Okay, I think it's about time to get started. Welcome everyone. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of CNI, and you've arrived at one of the project briefings that is part of the CNI Spring 2020 virtual members meeting. And we're about halfway through now, a two-month virtual meeting that will run till the end of May. There's still lots and lots to come. Today we're going to have a breakout session with quite a number of speakers. Reflecting on the effects and achievements of the merger that took place fairly recently between Lyrasis and Dura Space. This was a highly strategic merger for all of us, I think, because many, many of our institutions and much of our work depends on various things that those two organizations do. It also was, I think, an important milestone in helping to increase the sustainability and robustness of a number of our critical infrastructure elements. So I'm really going to be intrigued to hear about this. I will hand it over in a moment to David Wilcox, who will give an introductory presentation and will sort of orchestrate the panel. When the panel is done, we will take questions at the end. Diane Goldenberg Hart from CNI will moderate the Q&A. There is a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen, which brings up a box where you can enter questions. Please feel free to put questions in there as they occur to you during the briefing. There's no reason not to queue up all the questions as they occur, but we will try and answer them all at the end of the presentation. So with that, I'll just say I'm delighted to have this panel, and I welcome and thank all of the presenters in advance, and I'll turn it over to David. Great. Thanks very much, Cliff, and thanks to CNI for moving this spring meeting to an online format. I know I've enjoyed being able to attend more of the sessions through webinars and even download the videos of the ones that I've missed. And so as Cliff mentioned, I'm going to be primarily moderating this session, so I'm going to provide a brief introduction here, just setting a little bit of context, particularly for those of you that might be less familiar with DuraSpace or Lyrasys or some of the programs that we work with. And then the focus here really is going to be on Q&A with the panelists, who I'll introduce in just a moment. And then we do plan to leave enough time at the end for questions from the audience, so do feel free to put those questions in, as Cliff mentioned. So the panelists here today are Julia Trimmer from Duke University, Christie Park from Texas Digital Library, Robin Rugober from the University of Virginia, Rosalind Metz from Emory University, and Tim Shearer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And each of these representatives work with one or more of the programs that we're going to be talking about here today. So very briefly, DuraSpace was a nonprofit technology organization that existed between 2009 and 2019. And amongst other things, DuraSpace stewarded three open source community-supported programs, and those are DSpace, Fedora, and Vivo. And I'll say a little bit about each of those in a moment. But together, we supported a global community of over 3,000 users of those programs. And so in 2019, DuraSpace merged with Lyrisis. And Cliff mentioned this, but the focus here really was on being able to achieve greater impact and greater sustainability for all of the programs that we work with. So more resources, more programs, but also more expertise by combining the staff of both of those organizations to work together. So I won't read all this, but this is just the mission statement from Lyrisis. It's quite similar to the mission statement that we had at DuraSpace. And so the organizations were quite well aligned from the start here. But there's a great focus, amongst other things, enduring access to our collective heritage through leadership in open technologies, which is some of the things that we're going to be talking about here today. So very briefly, and this really is brief. This is not a product presentation. We're not going to be talking about features or anything like that. I have quite literally one sentence for each of the programs that we're going to be discussing. And I should say too, this is not an exhaustive list of programs that Lyrisis works with. These are just the ones that we could kind of fit into this panel to talk about here today. And so one of them is ArchiveSpace, which is an open-source archives information management application focused on managing and providing web access to archives, manuscripts, and digital objects. DSpace is a turnkey digital repository application. It's open-source. It's free, created by and for libraries all around the world. Fedora is also an open-source repository platform, a little more focused on flexibility and modularity, and also with an increasing focus on digital preservation. Vivo is notably not a repository. Vivo is both open-source software and an ontology for recording, editing, searching, browsing, and visualizing scholarly activity. And finally, Samvera. And I should note here that Samvera has a somewhat different relationship with Lyrisis than the other programs. We may be able to speak to that during the panel session here today. But Samvera is a community of information and technology professionals who share challenges, build expertise, and create sustainable software solutions for digital collections. So I do have some links at the end of the presentation if you want to learn a little bit more about any of these programs. But we're going to move here now to the Q&A portion. So we've prepared a small set of questions that each of the panelists is going to respond to. And then we're going to follow this with audience Q&A. And I think to start us off here for the questions, I'll just call on the panelists so that we're not sort of stepping on each other trying to get to the microphone first. And I'll do this if I can remember to and just sort of alphabetical order by first name. So if you all can remember where you fit in that sequence, that'll help. And if I can remember. So first question, what was the status of your program? And in this case, each of the panelists is going to choose primarily one program to talk about, although for the future questions we may talk about more than one each. But what was the status of your program? And what were your expectations going into the merger? And were those expectations realized? So I think Julia, that makes you first in alphabetical order if you want to start us off. Sure. Thanks, David. Hi, everyone. So I'm the chair of the Vivo Leadership Group and the Leadership Group is the kind of governance, the main governance board for Vivo. So before the merger, the Leadership Group put a list of questions about the merger together and shared them with Lyrasys. And I'm going to talk about three of them. The first was the Leadership Group said Vivo seems to be a rather different kind of entity than other Lyrasys products. Vivo is not strictly a library service. So how does Vivo fit into the Lyrasys product strategy? You know, how do we move forward together? And since then, I've really seen evidence that Lyrasys is planning to expand in ways that will provide opportunities for Vivo. For example, supporting research and research data, Lyrasys wants to move into more global markets as well. And Vivo currently has active implementations in 19 countries. So I hope that we can help with our existing partnerships there. The second question we had was, will the MOU between Duraspace and the Vivo project be honored through 2019? And it was. We will also renew our MOU for fiscal year 21. Third, does Lyrasys understand what Vivo is and how will they support us? And since the merger, I will say that we've worked a lot with leadership in Lyrasys. They certainly are familiar with Vivo's value proposition, and they've already given us a lot of support. So I think over time, we hope to see Vivo more reflected in the mission and vision for Lyrasys. But overall, back when we were talking about the merger, the leadership group really felt strongly that Lyrasys was a great opportunity for Vivo, and that we definitely needed their expertise and help to grow. So thanks. Thanks, Julia. Christie, you're up next. Thanks, David. So I'm Christie Park. I'm the director of the Texas Digital Library and currently the chair of D-Space Leadership Group, which is one of the two main governance groups for the D-Space program. And I'll talk a little bit about the status of D-Space as a community coming into the merger first off. So coming into the merger, we had pretty stable membership. We had some growth in membership between fiscal year 18 and the current fiscal year. We've added more than 30 new members, many of them coming from a large consortium in Germany that we brought in. So we've had good stable membership income, but a number of resource constraints, which I think all of us have been dealing with, and we were certainly dealing with that at the time of the merger. We have one full, at the time of the merger, we had one full-time staff member, Tim Donahue, who was our D-Space tech lead, who was really bearing a lot of the load of coordinating the development and the open-source community generally. And we had only just been able to bring him on something approaching full-time to the D-Space program. He had been working on other Dura-Space projects before that part-time. So for the year or two prior to the merger, the D-Space community had really been looking for ways to raise income and funds so that we could hire additional FTE. So that was a real issue for us and remained so at the point of the merger. The other thing that we were really focused on at the time that the merger took place is D-Space 7 development. This has been going on since around 2016. It's a major rewrite of the D-Space platform to modernize it, bring it in line with the core next generation repository principles, open-air B4, GDPR compliance, really modernize it, make it a competitive repository platform with a new user interface. Very ambitious undertaking that we started with all volunteer coders as we have historically. And so that was putting a lot of pressure and a lot of creating a lot of resource constraints for the community as well. And at the time of the merger, we're really starting to think about how we needed to change the way or adjust the way that we were approaching that development. And then finally, I'll say just about the status of the organization or the program is that like similar to Vivo, D-Space has a global user base. There are 2500 or more, 2500 known installations of D-Space around the world and a large global user base. But a majority of those users are not contributing members to the open source program. And so one of our challenges at the time of the merger and that continues to be is finding ways to convert those users into engaged members of the community. So those are some of the challenges that we came into this merger with. In terms of expectations, I'm going to speak mostly for myself in terms of our expectations coming into the merger. And I'll say one of my expectations is that there would be some level of culture clash and adjustment as the merger took place. And I've been through, you know, corporate mergers and all kinds of things where that's just always the case even under very good