Okay, so this is this is one that is going to be a bit of a test or in on the test but we have a lot of people in which is great because we want to talk about community. How do you organize a local group? What do you have to do to make people join you? What are the things that we've learned from different countries and to do that we have a bunch of local organizers from different groups large and small joining us. I'll run through the names really quickly and then I'll ask them all to do a little. Hi, I'm this person. So I have Bonnie from Germany. I have jammy from Switzerland. I have italo from Italy. I have Leo from Switzerland. And then I have Roberto from Miami, which is the United States if we're doing countries. And then I have Christina in the background who doesn't have her video on yet from Buenos Aires. And that's all of them. So we might as well start with Bonnie, you're the first in my, the first person I see. So, another introduction, please. I'm Bonnie from the FSFE. I'm a junior project manager. And yeah, I work with local communities and also recently I became a translator, the translator coordinator. And I also do the podcast, the Zafra Freedom podcast with Matthias for the FSFE. And I'm here and looking forward to the discussion about local group activists. So I would be gone. Thank you. Jamie. Hi, my real name is Jean-Marie Adafre. As you said, I'm from Switzerland originally from Italy. I am a member of the Free Software Foundation, but also of the Free Software Foundation Europe. And in Zurich I work as the country coordinator of Switzerland for the Free Software Foundation. I'm working as a sales guy and working also as a project manager for my own company. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us. I'm going to move on to Leo because Leo is, do I say Leo or Leah? Sorry. My name is Leo as you have mentioned. I have been acting as a country coordinator for Switzerland for the last 12 years or so. Together with Jummy as a local group leader in the last time, we had some different people in that position before I have handed over now to Jummy because I have recently moved to France. And maybe I'm still moving on. That's not yet sure. But yeah, we can tell you a little bit of what we have achieved and how we have done it in Switzerland. Yeah, that's great. So you're in France now? I'm currently in France. A lot of people from France today. Moving on to Roberto. Hey everyone, I'm Roberto. I'm the founder of Lever Miami, which is a local group here in Miami. And I'm also a web developer and I'm really glad to be representing the United States and Florida and Miami. Thanks for joining us, Roberto. Italo. Oh, I don't know. I think you're muted. No. Not muted. I think, am I the only one not hearing it? I'm going to move on to Christina then for a second. It's Christina. Hi. Good to see you. So you can introduce yourself. Sorry, I think something is happening with your sound. So that should work now. Oh, there you go. Okay, sorry. With big blue button, sometimes it happens. And so Italo Vignoli from Milano in Italy. I am one of the founders of the LibreOffice project. And I'm currently handling marketing and community outreach for the LibreOffice project at global level, also managing or trying to manage the Italian community, which has the Libre, under the LibreItalia umbrella name for the LibreOffice project and contributing to several other projects as well. Lots to learn, I think, from Italo as well. Christina, hi. Hi. A little introduction. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't speak English since several years. Well, I'm Christina from Buenos Aires, Argentina. And I am currently participating on several free software clubs. I was founder of one called Foike, but now it's not functioning. Yeah, no, you're doing great. Okay. That's all. Okay. I think probably the best thing to do to coordinate this, keep this a little coordinated, I guess, is maybe ask everyone what the thing is that you think is the most important thing to get people involved locally, where you are. And I'm going to start, I think, with Italo on that, just because I feel like your experience will sort of incentivize other people to think about different things as well. Okay, so it's involving people in open source is not always easy. It, and it's a lot different country to country, because there are different habits, different cultural point of view, different languages, and of course, English is often often a barrier to to contributing on a global project for instance with LibreOffice. We have many local communities. We have a huge community for instance in Indonesia, where the people that is speaking English is just a minority. So we always try to to mediate between having some people connected to the to the center of the project to the global project to to get the information and then the same people translating the information and adapting the information for the local market. This is especially true for Asia. Asia has so many different languages that it makes almost impossible for someone who has a western culture to understand them all also very different cultures in comparison with our, at least with the European one, but in general with western culture in in in general. Also, we have also similar issues in South America where the majority of people speak Spanish. It's not fluent in English. So, of course, we try to have people speak the local language. When presenting at conferences. This is one of the reasons why I often visit South America because I speak a little bit of Spanish I understand it perfectly understand perfectly Portuguese but I can speak Spanish a little bit. So that makes it easier to keep the community together. And then if you go at local level. Of course, there are a lot of local nuances in managing the community in in a country in Italy, for instance, we have a lot of activities. We try to have a lot of activities at government level because we have a law that usually that should mandate open source, but it's not really respected by many people. Of course, the proprietary software companies are trying to find ways of getting around the low in a way that then people is locked in in their software we, for instance, during the covid the covid lockdown. We have seen Microsoft Google with their solutions trying to conquer schools. So we have tried to create some some alternatives. But of course, we have we don't have the same the same power in terms of ammunitions they they have a lot of advertising money. They have a lot of lobbying money and sometimes it's difficult to keep the pace of these companies. Of course, the activities at local level are in the native language so everything that we do in it in Italy is in Italian. But we try also another thing that we try to do is to motivate people that are in local communities to be more active in the global one. So there are many different levels where you can develop the community. Yeah, not always easy. Nice challenge, especially for elderly people like me. I find a lot of I find it really exciting to transfer my knowledge to younger generation that this I think makes me not only consuming the oxygen but also doing something positive for the world. Okay, this is very noble. I'm very happy to hear that. I think it's interesting the the the global first local that you can talk about. I think I would love to hear a little bit about your experiences in Switzerland. Both Leo and Jami, because from what I understand Leo started it a little bit and then Jami followed up right in your work in Switzerland. Yeah, Jami has just now recently followed up with my move to France. I have been responsible in the last 10 or 12 years as a country coordinator for the local group also in some time. But the question was about how to get people on board and I think this is you, you have mentioned very important point with the language barrier. We also have this in some kind of form because the country split to four language regions. Yeah, so I know about this issue. But on the other part it's more also about the local engagement how we can bring people from the local communities to actually take part at the first point to know about us because of course we are in some point visible because we do media work we do presentations we do work at universities and things like this but first of all besides that nobody knows about our activities only if they see the results of them. Which we present very obviously with our campaigns and and our efforts in the media and all this kind of things. So for us it's really important that we have new members on board that that it keeps going always because otherwise it can happen that this local groups. I mean we had also really different times we had times where it was like three four we had times where it was 1520 people only in the local group in Zurich. I'm not sure Jami how many people usually take part now. So the issue is mainly to get fresh blood into the system that it does not die out and this is really difficult and from my experience I have been professionally working in the university spaces for the last 15 years or something. Sorry I'm not so good with the time. But I think it's really important to engage students because students are like a multiplicators if they have good experience with free software and mostly in technical universities. It can make a lot of sense. And because then this people for example organize also new Linux installation days and courses and things like this and yeah bring bring the interest in the topic because in generally and yeah as I've mentioned if you don't know about it if you don't use the free software why you should want to join a local group to help to make it better. So first there must be a part to make free software known which is also the FSF doing a really good work besides FSFA of course we are all doing together really great work to make free software known. So people use it. And then we have to bring them to engage in the topic and this is also also I would like to hear also your experience. What are your concepts to bring the people on board to fight for free software and to make build a movement and to keep it alive in long term. So if I can add something basically found out that just meeting you know one time per month. That's not enough. Basically we have to go to the people and we did this with different workshops. We also help in the repair cafes to make new Linux installations. We had people or we had workshops about setting their own servers and so on. Leo she mentioned that about the media. So unfortunately we're doing press releases about the things we do you know, but let's say that the main mainstream media doesn't publish anything about us. It's mostly alternative media. That's really unfortunate. Another thing that is a little bit difficult is sometimes you have people visiting the local group. They come one time to time and then they realize you know you have to sacrifice some spare time. No for the different projects. If you want to really promote free software. So we always see people coming in all come to times and then leaving again. So that's really unfortunate. I'm lucky because we have like a strong base of eight people in Zurich who are really dedicated for free software when there is a lot of time free time in the different project and that's that's basically really big motivator for me and also for Leo to continue this fight. That is that is I like the the reaching out the student think I think I think that's one of the things that I fully agree with. Also because they have a very long life ahead of them so they can advocate for a very long time.  