Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the session. So today we are going to present session on the scalable heat engine. Okay. So this is my friend, Kiran Anand and myself, I'm Kanak. So this is the agenda. So we'll just brief over you of the heat. Then we'll introduce about the new architecture, convergence. Then we talk about the comparison between the current architecture and the new architecture. Okay. Just to give you the feel of heat. So this slide gives you the need for, what is the need for heat service? So today if you take any cloud applications, so you will have the front end, either mobile or desktop, then you will have in the back end, you will have the load balancer followed by the API. Then back end you will have the application server or the DB server, then the database. So if you look at the cloud applications, when the load is going up, so usually it will increase the number of servers, and when the load is going down, it will get decreased. So all these things will happen automatically in any cloud applications. On top of that, if you give any applications, there will be a configurations. So in common, if you look at the cloud applications, you need the load balancer at the front side, you need the scaling, scale up or scale down, and you need one service to deploy your complete application, which is kind of like a hardware, like infrastructure, like server or the storage or the network or the application or the configuration. So these are the different needs from the cloud applications. Okay. So that's where the heat was introduced. So it's basically orchestration service to create and manage a lifecycle of the cloud applications. So now we know like cloud applications means it has the infrastructure and the software that's application with the required configuration and the load balancer in place. So if you take any cloud applications, we can model it in the heat by means of the template that's called heat orchestration template. So it's nothing but it's equivalent of AWS CFN. Okay. So if you take the cloud application, it's made of, we saw it's made of different resources. So to model that resource, we have a resource plugin. Okay. So once you model the cloud application as a template, you can create as many cloud applications out of that by means of the stack. Okay. So once you deploy the stack, when the load goes up or when the load goes down, you want to scale up or scale down. So that's where it gives the auto scaling. Okay. On top of the infrastructure, you want to deploy the cloud applications for that it gives the software deployment. So once you deploy, you want to configure it. So for that, it gives software configurations. So while happening all this process, we want to track how things are happening. So that's where it gives the events. Okay. Let's just see the glimpse of what is the template. Okay. Take a simple example. Say you want to create the instance and you want to create the volume and attach it. So each of this element, you can model it. Like instance, you can model as one resource in the template and then volume, you can model it as another resource and then attaching them, you can make it as another resource. So all this constitutes the heat template. Okay. So now we know what is the cloud applications and how heat is helping to model and deploy the cloud applications. Okay. So heat is having the heat engine. Okay. In legacy, we have some problem. So we worked on top of that and then we solved what are the problems in the legacy and we created the new architecture called convergence and my friend will talk more on that. Thanks, Kanagraj. I'll go through briefly about the convergence architecture, the various phases that we decided we planned to do and the comparison between legacy and the convergence architecture and then I have some data. We ran some benchmarking tests that I want to share and show. So first, motivation for doing convergence. Robustness was lacking in the legacy heat engine in the sense that the heat engine doesn't really know about what happens to a resource when a stack is deployed and because clouds are noisy, there is possibility that due to hardware or software failures or due to some other, you know, user-related things like the division of a VM server without knowledge, those kind of things actually end up in a heat stack failure when a user does a heat stack update again. And then there are also issues with heat engine restarts. When a heat engine restarts, it marks the stack which was in progress as a failed stack. And this is pretty common when the system is upgraded, the heat engines reboot and then the stacks which are being provisioned, they are moved to failed state. So we wanted to ensure that when such things happen, either in the heat engine when the heat engines reboot or if the stacks that you have provisioned, the resources that are there in the physical world, if they disappear due to some reason or if they are down, then heat should be able to automatically bring them up to match with the desired state that you have mentioned in the template. Another issue was with respect to scalability. In the current heat engine, the stack is provisioned within a heat engine process. That means if you request for a stack, the whole request is taken by a heat engine and over time it starts provisioning that. And basically the whole heat engine is there in one heat engine process. So it may so happen that all the large stacks end up on a particular heat engine exceeding its capacity. Also, we wanted to ensure that heat scales up to the limit of other external components like DB or a messaging queue. It should not limit by itself. If DB supports 1,000 transactions per second, heat should take that up. If it supports 10,000 transactions per second, maybe it should take that up. I'm just giving an example in that sense. It shouldn't restrict by itself. Availability and usability. Heat should be available in the sense that it should be able to take action on... It should be able to take right action when user intervention is not required.  It should be able to bring it up and then keep it in sync with what is required. Also, users should be able to update the stack at any time. Stacks that are in progress and which take a long time, that as of now, user cannot do a stack update on that. He'll have to wait for the stack to either move to failed or a complete state. Then only they can update the heat stack. Then one more requirement was that when we move to convergence heat engine, these stacks should be backward compatible in the sense that stacks that were created in legacy heat engine, they should work fine because the convergence heat engine is being configured. All these efforts were addressed under the name of convergence and this all started during Juno time frame. After a lot of discussion and emails, we decided to do this convergence in phases because it required a lot of changes in the heat engine. Phase one was mostly targeted towards the design changes in the heat engine itself in the sense that we decided that we'll persist the graph in DB and then we persist the progress information in the sense that when the resources are done, we should be able to, when the heat engine restarts, it should be able to take up from where it left, not that it starts again. Then we decided that we'll have workers in each heat engine that will take up the load for stack instead of the stack being provisioned in one heat engine process. All heat engine processes should be able to take up the resource tasks from any of these stacks. Then resources should propagate on their own. They don't need to again go through the entire process because the resources are now distributed among multiple heat engines. Phase two, we thought we'll do the observer. I'll briefly talk about what observer is and then fault-tolerant heat engine maybe. And then fault-tolerant heat engine in the sense that if one of the heat engine processes goes down or the system on which heat engine processes are running, if they reboot, then it should be able to take these stacks forward. So users should not really see that these things have happened in the back end. Phase three, we thought we'll do the continuous observer that is still under discussion. Continuous observer is continuously monitoring the resources that you have provisioned using heat. So it continuously pulls, either pulls the resource or it will listen to the notification and then decide on what needs to be done and take the action and bring back the stack to the desired state that is being, you know, declared in the template. So let me talk about the design evolution. Let me briefly talk about the legacy heat engine, how it works in the current heat engine. These are the components and this is how it is connected. You have a heat API. The templates are given to heat API and then the request goes to RebitmQ or whichever is configured. Then the request ends up at heat engine. Heat engine has a database in back end. So user requests a stack. Here this stack one actually has four resources. I am just showing it as stacked up on each other to convey that resources A and B are needed for resource C and resource D needs all three of them to be done. So this is how the template is written by the user. I have just modeled it like that. So here you can see when a request is issued, the heat engine one takes up the stack request and it starts provisioning that. Similarly, stack two from some other user is taken up by another heat engine. Stack three is taken up by another heat engine and they start provisioning these stacks. So stacks are distributed among available heat engines. And then when stack one and two are done from heat engine one and two, the stack three here you can see is still running on heat engine three. So one of the issue here is that stack three, which is a very big stack, is being handled by only heat engine three. Though after stack one and two, heat engine one and heat engine two are available to take the load for stack three. So this is how it works in the case of legacy. Let's go to the convergence heat engine. All the components remain same. We have not introduced any new component. It's just the way it interacts, the heat engine interacts with each other and then other changes related to dependency graph of the template, those kind of changes have been done. So first thing in convergence is that the heat engine processes register themselves as worker to the AMP PQ, which means that each one tells to the rabbit MQ that they are available to work on particular resource to provision a particular resource from any of the stack. So same use case, let's go through. Stack one user issues a request to provision a stack. The stack one ends up, let's say, at heat engine three. The stack is provisioned in the sense