All right. Good afternoon and welcome. We are with the University of Colorado Boulder, which is just about 30 miles northwest of Denver here, and we're very excited to share with you today. CU Boulder's journey into Drupal. You can't hear? Did you hear any of that? So I'm Joe Bertrand. I'm the web manager in our university communications department, and my co-presenters today are Mike Carter, our integrations manager in our office of information technology, and Matt Tucker, our lead web developer in university communications. And in the spirit of our open source community, we really wanted to share with the community, particularly our fellow universities, our experience as a large university in developing and implementing an enterprise level Drupal environment to be used as a campus-wide service. In particular, what we're going to go over today is we're going to give you a brief overview of some of the challenges that we're faced on our campus, the solutions we identified, as well as some of the research and planning that we put into the project. Most of the presentation is going to be Mike and Matt going into some of the technical details of how we built and architect our web infrastructure, how we configured our Drupal environment, as well as our deployment process. We will also kind of wrap up with some, like, lesson learns and expected outcomes of our project. We would like to take questions after our presentation, so we strongly encourage you, if you do have any questions, if you want to tweet them, to use the following hashtag. We've had some staff members up here who are going to be monitoring for us, as well as if you want to just, like, jot them down. We have plenty of time for Q&A afterwards. In addition, we have also scheduled a buff called Drupal in higher education. It's at five o'clock this evening, and that's going to be in room 206. Just out of curiosity, how many higher ed institutes are in the room? All right! Well, we're very excited that you're here, and we're hoping that you can join us at five o'clock. We'd love to see what some of the things that you guys are doing as well. So this is the University of Colorado Boulder. Our university is located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and we have a population of about 29,884,000 degree-seeking students, with approximately 24,000 of those are undergraduate students, and around 5,100 are graduate students. We also have approximately 5,600 faculty and staff on our campus as well. We are a tier one research university, and what that means is that we have very strong research partnerships with federal institutes and labs such as NASA and NOAA and NREL to name a few. So in relation to that, we have about nine research institutes and approximately 80 research centers on our campus. We also have eight colleges and schools that are overarching with architecture, arts and sciences, business, education, engineering, law and music. I think I got them all. And within those, we have over 85 departments within our colleges and schools. So as you can see, we have a fairly large internal audience base that we are serving, and I think that helps to kind of put in perspective for you some of the things that we as a team really needed to keep into consideration as we were looking to roll out a new solution for our campus. Some of the challenges that we were facing on our campus was that we were sitting on an extremely outdated server environment that would not allow us to use the most latest technologies such as a CMS. It was really just a static HTML environment where we can use Perl or CGI scripts to do some of the more dynamic stuff, but it was extremely limiting. And our departments were finding it very challenging in trying to build and maintain and update their websites in that environment. In turn, a lot of our departments were starting to jump ship. They're starting to jump off of a free campus-wide server and going out and purchasing and supporting their own server so they can take care of the latest technologies on their own. We did a survey about two years ago and found that there were over 600 surveys across campus sitting under people's desks in their closets being used as coasters that our departments were using for various websites and web application needs that our main campus server could not support. It was really quickly becoming an IT nightmare for us in a very decentralized environment and just not the best resources for our campus. And many, many of our departments were struggling with this. On top of that, we were getting a lot of complaints that our university web presence, our website, was completely laggy. It was out and out pretty lame. I was involved with this, so I can say that. Because we were stuck on this static HML environment, we really just did not have the capabilities to really showcase some of the amazing research that was going on across campus and some of the great things that our faculty and staff were doing. One other key challenge that we also identified is that because our current server environment had been around for at least, correct me if I'm wrong, 15 years or so, that we had a ton of legacy data on those servers. Mike did a quick tally and he found that we had about 700 websites on our campus environment. Some were probably had been abandoned and some were still active. And so we needed to make sure that whatever we came up with with our new solution that we had to figure out what we were going to do with all of this content and all this data on our current server environment. And then on top of that, our university rolled out a new brand in the spring of 2011. And we were charged with a two-year time frame to conform all of our department websites into the new branding standard. So we quickly realized that we needed an entirely new environment to help us to manage this brand and to roll it out for all of our different departments. So we identified three main solutions to help us with these challenges. First and foremost, we completely needed to modernize and revamp our entire campus web infrastructure and really build something that was enterprise class. It was highly available, highly scalable, and something that will meet all the particular server needs that we were seeing across campus. We also identified that we really needed to convert to a CMS environment and really leverage the power that a CMS can provide us in really streamlining our web development process for not only the university website, but how we can roll that out and create a service for our departments for their websites as well. We also identified that we really needed to create a completely new service model for our campus around our web development process as well as web application hosting. Looking at a service that would allow our departments to very easily build and maintain their own website without having to go out and hire their own web staff or technical staff, as well as a service that will allow our departments to take advantage for all their different web application or database needs. So as we started to plan out this project, we really realized that to do this correctly, we needed to do, first and foremost, we needed to invest in equipment and invest in our staff. The equipment part was pretty much a no-brainer. We were sitting on some pretty old hardware that we really needed to invest and bring in some new hardware to really build a more robust technical infrastructure. But we also realized that if we were going to support this whole new environment, as well as this whole new service, we wanted to provide our campus. We really needed to invest in our staff so that we made sure that we had the bandwidth to be able to support the 36,000-plus people that were on our campus. We also did a... We took a deeper look into the type of service model that we really wanted to provide the campus around our new CMS environment that we were going to build. And we identified two key areas that will meet a lot of the different needs that we were seeing. The first is what we've been calling for now is a self-service template environment. And the idea behind that is really to have an environment that our departments can go to, log in, give us some credentials, and we provide them with a suite of packages of pre-developed designs that are within brand standards, of course. And as well as pre-configured functionality that the departments can really kind of turn on and turn off based on their specific... their particular needs for their website. And the idea is that once they kind of give us all this information, they pick their package that we would have this environment ready for them within a 24-hour or less time period so that they can then start to build their website on their own. We identified that this will probably meet, you know, a good 50%, 60% of our campus needs. We also identified that around our CMS environment we wanted to provide kind of more of a professional service around building custom websites so that for those departments such as our larger ones like admissions or financial aid that have very specific business requirements for their website that we could build a custom theme. We can build custom content type, a really a custom Drupal environment just for them and all of this supported by our team as well as on the new campus infrastructure. We also identified that another service we wanted to provide was related to web application hosting, something that will help us departments get rid of all of the 600 servers that we saw across campus and really kind of come back in and use the campus-wide service model so that we can kind of get away from this decentralized model that we were in and really create something that's more of a consolidated and streamlined service for our departments to take advantage for their various server needs. It could be for a non-Drupal website. Oh, no. We won't mention those others. It could be for, you know, file storage. It can be for backups or database needs. So the idea behind it is something that's really flexible for the various needs that we are seeing across campus. We also started the plan for how we can create a process to phase the migration of our legacy content into either our new CMS environment that we'll be building or into this hosting environment that we'll be building. We realized that there's just no way that we are going to be able to convert the 700 sites that we have identified within our timeframe into a Drupal website. And so we really need to make sure that we could provide a way to have both our new shiny infrastructure as well as our legacy infrastructure, both under the Colorado.edu domain name. Some of the research that we put into this project is first we created a list of requirements for our CMS so that we can use that to evaluate all the different tools that are out there. I think we looked at about 15 or 20 different CMSs and Drupal by far rose to the top very quickly. It not only met all of our requirements on our sheet but really just kind of went beyond that. And the other thing that fit very well with us is the whole Drupal community. The idea that there's this amazing community that is really dedicated to advancing and growing this environment just really was a great match for our campus. We also did some research into kind of an internal audit of our staff. As I mentioned, we identified that we're really going to need a strong staff support to run this new environment and new service. And so we looked at what we currently, who we had on staff, what their roles were, and looked to see where we can maybe reallocate some staff, redefine some job descriptions. And once we finished with that, we could see where the holes were. And so we identified a couple new positions that we needed to hire to make sure that we can provide a nice, robust service for our campus. The other thing is we reached out to our community external expertise. We talked to about four different universities that have implemented Drupal in some form or fashion on their campus and really just asked them, what did