To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the latest reports on waiting times to access support services that allow older people to live independently at home. We are aware that there are a number of areas that are experiencing difficulty providing suitable care in the community. We recently allocated £5 million additional funding for 2014-15 to the health boards that face the most significant pressures on delayed discharges. That funding will enable them to accelerate progress towards sustainable change, drive down delayed discharge numbers and enhance rehabilitation services and community care capacity. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response and recognise that he recognises that there is still work to be done. The Scottish Government states on its website that in order to achieve its 2020 vision for the NHS, there will be a focus on supported self-management. However, we have learned that some people are waiting for up to 36 weeks for rehabilitation services that the Scottish Government is aiming to deliver within four weeks by the end of 2016. Patients cannot begin their self-management without such intervention. Professor Paul Knight of the British Geo-Reaction Society of course stated that to make an intervention worthwhile and effective, you need to reach the individual as early as you can make it. Does the cabinet secretary agree that the Government is failing in its attempts to ensure that elderly but failed people can live more independently? No, Presiding Officer, we are putting a record amount of resources into this whole area, but let me say that I recognise that there are some parts of the country where there are pressures, particularly in, say, for example, parts of five, parts of Glasgow and elsewhere. We are working with the respective health boards and the respective local authorities to address those issues. Indeed, we are working with COSLA. We have recently commissioned with COSLA a follow-up report to the review of residential care to look at care at home services because we both reckon that some of the problems associated with residential care are also similar to the challenges and problems that are faced in parts of the care at home sector. I recognise the review that you mentioned, but will the cabinet secretary commit to a full review of the provision of rehabilitation services across the country and consider bringing forward his target from 2016 to get a real grip on that problem? As part of the report commissioned jointly by COSLA and ourselves, it will be looking at rehabilitation services as part of that review because very clearly care at home services is an important element of rehabilitation. I absolutely agree with Mr Hume about our concerns in those areas where there are pressures, but working with COSLA, the local authorities and the health boards and with the additional money that we have put in, we are actually doing everything that we possibly can to substantially reduce the waiting time where it is far too long. The cabinet secretary will be aware that there is a lack of funding to provide support and rehabilitation services due to cuts in council budgets. That has led to bed blocking in many areas with the NHS struggling to cope. He will also be aware of issues regarding inadequate care when it is available with 15-minute or less care visits. While we welcome the additional funding, it is a drop in the ocean of need. Will he now agree with us that we need a comprehensive beverage-style review of the NHS to make sure that there is adequate care available for older people to live independently and securely in our communities? The beverage report was not to review, but it was a plan. It is a plan that we are going to produce for 2020, building in our 2020 vision. At the core of that vision is treating people as much as possible at home or in the community in a homely setting. As the member knows, I have held discussions with other parties, including representatives from the Labour Party, and offered them the opportunity to come up with their ideas on the 2020 plan. To date, I have heard nothing from the Labour Party. The report, combined with the crisis in social care, means that more and more people are stuck in hospital when they should be living independently at home. Why do the figures released today and the standard of care services continue to deteriorate under his stewardship? As usual, Mr Finlay does not get confused by the facts. The reality is that the average stay in hospital today is at a record low, so, by definition, people cannot be generally stuck in hospital. Now, there is a problem with delayed discharges, but we have significantly reduced delayed discharges as this Government was in power. In fact, we have now got, amongst the lowest—not the lowest, but amongst the lowest—if you look at it historically, a level of delayed discharges in Scotland. There are still challenges to get to where we want to be. Indeed, if we were able to get delayed discharges to the level that we want them to be—which we intend to do over the next two or three years—that will release £100 million additional resources for investment in other priorities, either in the community or in the hospital sector. However, Mr Finlay should recognise the challenges that we face as a result of the massive cuts in our budget made by the Westminster Tory Government that he is in cahoots with to get a no vote. 2. Rob Gibson Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the Scottish Government what it considers the economic impact will be of Royal Mail's decision to bring forward rural postbox collection times. Postal services are a vital lifeline for many of Scotland's businesses and communities, particularly in some of the nation's more remote rural areas. Many businesses depend on the timely uplift of mail from postboxes, which is why it is worrying to learn of Royal Mail's plans to bring forward collection times for many postboxes. Rob Gibson I thank the minister for his answer, but I have some information that Royal Mail has also been discussing. Further cuts in rural services by making postal collections every second day. I wonder if the minister could find out if that is true and if this is another example of undermining the universal postal service. We would be very concerned if there were further diminuitions to the service, especially those in rural areas, who already enjoy a lower service than before, as Mr Gibson has rightly highlighted. I will therefore, as he requests, make inquiries by writing to the Royal Mail on the particular point that the member raises. However, it seems self-evident that we in this chamber do not have any power or control over those matters because the Royal Mail is not accountable directly to this body. We are not therefore able to give vent and support to the wishes of the people of Scotland, 72 per cent of whom opposes the privatisation of the Royal Mail. We are powerless to prevent that, unless and until we have the power and the choice to determine those matters in this place. I thank the minister for that answer. If an independent Scotland is able to gain public ownership of the Royal Mail, will that restore postal services to both rural and urban addresses to a level that does not disadvantage those communities and businesses in the future? I think that that would be for the first Parliament in independent Scotland to determine. However, I do believe that any Government in a Scottish Parliament elected and accountable to the people for those matters would have a stronger desire and wish to ensure that a fairer service is provided to all our customers by a Scottish Royal Mail. I have to ask the Scottish Government what precautions it is taking to reduce the threat of the Ebola virus. Since the start of the outbreak in western Africa, we have been working closely with Health Protection Scotland to minimise the risk of Ebola to help protection Scotland routinely monitor global disease outbreaks and the risk from Ebola is currently assessed as very low. No cases have been reported in Scotland or elsewhere in the UK. Scotland has well-developed procedures in place to respond to this type of situation. The NHS in Scotland safely managed a case of viral hemorrhagic fever in a patient in Glasgow in 2012, and our recent experience during the Commonwealth Games further strengthened those procedures. As