that because of the fact that those layers are just so short you can't get them on an iron you can't do certain things it starts to look more molady kind of so this is just a great way you can see the length and the movement of those layers now I'm going to go with my brocado mousse this mousse is great it's something I've been using for a long time now it's got a nice thick feel to it very conditioning on the hair and also has a nice medium hold but it doesn't get flaky or crunchy or anything like that so in honor of John Paul's birthday from Paul Mitchell this is actually the 413 brush I recorded this video on 413 so it's his birthday the brush is numbered after his birthday so we'll go ahead and use it one of my favorite brushes I've used use that brush for a long time so we'll go through also using the Dyson blow dryer a lot of you guys gonna have questions about that I believe that the Dyson blow dryer is a great blow dryer I've been using it all my guests I use it on these videos I think it's overpriced I don't think a consumer needs to pay this much money for it but as a professional if you want to splurge if you don't own a great scissor though I would go for the scissor first so I would get the type K scissor way before I would get the Dyson blow dryer because it doesn't make your job easier it's just a cool looking tool so I would get the scissor first get the combs with the clips get all that then get the blow dryer because you probably have a great professional blow dryer that does the same result so that's pretty much my my review on that I also have a full pledged video review of it as well so this is the brocato vibra straight iron it's one of my favorite flat irons the cool thing about this iron is that it vibrates as it iron so obviously vibra straight but the the great thing about the fact that it vibrates is that the less friction you have on the hair the less damage you're gonna get so a lot of people will go straight up to the hottest heat with their iron they'll pass over at a hundred times the vibra straight iron is cool because it oscillates over the hair kind of works the kinks out of the hair works its way over the hair but doesn't create as much damage as most flat irons do and then also I usually keep it around 390 375 because you can go nice and slow over the hair there's no reason to rush it and then you get a lot less heat damage on the hair a lot of our guests so if you're out there and you're not a hairdresser a lot of people ramp up the heat so that they can get that worked on faster but really that is not the way to do it you want to go nice and slow pass over the hair and make sure you're creating the least amount of damage as possible so this is the last bit and you remember if if you remember we over directed the top section of the hair all the way to the front what that does is pushes the length to the back so because we have that length in the back you can see that disconnection do not cut off that disconnection it's there on purpose it gives it the movement the layers underneath it the shorter layers give it the depth and give it the kind of volume feel and hold the shape of the haircut but those top layers are what you can iron and have some fun with so just make sure that when you go through it I'm point cutting those layers but I'm just point cutting them to break them up not to remove it so this is the last little bit we're gonna style it I'm gonna show you guys three different styles with this cut the first one is a fringe that lays down some people like the fringe in front so you can see how nice and soft that angle is that we created with those layers we didn't even cut the fringe if you think about it it didn't seem like we were but we were cutting it when we cut those layers so we got that nice soft feel to it you could see the blunt edge on the haircut which is very popular right now and then you could see all the movement with those layers when I get my hands moving through there so you could see the longer layers but then you can see some of those shorter layers throughout the interior of it as well so the next style I'm just gonna take the blow dryer the nozzle of the blow dryer and blow dry the fringe up so a lot of people like to wear the fringe back and over so I want to show that style as well same haircut different style so I'll spray a little bit of like a working spray I use the brocato firm hair spray just to give me that hold in the front and then as soon as I hit it with the heat on the iron it holds that front fringe up and that's all you have to do to change that style up so the blow dryer would be the same iron work would be the same and then you just pop the front up at the end so now I want to go through a little bit of curling iron work this is an inch and a half curling iron this is a palmetial iron I just go through I curl everything in the same direction off of the face you can change this up have some fun with it you can curl every other section different ways you know I'm just trying to give it more of that wave and bounce and natural feel like I say to you guys all the time I'm trying to create salon friendly looks that you can do quick and easy because obviously I realize that you guys don't have all the time in the world with every guest so the quicker we can create different techniques the better off we are so just working my way through just like the clock did we did with the cut we're gonna do in the same thing with the iron work just working our way through taking maybe two inch square sections out and ironing them the same direction finishing off a couple times on the top other key thing I'm not really messing with those sections as I take them off the hot heat so you heat them up with the iron and then make sure that you don't really mess them much let them set let them cool and then I go through with my hands start breaking it up now it's not a super modern feel to just have curled hair so what I like to do is break up those curls so now it seems a little bit dated to me at this point so what I do is I go through with my vibrostrate iron and just pull out some of the ends of the curl which you could do on on a little bit longer hair it's easier because you can wrap it around the iron and leave the ends out with shorter hair and some of the shorter layers it was easier for me to just curl it completely with the iron and then just go through and break it up at the end so just going through the vibrostrate iron hitting the ends obviously I wouldn't do a straight look and a curly look so I wouldn't want to hit hair twice with a flat iron but in this case I wanted to show you guys multiple styles so finishing up this is the brocado firm hold hairspray and I really like this end result I love all the layers the movement I hope you guys love it hope you guys can use it in the song let me know what you think in the comments below thanks for watching all right guys like always if you like this haircut then hit the like button hit the share button share this video with all of your hairdresser friends out there also I want to announce a mizzatani scissor giveaway so those of you guys that have joined our fsc partner program I'm giving away one mizzatani scissor to you our fsc partner program is our live classes online that we do every month it's $9.99 a month for students and $20 a month for stylists so it's super affordable and you get a live class where you can interact with us every single month so make sure you join the fsc partner program that's fscpartner.com you can get more information on that we also have a bunch of on-demand videos already of classes that we've done in the past you can watch those as well so check it out you have a chance to win a mizzatani scissor I'm picking that winner at the end of this month so definitely go on there join I hope to see you there also if you're inspired by this cut and you're looking for a new hair salon and you're not a hairdresser then go to hair salon locator.com that's where we put all of our fsc partner stylists so that you guys can find stylists to train with us do these haircuts know these haircuts and you can get a great haircut yourself so go to hair salon locator.com thank you guys for watching always supporting I appreciate it also don't forget I got a special offer for you coming up right after this so check that out as well on our online store free salon education.com thank you guys I'll see you next time