that the template is validated and template is parsed, validated. The resources are created in the database. And then as you can see, A and B are the first set of resources that needs to be provisioned. C and D cannot be done because they depend on A and B. So it then schedules A and B for provisioning. So A and B here, as you can see, they are distributed among the available heat engines. They probably go to heat engine one and two. Similar things happen with stack two. Similar thing happens with stack three. Stack three is loaded and parsed, and the resource graph is created, sorry, dependency graph is created, and the first set of nodes, A, B, C, D, E, F are distributed among the available heat engines for provisioning. Then how it propagates. I want to show here how the resources really propagate. Let's say from stack one, resource A is done. When resource A is done, it marks resource A as done in DB, and then it updates the data for C. Whatever data is needed by C for provisioning, that will be updated in DB. So resource C could be like a volume attachment which needs a server. Let's say A is a server and B is a volume, and C is volume attachment. So volume attachment needs the server ID and the volume ID so that it can do the attachment. So in this case, when server is done, it updates C's data saying this is the server. But it cannot really trigger C because it still depends. B is not done. So when B is done, it again updates C's data saying that I am done and this is the volume ID. Then it actually sees that A is also done. That's when it schedules C for provisioning. So here you can see the first set of... first level of nodes are all done for stack one, two, and three. I just want to show you the distribution of work, this is how it happens in case of convergence heat engine. So all the heat engines are provisioning all the resources from these stacks. And this is how it propagates. A, B, C, stack one and two are done with stack three. The second level of nodes are done and the remaining nodes are propagated. And finally, the final resource from stack three is being provisioned and then it is marked as done. So a brief design comparison between legacy and convergence. In legacy heat engine, there was a stack-wide lock in the sense that when you issue a request to create a stack or update or delete a stack, the heat engine would acquire a lock and that stack and then it starts provisioning or deleting or updating the stack. So this in a way restricted the user and they were not able to do an update on a big stack which is being provisioned and if they want to update that stack, they are restricted. But this is not the case in convergence. In convergence, there are more granular locks. The locks are actually on the resources that are being worked on. So if a stack is in progress, you can still issue an update on that stack. What would happen is only those resources which are logged, they will be weighted upon and when they are done, the new update will take over. Otherwise, all other resources will be provisioned depending on the dependency, of course. Then the entire graph and progress information in the sense that up to what point it is done and what is being provisioned next, that is in memory in case of legacy, the whole stack is there in memory and then it continuously provisions them. In case of convergence, all of this is put in database in terms of the dependency graph, in terms of the sync points. Sync points are nothing but the resource data that I talked about. When resource C needs to be provisioned, it needs data from resource A and resource B. So this actually founds the formation for fault tolerant or high available heat engine. When heat engines go down, they come up, they can simply look at the sync point and then proceed from there. They don't have to go figure out where it needs to start. Load distribution, in case of legacy, you have seen that these stacks are distributed among available heat engines. But in case of convergence, it's more granular. The actual resources are distributed among available heat engines. That way the resource utilization is very high. So because of the stack-wide log that I told just now, the concurrent update in the sense if a stack is in progress, you are not able to update that stack that is not available in legacy heat engine, but it's available in convergence. So let me talk about observer in brief. Why was this required?  And then heat doesn't really know what is happening to those resources. It needs to be in sync with the physical reality. For that we needed an observer. So primary purpose motivation for doing this was there was no mechanism to know the current state of stack and then no mechanism to tell what's happening in the stack to a user, whether their server is down or the network port is up, all that information. Also, if a resource is not available or it's deleted or the server crashed or due to whatever reasons if a resource is not there, then your update is going to fail. I'll show you briefly. Any such updates on that stack can fail. So again, coming back to the heat engine. Here, as you can see, this is the heat engine that is down the stack. This is already done, A, B, C, D. But the resource C is down, let's say. It's not available. Let's say it's a server or something like that which has powered off due to some reason or deleted. And then the user issues another update that is having another new resource, N, which depends on C. For example, it's a new volume attachment or a new network port to be attached to a server. So in case of legacy heat engine, what happens is, without observer, I mean, what happens is that heat engine takes this request, it sees that resource C, it will check what's the status in DB and then it will try to compare whether it needs to be updated or not. Because resource C here is not changed, so it won't update it, it won't do anything, and then it goes ahead with the resource N. And when it tries to do that, it will fail because in physical world, the server is actually down or it's not even available. So creation of resource N will fail in this case because it depends on C and then C is not available. So with the observer, what happens is that when a stack is updated and a new resource is there, like the resource N, it goes through each resources and then tries to sync up with reality in the sense that it will poll NOVA for the state of server or it will poll Neutron to get the state of network port. And then if the reality doesn't match with what is there in the template, it will try to sync it up in the sense if the server is down, it will probably bring it up or create a new one. After doing that, it will try to provision N, resource N, and that will basically succeed. So this was the primary reason to bring in the observer component, not really component, the feature in heat engine. Talking about progress, it's been a long way. In Juneau, almost end of Juneau, the convergence initial blueprints were filed. And then in Kilo, we did a lot of POCs and evaluations, and then we decided to do it in phases. In phase one, blueprints were submitted in Kilo time frame and two basically blueprints were implemented. Those were the DB changes to the convergence message bus. In Liberty, we did a lot of phase one related blueprints. We created the lightweight stack, the convergence graph computation, storing it in database for reliability, and resource level locking mechanism, then the concurrent update features, and then we added the convergence-related scenario tests, which were very important. And then we had experimental gate job running every time people submit patches, we wanted to test with convergence whether it's going fine or not. In Mitaka, we did a lot of bug fixing. There were intermittent issues with respect to functional tests. They were failing sometimes, they were passing sometimes, so we had to fix all of them. The experimental convergence gate job that we introduced in Liberty was made mandatory in Mitaka. There were a lot of patches around observer in Mitaka time frame. So it's... That's how it went in Mitaka, and in Newton, we planned to make it... In Newton phase one, we planned to make convergence as default heat engine. And then we have other plans to implement the convergence phase three that I talked about where we have a continuous observer which continuously looks at the state of resources in physical world and try to sync it up continuously. We also wanted to bring the active-active HA capability in heat engine. So we'll discuss in this summit and we'll decide what needs to be done there. That's mostly about the progress of convergence from past few releases. This is... We ran rally tests. This is the data collected from that. We had taken the... What should I say? The templates and the scenario to run this rally test from Angus. So thanks to him. We ran the rally tests, and this is what we found. We ran it on a HP server which had 48 CPU to 56 GB RAM, one TB hard disk. We had multiple runs with number of heat engine workers. We wanted to see what happens when the number of heat engine workers goes up. So this is running with 32 heat engine processes. And then we are creating stacks with various size. So you can see there the stack size horizontally growing 50, 100, 150. And then you can see that the convergence heat engine... In case of convergence heat engine, the throughput is high, which means it's taking less time to provision than. So we carried out tests from the code from master branch and a few patches which are still in review. We also wanted to... For some reason I am missing the... Okay, here. This is the comparison between, you know, number of heat engine processes. We wanted to see that whether it really scales out. If we have a convergence heat engine running with eight processes, and then we increase add more number of processes, we wanted to see that the throughput actually increases. So this is what is being shown here in case of convergence engine. You can see that the fading green line is with, you know, eight heat engine processes. And then the time taken is much higher than the orange-colored 32 heat engine processes when we run with it. So when we compare the same thing in case of legacy heat engine, there is not much improvement because it's not designed to, you know, scale out. You just take one stack and then that heat engine processes, provisions that stack. So obviously there's not going to be much difference. This is mostly... This is about the contributions that were being made, the blueprints and then folks involved. I thank the whole heat developer community for, you know, giving a lot of reviews, helping us with POCs and evaluations, filing blueprints, taking this forward. Thank you all for these things. And I hope we will take the observer and continuous observer forward. So please get involved with heat. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be done with respect to observer, and we need to have a lot of functional tests return and a lot of scope to be done in case of heat. Q&A. That's all I mean. You showed a graph of the time it takes as you add more to your heat stack. I was curious about that sort of graph, but against the memory footprint. And I was wondering if you tested that. I guess I'm interested in... Does this change reduce the... Yes, yeah. In other words, do you have a similar graph or was there a test taken? These ones. In case of convergence, we compared with eight heat engine processes and then 32 heat engine processes. The previous one. But it's the same idea. I mean, I guess I'm curious. I see you've improved the time taken. Have you improved... Did the memory footprint change at all from this or is it about the same? I think memory footprint went up in case of convergence, but I have not collected that data. I just wanted to see whether the throughput goes up or not. Yeah. I would say I was marginally gone up, but we would do... I mean, it's still in the process. We are in the process of getting these tests done. So probably we should be able to share this data in the following weeks when convergence is actually getting enabled by default. That was one of my questions. So I have two questions. One, how... If I wanted to run a convergence engine, heat engine, how would I do that? And two, can I run a convergence heat engine against a heat API that is on an older version? Compatibility is between the two. So how do we run a heat engine? That's the first question, right? Yeah. How would I run a convergence-enabled heat engine? Yeah. For example, if you take the Mitaka release, you have to just enable it using your configuration flag. Okay. Right? It's disabled, marked as false. Okay. And your other question of how would you actually use it in legacy? Yeah. Can you use a convergence-enabled heat engine against a legacy heat API or are they tied together? Does that make sense? Not really. The API perspective would still be the same. So API and all, there are no changes in API. The changes are in heat engine, so that won't affect the heat API part. Right. So my question is, I could potentially run an older version of a heat API that would run against a newer heat engine. Yes. Yeah. I mean, from an end user perspective, you can use the same old API, same old templates, and run against a convergence-enabled heat engine. Okay. Yeah. Do you plan on implementing cancellation? Heat cancel update kind of thing? Yes. Yeah. There is already a patch in review for heat cancel, stack cancel update in case of convergence heat engine. Yeah. We are planning to do that. Yes. Okay. Questions. One, what is the unit on the horizontal scale for stack size? Is that the number of resources? What is the unit? Yes. That is the count of resource group, basically. And that includes the dependencies as well. Everything is resource at that point, right? Yes. So basically we had a template in which we had a resource group. Okay. And there was a way to change that count. So we incremented that count by 50 that you can see here. Okay. That particular resource, it's a resource group itself. It's a resource. The actual resource in that resource group is another stack, which is having a server volume. It's basically emulated like it has a server volume attachment, a floating IP volume, but it's been emulated by another resource called test resource. So we have actually not run it on a cloud or physical, this thing. We just tested with test resource. And also you said you can turn on migration in the Newton release. Convergence will be true by default. It will be enabled by default, right? We are planning to enable it in Newton phase one, yes. So if you're already using the legacy engine, do I have to migrate my stacks or will there be a migration process? If there is one, would it require that the engine be brought down? Or it will be no downtime upgrade? So it can be... We are in the process of doing... We are writing scripts to migrate the running... Sorry, the stacks that were already done to move it to convergence heating. Okay. Thank you. Hello. My question would be that how is action check related to resource observation? So is it implemented through that one or is it something completely different? So in case of resource observations, we are... We plan to look at all the properties and then see if we can, you know, update that resource, if we have to bring it back to what is given in the desired state, what is given in the template. So you mean that you actually have to implement the compression of resources for every resource one by one? Yeah. So every resource it will pull to the external system, NOAA or Newton and then gather what's the real state and then try to update or update, replace it. Yeah. So my question is also along the same lines. So there were plans to address failure policies at resource level. Right? Like, you know, after a stack create is done, if one of the resources fail, heat convergence will take care of applying failure policies for the resources. Convergence? Yeah. I think it would fall in the bucket of observer, the continuous observer which is being planned for discussions in this summit. Okay, it's still being planned. To automatically, you're talking about when the resource fail automatically heat would actually inspect or know that this resource has failed and take corrective action to restore it back so that it's in sync with the stack. Let's say somebody deletes a VM that's in a stack. Right? Yeah. That is not handled today in convergence. That is the part which we plan to handle in continuous observer for which we would discuss in the summits. So is that planned for Newton cycle? We are planning to discuss. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Hi. Earlier today there was another talk on one I also learned about called Sennlin and in the Q&A session of that I believe heat convergence was mentioned as well and somehow these overlap were related. I was just wondering if you could comment on the relationship between heat convergence and that project if you're aware of it. So I think it was with respect to auto scaling. So I think what Sennlin does is it will auto scale. It will see if there are four resources and then it has been overused and it will add another fifth resource or six resource like that and it will probably scale down. But let's say if you are scaled up from four servers to five servers and then it so happens that now for some reason your two or three servers go down automatically in that. Not in case of auto scaling, in case of resource group let's say which is not auto scaling group. In that case if the server goes down in that group the observer or continuous observer will bring it back to those many number of resources. So this observer particularly is very tricky to be implemented in auto scaling heat engine. So as of now we have we don't plan to bring in the observer for the auto scaling resource group because there the auto scaling happens from a feedback from silometer or monaska so it's bit tricky to do that thing there. And just to add to what you said I think with heat right auto scaling is I mean if you integrate with monaska or silometer I think that is where heat gets its information whether to auto scale or not. I'm not sure how senlin would do it. So that was one part we didn't get much clarity on that session probably I think during inter-project discussions we actually have to see what are the specific use cases senlin and heat would be addressing. The closed loop corrective system you're creating using your observatory model the corrective the correction happens immediately right because in your example you said when a request comes for land it sees the dependency C and then if the C is not there then it creates it. But if it's a closed loop corrective system it happens as soon as it detects an error. It does not have to wait for a request to come right? No that's the continuous observer part. Yeah that's what I'm doing. When continuous observer will be done it will either pull or it will depend on notifications from NOVA let's say NOVA notifies the server is down then it will immediately bring it back. Okay and then how do you determine if the action happened intentionally by user or if it happens due to an error? That probably we cannot determine if it was user who deleted or I mean powered off. The server could be done for administrative reasons or it could have crashed. How do you determine between these two cases? In first cases you really don't want to restart it automatically because it's a user action. Yeah that's one of the reasons why in continuous observer there would be options actually to specify whether a particular user has to be recovered or not. In the sense like is it something is this resource has to be continuously monitored or is this resource has to be kept out of monitoring. Okay and even in this case I think the particular use case you described where an admin has actually brought a particular resource down to maintenance. This has to be considered in the continuous observer use case so that it doesn't automatically interfere with an admin initiated operation. So each what we plan to do is give a flag at a stack level and resource level where you can say whether you want to observe or not continuously. Suppose you have plan to do a maintenance activity you can switch that flag off and then continue with your activity and then again switch the flag on then it will again start monitoring it. Thank you. I think my question connects to the previous one so I forgot it. I'm sorry. But I have another question. So we see these graphs and you say that the number of processors and the threads that are running the heat tasks is scaling quite linearly. Currently as I saw it in the heat code the Nova tasks are implemented in a quite naive way. So for example when you start a server or boot up a server it will wait until it reaches the running state but this is done very naively going down to the Nova list API and getting the state of the server. So when concurrent way on lots of threads this can easily overload the Nova API I guess. Have you been thinking about this? So we have not tested with actual NOAA but I'm pretty sure it will load NOAA so NOAA also has to scale to the user needs when a user wants to deploy a template which has let's say 50 VMs or 100 VMs in case of convergence you can imagine all the requests will go at the same time in case of legacy also it will go at the same time but there is little bit switching happening in the event lead so it's bit more parallel in case of convergence so it may so happen that the NOAA API returns back saying that this cannot be done