a result, we are better placed than many other parts of the UK to respond to suspected cases of Ebola virus. However, given the situation in western Africa, a number of additional steps are being taken. We are lazing with other Governments across the UK to ensure a co-ordinated response, particularly in managing suspected cases. Updated guidance has been provided to UK border agency staff, who may encounter travellers returning from western Africa, and Health Protection Scotland is producing a poster that will be displayed in hospital in airports and ports advising travellers on precautions against Ebola should they be travelling to an affected area. Professional guidance has been updated and revised, and GPs and other healthcare workers throughout Scotland have been notified to be extra vigilant when dealing with patients who have recently travelled to the affected areas. In the last fortnight, we have asked all NHS boards across Scotland to confirm that they have arrangements in place to deal with any suspected cases of Ebola, and all have provided assurances that they are prepared. Finally, a short-life working group has been established, which will bring together relevant Scottish agencies, including the Scottish Government, to consider if anything more needs to be done. I am personally meeting with Health Protection Scotland next week to discuss this further, and I am confident that the risk to the people of Scotland remains very low, and the NHS stands ready to respond to any suspected cases of Ebola. I thank the minister for that very comprehensive answer. I would ask, has the issue been discussed at Cabinet, although I suspect that I know the answer, what discussion has taken place between the World Health Organization and the Scottish Government about the risks? What is the Government view on the use of the experimental drug, Z-Map, if I pronounced it correctly, should a treatment for Ebola be required in Scotland and has any evaluation of Z-Map being made by sign should that drug be required? I can confirm to remember that the issue of Ebola was discussed at the Cabinet today, and the Scottish Government continues, through Health Protection Scotland, to laze with the other international parties, including the World Health Organization, around the state of preparedness that we require. Of course, the World Health Organization has declared it a public health emergency of international concern, and we are responding to it on that particular basis. The member raised the issue about the experimental vaccine. Although there are no vaccines against Ebola at this particular point, the World Health Organization is considering the possible use of this particular drug for patients who have contracted Ebola. We will continue to laze with the World Health Organization and to operate on the advice that it provides us on the matter. However, it would be a matter that has to consider a number of very detailed and complex ethical issues because of the experimental nature of this drug. Once the World Health Organization has come to a decision on that, we will consider what any further matters have to be put in place here in Scotland. Where would people be treated if a case or cases of Ebola were to be found in Scotland, and would any special measures be taken to protect medical and hospital staff if cases of Ebola were to be discovered in Scotland? We have already specialist protocols to deal with any type of significant contagious disease. As I mentioned in my open response, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde dealt with a case of crimine congo viral hemorrhagic fever in 2012, in which the protocol that was used for dealing with those types of illnesses was utilised. That particular patient was dealt with in the Brownlee hospital unit, which is a special unit for contagious diseases. We have protocols in place for dealing with patients who potentially could have a disease such as Ebola. We have the facilities in place in order to deal with any patients who may require treatment. We also have arrangements in place to ensure that there is proper protection for our medical staff who may be treating patients who have such a condition. As I mentioned, in the checks that we have made with our health boards, they have all confirmed that they have sufficient personal protection equipment in place to deal with any patients who may be suspected of having Ebola. Thank you. That ends topical questions. We now move to the next item of business, which is a debate on motion number 10769, in the name of John Swin, an economic opportunity for independence, and I will give a few moments for people to change their seats.


12.30. Is it that time? Good afternoon. Got lost there for a minute. Welcome to the last of the Brown Bag Lunch Interviews. We have a photographer here today from the Burlington Free Press. Did I get that right? Vermont Arts Council. Vermont Arts Council. Even better. From the Vermont Arts Council, who are funded for this festival. So he's simply asked permission that he be able to take photos. Does anybody have a problem? We have some black puppeteer masks if you really want to be in the news. Is that alright? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. We'll take that as a yes. Okay. We'd like to start with an art burst, and do you want to just tell them about this? Yeah. And I will say no more. We couldn't decide who should introduce whom. Because we're both in here. So we'll introduce each other, and I'll introduce him after he introduces us. So, Sherry Valeska and I did the same glass puppetry training last summer together. And this is a two week intensive. You guys want to say something about the process? Yeah. We all brought articles that interested us, and then we were given guidelines of how we could create the actual piece. And some of those guidelines were how many lines we could take out of the article. That there had to be a look back. Do you remember the other ones? Things like the two. The actual text. And then we made the show mostly after class, because we had instruction with Eric and Ines during the day. And then we worked on the piece and presented it once to each other, got some feedback, and then presented it one more time. And everything was created. So we've been holding on to this for a year. So you know what time does to cardboard and papers. Yes, there we go. The immigration crisis on the U.S. border isn't just about money. Far from it. But it does force a critical question. Does the influx of unaccompanied alien children contribute more money to the U.S. economy than it takes out? Boom or bust? The state is seeking $5 million in reimbursements for a decade of spending. The Senate is offering $2.7 billion and the House $1.5 million. Border operations cost $1.3 million a week. 1,000 National Guard troops reported price tag $12 million a month. $37 million undocumented children. Are you sure she's going to say something? It gives me great pleasure to introduce Eric Bass and Roberta Solomon and John Potter to talk today about their collaboration and I'll let them say more. Thank you for being here. We have one more show of El Patico Feo at Hilltop at 3 o'clock and then tonight Romeo and Juliet at NYT at 8. Last chance. So good afternoon. Thank you all for being here. As you heard, my name is John Potter. I'm the former arts editor of the Brattleborough Reformer. Now the executive director of the Latches and very pleased and honored to be asked by Sanglass to help facilitate these conversations. With me today is Eric Bass of Sanglass Theater and Roberta Solomon and we'll talk about their collaboration there. But to give you some context, El Salvador right now has been called the world's most homicidal country. They are averaging 30 murders a day and to put that into some context and how we would feel about that. That's the level of violence. 