And let's move to the code of conduct. We don't have that today. There you go. Thank you. So again, after that's the other piece that everybody needs to be familiar with. Welcome to the TSC call. This call is open to everyone. And everyone is welcome to participate. But please do respect the code of conduct, which essentially is asking everybody to be decent person, which I don't think is too much asking. But nowadays it seems like we have to remind people. So there you are. You have been reminded. All right. So I made actually it for those who just opened them. The agenda you may have noticed that I've shifted things around a little bit. But basically, I think we can do the reports first before getting into the discussion. We have a whole bunch of issues we could discuss. I apologize for last week. I could probably have made the call, but I was in Japan. It was really late in the evening. And I thought we could use the time offline to make progress on the issues. I'm sorry to say we haven't seen, I haven't seen much traffic or not as much as I expect or hope. But so we'll try. I think there was a flurry, right? When you say there were some, there was some. Yeah. And I appreciate the, you know, those who took the time to comment. Thank you. But so in any case, I think we can start with the, the announcement and the quality reports, which, you know, should be pretty quick. And then we can go as much as we can, you know, given the time left on the discussion topics. So with that further ado, let's talk about the maintenance summit. Is Dan back on with sound? I don't see Dan. I know that Salona is on Salona. If you want to address this. In regards to maintainer summit. If you want, you can click over to the pages on the wiki. Dan and others have been organizing it. To sit there and see where the. The location is and what the registration and the agenda are. And notice the pre-registration was coming up on us very quickly. Do you know how many people have now registered? As of yesterday, we had 40 people registered. So we still have room for more. Yeah. We're quickly retaining the size of the venue. Yeah. No, I realize that, but okay. It's so that we set the right expectation. I don't want to encourage people to register for really over, overflowing. It's like. So there's still room if somebody wants to register. Yeah. If we have a few more people, that's probably fine. We have, you know, 50 more people that's definitely not fine. Yeah. Is there, is there something in the registration page that will not allow you to register if you pick warm. Okay. I see Dan has joined. Yeah. Sorry about that rejoined. You want to talk about the maintainer summit was the status. Yeah, it sounds like you guys were just talking about, we're right about at capacity. So I think if there's, um, you know, you can just go ahead and do that. But I think I'm, I'm really happy that we've gotten a really strong turnout and there's a good starter list of topics. And I've got a couple of ideas that we haven't put on there yet. All right. Thank you. That's what we wanted to know. Any questions, anybody. If not, we can just move ahead. So the next is the bootcamp. Sorry. Yes. So everything is up and ready to go in regards to the bootcamp Russia. The main thing that we're doing now is working on getting out. People to join. We've got a lot of session leaders. We've got a lot of different sessions happening. We've got a lot of different people visiting. One of the major changes that we did is because of having currency issues. We took away the sign up fee. Um, because there were problems with credit cards going through and there were problems with the ruble and et cetera, acknowledge them. So that's the major thing that got changed. Um, but other than that, where I think at, um, about 40, but we went to get to closer to 200, but we just had one of the banks that they're and say we want to bring 30. So we're getting there. It's just a bit slow on the signups. All right. But it's all organized. Okay. Any questions? Anyone? Does the, uh, dropping the fee impact everything for the budget. We can see anything. The fee has never, I'm going to mute Chris first. Okay. Um, the fee has never been anything significant to us. It's only been $25. Um, the only reason we do it is to make sure that no one takes up a spot and it doesn't show up. Um, Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. And as I recall, uh, we, I, for years we never collected those fees. Um, it was more of a, of a theoretical stick. Uh, that may have changed, but. It changed. We do actually, we do actually. We do actually collect those rye. Um, it's that, uh, previously we, um, would occasionally refund them, but we were, we didn't, we haven't been doing that this time. We've just been doing the different fees. Um, so for this one, we refriended the 10, uh, fees that people had actually paid because everyone else would sign up was a session leader. Yeah. So they didn't actually pay. They just used their session leader codes. Um, but for the other people, we're now, uh, we've actually waived it because there were so many problems with payment that it was actually affecting the registration, the ability of individuals to register. Is there anything that needs to be done to make that more known and crank up the registration number? Uh, we're going to go and contact all of our members that are in that area and we're sending them materials. And then we're also going to, uh, work with the meetups as well, because each of the meetups have about 700 people in them. Okay. Any other questions or comments on this? If not, thank you. So now let's move on. Okay. So, uh, I'm going to send an email to the list. About the DCI working group having drafted the survey and requesting. Input of feedback. You want to say a word about this? Yeah. Um, so from the DCI, this is kind of the first thing that we're trying to, um, Produce and what we've been working on for the last, uh, the last couple of months. So, uh, I think our idea here with the survey is to kind of get a baseline of the community. Both to figure out. Kind of what are the demographics that we have, and then also kind of understand what their experiences are like in the community. Um, and we're hoping that if we can come up with a format and a list of questions that we can repeat. Year after year, we'd be able to see. Or gauge our improvement or. We'd be able to see some of the different kinds of actions or motions to kind of improve. Uh, diversity, civility, inclusion in the community. Uh, so just kind of getting some general feedback, uh, would be great. And then I think we would want to kind of put this up as like a discussion item in the future TSC meeting. Um, I realized that we could probably put the little review. That after this meeting to add our names. At the bottom. Oh yeah. Sounds like a good idea. All right. Thank you. Any questions or comments for the sweater? Um, hey, this is Silas. Yeah, I just had a few. I just quickly had made a few on there. Um, So I'm. So I understand that. Um, I'm just part of the survey is about setting sort of more statistical baseline. And I think the section two stuff, this is the table that seems fine. The first section of questions. I struggled to find, uh, sort of engaging. I mean, my answer to them was like, yes, it's extremely important, but I feel like in answering it. Uh, I'm not sure that the, the, the. Um, I'm just learning much about. You know, what I think should be done about it. Um, And I wonder how useful they will be as quantitative questions. And if they're not useful, particularly as quantitative questions, could we recast them as. Uh, tell us about a time when you felt excluded or tell us about a time when you X, like something, maybe a bit more anecdotal, anecdotal that might guide more statistically minded questions. I don't know. I find them kind of. Not engaging questions in the current form. Um, I don't know what other people think. Um, I just don't think I'm giving a lot of information in my answers. Um, Oh, and then we're blessing, uh, maybe I shouldn't batch them together. But, um, yeah, the demographic list looks like it's missing at least one continent. Um, I wonder if a demographer could help with a contemporary list of ethnicities. Um, Um, We don't want to be exclusive in the inclusion survey. Um, Definitely we'll look at the demographics in terms of the first set of questions. I know this has kind of gone. Uh, we've had discussion about what is the value or what are we getting out of it? And I think, um, that first set of questions, the whole idea was if we surveyed the community and perhaps they are a little bit boring, but if they do say, Hey, you know, gender diversity, regional diversity, civility are not important to us. It kind of gives us an idea of. You know, there, those are not people we're going to be able to change. But those are not the people we're going to be able to like make differences. Like it kind of is some of the blockers that we would have to deal with in trying to bring diversity, civility, inclusion. At least I think that's thought process. Uh, behind those questions, but I do think we can have more discussion about that. Um, I'm sure we will discuss it. They spoke offline in, in our next meeting. Okay. So one suggestion that just coming to me, she's saying that, um, I think it would be much more, uh, perhaps interesting if you change them into a ranking question, if that, if that's what you want. So rather than having everyone kind of voting from motherhood and apple pie, um, uh, you know, rank these different forms of inclusion in priority order, I think that would be a much more interesting signal because it, you know, it forces people to, uh, trade against them rather than just answer, as I expect a lot of people with that, you know, they're either important or very important. Okay. That's an interesting idea. I kind of like that. Um, again, definitely we'll take it back to the working group and then we can see how that kind of fits in together. All right. Thank you, Silas. Thank you. I mean, I don't mean to get into too much discussion on the content. I mostly wanted to take advantage of the call to highlight the call for feedback. That's what I sent out on the mailing list. So I invite others to follow through and. Come and come into on the wiki. All right. Thank you. So let's move on. Quarterly reports. I just wanted to, I don't think Sophia, I didn't see Sophia on the call. I did have some email exchange with her. You may have noticed last time I pointed out, I was confused because, uh, she had filed a Q two smart contract working with report, but she said, oh yeah, sorry. That's just a mistake. So this is now been renamed key Q three. And she has answered some of the questions comments that had been posted to the wiki. And she didn't have any specific issues she wanted to bring up to the TSE otherwise. So they are facing like many other working groups, I would say. Issues with regard to participation, but there's nothing unique to it other than that. So we'll see if she ever, you know, if he joins in a third year call, we can always, but I mean, if you have questions, the best is to post to the wiki. She is now paying attention. She actually as was moving and she was busy and for low white, she was not so responsive, but she has fixed that now. So. I think they also just posted a rough draft to a white paper that she was asking people come and help contribute to. Yes, I saw a note about that. So that's good to bring it up. All right. So the report has all joined. So. I posted a report for Ursa. There was one point he wanted to bring up to the TSE.  If you're watching the zoom window. And it has to do with, you know, trying to get other working group or other projects to use it. And to care. Which is a bit of a challenge. Yeah. So one thing we've been talking about there is we had started off with, with two ideas. One was where we're all doing some basic things like digital signatures. That's an easy area for everybody to start using the same code and we get some collective strength out of. We're lying on a more redundantly reviewed set of code for the project. But that's also a little bit less interesting maybe for some projects because it's not giving them a new feature. It's just having them maybe replace something they were already satisfied with. That we did recently see this addition from. And then the second area are. These newer kinds of cryptographic features. And. They're not actually in their, in their use case pipeline yet. Or they're, they're just not. Aware to share those with, with Ursa so that we can help provide those features. Yeah. So there's a call for. Yeah.  