Yn amlwg, Debra, mae'n amlwg, yn gweithio, yn rysg, yn gweithio. Roeddwn i ddweud o unrhyw pethau sy'n cymryd i ddweud o'r dweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud? Roeddwn i ddim yn y ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud? Roeddwn i'n mynd i, roeddan nhw o'r ddweud ac oherwydd gwneud fe fyddai, dwi'n gynghwytoedd gallu cymryd o'r ddweud o bob oedd, dwi'n meddwl ddweud sydd wedi'u cymryd i ddweud? Dw i'n mynd i'r cael ei ddweud sydd gennym i ddim yn polisi i unrhyw o'r dweud ein polisi wedi'i gerder wysig defnyddio chi. Roeddwn i'n gymryd i'n meddwl ar hynny, roeddan nhw'n iaith cymryd i ddweud sydd wedi'u posibu bryd yn ychydig sydd yma. Roedd un i nhw rhan o'r cymdeithas yma yn y llunio. Roedd yma'n gweithio gan ymddangos hwnnw. Roedd yma'n mynd i'r eitem iawn y gallwn ymddangos ar gyfer hynny'n rhan o'r ysgol o'r ysgol yn ymddangos, roedd wrth i'n rhan o'r eitem iawn ymddangos o'r pethau a phryfaf oes, o'r pethau a phryfafaf oes i'r pethau. Roedd yma, rwy'n gweithio i'n rhan o'r eitem iawn yn ymddangos i'r unrhyw o'r cymdeithio Under the type of specific locale I think that the nature of our story is so serious that unless each one of us in this room tonight self identifies as an urban activist we've got a real problem because if you peel away the high level aspirations of the new urban agenda ultimately as I've said before, that's going to have to connect to a real person and a real place somewhere and we're all real people in real places. Felly mae'n grannu'n ei gynhyrchu. Mae'r cyfnodd i gael ffordd i'r ystafell, ond rydym ni'n meddwl i'r FFGN o'r FFGN oedd ymddynt, mae'n eisiau i ddaeth i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd. Rhaid i chi'n ffordd. Rhywch i'n gweithio i chi gyd. Rydyn ni'n cael ei ddweud o gweld ychydig? Gwylodau o'ch cyfnodd, ysgolfant i Deborah. Mae'r ydwch yn gweithio i'r maes, Please introduce yourself. I'm Lisa Granger, a citizen and no more, and all I want to know is some of the ways in which you have encouraged people in Durbin to become activists and what sort of results you've had. Take that one then we'll go back to the audience. I think it's important that, again, we personalise that is empowerment around activism because activism is only meaningful if you can self-identify with the cause. And I think one of the big problems that we are having at city levels is that we are not hearing people enough about the issues that are adequately important to them, and if you don't get that connection you are simply not going to act. Currently we are working through the development of Durbin's first resilience strategy felly mae'n gweld gwahod o'r proses gwahodd, a ddaf yn ddechrau'r ddweud cyfle cyflwyno ac mae'r ddau'r ddau yn ychwanegu ac mae'n drwsio i'ch ddweud ar gyfer y cyflwyno a'i ddweud â fwy o ddweud yma'r ddau. Mae'n lefyd o'r ddweud yn oed neu ddweud am yr ardalion oedd y rhesilio o ddweud ar gyfer dyfyn. Mae'n mynd i chi'n helpu ar ddweud arill o ddweud ar gyfer ddweud. Mae'n ddweud ar gyfer ddweud ar gyfer ddweud. Felly, mae'n cael ei chael cyfnod o cyfnodd, mae'n gweithio gydag o'r ffordd i'w rymde i'w rymd. A mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, y ddechrau hynny na'r ddefnyddio ddweithio'r gwaith ddau yn ddechrau, ond mae pob ddweithio, mae'n rhaid i'r ddaeth ddweithio'n gwaith i'r gwaith rymd i'r cyfnodd yn y ffordd i'r gwaith ymlaen. Yn y ffordd i'r llwyteb, a rhowch i ddiweddol y ddim yn ei wneud cyfnodd yn y gyfnodd. Byddwch yn y cyfnodd ati, rwy'n cyfnodd a'r hwn yn holl ffynol, a'r cyfnodd i'r holl ffynol, ond rwy'n cyfnodd yn ni'n meddwl cyfnodd. Byddwn ar hyn o'r cyfrifio cyfnodd yma, rwy'n cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio, a gydigodd yn ei ffynol gyffredinol.  Fe oedd hynny o hwn yn ddechrau os oedd y cyd-rhywbeth. Mae'r pysig ddweud o'r prrywyddiad, mae'r cyd-rhywbeth fydd yn yngyrch i gyd, ac yn ddiweddio chi'n fath a gennym gwybodaeth. Mae'r gwaith ar gyfer mwynhau er mwynhau. Y fytwpen yw Fhireu Zezachys ar ychydig fydd jagi mewn gwaith oherwydd. Do you Debra, have an example of a group of people or a project that is directly trying to achieve something in an area in Durban? If you could perhaps share that with us. Any, we take a couple more of groups. There's one here. Hi, thank you very much for the talk. Is it Gareth Wolff from the Commonwealth Government Forum?  Cyfwisio ar gyfer ei wneud, notation ystafell? Mae'r sgolion i'r holl yn amlio fynd i ymgyrch chi. Mae'r holl ychydig yw ymgyrch yn oeddiol, a'r gofyn Windows. Byddwn i'n gweithio ysglwyddon i'r afrikwadau, mae chi'n diwylliant i'r sfrwysau sy'n gorfod gan yw'r Gweithio Gweithio Llyfrgell i ddylch yn ymddangos yn gweithio'r cyfrifiwyd gyda'r cyflwyngau. Mae'r cyfrifiwyr ar y cyfrifiwyr ysgwrdd wedi'u gweithio gyda'r cyfrifiwyr yn y syniadau sy'n gyfrifiwyr ysgwrdd. Ond y gallwn ysgwrdd wedi'i gwybodaeth yn y ffordd o wneud o gyfrifiwyr newydd i'r cyfrifiwyr ysgwrdd, and under development that we have. So, we have a number of pilot projects around the city where essentially we reforesting key catchment areas and that process is being done in partnership with the local NGO. We were working with local communities, really focusing on the poor and unemployed, largely women and youth who are the most vulnerable in those areas. And they have the opportunity to produce the trees for the reforestation program. They're capable of then trading those trees through tree stores to access things like clothing, building materials and so on. And we've got some great examples where literally one woman has built a six bedroom house out of her tree care credits. She's now sending her young female children to better schools on the basis of this particular work. So, we begin to see in that kind of cycle the beginning of potentially a new sort of economy which is more respectful of the fact that we have a city which is growing up in the middle of one of the 35 global biodiversity hotspots in the world, a city that is plagued by poverty and under development and a new way of managing both of those problems which also increases our adaptive capacity, restores our catchments, our ability to manage water and so on. But again, those kinds of things come out of left field. We need to find ways of scaling those up and mainstream them which again requires new conversations. So, what can be done to raise the profile of local governments? I think already local governments themselves have realised that they need to self-mobilise and we saw that particularly in the build-up to Paris with the formation of new city networks of coming together of old city networks to bring joint power together. So, that's already exciting because cities themselves are mobilising and if you look at the buzz currently, all of those networks are talking about the post-kita fashion period and what we're going to do to implement. The problem is all of that bottom-up mobilisation means nothing if it doesn't connect into that international and global debate and really where we have the gap is between those two. So, it's not about top-down or bottom-up, it's this pincer approach. We need to bring those two elements together and that for me is the important missing piece of our puzzle is how post-kita, we begin to create arenas where national governments and local governments can begin to sit down as equals and begin to talk very practically about what implementing the Paris agreements, the city SDG, the new urban agenda actually mean and those fora are not numerous enough, they are not accessible enough because of regional politics and so on. So, that for me is the missing part because certainly as local governments, we'll keep waving the flag, we'll be activists as we tend to be, but while the national and local are disjunct, we are still going to have problems. So, that for me is the missing piece. Right. We'll take another question there and then I'll abuse Chair's position to come back in with one. Please go ahead, can we have a mic down the front, please? Hi, my name is Murtaza, master student, King's. I just wanted to ask whether private foundations are now best placed actors in achieving success when it comes to disaster preparedness now or is it the state because when it comes to understanding the political dynamics or the terms that each government has, it's not really going towards more of a preparedness notion, so are private foundations more best placed or what do you say? A mixture of those, I don't know. You see, I think it's really, there is no silver bullet any more and so one can't point to a single act and say you're best placed because many of these challenges are so context specific. I think we've got to look at the local need and look at what that need might be, what the recent vulnerabilities are and then look at the players who are willing and able to enter into that space. So, it's a very complex calculus at the local level. We've got to pull in a variety of actors who will have different roles at different timescales and it's working out that complex calculus, which I think is the big challenge. So, I wouldn't say that anyone is particularly well-placed until you assess what the particular challenge is at the local level and then look at what resources you have that you can bring to the party. Thanks. Deborah, you spoke eloquently about needing cities where no one, no space, no natural system is left behind. You live and work in, I think in genico-efficient terms, the most unequal society in the world, which must create hugely powerful kind of exclusionary and divisive dynamics in cities, gating communities, fear, division. What at your level, what at the level of the local administration, what actions do you take to counter that dynamic? I think we've probably got one of the greatest macro-challenges of, I suppose, any urban environment in the world because the cities that we live in were meant to be the ideal apartheid cities where people were excluded from access to various areas. So, we're