It's somewhat embarrassing for me, the intro, because people describe what I've done in two different ways. The good description I've had to date is when somebody called me the Gorbachev of education. But the one that I think is more accurate is another one which I heard down in Australia, which was, I was described as the Tarzan of education. So why is it that way? Because firstly, I have absolutely no formal knowledge of education at all. I never studied it as a subject. And I studied physics. Having said that, there was an interesting connection that might interest you. My father was in education, and he did his PhD in Chicago under a very famous man, Benjamin Bloom, in the times when people used to talk about objective-driven education. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to do the following. And then we test for that. And if you are able to do the following, then it's done that bit. So not that I had any interest in that, because that's what my father used to do with Bloom. And there used to be this string of rather peculiar characters who used to come to our house. And I had no clue who these people were, except that every so often my father would say, you must really meet this person. His name is Adler, or things like that. And that kind of thing. And I was like five or six years old. So then I went on, and I decided that I would do anything but whatever my father does. So I did physics. I did theoretical physics. We were as far away from there as it could possibly go. And then I will describe to you what happened because somehow I stumbled back into education. And the way it happened was that I did my physics. I got my PhD. I came out as working as an engineer. My boss said, you've got a PhD. You really ought to teach other people how to write computer programs. In those days, physicists were the only people who knew how to write computer programs. So I just teach that. And so now for the first time, I had to teach somebody. So I said, well, this is simple. I'll just write on the blackboard. I'll do whatever teachers do and teach them. It went all right, except that I had this very plush office in Delhi, and just outside was a slum. And I used to think I'm trying to make rich people's children into good quality programmers. But how many good ones am I missing back there, the ones who we don't care about? And I think you'll agree that that problem is not just an Indian problem. It's increasingly a global problem. What about them? And how many kids are we missing who might have changed the world if we knew how to do it? So it used to trouble me a great deal. And I didn't know what to do about it. And I said, I used to think to myself, well, I'm not a social changer or anything like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy a computer and give it to them. And people said, well, for what for? They wouldn't know what to do with it. They'll probably break it, or they'll sell it off. So I said, no, I want to see what happens. So I gave it to them. And is that the quicker? And what happened, I'll come to very shortly. So now here's my take on education, first of all. Everybody knows what that is, which is unfortunate. If I showed you a piece of modern physics, everybody wouldn't know what that is. They would know the old one. But how come we know that exactly? So I started tracing back to one of the things that is funny about this picture is that if I said to you, can you put a date on it? You'd put a date which is within the last 300 years somewhere, ever since photography was invented. You'd say it's somewhere that it never changed. Who decided that it should be that way? And I couldn't find any documentation anywhere. So I made it up. I said, there must be a way to figure out who invented the classroom, and why, and when. So I first started looking at when. And when took me back 3,000 or 4,000 years. Then it took me back 5,000, 6, 7,000 years. It's always the classroom. So why? I mean, we just take it for granted, this structure. Why? And this structure explained the whole thing to me, actually. It's because you want to listen to what I have to say. You're not reading what I wrote. You're not taking home a video on a stick that you can watch at home. You want me to be live and you want to listen. So I said, OK, now that gives us a first clue. This happened before there was any paper. So you had to call the fellow, whoever you wanted to learn from, and say, OK, stand here and tell us what you know. So then, how big a space could you use? It depends on what the average fellow can throw his voice at. You work out to about a room about 20 by 30. I looked up the physics of the voice, and it said 20 by 30. I said, OK, we've got the size of the room. And how many people can sit there? Well, there's simple civil engineering calculation tells you anything between 20 and 30 people. OK, so now I've got a room. I've got 20 and 30 people inside just because it's possible to speak without any aid to that many people. And for how long can a person speak continuously? Well, if you look up the medical data, more than an hour, your voice starts cracking up. So we will have one hour periods in classrooms which have between 20 and 30 people. And it's lasted for 5,000 years, just that design based on a human voice. OK, then examinations, how shall we examine? Well, obviously if it's 20 people, at the end of whatever, a month, two months, I'm going to call them individually or in a group and I'll say, tell me the answer to this. And you'll stand up and you'll tell me the answer. And if you're right, you pass. Otherwise, we do all sorts of corrective things. So that was the system until paper got invented. So when paper got invented, things started changing. Because imagine that in the oral age, if you were preparing a primary school child, you would say to the, yes, this is also important, what will that teacher say to these children in that situation of oral transmission? Sit, do not talk, pay attention, listen carefully and remember what you hear. These would have been the instructions. They are the instructions even today, OK? Sit, listen carefully, don't look towards your neighbor, et cetera. So when paper came in, what would that primary teacher have done? The primary teacher would now say, well, never mind about how you speak. In the oral examination, she would have taught the child, speak clearly, answer when you're spoken to, et cetera. She would now say, no, no, wait. That's important, but never mind that. You must have good handwriting. Because if people cannot read what you're writing. And you don't necessarily have to spend a lot of time trying to memorize. Write down carefully whatever that man is saying. So the primary teacher's attitude would have changed just because of the introduction of a single piece of technology, paper, paper and the writing instrument. So then that went on for another several thousand years until the Germans made the printing press.  So why do I want you now? So now the teachers had to quickly reconfigure and say, no, you don't need me to talk all the time. But you do need someone to tell you which books to read. So I will tell you which books you have to read. Because books don't tell you what's in them until you read them. Well, now jump to today. And books are no longer physical objects. They do say what's inside them quite easily. And they do one more thing. They point to each other. So like the teacher who would say, read this book first and then read that one. So you don't need that because the books now point to each other. And if you know how to follow the track. So it kind of gives us this 5,000 years of history. It tells us quite easily what we should be doing. We need to be able to tell children in that hugely pointing to each other information space how to go from one point to another. What's the efficient way to do it? Unfortunately, most of us don't know it ourselves. So we have to find a way to teach ourselves. So it reflects on all sorts of things, teacher training, approach, and so on. Another mystery in particularly primary education. So we saw the introduction of technology changed things. Did our forefathers 1,000 years ago or 500 years ago, did they say that assistive technology should not be given? I found to my surprise, they said just the opposite. They said use straight edge rulers, use protractors, use set squares, use compasses. In other words, use everything that they use to do their engineering and their measurement inside the examination hall and then show us that you can solve problems. Somewhere along the line, oh, they went further. They said, when logarithm tables came in, they said use logarithm tables, use slide rules. They never said assistive technology should not be allowed. So why did we at a certain point in time decide that this is it? After this, no more technology. So you cannot bring your tablet phone into the examination hall. You cannot bring the internet into the examination hall. So I wonder now that if we could go back 500 years to those forefathers and explain to them, wouldn't they have said, why are you doing that? Why are you not allowing them to use the tools that they will use in life inside the examination hall? If you just construct a world where examination halls allow the use of the internet, it will cause, according to me, the same change to teaching as the introduction of paper did because the examiner, the way you write questions, it will have to change. There's no point in asking a factual question which Bing or Google can tell you in a second. So you have to ask a different question, et cetera. So let's take a look at some of that. You're familiar with this, children marching, for whom? It took this picture, actually, in a school in India. I asked the school principal, who are the marching for? I mean, George, the fifth, the sixth, or which one? And he said, no, no, no, they're all gone. I said, but why are the marching then? I mean, are they all going to go to the army or what? Who are they going to fight? So he didn't have an answer, but he saw the point, I think. You've seen this. This is quite familiar. In my time, it used to be called a tired child. Today, it's a child with ADHD who is to be medicated immediately. I cannot believe that. I can't even begin to understand how you can go and medicate that girl so that she'll wake up like a robot and start reading her book. And what point is there in doing that? Why would we not ask the question, why is she sleeping? And the answer will be not with her. Nothing to do with her brain. The answer will be with us, the things that we do. In an American meeting, I said, I had ended this bit by saying, therefore, we should be medicated. But the Americans said, no, then leave that one out. So I made a little list of things that we know. This is one piece first. It's difficult to get good teachers to remote places. I have a little experiment, published experiment. This is Indian data, science, mathematics, and English scores in primary schools as you go further and further away from New Delhi into rural India. And you see the downward graph. What's the reason? I went to the establishment to ask the admin people. And you won't believe this. And lucky, there's no Indian apart from me in this room.  