So there's a call for input there from the maintainers. The other projects. You know, as to what they might want to see out of Ursa. That would make it more interesting to them. If anything. Yeah. And it can be fairly high level. I mean, you don't have to mention a specific cryptographic technique or algorithm. It's just like, if there's some use case that. Could be satisfied potentially by a cryptographic use case, then it's also pretty likely that, that one of us can help pull something out of the literature for that. Thank you. Then anyone else. Any reactions. So scary. So I guess. I mean, I know this there was a discussion way back when, when the Ursa project first came out, but do we really think like writing everything in Rust is actually the best way to get everybody to use this? Well, there's, there's language bindings. And we can have language bindings. I mean, I get how to use it. Don't get me wrong, right?  There's kind of like this approach, which I think is one approach and probably makes sense to start out with to a degree.  Which actually, and I'm not saying they did a great job either, but you know, they created, you know, their crypto stuff and they wrote them in like three or four different languages. Ironically, Rust wasn't one, but I know a lot of the original, like, you know, indie crypto and stuff like that uses, like the BLS thing, interesting things like that that were over there.  I mean, granted, Rust is, you know, cross compatible or whatever that's in there. And then, you know, I guess maybe one of the things like you said, like maybe some of the newer, cooler or more interesting, you know, algorithms become more of interest, right? So that people don't have to, you know, go figure out how to do this. But I don't know, I just, it becomes, you know, tougher to do that, right? I mean, the only onus, for example, on like a fabric side that we would have for swapping out a crypto library right now is if somebody gave me a FIP certified library. Okay. For the crypto we use today, which by the way, as an aside, I kind of have through Red Hat. So I think those, I mean, we can talk more about that, but you did ask about those from the TSCN, maintainer on the other side, right? I think that's kind of where we got to, I do like your thing of like, you know, where the roadmap of the more advanced, you know, crypto stuff, I think that becomes probably more intriguing right? So that projects don't have to implement those things themselves. Yeah. So AMCL, if I'm thinking of the right project, they were able to do a lot of languages and that's pretty cool. But they do that by having a non-optimal approach. So sort of an anti-goal for them is optimality. So they're not trying to, you know, really push performance. And that's a totally fine design goal. Going with rust is a little bit different that we are hoping for some performance benefits, as well as the threading safety and so forth. So it's a little bit of a trade-off. You can provide bindings or you can do stuff directly. I don't know if we'd be at a point to switch thinking on implementation language, but right now, as far as the contributors we've got, it's all sort of rust focused anyway. See, is there a request more around specific language and then being able to provide that binding for that language? Is that a me, Tracey, or? Yeah, I mean, it's like, we want it written in Go and therefore, or we need the interface would go and therefore we need the bindings for Go. Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's, you know, the bindings thing is okay. And I think that would probably be, I mean, that would be an amenable approach that's in there, right? I guess, look, and we have our issues right now, but look, just like anything, right? Anytime that you add additional stuff, right? There's always issues, right? Yes, we have Seago, right? So clearly we can create Go bindings via, you know, C interface into this type of stuff, right? But, you know, you're always going to get into, anyway, right? Anytime you try to do stuff that's cross language, cross whatever in there, just add additional, you know, overhead and stuff like that, right? And, you know, if you're really looking to build cross platform, right? Look, I mean, some of this is on the open source side. Some of this, I can, I'll speak, you know, selfishly as a vendor on some of this stuff, like, you know, we, you know, so we have this and while the world runs on x86 and there's a lot of great stuff in there, we have to build our stuff to run on other platforms, right? So, again, it just adds an additional layer of complexity, right? Into, into builds, right? Even if you have cross language bindings, right? Because you're still loading something, you still have to compile the other stuff to source, etc. Yeah, I want to make a point about this. I don't know what, how Fabric feels about this, but certainly, I mean, at first, I am supportive of, you know, you know, you know, Fabric feels about this, but certainly, I mean, at first, I am supportive of Rust, if there was going to be one language, things written in. For Borough, we hang on fairly jealously to our single pure Go binary. See Go is, is not free in a bunch of ways. You can, fairly well documented in particular building for like muscle instead of Lib C. You lose a lot of the benefits with some of your reflection and, and stuff once you switch to See Go, it is a, I mean, it kind of looks the same up to a point, but there are a load of gotchas with See Go. So that would be a blocker for me using Earther directly in Borough. Although I think probably we do have a C compiled mode for like, we use SQLite as an option. So if people want that and possibly we could use it in our proxy kind of wallet service. But currently it, there'd have to be something that I really needed in Earther to, to drop C, to be willing to have See Go binaries. Yeah. And I think that's exactly the way to think of this question is, we know that there's obstacles, whatever they are. So what is something of value that would rise above the, the obstacles for you? And maybe it's with, you've got itemic stuff in, in fabric, right? Right. So we have itemic in fabric, right? And that's your point, right? You're exactly right. Again, on optimization, right? We took the, we build the, we take the Go stuff, right? And then you're a thousand percent correct that if we took the, even if we took the C version of AMCL instead, we would probably get much better, not probably guaranteed. We would get better performance. Yeah. So what I was actually getting at is, I think that itemic stuff that you have is like RSA style, they're CL signatures, but they're using these, these bigger groups. And so there might be newer stuff that we're doing with elliptic curves. So I don't know if that's interesting. I don't know if there's even an awareness of that, but just, it may jump here. So this is Angelo. So we are using already elliptical. Okay. And we also have an implementation with delegatable credentials for, for in Go directly. But do you have an estimation of how much can be the penalty of using the, the, the bindings? I didn't quite hear that. How much could what? The penalty of using the bindings. So suppose that we want to use that, or someone wants to just fork fabric and then wants, or any other project and wants to use this Rust library. So what would be the penalty in for, for, because the Rust can be efficient, but then if you pay a lot in the, in the bindings, you know, you are actually losing. So what's, do you have an estimation for that? I don't have any reason to think that there's much cost, but I don't have any, any numbers to back that. Do you have a, I was thinking to this other aspect, you know, if it's very, it's very interesting to, to have the same library shared by multiple project, but it also poses a risk in the sense that if the library has a bug, this bug will be immediately, will immediately be effective on all these platforms at the same time. So is there, I mean, sometimes it's, you know, it's better to have the implementation of the same algorithm done by multiple people like you would do in the, in the distributed algorithms. And then, you know, if one has a bug, you still have other platforms without, without the bug, this kind of thing. So any, any thought about that? Yeah. So the idea is that if we've got more review focus on one library, that library's more likely to be robust. Whereas if we, each project has separate implementations, then it's more likely one of those implementations has a flaw. In order for the logic to hold that you've got multiple implementations leading to more strength of a network, then you have to have that entire network drawing from those different implementations. So like if you've got a fabric network, but that fabric network is only using the fabric implementation, it doesn't matter that sawtooth also has a separate implementation, because those aren't on the same network. All right. So I don't want to get too deep into this discussion. I'm happy to see some technical discussion for the technical steering committee. It's actually not that common, unfortunately. So I didn't want to get it short either, but I think I'm happy we're having a discussion. And hopefully this can continue offline. Yeah. I thought that was good and helpful. And so if anybody wants to do that live, we've got the weekly Ursa meetings. Otherwise, I think general preference towards a sync communication on the lists or chat. I think that would be good. I think this is what the Ursa working group project is asking to have this kind of interaction. So they understand better what might be the resistance to using Ursa or what might make it more attractive. So I think it's good to have this discussion. All right. With this, let's move on. So there was a report posted by David fueling on quilt. He actually brought up a question in his report. I think we mostly addressed it in comments. I know David is on, but essentially, you know, he's, he's repeated what has been said before that he's back on the project and is hoping to be able to make progress. His question was mostly about, you know, not being sure what is expected of him in terms of free port to the TSC and all.  And so if he can make progress, you know, we're definitely going to let him do that. So I just encourage everybody to look at it and comment. I don't think he's online. So on the call. So you can risk, you can post comments and questions to the wiki page. If you have any questions. Moving on. The last one is caliper. I did a posted the report. He didn't raise any questions or issues for the TSC. I don't know if anybody has any. I know he's on the call and he offered to answer questions that might be raised during the call. Hearing none, I guess there isn't any. Well, thanks for being here and anyway. So let's move on. Let's get to the discussion part of the agenda. So first, Gary, you, the one who missed the call last time, as a new member of the TSC, I invited all the new members to take a moment to tell us what they would like to see the TSC do maybe differently than we've done to date. And so what's your interest in the TSC, you know? Yeah, I guess on a few things, right? I think that's why I went into the rat hole on that one. I think it would be interesting to have more technical discussions. Right.  I guess it's a fine line between, you know, having those discussions as, you know, in the actual projects themselves or sometimes on some of these reviews, even maybe a project, right? It could be, you know, discussion kind of like we had there. I think it's kind of interesting.  