literally having to change the geography of cities. So, if you look back to South Africa's history, the previous township areas only had one road in. So, if there was a problem, you could bring in armored vehicles, you could shut down access and egress from those areas. So, we ourselves are going through massive infrastructure-building programs to try and change the geography of the city. So, that's one macro-level intervention. But perhaps more nuanced and overlooked are the necessary changes in governance. And I alluded to the fact that we live in a very interesting city in the sense that the central part of the city is something you would all be familiar with. It looks a bit like London or, you know, Brisbane. But if you go into the outer reaches of the city, those are largely rural and they are governed by traditional leadership. And that clash between city hall governance and traditional leadership has really stopped our society coming together in a way that has allowed us to move forward with big visions for the city. And so, what we're doing now is creating the process. And one of those is the resilient strategy process I spoke about, which is welcoming in these alternative voices into a new urban debate, where we acknowledge that no one has the answer. And that, I think, is an important thing to realise about local government. When I first started interacting with local government, the way our city was planned is they looked at what they did the last two or three years and they just projected that forward. We now live in a scenario where history is no longer a good predictor of the future. And so, what we have to do is welcome in many voices to help us reimagine what the city might look like and to give those people a real voice at the table. And that's meaning or means for us that we have to change the pattern of governance and use opportunities to have new conversations about how you manage cities in these unpredictable and uncertain times. Thank you. Let's throw it open again. We've got a number of questions down here. Let's take three and then go back. Emma Cox, PWC. Thank you for a fascinating insight. I think having recently read the new urban agenda, I can understand some of your sentiments that you raised about it. You've talked about different voices. You've talked about local national government bringing different people into progressing the urban challenge. It took me until paragraph 133 of the new urban agenda to see the word business actually mentioned. Would you like to talk a little bit about what you see the role of business can be in helping progress the new urban agenda and how maybe in Durban you're thinking about that? Thanks, Sam, and then the... Yeah, Sam, because there's CKN. Thanks very much, Deborah. Not wanting to lose sight of your bricks and your cement. I'll just refer to the policy agreements and the Paris Agreement, which, success to Paris, depends upon the ratcheting out mechanism to achieve living within just a safety of two degrees, global warming. Our sit is to sort of save the... that can drive the agenda, that can lead nation states who remain the parties in that agreement to achieve that ratcheting out. There are a lot of zero carbon emissions, commitments emerging, but can that turn into reality to bridging the emissions gap that we still see? Thanks, Sam, and then... Hello, Dvindi Grant from Mont McDonald. So, picking up on something you said, how do you see the best way to sort of switch or get local governments to enter the conversation about ecosystem services? Is it valuation, improving technical understanding, or something else? Thanks very much, Joanna. Take those three, Deborah. Sure. So, starting off with the role of business, and I suppose that echoes one of my previous responses, is everyone actually has to be at the table, and we know that it's notoriously difficult, in some particular areas, to begin to draw business into some of these discussions. Certainly, looking at the work that we're doing in Durban, again, hocking back to our work in the resilience space, there's been a very determined effort to begin to draw business into this debate to show the relevance of this debate to business in terms of being able to foresight where the future of the city might be and where the opportunities might lie in this changing space. And I think if we begin to have that conversation, I think there's always a tendency to stereotypically label business as the bad guy, when, in fact, there can be quite an active player if we make sure that the goals we're chasing are, in fact, common and geared around a particular purpose. So, the reforestation program that I spoke about has business inherent as a key component in that, as a way, obviously, to achieve their corporate social responsibility outcomes. So, again, giving people a real purpose, but people want to see practical interventions, and that's the problem. I think the issue with many of these ideas, and it's the problem with the new urban agenda, we've left it at such a high level that people can't relate to them. We've got to pull it down so that people can relate to the reality, they can see the difference, and I think that's really a task is to make explicit not only the role, but the net benefit, and then we found that business becomes a much more engaged conversation list in that particular arena. Are cities the saviours? Are they going to save us from ourselves? Well, it depends, I think. Certainly there's a sense that one of the big global opportunities to bend the curve lies in the city arena, and we've just had the scoping report for the 1.5 report that the IPCC has been invited to do by the UNFCCC, and during the course of that week in conversations, we constantly came back to the role of cities, but the real challenge there is, we know a lot about what's happening in cities, we see cities profiling the action, but the question is what does it add up to? So some of the fundamental science is missing, and this talks to some of the new important partnerships that I think need to emerge between science, both the natural and social sciences and local government, so that our activities can go out to be analysed and come back and be synthesised and help us contribute to that debate, and certainly groups like C40 are already beginning to push those boundaries in order to be able to demonstrate that. So potentially, but at this point we don't really know, and hopefully we can use the platform of the 1.5-degree report to really give us insight into that particular arena. And then a person in the middle who asked a question off to my own heart, how do we get local governments to acknowledge the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services? Well, again, that links to really looking at the development agenda of the city. One has to remember that cities are developmental spaces. That's why we created them in the first place. We settled along a river or a coastline because there was food, there was an opportunity to barter with your neighbour. The inherent heart of what cities do is developmental in nature, and so it's very important that we find the opportunity to lock in some of these alternative discussions around the many roles that cities now have to play in the 21st century into that developmental role. But that requires us to reimagine the developmental role of the city. So cities are no longer about building houses and industries that produce widgets. There are global custodians that could bend the curve on the climate change challenge that become custodians of protecting globally significant biodiversity that are on the edge of the green economy, if you believe in such things. And so I think we've got to re-articulate the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services in that sense is what developmental role does it play. We've certainly gone the route of evaluating those ecosystem services. We're doing some new work with the World Bank on that regard, but it's really been tying those ecosystem services into the risk reduction role, the developmental opportunity associated with having functional ecosystems to guarantee water of appropriate quantity and quality that strikes the right kind of political note. So, you know, as urbanists and as scientists, we have to become a lot more politically savvy and begin to have conversations that can link into the predominant development narrative. Fascinating, thanks. Take some people at the back. Is there anyone at the back with questions? No, we've got one here. And then we'll maybe go to the left at this point and then come back down. Thank you very much. I'm James Alexander from C40 Cities. And we're very proud that you're one of our really active members, so thank you. I wanted to build a bit on your last answer and ask about the commonly there's a view that you can have either protecting the environment or development, but not both. And I want to understand from you what you're doing in Derbent to try and achieve both. What have you done that can try and deliver development and environmental benefits at the same time and make the city more sustainable and resilient, whilst also growing the economy and creating more opportunities? Thank you very much. You may have a question, I think, around here. Hi there, fascinating talk. Sorry, Anders Louensson in the mental writer. I just want to touch a bit on the sense you said before. There's a sense that cities have a global opportunity to bend the curve. And also, can you talk a little bit about the huge impact that has happened with Solstice as well and how we actually live in the 21st century and what impact stuff like smart grid and new energy technologies, what do you call it? Desensualised energy and stuff at what kind of impact that can happen in cities. Thank you. OK, someone wants to come in with the last question. Yeah, thanks, Susanna. Hi, I'm Susanna Fisher from IAED. I wanted to ask a question about timeframes. Thinking with a