Alright, cool. So, full disclosure, I was a theater major in college, so this totally feels like undergrad right now, which is kind of nice, a little throwback as I'm getting a little older. So, nice to meet you. I'm glad to see a lot of people here who want to talk about prototyping. My name is Danny Norton, and it helps when you're presenting in front of a lot of people to turn the clicker on. Just a little bit of advice from me to you. My official title right now is a little influx. I'm actually finishing a master's degree at Bentley University in the Boston area of Massachusetts. So as part of that, I'm working part-time as a research associate at the Bentley User Experience Center. And we work with clients from Fortune 500 companies all around the world doing usability testing, design strategy, user research, all sorts of fun stuff. I also just started a position at a company called Patients Like Me in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the senior UX designer, where I work with people who have chronic diseases to create a social support system and open research platform so that people can get support from other people who are dealing with the same conditions, and also they can share data about themselves that the healthcare community can actually use to help discover what works and what doesn't from people directly who have the disease. I'm also the UX lead of the community tools team. I'm the co-author, the co-organizer of Design for Drupal Boston. The author of Drupal for Designers, which some of you may know because I signed your book today. And this adiva right here is my daughter, Charlotte, who's the reason I get up every morning, despite my love of the Drupal community. And I am Danny Girl on Twitter and on d.o. And I'm here to talk about something relatively controversial to some people I know, which is why you should not prototype in Drupal. And I'll tell you why. There's a story behind this. About two or three years ago, I was hired by Babson College, big business school outside of Boston. And they wanted to completely redesign their digital syllabus. So this was fairly standard UX project. We did user research. We did personas. We did journeys discovered when students were studying. I mean, think about this as sort of an executive MBA program. I'm not sure if that's familiar to Europeans, but it's the idea that you're getting a master's degree, a postgraduate degree while you're working.  So we're trying to uncover some of those things. And then we start figuring out features that might work for some of these different audiences. We put that into a set of functional requirements. And then after 12 weeks, my boss says, I need something we can test. And at the time, we're using Drupal Commons on six to do a lot of this stuff.  So download a distro. The whole thing is three to five content type node references. I mean, this is complicated stuff. We're dealing with node relationships, OG views, all of this stuff that I have to deal with 30 plus hours of labor just to get a third of what we needed in there. And because this whole thing was so incomplete, we could not get these guys to actually buy into what we were doing. They ended up throwing out all of the research that we did. When I finally got around to learning Aksher and saying, OK, well, let's just, you know, quickly prototype this and put a spec together. Four hours on a plane. Four hours. And I got eight pages of annotated screenshots, including a note add screen so people could see what it should look like to actually enter in the content. Full interactions. Everything was demonstrated. And I could generate a specification with all of my annotations with the click of a button and deliver it to them. Now, mind you, this had already poisoned any ability we were going to have to get buy-in from this. But this got me thinking. There's a lot of power here. There's a lot that I can do before I start investing all of this time to show someone what something can do, what something should be able to do. I'm going to try doing some more of this. So a year later, I'm hired by Berkeley College of Music. Big Music School, great group of people. They are trying to take two different legacy systems. One, and I want to say, like, Web Advisor, one over here, both of them really kluji haven't been updated since about 2007, and they want to move them into Berkeley.edu, which was already existing in Drupal 7. And so we have to migrate content from all of these different departments into Berkeley.edu. And so the first few months, all I did was site maps, site maps and meetings, because we had to reorganize the navigation and content for 98 departments. Most of whom were staffed, by the way, by professional musicians, so you can imagine that there were some egos involved. And some fights over this navigation. We had to set up an internal announcements model that allowed users to subscribe to specific announcement categories. We rearchitected the way that departments and the way that staff and faculty were shown, because now we weren't dealing with nodes anymore, we were dealing with user profiles. So we had to figure out what that looked like. With an announcements model, we had to attach different categories of announcements to users. What does that look like? We also had to completely rearchitect the college magazine, Berkeley Today, which some brilliant person decided they were going to import from another system. And so there were thousands and thousands of nodes with the title, No Title Found. That's fun, isn't it? So I broke out Aksher, and I explained to my team what the workflow might look like. And after doing all of these sitemap models, I started doing a content model. I said, you're moving content from 98 different departments under one hood, and your department right now is just the basic page.  Because they want to put this information out there, but they don't have a way to do that.  We completely rearchitected the page itself and what the different sections looked like, what the left-hand navigation looked like. We also created this internal model. The entire process took eight months. First time in a couple years of doing UX that something consistently launched. And during this time, I was able to do prototypes for six new features and content models for three entirely new areas of the site. And the best thing about it is the entire thing was in one document, and the developers worked straight from it. They didn't need requirements documents. They didn't need a printout of specifications. They just looked at the prototype, and if they had a question, they said, hey, Danny, what did you mean by this? This isn't working in Drupal. How can we rearchitect this? This doesn't work responsibly, right? How do we make this better? And everyone could see it. And the best part was we could also socialize this around the college, which meant that all of those 98 departments with all of those professional musicians and all of those egos could sit and fight over the 100-some-odd links in the navigation, and we didn't have to make changes in the Drupal menu structure. Imagine the time savings, just in that alone. So one of the questions I always get when I talk about Aksher is, wow, this sounds awesome, but can I get production-ready code? No. No, you can't. Because the point is that you're only mimicking these interactions. You're only showing what search might look like, what data entry might look like. And there are even some interactions, like drop-down menus, that I still prefer doing in CSS when I can, because it's still easy. So there are certain things that can be annoying about it, but what's really nice about it is it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. When you're prototyping, you actually can create the interactions that you want to mimic without investing a bunch of development time, without having to worry about code, and you can also comment on these prototypes and discuss them anywhere your folks happen to be. So if you're working in a distributed team, you publish this to a service with the click of a button, there's a Discuss tab, and you can sit there and literally talk about this in a go-to meeting or even asynchronously. And if you annotate the prototype as you go, you've got comments right in there that will tell the developers this is where this information should be coming from. You're going to need to add a new field here. I see this is coming from a view. And so your developers can go and look at this prototype and know exactly what you were thinking. And they can call you on stuff and they can say, well, how do you see this working? So all in all, the biggest thing about this is it lets you work much more efficiently. You can even work in teams. It has version control. Guys, it has version control. You can actually work with anyone. If you share this thing in a Dropbox, you can work with a distributed team. And one person's working on this section of prototype, one person's working on this section of the prototype. I just really love Acature. But there are specific times when you need it. When feedback is going to come from a bunch of different sources and it's a highly politically charged situation, for example, the 98 departments fighting to get their navigate, there are a link in the top spot. And the one department that thinks they need to have their entire section in the top navigation, you get to have those fights without having to mess with Drupal. So when things are likely to change really frequently, when you need to set up the entire structure of something before it goes to code. So if you're creating an entirely new feature and you don't necessarily know what it is yet, you don't necessarily know what the experience should be yet, you can put it together in Acature, you can test it with actual users, make any fixes you need, iterate, and then you go into Drupal. And you don't have to worry about touching a database, you don't have to worry about writing a bunch of code, and you don't have to worry about being nervous about throwing it away. Because it's just drag and drop. So some of the stuff that you can create in the program itself, site maps, and site maps can also link to pages within the same document. Content models, which are really, really helpful for working with Drupal sites, to show how content works together and how the relationships work. This is actually really important for what we're doing now with entity references in Drupal. So much of our stuff really is dealing with these related content types that talk to each other and we're pulling a reference in from something else. I mean, that's becoming more and more common in the architecture of our site. You can work all of this out in Acature and do the entire information architecture in this program and then prototype the flows that you're trying to show your team, all in the same document. So in addition to prototypes, you can also create documentation. So this, some of you may have seen and commented on this. This is actually the Drupal.org profile redesign that I worked on that Dries mentioned in the keynote. This was the original Acature prototype that we worked from and that the folks at Drupal.org are actually working from as we implement the new profiles. And this took several iterations. It had the entire community's feedback. It was listed in the issue queue. And when I went to make changes, every time I make changes, it took me less than half an hour. And it's all in the same document with all of the different versions inside. This is pretty cool, isn't it?  