I personally, you know, find that we're too loosey. I think we're getting better. I think we're too loosey-goosey on expectations set across all projects from a technical perspective, both from life cycle, et cetera, et cetera. I'd like to see perhaps more of that, more similar to Apache. And then having a TSC actually come up with ideas in that space. All right. That was good. And, you know, I'll say, I'll repeat what I said last time because you weren't there. It's, you know, from a technical point of view, I don't know anybody who would like, who wouldn't like to have more technical discussion just like we had. And so the problem is we do have process-oriented questions like what's left on the agenda for today that we still have to tackle because we have a gap. Hopefully, you know, this won't take us forever to solve an address. And then once we have put those to rest, we can focus the agendas to more technical matters. I think everybody would like that. So I'm definitely, you know, in favor of that.  So do I have you to blame for the non-technical nature of this agenda? Yes, you can. But hey, the agenda is a wiki page and everybody's invited to participate in putting it together. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to remind everyone of that fact. And take a look at the decision log or the backlog at the bottom. Right. And anyone can add to this backlog. These are all wiki pages. So if there's a, something that you want to bring up to the TSC, you can add a page here trivially. I would like to echo Arnaud's statement there. This is also a wiki page. So if you don't like where it's going, you know, jump in, make an edit. Yeah, I have a question. So when I took a look at the agenda yesterday, I was surprised to see that there were some discussion items that we were probably going to end up loading on. You look at that backlog, it's in alphabetical order. Is there some way to know what it is that we're going to focus on for the next meeting so that we can make sure to spend time on those items before we get to the point where we're like, Oh, we want you to vote on this. So my point, the way I'm looking at this is what's in the discussion is highlights of some of the points that are in the backlog. And this is what I hope we can vote on. And we might get to the rest if we ever, you know, have more time. But so far, this has not been, you know, historically, as you know, the TSC usually is pretty short on time. So we don't really have that luxury most of the time. But that's the idea. I do highlight all these things. Product life cycle issue six, TSC co-chair, TSC size, items that are in the backlog. And they are the ones that have highlighted for this today's call. I guess what I'm saying, I don't know is I understand that they were in the backlog. I just didn't understand they were the ones who are going to focus on this week. And so I didn't spend time on them until yesterday evening. And I have some thoughts about at least the TSC size one and the discussion that's been going on there. But like, it was late last night when I looked at it and I haven't been able to comment on it. And so I guess I'm just saying I want to make sure I have enough preparation time on the items that we are going to discuss for the week before, like the day before. Okay, fair enough. And, you know, I, I don't actually, I mean, the fact that I put them on the agenda for discussion doesn't mean I just expect a straight vote and nobody has the right to comment. And so you may very well say, Hey, I'm sorry, I'm not ready for us to vote on this today.  Or if you're ready to do that.  So we'll have to get used to it. And, you know, I didn't, I pray could have done a better job, but communicating the process I wanted to try and use. So no worries. We'll work through it together. Okay. So any other questions under the process or how the agenda is set up since we're talking about this. And, you know, I very much welcome feedback. I'm myself trying to sort it out and figure it out. Right. So just a wine. I missed the push model of the TSC agenda getting email. I got so many compliments emails a day that it's hard to figure out which ones are just someone creating a page to see if something works versus. Here's the TSC agenda that has been set now and it's not going to change. Yeah, I, I have the same complaint markets. I don't know, Rye or Solana, if there's any way of cutting down on the spam from the TSC agenda, I don't know, I don't know. If you go under confluence and go under notifications, you can go through and customize things pretty dramatically. So I would, yeah, I would go in and yeah, it's for each individual. Each individual has complete control over their notifications. And you can go in and prioritize and do a bunch of different things in regards to that. So I highly recommend going in there. I think though to Mark's point, it would be maybe nice if either Rye or I know or whoever would send out a specific email saying here's the agenda. Yeah, I can do that. That's fine. I almost did it earlier yesterday. And so I'm happy to do that. I was already tempted to do it. So it's fine. I can do that. When I put the agenda together and I feel like, okay, stable enough, I'll send an email saying, hey, I'm going to send you a book and see if you want to add anything or what there may still be changes to Wiki. So anybody can make changes. I can guarantee that, you know, it's not going to change at all, but at least I can send you an email to say, hey, you know, I think that's the most of the news is there. All right. And some of this is like changes. That's when you get, that's when you get notified. Anything you change, you get notified automatically, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is proactive and designed to be asynchronous. So like as you have time during the week, going in and checking on the backlog on the items that you haven't reviewed before. We're checking in on conversations that you have been engaged in. And it's sort of less important when the final agenda is built because you're already up to speed on those things. Yeah. All right. So let's try and make progress on some of the issues that I've highlighted. Yeah. So the first one, or the first ones have to do with issue six. You know, so we have had quite a bit of discussion over time as to whether we should have some kind of formal sub project structure. And the heart for one was a proponent of, you know, making that happen. And there was quite a bit of discussion on the profit, you know, as part of the project life cycle task force. You know, my feeling was, well, at the end of the day, we didn't really have any form of consensus when we're another, but it seemed to me the majority, you know, didn't seem to be in favor of creating a structure. And so I after quite a bit of rambling, I put together that one resolution that says, well, we're not going to have formal sub projects. And so that's the proposal that I'm putting before the, the TSC today. So as an implementation detail, what you mean is that I just want to make sure that this is all like spoken, right? So for instance, fabric can create a sub project called fabric SDK foo. And not have to get any blessing from the TSC and not generate any reports. And furthermore, if the fabric group, if the fabric project decides that fabric SDK foo is deprecated, they can archive that without any say so, or anybody having a vote on that, they can just do it. Yeah. And that also means that when we do TSC reports from the project, they should include, you know, reports on all the different sub projects like the, like the different SDKs and things like this. And so just to finish the corollary to this proposal is the 6.2, which basically says, okay, there were historically we have had some projects being, you know, presented to the TSC as new projects. So they were actually proposed through the heap process and approved, but we never really handled them, managed them in any shape or form lack top level projects. Right. So we don't have reports from the, the chain tool project, for instance, and, and, you know, so there's a, there's a corollary proposal, which is to say, officially we are rescinding these from top level projects nomination, even though they are not surfaced. So it's really purely administrative at this point. We're just saying, okay, all of these things are really part of fabric. I don't know if any others that are, it seems all of those are related to fabric in fact. Yeah. So, and so the go SDKs actually made a request. I missed the last maintainers meeting. So I don't know the status of it, but to actually join fabric. So it would become a sub project. Of fabric. Python SDK is still sort of independent. I mean, again, we could look at that. I don't know if that was on or anybody from there, we could look at doing that chain tool. I don't even know if that's still being used to be quite honest. I know. So I had a discussion with Greg about the, during the migration from here. You found it. I did surprisingly. And I asked if the project should be deprecated and he said it's still, he's still willing to do it. It's basically stable. So they're going forward. I don't know what they want to do in terms of becoming a sub project. But yeah, he's alive. Okay. But I would consider it really can't become a sub project because we've removed support for it in fabric. Right. Exactly. So. Okay, but hold on. Let's not get too much into this right now because. So there are two parts. Right. The first is we don't, we agree that we are not going to have formal sub projects. But we are not going to have a formal sub project. So we are not going to have a formal sub project. We are not going to have a formal sub project. And we're not going to have a formal sub project with a structure. Right. So high article projects. Right. And so, but what I wanted to say, again, going through these things. I think if somebody comes along and they say to the fabric maintainers of the sawtooth maintainers, Hey, we'd like to create a project. You know, Fubar. As a sub project of sawtooth or whatever. And the sawtooth maintainers decided, you know, the future of the project would be the future. You know, if somebody comes along and wants or, you know, we're not really necessarily prepared to support it and so forth. Then I don't see any reason why somebody couldn't come along and say, I'd like to create project food. Just as a top level. No, and that's correct. And in fact, I hope I was trying to find where that is. the leadership of Dan actually is the chair of the TSE, he you know we have had a few proposals made where we said well that looks like very fabric specific why don't you talk to the fabric maintainers and see whether you should really do that as part of fabric or is it a lab and so all of these are still possible we're not saying you cannot exist outside of fabric if you're somehow related to fabric yes that's that's resolution 6.5 yes i think that's the last one yeah it's all one really i think it has to be one thing so i think one of the issues i'm struggling with internally is to me things like fabric and sawtooth are top level projects right maybe we need like a different category for projects like a major project and a minor project well just so you know if i want to come in and propose something well just propose something for sawtooth that sawtooth doesn't want and suddenly becomes a top level project and gets the same publicity as sawtooth and fabric where it's really you know a wrapper around one of their apis or something you know so if they don't want it automatically becomes a top level project and well it still has to get through TSE so yeah there's feedback like hey this is just a wrapper around sawtooth and hopefully committee shuts that down but sawtooth doesn't want it so but i need it for what i'm doing therefore does hyperledger just say no we don't want it go somewhere else with it well no but i think that that's a function of many of the labs in fact or you know sort of small extensions or whatever you know um that uh you know either wrap the SDK or whatever and add some new functionality um there's there's a lot of those out there and i think that's a healthy thing okay well i just you know where you have you know ascension and again many labs i i i i wrestle with the