So I want to welcome everyone. We're very happy to be here. I'm Manal Omar. I'm the acting vice president for the Middle East and Africa Center. And I welcome you to the U.S. Institute of Peace. We're very excited to be having this discussion with IOM, the International Organization for Migration. About a year and a half ago, we also partnered with IOM. And I think that the discussion was very rich and very helpful. So we're looking forward to this again. We're hoping initially to have a public event, but because of the weather and because of other limitations, we weren't able to, especially over the holidays. So we're glad that this worked out. We're also filming and going to push out the video to a much wider audience. So I wanted to make sure that everyone was aware of that. As most of you know, I think you guys are familiar with the U.S. Institute of Peace. Iraq was our first country office. It was our first presence in the field. We've been there since 2003. And we've always been very proud to say that we've never pulled out of Iraq. At particularly times when people were for very legitimate reasons, being forced up to the north or having to go out to neighboring countries, USIP is always making the presence in Baghdad and in other areas. And we found that has always allowed us to really strengthen our relationships with our partners, including the government of Iraq. Today, we have three distinguished speakers who are going to talk about the work from Iraq, particularly from a field perspective, being on the ground. We have Dr. Thomas Weiss, who's going to be our first speaker. He's the chief of mission for IOM in Iraq. Welcome to USIP. Thanks so much, Manav. We're also very lucky to have Dr. Ili Agaron, who's the director of our Middle East programs. He's based in the field in Beirut and he was actually in Iraq in December and travels all across the region. And we also have our senior program officer, Sarhan Hamasid, who's also our lead on all Iraq programs, who is also in Iraq in December. So really the focus that we're looking at is kind of inside Iraq, how is the programming developing and the political situation. The difficulty of Iraq has always been that the changing situation makes us a little bit lagging, us being the international community, often lagging and really being able to identify the trends and the patterns that are happening in Iraq. What we're hoping is through this discussion, we can be a little bit forward leaning and identify the trends rather than having to react to them. So that will be the primary focus of the conversation with a specific look into the security and political conditions, efforts to counter the Islamic State. We're seeing a growing militarization of the society, the difficulty in terms of programming gaps, as well as the challenges that lie ahead. So I'm gonna stop talking and actually turn over to the field and starting with Dr. Weiss, hear a few comments and then we'll move to the other panelists. Dr. Weiss. Thank you very much, Manala. Good afternoon to all of you. Very happy to be here to share this space together with you. I'd like to start, of course, by thanking very officially the US Institute of Peace for the great work that you do. Congratulations to your consistently very important efforts when it comes to preventing and mitigating conflict. I think this is a very laudable work that needs to be made known, that needs to be supported from all possible quarters, and we are certainly an international organization for migration. Very happy to be making use of this forum of the space that you're offering to us. I would also like to cease this opportunity to thank my colleague, our chief omission, Luca Daloglio, chief omission of IUME in Washington for together with USIP having arranged for this meeting and having organized this encounter. My presentation, as Manal said, is going to be out of the cuff. I did not really prepare anything formal. We did not want to formalize this presentation through PowerPoint, et cetera, et cetera, but really share with you a perspective from the field. And I am, as chief omission, only one of approximately 600 colleagues that we as the International Organization for Migration do have in the field in Iraq, operating out of what we call three regional hubs, Baghdad, Erbil, Basra. We have a support office in Amman in Jordan. And our operations, our colleagues are basically covering all the 18 administrative units of the country called governorates. So this is sharing with you a little bit of the very field-based, field-driven type of experience that we, as IUM, working in Iraq since 2003, over the last 12 years, have been able to build up to construct step-by-step. I suggest to articulate my presentation briefly around three particular points, kicking them off with a human interest story, a little experience that we have had recently with some of our beneficiaries. And then to give you some pointers regarding, first, the general situation in Iraq, where we stand from IUM's point of view at the present moment. Then to talk, second, about what I would call free peace, partnership, and programmatic priorities, strictly from an IUM point of view. And then to wind it all up, sharing with you some rays of hope, something that, in spite of everything you can hear and read and listen to regarding of Iraq and the current and prevailing situation, some small indicators that make us as one of the humanitarian players in Iraq believe that there is some modest grounds for optimism. So if you would bear with me with this specific structure, I would like to kick it off with a small story. And the story goes as follows. At the end of November last year, we as IUM distributed approximately 100 non-food item packages to 98 families, living accommodated temporarily in a very small village in northern Iraq, right between Dohuk and the border of Syria. So we arrived there with the colleagues and with the lorry containing the NFIs. And then we were surprised, where is the village? The displaced persons were supposed to be living at. So there were only a couple of houses standing there. And then we learned that these couple of houses were the village that was created, that was established, sometimes between the end of the First World War and the mid-1920s, jointly by a few families of question and of Muslim background. So today this is a village made up of 20 families, approximately 110 persons actually. And these 10 families, 110 persons, were welcoming, were accommodating, 100 new families, victims of the recent displaced crisis originating from the Sinja Mountains. So essentially, family is making up or made up of representatives of the Jazidi community. So we started to talk to the Mokta, the leader of this little village and then his counterpart, the head of the Christian community and expressing our surprise. How come that you managed to accommodate to welcome so many new people? And they simply said to us, look, it's an issue. If we had been the victims of the crisis, other Iraqis would have welcomed us. We share the little resources that we have. They receive each and every day from the municipality in Dohuk, there's a small lorry coming in with bread and with food items, other food items.  And I believe it's good to kick off a presentation about Iraq with this extraordinary example of generosity and hospitality, with this extraordinary example of humanity. Because let's face it, when we open the newspaper and we read news about Iraq, we certainly do not associate whosoever and whatsoever in Iraq with characteristics of generosity, hospitality, and humanity. And I'm going to get back to this point in my last of the three points in terms of the race of hope. So the general situation in the country is indeed dire. It's very difficult. We are now faced with the greatest and the biggest displacement crisis in the already very long and very often very tragic history of the country. To share a few numbers, a few numbers, I feel. There's an agreement among representatives of the new government and the international community in other nations that at the present moment, there are more than 5.5 million persons in Iraq directly affected by the ongoing displacement crisis. More than 5.5 million persons. 2.2 million of these represent the victims of the latest succession of displacement crises that started in early 2014, in June 2014, during what we call the Mosul crisis. This Mosul crisis was directly afterwards followed by an Anbar crisis, by a Sinjar crisis, and the succession of crises in the country last year, approximately early November and mid November was then finished by another Anbar crisis and displacement related to smaller, focused areas of crisis, basically. So all together we are now talking about 2.2 fresh victims of displacement due to the ongoing fights in the country. Then we have to add, and nobody knows exactly, another 500,000 to 1.3, 1.4 million victims of previous displacement crisis, the protracted victims, basically. Then we have approximately 230,000 Syrian refugees, victims of the ongoing military operations and the humanitarian crisis in Syria who have opted to cross the border and to become refugees in Iraq. Then we have quite a number of Iraqi returnees, returnees from neighboring countries but also from further abroad, approximately 70,000 persons. And then to all of those direct victims of displacement, you have to add host communities, like the 20 families in the small village between Dohuk and the border of Syria who for reasons related to geography, for reasons related to chance, for reasons related to humanity have been directly affected by the crisis. Directly affected because they are sharing their very scarcely available resources with these internally displaced persons. And this is another group of approximately 1.8 or 2 million persons. So all together we are talking about 5.5, perhaps a bit more persons directly affected by the crisis in the country. So this is unprecedented in the long history of the country. I will not go too much into detail when it comes to the range of IUM operations that we are implementing in Iraq. We opened our first office, as I mentioned earlier, 12 years ago and have always been implementing examples in terms of projects or programs covering the whole spectrum of migration management, technical cooperation, counter-traffic capacity building, movement-related operations. We are operating on behalf of the US government, the United States Refugee Resettlement Program in Iraq, which is one of the biggest sending countries for refugees regularly resettled in your country. But we also have a very important part of our operational portfolio, occupied by or busy with interventions in the area of humanitarian assistance, life-saving type of operations. Now the ratio of technical cooperation capacity building and the other regular type of migration management activities as compared to interventions in the humanitarian realm has, of course, been changing with the onset of the fresh series of crisis in early 2014. IUM is now approximately, well, we have at the end of last year, we had an operational portfolio of about 120 billion US dollars. 