Well, you can go ahead and kick off the recording then, Mariah. It's recording. All right, you want to kick things off, Andy? Yeah, so I'm Andrea Anderson. I am going to welcome you all to the Hyperledger TSC meeting today. All are welcome here. We divide by the antitrust policies in our community total conduct. Thanks, Andy. And if you haven't met Andy, she's been around for quite some time at Hyperledger. We may have met her at one of the HackFests. She's one of the more prolific coders at Hyperledger with about 40,000 lines of code or so in Sawtooth Core plus SDK work and, I think, our most prominent contributor on the WebAssembly engine Saber. Yep. So I've invited Andy to kick things off for us, just like we had Rodrigo de la Verdeleal a couple of weeks ago to bring the perspective from Palo Verde. So, Andy, I don't know if there's anything from your experience at Hyperledger that you'd like to share with the TSC, maybe things that they might not be aware of or maybe they are aware of, but you want to highlight anything that maybe makes it easier or more difficult to contribute here? Yeah, the only thing I'd like to mention is sometimes with how much volume there is on the mailing list, it'd be great if we could have a central location for decisions made just so that they're easier to search through and find what the TSC decisions are. But besides that, I don't have anything else. OK, that's a really good idea. So when the TSC makes decisions, if there's some centralized catalog somewhere of, I don't know, maybe RFC-like is maybe what's in your head? Yeah, obviously I'm really familiar with RFCs because we do that for thought-tube, grid, and transact. But something similar to that, just a central location that you can see a full, not super formal, but formal write-up. OK, yeah, that's great. That's something that we should think about some sort of consolidated version of minutes that just addresses the decisions made and the proposals offered. OK, great. Well, thanks. And everybody, feel free to reach out with one another, regardless of these kinds of intros. It's good to be connected across our community here. We don't have any announcements this week, but I thought we'd start off with a little bit of housekeeping. We've got three important task forces in flight. And one of the objectives of setting these things out as task forces was that they could operate more quickly than a working group or maybe in a more concerted way than having maybe just weekly discussions here in the TSC. So I wanted to check in and see how things were going, starting first with the CICD work, looking for some sign on the horizon that that is winding up. Thank you, Dan. So yeah, this is Dave Huseby. The CICD task force has been chewing on this problem for a better part of two months. And the last meeting we had, which was a couple weeks ago, was lightly attended due to all of the travel in the summer. But we've been doing our best to drive towards a conclusion. I have not produced a report due to the travel and the lack of buy-in by all players. But if you've been watching the notes, you can kind of see where we're headed. And I can give you some of the highlights here. We have narrowed down the proposal to a few options for short term and a few options for long term. The only thing that's really important to note right now is that there is no silver bullet. After considering a lot of things, there is no one solution that is going to be easy for everybody. There's going to be some level of cost, whether it's an effort or yeah, it's basically cost and effort for people, for all the teams to try to unify. And we're not even sure that's what we're going to do. So that said, I'm reluctant to provide an official report at this minute because we don't have buy-in by all of the teams and all the participants in the task force at the moment. But people are starting to come back online and we're hoping to narrow that down, get everybody on board. And at that point, we will float something to the TSE, but it's just, the conclusions are not, or sorry, the proposals are soon to be, sent to the TSE. I don't know exactly what soon is, but it's not a month from now. It's not tomorrow either. So somewhere in between. Okay, great. I think probably the hard stop that we have is the board meeting at the 1st of August, so. Yep, I'm fully aware of that. I think we will have, I can tell you we will have a proposal before then and we'll give the TSE enough time to consider it. And it's important that it goes, that it's done before the board because no matter what we do, I believe this will incur more financial cost to hyperledger. So it'll take a bigger chunk out of the budget and we'll need to consider that. Okay, great. So Arno is not here. When I last checked in on the Lifecycle, the Lifecycle Wiki page, I didn't see any updates since, I think the 20th of June, one of the last things that we had discussed was breaking out the issues or proposals into separate pages so that the comments could be more easily tracked for those. So maybe we'll look to follow up with Arno on that separately later. And then the working groups. I know that that was intending to trail behind the Lifecycle discussion to incorporate any dependencies that come out of that. I don't know if there's been any discussion in that committee yet. Nothing. I mean, it's basically, we've been capturing a bunch of notes, or I've been capturing a bunch of notes on the Wiki page from various discussions, but as you said, it's really gated by the Lifecycle work. Okay. So I don't think we've got a hard stop that can help drive progress there, but clearly the update that we'll be looking at from the architecture working group later today and some of the other working group updates as those have progress or difficulty making progress, the more that we can provide some improved direction about how working groups operate, the better that will be for all of those. And speaking of working groups, moving to our proposal for today, which is a proposal for a diversity, stability, and inclusion working group. I'll let you navigate on your own screens to the proposal itself, which is linked in the minutes. This work started sometime in fall of last year where we were looking more broadly at community health. And when the topic arose for it to be a working group, some of the feedback at that time was that that was too broad. And so the people that were interested in forming that working group at the time continued to meet since that point and worked on honing into a more addressable scope. In parallel with that, the Linux Foundation has been also focusing on its diversity, stability, and inclusion efforts. And so we've had a few discussions with the Linux Foundation proper. It's been collaborating with us. And then also again, narrowing down what we wanted to do across the possible things that we could do to improve community health to focus first on DCI. Within that DCI scope, we had a lot of discussions about what could we do, what could we do first? And some of that decision making, you would want to be informed by numbers to say, all right, where are we not diverse, civil, or inclusive? And we don't have a lot of data to direct where we would prioritize our efforts first. I'm happy to say that we don't have at this time a lot of civility issues. There's not been, to my knowledge, any, but for perhaps one report across the longevity of hyperledger, any civility issues. So then it really comes down to what can we do to improve inclusion and our diversity? And being able to measure those is one of the first things that we want to go after. We found that as a group, it was difficult to get the kind of engagement that we were looking for from other parts of hyperledger and to figure out how we would resource or capture some of these metrics in the way that we were able to interact. So limitations of not having things, simple things like a mailing list and the visibility that comes from a working group were really impairing our ability to move forward. So as we've