 The experience of Cisco, which is a very large company, participating in open source. And we had a lot of different kinds of conversations here this time, other times, about that experience. So I'm not wanting to get so much of the nitty gritty of the sort of traditional blocking and tackling, learning to engage with the community stuff, because we have a number of panelists who have actually participated widely in communities in moving forward the world in open source. What I'd really love to do is to get some questions from you guys about the panels like this. The kinds of questions you have about the work that you're actually doing in the community rather than the, what is it like to be in a big company? So to begin, what I'd like to do is offer our panelists the opportunity to introduce themselves in a little bit of what their experience has been and the kinds of communities they've worked in and the kinds of things they've worked on. And you're free to proceed in whatever order but I'm going to bet on moving that way. Sounds good. Thanks, Danian Hansen. I'm a software engineer with Cisco and I currently work on the Kubernetes project. I've been involved in containers for about three years. I am leading a team of engineers that is adding IPv6 support to Kubernetes. If you were in this room a couple hours ago for Thomas Graf's presentation on Kubernetes and IPv6, Thomas and I work very closely together in the community. So it's been a really exciting project in the sense that it's not a Cisco-only project. It's a Cisco-only effort. It's representation from a lot of different affiliates that have been able to add this support to Kubernetes so it's a real open source success story. All right. Hi, I'm Charles Echoll. I'm a software engineer by, I guess, education and training and been doing that for the majority of my career. Working with open source a lot, starting in like 1999 when I think open source really first, at least in my mind that's when it kind of first came into the masses. And done a lot of work with standards as well throughout the years. The area where I've been working is mostly around communication software, initially more like traditional telephony systems and voiceover IP and video conferencing. And that's what brought me into Cisco. And now I work in DevNet. That's our developer network. And I have the role of representing to the external development community what Cisco is doing in open source and in standards, helping you understand where we're contributing to open source and to standards, how they manifest themselves in our products and solutions and how you can work with us and how we can help you to build on top of the products and solutions that we provide using the APIs that are there. And when the code's open source, I think that makes it even easier for us to work together. Hi, everyone. My name is Serpil Bayraktar and I'm a principal engineer at Cisco in chief technology and architecture office. I've been working in the networking industry since early 1990s before the internet was commercial. My expert, mostly as a network engineer. My expertise is in IP routing protocols. I've been with Cisco for six years and in the last three years I have been, my team and I are running an open source project called Streaming Network Analytics System or SNAS. SNAS.io. What we do, we tackled a problem that was not really solved in the last 20 years in networking to get a very special kind of data from the network, meaning BGP data, which is stateful and different than the other ones in real time. And it's been very interesting and rewarding to work with the open source community. In May, our project moved under the Linux foundation family. It's been also interesting for me to go through that process. I'm also the founder of woman in technology at Cisco where every month the technical woman at Cisco get together to talk about what's going on in our industry. I don't think this is working, is it working? I'm off the hook. Hi there, I'm Ann McCormick. I'm a tech lead at Cisco, software engineer. I've been working at Cisco for maybe two long, some might say, 11 years. I've been working with OpenStack for the last three years and attended, I think, five different OpenStack summits. What I work on particularly is MetaCloud, which is an on-prem managed cloud solution that Cisco offers. So we go to the customer site, install the hardware, get the infrastructure working, install OpenStack on top of it, and then continue to maintain it as a service going forward. And particularly what I focus on is networking in OpenStack. Thank you so much. So start thinking about the kinds of questions that you would be interested in having answered by our... I wanted to open up with a question. To express it, but why? You're up. Who wants to go first? Okay, we'll rotate as to who has to go first, so. Okay, why? I'm gonna take that as why am I involved in... Oh, okay. I'm gonna take that as why am I involved in OpenSource and kind of why am I passionate about it? And I think for me, things got started. I mentioned back in 1999, I went to go work for a startup company. We were in, we called ourselves VoVita, and VoVita came from the name Voice Video and Data. We were going after making software for communication, voiceover IP stacks. And Linux was kind of the thing at the time, so we thought we'd build everything on Linux. OpenSource was seeming really cool, so we