shirt or a t-shirt of your favorite open source project here, or even the other ones? These are things that matter to us in a whole variety of ways. And well, the other one is of course politeness, but there's more to it as well, right? You don't want, you want to present a certain image of yourself. But it goes beyond that. And I think the political one is rather obvious. There's been plenty of talk about political interference using big data platforms, using Facebook and other platforms, and what this can do. There's currently debate going on about TikTok and what it does. And I do want to point out that in China since 2018, there are very strict regulations on TikTok. Who can use it? How long they can use it and what they can use it for while here in the US and then basically the rest of the world, there's only been the first traces of some kind of control over this from March 1st this year. So at least the country where the technology came from, they realized there are problems. There's an impact that these technologies have on society. And politically, of course, I mean, yeah, again, we don't know how these technologies really impact our political discourse, but that have an impact, I think is obvious, right? Our communication happens online. It happens through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, et cetera. And these technologies are not public domain. They are owned by companies who can, within reasonable rules, do what they want, which is fair enough. Businesses can do what they want. And I think they should. But it is a problem that we're all on the same three, four platforms because that gives them extraordinary power. And we don't know how they're using it. I mean, none of you can explain, and even the people at Twitter can explain why a tweet shows up in your timeline when it's the recommended for you timeline. Facebook can't tell you why a certain thing shows up in that timeline. It's just those algorithms are so complicated. They themselves don't really understand them. And only not even talking about something like TikTok. And if they want to make a certain brand more popular, they can just tune somewhere in these algorithms something that makes positive things about the brand show up more often and have negative things a little bit less often. And they start changing people's perceptions. Because after all, when you're on Facebook, you think what you're looking at is your opinions of the people you follow, your friends and family. But that's not true. There's a filter between what you're looking at and what's really their opinions, right? There are multiple filters even. There's a filter that they choose what they share and what they put online. And that might have been triggered by things they saw maybe made really pissed off by one message or another reel or not. And the second filter is of course what Facebook's algorithms or Twitter's algorithms or you name it have decided you should be looking at. So this has an impact and we just don't really know what exactly. Of course, there's a business side to this as well because if everything goes through a few companies, these companies have extraordinary powers. Ask any hotel owner if they have a choice whether they are on booking.com or not and paying about 20, 30% of the profits of that platform. They'll tell you they don't have a choice. We can say, well, free business are free to do what they want, but it's not really a free choice. And the house cable internet going, right? How, what are monopolies doing in general to business? This, there's a risk here when it comes to data. And again, if data is new digital oil and it's all owned by a small number of companies, this is gonna impact commerce. This is gonna impact business as well. It's, yeah. We let a couple of monopolies control the market. We all know what happens already. And last thing, but very much related to that is of course innovation. If you built, and I've been giving this example since early 2000s, back then it wasn't much more relevant example than today I think but I always said, you know, I was talking about open office back then, LibreOffice and trying to explain to people why it's important to have an open source office suite. I said, look, if you invent a really amazing feature that makes writing letters incredibly much easier, think about something like chat, PT, but then in early 2000s, that would have been a revolution. But you couldn't have built an office suite and then building your amazing feature. You were competing with Microsoft Office. You would not have been able to actually build a business around your feature unless you managed to somehow integrate it in Microsoft Office, which means you're entirely playing on their domain. In other words, the only shot you would have had at making money out of your innovation would have been, I don't know, get bought by Microsoft, probably for a nice discount because what else could you do? It limits innovation. You couldn't really have built something. Sure, it's a free market, but only free as long as you're Microsoft because if your product isn't 100% compatible with Microsoft Office, and also seen as such by other people, then good luck. And it is, of course, the same today with lots of products. Right, so now I'm not saying all of this needs to be solved by government, but this talk is about what Europe is trying to do and how they're fighting with Microsoft about this, so that's where we'll end up either way. Let's have a look a little bit at what Europe is up to. Now, I first gonna talk a little bit about privacy in general because there has been a couple of regulations about this in Europe since 2000, and what they tried to regulate here was the control of individuals over their data. So can you put, if you hand over data, your personal data, maybe just name and password, but maybe also other data to a company, and this company was a US company, or another company somewhere else, what happened to that data? Did you have any recourse as the data leaked, et cetera? And well, this regulation put in some rules, but basically what it said was US privacy rules and European privacy rules are equivalent. That was kind of what it boiled down to. And the thing is, they're not, certainly not when it comes to the rights of foreigners. So when this finally ended up at the European Court of Justice, they gave a big note to this. They said, Luke, in Europe, privacy is a fundamental human right. And in the US, it is far less protected as many of you might be aware. And so, well, this was considered invalid, this rule. Of course, it had already been in effect for quite a while, and the European government started working on a replacement, which they called the EU-US Privacy Shield, which had some different wordings, but in the end, was pretty much the same, and as we'll see soon enough, would also be struck down by the courts. In the meantime, Europe was actually strengthening its privacy regulations with the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation. How many of you are familiar with the GDPR? Oh, wow, that's like two-thirds. Are you all law nerds? What is the audience here? Fair enough. Right, California has CCPA and CCPRA, yes. Yeah, and they're modeled after GDPR, sorry. I'm repeating now here, but it's pointed out to me that it's relevant if you do legally related stuff in the US as well. Yeah, I knew that the Californian law was modeled after the GDPR. I don't know, of course, how close this modeling is, but if so many of you are familiar with it, then I'm not gonna spend too much words on it. But it basically puts a whole bunch of limitations, of course, on what companies can do. They have to be transparent, they have to remove data if you ask for it. In other words, it really puts the user in charge of what happens to their data, at least to quite some degree. In Europe, it mostly applies to bigger companies or commercial entities, at least that's what it's intended to be. In practice, you see a lot of organizations be sometimes maybe more worried about it than is really necessary. On the other hand, I think a little bit of data and privacy hygiene is a good thing. So overall, I don't know, it causes more paperwork, but I think it is a good thing to be more aware of privacy, security, et cetera. Anyhow, this obviously raised the bar, and well, then this happened. So President Trump signed the Cloud Act, which in kind of simple terms says if data is under jurisdiction of a US company and a US judge says, I want it, they get it. Doesn't really matter where the data is. And that's rather incompatible with the GDPR that says the user whose data it is is in control over the data and gets to decide who gets access to it, period. Of course, for a European judge, you could overrule this, but not a foreign judge. And in the end, the US is a foreign country. So when this ended up in front of the European Court of Justice, guess what? There was a big noep again. So this means the GDPR and the Cloud Act are incompatible, which technically should mean that as a US company, you can't hold data of European citizens, period. Of course, if that were the case, there would be a huge number of companies in violation with European law. And honestly, I have not seen a real answer to that. This seems to be the current situation, although there are discussions about it. I believe, well, some of the laws that the Diesel Market Act got through in Europe already. So they basically are in a way gonna raise the bar in a couple of related areas as well. So Europe keeps moving into a more protection for privacy, security, et cetera. So Diesel Market Act, it has a ton of provisions because they like to make the laws complicated. But one of the more relevant ones is that in a way, you could call it a GDPR for business, in a way that it forces companies to also respect data ownership of businesses. And it puts especially strengthened limitations on really big companies on a couple of the things that I mentioned earlier about competition, pretty much. So forcing companies, for example, to give you the lowest price to be allowed on your platform, like booking.com does, this can be challenged under the DMA. So you can say, yeah, but if people come directly to my door and don't need to give them the 30%, so I can give them a lower price. And if then booking.com says in their rules, well, if you wanna be on a platform, you're not allowed to do that, that's a rather anti-competitive move. And Diesel Market Act might forbid that.  Meanwhile, the US is moving in the other direction, now thinking about whether even encrypted data should be accessible by US law enforcement, which again continues to be going against what the GDPR and European laws would consider okay or legal. Now, a new solution. We had the Safe Harbor and the other one, right. I forgot the name, but we got the third one now, which is a transatlantic data privacy framework, which was agreed on in principle. And I think this was already now, yeah, this has already been fully agreed on and signed. They've added a dispute mechanism to basically the previous systems, but it is still, I believe, yeah, in front of a US judge and not a European one. So kind of waiting for a scrams tree decision by the European Court of Justice, which I don't know if you ask me and if you ask a scrams who is a Austrian lawyer after whom these cases are named. If you ask them, it's probably gonna be the same thing. It's gonna be struck down after which we will get probably another ruling or another, you know, new deal. Given the direction of both countries, if you go back here, given the direction things are moving with the EU, the EU creating more strict privacy regulations and the US giving more control to law enforcement, I'm quite curious to see how this will develop. We can debate this later or even now if you want, because I have a different subject going forward that I wanna talk about. Are there any questions about this or maybe debate points or things to ask because I'd be happy, yeah. Please ask, I will then just repeat the question. Yeah, so the question is, if I may rephrase it that way, if you look back at traditional operating systems like Windows, this is running in your home on your premise under your control, but with a mobile phone, I mean, let's be honest, the degree of control we have over the data on our phone is minimal at best, right? I mean, Android syncs almost everything by default and so does iOS. Apple does a fair bit of effort in encrypting and end-to-end encrypting and then saying like we don't have access to it. So I think once the data is in plain text on the servers of these companies, AKA Google and Apple, they fall under these regulations and therefore, yeah, everything that we're recording and taking with our mobile phones is a problem in these regulations, I think. When it's end-to-end encrypted and you don't have access to it, at least directly on the server, it gets a little more interesting because in theory, you could, as Apple, you could of course push a specific update to a specific person's iPhone that bypasses the whole end-to-end encryption and just uploads the files. And I mean, that person, none the wiser and nobody else. And I think it's an interesting legal question whether a judge could force Apple to do that. I guess that would be really quite a hard call. I would guess not. So end-to-end encryption, I think protects you. I think this might also be why other players are also introducing more end-to-end encryption because it creates this layer of trust. Of course, I could still do it, right? Like, if WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption, I think this is mostly for legal reasons because if you in a unencrypted format are trying to plot a terrorist plot and they don't catch you, there's blame. If it's end-to-end encrypted, what can they do? So I think what they're looking for is ways to avoid having to, you know, moderate conversations almost as much as they're actually trying to provide security. Have you think of what happened in Myanmar? How many of you are familiar with what happened in Myanmar and Facebook? All right, that's not as many as I had kind of hoped. It's a bit of a nasty story, but in Myanmar, where, yeah, democracy is not as well-established as over here. Let me put it that way. Facebook did not imply many, if any, moderators. And so the conversations on Facebook there spiraled out of control, resulting in what has been recognized, I think, by the United Nations as a genocide on Rohingya Muslims living there. I think you will find most experts agree that if Facebook had had proper moderation in place, this would not have happened. I think the implications of that are quite shocking, quite bizarre when you think about it. And then what happens if you employ end-to-end encryption and you can't moderate anymore?  Might also result in more genocides. It's a weird world we're living in when you're wondering if end-to-end encryption is actually a good idea or not. I don't have any answers here either, but it's a bizarre conversation. Either way, I don't think I have any hard answers to your question. I think what you brought up, like the mobile phones and the way they send any data, usually immediately to cloud servers make the whole problem a lot more visible. All right, any more on this subject before I'm moving to antitrust? All right, because this gets us a little closer to what we have been up to at NextLoud. I think many of you, because this was brought up in the beginning, many of you might be familiar with what happened with these two. For those who are not, the cliff notes of it, in the 90s, a company developed pretty much the first browser and build a business around it. Then Microsoft decided they wanted a piece of the pie, build a browser too, bundled it with Windows, which in the end killed, of course, the other company. And halfway down the killing of the other company, the other company said to antitrust authorities, this isn't really fair. We're not competing on a level ground here. It's not about who has the best product. It's just about they have an operating system we don't, so they win. That's not really fair game. The antitrust authorities agreed, a couple of years after Netscape and bankrupt, so that wasn't really helpful. But yeah, the bundling thing is still happening or happening again, which is where we come in. So as I mentioned earlier, NextLoud is building a self-hosted, fully open source collaboration platform. So think of file sharing and syncing, think of Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive. Now, what do you find bundled with Windows these days? One Drive. So we went to the European antitrust authorities, together with about 30 other small tech companies in the open source space and we said, hey, that's not really a level playing ground here. Why can't we be in there as well?  