stion, what were the decisions that the principal was making in which he didn't have the authority to make as noted in the external auditor's report? The reason that I included that was because there was no evidence other than some information that Mr Doyle had offered a severance package to a member of staff that was— Percent pay increase? Well, there was the 19 per cent pay increase, but there was also the 18-month severance package that was mentioned by one of the remuneration committee members this morning. The letter was also sent in February 2013 from Mr Doyle to the member of staff offering 18-month severance when there was, at that point, no other agreement to that package. He was making those decisions without referring to the remuneration committee or the audit committee or, indeed, anyone else? Where that one probably would have gone would have been the HR committee, but I'm not aware of it having done so. The audit committee has come up in discussion in this particular session, and I'm not aware of the membership of the audit committee at the time. To the previous panel, when I posed the questions, I highlighted that members were members of other committees in the college. Was there any crossover in terms of membership of the audit committee and of the remuneration committee? I believe that there was, but without checking specifically, I wouldn't like to be sure today. Okay, that's fine, thank you. Can I just clarify whether Mr Doyle attended any of the audit committee meetings? Mr Doyle attended audit committee meetings. He was there in his capacity as principal. There was normally an element within the agenda for him to give a brief update to the audit committee members about what had been happening in the college and perhaps make comment about specific things that were happening. He was also there to provide advice and answer questions on individual items on the agenda. If they need a rose, he wasn't a member of the committee, obviously. From the middle of 2013 onwards, he didn't attend the committee any more, but that wasn't necessarily unusual in general. It was unusual in Cotebridge's context. I was just looking at this from the outside in and looking at the checks and balances that are in place. Paid into Mr Doyle's account was £304,000 in the 25th of October, so that's a lot of money to be paid into somebody's account. We've been advised by the Scottish Funding Council that they've prevented this as much as possible from ever happening again. The process has been followed here, and it's pretty straightforward. Somebody's agreed something at a committee. The director of finances arranged for this money to be paid into his account. How do you stop that from happening? If we say that the auditor should be made aware of this and somebody within the college doesn't do that, do you not feel that we should be able to recover the money then if that process hasn't been followed through? I think that we need quite a lot of legal review of that. In the end, the conclusion that I came to was that the college board members were entitled to make the decisions that they made. At that time, the responsibilities of the board members were that they could make the decisions that they had done so, and therefore the payment was legitimate. To be fair, I'm actually taking it to the next part of the process, which is paying money into somebody's account. Does it just the director of finance that says, yes, I'm going to arrange for this money to be paid in, and that's it? Nobody then says, this is £304,000, it's a lot of money. Somebody needs to get on to the external, internal auditors before we can transfer this money into somebody's account. For all we know, what kind of checks and balances are put in place to stop that from... I would expect, no matter what it was for, it doesn't matter who's agreed to it, whatever's happened, somebody says, £304,000 surely... I mean, I know of organisations who need three signatories in their check account to pay... I know of bowling clubs who have got three people who need to sign for it, so surely in a college, it's not up to one person to make that payment of £304,000 without a process that at least confirms it, it's the money that should be paid. There were processes within... Can you tell me, can you take me through that then, what I've happened, in that case? I don't know specifically what happened in that case. I know that generally there were levels of delegation in terms of who could sign off on payments within the college and any testing that we had done and that internal audit had done in the past had shown that these limits were adhered to and that authorisation processes were applied correctly, without going back and getting further in. You don't know what process was followed from Mr Doyle, so £304,000 had been paid into Mr Doyle's account. You've carried out an external audit, Mr Gray's carried out an internal audit, but we don't know what process was followed to make sure that the due diligence was there, because for all I know, one person could have agreed to give to process that amount and nobody's checked it out. No, what we know is that there was a process that had been undertaken within the college and that there was information that showed that that payment had been approved and therefore it was legitimate for it to be made. After that approval takes place, one person is responsible for making the payment now. I thank you both for your attendance this morning and I now briefly have a brief interval to allow for the next witnesses to change over. I welcome our final witnesses today, so our witnesses are, for the next panel, some order, order, please, as Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland and Angela Canning, the Assistant Director for Audit Scotland. I understand that Ms Gardner has a brief opening statement to make. I thank you for the opportunity to support the committee once again in investigating the issues raised in my report on severance arrangements at the former Coatbridge College. I welcome the committee's decision to take a call for evidence on these matters following my briefing to the committee in early September, particularly given the complex nature of the issues raised through the audit process. Since then, you've heard evidence from individuals who were responsible for governance at Coatbridge College during the murder in 2013. There has also been evidence that concerns about severance and salary enhancements were widely shared. Some of that evidence has provided helpful insight into key discussions and decisions on severance at Coatbridge College, as well as the difficult environment within the college during the murder process. However, a number of pivotal questions remain unanswered when you started your session this morning, in particular about the timing of the events on which I reported, the information that was available to the Immuneration Committee in carrying out their responsibilities and the role played by Bigot Bailey in advising at the Immuneration Committee. Those need to be addressed if lessons are to be learned from what happened at Coatbridge College and public confidence restored in the ability of colleges to manage public funds openly, effectively and ethically. I therefore welcome the opportunity to explore those questions further with members today, and I'll be happy to do so again in future if it assists the committee and also citizens, taxpayers, staff and students across Scotland to gain a full and clear picture of what happened in this case. Okay, thank you, Ms Callaghan. I'll just open questions by referring you to Exhibit 2 of your report. You'll see here from the bullet points starting with the principle making decisions that he didn't have the authority to make. I see you've raised a number of other points in the bullet points, but I think we've fared from the external auditor in connection with the decisions that were taken by the principle that he didn't have the authority to make. I'll come back to that. You'll see from the other bullet points here agenda papers for the Immuneration Committee either not being fully prepared or kept, minutes for the Immuneration Committee not fully recorded, minutes not being properly produced or reported timelessly. Can I just ask who you would see as being responsible for that process not being followed through? You've fared from Mr Doyle last week who advises that he felt that it wasn't appropriate for him to attend the Immuneration Committees and advises that he absented himself during the process to ensure that there was no potential conflict of interest. Could you advise who you think should have been responsible for those four bullet points? It's very clear, both in general governance terms and in the funding council's guidance about severance, that the principle had a key responsibility in ensuring that the Immuneration Committee had the information and advice that it needed to carry out its role. The evidence that you heard last week suggested that Bigot Bailey had been brought in around 10th or 11th of October in order to provide that advice to the Immuneration Committee on 28th of October. I have two concerns about that statement. The first is that, as you've heard today, the decision was made about the principle's severance package at the meeting on 28th of January, and indeed a letter was issued to Mr Doyle and accepted by Mr Doyle on 29th of January in relation to that offer. By the time the 23rd of October meeting happened, the issue of advice was really moot, it was beside the point. My reading of the minutes of the meeting on the 23rd of October suggests that Bigot Bailey were not brought in to provide that role of independent advice about the broader question of severance package, but instead about the question of the entitlements that had been generated by the issue of offer letters to the principle. We think perhaps to the other members of the senior management team back in January. Can I just revert you back to the evidence that you had heard earlier from the Immuneration Committee? One of the questions that I raised with them was the guidance from the SFC, which had been in place since 2000. Perhaps Bigot Bailey should have provided that guidance to the Immuneration Committee, and other guidance, indeed, should have been always available. Do you think that they should have provided that guidance to the committee? If they were appointed to carry out the role that Mr Doyle suggested to you last week, then I would have expected, first of all, for there to be a paper from the principle to the Immuneration Committee at the appropriate meeting, and I'm not sure that that is the October meeting, being very clear that he has a conflict of interest and proposing that independent support to the committee is provided by Bigot Bailey. There's no mention of a paper of that sort in the Immuneration Committee minutes, and Ms Wiley didn't find any evidence of that. My view, though, is that that's not the role that Bigot Bailey was playing at the 23rd October meeting, given that the decisions had already been taken at the meeting in 28 January, and an offer had been issued and accepted immediately after that. I'm sure that Mr Doyle advises that anything related to his specifics package he sent to himself from that, and there was no suggestion that he was involved in any of that, but do you agree with that statement that he made? It's certainly true that Mr Doyle wasn't at the Immuneration Committee on 28 January or 23 October, according to the minutes and the testimony that you've heard today from Immuneration Committee members. However, it's clear from the funding council guidance that the principles role goes further than that. I know that members have a copy of it. There is a very specific reference within that guidance, but the principles role is a very sensitive one. It says that it is not acceptable for the accounting officer to abstain from their personal responsibilities by contending that they're not part of the Immuneration Committee or form any part of the decision making process. That's clear in the funding council guidance. I