Well, let me just welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm so glad to see you're here today We have a really interesting topic for an experimental session today I'm very excited about and I'm really looking forward to it This is a scenario exercise where we're going to be exploring What might happen if the American presidential election in November 2024? gets unsprung and gets out of control and We're doing that to examine how it might impact higher education and how academics might respond to it Now to do this again We just walk you through our timeline the basic idea is I'm going to introduce the scenario And then give you a chance to respond to it both overall and also in small groups And then we're going to adjust the scenario take it further another month And then ask you to respond to how that might work And as we do this Please assume that you are in the role you currently play if you're a president of student Biologist or whatever or the role you'd like to play next year So if you're in a job hunting right now or thinking about a promotion Think about that role and how this would impact you And I'd like you to also take a look at how this might impact you practically But also in a visionary way So don't be afraid of looking at the big picture in the sector as a whole as well as thinking about how this might impact say your learning management system And you must work with everybody else here because we have wonderful people Brilliant people with a wide range of ideas and backgrounds. So please feel free to collaborate as we go So to start off What I'd like you to imagine is that it is early November 2024 the presidential election has been held and the results are a mess There's no clear decisive outcome Both sides both Biden and Trump claim electoral victory That different states have put forward different slates for the Electoral College And those are competing and fighting each other in court and online There are protests in cities across the US that are growing both protests from the Democrats and from Republicans And those protests are growing more intense as uncertainty continues to unfold. There's also quite a bit of digital Everything people are sharing their opinions online courts are publishing opinions people are making videos And there's also a great deal of misinformation going on and people aren't sure how to tell what's actually happening Court cases are occurring as people are suing each other left and right Now within higher education and this is where you come in. We just give you a few things to start from We see many academics making public statements And that is everything from presidents to professors to staff to students and the statements appear everything everywhere from Traditional media and newspapers and television to tick-tock to all kinds of digital media We're seeing more and more student protests and those will of course tend towards the Democratic side But not exclusively and these protests sometimes clash with each other on the same campus The organization turning point has been calling out individual professors for accusing them Either being disloyal or causing strife politically And they've been doxing some of those professors and trying to share evidence of them There's also growing pressure for universities and professional associations to take sides in the conflict to issue Statements that call out for us to do one or other things So my first question to you and this is for everybody as whole is to ask What questions do you have about this scenario? What would you like to learn more about and again either hit the shunt box or on the bottom of the screen that white strip Click the question box to type in a Q&A What questions do you have about how this actually occurs and takes place and Hello to people who have just joined us. I didn't get a group before Hello to Ellen and Fort Collins. Oh, I'm sorry. Things are dry there. I'm just here in California There's been a ton of rain. There's the badly needed Hello, Chris and Santa Fe and Robin Sullivan always good to see you Chris says we've always had we already had a preview. This is quite true that in 2020 especially January 6th. We had examples of how this might occur Christopher Nelson asked a really good question in the scenario our votes still being counted in some states It's already done in other states there are recounts going on Hello, Roxanne from Connecticut Wendy says how the networks call the election very very good question. All the networks have Concluded who they think has won most of them have concluded that Biden has won Something that Trump has won both site polling data exit polling data and whatever information they can find Meredith asked Heather an act of violence Very few so far and violence against property not against people Vanessa suggests we point my call field this informations are hanging a second. We're coming to that and We also have one question coming up right here Seth Fierne asks, what is the president Biden doing about the chaos calling out the National Guard? not yet they Are multiple lawsuits, but a lot of this is happening at the state level And we haven't seen any immediate changes to federal Action Seth also asked what is Congress doing if anything right now some in the House of Representatives are calling for that body to determine the election Some are calling out of course Praising their their own candidate on both sides So the House of Representatives and to a lesser extent the Senate are both kind of microcosms of the nation Joseph asks because chat you BT is still functioning. Yes in this scenario Please assume the full range of generative AI is available everything from Gemini from Google to Microsoft's co-pilot to hugging faces open source alternatives to Metta's Lama to chat you BT, etc Phil Katz our American historian asks a really good question How many members of Congress are also in disputed elections the state officials? Some members of Congress just a handful right now John Hollenbeck asks I'm assuming Trump is acting like Trump or Biden is reacting to him So far although Biden is also charging Trump with Causing election chaos Chris has quoted Elon and Taylor said A Good question. I don't have a good answer for a Elon by Taylor. I assume you mean Taylor Swift Christopher asks our nation is threatening to see from the US not yet David asks are a potential government shut down at the moment perhaps the budget on the brink not right now But it's going to make negotiations for the next crisis much much harder Ah and Seth asks another great question. Is there evidence of interference misinformation by outside actors? There is no evidence. There are competing claims And we are seeing Republicans claim China is intervening on behalf of Biden administration And we're seeing Democratic claims that Russia is intervening on behalf of Trump both neither nation neither China nor Russia has Admitted to doing this and it is still early days with a lot of back-and-forth about this Joseph asks how many seats in Congress have independence one zero right now? Roberta asks if it's possible to share the scenario again in the chat. She was called away Sure, I think I can share a little bit of that right now This is going to be a little ungainly but it's going to be in a form of Just text so here. I'm just going to copy and paste this in or better and tell me if you can read it And everybody else can also help right now And we're better. I'm putting the scenario, but also some of the initial Higher education responses You're most welcome All right now. I'd like to ask you all together If you could think right now Oh, sorry one more question has come up and really really nice one from Richard Whack What parallels or lessons learned might we draw from the hanging Chad election controversy from the 2000 election to lessons? one is that People are looking hard at the physical mechanics of voting and some of the recounts as well as charges of vote tampering But also the role the Supreme Court multiple court cases are flowing upwards in that direction Doug the markets are really really uneasy Chris the Supreme Court has not ruled anything right now now How do you respond? How do you react to this? Imagine yourself either again in your current role or in the role you'd like to have How does this play out in your work? Think for example about your professional identity your professional associations think about your institution if it's a campus or a library or Museum think about how you'd interact with other people Chris in the chat says that as a teacher. This is a teaching moment And here actually, let me just quickly fix up the Screen here This is a teaching moment And I assume by Chris that means you're going to see a lot of Teach-ins and different faculty in different areas notably policy sign government working on this Christopher Nelson says as an administrator. This is for the moment a calm down and carry on moment So keep everything Christopher from me keep everything operating. No sudden reactions Wendy Williams as this faculty developer. It's also a teaching moment for helping faculty discuss disinformation where their students That's excellent. Wendy. Do you do you see librarians and technologists playing a role in that? Very good. Very good. Those are two very very important points Christopher Nelson, if you could just say why that might happen I'm sorry why why the keep calm and carry on idea John Hollenbeck says he is an election official. I think it's called in That they which is that it's interesting. So some academics are gonna actually be election officials in different levels, too Chris adds. It's a good time to engage citizenship. Yeah, can you say a bit more about that Chris? Joellen Parker as usual has a brilliant comment donors are using their giving depressed institution tick positions They prefer so imagine Republican donors who are asking their campuses to take a pro Trump stance Imagine Democratic donors asking the opposite very very good Chris that's a good point. What does it mean to be a citizen in this moment? Michelle Miller says I focus on my students and mostly on how I can keep them safe to be realistic about their Capacity and keep thing moving forward to their goals So again, this is Michelle as a professor here.  Very very good point. Very good point. Thank you, Michelle Ed Finn says he agrees with Christopher and Wayne This is a time to talk through the scenarios and through possibilities Professional whether faculty navigating as a key Ed I can't tell if you're talking about our session right this moment or about November But either way, I think it works Steve Brown's an election official New Hampshire given the state's purple status. Yeah, you might be working some long cold nights Phil Katz asks what about public higher education institutions? Are they insulated from the political persuasions of their governors? This is a very good question. So what happens to pick an example say Texas? If faculty or administrators staff or deans or students take positions at University of Texas Austin For example, how does that connect with the governor there? David Stone mentions international students seem to become uncertain about their return next semester questions about Course enrollment next term a good point very very good point Schumler asks, too Is there a responsibility of if there's a possibility of violence? We'd have to go to remote instruction Then we have practice in doing that. Thanks to COVID After the recount he's retiring and moving to Portugal I can I can see that I can see that Joseph Robert Schump is worried about the mental state of his students So must open a dialogue or ground rules deescalate high emotions John Joseph, that's a great idea and I'm wondering for you and for everybody else Who on campus might assist with that? Who might you turn to for help in trying to help that work? All right It sounds like a lot of ideas here Chris says he is as an online teacher COVID was productive time usually a PhD students Good point good point Brent Presley has that if institutions take a position on the election when they shouldn't there could be employee departures Quite true. So we should anticipate some walkouts or