80% of this in 2014 was dedicated to life-saving humanitarian response activities. But of course we hope that at one point of time this is going to flip over again so as to enable us to focus more on migration management on longer-term type of activities. Regarding figures, and with this I'm going to finish my first point, we have a very interesting mechanism that we call the Displacement Tracking Matrix in Iraq and which is on behalf of the entire humanitarian assistance community, on behalf of the United Nations country team, providing all those humanitarian players with basic data, basic information, which is crucially and critically needed in order to do proper humanitarian planning. We employ at the present moment 600 colleagues in Iran, most of whom are local staff members and most of whom are directly involved in the operation of the Displacement Tracking Matrix through which we have field-based teams, these field-based teams roving around in the 18 governorats to talk directly to victims of Displacement, to talk directly to representatives of host communities like the Mokta or like the Christian mayor we spoke to in this little village close to the hook, in order to get an idea about numbers of people displaced, about patterns of displacement, whether this is a primary, a secondary or a tertiary type of displacement, and what are the particular needs, the needs in terms of food, the needs in terms of non-food items and other types of needs of these freshly displaced populations. This information generated through these interviews, direct interviews on the ground, is then channeled or is then sent by our colleagues to the free regional hubs, the hubs representing the central nervous system of the DTM of the Displacement Tracking Matrix, is then transforming this information every two weeks into a new set of maps, of statistics, of updated lists of needs. And these lists, these statistics are then being used by players representing the whole of the international, humanitarian response community in order to do their proper planning. This DTM is an IOM product that we have elaborated, that we have launched a couple of years ago, and it's now operational in all countries where IOM has a presence that is related to providing assistance to humanitarian and emergency situations, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, et cetera, et cetera. So this in terms of the general situation. My second point is the point related to the free peace, partnership and programmatic priorities. Our Director General, Ambassador William Lacy Swing, US Ambassador, when he started with his first mandate in 2008 as our DG, shared a list of top priorities with member states, stakeholders, and also his own colleagues in the organization. And on top of this list, he had decided to put partnerships because simply based on the understanding that migration and its management is larger than life initially. Migration has so many issues of interaction, is so much cross-cutting with development, with gender, with labor, with environment, with health, that it is simply too big in order to be handled properly by only one single player. So if you want to be efficient in working in migration management, you work hand in hand with partners. And Iraq is a fantastic terrain or territory, or laboratory for working in partnership on migration management issues and especially on issues related to responding to the humanitarian crisis. I have very little time left. And this partnership that we have with UNHCR, with UNICEF, with many other agencies has also been fomented and aligned very strongly by a huge amount of funding that last year, middle of last year, the UN country team received from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through OSHA. And we have to report joint to OSHA and to the Kingdom in terms of the use that we made of these funds. Programmatic priorities, because of the situation and because of the very difficult definition of what is the priority now, because we are now in winterization and then we have summerization, then we have community stabilization, social cohesion, et cetera, et cetera. We work on all of those issues at the same time. When we ask about what your priorities are, we simply say the priority is to save lives and then to make sure that people are given the necessary means, the necessary elements in order to recreate sustainable livelihoods. And we hope to be able, of course, to continue working on these different focus areas. And this leads me to my third point, which is the race of hope. Together with the government of Iraq, we have been very much encouraged by recent political developments. You all know that the formation of the new government in the following election last summer was a very lengthy, a very thorny process. Now it is done. There is lucky enough a participation on the part of representing the different sectarian, the different ethnic groups. And this government has, at the end of last year, organized two very important events that I wanted to share with you as two examples of these race of hope. The government has, for the first time in many years, called for a humanitarian dialogue, humanitarian dialogue with representatives of the international community, representatives of diplomatic missions represented in Baghdad, to talk about what is going on, to talk about the difficult and the dire situation of so many persons in Iraq directly affected by the crisis, and to talk about joint race in order to address these issues. So this was interpreted by many of the participants representing the international community as a very sound and a very hopeful step into the right direction. And this step has then been in parallel and matched with the first interactive session between representatives of the new government and the United Nations country team at the level of heads of agencies. We started the day after this humanitarian dialogue to organize our own bilateral dialogue revolving around four particular issues that were predetermined, two of which have a direct bearing on the humanitarian situation in the country related to social cohesion as well as sustainable responses to the displacement crisis. So we all believe that this expression of interest on the part of the new Iraqi government to actively dialogue with the UN, with representatives of the international community, with donors is a very positive step going into the right direction. And this has then matched with the example of generosity and hospitality that we all have as colleagues working for IOM, as colleagues working for other agencies. I could give you plenty full of additional examples of this generosity and hospitality. And therefore we believe that in spite of the currently very difficult, very dire situation that the country is in, there is some ground for optimism. If we continue to all work continuously together in partnership, if we continue to all work continuously together in engaging the government in making sure that the government is acknowledging responsibility. And if we continue to work together also with the donor community. We have just today, yesterday, since the beginning of the week had a number of discussions with representatives of the United States, donors, PRM, State Department, the USAID of the. If this dialogue also can continue and will be crowned from time to time with fresh funding, I believe that there is an opportunity, a possibility to help Iraq overcome the current crisis situation. So thank you very much again to the US Institute of Peace for this opportunity to dialogue with you and of course, very much interested in hearing your comments and questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Weiss. And thank you also for ending on a note of optimism. I think it's very difficult when we're looking at the situation in Iraq to heal back a lot of the political elements and be able to see. And I think most people in this room are really sympathized with the idea of our priorities are moving in parallel. It's very hard to put one above the other, especially because they're so interlinked. We'll move on to Dr. Ili, who is our Middle East Director. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. I'll steer a little bit away from the displacement and the technical aspects of displacement and responding to the humanitarian crisis. I throw some ideas to the discussion about radicalization and the increasing militarization of the communities as we're trying to call it. Until very recently, everyone was talking about radicalism and radical groups. I think now, if we look at the region, especially the Levant, we should be more concerned about the fast-growing militarization of the communities, not only the militarization of radical groups, but also of communities that are not labeled as being radical. In the 90s, I was always offended when I heard about the libanization of the Balkans and then offended also when I heard about the Balkanization of the Iraq and then now the normalization of Syria and other dramatic analogies. I think that we're set to live with more dramatic analogies, unfortunately, in the coming years. The existence of radical groups in the region is not new. They've always existed. What is new, nevertheless, is the fact that we've noticed that they are able now to build smaller constituencies from among the local communities around them, and this is the dangerous trend. Controlling territories and some resources by a radical group is not by itself a dangerous or as dangerous as being able to infiltrate people's hearts and minds in some cases. That's true. It's slow and limited until now, but if it's not addressed at these stages, then it becomes beyond control. So, and what worries me also is the fact that we're seeing an increasing hatred speech and discriminatory statements and behaviors coming from non-Muslim communities as a reaction to the radicalization of some Muslim communities. So it is becoming a worrisome trend in