that's possible but this NOAA the ball is in NOAA's code to address these issues if I understand the question correctly is the concern that heat is actually overloading these APS because it's doing a lot of this polling yes okay valid concern I think I think this and even it's the number of times it actually disconnects into the observation so do you consider the order of the events you see or you observe so for example when a port disappears from the API do you immediately want to recreate it or do you also correlate it to something like the server has been deleted or something what is being planned is that when you see that certain thing is not there then probably create it so that the stack is in sync with what is desired again I would say like it would be treated you would look actually at the hierarchy the dependent components and then actually decide whether to create it or not so yeah I mean these are finer aspects which are very fine thank you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Today I'm going to talk about social media and emergency management. We're going to talk about the strategy and the thinking behind it and also I'm going to go into the details about how we've tried to implement it in the State Control Centre and the real practical lessons that we've learned and the challenges that we've faced doing that. I've identified three main change in mindsets when it comes to using social media effectively and I think it applies more broadly than social media as well. The first change is the mindsets that have happened in this organization since Black Saturday and the Royal Commission and so on. So we'll go through some of those. So previously I think our attitude was that we held the information the community needed and that we expected them to come to us to get that information, to come to the CFA website, the other agency websites and get that information. So the move into social media is very much a move towards we'll come to you. We'll take the information to where the community is which is on Facebook and Twitter and on mobile devices. And I mean this applies not just in social media programs like the Home Bushfire Assessment. It's a good example of us taking our information, taking our services to people at their home rather than expecting them to come to us. Change of mindset number two. I think in the past we've had the attitude that we are the people that should decide what the community needs and they should be grateful for it whatever we decide that we want to give them. I think that's very much changed now to us, very much more concerned about what the community tells us they want and what they need and we provide that to them. There's also a big argument for sometimes just releasing information and we may not know exactly what the community might do with it but if you make that data available and make that information available then that encourages innovation and people come up with new ways of using that that can benefit everybody. The best example of that is plan burns. There's been a big debate about whether or not plan burns should be displayed on the same map as emergency incidents. Now obviously with any agencies with very specific views about what plan burns are and what emergency incidents are but from a community point of view, if a person sees smoke they want to go to the website and find out information about it whether that's coming from a plan burn or an emergency incident really doesn't make a lot of difference to the community. So there's been a lot of great work done by the information operations team and the IT guys to actually get the plan burn data available and hopefully very soon all that information will be available on the same map. So that's a really good step forward. Change of mindset number three. The public is a resource, not a liability. So again we often take the attitude that we're the experts and we need to tell the community what to do and that creates a very passive community who sit and wait to be told what to do and that's one of the things that we don't want the community to do. We want them to take initiative and be educated and make decisions for themselves. So that's an app from the San Ramon Folly Fire Department in the United States. It was created after the fire chief was out for a meal at a restaurant and he was enjoying the meal when a couple of his fire trucks pulled up the front he would like to see what was happening and somebody in the restaurant next door had a heart attack and it actually died before the fire officers were able to get there and use the defibrillator machine to do CPR. So this app tells people if there's an incident nearby them it tells them where the nearest defibrillator machine is and that's obviously empowering the community to actually help in that scenario. It's that concept of the community being the first responder rather than us. We all see ourselves as the first responders but generally there's community on scene and so the community are the first people responding to the emergency before the emergency services get there. This is Craig Fugate who's the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States talking about that same concept. We deal with this kind of this hypothesis and that is the public's not a liability to their resource and that oftentimes it's in their own nature to try to share information and they now have tools they never had before and they're doing it every day. They're doing it just for their routine how they communicate with friends and families but also during a crisis and we're seeing this more and more for the other you that do the hashtag stuff try following this hashtag SMEM social media and emergency management and really starting to see how local and state emergency managers are looking at tools like Twitter and Facebook not so much as a broadcast tool but really looking at how people are moving information around and how to incorporate that into their tools. The public oftentimes has better information and situational awareness in an area of a disaster than any of the teams in response that are coming from the outside but we kind of have this barrier because the public is an official it's not an official source of information the other thing is we're not really sure how to do this because we've got a lot of phobias about privacy and how we interact with the public and all of this stuff but we've seen now in the U.S. from wildfires in California and Boulder to the recent ice storm and snow storms the public is putting out better situational awareness than many of our own agencies can with our official data sets So what we've been doing at CFA and in Victoria 2008 we set up our Facebook page I think it was 2007 we first got into YouTube so it's quite early on considering those platforms that have been going for a few years at that stage but it was very much in the prevention and preparedness phase of emergencies we weren't getting involved in the response and warnings or anything like that it was the community education total firebands, fire danger readings that sort of information that we were providing to people on social media but last year there was very much a move towards response and getting social media integrated within the response phase Why did we do that? Basically the speed and the rates that social media gives you the two most basic reasons obviously you can reach a lot of people very quickly and those people can be journalists who then rebroadcast that over more traditional mediums as well so everyone benefits from that speed not just people on social media quite light-hearted look at it but technically it's true you could easily get a message from one side of America to the other before the earthquake arrived What reasons why we do it? Obviously the bushfire as well commission the focus on community education and warnings after that so we're looking at new ways of getting information and warnings to people and I think the attitude has been we need to look at new ways of doing it it's not just a matter of trying to do more of what we did before or trying to do what we did before better but really trying to look at new ways of getting warnings to people and also the Victorian Fludge Review specifically addressed the need to use social media for warnings and also interestingly looking at social media as a source of information to and from the public so I think a couple of years ago people were using social media to push information out to people but really now we're in the space of looking at using it to push information out to people but also how do we get information in from people so that intelligence gathering which has been recognized at the highest levels there's a comment that we had on our Facebook page another good reason why we do it is that for Sarah it's the only way she can get warning information, she hasn't got radio reception she doesn't have a connection to the internet and that's because often people don't have credit on their phones to access the internet on their phones but they do have a free with their mobile package they have a free access to Facebook so Facebook is probably the only contact with the internet that they have and also the generational argument that a lot of younger people rely very much more on online news sources than the traditional media so the big step forward I suppose last year was the integration of social media into OneSourceOneMessage for those of you who don't know OneSourceOneMessage is the system that our information officers use to get warnings out from incident control centers around the state they get messages out to various different mediums so as soon as they put the message into the system it goes on to the website it goes out to the media, traditional media it goes on to the RSS feed various other mediums and what we did last year was get that integrated get social media integrated to that so as soon as a warning is issued 24 hours a day, 7 days a week they'll automatically go on to Facebook and our Twitter accounts and then that's complemented by manual updates from our media units so that's the sort of information that the media are inquiring about how many trucks and just more information about what's happening with the incident here's an example of that so this one the one at the top there is a manual tweet by our media unit promoting the township protection plans that are available for the areas that are currently involved in the fires the thinking behind that is that you have people's attention while the fires are happening so it's a good time to promote the township protection plans even though you'd hope people were looking at them before the fire happens and then the next two are the automatic posts from awesome and then the fourth one, another manual tweet from our media officers and this