20 times more violent and deadly than the United States as a basis of population. As someone said, this country is bleeding and it urgently needs a tourniquet. And I don't know if Eric and Roberta will consider themselves the tourniquet, we'll find that out but we're here to talk about their collaboration and the context in which it occurred. Peace you guys have been working on. We've been working for a good number of years. I started my collaboration with Sanglass about 15 years ago and we've always been talking about doing a project together in Salvador and well, we're mixing actors and puppets and which ones can't and why they can and why they can't and we both like Nathan the Wise by lessing the 18th century German playwright very much and we finally decided that this was what we were going to go on and we started putting this project together which took the association between Sanglass Theatre and Teatro Lispoma with a lot of grants in between. We were able to do this project with actors over a period of a year and a half and first it started with a workshop in which we invited 15 actors to participate and it was a training program to be able to work with puppets the way we had designed the show to be and then we directed it with the help of Ines who did the puppets and contributed greatly to the training in... that's React and after this period of training which was about three weeks we chose seven actors out of the 15 and then started the rehearsal periods in... and we staged this we started staging this and then stopped for six months six months about, yes and then they came back to... we also continued to the rehearsals and then we just presented the show last month in El Salvador and the effect has been very, very positive and it's been very well received and it's a play that talks basically at tolerance but it talks about a lot more things that have to do with El Salvador and that really touched the audience and really felt like we were talking about El Salvador with the intolerance and the murder rate and whatnot but other than that it's still a beautiful country and our Blue Lake has just turned turquoise last week so that's the nice news too I like to give nice news about countries today now we're the murderers I should go ahead, Scott Ainslie a local wonderful blues musician also a very good theatre composer came down with us to Salvador to create the score for this piece it's a wonderful score and I might say just a word about the relationship between the actors and the puppets that the story takes place during the... and we made the decision to let the puppets be costumed and so what did we do with the actors? so we made the decision to costume the actors as if they came from different classes of contemporary Salvadoran society and by doing that we created a fiction that we don't talk about in the play but it's as if seven people from different classes of Salvadoran society made a politician, a gang member to do something that they don't do come together and do a play about racial and religious intolerance and the play begins, you'll see it when we show a little video it begins with them presenting themselves and ends with them presenting themselves and one of the... God, one of the... was someone in the audience who said how can you have a maid on stage and how can you let her manipulate the puppet of the sister of a sultan you know, I mean the class stuff was... would you agree with that? absolutely, yeah absolutely except it was a third crusade thank you maybe Eric, you could delve a little deeper into the play, Nathan, the wine tolerance themes come to light Lessing was perhaps the great spokesman for the German Enlightenment in the late 1700s and a great friend of Moses... there you go philosophers, writers you've derailed me is that... Muslims, Christians, Jews are all represented in the play as they were of course in this place and time and they were in this place and time essentially enemies within the whys the actual plot of the play is one in which everyone surprises himself by rescuing his enemy and then can't deal with the emotions of having done that it's utterly brilliant and being rescued by their enemy also yes, yes we do a two-person number here yeah, yeah, we're bringing out that so the Templar for instance is about to be executed by the sultan the sultan looks at his face and sees in it the face of his own lost brother and spares his life the Templar then runs out into the world almost deranged from having been spared from being beheaded sees a fire, rushes into this house on fire and rescues a young Jewish woman a Jew his sworn enemy so in the Templar alone is this battle of being both rescuer and rescued by his enemies and that's basically that's the battlefield of this piece and the Jewish girl is Nathan the Wise's daughter and Nathan is a merchant and Saladin needs money for his wars and Nathan has just loaded with goods and has a lot of money and doesn't know where to place it so he becomes Nathan's moneylender so everybody owes something to somebody and everybody is is owing something Eric, when we talked it struck me that the transformative moments for these people occurred through their actions rather than them receiving it was through action and I've just found that an interesting interesting approach and we also talked about how is tolerance the right word for what happens maybe you could ruminate on that a little bit you don't know this we had a enlightening yes, no we had a in Salvador after one of the performances in which we invited the interreligious conference of Salvador where there's an Imam a couple of evangelists a Catholic priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist and strangely enough it's the Buddhist that runs it not strange at all anyway it's this very ecumenical group and they came to a performance and after the show and it was interesting that one of the themes that came out precisely you were just talking about is tolerance because the rabbi brought up that he was very offended by this word tolerance because he said it's not really a play about tolerance because tolerance means that you're better than the other one whose presence you're tolerating so we thought that was interesting and really shed light on what we were doing yeah and I think you know it's I think here it's kind of a 60s term and I think that it's no longer well received as it doesn't say what we mean yeah do you have a word for what you mean? no engagement solidarity could you shed some light on what's causing the conditions in El Salvador and then maybe moving into what it's like to create well the main thing is the historical unjust distribution of wealth in Salvador but let's say that if the United States legalized drugs but then of course and if the arms sales stopped that would help a lot too so I mean what this is is it's since the Cold War era Central America has been in the eye of the hurricane as a center of war commerce which later became drugs and Salvador is more dangerous now that it was during the war during the Civil War and what happened is that the gangs which you all know about and over 600,000 people depending on the extortions of the gangs so when people say get rid of the gangs I mean you know there are articles in the papers saying we did in Honduras, why don't we do that which is basically putting 100 gang members in an airplane and then crashing that airplane into a prison where there are another couple of 100 gang members I mean this is one of the solutions but of course when you see the when you see the jails and the way these jails that are designed for 200 people and have 900 people in them or 2,000 people in them you just wonder about how do you get out of this I mean I don't have an answer but mainly the problem is there is also a very big other countries it does not exist in Nicaragua or in Costa Rica or in Panama nor in Guatemala for very different reasons but this exists in Salvador and Honduras which is class hatred there is an exacerbated situation of class hatred in Salvador which is not logical actually that it doesn't exist in other countries well Costa Rica solved the problem years ago in which they simply killed all the local population Guatemala is a whole racist problem it's not a class problem it's a race problem with its indigenous population but Salvador has this extraordinary thing of this really very very strong class hatred which can't be taken out by the root well clearly you put that in your production an examination of class I don't think you can do this otherwise when I started doing theater in Salvador one of the directors in the late 60s called me over when I came in with my cast to the national theater and he said you're really going to do theater with this bunch of Indians because before that before the late 60s he's sort of a little taller a little blonderer and a little wider what was