circumstances. And this, I think, was a very good circumstance where most of our community could see the benefits in terms of sustainability and scalability of this merger. And yet we're wary of how it would change D-Space's culture, D-Space's community. And secondly, we, because we are a global program, we had a number of members of our governance groups in Europe and Latin America who were not familiar with lyricists. And so that adjustment of building trust between the D-Space community and lyricists took some time. I think another expectation we had is that, you know, the benefits of this merger would accrue to D-Space in some form or fashion, that additional resources, additional expertise would be available to us, that we would be able to think about ways that we could ease the load on our single FTE. And I think that for the most part those expectations were realized. I won't go into detail now on that, though I may have some things to say about it later on. But I will say too that one of the ways that my expectations have been exceeded in this process is just the higher level of CEO level and executive level engagement in energy with D-Space that we have seen that has been really beneficial to the D-Space program as we've tried to raise funds and and make some changes to benefit the program. And I'll stop there for now. Thanks Christy and I believe Robin is next. Yes, thanks David. So our Cubspace, I'll start out by saying that I was one of the people that was in the group who laid out the very first requirements that would become part of those requirements would feed into the creation of our Cubspace. So while I haven't been in governance, I've been watching our Cubspace and UVA adopted it as soon as it was ready to be released. Our Cubspace is a little different from the other programs that have been that are represented on the panel primarily because it was a mature program already part of the lyricist organization. Our Cubspace was primarily expecting I think to work more closely with like-minded community-supported programs coming from Dura-Space. And I really think that the community saw an opportunity to share resources, explore integrations between programs and see what we could learn from one another. As part of this panel I'd interview Laurie Arp who is very deeply involved. UVA has a developer that works on the development team and we've had people often on contribute in different ways to our Cubspace. But I think it's unique in that it was already part of lyricists and I think there was a real I think optimistic look at the possible merger and the opportunities that that would provide. Great, thanks Robin. Rosalind I think you're next. So my name is Rosalind, I'm at Emory University. I'm actually the chair-elect for San Vera so I'm going to speak a little bit about San Vera. So as David alluded to during the intro section, San Vera is different than it's different in many ways than some of the programs that we're talking about here. But in regard to its relationship with Dura-Space it was different in that it was not underneath the larger umbrella organization of Dura-Space. Although I will say that Deborah Hank and Kurtz who at the time was heading up Dura-Space was on San Vera's formally Hydra, San Vera steering for a while and so we did have a really close relationship with Dura-Space. So when the merger between lyricists and Dura-Space was announced I would say that the community was very hesitant about this relationship. At the time we were rethinking governance in that San Vera sort of had no governance. I mean it had governance, it had norms that it was following, but it didn't have really hard governance the way many of the Dura-Space projects did. We were also considering hiring staff. That was something that San Vera even though it is over 10 years old had resisted doing. It was primarily run by its community members. There was no centralized staff sort of helping except for staff at Dura-Space who would help with finances. And as hiring staff we were working toward developing a contribution model. And so San Vera for its first 10 plus years had really run on the idea that we were not going to ever ask you for money. That all we would ever ask you for was your time and your dedication to the project. But if we were to hire staff it really necessitated the need for financial resources coming into the community in a regular fashion. So when the merger occurred we were sort of going through an exercise to rethink all of this. And that is no small undertaking anybody who has been part of a community can say. I mentioned that San Vera is different because it wasn't an umbrella underneath the umbrella of Dura-Space but it's also different in that it is a community of communities. So all of the other projects named here have a single piece of software that they work with that they're responsible for maintaining. And the San Vera community has three, four, five. It always seems like there's another product that works with it. I would say the three most notable are Hyrax which is sort of the flagship application we'll call it. There is Haiku which is a hosting service for Hyrax and other custom San Vera software. And then there's Avalon which is for AV materials. So those products are underneath the San Vera umbrella but they are also their own communities and their own rights. So the needs of Avalon don't actually always mesh with the needs of Hyrax. They don't always mesh with the needs of Haiku and so figuring out how to balance those needs is something that the steering group for San Vera deals with all the time. So we were cognizant that we are very different than some of the other application or other communities that are out there. And we were hesitant because we weren't sure Lyricist truly understood that. And so we found around our expectations being realized I would say our expectations were probably low. And I would say that Lyricist has surpassed us. But it's been a huge learning curve I would say for Lyricist. So as we're discussing hiring of a staff member right now you know there was I think an assumption that the staff member would do a lot of what many of the other community managers similar to David do or each of the existing projects. But really San Vera's community manager would be handling finances and helping to put on conferences and in-person meetings. We have one annual conference a year. We have a virtual conference every year. We have two in-person partner meetings a year. And that's a lot of administrative you know coordination work. And then there's the work around trying to coordinate sprints that we would also be asking for this position to do. And that was some that was kind of a learning curve for Lyricist. I don't think that they realized how much work we do around face-to-face meetings and that those types of relationships. It's still happening. We're still on that learning curve with them. Where they've been I would say very gracious in giving this giving themselves time and giving us time to get to know one another. But we're also cognizant that this relationship probably will need to change in the near future. As Lyricist sort of brings in all of these other communities and tries to bring them closer together and make them work more closely. San Vera will have to come to a decision point of whether or not it will choose to become part of the Lyricist organization or choose to continue down its own path. So I guess I'll hand it over to Tim to talk about Fedora. Hi folks. It's great to be here. Tim Shearer. I'm at the libraries at Carolina. I'm also here as a member of Fedora Steering and Fedora Leaders. But I should mention both Robin and Rosie are as well and are actually chairing. But I'm just going last. So I'm going to clean up here. As you probably know Fedora has been around for quite a long time. Has a significant footprint both in North America and internationally. As often happens when leadership transitions several times over the governance of a project. I think in some ways we were in an array in a renaissance in that a whole new group of folks were starting to look at it. So at the time we were revisiting how how the product is staffed within then Dura space. So like which software developers worked and there was an effort to bring in cross training which was lovely. We were revisiting the community trying to bring in more voices be more inclusive and get more representation and expand. And we did that on all the different levels. So we were looking at membership. How do we bring in different sized organizations with different missions. We were looking at governance. How do we get more representation and voices on governance. We were looking at our international folks and seeing if we could get more international representation and membership and governance. And we were trying to explicitly tie ourselves more strongly to other communities specifically to Zanvera D space and Island Dora with governance. So all that was kind of in train as the merger was coming along. Another thing on the technology side and I mixed metaphors and my colleagues are used to this but I'll go ahead and do it anyhow. Fedora three and earlier was kind of like gardening with soil. And Fedora four was like gardening with hydroponics. You were still making vegetables but you were going it with a completely different infrastructure. And as it turned out it was really hard if you're used to having a soil based agriculture to switch to a hydroponic agriculture. And so there was a huge jump folks were having to make to get from three to four. And a lot of people were kind of afraid and wondering why they should do that. So another thing that I think was going on was a realization that we inadvertently in an exciting and great way kind of chose a whole different way of doing business. And so in Fedora five and now six what we were looking to do is to knit those back together. So all gardeners could use Fedora. And I think that we're relatively successful in that there was some mild reputational damage I think during that period too that everyone was working on repairing. So to me that's the context in which the merger began. I don't think I have much new to say about the merger or what we were expecting but questions about the membership model the community or communities the cultures within those the autonomy of Fedora inside that the autonomy of governance what kind of staffing models who wouldn't wouldn't be able to work on the Fedora projects. And even down to the more banal alignment of schedules and meetings we had our own cycles of schedules and meetings and lyricists did. So all those things were popping up. And so what we did know is that Fedora had a great community and great leadership and a great staff and so we were hopeful and I think we found at least so far that some of those things that we could have worried about are really not to be worried about right now. So with that I'll kick it back to David. Great thanks Tim. So on the next question really just kind of wondering what impacts either positive or negative the merger has had on the programs that you work with. And so you know we don't have to necessarily have everyone speak about the exact same programs I think it's just whatever is most relevant to you as we as we go through. But Julia if you'd like to start us off again and we can just keep the same order. I'm sure. So we in Vivo kind of took advantage