whole the whole concept of you know a lab or a major project a minor project uh some labs are you know really just here's a sample and they that's the end of that then other things it indeed may be some sort of an extension that's only useful in one domain that doesn't really become part of the core but it's still very valuable but so the proposal the first we have to agree is the six one which is we don't have hierarchical projects we have a flat structure we have different categories indeed we have labs and projects and we can still play with that for certain things that feel like okay maybe we're not willing to put that as a top-level project and i've as mark pointed out all the resources put into this whether it's pr ci and you know security our deeds and all this stuff yeah for for me six one is easy because it's meant to stop the situation where sawtooth or fabric says no that doesn't look like it's architecturally consistent with with our project we we don't want that feature and the tsc says too bad that's part of your project now indeed so can we agree to that i would like to put that one before the tsc as a formal proposal can i can i ask a question about sure this one sure so uh so i kind of see this pattern between there's a lab there's a high level project and then there's these things we don't want to call sub projects but they still kind of exist um how are these top-level projects expected to govern these not sub projects not minor projects but whatever you want to call them i guess part of my question is you end up with maybe two levels of maintainers in this situation you can see that with fabric and a couple of the whatever you want to call these sub projects you can see it in aries where there's multiple framework projects with their own maintainer count um what what is the actual role of the top level project and something like aries or what we call the maintainers of those i i think i'm sorry this is brian i don't mean to jump in but um but i'd put this in a comment um i think it is important for you know the maintainers of a project like fabric to be kind of a single set and that set should include the maintainers on these um additional pieces of code if we don't want to call them sub projects um i um you know and that you know that group of maintainers is still what's accountable to the tsc they still work together to create the report that sort of thing um but i wouldn't want to see precisely what you describe as kind of two levels of a of of maintainership or one group of maintainers the reports to another group of maintainers um it should really be just one unified group and that's partly the basis for deciding should this new code base be within this project or not you know those existing maintainers are essentially adding to their the responsibilities and and hopefully adding to their their population as well yeah and to clarify i find this a bit disturbing because i realize you know there's different ways you can interpret the pose resolution i mean the proposed resolution is actually to avoid this kind of hierarchy so if somehow we end up with the sense that there is some hierarchy that the stk go maintainers for fabric are lesser than you know the fabric core maintainers i think this if it's the point it's i'm thinking of this we have a flat list of maintainers of all the different fabric related to repose i think i i i i mean but that becomes problematic i think that becomes problematic right i mean you can say well maybe it isn't because people are in there and then they you know they only do they only end up reporting on whatever i i mean i'm not just not the fabric but let's just talk about i mean sdk is a probably a big thing because areas is going to have them and whatever right and again i just go to things that i know i look at kafka kafka says look we're going to be the kafka project and we're going to provide a jive a java sdk that's officially supported as part of our thing and that's what's under a patchy patchy kafka they have a official kafka release they have a fish of java release there's 10 other sdks out there now half of them are created by the guys that linkedin bought or that's influenced apart from linkedin and other stuff but and they create their sdks over there and they test them and they say what's certified on them so i think this is where things get you know tricky right because if i'm a person on a project right and people come in and have a project and have this stuff my expectation is that anything that's in here and classified as release or whatever it is should work and on the other side right i think that a lot of people don't go in and i mean maybe it's not a problem because you put one big list and you say that the people are in there but i'll be honest most people aren't capable of reviewing some of the stuff so why would i want somebody merging something i mean we can revert and get into battles there so i mean maybe it's a trust thing i don't know so brian if you suggest we have one massive list and then you have co-owners and assigning uh that that could work i guess i'm confused with gary gary i didn't mean to say we have everybody be maintainer of all the repos because that's what you seem to be describing well i thought that's kind of what that's kind of what was implied yeah i think then it becomes clear that then we don't really have agreement on what this means um i mean again you know to taking gary's point though there's also examples where there is a sort of a top level project and then there are a bunch of projects that are definitely related and typically you know sort of go with the flow and but they often have different maintainers um and that's simply because of area of expertise right so i mean i take a look at for instance open stack the open stack of the defined release structure the release of open stack itself though was defined by the um the architecture technical committee um and uh but then each of the projects had different set of committers or maintainers and um and in fact in some cases you even have different parts of the code base for a particular sub project whatever you want to call it a strictly repo that people had authority over and so you know i i think again within a project i think it's entirely uh likely that you're going to have you know a java expert be responsible for the java sdk and a go expert as the go is and so on and so forth um and they may be different people and maybe they are maybe they aren't part of the top level set of quote unquote maintainers but um and that's a project it's to sort of decide for itself how it wants to be governed yeah i mean google code review don't manage this they have a package level permissions like an owner's file that says who can who can sanction say i mean that's partly i mean they're because they're a monorepo but um i mean i don't i think there's a case where like maintainers get actively antagonistic towards each other but presumably in the majority of the cases is governed by consent so i i just wanted to mention that i brought up fabric and aries for two reasons one of them is because i'm personally involved in them but also because those are two distinct examples of different kinds of projects fabric having this kind of um you know top level project and sdks and components kind of um in an ecosystem but aries is is a different animal because you end up with kind of this peer-to-peer system and there's not really a top level project to speak of it's just you know a bunch of frameworks and and sdks that should talk to each other so um they're definitely distinct animals and um it's not entirely clear to me what we mean by maintainers of the project as a whole versus uh code owners of a component if that's what we're what we're talking about now because i think that makes sense but the point of this is that as the tsc we don't need to get into that what we're not going to do is the tsc is force some project or some community into an existing one right but then i'm going to say that we can't vote that there's no sub projects because clearly they're not sub projects they're just projects right i mean i i think you have to say that look i think there's a there's a defined life cycle right i mean maybe what you're really saying here is there's projects and there's not projects we can classify stuff as frameworks or whatever that's not up to me but you're either a project and you're you're either a lab or you're a project and if you're accepted as a project you're either an incubation uh brand will save me but you know whatever the life cycle is right that's i think that's really what six want to say no uh so yeah well this is what this is about is do we continue to have things like you know fabric go as dk officially labeled as a top level project or is that just considered to be part of fabric i think that's hard to resolve if we don't just if we don't resolve what are kind of rules in a project and what does it mean to be um is there a second class of maintainer at this point what i'm hearing here is there's there's not a second class of maintainer from the tsc's perspective and from a project decision-making process we think of all the maintainers of sub-repositories as maintainers of the overall project and then those maintainers need to figure out how they're going to work together and how they're going to manage whatever pecking order they think they need to accomplish their project's purpose and and you know i think you mean from i thank you net this is correct this fits my mental model and to me it's not different than what's happening today today we have different repos of fabric and every other project they we all have different repos and not mean the maintainers are not the same and all the repos right so i don't think anybody is suggesting we change that what i meant by you know we have a flat list there is no second citizen the second class maintainers they all are maintainers on the same level and that's yeah it's a status quo thing all right so we're running out of time but i'm glad we had this discussion clearly we still have to do some clarification about what is meant so i guess we'll close it for this uh for today on this i encourage people to look and use the wiki offline we'll get back to it next week hopefully we'll be in better shape to have a crisper proposal that everybody understands and we can vote on and the same goes for the other topics that are in the in the discussion section of the agenda for today all right i will close the call on this so we respect everybody's time thank you all for joining me talk to you next week thank you goodbye thank you