some resignations Roxanne as usual has a really really important point She says socials will explode the information all ways need to experience videos image audio possible disinformation Misinformation factual information. It might be one of the best teaching. I'm learning experience times So just think about for example using if if open ai's tool Sora becomes available To have people generate a clip President Biden saying he's resigning or a clip of Canada Trump saying that he concedes the race for example very very good point Phil Katz as I can imagine college is in an awkward position after encouraging students to vote They may feel a need to tamp down student activism after the election Good point that goes back to the keep calm and carry on so we have lots of energy going in lots of activism lots of excitement and Then the excitement is turning sour. So trying to tamp that down That's a very very good point Joe Lambert says he's studying the method and approach of the French resistance to develop a game for the underground networks on campuses Indeed, that's an excellent way Thinking about ways of doing that Joe. I think there's at least one tabletop game on the French resistance Can't think the name offhand. I'm a dwarf Consulting Christopher Nelson as at this time the explosion information will be filled with generative AI stuff Very much so so we can imagine for example books and Amazon appearing right away generated entirely by text bots We can imagine blog posts. We mentioned social media of all kind Chris adds students and faculty might have a hard time focusing on work This is a really good point. We're all this is going on. How can you do that? Steve Brown wonders if students will be able to or be interested in class Again, they may be focused in the election of possible futures or as class of refuge for some So imagine if we have students or faculty or both asking for time off from classes Meredith Goldsmith and some faculty members are feeling unsafe a good reason. They're already afraid. They might be in professional jeopardy Again, let me just let me just put that on on the screen here Absolutely, I mentioned one possibility here of The Conservative group turning point doxing professors so you can imagine turning point also following Practice from the year 2001 of coming to the list of disloyal faculty or faculty Outreachers you could imagine groups like lives of tiktok trying to find more examples of that which could lead to threats Michelle Miller is worried about the side picking dynamic a lot And trying to steer clear of that to be honest not necessarily picking on election side, but more institutions departments faculty being pressed to make a formal statements And that's gonna be a hard thing to do to be neutral I mean so, you know, you have two very very passionate sides and then to try to be neutral in order again to Keep operations going and to help people think this helps students think this through John Hallenbeck would expect a oops. I'm sorry Just lost it would expect a decision to come within a week of the election outcome Then a truly dangerous time happens John. That's coming up in the second part of the scenario Phil Katz asks a really a solid question. Are any students members the national guardians? They get called into the streets quite true in fact in my office and are my classroom in Georgetown down the hall literally is National Guard office right there Vanessa Vales is although they should not be inoculated. Sorry. Oh, they should be inoculated Academics are not automatically immune to this information Quite true. So think about what happens in campus when a professor or administrator or staff member shares a Facebook post or a tweet or a tiktok video that is disinformation. How do you respond to that? Phil Katz asks if colleges encourage or discourage students were engaging in politics in the streets So by street, do you do you mean off campus? I'm assuming you do Joseph Robertson adds that department heads and deans can help facilitate a town hall I prefer counselors and DEI VP's for this, but we just got those folks decommissioned and gagged here in this wonderful state I'm sorry to hear about that last point, but a town hall might be something That's a really really good way to get information out bring people together, but it could also be a place for political statements and perhaps more friction Roxanne adds academic stress and anxiety will increase even more than the present time Quite true quite true, which will have all kinds of effects of mental health back in and performance and physical well Ed Finn responds to Chris by saying this is where faculty developers can help focusing at least for faculty by reinforcing the importance to education and Helping students process and we're conversation today after the 2016 election of the faculty member It's a good point at if I could back in 2001 fall after September 11th attack I helped at the campus where I was teaching out to a bunch of faculty get together into a kind of Improv continuous teaching every week with a bunch of students Faculty and staff. We had the faculty from different departments. He's a biologist talking about anthrax We had political scientists talking about geopolitics a law professor talking about the legal dimensions and so on Chris says that his first term in college was during the invasion of Cambodia in Kent State Classes were chaotic poorly attended Chris. Wow Can you add any more from that in terms of historical echo Ellen Paul says I'd be checking the emotional health of my students Possibly outside of class good point Ellen and again I'd ask the question who might be able to assist you in that thinking about your own health and your own energy reserves Seth Thierney says as an instructor at American University overseas I would ask the president to organize at least weekly open sessions on how the American electoral system works and updates in the situation Might invite the American ambassador to speak to students great ideas. That's great ideas Joseph Robertson would add news. Sorry would also feed all newscasts to AI and ask it for help to locate this information Oh, very interesting idea. Just if you try the Google Gemini double check where it takes its AI output against Google searches Vanessa says it's going dark. I wonder anyone else here old enough to remember it Kent State Good question a good question. Vanessa. I mean think about how much historical memory we have within academia and in society as a whole what lessons we can learn from that Good friend of mine at 18 was in the National Guard and sent out to patrol a street corner in Washington DC after Martin Luther King was shot Will Emerson says most institutions should have policies for deploying National Guard troops I had many students deployed during the troops urgent Iraq a good point. Will again We there's a lot we can learn from we're not reinventing everything from scratch Vanessa was five miles away. Wow, Jess Ed Finn adds that town halls are good, but also one-on-one conversations going to be crucial. Yes, although they don't scale They are crucial Roxanne Raskin says debriefing and always imaginable should not be optional but required How might you do that Roxanne? How might that work? Ellen Paul will remind students that we have more in common than we might have through our political differences I would urge them to connect with others Great insight or great desire gallon Lauren Kelly. Hello Lauren would be concerned about violence outbreaks on campus particularly if citizens decide to take matters into their own hands Upset over the outcome of the election. Is institution prepared to keep everyone safe? That's a great point Lauren again emerging here. It seems to be a dual theme of emotional safety, but also physical safety Joseph Robertson says not yet Phil Katz gets meta is this conversation really gets the tension between student treating students as full citizens by age and birthright Versus students understood as unformed civic actors who must be nurtured protected by colleges And that's a really good point Phil. That's a really really good point Hopefully that's a productive tension Chris says that he was that art. He was at Chapman College and students took over the student union to organize And we alert women did not like to be told to make the coffee. Yes But that's interesting thought to imagine Two thoughts there one is students not just being Part of teachings and in town halls perhaps organizing to take steps Maybe protesting at larger scales and of course divides Within student populations over issues of identity and justice Joseph Robertson Turns to a technology angle and as a discord other closed social media should be used or could be used as communication to share news Interesting interesting design. I wondered to what extent How we can do that when the social media environment is so fragmented Vanessa says stepping outside the higher ed environment students staff and faculty can cooperate and distribute networks to educate and inform the public Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. This is where town gown and public intellectuals really come in And again, there are risks to that Our campus is ready to support faculty staff and students who do that Brent Presley. Hello Brent says most people retreat to their echo chamber They're listening to nothing but what they want to hear. Yeah. Yeah watching MSNBC your Fox and getting what you need to hear Following the people on social media that you want to hear from. Yes, the echo chamber is real Steve Brown says if one group takes over campus spaces with students the other side organize take those spaces back Good thinking good thinking Paul adds as soon he has a new local initiative I'll take a look at that link. Thanks Paul and John Holmbeck says the largest generator of conflict will be uncertainty of the results Well, John, you are right on this and let me take this a little bit further But thank you Paul. I appreciate that on local news so let's advance this to December and By December things are getting more and more out of hand Let me actually in big in this so you all can see this. This is by the way generated by AI as You can tell from the weird language on this by shows this in parks. It's a good visualization But also because it suggests the role AI might play So unrest continues to grow. There is no clear outcome yet And protesters across the country start to clash violently This happens in some of the usual spots you can think about say Portland, Oregon or Washington, DC, but also elsewhere Media coverage becomes more and more intense. It depicts and responds to these clashes And which may in part accelerate them by giving more evidence of outrages on both sides Now there is open talk by multiple states of seceding We have states like South Dakota and Texas which are talking about Seceding if Trump it does not win the election. We're seeing talk from blue states as well Of doing the same if Trump is certified to be from the president there are now outbreaks of violence between protesters and police and With more violence happening on the police side pictures of protesters being beaten of police being targeted by Molotov cocktails rocks and so on federal and state office buildings Suffer some attacks such as shooting graffiti bricks through windows and they're hardening up now putting up barriers of all kinds troops being called out to protect them The crisis worsens as the South Dakota and Texas National Guard Exchange fire with federal agents and by agents. I mean federal government officials, but also FBI agents And the president president Biden gets to call out the US military We see armed groups attacking state officials charging the state officials with Disobeying the will of the people We see military officials not many but some making very provocative statements about the necessity for maintaining Order and law and about what they might be able to do in order to bring that about The United States will economy is now in a great deal of freefall And this is having impact around the world from European Union to China to India to the developing world Well markets are in short in turmoil Now given all of that