of the merger to do a program assessment and I think all of the other aerospace programs did as well but it was really helpful for Vivo and enabled the leadership group to clarify the most important priorities that we had. Our project director Mike Conlon was ready for a transition. Where's this and this assessment process helped us through that. We began and completed and it takes a village assessment with Lori Arvin, Megan Forbes that helped us take a fresh look at all aspects of the project and in terms of sustainability. I think the leadership group really has a much better understanding of the project now and I would say that everybody is more engaged or was more engaged before the pandemic hit. And then I'll just add that I'm looking forward to seeing some kind of coordinated communications strategies and updated branding for the Dura space community supportive programs but but I realize that takes time. So that's it for me. And I'll add from the D space perspective I think the greatest positive impact for us has been not terribly surprising but the greater size and breadth and scale of the organization under lyricists has allowed us to take advantage of some additional resources within the organization bringing in people from other parts of the organization to help us take a fresh look at some things that has been really positive for us and has also let us take some risks with how we move forward with development with other things that we're trying to do in ways that we couldn't with Dura space because we had to be very conservative there wasn't much as much of a safety net I guess you'd say. And so for instance with D space we have moved to a paid development model for the remainder of D space 7 which adds expense and we're doing fundraising to cover those expenses right now but because we have the larger organization with more resources kind of behind us we can take on that risk and a little bit with a little bit more confidence. Thanks Christy go ahead Robin oh you're muted. I think the largest impact that archive space experienced was having to move within the organization and move under new executive leadership. When Dura space merged with lyricists it became the division of community supported programs and so collection space archive space and other things moved in under but while it's only been a short time and I think a lot of the expectations archive space had has not yet been realized I think that they have actually been able to work more closely with the other programs there's been a lot more sharing of things like lessons learned. I think the overall cost for all the programs for that executive level and has gone down or at least they're getting more for their money if that makes sense because we've got a much fuller administration level and as Christy was saying a much larger budget within lyricists for all these programs but you know the other programs coming in alongside archive space definitely had things that archive space could benefit from. I think it was mentioned before about the assessment being done across and there's discussions across all of the programs and how we can share things hopefully in the future we'll be able to share things like development cycles and other things but it's been largely a positive impact. For Sinvera I would say this is very odd for me because I'm also the chair for Fedora and it's an interesting dichotomy seeing sort of how Fedora has been impacted and how Sinvera has been impacted. On for Sinvera I think actually we've seen some negative impacts particularly around hiring. There are MOU which underneath DuraSpace was easily sort of just renewed for finances we had to go through a whole new set of challenges. One of our partner institutions, Emory University, will be hiring the community manager and unfortunately some of those delays around our MOU caused delays in hiring and now Emory is under a hiring freeze as everybody else's I'm sure and so you know we have I have as the hiring manager concerns about whether or not we'll be able to sort of push this forward. I suspect we will but you know you don't really know as I'm sure you're all aware the COVID situation changes every single day and so I would say immediately it was that not really understanding why the community needed this position sort of caused a lot of delays. I think there was thoughts that oh well lyricists can just sort of cover that work and it's and it was like no we don't really think that they can right we think we really do need somebody and we need somebody dedicated to us because we are a community of communities and we're not just asking this person to manage a single community but to help all of these products move themselves forward and so I would say on the San Bernard side it was negative on the Fedora side it's it's been positive and we did have a lot of integration with Aaron Tripp you sat on in on all the Fedora meetings prior to the merger but afterwards you know having Robert sit in on our meetings I think has driven us in interesting directions like Tim mentioned he's sort of throwing out ideas and I'm asking us to think about why we've been doing what we've been doing and how maybe we can change but I'll let Tim talk a little bit more. Thanks Rosie I'll go quickly but I think one of the things is that Aaron from the Durr space side at least that's who I'm aware of probably some other Durr space staff and folks at lyricist kind of protected us from a lot of the legalese and so we would hear there's a decision point here but all this other stuff is masked as work so in some ways I'm very grateful for that the the main things that I kind of was looking towards after getting through some of the angst about change was the larger infrastructure so when you're in a very very small shop you're building the website you're writing the blog posts you're asking for grants you're doing the finance and moving into lyricist there's more specialization and there's some real lovely things about that like here's a thing we need to do and here's a team that knows how to do it and so I think that's been wholly positive and that's in areas around granting infrastructure communication events and finance and probably HR as well so that's really all I would say right now. Great thanks Tim and I think and we've got one more question after this but here we're just kind of wondering about unrealized opportunities so things that haven't happened yet but maybe things that you hope will happen and I think just for the sake of time if everyone has maybe one thing that they're kind of thinking of that would be probably helpful so we can start with Julia and feel free to pass and come back if you don't have something at top of mind but but go ahead whenever you're ready. Yeah thanks David I think that I would say that you know we're looking for ways to make Vivo more accessible to a wider group of wider community so we're thinking about exploring kind of possibly a more streamlined version of Vivo and a hosted service so I think this being part of lyricists and getting that guidance to find funding and even grants through the catalyst fund is probably our biggest opportunity. Thanks. Yeah and I wrote one one thing down as I was thinking about this although I think there's a lot of potential opportunities but the thing I think about is just I would like to see more and I think we can do more coordination and cooperation across the platforms and across the programs which I think Robin alluded to earlier. Yes I think I'd add to that besides integration with some of the platforms really you know some of the more mature programs the older programs that came into lyricists have worldwide adoption and while archive space was built you know by people from Australia primarily I don't think it's got quite the adoption worldwide that we'd like to see so I think there's some things that could be some opportunities there. So I'm going to actually sort of talk umbrella-y unrealized operations you know Christie sort of touched on better collaboration with all of the communities unfortunately the communities were supposed to come together at the core meeting in Peru and aside from the fact that I just wanted to go to Peru I was also really looking forward to that meeting. I think there are things that at least the repository communities could benefit from around standardization of the tools that they have and that's not just underneath core but from an infrastructure perspective and standardizing around the way that we do certain things that would make it easier for all organizations everywhere to move back and forth between different platforms. It would also make it easier for those non-repository communities to better understand how the repositories work and then integrate with them. So I think that is an unrealized opportunity. I do know that Robert is very keen on making that happen and is really hopeful that we can come together and do that collaboration. He was still trying to I had conversations with him he was still convinced after core was canceled no we could do it we could do it we could do it in Atlanta Rosie maybe you can host and I was like Robert we're not having any meetings we'll have to wait it'll be okay but I know he really really wants to make that happen and bring all of these communities together. I don't I think everybody's covered the the things that I would think about which include globalization a tighter knit community and I think anything that reduces barriers to entry so I think potentially hosting and some of the work that's been done to get us to Fedora 6 and other some of the other products will help reduce barriers to entry so greater greater sense of risk reduction and preservation and access across all of our communities. Great thanks Tim so we have one more question which is probably an obvious one given the times we're living through but after this we are opening it up to audience Q&A so do feel free to put your questions in if you haven't already and so again final question for the panelists here how has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the the programs that you work with Julia go ahead whenever you're ready. Well I think the problem I want to speak to the budgetary challenges I've seen that sort of the focus of our community and our leadership group has really been kind of fracturing people just don't have with the bandwidth right now you know it's really it's such a sad time and you know that takes its toll but I also have been thinking about the challenge that this gives us and that is really making open technologies and open communities a big part of our recovery going forward right how do we present and position our programs as the smartest way to move forward in these times and for so many reasons and and I don't know how to do that yet but that's what I'm thinking about. Yeah I think that you know it's impacted us in a few few ways Rosie already mentioned the cancellation of the core meeting where we were going to have these conversations about greater collaboration and integration. Our leadership our governance groups are international we have members from Italy Germany and elsewhere where they were experiencing impacts much earlier than we were in the US and that disruption so that disruption to our kind of governance dynamic has been going on for a while and that's it's just difficult to see it's emotionally difficult as Julia