To begin, welcome, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm glad to see you here today. We have a great set of guests and who are doing some very important work. I'm looking forward to our conversation about that. We've been taking a look at COVID since, well, since it began in late fall of 2019. And we've been taking a look at this from numerous angles. We've been thinking about how our education has changed in terms of pedagogy, in terms of how we care for students, in terms of faculty and staff stress and workload, and not to mention research and all kinds of things. Today's guests have an unusual, unusual approach. What they're doing is they are working on documenting what happened as a result of the pandemic. They're doing a lot of research into this to accumulate stories and building up deductions about what the COVID experience did to higher education. Now, I'd like to hear more about them, but let me bring them each up on stage, first of all. We have great people, Tula Dlamini, Stephanie Pirriotti, and Ribbon Puethedore. So some of you may know these people already, but just in case you don't, let me bring them up one by one so you can get a sense of who they are and what they do. So to begin with, let me bring up Tula. Hello, sir. Distinguished panelists and all participants in the forum. Brian, thank you so much. For pleasure. It's a pleasure, too. Now, to the audience, my name is, as you've already heard, is Tula Dlamini. I was born and bred in Africa, Southern Africa in particular, at a place called Bulawayo, and this is in former Rottisha, now Zimbabwe. It's in Southern Africa, as I've said, Southern Africa is the home of my parents, grandparents, and a trailer load of relatives. So I am home in Southern Africa. Excellent, excellent. Just outside of Johannesburg, right? Yes, absolutely. Excellent. Tula, the way we ask people to introduce themselves is to ask what you're gonna be working on for the next year. What are the big projects and what are the big ideas that are gonna be uppermost in your mind? I'm quite a beg-full of ideas. My background is in journalism and writing, and so documenting stories is something that I consider part of my DNA. And working with the team at SAU, we're doing exactly that, except our focus is on education and how we can take a leap from the lessons that have been learned through the COVID pandemic. And so what we have done is interviewed, I think, by now over 20 individuals who have told us very unique, diverse stories about their personal experiences. And we are now taking these stories and putting them through analysis process to find out what is it in the studies that we can learn and leverage in terms of solutions. Well, terrific. That sounds like an amazing project. And I look forward to hearing more about this over the next hour. Thank you. Thank you, Tula. Let me bring your colleagues up on stage so they can join you as well. Let's see. Let's see if I can find the awesome colleague of mine who people sometimes mistake for me. And so let's just bring Ruben Puentador up on stage. My good friend and hero in the world of education, technology and world leader in beard growth. Ruben, hello. Hey, Brian. It's good to see you. Good seeing everyone today. It's really a pleasure to be here. I am really honored to be sharing a stage right now with Tula and with Stephanie and really feel myself very, very lucky to be working with them on this project. For those of you who know my work, I work on how technology can make a difference in learning. So that's where the SAMR model and yet that Quintet to the models I developed come from. But of late, I've been also turning my attention to the whole question of black swans and antifragility. And this project is at the nexus of some of my earlier work as well as some of that antifragility work, which is we really need to understand these stories. And I always have had a fascination with storytelling. So from my perspective, we'll talk more about this, being able to better analyze what these stories are telling us as well as collecting them and sharing them with the world are all part of a package that helps us better understand what happened and better build new solutions, new antifragile solutions for what's to come. So that's what I'm looking at for the future, Brian. Excellent, excellent. Black swans, antifragility, storytelling. We need more of this. Thank you, Ruben. And now let me add last, but definitely, definitely not least, let me add your colleague here. And I think a chief cat herder of events here. Let me bring up Stephanie Pierralti. And she's going to correct me because I probably mangled her name some kind of bizarre mock Italian. You said it beautifully. Thank you. Well, you're very kind. Stephanie, hello, and thank you. You're coming to us from Scarsdale, Arizona? Scottsdale, yes. I just came from the ASU campus where we did a launch of our Zoom Innovation Studio. Very cool. But yes, I am the chief cat herder slash co-show runner and ringleader, if you will, of shaping EDU, which is a community of about 4,000 education change makers around the world who work together to help lifelong learners thrive in the digital age. Well, it's terrific. That's a great project. And I really am really glad that you could spare some time to talk about it with us. Stephanie, for yourself looking ahead for the next year, within shaping EDU, what are the big projects and the big ideas that you're focusing on? Well, we'll announce in the second week in January our five calls to action, which we rally around throughout the year. And we'll convene in person for the first time since COVID at the end of February of next year. And that kicks off our annual project cycle, which runs from the beginning of March to the end of October. So that will be our big focus, five new projects for 2023. That's a lot. And can you tip us off at all? Can you give us any hint about the announcements in January? Yes, we'll continue some of our current focus around digital inclusion, which there's a lot of work being done around that and we'll announce some new projects for that. We're also working on developing the physical classroom of the future and learning environments of the future. So those will be two areas of focus. And then we're also looking at holistic wellness of educators and of students. So really addressing the mental health crisis. And I'll keep two of them secret, but those are our big guys. Thank you for the sneak peek, sneak preview. And let me just show off the visual skills of this platform here and arrange you in a nice kind of 1970s style panel. I have all kinds of questions for you. And friends, I'm just gonna ask a couple of them just to get the ball rolling, but then I wanna get out of the way and let you all ask your questions too. If you wanna learn more about this group's work, on the bottom left of the screen, you should see a link that says, are we there yet? And then that will take you to their page. So I'm just wondering really quickly if the three of you could start off by talking about what are some of the lessons that you think higher education learned from the pandemic period? And what are some of the lessons that your research into this has yielded? I'll let Ruben go first, and then you can popcorn it over to one of us. Well, I think one of the lessons frankly learned is the fact that it's not enough to just provide a campus and little boxes where classes take place and lectures take place. The whole question of mental health, the whole question of social emotional learning has come to the foreground in a very deep way. In my conversations and stories that we're collecting, we're hearing this not as an ornament or as an, oh yes, by the way, we offer this through health services. No, no, it's coming through as a fundamental aspect of what we need to be thinking about and I would say if you ask me to choose one key highlight, that would be it. It really is remarkable. And by the way, it's not just higher ed, it's the entire K-20 range. So that's the one I would pick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, go ahead Tula. Yeah, for me, the number one is, you know, student engagement for better outcomes. And I think this is why COVID-19 was such a dilemma for those amongst us who define student engagement only in terms of face-to-face learning. Of course, the other variable related to that is student-centered learning where you have to start by assuming that every student knows something and that student, you know, has something to share with other students and their technology is an enabler and it's coming out in some of the stories that we've collected. Excellent, excellent. I can see how that connects with social learning that Ruben mentioned. And Stephanie, that brings us back to you. What other lessons did you derive? I think two big takeaways for me were the need for community, that sense of belonging to a group of, if not like-minded folks, folks to have constructive conflict with and discuss issues. And I think also the learn anything from anywhere concept that allows learners to embrace new types of journeys in learning and what does that mean at the end of the day? What are the micro-credential options? What are stack credentials? How do we put all those pieces together? And I think people now realize that there are many different paths that they could take, whereas it might have been a linear journey for them pre-COVID. Oh, that's very interesting. That's very interesting indeed. Those are five very, very powerful and nicely interconnected principles to derive from all of this. Friends, I wanna ask a more material question about this project's work. And then I wanna get out of the way and hear from you and to see what questions you have. And the material question is, could you say a bit more about how are we very yet functions? What do you, how are you gathering stories? Where are you finding them from? Tula, you mentioned processing them. How are you processing them? What should the rest of us expect?  Are you gonna do a series of podcasts? How are we gonna be able to access the results? Tula, you take that one. Yes, what we did was solve the idea of collecting the stories to a range of individuals. And that included my own daughters who spoke to students that they knew. I also spoke to, as a former lecturer at the university, I spoke to a number of my colleagues that I used to teach with. And the university administrators were willing to give us these interviews, which we collected. And as a team at SAU, we also collected range of stories from a number of people. We've had each team member collected a story. And more stories have been collected as we speak. And what we are doing now with about 20 stories we've started developing the tools which we're going to use to analyze the stories. And I think Ruben is best suited for you, Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you, that helps a lot. Stephanie, you threw that to Tula so quickly. I assume you were about to say something yourself, too. Well, we've published several of the stories. I think we have 13 maybe live right now on our YouTube channel. So if you just go into YouTube and look up Chapingedu, you'll see our channel there and you can access all the stories. So basically the interviews take place over the course of an hour and we boil that down to about seven or eight minutes per video. So after we complete the interview series, Ruben and Tula are going to work together on an analysis of the stories told and the key takeaways that we'll publish early next year. So that is what's happening at this moment. Excellent, excellent. And how does this all fit within the Chapingedu enterprise? I think that it's important to see representation of different elements of the community from around the world and discussing a common topic, a common problem and looking at how everyone has dealt with those challenges differently. So we can learn by sharing the storytelling component of what we do at Chapingedu is so important. We really wanna be able to develop resources that could be events, could be interviews, could be white papers, could be toolkits and for the community to take back to their communities of practice to then share out. And in doing that, that is how we foster change. Wow, I love how that integrates so smoothly. Thank you, thank you. Friends, this is the time for you to put forth your questions. You just learned a little bit about how they do their work. You learned a bit about the major conclusions, everything the importance of mental health, learning from everywhere, student engagement. What questions would you like to put to our group? What questions would you like to ask them? This is the place and time for you to do that. So if you're new again to the forum on the very bottom of the screen, you can click the raised hand button and that'll let me beam you up on stage. And I promise you can see already, in fact, that our guests are very nice. And if you would rather type in a question, just hit the Q&A box and type that in. In fact, already we're having a good exchange between several people in the chat between Tom Ames and Kiel Doomsch about online education and how this works. Well, people are thinking about this and they're starting a couple of questions. I have one more quick question for you. Why are we there yet? What does that question refer to besides the inevitable cry of children in the backseat of a car? I think it's a moving target to a certain extent, right? Because we don't wanna say in the post-pandemic world, we don't know that we'll ever actually be in a post-pandemic world. So what does that look like and how do we learn from this experience to then whatever the next global crisis may be? How do we take what we've learned from this and