would therefore have expected him to place on the record the steps he was taking in order to handle his conflict of interest and make sure that the committee has the advice that is needed to carry out its role. I just finally raised two questions with you. One is that the external and internal auditors didn't play a role. We're pretty clear about this now that there was no from the evidence that we received this morning that both the internal and external auditors weren't made aware of the proposal that was on the table. Do you think that there was any process followed to try to prevent the external and internal auditors from perhaps passing their eye over this? Maybe they would have rejected it. Do you think that it was convenient for perhaps Mr Doyle for this information not to have been provided? You heard from both Ms Wiley and Mr Gray this morning that it is unusual for them not to be consulted informally when these matters are under consideration. It is clearly a requirement in the funding council guidance. You heard my professional view when I gave you evidence back in September that there had been a withholding of information through this process from the Immuneration Committee, and I don't think that is a coincidence that the auditors weren't asked either. Would you put the blame fairly and squarely on Mr Doyle for that information being withheld from the Immuneration Committee and from the external and internal auditors? Mr Doyle, as principal and accounting officer of the college, had a responsibility to ensure that the Immuneration Committee had the advice that it needed. If he had done that, they would have had the funding council advice, which would have made it clear to them that they were expected to consult external and internal auditors. I think that the chain of events flows from the failure to ensure that the Immuneration Committee had the independent advice and support that it needed back in January when the original decision was made. So you think that Mr Doyle is withheld information now? And to the financial benefit as a result of that? I think that it is very clear that he bears responsibility for the information not having been provided to the Immuneration Committee. We have heard quite a few opinions over the years about auditor general reports, but we have never heard them described as incomplete, inaccurate and vexatious. Can I perhaps ask you to respond to Mr Doyle's description or his opinion of the auditor general report on Coatbridge College? Of course, Mrs Scanlon. You heard a little from Ms Wiley earlier about my role, which is to appoint an external auditor to all of the public bodies in Scotland that come under my remit to set out their responsibilities in terms of the things that they are required to look at and that that involves an annual audit of the financial statements plus some wider dimensions. I also have a power to report matters arising from those audits to the Parliament through this committee under section 22 of the Public Finance and Accountability Act. As you would expect, I do not take either of those responsibilities lightly. I take them very seriously and I think that they are a key part of the checks and balances for the way public money is used in Scotland. When Ms Wiley was carrying out her work, she kept in very close contact with my team in Audit Scotland about the concerns that she was becoming aware of and the issues that she was seeing. My team worked with her to test and challenge the evidence that she was seeing and the other evidence that she might look for, the relevant guidance that she might apply, and came to the conclusion quite easily that there was a section 22 report here that it was a matter of public interest that I should bring to your attention. We applied the same care, attention and professionalism that we do to everything else in bringing the report together. I think that much of the other evidence that you have heard in your evidence sessions has confirmed that. I think that the committee will draw its own view on the quality of the report that I produced for you. Thank you. I am very grateful. I think that it is important to get that on the record. Can I just ask—I appreciate that you have listened to all the evidence that we have also heard. Are you any clearer now who actually developed the terms of severance payments to Mr Doyle that was presented to the remuneration committee in January? I think that that is one of those difficult issues that we come across from time to time in audit work that often what we are faced with in these circumstances is the absence of evidence. What we would expect to see in normal circumstances and what is very clearly good practice is a set of papers for the remuneration committee in January 2013 that included a scheme overall for severance for staff at the college and a business case in its application to individual members of staff, particularly senior members of staff. We have never been provided with that evidence, either at Audit Scotland or Kathy Wiley as the external auditor. You have heard evidence this morning from the remuneration committee members that the advice was verbal and was provided by the chair. You have heard evidence as well about a letter before that from the principal expressing an interest in leaving under a voluntary severance scheme. There is no evidence that anybody else provided advice and certainly not that steps were taken to provide independent advice to the committee at that point. My final question relates to paragraph 22. It appears that the chair did not provide the remuneration committee with complete or accurate information about the advice provided by the Scottish Funding Council. You use the word and so it appears. Having heard the evidence that we have all heard in the sessions last week and this week, would you go further now and say that would you be stronger than it appears that the chair did not provide? Would you now say that the chair definitely did not provide that would you strengthen that point given the evidence that you have heard? I think that the committee heard very clearly this morning from members of the remuneration committee that they did not have access to that guidance, even though you know from evidence from both Mr Doyle and Mr Gray and the funding council that it had been provided to Mr Gray in advance of the meeting. That concern is heightened by the wording of the minute of the remuneration committee on 23 January, which indicates that a misleading version of the funding council's view was relayed to members of the committee. It was not only that the information was withheld but that misleading information was given. That is my view, Mrs Gray. Serious, convener, if I just make final questions for you. How serious do you feel that this issue is that we are looking into today? I think that it is very serious. As I said when I gave evidence to you back in September, it is very unusual in my experience to find a case of this nature. I think that the overall failings in governance are very serious and in my view there was a deliberate withholding of information from the people who were charged with making a decision. The amounts of money involved, you might argue, are relatively small although I think that people across Scotland would disagree with that heartily and I do myself. I think that it is very important that any of us as citizens and taxpayers and people who rely on public services can depend on the people charged with stewardship of that money, that it is being handled well and in line with all of the expectations of people in public life. I reported to you because I think that that did not happen in this case. Can I just clarify what is Scotland's understanding of what happened before the meeting on 28 January 2013? What we, I think, learned this morning is that Mr Dall wrote some kind of note to his chairman saying, I want to go. Mr Dall and Mr Gray then, if I get this right and please correct me, spoke to the then chief executive of the Scottish funding council and got the advice that we all know now that I was not given to the meeting on 28 January. At that meeting, the remuneration committee took the absolute decision about Mr Dall's package full stop and after that it was a done deal. Would that be accurate? Yes, the only bit of that I can't actively confirm as having not seen the evidence is the letter or memo or whatever from Mr Dall to Mr Gray. We know from the evidence in front of the committee that on 25 January, the then chief executive of the funding council confirmed to Mr Gray the conversation that he had had with him about voluntary severance and forwarded a copy of the guidance with the funding council's expectations. We have seen a copy of an offer letter to Mr Dall from Mr Gray dated 29 January, which set out the terms that were discussed at the meeting on 28 January. That was returned signed by Mr Dall on the same day, on 29 January. We know that the settlement agreement between Mr Gray and the college was signed on 11 October in advance of the 23 October remuneration committee at which Mr Dall told the committee that Bigot Bailey was providing independent advice on how to handle the conflict of interest in which he found himself. I was conscious of the evidence that Mrs McCarthy gave this morning from the remuneration committee in which she said that they were advised that there were many of these kind of deals across Scotland, across the college sector. What's your view of that? Is it the case that all those other deals, if that is the right expression, accorded with the need to have a proper business plan and appropriate governance procedures in place so that they were, in that sense, at least acceptable? In my wider report on Scotland's colleges 2015, I identified six colleges where auditors had raised concerns about severance arrangements in the colleges going through the reform process. It gave details of all six. Two of them—Cokebridge and North Glasgow College—were serious enough to warrant a section 22 report. We know that in other colleges there are colleges that paid more than the amount that is recommended in the funding council guidance and that they were permitted so to do under that guidance, subject to certain conditions. I have no evidence to suggest that, where those higher deals were paid, that was not done as a result of a proper process and a proper consideration of the balance of costs and benefits of doing so. I know that you have requested further information from the funding council about that, but you have the assurance in my earlier section 23 report that, where other arrangements have been made, auditors have not raised concerns about the process that has been gone through, except in those six cases. Thank you. On Billy Biggett in relation to the convener's questions, when you point a lawyer, the lawyer gets a brief. Given that it was clearly Mr Dahlio appointed Billy Biggett—again, it would be interesting to know about the governance of that decision—what brief he got, Billy, but give it got? I have not seen the brief that went to Biggett Bailey, but in reading the minutes of the remuneration committee on 23 October, the impression that I form is that they had been asked to provide advice on the commitments that the college had entered into following the remuneration committee on 28 January. There are some quite surprising comments in there about the advice that, although the funding council was unhappy with the arrangements that had been made, they were within the college's competence. That is certainly true, but it does not sound to me like the advice that you would be giving if you were being asked to handle a conflict of interest that the principal faced. There is also a comment in the minutes that confirmed to the remuneration committee that they did not need the board's approval in order to do what they had done because they had delegated powers. That leads me to believe that they were advising on the legal obligations into which the college had entered because of decisions that were taken at the remuneration committee back in January. That belief is heightened