they do with Drupal? How did they do it and was it successful? What were some of the challenges that they faced and what were some of the advantages on their campus for rolling out Drupal? And really just, really figure out if they had any kind of words of wisdom for us. And this was very, very valuable information for us and we really strongly encourage anyone who's about to embark on a very similar journey as us to really reach out to your peer institutes and find out what they're doing and connect with them because they're more than willing to help you out. We also realized that we engaged some professional experts to really bring us up to speed. Two years ago, none of us knew how to work in Drupal, let alone spell it correctly. Yeah, we spelled it wrong a couple of times. And so we realized that in order for us to do this correctly, we needed to bring in some experts to not only help us with the Drupal part and how we wanted to configure our Drupal environment but also how we were going to build this infrastructure to support that, how we were going to create a deployment process that will make it very easy for us to manage the many sites that we were anticipating that would be under this new environment. And then once we had identified Drupal as our CMS for our campus, we reached out to the Drupal community and that has been just an amazing experience for us and I think really solidified for us that we made the right choice with moving forward with Drupal. After we finished kind of all of our research and some of the planning, we decided that there's no way we can do this all at once. So we created a phased approach for this project and we're just finishing up with our first phase, which is really just building out the infrastructure, building out the foundation for this environment and for the service that's going to be on top of it. And on top of that, we decided to start out with the university website and we launched that on January 4th. So we did not have a holiday. We really wanted to start with the university website. One, so it kind of gave a face to this really amazing robust infrastructure that we just built and also to generate some buzz and excitement on campus to show off that we have now invested in this new technology for the entire campus to take advantage of. This is just an example of a site that is built in Drupal and letting them know that we are now in the process of building a service for them to take advantage of. And so phase two is where we're going to build out that CMS service environment that I was talking about, so that self-service template environment and that custom development environment and we're just about to start on that phase. And then phase three is when we'll start to roll out the web application hosting for all the other various service needs that we have on campus. And with that, I will pass it off to Mike Carter who's going to go into more of the technical details of how we built out our infrastructure. So I'm Mike Carter. I've been at CU pretty much since before there was even a web. First thing we had is some really core decisions to make about how we were going to try and roll up this service out. And obviously the first one that you probably have been hearing about for the last two days is do you do this in the cloud? Do you do it yourself? And there were some key points that made us take the road of doing it ourselves rather than hosting it in the cloud. We're a big university. We have data centers. We've been running data centers since the 70s. So the facilities were in place. The other thing that really drove that is that, as Joe pointed out, we had 700 top level domain sites that needed to be maintained and trying to figure out the networking for that in the cloud with what we were rolling out new. It was beyond our ability and comprehension to be able to do that in the cloud.  The other thing that we needed to decide is how we were going to do this load balancing and web traffic management. We picked F5. We'll go into that in a little bit more detail later. VMware, we already had VMware clusters running. We have the people that understand them, the people that manage them day to day. So that was a pretty easy choice. And the last thing we did is we built a sandbox. We wanted to see if we could do this and how all these different layers that we didn't understand would talk to each other. So the first thing I'm going to talk about a little bit is the web traffic manager. And the big thing that that gave us is that we didn't have to move everything at once. As Joe pointed out, we had lots and lots of sites. We were going to bring one site, the university homepage up first, and then additional sites that had already been brought into Drupal, but were running either in the cloud or on other hosted services on campus. And the big part of that was keeping legacy alive. We've got a half a terabyte of spinning, static, and CGI content out there, much of which is extremely important to some department or some Nobel laureate that if we disturbed would be not very happy with us. And the last thing that I want to point out about that is that it does bring up a little bit of maintenance and a little bit of overhead that our university communications group wasn't used to in that they can't just spin up a new site and have it magically appear. They have to work with our networking group. We're developing a process. It's fairly manual today. We've got a tool that we're prototyping to make all that much easier. So what we're doing with the web traffic manager is directing really five different kinds of traffic to different places. So the first and most obvious one is the stuff that's going straight to Drupal, non-authenticated Drupal via HTTP. And we inserted a varnish layer in there. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. And then there's the authenticated Drupal, which we bypass varnish. So we're doing the web traffic manager sitting there in the middle making all these decisions for us, data groups, all sorts of stuff in there that make that happen. We can also keeping just that one single domain route traffic to somebody else, our housing department. If they want to live under the www top level domain, we can route their traffic. And then of course the thing that we've been harping on here, which is our 700 legacy sites that sit out there on static HTML and CGI. So the really important thing about this slide from my perspective is that we have a lot of layers here and there are lots of VMs at each layer. So obviously the web traffic manager is sitting there at the top and that's what we'll talk about. Well, I just talked about that. Underneath that we have a web proxy cache for speed and we'll go into each one of those in a little bit more detail as we talk. So I guess the thing that I really want to point out here is everything here is in the open, all this stack is all open source from how we're providing our database files. I mean, you guys all know that the core of Drupal is all open source, but everything else that we're doing here, other than the web traffic manager, the F5s themselves, everything else is open source. So that web proxy cache layer is, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, that's just speed. Being able to cache pages, et cetera, in Miram, we're currently in our production environment, we have four. As at least one of the experts in our audience will tell us, he'll tell you, we probably don't need four yet, but we've got four. We're sort of in that more as better, but we may scale some of those down. After the varnish layer, we've got the web Drupal layer obviously. I think probably everybody here understands what makes that up. The one thing that's added to that is our APC cache, which again is just one more thing to try and cache your PHP byte code, speed things up. We've got an object cache layer here. We're using memcache. Again, we've got four. We may not need four, but that's where we started. Our MySQL is in a dual master configuration with the non-master node being a read-only node, and we're using Red Hat 5 actually because the pacemaker cluster that we chose to implement that on didn't support six yet, but that's obviously highly available. That's actually the only layer here from the Unix-y side of the world that's not virtualized, and we did that again for speed. The last layer, for what Drupal needs in terms of files, is an existing highly available NFS cluster that we use as actually the NFS cluster for our legacy sites. We've added a little bit more storage to that, and that's what's providing the site's default files for the UDrupal heads in the room. Specifics on hardware. F5s, we've got two for dev test, two for production. There are 3,900s for those of you who are shopping for things with the LTM package, that's the local traffic manager package. When we were looking at all these layers, we figured out pretty quickly that there was a lot of intra communication between these layers, and so we were using pairs of 10 gigabit switches to let all the layers, whether it's memcache talking to Drupal or varnish talking to Drupal or whatever needs to talk within these stacks on dedicated 10 gig switches, that solved two things for us. When it simplified our overhead wiring and it also made our racks more easily portable, which we'll talk about in a minute. Their Dell R710s is the base technology we picked, 96 gigs of RAM, 6 cores, fairly standard 2U units. The storage for all of this, whether it's the VMs or the highly available NFS, is what we call at the University of Colorado our enterprise storage, that's HP left hand ice guzzy sort of stuff, fairly standard. The one downside to doing something locally is obviously you don't get the geographic separation that you would in the cloud, or that if you do things right in the cloud, you get in the cloud. And so we planned for that, we haven't actually implemented it yet because our second data centers networking isn't ready to support the F5s or the highly available NFS and the enterprise storage at the moment, but I'll bet we're there within a year. And so before I let Matt here talk about where we are today and show you some pretty cool stuff, just a real couple of quick slides about where we came from. So this slide is actually our website in 1996 as seen in Netscape 3.0. And the most interesting thing to me about this is that Netscape 3.0 right there is actually still running on my desktop on an old Solaris box. So I was able to recreate that web image pretty easily. And the last one is just to sort of show where we came in terms of servers. In 1996, the server that was serving this page was a single Sun Enterprise 450. It wasn't really sitting in a hallway like that outside my office. But we've come a long way from one 450 to 12 Dell R710s, four dedicated networks, which is in four F5s. So Matt Tucker. Hi there. So I am the lead developer at the University Communications and Joe wasn't completely right in saying that nobody could spell Drupal two years ago because I've been using Drupal for about five years. But just joined the team about a year ago. And today, the University Communications maintains approximately 60 different Drupal sites. And most of these are still currently living on external servers that are not using this new production stack. But we are slowly moving these over as we have the time. But again, the most visible change was the Colorado.edu homepage. And what I'm going to kind of just quickly run through is some of the modules that we use to build this. Our search in the top right is using the Google Appliance. We have a Google Appliance sitting in our data center. And what just happened to my screen? My screen is gone. Tech help. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Well, we just might kind of have to make this up. Of course. Well, I'm kind of stuck. 