Yeah, of course, especially as we have an European point of view and not only like on one country. I'm sorry my video is really lacking I hope my voice is okay. So I hope you can all hear me quite good. What I would say is that workshops and workshops is really important like people a chance to get in and to get involved and to learn how the process works and to also what I did with the public money public code campaign. I documented how people could get on board and how they could. For example, what I did contact local public administrations and I put this on the wiki page and I made this available to all the people out there and I talked to them and join local group meetings and introduce this that they could, for example, reach out to the public administration for the public money public code campaign. So it is also really important to break down big campaigns for them and to make it easy for people to understand what they're supposed to do and to also make it available for of course in different languages as Italo already said this is also a problem that we encounter, because on the European level we also have a lot of different languages. And yeah, not everybody understands English and also translations are really good thing to have and are really important to get people to understand what you're doing. So, so do you do you within within your work. Do you organize also the translations to happen already. Is that a key part of the work that you do. Yeah, this is one of the key parts they do as well because I'm also the translator coordinator and I do think this is also really important but I think the more important thing is to organize. Workshops and to give talks and to show people what they can do and break down a campaign for them and make it easy for them to jump in because if it's such a big step for them to jump in, for example, the public money public code campaign, reaching out to a whole government is big too big for just a local group you need to break down things and to make it easy for people to get on board. And this is even like this is, I would say the more the focus I would have. So, like, with the public money public code campaign I broke this one down to only contacting local public administrations like a small one like the university or a library, for example, so that people can have something they can grab and they can follow the steps and you can guide them. Yeah, because that's putting something out there and expecting people to jump on it to be involved. I don't think this is working you need to put it into small pieces because many people around the world doing small things, making a big movement. Yeah, they can be big movement. I think that's very important as well. Also, if you don't break it down enough, you can scare people away a little bit. Roberto, do you want to talk a little bit about what your experience is because you really sort of we followed you start a group from nothing. I know you had some challenges. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? So, I would really like to first say that I take a bit after Deb and Melissa I was really inspired by them in kind of focusing more on instead of like the stick of like hey this is all the stuff that's bad with proprietary software just like throw out a little bit more of the the carrot and pepper, you know, and just, you know, make all these like beautiful things and, you know, kind of show people how labor software can help them flourish as people, right. And I'm blessed that there was a lot of, you know, grueling work foundational work very important work that has been done before me, right. And that, you know, I noticed that, you know, that we're in a position where there's a lot of good that we can do just with, you know, the, you know, the handful of tools that we got, let's say right. And something that made me very happy recently was that I met this very beautiful intelligent Haitian woman who wanted to help promote awareness of like, you know, kind of reduce the stigma about mental health issues in the Haitian community and in Haiti as well, by making videos in FRIO.  So, yeah, it's very, it connects very much to what Bonnie is saying is that you, if you break things down into small steps, so basically starting people off with one program, two programs, and then bringing them to a larger conversation. I think that's very good. So, for Jemi or Leo, either of you, one, I'm curious, if you're now starting these conversations, if you're starting a group in France again, and if that is going better or worse than in Switzerland, because we just spoke to some French people and we know that, like, free software is quite a life there, so I'll go to I'm just thinking to move out from France again.  I need an English speaking country. I don't even speak the language, so no, no, this is, but I would like to step in to what Robert has said, because I find this a very interesting topic and also this can help a lot because I think we can engage the people also to really pick this low hanging foods, which are there, the software is good, we have really good, usable free software, we can present them, we can offer them just as tools to people so they have an alternative. And also what Bonnie has said, the thing with the workshops, this is something which attracts a lot of people, we have done several workshops on privacy topics, on the last workshop we have done was on self hosting, for example, how to set up your own cloud with you know host of freedom box and things like this and it was a full house. I mean, we had seats for 50 and 60 people was coming and 10 people had to stand in a row. So there's a lot of interest in that. And this is really fun also and it is really easy to pick. For me this I think that we have to continue this is always something we can do but for me this is also what I tried to mention before. For me the more difficult aspect but also in long term more sustainable aspect is how to engage those people that you have one there or that are interested, for example in political campaigns, someone who wants to do self hosting, possibly has no interest in anything political so how we want to engage this people in political campaigns. We have, I would like just to mention one example we have for example, made a little campaign this. Yeah, we cannot read your documents style. And where it was about that public organizations were sending out work documents or asking for word documents and this kind of stupid things. And we have just prepared a font we have used a free font and transformed it so you cannot read anything. And then we have written a letter with the GPL and some sentences on it and then we have written down here. This is how we feel on our side when you we get a word document for from you. And we have printed it and sent it to hundreds of public institutions in Switzerland. And this is, this is, yeah, but this is like a fun project it has a political aspect that is very important topic, but you make like a game out of it and this is I think another topic, which people possibly don't like to hear but I think it's very important. It is the gamification. You need to do something like this. You need to give also some, some goals. Okay, yeah, maybe I'm already thinking for example, yeah, to give some kind of achievements. I don't know if you know fedora they have experiments with these badges where you get this little stickers with panda bears on it and things like this.  And there's a lot of fun actually also and I think this is this is one part that we we don't have to forget because I mean I live also from free software but first of all it's the fun that has to be in the in the foregone. If we don't have fun in what we're doing, we can just stop it now.  Also, yeah, they need to actually enjoy what they're doing. Very important points. Yeah. Italo, do you have a lot of you have. I mean, you've been with the document foundation for a very long time. Do you do campaigns like that to help you grow? Yes, we try. Actually, we are implementing the same badge concept that Fedora has implemented. Twice a year we we organize a month of LibreOffice where we recognize contributors and people that is contributing during those months they get stickers, mugs, it depends from the numbers so they they can get they can be motivated. We try to recognize people especially when they're doing a good job in a in a specific community. We try to although we we refrain from giving titles like leader or but we try to to use them as a prefer as a prefer the point of collection of the information for their for their community. And these has proven to be very effective in in several countries. For instance, we have an extremely active community in Taiwan that started from one single person. And we we we just empowered this person and he was so enthusiastic that started to promote the software and today Taiwan is one of the most advanced examples of use of not that much LibreOffice, but the ODIF standard in the public government, which is extremely important. Of course, they most of them that are using LibreOffice but the reason why they're using LibreOffice is because as the best management of ODIF and this it's really important because we what we have realized is that basically no one is aware of the advantages of using of using real standards. On the other side I think we are not doing enough as open source in general to to promote open standards to make it clear what open standards are. But when when when we manage to have people that are decision maker around the table and explain the advantages of ODIF, you know it's like looking at us and saying, oh, but that's clear we should use ODIF. It's it's a no brainer. And then you ask what what have you have you been using for the last 10 years and they say, oh, of course we use the Microsoft formats, and we are talking at the moment in Italy with a large military body. And we provided the information and the presentation on the topic. And when they went to the to the, you know, to the top layers with this with the presentation, the guy said, oh, but if the advantages are so clear why are we still using Microsoft formats. And, and of course, then you have to say because there is a unfortunately there is a legacy of 1020 years of documents existing that cannot be ignored. So what we suggest is a is a migration path to to the new reality, which doesn't break the situation. Because we have to balance doing this kind of activities which are sometimes a little bit boring, but very useful and do some activities that are more fun for, especially for the younger generations. We will launch soon. Unfortunately, when we were ready, the lockdown started. We will start a program for universities where we will appoint the students as ambassadors. And we will give a small stipend for for six months similar more or less in the concept of what Google is doing with Google summer of code, not exactly the same because we are not. Our goal is not to develop the software, but is to create awareness of the software inside the university so talking with with teachers professors talking with students and in some cases providing reasons why to use LibreOffice for learning how to program in C or to learn how to program in Python because LibreOffice can can use macros in Python. So to different approaches according to the different to the different people. And in some cases just relating to what Leo was saying before. Of course we have to do also media outreach and that is that is something is is rather difficult that this actually is the reason why I started into open source because I have worked in in public relation for now for 42 years. And I started using open office, because I was trying to find an alternative, not to Microsoft Office in general, but to outlook that I always considered the worst piece of software ever developed by a Quadruman just to reduce the number of people that have been involved in the development because they're human beings but I say Quadrumans to reduce the number. And I stumbled upon open office and I remember I sent them an email to the to the to the project at that time it was 2003.  And, and I can, I can change a little bit and he said, what are you doing and say I can just engage some, some journalists on on the project in the time was completely different but I remember that in Italy we went to from 2 million downloads to 8 million downloads in a year in in less than 18 months. And he did this by by getting more coverage. Exactly. It was, you know, at the time, the, the, the way of engaging media was completely different than today today there is a lot more money involved in placing contents. There's a lot more saturation, of course. Exactly. At that time I was the first to promote an open source software. Just by sending out press release by press releases by line articles and so on. Getting interviews I remember I got a full page on so leventy quattrore which is the Italian financial daily. And that the the managing director of Microsoft was pissed off because they said we pay a lot of money in advertising and you are promoting our competitors. And the journey said but you don't have as many things to say as your competitors. So just improve the way you, you handle the media and and we will give you more space. So I was not, let's say not popular amongst Microsoft people but not even some people because I was doing this as a volunteer. And I got more coverage than a son PR agency.  