Given all of that How would you respond in your role again as a faculty member as a student as a staff member as a dean? trustee as a Librarian or as a curator and Again, if that's the role you currently have or the role that you would like to have I'd like to I'd like you to talk about this and then I'm gonna put you into some groups to talk about it amongst yourselves a bit Joseph Robertson says his online classes are taught in discord. It serves as a good emergency notification system Do you think Joseph and everybody else that learning management systems would fulfill that role? Ellen Paul would urge the administration to go fully remote for the next semester Ellen, you mean spring 2025 to be sure, but I hope some kind of safety normalcy She hopes to create some kind of safety and normalcy in my online classes Lauren Kelly asks a really good question. Is the college open? So interesting question if I turn that back to you Laura would be when would a college remain open and when would it close in this environment? Chris gets if I may a bit apocalyptic saying that this is a time for back-to-the-land and rural immigration I hope you but immigration to the countryside time to teach native plants and foraging Thank you Lauren is thinking about this. Well, if you're all thinking about this and thinking hard about this Learn there are curfews all over the place in different forms in different types Usually at the state or at the county level obedience to them is uneven enforcement varies of course from local police to National Guard and Some places don't have a curfew Will Emerson says I live in the country. I'm not sure we have room for everyone to go back to the land Yeah, yeah, the country can only support so many people Seth fear and he says a priority needs to be protecting the campus facilities So how do you do that Seth and everybody? How do you physically protect all of those facilities? Joellen Parker gets takes us to the academic apocalypse side of this enrollments plummet and Endowments do as well. So remember how many endowments are keyed to the stock market and investments as those markets are in free fall This is bad news for an endowment No one's getting paid and no one's paying tuition. Joellen. Do you think we'd see? Either tuition strikes openly or people who just don't think that the academic environment is worth supporting right now Or that the academic experience is degraded on a COVID or the immersion instruction Seth says not my job understood Seth. So for everybody else, it's an interesting question. How do you physically protect? physical campus facilities Michelle says good point many of my students are residents of or have ties to the Navajo nation which has its own policies and Can prevent them from coming or going which will need to accommodate very very good point Phil Katz asks is it's the right time to have a teaching about the revolutionary role of university students and say 19th century France the Russian Revolution came on square, etc I would add the V&E students in 1848 who basically took over that government Good idea Steve Brown says I'm thinking about Margaret Wheatley's invitation to create and hold space for Islands obscenity within the chaos. How would a university collaborate with a local community to create such an island? Great question Steve great question Joseph says ultimately I would reiterate with my students the term of office is only four years if it is by the anyway and encourage voter registration John Holbeck says we've been a reactive role this early stage keep those closest to us safe Maybe grouped together Brent Presley adds that with the economy tanking unemployment is spiking so in addition to election uncertainty There are financial security worries for many quite true Brent I think about students whose family get unemployed faculty whose spouses lose their jobs And how the overall decline of the economy and how that impacts the campus community as well Paul Asked us to think of institutional differences as Phil Katz said earlier How will the experience differ at universities and community colleges? It's a great point if we think of students who are residential versus a computer think about students who are there for research But also community colleges where they're deep ties the community Joseph says I would also be feeding people at this point and asking for others to join me in that effort like a campus food pantry Joseph Lawrence is just thinking what if colleges did close what happened international students staying in residence cells Aha great question. Do they get left alone or special cases made for them? Vanessa veils is how is this unrest affecting supply lines and basic services we take for granted? Quite true Vanessa. What a very very good point think for example, if we have a trucking strike And how that shuts down food coming into an area Shelly Wynance. Hello. Shelly says I think many faculty would be stressed and overwhelmed and looking to the campus to provide Helpful guidance for the all the campus community. I hope they would learn from Cove and get helpful info out to the campus quickly with resource services Shelly, who would take the lead on that? Do you think that that's a presidential task? Great great comment Steve Brown asked what role would hide inside a steering what in I think you mean in a higher education institution Have a mutual aid work. Steve. Do you mean mutual aid in emergency services or in some other sense? Chris says I fear the crisis would be a tipping point shameless plugs see the APF compass on collapse Chris Please share that link if you if you've got it there a Tipping point into what to Wendy Williams asks how would experience a different in public versus private universities? Being at a public school in a blue state would be more insulated interesting question. I imagine though I wonder how the red Citizens if you will when the your institution how they would react and how they'd feel Brent Presley as one of the two candidates is fanning the flames because as Alfer Pennyworth would say He looks to watch the world burn quite true, but Ed Finn points out that leadership is key here recognizing difference, but still encouraging civil behavior is important Steve says emergency services. Yeah, that's a good question I wonder how many faculty staff and students are cross-trained in the emergency services or have a role in that Can campuses play a role in say providing housing for distressed people Shelly one in says it needs to be a campus task force. You know campus admin leaders Which also has representatives from faculty staff and students Oh Ed Finn no problem that modeling civility while recognizing the need to protect physical and emotional safety This is good. I don't mean the situation is good. I mean all these responses are good. Let me give you quickly Five minutes in small groups to think about this I want to make sure that everyone gets to participate and I want to make sure you get Those who feel comfortable small groups get a chance to do so So I'm going to do this for five minutes and let's see how this goes again in your groups to Take this further think about your role and how you might respond But also think about how you responded to the November part and how that might play a role Let's report back. Let's see what people said What did you find? What did your group come up with? What did you determine? Vanessa let me just get a little closer to the To the mic see if that helps And if if you would like please hear me put this open podium up If if one of you from your groups can just click on the on the podium You can be brought up on stage right away or if you'd like to type in text into the q&a box Michelle miller says she appreciating the perspective of those the direct experience of the unarrested late 60s and early 70s So important so important to have that. I'm really glad to hear it Wendy Williams says maybe those of us who don't always have mic video enabled should be told you that in advance Oh shoot. Wendy. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Um, I'm I'm so sorry Well, I let's let's let's work with what we have right now And next time I'll absolutely do that. Thank you Um, so what else did you find? Uh, what else did your groups come up with? And I'll pick on people if you don't Vanessa wants to send Robert to the podium Oh, that's easy. We can do that I can pick on him right now Uh, is that Roberto, uh, Vanessa or is that Joseph Roberts? And while Vanessa is answering that and picking who gets to be up How about the rest of you? Well, he does have a great beard, but uh, I can't find that Robert right now, Vanessa. He may have uh, he may have departed so Oh, Joseph Roberts. Oh, okay. Yeah I'll bring him right up on the stage right now Because he does have a terrific beard Hello, sir Can you hear us?  Yeah, you're you're muted right now Meredith said that in her role as co-curricular academic support I think I'd be focused on creating space for students to connect Share perspectives learn about what's happening and not feel so cut off and isolated Especially in the event of schools going remote That's excellent. Meredith. Um, what institution are you? Are you I I can't see from right here Lauren, perhaps he was pursued by a bear Charles Finley Shares that in his group that they can't continue classroom operations as usually Oh, you're at RISD. Good to hear it Meredith Well, this is let me just ask you to all think about that from from charles for a second. This has come up Um from a few people. So what happens if it's december 2024? So this is only, you know less than a year from now What happens if election on the rest is so strong that it becomes impossible for the campus to operate? So how do you plan for that right now? Do you have a plan already in place if this is going to occur? But that's a no problem, of course Lauren Kelly says that we tried about the other issues that everyone was facing in the time like covid I know I was in florida. So we had a hurricane and covid so things might have been worse But there is so much happening at the time That's a good point. Um that other things can be happening at the same time I mean think about geopolitics think of course about implications of the economy and think about ai There's a lot going on John points out there go finals. I'm so glad you said that john Because that was one of the reasons I put this timeline up How are you going to have final exams and final projects if all this is going on at the same time? So do you know you think about what happened for example with covid? Do we have pass fail or alternative grading? Wendy asks or Points out that if the l miss is working we can keep going but I don't have a plan b for that Hmm This might be a finding for our discussion today is to actually set up such a plan b Uh chris points out climate change. I'm so glad chris. I'm so glad chris to point that out because climate change won't be stopped by the outcome by the machinery of an election So fires floods Heat waves are all there as well Charles finley adds that there was some resistance to going to remote learning suggesting that students might need support from each other So that would be interesting to see how that plays out You might remember in march february march of 2020 how campuses trickled and you know flood went online or hurry Maybe this will be something where campuses will think about this in different ways Perhaps sending some students home, but not others some faculty and staff home, but not others chris points out the first responders could be distracted. Yes You know thinking about fire thinking about police thinking about emt's As this kind of violence begins to unspool Roxanne Says that she had many students with severe emotional outbursts during the clinton trump election type An inclusive plan nissi made of physical and psychological safety I agree I experienced that as well. Uh, so we do need to have that kind of plan in place now John holmbeck points out that campus academic reorganization will be more of a spring semester thing November and december will be reactive to the chaos Okay, so in november december you're looking ahead to spring term And how to plan that so this is I