by the fact that Mr Dahlio's settlement agreement was signed on 11 October in advance of the remuneration committee on 23 October, on which bigot bailiwyr providing support. Thank you. On the evidence that Mr Gilever gave this morning from the remuneration committee in which he suggested that there was no evidence whatsoever that commercial income that Coatbridge College had gained had been used to pay the enhanced nature of the principal's settlement over and above that that was provided by the funding council. In order to discuss those deliberations on this, have you any reflections on that evidence? Two reflections I think, Mr Scott. One, I fully share Ms Wiley's comments earlier that that's not a meaningful distinction in this context. It's all college funding and it's there for the purposes of the college. Some of it will still be public money from local authorities, from other public agencies. Secondly, again, the funding council guidance, which is very useful on many aspects of this, says very clearly, in principal colleges can supplement severance payments with private funds. However, in such cases, the college still has a duty to behave prudently and responsibly in using funds held on trust. We know also from the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator that they have concerns about the extent to which the members of the board were fulfilling their role as trustees in using funds for this purpose. I think it's a distinction that has no meaning. You could argue that students suffered while Mr Doyle got his big pay-off. It would be another assertion that could be made given how many assertions Mr Doyle made in that. The final one was that I was genuinely puzzled that—well, not puzzled, but I was genuinely taken aback that Tom Keenan reported that when the chief executive of the funding council turned up at the board meeting on the 23rd of October, he didn't lay it on the line. Were you somewhat—I mean, I suppose there are two perspectives on that. Firstly, it was done deal, as we already now know, and, therefore, it nearly didn't matter what Lawrence Howell said at that meeting, because the thing was already sorted. Or was it that the level of mistrust and disquiet about the whole thing was at such a level that he didn't feel it was worth it? Again, do you have any reflections on why the chief executive just didn't make very, very clear in simple and abrupt language how displeased the funding council was by the whole thing? I was surprised to hear it, and I have to say that it's not the impression that I took from the minute of the board. It was actually the board and not the remuneration committee at which Mr Howell and Ms Drysdale attended. I was, though, taken aback by the timing of their presence at the meeting. The meeting opened at 7 pm. There was some introduction before Mr Howell was invited to speak. The meeting records—the minute records—that Mr Howell and Ms Drysdale left the meeting at 7.10 pm, so just 10 minutes later. There followed general discussion between the chair and the board on the issues raised by Lawrence Howell, and then the management team representatives joined the meeting at 7.15 pm. So there's only five minutes for discussion. I find that surprising, but you heard evidence from Mr Howell last week, and, in my view, the minute gives a clear record of what he put forward to the board, the way in which it was received is harder for me to comment on. Last week, Mr Howell and Mr Gray were quizzed about the point of departure of Mr Howell or the circumstances around that. There was no mention made at all that Mr Howell had applied for any severance package in January. Does that not seem extraordinary? Did that come out at any point in the audit prior to this? As I said in response to a question from Mr Scott, we have never seen the letter that was referred to. It was evidence among the Immuneration Committee members about the form in which Mr Doyle's wishes were made known to Mr Gray, but it's clear that there's no evidence either of a scheme being in place for voluntary severance or of an application from Mr Doyle or other members of the senior management team, who's voluntary severance was also approved at the same Immuneration Committee at that point. There is a general concern, which is one of the cornerstones of my section 22 report, that the lack of that evidence is very poor governance. I think that there's a wider question about whether Mr Doyle could have hoped for or wished for a continuing role with Coatbridge College up to the point of merger and then with the successor Merged College North Lanarkshire College. I think that you heard evidence last week that Mr Doyle hadn't applied for the post of the principal of the Merged College, and my understanding is that that was advertised at the point when Coatbridge was outside of the merger discussions. At the point where Coatbridge rejoined, the process was either complete or very nearly so, and Mr Maguire had been appointed as the principal designate, so at that point he had missed the opportunity of the principal's post within the new college. However, as you also heard from Mr Howell last week, there were examples of principals within Merging Colleges taking other posts. They may not have been successful as principal, but they may have been well able to serve in another role in the new college. I can also see no reason why having been unsuccessful and perhaps feeling that voluntary severance would have been the best outcome for Mr Doyle and for the college, but he could not have been expected to serve his notice period and do his best to see the college through to the merger at the end of March. I suppose that my concern here is that, as I see it, information was concealed from this committee. Information was not volunteered to this committee when there was the opportunity to do so, and that seems odd. I share your concern about it, Mr Beattie. I think that there are clear discrepancies between the evidence that you heard from Mr Gray and Mr Doyle last week and the other witnesses that you have heard from. Clearly, I am appointed by the Parliament to report to you quite independently on what I and my auditors have found in these circumstances, and you have heard my very clear view about the failings in this case. Just touching on the informal meetings that the Immuneration Committee appeared to have, it seems like that was a regular situation that, frequently, they met informally and rarely formally. From the minutes that we have seen, they are fairly sparse in terms of giving us any real grip of what decisions were taken and so forth. Previously, auditors have said that governance was robust. Did the auditors know anything about, for example, those informal meetings and the decisions that were taken through that, and how were they recorded? It just seems extraordinary. I am not sure that I have heard very much evidence about informal meetings of the Immuneration Committee. I think that there was a meeting in January and one in October called because there was an issue in which the chair wished to discuss in the first case and because the funding council's concerns had been relayed to him and to others in the second case. I agree with you entirely that the minutes are thin. I think that, as you pointed out in a question earlier, one would expect to see more than action points and instead some record of what had been discussed on the views that were put forward. The auditor's report is very clear. First of all, in paragraph 21 of the auditor's report, which is in the public domain, she concluded that the governance lapses arose as a result of the established and expected process and procedures that had previously operated well within the college, not being followed by a small number of people. The lack of openness and information about the actions that were being taken made it difficult for board members to scrutinise and challenge these actions. She also said elsewhere in the report that, in her view, the governance failings improved slightly after late October 2013. My concern about informal meetings was that it was actually one of the remuneration board who actually said that, from time to time, they would just have a quick informal meeting to make a decision. I am sorry if I missed that evidence this morning. I did not hear it and I would not comment on it. It is not my understanding from Ms Wiley as the external auditor and it certainly is not supported by the conclusions that she placed in her annual audit report on the overall process that has been followed. I must apologise that I am going to leave shortly. I have really just one question. Given that we now know that the principal applied for severance, the chair called a meeting at which he misled the committee, I think that that is clear now from the evidence, and he immediately issued a severance letter, which was immediately accepted, would you have expected the Audit Committee to have been informed of this? The Audit Committee met in June at which the internal or external auditors may or may—I think that they probably were present—certainly one of them was present, and yet there is nothing recorded in that of this significant severance package being agreed. I would not expect it necessarily to be part of the Audit Committee's business. The Audit Committee of any organisation has a clear set of functions, and the Immuneration Committee was set up for the purposes of agreeing senior staff pay, and we know that there were failings in that as well during this period, pay policy for the wider staff and exceptional items like voluntary severance. I think that the more testing question is whether the board was fully exercising its oversight of the Immuneration Committee, and, as the committee has noted, the fact that the Chair of the Immuneration Committee was also the Chair of the board, although permitted at that time, is not good practice in general governance terms. You would have expected that the letter that Mr Gray issued to Mr Doyle and which Mr Doyle accepted to have been reported immediately to the next board meeting? I would expect the decisions of the Immuneration Committee to have been reported to the board meeting. That is normal practice in any organisation that committees with delegated powers report back regularly to the board. I would have expected the process by which the Immuneration Committee made its decision to have been much better than it was. It was a board meeting between 28 January and 25 October, when there must have been board meetings in the intervening period. For the Chair not to report that to the board when it is a huge amount of public money involved? It seems to me that normal good practice would be for the minutes of committees of any board, whether that would be the Immuneration Committee, the Audit Committee or any other, to be reporting that regularly in the meeting cycle would be normal and good practice. Thank you very much. Just a small follow-up from Dr Simpson's issues. I think that most of the issues have been covered, it looks like. It has been a done deal from the very early stages in January, but as we have heard from evidence, there were board meetings and, obviously, there were finance committee meetings, etc. Surely, if this had been a done deal, as it seems to have been, from 28 January, and that was reported to the board meeting, concerns would have been raised at that point. As a committee and as an Auditor General, how can you ensure that these meetings are conducted properly and that the minutes are passed on? Basically, what we are saying is that the chair, Mr Gray, of the Immuneration Committee, withheld evidence to the board and such that all this money being paid out, a severance payment, which people did not think that two members anyway did not agree that that was actually a correct minute. I think that I can probably only refer back to the evidence that I gave when I met the committee on this subject back in September, that good governance is there for a reason. That manages in any sector, in the public sector, in the private sector, are professionals who are paid to carry out