it a hard decision to talk about costuming the actors in various classes at what point did that enter the conversation yes it was a very hard decision because I was against it at the beginning thank you for saying that part of that is that theater as a vehicle for social change in the United States is in a very different position from theater as a vehicle for social change in Salvador that what constitutes which aspects of theater constitute social change in these two countries is different and in the theme has a lot to do with it as well as casting and so forth and so on but if we're trying to raise money for this production and a good part of the money that enabled us to do that came very thankfully from national performance network theater communications group private family foundation so a good part of it was raised here not all of it on some of the work and that meant writing grant applications and that meant being very clear in the grant applications why you know why this project we weren't just a bunch of American missionaries going out to do Oklahoma it was this play with this people in this configuration in that place and articulating that I think also helped us understand what the you know this is the beautiful thing about writing grants is that sometimes it's as you're writing the grants that you discover what you really want the production to be it's not it's there's this is a very nice dynamic sometimes and it was very clear to me that this needed to be a play about Salvador and and it certainly wasn't written about so you know so what are the choices you know are we gonna costume the puppets and give everybody a kind of a contemporary Salvador in way of speaking you know or um in the puppets which is a natural place to go in puppet theater and so the way to address this really really happened in how we used that relationship to help us create that part of the world which was Salvador and then Salvador's relationship to doing this classic piece so that that discussion approach then I think then what you first envisioned and and our discussions kind of led us to to work that out and then once we had that who were these people and certainly Roberto brought to this conversation a really different perspective than some of the stereotypes that I had about how these costumes are going to be read in the context of the Salvadoran audience and there's another element I think that is important to point out is that in the translation Eric did a translation in verse in a sort of an 18th century English also using inverted terms that we don't use anymore and I used a translation, I adapted one but you adapted it, yes and working on this translation which I did into Spanish inverse to use as many terms possible as were terms that would ring a bell in a Salvadoran ear today which is like there's been a truce between the government and the gangs so what Saladin has with the Templars is a truce, it's not a stopping of war like in the last week so all these terms that all of a sudden brought the play back to life like brought the play to today in Salvador like at one point at one point the Sultan's emissary asks Nathan where is the money and we said where are the bags and this in Salvador is immediately recognized and the next president is in how do you say when you're in jail in your own home house arrest from Taiwan and it's called the bag issue because it's money bags right so all this is very important to me anyway and to us generally is to have the play resonate in the ear of the spectator who's watching it today which is something that I'm always blessed with because I'm always working in translations so translation allows that do you feel that maybe it's too early to tell do you feel that it's making a difference or how will the play make a difference no I really don't I think we can make people more sensitive but I don't really think that I'm going to be 70 this year so I stop thinking that we can change the world with theatre but we can contribute to it there have been some nice repercussions we got one of the nicest reviews that came out Ines and I were still down there on the first weekend that the show opened for its initial three some of those first reviews one of the ones that Roberto showed us came not from a theatre critic but from a political columnist a leftist political columnist place of such violence this production is a breath of fresh air did I get that right? yes he's the rightist columnist even better okay so comments like as a manipulator of a royal figure I mean what can you do you can create some kind of you can throw a pebble in the stream you can do little shock waves hope that there's shock waves there you are we have a ten minute is this a good time somebody turning that on this will give you it's just excerpts just give you an idea of the staging and how this feels it's a cast of seven it starts in dark times live theatre alright sorry we need to restart the computer so let's take another question okay Michelle what was your initial and finally agreed to do what was your initial that well it's not a coincidence that Eric has talked a lot about the maid because that was the one that was clear the others weren't clear because I really don't know what a gang member looks like today I mean I live that every day of when I'm going home in my car and wondering gee I wonder if that's a gang member on the corner there and I wonder if that person coming towards my car is going to pull out a gun yeah just one second but the you know to me it was difficult to have some clear iconography as to how to dress them it's one of the most difficult shows I've had to dress because of that we were on the beach one day we had a day off and we went to this beautiful beach and one of Roberto's friends on the beach was standing and talking group of people Nara was there for anyone who hasn't met Nara Salomon Roberto's wife and she also plays Nathan in the show on the screen momentarily and we're standing there and five young men pass us on the beach and since he says young men passing on the beach they were five young men passing on the beach and now you immediately think am I about to get robbed is this a gang so are we ready I don't know if I answered your question Michelle what's that I don't know if I answered your question I think you did, yeah defining an aesthetic approach that was flexible and broad enough so that you would not be too specific in your delineation of meaning so that they would be echoes and reverberations yeah but it's very difficult to try to keep away from from the kind of production also you just the Chinese slippers with the black leotards yeah because this is what I thought and then of course we were limited to taking seven actors because we want to travel with the play and anything over seven seven is already a very big group to move around but anything over seven is just completely out of the question the fact that the one who plays the maid plays the princess so how do you do change costumes do you do not how do you deal with that and I think well you'll see here the puppeteers are playing puppets who have in terms of character but they don't become a that we're doing here is and I did this in the adaptation this was the way the adaptation was formulated and one of the dramatic things that Roberto and I then had to figure out did it work and if so how does it work that in the relationship between actors and puppets we essentially have two different to each other they're not in the same world and so what defines this and so you know and why are some puppets and others not and so essentially what we did was we took the five characters who are in some way what we'd consider the family the people who represent the characters in this play who are interconnected there are other characters in this play who further the plot but who are not interconnected and so for me dramaturgically they actually don't need to be characters they are they are forces that act on this central grouping of characters and I think you'll see that really clearly in some of the scenes Jen can we go and one of the things that I find amusing in this experience is the fact that you have to sort of the actor has to become neutral in order to be able to go through the puppet but a neutral that is not an effacement of what you are and of course this is incredibly difficult in Central America