mean this is really tricky to think about how there's the immediate reaction What's going on day by day, but then trying to figure out how to plan for spring 2025 Michelle takes us even darker. Here's a nightmare scenario violence targets institutions of higher education and faculty with impunity due to promise immunity So basically if I get you right, michelle just say hypothetically that A republican leader Says if you go ahead and do some violence against a A communist professor or a trans staff member that then I'll pardon you. You'll be good to go Faculty told they have to come in person any winter through dismissal and some universities the faculty be purged unmasked this way This is a very dark scenario, but you can see that happening and we had this kind of argument during co vid during various closures Would faculty or staff be ordered to come to campus? Would campuses be safer or more dangerous places? That's a really That's a really good scenario. I mean good as in well thought out. Not good as in a happy one, of course Steve brown wonders given how organized some of the christian nationalist community are Might such a group targeted campus for takeover. Maybe in the northwest with wsu. I'm not sure that stands for is it Be an easy target for example Makes me think of Wayne state university, steve Um, but yeah, we could imagine that especially if a campus is people perceive it as being a source of dissent and unrest meredith goldsmith As that during co vid I supported faculty making decisions about what they wanted to accomplish in their courses This is an opportunity to identify what's really essential and what is it? Oh meredith What a powerful idea Um, but in what role did you have then? Were you educational technology learning and centered leader? But making us rethink Classes and what they were about trying to find the critical path for our curriculum Vanessa claims sundowning due to age, but it's not to alarm folks more considering election results topic Oh, this is an issue. I mean Having this session today Imagine this kind of planning Will alarm people Charles finley Writes that it is possible to consciously provide support from another virtually as I think we sometimes do in this form here One of my first exposures from well-wishers around the world to a colleague who is scheduled for surgery Yeah, so okay. So how can campuses and individual faculty staff and students prepare for that? And how do we structure that do we have a set of individual? Slack channels do we set up discord channels to use the lms? That's So of Phil cats asks this good question How would students and others react to some efforts described here to keep schooling as normal as possible? While the nation has an existential constitutional crisis It could make colleges seem even less relevant This is a good point if you think for example that you're that the country is sliding into fascism or marxism or terror Why do I need to keep studying? Cell biology when I should be in the streets When I should be helping solve this problem You could see again as joellen parker pointed out you could see students disenrolling either quitting Formally or just not showing up for class the same for faculty and staff Roxanne brings back to technology. There might be a time for higher cyber attacks directly higher education. I even considered Yeah, so how many ransomware attacks or just denial as a service or malware Oh, watching the state university. Thank you. Steve. Sorry. Just totally missed that Michelle says yes cyber attacks. We had to think about how it has to plan for this Um, oh meredith was the associate dean for academic affairs. Fantastic meredith. What a great position to be in to do that Uh, joellen parker takes us back to boards. They have to determine how much risk they're willing to afford to assume a behalf institution So I think about the trustees and think about the boards how they have to decide Should we can't the camp should keep the campus off open? Physically, should we go online? I like covid.  Think about the risks of violence as well as being sued by students faculty and staff excellent excellent point Wendy asked if the check had saved the recording. It does not but wendy if you like I could if already put this way if nobody objects I can post this to a blog anonymized and In order to keep everybody off. If anyone has an objection to that, please put that in in the chat with me now Chris's comment. I want my colleagues at southern new hentry university to see oh, sorry it nhu Yeah, southern new hentry university to see this webinar Chris we're recording it right now and it'll be up on youtube in a couple of days depending Vanessa says multiple networks like cling on neural networks. Nice Uh, no objection. Chris. Thank you. Michelle Miller asked for maybe we need to set up alternative hubs of sorts to provide affiliations from people who've been purged or let go Or so we're looking for kind positions abroad or both. Uh, good point. Good point Uh, john hallbeck gets met again. What would the reaction be if news of this planning or post election chaos gets out now? Can you imagine the headlines? well That's a great point. Uh, again thinking about The exchange the venice and I had Let me ask all of you. Um, just before before we wrap things up Um, let me ask you take a deep breath This was an exciting session and a bit scary. I think What did you think was this a useful exercise? Should we do it again? Is there anything we should do differently? What do you think about what we just did for this past hour? And again, if you want to climb on stage just click the podium the the teal colored podium button and uh, and just feel free to talk Meredith, uh, asks a really really good question. So before we get to the meta part Is there any way that some standard features of higher ed survive this? What happens is shared governance of the tenure system? Oh, I love the way you think Uh, wendy says this was useful and interesting if we do it again. I turn on video. Absolutely. Sorry about that Um Chris says we need to explore many alternative features of high-rate green transhumanist and collapse. Yes In chris, we've done a couple of these so far. We've done a couple on ai and we did one on uh, solar punk. So more of this Um, joe says I think someone does know there is a mic doesn't know their mic is on Roxane says this is important. This event could be transformational chris. Let me know what to do make it more so Well, so this is interesting Will polling questions are a good idea That's a really good idea Yeah, I like that Lauren likes that we had a generating images. Thanks. Thanks. Um, I got some really scary ones in in that lot John said he'd be interested in having more high-rate scenarios comment on the scenario Maybe john and we've had some here Including former presidents and deans maybe I should take this to some other administrators take the recording and point this out to them And ask them for their thoughts Well, we have the end of the hour right now. So I'm going to need to wrap this up Lauren says I could see you doing this as activity for faculty whether subjects and concepts Yeah, I'd be that's a great idea. Lauren. Please run with that. I'd be happy to help Wendy says there's an episode of the handmaid's tale where the string of academics Uh, yeah. Yeah, I remember that See, I stopped this scenario in December because I just wanted to focus on the immediate part But we could take this further Steve says are there any institutions using scenario thinking exercises? A few Not many. I've been trying to help people to do more of that Vanessa wonders how many groups are already forming networks. Good point. Good point Well, um, I need to uh, I need to wrap this up. So let me just, um, put some of this together So I hope this was useful. I hope this was thought-provoking And I would love to hear more and more of what you'd like to say If you'd like to talk about it right now further, uh, please, you know, hit up the socials use the hashtag ftte I'm gonna blog about this as soon as I can If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, which have covered some of these issues both we've had several scenario exercises But also we've talked about things like nationalism and political uncertainty Please go back to our archive at tiny url.com slash ftf archive We have sessions coming up on all sorts of topics which are very different You can find them on the forum website forum that future of education dot us Um, I always love talking and thinking with all of you about the future of education I think you were a brilliant splendid community. Um, this means a lot to me And I really appreciate just how thoughtful all of you were in this hour thinking through a very very difficult problem Uh, I appreciate your participation. I appreciate your reflections Um, and I Really hope we can do this Further, uh, I hope all of you I thank you again. I hope all of you are safe and sound Hope you stay well and Let please reach out to me if you have any thoughts along along the lines of this topic or this uh scenario Take care everybody See you next time online. Bye. Bye


Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor for Data Diversity. We'd like to thank you for joining this month's installment of the Data Diversity Webinar Series, The Heart of Data Modeling, moderated by Karen Lopez. Today Karen will be discussing Survey of NoSQL Support in Irwin, ER Studio, and Power Designer. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to a large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A section. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag heartdata. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the recording of this session and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now let me introduce our speaker for today, Karen Lopez. Karen is the Senior Project Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors. She has 20-plus years of experience in project and data management on large multi-project programs. Karen specializes in the practical application of data management principles. She's a frequent speaker, blogger, and panelist. Karen is known for her fun and sometimes snarky observations on data and data management. Mostly she just wants everyone to love their data. You can follow her at data chick on Twitter. And with that, I will turn it over to Karen to get us started. Hello and welcome. Hi, Shannon. Thanks so much for that. Are you having a great day today? It's a fabulous day today. Excellent. And you? Thank you. Yeah, running to the airport later. But yeah, thanks. So I want to welcome all of you who joined us live today. That's always a really exciting part of doing these webinars. I wanted to point out that there's, all right, that I do welcome Twitter discussions, discussion in the chat. You guys get to talk to each other, not just to me. And then if you have some formal questions, put them in the Q&A section of the webinar software. So I'll try to keep looking at both of those. But the Q&A is the things that I will actually see. And I have a couple of Q&A breaks scheduled just to remind me to take a look at those things. So normally we would do a poll here now. But if you guys want to just throw in the chat, I did put in an opening question about what brings you to today to hear about NoSQL and how those things are supported in data modeling tools. I'd love to find that out. So get your Q&A questions in now. The chat is how we make a great community. And yes, there will be slides and recordings distributed early next week. So I know people will join in late and ask that question in the Q&A. I think the Q&A just ought to say that. That would be great. So what are we going to talk about today? Why this topic? So given as part of this webinar series and its previous life as big challenges in data modeling, a lot of overview talks about what the basic types of NoSQL databases are, why they're used, how they're used. And so all of those resources are out there. I'm going to include a tiny, meaning a one-slide introduction to each of these. But I expect that coming into this that you either have a search browser in front of you so you could go look up some things or