25 seconds, cool. So yeah, our search is done with the Google Appliance. One of the big things that we really, really like about Drupal is its robust taxonomy system. So the primary menu that's at the top of the screen are all top level terms in a vocabulary that we're actually planning on sharing across multiple sites. So we're using, we've prototyped a combination of the services module in combination with feeds and there we go. Cool. I think this is just going to pan through again. So yeah, we're planning a combination of the services module and the feeds module to actually share this vocabulary across multiple sites on campus so that we all maintain the same general taxonomy system. There's two main node types on the site that are, of course we have about 15 or 20 different node types on the site, but there's really two main ones and that is news releases and feature articles. Feature articles are a little bit richer content. It allows our news editors to add in photo galleries and videos and slide shows, whereas news releases are a little more just basic text. The, all of the different displays are of course done using the views module with heavy caching on all fronts. The site itself is built on the 960 grid framework and it's built using a responsive design and so if you pull up the site on your iPhone or iPads you can see the site responding to the size of the screen. Responsive design is an interesting topic that Luke will go into a lot more during tomorrow's keynote, but it's really difficult, not necessarily technically. The media queries in JavaScript is actually pretty simple, but it's really hard to in a way philosophically determine what is the most important content for mobile users, what's the most important content for somebody on an iPad and how much of the site do you need to change for the various devices. And so we actually just launched this responsive design on Monday and so it's definitely still evolving. We're going to continue to change it over time. As you scroll down the site, there's quite a bit of content, but if you keep scrolling all the way down you get to a beautiful campus image. We're able to quickly swap this out for major events. It's snow day, we put the beautiful snow picture and when CU was recently in the NCAA basketball tournament we were able to switch out the image in support of that team as well. This particular functionality is provided by a module that I've contributed back called the Backstretch module and it's simply using a jQuery library that already existed but it just integrates it into your Drupal environment and allows you to very easily select which images get displayed as the background image. So kind of moving off of the homepage and on to the bigger scope of this project in terms of maintaining lots and lots of Drupal websites. A single Drupal website really isn't that hard. It's just a couple files that talks to a single database but when you start working with 20 and 30 and 50 and 100 sites it becomes extremely difficult and there's a lot of challenges that you run into in terms of keeping modules all up to date across all the sites and keeping Drupal core up to date and so we developed a module called the Drupal SimLink Manager or DSLM which its goal is to try to make this slightly easier. Basically what it does in order to use DSLM


Now we have a floor and we can see the floor because we've added a light I'd like to be able to run around this level to see how it feels to the player and We need to set up a couple of things to allow that to happen. So I'll show you what we're going to do first So I want to be able to run around and I'm deliberately going to do this wrong first So if I were you I wouldn't copy this but the way that we do it is we press play here And that will play the level in the active view port which is here and when I press play what's going to happen is My player just kind of drop past the floor and will now fall forever Which is sad and then we need to know a few things as well to get out of this So we can click on stop to stop the simulation But if you've clicked in here You now can't get your mouse out because you're controlling the camera in the game So you can either press shift and F1 to regain mouse control, which is good Or you can just press escape and that will end the simulation, which is how you get out of it as well so I am now Very far away from my level. I'm kind of lost in the middle of nowhere And rather than just try and find my way back by controlling the camera That would be not I'm just going to select something from my outliner the rectalight will do and then I'm going to press F and Then it will just reframe my camera and put me back where I should be So I'm going to show you why that went wrong So it was a sensor because I wasn't over the floor and if we click on this here change play mode and play settings When we spawn a player they'll spawn at the current camera location Which I fell them because my camera wasn't over the floor And you can see there is an option to do default player start, but it's not available to us yet So if I click on play now, you can see that the camera is in place The collisions are working and the player can run around. That's good. That's brilliant But I've still got no control over where that player is going to start other than putting my camera in place So we're going to add what's called a player start and then that will allow us to make the player start exactly where we want them to Every time we do that by clicking here And this time instead of searching through the menus for this if you just start typing player like that It will do a search in all the menus and then you've got player start So I'm just going to drag that into my level like that And I've dragged it on purpose because I know when I do that It will give me this bad-sized warning and what that's really telling me is that it's just Intersecting the floor and all meal engines worried about the collisions. So it says hey Why don't you drag it out of the floor and I say good idea? So we've done that and then the other thing to be aware of is that there is a direction on this It's the way that the player faces if I just go to my selection tool You can see that this blue arrow is the way the player will face when the game starts So what we will do then is move this to about here So that the player can see most of the room will put it fairly central as well You see most of the room in front of them when the game starts So now I'll just deliberately put my camera out over the void and then we'll press play and You'll see that the player has started where we just put the player star which is useful And now we can run around and in case you need to know this your default controls for this default character are W a s and d and then you control with your mouse the direction that you you're facing as well by default We've also been given this default character who is known as Quinn She is one of the two default or meal engine five mannequin characters There's also another one called Manny who's a male version of this We might look at how we change those later, but for now Quinn will do she's perfect for our needs So I'll press escape and just zoom out a little bit So we're now ready to continue to test this level as we move forward As we make changes we can quickly figure out how this looks and feels to the player in the next step Then we're going to put some walls in to stop the play from just running off the end of the level Which is not what we're going for so I'll see you in the next step for that one Thanks so much for joining me I hope you found this tutorial helpful and enjoyable if you're eager to dive deeper into game development with Unreal Engine 5 I have a fantastic recommendation for you I highly recommend checking out the course on real engine 5 the complete beginners course by David Nixon on Udemy It's a comprehensive and beginner-friendly course that covers all the essential aspects of working with Unreal Engine 5 I personally found it to be an excellent resource and I'm sure you'll benefit from it too Check it out by following my link in the description below once again Thanks for watching and supporting the channel if you'd like to help me create more content like this Please consider becoming a patron on patreon the contributions I get through patreon make a huge difference in keeping this channel going remember to like comment and subscribe to make sure you Don't miss my upcoming tutorials your support and engagement mean the world to me and help my channel continue to grow Thanks again, and I'll see you in the next one


moment there we go now we're recording so as always I'm recording and you should see on the screen our our agenda for the for the hour and to sort of kick things off here's our antitrust slides so please review that and the upshot of course is it's all about being a good person so and if you need to dig into that a little bit more feel free to do so what I what I'll ask is if someone might take notes for the hour and these are just simply high level notes of things that we think are generally important oh and I hear crickets here so I know Wendy's done this before I believe Jeff has taken notes before so they're off the hook nobody am I gonna I'm driving I'm driving can you're who else is driving otherwise flying conducting heavy vehicles well I would I'd volunteer put my hand up I can do it for the first 45 minutes after that all right you you got it Steven thank you so much how's that for an easy sell all right and just just very very high-level topical and then shoot shoot me an email at the end of the hour or whenever you're back in an office okay with that out of the way again thanks for joining us and I do know we have at least one new person on the call this morning I'm just doing a quick scan at the list here and yeah and so I think Alicia is is our sort of our new member today often we have new members on the call and so sure enough today would be an example Alicia you want to talk a little bit about yourself sure good morning so my name is Alicia my background is nursing but I have done a lot of different things in healthcare from working with employers hospitals billing so I have a really good picture about everything occupational health so I've always been interested in technology and I've always been interested in entrepreneurship so right now I'm volunteering with a nonprofit here in Seattle that is called Seattle health innovators and the function of this group is a nonprofit helping startups understand the health care system and I'm volunteering for that right now so I participate and I go to a lot of the conferences that have to do with and try to get involved in anything that has to do with health care and improving the system yeah and Alicia and I have worked together through Seattle health innovators and her real interests and skill is in the payor space and I mentioned that because Ravish is on the call and Ravish happens to lead our our pair subgroup and so Ravish you may have a potential new member to work with and so Ravish will go through updates for the pair subgroup in a little while and again thanks Alicia for joining us this morning and great to have you on the call yeah thank you very much sorry Luis what was the name of the nonprofit again oh and she muted but I could I can cover for her and it's Seattle health innovators okay and again thanks thanks Alicia for for for joining us on the call okay anyone else on on the call that's new or would just like to introduce yourself as we as we move forward already oh well oh good morning yeah okay I don't see my name on the list but but I know I'm in the meeting yes good morning morning sorry for joining a little bit late yeah so I do have a blockchain for digital health company and I've been meeting joining some of these meetings on and off I'm a little bit under the weather today so we'll not talk a lot but I'll try to participate in it in any any way I can so we're basically working on using the blockchain to store both identity and medical records and we are working with local universities here in Miami to write a grand proposal for a specific use case that involves telemedicine antibiotic resistant excellent outstanding and and Patricia I was on a