mentioned and I think that it's had some impact on productivity in terms of the development software development on d-space seven understandably and predictably I think we're seeing that across most of our organizations um but overall I would say the resilience of our communities have been really strong and I think part of that is what Julia was saying about the opportunity we see to really lead in this moment with these platforms and the you know open infrastructure and open content and the impact that we can have on what's happening now and what comes after. The other I'll just mention I don't really want to talk about budget stuff but I guess that is one of the big impacts and we're in the middle of a fairly sizable fundraising effort with our members to fund some additional d-space seven development and we were having great success with it prior to everything changing and I think it remains to be seen what all the impacts are going to be on that but that is you know something we're dealing with and concerned about. I'd have to agree with others that have talked about the interruptions that we have gone through and whether that's at the governance level or at the development level I think in one way you know everybody was working remotely anyway and so sometimes our conference calls and other things felt like business as usual and might be the only normal thing in our life but but I think that our face-to-face meetings that we haven't been able to have that's you know less in the communication I am really grateful that we have the technology we have to be able to work and see each other online but there has been an interruption in the development across all the programs I think but also it's changed up how we have to argue for funding. Some people are saying that more digital resources are being depended upon and so that makes our programs more important but when people are looking at the budget and our hospitals losing 80 million dollars a week so that's a huge amount of money going out that has to be recovered so it impacts everything. Yeah just to echo the budget situation, St. Vera sent out its first round of invoices for the country for its new contribution model and you know we've we've been clear with our community that they don't need to provide the full contribution until the not this fiscal year next fiscal year but we're already hearing back around people saying I don't know if we can do that this year which then brings issues to the next year so one thing is that's good is that we do have money that has been set aside we wanted to make sure we had a two-year cushion before we made a hire of a community manager so that we can guarantee the position at least always one year in advance we didn't want to just spend down all the money and and then be living hand-to-mouth so to speak. I think everybody's hit the the the things that I'm thinking about it used to be like who are you going to buy your socks from and now it's like well maybe we're buying our socks from Walmart but I'm I'm pretty sure we're headed towards adorning our own socks and so the the question then becomes how do you how do you fund this really important work with with really limited resources I will say that the the thing that I think has been the most personally appealing to me is that there's a bigger seawall with lyricists than there was I think with DuraSpace and so some amazing talent that I've worked with for years and come to care deeply about I feel like are in a much better situation to weather this particular storm so it's basically personal feelings I will say that Estee Pope at Amherst has has written a lovely description of how the importance of open open source open access open communities is at this time and I just think it's kind of terrible that as the the clarity around needing this infrastructure shoots up in this crisis the ability to fund it despite willingness may be may be hampered a little bit yeah I need to make one quick correction that's 85 million per month not weak for UVA medical but it's still a huge loss one thing I also wanted to add on to Tim's comment is within Fedora we're even talking about bridging memberships because we don't want to lose our community we have really great individuals who contribute from their institution they give a lot back and to lose them would be huge for us so we don't want to lose those and that's actually an idea that came from Robert he thought he said in our meeting what about bridging memberships for those who may drop because of this crisis can we bridge those memberships just to say yeah you can't pay this year but you're still a member you're not you're not going to get rid of us that quickly because those members those in those institutions are really valuable both from a providing financial resources but also the the human resources that they provide are extremely valuable yeah thanks Rosalind and and to everyone uh for all the uh the answers um I think we're we're ready at this point uh to use the time remaining for questions from the audience and I will maybe just leave this slide up as we as we take those questions just for any of you that want to learn a little bit more about any of these programs or lyricists more generally those are those are the links but yeah with that I think we can open up the floor for for questions thanks David and thanks to all our panelists for really interesting conversation today about these challenges all the issues that you're facing with this merger this consolidation and so many issues that I think apply more broadly at this time which I think a lot of folks will find interesting in this context and in others so I won't delay any more because I see lots of questions coming in so let me just get started right away and the first question comes from Roger Schoenfeld who says I'd love to hear more about institutional adoption of repositories since the merger specifically are the various Duraspace cloud-based repository offerings growing their market share versus v-press digital commons and other competing offerings so that's probably uh yeah the the division of of lyricists that works on sort of the cloud-based offerings is not the one that I work directly with so I really don't have the the numbers for that that question in front of me I think it's a very good one and one that we can probably follow up with but I wouldn't want to venture an answer just because it's it's sort of outside where uh where I work at and I'm not sure if any of you really have any insight into that but I really don't have the numbers in front of me I would say anecdotally san vera has seen uh just a handful of institutions moving from v-press to san vera they're not I mean I would say that d-space is much more analogous to v-press than san vera or fedora are um so I would sort of look to christie to see it seems like you're growing so I yeah and I think that the the it's a tough question to answer we don't track this kind of adoption at the open source level as well as maybe we we could or would be nice to it's very difficult to track who's using an open source product and so we have a sense of that but not really hard data as far as I know the d-space direct service at lyricists would be a good you know kind of test for that I will agree with rosie anecdotally in texas where I am we see some you know a handful of institutions moving from from v-press to d-space or other open source platforms but we've also seen a couple go the other way so I it may be a wash anybody else on that one okay all right thank you thanks very much for that answer thanks for the question roger uh looks like we had a comment come in as well um let's see oh it's also includes a question this is a very this was a very helpful panel is the comment and thanks to all the contributors greater collaboration among the service offerings seems to all panelists to be an opportunity that the merger affords when any of the panelists care to be more specific about examples of collaboration that they see as most desirable so um I will say that um in fedora we've chosen to move to the oxford common file layout as our um way of storing content that we put into fedora um that has an upstream impact on san vera repositories and islandora repositories so um it may make it easier for folks to move back and forth between um san vera and islandora or using fedora to build your own repository on top I would love to see d-space also um think about adopting OCFL um again because it may really help um with folks migrating back and forth um between the different repository platforms um so that is me lobbying christy while simultaneously telling you what my hope is is lobby via presentation I also think that there's a real opportunity to share resources across the different programs and duraspace was doing that some um but we've also I think done more of it since we've come under lyricists and that's in terms of you know if you need someone to do uh some technical oversight work or uh some project management support or bounce ideas maybe you've got a new a new person in a role and they need to have people to bounce ideas off of there's a lot more cross-pollination across the programs that I think we could do um I'll speak up and say I I think anything that reduces barriers towards um any institutional entity trying to get their stuff into a system manage it and preserve it is good um I think some of the larger conversations were beginning to happen around the open communities and what's exciting to me about this is to a certain extent lyricist synthesizes several voices into a bigger voice to help speak to that need to coordinate more effectively nationally and internationally to spend our our collective resources more wisely but I'd love to see a small medium and large or so that anybody can get themselves uh their their their stuff taken care of that's I'm losing words I would also say that the open there's the open platform initiative um one of the many of the things that we talked about in that initiative was around funding many of the communities that are now underneath lyricists um so I do think that the merger between lyricists and duris space makes it easier to see a way of being more sustainable with our open source communities um again you know sharing resources sharing technologies making it easier to move back and forth between products um you know I think I think a lot of the challenges open source communities have been facing or something that lyricists um is well positioned to help us solve I agree and I want to add I think there are some concrete things that we know about where we could collaborate across platforms like Rosie mentioned with OCFL I think there are just some things we don't even know um and we haven't yet figured it out and I think that the the desire and the idea of cross-platform integrations or collaborations has been around for a long time way before the merger uh with lyricists we've been talking about you know fedora and dspace integrations or various things along those lines but I think that each of our well I'll just speak for dspace at least a lot of our programs have been very focused on kind of subsistence living just kind of getting it getting it done getting to the next year doing the fundraising the development and what lyricists offers us with its larger organization and and greater set of resources the ability to think a little bit bigger than that and to think beyond just the subsistence living that some of us have have been doing for a while that's my two cents thank you thanks so much thanks so much everyone and thank you for the wonderful questions I just want to invite you to go ahead and type in your questions we do have a little bit of time to take more questions if you have more for our panel and I also just want to mention that if you would like to um have your microphone turned on and um interact um address the panel directly make a comment ask a question live please feel free to raise your virtual hand and um I can unmute you and we can do that in this environment um I also want to remind everyone that you are here as part of CNI's spring 2020 virtual conference we are so delighted you made time out of your day to join us and hear about this topic I'm sharing with you now um a direct link to the schedule for the rest of the meeting will be going on through the end of May with lots of interesting webinars and presentations yet to come so check out the lineup and register for more offerings now through the end of May so with that I think we have no more questions in the Q&A list and I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to our panelists for coming and talking to us about the merger their experience their reflections and who are audience for coming and asking great questions and being a part of this webinar today