kind of climate lens, I wondered what opportunities you've had in Derbent to reflect in a longer timeframe the kind of traditional urban planning cycle of two to five years or your planning cycle. If you've been able to think a little bit more about the medium to long term challenges and really how you've managed to do that because I think my kind of experience with other cities or hearing about national governments is a real challenge in being able to think before the short term to ensure that you're not locking in or creating governance problems for the future. Thanks, Susanna. OK, so the question on the link between development and environmental benefits, I think there are a number of answers to that particular question that could be technical, but to me perhaps one of the greatest achievements is anyone who knows of me knows that I'm a deep green activist when it comes to the city. And really what has happened during the course of our post-democratic local government evolution is that we've begun to expand the environmental debate in a way that I alluded to that links into development priorities. So investigating opportunities to create new forms of economy that take communities that are excluded and largely illiterate and draw them into the pool that increase the opportunities for skills, upliftment and business development on the back of environmental management opportunities. And I spoke to the reforestation issue. But then it's also been a process of entering into the political narrative which I think has been important as well. Bringing forward those very practical examples to demonstrate the value of these alternative views. And that's begun a process of changing the institution itself. So I'm a case in point for 22 years. I've headed a department that's dealt with biodiversity and climate change issues. I've just moved into a new position in the city which is looking at sustainability and resilience. So effectively what we're seeing is institutional change which I think is probably one of the most powerful changes that local government acknowledging that these two things are no longer separate. So now I work in the team of the chief strategy officer who's responsible for the long-term development plan of the city, inputting these new ideas. And that to me is the exciting evolution. We've moved beyond the demonstration project of the solar panel or the tree in the forest to a real change in the way that local government is structured. And that change then offers the opportunity to produce new plans, new policies, which will hopefully give us the ability to kind of upscale. And that for me is important. But it's taken 22 years for that maturation of the debate to actually bring those two things together from an institutional point of view. The question around cities bending the curve and new technologies. To be honest, I get really frightened when people give me questions that have technology in it. Because I'm increasingly seeing, particularly in the climate change debate, that given the urgency that we're facing, we seem to be defaulting to technology as the response. There's got to be a smart grid. There's got to be some kind of panel. There's got to be some kind of switch which ultimately we just haven't invented yet. And once we do that, we'll solve it. The fact is, given the problems with intellectual property rights and so on, for many of the cities around the world, technology is simply not the answer. So bear in mind, and I think Andrew alluded to some of the fairly challenging statistics. We're anticipating what another 2.9 billion people to live in cities by 2050. The majority of those are going to be living in cities in Asia and Africa. They look nothing like London. They're going to be small. They're going to be informal. They're going to be off the grid. And so to me, the really exciting response is the ability to bend the curve is to make those cities different. And I suspect while technology may play a role, it's going to be much more about rebuilding social cohesion, getting people to work together to use more sustainable approaches through the use of natural ecosystems, localising food production, predicting catchments. And so I put a caution on that because I do sense a kind of excitement in the room, generating a technology as mentioned. And I think there may be a problem for that, for the new cities of the century, which are simply not going to be in the front line when technology is there. It's going to play an important role. We've seen that through mobile technology in Africa. We've been able to leapfrog the landline, but it is not always going to be the answer. So just a cautionary on that. Time frames, very important, obviously. As a biologist, I was trained to think by John in terms of 100 and 1,000 years, which is very difficult when you're talking to a politician who's thinking in a four to five-year timeline. But there has been a push, and Durban was one of the few cities around the world who began to think about 100-year plans. So beginning to think about that longer term and what that might mean. And I think that's very important. We haven't got it entirely right. But what it does do is it allows us the opportunity to think about the trade-offs that may be lying in wait for us along our development path. Because another thing that frustrates me, and I have not forgiven the first Earth Summit in 1992 for, is this idea that we can have these win-win-win scenarios. I think the reality is around the world that we're facing win-lose scenarios. And often we've got to debate who's going to lose, what are they going to lose, and how do we deal with that loss? And so insights into those trade-offs, I think, are particularly important. And it requires a brave city to think about those longer term processes. But again, that energy to focus on the longer term has come through the process of a city network. One city going ahead, being a champion in that regard, other cities becoming brave on the back of that experience and picking up that particular challenge and moving it forward. And so again, it comes back to what is the role of cities and city networks in a post-Keto phase. We've got to stick together because there are going to be some there who have more access and resources, they can afford to be the champions. But braver, leading, that gives the kind of political capital for others to begin to say, we think we need to ask those longer term questions. So it's an incremental process of building out on good and often sort of individual action from champion cities. Do you have any personal reflection stories? You were describing this as a storytelling exercise. Do you have any personal stories that you can share on that, on that sense of shared experience and how these networks build action? Yeah. I suppose most recently has been, I work with the Durban Adaptation Charter. There was a very real frustration we were experiencing in Durban because we were talking about adaptation action. Everyone else was talking about mitigation. And so the Durban Adaptation Charter became a real platform to begin raising the flag around the importance of adaptation. And we began to realise that we would ourselves have to be the agent of change, the champion city. So through the charter what we've done is, and we're a very big kind of primate city in a typical African sense in the province, we've reached out and formed a compact with our surrounding municipalities that are less resourced, have access to less skills than we might have in order to create a partnership to share our experience and learn from theirs in terms of climate change adaptation. We're also reaching out to Mozambique and local authorities in that particular area to again begin sharing experiences and learnings across that. And that's all been done without national government support. On the back of that success we've gone to national government and said we think this model of a compact which we ultimately learnt from Fort Lauderdale in Florida is useful at a national level. And so national government is now looking to the creation of similar compacts around all of the major metropolitan areas in South Africa to create these kind of partnerships to advance this kind of action. Great, thanks Deborah. We've got another 10 minutes if we want to use it. So who has a burning question or a story to share that I'm being pointed up the back here. So we'll go there first. Thank you very much. My name is Yazan and I come from Nairobi. So I'm really interested in what Diaban has been doing. But my question is how do we expand this knowledge practice and initiative to other African cities who obviously have very low capacity in terms of finance and institutions? We have them. Zoe Spriggin is also from C40 cities. I wanted to ask you Deborah, as you've watched for decades about maybe how cities have changed in the narrative but how optimistic or pessimistic are you that now there's name checking of cities in UN documents and international agreements will mean that nation states really want to hand over money and power to cities particularly maybe in the South African context in the wake of the local elections but also globally as well. And the last question here for this round. Thank you. I'm very inspired by this idea of the... Can you introduce yourself please? Yes. I'm an architect. My name is Cani Ash and I run Little Practise here in London. I'm very inspired by the idea that you discover new voices. And although the technology you feel can be a distraction I just wondered how much the visual has played over the last five or ten years in your thinking on the connectivity that you're talking about, building up the physical infrastructure but also the resilience that through the social networks that you need to change the feeling of power and agency that local people would have. You want to take those Deborah? Sure. If anyone has any last questions I'll take one more round after this. To my