and Mexico where the tendency to melodrama is extremely strong and we are all very melodramatic and so we had a very hard time doing that here we go this should work did you get that heavy big playbook where you remember the old movies the movie the war and you know how many times you are going to be killed and almost your father knows who you are and you know who you are and you know who you are now I have seen who you are then you will remember what you do in a world again Music's got answers, yeah. So where is this headed next? Well, we're going on tour to Honduras in October, and we're trying to get a tour organized in the states. Latino communities. Right now we're working on the New York and the Washington area. But the idea is not to bring only this play, along with four other Salvadoran playwrights' productions. But it involves 20 people, so it's a dream. A lot of cats to her. Particularly Salvadoran elements, particularly the costumes, might be lost on audiences that don't know about this. And how will you give that context to people? Questions from people. Anybody have any questions? Yes, ma'am. Since you put so much work into the English translation, is there a chance to see it in English as well? No. This production just belongs to Teatro de Lisbonna. Yeah, but you know the reason why I was asking is because Lessing is not really a known component in the US. Completely and well. And I honest left his work. That's why I thought it would be really nice to get a chance. F. Murray Averhands doing it at CSE in the North this season. Really? Yeah. I have to say that one of our challenges, it's I think the play as written for a contemporary with an embarrassing melodramatic ending. And that all of a sudden everybody's related. Oh, God, that's so nice. And so I think the puppets helped figure out how to make it playful without losing the truth of it. Doing a play with a message and telling everybody it's a message, I mean, this is really kind of embarrassing. And recognition scenes just bring forth laughter. Now in the 19th century people would actually faint in the audience because it was such a standard thing to the lost child. That's something being one of the inside, as you can see from the pictures, it's amazing. What I really felt was very interesting for us is that the philosophy of the play was for us to use as the philosophy of the team playing it. Because with the technique of, I would say, San Blas Theater or what they offered us, we really had to put away all our differences and all our different way of being, of acting or anything to be able to create together life for the puppet. Because as in the play we speak about there's three vulnerabilities, but when we are three to give life to one being, like the character of the puppet, we have really to breathe together to be one. And that was really interesting. We had to work a lot on ourselves and I guess everybody working this kind of technique has to, even more than when you build a play, what you generally have to try to understand each other. But there it was so much stronger to give life to one of the character between three so different persons when you have to be part of the body. And so I thought really it was interesting to have this philosophy of the play in the team who is giving life to the play. In the staging, just to expand on that, I think that the staging by necessity creates a non hierarchical society. So Nada is Nathan, she gets to do the F. Murray Abraham moment and then the next moment she's on the feet of a puppet and a character dressed as a high level politician comes out and commands the stage with his character one moment and the next moment he's on the feet of a puppet and it's fluidly changing from one to another and everyone, metaphorically as well as physically, everybody's willing to take the feet of somebody else. I think that from the puppet perspective that is the ultimate non hierarchical society. How can I help you walk? So that's what happens. Could you guys talk about your long relationship together? How much work you've done? How to where we started today? Well, I first saw Sandglass when they performed in Geneva, Switzerland and I was very taken by it. I don't know if it was invitation to heaven or sand. I can never remember that. To me the place mixed. Very impressed by the work and then I think Eric was at the time looking for somebody to direct him in sort of a very crazy project that he had with improvisations, with puppets. And so we tried that and we performed that a couple of times. And that one failed miserably but it led to better things. Right, and it was a horrible show. Because you can't really improvise. You have to make them as you go along, right? Of course you can, but not the way we had set out to do. So this led to something else which was a fantastic project which was One Way Street, a navigation of Walter Benjamin which to me is one of the most beautiful shows I've ever done. And it was not only a fantastic life-changing experience for me discovering Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt and Gershom Sholam and their writings and what this means in the world today. And that was a beautiful show which had a great career in a memorable place in the show. I can thank the Salvadoran Civil War for having met Roberto and Nara because you were basically in exile for 12 years in Geneva. 25 years. So thank you Ronald Reagan. That's not something we've heard a lot during this festival. I was being ironic. Any other? He was totally awry. He's like, don't put that out on record. Can you talk about some of the evidences of the violence that you saw while you were down there creating and how that made you feel? Yeah, I mean I guess the several of them that impacted we were actually coming back from dinner one night and Roberto got a call from one of his good friends to ask if we were all right and we didn't know why he was asking that and someone had thrown a grenade into a hotel in the neighborhood. We were down there when the gangs gave an ultimatum that there was going to be a curfew and we were in the middle of rehearsal and all of a sudden they stopped and they're all looking and Roberto looks up and says, what's going on? It's after time we need to get home before the gang curfew and Roberto says, oh, right, right, pack up quick. We're gone, we've got to get home. And then there was just... We lost one of the finest members of the first workshop who was going to be in the play because half the time he couldn't make it to the workshop because he lives in a gang infested area where he has to ask permission to leave the neighborhood and they said no that day and the next day they said no and just call and say, I can't come in. There are things that are bigger than the theater even if the show must go on, sometimes it can't. And what was that like creating in that context? Louder, louder. What? Enes needs to be louder. Enes needs to be louder. He was inspiring because he put everybody into a different focus, he really focused in a different way because your subconscious constantly was dealing with something that you tried to push in the background but kept on working but you couldn't fully get rid of it. For me it was very exciting. I always find it a terrible thought to think that great art has always been produced under times of great censorship but great art does get born around very difficult situations. I guess I would just say we were very aware that every day we would wake up and look at the news to see how many people had been killed that day and who they were. A doctor, not a gang member and so we would have to say why in some place there was some connection to the gangs. You know, in one day it was there's always this question of why is it those people? What's the connection? Is it random? Is this accident totally random and anybody could go out at any time? And that question I think was always with us so that we could just try and understand where we stood. Do you agree with that? And the great tragedy of Salvador is that an exodus of people during the war and after the war and now it's a country that has one editorialist who I despise said but I think it was very clear so I'll quote him. He said Salvador even death has class consciousness because basically it's poor young men who are getting killed. I have a question here. I'm hearing that in some ways it is the randomness that Erich was talking about. The perception is that it's random because you're not on the inside you can't possibly know why somebody was targeted and so it feels random. I think under those circumstances sometimes petty differences disappear and people work together as a team because they're in the same boat and it feels like that. Anybody because of the randomness could not be able to make the next rehearsal. You just don't know. But just a question.  