adapt it to future situations which Ruben can speak to as he is the herder of all Black swans? Right, I was going to say, yeah. The interesting thing for me is exactly what Stephanie just said. Not just say, okay, so this is what happened. How interesting, we'll write a little book about what happened and that's it. It's how do we use this to learn to move forward? And for instance, the tool set that we're developing for this is all designed to be open source what the European Union calls Libre. So all the software is going to be openly available. The raw interviews are going to be available to researchers. In other words, we want this to not just be, well, we found this out and that's it. So we want this to be a point of departure to explore what happened in light of how we could make the good outcomes be better, maybe apply in cases that have nothing to do with pandemic, but also avoid some of the bad outcomes. And again, not have to have everybody reinvent the wheel, reinvent the tools, but to be able to say, hey, these tools work for thinking about this, for developing this, we can just take the tools and use them. And the last point I wanted to make in this context is for me, there's also a very nice match between the tool set itself and what we're talking about because we're talking about story time. And the tools that we're using to develop the analytical tools for the project is built on what a platform called Jupyter. And Jupyter takes what is a notebook and narrative approach to the integration of data analysis and talking about it. So you're not saying to somebody, well, you go here and you have this data set and you go and you run that program there and then after that, you write a separate paper and somehow all the pieces, the whole thing is integrated. And as I say, it's designed to be freely shareable with the community. So once again, we're taking a, if you will, data storytelling approach to also telling these stories in terms of how we think about them, both in understanding, but also in terms of what we do for the future. Very nice. I just put a link to Jupyter in the chat and tweet this out. And speaking of the chat, our good friend, Sarah San Gregorio, thanks you for acknowledging the pandemic isn't over, especially for me to compromise to this. Agreed, agreed. We have a question here from our excellent researching friend, Kail Duhmsch. And let me just bring this up on stage. And again, if you're new to the forum, here's an example of a text question. If I can hit the correct button. COVID didn't change the obscene prices of higher ed. The catalyst for change in that area will come from alternative forms of credentialing, breaking higher ed's degree monopoly in high rate. So that's not so much a question as an assertion. I 100% agree. And I think that, you know, knowing that the average student in the States graduates with over $100,000 in debt is a frightening statistic. And it's interesting. I was just in Europe a few weeks ago and talking to folks that aren't involved in the education world, that number just blew their mind. And to know now that we have a generation of students looking at higher ed options and thinking, I don't want that debt, I don't wanna go down that road. So if there's something else I can do that will still get me the job of my dreams, why would I not do that? So if employers are validating that level of concern and embracing the alternative options for education, I think that all schools need to rethink how they're marketing their services to prospective students. And if employers are working in conjunction with higher ed institutions, that's kind of where the magic happens, right? Because then employers are forming relationships with students earlier in the process and the education institutions are offering broader options that won't require that obscene price tag. Thank you, that's a really good response. Tula, do you have any insights from the South African point of view? Yeah, just to add that, of course, as my colleagues have said, the problems are bigger. But we have told ourselves that to achieve useful interventions, we need to understand real challenges empirically. And that's why we're collecting these stories and analyzing and the preliminary analysis that we've done. Some of these challenges around access are already coming up and we are therefore going to be able to make informed recommendations based on what is coming up. Oh, good, oh, good, very good. Urban, did you want to add anything to that point? No, I think that covers it nicely. The only other thing I was going to say is, again, if we look at some of what happened, what we can learn from during the pandemic and things that work, it's in terms of seeking out these new opportunities or different opportunities, student networks are becoming very, very central to the picture. So it's not just what universities and faculties decide to do. It's also how students come together to share knowledge, decide how they're going to pursue knowledge again. So very, very interesting opportunities opening up on that front as well. Okay, very good. Thank you, thank you. And thank you, Kio, for the question. If you're new to the forum, that's an example of a test question. And speaking of which, we have an example question coming up from one of your colleagues. And this is from the irrepressible Tom Hems, who asks, what kinds of actionable suggestions for institutions are you seeing so far from your interviews? What tool and ribbon answer that since they've been doing the interviewing? I think owing to the commonality of the challenge, it's become clear that issues around access to technology are key in the professor. And they're easily adapted to across different environments. So we have to solve the digital interview. It's just one of the priorities that come out very clear. I'm sorry, Tula, I lost your last sentence. You're pretty quiet. Can you up your volume or get closer to the mic? Yes, I said, it has become clear that the proposed solutions, especially around digital access, are adaptable across different environments. And we really need to solve for this digital access, digital inclusion, because it is indeed an enabler and it's coming out very clear in the interviews that we've done so far. And that's just one of the challenges that has come up there several. We mentioned earlier, or it was mentioned earlier, issues around mental health, access to appropriate management systems and how those systems themselves provide opportunities for development, making the user interface more adaptable and all these things we need to solve for. And the interviews are beginning to tell us and guide us which that it needs to be done. And I think this is just to show kind of the joints in our work, if you will. A lot of these interviews have surfaced the challenges with connectivity to Tula's point. And this brings us to another part of our work where we're advocating for folks to sign up for the ACP, the Affordable Connectivity Program and working with the FCC and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance as well as locally the Digital Equity Institute to make that happen. So there's been, we have an amazing member, Lisa Gustanelli in Florida who's run two programs, one with the Haitian community as an example where she's gone through the churches to connect with folks that could use the ACP funds to get connectivity and teach them what to do with it, what their opportunities are to connect with once they have that connectivity. And in doing that, we've surfaced challenges with the internet service providers knowing what ACP is and who do you talk to? Once you're approved, where do you go from there? So there's, it's like an onion, right? So we're peeling away the layers of the onion. Yes, you wanna learn online but you need affordable connectivity. You need that, you qualify for it. How do you actually get it? So I think diving a little deeper is a really important part of the process. Excellent, excellent. Thank you, thank you. Ruben, you live right on the edge of connectivity yourself. Would you like to add more to that theme or another answer to Tom's question? No, I was going to say it's funny you bring up connectivity because I don't know if this is coming through my mic but I have a steam shovel working outside my house and I have to admit I'm a little concerned that my long pipe to the net is at risk right now. But, so anyhow, so no, I think a tool and Stephanie did a great job of summarizing that the only thing I'm going to highlight is just one thing that's less a direct takeaway more a mode, if you will, which is really listen to what your faculty, your students, your communities are telling you. Not what you think is sort of a grand summary. And this is one of the things that sometimes concerns me because I will see narratives about mental health in the press but they don't match up frankly with what we're hearing in our stories. It's a much more complex and nuanced landscape. I'm a little concerned sometimes that people say, well I read the story in pulling the blank of your hometown newspaper that you always listen to, therefore all the sign policy around that. And if I had to take away that to say, you know what, listen to the stories really being told because you're going to find that there are very many nuances and very many differences with what sometimes is an over-generalized narrative. And to that point Ruben, I think it's so important that we can look at stats and we can look at research and we can read articles that to hear it from the proverbial horse's mouth what's actually going on with the folks who are boots on the ground that makes a huge difference and it won't always align. There could be another, you know, continuing with my onion metaphor, there could be another layer of the onion that needs to be pulled away to get really to the meat of the problem. Can the two of you give us an example of such a case and anonymizing the parties to where degree necessary but of a university listen or college listening and hearing this one outer layer of your onion if I'm going to completely mangle the metaphors now. But instead there is a deeper layer or deeper message that they should have heard instead. Tula, do you have a good example from your interviews? Tula's been doing a lot of interviews. I think it's fair to say, you know, this is early days. We haven't even begun the deep dive in people. It's suffice to say, when we have spoken to the people who have spoken to them, they approach us and they allow them to tell us. And we believe that the analysis that we are about is not a secret issue for the interviews that are telling us. This might be a good opportunity for Tom to jump in too because Tom's been, that's conducted several interviews. Well, in that case, let me, I can easily just draft him up on stage without asking his permission. And let me just clear out some room on the deck so he can join us. And let's see if you can hear. Hello, Tom. Yeah, yes, got you. No, I'm not wearing a bathrobe either. Yeah, no, I mean, the interviews have been kind of an interesting experience. I mean, I was one of the interviewees and then I interviewed a couple of my colleagues at the community college. And it was very interesting to see the range of responses. One colleague who was teaching art, she was like, oh, it's no big sweat. I was already moving in this direction and the way my courses were set up, it wasn't that big of an adaptation based on what I was teaching that. I was already doing a lot online. And then the other colleague was like, I was completely unprepared and it's always been a struggle and getting through. He's just not good at getting through to the, in that kind of environment. He just didn't feel like he could connect to his students. And it's interesting because the first professor has continued to heavily teach online as I have as well. But the other one has gone back to in person as fast as he possibly could. And he has a very different mentality. I've known him for 20 years. He was actually my first boss at the college. And he has a very different mentality about how his teaching works. And he's certainly more traditional. But he's very good at