comrade from Nairobi, greetings. Yes, that's a huge challenge. How do we get to work together across the African continent? I think there are a number of opportunities. I've already cited the 100 Resilience Cities work that's being done so we have a number of cities in Africa where the model of that particular programme is creating an opportunity for those cities to begin to share their stories and their differences. But it does require that we have those platforms to meet. You will know, like I know, how difficult it is to communicate on our consulate. Very often you can't hear people on the phone line, the Skype links don't work. And so what it does require is structure and resourcing to make available those opportunities for us to talk. And what we've done is we've used parallel opportunities. So we ran, for example, a climate change conference in Durban, and we used that as an opportunity to get the African 100 Resilience Cities together as a sidebar to have a conversation about what was important to us. Because the African urban agenda is very different to everywhere else. But again, it comes back to the fact that that has got to be enabled both by ourselves using our opportunities and our own resources, but also by outside interventions making those opportunities available through programs and so on in order that we can share our stories and learn from those. So it does require direct agency in that regard. How optimistic or cynical am I that nation states are going to see the lights and recognise that power and money should flow to local governments? I think we've got to be realistic, particularly where we are in terms of the global development cycle, that that's not going to be an immediate response from the nation states. I think they're worrying about other things. And I think many nation states are troubled by the rise of powerful city states and powerful mayors. They're seen as potential threats in some parts of the world. So I don't think that's going to happen, but I do think through the consistent mobilisation of local governments by actively reaching out, by knocking against the glass ceiling that's created by national policy, that that's the only way of beginning to bridge that particular gap. There again, of course, there are nations who are very innovative and who are leading on this, and so they set that kind of example that others can follow. But again, there's no silver bullet. There's no easy ask here. It's not like we can produce a recipe and say if we do this suddenly there'll be this great conversion. It's going to take hard work. And that's why I really underscored the fact that there's a great deal of unfinished activism out there. Because all of these important things still need to go those final two, three, four steps of the journey, the need for that activism is not yet complete. So I'm neither cynical nor optimistic, but just know there's a great deal of hard work that lies ahead to move us forward. Just in terms of the question around what role does the visual have in changing the power distribution and the agency, I think that goes back to a realization that particularly having been trained as a scientist and believing in the power of science, I got very frustrated when you go to City Hall and suddenly no one wants to look at your graphs or your maps or anything like that. And in fact, what we've learned is only by a very practical demonstration of change that you capture the mind of leadership. So in many ways the visual is playing a critical role. So we virtually have a production line of experimentation where off the formal local government grid we access some outside resources. We experiment. We see what that produces in terms of outcomes that may be palatable or unpalatable. And then we draw that stuff into the mainstream as the visual representation of what change might look like. Because I think the big challenge for us is we keep talking about resilience cities. We talk about transformed cities, but no one's ever shown me a picture of what that might look like, particularly in Africa where I live and work. And so what we're doing by this process of urban experimentation is literally building out a jigsaw puzzle piece at a time and drawing that into the mainstream and then showing how all of these jigsaw puzzle pieces of urban experimentation begin to link together. And those eventually then create the critical mass that create the institutional change that allows you to drive that narrative into the more powerful parts of the city. So it's a very complex arena of political activity and experimentation and just shared doggedness on some days. But that ability to show is probably one of the most important pieces of linking experimentation to institutional policy change. Thanks, Deborah. I want to come back just as we're closing to Qita. You've been entertainingly tough on the new urban agenda, which is indeed a fairly strikingly turgid document in many ways. But you've also spoken a couple of points about a post Qita or you've talked about what can we do post Qita, which kind of suggests intriguingly that you've not given up on Habitat 3 as a moment of change or as a moment of possibly transformation. So can you just square that a little for me? Where do you see the importance of Qita and the potential? OK, so I suppose going back to that analogy of bricks and cement, at this point I'm more interested in the cement that we can use to pull these bricks together. So we've got in the bag, we've got Qita, or hopefully we'll have Qita unless there's some kind of major evolution there next week. We'll have the new urban agenda, we'll have the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. But we need to find fora where we can bring the different partners together to talk about how these things begin to link in an effective way. And certainly I think the beginning of that conversation of how you pull the SDG, you pull Paris and you pull the new urban agenda. There's an opportunity through work that we hope will get approved at the next panel meeting of the IPCC to have a global conference on cities and climate change science, where in fact we can look at how these different jigsaw puzzle pieces can in fact fit together in the cities of the 21st century because there's no denying, let's not hide from the fact that the climate agenda is the new development agenda. I think Paris really clearly indicated that. And so let's use that momentum to convene people across the practitioner arena, across the scientific arena, across the local government arena to begin to figure out how we build the glue that's going to link these policy pieces together and what does that glue look like? That glue comes in the form of data about what is happening at the local government level. As my colleague from Nairobi said, how do we share these things? We're all doing exciting stuff but half of us don't know about it. How do we collect that? How do we collect it in a way that creates a critical mass that we can begin to analyse it, that we can demonstrate that cities can in fact bend the curve? And by bending the curve, we can then make the clear decisive argument that we can link back to the financing. As the power to bend the curve is in fact in our hands, then we can access the right to the green climate fund and the opportunities that lie there for particular financing. So, I think for me, I haven't given up. What I am seeing in my mind's eye is I've got a basket of jigsaw pieces or bricks that I somehow need to stick together to make a functional wall or an attractive picture out of my jigsaw puzzle pieces. And we've got to create opportunities post Keto to draw all of these stakeholders together, to begin to find the opportunities to link these narratives together into a cohesive whole. The challenge is up to this point we've been so busy chasing each one of these things. So, you do the SDG, you do Paris, you do Keto, that we haven't really had that opportunity to draw those together. It's unfortunate that the new urban agenda didn't take that opportunity. I think there was a ripe moment there, but that hasn't happened. And so, we're never defeated in the trenches. We go on fighting. So, we create further opportunities post Keto to have those conversations. An important one is coming up through the IPCC. Thanks very much, Deborah. I'm getting signals at this point on time. So, I think we need to draw to a close at this point. But many thanks for sharing the stories. I mean, there are many things that I think we can draw from this. The eloquence of your view on activism, the importance of sharing, learning and sharing stories. The potential for cities to lead in the climate space in various ways. But also, I think above all for me, these inspirational examples of what good practice at the local level linking communities and local government can achieve, which is something that we often don't see from other worlds, if you like. And that was, so that was really fantastic. Also this sense of how we combat exclusion, which, you know, there is obviously the risk that this is going to continue to be a driving force in our world. And the role, indeed, that city governments can play in that. So many, many thanks. At this point, I think I would like to start by thanking my IAED colleagues who have organised this. So if we could just have a round for them. If we could be right. Too many to know, but many thanks indeed. And then, particularly to thank Deborah for being our storyteller for this collective. So many thanks again. And thanks to all of you as well. And now we can move for the... Down back to the library. Down back to the library for... For the free finger food. For networking and food. Thank you all very much.