Now what about Drupal? What do you do in Drupal? There are some distinct drawbacks and I'm certainly, I am absolutely positive that everyone here has dealt with at least a few of these drawbacks. If you're dealing with anything complex, it gets to be a major time suck. Even just configuring Drupal so you have something that someone will look at and not think is horribly broken, unless you've got a process severely down, like seriously down, that can take like 20 hours alone. And because it takes so long, and this is a basic psychological principle, we work really hard to get somewhere, do we really want to give it up once we've done it? If you spend 20 hours just getting something to the point where you can look at it and comment on it, do you really want to give up on that code if you realize that someone can't use it? Not really. But if you can put together a really quick prototype and test it with some folks and say, yeah, okay. And we're not talking about months and months, we're talking within a week. You can get up a prototype once you get up to speed with this program but not that hard. You can actually get a working prototype up in less than a week. Test with users on Tuesday, make changes to the prototype on Wednesday, test again on Thursday, and then iterate on Friday. And then you're ready for development on Monday. This does not add a huge amount of time to the process, but it can save you hours of development time. Now, there are times when you do want a prototype in Drupal. And the times that I have found that are most useful is when you actually have to start getting involved in complex content relationships and field relationships. Sometimes it's nice to see those in the way they interact with Drupal. Same thing with views. When something's going to require a lot of views. Another thing that I'd prototype directly in Drupal is batch uploads. Because there's really nothing you can do, like any kind of database touching, like real database-y stuff. That stuff, yeah, it makes sense to prototype that in Drupal. But most of the sort of front-end, this is what a department would look like, this is what the staff directory might look like, there's no reason to start that in Drupal. So when you know exactly what you're building and you're setting up the initial configuration, all of that stuff can happen in parallel with work that's being done in Azure on other sections of the site. And if you need to think through how Drupal does things, you know, like maybe you need to see, like, how would this view get set up? That's a time you want to prototype in Drupal. Another question I often get is what about Zerb and Foundation and... Blue... What is it, Bootstrap? Okay, yes. So what about whatever CSS framework I want to work in? That's really nice for seeing how something really works. But it's tricky. And I actually dealt with this firsthand on a site that I'm working on. It's really easy to convince yourself that you're creating production-ready code. But you're not. You're creating code that may or may not end up in Drupal someday. And the important thing to remember about all of this is that design is really about communication. And that's why I use Aksher instead of other tools, is because this actually allows me to create design documentation for my team. That I can also test with real users because it looks enough like the actual site that we're not gonna get a bunch of confusion about how something's actually going to look. And we're not just sitting here commenting our opinions on a Photoshop comp and arguing over whether something should really be that color blue or it should be a slightly darker shade of blue. You can actually show someone the interaction, show them how it works, get feedback, iterate, and then document everything for your team. You cannot do that if you're prototyping just front-end code in Bootstrap and telling your developers how a Drupal page should look. I've also found out the hard way that oftentimes when you're prototyping in those frameworks, unless you actually know that the code that Drupal is gonna spit out, it is a pain for your front-end developers to take the CSS you wrote and turn that into Drupal code.  And so we had problems with the prototypes that we got from our designer, which were done in Foundation, where we could not, for the life of us, get the header to not be messed up because the admin menu showed up, because he had a fixed navigation, and he didn't account for that in any way in his prototype. You also can't account for things like, what does the content model look like? What is the architecture really? What are the underlying things? These are things that you can use actually to actually work out with your development team. So it's much nicer for collaboration than just trying to go into a CSS framework and code some things. And that's the thing that I really want people to take home from this talk, which is that if your code is just what something looks like, then you might as well just use Photoshop, because you are creating the same level of communication for your team as a Photoshop mock-up that has no annotation whatsoever. The point of a prototype is to communicate design to the user and to the team that actually has to implement this stuff for you. So I want to give you a couple of tips for getting the most from Aksher, because I find that the initial learning curve, if you've ever used Photoshop or Illustrator or any of these other types of tools to create mock-ups, then Aksher will be very familiar to you. It's drag and drop. You have widgets. You drag them into the thing. Omnigraphil is another tool that's very similar. So the biggest thing that I tell people is that they should always start with what they call the core training. And the core training is right on the Aksher website, and it's six videos, takes under an hour. And it'll give you the basics of what you need to know to use Aksher effectively. And it'll teach you most of the things that you need to know. The next thing I recommend is that you actually download some widget libraries. And widgets are essentially shapes that you drag into the frame. And you start putting them into your design. And what that does is it just makes it... It gives you a set of defaults to work with that are nicer than the Aksher defaults, and they help make it very easy for you to start putting together good-looking prototypes. The other thing you can do as you get more skilled is you can build your own widget libraries. So, for example, I'm actually creating a widget library for patients like me that essentially puts our style guide into Aksher so that I can very quickly put together high-fidelity prototypes of different aspects of our site. The other thing you want to do is set up an account with Aksher Share, which is free. It comes with a license, and you can store something like 1,000 prototypes for free, and you can organize them into folders, which is really nice when you're doing them by client. You can also generate, by the way, prototypes for just specific pages of a prototype. So, if you're working on one particular project, you can have the whole thing in one document up to something like 1,000 pages. I want to say Berkeley was something like 120 pages when I was done with it, but each section actually gets exported into different prototypes, so the developers only need to worry about the things that they're actively building. And the other thing is to annotate. And annotating is really, really easy in Aksher. You literally click on a widget, you see a thing that says Notes, and you type. That's it. And so what this does is it actually aids in that communication process between you and developers, which is especially important when you're dealing with distributed teams. Or you're dealing with, you know, a manager who just keeps hitting refresh on the prototype. I'm not saying that I had a manager like that, but I did. And seeing and wanting to see the changes and wanting to see where your thought process came from. And the annotations that you put into the prototype, if you export a specification, it goes directly into the specification. So literally once you're done, you export a specification. It shoots out a Word document with screenshots and all of your notes. And the developers can just take that piece of paper and go with it. The other thing is to work with masters. And if any of you are fireworks users, you'll be familiar with this. It's basically shared layers. So it's reusable bits of code. It's actually very similar to having a style in SAS that you apply to everything. This is my component. This is my header. It's the same on every page. And this actually helps you make iteration easier because you only have to edit one master. This was a lifesaver when we were actually dealing with the fights over the navigation. If you're working on teams, you can easily set up team projects and then you basically check things in and check things out and check them back in in order to make edits. And it also supports Font Awesome. So you can actually get a widget library for Font Awesome and use the icons directly in your prototypes and