that you've attended one of those webinars. So I'm going to have a little bit of demo light, mostly just showing how the native features in some of these tools support these things. But nothing really heavy. We just only have an hour, so not enough time to go through all NoSQL things and some resources for you. But a disclaimer, these are not product reviews at all. It's to discuss the current state of feature support in the top three data modeling tools. And this should be considered a baseline, potentially with future webinars doing updates. So right now, I'm recording these. I'll be blogging about what feature sets and how some of these things are supported, specifically a specific version of a NoSQL technology in a specific data modeling tool. But I wanted to set the baseline of where we are today. That means if you're also, if you're watching a recording of this later, please know like anything else in the cloud and the Internet, most likely it was out of date before even got to this webinar. So some disclosure things I do need to make. I'm experienced. I've been doing this for a while. That means at some point I've done business with these vendors, either the NoSQL ones or the data modeling tool vendors and my company Influ advisors in the past has participated in partner programs and the data modeling tool vendors. We're not currently a partner with any of them. And I formally and informally have participated in product advisory groups for these vendors. Having said all that, I do do business with them and still have that ongoing, but I have no business that's tied to sales of these products. So I think that modern data architectures will have hybrid technologies. And by hybrid, I mean both relational and non-relational technologies, much like it does right now already. So one of the problems of talking about NoSQL is it really doesn't mean anything. It means not relational, even though people are interpreting now to mean not only SQL. That's only because of its history of starting out being an anti-relational movement. Clearly that people have progressed beyond that. And so now we have relational and non-relational technologies. The non-relational technologies that I would guess every enterprise class shop on the planet has is at least XML, common delimited files, spreadsheets, Microsoft access, and what have I left off? Anything else. But in today's topic, as I'm talking about NoSQL, I'm really talking about the newer technologies that most people fit into a classification system that I'm going to go through. And of course some existing, some legacy systems or NoSQL, think IMS. And I know that still exists in place. Think common delimited files. Think all these sort of non-relational, I even think of AS400 is kind of a weird outlier. You can think of it as relational, but it's not really, it's some hybrid thing. So if we look at a classic data warehouse data architecture, it is typically made up of transactional databases, some ETL and staging and processing that happens, then an enterprise data warehouse that kicked out some data marks or contributed to the data warehouse, and we did lots of reports. A modern data architecture is one where we're going to take certain data stories, certain use cases, and we're going to use something other than the primary relational databases, whether that's Hadoop or a graph database like Neo4j or a key value store or a columnar database. All of these things have a place. And the reason they have a place is a modern data architect or enterprise architect is going to choose the right tool for the job because we want to do cost, benefit, and risk as we look at each of these things. So typically people dizzy up the database world into these types of databases, data stores or stores. Now today I'm going to use the word database, but I know when I speak to a lot of these, the communities where people are really in-depth working in these things that it's not, they find the term database confusing because most people assume database means relational. Data stores is another way of saying it or just stores. I'm going to treat all of those equally. I'll probably say databases a lot just because I'm using those terms generically. So we have relational databases, so things like Oracle SQL Server DB2. We have graph databases, columnar and column family. Now those are in the same blocks on this graph or on this graphic. They are not the same thing, but the confusion over the use of these terms means that I often talk about them together. They are, there's a big difference between sort of how they're physically implemented and what they mean, but to a data modeling tool, the distinction isn't that big as we'll talk about. Key value pair databases. So those are things like React or features in hybrids, and we're going to give you some examples of those, and document databases. So things like MongoDB and anything that's JSON or JSON base, and then all the others. So one of the things I think is funny is Hadoop, it doesn't really classify in any of these likely because it's not a thing, it's a framework of things, and therefore some parts of the Hadoop infrastructure are relationally and some parts are columnar and some parts are, well, we'll just get into that. So some other terminology I want to talk about is while I was looking at data modeling tools and how they supported these technologies, I want to talk about how they have native support. So native support is, you know, the holy grail of having a data modeling tool support, something that you need to build things on. By native support, I mean I use a client, a database client, driver or connection, directly connecting to a database, and that connection and your data modeling tool are feature and version aware of all the differences. So if I use an example of SQL Server, I want a data modeling tool that can connect to my, not only just connect to my SQL Server databases, but connect to it and know that SQL Server 2012 is when they introduce sequences, and if I connect to a SQL Server 2008 database, I don't want my data modeling tool on the physical side to allow me to specify a sequence. So that sort of native direct connection feature and version aware is ideally what a data modeling tool is, what a data modeler who does model-driven development wants to have. And we want to have that so that we can do round trip engineering. And by that, I mean I want to be able to forward engineer and generate those databases or the structures in them. I want to be able to reverse engineer them. I want to be able to point my data modeling tool to say like MongoDB or Neo4j and say reverse engineer this, show me what's in there. Bring back all the properties that are in there. Show me what the security settings are, what the attributes are, what the properties are, everything. And then I want to be able to compare one version of a data model or a database to another one and be able to have the tool be aware that I'm resolving these differences. There's also always, we've had for a long time in all these tools, just an ODBC generic connectivity. And through some of these technologies, you're only able to do that because there's some sort of ODBC JDBC bridge or something like that. ODBC is sort of the last stop on connecting your data modeling tool to a database and getting something useful out of it. It's wonderful for people who need to support a DBMS that their tool doesn't directly support, but it has lots of limitations in that ODBC is really focused on SQL-like structures as well as the fact that you often can't generate an alter script or you can't do the types of compares that you would like to do. So it's really where round-tripped engineering starts to fall apart. And then there are the various import-export ways of getting data about databases into your data modeling tool. The number one way is through some sort of meta-integration bridge, and that's a product. That's a modular feature that is sometimes embedded in the data modeling tool that comes from a third party. And it allows you to bring in other modeling tool models. It allows you to bring in some table structures and connect to some databases for which there is no native support. That is definitely a point-to-point integration, and you are doing just importing. There's no round-trip engineering there. You can force some compares by importing two different models than comparing the models, but there's not a way then to take those deltas and then generate an alter script or something like that. You would just be able to generate a full-blown new schema. There's our various XML hacks. So if you have some way of dumping the structures out of your database into an XML or a JSON format, in theory you could bring those back in into the tools. And then there are the lowest level of things of some individual hacks, I'll call them. So back when we couldn't support certain types of objects in our database because a data modeling tool didn't support it, there used to be this Excel trick where you would export your data model into Excel and then manipulate your table and columns in there just as a list of terms or add some new features to it by using Excel formulas to be sort of a generation engine to generate the proper syntax for DDL. And then you could either reverse engineer that text file, that DDL, that SQL file to do that. And then there are probably ways of doing that with macros or pre- and post-DDL features in a tool.  Because I want this data model-driven development. I want to have this round-trip engineering of requirements in a data model and a database or multiple databases and then more requirements and changes and tuning and when's to happen and just to keep going around and around there. The great thing about model-driven development is you don't have to start at the data model. You can start at the database and apply if you have legacy databases or databases that were done by a bunch of developers and now you want to figure out why it's not working. We do all those things. And in order to truly do this engineering-like data model-driven development, you have to be able to connect to the databases, do those compares, and do those alters. So before we start here, I'm just going to check the Q&A. Where do you consider RDF-based data models tools in your diagram? I have not. That would probably be a great discussion for a whole other presentation on supporting all of those types of semantic-based technologies. And I hope to learn more about them soon. Someone else said, I've written data hacks with Python to find out the data models of a NoSQLDB like to find a better way. That's a good reason to come to this. So we're going to start with graph databases. So graph databases, pretty much Neo4j, is the one that a lot of organizations use. And here's some language for creating nodes and relationships in Neo. And then on the right is sort of one of their visualizations of this same data. And if you look at the link at the bottom of this slide, that's where you can actually go hands-on and play with it right in your browser. And you can run those things, and you can insert your own data into the nodes. Now one of the things you'll notice about this data is that even though Matrix is a movie, Keanu is an actor, Keanu acts in... the actor and movie part look a lot like entities we would have in a relational model. But they're really sort of like roles that these occurrences play that have been categorized. Those are not really any of the structure in a graph database or in Neo. And that's one of the hard things that it would make for a data modeling tool to support a graph database. We hear all the time, the data model is the database, and the colary to that is the database is the data model. So while people talk a lot about NoSQL technologies being schemalists, it's not that there's no schema, no understanding, no structure. Those tags and those properties are kind of a structure. What they aren't are constraints. They don't constrain the data. I could put a movie in as a role, and I could put an actor in as a movie. Of course we could do that in the relational world, but the difference is that all the properties I'm going to have on these nodes could be highly variable