Let me be honest to you, we're not expecting them to fix this before, well, I don't think we'll go bankrupt, we're doing just fine, but this is of course not gonna get solved by them in the timeframe that is relevant business-wise, but we do think that it's important that government is paying attention to this stuff. And we've been told with so many words that the Digital Market Act, for example, might help in this regard and might also then give the European authorities the legal tools to deal with it. I'm not sure if the Digital Market Act is enough and we would prefer if the cartel organizations would continue their investigation a little more aggressively than they are, but at least there's talk happening, there's discussion happening. And other companies have also started conversations about this, for example, Slack has filed a complaint about the integration of teams in Windows, which is of course, again, the exact same story. But luckily, Microsoft has responded by of course, integrating their products even deeper. And it's funny because those of you who remember the browser wars in the 90s and the Internet Explorer versus Netscape story, they might remember what Microsoft did to deal with this. They integrated their file manager and the web browser in a single product and then they said to the antitrust authorities, yeah, but it's so deeply integrated, how can we ship our products without a file manager? Sorry, it's quite amazing and it seems like they're trying to do the very same thing right now with OneDrive, making it such an integral part of the product that if government might decide they need to disentangle the mess, they will just say, yeah, but we can't because you know, how could you? So yeah, they're up to the old tricks, I would say. It's quite interesting to watch. And of course, you see them in other places as well, moving SharePoint. I don't know how many of you are familiar with what's happening there, but it won't exist as an on-prem product much longer. They're moving you to the cloud, whether you like it or not. If you talk about digital sovereignty, that's not fun. So a lot of organizations are actually looking for alternatives. Well, we're one of them again at Next Cloud. And well, I think many of you might also be familiar with the whole discussion about whether you need an online Microsoft account to install Microsoft Windows. I discovered that if you Google, Google, well, recommends searches on this and the other one is very hard to see, but let me see. If you want to stop Windows from saving to one drive, there were what was at 5.2 million results. So people are definitely wondering how to get rid of that integration. So again, customer demand, I don't know. People are not all a fan of it. So anyway, the saga is not over. I can't really predict what's gonna happen here, only that it's probably gonna take a long time. Well, I promised it wouldn't take that long. It did not. Any questions? Yes. Oh, God. Failing to... So true. Yeah. So let me repeat the question. Mr. Here pointed out, pointed to the open document format situation and said Europe has a proud tradition of creating very sane laws and then ignoring them. If I maybe so bold as to summarize it like that and you're asking how I see this develop, I'm not expecting a lot of changes. Let's be honest, but I mentioned digital sovereignty in the beginning. Yeah, I mean, let's make it extremely concrete. I mean, if European court would say, you know, today you have to abide by the GDPR. In the interpretation we used before, AKA you can't put your date on the jurisdiction of a US company, then all of Europe's economy comes to a grinding halt because they're all completely dependent on either Google or Microsoft. And it's just a plain and simple fact. And if you say it would be similar, I think even here in the US, if you would say let's take this privacy laws, the Californian privacy laws, 100% serious, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of stuff also stops working because, you know, you can't, yeah. These companies are built around violating privacy because again, they need all the data and they need to be able to use it. I mean, Judd GPT, Dali, the new AI image generators, would they work without all the copyrighted image from artists all over the world? Yeah, they can't create art in the style of Friedrich Kalle if they don't have training data from the artist. And this is true of control of this. I don't see it changing. It's, I think, and Microsoft, before I get to your next question, one more thought on that because I've noticed that Microsoft knows this, like they're very much aware of this pattern and they're basically reinforcing it. So quite some years ago, when the term digital sovereignty started to become relevant, I think it's about four or five years ago, I went in Berlin to a Microsoft event about digital sovereignty where they basically got on stage and told the gathered politicians there that, you know, Germany should stick to cars, leave the software to Microsoft, and you have no alternative deal with it. I mean, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but that's pretty much what they pulled down to. Yeah, as long as European politicians believe that, well, they're not gonna try to enforce the law, right? And so you create a nice self-fulfilling prophecy, which is, of course, well, that's a great way of dealing with it. Yeah, then your question. I've been hearing recently that some of the hybrid cloud providers are being forced to develop private clouds for individual companies to deal with, like GPDR and that sort of thing. I know IBM has been doing quite a bit of that. Has Amazon and Microsoft been developing countries-specific clouds to deal with those issues? Yeah, that's an interesting question. So when we're talking about cloud, there's, of course, a whole bunch of different meanings to that, fully aware of that. One of them is, of course, when you're talking about AWS kind of clouds where you run various workloads on, but also like the workloads themselves, AKA an application or a set of applications like Microsoft 365 is referred to as a cloud. So let me answer about both. I mean, when it comes to a cloud infrastructure like AWS, you have OpenStack these days, so you can run it internally, and there are plenty of companies doing that, just building their own internal cloud to run their own workloads on, sometimes doing hybrid stuff. I mean, you're all aware of this because there's tons of conversations about this happening. When it comes to Amazon offering kind of an internal version of AWS to companies, I'm not aware of that. I also would imagine that those companies would simply use OpenStack because there's a great degree of compatibility there. I mean, it doesn't maybe offer all the bells and whistles, but I think as a company, if you say, look, we can't use AWS, but we want the feature set, then with OpenStack and Kubernetes and all these things, you can get fairly close with perhaps some extra costs or maybe even not, right? There are ways to save costs with that as well. When it comes to Microsoft, it's interesting. I've had a conversation with a gentleman from a very big European car manufacturer, you know, and I asked like, how do you deal with the GDPR issues? And they were like, well, rather paranoid about that. So yeah, our data cannot leave our premises.  And he told me they had basically gotten such a kind of private cloud from Microsoft, something that was really completely firewalled off from, yeah, the rest of Microsoft's cloud service. So from what I can tell, because this is not being, I haven't seen this offered anywhere. I don't think they offer this to anyone who just asks, but if the customer is big enough, they'd rather not lose the customer to a alternative solution like ours, I suppose, and they will offer it. I'm sure there are technical difficulties to come with it, and there are significant costs, I'm sure. They have tried to run a European, hosted, owned, and controlled version of Microsoft 365, together with Deutsche Telekom, the German telecom company. This basically run onto technical issues. They did not, apparently, I mean, they announced there was no demand when they shut it down, but I mean, I find that hard to believe, but the rumors were that they just couldn't get it to work properly without breaking and causing various issues, but they are trying similar things again. So the trick they're doing here is they're basically just letting Deutsche Telekom, they create a new company, that's an European company, partially owned by Microsoft, partially owned by Deutsche Telekom. That company, of course, and pay license money to Microsoft, runs the software on German servers, managed and controlled by Deutsche Telekom. Only Deutsche Telekom employees have access to it. Yeah, it's a kind of a legal solution to the problem that works, because then if Microsoft would be ordered to hand over data, they can't. Deutsche Telekom owns and controls the data. Of course, Microsoft could do the same trick and change their software and hand over the data that way, but then you come back into the legal quagmire of, can you force a company to hack one of their customers' phones effectively by providing a special payload that uploads data? I mean, I think that's really, I don't know, it might be happening, of course, because this might all be then happen sealed, but I think that's really tough on. So this is happening and I don't know the degree of which because it's not that public. I hope it answers the question, yes? No, right, yeah, you open a whole new kind of worms, email. Once upon a time, completely federated and open, and I think it's still a good model, but yeah, given now everybody's hosting a Gmail, yeah, calling it open is not really the right term anymore because if you get blocked by Gmail and Hotmail and maybe one or two more, then effectively you don't matter. Of course, you have companies like Centgrid that then pride themselves on having deliverability. We at Nexlile are not currently offering a email server as part, so our product has a mail client, but as I say, it's a client because running a mail server, technically it's not hard. You can get tons of solutions for that. It's very easy to run a mail server and get some of your emails delivered some of the time. It's nearly impossible to run a mail server that gets all of your email delivered all of the time because the big companies are constantly changing the rules and playing with them. And as long as Microsoft can get its emails delivered to Google and vice versa, they don't really care about the small players. And of course, one of the reasons for that is spam. Sometimes I think it's also an excuse, but yeah, running a mail server is really hard.  Lots of big companies still run emails, so I think it's more the trend that worries me personally than the current state. Like it is a bit nasty, but if you have a part-time sysadmin who knows what they're doing, they'll be able to keep your emails arriving. We also run our own mail server at Nexlile. Not for the bulk email, like the marketing emails, they, for that we use SendGrid or something similar, which is I think also, yeah, that's okay. But given the trends, I think five or 10 years from now, it might be nearly impossible. Honestly, I leave this problem to other people to fix because I, yeah, it's a tough one. Exactly. Yeah, there is a small company trying to think of the name. They built an open source tool that monitors the deliverability. And what they were trying to do is to automatically configure a mail server to guarantee deliverability. So what I wanted to do is they, you have a bunch of mail servers that would have their app installed, open source app that runs on the mail server. And if mails don't get delivered, then you try to fix it. And then it would then roll out that fix to the whole network, kind of. So kind of like solve collaboratively and in a decentralized way, this problem of big tech constantly coming up with new problems for the mail servers to solve. I can't think of the name. Come to me later, I'll try to find it. But it was a pretty clever solution and open source. So any more questions? A few more minutes left. Yes, cyber bullying. Yeah, I don't think it's part of the GDPR. I think this is separate legislation. I've not followed this closely honestly. So I can't say anything smart about it, sorry. Any more questions? Well, we're close to the end. So, ah, one more? A comment, okay. Well, then I'll give you the microphone and that'll also be the end of it. So, thank you all. Yeah, I had sort of a comment, what he said. Normally what happens between the EU and the US or other countries that are the EU in particular, they usually work with each other to adopt their standards. And normally the EU is usually a little more strict so the US tends to adopt those over time. Interesting point, yeah. I mean, I think the California privacy laws are a nice example of that already, right? All right, that's it. Thank you all. Appreciate the time you took. Thank you all for coming in about 10 minutes. We'll have another talk this time about transition.city planning your own public transportation using open source data. So, see you in a little bit. Next thing. Hello? All right, coming up next, we have bringing transit planning into the hands of everyone and we're gonna learn how to make your own bus line, which I'm very excited by. Thank you. So, as a, I'm Yannick Brasso. I'm gonna talk to you about some transit stuff. So, this is my neighborhood. I live in Montreal in a neighborhood called Verdun. I'm just a little bit far from the subway so I often rely on buses to get anywhere else in the city. And, like most of Montreal, all the streets are aligned and well-designed grids so it's really easy to pass a lot of bus lines. But, from my places, even though I have access to five or six different bus lines to go connect me to the subway, I feel that there's times during the day where I don't have access to any buses.  And, I started wondering, is there's a way to prove it? To, I can do something, to like go to the city council and say, there's a problem in this part of the city. Luckily for me, a couple years ago, I started helping a team, working on a tool called Transition, to help design bus network. So, I got a tool that might be able to help me. We'll see. So, our goal with the tool is to make transit planning, transit planning tool that is the best you can get for transit planners, but make it as easy so that anybody, any citizen could take the tool and use it to analyze the transit network in the area. If you look up my profile at scale, might have seen that my previous talk here was about the kernel and kernel upstreaming and all the deployment process. So, why am I here to talk to you about transit? So, the story is like a couple of friends working on this tool, they can help us and after I left my previous job at Facebook, I was like, oh, maybe I can help you. We'll see, what do you need?  