No problem.  We cannot fire you. You got the point.   Thank you. That's a good, good little summary there. I wanted to ask Bonnie, Bonnie, do you how do you engage local media with your program because public money, public code is doing pretty well. In that sense, because we're hearing about it's all the way over here and I think everyone has heard about it by now. So one of the ways that you can maybe you can speak a little bit one about sort of how you use gamification to get people involved and then move into indeed how do you make sure that people know about you from a media perspective. I wouldn't say that we use that much gamification because it's more about signing the letter and then talking about it. So there's not really a price or batch that you could win from it. For example, you can of course get all the stickers. This is also really important part maybe this could be seen as some gamification because we have funny stickers and you have to share pics and everything like that. Yeah, there's still some incentive. Yeah. Yeah, so they give probably some kind of gamification but not like that was in a sense that was mentioned before with the things that you can win or so you can trust or not trust. It's also really fun thing to do to create a share pic and find the SVT file on our download server download that episode.org and do a share pic for public money public code there. And for the local media, I would say is basically just talking about them and reaching out to like publishing, for example, work that you find and that connect this one to public money public code. For example, there was this cool free software that was used in a small town in Baden-Württemberg, which is a part of Germany. And I started some Twitter somehow, I don't remember now. Anyway, and I got in contact with two people there and I talked to them and it was like, oh, this sounds really cool. Could we do an interview about this? And I also connected this of course to our public money public code campaign because it was a public administration using free software. And I did this interview. And then a few days later, one of our technical newspapers on the internet called NetsPolitik.org came over and asked me, like sent me an email. Can we reuse this because this is a really cool story. So just this made, for example, made it into the local Berlin newspaper then online in the background story there. So, yeah, that's just an example how things can work out if you talk about them and publish something that you find really interesting. Jamie, do you want to talk a little bit about if you've had any success getting local stories or sort of local media involved? No, unfortunately not. We had some media like at the time Prolinux and stuff like that who published a few information about the workshops we have done. But let's say the mass media, you know, the newspapers and so on. We never had any success to get anything published. So what do you think the challenges are in this?  So that makes it really difficult. In Switzerland, you know, it's federalistic. It makes it even more difficult to know to reach out to the right people to promote the software. Like in Italy, you know, it's centralistic. They decide, you know, from today, we just use free software. In Switzerland, it's like 26 regions. Everyone can do more or less what they want. It makes the same thing for public money, public code, you know, we have not been really successful in Switzerland because of the federalistic aspect of the country. But I think that's a very important point. It's very dependent on the country, how the country's sort of press system is built as well. And yeah, please. Because it's not completely to have some press coverage, but from my experience is very successful when you target, at least from my experience in Switzerland, but also in Germany, it's very good when you target this local press, this town press or region press. And when you have a topic where they are involved, because I give you just a little example, one of our fellows, Ralf has made a project where he has tracked OpenStreetMap together with pupils in a school project. So he had this project week in the school and he went out together with pupils and tracked OpenStreetMap tracks. And this had been covered in the local press because it's the local school which was involved. It is something with kids. It's the pupils which were involved. So this kind of things work very good. For example, I have had a project where I was collecting old laptops and then installing new links and giving them away for free to students and pupils again. And this, I had really good local media coverage with this and really big success. I mean, hundreds of people called me afterwards and said, hey, I have a laptop or I want a laptop. And this kind of things are very successful. I think this cannot be underestimated. I'm sure when you want to get in New York Times or things like this, then you have to have bombshell news. But it's not about this. I think these little news magazines, these local news magazines are so widespread. And I also did not expect that a lot of people still read this kind of things. Also, these magazines that you get for free in the postbox, I'm not sure if they exist in your country, but in Switzerland they exist. Yes. I think those are very important points and I want to add to that. So I also believe that local press is doing a lot. And I lived in Australia a little bit and one of the things that worked really well there was going to the local cinema and putting your flyers there. Little things. They can be really, really helpful and really successful to just help you spread the word. There are multiple ways of doing that. And when we were talking about students, every university, every student's organization has usually their own channels, their own outlets, their own newspapers in some cases even. And it depends, of course, on the size of the organization that you are, how much reach you're going to find as well. So I think indeed, underestimating local attention would be amiss. I'm going to move to Roberto and ask you if you had any successes that you think sort of helped you spread the word locally. So this funny story first, when it was just me and I first started, I got this weird idea. I was like, let me see what happens if I just shoot this guy from MPR with a quick email and see what he says. And he was like, yeah, you know what? That sounds really interesting. Let me hear more about your work. I didn't have any work to tell him about. I'll say, all right, I'll get to that. And what I've realized is that people really want to hear about this stuff. And I think it's just a matter of packaging it up and whatever is relevant to that. And something that's kind of, I'm seeing here, I'm thinking about this now.   You know, we can maybe like, say some people already use like some more interesting stuff.   So the people that are in your group, Roberto, how did you find like, what were your first steps of outreach? So the very first person, so the very first person that was in my group was someone that was already kind of an FSF member. So, you know, you guys helped me find that. So definitely if you start a group reach out to the FSF, you know, become an associate member and, you know, they'll help you out to get it rolling at least. And then it was a lot of kind of me going out there meeting people and word of mouth. And then once the pandemic hit, the nice thing that happened was that since a lot of people just kind of shifted online and it happened to, you know, have a few things up on GitLab and some of the members set stuff up on GitLab and, you know, some other code repositories and stuff, then I had the website set up and everything, then, you know, we just kind of started getting a couple of people just kind of like kind of like poking around on the internet at finding us.  Yes, so one of the things of what we can do as the FSF is indeed if you are starting a local group, you can reach out to the FSF and I'm sure the FSFE would do the same. As you can reach out to us and we will help you connect to our channel so via our subscriber list and things like that to see if we can help you find members that want to join your group. Let's me. So the Libre Planet mailing list. Yes, and the Libre Planet Wiki page, of course, you can also register in there and so there are many ways. But they help you discuss that you can sign up from the Libre Planet's website is a very active list with a lot of very active community members that you can also just ask questions to. So I think that's also, and that brings me sort of to another thing is how do you talk to people that don't know what you do or don't know what you're talking about. Maybe, Jami, I'll start with you and then I'll move to Bonnie. How do you start the conversation with someone to convince them? You know, usually I don't start the conversations. What we have is people, you know, getting in touch with us, for example, at the repair cafes, where we make new linux installations for free. And they come with a certain problem. They don't like Zoom because of spyware and so on. Or they have an old computer they cannot upgrade with Windows, whatever version in these. And so we try, you know, to take their problems and then give them a solution and then assure them that the software will do. The Libre Office is compatible with Microsoft. It's an open format and so on. And usually I'm less patient, so I'm working with Enrico, he's a 72 years old biologist who helps me. He is the one who really takes time to explain about the movement and why what is the ethical aspects of this. And then we say, you know, what if you're satisfied with the software, you know, please try to convince your friends and your families to also to make the switch.  