In a new move, the government has granted full autonomy to 52 universities and 8 colleges. This has been widely opposed by a wide section of teachers and students. To discuss the issue and its implications, we are joined by Saikat Ghosh who is an academic council member of the Delhi University and is also one among the leading activists of the teachers movement in the country. Welcome to NewsClick Saikat. So let's start with this granting autonomy that the government has said. What does this mean, granting full autonomy to 52 universities and 8 colleges? Can it be seen as a part of growing attack on the entire education sector? Yes, but to begin with, it's not full autonomy. What the government has in its agenda right now is graded autonomy and it has basically followed a tired system of distinguishing between different institutions. So that tired system was determined on the basis of the results of the NAC assessment and the NIRF, the ranking, the national level ranking that was done by this government. And so the institutions after the ranking and the assessment, the ones that have gotten A grade, okay, now they are getting the maximum sort of autonomy and the first leg of announcements pertain to the A grade institutions. And this autonomy, I want to tell you of viewers, has nothing to do with the freedom of teaching, learning and ideas, okay. The government might claim otherwise, but really the autonomy pertains to giving managerial and financial autonomy to managing trusts of colleges, to university administrations and why? Because the government wants to very rapidly now withdraw from public funding of higher education. So the resources that need to be generated in order to run the system, those resources now have to be generated by the university administrations themselves, the managing trusts and the governing bodies of colleges. And therefore this autonomy the government feels is necessary to allow them to take decisions on their own, to mobilize funds like by hiking student fees at will, by making teachers do corporate consultancy, by signing MOUs with corporations, by tailor making their courses in a manner that there is a direct connection between the curriculum and the market. So through all these means the government expects, now whether it will happen or not is a different story. But the government expects that this is how it will facilitate these institutions to generate money on their own and run this education system. So let's also trace the history of this entire thing. Is it something new that the government has come up with right now or is there a history of it like we can also go to the WTO negotiations? Of course. You see the story actually begins in 2005 in the Doha round of the WTO, the then government committed higher education as a tradable service to GATs. You know GATs is the general agreement in trade and services. Now of course we have a completely, teachers have and many students have a completely contrarian view that education cannot be treated as a commercial service. It's a public good. It is meant at least in the context of our country. It remains one of the very few actually and critical means to progressive social transformation to addressing inequality in the long run. But the government did not think so under the dictates of the WTO and the World Bank. It decided to pawn away higher education. Then there were movements, several sporadic movements against this. We tried to create some sort of an environment in which the government would be forced to rethink its position before the 2017 Nairobi round of the WTO. And we wanted the government to really pull back, withdraw its commitment to WTO on higher education. But it did not happen that way. We learned that in the Nairobi round the government ended up reiterating that commitment. And you see the principle clause of GATS says that there has to be a level playing field which means right now we have a public sector higher education system, public funded universities and colleges and a private sector higher education system. Now according to the GATS there cannot be any difference between the two. So there won't be any public sector. There won't be any government subsidy or public money subsidy on the system. That subsidy will be withdrawn and everything will be thrown into the open market and the competition of the open market. So I guess even the government has said that these universities and colleges can open new courses, offer new programs, open skill centers till the time they don't ask for funds from the government and the UDC. So what impact is it going to have on this entire, on these universities and on the students because I guess it will all go into the self-financing mode? See the main policy recommendations that the government is now following and creating a roadmap on the basis of is the Niti Aayog Action Agenda. Okay, the Niti Aayog as everybody knows is headed by Arvind Pangaria and they brought out a document outlining what are the desirable changes according to the government that are necessary in various fields, including higher education. So they said that, well, one is that government has to now withdraw funding and it has to also create a situation in which universities and colleges are forced to reorient their curriculum in a manner that there is a direct pathway from the classroom into the corporate sector. So only those courses are going to survive that have a direct market value. Okay, now everybody knows that a proper comprehensive education needs to cater to humanities, social sciences, philosophy, languages, the basic sciences and which don't have a direct sort of value in the market. Students end up getting very good jobs, even students who graduate from these disciplines, but there is no direct correlation. These disciplines actually create citizenry, the citizenry that is considered ideal for a democratic nation. So in a way, these disciplines are critical disciplines in the making of the democratic nation. And we have seen in nation after nation in recent times, how democracy can be very easily undermined. Okay, when there is a deficit in the number of educated citizens. Okay, so the government has taken a very narrow view, I would say the Niti Aayog has taken a very narrow view of this. And they have created this situation wherein self-financed courses, because who will sort of enroll themselves in these self-financed courses which are going to cost, I mean, the student fees is going to be exorbitant. So unless the student is assured of a job, and most likely you see, apart from the wealthy classes in India, the middle classes and the students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds will be compelled to take loans. So it is also a way of enabling the expansion of the financial sector into higher education. But the repayment of the loans will be predicated on the kind of courses that the institutions will be able to offer, whether that those courses are going to help the students get jobs and quickly repay their loans or not. So this is the main agenda. But self-financing also means that teachers are going to be employed on contract. We already see that there is a huge crisis in Delhi University and many other universities, public funded universities, on permanent appointments. Most of our faculty are now working on guest and ad hoc basis. And they are brilliant students with very high qualifications and research degrees. But they are not getting any increments. They have no retirement benefits, no health benefits. They have no maternity leave. You know, if somebody can't even plan a family while working in the education sector, because of these kind of contractual jobs, which can be ended in a day. So now contractualization is going to become a norm with this government, because in self-financed courses, the government is not going to sanction posts. When it is not going to fund these courses, it means that it is not going to sanction posts. So it is going to institutionalize contractualization in a big way. Teachers are not going to get appointed. Teachers are already not getting pensions. And therefore, the teaching profession is going to become very unattractive. Teachers are going to go for those university jobs where the salaries are exponentially high. Or they are going to try and seek jobs abroad. And if jobs are not in the offing, then they will have to seek other professions. But that goes for the academic community. Students are, you know, a large number of students from the marginalized sections of society are going to be excluded from the ambit of higher education altogether. So these are the main implications of this kind of thing. Apart from the fact that it is going to become very difficult for traditional disciplines in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences to survive. So also, I mean, when they're talking about these things, research centers, incubation centers, university society linkages, they're also saying that you should either do it either in the self-financing mode or do a public-private partnership. So it's actually a move towards privatization if I'm not wrong. And we are also seeing, like, a lot of universities in the country coming up with this model. One example is Ambedkar University, where the free structures, even for basic humanity, courses are quite high.  Well, as I told you, it implies that large sections of the Indian populace is going to be disenfranchised in terms of their right to an access to a quality education that's going to be cut off completely. And this entire fund of affirmative action when it comes to the marginalized section, it goes in the backbench, right? It goes in the backbench. There is no clarity on reservation policy in these kind of autonomous organizations. We already know that there is no reservation that exists in the private sector. Now the government, in giving autonomy to even public run institutions, is not compelling them to follow any regulations. I mean, autonomy basically here means autonomy from public accountability. There are no input insistences. So the government is not interested in finding out whether you have adequate classrooms, labs, whether your library is well-equipped or not. There are certain concrete outcomes. For instance, your institution will be seen in terms of the kind of placement profile it has, what kind of companies are recruiting your students. That is one basic direct thing. But what we were looking at last year when this entire we got wind that the government is going to do this because last year we had an office memorandum delivered to all the central universities that the government is now it came from the Department of Expenditure Finance Ministry that the government is willing to fund only 70% of the revised estimates as per the Seventh Way Commission. And a couple of months later the government tried to tamper with the workload of the teachers in order to ensure that a large number of the working teachers at that point of time would lose their jobs. So we were out on the streets during the hot months of May and June last year.  