an interesting webinar I think it was either yesterday or day before and there was a gentleman from UC Davis that was on the call and he's doing something very similar to what we're doing here in Seattle which sounds very similar to what you're doing down in Miami and what I'll what I'll do is I will forward you the link to that presentation and and you can sort of parse that and decide whether that sounds interesting to you and I'm due to follow up with this gentleman gosh his name escapes me now I believe it's Michael something but he's out of UC Davis down in California so I'll just make a note to myself yeah so you see Davis and yeah and I'll send you the link to that presentation it was an excellent presentation it was on blockchain in the health care space and one of our local folks here in Seattle David holding from Microsoft spoke and of course David spoke here with this group a couple of months ago and he's a great speaker very well understanding of blockchain technology in the in healthcare and and he's he's a great resource for us to have here in the Seattle area okay well perfect all righty so moving on so community announcements so I was contacted by hyper ledger leadership I think was yesterday maybe to before we are they are planning for the HIMS 2020 conference which is happening next year March if you might recall hyper ledger and the healthcare SIG particularly are represented at the HIMS conference and that was we started that about two years ago and most recently myself and then Dennis Kozen were at the HIMS conference this year I was represented in the hyper ledger group and it was phenomenal because this year was really the first year that we got an awful lot of traction in the blockchain technology space in healthcare in large measure because two years ago was really the first time anyone at the conference even knew about blockchain I think it really has hadn't entered into the lexicon at that time and so we're planning early this time around because what we're really looking to do is develop a little what I would call a more robust approach to to having hyper ledger represented in the healthcare space and the idea would be to perhaps develop a panel so we could have panel discussion at the HIMS conference next year and so what we're what we're asking membership and I'm I probably will also send this out as a separate email to the full the full HCC membership as well but what we're looking for are people who would have an interest in speaking about their experiences of using blockchain technologies in the healthcare space at the conference and again the thinking is and this is very very high-level thinking at the moment whether we have a panel discussion whether we have separate presentations whether we do this in a forum at the last HIMS conference we had basically it was a full-day event that was immediately preceding the conference where it was all about blockchain and I can I know Dennis and I participated in that and it was very good and so we're looking to try to reprise that again this year if you happen to be interested let me know either send me an email or contact me over on rocket chat and I will put your name on the list and we will start to to sort of convene meetings through the leadership team to think about how to develop this this this idea of having a more robust presence of hyper ledger at the HIMS conference right now that what they're asking for is a deadline for proposals in mid-July that's what that's what I'm being told and honestly I think that's a little bit premature but that's that's what that's what I have up there right now so that's kind of the the time frame we're looking at again I think that's you know just personally me I think that's a little bit a little bit too soon but so anyway so anyone happened to be offhand interested in this it's a great opportunity okay all right yes yeah go ahead since since Tara might be okay so so Ken are you are you partisan Tara oh yeah now I am okay and I think you know and the reason why I asked is I think Centera was represented at the webinar two days ago so I reckon my brain on that one yeah okay yeah also at the last at the last HIMS my CISO was up on the panel oh and and I think it was Mike CISO that was at the webinar so his name isn't very familiar oh good yeah a small world all right yeah it's all connected and and I thought I might have heard someone else comment okay oh perfect all right thank you Ravish good good good okay moving on so just last night just yesterday the Hyperledger team announced Hyperledger Transact and that it's it's effectively a smart contract engine I posted the the sort of the the announcement here and I wanted to just pass along to to the group this morning only because it's a it's a brand-new brand-new tool it's it's really another suite of tools that we would use for for developing blockchain solutions the purpose of Transact will be to develop really sort of an abstract smart contracts what they're calling smart contracts engine and that will allow us to run sort of agnostic against the the blockchain DLT and what's really interesting about this is the excitement is really sort of cycling around the notion that it'll run across EVM it'll run across you know disparate DLT's and so it just got announced yesterday I wanted to pass that along and just for those of us that tend to focus on the more technical stuff this is a great tool and what I'm seeing and this is just from my personal take on it is more recent hyperledger tools and frameworks are tending to be more sensitive to frameworks outside of sort of the hyperledger greenhouse which is phenomenal and that really includes Ethereum as Ethereum is probably the the other large DLT framework that's out there so do you have any questions please let me know and if you'd like to have someone speak on hyperledger Transact here within the health care cons context please let me know and I could probably set something up okay and then as as many of you know we've had for for number of months Michelle and Appalene from Cambridge they've been developing a global blockchain benchmarking study and they contacted me I want to say about a week ago to let me know that they have now completed their work and they're now in the process of completing their report which is going to be a phenomenal report and it's really focused around production level blockchain solutions in health care and that paper that they're developing will be done they believe probably end of July and so we're hoping that Michelle will be joining us and he'll be presenting on the work that that he and his team have done over the past oh gosh it's been probably about three or four or five months so I wanted to let everyone know that thanks for for your participation if you happen to have a production level blockchain solution in health care up and running and that effort that work effort is finally coming together so we're we have fingers crossed that we'll get some feedback from Michelle after they get their paper out and they'll be presenting again my guess would be August probably August time frame or so okay any anyone else have any other community announcements that they'd like to mention things that they're doing in their community that are in any way related to blockchain technologies in health care Rich Mr. Rish I just wanted to quickly announce hopefully I'll bring up the meetup probably will send the information out over the weekend we did get agreement one from Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship and approval from the Howard County Public Development Authority for the event sponsorship regarding Hyperlegit local event so I also reached out to David and we caught the Maryland Hyperlegit meetup group started and the first event will be that event happening on July 18th from 9 to 11 30 I will share it with anyone who is in in Maryland or in around Maryland can join over the phone I will see if there is arrangement in their facilities to open up for a call I don't know yet but if that happens we will definitely open it up on the call as well but nonetheless the idea is to bring you know a bunch of community from hyperlegit perspective in person there and I'm I've already talked to them if we can do it every other month they've agreed to it so it's just a matter of working dates but that's something that is going to be happening and I will send out the agenda I will send out there are two sections that I'm planning to cover one is going to be the general blockchain discussion and hyperlegit and second is going to be focused on from their perspective already working with one of the IDC consultant who has you know published a paper around a bunch of use cases in blockchain and healthcare blockchain so I'm going to be exploring for him to come over there but nonetheless the overall from community perspective those are the two areas that we will be having discussions about I have been able to arrange the a little bit of funding from you know one of the organization who can bring in the break first so I think July 18th is happening and I will I literally got that confirmation a day I think it was Wednesday when they finally approved it and you know David created the group quickly and we are going to be sending out the advice so just wanted everyone to know about excellent well good to hear rubbish tell me again where where this is being held at this is going to be in Columbia Maryland at Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship they have a facility which is the Gateway Innovation Center I will send out details with the agenda with the location and everything and you know you can share it with the subgroup I mean the whole healthcare group in fact the healthcare community not just the first half is going to be general and second is going to be there focused I am reaching out to local pairs you know leaders who can you know come come to the event and have a real discussion excellent yeah and if you could add that post your announcement over to the rocket chat channel as well and that it will be helpful for for folks that are yes rocket chat perfect excellent thank you thank you rubbish where was that I I'm in Columbia Columbia Maryland thank you yep and and rubbish when will you know whether this is we can do call in so that for those of us that are not in on the East Coast hopefully Monday I will definitely talk to them by Monday and update everyone if the call in going is going to be available or not I am hoping to make it happen so we'll see outstanding well good and and best of luck with with your you sort of your kickoff event that sounds very exciting alrighty okay any other community announcements alright so let's move over to our subgroup updates Dennis did you want to talk a little bit about the patient subgroup yeah good morning everyone if someone has doubts about global warming he should come now to Switzerland I've heard it's quite warm today's the biggest update for all of us in Switzerland is 40 centigrade I don't know which what's in front of me wow that is that is warm are the Alps are the Alps officially melting at this point yeah many says today that they cannot work under that circumstances anyway it's a very Swiss way in Switzerland in Europe I know but we're in Switzerland where in Switzerland is French part of Switzerland but I know where are you though I am next to Weiwei do you know Weiwei Montreur no I'll be going to Switzerland in in September mid-September it's it's better time than today it's it's great so yeah I hope if you have any questions or you need support just let me know thank you welcome um we had a great meeting last week and it is wonderful that also Patricia is participating today there were some responses few responses from the from the last meetings and we decided to go with the patient data for clinical trials on blockchain and the the using THS and we complied with GDPR and it was also a great discussion all together with Fabian, Patricia and Florence Hudson which was first time in our group and she brought also very valuable information