So I said, you can't believe that you can't say that. There's no data which supports that. So I went to find what the reason was. And I found it with just one question. The question to the teacher, would you like to work somewhere else? As you go from to in Delhi, they said, no, it's fine. It's a nice big city. You've got good health care, good entertainment, good everything. The suburbs, no, we don't want to go anywhere. It's even better. I mean, we don't have the traffic jams of Delhi, but we have, Delhi is only 10 miles away. You go a little bit further and say, yeah, it's a bit of a drive. It's 45 minutes to Delhi. I wouldn't mind going a little bit up close. 100 kilometers away, I said, yes, I'm trying to get a job in Delhi if I can. 200 kilometers away, anywhere but here. So it's a geographic remoteness and teacher migration. And then when I went back to the Department of Education, they grudgingly said, yes, teachers migrate away. The good ones migrate away. I mean, if teachers try to migrate, obviously the good ones succeed. So what are we going to do about it? I asked the government. The government said, we will do teacher training to level the playing field. We'll make the poorer teachers better. So I said, you take a teacher over here, 250 kilometers from Delhi, and you train her. And she becomes a really good teacher. What do you think she'll do next? Get a job in Delhi. So that's not going to solve your problem anyway. So teacher training is not a solution to remoteness. When I came to England, then I thought, OK, I'm not going to see this problem. Here's a developed economy. So obviously the rural areas just as developed as the urban ones, some people actually prefer living there. And when I looked at the GCSE scores, the school living certificate scores, there was no obvious geographic correlation. But there were some good ones and bad ones. So I started looking for what's the reason for that. And I found the correlation. In England, the GCSE scores, if I plot them against a peculiar number, the density of council housing, council housing for poor people, for alcoholics, the density of that, the places where there are lots of them and places where there are not so many. And you get the same graph as in India. I started going to those places to look at what they look like. And it was obvious what the reasons were. There were drug problems there. There was graffiti on the walls, dirt on the floor. Why would a good teacher with little children perhaps want to teach there? So I started talking to the teachers. And apart from a few dedicated ones, I got the same answer as in India. So yeah, it's not very safe. And that's one factor because of which I'd like to move to the posh areas. So this is a social problem. And it's there, I think, in every single country. I studied it in the United States. It's there in the inner city ghettos. It's there in the deserts. It's there high up in the mountains. And it causes a rift in society. And it causes the rift which all of us know, which is that the rich people in the nice places do better and the poor people in the not so nice places who feed the rich people in the nice places, they do badly. So I published all of that. And I did an experiment, which you just heard. So I won't go into that in a great deal of detail, but it basically was exposing children to a computer because of a very simple reason. Computers don't care where they are. They will work the same way in a remote place as they would. So if I can keep them running in a remote place, and that's easier said than done, then they will work the same way. And I found quickly that children can teach themselves how to use it. Even though they don't know the language, they've never seen it before and so on. So groups of children can learn to use the internet on their own. This is a 14-year-old result. At that time, people didn't think that this was possible.  I wanted to see if this is true. And the actual truth of the matter was that it is not true. Provided the computer is in a public space and it is unsupervised. These are very important factors. A child alone with a computer will repeatedly play the same game over and over again. If there are a group of children and somebody tries to do that, the rest of the children immediately say, don't waste time. We want to do other things on it. So there is a good, high variety of games. Even that doesn't help. After a while, they get bored of that and they start looking for things. They start looking for all sorts of things, including something like this, a seven-year-old, a group of seven-year-olds, looking for the word arthritis. So what are you looking for? No, we're trying to figure out if they'll get a pill. So why do you want a pill for arthritis? This means grandpa has a problem, you see. So then I said, yes, they do want to help, except that we never let them. We think, we'll say, no, you can't do this. When you grow up, you'll find out all this. If I remove those factors, in other words, if I remove the adult, the child is different. I don't see them falling asleep. I don't see any ADHD. I see a lot of energy. But more about that in a moment. But here's just a glimpse from the experiment that eventually got called the hole in the wall. This was the first day, you can see these girls scratching their head, wondering what it is, because this is back in 1999. And then after a few hours, they would start to teach each other how to browse. So how on earth are they doing that? And they said, you know, there's an arrow in this and you can move the arrow with your finger. I said, all right, I figured out the cursor. The arrow pointing. So what I said. And then they said, the arrow turns into a hand at certain points. So I said, okay, that's very good. You figured that one out. And so then what happens? And I said, then you have to hit the pad. You have to hit it like that so that the hand can touch. That's in Hindi, so the hand can touch that, you know, the hotspot. And I said, and then, and then I couldn't understand what they said because they said, and then Shiva plays his drum. So I said, Shiva was an old Hindu God. So Shiva plays his drum. I mean, you can hear it. No, no, no, you can see it. I'll show you. He said, he moved it to a hotspot and he hit it. And the hourglass started. Hourglass is an unknown symbol in India but Shiva does have a drum and it looks like an hourglass and he plays it like that. So I said, okay, so Shiva plays the drum and then what happens? So whenever Shiva plays the drum, something else will happen. But you have to wait. So they've gotten to the fundamentals of the operating system using a mythology that they've created for themselves. And I thought to myself, why not? Isn't this what PRJ said children should do?  So good for them. I measured this whole process over a nine month period and in those days the result we found was the groups of children left unsupervised with a computer. Well, in a period of nine months, get the same computing literacy as the average office secretary in the West. Okay, word processing, the spreadsheets, this, that, the other thing. Unbelievable, but people used to come from all over the world to see this and always they used to ask, are you sure nobody taught them? And I said, no, they taught themselves. And it's a process we don't use much. So I published all that, that's also published. We know that groups of children can learn most things on their own. Now that's a big, big thing to say, but I'll tell you why I'm saying it. We did lots of experiments in those days. First of all, we measured their computer skills, which I showed you, that was a clear illustration. Then some of my colleagues started measuring mathematics, simply by pointing them towards little math sites. And the math scores started changing. I did an experiment on improving English pronunciation using text to speech. It's really simple, you know. I think in the EU that could easily be a usable thing, which is that you speak to a computer and you have a little program, which, I mean, you can buy it commercially, which types out what you're saying.  So I did this in Hyderabad in India and there was a remarkable change in their pronunciation as they, by trial and error, removed all the errors. So the speech-to-text acts as an examiner, basically, and they like that because it's not human. Finally, I came to England and a lot of people ask me, why did, after all these years in India, why did you come to England? Well, the answer is nothing mysterious. It's an answer which drives all of us researchers to various places, money. So there's a large, several million pounds worth of research money came into Newcastle University to improve the quality of education in poorer parts of India. So they called me and said, you're the man who should be doing this. So anyway, my son had grown up and everything so we sort of packed our bags and said, okay, let's do it. And went over here to England. In England, the reaction to all of this was, it's very fascinating, but you're overstating it. When you say children can learn anything by themselves. So I designed an experiment which would change my life completely. At that time, the experiment was designed to fail. I said, I'm gonna do an experiment where they don't succeed. And that will establish the limits. So the experiment I made was can 12-year-old Tamil-speaking Indian children in a village, Tamil being a South Indian language, teach themselves the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a street side computer on their own. And I said, you know, I'll give them a pretest. They'll get a zero. I'll give them a post-test after some time. They'll get another zero. I'll go back to England. I'll say, we need teachers. So off I went, I found a village where they had a hole in the wall computer. The children came running. I said, what have you done? Have you brought a new game? I said, no, I've brought something very difficult. Here it is. The downloaded material on DNA replication, genetics. The children came and said, how can we understand this? You know, this has got huge English words and chemistry and this and that. I said, I don't know. That used to be and continues to be my pedagogical method. I said, I don't know how you're going to understand it. I just brought it for you and I'm going to leave now. And I left because I knew by then a sentence which I don't know how you'll react to. For all these years, I used to say, look at how clever these children are, how far they've got in spite of the fact that I wasn't there or a teacher wasn't there. I changed that to look at how far they got because we were not there, okay? Hard to take, but we have to take it. I've learned it with years and years of observation. Anyway, so in Kuppam, that was the name of the village, we did this experiment and they got a zero. Three months later, the children came back in very quiet. I said, what have you understood? Nothing. So I said, nothing at all. So when did you give up? So they said, no, we never gave up. We look at those screens all the time, trying to understand them, but it's very hard. So at that point, one little girl, luckily for me, she raised her hand and in sort of broken Tamil and English, she said, but apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. So I said, what did you say? So that's what Kuppam looks like. There's all in the wall, computers. When I pre-tested and post-tested, then they're gone from a statistical zero to 30%. It was an educational impossibility, in a subject that they don't know, which is 20 years ahead of their time in a language, they can't speak properly in that tropical heat, outdoors without a teacher. It went against everything that the educational theory had to say, but there it was. But I couldn't go back to England with those results because in our traditional Victorian system, 30% is still a fail, so it failed. So how do I get them another 20 marks without a teacher? Couldn't find a teacher, but I found a young girl who was a good friend of theirs and I said to her, can you teach them more biotechnology? And she said, no, I didn't have science in school.  