But we realized that this government basically wants to completely dismantle the education system as it has existed and allow the private sector to run it in their own way and generate profits in their own way. So none of the established principles, the founding principles of our education system, equity, access and quality, none of these principles are being insisted upon. All of them are being thrown out of the window. So is it something to do only with this government or the Congress regime was no different? Because if I remember the first movement, the massive movement that DU had seen was again semistralization, and then FYUP. So what was Congress's position on this entire issue? Congress's position was pretty much the same. I told you about 2005 Doha around that time. Congress was in power. The UPA was in power rather. And the BJP has, while in terms of its rhetoric, its peaks of a Congress, Mukth Bharat or whatever, and it has tried to project itself as a party that is different from the Congress, but in terms of policies, not only in the field of higher education, but in other critical fields like health, for instance. I mean, all fields that pertain to the collective interests of the masses, it has continued to implement Congress policies. And of course, with a greater degree of aggression and a greater degree of they are more anxious to sort of complete particular sort of target of reforms in a shorter span of time, I feel. But it's the same. And this is the neoliberal model. And it's not just confined to India. If you see university unrest, student strikes, teachers going on strike, this is happening all over the world. If you follow the Guardian in the last week, in the United Kingdom, students are on strike. Teachers are on strike for the fourth week, fifth week now. It's happening in America. Adjunct faculty there are having to their compel to work in strip clubs at night in order to actually make their two ends meet. They're academicians who are working in strip clubs. I mean, the dignity of labor, the dignity of intellectual labor, that myth of dignity has been completely demolished. So there's also this clause which talks about the foreign students in this entire autonomy granted to the institutions. Can you throw some light on it also? Because when we talk about infrastructure as you raised that point, if we see, for example, Delhi University, 27% reservation for OBCs, but still there was no preparation for it that went into it for providing infrastructure and basic necessities which should be there in academic institutions.  So well, I mean, you see, Indian government has also been insisting on the heavy use, intensive use of digital information technology. And through massive online courses, you can actually virtually increase the enrollment of students without having to augment physical infrastructure. Now, the whole question of foreign students, actually, it's a very interesting backstory. In the United States, in developed countries, the cost of education has been rising. Now, mainly the education sector is funded and run by the private sector. And students over there were being forced to take humongous loans to fund their education. And the 2008 crisis, which was actually the culmination of a debt crisis, the dominant component of that debt crisis was student loans. Students were unable to pay back the loans that they had taken. Now, a large number of students are now wary of taking loans. So in the advanced countries, also you have this problem of their own populations not being able to access quality education. The NRI communities also there, they are putting pressure on the government through the WTO and the GATS that some way of accommodating them, because Indian education still continues to be cheap compared to the cost of education in these advanced countries. So some way of accommodating this section of the people who are not getting access to higher education over there. So the government is saying that these A-grade universities, autonomous universities and colleges will have the freedom to appoint up to 20% foreign faculty on a variable pay scale. But they will have to generate the money on their own. The government is not going to give them a single NIA paisa. They can incentivize and whatever, but all the fund has to be generated on their own. And up to 20% of the seats for students has to be reserved. Now we are looking at a scenario where there has been a massive seat cut in terms of research seats primarily. Our nation's critical research and development infrastructure is also getting dismantled and destroyed by this government. They have drastically reduced research seats in universities. We see that in places like JNU, which used to attract the best research talent, now in many disciplines they are not having admission interviews, because they say that we already have enough people and we are not going to admit any more people in this next academic session. So at this point of time for the government to insist upon institutions being forced to take in 20% foreign students is, I think, clearly against the interests of the nation. And that is what your viewers must realize, that this government will keep on harping on its own nationalist credentials precisely because its policy thrust is anti-national. Anti-national in the sense that it goes against the interests of the larger collective of the national population. So that is why rhetorically and in terms of their hyper-propaganda, they will continue harping on nationalism because they're doing exactly the opposite. So Sikath, this would be my last question. The DUTA has been leading various struggles since last few years. And recently also there was a five day program. How does DUTA and other such organizations, even at the local level and at national level, plan to resist it? Well, we've had a very long history of resisting this. When Vajpayee was the prime minister, in the previous NDA government they tried to bring in a similar kind of a change through the Birla Ambani Model Act. And we successfully fought it off because the governments at that time were not as insulated from democratic pressure as they seem to be today. So the changing political scenario makes our task even more difficult. But we must also understand that the teachers are, of course, an important stakeholder in the system but not the only stakeholder. A much larger stakeholder in the system are the students themselves. Their parents, the people who are paying the money to get an education, they are the bigger stakeholders. So we need a movement where teachers and students come together, where parents come, where there is a greater public awareness. Now, the challenge is that in India there is the consciousness about the quality and the right to education is not very high, precisely because traditionally the largest sections of the masses have been cut off from access to education. But now that the access had started increasing in recent decades, that access and the aspiration is there now in a big way. People from poorer families, rural families and urban poor, want to send their kids to colleges and universities because they have sort of instinctively realized the value of education now, much more than before. But still they don't understand the quality of education, how the system is running, what are the stakes and that they need to be made aware. That is why the duta is spreading out into the public. We are going for a full-fledged public campaign. But the teachers' activists are few in numbers, so we need the help of our students. We need the help of parents. They have to become activists. They have to join the movement. And it is only through democratic pressure. We've seen this in the past also, that when elections come and parties have to actually turn their faces towards the public because they now have to seek votes. So for the first time, they start registering public concerns. That is when the public has to put pressure on the government. I think that message needs to go out from the public in a loud and clear manner. And for that, we need all the stakeholders of the system to come together and build up a unified movement. So that's a very powerful note to end on that, if you don't mend your ways, you'll not be required. That's all the time we have for today's cycle, and as these things proceed, we'll be coming back to you again on such issues. Thanks a lot. So the teaching community and the students have given a warning that the government should immediately roll back these steps, otherwise there will be a massive resistance that they'll have to face. Thank you for watching NewsClick.


Hello, welcome to the Debecombe Travel Sponsorship both with Philippe Hens and Ganev. Thank you Welcome everybody and let us start out with a short description of the past methods which we used in the past years Basically travel sponsorship means that we have to look at multiple hundred people who want money to get sponsored and We had two different ways to do that in the past The first one was that everyone well Everyone has to apply for sponsorship and tell us how much they have an actual private cost and how much they want to have sponsored and The first method we used then was a very big ISE meeting where we actually talked about every candidate When we talked about every candidate and looked at his flight price and what he wanted to have and from where he came and Also the contribution to Debian to actually judge if he should get a travel sponsorship or not Everyone who was in the travel sponsorship team at that Debecombe could vote for him plus minus or nothing at all And in the end we got out Voting for every candidate and could rate them and had a ranking that ranking still had ties in it There are multiple people got the same ranking in the end and we had another ISE meeting to untie those people and In the past two or three years we actually do it by having people enter the data into Penta barf and then have all the members of The travel sponsorship go into Penta barf and rate the people inside there They do see the travel sponsorship amounts they want to have and they see from where they are coming They can also look up What they are doing for Debian and then they can rate people based on two values currently One is about the contribution in Debian and the other one is the requested amount compared with other people that are coming from the same area that also gives us a ranking and Afterwards we had an ISE meeting again where we talked about if we want to change the ranking and as we have Limited amount of money available where we want to set a cut-off line Everyone beyond that cut-off is getting told that they do not get any money at all and everyone before Appears in an order and we tell them you can have money when this actual Budget team is telling us yes. You have this amount of money available So those are the ways we are having in the past the way of selecting a team in the past usually Was that someone who started the travel sponsorship went around and asked people? Either on a mailing list or a lot of people directly like this year I asked about 40 or 50 people if they want to participate in the end We had a team made out of 12 people who rated in the past years. We had asked on mailing list or also Going around and just asking people One goal of asking those people is that you want to have people from all around the world because you have Applicants from all around the world and usually people local to those know them better and can better Judge if they contribute to Debian or if they just want some money to have a vacation somewhere So usually we end up with a team that is all around the world and an ISE meeting to coordinate is not all the nicest thing Some people end up being in the meeting at 4 a.m. Some people end up in the meeting somewhere around 10 p.m. or so and That's basically how it's working in the past well every year we discuss this and the problem that keeps on coming up again and again is that The rating system requires the last candidate to be in pretty much before you can start Ordering people which means that you have to wait till quite late in the day to give out money and That's a bit of a shame because prices go up So people's predictions of what things are going to cost are generally wrong And it sort of punishes people for applying early because their idea of the prices could be radically wrong by the time They get money to pay for things so it would be nice to come up with some scheme that actually Rewarded people for applying early and rewarded people for well the system already does reward people for giving us lots of information, but if the assessment started as soon as the first candidate applied then that might be some Way of encouraging people to apply early and also would give a way of giving feedback to people that give sort of insufficient details to To judge whether they're good or bad people to be sponsoring The trouble with that is that obviously you're gonna if you start giving out money before the last