from other committees like the IEE pre-standards work in blockchain for healthcare they are developing standards and also from PHUs and his her strong intention is also building a collaboration between the groups and I think it's it's also very useful for many of us to to communicate and find out the value-added share of knowledge in order to proceed with the project with the use case and my main intention was last week to narrow this proposal patient data clinical trials and blockchain to a more specific requirements in order to define it together and also try to develop it together and we have been speaking about interfaces between the data and the blockchain hyperledger and the structure and the architecture and mainly how do we in which part we put to patient data and we have been discussing and we have we also decided to think about it till the next meeting in order to make it more concrete and Patricia will you we also like to add from your side if I'm missing something hi Dennis well I think you they're a good summary of the last meeting yeah we actually looked at different proposals that we all agreed on on the clinical trial one what we are basically we have we have we have an assignment for next time in which we studied the different aspects of clinical trial and we had to focus on one because there there are many different aspects so each one of us is looking into how we could work together maybe obviously some kind of open source solution that would help each of us in our respective you know projects so we're still we're I'm still looking at that what we left off yeah wonderful and Patrice also supporting really with deep knowledge it's very much appreciated and we are looking to next week to make it more specified and more building a block of the standardization of data and the process and I think my personal opinion or my personal experiences keeping the data before the hyper legib before the execution of the process together and we are discussing that at the moment so this is a brief summary from our sites excellent thank you Dennis sounds like it's coming together very nicely and I'm and again I'm very glad that that's you're you've taken over this group because I I'm starting to see good momentum and a good cadence building up so thank you so much for that and thank you Patricia as well for participating excellent it's very very exciting yeah the team support was great and we will do together as a team and your next your next meeting is when next week Friday perfect so so patient subgroup meets really actually opposite of this group plus one one hour if I recall or two hours two hours two hours okay and anybody in the group is very much welcome to participate and as we are just in the initiation phase we can we can we can do together and look into the next meetings for the more effective work outstanding very very exciting time thanks again Dennis okay Ravish you want to give us an update on the pair subgroup so rich unfortunately this week we were not able to meet we meet every other Tuesdays now same week as this meeting from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and unfortunately we were not this week I had something come up and had to cancel the meeting today or this week however we are working on your two things I know we've been working on that paper and you know it comes on and off but one of things that I am really focused on is start working on the use cases and POC that's some that's that's one of the main reason I am also organizing that physical event going forward to ensure that we have engagement because a number of times what I thought I have at least observed is you know discussions are great but something physical being done and some tangible deliverables really catch up the momentum so that being said I know Jeff that being said Jeff has been a regular attendee and and some of the folks I did realize last time that there was some confusion I think we were meeting earlier weekly and the meeting was on for weekly calendar but the meeting was happening at the other so I reached out back to the the person who sent the invite and requested them to update the event on the calendar so it just reflects I suspect the attendance went down because people might have been calling the week when the meeting was not on and it might have you know caused some confusion so just trying to reset the attendance and be the schedule and that's that's what is going on okay anything anything you have to add Jeff did you want to add to that and Jeff Jeff is appears to be muted at the moment and maybe having taking a sip of coffee so so thanks rubbish for that and glad to hear that you were able to get the the schedule or the calendar updated and I think it yeah I think it's probably easier to manage every every other week rather than weekly just just from an overhead perspective as well I wonder if we wait if you'd be interested in we can probably do a put together sort of a description of what you what you guys are currently doing through the payer subgroup and we can generally generate an email out to full membership just to let let people know about your new schedule and then for those that are interested in participating to get on that schedule rather than on the weekly schedule because you may yet as you point out you may have lost members if they thought that the the subgroup was had had been disbanded if you had to buy weekly and you were still on the weekly calendar so let me know if you want to go that route and I'd be happy to help facilitate that I think that would be a good idea so if you can just share that communication that would be fabulous sure send me sort of a paragraph or two yeah and then and then we can get that out to membership fantastic thank you Ravish okay Stephen you want to talk about the the healthcare interoperability subgroup so not much has been done given riches gentle urgines I will complete some work over the weekend to provide a kickoff letter and continue work on an initial agenda and commit to getting this the interoperability subgroup started sometime this July I apologize for my my lack of agenda and my lack of time it has opened up so now I'm just struggling with finding the same momentum that led us into this initial initial thinking about the subgroup so I I hope to regain that momentum pretty quickly and then take riches advice and just kick things off and see how see how it begins to roll well thanks for that Stephen and I mean the reality is this is a really great space I think for us to be in interoperability in the healthcare space is a big issue I think we all kind of know that and with with your guidance and your sort of expertise in the area I think this is going to be a very very high growth and high visibility area and we've already heard from at least one speaker and I'm thinking of Brian from insta med and they've they've done integrations using fire and I was at a conference well actually Alicia and I were both at a conference about oh gosh I think it was about a week or so ago and you know and it was about interoperability in health care and it was all about fire and so clearly interoperability continues to be an issue and it'd be great to have you and your subgroups sort of you know sort of kind of convene around some of the use cases as they relate to interoperability it's such a tangible real issue it's great to have you sort of addressing it yeah so yeah don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of this I think a fire is a great interoperable model as far as data though goes that's where the semantics meet the road so it's really all about you know are you using ICD 10 correctly or you got CPT for it there so codable concepts and that sort of thing yeah so the yeah harmonizing that that semantic is is really not going to be what we will focus on that's for a larger more clinical group I think but we will be using the same coding solutions and well we'll I think be doing a little bit what sounds like the pivot in patient and I'm really happy to hear that this is sort of moved away from a supply chain donor milk which didn't really have anything to do with patients to something more about clinical trials and how people provide consent management to their data and all those other really great things which are really how data is going to be shared not just in a blockchain but how it's going to be made available by people to participate or to make their data available and anonymous and maybe not so anonymous ways anyway yeah great great to hear that's happening and we'll definitely try to bend it here to more of those discussions okay well excellent well good definitely keep me posted and then when we're ready to when we're ready to launch I really expect to see some really good momentum here so thanks again for your work this far and looking forward to the future okay so let's do a pass on a round on updates for our ad hoc teams and generally speaking ad hoc teams tend to tend to focus around topics of interest and they oftentimes kind of grow into a subgroups that they tend to meet more regularly so right now and this is sort of an ongoing issue we're we're always in sort of this this sort of wiki redesign space as most people know we sort of moved from an older wiki to confluence which is what we're looking at today and I'm always always it seems to be a thing for me looking to find people that have expertise in in confluence of the wiki and sort of a general design sort of expertise as well and so if you if anyone on the call has you know that that's sort of understanding of how to use confluence and really enjoys design please let me know in fact this issue is not just for this SIG but it tends to be something at a much broader level that we're talking at a leadership level and and again this is really an appeal to find a good resource to help sync up all SIGs and working groups so that we have sort of common look and feel and the real value to that is so that members and again we continue to have new new members coming in we are growing at a phenomenal rate coming into the community and so we're looking for a way to synchronize look and feel across all SIGs and all working groups and so you know this is just an ongoing issue so if you happen to know anyone or you happen to be someone that has interest in design and have expertise with confluence please let me know okay moving forward so the academic research team led by Adrian Berg I reached out to Adrian earlier in the week and he is sort of on a quasi oh gosh not a vacation but a just the word just like anyway he's been out for the past couple of months and so he's just getting back into this swing of things so I would imagine we'll be we'll be spinning up the academic research team again when as Adrian gets on back online but the gist of that is to develop some some expertise around process for making blockchain technologies more relevant within a health care context by way of peer reviewed journals and and and sort of aggregating some of the research that's been done thus far in this space and to that to that extent Wendy has done a great job with her sort of research efforts in sort of aggregating those white papers those are up on our wiki for those that are interested a phenomenal resource and and thanks to Wendy for that and this is probably a good segue to move over to our use case development team which is being led by Wendy and I see Wendy's on the call so when do you want to give us an update on where you're at with that sure hello everyone I have a quick update to something that Rich just mentioned so the frontiers in science has created a new journal called Frontiers in Blockchain for Science that just kicked off today I was named as one of the associate editors and so we believe that this is going to be a fantastic forum to advance academic research for blockchain and so keep looking for that journal and if anyone has a strong scientific and review background I'd love to talk to you going on to the use case development team this has been slow gaining traction we have four additional