it will actually load web fonts for you. You can also set up adaptive views, which I've only just started playing with, but it allows you to take sort of a mobile-first approach to creating your layouts. So you can actually start with a base on your phone, set up your breakpoints, and then go up from there. You can also work with grids. There's a 960-ended 1200 grid that's already built in, which is nice. Or you can set up your own. And you also can set up both widget and page styles. So what you can do is, if you really want to just talk about overall layout and you don't want to get into arguments over color, you can include color in your prototype, but then make the entire prototype grayscale. That's really nice. You can also go from low fidelity to high fidelity, really, really easily, just by changing some of the base styles. So this is very similar to anything that you've done in any Adobe product. It's the same type of interaction. In terms of the process, AXURE doesn't replace sketching. It doesn't replace going into Photoshop for certain things. You still want to make sure that you understand which pieces of the product actually need to be prototyped. So what is it that you're trying to create? Are there specific pieces of functionality that are a little more complex than just throwing together, you know, a blog or something like that, or are going to be a little bit more political? Are there, with Berkeley, for example, we actually had a couple of departments that we knew were going to have specific content that was going to need a little extra love? So we prototyped that in AXURE and ran it by them and said, this is what we're thinking. This is how we'd implement it. You know, what do you think works about this? What do you think we need to change? And then you also want to have an idea of what the goals of the prototype are. Is it something that you are trying to just model the content and understand how the relationships work? Or is this something you actually want to test? Are you going to be running usability tests on this? Or are you going to have stakeholder feedback? Are there any areas where you think the stakeholders are going to get stuck if you don't include that interaction? And then once you decide what pages and features need to be included, then you can start sketching.   You start with the masters for common elements. You start laying in the other pages. And the biggest thing is to annotate as you go. So when you think an interaction should go a certain way, you actually annotate and say, this should go like this. This should be coming from here. Because that way you don't have to think about it later. And it becomes part of your thought process. The entire prototyping process becomes part of your design process, which goes really far towards helping you sell your stakeholders on the idea, even if they're not in the room with you. So once you're done, you just publish to Action Share. You do want to make sure that Font Awesome is available if you're using the icons. That's a pretty quick interaction. You can also create custom generators. And then you discuss and iterate. And that's it. That's the whole thing. So it's not going to change your overall design process. But what it allows you to do is get the structure into a prototype in Action that the developers know about. And then you know what you can do is you can focus on using Photoshop for what it's best for.  And you can focus your Photoshop work, your fireworks work, or any of that other stuff on creating essentially a style guide for the developers to go from. Rather than spending hours iterating on Photoshop comps that will never, ever look like what these people are building in Drupal. And it becomes a much more lean and iterative process. So there's a couple of resources. I will actually share these slides, so I'm not going to sit here and read from my slides for you. But there's a few different books that you can get that will tell you a little bit more about a little bit more about Aksher and about design deliverables and that kind of thing. There's some good blog posts and tutorials. I want to get to questions, but I also want to do a little bit of a demo. And I'll show you an Aksher prototype in Action. Oh, yes, my daughter lines up her ducks. I have no idea where she gets it from. A little awkward trying to figure out my dock looking over there. Okay, so this is actually the prototype for the Drupal.org profiles. And so you can see here, if I go into this Discuss tab, I can actually create notes right in here. And I've got annotations all over it, so it tells you exactly what you might be building. You can also tell that I've gotten pretty high fidelity here. It's not exact, but it's pretty close to the Blue Cheese theme. So, again, we're not replacing visual design. We're not saying we're not visual designers anymore. What we're doing is we're focusing on interaction design and thinking of visual design as a layer on top of that. And what's nice about this is because this is available at a link, anyone can come in. I think this one actually has more comments on it. So we can actually have someone come in and actually start making comments whenever they happen to look at it. So many of you probably have colleagues in different countries, different time zones. I know I certainly do. Isn't that nice that you can put this up there and have people comment on it while you're sleeping, and when you wake up in the morning, you can go in, you can answer all the comments, and you can resolve them directly in the prototype, and every time you output the prototype, the comments stay. So you don't have to worry about accidentally saving over your comments, and you can show which ones are resolved and which ones aren't resolved. You can also do page-level interaction. So, for example, you can say that one particular item is selected. That's not here, but it's in other ones that I've done. And you can also organize your folders so that you've got prototypes that you've done here, prototypes that you've done here. This is one that we're actually doing for... This is one that I'm actually doing with the User Experience Center for some research that we're doing on navigation. So we're actually comparing four different usability testing methods, remote, unmoderated usability testing methods for essentially testing the effectiveness of information architecture. And so essentially what I was able to do was in a couple of weeks put together a pretty reasonable fidelity prototype of the WellsFargo.com site with the navigation really quickly, and you can actually set about states for this. So I've got a page-level interaction that once you get in there, it tells you what page is active. So there's a lot of the basic interactions that you can expect in a website from doing code, but it's all drag and drop. And you can focus just on the interaction, not on all of the other stuff. So, I mean, that's Aksher, and that's why you should use it. Any questions? Hey, Danny. Hi. I've been using Aksher recently, and I found that the share feature or the functionality is actually kind of hard to use. Surprisingly so for the UX tool. And the clients I share with have trouble figuring out where to find all the pages and how to comment and stuff like that, at least initially. My question is, is there anything out there that you can use to kind of replace the functionality or improve it, like a plugin or something like that? Not that I've found recently. The basic thing that I've found is you can actually save generators, or save prototype generators. So, what I typically do is I create a new generator. I don't know if it's worth. So, what I usually do is I create a new generator in order to capture the stuff that I want to do, and then I change my default generator to make sure that font awesome's in there. So, that helps in terms of making sure that everything's there. But usually what I'll do is I'll have a new generator for each project if I'm outputting just like a section of pages. No problem. Hello, I'm Christian. Yes. I have like five questions. That's okay. Maybe I'll just throw them at you and let you handle them. The first question is about, you know, DRIPPLE-specific work. We have the issue that, you know, I don't use Accure, but the project managers are also kind of busy with handling the customers do. And we're not a pure, pure bland DRIPPLE company, but lots of different CMS. And, you know, we sometimes have the issue that certain project managers, you know, jump from CMS to CMS, maybe even from technology to technology, and sometimes kind of lose scope what actual DRIPPLE is about. Yeah. Does this help or not really? I think it does.  Like, you need to be able to communicate what the capabilities of the software are.  And so you can very rapidly iterate on this and they can come to you for feedback, and they don't even have to be in the same room with you. They can just send you a link and say, look at this and tell me what you think and kind of feedback. So this is one of the things I like about Aksher as a tool because it's one of the few that also focuses on communication and documentation. So it's not perfect by any means, but it gives you that level of real collaboration between designer and developer and project manager and developer that I think is missing with a lot of the other tools, like InVision and some of these other ones that really just focus on being able to put a prototype together for a usability test.  