the region and I think it has to be addressed somehow. The response so far has been focused on the military and security aspects which I think is short-circuit with all due respect to the proponents of this strategy. I think that train and equip programs, providing weapons and other military responses to the crisis can cover only some aspects but are not wise and are not sufficient, definitely. And what we're seeing as a result of this strategy is that it is leading to a massive distribution of weapons among people in the region. And in many cases, it's being done in a very chaotic way. The emerging non-state actors with a lot of weapons are now being manipulated by local and regional players. So we have Shabbat strained by Shi'as, we have Shabbat strained by Kurdish, by Kurds, sorry, we have Christians strained by different parties, we have Yazidis strained by these and Yazidis strained by others. It's a bit worrisome how this will unfold in the coming phase. We are seeing an increased use of violence in non-political conflict. So we're reading more and more about shooting incidents or violence used in tribal slash civilian or conflicts of tribal or civilian nature. We're seeing an increased number of child children involved in the military groups. And we're seeing as well some extravagant and dangerous political agendas being put forward such as minority leaders, especially minority religious leaders requesting an international military protection for minorities, for example. I think this is by itself a very dangerous trend that some communities might be taking. So today the region is living with around 1,000 groups in Syria, 1,000 military groups in Syria. Iraq, we're seeing an increased number of Shia militias. Before we were struggling between Al-Sadr and Al-Badr. Now we have a lot of new names, a lot of new trends within the Shias themselves. We are seeing Sunni tribes or Sunni tribal groups being trained by Jordanians, by Qataris, by Saudis. We're seeing Lebanese Shia from Hezbollah fighting in Syria. We're seeing Iraqi Shias coming from Iraq to fight in Syria. We're seeing Kurds going all through Turkey to fight in Kobani. All these are new trends to the region. And if they are not new trends, the scope of these trends at this stage has become really dangerous. So the focus from my perspective should not only be limited to the military and security aspect. We need to look into other aspects as well, including education and economic development. These groups might be defeated militarily or they might cease to exist at some point when their patrons decide to stop their funding. But the consequences that the events are leaving, the scars they are leaving at the communal level, are not easy to handle. So we are consistently observing a thrive for revenge in Iraq. And even if we are optimistic and we hope that some regions will be liberated in the coming future, the seeing the IDPs returning to this region is not granted. There are a whole set of challenges, including the possibility of seeing revenge operations being carried out by some actors. There is somehow a change in the set of social values. The violence is more accepted nowadays, especially at the level of youngsters. And we have scores of youngsters who are not able to go to school because of their displacement or status as refugees. Just as a highlight, the offspring of those who started fighting in Iraq in 2003 are today, they are 12 years old. In a few years, this generation will start fighting itself as their fathers did. So I don't think there is a lot of time ahead before we look into more comprehensive solutions to the trends that I described. And again, I sincerely call on looking into aspects related to education and economic development. In addition to the military response, which I'm not denying the value of, but it shouldn't be the exclusive approach to look into the situation. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Ili, and I think some of the points you brought up kind of push us to think. I mean, particularly the idea of the difference between radicalization and also the militarization of entire communities. It really goes beyond just one particular individual, also kind of bringing out the non-state actors and what the role for us to really think about that. Most of our program traditionally is built bilaterally. So what do we do with this emergence of non-state actors? I thought it was important kind of the note that you kept talking about the region. It's very hard to talk about Iraq now in isolation, tying it to the region more and more is becoming really important, not just because the borders are literally being blurred, but the way the conflicts are actually feeding one another. I think a lot of us are aware of the pitfalls of the train and equip alone. And I think that cautionary note is very important. But I think also kind of on the note of optimism is just this realization that we have a lot to do in the prevention mode. It's not just responding to conflict, but we can actually prevent further conflict. And I think the point of the 12-year-olds today, compared to 2003 when we started, is a very strong way to drive that home. So thank you for those trends. Turning to you, Sarah-Hung, our lead on Iraq programming. Thank you, Minna. And I'll be talking about the nuance in a couple of areas that Dr. Weiss and Dr. Lee mentioned. First of all, when we were there in December, I'll add the long dimension, but also tie it to the meetings that we have done in December. It was the last time I was there in June. Actually, I departed a couple of days before the so-called Islamic State takeover of Mosul. At the time we were looking at Iraq, we were looking about prospects for reconciliation and see what we can do on those and two days after the dynamics completely changed. But I think some of the long-term issues will remain the same. Before I get to those, one more long term, just to give you a feel of the change I have seen in just the six months. The calmest elements of the Iraqi society I have seen in my life was the Yazidis and the Christians of Iraq. And actually, today, probably they are the most angry and they have the right to be so. Talking about calm, talking about tolerance will trigger more reaction, emotional reaction from somebody than talking about revenge and violence and killing and all of that. And that's something that Lee also touched upon. It was very striking about how in six months so many things have changed in people. And there were positive things at the macro level and there were things that worry some that will give us the indicators for the future. At the national level, I think there was, the macro level, there was a welcoming of the steps that the minister about to use taking. I think there was, it was that time when we were there that the KRG and Baghdad entered their agreement. So that also injected even more hope that actually the country may be going in a good direction. So that was, and everybody equally, Kurds, Sunni, Shia, minorities all welcomed that direction, the crackdown on the shadow soldiers and many other steps are very, very welcome. The Sunni communities, especially the tribal leaders are also very welcoming of the direction that the government is taking. And here I don't wanna lose the excitement and the points that they are expressing, but also I need to point out that, okay, what is the metric against which they are measuring that excitement? That excitement is measured against their time and the policies of Prime Minister Malik. And that if that is the measure, then we'll have to remember, okay, what was the level of frustration and dissatisfaction that were there? So these steps are positive steps in the right direction, great steps, but maintaining them, maintaining the momentum and going beyond just the news and initiatives to actual practical steps that leads to change in the life of the people will be the critical test that the Iraqi government, that the international community should maintain an eye on. The second thing is I'd like to talk about is, I think it was great after the Islamic State to cover that there was, okay, wait a second, Iraq exists under a lot of problems that could affect the region, could be a global problem. And seeing an international community forum and actually the Iraqi politicians come together, the region welcoming the new government and all of that are great positive steps and getting the attention to Iraq is very important and that's very much welcome. But again, in December, it was an opportunity to see more closely where is the gap between where the need is and where the help is coming. I think the magnitude of the displacement and those people who are affected is so great and beyond what has been offered by the Iraqi government, by the international community and also by very generous Iraqis. Actually, before the international community, it was the Iraqis that Dr. Weiss spoke about that actually saved the day in so many ways for itself until the International Community acted and set up operations and translated the Saudi money into programs and assistance that can reach people. But even then, with that, through the meetings that we had, we were told that still the majority of people are not in camps. Those who are in camps, the kind of tents that they have, the kind of assistance they have is not sufficient, is not helping them to cope with the harsh winter of Kurdistan region. So help there are other issues that may come. Second, the gains against, perhaps in some gains, but also on the positive side against the advances of the Islamic State, those gains have been in the Nineveh Plains of Iraq. They were in Diyala. They were around Baghdad. They were in Anbar. But also it's important to see the limitations of those gains. I think by June, July, everybody was hoping said, okay, this was a shock and a surprise. We will regroup. People will regroup and then we'll counter. But that has not materialized. And statements like this will take a long time. What was floating around? But this time in December, what was that long time? I think people start throwing years around, say, okay, it will take three to five years to liberate Mosul. And these are coming from coalition and non-coalition sources. And if that is the case, then what does that mean? So what three to five years to take, what, to push out the Islamic State? If that is the case, and if we are looking at the areas that have been liberated so far, what do we see? We see a lot of destruction. And to point to what the previous speaker mentioned, that people go back to what? Reconstituting society and social division around what? When people go back to areas that the Zomar had been liberated, probably announced three or almost four months now. And the clearance of the amount of explosive set and booby traps has not been finished. Parts of the villages around Jalola, which has been also liberated for some time, it has not finished. So any liberation will be very, very slow.  