thought we'd open source everything we did. Protocol stacks, our soft switches, we called it. Everything was out there in the open. I didn't have any idea how we were gonna make money or be sustainable, but it was fun. We were doing great things and people were excited about what we were doing. And I remember people would heckle us about our name, like VoVita and they, like is that, Velvita and they called us the cheese company. And we kind of took that to heart and we decided, well, we'll name our releases after cheeses. So our first release came out, it was kind of rough. It was, you know, some would say it stank. So we called it Stilton. We thought that was a very fitting name for our first release. Fortunately, things got better and better and eventually we came out with the release that we thought was, you know, getting to be a little more sophisticated. We called it Bre. And then I remember going home afterwards, it happened to be my sister's birthday and her name was Breanne. But we always called her Bre. And to me, this may seem stupid, but it was kind of special that the name of our release, it was in all the files, it was in the software. And then I could go and I could show her what I was working on at work. I'd never shown my family the code I wrote. Here I thought it was special because I could show her, hey, here's this release that's named after you. She's my kid's sister, so she was really young and she was kind of touched that I could show her this and then we could actually like build it and run it and use it to make a call and make our home phone ring. You know, so kind of stupid stuff, but to me it was cool. I'd never shared anything like that with my family, with my sister. And it kind of dawned on me how cool this open source software was. The fact that it made what I did that tangible and to share with my family, with my friends, with the rest of the community. And loved it ever since. Excellent. So who's up next? I can go next. So I guess there are different reasons why you would go open source when I look at some of the reasons why people did open source in the past is that you're dealing with a very pressing issue that involves multiple entities, maybe a whole industry, you wanna go fast, you wanna be agile, you wanna apply it to a lot of places. And the problem space that I was dealing with involved legacy and new networks across industries and all types and sizes of networks. So we really wanted to look at the problem holistically without the restrictions of any of the vendor specific targets, like one product in mind. It was too narrow for us. So we wanted to collaborate and be very transparent with the community of the system that we were building. We wanted to get that feedback fast and honestly. So through the open source, you kind of bypass all the regular process channels and you go directly to the members and the users and it's been really, really rewarding. Originally we were a standalone open source project just on the site, but in May we did move under Linux Foundation and the reason for that move is that once you have something that solves the original problem and you have a framework, it doesn't end there. It actually begins. So we wanted to be part of the ecosystem of projects who could really benefit from what we built. We wanted to provide that service to them and we also wanted to understand what else was going on in the industry, whether what we built is really enough future looking. So it's been a very productive and useful approach. So monetization I think comes after when you're dealing with a really big problem and so far it's been a really good journey. So I'm gonna take that with my OpenStack glasses on and say why is Cisco doing OpenStack? I've been hearing the terms waves of the internet. The first wave was when we were building the infrastructure and of course Cisco was deeply entrenched in building that and the protocols, defining that being in the standards bodies, IETF. The second wave is cloud. So now we're not so concerned about the infrastructure. It's there, it's great, it's working. Now we wanna build on top of it. We wanna look at things from an application point of view. So the innovations really are happening at that level now and why particularly OpenStack is because it's a leading open source cloud infrastructure. So I think it makes sense for Cisco to participate in that and that's it for me. I'll take the why and say why IPv6 for Kubernetes. I was presented a unique opportunity to kinda have a blank canvas about eight or nine months ago. And so we were going, our group was going through a transition and our management team came to me and said okay we wanna start getting involved in open source container projects. Can you help lead a team and then figure out where and how and why? And so this why question is I asked myself why quite a bit during this process. And so as I looked through the container landscape, again I had a background of a couple of years in containers before this came about. And so I honed in on Kubernetes and for multiple reasons I saw it as kind of rising to the top as that container clustering system. How do I run containers at scale across multiple hosts in my data center or across multiple data centers? It was going from Docker to Kubernetes because Docker solved that problem how do I take an application and make it easier to deploy, manage, maintain on a single host