So that's really what this does. And it's CMS agnostic, by the way, too. So, like, no matter what CMS you're working in, you can put something together in Aksher. Well, some of the questions are repeating, but my second question would be, you know, the usual process in developing is, of course, based on some ticket system we're using Jira, there are others out there. Do you have any magic bullet to actually, you know, make Aksher somehow work together with the ticket system? I call it my design stick. It's just a stick. It has design written in Helbatica, and I just hit the developer. No, I'm kidding. Actually, so one of the things we're playing with at patients like me is this idea of epics and stories. So the prototype is kind of like the epic, and then the individual pieces that need to happen based on that are the stories. So it's similar to what we did in the... similar to what we did in the issue queue with the profile prototype. Essentially, the profile is the epic. It's the meta-issue. But then the stories are, well, we're gonna need to transition this field to this, and it's gonna have this format now. So that's basically what you can do. And the thing that's really nice is that when you have a prototype like this, you can say, this is the thing that needs to get done. See here for the example. And you can share a link directly to the prototype. And so for you, you're not sitting there looking at a Photoshop file saying, wait a minute, there's no hover state. Like, what am I doing right now? You can look directly at that. And you can see it also in the context of what's going on within that. The next question kind of comes after that. Do your developers actually comment on this as well? Do you include them or just the clients? Oh, no, absolutely. No, the developers, the developers, the clients, with the profiles, we wanted the whole community commenting on it. At Berkeley, these prototypes were shared with the developers. We actually realized once we got into development the dashboard that we had originally put together was really not going to work in a responsive way. So we went through an entire, like we basically threw out the whole dashboard that I'd constructed and made a new one in Aksher. And they just took it and looked at it and they're like, okay, this is what I build. All right, cool. And if they had any comments, they just yelled over at me. Well, doesn't this open up the issue that, for example, we have that there's something you're working on. And there's certain reasons why you do certain things and you put it away and then like half a year later another developer has to work on that and you kind of ask themselves why did they do it the way they did. So usually you would look into the ticket and look at the comments. But if comments and all the information about certain objects and design decisions are spread out over tickets, is that a problem? I haven't seen it be a problem yet. I can see that being a problem. The way that I've been trying to, the way that I've been trying to handle the discuss features and I think this goes to your comment too, Lewis, the way that I've been trying to handle the discuss features and the page notes is that anything that's the specific documentation and rationale lives in the prototype. And then the comments that go into the prototype are deleted once they're resolved and in the next version of the prototype. And then what I also do is I include essentially like in most prototypes a list of changes on the home page. So the home page is essentially your change lock. So these are the things I did on this date per this comment. It doesn't replace by any means the comments that are like the comments that might be in the ticket. But if you're careful, if you're mindful about where you put what comments where, like what the comments pertain to, then that I think can mitigate some of that. Or what you can do is put all of the stuff that's related specifically to this is why I did this. You can reference a JIRA ticket in the comment. Okay, last question is how do you handle that? Well, I have that sometimes that clients see your prototype and then later, you know, the actual prototype and then later you come along with your software and the client starts to point at your prototype and says, well, you know, I want it that way. So where clients kind of get fixated on the actual way of certain things and you were still, you know, while we're doing with the actual you still were not there the way you handle it in real life. So the differences between the prototype and the actual Drupal, how do you handle that? So I have to be honest, that's one of the biggest benefits of Aksher because that almost never happens. And the reason why is because you can tell them this is an early prototype, the visual design layer hasn't been applied yet. This is just to talk, we're just talking about the interaction and how things are supposed to work and getting an idea of how the flow works. When you show the visual design, what usually happens is clients get fixated because they see a Photoshop mock-up and they wonder why it doesn't look like that on their laptop. And with this, they are actually looking at essentially code, but there's enough differences that it doesn't seem to connect. They don't seem to obsess about it as much. They can focus more on the interaction and many of them honestly are just so so happy that they can see an interaction instead of looking at this screen and having to imagine what it might work like that the whole visual design layer doesn't even, like they think of it as an entirely different phase of the project that happens later. And I find that it works a lot better because I've seen people do full design comps in code and then you try to apply that code to Drupal and all hell breaks loose and that is just not a fun thing to deal with because even when you're dealing with straight front-end code you think it's going to be easier, it's just not. It's not that much easier. Thank you. You're welcome. Quick question. So after you do your prototype I'm sure you might do design, like visual design. And what my question is or what the challenge is is that you have one source is a prototype for specifications, for annotations, for explanations how this should work and on the other side you have the visual design and how do you keep these two things together? Yeah, no, and that's a really good question. Where I see the opportunity is, where I see the opportunity and certainly in my process, like I've still done action prototypes and then a fireworks layout that says this is like the visual styling that should be applied. Lately I'm starting to lean more towards style guides and I'm not sure if you've heard, what is her name? She's at Twitter now. Samantha Warren's talk about style tiles. The way that I've been thinking about visual design now is more what are the components that we're designing and what do those look like? And then how does that work across the layer? And so what you can do is things like, actually name things with the class that they should be called. And then you have your style guide that says, okay, when I see this component it should look like this. And that's something that's a lot easier for developers to relate to. And what you may end up having to do is still like mock up a fireworks layout with the basic typography and the header and like a couple of stages of the navigation just so the client can sign off on it. But it's much less work than trying to do, like the reason I started going to AXR was because literally I was watching my team go through hundreds of pages of Photoshop files daily. That is not okay. That is not a sustainable workflow. And so AXR allows you to solve most of those challenges and focus the visual design on creating a vision for the overall look and feel and guidance for the developers rather than trying to create these, you know, quote unquote pixel perfect mockups. Is it possible to connect Azure with something like Jira? So you write a comment on an issue and it will show up in Jira or... I think if you made that, the AXR team would love to implement that. I mean, what you can do, for example, is you can reference a prototype link in each ticket. And then you can comment on the ticket and then there will always be that link back to the prototype so that you can see what you're looking for. There's no real... It's not like a database-y type thing, but they're very open to saying, you know, this is a feature we'd like to do and I'm sure that if somebody actually created that feature, then they'd be like all over it. You're welcome. Hello, Megan. Hello. Just a follow-up on Dagmaw's question. One of the reasons I like the concept of masters in AXR is because it's a really nice introduction for designers to reasonable design components similar to what John was talking about earlier. But the kind of thing I find the urge of doing with masters is adding them to a page but with slightly different content without just duplicating them and changing the content because you cannot lose the benefit. Is there any way of doing that? So I think it's a learning curve as you... I mean, with any design... I mean, how many here took a little while to develop your process and how you save things, how you organize a page? So it's the same thing with AXR. The learning curve is not as much the software. If you've ever used an Adobe product, literally you can figure this out in a couple of hours. It's really in developing that workflow. What is it that needs to be a master versus what is it that needs to be? So in your case, what you're probably thinking is that the background should be the same but the content of it should change but it should remain the same typography. So that's an opportunity for you to use a master for the background and then a style for the typography. No problem. Oh, and you can also, by the way, create widget styles, too. So you can