gotten more concrete on the steps that we've liked to take and we've also become more aware of the limitations that we were operating under, we put together this proposal and we've circulated this with not just the TSC list, but before that, as we looked to build support for it, it's been socialized with the governing board and with the maintainers mail lists. And so I'm hoping that even though this is the first meeting that we're discussing the proposal itself, that it's something that's not necessarily news to the majority of people on the call. As we skim down in the proposal itself, we've got a pretty healthy list of interested parties that have been working together over different periods of time on this with a couple of newer additions as we started to bring this proposal forward. But that list doesn't even quite capture the full list of contributors. One of the principles that we like to act on in Hyperledger is making sure that the initiatives that we undertake are community-driven. And we have a lot of strong staff support for a number of these initiatives that we do at Hyperledger. But this one in particular, I have to say that I feel like there's really strong staff support just based on the motivations of the staff participating, that this is an area that people feel pretty passionate about and good about contributing to. So that list of interested parties really doesn't capture the full set of participation that we have there. What we'd like to do is get started with the working group, get those tools that we don't have available to us right now, like the mail list and so forth and get underway for some period of two or three months with me helping to guide that initial period. But I know we've got a lot of strong leaders already on that list. And we'll be looking during that initial phase for one or more of them to step up and then select amongst ourselves for a more permanent lead for the group. There's quite a few references there if you have time to go through them of materials that's been gathered over the several months that we've been working more or less behind the scenes there. And that also helps support our ability to execute successfully once this is launched as a working group. And so with that, I'd like to invite any questions or any comments from the other participants that have been working together on the proposal. Yeah, Dan, Mark, one of the things I've brought up on some of the calls, the committee calls in the past is what are we going to do with the data? We don't have clear goals. If the data shows that we don't know what the industry averages are is the goal to just increase participation, then are we just baselining and saying that we improve gender diversity? I mean, I'm all for improving gender diversity, but if the data shows we're 50% ahead of the industry average, what do we do with that? It seems like we're collecting data to collect data. Yeah, definitely not collecting data to collect data. We want to use data as a means of direction for us. And like you say, if it turns out that our participation is actually ahead of industry benchmarks, then that would tell us to focus on some area where we're weaker. Some of the materials that I think Mandy helped assemble did have some benchmarking in it. I don't know if it's sufficient benchmarking at the industry level or not, but what we don't have is any sort of benchmarking for a hyperledger itself. Mark, you touched on something that I'm allergic to collecting metrics, just to collect metrics, as you said. And my question about any metric that is proposed is if we had had this metric a year or two ago, whatever the number, how would it have informed our actions? How would we have acted differently if we had this metric some time ago? So that's what I usually try to think about any metric that we're proposing to collect. If it wouldn't produce something actionable, then don't collect it. Yeah, absolutely. So then what's the answer to your question? And what would we have done differently if we'd had this information earlier? So I think what we were balancing was an interest in moving forward in a data-driven way with an inability to actually have that data. And so we've taken some stabs at some ways that we can take some actions, but also wanting to fulfill that interest in having some database decision-making. And one of the actions that we would make differently or the same would be actually understanding if we do have a discrepancy in the representation that we have at Hyperletra versus Industry Benchmarks. So more specifically with the gender issue, for example, we picked that for the reasons that are stated in the proposal, which amounts in some ways to saying that that's the small amount of signal that we have to work with. But if we had a stronger signal saying that that gender was not a strong issue for Hyperletra, but we had some other inclusion problem, then that would help us spend more time on the problem that we did have. So Dan, how do you see this working group reporting back to the TSC? Is this gonna follow the normal working group pattern, which is driving towards some white paper or some technical article? Or do you see them being more active in the TSC, like doing monthly updates to the TSC mailing list or something like that, almost like a DNI newsletter or something? Yeah, I think that it's likely to be more varied and more contained kinds of deliverables than having a long-term white paper. The intent would definitely be to bring back recommendations as we're able to. And then also act in other venues, like when we're having an event, for example, making sure that that event is executed in a way that helps support the DCI initiatives. So not just maybe written reports, but those kinds of actions, as well as the feedback to the groups listed there. Great, thank you. So I think there was a comment on this at one point on the page. Why is this part of the TSC rather than the Marketing Committee? We had some very specific deliverables listed there that were about engagement plans. And that related to some actions that Hyperledger staff was taking. And so the wording of those sounded a little bit marketing-oriented. And what we did to help clarify that, that you'll still be able to see in the history for the pages is that we moved that off of, there's three work products listed there. There was originally two listed. And so what we did was we added the line for recommendations to Hyperledger staff, which those items fell underneath. And then also just moved those very specific recommendations that were already in flight off of the proposal itself, just because they were a little bit narrow in time than what the proposal should encompass. But it could also be a good recommendation. I'm not sure if you're making it that that this working group also provides feedback to the Marketing Committee. So I had a question about the difference between what we consider a regular working group and some of the actions that this group is planning on taking. For most of our regular working groups, the result is really more like a paper or guidelines or just general guidance or things for the general community to just consume. It seems like this group has in mind more particularly to make policy recommendations and build tools that directly affect community structure. And I wonder if maybe it would be better to classify it as something more than just a working group as a result. Maybe classify it as some sort of committee or task force that reports to some element of Hyperledger's governance structure where they'll build a recommendation that then would be ratified. Because I like the idea that we're discovering what we need to do to affect how we manage the community and make that more official output perhaps of this group. Yeah, there's a lot of different names that we could put any of these efforts underneath. And I think when this came up in the fall, since it felt different than other working groups, that was one piece of resistance that we met. But some of the very tactical