but as everyone started drinking the Docker Kool-Aid that's really when the conversation started turning to Kubernetes. And so I honed in on Kubernetes and I asked myself why across three primary spectrums is okay if we're gonna contribute to Kubernetes why do we contribute to Kubernetes? Why do we use IPv6? And I said to myself well IPv6 was important to the Kubernetes community so I checked that box. And I said okay well IPv6 is important to Cisco we're a networking company we have a rich tradition in IPv6 so to me I was able to check that box of why IPv6 for Cisco. And then I think most importantly as a customer like if you're not solving a customer problem you're not trying to help a customer then why are you doing this? It could be great for the community it could be great for Cisco but ultimately if you're not helping a customer out then why are you doing this? And we were fortunate to actually have multiple Lighthouse customers that wanted this functionality they wanted IPv6 their big IPv6 shop across their data centers they're moving forward with Kubernetes and they're saying to us they're saying to the community where is IPv6 in Kubernetes? And so that's what essentially brought us to contributing IPv6 to Kubernetes. And this is an effort that started at the beginning of this year and it's really great to see the team and I going from sitting on the sidelines to actually being highly involved in the SIG network community if you're familiar with Kubernetes it's such a big project so much going on they break the project up into SIG special interest groups and again we went from not being involved at all in the SIG network group to being highly involved in IPv6 being probably the number one feature that's gonna be coming out in the 1.9 release. Again it's not a Cisco only kind of thing which to me is one of the big drivers of open source. This isn't something that Cisco is doing we may be highly involved in it but again there's affiliations Google, Morantis, Andrei who is up here I mean the list goes on of contributors in the community both in Kubernetes, CNI which is another project that's very important to Kubernetes networking, Sky DNS for Kube DNS and so it's just been really a great ride over the last eight or nine months going from what do we do here to actually starting to paint that canvas with the picture and now we're just putting kind of the finishing touches on that picture. Thank you all. So for those of you who seem to be in other situations you are aware of this and this is also true in the panel and so I have a very expansive, we don't even have a singing mic. We don't even have a mic, correct? Awesome, are you recording? Is that what you need? All right so for the audience at home. So I have a very expansive view of panels. Everyone likes to think of panels as a collection of people up on stage and we have a very distinguished collection of people up on stage. I tend to think of panels as including the audience as well and so the question I really want to pose to you guys in the audience is why are you here? Why did you show up here? What are the things that you're really interested in coming to understand from being here? So please speak up, raise your hands, let me know. Yes, money's good. That's a really good question. Really quickly, does anyone on the panel want to respond to that and sort of describe their experience inside Cisco because we've got many different viewpoints here? I guess I could just say sometimes I think of open source like TreeHuggers, it's a utopia, everything, we all love each other and get along. But the reality is we need to make money, right? I mean we all work for companies that need to make money so I think it's a very big concern. How do you monetize that? How do you come to panels and summits like this and not appear as just a vendor trying to sell hardware? It's a very difficult balance. I like to think we're doing it well, but. Sure. So I've been involved in open source within Cisco for five or six years and I remember the first year or so it was very difficult. The company at that time just didn't get open source and so a lot of my time was spent actually just internal discussions, internal meetings of explaining why open source and that it's not a threat to you, right? So from me speaking personally, how to do open source to me is it's not rocket science. You know, what I like to do in life generally is if I go to do something and it's new to me, I always try to kind of look around and figure out has someone done this before? You know, and so when you look at open source, there may be a lot of different open source contributors out there and companies that contribute, but for me personally, I look at the likes of Red Hat, the likes of CoreOS, companies that have built a successful business model around open source software. And I think if you spend that time to look at, well, how does Red Hat do this? How are they so successful in these open source projects but still a very profitable company and you spend that time to see how they do it? You could almost use that as kind of your recipe for Ericsson or whatever company that you work for. I think when I look at open source, Cisco's been involved with open source for a long time, but most of the focus on internal, say policies and that type of thing was around compliance. Really it was about licensing things correctly, contributing as you're supposed