well five members of our team and I see Patricia on the call thank you so much for participating in this use case group and we're just waiting for one more team member to provide his availability in our doodle poll and Ken if you can give Ray a little nudge I would appreciate it because he's the last person we're waiting for and it looks like we will schedule our first use case meeting for July 9th or 11th excellent thank you thank you Wendy and as far as that sort of a new academic research component goes and the work that you're doing congratulations on on your involvement in that and if there's any way for us to help facilitate sort of that that getting the information out to membership here I'd be happy to do so we can maybe generate an email out to full membership if you think that's appropriate yeah that's fantastic the editor in chief Sean Mannion sent out an email and LinkedIn post this morning and so I can forward to you that information so that you have it and yes by all means we would want the full membership to be aware that this is a fantastic new outlet for updating the academic literature outstanding and this this falls very closely in line with the academic research team that Adrian's been exactly so we may want to find a way to pivot or to collaborate or you know what will work those issues out sounds good thank you any this is very outstanding and thanks so much for your efforts on this in this area this is really something that we've you know we've talked about for a very long time and so I'm happy to see all this stuff is sort of coming together in large measure by your hand so thank you so much for sharing that I also wanted to give a shout out to Erica beerbower she and I are also working on some academic literature with Kevin Klosson and I am madly writing a paper and for a publication deadline of July 22nd and my primary focus is on regulatory compliance of uses for blockchain in clinical research and it goes in depth into the OHRP FDA and HIPAA regulations on many different touch points relating to regulatory compliance outstanding oh very cool very exciting interesting stuff too okay well thank you Wendy again very very exciting area and and again a very high-growth growth area and I gotta imagine that we've got an awful lot of folks in membership that would be interested in and sort of being more enlightened in this space and so yeah let's let's find a way to get the word out okay so so moving on so we don't have any old business per se but I do have a couple things that I wanted to talk a little bit about and we do have a special report coming from Dennis but so first off and this I just learned about just a couple of days ago and apologies for catching this kind of late in the cycle but we do have a periodically and for folks in the government space there are things called what I refer to as Sibbers and Sitters or SBIRs or STTRs and those are really aimed at small businesses and these are government grant opportunities and funding opportunities STTRs or oh gosh small business technology transfer I don't know what the R is I forget and Sibbers are gosh I can never remember that but they're all aimed around small business Sibbers generally speaking SBIRs generally speaking are for small businesses to to develop a solution standalone whereas an STTR usually a small business will work with an academic institution and that collaborative effort is lends itself to the grant application so in this particular instance we have a blockchain technology opportunity this is through the Department of Health and Human Services and it's in collaboration with NIH and so I'll switch over to that and so that's what we're looking at here what's really wonderful about it is their the program funding is a million dollars which is phenomenal the bad news is that the closing date is end of July so we're really catching this sort of in midstream here and so that gives folks interested in participating in this about a month to to put something together the the high level value of this is for folks that are interested in participating in substance abuse that's what SUD care is about and so if you have an interest or expertise in in substance abuse in the health care space and you have an idea about applying blockchain technologies to substance abuse this is really developed for you and again I'd be happy to help facilitate I'd be happy to put this out to full membership if you would like to drive this or you have a team that you want to put together again we can do this fairly easily as far as Sibirs and Sidders go I'm very familiar with managing these we've done these in government military in DoD I've done many many of these over the years so so the mechanism is pretty straightforward and it's just a question of convening a team sort of quick enough to be able to sort of answer that end of July due date and so and I really haven't explored the details particularly so my first question of course this being an international group is if you happen to be outside of the United States can you participate and honestly I really haven't dug too far into it but my suspicion is you as a as a foreign entity you probably could with some I have to imagine some exception anyway so I'll leave this to you if anyone's interested feel free to contact me and then we can like I said we can make use of the resources within this special interest group to put to this if you have interest in and driving this forward rich can I can I ask again I didn't get everything but I got that there was some kind of proposal or a call for founding announcement opportunity for substance abuse is that from NIDA from the National Institute of Drug Abuse yeah I believe so so if we take a look at so I'm gonna jump over take a look oh it isn't a wiki okay I can look at it okay well and the reason why I mentioned it is because you mentioned NIDA and I believe yeah so so it's it's it's actually interesting it's HHS it's also NIH and then to your point and I when I was reading this the other day I noticed NIDA so NIDA is in fact involved okay that's interesting because we wrote something that could apply but this is thank you for pointing it out I think it's a little bit late because when is the application deadline end of July yeah that's gonna be difficult and unfortunately I just found out about this literally two days ago and so it's one of these things where boy it'd be nice to you know to have that the turnaround especially with an STTR when you're working with an academic institution it takes almost forever to get you get through the approval process and so my experience is usually Sibir's small business grant options those are a lot easier to operate against because it's just you your small business and then you can kind of be in a team yeah SPAR would be best for this one yeah and and it's possible and again I haven't gone too deep on this it's possible that this particular grant opportunity is dual meaning that there is an STTR and then it branches as an SBIR as well the the company that I I heard this from I talked to them we're doing a consulting thing we and I talked to them earlier this week they were of the belief that this was also released as an SBIR so but I didn't find that information but they they were of the belief that it was so the real the real issue honestly is that you know you have to have something turn around by end of month July which this opened up I want to say in in May June time frame so these never seem to have a whole lot of time for you to operate against but yeah one month is difficult unless you know you as a as a company are already sort of poised in this area and working in this area actively so right so that's interesting we are and this would be fantastic it would be a good fit with the project that I'm currently working on for the unit uniform services family health plan which consolidates data from six different health providers so yeah I'll be in touch and did you say this isn't you you think this is a silver but you only have the sitter yeah right so so you know Steven if I were you I would probably drive this a little bit more so the way that it was described to me it was passed over to me I want to say on Wednesday I think my meeting and they had they had asked if I could be if I could participate in this and I said well you know my read on this is this is an STTR which means you have to have academic involvement which is honestly a headache unless you know you really have those relationships well established and they went oh gosh that's a problem and then one of their team members said oh but it appears to also be released as an SBIR as well as a cyber so if but but I didn't see any information to that effect when it might be diligence but it may exist out there and so you may want to sort of drive that that one to ground and if it is a cyber yeah that would be the way that I would act on this and and again it you know it does have significant funding behind it I was gonna say that's the top of the that's the top of the bar for Sivers yes yeah exactly there is there is an SBIR you call it cyber oh yeah yeah and I've been I've been told so there is one I just found it oh good good good okay if you can put it up on chat through the chat window Steven can you can you grab that out of the chat window or Patricia's can you send it over to Steven then we'll get that into the notes yep we'll publish that and I'll push push that back to this this agenda through our notes so Siver yeah absolutely a Siver would be much much easier to respond to especially given the short time frame and and you're absolutely correct Steven that it is a high ticket item and so that's what caught caught our interest initially thanks I need to ring off I've got the link from miss one dia which is gracias and I'll pass you over the notes when I when I finish cleaning them up okay thank you Steven thank you and thank you Patricia okay so moving on so really the rest of the time I want to put to Dennis Dennis was recently attended the Hymns conference in Finland so boy I tell you what an opportunity so so Dennis do you want to talk a little bit about your your experience at the Hymns conference yeah with pleasure and as I told to reach that I'm going to attend his conference in Helsinki he kindly proposed to have me the presence of hyper ledger just few information this is the second Hymns conference in Europe and the participants was around 2000 people in comparison to Orlando 42,000 people so it was much smaller scale and especially because of the location it was very much dominated with the Scandinavian organizations that has one good and one bad thing the bad thing is it doesn't really didn't really represent the whole Europe for example Switzerland in Zook Ethereum is coming and there are almost 300 different startups and almost 20% is in healthcare in Geneva etc and in Holland there are also many others but the good thing is Finland is the best EHR integrated nation in the world and I had also the opportunity to know more about the whole initiative and that was my main objective attending to the conference and just open so the Finnish healthcare system has a portal for any season who is over 18 and the name is my canta dot com and the users can access their prescriptions health and well-being data manage their living veils organ donation veils manage access to their data using consents and restrictions browse logs about access to your data act on behalf of a child aged under 10 and manage their personal health care record data so and it is used almost 25 2.5 million of users which makes the half of the population of Finland so it there is no big discussion about interoperability in Finland and on the other side there are also patients traveling to Estonia on the other side of the sea and they want to also integrate Estonia with their healthcare system with their EHR system in order to took all these things in record and consolidating and for the use of different purposes so it's very much GDPR compliant it's very much patient driving and it's very much interoperable