things that came out of our experience in the last several months was that there was almost an irony to what we were facing that in trying to create a group about inclusivity, we were a fairly hidden group. There was no mail lists, there wasn't a lot of visibility into what we were doing. And that made it hard for us to have the kind of engagement that we need across the breadth of the community to really understand the community and incorporate the kind of feedback that could be provided. So, well, I think that we could put a lot of different names on this effort. It's the recommendation of this group that a working group is the best choice that we have to give the right kind of tools to make this effort successful. I mean, to further Nathan's point, it almost seems like this should be something addressed by the governing board. From a technical staring point of view, I mean, it's increasing participation, but are we setting a technical direction for a hyperledger by doing this? I mean, would the governing board be able to give this more resources than the TSC can? That's another good thought. The governing board meets less frequently than, they've got a slower frequency of interaction and reaction than something like a working group would be able to facilitate. I think as well keeping this closely connected to the development communities and looking at how the teams work is pretty important. Certainly, the governing board will pay attention to whatever gets produced out of this, I would imagine, but I don't think you all would want, as the governing board said, we've decided, thou shalt change how you all work. You'd want some say in that, right? You'd want, and I think the more public this conversation, usually the better, right? So, it's not like the governing board would be ignoring this. I think it's just best to have it rooted very closely to where the development activity is. Or consider that at least. I mean, I think it's a technical failure, so in a similar way that it's financial failure to have a smaller percentage of women on boards. So I like the idea of having it in the technical steering committee. One thing I'm struggling, and maybe this is putting the cut before the horses a bit because the group hasn't started, but given that these are cultural and systemic things, what, does anyone have a nice example of an action or a recommendation that might flow from this, or maybe already has in previous work that people have actually done, and that helped? Yeah, so we've got some expertise on the group here. Mandy, for example, this is her PhD background. So I know she's got a number of examples. I know she's not able to join us today. Tracy, I might be able to put on the spot, or I might not, but I know that she related in the last meeting that we had a very specific example. So I'll let Tracy speak up if she wants to now, otherwise I'll just yammer a little bit. Yeah, so I guess my example was my first contribution to hyper-leisure recovery. I was trying to make a documentation change, and it was a one-line change, and it was actually rejected because it wasn't large enough in scope, right? I was trying to keep my chains down to a very narrow scope and get something in that was basically a typo sort of fix, right? And I think that would have been extremely disheartening for anybody coming in who didn't kind of want to get this change in, right? To say, okay, well, they don't want my simple change. I'm just gonna leave this community. And it really helped me specifically because I had Nick Gasky who was basically being a mentor for me to make that contribution, right? It was the first time I was ever contributing to fabric. Didn't really know the process of contributing to Garrett and what that process looks like. And he basically helped me through that process, helped me understand why the change was rejected. And I think we don't do enough of that inside of Hyperledger in the community. At least I haven't seen enough of that is the mentoring, the responding back to people, the answering questions or just helping somebody through the process of contributing. And it's not to say it doesn't exist, but I think it needs to be more, right? I think we need to make sure that we're a community that is welcoming to all and make sure that the people who do want to contribute and have taken some time of their lives to put together a PR are in some way recognized and helped through the process to understand why or how to get something into the Hyperledger project. So I guess that was my example right there. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Kirsten on chat was also sort of emphasizing that in a similar way as well. Another example that comes to mind that Mark Wagner shared and I'll let Mark speak up for himself here related to how people interact in the sort of social work settings that we have and is still relevant in Hyperledger when we have things like member summits and hack fests and so forth. So Mark, I don't know if you recall what I'm referring to as far as like going out to get a drink and that kind of thing. I think Mark dropped off the call. I, yeah, I guess he is not here. But so one of the anecdotes that he related to us was about becoming aware that there can be a big gender bias in going out and hitting a bar or something which is considered a social thing for a lot of people but other people aren't comfortable with and that can be not just a gender issue but an issue for people that don't wanna participate for other reasons in a venue like a bar. There's been a number of other anecdotes shared in these meetings and that I think are actionable things that we can bring forward and create some general awareness. Maybe the last one that I'll hit on is being made aware of accessibility concerns for using software. So not just how are we forming as a community but also this sort of feedback loop that you get in what kind of software you create is what kind of community that you're building in front ends for our software are the things that the people who are visually impaired can still make use of. There was a lot of different considerations that we might look at beyond gender which is kind of focused a little bit in this proposal but things that are actionable in very different ways across hyper ledger. So could you just give me an idea of what policies might look like and in particular, given that this is an open source project how you would hold people accountable for those? Yeah. So it's a little bit difficult to explain a solution that the goal of the proposal is to arrive at some solutions. So I can't tell you the end state right now but what we can point to are some of the anecdotes that are just related being able to provide those as ways to sensitize people to things that they might not be aware of. So those aren't necessarily things that require enforcement as much as they require awareness. And there is a degree of enforcement that comes from our community code of conduct. So there's an explicit enforcement in that. So any sort of violations of that there's actually a policy around there. I think one of the most effective ways to bring about some of that change though is not reacting to violations of policies as much as it is doing the more positive and proactive thing like we've done in adding all our welcome here banner to a lot of the materials that we produce. So setting the tone out front that this is a welcoming organization as opposed to a more punitive tone that if you're here, you better behave. So my, as you are deeply aware and I think all of our companies have very specific policies for hiring for how interactions work for what our expectations for the environment and that we're creating. And within those companies there's that we have our HR organizations that can enforce some of those policies. I mean, just to throw something out for discussion purposes only, would we be willing to do something like say the TSC vote would not be or we could not vote on TSC members until at least one third of the candidates were