I can't help. So I said, no, you can. What you got to do is use the method of the grandmother. So she said, what's that? And I told her my authorite story and I said that, you know, children, they want to help their grandparents. They just don't know how to say it. So what you do is you stand behind them and whenever they do anything, you admire them. You just say, how did you do that? When I was a child of your age, I was really silly. I couldn't understand anything. You know, I can see some of you nodding who know the grandmother's story. So the grandmother uses a pedagogical method which is very significantly different from the parent or the teacher. It's just that they don't voice it, but it is a highly effective method. It uses admiration to produce a spiral of learning inside children. So I asked her to do that and she did that for two months. The scores jumped to 50%, just because they wanted to hear her say that they're very clever and I published. And it became a very referenced paper because it showed the impossible happening in education. So I started experimenting all over the world. In England, well, when this got published and I was giving a lecture like this somewhere in England, a school teacher came into the university and met me and she said, it's fascinating what you're doing with all these children in remote areas. But what about us? So I said, what about you? In England, you've got good schools. What's your problem? So she said, come with me to County Durham up of northeast. I'll show you some good schools. So we went with her and God, that was such an eye-opener.  They have a problem with alcoholism, single parents and all kinds. I began to see the West's problems for the first time to see that, okay, there's a whole new world out there which I didn't know anything about and the children are the main sufferers of that. So I went into the school and I started.  We called it a self-organized learning environment. So what you do is you go into a classroom, it's very simple, you take away the computers, leave just one or two, ask the children some really difficult question and then leave them alone. So they have to do what the children in the hole in the wall do, which is they have to cluster around each other and so on and so forth and they produce some amazing results. So I did this sort of all over, this is in Hong Kong, China and so on and came to the conclusion, which I told you just earlier in the slide, that groups of children have the potential and the capability to teach themselves anything in today's world by themselves. It doesn't matter how many years ahead of their time you ask them to do, provided you make the question right. So I'll just give you an example because this part is very, very important. You can also do it wrong and it won't work. Seven year olds in a London school, the teacher says to Gata, I'm going to tell you to do something which you will never succeed in because the subject I have to teach today is the most boring on the planet. I said, what's that? It's gum health for seven year olds. So I said, okay, I'll take it on. So when this is a group of seven year olds, so first thing I said was, okay, how many people have shaking teeth? So you know, seven year olds, I've got two, I've got one and so on. Okay, so I said, you know what? When you were born, did you have any teeth? No, no, we don't have teeth when we were born. Okay, then what happens? We grow teeth.  And then they grow back, yeah.  Now I've got them, okay. Yeah, they never come back. So I said, yes, the question is, why does that happen? Why does it come back the first time? Don't come back the second time. Okay, so they worked on it, they figured out everything 40 minutes later. It's usually 40 minutes. Then they present in group, I call it a conference, I say, okay, what are the results of your research? And so the fascinating stuff, you know, milk teeth are, babies grow teeth when they need solid food in order to smash it up. But the solid food that babies eat is soft food. So they need little teeth and not very strong to process that. When they, in their words, as they grow up and their stomachs become bigger, they need bigger and harder food. Now those little teeth can no longer take, chew that kind of food. So they fall off and big, strong teeth come out. And I said, okay, and then? And then years and years passed. We eat all our food and everything. And the gums start to get loose with all that chewing. And now the teeth fall out, but the new ones can't grow because the gums are too loose now to hold them. Fascinating stuff. So at the end of it, I said, so guess what? If there was a way to keep the gums firm for a little longer, the teeth would last a little longer. And I'm waiting with my fingers crossed and they said, yes. So then I said to the teacher, well, go ahead, gum health now. They do gum health for the next three hours. You know? Because they know what they're talking about. It's what they have found. It's not what I have told them and so on. So if you put that together, if you put the self-organized learning environment along with the kuppam result that a granny method can improve the performance, you can also see that grannies can be beamed. In England, I put out an appeal once to say if you're a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time every week for free? In the first two weeks, I got 200. I know more British grandmothers than anybody else. Okay? So they're called the granny cloud. And within that, there is a workforce that was being totally wasted. 40 years of experience, 30 years of experience, sitting in a little village knitting. So I take them and using Skype, I beam them into the schools where good teachers will not go. And the children love their Skype grannies. They appear full-size on the wall and they talk to them. So, and they do it for free. Because it's only one hour a week. I have enough of them to do it with and it changes their lives actually. That's what I didn't expect.  It's our lives are changing. So, and they have so many stories. Just the other day, one of them said, I prepared for an hour. I had such a lovely story to read to these children, children in Hyderabad, India in a slum. So I said, then what happened? They said, are you talking with your laptop? I said, yes. So they said, in that case, get up, take the laptop and show us what's in your fridge. So, she said, I spent my one hour discussing Tesco. And, but that's the kind of, it's so rich, you know? Incredible. So that's what it looks like. Okay, the granny cloud is 5,000 miles apart. So that's all the published stuff. Now comes the harder bits. So we know these things. We just revisit. We know that children can tease themselves to use the internet. We know they can tease themselves, almost anything by themselves. We know that given a granny, this process is amplified. We don't know if children can learn to read by themselves. And this is very crucial because for this whole method to work, they must be able to read and understand. How quickly can we reach that goal? I started looking for the numbers and discovered that it's in a pathetic condition. Country after country is saying, reading comprehension is very poor. Children are reading below their reading ages. Why is that? I don't know. At the same time, you find two and a half year olds are handling iPads. Wherever I go, I find people telling stories about, oh, my little granddaughter has changed my wallpaper on my phone or something like that. And how are they doing this? I think there's a different kind of literacy that we've missed somewhere. And we don't have a name for it. Just to give you a quick example, I have a grand niece who was downloading. She very excitedly told me that I have downloaded an app. I said, look, is that your mother's iPad? Yes, but don't do that because it costs her money. So she said, no, it's free. So she's two or two and some months. So I said, how do you know it's free? So she points to the box, she's illiterate. She says, in this box, if there are no number, number things, then it means it's free, okay? It's some kind of functional reading, which we don't know anything about, but she's reading, okay? So can they learn to read by themselves? I don't know. But I did another study, I did this in Uruguay. Uruguay is interesting because there is no child in Uruguay who doesn't have a laptop, okay? It's a small country. Every single child has had one for five years. So Uruguay called me and said, can you tell us, has anything happened? Can we justify this expenditure? So I did a measurement and discovered very quickly that in Uruguay, the children were reading better in Spanish and English than their counterparts in all the neighboring countries, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and the United States on national average scores. So why? And then it struck me, well, if a child is constantly reading things off a computer and nobody is telling him whether this is meant for his age or not, isn't it obvious that they're reading comprehension will go up? I'm experimenting with that. And the findings are that doing all this in groups is absolutely key to the whole process. Alone, they'll just say, this is too difficult and leave it. In groups, they can read higher than their individual levels. But I have to do these measurements better now. The second thing we don't know is if children can search accurately by themselves. What if they land themselves in trouble? What I have found is very hopeful that when children work in groups, if the groups are allowed to interact with each other and talk freely, if the adult is not there, they can detect doctrine from actual, serious material. I don't know how they do it. So I think the sum total of what I've found in these 14 years is that the metacognitive skills of a group are way above the individual levels, way, way above. And that in the subject which I know is called a self-organizing system. That's what a physicist would call it. Hence the conclusion that what we're looking at here is learning in a self-organized system. So we also know that children can do lots of things and that the age at which they do it is getting less and less. So what should we do about it? I think curricula around the world needs to be revised and should include the internet, every piece of curriculum, somehow. Take a look at this one, the British National Curriculum. And one of these points, pupils should be taught to recognize that the past represented and interpreted in different ways and to give reasons for this. Can you imagine explaining this to an eight-year-old?  