doing that. It's just that he's trying toward the end of his career and he doesn't really want to throw everything out and start over from scratch. But he kind of looks at the stuff I'm doing and goes, okay, that looks interesting. I'm not sure what you're doing, but I get it sort of. I'm curious, Tom, if I can put some of that. And of course, from the rest of the crew, I'd love to hear your thoughts. If we can consider that to be an example, an exemplary case where we've got some faculty who learned to love teaching online and some who decided that while they could make it work in emergency, it's not for them. What does that tell us about higher ed going forward? Does it mean that we are increasingly bifurcated in our teaching experience with more online? Does it mean that for the next crisis we're going to have to go through the whole spring 2020 process again, or will we be better ready to meet the next crisis? You know, I think one of the things it tells us is that a lot of the professional development that we've done toward teaching online has been very technical in orientation. It is really focused around, this is how you use the learning management system, not what you can do with it or what you can do differently. And I think a lot of times we miss having those conversations about, I mentioned in the chat, that a lot of institutions miss this too, is that it's a very different environment when you're teaching in an online space as opposed to an in-person space. And it's not always obvious what the differences are until things simply don't work. And one of the things I learned fairly early on is that in an in-person space I teach very socratically. That doesn't work. It just really doesn't because you spend half the class wranging the students to respond to a prompt and most of them are hiding behind boxes and they don't. So you have to do something a lot more active than that. You actually have to be doing activities in class and that takes more work. It takes more prep work. It takes more upfront thinking about how you're going to get to the same place in a different way. And those are conversations that I think a lot of times that we don't, even at places like community colleges, which are very teaching focused, we don't have those conversations enough because frankly, it's a lot to ask people just to master the technology or certainly was the case for the last 20 years, especially people who are not terribly comfortable with technology as a whole and all of a sudden, you know, have to somehow figure out. And of course, there's a, you mentioned in a talk almost 20 years ago, I saw you, these two levels of technology. So in the first level, you basically are copying what you did in the old method in theoretically a more efficient way. And then the second level, you've completely redapted everything you're doing. 99% or 90, a large percentage, 90% of the faculty out there during COVID were barely getting into that first bracket. And they never had the time to stop and go, okay, I'm going to rearrange the deck. I had an advantage in that I had done that from a conceptual level of several years before, not because of teaching online, but because I wasn't satisfied with what was working in my in-person classes. And it turned out when I transferred that online it actually worked pretty well and seamlessly in an online space compared to what other people were doing. And to add to that, Tom, I think, you know, one of the reasons that we're looking at game-based learning and gamified learning and how eSports affects that is because the expectation level of the student is much higher for a deeper level of engagement than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago. So what we as educators were doing 10 years ago, 20 years ago, isn't going to engage students in the same way. We have 95% of kids from 13 to 18 that play video games every single day. That's what the instant reward and that deep level of engagement is setting a different level of expectation in the student and educators need to adapt to that. So there is going to be a bit of a, I think, survival of the fittest, if you will, of educators that are able to create really engaging, amazing learning experiences for students and those that are perhaps not willing to adapt that technology and are just going through the motions of teaching the same way that they have for their entire teaching career. And I think one of the things with digital is it makes everything very transparent. There's no hiding, especially if you're recording things. And I have every lecture, not lecture, but I have every one of my classes for the last three years on recording. And it changes a lot. I mean, if one thing you can see everything and you could assume the students can go back and look at things too.  It just wasn't clicking. It was one of those days when I was pitching, I was Justin Verlander on Tuesday and I was pitching everything best I could and they were hitting it out of the park. And I was just like, it just wasn't working. But I think that one of the things that I would say that I'm not sure it ever really worked. I mean, when I went to school, if I remember back on my undergraduate experiences, and I challenge everybody to do this, reflect back on your own undergraduate experiences, also be aware that you're not typical. If you're in this business, you're not typical. You like school at some level to do. So your reactions to this are going to be slightly different than the quote unquote average to it. But even with me, I remember quirks of professors. Do I remember the content? I mean, I remember the professor who used to start every day playing rock and roll music in the class. He showed up with cut off shorts and flip flops. It was an astronomy class. He was very entertaining. Do I remember anything from the class? No. Do I remember another professor in astronomy at one point? What he did, he was literally flipping transparencies every 20 seconds or so. And these were crammed with handwritten text. And you just spent the entire time writing as fast and as furiously as you could. Again, do I remember anything from that class long term? Not really. So I mean, the question is, that's what we've had a lot. That's the education we're used to. We're used to the Kingsfield method of teaching. And one of the problems, of course, is that when we start changing the modalities, where this is not hidden around in four walls, people start to see that. And then they go, wait a minute. What exactly are you doing here? And think about where your actual learning comes from in college or otherwise. Where does the stuff that's stuck? Skills and things like that, yes. Methods of research and learning and scholarly inquiry and things like that. Certainly from grad school. But content, especially in undergrad, not so much. So we'll be there. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious, Tom and Stephanie, between the two of you, what you're describing is a professoriate that seems to have improved marginally over the course of the COVID experience. And in the chat, we have affirmations for this from Lisa Durf and Sarah Sangrigoria. But that we haven't advanced far enough either to do what we need to be done now sufficiently or to take care of the next crisis. This is the Afro-the-Future Transformer. We look at the future of higher ed. So Rubin, let me ask you to do a little forecasting, perhaps a little scenario. How do you think higher education is going to respond to the next, maybe not necessarily COVID level, but something substantially dangerous, such as, we can pick a few of these disasters. How do you think we're going to respond? Are we going to rerun Spring 2020? Or are we going to do something a bit different? It's a great question, Brian. I'm not sure, to be honest with you, so the good news is I don't think you're going to see somebody just replicate what happened at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and that's it. So I think some lessons have been learned. So that's the good news. But let's take it from the perspective of, for instance, climate change. Let's put it a little bit more quickly. So if you're looking at the type of scenarios, I think there's going to be a learning curve for adapting some of the lessons learned to a different type of scenario. So, for instance, people learn that they had to go remote because of issues of contagion with COVID, et cetera. But climate change could push you in the other direction. Climate change might push you to a point where, in fact, the learning space becomes a shelter space. So the question becomes, then, which lesson have you learned? Because whatever you learned about how to use Zoom probably isn't going to be directly applicable. But this goes to a question that Tom was bringing up, which is thinking about how the spaces work, thinking about how to think about that. I'd like to think that things are a bit further along the issue of technology, which was brought up by Tula, the issues of how that technology is mediated, connectivity brought up by Stephanie. I think all of these play into the picture. So if I had to make any sort of forecast that, say, probably hiring isn't going to get it right at the next major challenge. Probably you're going to see lots of mistakes, lots of missteps. But I think a few fewer. And my hope is this type of project that we're doing will help people say, hold on, we don't have to reiterate or re-replicate everything we did wrong with COVID or all the errors we made. We can at least make new and exciting errors, but hopefully a few fewer. That's my take. I welcome to hear from the rest of you what you think on that block. New errors. That's from the Black Swan herder. I'm curious, Tula and Stephanie, what do you think, based on all these stories? How do you think higher education is going to respond to the next COVID? One of the things that some students have told us is that it was not all gloom and doom. Not every student had a challenge with access to technology, for instance. Although that position is not evenly distributed. But they say that having to learn from home and not going to class meant that there was no peer pressure for them, for instance, that they could study from wherever they were in the world. That there were no compulsory extramural activities for those who didn't like them. They had freedom to organize their own time, decide when to study, what to study. Some of them say they prepared the online exams. They say they were less anxious. They just woke up, pep, sit on a desk. This is different from regular school. There are all these things that we are learning, but we think somehow we can find ways of leveraging on them. Good point. I remember seeing studies which showed all kinds of interesting virtues to what was then emergency online instruction through people who were suffering from social anxiety. Being in a crowded lecture hall, for example, being online didn't give them that necessarily. Some people who, in the K-12 space, were reporting social problems, such as bullying, found being online was a lot better. And, of course, there's the environmental change that people are not burning CO2 as they travel from and to universities and campuses. It's really important to thank you for showing that there are really positive lessons that we learned as well. Friends, what other questions do you have? We only have about 10 minutes. I can't even finish that sentence before someone asks a good question. This is from Charles Finley, our good friend, who says, any international global initiatives addressing access, students are attempting to write required essays on phones and trying to meet deadlines with no electricity for a day or two. Change of requirements? What do you all think? I think it will continue to be a problem, especially as we struggle with how we adapt to climate change. But I think this first step of getting more people connected with the ACP will be very telling in what's the norm, right? What's expected? How do we get more folks access to online education? But it is creating a digital divide and it's up to us to try to close that. And again, the ACP, that's the United States FCC effort to give some