and the thing is how do they realize that is the controversial thing because they realize it very much central plant and driven and also it took almost 30 years to come that point I had the opportunity discussing with the system architect with the managers they really want to improve the whole system also in the regional levels they started with the predictions with AI implementations it was it was a miracle in comparison to Switzerland and because in Switzerland there is an initiative for the EHR standardization standardization of the HR which is not really running because of different political discussions almost in the last five six years so it was a big good practice experience touch and feel in Helsinki and I also organized for a hyperledger six different meetings in order to present the the frame frameworks and also the initiative and it was very useful because blockchain was not really very much present in that conference very much like Rich reflected the 2018 it was correct Rich in in Hymns global in the US it was almost the same situation and the thing is there were two sessions about blockchain and it was not really deep discussed and presented and I think there will be lots of opportunities if we can organize in the future in healthcare events and conferences hyperledger will be present and another information for the key challenges for blockchain in healthcare in Europe is very much the lack of house skills and insufficient user knowledge I can also send this presentations to you guys if you want to have more deeper understanding and which vendors for blockchain technology in the healthcare ecosystem do you know 76% doesn't know any vendor or any any any framework in blockchain in healthcare in Europe so there is a big potential and opportunity to to contact with people and to inform people about the opportunities of hyperledger and what we are doing in the future in order to get also the commitment and support so it is almost three to five I can also talk longer but I don't want to take your time if you have further questions you can write me and I will come back to you with pleasure excellent thank you Dennis and so yeah if you can send that information over we can put it either out out on the wiki which I think is where we want to put it and I can also send it along to full membership if you think it's appropriate but absolutely please send that information over and that would be that would be useful and and thanks so much for your summary boy it's very interesting to hear that blockchain technologies are not necessarily fully considered yet in the healthcare space in Europe and I think yeah maybe maybe they they're just simply lagging maybe a year in this in the healthcare space which is interesting because in a lot of respects Switzerland tends to be sort of a central point for much of what happens as far as blockchain technologies go at least in the fintech space and so in financial industry and so maybe that's the disparity that we see here but thank you for your support with you with different informations information before I travel rich and David was also very much supporting thank you good good good I'm glad to hear that we were able to get hyperledger support behind your visit so excellent well good thank you Dennis all righty well so we're coming up to the very top of the hour any other last comments or thoughts before we close out for the week so our next meeting is scheduled for July 12th which is two weeks from today same time seven o'clock Pacific time and if we have no other comments or thoughts we'll close out and I'll wish you all a great weekend thanks everybody thank you likewise


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE coverage here at IBM Think 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Mandalay Bay. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage three days of wall-to-wall interviews, thought leaders, experts, entrepreneurs. You know, people making an impact. And our next guest is Harte Sani, who's the co-founder of Ho Show.io. H-O-S-H-O.io, Ho Show.io, advisor at Pink Sky Capital. He's a CUBE alumni, a walk-in off the streets because he lives in Las Vegas, but very instrumental to connect into this community because of his pioneering work in crypto, blockchain, and the future of money. Harte, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming by. Thank you for having me. It's good to be back on theCUBE. This is my second time. And second time, yeah, in only a couple weeks, we just saw each other at the Bahamas, the first security token conference. Yeah, Polycon. IBM's really big on supply chain. This is their business, their old school, generations of providing software for businesses, B2B, but now block chains are a big thing. But block chains, pretty straightforward. Yeah, you get efficiencies, but they're not talking about token economics because they're talking about some of the execs here. They're like, well, that implies the general public in their world thinks cryptocurrency, they think Bitcoin. So I want to connect the networks together. Our network, IBM's network, your network, because the melting pot of this trend is really about blockchain cryptocurrency in the sense of the value around tokens and how tokens can be harnessed to capture the values. I want to get your perspective as these worlds collide. So I think that IBM's doing a great job by spearheading a blockchain movement and they're really, they're focusing on the Fortune 500. And the key with Fortune 500 companies right now is that they have rooms full of Java developers, Java engineers. And Ethereum is the protocol right now that is most commonly found. The majority of ICOs and token generation events that have occurred to date have all been on Ethereum's network and Ethereum is the most commonly found blockchain. However, the Ethereum blockchain, the language to build and launch token generation events on Ethereum, you have to write in a language called Solidity and Solidity is a new language. And IBM has made a smart move by doing everything in Java and JavaScript similar to a lot of the new blockchains that are aiming to compete with Ethereum. And the key distinction, just to kind of put it out there I want to get your reaction to and get some commentary around is, IBM is not competing with public blockchains. They're looking at it in a different way.  I mean, it's not really a dirty word because they have a different use case. Correct. I think it's very important, especially when it comes to things like healthcare. You look at the healthcare industry, healthcare records will not be going on public blockchains. And so the hyper ledger fabric framework may make sense for things that need to be HIPAA compliant, for example. So reliability is key. So what's there is like, say, hashgraphs got a lot of traction in their performance and their speed. They got timestamps. That's not a native blockchain, yet that's kind of getting some traction. IBM's got something similar for those markets that require the reliability, the performance and the security. So help the audience understand IBM's moves here because IBM's conservative, so they don't really want to throw the word cryptocurrency out there because it might be misunderstood, but this is going to end up in token economics. How do you explain what the moves IBM's making to the average person that might not know the inside nuances in baseball for, say, the crypto market? I think what's interesting is that IBM has a more mature focus on this space. And, you know, they have direct ties historically to the Fortune 500 companies, the way others do not. And so they've taken a much more sophisticated and a much, much more conservative approach. You don't see IBM throwing around the word cryptocurrency. And that's a smart move because it's about the cryptography that secures blockchains in a decentralized ecosystem. And it's that the discussion of just tokens and token sales and leveraging tokens as a currency, it's a premature time in this entire industry to be having that discussion. So although it's going on, it's a distraction for IBM, you saying? Yeah, because it's more interesting for smart contracts to be written that are functional smart contracts that for the first time ever, white-collared middlemen are being cut out of the picture in a new, trustless, decentralized ecosystem. So talk about where IBM could take this with token economics. Obviously, do you think that this all leads to some sort of tokenization? Is that going to be where the value capture's going to be? How does IBM get there in your mind? I think they get there by having Fortune 500 companies launch legitimate decentralized applications on their blockchain. And that's just what Java JavaScript? It's because most Fortune 500 companies already have a plethora of engineers globally that they can simply have, start working on IBM's blockchain. And you don't see that as a risk for IBM? No, that's IBM's advantage because today the Fortune 500 companies aren't building on Ethereum's blockchain mainly because of the learning curve it takes for a current full stack engineer to become a Solidity engineer. What's Ethereum's future now? Obviously they're working on Lightning, seeing some things going on that area. Lightning is Bitcoin, Ethereum is Plasma. Yeah, Plasma, I'm sorry, I'm confused. So they got to get through the work that some real work that's got to get done. Ethereum touts a big developer community. The biggest. The biggest. So do those merge with the IBM communities downstream at some point, or is it okay to be separated and does it matter? I think they'll remain separate in this case. I highly doubt that IBM Hyperledger will go down the route that Rootstock has gone. Rootstock essentially is the Ethereum virtual machine side chain to the Bitcoin blockchain enabling smart contracts and the Bitcoin blockchain for the first time. And Rootstock is a very interesting project. However, IBM is its own ecosystem and the way in which they're catering to the Fortune 500 is extremely intriguing. And from Hosho's perspective, we want to be auditing smart contracts that are functional, that are written by more sophisticated players in this new decentralized ecosystem. Our main focus is just security auditing. And there's going to be a lot more smart contracts written by more sophisticated players on IBM's blockchain than possibly the other ones right now. We have not seen a plethora of Fortune 500 companies by any means launching smart contracts on Ethereum's blockchain. And blue chips banks or whatever, as they try to disrupt themselves, need to get a trusted partner, governments. Okay, talk about it for a minute. I'll just take a second to talk about your business. I know we covered this at Polycon and the Bahamas, but for the sake of context to IBM, talk about what you guys are doing. We are specifically in the marketplace of partners. Would you sit if you were partnering with IBM and your role that you could possibly take with IBM? So to take a step back, quick Hosho, the word itself Hosho and mean security in Japanese. And we started this company eight months ago, my co-founder, Yo Kwan and I. And our laser focus is blockchain security and being the global leader within the blockchain security space. So as far as we see, there's new blockchains being made, new protocol tokens being launched, as well as new tokens being launched, as well as new smart contracts being written that are functional for the entire business. And no matter what blockchain a smart contract is written on, that smart contract is code that has been written and that code has to be audited by a professional third party. And we are that professional third party that does a line by line code review of the smart contract and finds all security vulnerabilities. And we've been building proprietary tooling to find vulnerabilities faster and faster and faster. We do a gas analysis to make sure that that blockchain is not being clogged. We conduct a static analysis to find any hidden functionality within the framework of the smart contract. And the last part, which is very crucial, is that you are a very uniquely qualified full stack engineer with a unique QA mindset and a security background who knows the language in which this is coded, which currently most projects that we're auditing are Ethereum ERC 20 tokens written in solidity. Someone has to marry the source of truth, which in the case of an ICO is a white paper and marry the white paper to the smart contract and make sure is the smart contract doing what the white paper says. Yeah, codify the white paper basically. This process of auditing is gonna be ever more crucial within the business that IBM does with Fortune 500 businesses because when a publicly traded company launches a smart contract for a decentralized application, security is the highest priority. And the vulnerabilities is where the hackers could come in, just being on a time to market, getting those smart contract codes written until it's fully baked.  