Instead of that, in a soul, what I did actually is convert this point into this question. In a museum in the Indian city of Mathura, there is a statue of the great emperor Kanishka. Who was he and why is his head missing? You know, eight-year-olds love missing heads. Okay? And the answer to this question is that bit of curriculum, that history can be interpreted differently by different people. Okay, so why not convert a curriculum into big, important, interesting questions? We know that young people are like this and we don't like it. The first bit I can understand that, yes, we all say, we've all seen this. We've seen this in malls, we've seen this in trains, buses. But the second bit, we don't like it. Why? Why don't we like it? And what if they were to say, we don't like you? Then what is that a problem? So why do we not like it? Because we think that they're wasting time and we think they're being antisocial. I started asking my adult friends, do you know, do you have data on what they do on those phones when they keep staring at it? And nobody did. Everybody was guessing. Everybody said they're texting all the time. They sit next to each other, their best friend and both of them are texting away at somebody else. This is awful. I said, do you know? And nobody did. So I did a terribly rude thing the last three months. I sat behind them and I looked at what they were doing. You know, I know it's terrible, but somebody has to do it. Otherwise, where's the data going to come from? Okay? And I saw that they don't text all the time. They search a lot. They continuously learn from these machines. When they do text, it's not any, it's not banal. I mean, sometimes it is. It's just, oh, so where are you going this evening? That sort of thing, followed by in my part of the country. Oh, I'm going to the metro center. What for? There's a new shop which is open. What's it about? These are boys texting. It's got a quadricopter. What's a quadricopter? And so on and so on. And then I see this banal conversation sliding into instruction. So what's wrong with that? We didn't have that in our youth. So why do we get annoyed when we see it now? Pedagogy needs to include the use of the internet. Not just for searching, but for talking to each other, for Facebook, Twitter, all of that needs to come into the pedagogy. We need their world to come into the classroom. We solve problems like this. We solve problems like this. When your children go out there and join an office, this is how they'll solve problems. Doesn't it remind you of the hole in the wall? So why would we not train them or encourage them to solve problems this way, collaboratively using the internet? We solve problems like this. This is most common, sitting around a table when we have a problem, we say, let's call a meeting. When we are in school and we have a problem, we say, don't look at what anybody else is doing. What is the point of that? One last little example. In a school in Newcastle, I did an experiment. I said, give me a group of children that I've never met before and don't tell me what they were going to do if I didn't come. So it turned out to be a group of 12-year-olds and they were going to do art and they were going to do Cezanne's use of light and shade in his watercolors. And I said, quite honestly, I said, I don't know a word of what this means, but I can teach you. How? You just tell the children, look, I've got a problem. Your teacher was going to do Cezanne's use of light and shade in his watercolors. I don't even know how to spell Cezanne. But I don't want to get thrown out of your school, so will you do it for me? And they did it. So I had a little film, but I'm going to skip that. However, we don't ask questions like that. We ask questions like this. This is the end of schooling. When you sit in this hall and you answer this question. Examinations need to focus on the internet and collaboration for problem solving and decision making. Example, here's a sample GCSE question. According to Darwin's theory of evolution, how do new species evolve? By artificial selection, by natural selection, by unnatural selection.  So I changed that question. I changed that question to this. Why do we have five fingers and toes on each hand? Why not any other number? Use the internet and mutual discussion to develop a paragraph on this subject. Isn't there a much more rational way to ask that question than the multiple choice, which obviously anybody who has access to the internet can solve in two seconds. But this one, it doesn't have an answer. It takes a lot of discussion. So we need to change that. Success is still defined by the ability to write nicely in a nice handwriting. We're using the correct spelling and hopefully using an obsolete device, the fountain pen. We need to change the definition of that one. So this is going to be hard, gentlemen. Handwriting, spelling, grammar, multiplication tables. We have to take each one and dispassionately see if they're required. If not, we have to check them out. And handwriting is my current target. Should people not know how to write by hand? It hurts to say it, you know. Can I say this for my own child that he will never know how to write by hand? I'll say, well, no, I'll teach him how to write by hand, but I won't bother with spending years on how good his handwriting is. That should become a hobby, like knitting. Spelling, when you have a spell checker, there's, again, my generation's misunderstanding. If you use a spell checker, you'll never learn how to spell. It's absolutely untrue, nobody's tested it. I think assistive technology teaches. You misspell a word once, twice, the third time you don't misspell it. So the assistive technology can actually teach if you allow it inside the school. Similarly for grammar, grammar checkers, multiplication tables, I mean, that takes the cake. 17 times tables, that's considered life skill. Whatever for. Why would things that a generation 200 years ago invented, who was a very clever generation, and said, one to 10 into one to 10, this table needs to be inside your head because otherwise you won't be able to do things on the spot. They were brilliant, and they would have laughed at us if we showed them a calculator and said, even now we teach your method. They would have said, are you out of your mind or what? But we decided that these are wonderful skills. If you answer examination using Shakespeare's English, you will fail. If you answer examination using texting language, you've had it. But if you answer in English in 1930s English, you are a good boy. Who's decided that year? What for, when are we gonna change that? Texting language, we hate it. Every time I try to write it and I hesitate to write it. I don't like it. And then I think to myself, we made a little gadget with an awful keyboard, and the generation we made it, we were selling it to, my generation built that and sold it to the younger generation. Instead of throwing it into the waste paper basket, they invented a new language for it. We should applaud them for doing that instead of berating them. This was the office until maybe 70 years ago. This is what an office used to look like. This is what an office used to look like with the supervisor moving up and down. And now, so you had to prepare children for these offices and you prepared them like this. Is it clear now what's wrong? We're 200 years behind. So obsolescence of ideas, skills, methods, knowledge need to be factored into learning methods, curricula, examinations. And I think the simple trick is if you start with examinations, it drives everything else. When teachers are friends, not sages, not guides, if they're just friends like the granny, then they can roll curriculum, pedagogy, and examination all together into one. We don't need to separate them. You know that question like, why do we have five fingers on our hands? It could be an examination question, it could be a curriculum, it could be knowledge, a lesson on evolution. It could be all of that rolled into one. And if teachers were friends, then schooling can be forever. Why do we need to box it between the ages of five and 18? How about a schooling system where, until the age of five, you go to school for one hour a day.  And after 18, for the rest of your life, there is one day every month when you go back to school. You know, the school was fun, so why just take it away, why block it off? So I'm building something called a school in the cloud. It's a very simple thing. It looks like a cyber cafe for children. It's a teacher-less facility. There will be a human supervisor, but she doesn't teach. It's usually elderly woman who looks after health and safety.  If the children want, they can get a Skypton granny. They have a whole list of which granny or which grandfather is good at what. And by the way, they're not all grannies. There's young men and women also in there. And so they can call these people. And like one child put it to me in India after a lot of coaxing. I said, why do you like this? Isn't it so much better to have a real person? Why do you like this person on the screen? And then in a very embarrassed voice, he said, you can switch them off. No. So. So I'm building them in some really remote places. I'm going to collect the data and I'm going to compare them with two schools in England where I'm building them also up in the northeastern England. And in three years' time, we'll have data on whether it's possible to roll curriculum, pedagogy, examinations into one, whether it's possible to have non-physical teachers, huge numbers of them. So a school can say that I can use 600 teachers. And where does that take the children? What does it do to their psychological health and to their performance? And TED calls them schools in the cloud. So that's it. I'm sorry, I've already taken too much time.