person's in then the best best candidate for sponsorship might be the last candidate and They might unfairly be Given no money But I guess that's all the tough is the way I look at that And there is one other problem with that to keep in mind because depth confusially gets money from sponsors And we didn't money ever label for something like travel sponsorship is usually available pretty late in the whole process because there are other expenses that are more interesting like you want to have a venue actually or Something like that or you want to have accommodation already done and stuff like that the travel money usually is freed up pretty late in the process Yeah, so we have some sort of Agreement from Debian that we should be able to have a budget in advance of sponsorship for next year Which would allow us to start handing out money as soon as we start getting applicants Obviously don't want to just give money to the first person that turns up So we could come up with some sort of metric where you wait until some number of people are in a queue Get all the people that are in the team or some proportion of the people that are in the team to Assess them all and if there's one standout candidate that everybody agrees definitely should be sponsored Then you can just give them the money straight away And then they can go and buy their tickets and that's someone that's out of the system So I think we should treat it like people walking into an emergency room So if someone is completely obviously going to die in the next two minutes They normally get them straight through the emergency room and don't put them in a queue In the same way if we've got a candidate that's either so good or so bad That we can make a decision straight away Then we should do that because that frees up the team for doing the choosing to concentrate on the difficult cases in the middle But how we do that is another question which you know contributions welcome The other thought I had was that we want diversity on the team and we could do that in by doing there's some research about Connectivity of social networks where if you pick people at random and then ask them who their most connected friend is Or we might ask them who they're most trustworthy for handing out money friend is then you actually get a very good set of candidates compared with random and it should We could do that by doing stuff like the outliers on the the GPG Trust keys key web of trust because that should like the first most the least connected person on our web of trust and The second least connected person are very far from one another probably on the planet And if we go through the list in that order obviously we need to worry about people then gaming the system by making up new keys and things But making up new keys or saying I don't sign all of you ten people until I have my travels from the ship I'm in the team or something. Yeah, so you need to be there are serious problems with that. So maybe random is better And you still need to make sure that you get a very diverse Yeah, keep on doing it until you've got quite a large team You can carry on doing it if it turns out that some of the people obviously you the person that's then nominated as their best mate Needs to say yes to being on the team Once you've got enough people on the team great if halfway through the process It turns out that some people aren't doing anything you can just create a few more team members if if you're using that method and That seems like a fair thing I think if I was I don't particularly want to be the chairman of this But I've been talking about it for long enough. So I'll probably end up doing the job If I was the chairman I would not want to be voting unless there's some sort of tie-break issue because I think it's too easy to assemble a bunch of people that know one another from previous dev comps and Then get all the the friends from previous dev comps along rather than people that have never been and It's much more important to have people that have never been come to dev comp Right with this wiki page The URL for it is this if you can see it It's wiki dev comp for wiki dev comp 11 travel sponsorship boff with the capital TS and boff If you've got ideas for this just edit the page as we go along and I'll I'll reload it occasionally I can reload it now if you want So we've pretty much done that but The rest of the page is that large enough or shall I zoom it down and we get more text on the screen? It's okay So I mean we've got a load of points here Which we can go through if people have got ideas that they want to contribute is someone monitoring IRC for this I think we've covered the idea that we should reward people for applying early I For the voting thing I would prefer that the people on the committee Be given as much information as possible like how much money we're likely to have how much money the person's asking for They can work out for themselves How much it's going to cost or they can discuss it amongst the team, but when they do their rating I think they should just put people in order as If they were the only person making the decision and then we have a mechanism for averaging that out because that way you can It's really easy if you've got an ordered list of people and a new person turns up in the queue to put them somewhere in that list It's really difficult to if you've got How useful they are to debut and rating and how worthy they are of sponsorship and something else The first person that you see you will always give sort of middle rankings Even if you think because you don't know if someone better or worse is going to turn up Of course, this has a trouble that the dev conf team It's it's a sponsorship team needs to give you a hard bj for that and that's If we get that thing you do because what you can do is so at the start we get 10 grand from Deb conf so we can decide that we're going to give out some or all of that Once we've got at least 20 people in the queue so once you've got 20 people in the queue and a majority of the people or The assessors or some other proportion have assessed people in the queue You can then do an average rating and if there's one person that's way over way up at the top You just give them the money and then you keep on repeating that process and if there's someone right at the bottom Then you tell them terribly. Sorry, but your application has been rejected That also gives people the chance to say oops. I didn't fill anything for any of the forming and Have another try which would get rid of some of the problems that we have where people realize quite late in the process They're not going to get Anything and that's partly because they failed to fill all the forms in do we have any Suggestion or something coming here any questions? Or are you all just listening to Phil and me discussing? This isn't really disagreeing with you. I think it's agreeing with what you're saying, but just to give a slightly different perspective I've mostly tried to keep out of the actual Allocation stuff this year partly actually is because I didn't see the email from GANF until after a long time I think but Normally I've tried to keep out of it but I think we have it has been a problem for many people over the last years how late we've given trials sponsorship and that's being perfectly fair to you with how we've worked that we haven't wanted to allocate until we've had the money but I think it Although it's going to be a hassle to do and it does cause problems It would be a much better system if we could give out money much earlier, so I mean whether that's Giving it a day after someone spends it or even or potentially for something I mean again There could exist people who should come to DevConf who do not have the cash to buy a plane ticket and Don't have a credit card or whatever again. Ideally we would have some system that in that case we can just buy it for them Before they come because obviously the most important thing is getting people here I think we've got quite a good system at the moment for people who are Well off from a rich country But just don't feel like paying for their flight But that's not really what we should have as our focus In this year for example, we have cynical arguing people who couldn't pay the tickets up front and as it was decided They get here. We could get the money via SPI to them It's not exactly the most liked way currently because there is trouble with getting the receipts and all the stuff later on Of course earlier we give it out in nicer days So if we get the jail and that's as 10,000 20,000 whatever at some point very early on that would be really nice Hector yeah, I Don't like the voting system. I think it would be better to try to think on a kind of a filter of a table and have like not like We value contributions or we value like have a set of rules and then apply these rules because voting Yeah, I know this guy. He's my friend and I bought him and give him a lot of points And then some other people. I don't know maybe so it is a bit biased So it's just a suggestion that could yes change and there is also Wait, let me answer to set from please and send the next There there are humans involved. So there's always a trouble with I know this guy So I will give him a little bit more That's one reason why we always try to get the team as large as possible As I've said earlier this year I wrote to 40 or 50 people and we had about 12 in the team later on and We had the people as far away from each other as was possible As long as you have some kind of human involved you will always have a be a thing in to If you have a technical way to find out who's contributing more and who should get more money for something We are all happy to hear about it. We would like to include that Okay, it means like when you try to get into a government position They they kind of have a give you points. They have a table. So if you have This certification then you have more points that other that doesn't have it and things like that So it's kind of more fair to people that you don't know or and there is also about the money allocation Might be helpful Or just a thought of like the money if there's money left over from this depth conf to be Allocated for travel sponsorship on next next step conf. So you already have the money and So, I don't know. I mean, I don't know the accounting But if you have like 20,000 left over you could allocate that for next year and how like You have you have depth comp minus one I don't know if they make sense Right the problem with doing the we have a table and it says this person's got a higher rating than that person is that it's very difficult to do that and Start the handout procedure before you've got the last person in Because the temptation is always to think there's one person that hasn't applied yet Who is better than all these people and we need to reserve some money for them? Okay, so That's why I think that you should just get every person in the team to assume that it's their personal responsibility And that they should be if they put someone at the top of their list They should be able to justify why they did that and they might do that by being informed by a Table that says that this person has made contributions But they should be in a position to defend their decision and if if everybody acts as if they are the one person making the decision I think we're a strange bunch in Debian So one of the things that I think just to make sure that there's sort of openness if we can Work out a way of including enough people. We should make sure that all those people are people that aren't applying for sponsorship So it's only people that don't need it that are making the decision because then there's no even appearance of vested interest and That makes it a lot easier for everybody to trust the team if you do that Most of the people in Debian who end up handling money at all don't even Claim legitimate expenses unless you sort of drag them screaming towards the money because it's really difficult to look like or not It's really difficult