I wait until people come to me basically. And Bonnie. Yeah, sorry. I would just add to this that, first of all, it's not to moralize and to talk to people like you are both then. So it's also really important that people show some interest, interest into your topics and willing to learn about what you're doing and what you're standing for. And then I would say would start with the basics, like, for example, how I did it with the example that I had written for all the local groups to talk to local public administrations. I first explained the four freedoms, meaning what free software like chair improve. I'm sorry. And read the code. So study and use. Yeah, so I would start with this and then I would also explain what are the advantages of using free software for them directly, for example, that they wouldn't have to reinvent the deal. And that if it's taxpayers monies, it should be public code. So yeah, just going with the basics and keeping it easy. I think that's really important to if you talk to people who are not yet informed about what you're talking. And is it your in your experience are people has because free software, of course, is it appeals to developers or people that are a little bit more technically inclined. So how do you, how do you explain to them that they can do a lot and that they that this is something that is really important to them as well. In case I would say that, for example, if you encounter a problem for software, yes, and it's a proprietary software as loads of administrations are public administrators out there using it. Then you can't easily fix it because you need to talk to the company selling you the software and you can't just give the code to somebody else and say, well, please improve this and this for me and public administrations as well as individuals out there need sometimes a special tool or need one to have something special and in a software or improve it or have a special function in it. Then this is really important that you can do this on your own and this is a huge advantage that everybody, even a single individual can have. Like for example, big button, which is also a software, you can use it in so many ways that there are no disadvantages for anybody. So this I think this is really important if you talk to people who are not really from the tech community into them that free software is not only there for tech people. It is also there for all the people out there not being technical skilled and yeah, it tries to make your life easier. Yeah, and then of course it's connected to a much greater story as well and that software is so ingrained these days in every aspect of our lives that you can't really talk about anything without including the software that you're using. Italo is this something that you run into? Like what do you say to non developers that approach you about wanting to help? What can they do? I am a non developer. So it's easy for me. I have a degree in humanities and my degree goes back to 1978. So PC didn't exist. My thesis was typewritten and let's say that I grew up without computers. And so when I first met the computer, my first computer was 27. And sorry, you were 27 years old when you when you had your first computer. Yes, yes, that was 81 and it was rather early because I had I was either I think by mistake by an IT company that was annual at the time because I was a journalist. So they wanted me to explain technology to non technical people. And after that, it's not so difficult. If you if you put yourself, I mean, I'm a user so it's not difficult for me to look at technology under the user point of view. And it's not even difficult for someone non technical like me to develop some understanding of technology. Because it's not so complicated. Of course, I'm not I'm totally unable to develop. And actually developers are very happy that I don't even look at the code because they fear that they can destroy everything just by looking at the code and not talking and not putting my hands on it. But it's, you know, when people ask me and they call in in Italy, we are used to give titles to people even if you don't know that they have a title. So when I attend, I often talk at events. And when I am at events, they tell me they call me engineer, which means is a kind of title like engineer with a degree in a school of engineering. And when I say not not exactly ever degree in humanities, which in it in Italian sounds even worse because we we don't have the term humanities we we use the term literature. So basically my degree in Italian is degree in literature. And then I say I'm over 60. And I use a I've been using now a Linux computer for years. And they look at me and say, how do you make it and say because I have a neuron connected to my ends and that's all you need to use free software is just to to use you use software like any other software there's nothing difficult, nothing different. Of course, if you want to set up a big server, that's a different story, but just no one would ask a user to set up a server. And then they I make the example of cars. Most cars today run on a Linux on embedded Linux. And so I when I say I tell people, you know that you are using Linux basically because when today if you have an automatic gear. Actually, probably 99% that is embedded Linux that is managing the gears for you.  And so you shouldn't be scared because that gear or that breaks or that friction, which is basic base on Linux is a lot more dependable than the mechanical one. The mechanical one can really fall apart while the digital one reduces the number of pieces and therefore makes it more robust. So it's but if you think we have Linux in in many appliances around us and and many people are using Linux without realizing that they're using Linux. Most smart TVs are Linux based.  Probably the answer is yes. And then you can tell Netflix as Linux servers that stream a digital signal to your TV which is a which is a Linux terminal basically. Yeah, I think I think that's failed right now. Can you still hear us or not at all. I can hear you but there is nothing. Okay, okay. We will wait. All right. Oh, cool. We're back. I'm just going to summarize a little bit I think what it was saying was that it's very helpful in your conversation about free software and getting people introduced into the free software story. It's a talk about how free software is already ingrained in a lot of people's lives and in a lot of people's systems without them knowing about it how new Linux is at the core of a lot of systems. Of course that doesn't make those systems free so we don't want to get them too much credit for that but it is true that it really sort of is everywhere and that we that I think people don't necessarily understand that. Leo, maybe you can talk also a little bit about how you introduce people to the concept of you for a new free software. Yeah, I have a little bit different concept or I think a little bit different in this kind of things I have also sort of like this year before but I've changed a bit my view. I'm also a technical person. I work also in tech and I like tech but when I introduce people to free software and never use technology. Nearly never. That's very interesting. Yeah, I think the political or the philosophical aspect behind free software is much more important. And this is where we get us the people of course people are interested in in Linux and students like to hack and have something they can can work with and it is a better operating system actually. This is, it's just a fact, but to keep a long term engagement and to keep the people really understand and think what is behind the whole free software ecosystem. You need to come more from the, at least I do it like this. I, I try to convince more from the political and freedom aspect, because as you have said it, we have Linux everywhere now everybody's. Yeah, I don't know the, the number of Android phones in the world, but it's a lot. Everybody's using Linux and they are in chains if they don't use a free Android version for example. So only using using free software does not mean you are free when it's not the ethical aspect behind it. Then there might be a free software component in it, but the users are still in chains. So that makes no sense. So there has to be an awareness. And with this awareness comes, at least for me came a deep insight. When I started using free software came a deep insight why I want to do this, why I'm doing this and why I'm fighting for it. And, and I think this is very important point we have to transfer also to the people. Yeah, I, I think that's a very good point to be speaking to people's philosophical if you convince them from a philosophical perspective or from an ethical perspective. You also like anyone can find their own truths in that and anyone can find their own connections to that because that also shows that indeed you don't have to be technical to believe that software should be ethical. I am going to give the word to to Roberto like how you do a little bit of that outreach and then I'm afraid we're already going to have to round up soon. So, but how do you like, and then I'm going to give the word to Greg a little bit. I know they're waiting to do a little bit of speaking on the FSF's behalf when it comes to local group organizations. So, how was it for you to start a conversation about people and how do you convince them that they don't need to be developers. So, my experience has been really that if you're kind of just like living the life and putting yourself out there in a positive way, right. People get very curious. Right.  Right.  Other stuff. So that really opens the door to, you know, hey, this is like, this is better for you. Right. This is better for you. So that's kind of the approach I take normally because the thing is that I really like the philosophy. I get, you know, really into all that and, you know, trying to break things down in different ways. But ultimately, I'm barely smart enough to understand it. And, you know, I try to like, just find, you know, what motivates these like different people and try to kind of see where free software kind of fits into that.    I'm going to, before I give the word to Graham, I'm going to ask if anyone has anything else to add that we feel that we haven't covered that we should have covered that is very important when it comes to local group organization. Could I add something? Yeah. I think that like, there were many points mentioned there and all of those points are really relevant, but I would like to mention that the movement is really diverse and it's always really important that every organization times their own way to connect with their local community and their local groups and how to motivate them. Yeah. I think this is also something important and ongoing. This is something that is really important. I also think that that's very important and I also think it's, it's, you don't have to think big. You can think small and you can start small and free software is very much about community so think about your own community and what are the things that matter to them and then talk to them about that. Great. I think, I mean, I want to thank everyone already in advance. I know Greg will also thank you again for joining in this conversation. I like, I learn a lot from everyone else's experiences and I love hearing about how the things that you run into internationally and I wish I could listen to every single one of you all day. I'm going to give the word to Greg a little bit. Greg. I mean, just listening to everybody speak has been really. I mean, I know that we're the FSF campaign scene, but often just listening to people's stories of, you know, being a local volunteer is like, well, it feels our way. We do this full time, but, you know, often there are so many things that we can learn from community efforts because it was local groups like that, you know, the software kind of spread, right? I mean, at least in the 90s because people just couldn't go to whatever website, download a canoe. It was all about that local outreach. And I think, especially now, you know, the quarantine watching everyone become more and more remote, more and more locked down. So I think that the FSF has gotten us thinking that, you know, the FSF needs to do something to support all these efforts. So like when the, when it's safe to gather in person, we want to be ready to hit the ground running when it comes to encouraging more software adoption, encouraging more local free software groups to be to announce that we're going to be putting to local free software groups. We're going to help them in their organizational expenses, holding meetings. Really, anything we can help them, like especially new ones, get up to the ground running and rebuild ones. We just want to let everybody know that the FSF is here to help. So I'm excited to be offering some reimbursement expenses with the local groups. You know, if you're planning a meeting and you needed to rent a space or do this and you contact the FSF. We'll be able to help you out with the monetary aspects of that. So that's really something that we're pretty excited about revealing. Because it's just, yeah, as I mentioned before, it's just been so kind of disheartening on the one hand to see how many people have not turned to proprietary software to an increase to work before because of the quarantine. But when people are safe to gather again, we really want to those local efforts.  