So the economic viability in those areas will be really difficult and it will be slow. And we don't know the gains that were made in the areas that have been so far, it's to be watched over the long term because these are areas that the Islamic State would have been vulnerable anyway. Wouldn't it have been difficult to keep anyways because there were mixed population areas that they did not have a lot of constituency and a lot of support. Whether in the Ninoa plains where most of the minorities were or in the Jalola, where you have a mix of Shia, Sunni, Kurdish populations. In Anbar, there were more gains in the past three months, then reversed, some of it reversed, but still a major challenge. The true test will be in the Sunni areas and where a purely Sunni areas. And this is where I have seen, we have talked to people who were more welcoming of an Iraqi government and even a Shia army and even sometimes for some of them, the level of desperation was even welcoming a Shia militia, which they did not accept even in the past. That is changing. And then the issue of revenge that Elie also mentioned, when you go back to this area, even the minorities that we're talking about revenge because their biggest surprise that they say, we know the Islamic State was bad, we know what they will do, but our biggest surprise, it was when our neighbors, the tribal, they accused the Sunni or tribes of a lot of what happened to them. You say the word tolerance in a room and you would have it easily explode and say, how do you not point it to him, just word in general? Would say, okay, how can I be tolerant with somebody who I raised, who I took to school, who I cared for at the time when he was sick and was that person who looted my house, who took our women and is raping our women. So there are very raw emotions that will take time for healing. And the longterm, I think we have a sense now of even if the liberation, military liberation happens quickly, even if it takes another year, then speaking of fear, force and time change people and this is what is happening in those areas. There's a lot of fear against the Islamic State and there is a lot of force killing people and forcing their way. And time is on their side now. And this is what also Elim mentions that this is where in addition to the generation who only knew violence, this is where it gives them time to indoctrinate. And this cycle of violence of 2006, 2007, even though there were a lot of violence and there were a lot of ideological issues, but the Iraqi army and the US military kept Al-Taeda in Iraq on its feet and on the run. This time, they have the luxury of going into Mosul and actually recruiting some 10,000 estimates, put it at 10,000, some 10,000 in Mosul, some another 10,000 in Salah-e-Din. And for training the new Iraqi army, whether after 2003 or in this recent round, the maximum that you can afford probably is an eight-week training and before you send those people to fight. This is mostly a militaristic fight for the Islamic State. They have a much longer time to train jihadists and they are not quite under pressure in that sense. So giving them another year will create a different problem, a different animal that we don't have. So I will say that to my last point, which is about decentralization in Iraq. I mean, before this recent trend of talking about reconciliation and different actors coming together, Iraq had a decentralization law that there were efforts to decentralize services and powers due to the provincial government. And now with the direction of the violence and the governance is going, that will be probably accelerated, go more even political, more security. But if we project against that, the layer of the militarization that we're talking about is that even if you fight, if you have tribal leaders or militias, they will have a sense of legitimacy that they liberated the land. After 2003, most of those actors could not go to their communities and say that we liberated because the U.S. Army was the coalition. This time around, they will claim more legitimacy. They will have a more say on how resources will be allocated. Those who did not win in the elections or were stepped aside, they will be seeking or retaining a foothold at the local level. So getting ahead of the next provincial election cycle now is the time for that. When we're talking about militarization for that, for the 2003, and of course we want to be happy to make this comparison, but I think that some context is similar. When the Peshmerga were said, they were the militias, that was an offending statement to them because they saw them as their liberators and as their protectors. For the Shia today, the term militia, they may use against certain groups, but they have used the term al-Hashdashabi, which is a socially mobilized force. For them, that is protection. That is what prevented the Islamic State from advancing on the holy land. So their appreciation and their wanting to retain that. The feelings about it is different from what the international community may feel about or what the Sunnis or what the Shia are. That will have political implication. And sorry, just on the economic route, reconciliation and as this division and militarization happen, the barrel of oil at 40 plus dollars is not gonna help. Before we've been hearing about how the Iraqi foreign reserve was wiped out, Iraq did not pass a budget in 2014. Even when they projected the budget at $60 a barrel, the 2015 budget has a deficit of $35 billion. Now that deficit will even grow. So fighting, recreating in military, paying for economic reconstruction will have a lot of tension, not only over land and revenge, but also over economic resources. I'll stop here and I'll come back to what the international community developed in this question. Great, thank you, Sarhan. Again, very useful and I think particularly just reminding us again how Iraq is shifting in the last six months, the viewpoints. But I think it was also helpful to think about the benchmarks or the metrics that people are comparing to compared to the Maliki. But I think really going kind of feeding it back to full circle to Dr. Weiss's presentation on the numbers, the staggering numbers that have only been to increase in terms of displacement and the idea that no matter what, we're really kind of behind when it comes to the magnitude of what's happening on the ground and that need for the coordination that you were speaking about. I think one of the other challenges as Sarhan pointed out is when we're talking about this numbers, we're talking about urban refugees, not the traditional refugees, which most of our programming in the past has always been designed for. So how do you identify, how do you prepare and how do you work with them? All very good points. I think the panelists, with your permission, what I would like to do is open the floor for questions and answers. I think it would probably be good to take three at a time. We only have about 20 minutes. I want to make sure that your questions are fed into the panelists. So we'll do three at a time, a response, and then if we have time, take another three. I have like 10 questions. So if you don't raise your hands, we're going to jump in. Who would like to ask the question or comment? Good. One of the questions that I wanted to talk about there seemed to be a current theme about revenge. In the past, there was a lot of conversations around reconciliation. Is there any appetite, and I know, Sir Hung, you already flagged that the resistance to the kind of tolerance in those conversations, but without using the word reconciliation, is there an acknowledgement or are there conversations happening on the ground that that is going to be one of the primary issues that will have to happen? I think particularly with your question of back to what, I think the only way of really defining that is to understand that line between revenge and reconciliation. I can start with that. I mean, reconciliation has different dimensions, and there is a national level for many actors. It was before the elections, you had Alawi, Maliki, Barzani, and others out of the government were not working with each other, were not speaking with each other. Now they are all part of the government, they have senior positions, so that is inclusive, that's the direction that is going to work. That is, I think, that does not capture the reality because it is not about having people in senior posts, it's about the performance, it's the function of the state and the situation of the people's life. For that, there are efforts that people are focusing on legislation and thinking about, okay, who do we have in the government? There isn't serious effort, and at the national level, there is still, for six or seven months now, there isn't, on one side you can hear that Vice President Alawi is going to be the national reconciliation effort, he's needed, he's going to lead it, and then you will come across senior officials who would say, well, no, not quite, not official, not final, that who runs, who takes ownership of this and gonna do it, is not settled yet. You have the Prime Minister who has a senior advisor on this and I think is working on that through some initiatives, you have others, but it has not quite come through a framework that explains what is reconciliation, what do we mean by that, what do we need? That explanation has not happened, let alone, okay, who is who, what about that? What has changed in the past six months is that reconciliation probably six months ago was needed at the national level between the national political actors to get the government going, or between the Sunni-Shia general political direction, but now with the amount of feeling of anger and need of revenge, reconciliation will need to happen village by village, city by city, tribe by tribe, you have in Anbar, the Boonimer tribe on one side and the Wassaf tribe on the other side, you have the victims of the Spiker military camp who were killed, you have the Sunni, you have the Shia tribe saying actually it was Sunni tribes who killed our sons so we seek revenge, that is the level of complication that reconciliation has gotten to, but unfortunately there isn't resources, the situation is so overwhelming, it is not taking traction to pay attention to those. I believe it is fairly early to talk about reconciliation. Let's look at who are those who are displaced. 