to be in the position where you have access to that sort of money and Not open to actually accusation of fiddling somehow, so I think we're Comparing this situation to politicians is completely ridiculous basically All the people that are involved in Debian have already volunteered in a big way They're not in it for some sort of weird self-interest so Yeah, maybe there are one or two people that apply for tourism funding, but it's not that often the case I mean that that depends on what the policy of the rules you said Is it on yeah fine Also, I want to reply to the part where you said if you have left over money at the previous step comps and already give out that money I Don't want to give it out at Debian for shortly before at the last step comp That money should in total go back to the Debian BJ as we are based with that And only when we are opening the next BJ for Debian comp and now that we are having some money either by the DPL applying it to us or By getting income from somewhere we should actually spend money For various reasons first because it's not our money. It's Debian's money So we shouldn't give it out and second I myself wouldn't be comfortable running around with three four five six eight hundred euros When I am When I cannot be sure that I'm actually attending the next step comp They could happen a lot of things that actually prevent me from going to Debian comp either my work says no You cannot go or Debian says we don't have Debian comp anymore or whatever may happen And then I'm running around with multiple hundred euros of Debian money that I don't actually Can do anything with except for spending for a flight ticket for a Debian comp that might not happen for me Well, I was more meaning like if you go to LCA you pay a fee and this fee Doesn't pay anything of that year but pays next year because they already have the money from previous years so I don't know and also I value more to Sponsor people with she's in Debian because I feel like it's more like a family. I'm happy to see people I don't see it during the year then maybe new people that you don't know and Well, maybe they might do good things for Debian in future, but maybe they just come once and you sponsor for as a new developer, but I Don't know might not be I Mean I prefer to sponsor well-known developers if they if they need it rather than new people that haven't been here we Actively try to sponsor more than the well-known developers. Of course, we have a limited amount of money That's also one reason why last year Joey has and got the depth Deppconf newbies fund actually from Debian and this year we repeated it again to have people that never have been in a Deppconf or More than three years ago or something to have some new faces coming to Deppconf and not only those that we are seeing regularly here I'm happy with having more people sponsored if we have an unlimited amount of money everyone can come the more we have the better It is actually Setting a table with a punctuation That leads to the precisely the same having a table Even if it says well, you're granted three points if you are a DD then you're granted two points if you're doing video job That doesn't really Solve the bias problem because after all We would be biased to To setting a scheme in a way that benefits Each of the individuals in the in the group or their close friends. I mean any system can be tricked and the I think nobody Well, nobody should accuse the the team of A of knowingly is being selective about who is Granted more sponsorship or higher ranking or whatever. I mean any any system will have a Good consequence and a bad consequence This time it well This discussion came if I'm not mistaken after one incident of one person that was well in the opinion of many Unjustly Ranked well, it happens. I mean we cannot just avoid that I think that the idea that you have this time to bring people who have not been very involved in that coffee for is a very good one because we The deaf comfort organizer team have Have made well a very a real social group. I mean we work together a lot along the years So bringing new people I think Lessons this if you well I was not this year part of the team. I was two two years before that It's not just that I enter and rate my friends and they rate the people. I don't know There's also a lot of discussion afterwards. So Even if One of the things that most triggers discussion is that if I rated you with the plus five and he writes you at Minus four then there's a huge disparity and that's the the people that get more more discussed and That tends to cancel any personal personal bias or impressions. So I think that I Mean just describing the process. It's not something we just came up with and Hope hope did works. So there's a question over on the last row actually to Um This more can Next one was more concern. No, I was I was waiting for you actually quite a long time I think that one of the things that would make it Easier for if we try to document it before I mean we are we now have some written things But maybe get these spread out and one of the things is this year incident was make a lot of noise But last year we had a couple of incidents. We just had a little bit more time They send an e-mail and we fix it it. So Every year we have this disparities Unfortunately this year we couldn't fix it in time So as they said if we have humans involved there will be even Everybody thinks about the case where we leave somebody out of it But if we start to change a lot the process between not so that doesn't happen We will have in the other type of error is having people that shouldn't be sponsored inside the list so This is a trade-off that we have to keep but I think that The list of how we do the processing would help and there are some singles that people requested And that would be very easy to others like Having no it is hard to find the volunteers and although I think Phil has this new method this proposal to find people It's always hard because you can ask them and keep saying no Some things are like Don't have people that I asked for sponsorship and I was in the travel sponsorship team So I could not accept the to be in the team next time to make it more transparent Or changing like for everybody that is part of the team the video team have it outside this lease This is another team, but then creates two lists of people And there are some ideas of that we should maybe think a little bit more is that the Having some sort of maximum amount per place But it's a huge work and this is one of the things that we are discussing yesterday And I have no idea because it would be great to have such or if you're coming from Germany the mode that the maximum We will bring burst use a thousand But then who will make sure this is the right number and this is actually quiet hard to do with the airline prices They are mostly a lottery I'm working for one and I talked to one of us doing the process and forget it. So there's nothing predictable in them so I was thinking about What I think we need to define what what we're aiming to do with the system that there's a couple of ways of doing it either it's It's very subjective based. So you have people rating essentially and and that's got one set of problems Now or you can do it as mentioned before about it being a very factually based So setting up with points and then that becomes quite clear and the second one it can work We do it in Cambridge with a project called homelink, which is essentially for Social housing so people who can't afford rents Essentially as a as local authority. We give them somewhere to live and we pay their pay their rent and that uses very much a process of points and bidding so It used the When the property comes up the person with the highest number of points gets the property And so it is certainly possible to set up a system which does that I think we need to try and work out what we're trying to do when we order people and and what we're trying to work out Is it just do they meet certain criteria or is it a lot more about? The value we think that they'll bring to debcom for the amount of work Is it a reward and trying to work out those fundamental points? I think would would certainly be be useful I think working that out is probably a task for the list because that will take some time There's not just the other value able for debcom, but there are examples for it. Let's take a Big example in that case is Otavio where you also need to keep in mind that he's handicapped and needs extra help And so has a higher amount so a simple system is not all that but probably a big Discussion on the list would be the best for that point We've been talking a lot about the rules that should be put in place and the system for allocating the money But we don't actually have it clear at the moment kind of the starting point again It was a slightly different thing for our Nils thing, but what we I don't think we have a good idea really of what the Social expectation should be of who should even be applying I'd say I mean there's some people who think They are working for Debian and they should the all right one I'm not saying individuals thinking about themselves But just out of the ideas some people at one end of the spectrum some people say Anyone working for Debian should apply for travel sponsorship. They're coming to debcom which is Debian work They should get there for they should apply as many people as possible will get it That's a valid view in itself. The other end of the spectrum is people who think well Only people from or we should be we don't have that much money therefore it should only be Targeted towards people who really need it Who couldn't possibly afford to come otherwise Obviously, there's a sort of gray area in between but still there's a question of what's actually What is right here? I mean personally I haven't yet applied for travel sponsorship for debcom apart from in Edinburgh where my application for one penny was denied But because I've kind of had always had the assumption that That I know kind of there's not that much travel sponsorship money around and there's a lot of people who are poorer than I am Obviously, I'd be quite happy to be told actually it's fine to just apply for it if you feel like it But we kind of haven't really had that discussion in a very serious way yet. I think I Think most of those questions are unanswerable And that most people will think that there's a mix of all of those things in all of the decisions Which is why I'd quite like to have a large team Using a process that's very lightweight So that it's not much effort for them to do it if that's at all possible I've no idea if it is because I've never actually done this any of this stuff myself So I have no experience whatsoever. So this is probably the ramblings of an idiot But if we can do something like that then each of those individuals can decide what that waiting They're going to put on each of those things and if we make the selection process random enough We'll get a representative sample and then the result will be something like what most people think hopefully I Mean that that's that works around dealing with the situation that we don't agree But it would still be quite friendly Of us if we announced what we expected who we expect should be applying Do we think as DebConf organization that everyone should apply and we'll hand it out as we get it? Or do we think that it should be people looking at their own circumstances and Applying if they really need it I Think that's also something we should discuss on the list because we are way too small a team for that My personal view on that has been that I've always applied for travel sponsorship But I've always taken only a short part of the actual travel amount I had so it's Some kind depth Conf is helping me pay the travel fare. I'm doing lots of work for depth Conf That's what I'm taking on that But let's see what we are getting out on the list As we have Debian policy I would suggest an action after this meeting of having a like a depth Conf policy and