to to meet the licenses that you're using, not using licenses in software packages that you shouldn't use in certain ways to kind of more of a protect yourself type of mentality. But that's what's been pretty strong at Cisco for a long time. It was only kind of more recently that I think Cisco engineers had been contributing to open source, but it was on sort of a, and still it is to a large extent, it's very disaggregated. Cisco for those of you who are not as familiar with Cisco corporate it's, to me I think one of the things I really like about it is how disaggregated the company is. It's actually, you'll see people in Cisco have no idea what other people are doing and sometimes they're doing sort of conflicting or duplicate things. We'll find out about it at conferences like this. That's one reason to do open source. I actually see what that happened to you too. And it's from an employee point of view, it's very empowering because you can go off and do things. And I think so far with open source contribution it's worked out quite well at Cisco because the employees have had the best interest and been educated and more or less contribute to open source well. However, I think there's a lot of room for improvement. We don't have any sort of like central open source office, maybe we should, but we love that disaggregatedness too. I don't know if there's a trade off there. So I think we have room for improvement, but as long as people are doing the right thing in the open source community, it seems to be working so far. That's how I would describe it. So to answer your question, how does open source work at Cisco, I think the answer depends on your group, first of all. So it really depends on where you think the real monetization come from. So we're tackling the infrastructure problem, the collection of stateful data that's in the hundreds of millions of objects. If you think about routing, the number of prefixes you collect, and if you wanna do it in real time, which people do all kinds of workarounds like dumps and other ways. So I mean what I wanted to say about the groups is that I'm in the Chief Technology and Architecture Office, which is not necessarily a product group. And our job is to really see where we should invest, what the framework work should look like, and the monetization really is going to come from the applications that are built on top of it. Cisco, just like any other company, will have to write the right type of applications and services and monetize it in the long run. I think, I see open source as a long term investment in a way for the company. Just like when the internet was first starting, Cisco was very much involved with the IETF, leading the technology, they didn't have to, but they were, they had an interest in it. Lots of people spend lots of time there. It was a very loosely coupled standards organization. It still is. That's why it's request for comments and not like some big ITU standard. The reason why Cisco contributed, they wanted to have the technical lead and they wanted to be the experts and they maintained that expertise within the company and they knew exactly what products to build on top of what was discussed and developed. Open source is in a way the same way. Cisco alone cannot build this big infrastructure because it's a multi-vendor problem. It has to be sold as a multi-vendor solution and it is an industry changing project in my opinion. It's very small and it's not very well known yet, but the fact is that people gave up on the problem that we're trying to solve, which is the collection and presentation of a very high volume of data in real time to the applications. Applications and services are where the real interesting stuff is going to be. We do have some IP, by the way, that we protect through regular methods. That doesn't stop us from filing for patents, but making the code available to other users and get the feedback, I think puts us in the right track for the eventual real application landscape. Excellent, so we know I'm an issues here. Why are you here? Yes, you. You did raise your hand, right? Okay, good. So really quickly for the home audience, the question was what other kinds of future projects do you think that Cisco will be involved in going forward? What other kinds of things do you have your eye on on the horizon? I guess anything to do with networking. We have our eyes on. And the other thing that I see across the company is the analytics and apps. Everybody has their eyes on that. I don't know if it's been resolved and I'm not aware of project names to tell you, but I see a lot of movement towards data analytics and applications and especially in the networking area where we have the expertise. Maybe this isn't really so much an open source project, but a way of working with open source, the standards and work that Cisco's done, say in IETF and I've been doing a lot of work with standards with open source and Cisco's been very supportive of me in doing that. Trying to bring those two things together, combining open source and standards. And I think part of the thing there is there's a lot of networking technology that's backed by standards. Now there's a lot of work being done in open source. You really wanna make sure open source works well with those standards. IPv6 support in Kubernetes is a good example. Take some of the stuff that came out of the IETF or networking, make sure it