No, that's not right. But their choice can be random. Can be random. Exactly. From your point of view if you don't know that there's a definitive reason behind your being chosen it feels random. Right, exactly. But the people in the company that Ernest is talking about I would think if you were working together on something that whatever petty differences might have bothered you if you had been someplace else where that would just fall away. I mean you can't afford that. I think sadly the pay differences are still very present in the political world of Salvador and Roberto has said to me that if the right and the left would stop arguing would stop fighting each other somebody might actually come up with a plan for the country. But not within the theater truth. That's what I meant. Not in the country. That can happen obviously. One more question. I think we have time for it. Yes, over here. You've talked about class as being the big dividing or splitting society up. What about gender? It's a difficult question to answer because the feminist society and yet this is a society in which there are almost no fathers. The fathers are very absent. It's a society that is primarily led by women. They are the breadwinners. I don't know what the percentage of mothers who are the head of households without fathers is, but it's enormous. This is something inherited from the colonies and the conquest. So in very many on site you would think it's almost a matriarchal society but it isn't. Gender equality, of course there is not but there is much politically much more than in the states. All the countries in Latin America that have had women presidents they don't know what the big Hillary thing is about anyway. There are so many countries that have already had women presidents. A Salvador is not a case in point because we have not. But in the work field are women paid less than men? Yes. I think the inequalities are still there. In the past three or four years there are several laws that have been passed to protect. In the past 20 years there has been a lot of laws protecting women and children. For instance, there is a law that if a woman can prove her husband the father of her children's alcoholism she can actually cash in his paycheck. And then there is the compulsory protection for children in which a father who does not and whose paternity is proved the mother can have his salary taken from his paycheck before he gets his paycheck. And these sort of things there is a Nanta feminisidio that a murder of women what do you call that in English? Massage your name maybe? Massage your name perhaps? I don't know the term. In Spanish it's the killing of women. The murder of women. Sounds like mothers to me. There is a law against difficult application but institutionally there are things moving but there is no equality. There is still a lot of derecho de piano. Yeah, I don't know how you say it. Right. I know how you say it in French. I don't know how you say it in English. Women thinking they can do very many women than ever, right on that imposed sexual relation just because they are male and she is female. We are out of time and I want to thank Eric and Roberto and all of you. Thank you for being here.


Okay, so hi everybody, thanks for being here today. My name is Raphael Ferreira and I'm the CEO of In-Avance, which is a French company specialized in open-cloud technology. I'm here today to give you more visibility regarding the financial aspect of OpenStack project. So I'm sorry, Fabia is old, living in Paris, I have a beautiful son. I'm running In-Avance since 2008 with the best partner ever, Nicolas Marchard, which is a CTO of In-Avance and Pierre Mona, which is a COO. What do we do? So we are based in Paris and Montreal. We are focused on open-cloud technology, like OpenStack. We are also core contributor on the SAF storage and Perpet. We are a good member of the foundation. And we are an active contributor to the code. Like for example, we created CELoMeter one years ago for the metering and bidding in OpenStack. We package OpenStack for DBR, we created the Perpet module for OpenStack, et cetera. And in the grizzly release, about what to be the seven biggest contributor in this release. And after that, we provide several types of service like design, build, run of critical platform. So today, we will talk about how you can reduce your IT cost from 30 to 60% by using OpenStack. To illustrate that, let me introduce you to Ed. Hello, Ed. Ed is a 35 years old man living in London. He created AdoptAmen.Love in 2008. And he's a successful start-up. The company grows fast, and there are now 150 people and they generate 50 billion in revenue. So AdoptAmen is a dating website dedicated to women.  It's a really website in France, but I have to change the name. Because they want to grow faster and open new branches in several countries, AdoptAmen need to become more agile and more scalable. They decided to outsource their hosting, but they hired an internal team to manage the platform. AdoptAmen have a seasonal activity. They need twice more servers, three months per year. And they also have a continuous increase of their audience, which is very cool for us. This is a typical pattern for this type of activity and for any business website. Here is the current architecture of AdoptAmen.Love. Because there are pure players that decide to split the platform in two data centers in London. They are using standard technology, HP and Cisco for the equipment, Varnish and GINX for the web and the caching, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB for the application and the database, NFS for the storage. And they also started to play with Puppet to automate the configuration of new machine. Here are the costs of the current architecture. They have 80 servers, four load balancers, eight firewalls for NFS equipment, for a total monthly cost of $20,000 per month. They are hosting two data centers in London, Quinix and Teddy City. And they use the one gig internet access for a total monthly cost of $15,000 per month. There are five engineers in the team to manage this architecture with an average of $100,000 per year and per person. The monthly cost to manage this platform is about $40,000 per month. So the global cost, actually, for this architecture is around $75,000 per month. But what's the problem? That's work, but Ed has several problems. To launch a new service, the average length is around three months. And you know in this area, the competition is very strong. So it's a critical problem for Ed. Because they need to install manually new dedicated equipment, the developers have to wait four weeks to have new environment to play with. There is a complete separation between the dev team and the ops team. The dev team have no access on the machine, no access on the operating system. This is a major problem for the dev and the test platform because they spend too much time waiting, building new environment to play with. Last week, Ed was invited to a great TV show on the BBC to talk about Adopt Amen. In only one hour, the traffic increased by 300%. Even if the code is well optimized after 10 minutes, the website failed. Ed felt that he lost 20,000 new potential customers for his website. He missed its fantastic opportunity and degraded his brand image. So Ed has now several motivations and he can summarize his expectations in four categories. Be free of his destiny. Probably most of the most important things for a critical business platform. We will explain this later. Be able to massively scale. Be aggressive in terms of investment. And be interoperable. This word is too complicated for a French guy, so I will tell it in French during all the presentation at the interoperable. Of course, we can tell that there are many other motivations like quality of service, like features. But for me, everything is in this slide. So let's have a