90% of all the displaced are made up by four communities. Sunni Arabs, half of all the displaced are Sunni Arabs, Jazeides, Christians, and Turkmen Shia. If you were a pessimist, because the focus, the focus of hatred, of violence, of ISIL is very much on Jazeides and Christians, if you were a pessimist you would say, this continues a little bit longer, there won't be anybody to reconcile with, left in the country, which is really very sad if you look at it from a perspective of a historian, the first, some of the first Christian communities in the Middle East were established in what is today Iraq. And then, yeah, talking already by now about legislation or longer term responses that would facilitate the process of reconciliation, is good, but again, I say it's perhaps a little bit premature. So we in IOM have recently started thanks to generous funding from the United States of America government, with an activity that we call psychosocial support, which is a combination of capacity building, which is a combination of capacity building clinical assistance and other types of personalized follow up and care activities, focusing on the most traumatized parts of those who were forcibly displaced. And our main target populations are indeed representatives of the Jazeides and the Christian communities. So before talking about legislation and about longer term perspectives, we look at shorter term and immediate type of interventions that would have kind of the first hand healing type of effect. And it could, let's be optimistic also, then prepare the ground for some longer term reconciliation type of activity. That's a very good point, Dr. Weiss. I think you're right, and it goes back to the idea of on the individual level, you really have to be able to address those needs. Viola? Can you follow up on that? I mean, can you even think about national reconciliation when there's still an open question about whether there may be a nation? I mean, is that his talk of Iraq dividing? Is that subsided completely in the midst of this crisis, or is that still an open question? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. There is no definition of what is reconciliation, reconciliation towards what. And without that lack of, it's difficult to translate into action. So that's why a legislation alone is not enough. Working on trying to reconstitute life in those areas that will be liberated if people go back will be positive steps. But again, in the lack of a framework of, okay, where are we? Where do we want to go? Which is the exact question. What will this country look like in practical terms? I think the efforts so far is, okay, let's fight this enemy that we have now. And then we will come to those fundamental questions. But this is where I think the Iraqi leadership and the international community will be missing an opportunity because the pain you feel now could distract you from the reason why you got there. And unless you think now, when we focus on the political track that got the country because it was the shape of the government, the powers, the authorities, who rules what, who controls what, if those are not part of the discussion, then you don't know what to discuss and agree on and be consile about. And that is not happening. And the fight is overwhelming. The humanitarian situation is overwhelming. It's taking attention away from that real fundamental question. This is what the international community will do the Iraqis a great favor if it keeps hammering that question and stays with it as they sort out these issues. And I would just add that if you're not having those conversations, even if you do talk about a divided Iraq, which again, there's not so much appetite because of what was described, you still have the problem of potential conflict of neighboring. And so that's where that process is so essential. It's not a simple divide. It really is about finding out how they'll be able to work with one another decentralization. But I think the most important thing is in the last six months, we've seen that that national dialogue process isn't what Iraq needs. It really is the village to village. And the psycho individual to individual to move beyond the trauma and to move beyond the revenge. I'm gonna just turn to the speakers because I wanna leave some time for interaction, maybe one-on-one versus just the panels, just for final wrap up. Any final comments? Yeah, one final comment about reconciliation. I think it's not anymore or the priority is not in the short term to work on these fancy national conferences where leaders convene. It's more to start working on reversing the consequences of what has happened and what is still happening actually over the last few years. And this is where working at individual level is very relevant as was pointed by Dr. Weiss. Working at grass root level as pointed by Sarhan village to village or tribe to tribe or house to house is also important. So it's not the national reconciliation and the conventional form that we know it. But at least this kind of effort will lay the ground for the day when the different constituents of Iraq will decide to re-discuss the political system and their administrative system and agree on something they would like to live under. But under these conditions, there's no way any political discussion can go further. Thank you, I actually have one adjustment. There's one more question and then I'll go to the panelists to answer in final remarks. So I have a question going back to Sarhan, your comment about the local leaders and how they're now in a position where they can claim legitimacy for the raiding the areas that they are living in. And you talked about getting ahead of that control before the provincial elections. We know that a lot of the players at the national level have changed. Some of the faces are the same under the CEO of Kosovo-Korela. Are at the provincial level those leaders who are taking responsibility for liberating those areas the same that we would have seen years ago in the political scene and in the political environment as running for these provincial council elections as being the ones involved in the process of these budget allocations and the actual state running of those areas or are these also new players that are coming in freshly with a different sort of banner and history of taking care of those areas? I think there's a combination and it varies from one area to another. If we are looking at the Sunni areas, you have the known leaders still in government. Usam al-Nujafi, even al-Nujafi, you have others like Saleh al-Muqla. But those do not have access to the ground now. So there are other leaders who did not participate in the elections and because they were either did not believe in the political process or they were eliminated through the debatification or the just as an accountability question not qualifying for election are, these are the people who are holding the guns and if you get into any settlement you will need to bring those into the fold of somehow and that is these people will come to legitimacy telling their people to be resisted. This we gain ground and they go in a certain direction. And on the Shia side, you have new militias or new fighters, new forces who were not there before that have arisen in America today. So by 2010 or 11 probably. So the political process brought most of the armed Shia forces into the government. Even part of the organization started to become a political party from being the armed wing of Iski. But now you have more forces who were not either who were at the time junior players in those forces who did not quite accept the political route and they have formed their own thing or they have just now revived. So Muqtad al-Sadr has created Saraya Salam again because he's among peers who needs cause to survive and that is he sees the next in the next stage. So there's a combination of old and new but those who were on the political moderate route it will be the time. The trend so far is not great but unless serious work is done and the development that could change in not in a good way unfortunately. And the military development is still very much open. The kind of tactics and attacks that is possible. One thing like the Samara or the Hauija could spark a major event that lead to this collapse. So it's really a mixed situation. Dr. Weiss, any final comments or response? Yeah, more of a final comment than a direct response to the last question. There is lots of competition around. Competition for by definition scarcely available funds. In the United Nations, IOM we are part of the de facto United Nations family. We categorize emergencies in three different levels. Levels of gravity that would then entail levels of or mechanisms of response. L1, L2, L3. L3 is the worst case scenario. At the present moment we are working we as the humanitarian community simultaneously on five L3 emergencies. Iraq, Syria, South Sudan, Chad and West Africa affected by Ebola. So when donors ask us which area do you prioritize? As a humanitarian organization, the response is always we prioritize the well-being of affected populations. So we cannot say you should give more money to Iraq than to Ebola affected West Africa. So there's lots of competition around. And in spite of the fact that Iraq is a middle income country as Hange impressively demonstrated the declining price of the barrel is not really helping at all. So at the end of the day, it's this famous issue that we often talk about in Germany of the tree or the forest. Sometimes you don't see the forest because there are too many trees. We have to see and we, I mean the international community that there is a need for longer term sustainable and predictable interventions. Predictable from the financing from a resource mobilization point of view in order to be able to really support and assist Iraq in order to recreate a situation that would be sustainable, that would be representing an improvement for the daily lives of the peoples. So as a humanitarians to wind it all up, we see the process of, let's call it healing. The process of healing in Iraq in three different steps but three different steps that in an ideal world would all be rolled out at the same time. First step or immediate short term saving lives, continue to save lives through the different interventions of all the humanitarian players and first and foremost the United Nations country team. Then midterm you look at social cohesion and livelihoods at the recreation of an environment that would enable people to stay where they are and to recreate their own lives. And then longer term or if you want extended midterm is then as Dr. Ely mentioned, education and development. As humanitarians we cannot fix it all and as my colleague Lado would always say we can especially not fix the situation with the jerry can and the mattresses that we distribute to beneficiaries. So there has to be a holistic and approach that sees the forest rather than the individual trees rolled out by all the players sitting around the table and that's why my second point you recall partnerships is so very, very important. And you in the US, you as the United States Institute of Peace you are part and parcel and element and an important player of this partnership. And therefore I thank you very much for the attention that you have given to us and to Iran through this round table. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you very much Dr. Weiss. It's not very round. It's not very round. Thank you very, very quickly briefly. I think there is a sign of hope for me. It was very inspiring that many people that came to see us from very dangerous areas. So in the Iraqi politics that tried many people's side as a constant that over the years and decades have been a player for stabilization. Since 2003, the international community invested in civil society. I think this is the second factor in Iraq as a factor for stability that they are partner, good partners for us to work with them and they need help. They are in this place yet their families and came to meeting and they were discussing a future for this country. Before everybody was saying Iraq is a rich country and it should use its own resources but with the barrel oil at the $40 plus dollar that statement is difficult to be true. Therefore, the international community needs to help Iraqi civil society rise on its feet again to regroup, rise on its feet and engage with it as a partner. The Iraqi government will not spend on that. The regional actors will not spend on that. This is where the United States, Europe, the UN and others have this responsibility to help. People in this room can contribute to that. Thank you and I want to thank you Dr. Weiss in IOM. Like I said, we did an event about a year and a half ago it was one of our best events. It really helped us. It gives us a lot of insight as did this. So thank you very much for your time and please there's a little bit of time if you want to have some more conversations we invite you to speak with the panelists. So thank you. Thank you.


Hey, it's time. Yay. OK. Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming to my session. I'm really excited to share the way that I manage sites with you. This session is particularly about how to deal with configuration management without using the features module. My name is Jen Lampton. You guys might know me from various other places in the Drupal world. I've been one of the main organizers of the Bay Area Drupal Camp in San Francisco area in California since about 2007. I was the initiative lead to get twig into Drupal 8 for about two years mid-Drupal 8 cycle. And more recently, I am infamous for being one of the co-founders of Backdrop CMS, which is the Drupal fork. For those who don't know me, as I said, my name is Jen Lampton. I've been doing Drupal for about 11 years. I'm one month away from my 11th Drupal birthday. It's really exciting for me. I still love Drupal. And something I think is a different from a lot of maybe other people who are at DrupalCon is that I do not work for a Drupal agency. I'm an independent contractor. I find and manage my own clients, my own jobs. And that changes the way that I do Drupal work. Usually, that means I'm on smaller teams. Usually, one to four developers, oftentimes I'm the only developer working on a project. That often means I'm working on projects that have smaller budgets. So sites as small as $10,000, usually the highest site I'm willing to take on is something around $75,000 US. And projects with budgets smaller usually mean smaller sites too. So it's a different kind of a world than if you're working at a big agency on big projects with lots of dollars for development. This is an example of the largest site that I currently manage. It's for California Government Agency. And I wanted to give you this as an example because at the end, if we have time, I can show you what their code looks like using this model. But this site has two active developers. There's myself, and we've got a front end around the project. We have 10 active editors, so these are people who are creating and managing content on the site. There are about 100 contrib modules on this project. So it's got a lot going on, even though there's not a lot of people currently working on it. And this site is built and managed in Drupal 7. So I know we're two years into Drupal 8. But let's talk really quick about Drupal 7. How many of you are currently running or managing Drupal 7 sites today if you could hold your hands up? OK, that's fantastic. That's all of you.  OK, so for those of you who have your hands up now, how many of you are using the features module to deal with configuration? That's what I thought. And those of you who are using the features module on Drupal 7 sites, how many of you had any trouble dealing with the features module? Right, that's like everyone, so that's fantastic. I am hoping that this talk is going to be really relevant to you guys. I have experienced a lot of personal pain, and I've tried to find a way around some of these problems. And I think I've developed a strategy that is working really well for me and my tiny teams. So really quick, let's talk about features. Features is a fantastic Drupal module. This session is not a features-hating session. I really like features. I just think that it doesn't always work great. There are two really strong use cases for using the features module. The first one is for bundling functionality together. So a good example, or the second thing features does, and this is something I think most of us use it for today, is for dealing with configuration management. This is a solved problem in Drupal 8. It's a solved problem in Backdrop CMS, but not a solved problem in Drupal 7, which is why I think everyone's using it. But first, let's talk about the first use case for using features module. And this is, for example, if you have a site that has a photo gallery, that photo gallery's gonna have a content type, it's gonna have a view, it might have a panel, there might be specific view modes or views displays, or other little bits and pieces that you need to manage to create that photo gallery. In a perfect world, you could build the photo gallery once, and then you could bundle it together, and then you could sell it to a second site or a third site, or you could distribute the same thing across multiple sites. I think this is really valuable if you have a really big, complicated site, or maybe a multi-site, or you have an institution that has requested the same thing in multiple places. But in my experience, doing smaller sites, the photo galleries I build are never the same from one project to the next. I have only ever in my entire time using features needed to feature exactly the same thing to distribute onto a second site. So that's something that maybe isn't super relevant for my use case. The second thing that features is used for is for configuration management, and this is to make a better developer workflow. And that's because if you have a view that's created for your photo gallery and you need to make a change to it, maybe you need to add some new module that goes along with it, you wanna deploy the new module and the change to that view at the same time and have them appear on your live site. And there isn't really a great way to do that in Drupal 7. Features came along and provided this awesome tool that does that mostly. And so everyone has kind of adopted using features to solve this problem. I would argue that this is the more common use case for what people are doing with features today. So both of these things sound really great. Like you're like, wow, I want both those things. I wanna be able to bundle my stuff together and organize them neatly. And I wanna be able to solve configuration management. But I have found that neither one of these use cases are super relevant or effective in the kinds of work that I do on a day-to-day basis. So as I mentioned before, I've only ever delivered exactly the same feature once. And that was two sites for the same client. Usually what makes somebody's Drupal site or website at all great is the fact that it's not exactly the same as someone else's, right? Like what sets you apart from your competition? You've gotta do yours a little differently. It's gotta be specific to your content. It's gotta be specialized to what you needed to do. So discarding that use case. Use case number two, configuration management. I've found three major problems in dealing with features on my Drupal seven sites. The first one is performance. I find that when you have the features module on your site with a lot of features, that module is constantly checking to see if your current features are in an overridden state and that can slow down loading unrelated pages. And I find that super frustrating. I also find that it often takes me more time managing the features than it does to do the change the features are supposed to be managing. So if I need to make a change to a view, changing that view is really fast. That's like a five minute thing. But if I need to then like get that view into the feature and then get the feature onto the site and then get the site to revert, that's like a half an hour process. And like now taking so much longer just to manage the configuration for the change than it would have taken to just make the change on the live site. Just a good thing necessarily, but just something to keep in mind in terms of how much time it takes to accomplish your goals. The third thing is developer sanity. And this is something that I find particularly important if you're like the only developer on a project. You run into one of those little things that features isn't necessarily really good at managing. Like somehow you have a view that has a path and ends up in a menu