Okay, sure, how do you plan to do that?  And I got there really, really scared about that. So, okay, you need help, I'll come and start working with you despite having to write some JavaScript code in the future. But luckily for me, I'm not a transit engineer, I don't know much about all the theory of it, but I'm surrounded there in the share mobility by a bunch of professional people, like we study transit, the PhD level stuff. And so the theme is really a mix of like compute engineers, transit professional, and we also have like an economist who study like the impact of transit in the various cities. So we are part of the L'École Polytechnique de Montréal, which is an engineering school. Since we do research, we do applied research. Over the years, we develop various different tools. First one called Evolution, which is a travel server platform and talk a bit more about that later. We have a tool called Oscars, to able to do a dashboard and monitor the congestion in the city. Similar to about taxi dashboardings, you know, what's the taxi use agency and the tool I'm gonna talk to you today. Transition, which is all about doing the planning of the mobility in a city. So I'm gonna talk to you about what is transit planning. I'm gonna go in more detail about the tool, what it does, how it's made. I'm gonna talk to you about the data source that you need to be able to do some transit planning. I might attempt a live demo, we'll see our time goes on if it works. And I'll talk to you about some of the challenge about writing code in a research environment. So what is transit planning? The role of transit planner is to start with the territory, a city, a region and do analysis of what's going on there, what's the population there, what's the need of mobility of people. They're gonna do, they're gonna study what's up there, what's the road network, what's the current bus network, cycling path, what people can use to go around and they're gonna, after that, formalize preposition, but what can we do to improve, what will reduce the impact, the environmental impact, reduce the energy level, or just improve the time spent of people moving around in the area. They will do cost estimate about the construction of the network and also the operation, which if you have a bus network, the main cost will be the operation and not the construction. They're gonna do consultation, talk with the citizen, get their feedback, they're gonna do counting, they're gonna see how much people are using it and then they're gonna give suggestions to elected officials and follow up on the implementation of that, see if the new network follow what they're working for and they're gonna just start again and again just as an interactive process, make sure you get the best network, pull them more the better way. There's more and more people living in cities, cars are getting bigger, like obviously moving people in cars in the city is the less efficient way you can do, even if you electrify them and as a way to solve the climate change, you still have the space problem in the city, so it's better to try to move people in a shared way, in a bus, in transit, in trains, than having everybody ride in their own private vehicle. But I will try to convince myself to talk about transit, but talk about how we plan the network. So for our tool, instead of targeting only the transit planner, we want to target every kind of users of the network.  But we want to make the tool available also to smaller organizations, you might have a small town, a small regional organization who wants to figure out how to improve mobility in the area, but they are not big enough to have dedicated staff of people working on transit problems. So we want to make the tool as good for people who have a bit of a standing or like work for a city, for example, but not a full time in there. The third target that we have is we want to make the tool so that elected officials themselves can go and use the tool. We don't just have to get the report from transit planner and take decision based on that. We often see a clash, we'll get a report, some city will come ask us like, oh, how can we improve transit? We tell them like, oh yeah, you should do that and they're like, oh, that's complicated or no, we cannot do that, why and the kind of second guess the transit planner suggestion. So if we can get the tool in there and it can draw themselves the bus line and see the impact of adding a bus or removing a bus will be in the general mobility of their citizen, we hope that we'll get the message better that there's way to improve the network. And the second part, we want to make the tool like as good for the citizens that can go and like do it as themselves, propose new lines and have like with all together with all those people and improve the governments of the city of the transit and have like a more shared view and more shared proposition for the network in there. Like ultimately we would love to have a tool like that easy to play, like if you have like, I don't know, your favorite city simulation game and just draw a bus line in there. We are not there yet, but that would be like the ultimate end goal to have like as easy a computer game. So let's have a quick look at what the tool does. So this is the main view of the tool. So we talk about transit, we talk about moving stuff around. So we have seen the main view is gonna be a map view of the area you're working in. I give a similar talk earlier this year that fuzz them, so this is the city of Brussels. I really like their bus network, it's all colorful, really shiny, it's really fun to see, so I kept that slide. So the main thing you're gonna do with the tool is like obviously it's at your network. So you have a few options on top to like add stops, add line, you can draw a line on your road network. If you had buses, but if you had train, you can just draw them directly where your train is going. You can obviously it's it's schedules. I'll show the screen after that. You can import and export your network. You can instead of having to redraw your city network, you can just import the GTS file that is provided and do that or you can even just export it. If you have like a small city, do you don't have like fancy tool to write GTS? You can use the tool, do a couple of line export as GTS and that can be imported to all the transit planning, transit planning tool that the user can use. We also have the concept of variant and that's probably the main tool that is important for transit planners to be able to compare different scenario, different network. So basically with variant, you might draw your actual network and then you do a second variant that will where you add new lines in your network and then you can do all the analysis comparing these two scenario or concept and see what will be better in there. As I said, you can add schedules or for every line you can compute schedule or we can generate schedule for you. Either you can specify a specific interval I want bus every 15 minutes, every 10 minutes, every half hour it will generate you a schedule or you can also just specify how many buses you have. You know you have 10 bus in your garage or you have the budget for 10 bus. You can say, okay, I have 10 bus, I generate my schedule with this and this is all the timing and it will know like with the length of your lines how many bus you can operate in there. It's not a tool made to really follow the operation of your bus, it will not consider like how much break you need to give your driver or how much maintenance you need to do that. There's other tools, other really expensive tools that does that but if you are really small operation it will give you a good estimate. If you say that frequency for your bus it will give you a quick overview of how much how many buses you need. So it will give you maybe a quick cost estimate but if you want to go like deep into operation and manage your maintenance, we are not aiming to do that at least not for the moment. So the first kind of analysis you're gonna do, it's simple routing. That's pretty similar to all the routing tools use Google map or any kind of mapping software or any application on your phone. You can specify the start point, the start time, overall time, how much time you want to do at most, how much time you want to walk to get to the network and obviously coordinate. You can ask it to like that, give me the best result or give me all the different alternative and you can use the data in there. The main thing that's interesting is it not just routing one route many tool that can do that but we have like batch operation capability. So if you have multiple starting and end point you can compute all of them in batch and then you can do comparison. Is your network better or not in there? So if you use that example starting in LAX at 6 p.m. when I arrive to get to here, this is what we get that for here in LA. I didn't import all the network in LA because I don't know how many different transit agency. I just did three of them so far. Just two, yeah, that's, yeah. So I did just three just to simplify my example. And there's a few artifacts.  So I decided to take a cab and take the transit sadly. All the length of it and how much time you spend like in transit thing. For example, like you will have for this like I don't know one, two, three, four, five, six different vehicle. You at least you don't wait only 25 minutes between them. In this example, I take the example of you as changing the variance. So I did a scenario where I decided to exclude all the L.A. Metro rail network. Usually I take the opposite example. I remove all the buses but for this example it was not possible. Like usually people will tend to stick to rail and ignore the buses but for example, you might have maintenance to do on the line and you want to see the impact of like where people will have to go or tell them like what's the, what's gonna be the time impact of changing this network? So basically, so I did that. Now it's only buses. Now you see it's 168 minute. If you exclude all the rails so you can tell people like yeah, if there's no more train it's gonna take you about like at least half an hour more. The interesting part is like you actually wait less between trains or between vehicle if you just take the bus for about five minutes. But it's always a bunch of statistics especially if you do that in a batch operation that you will get and give you an insight of what's good, what's better or what's worse in your network especially if you do that with all the points in the city. The other main tool that the transplanner is gonna use is what we call the accessibility map. The idea here is you take a specific point, a specific starting point. You can also do reverse accessibility map where you pick a specific destination and you compute the area that you can reach in a specific amount of time. In this example, I have the different shade of blues gonna be the 20, 40 and 60 minute that you can reach for the specific area here, starting point, basically this place. And that gives you an area and you have about, you have always statistics. For in 60 minute you can reach about 350 square kilometers of area.  This is the limited ability of people can reach only like 210 square kilometers. And that's really a big useful tool. If you compute that for like all maybe major population area in your city for specific network and then you add a new line or you change the frequency of your line, you're gonna see that space that's available to people grow and reduce accordingly, that's a really good indicator of like the wellness of your network for your citizen. I just wanted to keep that example for Brucell, really tight network as you've seen so that give you a tight accessibility map. The third tool that we have is simulation and optimization process. So basically the idea here is using, as I said, a bunch of like, either like real information about where people start and where people go or we can also just simulate that with if you have a population model and some model for the place you can do, we can generate those trips. And using a generic algorithm, we can improve your network by five to 10% in overall movement time. So we are able to reduce by optimizing your network, reduce like for about the example, we have like four or five to 10 minutes in general in the studio where we've done. You see there in the graph for most people will be improvement, some people might have a little bit worse using the algorithm but in general will be an improvement. And it's hard to convince people that you add a new bus line or do change a bus line but having actual all data that is actually better for most people, it's really useful thing to have. So it's not just in theory, we did a few study for various cities. This is Dramanville, it's a smallish city between Montreal and Quebec city, about like 80,000 people and they came to us with their old, this is the old bus network that they have, there's a bunch of different line in there. They were like, yeah, that doesn't, the city grew, there's more neighborhood, it doesn't respond to the need of the population, can you do something? So basically we came up with that running the generic algorithm.  We are working on an algorithm to have that draw the line automatically, probably add some like machine learning in there, we'll see, to put a position right now, you need to have a human like go and draw a lot of lines and the tool will find the best way to do that. So the actually right now implementing this network, we have a few issues with the congestion. It's a small city, we didn't expect too much traffic but apparently they are getting a lot of problem with traffic and that impact the bus traffic, all the bus gets stuck in traffic and then the connection gone works as well as we expected but that give us some feedback to improve the tool later on. Another example that we made with the tool, so we have this, so this is a map of Montreal with the main subway line and in pink, a couple years back, there was a proposal to add this diagonal new subway line to the network and to go cover like the middle part here where you have like the biggest population area in the city and they came to the lab asking us, will that improve, that looks like a good idea but what will be the impact of that line to a general mobility? So we use the actual like transit survey so we know what people move from where and go where in the typical day and we were able to prove that in general having that diagonal line will save about 5% of time for many users in there and the biggest improvement will be people like who are currently driving, they are the one who get the most benefits in there. That's obvious because there's a big part on the top left where there's no much transit there, a lot of people drive so if they are purchasing to actually go a diagonal to go downtown will be good. This is a map generated, it's not generated directly by the tool, the data is generated and then it was mapped by QGIS but it's some view that we might add in the tool later on directly. Basically by using, by mapping all the current project in Montreal, there's a bunch of new train line being added so what will be the improvement for everybody and we see on the map every blue area is where people there's, I forgot the key but there's a significant improvement in their transit time where in red there's no, where there's no project, there's no much change so we see that the tool like yeah if you add more transit line, it will reduce transit time for people. So this is the main view or the main tool, the main thing that the tool does at this point. Let's have a look at what does it run under the