diverse. I mean, would we be willing to accept policies like that to force us to solicit participation more broadly? And I guess what I'm saying is a lot of what I hear right now is still very passive. Like let's make sure we don't step on somebody's toes as opposed to being very active in enforcing ourselves to be active in soliciting broader participation. And I'm just throwing that out there solely for the purpose of driving discussion but will we go to that extreme? So I've got some thoughts about that but I've been fielding a lot of the questions. So I do wanna make sure that I give opportunity here for other people to react. I guess maybe while people are considering a question that they'd never considered before, I can say that we've considered policies like that or policies like that are under consideration at the board level. And so I think from my perspective as one voice on the TSC, that's certainly a degree or a kind of something that would warrant consideration. I don't know that we wanna get caught up in specifics of numbers or the policy itself but that as you say, something more proactive than passive is certainly something that should be on the table for consideration. I think that's a classic issue whereby do you want to be someone who came into a body because you were on a list? A lot of people who would be on a list, I know, I would say no to that. The other thing is in formulating your definition of what is diverse candidate, you are inadvertently treminatory. So there's a lot of book guns there. Use a HUSB term. If the passive way works, then maybe that's better because of that but if it's too slow, perhaps not. Yeah, these are all sensitive issues and you can definitely with good intentions create a more negative result. But one of the things that I'm appreciating out of this conversation is that there is strong interest amongst the TSC and interest to go after some of these uncomfortable questions. And I hope that we can see participation from as many of the TSC members as possible in the first meetings of this working group assuming that we get to a point where we're comfortable voting on that. I guess I will say just position-wise, this is an issue that has to be addressed and I'm all in favor of addressing the issue. I'm just not sure I understand why this is a TSC versus a governing board issue. That's my only, it feels like we're trying to establish much broader policy than just technical policy and that moves it out of the realm of exclusively the technical steering committee. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be represented, we should be represented and we should be held accountable for it. But it feels like a broader issue than just what we're doing. I would agree with that sentiment in that it seems like this policy would directly benefit a lot of the other efforts that go on outside of the technical effort as well. I really like the idea that we would play a strong role in a big part of what constitutes this working group but it certainly seems like more than just a technical working group. Yeah, can we actually get some experts? I think Dan, you mentioned Mandy to provide some recommendations on this. Like having a program like this designed only by engineers seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Right, right. You wouldn't want people who are outside of the discipline trying to forge their way blind through that and that's not the intent of this group. We do have some expertise on and we also have to recognize that as an open source community, there's nobody closer to impacting that community than the contributors within it. And so there's definitely roles to be played up at the governing board level. There's roles to be played at the Linux Foundation but I would think that abdicating our responsibility for some sense that there is a more powerful entity that could do more would be a fairly weak mistake. I'm not claiming that we should do that. I'm just saying that we should get diversity experts to help us come up with something. Yeah, my answer, there wasn't directed specifically at your question, but there was a few comments in there from you and others about the level of engagement from the board and sort of a existential question about whether or not as a working group within the community that we have whether we ought to do this. So I'd like to point out that we do also, we have the ability to go to a wider scope as well. There's chaos, which is a project underneath the Linux Foundation. They have quite a bit of representation from Mozilla and the chaos DNI group has experts on it and they do this stuff. So if we could work closely with chaos DCI group, we could probably leverage their expertise and work more broadly across open source at all. And I see Mark's hands up. Yeah, so sorry, I had to drop for a minute, I'm back. So one thing, I mean, even before we go forward with a working group and all, if we have like the member summit coming up, is there something we wanna do there? Or is it too late to try to plan to have a little table set up or a booth or something and try to start spreading the message that we wanna improve diversity. And rather than focus long-term, what can we do short-term as well? Who was it that, I forget, I think we had this discussed at one of the meetings and I can't recall what the outcome of that was, whether there was room in the schedule or whether the schedule was already full, but it would seem that some sort of booth space or signage or something would be addressable even if schedule time wasn't. Maybe Karen, I wanna say was looking at that and I don't see her on the call today. Yeah, she's on PTO. Okay, so sort of cycling back to the beginning of things to help wind this conversation up for today is, at that time, there was feedback that things were too broad. We brought a narrower scope that is more addressable today and I'm hearing a mixture of feedback about maybe it's not so much breadth as the, yeah, I guess I'm not sure what we're to select there, but actually pushing a little bit in the direction of more impact. So my preference is to keep the proposal worded more or less in the scope that it is. It's always easy to broaden scope, but I think that what we've found is that in other working groups is that with the, you're more likely to have success the more targeted that you make your effort. There any other concluding thoughts from TSC members? Yeah, I think a working group is probably the best point, you know, the best way to go forward with this. You know, I'm just trying to make sure we've explored all the options as a TSC, but you know, but it gets treated as a working group so that would help I think and it can work with other groups and projects. Yeah, thanks Mark. I think that's an important point is that we don't have to leave this, we don't have to have in this proposal the ultimate solution to all the problems and the ultimate way that we can act on those. But if members feel that the proposal hits within enough specificity that we can be successful, a lot of these questions can be explored within the context of the working group itself. I'll point out that we have 10 minutes left and are we going to cover the contributor summit? If we're going to take a vote, I propose we do it soon. Yeah, so I'm not clear from the feedback that we've gotten if we're at a stage that somebody is interested in making a motion. So I think that maybe what we'll do is let people consider this proposal for the next week and provide any other feedback and then we can pick it up again with less discussion next week. All right, we've got a couple of quarterly reports that I wanna just touch on real quick before we go into the contributor summit discussion which you might not have full time for. So I saw that most people were able to take a look at both of those updates. I think that we have contributors from both of those teams on the call right now. So if there's any verbal questions that let's go in order here. So for the architecture working group update, I don't