system and you're trying to get the menu to revert and like your menu system's getting all broken. It's just the amount of time you have to spend fixing that one problem is so much more than it would have taken to have done the change initially and you end up getting really frustrated with the system and trying to figure out like what is a better way that can keep me from getting to this place of complete frustration in the future. So those are the things that bother me the most about using features for configuration management. But I wanna do say that this is not the fault of features module. Features module is the best tool we have for this in Drupal 7. It is really good at doing a lot of things like giving a user interface for managing things that you wouldn't be able to do without that. And everything that features does really well, it does really well for a reason. It's because Drupal does those things really well and the things that it doesn't do really well are Drupal's fault, right? Drupal does not deal with deploying menu items or blocks or anything with a unique identifier really well and features is trying to give you a way to manage those things and that it can do. It does what it can do and it's working with the system it's got. So I would argue that the kinds of problems that I'm facing with features modules are actually particularly hard on smaller sites with smaller teams. I think these are things that are easier for big teams with bigger sites to overcome and I just wanna talk a little bit about why I feel like maybe I feel that pain more than others. So for starters, performance is something I've forgotten in but for performance is something that I think is a little harder on smaller sites because smaller sites don't often benefit from fancy Drupal-specific hosting that might have lots of different caching layers. So if for example you're depending on that page cache as being like your primary cache and that cache needs to stay primed in Drupal 7, it's not gonna be doing some kind of background fetch in order to make sure that cache is up to date, then if you have to clear your cache, like that's gonna be a hit to anyone who comes to your site after that cache is cleared. So you generally don't wanna be waiting for things like your features to find out if they're overridden or not after you deploy some changes. Developer time is also something that's a lot harder on small sites because these companies that are paying for them usually have smaller budgets and so if you overshoot by something that should have taken five minutes is now gonna take half an hour an hour, that's a big difference to those people maybe they now can't do the features. They can't add things to their site that they might have been able to afford to have you add if you as a developer are doing things like managing configuration with that time instead. So when you overshoot on how long something takes, it affects the scope of that project, it affects the budget. Whereas if you had a huge budget an hour might not be a big deal. And about sanity, I don't actually think it's more important for developers working on small sites to say sane. I think it's important for all developers to say sane. So that's just something that is a particular pain point for me trying to get my features to revert. And I think everybody probably feels that same pain. So I would like to show you another way but this is very specific to the use case that I've outlined with smaller sites, smaller teams. It's something I've had a lot of success with. It might not work for everyone but I'm gonna show you my code and see what you guys think. Before we get into the code I wanna talk a little bit about how Features Module itself works. So we have Features Module is a contrib module that means it's using Drupal's APIs. Those APIs provide you a way to ingest things from code. That's what Features does, it exports to code and imports from code. If it's using Drupal's APIs to do that Drupal APIs also give you a way to export and import things from code. A lot of those APIs give you not only a way to have a default thing but also to override a thing that might already be provided. Anything that Features Module is using Drupal APIs to do is something that Features Module does really well. So something like use exports. It's a great example of something that Features can deal with without any problems. There's other things too. If you had a custom module you could use the same APIs that Features is using to accomplish the same goal. So you don't need to use Features to do things the same way that Features does really well. You could write that code yourself. But all the other things, right? Let's talk about those. There are things that Drupal expects to be in the database. And this is the biggest problem with trying to deal with a Drupal 7 site for the long term is that you've got configuration in the database, it's a problem, it's been solved in Drupal 8 so we talked about. But Drupal expects those things to be in the database. And so when Features tries to pull them out and put them in code, there's this expensive process of when you're deploying those changes, trying to put them back where they should be so they're gonna be where they are when Drupal's checking to be where they are and that's where things get really messy is when you're trying to do this handoff between what Drupal's expecting and what developers want. And these are the things that are not super safe to manage in Features. This is where you start getting really frustrated with trying to get them to revert. So my crazy idea is like, well, why don't we just leave the things that don't work well where they do work well and try and figure out a way to work around that. So there's two ways that you can manage configuration in the database on Drupal 7. And one of them is to do things manually. And believe it or not, this is how we used to do things in Drupal before we had Features. If it's safe, that's a great plan. If it's not safe, you can write an update hook. And this is also the way we used to manage these things before I see people checking out. Before we had Features, we had to do it this way. So doing it manually, this is not a glorious solution, but it does work, right? If there's a simple, repeatable process that you can do on multiple environments and you can document that, you can redo it. It really depends on how complicated this thing is. If it's a process of creating a content type and adding 18 fields, that might not be something you wanna do manually. Something that's gonna be super time consuming you don't wanna do over and over again. But for a simple task, changing a view, there is kind of a balance there of how worth it is it gonna be for me to do this manually versus how worth it is gonna be to me to try and find a way to do it, not manually. And this is something that I do all the time, which is not for the faint of heart, but if you have a multi-environment setup, which even on my simplest sites, I have at least two copies of the site, sometimes three or four. Depending on what you're doing, creating a content type, you don't wanna do that four times. You might wanna go directly to the live site and say, hey, this group now wants to have a new video type, I'm just gonna create the video type on the live site, I'm gonna add all the fields and if there's something like 15 fields on it, publishers and dates and whatever, you can add all those things, you can export that live site into any other environments and that can be a much faster process than trying to figure out how to get that content type into a feature and deploy it. So rather than moving upstream, which is how developers usually do things, starting in live and moving it downstream is a much faster way to do it, but again, not for the faint of heart because you're dealing directly on the live site. So the other way is writing an update hook and this is something that you do need to know what you're changing, right? Like there's a lot of danger in like, oh, well I'm just gonna change this field display setting and the field display settings are super messy Drupal 7, they're serialized into a single variable and shoved into the variables table, but if you know exactly what that variable is supposed to look like when it's done, you can get an update hook that will take it from the way it is currently modified into what you want it to be and put it back in. So it's something that used to be the only tool we had to kind of make changes to the database. I would recommend in some instances that is an easier route than trying to figure out how to get it and manage it in a feature. So I know what you guys are thinking, I just said custom code twice and a lot of people are like, why would I write custom code when there's a features module that'll do this for me? And for me, I find it faster and easier and less crazy making to deal with the custom code than it is to deal with the feature. So just really quick, the things that we're trying to achieve here. Not harming site performance, so keeping features off the site will make your site faster. Saving developer time, so again this is a balance of like if writing that custom code is gonna be hard and painful and scary for people, that might be a thing that will say it's gonna be faster for this project to do features than it would be to do custom code. But I have found a significant savings in developer time to deal with all of my custom code instead of features. So that's a trade-off and it would probably be per project. And then the last one, keeping yourself sane. So if you like working with features and you think working with features can keep you more sane than trying to figure out how to write an update hook, do features by all means. This is not a solution for everyone. Okay, so I have been able to achieve all of these, solutions to all of these problems by doing it this way. This is my choice. I'm sharing it with you just for fun, not because I think it's the only way to do things. But it's something that I've showed people and several people have expressed interest in learning about it, so I figured it was worth sharing with you guys too. So what's gonna be in this code? I've got a stub module for each type of configuration that can be exported. So that means I've got a module for views and a module for panels and a module for feeds and a module for whatever it is I have on the site that needs to have exports and keep them separate. And this is something I actually learned from using features. When I originally bundled all of