hood. Right now it's mostly a JavaScript application, web-based application, client server, most of the code is in TypeScript. We have a few components in the back end in C++ and Rust, really hoping to migrate the most I can to Rust at this point. Lot of the code was written by students, the master, PhD level, it's not the cleanest that we can have so by rewriting some of it we'll hopefully have some stronger component. As I said it's split into like some back end, some front end and some common component at the JavaScript level. We develop a library with common component between all our software stacks, stuff that are like really common to all kind of transit analysis algorithm. We have a separate library and we have like the application stack in there. We use geographical data extensively so we build the thing on the post GIS and post SQL to manage all this geographical information. The basis of that routing is made with OSRM which is a pretty common tool to do routing on the OpenStreet map data. It's written in C++. We use that for like route network, path, cycling path. We are currently evaluating, switching into a different tool called Valhalla which might be more efficient in some of the specific use case that we have. For the transit part, obviously like the OSRM we do like a road network planning. For the routing path, for the transit path, we develop our own tool called TRRooting, simple name in there where we implement the algorithm called Connection Scan Out-of-Government. I will not go over in detail, I'm not sure I understand fully yet, but it's a really, really efficient way to scan your old network and all the connection and figure out the best way to go from point A to point B in there. Recently, especially at FOSDEM, we've met a team that make a tool called ModSys which is really similar. Doing that, they also implement some similar algorithm, so we might consider like just switching to their tool to see if it works for us, we might just collaborate and instead of having to support all the code, we could drum that part and use the other one. Otherwise, we'll continue to support it and I'll finish rewriting it for us at some point. So, having a tool is the first step, it's really interesting, but if you want to do anything useful, you'll need to have some data to do the analysis, to observe what's the impact of your transit network in New City. So, what do you need?  You'll need a transit network, existing bus lines. You'll need to know where you have population and where you have destinations and you have, you need to connect those two, so basically generate trips from source to destination in there. The big question you're gonna have is, is that data available? And in the various open license, like open, the ODBL, license used by OpenStreetMap, can you have other creative common in there or even public domain information? Like most these days, a lot of cities, a lot of government provide the data in some kind of open license. And the good thing, we don't reshare the information. You use it to compute it, so you don't have to worry too much. As long as the data is available, you can use it in there. The US, interesting part, is most of the federal government data is already in public domain, so you can use it without any issue. And just a quick note, like the creative common zero was developed to an average general definition that applies everywhere to the world, because not every individual rejection has a definition of public domain on the copyright. So there's now like a CC zero that you can make sure when you release that data, it's in public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. So the good news is you can do about everything you need, you can find it in OpenStreetMap. There's all the information there, obviously all the road and patent work is there. And for most of the city is gonna be good enough. Like obviously the quality varies from places to places, but these days, at least the road and patent work is pretty good, and you can use it as a good basis information. You're gonna have like a lot of a PUE point of interest, like shops, offices, gonna be marked on the OpenStreetMap, so you can use that to your activity center. And you can even extrapolate population, especially in the area where you have all the buildings, and if the buildings are marked correctly, if they are residential order, you can basically have an idea of the population density, and then use that to simulate your progress around. But as I said, it's not the same quality everywhere, so you have to do some validation if you want to have a really good accuracy in your results. We did a quick estimate in the most region we work with that it takes about 25 hours per square kilometers to validate urban area like Montreal or LA. If you go more to the suburb, it takes us about 10 hours per square kilometer and maybe just one or two for rural area. The important part that we need to do to make sure that we correct the most often is make sure we have the pedestrian and cycling path and the link together. And I put the example here of the conference center, and this is an area where, if you look at this area, you see some missing connection. This is the street, there's no sidewalks separated. That's one thing we do, we try to separate the sidewalk from the road, and I know that's a bit controversial sometimes in the open street map community, why should that sidewalk separately? For us, it helps a lot because you can see an actual distance difference between where the road is and where the sidewalk is, and if you have to cross a big road, that can have several meters, maybe a minute to your old transit area, the transit time, so it's there. And the connection here is really important, as you can see, if you want to go from this street to here, you cannot cross, there's no connection, so we don't know to cross there, so the only connection is here. So to do it properly, we'll probably add the sidewalk and from the conference center into the connection or at least do a connection from this corner to the road. The other big thing we're gonna do is add door to any big building. Same example here, if you just add the center of the building, it's hard to know where is the enter, and that will be really useful, like if we drop you at the bottom of the conference center and the entrance is here, you have to go all around and maybe you have taken a bus line that goes on this street instead of a bus line that goes on the bottom street. So we need to add all the, if you want to have a better accuracy, all the entrance and this marker for that in the open street map to add that. So that's another thing we do. We sometimes realign the streets, make sure the one-way are there, set the speed limit, maybe the street light that we'll have unpack on the bus transit line, and especially like if you have like weird, strange configuration of street, really steep angle that some buses are pretty big vehicle and we cannot do all the turns, so we have to consider that in the routing algorithm. And as we are in the map, we try to make sure we add all the point of interest if you have anything. So if you want to involve people to help open street map, one of the big thing missing right now is all the point of interest, all the shop offices, something that's really easy to add. You don't need to add all the information about it, at least having the type and the name is gonna last at least for us. And we try for big buildings of the number of floor that can help with the density in there. Right now we do all of that by hand, but we want to like probably evolve, we use like the tool like a task manager and map roulette to like divide the work. If you have a specific city, if you have a community that you want to help, you can target them with those tools. So the second part is using the, I think the transit network. And luckily these days, it's a pretty, pretty available, most transit agency will share those. GTFS 10.4 general transit feed specification used to be the Google transit feed specification, when they got invented was a partnership between Portland and Google, but now it's got generalized and it's an open standard that is created collaboratively by all the stakeholders. There's two variants, the schedule one, which is basically your static map. And there's a real time variant where you can know, where you can share if the agency has real time information about where the vehicle are, they will share that in that format. The format is pretty simple. It's a zip file with a bunch of text file with basically comma separated value in there for everything information, but this is an idea of all the different information. We have agents information, route trips, objurcy schedules, sometimes you're gonna have like fair information. So when you do the routing, you know what will be the cost for a specific user and you try to maybe reduce the cost in there. As I said, you can find that most transit agency have like a developer section these days where you can find this information, you can see the link in there, but not all of them have that as easy. I tried to find the one for the Pasadena transit agency and there was just a link, like email us, we'll send you the link. I'm like, okay, that's a bit annoying. But with some luck, there's a website now called Mobility Database that has about 2,000 meta information about all the transit agencies who will basically have a file for every transit agency with links and a direct link to where is their latest GTFS. So I could like get the Pasadena transit, just get the link, getting the file. I have a dream of having that directly integrated in the tool. It's not there yet. Again, missing time, but basically the idea would be just, okay, I'm here, please download all the GTFS file from Aria and we could easily do that automatically with all the meta information in that database. They are supposed to add an API to make that easily. There was a previous project called Transit Feed, that kind of got abandoned and now this one is the most up-to-date. For the population, as I said, you can proxy the buildings if you have them in the pre-sweet map. That will give you a good enough information, at least for transit planning. You don't need to count everybody, you just need to know how many people about come from air to there. So that will give you a good start for the simulation. We also use the LendRuze register. Basically, most government or region or state, depending on the area, we have some kind of public register of who owns land or buildings, what's their purpose, what's the value. So by just using that, that's usually really well-gelocated because they need to do the LendRuze of it, so you can use that as a proxy for, again, population. This is a residential area, what's the size of it, what's the value of it, is there any apartment that can give you a good idea? You should have all this information in there, so we can do that population. The other information that is widely available will be the census, but we have a lot of problem with that because the general area that you have is too big. If you have a census, the smallest information will be maybe a zip code in the US, but that will encompass like several blocks in a city. And if you go over three, four streets, you might have two or three different bus lines, and if you are one corner area versus the other, if you want to take transit, you will have a completely different path. We have students working on like kind of mapping algorithm that, okay, let's take the census information, how many people are in a specific area, and try to spread them in my streets to have in some way that makes sense depending on what's the street size or if I have any building and figure out a way to do that. And it will also be a really interesting tool, maybe anonymize some of this information so you can just, instead of having actual information, you can just take the survey, you know you need to have that kind of population that generates one that match. For the this nation, again, OpenStreetMaps is probably the best one. If you have the information in there, it's which is probably the most missing information. There's not a lot of other social information. You could scrape some actual map, probably not following their thermal service, but you can try that. Or if you still have like old phone books that will have like yellow pages, will have some of the shop information. But that's probably the part that is the most lacking in the open data information. Some cities, some region might have that available publicly, but it's really hard to keep up to date in there. Again, you don't need the exact information for simulating your network, but the most accurate you are, the most precise going to be your results. And connecting those two is going to be trip. This is the part that you will not find in the open, but most transit agency will have that kind of information in general. Basically, every transit agency will do a survey once a year, once every three, four, five years, and they will basically ask their users where they come from, they're gonna pick a specific week or specific day and ask everybody in the network, where did you come from, where are you going, why are you doing this trip? Are you going shopping, going working, going to school? And that will inform them in their planning decision in the future. They're gonna do that either by sending by mail a survey like the census, calling them and asking them by phone, or even just like stopping them on the exit of the subway and asking them, okay, where did you come from, where are you going today? That's really time-conservative. We have the evolution platform that make a web-based tool to do that kind of survey, which basically like whatever survey platform you have, what's really tailored for transit information. That's the evolution tool I talked about earlier. So, I have some time, so I can probably attempt to see if I can make it work life for you. Let's see. So, this is here, this is my mouse, okay. So, basically what I want to show you basically quickly is how we can use it to add a new bus line in your network. So, this is like, the line I have important, like I said, LA, the train, the bus, and the passenger transit. So, if I want to add a new, like let's create an agency that will like do an express line from the airport to here, and that's the only thing they do. So, basically you create a new agency, you will give them, ah? That's a good one. The next transport, I need to have a short name, let's do a color, something that is flashy. So, that's my agency, I have a new one. Then I need to add new line, I could like add new stops. I'll use the one that are existing on the map at this point, but basically I'll click here, add a new line, adding a new line, let's say this is the first line here, and so then the next thing you have to do is find mode, yeah. I need to tell it, let's do just a bus line, it goes simple, like the difference between selecting bus or train, train will just ignore your road network in bus, every time I click it will attach the bus line to the network. So, let's try to start somewhere near the airport. Yeah, here, here, okay, it's a bit tricky sometimes. It doesn't let me pick it. That's the fun part of doing a demo, and then let me pick it. So, I just click on it and it works. So, that's the fun of live demo. Okay, so let's skip that part. So, basically the idea I wanted to show you is to, I would have add that, so I would have create this line here, and if I click on it, let me check the path, and basically this is what I will get, so this is I would have pick a stop here, let's say I put a stop downtown and a stop here, and then I click like generate the reverse path, it will create the other path in there, and then when you go to routing, if I take the same route as before, I click here my