a role for the organisation and who very often will have a self-interest as well. The corporate governance system is a system of checks and balances, which is designed to safeguard in our world public money and make sure that the interests of the individual do not get satisfied at the interests of all of the rest of us who are funding public organisations. In this case, the system of corporate governance failed and it failed in the view of the Auditor General in my view because of the actions of a small number of people. It is always very hard to put in place systems that can cope with people actively working to circumvent the checks and balances in place to achieve a certain outcome. You have heard evidence from the funding council that their veto powers now, in relation to early severance, would stop this from happening again. I reported in my report on Scotland's colleges that, in my view, in light of the substantial amounts of public money being paid as part of the reform process, in order to generate savings, they should have had greater monitoring and oversight of what was happening across Scotland. I think that it is always the case, and we know that in not just public organisations but much more widely, that it is very hard to put in place checks and balances that will get around the risk of individuals colluding to achieve a particular outcome. I have one small follow-up. You do not have to answer this if you do not wish to, but Mary Scanlon alluded to earlier evidence as well. You have the word fraud, and part of the definition of fraud is withholding evidence. It is quite clear that, from 28 January, this was a done deal, and it was passed through. We did not have another meeting until October of the rumination committee, but there were other board meetings and other meetings as well. The evidence of this minute and others was withheld from the board meetings. Is that a criminal offence? The first thing to say is that I absolutely share the committee's frustration about this matter. People across Scotland who are looking at this matter will feel a real sense of outrage that this has happened. The challenge that we have, and I think that you heard a flavour of this from Ms Wiley as well, is that what we need to go on is not the dictionary definition of fraud but the legal definition of fraud. The college involved took legal advice, the funding council took advice from its legal advisers, and both came to the conclusion that the likelihood of money being recovered from the individuals concerned was very small and that the costs and risks of doing so outweighed the likely benefit. We have to work on that assumption. Mr Don asked when I originally briefed the committee if there should be a new offence or some other sanction available. I think that that is a good question for the committee to consider. For me, it is just a question regarding Billie. It was touched upon earlier regarding the brief for them coming in. Which committee or committees at the college should have been looking at the brief or should have been provided with the brief for them to have a discussion about it? As I say, it is very clear in the funding council guidance that the principal had the responsibility to ensure that his conflict of interest was properly handled. What I would have expected to see was a paper from the principal at an appropriate stage, and in my view that was not the October meeting but the January meeting, setting out why he believed that he had a conflict and proposing that that should be handled by the appointment of, Bigot Bailey or another law-fork firm, to provide independent advice to the committee, which would have included not just whether they were legally competent to do this, but also the options available to them, the costs and benefits associated with those options, and the process that they should go through. I think that it was entirely appropriate for the remuneration committee to make that decision, but it should have done it on the back of a proper briefing from the principal about why it was required and the way that responsibility should be fulfilled. Should the audit committee or even the board have been consulted on this and this particular organisation coming in to undertake that particular piece of work? I would not necessarily expect that. As my report says, the principal had a duty to take steps to manage his conflict of interest, and in my view he did not do that. Thank you very much. Two questions. First of all, it's unfortunately only now or this morning that I've come to understand that Mr Doyle made some kind of written request in early January, that the meeting of the remuneration committee met in late January and we have its minutes which seem to agree that some package was agreed, that a letter was written by Mr Gray on the 29th, I think he said, and that it was turned straight around by Mr Doyle. And that you've told me that the settlement agreement was actually signed on the 11th of October, which was plainly ahead of the meetings on the 23rd. Do you believe that that was what the remuneration committee thought was going to happen? Was that what the remuneration committee were agreeing to in January? I think because of the lack of papers to that remuneration committee in January and the opacity of the minute and the disagreement about the minute 10 months later in October, it's very hard to be clear what they thought they had agreed. What I heard this morning, though, was that they felt that there was a strong case for the principal's position to be resolved at that point. It's clear that they didn't have access at that point to the funding council guidance, which they should have had. In my view, it's also clear that they didn't have the information that should have been provided to them more generally about the reasons why the principal's position needed to be resolved at that point, what the options open to them might be, and what the costs and benefits of those options would be. The minutes of that meeting in January come to us as an annex to the, effectively, the calling notice for the meeting in October. Is there any evidence at all that those minutes were seen by anybody beforehand? I think there's evidence that they were not seen by members of the committee until the meeting on the 23rd of October in the minute itself, where you start to see the disagreement between committee members about what had been discussed and agreed. I think that that's common ground between the members of the committee who you've heard from. Is there any evidence at all that anybody else will have seen those in between? Not that I'm aware of. My expectation would always be that either there would be a committee meeting at which they would be agreed and then reported to the board or that they would be agreed by correspondence among the members and then reported to the next board meeting. I am entitled to the view on the evidence that we've got that the chairman drew up the letter that was signed on the 29th, effectively, on his understanding of what had been agreed. I don't know whether the chair of the board and the committee had access to the minute of the meeting on the 28th of January when he put together that offer letter, which was then accepted by Mr Doyle. It's very clear, though, in any case, that it would have been good practice for there to be confirmation among the committee members about what they had agreed, and that confirmation would have been much easier to achieve had there been good papers prepared for the committee to consider in the first place. The whole system of governance around the remuneration committee, I think, fell down at that point, and I think the evidence that you've heard suggests that that was more than an accidental failure. Forgive me, convener, but can I just confirm—I'm not trying to put words into your mouth, as always—but I'm getting the impression that there is no evidence of any paperwork between the 28th of January and that letter from the chairman that nobody's spoken about it, nobody seems to have known anything at all about that letter being written. As far as I can see, there's no evidence other than what's still called the draft minutes of the meeting on the 28th of January and a letter signed by Mr Gray dated the 29th of January, which was signed and returned by Mr Doyle on the same day. We have access to that through the audit process, but I have no evidence that anybody else saw that to accept the two of them. We all agreed that the remuneration committee did not have the Scottish Funding Council guidance when they made the decision in January 2013. However, in a letter to Thomas Keenan, the position that was adopted by the remuneration committee at the end of January 2013 was, in my opinion, based on the guidance that existed at that time and, indeed, followed discussion with the Scottish Funding Council at that time. We know that there was no guidance from the Scottish Funding Council or, indeed, discussion with the Scottish Funding Council. Is it fair to say that Bigart Bailey was also misled into thinking that the Scottish Funding Council advised the remuneration committee? I cannot comment on that letter, Mrs Scanlon. I share your view that we heard very clearly from the committee members this morning that they had not had the funding council guidance drawn to their attention. We know from the correspondence that is shared by the funding council that their expectation was that it would be made available to the committee. Bigart Bailey thought that they had been advised. My final question is now much clearer about the remuneration committee, audit committee, etc. I am still struggling to understand the role of Roger Mullin. In an email to John Doyle on 18 August, he proposed agenda issues and one of the proposed issues is voluntary severance. Given that he was the Government's main person to pursue the merger process, what role did Roger Mullin have in agreeing or confirming and discussing the approach to voluntary severance with John Doyle? My understanding is that Mr Mullin was appointed by the Scottish Government to provide support to the merger process and that he provided that support in a number of areas. I know that he was providing support in Lanarkshire and in other parts of Scotland from other work that we have done. I have a copy of the email that Mr Doyle has provided to you as background for today's meeting. My understanding is that what he says is that, on 18 July, he asked myself, John Mullin, and Leonard McTavish to advise on when you might depart. We avoided answering as we didn't have a clear view and didn't know what the wider merger considerations would be. That seems to me an entirely appropriate response, particularly in the context that we hear that back in January, Mr Doyle had made his wish to depart already clear that he hadn't applied for the principal post of the new merged college and that he had, effectively, already accepted an offer of voluntary severance on 29 January. The departure date seems to me to be something that is important, but not central to the matters that you are considering today. Given that Mr Doyle agreed at the end of January and he had a letter of confirmation from John Gray, why is Roger Mullin inviting him in to discuss the approach to due diligence culture study and voluntary severance? I do not think that that is the question that I can answer. I appreciate that. I have just raised a couple of other questions that you have heard from Mr Keenan this morning, who raised the issue about the fact that the Scottish Funding Council perhaps should have provided direct support to board members, which, in this day and age, could be that difficult a process to follow. Could there have been a wayday for remuneration committee members? All of those people were all given this significant responsibility to carry this process through, which is something that not that many of them would have had experience in doing, because we have not had a major process in this scale. Given that the Scottish Funding Council, who had the response that was tasked with that responsibility by the Scottish