And Phil for example is saying we apply. I mean we have to justify why we gave maximum Punctuation for these people so you probably have a criteria to give that evaluation so just writing down this criteria and Trying to get a consensus between everyone. I think that that will help Writing down stuff will help unless you are getting too much written down than you are drawing and stuff So you need to be careful how much you actually write down Over there. We have one more is somewhere visible what was Asked and what was spent on traveling money And it's visible inside Penta bar for people that have a Administrative committee or reviewers white. It's not visible in the public at all Are we I think except yeah, are we obliged to our sponsors? Okay, everyone have a laugh at that picture for now That's actually is travel sponsorship money, which we had to give out to people Where the local banks system is well politely said completely fucked up And now let me see if you actually can answer that What's that for a keyword the idea behind my question is What are we talking about it is it the large as the large impact we got a request around 50 to 60,000 Eurs and got out 35,000 euros something like that the past at some point We had a maximum in the statistics. That's why I'm looking here, but doesn't look like we have so statistics this year We can give out the maximum number in a without our travel money. There we have it so we got a Complete travel fair for to bring people here of 64,000 That is what they have in complete travel and request its sponsorship is 46,000 and a little bit euros Okay, thank you Any other questions and more a once more. Yeah, it's actually kind of the same point, but now you've got the numbers I was just gonna say I think if we did decide that Everyone should be a everyone who feels like it should be applying then the number asked for would go up a lot here Yes, that's another thing about the kind of it's been a slightly Although it's been in theory in principle an open process. There's been a kind of Clue a group who knew about it and who felt that they were qualified and who had possibly some of them been involved in it before and knew who else had got it and so on So again, that's a kind of non-ideal thing at the moment that maybe there's a lot of people out there who just assume that they Don't qualify some of the people involved in the team have thought well They probably do qualify compared to other people that and then had a better chance of getting it That's actually one thing that comes new we also try to avoid that people think they are not qualified and we made multiple statements on lists and on planet and on wherever that we have that money available and Seeing that I got something like five thousand US dollars assigned by the DPL for that and I can only spend something like 2,000 because people just didn't come to me and asked and I cannot go to people and say you should have money come up over to Defconn They needed to be a newbie to qualify for this. Yes I needed to be new but there should be new with there should be people who haven't been to any Defconn Ever there are lots of people in Debbie and who never have been here We actually got two people who guessed it that should have from team members and stuff unfortunately both of them had to refuse Someone had a visa trouble something like 90 days. They told him it takes for him to get a visa first off it would be really helpful if all the people here could write their names on a piece of paper if nor Put themselves into the wiki probably on the paper is the easiest way of doing this because You're enthusiastic enough to actually sit here for the duration So maybe you can help if we want to bias this towards people that haven't come then if we're doing some sort of random Selection process we could wait it towards people that haven't come and you know do that so that at least When we asked them to nominate someone the person they're nominating knows someone who hasn't come Which would then help their application and also encourage them to think about applying because they know that someone that they know Is going to be on the assessment committee? Yeah, people in the people in the teams that actually know other people in their teams and want to have some and want to meet Them and stuff encourage them to do so tell them to go there apply and keep track of them Actually staying in the timelines because many people somehow Managed to miss all the timelines for some reason Just kick them repeatedly and tell them you want to have them at that conference a completely different even from everything They might know from the past and it's really worth being here I think also if we can be if we can actually do the early handout thing And we can be public about that Then that will encourage people to apply because if they see that people have been rewarded for an early application Then they'll suddenly rush into the queue rather than thinking. Yeah, I can do that at the end Someone else was a question What I haven't heard and that Ideally I would think would be one of the one of the factors is is someone that gives a talk that that we want that has a Strong plan of work for them camp or something has a it's a factor in a priority Giving talks of course cons as contribution and if you have a Very good filled out pent up of applications and you usually also have something written in the field by the heck Do I want to go to depth camp and if you have written something very impressive whatever you want to do there and One two three five ten whatever evens listed for you where you are contributing as a speaker or something That counts at least as much as having ten million packages for Damien or being in five core teams Whatever was there any attempts to to use a travel agency or to contact them Up up to now there was no attempt as far as I know. I think at some point we talked to someone You wouldn't who has travel agency experience using that for the UDS and in the depth of discuss lists They actually wrote about it that usually if you are using a travel agency You are having a high-cost edit on top of the usual ticket fare because that's how they are staying alive So it's actually giving out more money if you're using a travel agency also Another problem with using travel agencies is that well we can only Give a give a travel refunds. We cannot pay in advance and a travel agency's a work only when you pay them in advance There's one thought actually that came up if you can do payment in advance if you actually have to be J If he says it DPL says yeah, you have something like 10,000 do it and have fun Then we could pay in advance actually we still need to keep in mind that travel agencies actually want some money to live at the job after all and But we are usually trying at least to do a plenty good way in Telling people that there are things like Czech Felix or Oporto or something where you can search for flights going over multiple airlines multiple other providers and stuff Of course, it's not a perfect travel agency, but usually it makes it out cheaper and well not only that but It's also that we don't usually know that how much money will we have for the conf usually until Say this year April May it started looking is Close to what we ended up having but figures always look very bleak at that point in time so we never know how much money we will be able to approve at some point in a Well team meeting it is told to the to the sponsorship Okay, we will have a 30,000 the autos for for that and we can just wish it works But we have to be close to real figures for that Right looking at the time we are nearly out of time. So if there's one more question here, we could do that There is one more question Hector once more not a question just a comment and it's just Maybe the fundraising team should might need more help and look all into other ways Not just look into sponsoring companies, but maybe set up Kickstarter projects and things like that I know how would you feel like that? I mean people could be paying 20 euros and you can collect a lot of money out of out of that as well I did have a comment from someone here that we should allow people who can afford to pay more than they need to to Realize that they'll actually make sure that people come here and possibly provide routes outside Debian and DebConf for Funding particular people if they want to so that those people don't need to come to us for sponsorship Which seems like quite a good idea. I don't think it is necessarily something that we can directly get involved in because of the SPI being a nonprofit and So if you say here's $50 for a particular person that doesn't really fit with a nonprofit thing But if we had a structure outside of the SPI money handling for putting the Individual sponsors in touch with individual Sponsories That might help take the load off us and would allow them to negotiate something way before we have to do any of the assessment Okay, and the set Time is up. Thank you everybody for participating and please participate on the list and on the wiki and wherever and Help to get the travel sponsorship process next year. Maybe a bit nicer. Maybe a bit less complaints We always had complaints. We will always have some but maybe we are getting a bit less. Thank you for participating


Welcome back to Humane Architecture with Martin de Spain, your host on another beautiful early evening on a Tuesday here in Honolulu which is a metropolis here on the islands of Hawaii in Oahu. And today we have a guest who comes to us from San Francisco but who's very familiar with the islands because he's home grown here on the islands. And that is Kurt Sandburn, thank you Kurt for being here with us. It's my pleasure. And you know I want to keep it short and sweet as far as your bio. Actually I have to start saying how I introduced you in the last show and then we met and you were a little critical about that which I said is basically you're the most investigative reporter on the island. So I insist on saying you are that but you're much more your writer. You are which I insist to say the most critical mind on the island who is putting not afraid to put his finger into some hot spots. So you grew up on the island and you have written books.  