One thing we do do as we mentioned earlier is we use our internal subscriber list to send message to people in your area who might be interested. So I remember one of the first sent as an FSF staff member was about a free software group in Denmark. And so we know the free software community in Denmark, you know, they may have said, oh, yes, mail me about things that are going on in my area. So you can rely on us to send that information to hopefully connect you with people that you may not have been aware of before. And there's also, of course, always the lead replacement, which is where the a lot of these groups have most of their organizational presence. But also, as Roberto mentioned earlier, they discuss the general mailing list is like a constantly great source of topics to be writing about. And to share with the wider free software community. It's also a good place to find the people who might be in your area who, you know, didn't really know about. So, yeah, I'm really excited to say that we'll be we'll be doing this reimbursement program. If you're interested, we're still working on the criteria. But if you are in some city where you that there's a free software group or there's was one before. And it was, you know, it's last activity was a long time ago to write us at campaigns at fsf.org. And we'll be on the program because, like I said, when everything is as back to normal as it's ever going to be together again. I think we both the fsf we and we as the free software community kind of come together and encourage adoption, free software adoption and advocacy for these local groups. So that's something we're pretty stuck about. And thanks everybody again, it was really great to hear from everybody. I know I was a little bit. Mostly because I didn't want to mess up with the organization of everything, but it was real hard to hear everybody and it was really inspiring to us as members of the for sure. Yeah, and I want to I want to thank. I know Kelt just couldn't make it one of our free software supporters from Denmark, who jumped in just a little bit too late. It would have been great to listen to as well. We also had Christina. We had, I had so many people respond really nicely to joining this conversation. And I want to start, of course, thank all of you, Bonnie, Jamie, Leo, Italo and Roberto, all of you so much for for joining us in this. What I'll do is I will watch this again, and then I will make a little summary. I'll write up something trying to summarize some of the lessons that we learned today. And then we'll publish that with the on on one of the FSF blogs because I think that's definitely worth it. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, everyone. We're going to move to the next talk is John Sullivan, our executive director who will speak a little bit as to his 35 years or his 16 years, but our 35 years of FSF and then I guess some of the projects that we're working on. Thank you again to all of you for joining us.  So I'm very excited that we were able to make this work. Thank you. Thank you. I'm inviting. Bye. Thank you. Bye bye.


And so I'll take notes and rely on others to chat. Perfect, just at the recording. So we are ready to start. Hi, everybody. Today's to the agenda. We are first announcement to say that because we are doing a Jenkins call release in the coming days, please do not modify anything related to relays.ci. So hold on any PR that could affect that service. The second thing that I noticed today is archives at Jenkins.io is really unreliable at the moment. I still have to find some time to investigate what's wrong. What I discovered today is it affected the monitoring check that the check if we can download packages. Cara made a PR about that. So the idea is to use get the Jenkins.io instead of archives to Jenkins.io to monitor if we can download packages, which obviously makes sense, which is the service used by everybody. On another, so the next topic, we made some garrets and David made some nice improvement regarding the way. Sorry. Go on. Just on archives at Jenkins.io. Mark, did you end up reverting your change that made the pipeline not fail if archives was down or did you leave it commented out or disabled? It's good point. I have archives at Jenkins.io. The change I made has been reverted, but it worked last week for the 2.274 release. So I'm not sure how to answer that, Tim. That's a good question. That's probably a risk that it could cause the pipeline to fail. Yes, risk that the 2.275 and 2.263.2 release pipeline be able to upload to archives. However, now, Olivier, because that's a stage, those are stage releases, Daniel's announced that they are security releases. Since they're staged, I assume they are not yet uploaded to archives.jankens.io because they're staged. Yeah, which means that we must be sure that archives.jankens.io is really when we publish the packages because it may fail the publishing script. That's a really good point. Or we re-add marks disabled or true to it because it doesn't really matter if they're right. Oh, yes. That's a really good point. Well, Olivier, do you want to have a conversation with Daniel back to see which is best for him? I think it would be best for now to disable. Sorry. Oh, Daniel. Hello, Daniel. I missed that you're here. Thank you. I didn't want to interrupt the talking, but now that you're mentioning me. So do you have a preference there? Is since those releases are being staged, they aren't immediately dependent on archives.jankens.io. Should we disable the attempt to publish to archives because it's currently not trustworthy online? Well, I may have missed the beginning of this topic. So what is archives used for exactly? So what we need is once we publish it, it needs to be made available to everyone. Yes, archive.jankens.io is used as a fullback. So in the script, when we do the sing.sh, one of the stage is to upload the packages to archive.jankens.io. So it's not directly used, but it may affect the sing.sh script. And basically what's happening with that service is for some reason from time to time, it's really slow. And so we get time out issues. So people do not download artifacts from theirs, but as part of the release process, we upload our artifacts on that machine. So it's probably better to just remove, to disable that service for now. So what's currently behind the fallback host name? So the fallback host name is get.jankens.io, in fact. So when we do, when you do the release, we upload the artifacts to an Azure file storage. And so fallback.jankens.io is the same. So there's nothing to use in archive right now. It's just a fullback, fullback. Okay, so we do not even need archives.jankens.io before all the mirrors are sent because that is occasionally a problem. I think that was Tim, what we worked on with plugins mid last year. When the mirror distribution was delayed, we made sure that it's immediately available from somewhere. And this is not implemented with the archives, correct? So for the plugin, maybe for the plugin, yeah. So Susan, is your file storage is fullback right now? So when you look, when you look at the script, sync.sh, you see that we upload packages into multiple location. We upload them to Azure file storage and we upload them to archive. The thing is in the past archive has had a limit on the network runway. It was really slow. And the purpose of archive was really like as a fullback service. So archive contain every artifact that we published since the beginning of the Jenkins project while most of the mirrors only contain packages for the last year, something like that. Okay, so it's not important for the distribution? No. So if it can be safely done, my preferred approach would be to remove that from whatever scripts would do the uploads to ensure that they finish with everything else that is actually needed. Yeah, it's safer in the current situation. Who can handle that? Marc? So I think, yeah. So I think what that means is that's just reinforcing that we should reapply the change that I had done a week or two ago to temporarily disable upload. Tim had mentioned it earlier. And I think that's just it. We need to apply again the skip archives change from two weeks ago when it was offline as well then. Great, okay. Is that, do you want me to submit the pull request and then Daniel, you and Olivier review it? Yeah, if you can submit the pull request, that would be nice. All right, we'll do that later today. It's going to be several hours yet. Is that okay? That it's delayed several hours while I'm at other meetings? Yeah, that's fine. My only question is, I'm not sure to understand which fix is needed. I thought that you had to manually modify the scripts. No, no, no, I pushed a change into the repository. It wasn't a manual change. It's really trapped as a PR. Okay, but you pull it on the machine though, right? Okay. Okay, I see which repository you mean. Okay. Okay. Thanks. Any last comments on this topic? No. The next topic, which is the way we build the current images. So as I was saying, Garrett and Damian made some progress here. So the ways working now is the reason, so the reason why they started working on that is because we start moving more and more jobs on the Jenkins running on Kubernetes because it's faster to treat the provision jobs, nodes on Kubernetes. But the challenge is because we do not run the Docker, because we don't have access to the Docker element. Yeah, we had to modify slightly the shared library used here. So I can, so I won't, I can show you what it looks like. So basically what it says, right? What we are doing right now is if you want to provide, if you want to add a new Docker image on the Jenkins CI for our organization, you just create a git repository with the name Docker dash and the name, whatever name you want to use. Inside you create the Jenkins five with the right function. And then it will automatically, it will automatically create a pipeline job on infrared at CI and it will run some LinkedIn tests of we're using Adolins. So we can, we can look at the results of those Adolin tests. And then it builds a Docker image using both the branches and the tags, which means that, oh yeah. Is that just starting Jenkins at the moment or can it do Jenkins as well? So let me, let me show you. Mark, can I show my screen, can I show the screen?  Yeah. It has access to Jenkins, so we might be able to, so I've got a couple that ideally we moved over to possibly that. So ideally one of the thing that I see here is we could move many of Docker image build from trusted at CI to infrared at CI. So in order to increase the visibility of those jobs and it's just easier to manage right now. Yeah. So if I show you what it looks like here, between it's a new browser. I know it's already here. So I can just show you where is that? It's here, sorry. Do you see my screen? Yeah. So we now have a new folder, which is Docker builds. And if you look at it, we right now have a bunch of Docker images. So as long as you create a, as I said, a git request here with a name, that much Docker dash, it will automatically be added here. And so if you look at one, we can either build image based on branch or on tag. And so if we build on a branch, it will push the latest and the mass branch. And if we use the tags, we can also trigger for a specific tag. And so let's say for instance, this one. So the idea was to use release drafter to generate new version of the current images in this case. So the version would not match the different version that you have inside the Docker image. And so we do some ninting test build. But what is interesting here is we also have the view of addolins warning. And so you can see what are the errors found in this Docker image. And if you look, if you click on the different, so we see that this error is located on two lines. If I look at the Docker file, line seven, it suggests that we run apetek install with no install recommends. So we only install the packages that we need. And so yeah, that was a nice improvement. And then it automatically push the images on Docker Hub. So that's the current situation. The manual procedure right now, when we need to add a new Docker image is to create the Docker Hub repository in advance. Is that actually needed? I thought as an owner of the org, it automatically created a repo when you pushed. On Docker Hub? I thought so. Oh, that would be interesting. I think at least under my personal account, I think it does that. I'm pretty sure I can just... Yeah, so that would be a nice improvement. It creates automatically for you, even though it's a public one with the default configuration set. So depending on what we expect, we are not totally sure. So by default, if you expect it to be public with the default set, it's okay. Otherwise, you must create it before, as soon as the Docker needs a bird to