my features into individual sets of functionality, like the way I thought it was supposed to be done, I found myself wasting a lot of time looking for like, where is the view that manages the photo gallery? Is it in the one for photos or is it in the one for galleries or is it, I don't know. There's so many different pieces of a Drupal site that can sometimes be one piece or another. It's kind of up to whoever created the feature to decide where to put it. For me, I started grouping them rather than by feature. I started grouping them by type of thing. So then I had a feature for views and a feature for each content type and it was only the database structure and then I had a feature for panels. And so when I started creating this custom solution, I did it the same way where I now have a custom module for views and a custom module for panels. Which just makes it really easy for developers to know exactly where to find the file they're changing. And then almost every one of my projects also has a custom module that's specifically for update hooks. So that way if I need to make a change to the database, I know exactly where that file is gonna live and it's in that separate module for updating code. So I wanna show you some code examples. So this is my module for views. Info file is just really simple. It just has a dependency on views. Depending on what your views need to do, you can add additional dependencies. So for example, this site is using the Flexlider module. So I have a dependency around Flexlider views and I'll show you Flexliders have presets that are also exportable and I'll show you those in a minute in the code as well. So the module itself is really simple. There's a couple of views hooks that you need to implement just to make sure you're running the right version of views. This could be version three or whatever it is your site needs. If you have plugins that you need to specify where those plugins are or what version of those might be needed. But the code that actually handles the export is super simple. It's like, what is this? Less than 10 lines of code, eight lines of code? 12 lines of code.  If there's a view in that file, load it. So this is how all of your views exports get managed in nice clean individual files. And then I did the same thing again. Views module has a alter hook. So views provides a bunch of custom views. A lot of contrib modules provide default views. You wanna be able to make changes to those default views. You can do it in exactly the same way. So this just says, hey, go look in this folder called views. So I'm not sure if you can see this on the screen because it's really tiny. But in my views module, I have a views folder and inside that views folder there is an ink file for every single view. And this is just what happens when you go to the views UI and you click export.  You just copy the PHP and you throw it into this ink file and you save. And I find having one view per file is super easy to manage because then if you have multiple developers and one does a poll, they can see which view has been pulled in. And they can go to their interface and views and they can make sure that it's in a reverted state so that they don't have any changes that are gonna be competing with the changes that were in that file. So it makes it really easy to manage and get. It makes it really easy for developers to know where they are and all of this stuff is right there. So I mentioned before that the views in this particular example are using Flexliders. Flexliders also are using the Ctools export UI which is what, or Ctools export API which is what views uses to manage this like view export thing. A lot of can drip modules in all of Drupal do this. And every single one that has support you can manage in this exact same way. So in my views module, I also have a hook for Flexlider defaults. And the only difference between the Flexliders and the views in this code is the folder I chose to put the ink files in. And that's just so that when I'm in this Flexlider UI, I can say export a Flexlider. I know exactly where to find that. I've got a sliders folder inside my views module and I've got a couple of Flexlider preset exports here too. So again, depending on how you wanna manage things, you might wanna have like a separate custom module for sliders that's different from your ones for views. But in my case, I never use a Flexlider preset that's not part of a view. So it made more sense to keep those in the same module cause they always went together. But again, it will depend on your site and your developer's workflow, how they wanna organize things. So that's views. Panels, does anybody use panels on their Drupal seven sites anymore? A couple, that's pretty good. Okay, so panels are a little bit more complicated than views. But the model is exactly the same. So info file uses panels and page manager. I also have an additional dependency here on a module that provides a bunch of layouts cause my panel pages use layouts from that module. But again, it will depend on your particular setup. Make sure you have your dependencies clean. That's the only point here. And then the panels module is the same thing where it has version requirements. This is just the normal hook you use for panels. And then there's another, a couple of looping hooks. There's one of them here that handles handlers. So panels handlers are the things that override existing paths. It's something like nodes and taxonomy terms. Anything that's already existing and you wanna alter the way that menu callback works. So I have a folder for handlers. And then I have another one for pages. So pages are things in panels that you make yourself. So like the homepage, something that doesn't already have a path. And those go in a separate directory too. And the reason I chose to put those things in separate directories is because the user interface is different. So where you are in Drupal when you choose to export is different when you're on a handler page. You're not exporting the whole thing. You're only exporting the little bit. So you have like no type article, no type page or whatever those specific bits are at smaller amounts. And so I found the people I was working with had a harder time figuring out which UI you exported from. Cause in panels you can do both. So I separated them on the code side.  It'll tell you okay, well if this is a handler you're not gonna be exporting the whole page. You're only gonna expect exporting one for that type. So it's just something that I developed over time. Again if you guys wanna put them all together that's really up to you. And then same thing here. I have text on it, my term example. But whatever you do in panels you can export cleanly here. So handlers pages and then if you're using the mini panels module those also export in another place in Drupal UI. So I created another folder in my panels module. So I've got a folder for handlers, a folder for minis and a folder for pages. And so depending on what you're managing and where you're exporting it you can organize it cleanly in your code to match. And again that's to make it really easy to manage in Git. So let's talk about some of the examples. All of the views and panel stuff we just looked at even including flexliders and mini panels. Those all use the CtoolsExportables API. But there are things in Drupal Core that do not use CtoolsExportables. And those are things you sometimes also wanna be able to manage in code. So three of the most common examples I do on almost every site are view modes, image styles and date formats. And so in my code I have three separate modules for managing those. Image styles are the most common so I'll do that first. Again very simple info file. The module has two hooks. So these are not CtoolsExportable API hooks. These are just Drupal Core hooks. But there's one that is default image styles. So if you wanna add your own default styles like things that don't exist already in Drupal you can just export them with whatever image effects you wanna have. If you're using contrib modules that add additional image effects you'll again wanna make sure the dependency is there in the module but you can still export them in the same way and get them into this file. And if you want to modify an existing image style there's also an image styles alter hook where you can take something like there's three image styles that come by default in Drupal 7, small, medium, and large or thumbnail, medium, and large. You can change those names, you can change the styles, you can change the sizes in the same way just by using this alter hook. So this is usually how I do this. I find that usually what happens with image styles is I end up creating them in the beginning and they don't change very often. So this particular module is adapted from a site that was built once in these image styles have never been changed. But I do find that if you have a site that is changing a lot or adding a lot you can also put a little loop in here and put each one of these into its own PHP Ink file too if that's easier to manage that by. So similarly here we have date formats. Same thing, there's a hook and core that lets you provide default ones, there's a hook and core that lets you override them so if you want to add your own date formats you can. All of this, well I'll get there in a minute. So here I've got an example of like I'm adding four new date formats and I'm defining types that work or what the actual string code is for each of those date formats. I'm changing names on existing ones just to make the interface less crazy. And then I have, the other one is view modes. Here's an example of the view modes module. It doesn't have any dependencies. I just added an extra one here for something called widget. And then I have a fieldable panel pane as the module I really like. Here it's got an extra view mode for those so you can control how those look. So if you want extra view modes on your nodes or whatever you can add them in the same way. Okay, I know I was gonna have time. Really quick. We talked about that custom code is not that scary if you have an example to work from. And this is open source. So I've open sourced all my code. You can find it at github.com slash gen left and just generate. So if you wanna refer to this in the future you totally can. And this works for me. Might not work for you. Feel free to give it a try. And we're out of time. If you do have questions feel free to meet me in the hall. I know there's another talk that starts in like three minutes. So that's it. Thanks guys.