financial assistance to people who don't have you. Exactly. It's basically a stipend, you know, just something to help ease the burden of the cost. They don't cover 100% of it. I apologize if I get these numbers incorrect, but I think in the tribal nations, it's a $70 a month supplement and then it's either 30 or 35 for other folks. So just having that as, you know, something to help is important. But also making sure that our libraries are being put to good use. You know, we do have a lot of resources available at libraries that aren't always utilized. So making sure that that's accessible is really important too. I'm the facilitator here. So my job is not to ask questions, but to ask them. I would just say one of the great takeaways from the pandemic is the massive realization of the digital divide at a worldwide level, just how thorough that is and how unaddressed it is. Someone started answering and I didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, just a very quick thing. Because I want to, to Charles point, there's something very important that comes out what Charles said because Charles mentioned international aspect and that to me is really important. Because there is work being done internationally. Some under the auspices of UNESCO, some under the auspices of international NGOs. Et cetera. All sorts of different organizations. And it's important to learn from them. One of the points, for instance, being brought up, which is so students are arriving on cell phones, et cetera. We actually have good research that's been done on that front from UNESCO, from Japan, from several other locations that say, no, of course you don't say, let's get a traditionally formatted essay out of this. But it is a way of saying, how do you re-adapt or re-say, what is the purpose of this task? And then can I rethink it, re-adapt it, et cetera, in the context of that technology, which is available, which happens to be robust in the face of a technological challenge, whether it's a flood due to a hurricane or what have you. So absolutely, Charles, the point you brought up in your question as to the international aspect of these initiatives is really a crucial one. And again, if you ask me for strong encouragement, for me, for instance, it's a joy to be able to work with Tula, but I would expand that to, it's a joy to be able to work internationally and to share with colleagues from around the world their solutions, their ideas, and to be able to look at this work. And that's part of the amazing, the special sauce of having a community like Shaping EDU is that we do offer global perspectives, and we hope to be able to say, okay, our friends in Sweden, how did you deal with connectivity issues there? What can we learn from you that we can take back to our communities of practice in the States? And the more of these conversations we have with a broader, the broader community, the more solutioneering we can do together. Stephanie, in your capacity as director, I just want to put a bug in your ear. I would love to host your broadband access group here. And we can follow up by email perhaps, but... Yes. No, the only thing is at least one of those people has to have an impressive beard. I mean, that's just got to be... Ruben, you're in that group, huh? Yeah, but we need to diversify. I think we need to encourage more members of the group to... To grow a beard, I think that's right. In the chat, on a more serious note... That's a pretty clean shaven group, actually. We don't want that. That's only a sign of troubled characters. In the chat, Susan Klausmuth reminds us a more serious note. There are still people impacted by recent storms. Fiona and Ian here in the Southeast U.S. struggling to reconnect their lives in general, not to mention stay on track with their education. And again, looking ahead as the climate crisis worsens, and that means we have a greater incidence of such storms, and those storms will tend to be a greater destructiveness. This sounds like something that we really need to focus on in higher education, and we need to be well-prepared for. Charles, thank you for that excellent question, and each of you, thank you for those answers. And I think, you know, getting back at what Ruben said a minute ago, is that one of the things we need to learn from the pandemic as well as the, you know, the potential interruptions of the futures, we need to be looking really carefully at how, what our tasks are, you know, what we're trying to do when we're teaching, and create a flexible framework that allows us to slide from virtual to in-person, depending on what makes the most sense, not only given the circumstances of the time, but also given the learning needs of the learner. I mean, some things are just better taught in-person, some things are better taught online, and we don't tend to think critically about which falls into which bucket, and or what are the trade-offs, you know, for this environment versus that environment. There are many things I've lost teaching online that I would love to recapture, but my school does not really have a very fluid, hybrid environment.  And sometimes it's 50-50, but that means you're online half the time and in-person half the time, and it's not 55-45 or whatever you need it, it's 50-50. That doesn't make sense. That's arbitrary, and it's based on the antiquated industrial learning systems that we've built up, and that, you know, one thing that COVID has hopefully taught us, at least that first year, that first semester especially, is how can we be flexible and fluid? Although one thing I do remember from quite a few institutions having these conversations in the spring of 2020, there was a casual discussion about, why don't we extend the semester into the summer? It was almost always got killed, because, God forbid, we mess up the graduation date or something like that. What differences does it make if you graduate on May 31st or June 31st? June 31st might be a little of a problem. That could be like a Trump University certificate, but June 30th. But, yeah. But that's the kind of thing we're getting into these fundamental systemic things of time and how we think about time and structure. Of course, we also get into this question of, some students can learn this material in 16 weeks, some need 18, some need 19, some need 12.  You just fail all the ones who need extra time, right? That's what usually happens. And then the ones who don't need much time get bored. It's this arbitrary 16-week limit, you know, these are all things that we didn't play with, and yet we're scared to. And we don't do that, but yeah. Tom, because that's an incredibly important point. And we did see a lot of our churn on innovation on scheduling and taking a hard look at this. In fact, at the forum, we hosted a couple of guests who spoke about this. One group at Small Liberal Arts College redid their calendar into smaller chunks. And we've also hosted Eddie Maloney and Joshua Kim. We've spoken about the sheer variety of institutional creativity. I think that's another thing that we need to remember. Don't forget about Dean Dett and what he was doing. Never forget about Dean Dett. Matt Reed is brilliant. But I wanted to ask you one last question. If I can pull together a few different strands here. One is, Tula, you mentioned the importance of student engagement. Ruben, you spoke about the faculty duty, really, to redesign their teaching once the computing environment has changed. And Stephanie, you've been speaking about the difficulty of trying to get students engaged with educational technology when they're already hyper-engaged through social media, gambling, and other tools. What did we all learn from this experience about instructional designers and instructional design? Did instructional designers come to the forefront of how we teach online? Or what else did we learn about the profession and the function of instructional design and instructional designer? I can speak from an ASU standpoint of being part of the learning design experience team, making sure that professors have access to tools from learning experience from point A as quickly as possible and learn in their education process, their own education process, how to utilize those resources. I think it's become really critical to the success of educators. I mean, I have to admit to being biased. I teach in a master's degree program for instructional designers. So I'm like, good, good, yes, but please, Tula, what do you think? Are you seeing more interest in instructional design in South Africa and elsewhere? I think for us it's been our first goal has been to collect the stories really and to avoid preconceptions around what the problem might be. Of course, there is preliminary data which indicates that digital technologies and access are an issue, but we need to delve deeper into the stories that we are getting and to speak to more administrators and hear from them. They must tell us because if we approach this investigation with preconceived notions, then we might miss the story behind the story. So this is where we are at at the moment, but hopefully the data we are getting will be a deeper dive within time. Thank you. Back to the story collection, thank you. Ruben, on that story note did you want to add anything? No, I think Tula has summarized the point accurately. I think we are seeing some instances for instance of what I would call a deepening and some institutions of re-engagement, but it's early to tell what the overall profile has been from a personal perspective. I couldn't agree more about the crucial importance of getting instructional design at the forefront of thinking about what happens next as well as a certain, for lack of a better word, having instructional design permeate faculty practices. But I also agree with Tula 100% in terms of what actually has happened in the pandemic, where we've seen instructional design play a key role where we haven't that's part of what we're trying to find out. Okay. Thank you. Thank you all both for answering my bizarre last question, but also for being just fantastic guests. I really appreciate all of you. Tula, Ruben, Stephanie and Tom, what's the best way to keep up with your group? Well, we do have weekly meetings that we welcome folks into. If you go to the shapingedu.asu.edu site, that's a great place to connect with us. And also going into our YouTube channel, our shapingedu YouTube channel to actually watch the interviews there. Excellent. Excellent. Well, we've gone over the end of our hour so I need to pause, but once again Tula, Ruben, Stephanie and even Tom, thank you so much. Thank you for all this work and please keep doing it. And we'll circle back and catch up with you. Thank you all and be well. Thank you, Brian. Thanks, Brian. Thank you. But don't leave yet friends. I've got to let you know what's happening next on the next few sessions of the Future Trends Forum and I want to thank you all for your questions and comments. And by the way, if you would like us to do more sessions on this topic of what we learned from COVID, there's some interest in the chat there and I'd be happy to do more. So if you want, keep talking about this. You can use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter or Instagram. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian Alexander at Shindig Events where you hit up my blog at BrianAlexander.org. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, again, we did quite a few sessions on COVID, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to look at what else we're talking about, we're covering everything for how to reimagine higher education to campuses and local inequality, to free speech, black students in debt, just go to forum.futureofeducation.us for more. If you have any of your own projects that you want yourselves to celebrate, Sarah, you mentioned an article of yours, shoot me a note so I can tell everyone about it. And above all, everybody, good luck working as we work our way through October here in the Northern Hemisphere. We're getting cooler and darker. I hope everybody is succeeding well. And above all, I hope you all take care and are safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.