Good afternoon. I think we're going to get started for the sake of time. I'm Margaret Headstrom. I'm the Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. I'm also the Project Director and PI of SEED, Sustainable Environment Actionable Data, a recently funded NSF data net project that started on October 1st of this year. Also joining me from our team is Robert McDonald. He is the Associate Dean for Libraries at Indiana University and Associate Director of the Data to Insight Center. And Robert is a senior staff on the project. I'm going to start by giving you a little overview of our inspiration and aspirations, what some of our thoughts are, motivating our approach to the data net call for proposals. And then Robert's going to talk more about how we are going about developing infrastructure to support integration of data and long-term preservation and access. For those of you who are not familiar with the NSF data net program, it was a very broad call that came out. Well, it seems like it was a decade ago, but I guess it wasn't quite that long, but five or six years ago, actually. Looking at new types of organizations was one of the aspects of it that would integrate infrastructure, development libraries and archives, computer and information science, and domain science expertise to build the capacity for reliable digital preservation and access. For science and engineering data over decades long time, part of the ideas were to continuously anticipate and adapt to change in both the technologies and users' needs and expectations. And one had to be pretty forward-thinking to anticipate that it would take three or four years to get an award approved by the National Science Foundation to engage in research to drive the leading edge forward and to serve as components of what is envisioned to be an interoperable network of partners providing preservation and access and other data services to scientists. I am going to really address a little bit about the new form of organization. I'll say a bit about reliable preservation and access, anticipating changes in technology, and maybe just a bit about being an element in a larger network. I am not going to discuss the engaging in research. This is in part because in the course of the second round of data net proposals, they were vastly reduced. The original program were to be $20 million awards. They've been now reduced to $1 million a year for the first two years. And if we develop a successful prototype, there may be $2 million a year following for the next three years. As a consequence of that, all of the research that we had intended to fund directly as part of this program is either not funded or people are going out looking for alternative sources of funding for the research. The seed data net has a series of partners. It is sort of based at the School of Information at the University of Michigan with participating COPI's and senior staff at Indiana University in the libraries and the Data to Insight Center at RPI at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where one of our COPI is Praveen Kumar, who is a computational hydrologist and leading the domain engagement piece of seed is located, as well as some participation from NCSA and also at the University of Michigan ICPSR, the Large Social Science Data Archive. For those of you, I hope that some of you have at least passing familiarity with the data net program. I just want to mention kind of how I see seed fitting into, in with other projects that are working toward building the data net infrastructure. I think our unique contributions are trying to address domain-driven needs and requirements. Well, I would be a liar to say we didn't come into this with some preconceived notions about good ways to go about developing this infrastructure. We're very much letting the scientific community, and in our case that is sustainability scientists, I think drive what it is we build, what services we provide, how we evaluate them, and in many ways how we engage more and more people beyond an original set of researchers that we'll be working with. Secondly, we are looking to serve scientists and researchers in the long tail, and I will say a bit more about that in a moment, but Cliff Lynch's remarks about not all data is big data resonated very much with me because our orientation in seed is to scientists who are dispersed, they have very valuable but often small data sets, they're very heterogeneous, and they have not been served or addressed much by efforts to look at long-term preservation and access to data. I think another contribution is that to the extent possible we're trying to integrate existing tools, technologies, and services rather than building something new from scratch. And for example, although there's a lot of emphasis in the data net call on long-term preservation, our approach is to build a way of passing data that is of long-term value into institutional repositories and subject repositories like ICPSR rather than trying to build a whole new repository infrastructure. As I mentioned, we are working with sustainability scientists, and in particular we were forced to put regional and I would say subdomain constraints on our at least initial set of scientists that we're working on. So our interests are in mainly issues of sustainability of water and water resources in the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region. We chose sustainability science because it creates some very interesting problems where researchers need to integrate data and looking at it on multiple scales from multiple perspectives. We have multiple data types and our goal is to provide a service that makes it possible to add value to those data sets in part by making them easily discoverable, in some cases being able to combine them in new ways or to do computation across heterogeneous data. So the kinds of data challenges we're facing is the heterogeneity. So we will encounter everything from some pretty complex GIS systems to hydrology models to streaming data to data sitting in spreadsheets to kind of standard numeric files. And because sustainability science is looking at human interactions between humans and natural systems, there's a whole set of social and economic data that comes along with it. We're talking about multiple scales of granularity, for example, data that's captured at a very, very particular fine point to data that is collected on the basis of an entire region. It is inherently multidisciplinary and, as I said, many small data sets. One of the things that we are going to focus on, in fact, are drive data sets where someone may have taken data from a very large data collection, selected data about a particular aspect of that data set, combined it with some other collections, and created drive data that has, you know, it's had a lot of time and effort invested in making it a useful resource for this community. And we're really driven by looking at kind of what are the economics of the long tail, the data out there in the long tail. As I mentioned, there are small and derived data sets, heterogeneous. There are many, many sources of data. So some of this data is coming from state and local governments. Some of it is coming from individuals out in the field. Some may be coming from, you know, large standardized surveys. And these data become valuable when you can discover related data of relevance and combine it to address a particular problem. And so that's the area in which we are trying to make a contribution. Now, just in terms of our overall vision, we are kind of, one of the things that we're trying to do is sort of develop a place between the researchers and their labs and where with very low barriers to entry, researchers can deposit data without strong metadata requirements. We will secure that data for them. We will let them control the initial access to it. And using this idea of both social media and active social curation, as others become interested in the data and discover it, we will provide capabilities for things like commenting, recommending data, and possibly adding metadata to it. So we want to leverage social media. We're in the process of installing an instance of Vivo for our first set of researchers. We are hoping to move data curation upstream in the data lifecycle, not necessarily by expecting researchers to make their data conform to long-term preservation requirements, but to get a better mutual understanding of what it takes to curate data like this and what their specific needs are. We want to involve domain scientists in setting priorities for the way seed evolves and also I think for what kinds of data we actually invest in. There's been, to my mind, too little discussion about what data should we be focusing on. And there are, I think, illusions about, we'll just save everything. Storage is cheap. And I think things like mandated data management plans almost push people toward at least saving data and not necessarily focus and investment in all of the things that might be necessary to make that data useful, preservable, and accessible. And then taking advantage of the existing infrastructures, as I mentioned. I think I've mentioned most of these points about active and social curation. And I would say we are taking a measured approach to the idea of outsourcing or crowdsourcing some of the value-added activities. We're not expecting armies of schoolchildren to want to mark up streamflow data from the Illinois River. But we do think that within a limited community where there's ongoing research and there's an ongoing interest, other researchers with expertise and a need for this data may make those kinds of contributions. And importantly, the idea of people reviewing and commenting and rating data I think is an important, it has a lot of potential, I should say, to at least experiment with an equivalent to peer reviewing in the data world. Just quickly, our status. We started the 1st of October. So we're in our beginning of our third month. And we hope to have, we plan to have. We will have a working prototype, 18 months into the project, which hopefully will pass muster and then allow us to expand out. I think, well, as I said, I was going to say how I thought we might expand. But as I said, we're going to let the users also help us figure out how it's going to evolve. So I'm not going to make any more comments on that. This is just a list of some of our key personnel.  