push. Okay, so it's all... Okay, that's interesting. Anyway, we don't have private images and we don't have credentials inside Docker images. Yeah. So yeah. Now the question is more about all those Docker file that we're building where we have the Docker file next to an application. And the example that popped up in my mind is the account app where we have the Java codes and the Docker file. So we may have to manually add the job here. What I've been thinking is instead of adding jobs here based on the Git repository name, maybe having a way to, let's say, add based on a Git repository label, whatever. If we have a specific... There's a really nice... Yeah, there's a really nice pull request open like it have branch source for doing it by topic. Really efficient though. So maybe that will help, yeah. So we could have... I mean, it's just a way to visualize all the builds, but in this case, we can clearly see. That would be nice to have every Docker builds from here. So that was... Just to add something, there is an upcoming process that would come within the shell library that if an upcoming pull request that will allow to run some tests between the build and the deploy parts when building a Docker image, this test will be only using a driver named tar. So it will only check for the presence. You can only check for presence of files for file contents inside the content of the Docker image. It won't use a Docker engine for the security risk that it will cause inside Kubernetes, but it will allow to document and work on TDD when you have a Docker file image because you say, I expect to have this file with these properties with eventually these contents inside my image. So then you will have a kind of no regression testing for Docker images there. If we want to go further, we must use a set of agents that will be able to spawn the image on VM because if you try to run Docker in Docker, even though you have the rootless available, you still need some capsis admin rights on the host, underlying host. So the best solution for today will still to might be if you want to run some Docker workload to run a virtual machine dedicated only for that, that will imply stashing and unstashing the tar image before pushing it to registry. The goal here is to avoid pushing an image on any Docker registry without having run some tests. Ideally, I would like to add then security scanning on the static image, but already having some tests. So you have the links that helps you to parse the Docker file and find good and bad patterns. Then you build it with IMG. So no Docker engine involved. And then we use a Google container test for testing that will only deep dive inside the image. If the test pass, that will be run on each pull request. And if you are on the main branch, then it will deploy automatically. Security scanning shouldn't be too hard to add, what I thought, doesn't need to be in for that. But yeah, sounds really good. Yeah, that's another improvement that would be nice. Any last suggestion, question? No, so the next topic is about Mirrors. We start to need more Mirrors. Right now, we had issues with Severion over the past weeks, which has been unreliable. And so now I would like to maybe write a blog post to promote and ask contributors to provide Mirrors. So basically what I did is I improved the ham charts that we have right now to also install a nursing server on the Mirrors. The reason why we need nursing is because Mirrored Bits use nursing to gather metadata information for the files and to know if the mirror is there or not. So we just need to be able to reach from Mirrored Bits nursing server. So everything is in place. I just have one issue that I still have to identify why the mirror is marked as down, even if it's there. But yeah, that's the, what's the missing parts before promoting that component. So Olivier, I've considered using some Oracle infrastructure as a possible mirror just as an experiment. Would you be willing or interested if I were to offer a, it won't be what I would call in an interesting locale because if I remember they don't have a data center in India or in Australia, but it could be Phoenix, Arizona and the US. Is that interesting? Or is it better that we look outside for this initial experience? Is it already mature enough that you don't need me to test drive it? So basically right now we have a ham charts. So if you have a Kubernetes cluster, that's definitely super simple to install because the way the ham chart is configured is working is it starts multiple container, one container that provides you the content from a specific directory, just an Apache daemon. There is a second container which is a nursing that provides you the content from the same directory, also as a nursing. And then you have a third container which is a current job that's regularly pooled information from get the Jenkins.io. So from one mirrored, one trusted mirrored specifically. And so the first time you deploy the charts, you need to wait the time that it takes to download the packages to have a locale copy of one of the mirroreds. And then we can use it.  So I don't have a ready to deploy thing for your box. Well, but that's great because I would want to do it in Kubernetes. So I missed in the notes, the container with R-Sync, a container that pulls from get.jnkans.io on a schedule. What was the first container? So you have R-Sync, Apache, and a current job. Okay, got it, so. And so the idea is really, I mean, it's really to have it to work independently. And so the R-Sync daemon is a read-only server. So it's really just, I mean, it just provides information. And in the current configuration, it only allows connection from specific location. So the R-Sync is really designed to be used from get.jnkans.io. Oh, okay. Which means that if you deploy it on your cluster, you won't be able to test it from your machine. We have, I mean, yeah. And so we have dedicated Docker images built on the Jenkins project on inflighted CI and published on Docker Hub. So everything is to be there. And did we have anything on the serverry on mirror being unreliable? Do we need to notify them of that? Or have we just given up that we can't trust it and? I mean, I think I have to send them an email to report the issue. I think the problem is they just have too much traffic. They are not only providing data for the Jenkins, they also offer a mirror for Debian and other projects. So my guess is we just ask them too much. So I think it would be easier the day we just provide more mirrors in the same area than they did. Yeah, they just send an email once complaining that we turned them off. And I think we got to turn them back on at some point. So they did notice it's not one. The problem is, and that's the same issue that we have on our infrastructure. You always have moment in the day where you have a lot of traffic. Typically the moment between Europe and the United States during the morning, I mean, morning for the United States, you always have small peaks. At that time, and it's exactly the same that happened on the update center. And so if you only have one mirror, and in that case, I think you only have two or three mirrors in the United States. The problem is, and it's hard to detect, the problem is the mirror is there, it's working. And then for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, the mirror is down. And so nobody is able to, let's say, install plugins, for instance. And so we just have to be sure that we have enough. Yeah, so their mirror is actually in the Netherlands. And one of the problems is it is incorrectly identified as being on the East Coast of the United States. And that causes all sorts of other issues. So for me, leaving it offline for now is fine. It's healthier for our East Coast users. They're not asking for data from the Netherlands that could be available from New York. Any last question regarding mirrors infrastructure? So the next topic we are running over time, so I'm trying to go quick. So we have few PRs that we affect infrared at CI and released at CI. So I would like to plan a maintenance window next week with Garrett and Damien. So we have great, we merge those PR manually and we upgrade everything. So we are sure that we are running the handbeat V3 handshots for Jenkins and a few other PRs. So basically what it means is we need to send an announcement on statues.junkins.io to announce that the service may be done. And also we have to announce the mailing list. So that's one of the things that I have to work with Garrett regarding that. The two next topics, we have one about acceptance tests. So I would like to use the Jenkins acceptance test to test Jenkins Docker images. I found to get repository, but I'm not sure which one I should use. But I propose to talk about that during the next Jenkins information. It's not urgent for today since we are already running over time. I propose to move it to the next meeting. And the last topic, which is highlight for the new year post on Lake, but Lake is not there. I don't know if, Mark, you have some inputs on that topic. Oh, just OK, just share information saying that you wrote a document, I guess. So sorry, here it comes. So there is a new year's blog post due to the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the 13th, so tomorrow. And this is the draft of that post. If we have specific things in infrastructure that we would like to highlight in that 2020 summary, we should propose them to it today. All right, I've put some things on infrastructure in here already. And like releasing Jenkins score? Exactly, like releasing Jenkins release automation, like all sorts of other things that are info related are in here already. But if you please feel free to review it. And if you think we missed something, this is the day to propose a change to it, because it's due tomorrow. OK, I'll try to look at it. So any last thing you want to discuss? Otherwise, I guess we can finish the talk here. So I'm going to three, one, two, three. Then thanks for your time, everybody. See you in RC and see you in one week. Bye-bye.


The story you're about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.  You're assigned a robbery detail. Two armed bandits invade the home of an elderly couple in your city. The aging husband is tortured unmercifully before he reveals the hiding place of his valuables. The two thieves make good their escape. Your job? Get him. The documented drama of an actual crime. For the next 30 minutes in cooperation with the Los Angeles Police Department, you will travel step-by-step on the side of the law through an actual case transcribed from official police files. From beginning to end, from crime to punishment, Dragnet is the story of your police force in action. It was Saturday, October 3rd. It was hot in Los Angeles. We were working the day watch out a robbery detail. My partner's Ben Romero. The boss is Harry Diddy and Captain of Robbery. My name's Friday. It was 11.38 p.m. when I got to Georgia Street receiving hospital. Room 5. Treatment room. Joe? How's it going, Ben? We're not going to be able to talk to him any more tonight. Doctor said maybe late tomorrow morning. How's the old man making out? He's resting a lot better. Doctor gave him a sedative. Old fellow sure had a rough time. How about since I've been gone? Did he tell you anything else? No. Just kept repeating the same thing. He forced the way into his house, beat his wife, tortured him, took all their jewelry. That's about it. Well, I put in a call of the office. I got a broadcast out on the information that we have. There's not much to go on. We should be able to pick up a little something more tomorrow. Doctor said it's been a long time since he's seen anything like this, where they worked old man over. What'd they do to the fellow's hands anyway that doctor able to tell? He thinks they used a hat pin on him. Something like that. It's sharp and thin. At least a dozen wounds in both hands. He's pretty badly burned, too. Yeah. It's hard to imagine somebody that cold-blooded, 71-year-old man, souls of his feet and massive burns. Wonder his heart stood up through the beating I gave him. Has he got a weak heart? He's had a little trouble, yeah. Terrific shot going through something like this at his age. Well, maybe we better check back at their house, huh? See how the old fellow's wife is doing. Yeah, all right. How's it shape up for you? Well, there's not an awful lot to go on yet. It wasn't a shot in the dark. I think we can count on that.  