You've done many things. Maybe you want to talk about the ones that mean the most to you. I think what means most to me is having helped start and written throughout the history of the Honolulu Weekly which is I think a much missed paper in Honolulu. And I wrote a lot of different things for them. And I was editor there for three years. And I've since written a number of different articles on different subjects. And I would say I'm not sure how invest that I'm not I would not call myself the best investigative journalist on the island. I just think I'm curious about things many different things. And I just I'm curious about them. I write about them when I get interested in them. And however that falls that's that's what happens. And I've enjoyed it over the last 20 years. That's very fair. So maybe to fight this out more here you know in front of the public. Maybe you try you saying that you know an investigative reporter could be that for the sake of itself and just saying OK let's jump on to the next topic and let's touch as many as we can. But the term we finally agreed on to make the show's name is activist journalism. So that is that you actually jump on topics that really get to you in one way or another. And so you gave me the permission to actually look and we've known each other for some while to look actually which I call your activism acts. And I I found there is different ways you you you are an activist. So if Zuri can maybe bring the first picture number one which I call the Activism Act of Preserving. Can you talk about that. Well this this particular image I wrote a piece for Civil Beat about a while who's incredible collection of beach pavilions and they're in various states of repair and disrepair. And some of them are really incredible. Some of them are just spectacular and much beloved buildings in the landscape. And at the end of this piece I catalog them photograph them. And then I found out that the city was considering replacing a lot of them with a row of porta potties with a little Hawaiian style roof on top. So it would be this easy clean no hiding places row of porta potties that are beach parks. And I just kind of let people know this was in the works in the city. And I think they've kind of pulled back from that. I hope I hope the city understands how much people love the beach pavilions from many different eras. And some of them are really incredible. They're just some of the most purest examples of modernism on the island. And they're just so simple open to the air. And they're beautiful. And I'm just so that that was one one case. And they're they're made sorry if you came back that picture please for one more second here. We see a clue for that that's actually the person that's lounging their ride. So he she was coming with his bicycle and basically stopping there. It's just crashing and enjoying, you know, being in the shade being in the easy breeze. Whereas the portable is just for one reason that we all know that we need to do at times. But it's it's nothing else but that. So this is really about that's a gay lagoon by the way that that structure there. And I think there was a recently a fire at one of those. It actually I think it was that I think it was very it was very sad to hear. I don't know how it started. I don't know who did it. But yeah, very sad. So that might, you know, get you the criticism will Kurt is only things that the stuff from the past is good. And whatever we do these days might not. So I want to bring up the next category, which is the activism act of promoting things. And so this is a case study for that. What is that? Well, that is the edge of the solar roof at Rainbow Drive in a couple of Avenue in Honolulu. And I in one column for the civil beat I called it the best new building in Honolulu. And that was your idea originally. So I do credit you with that. But I totally agreed with you. It was simple functional and it served multiple functions in a very simple and inexpensive way. And I give credit to Rainbow Drive in for having the budget relatively small budget to kind of make this make the drive in much more comfortable and and you know, generate electricity for itself. And I ran into I think we ran into have the pleasure and privilege to have my oldest son Joey here who's here with us. And so good to have you here. So in the morning we were running by and we met we ran into Jim, who is the owner of the Rainbow Drive. And we talked to him and said Curtis back and he says hi. And that was one of the pieces that you wrote for civil beat fairly recently fairly recently. And you know, many of the articles actually are once again, I'm not afraid of name things. So this is again one where you said, well, there's good stuff that we need to name. There's also stuff that's not so good. We also need to name. Let me go back to the Rainbow Drive in for a second. It illustrated for me one of the main concepts that I love about Hawaii architecture. And that is the simple and I the simplest shelter against sun and rain. And it has many, many iterations in Hawaii. And it's one of my guiding principles is the Hawaiian concept of a lanai. And it's incredible versatile uses for today's Hawaii and including we'll get to this later, I guess. But the old Honolulu high rises, the older ones are I decided they were stacks of lanai. And people lived in, could live in stacked lanais in Odenoi. Anyway, so I just want to make that point about that building and why I liked it so much. But your question was? Well, it wasn't so much a question, but it was just elaborating on. So the, you know, that you were criticizing the portable solution with that sort of Hawaii on our roof on it. That is more decorative because the port, the party pots are actually getting hot because they're closed. So it will not be pleasant to be in there and taking care of business. Whereas the lanai beach restrooms are basically pleasant to use. So you're just saying that's exactly. So Jim, the owner who also asked to be on the show, so hopefully he will do it. You asked him actually about, so is this a local building in your writing? And he was surprised to begin with because I said, I've never thought about it this way. But actually now that you challenge me, yeah. And he lists everything that you just, that you just named and said. So what the point is maybe, although it doesn't, it doesn't look Hawaiian on the first glimpse. And especially not the perception we have, which is sort of branded by tourist industry and other forces. But it feels the way, you know, people have always been building here. People have always lived on their cardboard. I've always gotten their cardboard. That's because it's the simplest place to hang out. But technology has a wall so we don't have the sticks and the thatch anymore. So steel is available and for that structure seems to be the most appropriate to do. And then we have renewable energy that helps. So, but saying, you know, there are articles who were the most provocative. If I ever, you know, heard and read here and I loved it. And there were some of them were called ugly Honolulu, literally. So it gets us to the third category of activism act, which I call literally preventing. And, Zuri, if you could bring up the third picture, tell us, you know, about this example, a case study. This is an old one 30 years ago. I moved back to Honolulu from New York and I grew up in East Honolulu. And I drove out to Sandy Beach one day. I saw a big berm on the Malca side of the highway. I thought, oh, they're great. They're going to build houses and they're going to hide them from the highway with this berm.  And then I found out that they're going to build houses on top of the berm. And I immediately was incensed that my, where I grew up, Sandy Beach was going to be suburbanized rather intensely. And so I went to a meeting and got involved in the Sandy Beach fight. A big historic Sandy Beach fight in which a group of activists, many of them from Hawaii, I was from all over the island, got together and basically prevented this development from occurring along the, all along the Malca side of Klondon on the highway. You know, it would have totally changed the mood and feeling of Sandy Beach and the whole Kaivi Coast. And I'll just say that we were very successful in that effort. Wow, voters voted two to one to oppose this development. And just last year, some people got together to finally purchase the last two remaining private parcels in that entire coastline. So at this, at this moment, the entire coastline is protected in open space and in its most natural form. So that was a big, big fight and it took years. And we went up against all the developers and all the bankers and all the politicians in town and we won. And that was a major lesson that I learned in my relative youth. And I learned that with proper messaging and proper organization, you can change things and protect Oahu if you need to. So the Sandy Beach fight, that is what led me into the Honolulu Weekly. And I started to help start the weekly and I got involved and I wrote for the weekly pretty passionately, I think, on issues pertaining to quality of life and architecture and planning and so forth. And there was an article called Growing Up Howley and it was controversial. And I, you know, I read a lot of stuff. So, yeah, it was, I read a lot about architecture. I complained about the fact that the whole culture seemed to have adopted this whole Hawaiian roofline, that Dickey Roof, the double-pitched Hawaiian roofline. As though that were going to be the answer to all of Hawaii's future architectural questions. Plantations. And not only is it a kind of boring, if you see those roofs everywhere, it's not going to mean anything. And it's also, it refers to references appeared in Hawaii's history as a sugar oligarchy that isn't that pleasant for a lot of people. And it's kind of, you know, colonial, if you will. It's not very advanced or interesting to me. It wasn't. I looked at someone like Vladimir Asipov, who was a, I was very familiar growing up with his buildings. And I loved the simple and linear spaces that he developed and refined and made absolutely gorgeous. And his high-rises, which did the same thing. And I just sort of, off that and the old concrete, reinforced concrete high-rises that were very simple. And the breezes blew right through, you know, the mocha side was the hallways, then Makai side you had the lanais and the views. And that struck me as a great vernacular form of architecture for Hawaii. And as we got more and more closer to now, I saw all these buildings going up that were hermetic, that didn't have opening windows, and didn't have cross ventilation. I thought, why are we doing this? Why are we building these boxes to live in when we live in Hawaii? That's a good keyword for actually the next picture, please, Zuri, which gets us to the point, which is actually the background picture that Zuri has used the entire time here. So you did that on the, sort of what we call the, you know, keep the country, country range at Sandy Beach. Well, yeah, that's not the country, but yeah, it's cool. It's not the city either. Okay, given that. But then... Countries of North. It's okay. It's okay. But now I want to call something, keep the city city or make the city city. So this is another project where you sort of were preventing slash protecting. Tell us about that one, please. Well, I heard they were planning a kyoya, the owner of many hotels, and like he had a long time, you know, good member of the community. It was purchased by a New York hedge fund, and they just wanted to maximize the land they held. They held huge chunks of Waikiki, and they wanted to put a big beach hotel right next to the Moana, sandwiched between the Moana Hotel and Kyoya Beach Park. And the hotel was going to break all kinds of laws, city laws, pertaining to setbacks. And they were going to go right up, you know, really close to the waterline. And I thought this was crazy. And there was a building on that lot already, a seven or nine-story building, a wing of the Moana Hotel that they were going to tear down and put up a 26-story combination hotel and apartment. Now this would have been probably the most expensive apartments in the state if they had been allowed to build it. And so I wrote about this in the weekly. I wrote several stories about it. And some activists locally heard about it, understood the issue, and they began to sue the city over it. The city granted them their permits. And so they sued, and finally, just about two years ago, the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor and against the city for granting them exemptions to the Waikiki Special District rules. So, and it was a pretty decisive unanimous opinion by the Supreme Court. And it basically, I was happy to hear it because it seemed to me to totally fly in the face of the existing laws of the city to protect Waikiki Beach and not to allow massive encroachment on the beach itself. So that's a, and the developer had to back down. And so the beach, there's not a huge tower next to Cuyo Beach Park. There's the nine-story building that has been there for 50 years. So that's... Congratulations. Compliments on that. Let's keep that thought and we're going to have a one-minute break. We're going to be back with Kurt Sandburne and his thoughts about activism journalism. Thank you for watching Think Tech. I'm Grace Cheng, the new host for Global Connections. You can find me here live every Thursday at 1 p.m. where we'll be talking to people around the islands or visiting the islands who are connected in various aspects of global affairs. So please tune in and Aloha and thanks for watching. Bye. Aloha. I'm Richard Emery. I'm with co-host Jane Sugimura of Kondo Insider, Hawaii's weekly show about association living. The purpose of these videos is to educate board members and Kondo residents about issues relating to association living. We hope they're helpful and that they assist in resolving problems that affect the relationship between boards and their residents. Each week, Thursday at 3 p.m., we bring you exciting guests, industry experts who for free will share their advice about how to make your association a better place to live and answer a lot of very interesting questions. Aloha. We hope you'll tune in. Ask me about No Need. Welcome back to Humane Architecture here with our today's guest, Kurt Sandburne. So we're going to continue here. So far, once again, people might say, well, Kurt, you know, you're preventing us from the worst, you know, things we could do. We love you for that. And another one, maybe we don't even want to get to, which you have actually dedicated two pieces in your recent civil beat, which is The Realist Carlton, but having said that, I don't want to go there because I want to go to something positive because, you know, I've always and only known you as a very positive person who always jumped on something and gets very passionate, which actually came across really well before the break. When you really believe in something that you want to keep and your island's as beautiful as they have always been, and it hurts you if you see developments that would prevent that from happening. So the next picture, number five, is a vision. It's a vision that you're always open to crazy things, to evolution, maybe we have to say, because, you know...  