Everybody for a steer ripping one box of 2022 elite football hobby for Nathan Q Here we go, Nathan. Good luck man. Let's see a see some nice pen pals That is a Montreux Washington rookie to 999 Playmakers Jonathan Taylor Evan Neil rookie number to 99 rookie on deck George Carl Aftis Calvin Austin the third turn of the century rookie autumn number to 199 Does a Logan Hall rookie to 399 Jalen nailer number to 390 or to 999 rookie rookie elitist Drake London Michael Warren the second to 24 die-cut rookie Justin Jefferson Jersey card elite debt Kyler Justin Fields the 399 my second year Fields Playmakers Dak Prescott Elijah Moore number 292 rookie on deck Jameson Williams Tyrion Davis price to to 999 rookie CD lamb insert Cam Acre is full throttle to 75 elitist Barry Sanders Tyrion Davis price to 399 and pen pals James Cook rookie auto base pen pals He decked us in Jefferson and that is gonna do it Thank you again for the order Nathan and we'll get these cards out to you shortly


Yeah, I'm going to record into the cloud so we can record in the same location as usual. Okay, so just sharing the agenda there. Just very first topic. Just want to propose a change to this meeting. Previously we tried to alternate one at a kind of China and European, more European friendly time, just one PM UTC and then every other week was five PM. But just for simplifying the calendars and things like that, I'd like to propose we have the meeting at this time slot every two weeks and we add an additional meeting specifically at one PM UTC which runs monthly. So basically every month we will typically have three meetings if none get cancelled. How does that sound to folks? It would be interesting if we had a discussion about covering the APAC meeting in chat maybe a couple of weeks ago. So basically it's yeah, so one PM UTC almost covers APAC. Yeah, maybe we could make it a bit earlier, so something like 11 AM UTC so that we could cover the time zones better. I know that in such case it becomes more complicated for United States so yeah, maybe a new UTC. We are just shifting it a bit more. Okay, yeah, let's throw that out to the get a chat channel and if you get some consensus then maybe we can do it at that earlier time. And then the other suggestion as well is I've seen this with some communities that we just pre-assign like for the next set of meetings different people to lead the meeting so we can rotate and then it doesn't necessarily always have to be the same person and I think particularly if you're having things in different time zones. So maybe for that it would just be a bit of text outlining what needs to be done, you know propose the agenda a couple of days before run up the meeting and then conduct the meeting or assign someone else to take notes as necessary. Does that sound good in general? I think so. So I'll start reaching out to I'll plan out the next few and we'll put it at the top of the meeting here and just people can volunteer for specific meetings to lead. Okay, so contributor summit retrospective and Oleg did we have is that just to do after get a link? So there are some notes from some notes but we haven't finished processing them so yeah I wanted to have it by this meeting but we've had JSOC final evaluations so yes I would rather postpone it till the next meeting. Okay, yeah no problem let's postpone that and I didn't see any other I guess the JSOC covers a lot of the attendees from the community so Martin and Malki and Natasha and is there anyone else we should reach out to for specific feedback? I guess I'm thinking maybe if folks like Ivelina. If it makes sense. I think Jeff Pierce is one of the mentors as well right? Yeah, it's not coming JSOC. Yeah. So is his feedback covered in JSOC? I believe so. We are still collecting feedback but Jeff was there and we had some discussions already so it's rather a matter of processing this feedback and somehow organizing that because now it's rather bring downs from people. Okay, okay so let's postpone that and then just looking ahead I think we're just saying we've got a number of activities planned for Dev Opsall Jenkins, Will Lisbon, so a hackfest on Monday. Monday, yep. Does anyone have the date? Uh yeah let me. I'm going to bless. December. It's December. Am I right? It's the very beginning of December so December, December, December 2nd. Off by one error. Okay so I'll generally put down these are all day things and we can start just mentioning them to folks so they can start planning to attend and then main conference are the 4th and the 5th. We have December 3rd as workshops and training days. So which one was workshop and training? The 3rd. The 3rd. Yeah. Okay. So some actions before that we had the rolling deck from which we used in the booth last time and I think we can maybe a bit earlier ask people to start adding in any updates making it keeping it up to date putting in any new features and any other things we want to kind of show off to the community so I'll put that there so people can keep editing it and then just mentioning the promotion plan so as people put the blogs out we can keep mentioning to come to Dev Opsall Jenkins will and Alyssa I think you're kind of maybe pulling up some more organized promotion around this. Yeah. So I so for San Francisco you know how I put this in a Google spreadsheet so we're gonna if we're going to share this with outside of CloudBees what is the best document that I should that I should create this in? I don't know maybe just the list of blogs or people who are committing to blogs just that summary of folks who are willing to write things or a place where people can put links to things they've already written which will be part of that pipeline so I don't know a spreadsheet or a shared doc. So a Google spreadsheet would be fine? Okay. Yeah Google Sheets. Okay. But maybe the key thing is just having that kind of bit of text if you want them to include it or artwork that people can see so they can just be pointed out and say hey could you add this to your post when you write it? Okay. So I'll put it in a drive or something. Okay. Okay. So I think that's all at this stage we'll ramp up as we get closer. Anything else on Dev Opsall Jenkins World? I don't think so. Okay. It's Google Summer of Code Oleg do you want to go run with that? Yeah just quick updates there. So yeah basically Google Summer of Code 2019 is over at least coding phases. It's still not over four card means but four card means it never ends. So yeah with our current results we have five projects which reached the final evaluations. So we lost two projects in the first coding phase due to different reasons. Not really the optimization I would say but yeah five projects is still quite an achievement and yeah all projects are pretty good. We generated a lot of content so there are something there are 12 technical blog posts on Jenkins.io. There are also personal blog posts. There are blog posts from other communities which participate in GSOC for example. There is also another contributor from CVC Rama who will be participating next week in the recordings. So yeah we generated some bars and lots of useful features because yeah things like Bitlap multi-branch source was one of the top voted tickets in Jenkins data and yeah finally it's delivered. So yeah I think overall it's a good result. There is still a process and feedback. There is an open retrospective document and if you have any feedback please put it there. Then I think we will just start preparing for the GSOC 2020 and there is also mentor summit ahead so there will be a lot of some more events in the next months. Yeah I think that's wildly successful this year so both in terms of people participating projects and then the way people have engaged with the events and written blog posts. So yeah congratulations to everybody involved. One note that GSOC helps us not only to involve the students it also helps on both the mentors and make them a big one in the community. So this year we had all of previous GSOC students participated as mentors and yeah we also had the mentors who became Orkan means and the project in the community now. So yeah I think it's a really positive thing for the Jinx as an organization. Yeah and I like that succession planning just move everybody up. Well that's what we do. Perfect and you have the event where all the mentors will get together and go together. This time it happens in Germany. Oh okay so no visa is to worry about for some. Yeah no visa well I've got visa approved to you. No I'm just waiting for the passport to come back. Good luck with that. But yeah so regarding mentor summit it will be me and Mark Jackson for going there as the delegates. There is also a lottery so maybe we'll have more people go into the event let's see. But yeah the main piece it's pretty helpful with regards to collaboration between communities and also yeah there is a lot to study because even if it's called mentor summit basically it's rather somewhat for community it's for Orkan means because it's on conference and everything is about it. Yeah that's I've had sounds good things about it. I was going to just mention um so I'm just writing for outreach the next period is coming up very quickly so we have to register the community by September 5th if we want to participate and I spoke to Matt Zicker and he's happy to mentor but what he says is the audit log program project which had been the previous one for the last couple of rounds that's more or less come to the end of its usefulness as a project for interns to work on so he needs he was suggesting if we could find any more ideas or other things that would work which sort of need project suggestions so I was wondering is that something I know GSOC normally does a lot of brainstorming is there somewhere we can look for a pool of previously suggested ideas yes just second post the link basically we can look not only for project ideas we can also look for mentors in GSOC especially for the winter period because there is no so there is some activities for GSOC during the winter but uh not coding and the mentors are more or less free so