for each node. So if I just wanted to keep track of what Keanu's hairstyle is this week, I could do that without having to keep track of that for all the other nodes. And there's all kinds of differences between graph and relational. But I think this one is the most difficult one. There's a reason that there's no native support with any of these tools for graph databases. Now I'll throw in, like a lot of these NoSQL things, there are some ODBC, JDBC connectivity bridges, drivers that allow people to do some sort of queries to this data, but I wouldn't consider that anything that your data modeling tool is going to be able to do much with. So then that brings us to key value pair. Key value pairs, just like it sounds, is that to these database systems, you have a key and it has a value. And there's a little bit more, there's some row identifier type things and partitioning keys that go into this. But in a lot of examples we see for a key value pair, they're very simple. And even this one is very simple, so I have a little bit more complex one coming up in a second. But what you can see here is that there's a whole lot of information embedded in that key. So I know that Facebook user 1-2-3-4-5's favorite color, I think this is red, and that Twitter user 6-7-8-9-0's favorite color is brownish, and that Google Plus user 2-4-3-5-6, her favorite libation is dry martini with a twist, and that this LinkedIn user's hero is top sales performer. Now this sort of thing drives relational thinkers crazy because we want to have libation being some type of entity and favorite color, at least being a column, and hero at least being, you know, something. The reason key value pairs are architected this way is they are for getting data out and looking up things by a specific key. I'm oversimplifying that again, but that's what they're built for. So in another example, a key value pair with the concepts of database and table, even though it's not the same as a relational table. What we really have is a partitioning key and a row key, and then the properties can all be stored as a big group of things. In this case, it's a camera store, and the product is the seller of it's this, the price is that, the date of the price, the seller type is online. That would be in the relational world one giant comment limited column, which is something we would never do. The reason we would never do that is that would cause all kinds of query problems and aggregation problems if you had to find the average price of online products in that product class. Oh, my gosh. But that's not what these databases are designed for. They are, again, primarily for doing great things by a key lookup, and in this case, if we were doing a product catalog, this would perform like crazy because we would just pull it out by that row key and we'd be able to publish all those things on a webpage. And because of that, you'll see that these really don't have native support in the data modeling tools. And the reason I think this is is that our data models, meaning in the traditional data modeling world, the ERD world, they might fit best in these processes as being great documentation and great wealth of information for telling our data stories, for explaining, there's a typo there, policies and metadata around them. So a typical thing, we might have in an enterprise data model from our previous examples that products over $250 have a price point over $250 should be kept in secured storage. Now, that's something that's not in those data, not in the data, but we would want to keep track of some of those business rules that way. And we could contribute that to anything that, where this data gets published. Another example might be, we might have in a transactional system about these products, we might have some constraints that we'd put on them for being creative, like let's say that every product must have a price, even if that price is zero. That sort of constraint really doesn't apply in these or would be applied in the application and not in the database. That would be a business rule that we would need to give an application that is using this data. The next type, columnar data storage. And remember, I'm going to be talking about both column store, so true columnar data, as well as column family ones during this section, even though they're slightly different. Columnar data storage basically means that if you look on the left, we have rows and columns, so in a traditional way we think of tables. And what we end up doing is taking all the columns and storing them together, while encoding and compressing them, and I have an example coming up with that, so that then we can make, we can query them very fast. And the reason we can, so if we had a table that had just first name, last name, some phone information, and some address information, this is typically how we do it in the relational world, we'd split those into columns, so now we can see all the first names would be stored together, all the last names, the area codes, all the states. And you start to see that, for instance, states, we're going to have a lot of repeating information, even cities and street types and names. And that allows us to encode and compress. We get high degrees of compression. We use a columnar approach to these things. And we get it both through doing either dictionary substitutions for the whole term or compressing repeating values. That also means that one of the features of a columnar data store is that you end up, not just doing this, you end up making chunks of columns together and storing them because they are queried together. So you actually, one of the features of doing design for a columnar database is to look at the type of query workloads you're going to have against that data and physically persist only the columns that are used in that query as well as persisting them together as a group because they're in the same query. So that's a whole other presentation I could give. But what you need to know is instead of storing things by row, we're going to store them by column and that's going to give us lightning, lightning, fast query retrievals. Now, one of the great things about columnar and column family is because, let's say they're not row oriented, they're column oriented, but just the fact that they're aware of columns being used together and because they have columns, they have SQL like query tools. So for instance, even though Irwin and ER studio have no native support, that direct connection and being able to compare to the database, I was able to reverse engineer HP Vertica columnar data store using their SQL like query using a SQL query language to do that. And I did that via the ODBC connections in the data modeling tools. Now, when I first did this about a year ago, ER studio failed on that. It would do the full reverse engineering, but then it would the reverse engineering would not bring me up a model because it wasn't valid in ER studio's understanding of the SQL that was in it. So it basically disregarded anything that didn't meet its validation test, but Irwin was able to do that. Well, then since then, since I gave a presentation on this just a few months ago, ER studio is now able to reverse and just connect to HP Vertica via ODBC drivers and reverse engineer those, I'm going to call them tables, but column structures that are in there. Now, power designer because it's made by SAP shockingly enough supports SAP HANA, which is an in memory columnar data store, and that should not surprise you at all. Also, the meta integration bridge is going to help with import and export features even if ODBC doesn't work. That brings us to document databases. So document databases typically are based today on JSON or JSON. So JSON is what I call the hipster XML, totally unfair, but definitely a text based with tags and brackets, and JSON is just a binary form of JSON. So here's an example of two documents. They're based on families, and one of the things you'll see is that for the Anderson family, they have a last name and parents who have first names and children, which is a repeating group. They can have many of them, and they have the children have pets who have names, and they have an address, and they have some registration thing. The Wakefield family on the same thing have parents, they have children, and they have pets. But you'll notice that some of the names of the tags can be different. So unlike in a row-oriented database in a relational world where every instance of an entity must have exactly the same properties as every other instance, in a document database that can vary, the structure varies, the many to many-ness of things can vary, and the names of what we call the data, the tags, it can also vary. They can imagine, so there's arrays and nesting and recursion, there's a way of linking like foreign keys in a document database. All of that together, you can imagine it must be really difficult to support that. Well, right now, Erwin has no native support for document DBs. ERStudio has support in its most recent version for MongoDB, and Power Designer doesn't have any support for those things. I think we'll see this changing not just for the support of MongoDB, but because of just how prevalent JSON documents are. So even if modeling tools aren't going to support, you know, a full-blown MongoDB document database, I think we'll start seeing them supporting just like it took data modeling tools some time to start supporting bringing in and producing XML documents which are really kind of the same thing, not exactly, but from a trying to support them in a modeling tool, definitely XML and JSON are some of the same things. So with ERStudio, I'm able to do a native connection to a MongoDB, so on the right here we have just in that post-it note looking graphic a sample restaurant JSON data file that I imported into a MongoDB database, and ERStudio came up with this data model. Now it's able to do recursions to look through, but it's important that everyone be clear on what this model represents, because remember how there's no, in the XML world, you know, we have a schema document that says here's what our XML structure is, there's not that in this restaurant sample data. So it has derived this data model by looking at all the instances of the data which may or may not have the same properties in every single one. So you would use this model to understand what the database, what the document store is telling you about the data it has in it, and it's having to concatenate or take the cumulative view of all those things. So then there's Hive. Hive is a SQL query language that sits on top of Hadoop features, and in this case it started as an abstraction on top of MapReduce, so that MapReduce that sits on top of the Hadoop distributed file store, and it's a meta structure on top of that. It looks a lot like SQL, and actually it was invented to add SQL to allow people who had strong SQL query skills, actual in the SQL language, to do queries on top of Hadoop structures. Well, since Hive is very SQL-ish, it should be no surprise to you that Erwin, ER Studio, and Power Designer support Hive. So ER Studio takes the approaches I'll show you in a bit, the various flavors, which means distributions of Hive. ER Studio uses a generic Hive.1 standard as does Power Designer. So it just makes sense that these tools support Hive. So here's an example of basically what I did here is on the left you can see a snippet of a Hive table that I created, external table, and this is just the SQL for it, and this is based on some IRS data, and I was able with Power Designer and all the tools to either import that in or reverse engineer that into the tools, but they also have that native connectivity to do that. I was also able to compare it. I was able to make a change to it and compare it to the original Hive table, and I was able to import changes that happened in the external Hive table as well into my model. I'm going to look at questions again. I have heard from informed sources that Erwin is moving to support no-SQL databases in the near future. I don't have a lot of inside information, but from the discussions I've had, informal ones, as well as some presentations I've been to, I