For example, that. And, Zuri, if you give us the next picture, Kurt can familiarize himself with that even more. This is actually something you've been sitting in front of on the floor, and we talked about that. So what is that? Well, that is... I believe one of your classes did that. That was stripping the existing Waikiki and Honolulu highrises down to their bare bones and making them actually literal lanai stacks. And when I saw that, I was thrilled. How realistic it is, I don't know, but it illustrates the concept of flow through ventilation and simplicity and stack spaces for many people. And that's great. And Zuri, can you give us the next picture?  I would respond to that, what if? And again, kudos and compliments to the students who have done this exploration, and one of our students hosted the model over the summer at his place, and he does, to make a living, he builds kitchens. And that's Dustin Solar, so thank you, Dustin, for that. And one of his, you know, kitchen business people was former governor Evercrombie. And Evercrombie came with his wife, what I heard, and Dustin delivered that to me, and they had a great discussion that was instigated by that model. That was rather passionate and rather about, you know, a realistic vision. And I know you wanted to talk about other politicians, as we have done before, who have been, you know, positive and encouraging about envisioning, right? About, you know, provocative proposals that maybe we need to counterbalance the pure power of capitalism only. Well, I know, former Mayor Jeremy Harris was, I think, pretty visionary. And he had this whole process to bring all the communities on the island together and begin this visioning process in which there were, oh, I don't know, how many different envisioning teams around the island. But they all came up with little small-scale, small-bore projects that would improve their communities. And they were each given, I believe, a million dollars or something. And each of these things were done.  And these little things, and I think Harris is, unfortunately, am aligned by a lot of people. But I think he really understood that Honolulu is a beautiful city. And he wanted to keep it that way. And his plans, he had this very beautiful, ambitious plan for the redevelopment of Central Oaxaca with a spine between Capulani, basically, and King Street, and Baratani, excuse me. And how to redevelop that in a kind of interesting way. And it didn't go anywhere because, you know, but I just think he had some really good ideas. And he's not given enough credit for some of his ideas. And Zuri, can you jump us over to picture nine already? Because that's showing a piece, and thanks for zooming in. That was perfect. This is one of the components of that sort of revisioning, rethinking paradise, you know, studio we did. I see a streetcar there. Exactly. So it's reintroducing something that I know your heart is in as well, which reflects and rethinks transportation. And in the following, Zuri will kindly show three other pictures that relates back to a project that I had started my practice with my family business, my father, Günther, and my son, Cynthia. And again, Joey is here visiting me. And this is me revisiting the project just this past summer. And I'm just going to, you know, keep the pictures as a background for your thoughts about transportation or the future of transportation on this island here. Well, I wrote a big piece for, in seven years ago, in 2009, for the Honolulu Weekly about the rush to build Mayor Handeman's train. And it was elevated and heavy rail and horribly, in my view, wrong. It's the same plan the city had since 1966. And it was no change, no innovation. And I also reported on Commandment Schools did a study, an internal study that was not meant for publication, which suggested elevated rail to Middle Street. And then there would be a loop, a light rail transit loop through the city. And then there would be the elevated train out west. And I thought that was really interesting and I wrote about it. And now we're in a situation where everyone's wondering if the train, as it exists, can get to Alamoano or there's thoughts of stopping at Middle Street. And there's all kinds of things I've heard. They want to make it subway through the city. And other groups want to do the light rail transit, at-grade street cars basically from Middle Street, circulating through the city, which won't destroy the city the way an elevated heavy rail train will, in my opinion, do. And getting it into Alamoano, getting it to Waikiki, getting it to UH is just, I can't imagine how it'll work. And how awful, I can't imagine how awful it would look and how much it would destroy the city itself. And not to mention it's going to be elevated around. It's highway on the harbor. So we have a lot of choices out of us. The legislature is going to deal with this session, I understand. And there's various ideas being talked about at least to figure out what we can do with this rail now that we've got it started. So that's a big question. I like your illustration of me showing light rail transit. And many cities do that, have done that. Very few cities have done heavy rail. And it's, in my view, an antiquated idea. So I'm hoping we can further conversation on light rail transit. People say it takes a lane out of existing streets. Well, you lose a lane of cars and you put in the train and then people don't need their cars. And you can... So anyway, I think it's a big question. Awesome. So we're getting to the end of the show. It always goes fast. Thank you so much, Kurt, for having been here. And when I just see that passion coming out, that fire in you, that fuels you, I just love it. And I would suggest there should be many more activists like you who are very passionate about things and fight for it fearlessly and relentlessly. I also want to close with extending an invitation. Whenever you're back on the island, please consider this moderator seat yours. If you have someone that you want to bring in, that you want to talk about, please do that. And please continue to be a great motivation and inspiration for me in particular. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. And have you back on our show Humane Architecture next Tuesday or the evening here in the metropolis of Honolulu, Hawaii. Thank you very much.


theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. Hey everyone, welcome back. Good evening from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, as you well know, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Day two of our coverage of MWC23. Dave, we've been talking about sexy stuff all day. It's about to get, we're bringing sexy back. It's about to get hot. It's about to get hot. We've had two guests with us, two senior consultants from the product planning, networking, and emerging server solutions group at Dell, Heather Rayhill and James Bryan. Welcome guys. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. Dave, you're bringing sexy back. I know, we are, we are, we wanted to bring, yes. We've been talking about this all day. It's here. Yes. Talk to us about why this is so innovative. So, actually we wanted to bring this, getting a lot of attention here. As a matter of fact, we even have a lot of our competition taking pictures of it. Why is it so innovative? So, one of the things that we've done here is we've taken a lot of insights and feedback from our customers that are looking at 5G deployments and looking at how do they basically bring commercial off the shelf to a very proprietary industry. So what we've done is we've built a very flexible and scalable form factor in the XR8000. And so this is actually a product that we've purposely built for the telecommunication space. Specifically, it can be deployed for surfing a virtual DU or a DUC at a cell site for distributed RAM or it can be put in a local data center but outside a main data center to support centralized RAM. We'll get into it, which is where the early excitement gets, is, it's flood based in its design. And so, because of that, it enables us to provide both functionality for telecommunications, could be network, could be enterprise edge, as well as being designed to be configured to whatever that workload is and be cost-optimized for whatever that workload is. All right, you're killing us. Let's see. Show it, show it to us. This is where I have to hand it off to my colleague Heather. But what I really want to show you here is the flexibility that we have and the scalability. So right here, what I'm going to show you first is a 1U sled. So I'll set that out here and I'll let Heather tell us all about it. Yeah, so X8000, let's talk about flexibility first. So the chassis is a 2U chassis with a hot swap shared power supply on the right. Within it, there are two form factors for the sleds. What James brought out here, this is the 1U form factor. Each sled features one node or one CPU for sled. So we're calling the 1U the highest density sled, right? So you can have up to four 1 node 1U sleds in the chassis. The other form factor is a 2U sled on the right here and that's just really building on top of the 1U sled that adds two PCIe slots on top. So this is really our general purpose sled. You can have up to two of these sleds within the chassis. So what's really cool about the flexibility is you can plug and play with these. So you could have two 1Us, two 2Us or a mix and match of each of those. Talk about the catalyst to build this for telco and some of the emerging trends that you guys have seen and said this needs to be purpose built for the telco. There's so much challenge and complexity there, they need this. Let me take this. So actually that's a great question by the way. It turns out that the market's growing, it's nascent right now. Different telecommunication providers have different needs, their workloads are different. So they're looking for a form factor like this that when we say flexible, they need to be able to configure it for theirs. They don't all configure the same way. And so they're looking for something that they can configure to their needs, but they also don't want to pay for things that they don't need. And so that's what led to the creation of this device, the way we've created. How is it specific for edge use cases? So if we think of the edge, it's emerging, it's burgeoning. What makes this so specific to edge use cases? Yeah, let's talk about some of the ruggedized features of the product. So first of all, it is short depth, so only 430 