scenario with the variant with a new line added, and just ask the route, and yes, it will take the most direct route that we just added there, and it's slightly faster than it used to be before. There's still some interconnection here to deal with, but so, yeah, so it will use what you're, it still use the other existing network, so if it can, so that was the quick demo in there, so it still works. Just a quick word, I mentioned it's coming from the research world. Some people sometimes say, oh yeah, research code is bad, that's true, but how do we make sure it works for real? The main thing we do is we partner with Actual Transit Agency, right now we are partnership with most Transit Agency around Montreal in the province of Quebec, so we actually develop the tool with them, so we basically real time write a code update, they have live platform that can use, the informers like oh yeah, we want to do that kind of process, that kind of study, and we meet with them regularly too, and they can ask them what kind of work do they do, and sometimes I will do that, and we export at that time, and we do that, and that's always like, what if you just give, can we give you maybe just a plug-in for QGIS, and you can just add the information directly instead of I export a CSV file, and then doing a bunch of stuff, and they're like oh yeah, that would be great, it's not done yet, but it's on the high priority list. The other thing that we, that the code quality with students, that's something difficult, like students will write a thesis, will write a paper, they want to do some quick, some prototype, it's sometimes hard to take the time to work with the open source project, so there's a lot of education to do with students to, okay, if you want your tool to be actually useful, and some of them are really excited by that, okay, this is how the open source process work, this is how to do a PR, and we know it's gonna take you some more time, but in the end, you're gonna have a better result, and try to push some research to try to do, and we are part of them like yes, if you shared paper, you shared data, but you need us to share the code, and this is, we have all the code there, so we try to push this idea in the research world that you should be doing that. We did a few things, before we opened the old code, we did a lot of cleanup around the, converting most of the JavaScript to TypeScript, we found a lot of unused variable, or we found variable that didn't exist anywhere that we use, some part was not going to clear why it worked. There's a lot of dependency creep, especially if you prototype a small thing, you end up import the dependency, like it's easier in PM and port, and then you have something, so we try to make sure we clear up some of the dependencies, and we have a few research professionals in the lab to do that. It's obviously an open source, this is the GitHub status, there's 450 issues still open, it's not all bugs, a lot of them are just new idea, but it's a start, it's a start, a work in progress, we're starting on it. There's a lot of stuff we want to do, like especially in the ease of use UI stuff, like just make things easier to do, a lot of performance improvement to do, like right now, I have imported all the data for early, I think I would have like put my tool a little bit to a stall, like Montreal is a bit the maximum size we have right now, but we're gonna do improvement as we go through. As for my initial problem, what I did, I did the accessibility map from my place, and did a calculation, a batch calculation for every five minute slot during the day, so from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for every slot of five minutes, and this is all the dot that we have here, so I did plot, what's the size of the accessibility area I have during the day, and you can see there's a few dips in there that kind of prove my theory of like, oh, there's a problem, and there's a big dip around 10.30 there that I reduced my accessibility size from like 75 square kilometer to about 65, and that's like more than 10% drop, and that's kind of significant, so I'm not a transit scientist, but I see there's a problem there and like something to investigate a bit more, so hopefully we'll prove that there's a problem and I can get better bus line in my area. Thank you. If you have any question, I think we have a couple of minutes. Yeah, sorry, I came in late. I didn't even know this was going on. Sorry, I'm losing my voice. So a question I had is so effective, and this is perhaps in room guard to my coming in late, is this all an attempt to improve what exists for the routes and infrastructure that exists only or do you have a component that looks at what exists, sees the sub-optimality of it and has the ability to either input or track or project costs that could be improved because in a lot of cases, particularly in America, less so in Europe and probably less so in Canada, that's a very big problem, particularly things like eminent domain and the rather spectacular costs that can be occurred, but ways to mitigate those. So I mentioned we have an optimization component. It doesn't do everything right now, especially automatically for planning and building, but if you can just put your existing network and we'll find optimization and then even remove route that doesn't useful or maybe just change route, like okay, you can convert these two route by one and it's gonna be as efficient as before. It's in the tool, right now it's only accessible in the CLI, we are working on adding a UI on top of that, but it's something that is in the core, needs improvement and needs maybe more intelligence into it, but it's something that is in there. The questions? Couple. On a similar theme, does the tool have functionality for looking at trade-offs, like we're taking away a lane of the road to put in train tracks? That's a really good questions, and there's always the question like, can you do the dedicated bus line and what's gonna be the impact? We don't do that, but that's a really good idea and patches are welcome. I think you'll be the last question. So I just found out about a cool project that one of the bus agencies in the Bay Area is doing with the California Department of Transportation and that is transit signal priority, where the bus generally gets a green light and cars that would be turning in front of the bus get a red light. Is that supported and if so, how much difference does it make? That's something that is in the tool and that would need to improve the routing algorithm. I don't know the detail, I know it does improve bus latency because the bunching of the bus behind and at the light, that's a big problem. I would have to ask my colleague, who are the transit professional, what's the actual impact? It's not something we have in the tool. I don't really consider that when you do the bus routing, how much time it has improved, but something definitely to put in the to do this. Yeah, so this will be a comment and then maybe we'll turn into a question, but I used to work for a transportation startup and I know related to the question, if you take away a lane in the road and you replace it with a train, like where are the pros, cons? And for our startup, we were looking at, for the tentative vehicle that we would have had, you're looking at the headway between the vehicles that you need to maintain, which ultimately feeds into the throughput. So I guess I walked in a little late, but is that something you could potentially add to your tool, looking at the headway of either the vehicles or trains and then ultimately being able to use that to compare throughputs. And when I say throughputs, there's vehicle throughputs and then there's also passengers on board, like total throughput, just things to consider. I don't know if there's... I think we have some of that. Obviously you can put different frequencies and different pacing of your vehicle. We don't do comparison between like, especially like car vehicle at this moment versus like buses or the capacity. We can do, especially when you do the simulation, we can do like load simulation and you know, like, okay, you need that, I mean, you know how many people per time per vehicle is gonna be in your vehicle, but I don't think we go as deep as the analysis that you are talking about. But yeah, we have a lot of ideas to improve and hopefully at some point get more people involved, especially if there's many transit agencies. The idea here is to, there's other commercial tool that do that, but obviously we prefer to do in open source and be able to collaborate with research and bring new ideas and get agency that have tool that really responds to their need and like do the analysis that people think or the people can invent new way to think about transit and we love to incorporate that and share that around. I know there are a few more questions, but we have 10 minutes to transition the room to the next speaker who's gonna be talking about scraping legislative data, which is a topic near and dear to my heart and she's coming from the Open States project. So we can take maybe, I think we have one or two questions but we really do need to transition the room. So you're good, is that, you want a question or are you waving me off? Okay. Otherwise I'm still here after the talks if you cannot answer yours. Yeah, so that is very interesting. I've, you know sometimes when I travel, right, I would use sites like Sigalert.com or maybe trafficpredict.com, right? And so I'm wondering like in terms of the, you know, the real time update, right, of traffic information, how often does this site get updated, like if I look right now, what is that based off of a snapshot of traffic like 15 minutes ago, an hour ago or what? Yeah, I think the actual like congestion information is really, really hard to do. It's really hard to consider. There's not a lot of open source of information about congestion. We have access to some with some partnership with like transportation agency and stuff but it's hard to consider, it's one of the weakness of like doing analysis based on schedules. You sometimes don't consider the congestion. One thing we might want to do is to use, especially where we have the GTFS real time information, compare that to schedule and then we know, okay, for this city the line number six is always off and do better analysis based on actual real time information versus the schedule one. But it's a difficult problem to consider. Last question. Yeah, so I actually have a lot of friends that are self-engineers at LA Metro. One of the main softwares that they use is a closed source software called Remix. And so I think they'd be quite interested in this. The primary thing that Remix allows is A, integration with very big batch data, census data and B, the cost estimation. If that feature doesn't exist, I might start working on your repo actually. Is that on your timeline or roadmap to integrate that kind of cost estimation for running the line? I think there's always some bits of it, but yeah, it definitely needs to be improved in there, but that's definitely something that could be interesting to have. We don't aim to be exact in cost estimate.  And we're like, okay, and then we do some basic outside computation, but it's something that should be able to get the athletes in some way. But we can do like, bitch back, we do a lot of batch processing with the census information, so that part at least should be covered. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Ted, as I said, in this room at the top of the hour, we're gonna have a conversation about scraping legislative information from as part of the Open States project. Got breathing, good. Still? Okay, cool. He's in it. Do we have to? All right, well, let's get started. Welcome to the housecape that is scraping legislative data as an open source project. For starters, just out of curiosity, how many people here have been on any government website? All right, awesome. Keep those hands up if you enjoyed the experience and found the data that you wanted. For you, that's impressive. Oh gosh. Yeah, I was gonna say, it definitely can be a struggle. So, while legislative data is nominally public, it does tend to be buried in opaque state government websites, open states attempts to load it all, normalize it, and make it easily searchable and enable legislative tracking across every state. That is one heck of a project to take on. My name is Riley Johnson. I am officially a software engineer with plural policy, but I do identify as more of a code gremlin. I do tend to break things further before actually figuring out a fix for them. I am, we're on the data engineering team at plural, which is formerly Civic Eagle, and also this is my first time speaking at a public conference, so please bear with my anxiety. Thank you so much. Awesome. Just a disclaimer, I do adore my job. I love trying to figure out ways to get all of this data. I am not complaining, just highlighting the strangeness that we've encountered, and just some of those weird things for state sites. Originally, open states was founded at PyCon in 2009. It was the goal to standardized clean and publish all of the legislative data we could get to the public to improve civic engagement and help people understand the legislative process that creates public policy. Occasionally, also would contract with some of the state legislatures in order to standardized data and improve access, but very few states were actually interested in improving that access, and very few projects have actually made it to completion. Originally, it was part of sunlight labs until 2016, when it fell mainly on the shoulders of one of the founders, James Turk, who maintained it by solo, mostly from 2016 to 2021, when he brought the project under the plural umbrella. I got trained in as number two, and now we actually do have an entire engineering team, which is very nice, because there's a lot of weird stuff. So, Open States has scrapers for all different data types, bills, legislators, committees, events, votes, across 50 states, federal, DC, Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands. Typically, we run about over 100 a day, some at least once a day, others every couple of hours, but as you can imagine, we run into some weird kind of things. Typically, I think you don't even need to be on these websites to know that state legislation, federal legislation, is pretty slow to evolve, even with all of the different marvelous technology options that we have nowadays. Standardizing that data across state borders is absolutely insane. Fortunately, I got into the project late, so I didn't have to do a whole lot of that, but there's still a lot that we still have yet to figure out, especially when we work on new data types. Even with, processes can vary, even with how bill versions get published. For those of you who aren't familiar, bills try to edit standing law, and bill versions can differ because state legislators have different texts that they wanna add to it, things like that, they do tend to mark those up and change that edit. There is one state in particular that didn't have that digitized. They actually have all the bill versions printed out at a specific printer, put on a truck, driven to the state capital two hours away, marked up by hand by the legislators, and then driven back to the printer so that they can actually print out the new version. Very archaic, still to this day, probably still running. But fortunately, they have actually started adding bill text on their website, so normal people can access it. Another kind of weird bit, there is one state in particular where we don't have access to the vote data. They just haven't thought that it was worth it to post, like how legislators vote on specific bits of legislation, but there is one company in that state that does have that information, and they just charge whatever they want for it. So we're pretty sure that they just pay somebody to sit in there and actually record them by hand, but we haven't gotten to that point, so we'll just acknowledge that we don't have it for now. But it is kind of a weird bit. But working on this kind of stuff, one fact that I've definitely come to terms with is that legislative websites suck.  