is just an example of the same thing on Facebook where you've got the automatic warning at the top and then at 40, 30, 39 minutes later we've got a manual tweet from the media team saying that the fire is now under control and a manual post to the Facebook page so that's how we do it year round as it were in CFA managed by the awesome information operations team and the on-call media people the 24-7 media coverage that we provide manages those accounts when it comes to the state control centre obviously a bit more complicated more agencies involved generally much busier times when there's major incidents happening so we needed to really look at how we would manage this on a multi-agency, multi-hazard basis so what we did was bring a paper to the strategic fire and flood forum which consists of the fire services commissioner and all the chiefs of all the different agencies to propose the establishment of two new roles in the state control centre first one being media officers, social media sitting with the media management unit and the social media monitor sitting with the public information section and the community warnings and advice officer there's three principles in that paper which were supported by the fire services commissioner and the chiefs one that obviously we agree and believe that the use of social media helps us achieve our core mission that we need to engage with people year round in social media and build up that credibility and trust to just suddenly try and engage with people when there's an emergency happening that's really too late you need to have built up that credibility and trust so people know where to find you and believe what you're saying and acceptance that agencies have a role to play in this there was an argument that this is too difficult for it's not our area of expertise and the emergency services social media so we should stay out of it and leave that to traditional media and we'll just use our traditional mediums to get information to the traditional media and then let them worry about social media but really that's the situation you'd be in and then we'd be that you'd be engaging with people in the preparation and planning phases and then suddenly disappear during response and then return for recovery again which just doesn't make any sense the principle here as well of engaging in the exchange of timely relevant and tailored information is important which once again gets the concept of intelligence gathering and what information can we get from social media that could help us media officer social media the latest information is posted to social media so that'll be a combination as we said before of the automatic posts and the manual myth-busting and clarifying is another very crucial role obviously anyone can post whatever they want to social media rumours do start generally they're not malicious rumours they're generally well-meaning people who have heard something and repeated and then that rumours spreads very quickly because of the nature of social media there's a real need and an ability I mean it's quite easy to squash a rumour the Queensland police find it quite easy to squash rumours about dams busting and so on just by tweeting on their account or putting on their Facebook page account because they had 180,000 followers and that actually kept the traditional media in check as well if they posted something saying it was incorrect they find Sky News and other traditional media outlets that's where we're removing rumours from their websites as well and the managed expectations that's obviously when it's very busy we may not be able to answer every single question we get in social media but Peter Baker actually from F&EM used the analogy that we use for fire trucks when there's major bushfires on we are quite clear and forthright with the community that we won't get a fire truck to every house when there's major emergencies happening so in the same light we have to be open and honest to manage expectations to tell people we're not going to be able to answer every single question we get when there's major emergencies happening but we'll try and prioritise and deal with what we can deal with the challenges that we find in this role speed information for authorisation it's a common issue that isn't specific to social media I've worked at CFI for seven years doing media work during emergencies the ability to get speedy information authorised has always been an issue even before social media existed it's just that it's a lot more obvious and the spotlight's really shone on it now so that's how we can speed that up and really stay credible because if we have independent accounts independent social media accounts who have more up-to-date information than we have then we lose all credibility and why would people follow us and they can get more up-to-date stuff from other accounts challenges of resourcing finding suitably qualified people to fill that role was a bit of an issue though we were able to fill it we did some joint training exercises with DSA, SES, CFI and MFB and we have quite a pool of people from the communication side of the organisations who can fill that role and it also exposes inconsistencies and the slower mediums the best example of that I suppose is if a warning's been issued saying a fire's out of control and then that situation changes and the fire now is brought under control it can take 10 or 15 minutes to update that awesome message on the website so the dilemma we're in is do we wait 15 minutes with social media to tell people that the fire's under control and what we're doing then is holding information back from the community but if we do post it then the potential of creating contradictions between the information so people see on social media they say the fire's under control but on the website it still says it's out of control so how do we manage that so the compromise we came to was that we would issue the warning issue the updated information on social media and highlight that the information will be updated shortly on the website and then make sure that the information is updated on the website the social media monitor is an intelligence gathering role so their job is to identify monitor relevant social media to do with the whatever the emergency is to analyse and assess that information and to feed it back into the SEC structures this is probably a more challenging role the first problem was finding suitable personnel and really because really for this role you need someone who's quite experienced in emergency management who can understand the potential significance of information from an operational point of view a particular smoke pattern or cloud pattern or changing weather conditions that a member of the community might be talking about in social media you need to be able to identify well is that relevant from an operational point of view and then also someone who combines that with social media skills filtering and verifying social media information this is the common question we get asked and there's no easy answer for it everyone around the world is trying to come up with better ways of filtering and verifying information you get in social media and it can be a bit overwhelming but there are ways of doing it I mean you've got trusted sources if it's people that you know if it's our own members for example passing information on or people that you've built up a relationship with over time that you trust and that's a way of verifying it and there's also a number of research projects underway the University of Melbourne are looking at how they can filter and analyze tweets using all sorts of complicated algorithms that can filter out and get the best stuff to the top so there's no, it's a challenge but it's a challenge that everyone around the world is working on and then just the challenge of embedding a new system into the traditional state control center structures, the EM structures it'll take a bit of time just to get that embedded into the system get people trusting it so these are some examples of the benefits that we saw over the summer a good example of the myth busting someone had heard a rumor locally that the fire had started up again and we were able to confirm reasonably quickly that that wasn't the case obviously we need to be careful with that it took me 15 minutes to confirm that because you don't want to go on and say no, our information says it's not started up and then you discover that our information was wrong because that loses your credibility so I needed to be really confident that the fire hadn't started up again before I posted that the correction of errors and inconsistencies we spoke earlier about the challenges being that social media can highlight the inconsistencies and our information, not the challenge but it's also an opportunity to actually deal with that the inconsistencies between the statuses of the fires people were saying on the website it says this and here you're saying that what's actually happening so we were able to find out what was happening clear up the inconsistencies get everything consistent and post that back to social media so it allows us to fix any errors in our information very quickly that's the sort of thing that's always happened but it may have been we just may never have known about it in the past as I mentioned earlier reach beyond social media the benefit from this the queens and police again the director of media there tells the analogy of a senior citizen sheltering under her table with the wind up radio listening to the emergency information and she's actually getting her information from twitter because they're putting their information out to the journalists by twitter and they're rebroadcasting that on radio so everyone benefits from it so the challenge is at times it's been a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole social media into our traditional structures and I think that basically comes from the way that we generally have worked in the past very command and control, linear, hierarchical sort of information flow and really that isn't what social media is all about social media is very much a flexible network an improvised medium so we've been trying to see how we can bridge the gap between those two ways of working our linear hierarchical way of working and social media, how do we try and make that work so we've done a lot of work in trying to understand the concerns we've had a lot of obviously discussions and debate we've had meetings with the state duty officers presentations to try and explain what it is we're doing and that there's a lot of strategy and thinking behind what we're doing because a lot of the misunderstandings a lot of the a lot of the wariness is just due to a lack of understanding or a lack of us understanding people what we're