So I am going to give him an object in his right hand. He will have time to move it around in his hands and he is going to understand what the object is. Then I am going to direct his left hand to this collection of objects and he is going to feel each of them and he is going to pick up the one which matches the object in his right hand. So let's start with the first one. Mike, here is your first object. Please feel it around. Okay. Now I am going to direct your hand here. I am going to pick up each and match and pick up the one which matches. That was too easy, wasn't it? Okay. So now let's do the same exercise again. We will keep that aside. Let's give you another object in your right hand. Okay. So he has again matched it with his left hand. Okay. Let's keep that aside. Let's give the third one. Ideally this test should have been done with very closely matching objects. And so widely different objects. Okay. Now feel this around in your hand. Now feel it. Okay. So he has matched the third object also. Let's... Okay. Okay. And finally we have the fifth object here. Sorry. Okay. So he has picked it up. Okay. So basically thank you very much. You have performed all the tests very successfully. And you have managed to... To make this test a little more complicated, what we should have done, we should have put very closely matching objects. That would have really tested his skill. It was so far different than he just picked up any state. Anyway, so by this test, you want to do something... You can put five different pens slightly different from each other. That will make it a little more difficult. They will have to palpate each pen very closely and then match each pen and then we have to do it. So they are going to make it a little more difficult for you. Don't give him too many. Three, three of each is enough. Okay. Don't let him see. I see him on the way out. Careful. You just have to feel all of them and decide. See, now it has to be a little more, isn't it? Okay. Let's give you another one. I'm just going to direct your hand and you have to do the palpation yourself. Feel yourself. It is matching, right? Yes. Yes, it is matching. I think he's done pretty good. I think he's done pretty good. Thank you very much, Mani. So, in most cases, there are several different things, several different functions of the brain.  He understood it with his left brain. Which specific area? The somatosensory cortex and the superior parietal lobele of the left side. The information went to his vernicase. Vernicase made him understand what that object was. He remembered it. Then he picked up the same object with his left hand. What happened? The information from the left hand went to his right side. Went to his right somatosensory cortex, right superior parietal lobele which was for stereognosis, but he didn't understand it. From the right side, it came back to his vernicase on the left side through his corpus callosum. Yes, it came back through the corpus callosum to the left side to the vernicase and matched it with the object which was already there in his right hand. And then told him, yes, this is the same object. So you see, with this test we have demonstrated the function of this sensory cortex on one side, how it went through the corpus callosum to the vernicase and then how he matched it with the other side. So this is what we have done. We have integrated what we studied yesterday in the parietal lobele and what we saw today in the corpus callosum and this is how we dispersed stereognosis and how we matched the object. So obviously, if he had lost his corpus callosum callosul syndrome or transcautical apraxia what would have happened? When I directed his left hand to pick up the object he would not have been able to match it. Are we clear? That is transcautical apraxia. Clear? I think that's what we demonstrated. So that is the cerebral cortex. Tomorrow we are going to have a lab session and we will have to come a little early and help me out with taking out the brain specimens put your mask because it's going to be very strong smell and we will demonstrate the brain.


Last year, I called on solutions to be courageous and hopeful in anticipation of a challenging 2019. And sure enough, 2019 has been a very challenging year with a worrisome economic and social environment. Many businesses continue to struggle and crime continues to undermine the safety and security of our citizens and their property. I wish it were not so, but sadly, these are the realities of our time. In spite of the challenges, I still believe that together we can change the troubled face of our country. We can return our country to a place of tranquility, tolerance and trust through the collective will of all those who desire a better St. Lucia. Our 238 square mile country is all we collectively can claim to be ours and we must therefore jealously guard and protect it. As we approach the year 2020, I call on all St. Lucia's to be actively engaged in shaping the future of this country. The future of our country cannot be left in the hands of a few men and women while the rest of us sit idly by as victims of a disabling environment. People power must speak loudly and clearly for a better St. Lucia in 2020 and beyond. Let us remember at this time all the vulnerable groups in the society and extend acts of generosity towards them. They too have a part to play in shaping our future. May our country be wrapped in the spirit of love, especially at this Christmas season. It is true love that will find hope and the courage to journey along the path of shaping a better St. Lucia. May usual thanks and best wishes to my constituents of Kastri's Easts. I continue to feel proud and privileged to represent all of you. Your support has provided me with the strength and energy to remain steadfast in the fight for a more equitable, just and inclusive society where differences of opinion will be respected and accepted. Thanks to my comrades in the St. Lucia Labour Party and staff at my offices. I am fortunate and grateful for your contribution to the movement for change. My family and I, with all St. Lucia's, including those in the diaspora, are happy and peaceful Christmas and a healthy and fruitful 2020. I thank you.


Up until now, we haven't been able to test for conditions. When we ask a person for their age in years, as in this program, if they enter a negative number, we do the calculation anyway, even though it doesn't make any sense. We'd like a way to tell if input is valid before we do the calculation. And that's why Python has the if statement, which has this generic model. If some boolean expression evaluates to true, we do some statements. This is called the if clause. Otherwise, the expression worked out to false. We do the other statements, and that's the else clause. The if clause and else clause are always indented under the if and else keywords. This is called a binary if. That's a bit abstract, so let's put a binary if into our age program. After we get the number of years, we're going to ask if the years is greater than zero, then it's okay to do our calculation of the number of days and print that out. Otherwise, years was not greater than zero, we'll print an error message. Now let's run the program.  If we have a negative number, we get our error message. In most cases, you're going to have an else to go along with your if. You'll want to do one thing or some other thing. Sometimes, though, you'll want to have an if part only without an else to go with it. And that's called a unary selection one way as opposed to this binary selection, which is a two-way if else. Let's add some code to ask for the user's name and print it in the output. We'll let name become input, and the prompt will be what is your name. And here in the print, we'll add the name to personalize our output. If someone named Nancy is 41 years old, we get their age and days. What happens if I just press enter? I don't want to give my name. And then give an age. I get output like this. You are about 10,585 days old, comma, period. That's sort of ugly. Let's put in a unary selection to provide a name if the user hasn't given us one. If the name is equal to the empty string. And notice by the way I'm using two equal signs here. Remember, a single equal sign is the assignment operator. A double equal sign asks a question. Our name and the empty string the same. That's a yes or no, true or false question. If the answer is true, then we'll change the name to mystery guest. We don't need an else. If the name wasn't the empty string, it's the name that they entered, and that's the one we want to use. Let's run the program again. This time let's have Fred, who's 19 years old, and we get his name. If we run it with someone who doesn't want to give their name, who's also 19, we call them mystery guest. The output is a little more humorous, and at least not as ugly as it was before. Some people like to have an else with their if, no matter what. If you're one of those people and you insist on having an else for every if, Python has a construct for you. In this unary if, I can say else, and the body of the else clause will be pass. That's a special keyword in Python that means do nothing. These lines now tell us if the name is the empty string, I'll set the name to mystery guest. Otherwise, I'll pass right on to the rest of the program. Nothing to do here. And this also works. If someone named Vin is 22 years old, it uses their name, and if someone doesn't give a name and they're 22 years old, they become our mystery guest. In summary, there are two types of if statements. One is the binary if with else, where you have two choices. If the condition is true, you do one thing. Otherwise, you do something else. The other kind is the unary selection. If the name is the empty string, we'll set it to mystery guest. Otherwise, there's nothing to be done and we don't even need the else part. However, if you do want to have an else part for every if, you can always use pass to tell Python do nothing.