The old man and his wife, well, they don't put up much of an appearance. You wouldn't be apt to figure that they had three or four thousand jewelry put away at home, would you? Maybe his wife might have some ideas. Yours are lousy shingles. Yeah. You might have to understand that they just held them up but working them over the way they did. There was no sense to it at all. Trying to show off what a couple of rough bums they are. Maybe that's it. Well, then let's do them a favor. Let's show them what it costs. Ben and I got in the car and drove back to the Westlake Park area to the home of the robbery victim, Mr. O'Wendell McClung and his wife, Catherine McClung. It was a one-story wooden frame building, gray shingled, a typical modest four-room bungalow. The men from unit 31R who had answered the robbery call were still there standing by. Another pair of men from robbery detail, Powers and Gonzalez were checking the neighborhood for possible leads on the suspects. Inside the house, Ben and I found Mrs. McClung propped up in an easy chair in the living room. She was a small chubby woman, gray-haired, looked to be in her fifties. We assured her her husband's condition wasn't critical. Outside of a small bruise on her forehead and a case of nervous upset, she seemed to be all right. In recounting the story of the holdup, Mrs. McClung told us the two bandits rang the front doorbell and forced their way into the house at gunpoint shortly before eight o'clock that night. How about the color of their hair, ma'am? Their weight and the height? No, I hardly saw a thing. Just that one look at them when they first pushed their way in. How was that, baby? Blindfolded? Yes, they might just as well have. You see, when they started to hit window, my husband's window, knock him down.  I reached out to find them, but before I did, I guess one of those gangsters stepped on them. $35 glasses broke both of the lenses, just ruined the frames. Look at that. Of course, I can't see a thing without them. That's why I say it might as well have been blindfolded. You didn't have a chance to notice what kind of clothes they had on and what they looked like at all. They weren't shabby, I know that. Pretty well-dressed, if memory serves. Both of them in dark suits. Only they wouldn't have broken my glasses. How about their voices, Ms. McClung? Anything unusual about the way they talked? Anything that they might have said? Ms. McClung? No, I was just thinking. One's name was Sam, I remember that. The other one had sort of an accent of some kind, maybe from the Midwest or maybe Texas, those funny people. Funny people? How do you mean, ma'am?  I see. I guess I really should be inside fixing you men a cup of tea, maybe if you just help me up here. That's all right, ma'am. You just sit there. When my sister Dolly gets here, it shouldn't be too long. I'll have her fix something. There's no need to bother, ma'am. We'd like to have you tell us this if you can. Did your husband do anything at all to provoke the two, ma'am? Call out for help or try to get to a phone or anything like that. It was the jewelry we had. Wendell and I, just those few pieces. The two men seemed to know all about it, just as if they had a list of the things. That's all right. Yes. When they first came in, they took my engagement ring and old brooch that belonged to my mother I was wearing. Then they got Wendell in that chair over there and tried to make him tell where our other things were. Well, now is it pretty common knowledge around the neighborhood here that you and your husband own expensive jewelry, ma'am? Oh, I don't think so. What the men seemed most interested in was Wendell's ring, his diamond-signet ring. It was a beautiful thing for a carrot. Yes, ma'am. We've got a description on that. That was when they tried to force your husband to tell him where it was hidden. Is that right? I never thought anybody would be that cruel officer. Downright cruel. They burned his hands and his feet.  It was just terrible. Poor Wendell. I had to tell them. They went and found the things, and then they came back in here and ripped out the phone, warned us not to move. And then they left. I just broke down and cried, officer, to see poor Wendell there the way they abused him. Yes, ma'am. We understand. You're sure he's going to be all right? What did the doctor say? I said there's no danger, ma'am. Mr. McClung's resting comfortably now. Well, that must be my sister. You want to stay right here with Mrs. McClung? Ben, I'll get that. Hi, Jess. You want powers doing any good? I've been checking through the neighborhood three, four blocks around. Not an awful lot. A lot of people know the McClung's. Few of them know about their having jewelry. Not even so anything unusual going on tonight. The thieves used the car. We know that. Didn't anybody at all spot it? Not sure, but there's one possibility. Some of the neighbors said a young kid was peddling magazines down this block tonight just about the same time as a robbery. He might have spotted something. Well, that's fine. Where is the boy? Where does he live? That's who we asked the neighbors. Nobody knows. A supplementary broadcast and an APB was gotten out containing what description we had on the two holdup men, plus descriptions of each article of jewelry taken from Mr. and Mrs. McClung. The following morning, along with Jess Gonzalez and Johnny Powers, we continued canvassing the immediate neighborhood of the holdup. The only thing we got was a fair description of the boy who had been selling magazines the night before in the vicinity of the McClung house and also the names of the magazines he was peddling. Monday morning, 9 a.m., we got in touch with a local distributor for the publications, got a list of five boys who sold for them in that general area and started checking them out. Third on the list was a Bill Newsom, a sophomore student at a nearby parochial high school. He lived a half a dozen blocks from the McClung's. We checked at his house, but his mother told us he wasn't at home. I'm sure Billy won't be long. Thank you, ma'am. Right in here, opposite. Just go ahead. Thank you. Sit down, won't you? Thank you very much. You must be him now. Billy, in here. Yeah, ma'am. Come in here, Bill. Two police officers to see you. Okay. Bill, this is Sergeant Friday and Sergeant Romero, my son Bill. How are you, ma'am? Would you excuse me? I'm going to have to start fixing dinner. You go right ahead and have your talk with Bill. I'll be out in the kitchen. All right, ma'am. Thank you very much. You speak right up now, Bill. Try and help the officers all you can. How can I help you? What's it all about? We understand you have a magazine out in the neighborhood.  Yes, sir. That's right. Thursdays and Saturdays. They're my regular nights. I don't really sell, though. How do you mean, son? Well, you see, I line up all my customers ahead of time. I got a regular list of people they buy from me every week. I don't do any door-to-door selling. That way, it's not much good. I see. Do you have a regular customer on your list but the name of McClung, Bill? That's M-C-C-L-O-N-G? Yeah, Mr. McClung. Once a month, he takes a gardening magazine. Comes out the last weekend every month. Were you over near the McClung's place Saturday night? You remember? Yeah, I was. I went right by it. I've got customers all along that block there. Say, this wouldn't be about that robbery. That's right, Bill. You heard about it? After church Sunday, a couple of kids would go to the same school I do. They'd live right around the McClung's. They heard about it. What time was it when you went by that Saturday night? You remember? Oh, about a couple of minutes after nine, I guess. Maybe a quarter after. When I heard about the robbery on Sunday, I thought maybe I ought to tell somebody about it. I wasn't sure about it, though. You know, I didn't want to be a pest. What do you mean, son? You weren't sure about what? This dark blue sedan I saw parked on the street there, just a couple of houses down from the McClung's place. The reason I even noticed it was because it was a new car, almost a brand new car. But it looked like the license plates on it were kind of old. What else? Well, I delivered some magazines to Mrs. Brubaker, and I got my money for them. And then coming down the stairs, I saw these two men. I'm not sure they came out of Mr. McClung's house. It was dark, you know, but I thought that's where they came from. Anyway, they went down the street, got in the car, and took off. It seemed to be in a hurry. Well, what did the two men look like, Bill? Do you have any idea? No, I didn't see them too well. It wasn't too close to them. I was about from, you know, here to across the street from them. How about their clothes? You noticed them at all? Yeah, they had suits on, dark suits. I know that. How would you describe their builds, son? Medium, tall, fat, skinny? What would you say? Well, I think I'd say medium. Yeah, both are medium. Now about that car, Bill. You said it was a dark blue sedan, but today a new model and the license plates look kind of old, is that right? Yeah, that's right. That's how I first noticed it parked down by the restaurant. How did that? About 715, when I started my route down on South Benson, I saw the same car parked outside the restaurant down there. Forget the name of the place now. It just opened about a month ago. I'm sure it was the same car. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure. That's why I noticed it again when I saw it up by McClung's place. I thought it looked kind of terrible. Brand new car like that with old license plates. By any chance, son, do you remember the license number on those plates? No, sir, I didn't notice it at all. I'll tell you what, though. Yeah? If I see that car again, I'll be sure and get the number for you. Before we left the home of 16-year-old Bill Newsom, we got a complete description of the car which he'd seen parked near the McClung's home on the night of the robbery. He told us it was a 1950 Hudson, four-door sedan, dark blue, white sidewall tires. We relayed the information downtown to robbery detail. After we left the boy's house, we drove to the vicinity of the restaurant on South Benson where the Newsom boy had first spotted the Hudson sedan. After making the rounds of several bars and coffee counters in the area, we started checking at the restaurant.  The main bar was situated just off the lobby, set apart from the main dining room. We interviewed the head bartender, and he thought he remembered serving two customers, answering the general description of the holdup men on the previous Saturday night. Not a bad-looking pair. They're in a little early, around 7.15, 7.30. They seem to be all right. Do you remember what they looked like at all? No, I didn't notice them that much, obviously. Can you give us some general idea? Or on the young side, I guess, not more than 28, 30. One of them talked like a Midwestiner, I think. You know, maybe Arkansas, Texas, someplace like that. Could you give us any idea what they were wearing? Well, we don't have the suits on, dark suits. One had on a gray hat, that's about all I remember. The reason I can place them at all is because Saturday was a pretty slow night at the bar. It's a new place here, you know. It takes a little time to cultivate a tray. Well, did these two men stop for dinner here? Do you remember that? No, they sat right here at the bar, had a couple of beers, and then they left, no dinner. Did you wait on them? Yes, sir, I did. I served them both a bottle of beer, imported Dutch beer. You served quite a bit of that imported beer, do you? No, I'm not here. No, it's mostly cocktail tray. These two colors, the only ones I remember asking for. Oh, do you remember if the two men handled the beer bottles at all? Well, I mean, did you pour it again? I filled up the glasses and set the bottle down. I guess they did handle them. They emptied the bottles. I see. But they'd almost have to, wouldn't they? Would you still have those two bottles on him? No, let's see. Yeah, I guess they would. They don't pick up the empty, still something around the middle of the week. We'd like to take a look at them if you don't mind. Oh, sure thing. You guys just want to follow me down the bar here. It's in the store, I'm just in back. All right, let's go. It's right back here, officer. Fine. Yeah, yeah, they're right over here. Oh, there you go. Holland label. Only one's in the whole case. The same two I serve those fellas. Yeah, I see. What do you think? Fingerprints? Maybe. And as soon as you get the fingerprints, you can pick them up, can't you? Yeah, when we find the men they belong to. Monday, 6 p.m. We call latent fingerprints, and they came out to check the evidence. First, they obtained a set of the bartender's fingerprints to serve as a basis for comparison. Then they dusted each of the empty beer bottles carefully. After the various sets of prints were lifted off the bottles, the men went back to the office to run the sets through, classify their findings, and then turn them over to our and I for further checking. While they worked on it, Ben and I ducked out and had a sandwich and a bowl of soup for dinner. 