doing so as I said we've had meetings we've done up guides and procedures flexible guides and procedures that really give some foundation to what it is we're doing so that people have faith in what we are doing practical examples in case studies are always very useful the Queensland Police case studies very useful for getting people to understand the benefits and the potential of it and hopefully the work that we're doing in Victoria can provide case studies for other people to use to try and encourage their organisations to move down this path advocating on behalf of the community is really about I think I've noticed quite a bit in this sector that we can be very focused on what suits us and what we want to arrange things that fit our agencies and fit the way we work and in this area we really have to always remind ourselves take a step back and think about what is it the community wants so the example of the plan burns earlier is a good example what is it the community is expecting out of this the Fire Services Commissioner recently at a conference I was at spoke about interoperability and it's a term that we've all heard bandied around and generally we see that as meaning interoperability between agencies but the Fire Services Commissioner takes that one step further and says that we have to be interoperability has to apply to the community as well so whatever systems and whatever systems we're using have to be interoperable with the community as well so I think that's a very important thing to remember when we think about interoperability and really we you know it's all of our duties to take a step back and think about that and remove the blinkers at times and think what the community actually want out of this integrating into exercises obviously very important as well to do with embedding the processes and getting other emergency managers to understand how this will work within their systems so we were very lucky last year to through the OASC to run an exercise multi-agency exercise which did just that this exercise is the first of its type it's the first in Australia and it's going to really push some boundaries here I'm very keen to promote social media in times of emergency if we don't dominate this space others will and this has to be a very credible source of information so it's vital that it's us that are putting the messages out and we get incredible messages back from the community who trust this as a credible source of how they get information times of crisis The FireBell Pilot Training Exercise aimed to create a realistic simulation of social media this allowed staff who may be appointed to the media officer, social media and social media monitor positions to train and exercise the use of social media tools during a significant emergency situation The Pilot Training Exercise used a scenario where in a bush fire encompassed the urban fringe of Melbourne, while simultaneously a significant storm cell resulted in flash flooding in a regional city of Victoria this multi-hazard scenario ensured that staff from different organizations were involved the four hour exercise was run at the State where staff interacted with the simulation as the scenario played out over five phases with pre-planned escalating levels of online community apprehension about the events I would count myself extremely comfortable with social media but I've never doubted with this kind of volume of requests before and it's quite overwhelming I've never had to deal with multiple platforms of just everything firing at once that have come up that I never really would have thought of otherwise so it's been pretty stressful and very valuable I think it's a way of them being able to get official messages through channels that they're familiar with and it's a way of them being able to get accurate information and sort of being able to dispel the myths of people being helpful and offering advice but it not being quite right I think the trial for the social media is what all the agencies are trying to do is crucial it's one thing for us to develop ideas and regulations and response guides in a room quietly in peacetime but to actually see them practised is a huge bonus I think for us and certainly we've identified some areas that we already need to work on some of them will be significant in terms of what do we do when there's a huge volume of responses coming in, do we focus on the ones that are the most dire if there's some responses for instance that have fire in their homes already do we have to focus on those do we focus on the generalised information and how we get that out even developing the roles themselves so people know exactly what they're responsible for when they first step in that was one of the first things we identified so certainly scope for expanding it definitely see enormous value in it the critical thing was a partnership, a collaboration of all of the emergency services organisations and agencies of Victoria being all in the room at the same time because on the day is not the day to be doing this for the first time with all the people you'd be working with on the day when it happens I think it's the key thing and around getting it right the accuracy of the information becoming that trusted source of information being credible, being present out there in the social media environment as the one trusted source and being confident to be in that space that's it thanks very much again for coming


Hello viewers and aspirants, welcome to my another doubt clearing session. So, UPSC frames questions based on those topics and news that make rounds in the newspaper and the televisions, but due to the dynamic nature of this examination, covering just the newspaper is not enough and that is why we rely on other important sources such as PIB and PRS. PIB is Press Information Bureau and PRS is the PRS Legislative Research. They provide us content that complement our current affairs knowledge. So, in this video I am going to tell you what to cover and what not to cover from PIB and PRS. Now, why PIB? See it is the legitimate source of information from the side of the government. So, it is the one-stop destination of all the government policy decisions. It will provide you content on government schemes, policies, programs, etc. In that way it acts as the best repository of government related news. Well, even PRS has good content. It provides you excerpts on many issues. Particularly, if you look at the monthly analysis published by PRS, it provides you certain contents that are very relevant for our examination. For example, you will find content on important features of certain policies. You will find bills passed by the parliament along with its analysis. You will find committee reports and its recommendations and also important questions that were raised in the parliament are all covered in it. Most importantly, opinion on all these matters is also given in this monthly analysis. And particularly, if you take the summary that is provided for schemes and bills or acts of the government, it will provide you an idea about that topic along with the opinion which helps you in your main sensor writing. So, in this way PIB and PRS are useful for our examination. But will you be covering everything that is available in PIB and PRS? Let me take an example here. Let us visit the PIB website. You can also use the PIB app that is launched by the government. It is available in Play Store. Now, I want news that appeared on April 1st of 2022. As you can see here, there are 125 PRS releases on that particular day. So, you have both load of information on the government policies, programs, etc. But what will you do here? Will you be covering everything? So, many of these informations are not relevant for us and many are repetitive in nature. So, here, even if you plan to cover everything, it will take you hours and hours of time to comprehend and to find the relevant information for the exam preparation. And even if you do that, finally, how will you retain all these information in your permanent memory? And that is why filtering the topics is very important. Now, before that, I am going to tell you what you will not be covering because this same applies for PRS also. You should not be covering political news and local news. For example, there will be news on appointments made in the government. There will be news on the allegations made by the opposition party on the ruling government. These kinds of news articles are not relevant for us. So, you will be choosing those topics that is relevant for the examination plus those ones that you can link with the conventional subjects. So, remember that even though UPSC is changing its pattern every year, the core is still unchanged because UPSC rarely asks those topics that are unheard or unseen by these students. So, what are the topics that you should focus on? Or what are the topics that should be filtered from PIB and PRS? See, focus on those topics like that talk about international conventions that talk about scientific innovations or the acts or bills of the parliament, especially those acts and bills that are contentious and also the schemes which come again and again in the news. Focus on that. Particularly, focus on the syllabus related topics. Yes, syllabus is very important in your preparation. You should know it by heart. See, in the beginning, it may seem difficult to remember the syllabus, but once you start comparing the syllabus with the news analysis, it will be easy for you. If you watch your Indian news analysis, we also do a comparison of syllabus with the topic, right? We'll tell you how to link it with each topic. So, you can do that on your own. So, after filtering these topics, you have to note that topic. You have to note down why is it a news and you have to note the basics about that topic. Then you have to revise it regularly. But remember that, even though you are scouring through the PIB articles and PRS news snippets, if there is any news that is really important, it will be definitely in newspaper. It will come today or tomorrow, but it will be definitely newspaper. There are only few news stories that are left out by newspapers. And that is why in such a scenario, there is also another handy solution available, which is relying on the monthly compilations that is provided by institutes. See, in these monthly compilations, you can find relevant information from the current affairs, including the PIB articles and PRS articles. Even Shankara's Academy publishes daily and monthly current affairs versions. You can find the monthly current affairs version in the form of a magazine in our IAS Parliament website. So, I hope I cleared your doubt in this session regarding what to study and what not to study from the PIB and PRS articles. I'll meet you all in my next session. Thank you.