millimeters. And this is designed for extreme temperatures, really for any environment. So the normal temperatures of operating are negative five to 55, but we've also developed an enhanced heat sink to get us even beyond that. That's Celsius. Celsius, right, thank you. So this will get us all the way down to negative 20, boot in operating, all the way up to 65C. So this is one of the most extreme temperature edge offerings we've seen on the market so far. And so this is all outside the data center. So not your typical data center server. So not only are we getting those capabilities, but half the size when you look at a typical data center server. So these can go into a place where there's a rack, maybe, but definitely doesn't have to be raised floor. It is still size cabinet. It's power, yeah, okay. Yeah, and we also have AC and DC power options that can be changed over time as well. So what can you pack into that one, one use sled in terms of CPU cores and memory, just as an example? Yeah, great, so each of the sleds will support the fourth generation of Intel Sapphire Rapids up to 32 core. They'll also be supporting their new VRan Boost SKUs. And the benefit of those is it has an integrated feck accelerator within the CPU. Traditionally to get feck acceleration, you would need a PCIe card that would take up one of the slots here. Now with it integrated you're freeing up a PCIe slot and there's also a power savings involved with that as well. So talk about the involvement of the telco customer here and then design. I know Dell is very tight with its customers. I imagine there was a lot of communications and collaboration with customers to deliver this. Interesting question. So it turns out that early on, we had had some initial insight, but it was actually through deep engagement with our customers that we actually redesigned the form factor to what you see here today. So we actually spent significant amount of time with various telecommunication customers from around the world and they had a very strong influence in this form factor. Even to the point, like I mentioned, we ended up redesigning. Do you have a sense for how many of these or in what kinds of configurations would you deploy in the typical BBU? So if we're thinking about radio access network, literally, tower, transmitter, receiver, somewhere down there in a cabinet, you have one of these, you have multiple units. I know the answer is it depends. You are right. But if someone tells you, well, we have 20 cellular sites and we need, we're moving to an open model and we need the horsepower to do what we want to do. I'm trying to gauge what one of these, what does that mean? Or is it more like four of these? So it depends. It depends. You're absolutely right. However, we can go right there. So if you look in the to you, we have three PCIe slots, as Heather mentioned. And so let's say you have a typical cell site. We could be able to support a cell site that could have three radios in the configuration here. It could have, multiply by three, right? It could have up to 18 radios. And we could actually support that. We could support multiple form factors or multiple deployments at a particular cell site. It really then, to your point, it does depend. And that's one of the reasons that we've designed it the way we have. For example, if a customer says their initial deployment, they only need one compute node because maybe they're only going to have, two or three carriers. So then there you've got maybe six or eight or nine radios. Well, then you've put in a single node, but then they may want to scale over time.  They just come in and they put in a new chassis. The other beauty of that is, is that maybe they wait, but then they want to do new technology. They don't even have to buy a whole new server. They can update to the newest technology, same chassis, put that in, connect to the radios and keep going. But in this chassis, is it fair to say that most people will be shocked by how much traffic can go through something like this in the sense that if a tower is servicing and number of conversations and data streams, going through something like this, I mean, somehow it blows my mind to take a thousands of people accessing something and having them all route through something like this. It will depend on what they're doing with that data. So you've probably talked a lot about a type of radios. Are we going to be massive MIMO or what type of radios? Is it going to be a mix of 4G or 5G? So it'll really depend on that type of radio and then where this is located. Is it in a dense urban environment or is it in a rural type of environment at that cell site shelter, but out in a suburban area? So it will depend, but then that's the beauty of this, is then I get the right CPU. I get the right number of adding cars to connect to the right radios. I purchase what I need. I may scale to that. I may be in a growing part of the city, like where I'm from or in San Diego, where Heather's from, where she's in a new suburban and they put out a new tower and the community grows rapidly. Well, then they may put out one and then you may add another one and I can connect to more radios, more carriers. So it really just comes down to the type and what you're trying to put through that. It could end at a stadium where I may have a lot of people. I may have video streaming and other things. Not only could I be a network connectivity, but I could do other functions like Mac, Multiaxis X on point that you've heard about, talked about here. So I could have a GPU processing information on one side. I could be network on the other side. I do, I do. Go for it. No, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm doing a hog all of the time. What about expansion beyond the chassis? Is there a scenario where you might load this chassis up with four of those nodes, but then because you need some type of external connectivity, you go to another chassis that has maybe some of these sleds or are these self-contained and independent of one another? They are all independent. Okay. And then we've done that for a reason. So one of the things that was clear from the customers again and again and again was cost, right? Total cost of ownership. So not only how much does this cost when I buy it from you what is it gonna take to power and run it? And so basically we've designed that with that in mind. So we've separated the compute and isolated the compute from the chassis from the power. So I can only deal with this. And the other thing is, is it's a sophisticated piece of equipment that people that would go out and service it are not used to. So they can just come out, pull it out without even bringing the system down if they've got multiple nodes, they don't have to pull out a whole chassis or whole server. Put one in, connect it back up while the system is still running. If a power supply goes out they can come and pull it out. We've got one. It's designed with a power infrastructure that if I lose one power supply I'm not losing the whole system. So it's really that serviceability total cost of ownership at the edge which led us to do this as a configurable chassis. I was just going to ask you about TCO reduction but another thing that I'm curious about is there seems to be like a sustainability angle here. Is that something that you guys talk with customers about in terms of reducing foot print and being able to pack more in with less reducing TCO reducing storage power consumption, that sort of thing? Go ahead. We need to take that one as well. So yeah, so it comes to be various by the customer but it does come up. And matter of fact, in that vein similar to this from a chassis perspective is I don't, especially now with the technology changing so fast and customers still trying to figure out well, is this how we're really going to deploy it? You basically can configure and so maybe that doesn't work, they reconfigure it. Or as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a single sled today and I purchased a chassis. Well then the next generation comes. I don't have to purchase a new chassis. I don't have to purchase a new power supply. So we're trying to address those sustainability issues as we go again back to the whole TCO. So they're kind of related to some extent. Right, right, definitely. We hear a lot from customers in every industry about ESG and it's an important initiative. So Dale being able to help facilitate that for customers I'm sure is part of what gives you that competitive advantage. But you talked about James that and we talked about it in an earlier segment that competitors are coming by sniffing around your booth, what's going on. Talk about from both of your lenses the competitive advantage that you think this gives Dell in telco. Heather, we'll start with you. Yeah, I think the first one which we've really been hitting home with is the flexibility for scalability. This is really designed for any workload from AI and inferencing on a factory floor all the way to the cell site. I don't know another server that could say that all in one box. And the second thing is really all of the TCO savings that will happen immediately at the point of sale and also throughout the life cycle of this product that is designed to have an extremely long lifetime compared to a traditional server. Yeah, I'll get a little geeky with you on that one. Heather mentioned that we'll be able to take this eventually to 65C operating condition. So we've even designed some of the thermal solutions enabling us to go there will also help us become more power efficient. So again, back to the flexibility even on how we cool it so that it enables us to do that. So do you expect, you just mentioned maybe if I heard you correctly the idea that this might have a longer user usable life than the average kind of refreshed cycle we see in general IT. What I mean, how often are they replacing equipment now in kind of legacy network environments? I believe the traditional life side of a server is what, three to five years? Three to five years traditionally and with the sled based design like James said we'll be designing new sleds, you know every year, two years that can just be plugged in and swapped out. So the chassis is really designed to live much longer than just three to five years. We're having customers ask anywhere from seven to when it dies. So substantial increase in the life cycle as we move out because as you probably know well, right? The further I get out on the edge, the more costly it is. And I don't want to change it if I don't have to. And so something has to justify me changing it. And so we're trying to build to support that both that longevity but then with that longevity things change. I mean seven years is a long time in technology. So we need to be there for those customers that are ready for that change or something changed and they want to still be able to adopt that without having to change a lot of their infrastructure. So customers are going to want to get their hands on this obviously we know, we can tell by your excitement is this GA now, where is it GA and where can folks go to learn more? Yeah, so we're here at Mobile World Congress in our booth. We've got a few featured here and other booths throughout the venue. But if you're not here at Mobile World Congress this will be launched live on the market at the end of May for Dell. Awesome and what geographies? Worldwide. Worldwide. Put your hands on the XR8000 worldwide in just a couple of months. Guys thank you for the show and tell talking to us about really why you're designing this for the telco edge, the importance there. What is going to enable operators to achieve? We appreciate your time and your insights and your show and tell. Thanks. Thank you. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Spain in mobile MWC23. Be back with our show day two wrap with Dave Vellante and some guests in just a minute.


Vaccine, this is a shot of a special type of antibiotics to help protect and fight against a virus or prevent you from becoming ill with the virus.