look. First of all, you don't have the same expectation depending on your size. If you are a small player on the local market, you can choose between two type of strategy. For a time-to-market reason, you will be looking for a package solution like Cloud in a Box to start fast. And for niche strategy, you will be looking for a specific solution for a specific type of market. For example, Cloud for SaaS provider, Cloud for gaming, Cloud for e-business activity, anything else. If you are a big player on the global market, we need a Cloud framework because you absolutely need to drive your own map. You will be the custom solution to fit exactly to your needs. This is a way following by head for Adopt-a-man.club. OpenStack can address both of these two needs. Being a package solution with, for example, Python Cloud or Nebula or TechOps. And being a framework with specialized integrator like IneVents. As I said, OpenStack is a framework. At IneVents, this is the main reason why we choose OpenStack two years ago. All that you can imagine in terms of infrastructure, you can make it with OpenStack. This is a reason why I'll resume the expectation of Ad in only four categories. Being sure your destiny allows you to build different type of platform. I am Cloud with high performance, high availability, complex network, high end support. Locals Cloud with cheap hardware, flat network, very aggressive price. Cloud storage for block or object storage, massively scalable and S3 compatible. Or HPC Cloud with compute pizza box or bar metal provisioning, rendering workload or specific scheduler. For the question is, how do you see the life? Like this, buy a software and build the same cloud on your competitors? Or this, though being special, being unique increase your creativity. I think you can find my preference. I know Cloud data centers, network, blah blah blah boring for most of us. But you can share that and use a framework to really innovate on this exciting market. The someone expectation is to be able to massively scale. So sure, it's very easy. But sorry, I have no money right now because I start a new activity. I know that because it was my case when I started in advance five years ago. And it was the same thing for Ed. The point is, you must be able to massively scale, but you must be able to start small. Even if you are a big player, it's better to provision the infrastructure progressively to minimize your power consumption and to get the new generation of hardware. And for that reason, OpenStack is the right solution because you don't need to follow unique reference architecture. You can start small or use your existing hardware and evolve with your business activity. So my favorite part, this is a financial part of the presentation, one of the two financial parts where I'm sure you will enjoy my English level in this topic. So you want to build your own private cloud. Of course, we need to be excellent in terms of quality of service, innovation and support, but you also must to be competitive in terms of investment because even if you really want to play with OpenStack, even if it's currently the hype in the IT industry, you must be in line with the market. I think it's not necessary to present AWS in this session, right? They are good, they are very, very good. Personally, I love this company. They innovate, they provide large-scale infrastructure, they are present in several countries and they reduce their price two or three times per year. As you can see, they can provide you a medium-sized VM for 17 cents per hour, around $120 per month. Rockspace, another player, they also ran a public cloud with an aggressive price and a very high-end fanatical support. They are most expensive than AWS, but are focused on quality and performance. A new player in the infrastructure market, Google, you probably never heard about this company, but they can address specific market for compute workload. This infrastructure is based on their homemade hardware and on a very aggressive price. So, as you understand, on this market, there is a real price war. So, is it interesting to build your own open-stack private cloud? Quick analysis. Imagine your target cost for a medium-sized VM is 14 cents per hour. With that price, we'll be in line with the market. For this price, you can propose to your team a VM with two CPU, four gig of RAM, and 100 gig of disk. We estimate that we can run 20 VM per node in a standard period, sometimes more, sometimes less, but 20 is a medium number. Based on that, you need to achieve a monthly cost per node of approximately $2,000 per node and per month. So, imagine you want to build a big private cloud, huge private cloud with the total capacity of 4,000 VM. So, it's a huge one. You will need to build your own infrastructure with 200 physical nodes, 20 by 20 VM by node. Maybe a secondary storage with the block to provide volume to your users, to your team. It can be a NAS like NetApp or distributed storage like CIF. You will need an IN security system keeping in mind that the security is a big part of your investment. So, you must protect yourself from an external street but you also must protect yourself from an internal street and it certainly is the most difficult thing to do. You will need network and node balancing, certainly in high grid line with the one gig and 10 gig for the storage and a minimum of one gig for your internet access. And you also need an information system and several production tools like LDesk, monitoring, backup, automation, stuff. So, we can discuss about the number but based on my experience, approximately price for that is around $80,000 per month. So, now you have your platform, it's great. You will need some rack and transit and you also need some good guys to do the job around 10 guns. So, your global direct cost is around $250,000 per month. Based on the capacity of 4,000 VM, your monthly cost per node is around $1,200. So, to resume, to be competitive with the leader of public cloud infrastructure, you need to target a maximum cost of $2,000 per node and per month. As you see with OpenStack, you can make it. You need to optimize your design, you need to have a good team or to find the good partners, but it's possible. So, what about proprietary solution? What about if you need to buy license, support specific reference architecture to do that? Last thing to understand, if you want to be the private cloud, your customers are everywhere, customer or users. So, be interoperable. Your customers are everywhere. You will need to distribute your application on several platforms. Maybe your OpenStack cloud and other public cloud. Your audience is unpredictable, so you will need to be able to scale fast and it's not sure you will have the capacity on your private platform. So, think hybrid. Be interoperable. Make your life easier. Help your team to easily move the workload between private cloud and other public cloud. OpenStack is the best way to do that. You can provide open APIs, you can guarantee the reversibility, you can be compatible with AWS, Rackspace, HP Cloud, and this is the best way to simplify your team life and allowing them to be more agile and more reactive. So, for Ed, what is the bill now for his new platform? He decided to move to OpenStack and create a private cloud hosting hosted in two data centers. So, it's okay. It was architecture designed by the Adopt-A-Man team. Now, to do that, they took advice through the community and through a fantastic and amazing startup name in advance, I think, something like that. So, this architecture is split into two data centers because this is a business-critical application, as I said. Instead of having custom server by functions, they decided to build a pool of identical servers and configuration for all the platforms. They also decided to give up NFS and to build two cloud storage platforms, one block storage platform for the database and one object storage platform for all the media and unstructured data. For the first one, they choose SEF and for the second one, they choose OpenStack Swift. So, regarding the need to be more scalable and more distributed, they have implemented Sedexys Global Load Balancing, allowing them to redirect all the users on the appropriate platform. It could be their OpenStack private cloud or any public cloud like a no-cloud workspace or WS. So, Ed have big ambition and