think that all the modeling tool vendors are doing what they can to support what they can. One of the both amazing things about the no-SQL world and also the biggest pain point for modelers and modeling tool vendors is that unlike in the world 20 years ago where you pretty much had to be part of either some very large global technology company or be people who split off from a very large technology company and formed your own company, that's what it took to build an enterprise class database system, but now we're entering this perfect storm of the open source business model actually working with more formal structures for venture capital investments with the advent of online collaboration tools and communities with sort of a generational shift on building things for the common good. All of those things have come together and now there are literally thousands of database systems that one could look at and one could support. That's wonderful from an innovation point of view. I think if someone wanted to build commercial products out of these no-SQL underlying data models, if they wanted to do that 20 years ago, we would not be sitting here looking at thousands of them. We'd probably be looking at five. The reason is if some of these no-SQL things go back well beyond the advent of the web and the internet, it's just it took all that to come together for the business model to work for all of these. I think what the data modeling tool vendors are working with now is trying to figure out which ones to spend the time to support, which ones make the most sense for the current underlying architecture of their tools, as well as which ones are going to be the fastest to do. I think the ones that either already have relational features or someone has built a relational query language on top of it will be first. What about data where health appliance tools like natisa? Yes. So there's all these flavors of not core relational tools that have been around natisa's one. You know, they might be quasi-relational, teradata. I mentioned AS 400. There's all of these flavors of things that I really would have liked to have done the research and investigated today. But as it stands, just putting this high-level survey together, and it's going to be ongoing work for me, is just trying to do this. The other issue is it's hard for your average data chick to get hands-on with some of these appliance technologies to do this sort of testing. So a lot of the testing and research I do is either because I've downloaded and installed something on a VM on my machine or I've been able to spend something up in Microsoft Azure to play with it and connect with it. But all of that takes, you know, a lot of time and sometimes a lot of dollars to do those. So I'd love to go do some more investigation into the appliance products, even the ones from Oracle and from Microsoft, but that's a very difficult thing to get access to. But great question. So let's look at some tools. So I did some talking about these things and did I just get dumped out of the, I think I did. No, you're here. Okay, good. So let's see. I have the sample model open in Irwin just because it's nice to show that. So these are the native connections in Irwin. So the DB2, Teradata, MySQL, MySQL, ODBC generic in Irwin, that's going to be your friend. And we're not really seeing a lot of diversity there right now. The key for Irwin is going to be the Meta integration bridge. And you can see the first one at the top is Hadoop Hive. And you'll see all kinds of modeling tool things here. There's more Hive with Cloudera, Impala, all through Hive, data stacks through Hive. You know, these are sort of the edges of NoSQL. The one that stands out there is Google BigQuery, which is a sort of column-based NoSQL option in the cloud. There's more Hadoop stuff, more data modeling tools, SQL server, Oracle stuff, some SAP stuff, but not HANA or modeling tools. So basically what you're getting out of this extension to Irwin is the ability that import-export thing that I said was probably going to help you a bit, but not going to support a lot of the round-trip engineering. So if we go back to Power Designer, the DBMS that I can choose. So database, raise your hand if you're that experienced. There's some AS 400 and green plum and Hadoop Hive and some regular stuff. There's your Nathisa stuff, ODBC, going to be your friend, and HANA. So and then some of these other things are also Teradata and others are NoSQL-ish. If I go up to, yeah, so that's the same thing. So one of the other features about Power Designer is that the other tools don't have is the ability to go in and through their extensions and their ability to add properties and features to basically build your own underlying meta-models. So you can build your own or enhance your own. That gives you a lot of extensibility perhaps for supporting some of the more SQL-like NoSQL features. So you might be ahead of the game there. I know Irwin has the ability to change the forward engineering templates to do something similar than that and there are those features as well. And then if we go to ER studio, there's my ER studio Mongo database that I got that graphic from. And basically, you know, it's going to have the same, almost the same things as the, because it's also using the meta-integration bridge. Now individual products get to choose out of the full-blown meta-integration product which of the features, which of the things are going to show in this dropdown. But, you know, we're basically seeing the same sort of things of hives and some modeling tool things. More hives again. And also the Google BigQuery, it's almost exactly the same which would make sense. Lots of SQL server things and Oracle and SAP. So while the import-export features of these tools is not going to give you easily that round-trip engineering, I think it's a good start for at least a good data modeler to be able to point their existing tools at some of the databases that are being used on the projects that people think they can't be part of, the modelers can't be part of because we only do ERDs. You can see right here. I have a JSON document, you know, basically through a MongoDB that I can report on, that I can do complete compares on, that I can generate. That all to me, very exciting stuff. So we looked at the three tools. I did talk about the doing of hacks through macros, through the APIs, through extending whatever is available in your tool sets, whether that's the forward engineering templates or being able to actually customize your own metamodel under there. All of those are wonderful things if you're trying to support a technology for which your tool doesn't natively support, but what's wonderful about where we're going in the modern data architecture world is eventually we will start adding modern to support to these. Now the other option for a professional data modeler is to find out if there's another modeling tool that comes from the open source community for that product that will allow you to do modeling. That's nice. A lot of the issues that I run into with those is that the definition of data modeling there is really reverse engineering diagrams. Still very valuable, very valuable to have a diagram of something in your database. The key is that that of course is not what we think of as data modeling. You can't add metadata. You can't add here are the privacy requirements about this or here are the restrictions on this or this is why we won't find customers older than or from this state that exists before 1984. Well, it's because we bought the rights to those customers. We bought a company in that state. All of that rich metadata and understanding of the data stories can't get documented or written or shared in something that's just a diagramming tool. I'm going to check for more questions. Please comment on storing metadata for NoSQL. I think I just did. That was good timing. You're correct. There are so many data store choices today. It's overwhelming. Yeah, so the story I told, I gave a related talk in the Midwest last week. This great thing about having 1,000 databases, what I call 100,000 vendors to work with now, because of course Hadoop isn't one thing. It's a framework of things. But each of those framework of things have many vendors distributing versions of them. This is what's so excited. So back when I had to support Oracle DB2 and SQL server, I thought, you know, I was so frustrated because I couldn't keep track of for those three things on Sybase, those three and a half things, I couldn't keep track of what the name of the feature was in each of the tools and which version supported which features and what name lengths could be. That was so hard. And then that was only a handful of tools. And now we've got these thousands of tools with 100,000 vendors because every open source person is actually another vendor, if you think about it, that those just boggles my mind. So now it's not that I can't keep track of which features and which tool. I can't even keep track of what the differences are for the tool. So in my no-SQL naming rant, which is recorded and available on dataversity.net, I make fun of all the names. And the reason is we've got so many products and so many frameworks that we have to come up with increasingly odd names. So I cannot remember what's the difference between spark and shark and snark, I kind of do. But we've run out of names and therefore I don't even know how to keep track of what features are in each of these. Next question, what about ETL tools as modeling tools to generate and convert database structures? You know that's kind of next on my list is I want to see how tools support things like data lineage and like the underlying models in say the Microsoft stack, like the tabular models and the cubes and all of the data models that are buried in those tools. But you know, SAFRA is preparing to modify their tool for HANA because SAFRA provides the bridge between modeling tools and SAP and other ERPs. I don't know that. That's a great question. And maybe someday we can talk about... I find SAFRA is a really unique tool set and sits in a unique space. It would be interesting to do a webinar about that as well. And from the chat, I'm not familiar with any of that tool, but thanks for sharing that link there. And someone saying, I've been told that developers in my company will soon need to learn how to model for no sequel, MongoDB, just being one, Cassandra and possibly VoltDB. Any recommendation on how to? Well, that's going to be our next section. So that might be a good segue. So to summarize what we've talked about so far, the more sequel like features that are available in a no sequel database, the more likely modeling tool is going to support it. That just makes sense. It's a great fit. It's almost for a data modeling tool vendor. It's just like supporting a different relational database almost. Those vendors are going to support the features. I used to say that users ask for. They're going to support the features that win them deals, but that's not a bad thing. Like I said, 100,000 vendors to work with, 1,000 different databases to pursue. Let's have the enterprise market, because let's face it. Three people sitting down to build the next big Facebook probably aren't buying enterprise class data modeling tools. Even the most popular no sequel databases that are free and open source aren't all supported by all the data modeling tool vendors because people who don't want to pay the fees for enterprise class databases generally don't want to pay the licensing costs for enterprise class data modeling tools to support those. So you need to ask your tool vendors, hey, we've got MongoDB. Do you support that? Hey, we're starting a Cassandra project. How does your tool support that? Those are questions you should be asking, not just tech support, but sales person from your tool vendor. But all in all, they're going to support the features that help them win sales deals. This is how the commercial enterprise software market works and we need to be part of that. The serious no sequel vendors are going to understand that hybrid is the enterprise data storage by hybrid. Remember I mean sequel and no sequel databases. They want to help us find a way, a way to continue to love all the data in our enterprise, not just the ones that they support now. Notice I put a little star, serious no sequel vendors.  