And so I am going to just acknowledge NSF for this and turn it over to Robert to talk a little bit more about the specifics. Thank you, Margaret. Just a quick switch here with my PowerPoint and I'll be back on track here. All right, so quickly through this. But this takes you to our wonderful new website. If you want to queue our code on that, I've got one at the end. But what I'm going to focus on really here is this a little more detail about, you know, the life cycle support, actionable data services, and what we mean by actionable within the seed kind of ecosystem and how that's integrated with a curation and preservation infrastructure. And I just want to thank all of my colleagues here, especially Jim Myers at Rensselaer, Beth Plaley at IU, Brian Beecher at ICPSR. We spent a long time working on this framework and of course retooling it every six months for a couple of years. And now, of course, we're kind of retooling it again to really mesh with, like Margaret said, the functional specifications that we have from our science partners.  You know, managed data storage and services are not cheap. They're quite expensive when they're managed. Now, if you can go get, of course, a terabyte of disk space and put something on it and not manage it, and that's very cheap, it's very affordable. But really the FTE in managing that piece and managing it within the enterprise at scale is the component that we're going to be dealing with here. And as our partners at ICPSR know, begging for metadata doesn't work. Actually paying for it did work in a big project for them. But of course, we're not paying for metadata here. So we're going to have to use, much like Cliff was talking about earlier, the best in our machine intelligence agents and processes to try to sift through that metadata and enrich it over time and capture as much as possible directly from the data source of the experiment. The other big piece that Margaret talked about is the long tail is not standardized. We're kind of working on the fly here in terms of working in an agile process toward what we build to glue together the types of community source software that we want to use to put our final framework together. We know that the data models that we're working from this will evolve over time. And we also know that every six months that cyber infrastructure picture changes. And at the bottom here, we had this piece originally in some of our slides where we said, you know, if you build it, they may not come. Well, we all know if you build some giant thing and you don't build the community first or build it and leverage all of it as you go, you're not going to have enough users because it's not going to meet the needs of those users. So that's a key component of what we're really working here with SEED on trying to do that with our scientific communities with Illinois river basin scientists. Now a little more detail about what we're talking about here. I found it interesting because, you know, when I put these slides together, I thought, oh, this is not going to be new for anybody or, you know, people aren't going to be that interested in what I'm talking about here today. But then I heard Cliff's talk and so it was just a refreshing kind of opening for a lot of what I'm talking about because our social networking component and what I mean by social networking component, that's easy to look at it and say, oh, you're talking about Facebook. Now I'm really talking about science of science and how you can do analytics across the right type of data there with science of science approaches. And looking at co-authorship and co-funding and how you actually put that together in a way that could be linked data across repositories. That's one of the interesting things we want to try here with our repository partnerships. And so at this point in my talk, I wanted to ask, who here has an institutional repository at their home institution ratio? Well, that's great. How easy is it for you to take some of your data in that repository and move it to another repository? It's still hard for me, but I got my hand raised. I know how I could do it. That's going to be the next step in terms of how we interoperate together as repositories. And as you saw there, almost everybody here had some kind of institutional repository. Another question, how many of you are publishing data in that institutional repository now? All right, we got a few folks. That's great because that's the key piece we're going to be focused on here now. I think there's other elements of linked data and sharing that can happen there. But the piece that we're most interested in right now are in terms of getting that data published and getting it put out there within our federated repository working group. So we have a permanent place for that data to live. And in particular, so that we share the infrastructure from our institutions. And I'm going to get into a little more of that later on. But the big piece that we're seeing there now, and it was interesting, I've heard the micro citation concept explained a few different times now by people who work in the areas of chemical information and big pharma. And I also heard, I was at a talk at a day where I heard somebody kind of compare it to this. What if you could get, you know, if your scholarly communication model evolved in such a way so that every piece of software update that you did to GitHub was a micro citation and gave you credit for that in terms of a publication. That's exactly what we're talking about here and how we're publishing our data within SEED and how we want to move that forward for the long term and tying it to the social networking components that we're going to use. And in particular, with that, we're going to use an open source product, Vivo. And there are other pieces out there that are open source. There are other pieces out there that are vendor based like Collexus, which is now part of SyVow. And in particular, I thought that was of interest from Cliff's opening statement in terms of the metrics piece because I did a five minute lightning talk on metrics not too long ago and I've had more requests for a follow-up on that just because it seems like that's at the point of interest now for research institutions. But if you take a look at this, this would be like an open data model from a chemical information component. And then this is an actual live one that we have up in our Vivo instance at IU that's mapping Coddy Borner's publications to a scientific map of disciplines. And one of the things we want to do with our science of science component of SEED is to actually be able to do that with the content of our data sets across disciplines with that kind of automated mapping. And this is nothing that took work. It was all built into the Vivo processes that are there in Vivo. So some of the key SEED questions that we really have to ask ourselves moving forward and especially in this 18 month prototype is what could SEED capture and when and how much could it capture at the point of origin for some of these scientific experiments and how can SEED provide direct value to our data producers, users, and curators. That's going to be the make or break for us whether we can get that functional specification directly from our users built into what we're putting together as kind of what I call enhanced glue for the types of open source tools we're putting together for people to be able to use this way. And how can we use robust web services and social computing to lower barriers and reduce and realign costs for kind of that mass crowd source curation. Just a little bit more about the repository. The three pieces that I'm iterating a little bit here today are the active curation component, the social networking component, and the kind of what we've been calling the virtual repository, which is like a thin layer repository that enables, you know, temporary storage of data in terms of moving it into our federated repository infrastructure. And that's exactly what we're after here is to leverage existing resources. And a couple of years ago I used to give a talk and I would ask people how many people counted their data in terabytes. And I'm sure most of us could raise our hand at that now. And now everything that I'm talking about now really needs to be thought of in petabytes. And if we're not looking at leveraging existing infrastructure and one of the key tenets of what we put together for SEED always had been in taking a huge chunk of infrastructure, both from IU, from NCSA, from UIUC, now with Rensselaer on board with their computational nanotechnology innovation center, and seeing how that could provide, you know, if you will, a cyber infrastructure layer to provide for the data throughput into the repositories for the long-term preservation of the content. And you'll see that the repositories we're working with are the Michigan D. Blue, IU Scholarworks, ICPSR's repository, and UIUC's Ideals repository. Just a little bit more, of course, we have to have a few technical pictures here. This is the, you know, kind of the layer cake view. If you cut it straight through the middle, you'd see there are a network of data producers who are putting their content in through our active content repository and taking advantage of our social and scientific networking components. And then that's moving into our virtualized archives that eventually ends up with the data in its home areas for the institutional repository and storage, managed storage infrastructure that we're taking advantage of for that. A little bit more about that. We think of it as having this active workspace that really is able to collect data at the source of the experiment and work with it in the most