One of the big mysteries of elections in India, which actually baffles a lot of people, is why is it that despite the Modi government's terrible record with employment, it still manages to come back to power? Why is it that the BJP, despite having a bad record with generating jobs in states like Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, whatever you take, it still manages to come back to power? And generally the answer is polarization. People say the polarization is so strong that it overrides all other considerations, especially economic considerations like jobs. In this show, I'm going to tell you why that is incorrect and not true. And I'll start with some data in terms of what was the annual average rate of job growth under different governments. So let's start with what it was under, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and that was between 1998 to 2004. I'm taking all six years. The average was 2.3%. As you can see, this is RBI's assessment, RBI's data. This is not private data. And what happened in 2004 looks of elections? Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost. Everyone knows that. And what happened when Manmohan Singh ruled in UPA 1, which was 2004 to 2009, the annual job growth rate was just 0.8%. And what happened in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections? Manmohan Singh came back to power with more seats. The Congress won more seats. Now let's just look at UPA 2, 2009 to 2014. The jobs growth rate actually increased marginally to about 1%. And in the last one year, which is 2013-14, the growth rate in jobs was 3%, which is the highest that one sees in RBI's data which begins from the early 90s. And what happened to the Manmohan Singh government? Manmohan Singh lost and didn't lose, just lose, lost very badly. And then Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. Here, our RBI claims data is only till 2014-18, between 2014-18. We don't have updated data yet. The annual job growth rate is minus 0.2%, which means the jobs actually declined in this period. Let me take the data from CMI, the private source. And CMI's data I'm comparing May 2016 to May 2019 because CMI started collecting data from 2016. In these three years, in the Modi regime, the first jobs actually declined at the rate of almost 1% per year. And yet in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Narendra Modi came back with a record win. So let's put all of these together. You can see it on your screen that every time there has been a better job growth rate, the government has actually lost. I'm not saying these are correlated. I'm just saying that there is no relationship between jobs and a government coming back to power. Let's now look at what happened in Uttar Pradesh. You know that Yogi Adityanath has just won the UP elections and won it with almost as many numbers. Maybe a reduced majority but still has performed extremely well. The annual job growth rate and here again I'm taking CMI's data and I'm comparing September, December 2016 to September, December 2021. This is the latest data, state data that we have. I'm taking a five year period. The job growth rate is negative again, minus 0.6% and yet Yogi Adityanath comes back to power. So you can clearly see that there is no clear link between jobs growth or even increased unemployment and victory by any party. We saw that Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath despite bad job records have come back. UP1 came back with a relatively poor job growth record as well. The reason for that is that when you look at jobs, when you look at unemployment data and look at it closely, you will realize that it is a very complex issue. So let me put out some data for you and most of this is going to be CMI's data. The latest as I said, I'm taking a long period, September to December 2021. Here it is, total population and look, I'm going to take the period between 25 to 59 years when people actually settle down and look for jobs. Although the working age population is anyone who's more than 15 years, between 15 to 24 you can say that people or everyone does not look for jobs and when they do get a job, they might not like it, they don't want to settle for it. So I'm going to look at 25 to 59 years of age and look at what I have. Total population between the 25 to 59 year age bracket is 668 million, right? In India these are CMI's estimates, obviously there's been no new census. Those who want to work and this is a special category, which means those who actively are seeking work but also those who will work if they are given some work, that is about 367 million. Actively seeking work, that is about 362 million, which means that 5 million people are not actively seeking work but they will work if you give it to them. How many people are employed within this? 344 million and that gives you, means that 18 million people in India are unemployed between the age of 25 to 59. When you go above 65, those who are seeking work are almost all employed. So above 60 years of age, the employment rate is actually extremely good. Now that does not actually tell us the entire picture, why am I saying this? I'm saying this because when we look at the picture itself, we should actually concentrate on men because in India women have a very very low labour participation rate which means that very few of them actively seek work or even go out, want to work. Most of them do not have any of time to go out of their house and work because they have so much work inside the house. So the people who would be frustrated because they don't have jobs are going to be men and more often than not if they don't have jobs is going to be this 25 to 60 category men because before that they have some hope, they're studying and after that they're almost retiring. So this is the age group that we are trying to look at. Male population within this 25 to 15 years age group is 333 million. Out of that, those who want to work, again as I said those who want to work includes those who are actively seeking work but also those who will work if they get work. That's 323 million. Almost everyone is actively seeking work amongst men within that age group. How many are employed? 317 million out of them have jobs which means that only 6 million men, 6 million male within that age group, the crucial age group of 25 to 60 actually are unemployed and that works to just a 2% unemployment rate. Most unemployment is actually amongst young people between the age of 19 to 24 and of course those below that 15 to 19 as well and this unemployment does not necessarily show up as electoral anger because there is hope that they will get some job and the number of people looking for jobs is not that high because many of them are actually studying as well. Now let's look at these 6 million people that I talked about. If these 6 million people were to be divided into Lok Sabha seats, it just comes to about 11,000 men per Lok Sabha seat because if we look at the women it will be much, much less fewer those who want to work but don't have work. So that is one of the crucial reasons why unemployment does not become a big issue in Lok Sabha elections because there just aren't enough people who are unemployed who have a voice who actively will vote against the government because they are unemployed and that is a crucial thing. Now as I told you, within this group, the number of people who want to work and are seeking work is one number. There are many who actually aren't even looking for work. Even if you say when CMI asks them that if you are given work, will you work? Their answer is no and I am looking at only men here and look at this number here, made 25 to 59 years, unemployed, which is the blue bar that you see is about 6 million but those who don't want to work, they are neither seeking work nor are they going to work if they are given is 10 million. This is people above the age of 25 and within the age of 59. Some of them might have problems, physical disabilities, some of them might be in higher studies but that number is not going to be very high. So the number of unemployed is actually lower than number of those who won't work even if they are given work. That is about 10 million people. Why is it important here? Because these people who will not work even if they are given work are people who are living at a subsistence level. And as I have said before, the Modi government's political economy is a subsistence economics, it is subsistence politics which means that there are people extremely poor. They have lived in broken huts, hovels, if they are given a little bit of money to repair their roof, if they are given a little bit of money to buy a little bit of daal or some vegetables which comes into their accounts and they get free rice, wheat and some other things along with that, then they are going to be more or less content with what they are getting because it is not automatic that everyone will want to work. In societies which are still not entirely modernized, which ours is as well, there will be that one to three percent of people who will not want to work or are vagrants, beggars. These are people who would not be counted as employed. This is a significant part of the population. And when you go down the scale, if people who barely have very low income, barely get work, they do not always get enough employment, if these people are given free rations, if they are given enough to just survive, then they are not necessarily angry with the government. In fact, as we know, if the packets of free rice, free daal, free sugar, free vegetable oil comes with the photographs of the prime minister and the chief minister, which we have seen as it happened in Uttar Pradesh. It used to happen in the south quite often as well. Then it is very likely that they will be considered the prime minister and the chief minister as a direct benefactor and they as beneficiaries. They will have a sense of obligation towards the prime minister and the chief minister. And that is what the BJP would rather do because there is a direct... If when people get jobs, they don't necessarily thank the government, even if the government policies, even if the government's policies have created conditions for them to get jobs. So that is why employment is not an issue. Yes, you will see that there are certain cases where people do agitate, people do go and vote against the government or vote for the opposition. And that does happen. But that unemployed number is so small that it makes no difference to elections. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Like us, subscribe to our channel and do share this video as well.