works well with open source. I think you're gonna see more and more of that. So it's not kind of like, here's the old way of doing things or whatever that was more standards-based and now it's all open source and standards aren't needed. I think it's in Cisco's best interest that those two worlds come together and we'll continue to see more work bringing those two worlds together. We had a really quick question here before we continue with this. Yeah, that's a good one. So I wanted to actually elaborate. I want you to elaborate on that. I confess I'm a standards guy. I work for the telco industry. So for telco and communications, as we go to the software-dominated future, what kind of things are best to do in open source and what kind of things are best to do in standards? And like as a company, where do you plan to put energy into open source versus into establishing standards? Thank you. So I would say, especially in terms of open, this is interim. Yeah, what I'm pushing for is not so much in either or, but that vote. It's not, oh, do I take this to standards? Oh, do I take this to open source? I would say work on it within the standards, but then don't just work on it in the standards for three years and think the open source community is gonna wait for you to three years later, come out and say, here's the standard, now go implement it. No, start working on it in the standards, be in parallel doing open source reference implementations or an open source project implementation of it. Have the two feet off of each other. So at the end of the day, you not only have the standard, but you have an open source implementation of it that people can start to use, extend, whatever, bring in to meet their needs. So yeah, that's the way I look at it. I guess one thing I can add is that we wanna see the standards making faster decisions, adopting newer technologies, and SISCA has a lot of interest. All see her actually does hackathons at IETFs, that's a new, so we're trying to really bring the standards bodies up to today's standards in terms of agility and technology. There is still a lot of influence the standards bodies have, and there's a lot of use for that. I don't think we're ready to abandon that. That's a good question. I can tell you which one is more sexier, and you can guess. Well, I can just go back to Charles point of, it's not one or the other, it's doing both, right? Is that the standardization process is long, and I go back and look at SISCO's history as, okay, let's work in the standards, but let's develop this needed functionality, and then when the standard is ratified, we will add that and VLAN tagging with ISL, and then with 802.1Q as standardized, we added support for .1Q, and it eventually became the default instead of ISL for VLAN tagging. How that relates to open source, it's going to be on a case by case basis, right? Is this functionality that is being standardized but is also implemented? Well, is that implemented in an open source project that we're leveraging for our products? Okay, if so, then let's go ahead and implement that standard in that open source project, and then consume that into our product. If it's vice versa, and it's functionality that's in our own software, it's still the same approach. It just comes down to where do we actually then implement that standard open or closed? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a gray area. A good example is CNI, the Container Network Interface. It's not necessarily a standard, it's an open source project that's trying to standardize on how containers interact with the, with networking in a containerized environment. Docker has lib network, right? And so a Docker, if you've got Docker, Docker swarm, you use lib network. If you've got Kubernetes, Mesos, and I mean, CNI is really starting to be adopted but neither of my standards. Do one of those eventually float up and be a standard? I don't know, I'm not involved in the standards committee, but I think, again, just going back, looking at history of, okay, we've got to implement this functionality somewhere, preferably an open source software instead of closed source software. And let's make sure, let's work with the standards committees and try to bring about a standard that everyone can follow, yeah, so. So I think the other thing is that it depends on the area, right? There is no point in for me to have an open source project for BGP. BGP is handled at IETF, it's very well handled, all the stakeholders are there, that's the place to do. Now, my project is routing streaming network analytics and we actually work very closely with the IETF because we use BGP monitoring protocol. So that's not even really part of our open source engagement. But IETF, there was really no forum or area to build this framework for us. So it seemed like the code piece, really, we had to take it out of the standards. Otherwise, we could never make progress, it depends. Can you build the community faster than the standards groups to mobilize? I think it depends. But I'm very into interactive audiences, so. In the NFV space, right? And then this is kind of the beginning, although I guess NFV started like maybe five years ago. There's been standards started and it was going slow and now there's open source, multiple open source communities, right? And it's kind of a competition. And open source is different, you can leverage it into your product