It's fairly common to be really hard to find information as a user, let alone find scrapable pages. Some websites are just interesting where you start with a new fancy landing page, and then the deeper you get into the website, it just becomes older and older versions of the internet where you're like, how is this still running? But it is running, so they don't actually change it. So you can actually see some state websites where they definitely have web pages that were designed in web one. But it is interesting to get into it because there's all different kinds of little, like when you're scraping it, you get all kinds of interesting console messages from different legislative developers, and we do tend to try into our best to find the most accurate and up-to-date sources for a lot of our data, but even then sometimes we'll find out after we've built the scraper that it just isn't updated as regularly or whatnot, so we'll have users complain to us about bills being late and things like that, but we just had no idea because we scraped from the wrong spot. Also sometimes legislative websites aren't the most secure. I don't know if anyone's that surprised by it, but there was a case where one state had a SQL injection of not-safe-for-work content on their legislator table, and we raised it as an issue with them to be like, you guys might wanna take that down and upgrade your security, which they did, but then they also accused us of doing the injection, so we've learned from that experience. Sometimes even just getting access is a trial and error challenge. With data impacting the public, you'd think it'd be easy to get all-edged as, not the case. Some state websites have implemented Cloudflare, so normal scrapers can't actually get any of the data, so we've had to find ways around that. Sometimes even with just how states have started adding this kind of data to their sites, there isn't a super clear path to get to it, even if it is on a webpage. In one case in particular, there was one state where their website wasn't super clear, it wasn't a great way to go about scraping it, and apparently the right person complained to the right other person at a conference, and we actually ended up with a napkin, with a address, and a username and password for a read-only account on their server. So that is framed in someone's office right now, but we've definitely had to come up with interesting ways to get to this stuff. Sometimes we can reach out directly to the legislative office tech team and get access or whitelisted or whatever in order to get this data, but not all of them like us or are particularly responsive, so we've had to find some interesting ways. There is another state in particular that just has a website that just has some garbage webpages, but we've figured out a way to forge calls to their not-so-public APIs, so it's fine, we get it somehow. Another thing that I've come to learn about this kind of getting into this stuff is that just anomalies occur. There's just some things where I just have absolutely no idea what's happening or why they decided to go about this, but we have a custom-built task runner that creates warnings every time that a script fails five times in a row, because most of the time it's self-feeling, there's just weird anomalies that'll happen, but most of the time somebody internally fixes it, so it'll run the next time around. But there was particularly one case where the Office of Legislative Services kind of fell off the face of the earth. The website of the office itself was still live, but the application that we were using to scrape data and that they used to publish any information about the bills that they had completely disappeared, fell off the face of the earth. I didn't know what to do, so I ended up, I emailed and kept getting delivery and complete errors, like one after another tried for like two, I think Gmail tried for like two weeks straight to try and deliver this email, and it didn't work, so I had to get over my millennial fear of phones and call. No one answered, so to my joy, but also confusion. And I had to search the internet to see if this was still a funded place, if this was gonna close, there was absolutely nothing. But lo and behold, the app came back several weeks later, like everything was totally fine, and it's just something I had to accept. And sometimes another factor that I've had to explain or to get to is that New Tech is not always better. There's definitely been a lot of new websites that have come out in the time that I've been working on Open States, and clean websites are really nice to scrape, and APIs are also the dream, really, to get all of the data that we need. But sometimes dreams are really fragile, and they can't actually make it through a successful scrape, even if there are only like five things on that API. So having, I've raised a couple issues with those state legislatures on their stability of the API. Sometimes they get back to me, sometimes they don't. Sometimes it improves, sometimes it doesn't. And occasionally, sometimes they add an API, and it might be a little bit like too good. For instance, one added an API while we were creating new legislators scrapers, and we got a lot of the information that we are requiring for that. Like easily got access to their name, their district that they represent, email, office information, addresses, voicemail, stuff like that. Also got some benefits like occupation, but then also got into things like home address, spouse information, license plate, and occasionally a social security number. I wish I was joking, but that was definitely something that was showing up on their API. I don't know why it would be on that part of it. It should be behind HR, but that's on them. We did raise that as an issue. Fortunately, this time we weren't accused of doing anything with the information, but it was just an interesting case for potential legislator identity theft. But so these are some of the issues that we've run into with getting all this stuff, and we do make it work most of the time. We do have some bugs and broken things, like currently we're a little bit behind on build data from Iowa. We're getting throttled by them, and I don't know what's up, but we do get a very comprehensive list, or data set for the public. That being said, we do have a lot of different touch points for people to get access to this data. So we have openstates.org, which is a public-facing website where anybody can track and find information about their legislators, bill information, things like that. We do have two APIs. One of them is about to be depreciated, so I'm very excited about that one. And we do also have all of this code on GitHub, so it is open source. Anybody can contribute, anybody can work on our code, but since it is open source, we also know that since it is forkable, some of our competitors do use our code, and at least one contributes back regularly, so that's okay with us.  And also being an open source project, we have a lot of different ways to communicate. So we've got the contact email for those who wanna go that route. We do have a Slack and a Matrix instance for people who wanna use more of that messenger kind of thing. We do have Twitter for people who are still on Twitter and want to tweet at us. And for those who are technically literate, we do have a GitHub issues repo where we have a Q and A discussion section and then also templates that allow you to post issues that you're seeing on the website. As expected though, templates do tend to get ignored a little bit. And we've also got some pretty thorough documentation. We have an air table for new session information that is updated as regularly as I can, especially when people care about new legislators in the state and things like that, making sure that people know when things are gonna be scraped, when things are gonna be accurate, stuff like that. We try to keep quarterly blog posts going so that people know exactly what's going on with the project and where we're going and who's working on it. And then also we have our own little summit that we've been trying to do more often. But since we have all of these different ways to communicate, we get all kinds of different kinds, all different types of communication issues. So one of my favorites and one of the most common is something like this. This is a ticket that just says district, question mark and there's no content. This is very common. I get a lot of emails that are just either one word or wrong legislator and it's like, I can't do anything to help you but thank you for reaching out. And sometimes they do get a little bit more specific. Here's an issue about specific circumstances which gives us a little bit more detail but I don't know if they're talking about an action or a bill text or there's nothing about even what jurisdiction I should start looking in. So incredibly helpful. Occasionally we do get, this is a whole bunch of texts that is actually meant for members of the legislator or the legislation and about gun rights and stuff like that. Just because we aggregate the data doesn't mean that we actually have impact on it. But it is what it is. And then we also tend to get a lot of questions like this one where it's about how bills actually impact daily life in one way or another. These actually kind of break my heart to get because I do wanna be able to answer them but I have no idea. We do just have to kind of remind them we just collect the information and we don't have the expertise to actually answer any of these and they should be reaching out to other people at state level or wherever to get that kind of information. But it is an interesting little bit. Last, like the last thing that I wanna share that I've definitely learned about doing all of this is that it is absolutely worth all of the chaos and like little road bumps. Truly like doing this makes a difference for a lot of people and definitely provides the opportunity to see more clearly what's happening with the legislation. So I couldn't imagine doing anything else. If any of these things are interesting to you or like seem like problems that you'd like to help solve please help us. We could definitely use more contributors and we do have a running backlog of issues that are in different varieties to take on. We do use fancy new Python stuff and try to cave everything up dated as much as possible but could always use more help and I went through this way faster than I thought I would but I hope you enjoyed and this is my contact information and now we're ready for questions. So a couple of questions. I assume you're using Python and you're pretty much developing whatever framework you're developing yourselves. And it's not based off a beautiful soup or something like that. It's I think based on Scribblib. Okay. But we do we've got a couple of different types of all of our Scribbers are written in Python. They are using different frameworks though. So again maybe a naive question. Did you ever look at the combination of nuts and solar and then post processing that data? Because you know you can quickly evolve what you're looking for what you get back and how you can structure it. It may not work for legislative bills. I'm not really sure but it's it's pretty general purpose as long as you're looking for specific things you can tune it you know when you know trial and error very quickly and get you know you're familiar with nuts and solar and you can also if for some reason you see you know an easy opening to enhance it. You know obviously it's open source it's an Apache project or set of Apache projects. Obviously people know solar with elastic search and Lucene are the two bases for that commercial product. So yeah I'd be interested maybe afterwards talk and find out how you're doing things and maybe throw some things in there. Yeah I definitely was not around for those kind of talks but would be interested to hear about that and also I will be doing one of the up-up-scaled talks later about the scraping library that we are currently trying to use. So well promo for that talk. This is really interesting and I'm looking forward to when you replicate this at the county level.  Perfect. How many counties are there in the United States? Could you give us just a little more information about what kinds of stuff you're scraping? I mean is it just bill text? Is it bill reports? Is it testimony? Is it budget data? Is it all of the above? That's my first question. And then my second question. Do you guys have any kind of relationship with the National Conference of State Legislatures? I'm gonna answer the second one first. I think we do also just because I don't want to forget what it was. And then first question, yes for the most part we mostly most of our information is mostly bills and resolutions. We do have some kind of like stuff around fiscal notes and stuff like that. At the legislation level it's most of the time we just try to get like the basics of it. So like the title, different actions on it about data versions. We don't actually process for bill text. That has definitely been something that we're interested in including on open states since it is kind of a huge thing that actually or like people need access to. We only provide the links to it. But then yeah so we've got most of that kind of stuff for bill data. We have information on the legislators. We also do have a find your legislator application so you can put in your address and find who represents you at state and federal level. It might not be entirely accurate right now because redistricting is kind of screwed with us. But yeah we've got stuff like that. Committee data events, hearing events and things like that and how they relate back to bills. But good question. How many people are on the project and how is it funded? So currently I think we have like six people on the engineering team that can talk to us on any one point. I do most of the daily operations now. We are backed by a VC company. So we do have a bit of money in the back so we don't have to worry about it too much anymore. That was part of why it got brought to Plural in the first place was it's not sustainable to do just for one person without funding. There we go, I'll repeat that. Jesse, the CTO of Plural is giving a talk on that tomorrow morning so if you are interested in more about that kind of stuff, stay tuned. I have a quick question. Have you partnered with any, if you're getting all these questions on your site about people who are wondering, have legal questions or whatever, have you partnered with like the EFF or anything like that so you can just be like, here, we'll just pass you right along to this public, you know, a Southern Poverty Law Center or whatever. She's like, here, we'll just pass you along to these guys and they know what to do. No, but we definitely should. That would be really helpful. This, Plural is for profit, yeah. Do you have or do you have any plans to add functionality to send like email notifications on my specific legislators at the state level whenever they vote on things like GovTrack does at the federal level? Yeah, not on vote data. We do have tracking on bills so you can like get know where bills are at and if there's action on those but not on specific votes or legislators themselves. That would be a good one. Any other questions? Oh, oh yeah, I thought you were just going to go. We got time. You might get the sense I work in government which is why