actually have backgrounds as a style, too. Which is nice. I haven't worked with AXR yet but I'm getting very interested and I was wondering, is it possible to do real content testing with multiple content items of the same type? Because in my experience, usually if you use one sample product, then everybody is like, okay, this is the right way to do it and then afterwards you start entering multiple products and then you start finding out, oh, these ones don't fit the model. Yeah. Well, this actually goes back to a fundamental design process that I personally advocate, which is if we identify that there's, say, three to five content types that we want, then I need three to five examples of each content type and all of those go into the prototype because we need to see how they look. That part of the process does not change. So I think that the big thing about, and again, this is that opportunity for AXR and Photoshop being used together, AXR will get you a large part of the way towards the basic typography, some of the layout elements, the blocking that you have to do. It's not going to get you all the way there but that's where Photoshop comes in. You can start making those little enhancements and use visual design as a layer over that sort of holds everything together as opposed to, like, this is my perfect baby Photoshop mock-up. Please, developer, go make this. I know that CSS doesn't do any of these things but I want you to do them because you are magical. We need to move away from that. So this is one of the things that helps us do that because AXR will not let you do anything that CSS3 can't do, and this is a nice win. All right. I don't know. Is that my time? Or do we have time for them? Cool. Are there any other questions? All right, well, thank you so much for spending this time with me. It was very nice to meet you all.


Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding, we welcome you to our second conference that we've held on the strategic implications of an improving Polish-Russian relationship. My name is Heather Conley. I'm Senior Fellow and Director of the Europe Program. And together with my colleague Janusz Bukajski, we could not be more delighted to see so many of you here this morning on such an important topic. As I was reflecting on today's conference, I thought, you know, Washington focuses on crises. And unfortunately, the international community is providing quite a bit of activity on the crisis front from Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, tensions in the South China Sea, North Korea. I would add the euro crisis to this list, but I fear Washington isn't paying enough attention to the consequences of that particular crisis. But I would say that all too infrequently, Washington does not closely observe those international issues that are having a positive, albeit still challenging trajectory in all aspects of an improving relationship. So that is where we place today's conference in some context, understanding the regional implications of an improving relationship between Russia and Poland. In the May-June edition of Foreign Affairs, editor Gideon Rose interviewed Polish Foreign Minister Rodik Szakorski, who of course is here in Washington today. He was also here yesterday. And in that interview, he specifically raised the issue of Polish-Russian relations. And I just would like to pull a few excerpts from that conversation. Minister Szakorski noted, quote, our relations with Russia, like yours, meaning the US, are pragmatic but brittle. We started our reset with Russia before you. When our government was formed in 2007, we made a cooperative move, lifting our objections to Russia joining the OECD and waiting for the move of the other side. Russia responded by lifting the embargo on our agricultural exports. We have an intensive dialogue with Russia on security issues. And I hope we will manage to mediate our differences. And then Minister Szakorski noting that the fourth phase of the US Missile Defense Program will not be built in Poland. He remarked, we hope that Russia will keep its word and refrain from hostile missile deployments on the NATO border. Pragmatic, brittle, intensive, hope. These are the words that one could describe the evolving relationship between Poland and Russia. And we look forward to hearing from our good friend and former foreign minister, Daniel Rotfeld, now co-chairman of the working group on Polish-Russian, I always get this, it's such a big title, co-chairman of the board of the Polish-Russian group on difficult matters, who will give us a clearer sense of the current dynamics of the Polish-Russian relationship. Why is this relationship improving? What have been the most significant challenges thus far and how have they been addressed? What institutional and historical reconciliation processes have been instrumental to this relationship? What could derail this improvement? And certainly one could argue the dramatic erosion of Russian civil society and democratic processes could be one factor. So today we hope to explore this relationship more fully through the lens of regional actors from Western Europe and the United States, Central Europe and the Baltics, and finally the common neighborhood of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus. The ripple effects of the Polish-Russian relationship can be felt across Europe and transatlantically. What are their implications? Needless to say, we are looking forward to a very rich discussion. This conversation could not have been possible without my co-chairman of interesting and important conferences. That's my new title. Sławak Dęski is the director of the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding and he has been our partner in crime in developing this series of conversations. And my colleague Janusz Bukajski and I have had just a great privilege of working with you in the center and your staff on this topic. And so thanks to their generosity, we are able to hold today's conversation. So with that, Sławak, I'll invite you to the floor and we'll begin and again, welcome. Thank you very much for your welcome and excellent introduction. I'm very pleased that for the second time I can open, join CSIS and Polish Center for Dialogue and Understanding with Russia Conference here in these venues. And I'm very happy that the links we established some years ago, at the time when I was director of the Polish Institute of the National Affairs still work and provide very solid ground for our today's cooperation. I emphasize this new role, this new head I'm holding today because some of our best friends didn't recognize the change in my position. So now I speak on behalf of the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding. This particular conference we decided to shape in a little bit different way than we did last year. As you can probably see read in the agenda, we almost do not have today speakers neither from Poland nor from Russia. The purpose is to give the floor experts on international relations that follow different subjects but from time to time are interested in what's going on between Poland and Russia and we'd like to hear their comments what are pros and cons of these Polish-Russian attempts to improve relationship. And we'd like to hear the recommendations, what we can do better, how we can shape this dialogue in the future. And what are the consequences on impact, what is the impact of this dialogue for a more wider area in Europe or transatlantic relations? Now I would like to welcome and introduce to you car chairman of the Polish-Russian group for the difficult matters, Professor Adam Daniel Rothfeld who kindly agreed to deliver an opening keynote for us. As we all know, the role of the opening keynote is to give the conference a good start. So usually we invite for such an occasion wise men and ask him to share his thoughts on the subject of the conference. And now we arrived to the problem of how we defined wise men. And there are two tactics in this regard. One we can follow the example. And here I have to turn your attention that Professor Adam Daniel Rothfeld has been already elected or appointed to the various groups of wise men by various international authorities including General Secretary of United Nations, General Secretary of NATO, Council of Europe, European Union, Polish, Russian and other international authorities. So we following this criteria are on the safe side having him as a wise men and keynote speaker opening our conference. And there is a second, also very important criteria or second tactics we can imply. One may call it Chinese one. Chinese say that you can distinguish wise men it is a man who live long enough and survive a lot. So I would like to turn your attention that Professor Adam Daniel Rothfeld born in 1938, survived World War II, survived Holocaust, survived communism in Poland, survived as a director of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, survived as an advisor to Polish presidents, survived as a Polish minister of foreign affairs and survived as a co-chairman of Polish-Russian group for difficult matters. So indeed he survived a lot and I think he deserves our gratitude that he kindly agreed to speak at the beginning of our conference. Professor Adam Daniel Rothfeld, the floor is yours. Thank you very much for invitation and as a preliminary remark I would like to say that now you have to survive my presentation. And one additional comment namely since Dr. Demsky mentioned different groups of wise men group and I would like to say that my experience is that people are wise not because they are nominated. As a rule I noticed that within wise men group there are very few people who are wise. Having