you can navigate to the link we provided there was something like 27 project ideas some of them are well processed some of them already got potential mentors so they go some feedback so yeah we could use it as a source of projects for reaching yeah basically yeah I will say you say it is a pool for community bridge great one of the leftover stories was about machine learning projects because he really wanted to run this project we had a great mentor team we weren't so successful with regards to student applications so this project is ready to go in a week if you find good students and the way to run that and there are other projects in such state perfect okay yeah I'll start off with that one and then anything else that um yeah if there's any other ones you think you should take a closer look at you can let me know we're definitely in the one to two projects and I think I might like to try to do a documentation one again but against the subject to mentors just because we can widen the scope although yeah again I'm not sure it necessarily markets that well to specific docs folks so regarding the documentation we have a documentation seek meeting tomorrow and I already put a topic about looking for community documentation for you all taking the timing we can do it for outreach so basically for community bridge you don't need to start to try it away so we can apply and see whether we can get students in outreach great perfect okay anything else from anyone comments on google some of code outreachy is there a plan for it should it's respective um let me find out from Matt I think they're wrapping up now I'm meeting with some of the interns as well so we still have some one-to-one schedule just for me to get their feedback and then maybe just a general mentors and everybody can can do that question will be good to do I don't think we've formally done it in the past but I think we can get better at that if you do that perfect perfect so moving on this is going to make a quick question quick comment on kind of social media and a twitter account so I had once upon a time I would do these monthly updates which would just consist of me asking Tyler to download the twitter analytics and then just pulling out some key numbers and posting them to the mailing list but that's just kind of fallen off the radar but I just thought I'd take a moment to highlight the number of followers there but it's something which would be good to kind of revive at some point and similarly for other channels like we chat I think Linux Rick was doing things there and then potentially if there's anybody interested or we can nudge anybody who wants to kind of help out with that I'd love to help enable people to get access so yeah I would like to say the word and I think yeah I already commented in the chat yeah I'm not a native speaker but at least I can follow these three tweets etc especially in the european time zone and the redundant content writing they can cooperate to make it better yeah um so maybe I think the way to do it we have to officially kind of do it just through the governance meeting so I could add it to the agenda for next time well yeah when we have next time governance but basically we have jeb and I believe that this jeb for twitter and this is jeb 13 it's only if they be the delegate we don't really need governance meeting to get it approved we need to be able to delegate to process it yes which in this case is Tyler so maybe I could just ask him to yeah I think it does say in the jeb that we just have to show someone who's been doing contributions and then get get general buy-in and then if everybody approves it then he'll enable it so exactly so maybe different delegates are in okay um and then the Facebook group I don't know anything about that Facebook or LinkedIn who has access and if we should try to revive them yeah so there was one contributor sorry I forgot the name so basically there is a Jenkins Facebook group which has um well quite a lot of subscribers just second they'll find it and for a while there was manual reposting of youtube videos blog posts there but it doesn't want to happen so I wonder whether we could at least set up some arithmetic one so just a second yeah I found the group yeah I don't know listen do you do you know anyone who has access to those no no I don't yeah I have to track that down yeah so there is only one person who has access I believe that I got some kind of access when I was helping these reposting events there yeah yeah so it's Malcolm Brooks who is a manager of this group so yeah reach out to him yeah if you could just set up automatic reposts for Twitter or whatever it would be also a nice start yeah just yeah some additional about some hits okay and then just finally last one is just the gems an event mailing list I think we saw uh with some activity but I listened myself yeah um so I now I'm kind of out of the water from San Francisco at this point so I I'm trying to catch up but um I went into uh the meetup our meetup account last night and I think things has changed a whole lot and I couldn't figure out you know uh some of the things that I was able to do previously I couldn't figure out where to get things done so like you know um Edson wanting me wanting us to make him the organizer I just couldn't figure out how to get that done and so I I chased it up with Max and he's like yeah I know how to get it done and so I met with Max this morning I said where where is it that I'm missing and he's like oh he's not seeing the same thing so they they changed a lot of stuff in meetup so I'm setting a meeting up with the folks at meetup.com for them to walk us through what has changed and you know how we can do the things that we were able to do before now we can't figure out where to find you know how to do it but then also um I will be um I should be able to figure out how to give you Tracy access after I meet with them so that's sorry that's like a long-winded answer. Actually for that meeting um it's would it be possible to find out if we can pick up the conversation about moving it over because uh when Skyler last had an interaction so we were talking about you know how do we move all these meetups uh to a cdf manage meetup pro account and it it was either you know can we hand over our pro account and try you know give that to cdf or the cdf start up its own meetup pro account and then we just move the jams so I think in both cases but I don't really understand one of the things that Skyler reported back was either way there's an impact for the jams because the the URL changes or something like that but I didn't really understand the specifics and I didn't understand if it was the case for both things like you know are we we want it to be as seamless as possible but if there is a cost to moving it we wanted to understand what that is so we can communicate it clearly yeah um so if there's anything you could find out about that because I think that's the only thing preventing us from going ahead uh with we're doing the move and I'd love to do that as soon as possible okay so then um so if we transition over to cdf um so for so right now if I was to go to the meetup.com for Jenkins it will be meetup.com slash pro slash Jenkins as the URL yeah so we'll probably need that changed so then what about all of the um the branding so I guess that would need to change to cdf as well yeah so I expect the way it's going to go is that cdf are going to set up their own meetup pro account but we want to then move the jams across yeah um either wholesale or in consultation with the owners but either way I think the cloudbies one we then kind of mark it to be deprecated uh so we give it an end of life date so only people who if the jams are dead then nobody moves them they don't go anywhere they just kind of go but um ideally if we could just move them all across and just tell people this is happening so they don't really have to care but I don't know if that's reasonable to expect right what do you think all right so one is these moving accounts there should be no problem as long as the the link redirects work but the branding topic which was brought up by Alyssa is quite different so something in the beginning of someone's color took action items to reach out to jam organizers to see whether they would be willing to the brand to continue delivery meetups etc but I would guess it has never happened but that's like what Alyssa's talking about it's just the the landing page for the pro account but that wouldn't affect the branding for each jam could stay a jam if they wanted to so yeah if we just talk about the encoderment then please let's better define was that the case Alyssa like the branding you were talking about um yeah so well that's I can see so just just the the landing page and I guess also the individual pages as well what do we want to do with that so just do we just want to leave that alone as is and I think we want to give people the choice um so they can choose to up level uh to to be continuous delivery meetup or they could stay jams but yeah so this page would change and then this would be cdf but any individual page for example that one um they should be able to keep it exactly as is unless they want to change so if they want to change um then they can so like this this would keep its logo okay but then in addition we would you could also have a tecton area meetup or spinnaker area meetup and it all be kind of shown in this one map it won't be a problem so in the worst case you can just uh at the Jenkins to the search field and they get all Jenkins meetups so sharing the same account will be perfectly fine so so you would do that and then we'd have a report to meetup okay yeah let's try and push ahead with that so if you could kick off those conversations Alyssa and then once if you think the the answers are kind of sound pretty okay then we can connect probably our meetup account exact with the cdf folks one uh and just connect the dots to get that done okay yep i'll let you know yeah i don't know if it's if we did have to get each meetup organizer to actually move the group themselves