wanna walk through the update itself but if there's any verbal questions that people want to bring up now, this is probably the best time to do it. I think there was a question raised in the report about what they do with Transact and so I don't know if that's something people wanna discuss or not. I think that was a cogent point that was brought up and so I can try to make sure that people are connected there. Okay, not hearing further questions and being short on time, I'll move up to the Sawtooth update. Do we have any verbal questions there? And there was one comment that I had responded to earlier today on the report itself. Okay, great, so I think we got through both of those reports in under 120 seconds which gives us time for the contributor summit. So we've talked at different times over the course of the year about how do we get together for our face-to-face. We haven't been doing the hack fest that we had been doing in the past. We'd spoken earlier about splitting out the different objectives that we had had for these face-to-faces into something that's more recruitment-driven and then something that's closer to doing core development. And so we've addressed the former with a couple of boot camps so far this year but we really haven't gotten together with groups of maintainers and core contributors to do some hands-on work that can be done in a way that doesn't also get distracted by trying to create pitches and things like that for new contributors. I reached out to my company to ask for space. This is one of the things that is always a challenge in putting the events together is what can we do from a budgetary perspective and what can we do for venues. So Intel is willing to donate space so that we can sit face-to-face. I specifically asked for an area where we could work collaboratively but would not really lend itself to people putting up PowerPoint and making long presentations. But we can certainly talk about the nature of the work that we do there. Hey Dan, this is my client. Accenture can probably offer space as well and we have offices in most locations so that should open up wherever you would like to do that. That's fantastic. Sovereign has located a space that can do the larger numbers in Salt Lake City that they're negotiating with right now to have it be free. It is one of those office spaces that we really like to have these kind of events in that's super open and has the tables and has the rooms and has all the complete breakouts. But the key element that we're working on right now is free. Yep, so I think with any space that we can put our hands on when staff asked whether I could find the space that's some space that I found there in Hillsborough, Oregon. So if there's other offers of free space that can come in in a similar timeline, I think we can pick whatever looks like the geographic centroid. But... Well, I will point out that we used to, when this project started, right, we were gonna do six of these a year and then it was four and then it was three. And if we have, you know, if we have a handful of spaces that we can use, there's no reason that we just use one of them, right? Right. So, you know, let a million flowers bloom and if we can have multiples, that means that it may be less onerous for people if they miss one. If we get back to the cadence where we're doing one of these every two or three months, missing one won't be so bad, right? Right. Yeah, so as far as timing, we were looking at getting outside the summer vacation schedule for the Northern Hemisphere and the back to school schedule. And anyway, so sometime end of September, beginning of October was what was suggested in one discussion. So that's the parameters there for one option that's in front of us. If people wanna offer up additional options, that's great as well. And imagine that we might wanna have some discussion on the composition of the group at these. The starting point for this one was considering getting the maintainers and significant contributors who are for whatever reason, not also maintainers together to do particularly a focus on cross-project development. Hey, Dan, how would you see this? Let me try to get my words together here, right? There's also been some discussion of having a boot camp in that timeframe. Do you see this as great, let's do both or maybe not? I think not. Right. So we have to resolve that conflict. And then there's also, I think September would be probably better than October because some of the events in October are things that we've participated in the past, like ATO, like all things open and stuff like that. So we're threading the needle on this one. It's not as easy as, it's like, oh yeah. Yeah, and we do tend to get into some spiraling discussions about optimality on calendars and there's no way to avoid all the conflicts that people have and it also tends to be difficult to book these spaces in without some significant heads up. So for example, getting this space in Hillsborough, Oregon, that October, those October days were the nearest days that I was able to get booking for. Well, yeah, I mean, the calendar might be the driving function on which one we pick. Which ones, you know, again. Again, yeah, you're right. So GSE members, maintainers, contributors, any feedback on the goal of the contributor summit? So it's essentially a hackathon sort of rebranded, right? This is the summit we had last year in Switzerland. Can I add, and I don't think it's right to think of it either as comparable to like the HackFest series that we had had before, nor a hackathon, nor just, you know, kind of an optional kind of thing. I think the idea was, you know, the group of maintainers and even the TSE members here meet face to face. So irregularly that, you know, you don't really get a chance to build the kind of trust that's essential to make good open source projects work and that there are a couple of really important themes like convergence that, you know, we can iterate over email and approximate too, but sometimes getting all the right people in the room to be able to kind of look each other in the eye and commit to something is something that just doesn't happen, you know, over email kind of asynchronously, right? So this, I would encourage people to think about a contributor summit as distinct from those as being something where it's a little bit higher priority to make sure that all the, or like at least a critical mass of maintainers on critical mass of project sniper ledger can make it and that it feels less optional or less kind of unfocused or unconferency as say the hackfaster or have, and not really a competition the way many people think of hackathons. If that's something people want, if they don't want that, that's something that doesn't have to be imposed on them, but it felt like there was a need for that distinct from the other. I think there is a need for that, but that does stand in opposition to what Reeve was suggesting about minimizing the badness of missing one. I guess we're trying to sell it as a sort of single event where that's the one you put effort into if you've got four a year and you can't go to four, then you choose one. So you split the crowd. That was my misunderstanding. I misunderstood and I see we're at time. Yeah, so please take the rest of the discussion to the mail list and you can build on that particular thread. If you've got feedback on the objective or have alternate dates and venues to suggest. Thanks for Rudy's engagement today.