And remember I'm using the term vendors to mean even the open source people. So developers, but not just technical developers, the whole thing. There are still some people preaching that relational is dead, it needs to go away, it's always failed. They probably will not be selling to the enterprise class market and therefore probably won't be of an issue to enterprise class data modeling tools. Our data models continue to have value and even the physical ones, even your db2 model, your sequel server model still has value even if your no sequel solution that you're deploying doesn't require a lot of constraints. One of the reasons why the no sequel tools can give up consistency and integrity and not worry about all those constraining constraints is that they are solutions for doing consumption of data. They're on the analytics side, they're on the reporting side, they're optimized for reading data, not writing data. That's perfect. That's the same story we have in our data warehouse world, optimized for reading data. We still use transactional systems and relational systems, relational still has a wonderful place in enterprise. Our models have value because the people consuming that data still need to understand some of the tougher questions about the data they're hosting. Maybe not the people managing that no sequel database but the people who have to make use of it. Just because the data has come out of our transactional systems gone through a process and is now sitting in Hadoop on some file store, our users and our reporting and our analytical systems are still going to need to understand what that data is, what its provenance is, how it can be used. So some places you can go to start having these discussions. Embarcadero has community. Embarcadero.com, CA has Irwin.com for asking these questions and having these discussions. There's also a knowledge base. SAP has a community for power designer for having these discussions. There's also still the old news groups around if you're very experienced like me and like to play there. I recommend Dan and Ann's book on making sense of no SQL because it focuses on all these differences and it's very approachable and consumable for these. If you want to know about graph databases, the folks from Neo4j have written this O'Reilly book and you can go download the ebook version for free and this second edition just came out and I find this really helpful. Steve Hoberman who is very active in traditional data modeling world as an author, speaker and publisher has written data modeling for MongoDB so I recommend you approach that. There's also still my favorite is to get some hands-on experience with a variety of these is seven databases in seven weeks which covers these DBMSs that both no SQL and SQL. And I've even based a presentation that I do sometimes with a co-presenter Laura Rebelke called seven databases in 70 minutes where we don't cover these or some of them we cover but we try to talk about all of those things in 70 minutes. Also coming up at no SQL now, Dataversy who hosts this webinar also hosts no SQL now, I'll be presenting on graph and relational databases along with my friend Joey and we're also presenting on DevOps in a polyglot world and for some reason my picture is not part of this so it eventually will be consistent. The reason I want you to go learn these things is now that we have so those thousand databases to choose from I think data modelers and data architects need to be involved even earlier in the project so we've always been asking about being involved early but now it's very important because these technologies are being chosen sometimes without an understanding of why we might want some constraints or why our data workflow may or may not fit. So it's good to have a data professional be part of those architectural infrastructure decisions because every design decision should include cost, benefit and risk. So seven reasons to go explore, I think it's fun. As much as I love my ARDs and my modeling I've modeled enough invoice line items over my life to never really want to do that again so seeing how people have optimized new technology for really making things perform fast is fun and these aren't yes, no decisions, we need to know them all. And unlike before where if I wanted to learn db2 20 years ago I had to have a main frame and I had to have access to it. Now I can just go spin up a VM in about 15 minutes in Azure or Amazon and be hands on playing with it with all kinds of tutorials out there. I think data professional needs to know more than one tool and I don't just mean data modeling tool, I mean database. And using the right tool for the job is important and it's also a lot of fun. So where I go is Azure and if your shop has MSDN subscription benefits there are trials, same things true. There are free inexpensive or sometimes free trials for Google or Amazon. I'm just most familiar with Microsoft Azure. And that's all I had for here. Let's see the last little bit of questions. Yeah. So I know SQL solutions still require some schema structure that needs to be documented absolutely. There's no such thing as schema less. What we just have is multi-schemas a lot of times so poly schematic is the invented word I like to use but schema less is just a meaningless term to go along with no SQL which really has no meaning either. It's either schema on read or the fact that someone still needs to write down what that data was. Excellent book recommendations. Yes. The no SQL book is by Dan McCurry and Ann Kelly. My picture isn't there because it's compressed. That's great. Yeah. Yes. Learning all these things is fun. So I think we're right at the time. Oh yeah, one minute over. Anyway. So what we do is we turn off the recording now but I can stick around for a few more minutes before I head to the airport. Let me turn it off for you here. I'm going to turn it off for you here and.


The Toastmaster speech contest is around the corner. This year, most contests will be conducted online and one of the critical components we need to get absolutely right is the timing device because going over time by even one second can result in disqualification. In this video, I am going to show you how to get it right. Let's get started. I created the speech timer specially for online contests. For now, the application is compatible only with Windows. You can download the application for free. The link to the application is in the video description below. Click on the link and you will be taken to this Google Drive where the application is available as a zip file. Click on the download button and the application will be downloaded on your PC. Once the file is downloaded, open it and you will find that the zip file contains two files and one folder. Select all the three files, right click and copy and create a folder on your PC. Let's call it Timer App and paste all the three files. I recommend creating a shortcut to the EXE file on your desktop so you can access it easily. To do that, you can right click the EXE file, send to an desktop, create shortcut. You will see now that the application is available to you as a shortcut on your desktop. If you want, you can even move it to the taskbar at the bottom of the screen so you can access it anytime. When you first run the application, you will get a warning message, click more info and click run anyway and the application is ready. The application is made up of two parts. The first part is the controller software. This is used by the person responsible for managing the time. The second part is what the participant should see and that is accessed by clicking on this hyperlink timing light. This window only shows the timing lights green, yellow, red without indicating the actual time taken by the participant. You can manually change the color of the window by clicking on the appropriate color for example green, yellow, red. This feature is very useful when you are demonstrating to the participants how the timing lights will appear. Next, let me show you how to use this application. When you are ready to start timing, click from the drop down the appropriate speech that you are timing. The application comes bundled with standard speech timings for example, a five to seven minute speech, an ice breaker speech which is four to six minutes, evaluation, two to three minutes, table topics, one to two minutes and so on. You can add additional speech types and I will show you how. Once you have selected the appropriate speech type, enter the name of the speaker and when the speaker starts speaking hit the start button and when the speaker stops speaking hit the stop button that's all there is to it. Once you hit the stop button, the system will automatically time the speaker with his name and the time that he has taken in this case seven seconds and you are now ready for the next speaker. To do that, hit the reset button, enter the name of the next speaker and when the next speaker starts speaking hit the start button and so on. When the timer is running, in case of any technical difficulties from the participants let's say they got disconnected and you want to pause the timer, there is a button at the bottom of the screen called pause, hit it and the timer will pause and it will show to the audience that the timer is no longer running. When you want to restart, hit the resume button and the timer will continue. If an entry was created which you don't want in the list, simply highlight that particular line and use this delete key to remove this entry from the list. The system will ask you are you sure you want to clear the timing data for this entry and you say yes and it will remove that entry from the list. If you want to clear the entire list, there is an option here at the bottom which says clear list, click yes and the entire list will be cleared. Let's say I want to create a new speech type which is 10 to 15 minutes and I want to show the green at 10 minutes, the yellow at 12 and a half minutes and the red at 15 minutes. I will start by giving a name to my speech type. Let me call it advanced 10 to 15 minute speech. Make a name, I can leave it blank. Please note that the time that we enter here should be converted into seconds. Since the green should be shown at 10 minutes, that's 600 seconds, I can put in 600 here. I want the yellow to be shown at 12 and a half minutes, that's 750 seconds. The red will be shown at 15 minutes, that's 900 seconds. You also have an option to define the disqualification times both for the minimum as well as the maximum. Let's say to qualify for the speech, the speaker must speak for minimum 9 minutes which is 540 seconds and he cannot speak more than 16 minutes which is 960 seconds. Once you have defined the setup, click save. You will get a message that the information has been saved successfully. Now when you look at the dropdown, you will have an advanced speech 10 to 15 minutes and you can see that the green will appear at 10, the yellow at 12 and a half and the red at 15. If you click on these three dots at the left hand side, you can also see the qualification times for the minimum as well as maximum. The final part is how to show this window, the timing light window to the participants. In my case, I use a free software called OBS Studio 26. I have a separate video on my YouTube channel that shows you how you can take any object on your PC and project it as a virtual camera. The link to that video is in the description. Follow that video and you should be able to project the timing lights onto your Zoom meetings or any other online platform. When you start your Zoom client, all you have to do is go to the camera settings and make sure that you choose OBS virtual camera and then click the start video button. The Zoom client will now show the timing window to the participants. When you start the timer, this is what the audience will see. So that was an overview of the timing application. I hope you found the resource useful and I wish you all the best in the upcoming online speech contests.