Great, so that was an awesome first chapter in our journey. Again, thank you to all the speakers for just the crazy things that you've talked about and I've been thinking about and I'm excited to talk about more today. But before we get there, we're still learning. So now we're going to shift away from looking just a little bit, looking at bacteria in their ability to produce materials and now actually looking at bacteria as displays and as input devices. And so this is really important especially for wearable biotech because bacteria, because they're living care and are already monitoring and already have these built-in sensors for a lot of the things that we care about and that our body is monitoring. And so we have these sensors, we have ways to make them display and so what can this reveal about our body, our state, our life. So we're going to have another three really inspiring speakers. We'll start with Katia Vega, who's from UC Davis doing some really cool work in tattoos, that sensor monitor. We're then going to go to Zinyu Lu, who's from MIT, bioengineering or mechanical engineering. And she's doing work involved with wearable living hydro gels and flexible displays. And then finally we're going to talk with Peter Wen, who is working with textiles that can tell us about what we've been exposed to and lab coats that can let us know when things go wrong. So, all right. Katia. Hello everyone. I'm Katia Vega. I'm an assistant professor from the Department of Design at UC Davis. And I will go back to this image that Patty was showing to us at the very beginning. I guess that most of us that learn about wearables maybe saw this image before from 1993. And I always thought that it was amazing to think about being that time with these people around campus with all these electronics or computers and sensing everything and having all this information from their body or the environment. And I wanted to also show you this image almost 20 years after that. I was a post-doc here at MIT Media Lab at Joe Paradiso's group. And you can see over here maybe you recognize some of them like Cindy, Sheen, Arting, Gershon. And there are other ones that were not pictured. We were the textile group and we were a discussion group that we were talking about what will be the wearables now. And if you see, comparing with the previous picture, it looks more like we are. Technology could become invisible and we could be what we wanted to express and how we wanted to show. So I want also to show you a little bit of what it means for me to have technology invisible. And I started this journey in 2012 when I created this concept called beauty technology. That was a way of embed electronics into cosmetics. So you could imagine maybe some conductive makeup that you blink and you turn on the lights. Or some fingernails with chips. These are RFIDs that you could pay that metro with your RFID chip on your fingernail. Or hair extensions that just by touching your hair, you could send your location to the police without being in danger. So it was a way to embed electronics into our body and become this two matter of skin that we have into an interactive platform. But after that, and after being part here of the Media Lab, we started actually with Nick Barry thinking about what if we go deeper into the skin. And what would happen if we could embed technology inside of the skin. And we joined many researchers actually, since people here from the Media Lab like Shin Liu, Birch Kang, Nick Barry, we were from Patties and Joe Paradisso's group. And we also joined with Harvard Medical School. And we were creating this project called the Dermal Abyss. And it was these tattoos. But instead of using traditional inks, we were using biosensors. And these biosensors that we could inject inside of the skin and they could react and change its color, revealing information that we usually don't have access to. Because, for example, if you wanted to have access to your cholesterol levels or your glucose, you have to make some blood tests. But what will happen if your tattoo is changing color and will give you that information? We were doing some experiments and we were even using a tattoo gun and injecting this ink in big skin and trying to make it to change its color. And we were doing that because inside of the skin we have this liquid, this interstitial fluid. And if the ink that is in the dermis is in direct contact with these fluids, we could detect different information that is inside of our body. So for that we were starting doing several tests with some fluorescence biosensors and some other chromatic biosensors. The fluorescence we were using sodium and pH. So the intensity of the fluorescence was giving us some information of lower or higher pH, for example. And the chromatic biosensors like glucose or pH, too, we were also giving us different colors that could also be reflected into a tattoo. After that we were also creating, now with Ali Jettison from Imperial College of London and our colleagues, we were extending this research adding new biosensors, too. But also what will happen in the same tattoo? We will have different colors of tattoos and we could read that through another software we developed with a camera, with your cell phone. So you could read that information and detect different information seeing the same tattoo. And of course this is a project still in development. I cannot make a tattoo to you right now. But because there are still many tests that we have to do, sitiologically, we could think about permeability, reversibility. We did that in an ex vivo model. We have to move in vivo clinical trials. You must think about how usually drugs takes a long time to develop. But today I wanted to share to you what were some lessons learned of creating these kind of projects. First I was imagining what it means to have the skin as a display. How we have like these cells tissues that could maybe convert into information that could reveal and have access to these, kind of like a portal to our inner self. Also thinking about technology that could be indistinguishable from the human body by using tattoos and technology that could be actually looking as part of your body by using tattoos. We are used to have in interfaces some buttons or some screens that you touch to having some kind of interactions. What will happen if our metabolism is an input for the interface? In this way like you could think about what you eat and what's happening inside of your body could be revealed. And also in my experience, since the beauty technology project but also the tattoo project, I was working with different artists. Different artists like as a loom when I was doing my fingernails. And tattoo artists in the tattoo studios that they were also very inspiring for me because they were creating their own designs and their own art and combining that with the sensors that we were implanted to them. So I think that if you think about wearables today we have these big technology industries that have a combination with a fashion industry. So I envision in the future this other kind of combination between technology industry but also beauty salons or tattoo studios or all these different body modification technologies that could also embed these technologies that we are creating today. And as we are also talking about gravel interfaces I want to share also another project from my student, LD Lassaro that we are also thinking about how to create sustainable prototyping. And for that if we think about us as designers and creators of technology we have a waste problem. We are generating different ways since like the different iterations that we create for having one prototype or the different leftovers for creating our designs. And even like after that we have induced prototypes that are in our shelves and this is how my lab actually looks like. And if you think about the degradation time of materials it makes I want you maybe to reflect about our practice as prototypers or designers or creators of technology of what it means to have all these ways that we are generating in our community. So this project was embedded different ways to use biodegradable materials in this case mycelium because you can create different shapes it's water resistant, it's heat resistant and we were embedded that and that's why we were using electronics to create these kinds of ways to prepare and enhance different tangibles, interfaces on our body but also different objects. We are creating also different workshops and also creating different objects that showcase these ideas of having also biodegradable materials. And for that I will just leave you with this cycle that shows how could be a sustainable prototype in life cycle. And this project right now I was showing you mainly what it means to use and the end of life of the materials but we have to think about ahead or before that what it means for having that material that you are using for digital fabrication you have to have like create the raw material, having distribution doing the manufacturing and sending that for you to use and create your prototypes. So I want to just leave you with that to having you as a reflection of your practice and maybe in the workshop we could also talk about what it means and some recommendations for improving our prototypes and the way that we create in a more sustainable way. So thank you very much.


Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today, I'm joined by Jim Bell. I'm the director of operations, the National Storm Shelter Association. That's probably one of my favorite tests I've ever gotten to observe because we basically have a giant air cannon and we shoot two by fours at the door in specific spots and the door can't deflect past a few inches. Nothing can come off on either side. It looks so fun, but it is such a serious conversation and topic. I've never worked with more nervous people than I work with with the hardware group because the hardware is vulnerable. And if they're there making sure everything's put on right, make sure all the bolts and everything is done right because you have to do three tests. And if you lose one item on one test and even if there's a paper behind the door, so something falls off the door and rips the paper, you fail the test and you got to start from scratch again. So it's nerve-wracking to do that testing, but it's there to protect. So when people haven't done that testing, they say, oh yeah, this will pass. We say that all the time, every test we do, oh, this is gonna pass. And then something very small will go through and tear the paper and on it again. Luckily, the one time I was out watching this in person, nothing went wrong. So we passed, everybody was so happy, but... Well, there's a celebration almost when you do that, when you pass a test and there's nothing goes wrong. And so it's usually preliminarily tested a couple of times and then you go to the serious test of whether or not you pass or fail and then you go through that whole process again, that you hope everyone did everything right. It is pretty serious and it's, when someone says, oh, my door will pass it, it's good and strong, it's a thick door. And that's not what you really had. You never usually have to worry about the door itself. It's all the connections and all the parts and pieces that make that process work. There's a label from your certifier that tells you that goes on the door just like a fire label or we laugh sometime, there's so many labels on the door, you just have one edge of the door would be a label and that's the bottom line. That's right, at the end of the day, it's just protecting the life inside. Can you talk about the differences between residential shelters because we're seeing the demand for that increase and then community shelters, which is what you'd find on a school or any public building? Basically the guideline is anything under 16 persons, or under can be a residential shelter if it's used in a residential application. In 2020, when the new FEMA 320 came out, before that FEMA 320 was for residential and light commercial shelters. During that time, we found that people were using residential shelters and commercial buildings when there wasn't a high occupancy requirement. But remember I said that you still had to build it to the building code. And in the building code for commercial buildings, you've got to have, there's egress requirements, there's, if you've got three points of latching, you need to have just one lever motion to operate all three points of latching so you can get out of a building. There's a number of requirements in commercial that residential buildings don't require. So they've changed that to just residential for FEMA 320. You can have a shelter with three dead bolts and a classroom door that doesn't meet egress. And that was one of the points that people had to wrap their heads around so that they have to build a shelter for a commercial facility. Or, if it's a pre-built shelter, it's got to be using the three point hardware that will have single release retractions, there's prior codes, there's other things that you have to be aware of that that door has to meet. And swing it out swings an important issue when you're dealing with building codes rather than just residential standards. And you have to build it as, because it's gonna function 99% of the time as a regular door in a commercial building.  It can't allow a failure during a severe storm as the bottom line as we're protecting the occupants really doesn't matter about how pretty it is or all the bells and whistles that we would like to have. The bottom line is it has to protect the occupants of the shelter when things are all set and done. That was one of the big differences is the occupancy, residential, you build them for, I think it's three square feet per person, five square feet per person and a community shelter. And then it goes up to 20 square feet if you have a wheelchair occupants you gotta have so many wheelchair occupants and a community shelter. And so there's complete differences as to the occupancy of the shelter. Those are the major ones that kind of define the difference between a commercial or community shelter. And it's, like I said, the residential shelter 16 persons or less, all other sizes are called community shelters. Everything that's not a residential shelter is called a community shelter. You can have some small community shelters but you still have to build it to FEMA 361 and ICC 500 and the building code for commercial buildings. All right. Well, Jim, do you have any final thoughts to share with us today? Yeah, that you continually have to keep up because like I said, the code people are working year-round now. Usually we just prepare for the next version of the code and the 2014 ICC 500 and we had the 2020 ICC 500. We had the 2018 update. So we're gonna keep seeing those. And as people, you know, we get changes brought up from the general public to architects and engineers and building owners also, you know, so I didn't, well, why can't we do this? And they have to look at it and see, and they try to look at it to make sure that they're not adding too much expense to, if we make the shelters too expensive to build and people are just going to opt out of building them even though they're required in most codes. And then the fact that they're for residential shelters, there's rebate programs that require you to build shelters a certain way. Alabama, June 1st is requiring that all their residential shelters meet the 2020 code which has different requirements. Most shelter manufacturers, they don't have that updated testing. You know, it requires follow-up service with your certifier that if you make any changes in your shelter, you have to have it written off so that it doesn't weaken the shelter, change anything. You have to use the shelter exactly the way it was tested if you can't change it afterwards. So that's what the follow-up service does is to make sure you're manufacturing it the same way that you tested it. And right now that's with a lot of the municipalities or that's a state of Alabama that's put that into effect there and we're really pushing on building officials. Now that all they got to do is look and see if that has a label. Building officials might be more apt to go in and do those inspections to make sure that there's still a lot of manufacturers that don't test anything and they're out there selling shelters. So it's still a buyer's beware for homeowners that make sure that they're buying the proper thing. The big things that we're looking at right now with the individual states. I just found out that state of Mississippi is adopted the 2020 code. So that's the one thing you need to look at is what the state has adopted and so what your requirements are for putting a shelter in. So my takeaway for residential shelters is check for certification and leave your label on. You know how your pillows say don't remove this label? Yeah. Don't remove your label from your storm shelter. No, absolutely.  It doesn't have a slab or it connects to because if the house blows, so does the shelter. So, you know, there's all kinds of things that people will say you can do, but you can't. If you want to be protected, if you want to sit in your shelter and worry about what you're gonna see once the tornado goes through instead of are you gonna survive it? There's a big difference. Yeah. All right, Jim. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was great seeing you again. It's been such a long time. And if anybody else is interested in learning anything else about what they've heard here today about storm shelters, you can go to the National Storm Shelter Association. I'm gonna put that link below. You'll also be able to get in contact with Jim if you have questions about shelters through that website and his LinkedIn profile will also be linked below. That's what I do. Thanks for watching.


Hi, I'm Tane Danger. This is Give to Gustavus Day and I'm standing here with Lily Kingsley, Audrey Octrip DeCarol, and Andrea James. Andrea James. Obviously. So we're here at Big Hill Farm and this, I understand, is where all of the food for Gustavus has grown. Not exactly. We do grow lots of produce over the summer and into the fall and we sell it to the cafeteria. So a little bit of the food in the cafeteria is from here. That is good. So like most of what we will be eating for the rest of the day is pumpkin and owl meat. Correct, right. Yeah. That's good. Now tell me more because it's like beautiful out here. I mean we're at the end of the season it seems like we're mostly eating pumpkins and and zinnias, right? That would be correct. So yeah. So I don't tell like who all is out here working and doing stuff? Well the farm is entirely student run. Previously it was just a farm. Now it's expanded to a student org that's active during the school year rather than just the summer. So this summer, for example, myself and two other interns, Emily Gurrenser and Josie Kleckner. Good name. We're putting around. We worked from June to still working currently. As you can see, there are still things to be picked and all of that food we produce, like Lily said, goes straight to the calf and then during the school year our org plans fun events, plans what will be growing the next year and hires new interns for the next summer. A squash. Actually that is a dead cucumber. It's rotted. We're at the end of the season. We are at the end of the season. See, you can tell this is totally unscripted. This is real. Like I just picked up a, that's fine. Anyway, so I don't know what do you all learn like by doing this? I mean obviously you learn which pumpkins are the cutest. Yeah, lots of hands-on skills. So obviously skills that include planning out a farm, planning what to grow where and when to grow it to make the soil be the best quality for where we're at. And then lots of other skills like appreciating nature, getting out here. We also focus on food justice and sustainable agriculture practices to get to know that a little bit more. So can you just tell me quickly about like sustainable agriculture practices like out here? Like what some of those are that you all are practicing? Yeah, so we are not certified organic but we don't use any pesticides or herbicides on our vegetables. So by definition they are organic. Besides that we do crop rotation. So these plants won't stay in this spot next year. We'll rotate them to another plot and that ensures that the nutrients that these plants took out from the soil this year won't continue to be drawn out and the soil has the opportunity to regenerate and stay as healthy as possible. Additionally we do low to no tilling which involves softening up the earth and drying it out and that can cause soil erosion. And beyond that we just try and plant pollinator friendly plants. That's why we have a prairie. Yeah and there's a myriad of different practices that you can employ but we don't have to get into all of those right now. No that's very cool and just I'm going to walk into the brush here in a second. But while I'm doing that can you just say a little bit about some of the I don't know experiences you've had because you've both been working here for like a while now. So like I don't know do you have any favorite memories of working on the farm? Yeah so my first year at Gustavus there you go. And on in. Oh good.  I'm so scared to go like I don't know if people are going to like me like I don't know if I should even be in this club. And so I was really anxious and then I went there and James and Andrea who our owl is named after just made me feel really welcome and eventually this kind of became my favorite club favorite place to be on campus.  Thank you. Well that is very cool. Should we do you want a habanero? No that's an extremely spicy pepper and I don't want that right now. I'll hold it for you. Well thank you both very much for talking to us. Thank you for showing us around end of the season big hill farm. I am going to steal this pumpkin. Go right ahead. But I hope that you all are watching and your support today is supporting really cool amazing things like this. So help us make Gustavus grow. Oh wow. Are you okay?  Oh I can smell that. Oh my mouth. Goodbye. It's over. The shot is over.


Good morning, traders. Patrick Munley here with another Tickmail Chartist. I want to draw your attention today to a developing opportunity in the Euro CAD. We've been in a contracting range triangle pattern, broke out yesterday, consolidates overnight, just trading above predicted weekly range resistance. I'm looking to go along through 157.40 here, paying attention to the equality objective at 157.85. If we can get through there, then I think it's clear water up for a test at the prior cycle highs towards 159.50. As always, traders, plan the trade, trade the plan, and most importantly, manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.