Welcome back to Los Angeles. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson, day three of theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon North America 2020. We've been having some great live conversations in the last three days with actual guests on set. We're very pleased to welcome to, for the first time to our program, Shimun Bendeva, the CTO of WACA, welcome. Hey, nice to be here. Nice to be here, great to be at an in-person event, isn't it? No, it's awesome. They've done a great job with this. You see people walking around. I think you're green, you're green like we're green. Fully green. Which is fantastic. Yeah, purple in heart, WACA, but fully green, yeah. Good to know, green means you're shaking hands and maybe the occasional hug. So talk to us about WACA, what's going on? We'll kind of dig into what you guys are doing with Kubernetes, but give us that overview of what's going on at WACA IO. Okay, so WACA has been around for several years already. We actually jaded our product at 2016, so it's been out there, actually eight of the Fortune 50 are using WACA. For those of you that don't know WACA, by the way, we're a fully software defined parallel file system, cloud native, I know it's a mile full and it's buzzword compliant, but we actually baked all of that into the product from day one. Because we did other storage companies in the past and we actually wanted to take the best of all worlds and put that into one storage that is not another me too, it's not another compromise. So we built the environment. We built WACA to actually accommodate for upcoming technologies. So identified also that cloud technology is upcoming. Network actually exploded in a good way. One gig, 10 gig, 100 gig, 200 gig came out. So we knew that that's going to be a trend. And also cloud, we saw cloud being utilized more and more and we kind of like bet that being able to be a parallel file system for the cloud would be amazing and it does. How are you not on me too? Tell us that when you're talking with customers, what are the top three things that really differentiate WACA? Speed scale and simplicity. Speed scale and simplicity. I like how Fauci said that. Like WACA. So speed, sorry, you see a lot of file system, a lot of storage environments that are very throughput oriented. So speed, how many gigabytes can you do? To be honest, a lot of storage environments are saying, we can do that and that, many gigabytes. When we designed WACA actually, we wanted to provide an environment that would actually be faster than your local NVMe on your local server. Because that's what we see are actually customers using for performance. They're copying the data to their local NVMe's and processing it. We created an environment that is actually throughput oriented, IOPS oriented, latency sensitive and metadata performance. So it's kind of like the best of all worlds and it's not just a claim, we actually showed it in many benchmarks, top 500s, supercomputing centers. Can talk for hours about performance but that's performance. Scalability, we actually are able to scale and we did show that we scale to multiple petabytes. We actually took some projects from scale out NAS appliances that actually got to their limit of their scale out and we just continued from their double digit, triple digit petabytes upcoming. And also scale is also how many clients can you service at once. So it's not only how much capacity but also how many clients can you work with concurrently and simplicity, all of that we from the initial design points let's make something that is usable by users and not like so my mother can really use it, right? And so we have a very simple intuitive user interface but it's also API driven so you can automate around it so simplicity, speed and scale. Love it. So Shimon, it's interesting you said that your company was founded in 2016 in that time period because. Before GA. GA, GA 2016. But in those surrounding years there were a lot of companies that were coming out at sort of the tail end of the legacy storage world. Trying to just cannibalize that business. You came out looking into the future. Where are we in that future now? Because you could argue that you guys maybe started a little early. You could have taken a couple of years off and waited for the wave in the world of containerization as an example to come through. This is like your time to shine, isn't it? Exactly and being fully software defined we can always adapt and we're always adapting. So we bet on new technologies, networking, flash environments and just keep on going and improving, right? When we went out we were like in 10 gig environments with SSDs but we already knew that we're going to go to a hundred and we also designed already for NVMEs. So kind of like hardware constantly improved. CPUs, for example the new Intel CPUs, the new AMD CPUs we just accommodated for them because being software defined means that we actually bypass most of their inner workings and do things ourselves. So that's awesome. And then the cloud environments is growing massively and containers, we see containers now in every day. We use cases where initially it was maybe VMs, maybe bare metal but now everything is containerized and we're actually starting to see more and more Kubernetes orchestrated environment coming out as well. I still have a feeling that this is still a bit of dev property. Hey, I'm a developer, I'm a DevOps engineer, I'm going to do it. And there is actually a lot of exciting things here taking it to the next level, to the IT environment. So that's where we'll show benefit as well. So talk about how Kubernetes users are working with Weka. What superpower does that give them? So I think if you look at the current storage solutions that you have for Kubernetes, they're interesting but they're more of like the, let's take what we have today and plug it in, right? So Weka has a CSI plug-in so it's easy to integrate and work with but also when you look at it, block is still being used in Kubernetes environments that I'm familiar with. Block was still being used for high performance so I used PVs and PVCs to manage my pod's claims but then I mounted them as read write ones, right? Because I couldn't share them and then if a pod failed I had to reclaim the PVC and connect it to multiple environments because I wanted block storage because it's fast. And then NFS environments were used as read write many to be a shared environment but low performance. So by being able to say, hey, we now have an environment that is fully Kubernetes integrated and it provides all the performance aspects that you need. You don't need to choose, just run your fleet of pods, your cluster of pods, read write many. You don't need to manage all the reclamations just to create new pods. You've had the best of all words, ease of use and also the performance. Additionally, because there's always more, right? We now see more and more cloud environments, right? So Weka also has the ability and I didn't focus on that but it's really amazing. It has the ability to move data around between different environments. So imagine and we see that, imagine on-prem environments that are now using Weka. You're in the terabytes or petabyte scale. Obviously you can copy and R-sync and R-clone, right? But nobody really does it because it doesn't work for these capacities. So Weka has the ability to say, hey, I can move data around between different environments so create more copies or simply burst. So we see customers that are working on-prem throwing data to the cloud. We see customers working on the cloud and then we actually now see customers starting to bridge the gap because cloud bursting is again, is a very nice buzzword. We see some customers exploring it. We don't really see customers doing it at the moment but the customers that are exploring it are throwing the compute out to the cloud using the Kubernetes cluster and throwing the data to the cloud using the Weka cluster. So there's, and one last thing because that's another interesting use case. Weka can be run converged on the same Kubernetes cluster. So there is no need to have even, it's so in essence, it's a zero footprint storage. You don't need to even add more servers. So I don't need to buy a box and connect my cluster to that box. I just run it on the same servers. And if I want more compute nodes, I add more nodes and I'll add more storage by doing that. So it's that simple. So I was just looking at the website and see that Weka was just, this was just announced last week, a visionary in the Gartner MQ for, what's the MQ for? Distributed