7.25 p.m. We got back to the city hall. I sure am getting tired of the kind of food that guy serves, Joe. It seems to get worse every time I go in there. It wasn't very good, was it? I'm willing to bet I know his formula for the soup. Two gallons of hot water and one bouillon cube. Well, I've gone and done it before. I may still do it again. What's that? Bring my dinner from home in a paper sack.  It'd be a better deal than across the street. I don't know about that.  Yeah, I almost forgot. Wasn't any better than this stuff across the street. Hi. Where you two been? Hi, Jess. Getting something to eat? A latent prince called just a minute ago. Told him I'd give you the message. What's that? The prince, they lifted off those beer bottles, checked them through the record bureau. Found two sets. They made both of them. October 5th, Saturday, 7.40 p.m. The two sets of fingerprints which had been lifted from the empty beer bottles were checked through R&I and identified as those belonging to two known criminals. The first was Henry Vincent Moss, WMA, 29 years old. He'd served two terms in the Cotty Jail for burglary and Grand Theft Auto and one term in San Quentin for robbery. The second was Ernest Robert Windsor, WMA, 28 years old. His home was listed as Little Rock, Arkansas where he'd twice been convicted on charges of first-degree burglary and served time at the Arkansas State Penitentiary. We pulled the packages on both of the men, checked the last known addresses, but failed to locate either of them. To double-check their identification, we showed mug shots of Windsor and Moss to the robbery and torture victims, Mr. and Mrs. McClung. They gave positive identification of both men. So did the bartender at the restaurant where they'd stopped for the beer. We got out a broadcast and an all-points bulletin on them immediately. We began the routine legwork, checking with all the friends, relatives, and associates who were listed on the mama's sheet in each suspect's package. As usual, it was a long monotonous haul. One of the persons listed as fairly close to Ernest Windsor was a man of his, a Mrs. Marie Ralph, whom we located at her home in the Echo Park District. No, I hadn't seen Ernest in almost a year, Sergeant.  I'd like to talk to you about it a few minutes, Mrs. Ralph. You don't mind? I don't know how I can help you. You can come in for a minute if you want. I've got to go out and do some errands pretty soon, though. It's all right, ma'am. Thank you. Right in here. Sit down if you want. Thank you very much. I've got finished taking care of my little children here, giving them nice clean cages. Oh, yes. Oscar and Ethel, that's these two here. They're both genuine rollers. Their grand folks came from Germany. Beautiful singers. Wonderful company. Yes, ma'am. My others are pretty, too. They're only choppers, though. Ma'am. Choppers. They're different than rollers. They sing much louder. Maybe not as nicely, but I don't like to play favorites. I like all of them. You have birds, Sergeant? No, ma'am. You should. I think everybody should have a canary in the house. Cheerful, you know. Wonderful company. Don't know what I'd do without mine. How about your nephew, Ernest, Mrs. Ralph? Have you any idea at all how we could contact him? As I say, it's been almost a year since I last heard from him. What would this be about, Sergeant? Just a routine investigation, ma'am. We understand that you're quite close with your nephew that he lived with you for a time. Yes, that's right. He did. When you come right down to it, Ernie's a good boy. He kept bad company. That's what I always said. Got him in trouble two or three times. I suppose you know that. You live alone here in the house, do you, Mrs. Ralph? Yes, that's right, Sergeant. Say, I'm a widow. Husband's gone a good many years now. You don't take in boarders or anyone like that? Oh, no. Just me and the pets here. They're company enough. I wonder if you'd explain that laundry piled up in the bed there in the next room, ma'am. Oh, what's that? The men's shirts, stockings, the underwear. They're right there in the bed there. Well, I usually try to keep things in better order than that. Just some laundry, I do, Sergeant. Little odd jobs for some of the bachelor men in the neighborhood. I do it as a favor for them. You're sure about that, Mrs. Ralph? Ma'am? What do you want Ernest for? Why do you have to chase after him all the time? Persecute him. We're not persecuting him. Ever since he's come here from Arkansas, it's been nothing but police chasing after him. Can't you give her any a chance? All he wants is a chance. He told me so himself. We've checked through his record, Mrs. Ralph. He's had all the chances in the world and nobody's persecuting. Why are you chasing him again? Hunting him down. Why don't you leave him alone for a spell? Give him a chance to get a job, do something. Why are you chasing him? This is a robbery charge, Mrs. Ralph. He's been positively identified. He and Henry Moss forced their way into an old couple's home a few weeks back. They tortured the old man, then they beat him till he was unconscious. That's what we want Ernest for. How'd you know it was Ernie? You could have made a mistake. No mistake, ma'am. The victim's identified his picture and it wasn't a doubt in their mind. And where is he? You sure that's the truth? You're sure it's Ernie again? Yes, ma'am. Again. You can have all the proof you need. The last time he told me he swore on the memory of his own mother. He swore he wouldn't do anything wrong again. I guess I just don't know Ernest. Where is he, ma'am? You want to tell us? The last time, Sergeant, I'm sorry. Ernie, that is last time. Yes, ma'am. He's sleeping. The room over the garage. You'll find him there. Ernest Windsor was apprehended and placed under arrest. His room was searched as well as the entire home of his aunt, Mrs. Marie Ralph. We failed to find a trace of any of the jewelry stolen from Mr. and Mrs. McClung. After we made arrangements for a stakeout on the house, Windsor was taken downtown to the interrogation room where Jess Gonzalez, Ben and I questioned him for five hours. He refused to tell us anything. At a special show-up, he was positively identified as one of the hold-up men by the two victims. Windsor was booked at the main jail on suspicion of 211 PC. The investigation went on. Every possible lead on the other suspect, Henry Moss, was checked out. We got nowhere. It was obvious that either Moss was in possession of all the jewelry stolen from the McClung's or had been hidden away someplace known only to Windsor and Moss. From time to time, we had Windsor taken from his jail cell for questioning. It wasn't hard to tell. He was bothered with the possibility that perhaps Moss had run off with the entire loot and was enjoying himself while Windsor spent his time in jail. We worked hard on that particular angle while we questioned him, but Windsor still refused to break to give us any kind of a lead on Moss. A month passed, Wednesday, November 8th. Sure working out into a dull routine, a full month. We got exactly what we started with. Yeah. If we can only get Windsor to break it, it sure do a lot to her to wrap this thing up, wouldn't it? I don't know what he figures he's going to gain, but keep him quiet. Yeah. Gonzalez and Johnny Powers said they were checking out a tip from some informant this morning. Supposed to know where Henry Moss is. I wonder if they found any luck. They ought to be back by now. Yeah. Go ahead. Hey, Jess. Oh, hi. How about it? Did you do any good this morning? Oh, not a bit. Informant didn't even show up. Johnny's going to meet him this afternoon. It doesn't look to be very much. How about you, fellas? Same, Jess. We're going as slow as you are. We got it. Robert, it's Friday. We got George. Uh-huh. Third and main? You sure, huh? Right. Yeah. Right away. Well, maybe we got a break. What is it? Henry Moss. He tried to hawk a ring at a pawn shop. Third and main about 20 minutes ago. He make it? Well, the pawnbroker stalled him. He didn't know for sure that the guy was hot. Well, how's it stand? Moss said he'd come back to close the deal. When? Half an hour. 11.55 a.m., a special detail of men including Gonzales and Powers. Ben and myself were sent to cover the pawn shop near Third and Main. Gonzales and Powers staked out in stores adjoining the place. Ben and I were stationed inside the pawn shop. Another team of men covered the rear exit. We waited. The suspect, Henry Moss, failed to show at the appointed time. We kept waiting. 1 p.m. 1.30. No sign of him. At 1.45 p.m., a young looking, dark-haired man in a neat gray suit entered the shop and approached the manager at the rear counter. There wasn't any mistaking him, Henry Moss. He surrendered himself without even protesting. We took him to the city hall to the interrogation room where we started to question him. Meantime, Gonzales and Powers located the apartment where the suspect had been staying. His rooms and personal belongings were searched and every piece of the missing jewelry recovered. Surprisingly enough, in contrast to his partner, Ernie Windsor, Moss was cooperative, even obliging. We had a stenographer take his full statement. Then we got ready to move him over to the main jail for booking. Just a couple of questions before we leave, Moss. Sure, Sergeant. Go ahead. We've had you in here before. How come all in cooperation this time? Why not? I had it figured before time. If you got me, you'd have everything you need on me. It wouldn't do much good putting in a beef, would it? Whose idea was it to start with, Moss, the hold-up deal? Yours or was it Windsor's? Both of us, I guess. I didn't want to get rough with the old man. I mean the way Ernie did. That part I didn't like. All I wanted was a loot. Ernie just lost his head. Too bad. All right. You ready to go? Anytime, Sergeant. Hey, I wonder if I could ask a favor. What's that? Well, it's going to get a little tough in there in that jail. Wonder if we couldn't stop for a good steak and some french fries first, huh? Maybe some good restaurant around here? No, it won't work, Moss. You know I wouldn't try anything. You put your order in a long time ago, Mr. What do you mean? When you worked over that old couple. Yeah. That's when you ordered jail food. The story you have just heard was true. The names were changed to protect the innocent. On March 2nd, trial was held in Superior Court, Department 88, City and County of Los Angeles, State of California. In a moment the results of that trial. Ernest Windsor and Henry Moss were tried and convicted on one count of first degree robbery and one count of assault with intent to do great bodily harm. Both men are now serving their terms in the state penitentiary. First degree robbery is punishable by imprisonment for no less than one, nor more, than 10 years. You have just heard Dragnet, a series of authentic cases from official files. Technical advice comes from the Office of Chief of Police, W.H. Parker, Los Angeles Police Department.