i don't know how good or bad that is it would be good because you then see which meetups are actively engaged but it would be bad if we just sort of lost a whole bunch but then again if they're not active maybe it's not the worst thing in the world yeah so i i think this is a good time just to revisit the active ones and the non-active ones um so i think this is gonna require some dedicated time and just going through that list um it doesn't make sense for us and unless somebody wants to step up and be the organizer right and if not that it doesn't make sense for us to keep paying for this it's quite expensive like for for ghost meetups uh the what tracy ghost i said ghost meetups as such meetups where just don't run events and yeah have left because yeah i guess it does incur costs plenty of them so the only thing that you if you consider deleting them when organizers step down there are automatic messages being sent to jump participants to see whether somebody wants to keep them running right so if we could do something like that before duration is two week or one month in a period then it would be really helpful yeah yeah that's that's the plan that i i would take you know i just i wouldn't want to just delete it because a lot of these has you know quite a good number of members um in each group so i'm hoping that somebody will be willing to step up but you know if nobody was willing to do it then we need to delete it okay great um yeah so then just coordinate where we need to update how you start the meetups and just redirect that to yeah i think there's a cdf page already that had been started for it i don't know if i'll be able to find it so if folks want to review this as well uh it's the first version of um once it's set up is that linked anything but this would talk about the new process for people joining so this is i think in standard how next foundation run them so any feedback uh we should get those out to our community to see if they have any comments i think the main difference uh was here they expect you to create your own jam and then ask for it to be part of the account rather than getting like i think how we do with the Jenkins and correct me if i'm wrong Alyssa people email and say please could you create me a jam mm-hmm yeah this one is they create the jam they run an event then they asked for it to be added to to the to the pro account okay yeah because we created it under the pro account and then um and then we make the the member organizer so i don't know how it would work if the individual page is already created then links to the pro but i can check with meetup there is an easy way to transition meetups and i think that cd foundations approach is actually pretty good because what we experienced but yeah there are many people requesting meetups but in many cases there have never been meetups in meetup groups we created uh if a person is a organizer's first meetup even if cdf helps with promotion by repeat or whatever the result of the kind of commitment are there so yeah i think it's much better yeah okay so let's promote that and then i think also we'll i think we'll be asking the board to um enable something like you know a $50 swag voucher once you join to get stickers and everything sent so i think it's good that people can show they've already been running them before they just kind of ask for the swag yeah so um so there is a sole uh request a request for a sole jam in korea okay should we have them follow this process or so does it cost people anything to start a new meetup it doesn't if there's few members is that right i thought that was the case but i don't know if it's still the case like your credit card and basically there is some base period but then you start paying unless you close your meetup at least that's what i've seen last time i was creating meetup outside jenkins meetup okay i thought it used to be free for i thought less than 50 people but that was a long time ago when i did it so let me find out i'll go find out just to see oh like do you um do you own more than one meetup groups yes i probably own something like eight so i so when i looked into this which is a long time ago if you had like one meetup group then it would be free okay yeah so let me double check on that but maybe we just asked them to uh start the group and mention we're doing this transitioning i don't know um yeah maybe i don't have a good answer now i feel um yeah so let me let me see what i can when i talk to the meetup people um see what they say and i'll respond to the uh true quest for the korean jam yeah so yeah one not only commented that in october they will be october first i've already started reaching out to some meetup organizers to see whether they would like to host local events so even there are disruptive changes it would be rather preferable to have them before october or after october okay yeah yeah so it's a minor thing but yeah i don't expect us to have many meetups maybe five good okay yeah let's see if we can drive that forward uh in the next few weeks right anything else then next meeting um i guess no i expected to be in two weeks at this time uh until we agree uh what the date and week of the of the apex friendly one will be okay thanks very much everybody thanks jaycee bye everybody okay thanks all i'll stop the recording and post it later over to youtube thank you all thanks thanks so much


for the kind introduction. In the next 20 minutes, I want to talk with you about artificial intelligence in the European Union. And yeah, as said, I'm representing the Free Software Foundation Europe.  And yeah, we do believe that this is done with the help of Free Software. And if I can click my slides, I would then go to the next one. Ah, there we go. Yeah. And I think also learning from this conference is that Free Software is pretty much everywhere these days. And this also means that Free Software is a lot on AI. And there will be more free software in AI in the next years. And that's why we need to think about it. So we need to think about how to regulate it and how Free Software can help to transform the world into a better place than here. And therefore, we came up with some criteria. And first of all, we do believe that AI should or must respect fundamental rights. Also, it need to be transparent. It need to be fair and accessible. And in the end, it should not discriminate us, but it should help us. So and with these criteria, we come up to the conclusion that we need free software, so open source for this. So because only with free software, we can guarantee that we can at least check if fundamental rights are protected. For example, because we have transparent code and we can also check if people are discriminated because of the transparent code. But there are also other reasons. Free Software helps to foster innovation. Also, a learning in general whenever we talk about free software open source from this conference, because first of all, we don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. And with free software, we have the right to modify the software so we can build on what's already out there. And thus, yeah, we can be quicker with innovation and that's why we also do believe that for AI we should use free software open source. And also, this is also a learning from, I think, the corona crisis that transparency also leads to trust. Just think about the tracing apps we had or still have. And only due to the fact that the code was transparent, we could check how our health data, for example, have been handled. And these transparency lead to the fact that people trust the software and use it. And therefore, we need transparent software and this is guaranteed with free software or open source licenses. So when we talk about regulating AI, then we also need to talk about the current proposal of the European Union, the commission proposed a law on regulating AI. Unfortunately, there's no saying on open source in it, but we have also the European Parliament and the European Parliament started to amend to the commission proposal. And for the European Parliament, open source free software plays a role. And what they did until now, so from the jury committee, this is the legal committee of the European Parliament, they submitted the text and they want an exclusion for open source AI systems until those systems are put into service or are made available on the market. And I think that's a very good idea because we all know that free software projects sometimes or hopefully most of the times are developed openly. This means you can see and follow every step of the development, but also this means that there might be times when there shouldn't be any liability to the ones who contribute or who think about bringing such a concept into life, but as soon as there's money involved, then there should be also liability involved. And this is something which is kind of different to proprietary software. And this concept has been like with the AI regulation first introduced in the European lawmaking process. And I will tell you later about this, also we continue in other upcoming proposals, not only on AI. And this is very important that the European Union, especially the European Parliament, understood in the meantime that there are advantages of free software and open source software and that there also needs to be a specific regulation around it. First, we've seen exclusion in the copyright directive for co-chairing platforms. Now we see it in the AI regulation in terms of liability. And we had a very strong position from the European Parliament on AI in general. So this is not connected to the lawmaking which is taking place, but this was just like a resolution by the European Parliament. And that was also highly interesting because they said that the principle of public money, public code, PMPC, should also apply to AI. So public money, public code means whenever governments, public bodies and so on, so whenever there's public money involved, then the results should also be made publicly available under a free and open source license. So we are running a campaign on