file systems and object storage. Talk to me, talk to us about that. What does that distinction mean for the company? And how does the voice of the customer validate that? Great, so actually this is interesting. This is a culmination of a lot of hard work that all of the team did writing the product and all of the customers by adopting the product because it was, in order to get to that, I don't know if anybody is familiar with the criteria but you need to have a large footprint, a distinguished footprint worldwide. So we worked hard on getting that and we see that and we see that in multiple markets by the way, financials, we see a massive amounts of AI, ML projects, containerized, Kubernetes orchestrated. So getting to that was a huge achievement. You could see other storage devices not being there because not every storage appliance is a parallel file system. Usually I think when you look at parallel file systems, you attribute complexity and I need an army of people to manage it and to tweak it. So that's again one of the things that we did and that's why we really think that we're a cool vendor and that's magic art, magic work, right? Because it's that simple to manage. You don't have any, you cannot, you don't need to fine tune it in like a bazillion different ways. Just install it, we work, it works. You map it to your containers, simple. So we're here at KubeCon. A lot of talk about cloud native, a lot of projects, a lot of integration, a lot of community development. You've described installing Weka into a Kubernetes cluster. Where, are there integrations that are being worked on? What are the, is there connective tissue between essentially this parallel file system that's spanning, say you have five nodes, you have Weka running on those five nodes, you have a Kubernetes cluster spanning those five nodes. What kinds of things are happening in the community maybe that you're supporting or that you're participating in to connect those together? So right now you don't, we only have the CSI plugin. We didn't invest in anything more. Actually, one of the reasons that I'm here is to get to know the community a bit more and to get more involved. And we're definitely looking into how more can we help customers utilize Kubernetes and enjoy the Weka storage. Do we need to do some sort of integration? I'm actually exploring that and I think you'll see some interesting outputs. So we got you at a good time now. Exactly. Yeah, because you can say with an API approach you have the connectivity and you're providing this storage layer that provides all the attributes that you described. But you are here live, living proof, green wristband and all, showing that the future will be even more interesting. Voting on the future. And seeing how we can help the community and what can we do together. And actually I'm really impressed by the conference. It's been amazing. We've been talking about that all week, being impressed with the fact that there's, we've been hearing between 2,730, 100 people here. It was amazing. In person, of course there's many more that are participating virtually, but they've done a great job of these green wristbands. By the way, we've talked about these a minute ago. This, you have a red, yellow or green option to tell others, are you comfortable with contact, handshakes, hugs, et cetera. I love that the fact that I am sandwiched by two grains, but they've done a great job of making this safe and I hope that this is a message. This is a big community. The CNCF has 138,000 contributors. I hope this is a message that shows that you can do these events. We can get together in person again because there's nothing like the hallway track. You can't replicate that on video. Exactly, grabbing people in the hallway, in the hotel, in the lobby, talking about their problems, seeing what they need, what we do. It's amazing. Right. So give us a little bit in our last few minutes here about the go-to market. What is the GTM strategy for WECA? So that's an interesting question. So being fully software defined, when we started we thought do we do another, a Me Too, another storage appliance? Even though we're storage defined, could we just go to market with our own boxes? And we actually decided to go differently because our market was actually the storage vendors, sorry, the server vendors. We actually decided to go and enable other bare metal environments, manufacturers to now create storage solutions. So we now have a great partnership with HPE, with Supermicro, with Hitachi, and more, as well with AWS, because again, being software defined, we can run on the cloud. We do have massive projects on the cloud. Some of the, we're all familiar with some, but I can't mention. So, and we chose that as our go-to market because we are fully software defined. We don't need any specific hardware for, we just need a server with NVMEs or an instance with NVMEs, and that's it. There's no, usually when I talk about what we need as a product, I also talk about the list of what we don't need is longer. We don't need J-BAR, J-BAR, servers, UPSs. We don't need all of that. Radio rays, we just need the servers. So a lot of the server vendors actually identify that and then when we approach them and say, hey, this is what we can do on your bare metal, on your environment, is that valuable? Of course. So that's mostly our go-to market. Another thing is that we chose to focus on the markets that we're going after. We're not another me too. We're not another storage for your home directories, even though obviously we are in some cases by customers, but we're the storage where if you could shrink your wall-cook time of your pipeline from two weeks to four hours, and we did. That's like 84 times faster. If you could do that, how valuable is that? That's what we do. We see that more and more in more than enterprises. So when we started doing that, people were saying, hey, so your go-to market is only HPC. No, if you look at AI, ML, life science, financials, and the list goes on, modern environments are now being what HPC was a few years ago. So there's massive amounts of data. So our go-to market is to be very targeted toward these markets. And then we can say that they also push us to other sides of the, hey, I have a worker, so I might put my VMware on it. I'll do my distributed compilation on this. It's growing organically. So that's fun to see. Awesome. Tremendous amount of growth. I love that you talked about it very clearly. Simplicity, speed, and scale. I think you did a great job of articulating why WECA is not a me too. Last question, are there any upcoming webinars or events or announcements that folks can go to learn more about WECA? Great question. I didn't come with my marketing hat, but we constantly have events. And what we usually do, we talk about the markets that we go after. So for example, a while ago, we were in BioIT. So we published some life science articles. I need to see what's in the pipeline and definitely share it with you. Well, I know you guys are gonna be at re-invent. We do. So hopefully we'll see you at re-invent. We're very excited. We'll be in supercomputing as well if you'll be there. Fantastic, I see that on your website there. I don't think we're there, but we will see you. We're a strong believer of these conferences, of these communities, of being on the ground, talking with people. Obviously, if you can do it, we'll do it with Zoom, but this is crisis. It is, there's nothing like it. Shimon, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for giving us an update on WECA, sharing what you guys are doing, how you're helping Kubernetes users and what differentiates the technology. We appreciate all your insights and your energy too. It's not me, it's the product. I love it. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. Coming to you live from Los Angeles, this is KubeCon, South NativeCon, North America, 21 coverage on theCUBE. Wrapping up three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We thank you for watching, we hope you stay well.