said that and I do belong to them by the way. I would like to say that my intention is to speak about dialogue and reconciliation in the context of the Polish-Russian relations. An experience of the Polish-Russian dialogue within the group on difficult matters brought me to the conclusions that the strategy for reconciliation is as a rule very specific and has to take under consideration the following factors. First, there is neither one universal nor regional model for the reconciliation. It is mainly a bilateral, not multilateral process. Second, it is as a rule deeply rooted in history but oriented into the future. Third, civil societies and non-governmental academic and confessional institutions, media and schools as well as public diplomacy and independent intellectuals are playing more instrumental roles for reconciliation than traditional inter-governmental diplomacy. Fifth, reconciliation has to be depoliticized multi-dimensional process. It required in Polish-Russian relations a need to seek not so much for compromise but for removing obstacles of the past in the mutual relationship. The truth cannot be the victim of the process but a point of departure in search of mutual respect. The next point is that only strong and self-confident partners can reconcile. The joint work of an independent group of intellectuals, academicians and experts can achieve more than traditional negotiators. And the last point is that the involvement of the broader public and the dialogue among societies accompanied by symbolic gestures and crafted statements by officials are decisive for reconciliation which has to be seen not as a single act or a series of such acts but as permanent historical and political future-oriented efforts. I would like to say that these are the main points. Now my presentation will be divided in four following elements. Concept, process, experience and protected conflicts. Concept. I would like to say that in his book, How Enemies Become Friends, The Sources of a Stable Peace published by Prince of the University Press two years ago, Charles Captain raised two principal questions. First, through what pathway the states succeed in setting aside their grievances, escape geopolitical competition and construct a relationship that precludes the prospect of armed conflict. And second, under what circumstances do zones of stable peace form and under what circumstances do they fail? In short, Captain's question is how, when and why do enemies become friends? The working group on historical reconciliation and protected conflicts established within the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative offered an approach that goes beyond traditional diplomacy to get at the root causes of the problem and urges a broader strategy for engaging society at large, the level at which solutions must be found. The point of departure for the EISI report finding is, I quote, one of the fundamental impediments to molding the Euro-Atlantic nation into a more unified and workable security community is the lingering distress that poisons too many of the region's key relationships. End of quotation. The report's proposal addressed to the European Union, Russia and the United States is to declared formally at the OSCE Council that they accept the responsibility to develop a joint stewardship plan for the 21st century designed to produce functioning Euro-Atlantic Security Cooperation. End of quotation. Overcoming historical grievances requires a broad-based, comprehensive, multi-level process. Such a process has to transcend official diplomatic efforts and engage many different sectors of society in an active dialogue with counterparts from the other side. Now a few words about process. The concept of reconciliation is, in my view, taken from the language of religion. The leaders of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches at the Royal Castle in Warsaw last year, 17th August 2012, called for, I quote, forgiveness for the offenses, injustice and evil we have caused each other and noted. To forgive, of course, does not mean that we can forget. Memory is an important part of our identity. To forgive means to renounce vigience and hatred to participate in the building up of accord and fraternity between peoples, our nations and countries, which is the foundation of a peaceful future. End of quotation. It is not by chance that almost a half century ago, Polish Catholic bishops set in motion the process of reconciliation with Germany. It was preceded by the French-German reconciliation and more than 20 years ago, followed by a similar process initiated in Polish-Lithuanian and Polish-Ukrainian relations. For the process of reconciliation to be effective, it has to be institutionalized and, as I said already, depoliticized. Quarrels, disputes and conflicts between European states are not a new phenomenon. European history is marked by persistent armed conflicts occasionally interrupted by longer or shorter periods of peace. International political efforts after World War II to ensure that in-depth social dialogue leads to a lasting elimination of historic animosities between traditional enemies constitute a welcome new phenomenon. The relevant dialogue has been augmented by broad educational programs and youth contacts and relations between France and Germany can serve as a model here. They were not only reinforced by the authority of President De Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer, but also gained from institutional forms. I have in mind, for example, so-called Jugendwerk. To some extent, that experience proved useful in Polish-German relations as well. The role of the churches in the two countries is especially praiseworthy in this context. On the German side, this particular price to the Protestant churches, not so much to the Catholic. Polish-German relations have improved over the past 40 years, not only due to the international law instruments that have been put in place, the operation of newly established numerous joint institutions and the involvement of tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border, but most importantly, thanks to the emergence of a new community of interests, prominently including the role played by the first non-communist cabinet of Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland and the activity of his foreign minister, Professor Krzysztof Skubiszewski, in promoting the cause of German reconciliation and reunification. And on the German side, the work initiated by Social Democratic Chancellor Willi Brandt and continued by Christian Democrats, I have especially Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel and many others, and many other German politicians in paving the way for Poland's accession to NATO and the European Union. The process of reconciliation has many dimensions. Political, social and spiritual, especially psychological. It would be hard to overestimate the input of the political elite in both countries and that of the churches, media and intellectuals, writers, artists, film makers. The psychological dimension is also crucial in the process of reconciliation, for it is a process, the ultimate success of which depends on the attitudes of individuals. Reconciliation cannot be decreed. Still governments do have at their disposal certain instruments that can facilitate a change in attitudes. This includes, for example, the convening of joint panels for the revision of textbooks on common history and schools curricula so that new generation can gradually discard nationalist prejudices and stereotypes. Now a few words about experience, especially in the context of a relation between Poland and two neighbors in the West with Germany and in the East with Russia. The process of reconciliation between Poland and Germany was primarily made possible by the changes that took place in Germany and among Germans. Poland and Poles also changed radically. It has been a qualitative transformation. Yes, yet in order to make these changes irreversible it is essential to institutionalize the whole process and keep making persistent efforts in all possible spheres. During his visit to Gdańsk on the 70th anniversary of World War II, 1st September 2009, Russian Prime Minister, at that time Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, made the following remarks. The historic post-war reconciliation between France and Germany paved the way for the establishment of the European Union. In turn, the wisdom and magnanimity of the Russian and German peoples and the foresight of state leaders in both countries made it possible to move decisively in the direction of building a great Europe. The partnership of Russia and Germany has become an example of meeting halfway and looking to the future while carrying the preserving memory of the past. I'm sure that sooner or later Russian-Polish relations, said Putin, will reach the same high standard of true partnership. This is in the matters, in the interest of our people and the whole of Europe. The end of quotation. The frequent references to the processes of Germany's reconciliation with France, Russia, and Poland might lead to the erroneous conclusion that these countries and Germany have elaborated a certain common model of reconciliation, a kind of a universal European model. That is not so. The character of Germany's relations with France, Russia, and Poland is different in each instance. These relations are the product of different histories of the states involved, different mentalities of their peoples, and totally different interdependence in its relations with France, Germany, and Germans have had an inferiority complex. The Germans impressed by French civilization and with French history