this and called public money, public code. And the principle, this idea was put into this resolution of the European Parliament. So they do believe that whenever public bodies are using or procuring AI, then it should be released under a free and open source software license because for the reasons of transparency, which leads to trust, but also in terms of innovation that we can or that we don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Also, they refer to the open source strategy of the European Commission. So a couple of years ago, the European Commission also came to the idea that it might be a good idea to release software under a free and open source software license because this is not only on AI, but I mean administrations all over the world are doing more or less every time the same. So there's no need to procure software for every single administration, but it's way better to collaborate, share costs and expertise, modify the software and also as taxpayers' money, our money is involved, it should also be given to us in the end and we should also have access to the software. And also the European Parliament said that free software is good for innovation, though they understood and they have seen in the last years that it's a very good idea to use public funds and invest in free software because it not only helps administrations to save money, but also like to boost innovation and thus industry and business. The bad thing about this resolution is it's not legally binding, but the good thing about it, all of these principles have been voted with a huge majority. So there have been only a few members of the European Parliament voted against it. So all big groups coming from left to right voted in favor of this idea. So we have a huge majority in general in the European Parliament when it comes to the idea of investing in free software and this is also true then for AI and this will help us a lot. And another interesting file which just like was released in the beginning of your year is the Declaration on Digital Rights. Again, proposed by the European Commission, but this paper should lead like digital rights of the European Union for the next decade. And unfortunately, there have been only references to the Berlin and Tallinn Declaration from the Commission in this paper and these both declarations, already the member states agreed on investing more in free software, whatever this means, like what is more, right? Is one euro more already more enough? And here again, the European Parliament amended to this position of the European Commission and they say that they see free software as a way to ensure transparency in the use of algorithms and AI and they are highlighting the importance of promoting trustworthy standards and whenever possible open source standards. So whatever this technically means, so I mean we have to maybe modify the wording here a bit but the European Parliament understood the importance of transparent AI and also want to bring this into the declaration of digital rights. So even if you won't find a concrete saying on AI and free software in the AI Act itself, there are surrounding documents these days, mainly amended by the European Parliament, highlighting the importance of free software and trying to make sure that there are also funds allocated to the free software projects out there dealing with the AI. And also what is super interesting is that beside of AI is the Cyber Resilience Act and with the Cyber Resilience Act, the European Commission just like also released the paper and there they now understood itself after the amendments from the European Parliament that the upcoming laws should include sayings on free software and here the European Commission understood that free software is an enabler for innovation and research and this is also highly interesting because now the European Commission also comes up with these texts and we see that it's going to be more and more important in the European Union that they have a saying on free software and that they include parts on free software open source in the legislation and that will help us a lot not only to have more free software but that there are also funds allocated to this and this is basically mainly what we are trying to do to lobby in the European Union but also in the member states that there are yeah, more laws taking notes and remarks on the special needs and the special structure of free software and that there can't be like a general saying on all software projects but we need to have specific sayings on free software and open source as well. So what's ahead of us? So in the yeah, pretty much next month the European Parliament will discuss these positions with the European Council which are the member states of the European Union and here in the member states I would say they are like not so much into it like the European Parliament so it will be super interesting to see how these negotiations will turn out in the end and this is also a call for you so whenever you talk to your local governments strengthen the position of the European Parliament because this will help us in these negotiations between the Council and the European Parliament so member states also need to understand as the Commission just recently did that free software plays an important role not only on AI but on all digital files but especially these days in the AI Act maybe also in the AI Liability Act the Product Liability Act which have been also just recently released the Digital Rights Declaration but also now here in the Cyber Resilience Act and by the end of the year hopefully we will first have the Declaration being voted on and then afterwards in the next year we will work again on the AI Act or continue to work on the AI Act and then also Cyber Resilience Act and AI Liability Act and what we are doing from FSFE is to use this mentioned campaign Public Money, Public Code so four years ago we just came up with this campaign not with the ideas or the idea is I would say way longer around but with this campaign we are reaching out to decision makers all over Europe and try to convince them that we want to have legislation in place that publicly financed software developed for the public sector to be made publicly available under a free and open source software license or to say it in short if it's public money it should be public code as well so this campaign had more than 30,000 signatures so far from individuals but even more important also a lot of organizations signed this more than 200 organizations from all over Europe and not only like the usual suspects like I don't know Wikimedia and the Open Knowledge Foundation and so on but also it's a widespread campaign which is supported by the middle of the society let's say like this and also what's super interesting and what I at least have never seen before by administrations itself so for example the city of Barcelona signed this campaign administrations from Sweden from Germany signed this campaign next there will be an administration from Luxembourg signing this campaign so they're also already administration behind this campaign and promote this idea and say that it's a very good idea also for their work to go into direction of public money public code and we've seen not only in the European Parliament these votes and the resolution I just mentioned but we have especially on the local level like municipalities, city councils and stuff like this so there we see a lot of progress and they understand that it's a good idea to collaborate with other municipalities with other administrations as they're doing more or less the same over and over again so that's why they should share their procurement procedures for example so to procure software together or to divide it into parts so one municipality procures one part another one the other part so and by thus they can also see that after a very short time they can save a lot of money and also the products way more tailored to their specific needs and this is particularly important because the four freedoms of free software to use, study, share and improve help also administrations we've just recently had a debate about digital serenity yeah so that we are able to not run into a Vendor log ins but to have the control over the technology and this is also for administrations very important and to be able to modify the software quickly again here we've seen this with the corona tracing apps for example so it's possible to have a cross border communication and the only thing which needed to be changed more or less was a translation it was a language thing so that my Spanish RALA COVID app also works with the German corona tracing app so that there is exchange of data but without interfering with privacy and at the same time we've been able to whenever we have seen bugs to quickly fix them and we didn't have to go to a vendor and ask them please do this for us and then maybe the vendor tells us no we want extra money for this or however and so on so we are able as administrations as society to modify the software to our tailored needs and that's why administrations also understand for their daily work that is so important to use more free software and yeah here you can see some of the organizations who signed this and this is also a call for you so individually please feel free to sign this campaign it helps us a lot we have seen it again during the AI Act but also in general meetings with decision makers that this campaign is a game changer in terms of lobbying but also if you are a representing organization please feel free to reach out to us and even better if you are representing an administration or know somebody from administration please use this campaign to explain the concept of free software and why it's important that public administrations should invest in this and just to give you a last number on this so up to 27% of the revenue of IT companies these days are made by public administration so just imagine how our world would look like if we invest all of these funds into free software and not proprietary software anymore thanks a lot