I'm like totally fascinated and I am so sorry I didn't even know this existed so I'm glad I'm here. I can think of a million reasons to answer each of the issues that you raised like why those things happen from underfunding of technology at the government level to legacy systems to all of the stuff but I am curious if y'all ever try to do anything like rank states in terms of who's more transparent and who's less in terms of making data available and God, I just have to ask do you see a difference between blue states and red states? Okay. I will not be answering question two first this time. Let's see. So for the first question, yes we actually did historically have a map of the states that gave exactly like a ranking grade to each of the states on like how much data we had and how what the coverage was that has kind of fallen by the wayside. I'm actually not entirely sure where that code is anymore but that is actually one thing that I've been pushing for with this year of actually having time and interest where people want to know exactly how much data we have in each of the different areas. So that will be coming hopefully this year. As to the second question, I will say yes I do notice the difference. I'm not gonna get into specifics. Yeah, let me think about how to phrase this question. As far as are there any resources for legislative bodies for how to like if they want to make their data more accessible and transparent, does plural offer any like white papers or documentation if states want to go that route and do you guys think that there's even, if it's worth sort of articulating a standard for how to structure legislative data? Yeah, that is a good question. I don't recall there. Like I think there is like with the historical stuff about doing that contracting work I think there is guidelines that we do have around like what would make this kind of stuff more accessible, but it is some specific on state per state. I don't think that there is a ruling body that would be able to make all of the states obey and get all of this stuff out, but it would be an interesting option. Hi, have you noticed a grouping of are there certain software vendors that you see over and over again providing state legislative data? I'm looking at the city and county data and you know, Granicus was the 800 pound gorilla, but then they started buying their smaller competitors during the pandemic. And so now they're probably 95% of the market in that case. Do you see that at the state level or is it just kind of a dog's breath of different vendors? I mean, we do have quite a few competitors that do have that kind of information at state and federal level. It doesn't really seem to be a whole lot and they do tend to buy up more of the smaller organizations that like get more state specific. I know that there's a bunch of state specific trackers that are available where it's just like very state specific, but not, there's not that whole much. What's your business model? Tomorrow talk, I don't know that. I just do the code monkey bits. They're questions? Cool, I guess I have good reflexes. Hi, I actually do something similar to this so I'm gonna talk to you after this but with different sorts of data. But my question, cause this is something that drives me crazy is how do you keep track of all a hundred and something of your scrapers? Like what do you do to orchestrate that? As I said, we have a custom built task runner. It's definitely like something that I don't blame anybody for glossing over and hearing. It doesn't work super well, but it does do the thing. And yeah, so that keeps track of like most of the latest runs in the last like, I think it's like 20 times that it's run and that's kind of a nice way to, it's very clear coded on like green if it actually ran or red if it failed. So nifty, yeah. Apache Airflow. Oh, well, I mean, yeah, we're trying. We'll get there. Again, I meant to get ahead of myself before tomorrow's talk, she won't be coming tomorrow, but so you're sort of owned by a private company but your data is public, you're gonna continue to operate publicly. There's no plan to put a wall around it or charge for it, although maybe your funding source probably gets priority access or say in development decisions. Is that sort of correct? Yeah, actually, and I can get a little bit more into the background of that because I actually started off as an engineer for Plurl. It is, so we ingested a lot of open states data originally and we, I like to call it kind of Google Docs but for legislation, so we just like use all of the standardized data and then make it nice and friendly so people can collaborate on it. And that's how I kind of got trained in because like I was working on adapters to get that like the state code into that project and then got into open states and contributing back to make sure that like data was accurate through that. And so currently, yes, we are planning on keeping open states public access and everybody can keep doing that kind of stuff. We do have further functionality and like stuff like bill text behind a sort of paywall. We do have a premium version but still in progress on that. But yes, we will keep this free for forever. Yeah, yeah, of course. Any other questions? One in the back, one sec. Getting your steps in. 10,000, right? Earlier you mentioned that sometimes web scrapers in this go down, you don't necessarily know why in the instance of an outage, I guess in like a traditional setting, you have an outage, you let your stakeholders know you have an outage. Who is your stakeholder and how do you let them know? Good question. Most of the time we don't. It's definitely like if they notice, they notice but there's so much going on where we can't really tell like who cares about which specific thing that it's kind of hard to know with open states like exactly who to warn about these kinds of things. We do try to get ahead of the curve as much as possible. Like I mentioned with that like find your legislator application, I tried to be as upfront as possible with people about like expectations about when that data was going to be updated, like how that was going to be completed. Definitely didn't anticipate it to be as much of a problem with redistricting, but we do the best we can on like that kind of stuff. And that application is a majority of traffic to our website, so that's the one where I'm trying to warn people about. All right, now any questions? Ah, one more. That's fine, I'm at line 9,800. It's cool, we'll be close. Are there similar projects or competitors? Yes, or no? Not that I have the open data side of it. Yeah, also California's not as good as you think. You just mentioned redistricting a few times. Is there a, I mean, I imagine this has a whole other layer of complexity to what you're developing and what you have running here in production, but is there a plan to maybe have pre versus post redistrict data and see how that compares or just for now just say, hey, we're gonna do only current legislation with the current district thing and assembly? Yeah, we do, since we only have like the bandwidth for like maintaining one source of shapefiles, we do try to be as explicit like that we are doing current representatives in current districts, which has been a problem, but we definitely have interest in both sets, so would be good to keep. Hi, thanks for your work. I did have a question, so I'm looking into plural as well as open states and I see it, the focus is more on legislative information and in terms of other facets of government or other departments, let's say like DMV for example or other kind of areas of government, right? There's a lot of different sections. Do you guys have plans to move out of policy into different sectors or are there any other like similar projects that you're aware of that are tackling different areas of government? There are definitely other projects that cover other aspects of it, like what is it? Like know who, like more of the like, we've gotten a lot of questions about like if we're gonna have stuff around campaign funds and things like that and there's other projects that already do that kind of stuff. We are probably going to be exploring different stuff outside of legislation, probably not under open states itself, but we are interested in other types of our branching out beyond just legislative. Good question. And it's in this room. No one can ever leave. Hi, so if your code is getting data and normalizing it, how do you, I guess if you make a change in your code, how do you know that it results in cleaner data coming back from wherever you're scraping it from? Like what metrics are you using? How are you getting a sense of that? Yeah, we do have some insights like into exactly like what kind of data is coming back. It is kind of hard to figure out like since there's so much happening and like like any scraper can return like thousands of bills. It is kind of hard to like get into the checking of that. Most of the time we kind of have to rely on like people flagging stuff on the open states out of things in the other application plural. We do have a dashboard that's around like how many bills have versions and like all that kind of stuff. And we can get a little bit more into my new details and feed that kind of bug fix or like things that happen on that side into open states and fix it upstream. So it's kind of cool that way. All right, well, I think we're done with questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. And for all of you who are asking how you can contribute and how you can do stuff like this, our next talk in this room in 19 minutes is how developers can get involved with civil at the open government. Yeah, or it's almost 5 p.m. Well, hi, my name is Margaret Tucker. I am a policy manager at GitHub. And I guess I should start by thanking you all for being here at 5 p.m. on a Friday. It's really rainy, I'm just, yeah. Thanks all for sitting in. And so I'm here to talk about how developers can get involved in public policy. The talk that went before me, Riley, was fantastic. And I could tell from the audience questions that a lot of you are pretty versed in how developers can get involved in public policy. You might be developers who are actively engaged in this. So I hope this isn't too basic of a talk, but I'm hoping that in the Q&A, maybe people can talk about their own projects and we can kind of get into some specific regulatory developments that are relative to developers. So first off, I'm gonna explain how policy advocacy works at GitHub. Obviously we started off as a startup, a lot bigger now, 100 million developers. We have a policy team. So I can kind of explain how we do our own policy advocacy strategy. And then I'll talk about some policy developments relevant to developers that you may have heard of and be engaged in, maybe you have questions about. And then we can get into how developers can get involved in policy. I'll feature some organizations that I'm familiar with, but again, this is not a comprehensive list. I encourage anyone who's engaged in something to share it, connect after it, I love that. So yeah, so let's get started. So I guess our policy strategy is centered around the idea that developers are important policy stakeholders. So GitHub was acquired by Microsoft because we have a huge amount of developers who have really important interests and it's important for us to protect developer interests, maintain developer trust. And so our policy advocacy is both internal, making sure that what we're doing at our company aligns with developer interests, listening to developers and trying to, when we mess up, working from there. And then also advocating specifically for certain policy developments that we want or we don't want and just making sure that the developer voice is heard from policymakers. And I should say honestly, I think that we are one of the kind of largest developer voices in policy debates just because we're a large and resource company and we are able to meet with policymakers. But that said, we also have an open policy repo where people can get in touch with us, where I check it, our Twitter, we check. So we're really like, I just want to put out there that we kind of try to both open source and engage with community when we have anything going on in the policy team. I guess this is our little, you know, mission statement. One thing I should say is our director of policy, Mike Lynx-Fair, he's a developer. He was really involved in Creative Commons and is an active Wikipedia. I'm not a developer, but I am a geographer by trade or by education and worked in OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. I came over from GitHub from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, really weird year because it was pandemic and then the election transition it was a really weird time to be in Science and Technology Policy. And I've also worked for Slate. So we have a really big mix in the room on our team. We also have a staff software engineer. That's kind of a funny story and I will get into why we now have a software engineer. Part of the reason you might have heard of a thing called YouTube DL, anybody? We'll get into that, we'll get into that. Yeah, thanks. So yeah, let's get started. So there is really notable increasing policy maker interests in AI, ever heard of it. Open source security and platform liability. So these are just a sampling of I would say some of the more relevant pieces that we're following right now. So there's the EU AI Act and then Canada also has an AI and data act. On the open source security side, really it seems like every country wants to take action on open source security and we're trying to make sure that open source interests, especially the people who spend their voluntary time working on software represented. There's also just last week I think that the White House announced a US national cybersecurity strategy. There's actually some pieces they really got right about that so we can talk about that. And then there was the securing open source act of 2022 that was introduced last year but it probably will be reintroduced. So look forward to that. And then on the platform liability side, there was the US Supreme Court. I'm sorry that weeks are kind of blurry with all of this but the end of February they heard oral arguments in the Gonzalez v. Google case. It's the first time that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has come before the Supreme Court. I don't know if you've all heard the Jeff Cossup phrase the 26 words that created the internet. Is that familiar? So, or maybe have you heard the kind of the rumor that Al Gore says he created the internet? Anyone heard that? Well, he took a part in drafting the legislation that did enable the internet to come about.  