Previously on the Kongsleden. We embarked on our journey through Sweden's rugged wilderness and after we traversed the dense forest, we stepped into a world where the boundaries between nature and humanity blurred and faded away. There's literally no sign of civilization anywhere. For the first time in our lives, we caught a glimpse of reindeer. I almost cried when I saw the herd of reindeers. That was really on my bucket list. We really took our time to connect with the natural world around us. And as we pressed on, the first sight of Sarek National Park emerged from the fog.


Okay, I will tell you something about the current stages of the LibreOffice extension and template side, the new side that I want to create to make it much easier for users to submit templates of extensions. So, a bit about me, I'm in the middle of the board. I work for LibreOffice and it's a former, what might I say, from 2010 on and currently I'm working on the step for templates and extension side. I started that for LibreOffice in 2010 on 2011 and I'm a developer in this collective part of the plan that's the community-driven projects. So, goals from this, how might I work, is first make it much easier. First, it should, this new repository should have a search function like the current one. It should have content tags, categories, so that you can search for categories. Then we need to know which version of LibreOffice you want to search, a template or extension form and we want to have lists with logo screenshots so that people can see a bit about it, description of the things, virus spreading should be there because we want not to submit extension templates that have maybe some problems inside. Then we have this configuration files for products, the label disclaimer, licensees, etc. Many things to configure and to submit to the user. Sometimes the contributor has to submit and agree to some licensees and some conditions and we will also put in front of users that download some information that we are not responsible for. Then it should have some L10N features so that we can translate it to different languages and have different language sections. There is content that is in both sides. Currently we have both two sides, one for extensions and one for templates that is not seen in the right but that are currently two sides will be in the future one side with two applications running the different stuff for extension and for extensions and for templates extensions and we have to transport the content from the older side or current outside to the new side that will be a special process because the structure will be a bit different on a show later. So that's the current status. We have this CMS Content Management System Plume. We have a bit customized Plume Software Center. That's something that Plume itself uses to submit add-ons for Plume. Then I had some plot storage because in that version of Plume Software Center it will be put into the database and lots of binaries should not be in the database because it blows the database up. So I had a special product but it's a bit not super maintained. That's also a problem. We have this virus scanning and two products for the templating of the different sides. So inside this Plume Software Center we have a Software Center project release a section that makes my head always problems because people delete this release a section and I have the problem that they get errors and I had to fix that problem because when I add a new release a section that's a problem with this product then inside this release a section you can put releases and the releases for every version you have a new release and add to this release you have to add a downloadable file that's this extension or template or you link to another direction when you have always a server or a service where the files are always delivered and you can link to that. You see it's a bit complicated. I have always to help users and so that was my start point when I want to make it more easy and comfortable for users to submit their templates and extensions. So what will we do? If you see we have this Plume. We have two different center in the future and we have virus scanning and one layout product. That's also a new method to template a site because you have rules file and then you have HTML and CSS and images and a connection between those so that the dynamic of this content management system is connected to this static files. You need only for templating one who is doing this stuff or who does the rules file and later on one developer who is able to do HTML and CSS. So what we have not have anymore is an extra block storage because the new one inside the product is putting every binary into a block storage that's started. So if you see the current status on the left side and the future status on the right side you see I have killed this release section and I have made also smaller the two battles. First I made only a release but with files that you could put inside the system but in the last weeks I made also this linked file because I know that people have always sometimes their files on different web services and want to link to that and so I provide also another object that has the possibility to link to objects that are outside of this repository but then we have not any mirror scanning for these people that may be a problem but they have to link with that. So if you see this green one is only for the side bench or the admin of the side but the contributor has only two objects to work on a project that has to be submitted and then published by review and then they could put releases with files or with linked files to this project as many as they want so should make it a bit easier would be great when it's in connection. The connection is a bit broken here. So then we have this messaging feature that we have not in the past when a new project is created the manager of the side or the management of the side will not see that although he is looking in the dashboard but that is not on your regular basis so we thought that it would be good if the manager would be informed when a new project will be created so that he or you can go to the project and review it and publish it then also for when the project owner doesn't know if the web flow status changes when he submitted for publication and the reviewer is doing the publication make it public then he don't know currently that it's public so in the future he will get an email and will be informed that this project has a workflow status change and he can look what the workflow stage is currently for this project maybe there is also some information that should do that manually so also when a new releases would be great when a new release is supported to this project because the owner knows then someone maybe said he himself has put a new release to that project and has not to look every day if there is something happening if someone is maybe contributing to this project so maybe so you see I want to show you that in the code the code system brings this messaging on some advance that's inside the features of the project and you have to have some coding to use this messaging feature in this one event the change of the status a mail will be sent to the owner of the project then the status has been changed the message is here the status of your project people on this extension project changed and your child subject that's the project name you see that's the message in hard-coded form that will go out to the user so he gets a message and can look on his project so you see that's not seen at the moment really seen but let's from the structure of the new center we have on this left side most popular extensions on the right side most recent extensions and a list to search for new extensions and templates it's the same in both parts one for extensions and one for templates that's the new project you you have here this description on the right side of the project resources for example if someone provides an external documentation and it is listed the link there so the install instructions I made it not good because I pasted a text real see it could be also linking that's a new resource for a release here you see only one is submitted one we have more than the list is longer and the compatibility and so on there's a level of mistakes can you go back? you see when someone has logged in and is able to write on this project he gets some more information one would be one he has not submitted a release and will be an information on top he should go the next step would be to submit a release if he has already one submitted then there are some links to click on it and go in the process to submit a new release they have different versions one with the person or files that are hosted on the system and the second or linked files linked release you see when someone is editing it's very easy there are fields with some descriptions that you can do this is a field where you can also put in some links it's very common on this field with some editing features as you see there is also a place for submitting a logo a screenshot and so on and some information I won't show the mail address of the owner what will you do next? the content of the current site has to be transmitted to the newer there are different methods we are thinking of making it a project for the next tunnel because we have new content types that are modern content types on the floor we have the current statuses with old content types they will be gone later with version 5 that's on the stage we have fewer content types so we have to shrink and to get the information in the right direction there are different ways to reach that maybe with a Python script because everything is running Python it depends on the numbers how much content we have to run what we want to have is also the historic of this current system the things that are in the portal are listed in the XSAT as you see then the MAM members users of the current site has to be migrated to the newer I have already a way to do that it's very easy all users have to get a new password they have to click and get a mail with the link then maybe I want to do some more exploring part of this the members I know that it's possible with Python script that I have already created that and took it up I use it for that then added some more languages the content is already enabled for multilingual support but I would first start with an English version and then later on add some more languages because everything has to be translated to the new languages that I add otherwise no one will see any content on it and that's not fine then when you get some more languages you have to move the content to language folders and that makes it that nobody will see with a different language the content when you have a German language setting in your browser then you will not see any English content so the content has to be translated many things we can do with this portal because the site itself could be and the add-ons can be translated with profiles so it's not that