and culture that was connected with the dominance of the French language in high society and diplomacy, and with an admiration for the French lifestyle, literature, and even the high French cuisine. So Germany was superior in other spheres, in science and technology, labor efficiency, social discipline, and legal culture. Both the German elite and society at large had an inferiority complex towards France. That differed from Germany's relations with its eastern neighbors, particularly Poland. Negative, habitual stereotypes of Poles were reflected by such phrases as Polish wirtschaft, denoting mismanagement, or Polish reichstag, meaning anarchy and tendency to quarrel. After the Second World War, a persistent irritant in Polish-German relations was the use by German mass media of the term Polish death camps with reference to the Nazi death camps located during World War II on the territory of occupied Poland. Camps that were located in Austria and Germany are described as Nazi concentration slugger. Without the geographic adjective, denoting their location. In effect, new generations of German readers were being misled to believe that Polish death camps existed during the Second World War. There are various other minor problems of this kind that irritate Polish public opinion. However, they have never hindered Polish-German reconciliation because the guilt and responsibility of Germany for crimes committed by the Nazi regime has not been questioned. The Third Reich lost the war and its occupying powers imposed the process of denazification of public life. Responsible political forces in Germany worked together to overcome the Nazi past, bring the criminals to justice and establish good relations with all the neighbors in the East and West. As a result, Poland has never had such good relations with Germany as it did after Germany unification of the Atlantic security structures and within the European Union. The point of departure and criteria are quite different in the case of building good neighbor relations between Poland and Russia. The Soviet Union did not lose the war. On the contrary, it was one of the great victors. For millions of Russians, that victory is inseparably linked to the name of Joseph Stalin. Yet he was a dictator responsible for countless crimes before the war, during the war, and immediately after its conclusion. It was the Russians and many people of other nationalities inhabiting the Soviet Union who were the main victims of mass-scale Stalinist crimes. Though the citizens of many other states were also targeted. In other words, the Russian people have a deep sense of having been a victim rather than perpetrators. From a psychological point of view, there is no analogy between the attitude of Germans to Hitler and the NSDAP and the attitude of Russians to Stalin and the Bolshevik Party. It is not worthy, however, that the dialogue on difficult matters initiated between Poles and Russians has made it easier for the present Russian leadership to pass judgment on other crimes of the Stalinist regime. Poles, by the way, had long been known who had murdered in cutting forests the 22,000 Polish officers interned in the Soviet Union after the Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September 1939 in an attack coordinated with Nazi Germany. The deliberations of the Polish-Russian group on difficult matters did not concern mainly facts and events. The facts had been known for years. However, it was important to juxtapose Polish and Russian perceptions and different historical memories on the same facts. A remarkable result was that the Polish and Russian experts had surprisingly convergent views on the most sensitive and difficult issues. For example, the cutting crime, the origin of the mold of ribbon-tropact, the Red Army's invasion and the incorporation of Eastern Poland, etc. It proved a much tougher task to ensure that the truth brought to light after 70 years reached millions of Russians, making that happen was beyond the power of the group. Decisions had to be made at the top level by the Russian president and prime minister. The attitudes of present-day Russians were deeply affected by Andrei Weida's film Cutting, broadcast on the Channel 1 of Russian television and watched by millions of people. The conclusion here is that the process of reconciliation between Poles and Germans has followed quite a different course than the ongoing dialogue between Poles and Russians. However, recognition of universal moral and political values and truthfulness in addressing the future was pivotal in both cases. Finding a peaceful political solution to the bloody conflicts that erupted within the former Soviet Empire, for example, in the Caucasus in Transnistria, requires a completely different approach than the process of reconciliation with Poland. And in the former case, it is the present day rather than history that is the cause of confrontation who are witnessing here friction between ethnic, national, religious and language groups. Past animosities have come to life, coupled with the aftermath of political decisions by the Bolsheviks, repressions and persecution of minorities and the uprooting of whole nations, Crimean Tatars, Chechen, Volga Germans, etc. condemned by Stalin to a collective responsibility and blamed for their lack of loyalty to the Soviet Union during the German occupation. The communist authorities use similar arguments when justifying mass deportation to Siberia and Central Asia of citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, following the Baltic States incorporation into the Soviet Union. The findings of American historian Timothy Snyder of Yale University are helpful in better understanding the deep and tragic sources of conflict in Central Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In his book, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, published three years ago in New York by Basic Books, Timothy Snyder described the fate of the 14 million non-combatants who lost their lives being exterminated for political reasons. He writes, I quote, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some 14 million people, the place where all the victims died, the bloodlands extends from Central Poland to Western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States. The 14 million were murdered over the course of only 12 years between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power. Often what happened to one group is intelligible only in light of what had happened to another, but that is just the beginning of the connections. The Nazi and Soviet regimes, too, have to be understood in light of how their leaders strove to master those lands and so these groups and their relationship to one another. The end of quotation. In the process of reconciliation, history matters. In search of an answer to the question how enemies become friends, Captain came to the following conclusion, valuable for the wider Europe. Regional groupings of the states that enjoy cultural affinity are more likely to cohere as zones of peace than those that cut across ethnic, racial and religious dividing lines. His most important statement is, stable peace is possible. Enemies do become friends. No single regime type. It was the end of quotation by Captain. Now I would like to say that no single regime type, cultural origin, has a monopoly on stable peace, meaning that the lessons of his study have potentially universal application. The presented brief analysis leads me to the following conclusions. First, each and every conflict has its specificity. Conflict prevention and conflict management require a holistic approach. There is a need to take into account the complexity of the situation with its different layers and dynamics. There is a need to find specific forms of institutionalization of the reconciliation process. Second, one has to avoid what Thorsten Wiblen has called trained in capacities. I have in mind applying the means and mindsets of the Cold War to the qualitatively new political environments, circumstances and requirements. In short, inherited historical distrust has to be replaced by a confidence base on shared interests, transparency and predictability. Third, the institutionalization of the dialogue and understanding in the form of functioning newly established centers for dialogue and understanding in Warsaw and Moscow could be seen as an innovative and creative instrument in search for reconciliation among the nations. In this process, the role of Catholic and Orthodox churches is difficult to overestimate. The fifth, there is a need for more timely and more determined efforts to control an emerging crisis situations. In such situations, the more sustained engagement of the international community is needed. The main challenge is now how to prevent in different forms and ways the development of political populism based on aggressive nationalism and chauvinism as the glue consolidating newly established states in a search for their national identity. A political culture of cooperativeness developed, for example, within the OSCE Council of Europe and the European Union can and has to be promoted in the Euro-Atlantic security community. Multilateral security institutions have to be seen as instruments of national strategies but should not be inclined to use them in an instrumental way in implementing their own national goals. Thank you very much for your attention. Mr. Raffa, thank you for that incredible tour de force and I think it sets the stage beautifully for the conversation we're about to have and Mr. I hope we can call upon you throughout our discussions to glean some of your insights so I hope you'll be available to us as we have questions.