Government to do that, should have looked ahead of that and said that we need to start contacting those colleges and ensuring that those board members are directly aware of their responsibilities, and that we will support them in that process, is that something that they should have done? I have great sympathy with that convener. As I said earlier in my report on Scotland's colleges 2015, which looked at the bigger picture of all of this, I concluded that, in view of the significant amounts of public money that were involved, the funding council should have assured itself that colleges had the right processes in place and used some money in line with its guidance, and I think that training and support would be an important part of that process. There is no reason why they could not have, particularly when they announced that the process was going to be taken forward. It would not have been that difficult to ensure that all of those individuals were in some way directly appraised of the guidance that has been provided. I think that there were other challenges as well, because some of the local arrangements that have been reached as well, the Edinburgh agreement, the Lanarkshire agreement, all those various ones, but there should have been some form of communication between the SFC and those members directly telling them to take this decision. I distinguished two things there. I said in my earlier report that I think that there was a strong case for the funding council to provide more support to colleges going through the merger process to make sure that they understood what was expected of them, had the right process in place and made good use of public money. In the case of this college, the chair of the board having contacted the then chief executive of the funding council to ask about voluntary severance for principals, and the chief executive having responded saying that he is the guidance, I think that the funding council was perfectly entitled to expect that it was passed on to members of the board and the rememoration committee. I just finally ask for your advice on that specific then in terms of, and I raised this issue earlier with the auditors, in terms of the £304,000 that was paid to Mr Doyle. The point that I keep making is that I appreciate that the board have taken the decision that Mr Doyle should receive this money, but surely there should be some external scrutiny when somebody has paid such a large sum of money, and the external scrutiny should take the form of an internal or external audit. Is that normal practice for organisations to do that? It actually isn't, convener. I understand why you might think that. What the external auditor is looking for and what the internal auditor is providing assurance to the board about is there being proper checks and balances in the system. What that normally looks like is a scheme of financial delegation that says, for small amounts of money, these are the individuals who can approve it, for larger amounts of money, here are the individuals and very often two signatories required, as you were saying, is commonly the case for voluntary organisations and all sorts of things, and what those people approving it will look for is proper authorisation by the board. Now, as far as they were concerned, there was proper authorisation there, and we've heard that the rememoration committee received advice from Bigot Bailey at the meeting on 23 October that that was there. The safeguard that you have, and I recognise that it's cold comfort, is that external audit, as part of its review of the annual financial statements, comes and looks at unusual payments, like severance payments, and if it finds anomalies, will bring them to my attention. Their audit reports address to me as well as to the board of management, and I can bring it to your attention. The question has been assured that there's vetoes in place for the Scottish Funding Council, but, in essence, that could still happen again. If it's a process forward where somebody withholds information, as you've alluded to this morning, and follows that process and people don't get the information that they should get, the Scottish Funding Council can't stop the payment being made. They apparently have that position in place, but they haven't changed anything that's any different from where we've been before. They're significantly to prevent this happen again, have they? I think that, my colleague Fraser McKinley, when we met you in September on this report, talked through the new power of veto, which is there, and our view is that it will help that, while in this instance all Mr Howells, as chief executive of the funding council, could do, was to meet the board for a short period and express his concerns about the process that we're going through, what the council now has the power to do is to veto payment, and, if the payment is made, it's on very much stronger ground in recovering it than it would have been in the past. What's changed then? What legislation has been passed to do that? The legislation that brought the colleges into the public sector, the college reform bill 2013, and the revised funding financial memorandum that sits alongside that sets out the way in which the powers that come from their new classification will be exercised by the funding council. There are real changes. We obviously missed this because this payment was made in October 2013, so this was legislation that was passed. I know that legislation was referring to it, but obviously it's the process that's followed as a result of that in the past. Is the enactment of that legislation given greater power to the funding council, which would greatly reduce the likelihood of this happening in future? OK. I thank the general for the session. Can I measure with the committee as I previously agreed in the private session?


All right, don't forget to put your name in the attendees section of the meeting notes that we know you were here. Keeping attendance helps us know who was available for particular conversations and if there's votes on things, we like to be sure everybody's been included and whatnot. All right, are we good on the agenda? Is there anything folks want to add? We're good. All right. Not hearing anything, Christian. Go ahead with release updates. Unfortunately, I don't really have a lot. Vadim is out currently. Once he's back, we will actually start to write like a standard operating procedure for creating OKD releases so we can better disseminate that knowledge and have more people help out with that. I'm not sure how much the community can do in that regard since those things will require some permissions within our OpenShift org, but yeah, disseminating that knowledge is definitely going to be a good thing. So, yeah, for now, no updates on the release part for the usual OKD releases. And for our releases, we're still working on it, unfortunately, that we're still blocked internally by some issue. But once we have resolved that issue and we actually have CI builds for OpenShift, for all of OpenShift, then we can also mirror out and tag OKD releases so that is kind of bound together internally with the CI work for the ARM platform. And then that will actually enable us to also do the OKD release for that platform. We do now have, and maybe Timothy, as I think that's already in the F-Cross updates mentioned there. So we do now have Fedora Coro as uploaded to AWS, so the AMIs are now available, I think, in all the releases on AWS. That was one of the main missing pieces there as well, because we need the installer to reference that AMI. So now we have those AMIs, and now the only part missing is having actually the component image on our proud CI system, which should be, yeah, I'm hoping it's going to happen this week, but it shouldn't be much more, we're really on the verge here. Can you get that piece in the proud system and we can, could we do a little very short blog announcing it somewhere? Oh, absolutely. There's also, I'm also going to prepare a presentation on the whole OpenShift, maybe if we get to doing the OKD releases right away, that'll be focused on OKD too. So that is definitely my plan. Maybe if you're going to do a presentation on OKD on ARM, we could do that as a briefing or an AMA too and broadcast it out. And did I invite you to the office hours at KUKON? I think you're in there. So if you could do a little, that could be part of the spiel there. That would be great to include that and that update. Thank you for all that work. Are you welcome? Thank you. Next up, FCOS updates with Timothy. Hey, so Timothy, I'm here from the Forest Team at Red Hat for FCOS updates. So I have three items today and most of them are forthcoming things. So the first one is kind of a warning, but shouldn't be a big one. We are trying to move away from the legacy of the table back end in Fedora Chorus to the NF table-based appetizers back end. So this is something that has been done for a while in Fedora, but for various bugs that it hasn't happened in Fedora Chorus. And we want to have that happen at the same time, approximately at the Fedora 35 rebase. So it's coming like in a couple of weeks. And we'll try to do that for new nodes first and then for everything in node because we don't really want, we don't really expect any issues here, but we still want to give folks some time to try things and make sure that nothing breaks. So the short version of this is the difference between the two is essentially you're using different paths in the kernel, but it should be fully compatible. So there should be no breaking changes. The second item is about the Fedora Chorus test day that we are putting up in, I think it's next week, something like that. And so we'll prime and suggest a few tests that people can do to make sure that Fedora Chorus works well on their platform. So this is like side lead on the side related to OQD because if you want to make sure that Fedora Chorus works well on your platform, that will certainly help OQD work well on your platform. Maybe the link on the agenda is wrong, pointing to the same tracker as the IP table. True. Oops, I did a wrong copy base. I think that now it should be the good one now. And yeah, so we are testing next, which will be Fedora 35 base, will be the most interesting from a testing perspective. The other ones are less, don't have that much change right now. And then the third point is around Arch64, which is coming, so we have builds right now, they're ready, and we are enabling that in the download page. So you should be able to try that out more easily, in an easier way, Fedora Chorus. And this is just the links, right? The builds already exist, they're just not linked out to yet. Yeah, yeah, it's just official links to have that officially in the download page, because you can figure out the links from the full builds, brother and everything, but we don't necessarily publish as officially all the builds that we do, all the release builds that we do. So if you get the raw list of builds, potentially you are using builds that we don't think are about it. So the links from the download page are fully stamped and should be good for usage. I have two questions for you. The first one, I think it has been already replied by Jamie, the latest 93448 and latest table 447 to be used for testing Fedora Chorus 35 on the test day, right? There's no plan to test 4.9 on top of that. You've not done any, I don't know, anyone's been testing 4.9 at this point. Well, I give it a right this morning, but yeah. And the second one is the reason for not testing 4.9 yet is that it hasn't actually been released yet. So it's not a stable version of the OpenShift code base yet. That is supposed to happen very soon. But since I think we are still not able to upgrade 4.7 to 4.8, our stable stream is still stuck on 4.7 for now. We should definitely test the latest 93448, though, because once that is figured out, we will be updating stable to 4.8. And then subsequently, once 4.9 is released to 4.9 as well. But for now, 4.8 is still the most current stable version, even though it's not yet in the stable stream, because