difficult in the normal process and the next step will be to have a new design we have to find someone who wants to make HTML and CSS files and make a new shiny design for the site because it's static HTML and CSS a skilled web designer should be able to make designs I think it's not that difficult to find one the root file is that thing that makes it dynamic to connect the dynamic CMS with this HTML so the nice thing inside the model is you can test it you can write this root file and there are also this index file that's normal HTML file and the CSS and images so you can use it to make it on the test side create a work on CSS and HTML and see already the result what's working, what's not working so it's really easy to apply a new theme so, questions what are the versions numbers the support was it really impossible to say that the support from this version and all the future versions no, but I have also made you have some fields to click on which version it's comfortable when the manager puts a new version to the list then every project owner will get a message that there is a new version of the office added to the list that you should look at his project if the releases are compatible with it that's a problem that we already have at the moment because someone puts a release outside and when there are another version of the office is out then nothing happens because nobody takes care of it so when we change over to the new side we have to look at every project, every release from the current side if it's compatible with the new and when it is there, when it is then we have to check that it's compatible we need some people, QA people who look at the projects and releases and make a list what's compatible, what's not compatible I'm not so happy to transport versions releases that are only compatible with Libre Office 3.3 for example, to the new side when they are not compatible with the current versions because we deliver 4.4 and 5.0 at the moment and 5.4.4 will not be delivered in a year or a half a year so it would be great to have only current versions transmitted from one to the other


Welcome to the topic, Understanding Depression, Loss, and Grief in Later Life. This is Sean Brotherson, Family Life Specialist with NDSU Extension. I am also joined on this topic by Jane Strohman, Extension Aging Specialist. Thank you for your interest in this topic and how it might be of relevance in your life and work. This is video number three in a series of short educational videos on the topic of understanding depression in later life. In this short video, we are exploring the topic of depression, loss, and grief in later life. Depression is an important condition to understand because it affects a significant number of people and can have severe consequences. Research indicates that depression is quite common in later life, affecting over 5 million Americans aged 65 and older each year. Depression is not a natural part of aging. However, if left unaddressed, depression may result in serious challenges, including difficulties in physical, mental, or social functioning, decreased quality of life, and delayed recovery from illness or other health conditions. As a person ages, it is common to experience a variety of losses in one's life. These losses can bring pain and sadness, whether it is a loss of independence, quality health, or a loved family member or friend. Grief is a natural part of loss and includes mourning the loss. However, if not managed well, grief can become challenging and a person can slide into depression. An accurate understanding of depression, as well as the loss and grief experience, can assist a person to recognize these conditions and the importance of managing them well. Let's explore some of what we know about depression, loss, and grief in later life, and then share information on how to get help that is needed. There are many factors that may raise the risk of depression for aging community members, such as living alone, having no relatives or friends nearby, or experiencing recent losses. Being aware of these risk factors can enable greater awareness of this condition. So what is depression? Depression is a mental health condition characterized by an inability to concentrate, insomnia, loss of appetite, physical tiredness or fatigue, feelings of extreme sadness, guilt, hopelessness, and helplessness, and thoughts of despair, discouragement, and death. It's also called clinical depression. Almost 4% of people age 55 and over living independently in the community suffer from major depression in any given year. Depression usually is marked by a variety of symptoms occurring together during a period of more than two weeks. Occasional episodes of fatigue, discouragement, or anxiety are common for all individuals. However, when a wider array of symptoms develops and lasts longer than two weeks, then clinical depression may occur. Some individuals may experience symptoms that are substantial risk factors for depression, such as social isolation, personal history including chronic medical illness or prior depressive episodes, and family history of mental health issues or alcohol abuse. It's important to assess a person's experiences to consider the risk for depression in his or her life. Next, we're going to focus on great loss and depression. Following is a short video from the National Institute on Aging that tells the story of an older woman who dealt with depression for years, but is now in recovery. My symptoms included loss of appetite, inability to sleep. I guess for a while I was irritable. I would begin to shun people because I knew something was wrong and I didn't want them to know. Peggy Templeman is 78 years old and has experienced depression throughout her adult life. It would come and then it would go for maybe over 40 years. About 2 million older adults in the United States suffer from full-blown depression. Another 5 million suffer from less severe forms of illness. Depression and later life can be caused by a variety of factors. The triggers for depression are changes in health, traumatic events, major changes in one's life circumstances, loss of people who are dear to you, loss of the ability to do the kinds of things that you are used to doing and give you pleasure. The triggers for Peggy's bouts of depression included high levels of stress, an inner ear disease, and losing a valued psychotherapist. And so I began to get sicker and sicker. My husband had to go to work. No one was at home. I was sick and so I did not take the medication. And so finally I did make an attempt to harm myself. I was seeking help. Peggy did get help and the combination of talk therapy and medications made a significant difference. With the medication initially and with talk therapy, psychotherapy, then I really began to get back on my feet. I had a marvelous psychotherapist who I continue to see periodically now. Peggy's experience with depression involved a spiritual side which she says was key to her improvement. She even wrote a book about it. The medications, all of that, and the talk therapy led to the spirituality, the meditation, the sitting in silence, the communing with the Almighty. Although depression is treatable, people should realize that it may take time to find the right treatments and for those treatments to work. Treatments for it typically need to be approached as something that's going to take a considerable period of time in order to have a beneficial effect. Peggy's journey out of depression was long and difficult, but she is now in recovery. And she has a message for those who may be suffering with this disease. Talk. Tell it to the family. Tell it to the friend. Tell it to the family doctor. Help is here. Help is there. As one ages, many older adults experience losses in their lives. These losses can be very painful. Examples of losses that older adults may experience include moving from your long time home to be closer to family or going to an assisted living facility or nursing home. Spouses, family and friends passing away. Loss of a long time career that provided a professional identity or status. Loss of health. The inability to perform daily activities resulting in the loss of independence or the loss of ability to get around or drive. Grieving over these losses is normal and healthy. Even if the feelings of sadness last for a long time, you can see in the stages of grief listed that depression is a normal stage of grief, manifesting itself with the same signs and symptoms as clinical depression. Sometimes telling the difference between grief and depression is difficult. Grief is a roller coaster involving a variety of emotions and a mix of good and bad days. Even in the middle of the grieving process, you will have moments of pleasure and happiness. With depression, on the other hand, the feelings of emptiness and despair are more constant. Grief after a significant loss, such as losing a loved one, is a normal reaction that generally does not require professional mental health treatment. However, when grief is complicated and lasts a very long time following a loss, treatment may be required. Let's sum up a few key points about depression, loss and grief in later life. Depression is an important condition to understand because it affects a significant number of people and can have severe consequences. For example, it can disturb a person's thoughts and feelings, alter a person's behavior and cause physical difficulty and emotional distress. In addition, loss is a common experience for individuals in their later years and may involve a change in job or status, losses associated with health or mobility, or the passing of a loved family member or friend. Grief is a typical part of the loss experience and includes a period of mourning and sadness. At times, depression and grief can overlap with each other, and the symptoms linked with each can be the same or similar, but both depression and grief can be managed with attentiveness and care. It is everyone's responsibility to understand depression, loss and grief and help individuals find effective solutions. A critical question is where can I get help? If you think you or someone you care about might be experiencing depression, you may want to visit your doctor first to determine if this is a problem for you. If so, your doctor may find a medication to help you or could refer you to counseling. In North Dakota, you can call 211 for confidential listening and support as well as information and referral. This concludes video number three in this series, Understanding Depression in Later Life. Thank you for viewing this resource. We encourage you to seek out further understanding on key issues related to depression, anxiety, grief, suicide and helping resources in later life by viewing the other short educational videos in this series. These and other educational resources can be accessed on the Andiesu Extension YouTube channel or at the web link on your screen. This educational resource has been brought to you by Andiesu Extension. Extending knowledge, changing lives.