he knows traffic will increase in the next few months. So, for that, you need 500 virtual machine, distributed on 30 physical nodes. If you need more computer resources, you will use a public cloud. That's it. In terms of storage, Adopt-A-Man need 40 terabytes of block storage and 40 terabytes of object storage. And because all the data are replicated three times, they have to provision at least 120 terabytes for each storage. This is a detailed build for the infrastructure and the hardware. So, depending of your contract with HP, Dell, or IBM, or Cisco, it will be something like that. You have four rack. You have one gig of internet transit. You have a hybrid LAN in 10 gig for the storage and one gig for the web server. You have a global load balancer. This is a SAS solution named Sedexis. You have four load balancers, the open source one. You have 30 OpenStack compute server. You have five OpenStack object storage server, five OpenStack, five step block storage server, and 10 management server. So, with our existing team at Adopt-A-Man, our total monthly cost will be around $70,000 per month. To be more comfortable, you can also add an optional support contract between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, depending on your SLA requirement for OpenStack NSF. So, it's a quick comparison between several solutions. So, on the infrastructure cost, OpenStack wins the price war because it's allowing you to use your existing hardware without specific requirement. The density in terms of number of VM per node is good, 20 per node, 25 per node. In existing platform, Ad had a problem of consolidation. He used too much server because he had dedicated equipment to specific function. And also because this platform has increased with the time. Another problem was that all the server were not virtualized. In comparison with a public cloud like AWS, for 500 VM at a medium price of $150 per month, including transit, snapshot, et cetera, the difference is significant. You have a maximum flexibility, no investment, so it's clearly a good solution, but it's more expensive in the long term. Regarding VMware, I've used this morning the TCO calculator on VMware.com. And in my point of view, the cost of the license is not the biggest cost in the VMware architecture. It's significant, but the main difference is in the reference architecture. To be able to use all the features of VMware, you will need some sand equipment. You will need a five-hole channel network. So for 500 VM on two data centers, you should invest at least twice on your architecture and the license. Regarding the team, it's very interesting because in this case, Ad don't have the critical mass to reduce the number of employees dedicated on the IT operation. If you want to provide 24-7 service, you need at least five-seven engineers. Ad can start with five people because even if the architecture is ready for 500 VM, you don't need to hire now. We estimate that for that size, that size of project, the team is the same for each scenario, VMware, AWS, or standard platform. Even for AWS, as I said, to provide 24-7 service and the application layer, you need at least five people. And in this particular case, you can reduce your monthly cost by outsourcing the management of your cloud. The economy in this case will be 25% higher. So where are the other savings? Between 15% and 50% of savings, just to start is great, but I'm sure we can do more. So this is a current organization of the majority of large companies in France. It's a basic team but we have typically two teams. The developer team and the operation team. I'd like to draw three lines. The first one is a metal line. And there's this line, it's all about data center, physical network and stuff. After we have the operating system line and the application line. Currently, under those three lines, this is the IT Bastion. Don't touch my machine. Don't touch everything. And this is the only way to do things. Whatever you are in the private cloud or in the public cloud, you have to reconsider the way the developer use the infrastructure. This is a way you have to reconsider your team if you want to maximize the value of your new cloud Christmas gift. Because as you know, the profit area is not in the infrastructure side. You have to give more autonomy to your developer and if you want to innovate faster. Keep in mind that infrastructure is just a tool to do something to create value who to develop new business. It's just a tool. We could take several hours on this topic but there are just a few concepts you should keep in mind or to explore to increase the value of your open stack cloud. The first one is the infrastructure as a code. Through the API and by hiring DevOps engineer, this is a man versus machine. The goal is to automate, automate, automate. Second one is continuous delivery. To have a good time to market and days instead of months, you have to be able to release every week or every day. To do that, you need agile test dev platform. So test dev environment ready to launch in a few minutes with for example, heat, our puppet chef Jenkins, et cetera. Design for failure. The infrastructure will fail. You have to deal with that. So explore chaos monkey project and design your architecture to replace than repair. Auto scaling. There are several projects in the open stack ecosystem around that one is incubated in a sailometer for the cloud watch. And you can also work on Chef, our puppet and the API is to achieve the auto scaling. And if you are a global audience, to target your global vendors in several countries and to scale, you need to practice modular design in your software development and also in the design of your architecture. So to resume the session, keep in mind that when you address the financial part of your cloud project, you must work on two areas. The cost of the infrastructure and direct saving. The savings are always pretty amazing in the open stack project. And the profit you can increase by improving your agility and your reactivity. It could be huge. How much would you value having three months of head start on your competitors? 10%, 50%, 300%. Think about that and thanks. If you have question, you have 10 minutes. Go. A question, you'll hold the numbers, it's okay. Perfect, yeah. Instead of Gluster, yeah. But Gluster is not a block storage. It's a file system storage, distributed file system. And we choose, we are very involved in the Chef project because the design is pretty amazing to be able to have object storage and block storage maybe after NFS in the same cluster and to allow us to manage this cluster depending of the customer needs. And in terms of performance, Chef is pretty amazing too. Is that a question? Yeah. I saw nothing, so go. I think we will release some performance testing in the next few weeks. On our website and with Ink Tank, we have a big Chef cluster, actually in France. And we develop some performance tool homemade by using some tools like a Tung or open source solution like this. And I think we will publish some results in the few weeks. Yes? Yeah. In your experience, is that a realistic? For a startup, yeah. Not for a large company. This is one of the biggest problems we have currently with some of our customers. They have an IT team which manage physical machine, physical network, et cetera. And they have to re-sync their job and it's one of the most difficult things to do, actually, is our large customer. That seems to be right. Are you selling a product that depends on a skill set that simply doesn't work? Yeah. Which is good for us about... Yeah. In France, like I said, in another session, we have the, I don't know if you are familiar with the syndicat, the syndicat, of course. It is a very powerful organization to protect the right of the employees, which is very, very good. But it's time to change anything in a company in France. So we don't have training for this kind of change management. It's just the beginning in the Europe and as I said, the problem we have right now to accelerate the development of OpenStack in Europe is not a technical problem. We have the technology, we know how we can implement the technology, it's okay. It's about people. We are not ready yet. This is... No. So, Chmuel is one of the senior developers in advance, he's a core developer on Swift. Okay? Another question? Okay. Thank you, everybody.