granular format and then bring that back into our repository areas. And like I said, toward petascale, we'll see an Internet 2 upgrade pretty soon. We'll see the bandwidth of that jump from 100 gigabits per second to 8.8 terabits per second. There's a terabit component again. And once we see that, we're going to have to think really hard about how our next generation data systems sit on that network. They cannot sit in the middle of our institutions between many, many firewalls and expect to have data moved around well. They can't sit there if you're going to use some kind of a wide area file system that makes the data through the throughput of the network appear as if it's close to computational resources like we're going to see set up under the NSF XSEED program. And moving up how to buy the data, I'll hopefully go from around a 10-day prospect to a 25-hour type of prospect. And while our data in SEED doesn't exactly fit with this, our data actually causes other types of problems because it's lots of small files. It causes other types of problems for hierarchical types of storage systems in terms of compute power. We'll also see the fact that we want to federate our repositories. And so, yeah, lots of repositories will have lots of small files, and that will end up being at a better scale once we start being able to share that a little bit better. So, within our 18-month prototype, we're going to target these key components of the active and social content curation. We'll have a pilot active content repository using Vivo. We'll have an exemplary service for data ingest, discovery, reuse, and curation. And then within that, we'll also have our virtual archive for long-term access. We'll be having our data model in place, our protocol design development, and our pilot federated repository infrastructure in some sort of test in that 18-month period. And just a little bit to leave you with, I'm not going to read all of these because some of these are covered, and some of these I've already covered in some of my slides, but to really re-emphasize the key components to have the community input on the agile development for what we build as services, to have an active curation layer that actually pulls in data as close to the experiment as possible, and is able to derive from that information about who created it and what they're publishing and how that ties in with the rest of the scholarly communications stack. And then we'll leverage existing institutional resources for long-term access rather than trying to build resources ourselves. We're going to actually tie in the institutions that I talked about existing resources in new ways. And I think we'll see, especially with this I2 upgrade, different types of data systems emerging at some of these cyber-infrastructure kind of powerhouse places because they're going to build new types of systems that will be about data brokering, whether it's actually in moving data from one cloud to another or whether it's actually getting the data close enough to a computational system. The other big piece here is the sustainability and resource growth partnership and collaboration that we want to engender here for what we're doing. And a lot of that drives from the fact that our core cyber-infrastructure team has worked greatly with software development and in looking at long-term sustainability models for that and how to build communities for that type of software. And the things that we're actually using here are actually already have communities around them that use the software in other ways than what we're doing here with SEED, but for the long term we hope to give back to those communities with what we actually build here from our scientific community input. And with that, I think we're ready for questions and I hope we'll have really good questions and good input. We had a recent panel of data nets and I walked the floor kind of like Phil Donahue, so I hope you're not going to make me do that in this big hall today. Questions? Yeah. Well, if you could go to them, it might be great because they're recording it. Thanks. So you mentioned, I think Margaret mentioned that there's still an intention for the data net projects to form some kind of network, hence the name, data net, but could you say anything at all about how you think you'll be collaborating with the current and other recently funded projects? Is there anything happening with that or any discussion within NSF about how that might work? Is this on? Yes. I think there are two mechanisms that are in place, maybe not operational yet. In late January there is going to be a meeting of the PIs of the data nets and the interop projects in Indiana and that's going to be the first time that we've been formally brought together. It's a challenge.  Now that we know the finite number, what the goals are, I think we have some concrete basis for moving forward. The other possibility is smaller proposals for research coordination network awards, which I am just beginning to understand, but certainly with the expectations of collaboration and working on interoperability on very much trimmed back travel budgets, we're going to have to, I think, get some additional resources to have some workshops. I should also add that we want to... I think it would be unfortunate if the focus was only on the data nets and the interop projects. I think there's going to be interoperability on numerous levels, and I think the piece that we're hoping to contribute to is interoperability between our service and institutional repositories, but I could see interoperability in lots of other dimensions as well.  Well, I also see another interoperability layer there from the next generation type of data utilities. We're going to see that we'll be for much larger data, big data, and we'll help it either move around or get closer to HPC resources, but then that derived type of data finding a way for that to find long-term homes in our repositories is the only way to really leverage the resources that we have out there in a lot of ways for that. I think I should just one other comment on this, and it's not, it's moving to a slightly different subject, but I think what's interesting and Cliff mentioned in his opening remarks about how it isn't really, nothing is really shaken down as to whether, and this was with regard to the data management plan requirements, whether universities would be providing these services to their researchers, whether domains would be providing these, you know, you'd have sort of topical repositories, whether they might be federally funded services of some sort, or commercial. We're looking at this in the sense that both, you know, Vivo has been deployed on an institutional level. We're trying to deploy it for a domain, and that's sort of an interesting experiment in whether you can sort of move out of the box of the institution and focus on a science-driven domain to use this to tie a community together. Likewise, the institutional repositories are institutionally based, but we're going to try to mix things up quite a bit, not just among the institutional repositories that are, and ICPSR, which is not an institutional repository, it's a topical repository, you know, whether we can mix things up among those, as well as potentially other institutional repositories. Is that Jeremy? Jeremy. I was wondering what you were saying about the interoperability with the repositories, with a very different kind of data, what issues you might be encountering or expect, taken to prepare those repositories to handle that kind of data and ensure it can be preserved? So, one of the very first things we're doing, and we'll be starting on it next month, is working with a particular group of sustainability scientists at the National Center for Earth Systems Dynamics at the University of Minnesota. They are an NSF STC that is sun setting, so they have data, and the infrastructure that's been government funded to, you know, collect and work with this data is going to go away. Part of what we're trying to do is extract a lot of information about their data types, their data models, the data standards that they use to get an understanding of that variety and heterogeneity. I look at the active content repository as kind of a soft landing zone for data that scientists may still be using a little bit, but they're kind of looking to give it up and hand it off to someone else to take care of. And it's sort of, I think, in that active curation portion of the project where the real specifics of the integration and interoperability issues on a data level are going to be exposed. And then on the repository end, although we're much less specific about it because, you know, we have this looming 18 month deadline, interoperability between publications and the data that they reside on or that they represent is going to be another interoperability problem. So, I mean, I look at interoperability pretty broadly. Hi. Thanks for the presentation. It was great to hear about your project. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your plans for the prototype for public access and discovery of what's in the repositories? Well, there will actually, there'll be a component of that, but that'll probably be a lighter weight piece of it now than some of the other parts that I mentioned around the actual ingestive data and the active curation component and the social networking component. I think more of our discovery layer will eventually be derived from that social networking component, but a lot of it will, you know, of course, take a little bit of work in gathering that data first and then being able to do something with it in some kind of faceted approach and then let you dig into it based on, you know, who published the data and how that works. But, you know, that eventually will be there, but the core elements that we're working on, that 18-month timeline will probably be less focused on that and more on how we get the data we need for the network components, for the actual researchers and how we tie that to the repository components. I think for the prototype that access to the active content repository is going to be pretty restricted to a specific designated community because this is data that, you know, may not be ready for primetime yet, may have all kinds of other restrictions on it. When it passes the barrier from the active content repository into institutional repositories, certainly, you know, the public access dimension will, you know, very much come into play. And we have questions about, you know, what do the policies need to be around the active content repository that, you know, if you make it too open, it's a real disincentive for people to put their data out there because it's not really clean or they might get scooped or there are proprietary or, you know, confidentiality concerns. So, you know, as I said, it's a kind of intermediary place for to hold the data, to do some value-added activities and to get a sense from the community itself who thinks this data is valuable and worth taking to the next step. A different question then. Coming back to this relationship between disciplinary services and institutional infrastructure, in earlier runs at the DataNet program, sustainability was a big part of the projects and I wondered if your project has any components of that still and if not how you're thinking about that since this has been a big problem for us for a long time trying to serve disciplinary needs with institutional funding. So, I guess one aspect of this being the long tail is that this data dispersed among multiple institutional repositories and requiring relatively little curation after it leaves the active curation process. From a cost perspective, you know, an assumption I have is that it hides in there with lots of other little data sets. I don't mean in quite such a, you know, covered manner, but, you know, part of our assumption was that if institutional repositories are going to be part of the infrastructure, then we have to count on being able to rely on something. Now, we're also talking about redundancy so that we're not dependent on a single institutional repository, but at this point, having had, we had actually a whole, we had an entire faculty person devoted to looking at sustainability models. The funding for that is gone. You know, I would say until we get through the prototype, we don't have focused resources to, you know, validate or challenge any of the assumptions we have about institutional repositories willingly and readily taking this on. Now, I will say that what I hear from the other direction is that many institutional repositories are interested in getting into the data business, but having some difficulty figuring out which data, which types of data, how to get the data, and I guess I see us sort of greasing the wheels in that regard. So I think I misasked that question because I'm not doubting that institutional repositories will continue to play a role in this. It's your active repository, the front end. Oh, the front end. That is a centralized service that your project is building and running. It isn't a distributed federated thing and it's aimed at a discipline. So I don't quite see yet how that fits into this ecosystem that we're talking about and whether you're planning to work on the sustainability of that piece of it. You see? Yeah. And I think some of that comes into play with the committed resources that we do have from IU and how we can put those toward what we've done in recent years, MOUs with other places like the Texas Advanced Computing Center and with Rensselaer on how we swap out data resources that are committed for the long term for this type of activity.  Excuse me. Yeah, thanks for the clarification. I guess I would say one other piece of this is that for the curation work, adding metadata, finding errors, improving documentation, we are looking at a model of, you know, micro-contributions by scientists themselves as they use this data. Whether that is just a pipe dream or something that we can actually enable remains to be seen. But I think, you know, you're pointing to a very important potential weakness in the fact that we have a grant to fund something that's supposed to be sustainable. My question, in a sense, follows on on that, but it also touches on something I think Robert brought out in his introduction about the issues of moving content between repositories. In a sense, when sustainability goes wrong, as we've seen with a number of domain systems, you're forced to the problem of moving content around between different technical infrastructures and different organizational infrastructures. Now, I'm aware that in your project, you are looking at moving content between the active curation domains and the institutional domains. What wasn't clear to me is whether you're also going to test out moving content between domains that are similar in function, but maybe different technologically or organizationally. Let's say moving between institutions. There's been a very small amount of work done on this, but I think not nearly enough when we could do with a lot more knowledge. Yeah, I think that's something that we would like to have as a real opportunity, especially with, like I mentioned, the upcoming Internet 2 upgrade, because everyone always says, well, this is an answered question. Well, not if you really want the data moved in any normal amount of time, right? Or you didn't write it to disk and actually ship it through FedEx to do it reliably and all the time. And that's what I was talking a little bit about before. And one of the interesting parts about when we started this data net was getting the CIOs on board a bit from the institutions, because they understand that this coming kind of piece for them is going to be more about where these resources are located in terms of the network more than anything else because of what you're talking about. And in fact, I use committed a certain amount of data for this activity to grow over a certain period of time for it, and I see as using that, you know, with what we have now with our data capacitor and even moving toward our next generation system, which has yet to be kind of put out there yet. But, you know, its whole modus operandi will be about brokering data movement across networks at real scale. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for finding out more about what really needs to be there and making sure that we're able to do some of that with this project. Those are interesting points. I mean, the technical ones about the network, but I'm also thinking about institutions do disappear. They merge, they split and responsibility for domain repositories comes and goes as well. And we then face with challenges that are partly technical, but partly very, very different in trying to move content between entirely different management domains of different concerns. And often people haven't planned for that from the outset. They've thought about the changes that happen within your institution, but not the changes that happen when somebody else needs to take it on. Yeah. ICPSR celebrated its 50th anniversary in October. And the University of Michigan will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 2014. So I don't know. As institutions go, I think universities and university libraries are pretty stable things. Certainly relative to, say, cloud services or let's start a data center, you know, and then worry later about what to do with the data when the project ends. The risk of, I don't wish to dominate conversation, I don't disagree that on average universities are long-lived institutions. And ICPSR is also a great example of a long-lived data repository. But we've also got it only takes a few to change and we've got, certainly in the UK alone, I can give you enough examples of institutions disappearing, going bankrupt, funders changing their minds about the main repositories they want to support, that it's a real problem that, well, we've seen failures in the past and it would be good to know how to avoid those failures in the future. Sometimes we will have to move stuff and I'd like to be more confident that we can do it without pain. And I'm interested to know whether your project's going to help us answer that. I was wondering if you are addressing any of the usability issues behind data preservation. One of the inherent things with data is that it's much more than bits and bytes that they come with readme files and contextual information interpretation is very domain science-specific and complex so you could imagine that a data set would be readable 50 years from now, but it would not make any sense to those who want to use it in scientific sense. Specifically where I think we might make a little headway in that regard is what makes a domain like sustainability science interesting to address that challenge is that you have a hydrologist and you have a soil scientist and you have an urban planner and they're all looking at what will happen if we increase the amount of impervious surface in this river basin by 25%. They all need data that you can somehow integrate and get a reasonable answer or set of parameters to that kind of problem. I don't think we can start solving these problems by saying this very specialized, we're going to make this very specialized data now understandable to anybody else, but in a sort of pairwise step-by-step way if we can get a soil scientist to understand the hydrologist data, then maybe the next step is that we can get an economist to understand the model that the urban planner and the hydrologist and the soil scientist put together. Whether that is something scalable I don't know, but I think it begins to look at one piece of what could otherwise be an intractable problem. I think we have time for one more question. Okay, well thank you very much for your participation. It's very helpful.