It's been regular practice in the cybersecurity world to type up code and to have it reviewed by a third-party auditor. We're simply applying the exact same logic to the blockchain space. And it's exciting to see more blockchains by sophisticated players like IBM come to fruition and we're looking forward to actual projects from big players around the world launch an IBM's blockchain and Ho Show is looking to be a preferred partner of IBMs to do all their security work, whether it's smart contract auditing or penetration testing. And real quick on penetration testing, that's our other core service that we provide. And penetration testing is both for websites and for cryptocurrency exchanges in which we're making sure there's no security vulnerabilities within your website and finding every way possible to penetrate your website or your exchange. And every time code is changed, you've opened up the doors to more vulnerabilities. And so in the cryptocurrency exchange space right now, we're seeing that new exchanges are being made but sophisticated investors don't know if this is a safe place to trade hundreds of millions of dollars or not. Yeah. And when you've got commerce being done, I mean, IBM's focus, you mentioned, is legit and they're doing a great job. By the way, props to IBM for doing what they're doing. They've been in it for multiple years now and they're supporting the Apache project. They're putting their weight behind it. But these are real-world examples. Granted, supply chain might be boring to some audiences but not to others. I mean, you're moving real product around. This is commerce with digital fingerprints and code and potentially tokens that's highly going to accelerate the payment process. I mean, the notion of clearing goes away. It's instant. Yes. This is a highly accelerated money transfer, value capture, value transfer environment. You can't take any chances. Yes. And security is primal concern and we're excited that companies like IBM value security and this space is one that the dust has yet to settle and what's going to help the dust settle within the blockchain ecosystem is more priority on security. So what's your take? If you are going to give a talk here, we're doing talking here in theCUBE, so it's awesome. It's going to be on live and on demand as well. Your advice to people saying, you know, we've got to tokenize our business. I need to start with blockchain. I can see some areas to create some efficiencies around some inefficient processes and create new business models. I got to get started. Your thoughts. My thoughts are, take a step back and first evaluate, do you have a business? What problem are you solving? Once your business is actually generating some revenue and you've evaluated why the concept of a blockchain could be interesting for your business, then pick a blockchain and stick to it and then when you started building on that blockchain, you figured out that a token could actually be leveraged within this decentralized application that you're building. Then you can start figuring out what the token economics of it would actually be. I think what people are doing nowadays is rushing to create a token because of their excitement about the fundraising mechanism that an ICO is. And an ICO is democratizing to some extent at least global capital raising. And I think that fundraising mechanism is not going anywhere. That fundraising mechanism is here to stay. However, the majority of ICO projects that we're seeing occurring today, I don't think these companies will be around in the next couple of years, which shows how immature to some extent the industry actually is. Whereas maybe the projects that are built and launched on IBM's blockchains that they develop, maybe they're more sophisticated and will be companies that have gone through a more rigorous process of making sure security was a primary concern and they wrote quality code for quality businesses that are actually leveraging decentralization in the appropriate way, not the other way around of we want to raise capital so let's invent a reason to have a token or you have a big case right now in Silicon Valley at least is you have companies that are very serious A and B and decided let's do an ICO for series C. And that, that's tricky. It's not always the right solution. What you're saying is don't confuse the ICO craze of fundraising arbitrage and new model to applying supply chain tokens and blockchain to a durable business. Agreed. And on the same token, we have people in the space whether they're investors, they're lawyers, PR firms, exchanges, they all need to mitigate their risk by keeping security as a concern for them both in-house and for the companies that they're working with. Lawyers don't want to be doing lawyer work for a company that will turn out to be a scam coin and someone has to do a security audit of that token. The same goes for a PR firm, a marketer and an exchange. Exchanges should not be listing tokens that have not gone through a smart contract audit. Well it's good to know we got a CUBE alumni here in the CUBE to help us with our security audit. Yeah, it only answers the life we're in a CUBE interview so we got one right here. I want to just get into a topic you and I were talking of a dinner the other night when we saw each other a few nights ago about the problem of picks and shovels and tools and maturity in this new emerging area. Can you just take a minute to explain what we were talking about there? And I thought you had a good point. I mean, the maturity of this space is not mature. It's growing, it's embryonic, but moving fast and there's need for tools. Let's unpack that, just share your thoughts and vision. So I think that a lot of people have been more excited to join an ICO, a token generation event and do more quick money grabs, but to me what's more exciting is the infrastructure that's needed for this industry to actually grow and mature and infrastructure is infamously known as picks and shovels because when the gold rush happened the people who made the real money were the people selling the shovels to the gold diggers. And what's included in that is businesses like our own Ho Show which is selling security audits of smart contracts, doing penetration testing, bringing maturity and making things less risky for everybody in this space. So we see ourselves as selling picks and shovels. On the other hand, I'll give you an example. Goldman Sachs has a trading desk. Today it's not 24-7. Stock market opens at nine, closes at five.  Do the traders that are now 24-7 have the appropriate tools and the governance built into software to manage a team of 24-7 traders at Goldman Sachs? Today when you have traders trading in the stock market they have a plethora of tools that make them snipers. And you have certified market technicians telling hedge funds that this is gonna go up two points here and three points there reading candlesticks in the cryptocurrency space. It's like poking a stick.  You're like a blind man. And so there's a dozen companies that can be made building the infrastructure for just what I just said, the governance for trading floors. This is a really good point. And I wanted to bring it up because in these emerging markets, these white spaces for tools and technology to help the overall trend grow faster has always been a successful one. However, you mentioned something about the Goldman Sachs trading desk and that is it literally could be turned on overnight. Correct. So that's the problem. You can accelerate things too fast and not be prepared. I think Goldman on a side, no, Goldman's done a great job at being very much forward thinking. They've been at every money 2020 since the beginning of that fintech conference. And they're definitely- Let's put Goldman Sachs aside. The analogy is a company can turn on a new model fairly quickly, faster than the old days, which would have taken months. And then now you can do it really on a much shorter timeframe. That means they potentially could be exposed if they go too fast. This is where the ecosystem has to help. Yeah, I think the bulge bracket banks are tritting the water very carefully. J.B. Morgan is doing things. They're involved with Ethereum, Zcash, Dash. J.B. Morgan has a lot going on on this front, but these are publicly traded monster banks. They're not going to take any risks. They have stockholders to answer to. They have the U.S. government. We have over 150 regulatory arms just regulating the finance industry in the United States. And so I think the average American citizen is quick to point fingers to bulge bracket banks. And those banks are answering to too many regulatory arms. This is one of the downsides of the United States right now in general, is the increasingly coercive environment of the government. IBM certainly got the blue chip company that got the Fortune 500, but they also have a marketplace. And that's where they could really kind of change the game, feeling in those white spaces. J.B. Morgan Yeah, IBM's marketplace sounds very exciting and my mind just goes to who's handling the security for everything to do with IBM blockchain. We're hoping it's hosho. J.B. Morgan Artej, thanks for joining us. Thanks for sharing your insight here on theCUBE. We're here at the IBM Think Conference. Breaking down all the top news that's really around blockchain and AI with data at the center of the value proposition, all being disrupted by new decentralized technologies, blockchain being the beginning and a lot more is happening. Certainly we're going to bring it to you on theCUBE. No matter where it is, we'll be there. I'm John Furrier here in Las Vegas for IBM Think coverage. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.


In the meantime, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, has asked the President's administration to transmit a bill to the National Assembly to amend the petroleum industry act, PIA. Lawan made a call, and his remarks after the bill skates second reading are that these would enable the National Assembly to extend the subsidy regime in the Petroleum Industry Act to be in line with the President's request for additional money to cover fuel subsidy in the 2022 budget from July this year. Lawan therefore mandated the relevant oil and gas committees of the National Assembly to engage the executive on the bill to amend the PIA to align with the President's requests. Speak to the issue of the executive sending request for the amendment of the Petroleum Industry Act to extend the provision of the fuel subsidy which is also requested in the amendment because the act itself says something else, that there will be no subsidy again. But if we are approving for subsidy, then it means we have to extend the period in which government will provide subsidy up to the point that this subsidy that will approve 2.557 trillion will last. So there is need for the executive to come up with requests for amendment or the our committee, gas and oil related committees should work with the greater side of government to get that sorted out as quickly as possible. News updates.