we're missing the upgrade path. It should be installable on a fresh install. Yeah, and for that, I would just take the latest 93448, obviously. Yeah, just wondering, because from the OKD virtualization six side, we are running on bare metal UPI for now. It's kind of complicated in its own ways, so yeah. And we are kind of trying to use the latest version in order to provide feedback before it gets released. So that's... I mean, yeah, if you're using experimental features, you can probably test the 4.9 builds as well. They should be, like, you should be able to install them. I wouldn't expect too big, like any problems that are really big, because I think, yeah, 4.9 OpenGift Compute Platform Product 4.9 to release is not far out, so builds by now should be pretty stable. Yeah, we're not saying they're stable or usable, but yeah, for experimental testing, especially if you rely on features that have only been added after 4.9. Feel free to use those as well. I think they should be. Okay, thanks. The second question that I have for Timothy is, where should we report back to the Fedora bugzilla or to the Fedora CoreOS GitHub? So, bugs in Fedora CoreOS are best reported in the Fedora CoreOS tracker. So I'll put the link there, but the best way to report them is to find an issue on GitHub. So, the link is coming in there. Yep, there, and that is the link to notes. Excellent. Any other questions regarding Fedora CoreOS? Questions or comments for Timothy? All right, excellent. Let's move on to the next item, which is doc updates. Take it away, Brian. Okay, so we've got the beta site up and running, and I've ported all the sort of content across there. There's still some work on the content to be done, because, I mean, things like the FAQ that's in the repo, it hasn't been updated for quite a while. So, I'm not saying that the documentation is finished, but we're now in a state where at least it's got everything that's on the current site in the new beta site. And so, it's really when do we want to switch it live? As far as I'm concerned, we're good to go now. There have been a couple of questions asked this week. One of them is, why are we in the OpenShift CS org, not the OpenShift? And is this a problem? If so, should we be looking to move before we switch it live, because it's all going to be linked in with the GitHub pages? Another thing that I just wanted to ask is about the code of conduct. We don't really have a code of conduct, but most open source sites do. So, a suggestion that I've actually put in there is, should we just point at the CNCF code of conduct and say, no, we, yeah, so, so, let's do, let's do, hold on, let's do one at a time for our listeners here. Diane, if you could give us the elevator pitch version of the history of the repo, we'll start with that. All right, so I did, I don't know, Brian, if you saw the email that I responded to that thread with the short history of why the repos are the way they are, did you get a copy that I'm not sure what, I probably should have, I don't think it went out to the whole main list, so I think it was just an set of individuals, so I apologize for that. Basically, when we started the open source side of OpenShift, it was called Origin, if anyone remembers that. And the repos are still all, where the code lives is still all origin, which makes things wonderfully confusing. We didn't change the name at the time for multiple reasons. One is we had lots of end users who had written scripts and things that we didn't want to break during the three point X era. And the other was we didn't really have the resources to change even our own internal processes. So we kept that and you'll still see all of our open source code in the Origin repo. And the other is in order to get, and I think Christian touched on this earlier in the call, the permission from the engineering team to edit and create a landing page under the OpenShift organization was not gonna happen for external users or even for myself to get that kind of privileges and permissions. So we created the OKD repo. The reason it's in the OpenShift-cs, which stands for customer success, is the folks that helped us build it. That was the repo they owned on GitHub to do it in. And it's not an optimal place for us to live. As the Kudbert folks pointed out, that was I think the kicker, the OKD vert, folks were the ones who were asking the question. So, and it's not a perfect world, but now as we're moving with Brian to your MK docs version and creating that in GitHub, once we get that done, I think it's a very good time to revisit, I have a theory that we could do, OK, a GitHub slash OKD repo was what I suggested in the email thread. And that would be much more open source politically correct than OpenShift-cs, especially as we move to not need the resources we needed from the customer success team, which has been renamed five times since the beginning of that time, but it still is the customer-cs repo. So it was a good question. And I just wanted to give the background on why it's there. And it may sound lame, but that's the history. And I would love to move it to OKD, but putting it underneath the OpenShift repo just begs the question of multiple permissions that we'd need to get from the engineering teams and everybody else. And that would just slow down the process and make it less open, shall we say. So I'm seeing everybody plus one, the idea of creating the OKD.org, I would love to do that. We'll have to run it by the engineering folks. And so maybe Christian, in one of the next engineering sessions that we have team meetings we have, we'll do that. So that's that part of the... I guess, so just what we talked about that. The only change that's gonna make is when we do the DNS redirect to the GitHub pages. So I don't think it'll be a problem bouncing to the OpenShift CS GitHub pages and then later bouncing it to an OKD.org. Yeah, I would love to see this happen. I don't see anybody having any objections to it. And it would just make the whole... And especially the guys who used to be in this customer success team would love to get this off their... And out of their repo and move on to their new jobs. Cause they all have been promoted like at least three times since they were customer success people. So yeah, so that's the story behind the repos. And it came out of the conversation about the overt folks creating their own OKD overt repo. And I think Jamie was doing some outreach to them to see if we could get them to move under customer success. And that's what brought up the topic. So, yes. Well, to get them under, to be clear, to get them under OKD wherever that may be, right? Yes. Okay, and then the next one was the code of conduct question. Yeah, so the code of conduct, well, we can't really point to the CNCF one. I had pulled the one from Ansible and I have been lax and was going to post it as a discussion for this group to look at the Ansible one and see if we could use that because I know that's been vetted by Red Hat Legal multiple times and it seemed pretty robust and to the point. So I will do that as an issue and let the group review that and then we can pull it in, Brian, to the landing pages that you're creating if that's works. And that way at our next docs meeting we can look at it, edit it anyway. We need to do and then at the next working group meeting we can approve or debate the finer points of it. Okay. That worked for everybody and if you want to take grace over to the Ansible docs is a whole page there that I was going to lift and shift and do a cut and replace. Okay. And then just the final one in the footer, we do have some social media links which point to various places to link to do with OpenShift. So I think in the agenda, Jamie did put about a Twitter but there's also a Facebook link as well. Is the Facebook, are they just going to the OpenShift Facebook page and the OpenShift Twitter? There is no OKD Twitter handle or Facebook page that I am aware of. That's probably just- Yeah, I mean they're going, it's OpenShift home on Facebook. So facebook.com slash OpenShift and the Twitter were on- One or is that a different one? Oh, that's just the regular red hat OpenShift. Yeah. Yeah. And the Twitter is going to twitter.com slash OpenShift. So the reason I threw this on here is the, yeah, the documentation group which I'm almost thinking should be the communications group. It almost seems like it's, we talk about more than just documentation but just communications in general. The idea came up again of Twitter, of having a Twitter because so much communication is done in terms of announcements of new releases and updates and bugs and whatever. And so this was, been revisited a couple times once before I was in the group and once I think just after I joined the group. What do people think about registering a Twitter with OKD something? Because obviously it, I think OKD has already taken, we had this discussion, but. Yeah. You could ask nicely to get the OKD name back. You could ask. Or use OKD project. Yeah. Diane, you seem to have some hesitancy of a Twitter in general. Let us know your thoughts.  And if we have announcements, the OpenShift Twitter handle would reach a much wider audience for us. So if we wanted to start doing announcements of OKD releases, I'm sure I could get them to be added to the OpenShift one and it would create. And that there is a person who manages that and watches it and responds to stuff on it. Hesitating because I already have OpenShift Commons, which I manage and it is often quite silent. But it does, both of those, the OpenShift Commons and OpenShift, if we really, and we could talk about this and maybe in the doc slash communications working group. Yeah. I'm wondering if I created that OKD GitHub repo. I'll just have to check and see if it's me that opened it. But for people who are watching this and that seems like a non sequitur, someone posted a link to github.com slash OKD, which is, yeah.  Go for it. Yeah, I was just thinking about the whole Twitter thing and whatnot and communications in general. I'm kind of curious, like what does the Fedora community do around me? I would expect if we were gonna have an OKD specific communications channel that we'd wanna have a little process behind it before we just start blasting stuff out. So I'm kind of curious, like does Fedora do something similar with the way that they roll out their announcements and their kind of official communication channels? So Fedora has the mainline Fedora Twitter handle but also has for many of the product variants, you can, for many of the product variants or SIG variants or whatever, there are specific Twitter handles for them. It is actually up to the working group slash SIG to elect to have one. So for example, Corios has one, Silverblue has one and a number of other variants do as well, like KDE and Kinoite don't yet. They may, they may not, don't know for sure yet. We haven't decided. So it is up to them and there is a, there's an informal policy that things coming from specific subteam deliverables, subteam Twitter accounts get retweeted by the main one. So to amplify that reach, but also there is some complexity in terms of making sure people are granted access to those Twitter handles while at the same time Fedora retains control of all of the Twitter handles. So like the main problem is delegating permissions and I don't think we actually have a setup for that here within the OpenShift team. So yeah. Diane? Yeah, I guess. Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut anyone off. Was that John? No, that was me. I was just going to respond to what, I was just going to say like, thanks Neil, like that really appreciate the kind of guidance there. I guess like my preference would be to see some of that kind of governance and process set up first before we start doing the other thing. But that's just kind of my gut feeling. Well, let me ask this, Diane, do you know, so what if it's something not a release? Like what if it's the meeting videos getting posted and stuff like that? Would they be willing to post stuff like that as well? Or does it have to have a certain threshold of coolness and- With my advanced social media skills, which are so advanced. What I think like what would be easier for the OpenShift Twitter handle managers and myself as an OpenShift Commons Twitter handle manager is to have an OKD one created of some ilk, whether it's projectokd or okd.io or whatever we do in order to find an OKD one in Twitter, my own. If we tweet it and then we ask for it to be retweeted, sort of what Neil is doing as a way of going through it. Though I do think it needs to be owned by or managed by someone. And I'll have to look into the OKD remark that someone's making in the chat about it not being trademarked for IT use. This is, we'll have to ask legal that. But I think we will probably need one person to be a red-hatter and multiple people can have access to the username password for a Twitter handle to manage it. But I think it would have to be owned, I would say, by Red Hat is my gut, is what it says. But I think it's much easier if there's a sub one to get others to re-broadcast it for us. Like the Red Hat Open, Red Hat Community, Red Hat in general when we have releases and stuff. So, and the videos are kind of just specific to us. They're not really big watch things for normal OpenShift folks. So I would say creating, I'm not against creating a Twitter handle if we can find, agree to one. Okay, well let's talk about it in the docs group. I just wanted to bring that up because there is so much communication right now that happens via Twitter in terms of Kubernetes stuff and tech stuff in general, but it seems like we're sort of missing out if we don't take advantage of the medium there. Let's move on, and I'll add that as an item to put on the agenda for the docs meeting. Let's now move on to, Jamie, yeah. Jamie, just to move on. Oh, let's vote, actually. Let's vote on this one. What is the process of actually when we decide to switch live? We take a vote on it right now. So, this is an official vote because it's something big. I will send something over the Google group as well because that's actually in our bylaws. But for the people that are here, the proposal is on the table. I'm making the proposal that we allow Brian to make the shift and Diane and Brian to work on getting the DNS change to make the beta site go live ASAP. Motion is on the floor. Does anyone wanna second that? I'll second that. Okay, seconded by Bruce. Any further discussion? Yes, we are following Robert's rules here. Any further discussion? All in favor? Say aye or plus one. Aye, plus one. Okay, and anyone opposed? Okay, anyone abstaining? All right, so let the record show that everyone in the call voted with a plus one. Let's see, yeah, that's everybody. Okay, and so go forth and move it at your earliest convenience and I'll send something out. I'm assuming that no one is gonna like override the 12 or whatever votes that we have here when I post to the mailing list. So I would say that just go ahead and do it. And we will note that an official vote was taken on this issue moving forward. So Brian, let's chat via email over this and we'll add in its Jerry Fala because Will Gordon is off on paternity leave. And so we'll get it switched over hopefully in the next 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever it takes. Thank you so much, Brian, for all the work. Yeah, I echo that. That was some awesome work, man. Thank you. Does this even unlock things? Yes, very much so. And I wanna move on to issues. There's one that is kind of, it's causing some weird problems in a couple of different places. If you look at, in the agenda, I've got a link to it, it's issue 873. We've had a couple opened up that are duplicates on this sort of overall issue. The change log stuff in the nightlies from the CI is broken. You're not able to actually see the change logs. It ends up showing an error saying that it could not generate it. If you go to the repo, and this is Vadim's repo where the CI is pulling from, all of the commits are gone after February 14th or something like that. And so these are all referencing commits. That's why it can't get the change log because it's referencing commits that don't exist in the repo anymore for some reason. Vadim is out until October. Probably the first week of October, maybe the second week. So we don't really have a way of fixing this at the time. If folks could just be aware of it and the different ways in which this impacts users and ideally we'll find some solution where maybe a couple folks have access to Vadim's repo or have, I don't know, we'll have to figure something out because it seems like a really weak point in our process for one person, if the repo goes south, that CI is based off of that there's nothing that we can do about it if they happen to not be here. So we can have that discussion on, yeah. If I just can add to that. So we are working internally on pulling all that code back into the OpenShift code base and essentially unforcing the machine config operator now upstreaming that into the master branch and not needing Vadim's fork there anymore. Yes, for the time being, we cannot fix this until he's back but in the future, we will definitely pull that back into the OpenShift art and make all of those branches force push protected. So these things cannot happen in the future. Excellent. And in terms of other issues, are there any issues that people wanted to highlight out of the issues submitted in the repo? Sandro submitted a whole bunch actually. There's a lot there and there's like what, five different items which we'll have to take a look at because these were all like early this morning. Yeah, so some of them may be related to the usage of some HTTP proxy that maybe has caused some of the troubles that I reported and still investigating them. And a few other are probably related to Selenux issues that I also reported to the Fedora Selenux policy package. And a few others I don't know, I just reported them because I have no clue on what's going on there. It's kind of hard to understand where the installer gets stuck and why it's not an easy task to find the right place. Right, we're actually working on a document. Actually Vadim was helping with this that sort of helps people troubleshoot installer issues or at least know better where to look on that. That's a work in progress. So this might be a good case actually use case to help build that documentation. So expect us once we can comb through what you've submitted this morning, we can provide some feedback and then maybe use that to inform a document that can help folks with installer issues. It brings up another point that I'll talk about a little bit later in the meeting but bare metal. We don't have a lot of bare metal testing. We have a lot of people coming to us with bare metal issues when they're trying to actually use OKD out in the world. We don't have bare metal testing. And that's always hard because obviously there's 20 million configurations but it might be worth us to look at rounding up some folks willing to do bare metal testing. Just get the community to help us so that we have something that we can see what's going on and not just sort of be reactive but be proactive in terms of bare metal stuff. Yeah, that's... Oh yeah, go ahead, Christian. So yeah, I've actually been working with the bare metal team internally to get support for bare metal IPI, install of provision infrastructure. So far we've only had support for user provision infrastructure, UPI. But yeah, all the pieces are now in place. All the code should now be there for essentially the ironic parts that I used to automate this installation for bare metal installed. And what's still missing is actually building those images in CI and putting them into the OKD release payload. I have a card for that to work on at this sprint. So this should also be happening very soon. Once those images are built, support should kind of just arrive with the next lively build then. This is, for now, this is master. So this will probably only land in 4.10. I don't see a good chance for us to backport that to 4.9. But yeah, just as a heads up, we should soon have, on the 4.10 builds, yeah, bare metal IPI support. And you can check out the code and in the ironic image repository, there's also the ironic IPA download repository. Most of that is in the ironic image repository though. There's a specific, an OKD specific Docker file now. And yeah, once that is hooked up into CI and automatically built, we'll add it to the new OKD release payloads. Excellent. Do they need that to start testing bare metal though? We could test bare metal. No, this is completely separate to the UPI bare metal that we already have. Obviously, more testing on that is always. Yeah, so it might be worth it for us to get a communication out to the community saying, hey, if there's some folks who can test bare metal UPI for us, it would really help the OKD project and something like that. So communications and documentation can take that up. Anything else from the issues? Yeah, from the verdict, you will get bare metal testing because it's basically the expected place to run OKD or running virtualization on top. So you will get a bit of bare metal testing from the SIG. Once there are OKD VRT SIG people to do stuff with it, I don't... It's fairly new, and I don't think we've even done anything yet to tell people that the SIG exists because I think we just created it last week. It has already 50 followers on Twitter, so it's great. That was purely good luck. Yeah. All right, so for folks that don't know, there was a conversation between myself and Sandra and a few other folks about trying to make sure that we have a joined effort in this and stuff like that. So expect in the next couple of weeks more info on how that we're all going to be united. And that's going to be a subgroup, basically of the OKD working group so that we can share resources and whatnot. And some of these website changes and possibly new repo and stuff like that are all going to help this, I think. Any other issues? Oh, there's one that I'll address, actually. We have a handful of AWS IPI single node issues get submitted. I'm actually setting up a AWS IPI-CI to test this regularly for 4.7 and 4.8 just because there was some mixups and it was supposed to work, wasn't work, et cetera. So if anyone can do other providers, if you can offer up some resources to try other providers to do quick builds of single node, that would be awesome. So just reach out to the group if you're interested. Anything else for issues? All right, moving now over to discussions. There was one discussion item, I'll have to put the link in the meeting notes, but 896 is a NVIDIA GPU question on OKD. This is like our third question in that regard and in particular about the operator that's available. Has anyone had a chance to use the operator NVIDIA operator to do the NVIDIA GPU stuff with OKD? We, not on this call, anyone, I would doubt. There is another Diane, Diane Fetima, who's a Red Hatter who has tested it extensively. It is now being maintained by NVIDIA as opposed to something that's created out of Red Hat. So there are contact people there. So we could hook, I could ask Diane Fetima to weigh in on the, go ahead, Michael. Oh, I didn't want to interrupt you. I've used it a ton on OCP as well. I've done a lot of testing around it. So like I don't have the same, like Diane's using it a lot for like workloads and whatnot. I've done a lot of work with it in terms of like auto scaler and like cloud infrastructure stuff. But I haven't tested it on OKD yet. I would imagine it works. The only difficult part is it needs like, on a full OCP cluster, it needs build entitlements to do like a build in there. I don't think there's an equivalent on OKD. So I'm not sure if it will pull the proper packages to do the building that it needs to do. Because right now that operator looks to pull a couple of specific like kernel header packages that are specific to the rel installation, you know, the core RS installation it's on. So like I don't know what it would do on an OKD cluster. It would probably try to pull a package