What's up everyone, Jossi here and in today's video we're gonna be doing an apartment tech tour in our new apartment in the New York City, New Jersey area. I want to give a special shout out to today's sponsor ASUS. We recently moved from the Midwest to the East Coast so this is our new 800 square foot apartment. Listen, it was almost impossible trying to find an apartment that was over 800 square feet that had amenities renovated with nice appliances and a solid layout that is open concept with good lighting. You know, the type of place that a content creator would need. One of my favorite spaces in this apartment is the kitchen. That's because I spend a decent amount of time making coffee, tea and cooking. I'm not sure if you can tell since I'm using a wide-angle lens for most of these B-roll shots but the kitchen is pretty small and that's fine with us because we prefer having a larger living space. The cabinets are pretty tall, they get almost as high as the ceiling. Definitely optimized for storage since we don't have that much space. One other really nice thing about this kitchen is the water dispenser so we don't need water bottles or an ice maker or a bretta anymore which really saves space. Thank you to ASUS for gifting me the ASUS Zen Wi-Fi AX6600 Wi-Fi 6 mesh system. The Zen Wi-Fi system consists of a pair of ASUS AX6600 routers. Packed with technology that gives you super fast, reliable and secure internet. Wi-Fi connections inside and outside of your home. One really nice feature that the ASUS Router app offers is the ability to prioritize what application your Zen Wi-Fi mesh system caters to whether that be gaming, media streaming, working from home, learn from home, web surfing and file transferring. I really love the way this pair of Wi-Fi mesh routers look. The white colorway is really clean and minimal with a ribbed design on both sides of the router. Actually looks good enough to be placed in the living room or kitchen. Since I spend so much time working from home, whether that's programming, answering emails and instant messages from my day job or uploading large YouTube videos on YouTube Studio, I also can't forget streaming content from our smart TV and playing the PS5 online. Wi-Fi has become more important than ever. Overall I'm really satisfied with this ASUS Wi-Fi mesh system. I really like having a reliable network that's secure, fast, along with being able to customize my Wi-Fi based on whatever application benefits me at a given moment, whether that be gaming, file transfer or just simply answering messages and emails while working from home. Thank you to ASUS for sponsoring this video. One of the newer tech items that we added to the apartment are these nano leaf wood elements that you see behind me. One thing you'll notice in this apartment tech tour is that a lot of the technology that we added was lighting that we could control with our phones. These hexagon shaped panels really enhance our space and the design fits in really well with our aesthetic. From the home app you can choose from a range of warm to cool lighting options to illuminate your space with a natural glow and really create this environment of inspiration. Since the panels are modular you can create a personalized lighting experience by arranging the panels into any configuration you want. There's also a control panel with touch buttons that you can use to find the ideal ambience. You can toggle between the different nature inspired lighting. There is a shuffle control as well that allows you to shuffle between different glowing illuminations for each panel along with a music option where each panel will glow based on the rhythm of the beat from the music you're listening to inside your home. The Gove Smart LED light bars have been a great addition to the living room area making our television experience so much better. It's really easy to pair your light bars to the Gove app through Bluetooth. Once paired you have full control over your light bars with the ability to turn them on or off along with an insane amount of lighting customization options. I can't even imagine a television experience without having LED lights behind my TV. There's the effects lab with over 20 different color variations I actually use this setting the most trying to find the perfect ambience and color based on what we're watching on TV or how we're feeling. There's also five different modes to select lighting options from where you can change the sensitivity, saturation, change the color, using a color wheel, save color and white balance. The PS5 is my go-to for gaming. The experience is just so immersive with haptic feedback from the DualSense controller. With the addition of the LG C1 my gaming experience has been remarkable because of the 4k OLED and 120 Hertz display for a smooth gaming experience. I still do have an Xbox but it's the Series S and the PS5 gaming experience is just significantly better especially when it comes to playing my favorite games like Madden N2K. I actually picked up the consistently sold out DualSense charger recently at an Amazon four-star store in New York City. It's honestly one of the more underrated tech items I have. My controller batteries used to always be dead because I would always forget to charge them via USB-C but now that I have a dedicated charging station with the DualSense charger the battery is consistently full. Believe it or not the TV has never been the focal point of our apartment slash living room tech setup. I always was of the mindset that TVs have gotten so much better you don't really need to spend north of $700 for one until I experienced OLED and QLED TVs with Dolby Atmos and Vision. We recently picked up the LG C1 2021 and by recently I mean literally like a week or two ago and we absolutely love this TV. This is a major upgrade from our previous Samsung 65 inch 700 series TV. The display is so vibrant and bright it really illuminates the space around it. Also the clarity of shows that have Dolby Vision technology make you feel as if you're experiencing what you're watching in real life. The colors are so accurate and the blacks are very deep adding incredible contrast and believe it or not the anti-glaring is pretty good. One thing I really like about this TV are the viewing angles. Even in the kitchen or from the side the image looks accurate there's not much color shift or brightness loss regardless of where you're seating or where your viewing angle is. Overall I'm very impressed with the LG C1 and if you'd like to see a gaming or TV setup in the future be sure to give this video a thumbs up comment down below and consider subscribing for more content like this.


Quape twins to drop DJ Tira collab next week. Now that Idol's essay is done and dusted, Viggy and Virginia Quape have stepped in to fill the void. They are releasing a collab with DJ Tira next week. The track, which will no doubt be a December dance floor filler, was announced on Tuesday and shared by the twins' Instagram fan account. It is titled Hamba. The song focuses on a dispute between the twins' management and DJ Tira. Tira took the twins under his wing after they left Idol's essay last month, taking them to gigs and recording songs with them. However, the twins' manager, Kim Coppin, told Chwisa L.I.V.E. that the sisters needed to approach Think Entertainment to negotiate their release if they wanted Tira to represent them. Gallo records also confirmed to Chwisa L.I.V.E. that the twins are still under contract with them and they had reached out to Tira to discuss the upcoming collab. We have contacted DJ Tira outlining our position that the twins are already signed and that Gallo would be open to having a discussion with them on the way forward. We have not yet had a response. The twins have also not been in touch with Gallo to discuss this or for further clarity about the recording contracts they have already signed, Gallo records Rob Cowling said in a statement. Tira told Daily Sun he was just helping the twins and that recording with them did not mean he wanted to sign or manage them. I'm merely assisting them to kickstart their music careers. I wouldn't want to see local talent going to waste. I took them to AKAs events for a public appearance. They did that for free and their fans were happy to see them.


Cancer. It's a very scary word. But an outstanding treatment facility was here at home. I was led to the Lawson Cancer Center. As a nurse practitioner at the Lawson Cancer Center, we are champions for our patients. I am so happy for Robert. The treatment worked. On Saturday, April 29th, the Pike County Public Library is hosting an emergency preparedness workshop. During the 30-minute presentation, those in attendance will learn how to prepare a 72-hour kit, otherwise known as a go-bag. The purpose of these kits is to help one or several people survive during an emergency if supplies are unavailable elsewhere. The reason I'm focusing on 72-hour kits, it's just it's something that my church strongly encourages emergency preparedness and self-reliance. And so we've been counseled by our leaders for many years to be prepared for adversity. And one of the things they've asked us to have is urgency kit on hand. It's sometimes they're referred to as a go-bag or a get-out-of-dodge bag or a get-home bag. But basically this is a 72-hour kit that helps you meet basic needs immediately after a disaster. Essential items found in a standard 72-hour kit are food, water, radio, flashlight, and a first aid kit. For more information and a full list of supplies, visit FEMA.gov. I've actually been doing this off and on for about 33 years now, so I firmly believe in it. One of the things I plan to talk about at the end are testimonials from other people how having a 72-hour kit has helped them. And even if you never need one, it still gives you peace of mind knowing that you have it. And I strongly encourage each person in the family to have their own, tailored to their own needs. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.