I work a lot on platform liability and while GitHub is not the most, typically these things are taking aim at social media. GitHub is a platform, platforms that are way smaller than us are also impacted by platform liability legislation. And so typically with that sort of advocacy, we're explaining why things should be tailored to risk profile, why things should focus on the actual things that say amplify speech or get really specific about what you mean when you want to dive in or narrow 230. And yeah, so also I should mention the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, both of these have passed. And one thing to note about these, I was listening in on some hearings last week at the Senate Judiciary Committee and they were talking about, oh man, the EU passed the Digital Markets Act, why can't we pass more anti-trust? Oh man, the EU's passed the Digital Services Act, why can't we have anything going on in the US side? So I'm definitely noticing a current of US policymakers looking to the EU and saying, hey, they can do it, why can't we? So I think that also is kind of a general trend and we'll see how that is. So yeah, and also again, I'm sure all of you are very familiar with this legislation or not, but would love comments on any of those developments. So I'd say that one of the pieces of kind of a policy advocacy that I think Github has done the most for and I'm really proud of is how we've advocated for co-collaboration on the copyright side. Are any of you familiar with the EU copyright directive? No one? Okay, well I can tell you that story then. So this was in, I think 2019, it was before my time at Github, but the EU introduced the copyright directive that would have introduced filtering and obviously that's really concerning when it comes to open source code. Obviously code could be flagged, it could create a lot of issues in the software supply chain and so we were able to get developers to provide comments and why mandatory filters would make sense on co-collaboration and further work and we were able to gain an exemption for open source and co-collaboration. So that was just one example. I think sometimes people, I obviously don't wanna sound overly optimistic but I think oftentimes when it comes to tech and science policy, we don't have as, the partisan lines aren't drawn as much and I would say that policy makers are really open to kind of technical expertise and when it comes to developers explaining hey, you don't know how this works but this is how this development would impact me is really important. Also again on the liability side, smaller companies, organizations, independent developers, all of those people, you might not have the resources to advocate for yourself because you're busy doing your work but policy makers do wanna hear from you so I'll get into some ways that channels where if you have a comment, you can provide that and let people whose job it is to amplify it, say something but yeah so a couple other updates on the copyright side so that technical measures, filters, all of that has been kind of a big push so we also participated in copyright consultations with the US Copyright Office this past year, we'll see what happens from there, these were kind of in relation to the Smart Copyright Act and it hasn't moved in a while so we'll see but there is a lot of push in this kind of idea that more of the internet should be scanned and filtered and we're trying to explain why it makes no sense for that to be applied to code for a host of reasons that I'm sure you're familiar with and then this last one is just pointing out, we filed an amicus brief recently with the Ute case so this relates to YouTube DL, we have a blog post on GitHub has a blog and we have a policy section, I encourage you to read it, our staff software engineer Kevin Chu was very involved in that and I guess I could explain YouTube DL a little bit when YouTube DL was subject to a DMCA takedown, we didn't have the kind of expertise to review these claims and so it did get taken down and it caused a lot of downstream impacts and that's the thing of open source code is it's used in, it's like 97% of code bases and so one takedown can have really massive unintended consequences and so after that happened and after we kind of changed our policies in response to that, we brought on a staff software engineer to review our DMCA claims so kind of have that understanding, he's also a lawyer, he's really awesome, I wish he was here, but he's not and yeah, so we can move on to this next one. Have any of you heard of the EU Cyber Resilience Act? Does that come up? Okay, this is a big one and it's new but it is a bit concerning so the EU introduced this proposal for a Cyber Resilience Act and that was starting, I think in May or so there was an initial consultation and it's really focused on kind of the single market of digital products and trying to assign responsibility for cyber security of those products. Now this one is, it's a complicated one and I have to be honest with you, I'm not personally as engaged with it, this one has gone to my boss, Mike Lynx Fair, so it's a very complicated one and we're really trying to get the open source community more informed about it so I encourage you this one, we're trying to get more of an explainer and more information out but yeah, so I'll kind of get into the details that the EU Cyber Resilience Act and also some opportunities for you to provide comment if you're interested. So yeah, so this one is particularly relevant to the open source community because there's a lot of growing policy maker interests in open source security and I just wanna say, this isn't a bad thing. The open source community needs policy makers to champion open source as a driver of innovation and also frankly, the open source community needs policy makers to play a supportive role in securing open source. So there's a lot of oh, open source, we need to do this but it's like okay, let's provide resources, let's provide support, let's take some of the responsibility onto the end users of this or not the end users, people who supply products that are used by end users. So in the case of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, we've been engaged in the consultation process, providing recommendations on how to improve the proposal so it reflects the realities of software development, especially the open source ecosystem. So some of the comments that we provided and have pushed is that open source software is made available for anyone to benefit from always with disclaimers of warranty and liability and developers work hard to make secure code and should be supported in doing so but it has to be businesses that integrate open source into their products who are ultimately responsible for the security of their products. And this again, a lot of things in the tech world boils down to liability. So if there is a vulnerability, whose responsibility is it to patch it? And we're trying to emphasize that the largest most resource organization should have, that's where the responsibility should lie. And so public policy can either break the economic model of contributing to open source or it can incentivize it. So it can incentivize businesses, building products to support developers and contribute upstream. So carrots and sticks, like what do we want? And I think some concerns we've had with the CRA is there's a lot of sticks, there's not enough carrots. So that's kind of a concern. One development that we think has gotten a lot right is the US cyber security strategy. I put a clip, you probably can see it better than I can but this is just a screenshot of two points that I think they really get right of rebalancing responsibility and realigning incentives. And so I encourage you to read that. We'll see how that moves forward. There's been a lot of increasing White House interest in open source security. And I have to say I'm optimistic. I think that there's been a decent amount of integration trying to hear from the community. And yeah, so we'll see how all of that boils out. That said, I will say I am optimistic also with the Cyber Resilience Act because of the copyright directive. I think in general the EU is supportive of open source and maybe doesn't understand it as much but we can provide them the tools and provide them the information to explain that. Oh, and then this one, this is more of a happy story for the most part but on the global availability side, something that we've really focused on on the policy team is trying to call for global availability, immigration reform. And one example recently is that, so there was this announcement recently, I think it was in September that the US extended the general licensing expansion for online services in Iran. But GitHub was already available in Iran because we went through this whole process to get into licensing expansion. We're also working on ones in, I believe it's Syria and Crimea. And so this one, we're kind of, this is more of, I would say like within industry of trying to push for companies to get licensing expansions especially when they provide internet infrastructure and digital services that are really important for movement, it's important for just people functioning. So yeah, so that's a big one as well. And let's see, okay. So I guess we're moving into the third part of this talk which is how can developers get involved in public policy? So there's a lot of issues, a lot of things that are specific to developers and specific to developer interests and clearly policy makers want to do something but they don't necessarily have the technical expertise to do it. So there's a couple things. So you could work with the public sector, you could run for office, maybe start with getting involved at the local level, maybe become Audrey Tang who's a really cool open source developer and Taiwan's minister of digital affairs but you could also support public sector open source initiatives. There's a couple, I have them on here. I'm sure there's more in this room of people who are working on really cool stuff but yeah, there's fellowships, hackathons, public service, public private partnerships. If you care about the direction of tech policy, if you want to see something move then be the change, get involved, use your skills to make a difference. A really cool example, I apologize, I realize this text is way too small to see but in the right corner, the sovereign tech fund, that was a really cool advancement that we've seen. It's the German sovereign tech fund and it is funding, it's not just for security but it's funding that's been put in place by the German government to secure open source and it's really exciting. We want to see more of that. Even for like, I would say smaller package registries, there's a lot of more kind of like, I would say community based like efforts that should be funded. Couple other examples, Code for America, US Digital Core, Tech Congress is really cool. That one is a fellowship on the hill that is specifically for technologists. So there's a lot of examples. Obviously, I think that we kind of get focused on our own careers but you can kind of think of, what are my skills, how can they contribute to what I want to see in the world and think about that. So yeah, lots of different ways to get involved. One that I'm particularly passionate about and I'm sure that a lot of you are involved, oh gosh, the organization, ignore that. But I encourage people to participate in ecosystem stewardship. These are just a couple examples of how many open source organizations are creating their own governance, trying to figure things out. And then also with that, it's not just stewardship of your own ecosystem but also advocating. So organizing and advocating for what you want to see. So just a couple examples. I did a lot with the OpenStreetMap when I was starting out and they have a really interesting organizing body so it's really cool. OpenForm Europe is a very, they are very organized and frankly I would love to see something like that in the US and more across the world. They're pretty cool and you know, I have Linux foundation on there but OpenSSF is a huge one. But yeah, these are just a small example of organizations. And yeah, even if it's like, say like contributing more on the maintainer side, just I think that sometimes we just consume things and we don't necessarily, maybe you guys, you're at this conference so you probably are much more involved in the governance of open source. But I think encouraging people to see themselves less as a consumer of open source than more of a contributor and maintainer of the broader ecosystem is really important. And so I'm almost through. Another one is being a policy champion at your organization. So even if you're say, not in a policy role, frankly I think that sometimes people who aren't in policy roles have much better feedback, they can point out things. I have really interesting talks with all the staff engineers at GitHub. So share how policies impact to you and encourage organizations to take a stand. It could be on things about tech and also could be on like other political issues. Sometimes I think that people see, if it's an organization or a corporation, there's a little bit of cynicism when they take a stand but it does matter, especially the people within the organization. So don't think that people aren't listening. And then also encourage open source within your organization, contribute to the advancement and stewardship of the open source community. Say you work at a company and you can say, hey, can I spend Fridays working on open source projects? Something like that. Think about how you can bring open source into your organization and also lead it. And then finally, offer your skills for public good. This is a big one. So you can advance causes that matter to you, volunteer, skilled-based volunteering. I'm sure there's a lot of really interesting projects that you can get involved in. GitHub is a social impact website that highlights those but also there's so many others. And even something that's not related to tech, I'd say that most things have a need for engineering and development capabilities. And yeah, and then finally get in touch with us. I say this honestly. I run the GitHub policy repo. You can get in touch there. We read the, there's spam sometimes but for the most part we do read things and I do encourage people to get in touch. If you have thoughts, we also have an email but the repo is really the best way. I guess if you're interested in specifically like changes at GitHub, we also have a 30 day notice and comment period when we're making changes to our site policy. And I honestly, I do think it's a cool thing. I wish that more companies did that. And we do, even with those changes, we do try to internalize them and provide people with explanation for why we're keeping something or why we're changing something in response to feedback. You can follow our Twitter as long as Twitter exists. And it's at GitHub policy. You can also read our blog. Most of our Twitter to be honest is just articles from our blog. And we do a lot of, I would say kind of like explainers. And then when we say like participate in amicus brief or attend like a consultation or something, we explain like what we did, what we said, like how we're showing up for developers there. And then also just share how policy impacts you in any way. And that's both within GitHub and not. I also will say this is not on the list but we do have, there's a blog post that kind of outlines this but GitHub has had a lot more focus on data and policy partnership. So if you have a request for using GitHub data, you can also get in touch with us about that. There's a blog post. We mainly work of like academic organizations but yeah, we're trying to provide more. An exciting thing was on the OECD like innovation index, contributions on GitHub are now used as like kind of a innovation index signifier. So I think that's cool. Yeah, so I guess that, I think it's just Q and I now. So I get it's five p.m. Friday. If you guys wanna go, no worries. But if you have any questions about some of the policy developments I got into, anything that you want to promote, like I'm not anything but anything related to policy that you would like to share, I encourage that. And so I have this mic so if you want to say something you'll say it and then I will repeat the question and then answer it. So yeah, any questions or comments? The blue hat? Yeah, okay and I will repeat the question. Hopefully I get most of it right. So there was an instance where someone who was the maintainer of a project that was used by the US Geological Survey. Oh, okay, gotcha, gotcha. To be honest, I don't know that specific incident. I encourage you to share in our policy repo so I can educate myself. But I know that Gallic Mallware is a big one. We're participating, Github is, MPM is like within Github. And so like MPM