that doesn't exist or something. So you might get, you might be able to get up to the point where it's trying to build the driver and then the driver might fail there. That would be my suspicion. But I haven't tested on OKD yet. Can you, can I ask you to respond to the folks that posted the issues and just? Yeah, sure. I can share what I know. Is there a link in the notes to that? Sorry. Yeah, there's a lot. Just put it in the notes. Yep. So it's under the discussion section discussions. And I put a link. It's discussion item 896. Yeah, OK, cool. Yeah, I'll search for the other one. If I recall, there have been a couple of OpenShift Commons briefings on it with people from NVIDIA. And there was a red hatter who was key to creating it. I'm not sure. I can't think of his name off the top of my head. But yeah, it would be lovely to get it working. But I think it's pretty finicky, if I recall. It is so, so, so finicky that it is not even funny. Supposedly though, NVIDIA is going to be making this better in the future. Like right now, the way that they're compiling this driver is that it must have the kernel headers for the exact kernel version that is running on the node that it's compiling to. Supposedly in the future, NVIDIA is going to be getting better about creating dynamic kernel modules. So it will be able to install into a range of kernels, is what I understand. But that work is still ongoing. They've already done it. They've got Kmod tracking packages. However, the Red Hat team that created the operator didn't incorporate any of the work that NVIDIA already did to use KBI tracking Kmods. So the NVIDIA team doesn't know how to do this, and so they're stuck. OK, that's what the speed bump is. Yeah, so somebody between Red Hat and NVIDIA needs to work together to get them to start using the stuff that NVIDIA already created for regular REL to do this stuff for this REL Corios OpenShift stuff. It, however, will not work on OKD. And so for OKD, we're going to need to be able to detect and do the right thing and stuff like that. Well, that sounds like a great thing to do. Martyr. Well, I think then what we can do is find out what those things are specifically and push up some changes or submit some issues to get us there, right? All right, so let's mic respond, and then I'll put this on the agenda for the next meeting as well, and we'll see where we are with that. OK, Sandra, go ahead and take it away. The virtualization's sick. Almost covered the whole section in the previous discussion, so not much left. Just raising the awareness on the existence of a kind of prototype of the SIG website that should be included in the upcoming OKD new website when we have a place to squeeze it in. And the Twitter and Red Detendal, so if you want to discuss stuff related to virtualization on top of OKD, you have a place where to discuss them. Last one, push it up kind of a big PR to the OpenShift docs for OKD, including all the parts related to virtualization. It's being reviewed right now by the OpenShift virtualization team, hopefully it will get in soon. So that's it from the good side. Maybe for folks that are going to be watching this video, can you give a quick elevator 30 second explanation of this change that's coming and why you're testing in terms of virtualization, changes in virtualization on OpenShift and OKD? OpenShift virtualization has been around for a while, and it's getting traction in different ways. The thing that we are seeing is that he is not getting that traction on the upstream community. We want to help the upstream community to start looking at it. And enjoy it. Yeah, so my thing about this when it comes to KubeBird and to a lesser extent, OpenShift virtualization is that to be blunt, it's terrible to use if you want virtualization. If you want to use virtualization even in the open stack style way, the Kubernetes API exposes too many details. And the UIs that are available for KubeBird all are absolutely horrific, with the exception of Harvester from Rancher, which I think is somewhat promising. There doesn't seem to be anybody trying to make a KubeBird front end that actually is appealing for people who need virtualization to be able to use and manage it. I mean, if I'm being somewhat optimistic, hopeful, reaming, or whatever, I would love to see the overt UI pulled right out and layered on top of KubeBird, because the UX there is really, really nice. And it's a shame that it just is sitting there not being used. Yeah, just a quick tip about this. There is a KubeBird provider that you can use for managing the OKD virtualization VMs from the overt web UI. So it already exists. It's already there. So yeah, that's another good point. And yeah, this kind of discussion about the user experience of the whole thing is one of the things that we like to see discussed in the virtual thing. So you're welcome to start the discussion there and we'll follow up. Excellent. All right. So we have eight minutes left. I want to make sure we get everything in. In terms of new business, I'm going to, I struck out, crossed out, location of main repo, because we sort of touched on that. And it sounds like a discussion for maybe in a month once the website stuff has settled. CRC subgroup. Neil, you had originally voiced interest in sort of leading the charge on some of that. We do need someone to really get the subgroup going because Charo is still sort of doing the builds, which means it's sort of at his whim and time availability. Are you and is it Dan that was interested? Are you both still interested in leading the CRC subgroup? Yeah, I think we are. It's we just haven't had any time at the moment to start that work up. But we've talked about it, about how we want to approach this problem. We probably need to sync up with Charo at some point and just like have a one-on-one conversation about it and then proceed from there. Because one of the goals Dan and I agree on is that we want to make, we don't want to make the automation for producing. We want to ultimately automate this. And so what we want to do is make sure that this can just be straight up run from within Fedora infrastructure on one of the CICD platforms that exist within Fedora infrastructure and then be able to provide a way for people to easily take that automation and use it for their own internal deployments as well if they need to have customized deployments for their own use. Because like almost everything else around OpenShift, nobody really understands how to assemble anything. And I'd really like to not make that worse with CRC. And so demystifying just a little bit of it and making it approachable. And also automated means that we don't really have to worry so much about whether a person is doing it or not. So do you want help arranging a time to meet with Charo? Or you want to just reach out to him via the Slack and try and find something that works for all of you? Do you want to make an official first meeting? If you can help arrange that first meeting thing, that'd be great, especially since I think Dan hasn't met. Charo at all. And so it'd probably just be good to get that initial introduction out of the way. And then we can take it from there. It's Dan Axelrod. Correct? Yep. And Diane, if you could CC me on that invite, I'd be interested in attending if I have the time. I'll do that. I'm going to try and set it up for next week right after the docs meeting if that works for people. Let me check real quick. I'll tell you what, we'll do schedule stuff offline. We don't want to think out like just a thought. Like because Dan's on PTO right now, and I don't actually remember what day he comes back. I think it's either the end of this week or middle of next week. I don't know, but I'll sync up with you afterwards and let you know. Yeah, I'll just create a little Slack with the four of us and the five of us now and see if we can't come up with a time. And some other folks had voiced interest. I think Mike said he was interested in sort of following along with what's happening. And so let's, yeah, and anyone else that's interested, Dreeti, in fact, also said that she was interested. Next up, I'm going to strike out bare metal CI slash testing group because it sounds like we've got an interest in that and we can pull people together. And so next up is the office hours, which is Wednesday the 13th at 5 PM Eastern during KUKON. Diane, do you want to say anything about that? So we are going to rinse and repeat our format that we used before. And I think we have an hour is how long we've done it. Again, we'll be live streamed. If there is someone, and I will send a note out to there, we have, I tapped a bunch of people already to come on to do that. It would be great if we had a few more external people. Jamie's, I think, are one external person at the moment on it, so if someone else wants to. And I was thinking of you, John Fortin, since you're giving the talk at there, and I'll send the time and that. And if we can get Christian to do a little spiel on what's going on with ARM, that would be great. But we have a slide deck that we use that needs a slight bit of tweaking that I will tap Jamie to do and to lead.  But it's a simple, it's a great way to do outreach to the Kubernetes community. And Timothy, thank you for agreeing to stay up late and do the answer Fedora Core OS questions. But yeah, I don't think there's, there is a limitation because it's being, it's not the same as BlueJeans. You can't have as many people as you want. We're using the CNCF's platform for it. So you have to get what's called a booth pass to KubeCon virtual and get in so that it's a little bit more complicated than usual. But if you are interested in sharing and being part of that, I think we're limited to five people in that window. So I'll have to count, but I think we might have hit that already. But I was hoping to get one more external person. So let's see what we can do. So if anyone's interested, reach out to Diane or myself and we will see what we can do and how we can arrange it. In the last minute or so, I wanted to point out that I'm actually starting a task list and putting tasks that we have assigned to people. So it's gonna be at the end of the meeting notes and I'll fill it out after watching the recording. And then I'll send an email out to the working group with the task list, like probably in the week between. So like next week, like Monday or Tuesday, you'll see an email with the task list sent out so that people are aware of their tasks and they can keep track of them. And we can keep track of you, keeping track of your tasks and make sure that stuff gets done and that it doesn't fall through the holes and stuff like that. So I think that's about it. Any last minute thoughts, needs, questions, comments, concerns? And as always, if anyone changes their mind and they are going to end up in person at KUKA North America, let me know. Cause- Elmiko, of course. Yeah, Elmiko. Oh yeah, I was just gonna, Neil said something that kind of made me remember this. And I'll just share a little bit of like, I guess news from inside the hat or whatever this community might find interesting. We're working on a series of documentation right now that we're gonna make as like a public Git repo and eventually be rendered to a site that's basically instructions for adding new infrastructure providers to the OpenShift platform. So like all the code changes that you'd need to make, all the different repositories that you'd need to touch and how that integration process would happen. You know, we had talked about doing this as like an OKD forward kind of thing, but we're focusing on OCP right now cause we have providers who are interested in getting in. So this is hopefully when it'll be done and like, you know, maybe a couple months or something it'll be a way to show off more of how the, you know, how the sauce is made or whatever for this community. Thank you. All right, we are at time. So let's call it here. Thanks everyone for your participation. Look forward to the video and the meeting notes coming up in the task list and talk to you all soon. Thanks everybody.