and all that stuff. But if I look at it just from an interoperability and open this point of view, some people say, well, as things get more software, why write a spec on an API when you can just have code and then you know it works, right? So in terms of interoperability, is there certain kind of things that are best to just do an open source for interoperability or is it better to do it in standard? The protocols obviously you do in standard. I was gonna say, for protocols, there's no point. Yeah, I think looking at protocols is actually a good example. If you look at like networking, right? I mean, look at, we have OBS, we have OpenSwitch, we have EPP, we have proprietary implementations, many, many of them. Fortunately, they can actually interoperate and co-exist because there's those underlying standards. So there's an example of, perhaps one day there'll be one open source switching platform at hopes it's VPP that just rules everything and then the standards don't really matter because the whole world runs on VPP. But maybe that's not what's gonna happen and maybe there's gonna continue to be a mix. So even with open source implementations, it's still fantastic having that standard basis behind them. One forward to rule them all in the dark and spine them. Yes, I'm gonna give you a mic. Thank you. Thanks. So just curious about your company's open source strategy. So let's say you have an internal project, you found it interesting and you consider to open source it. So what's the consideration before you open source it? Let's say the FIDO work very, very nice before you open source it, what kind of the, what made you make the decision to open source it? What are the considerations? So normally I prefer to have the panel answer and you will. Implied thread intended. But I will actually address this one a little more directly because I was very intimately involved in the open sourcing of VPP and FIDO. A conversation that I have repeatedly with executives inside Cisco is bringing back the fine point that we're in the business from a Cisco perspective of creating value. And we have a historical tendency to think about clutching intellectual property as the only way to create value. And the truth of the matter is that it is often the case that you create more of business value in your company by letting go of certain things. So you can look at the landscape and say, okay, there are market transitions that are happening where customers are demanding that things are based on open platforms based on open source software. They're not saying that they won't pay you for things. They're saying that they don't want to be locked in. You have places where the innovation that is necessary to make it through the complex transitions that we're dealing with more and more quickly, like the transitions to cloud native and microservices can't be done by any one single vendor. We have to have a place that we can collaborate together on them. And so you build a case around the value creation of letting go. Now then there's a whole lot of mechanics around things like making really certain that you are completely beyond reproach in terms of the providence of the code that you release. I can't tell you how many annoying code scans that I've read through just to make sure the endless array of false positives were in fact false. So there's a lot of mechanics to it as well, but the fundamental thing that has to be worked out is what is the business value case that you make to your executives? And how do you help them make that transition into the new world of thinking about things? And now back to the implied threat to the panel. Yeah, I'll give you another example. It goes back to the way I came into Cisco. I mentioned getting started in open source at Voveda and we were open sourcing everything. And Cisco acquired us. And after they acquired us, now they had to decide what to do with this code. And Cisco wanted to have a voice over IP solution. And but they decided, you know what? These guys are already open sourcing stuff. We're going to continue to open source it because yes, while we want to develop a voice over IP and hopefully a video IP solution, we want that whole industry to grow. So we want to put all this stuff out. It's like a toolkit to help others create voice over IP solutions. Because if the industry moves from traditional telephony to over IP, that's good for Cisco. We sell more routers and switches. We'll make money on that. If we also sell the best voice over IP solution, great. If someone else does, great. So let's put it out there as open source. So that was a decision way back then on that open source project. And just another way you can look at it. What is it? Where are you driving value from? And that can influence your decision. Just really quick, one thing I wanted to add there is there's also a benefit to open sourcing things, which is you can, assuming that you can build a developer community around the technology, you can actually accelerate development and innovation. All right, so we love you people up front. But we haven't heard from the people in the back. So why are you in here there in the back? Come on, don't be shy. That's a good answer. You wanna say something? No. Okay. Awesome. Anyone else in the back? Why are you here? I know some of you. I can guess. Don't make me guess. Come on. Okay, I'm very close to calling names. So do volunteer. Yes. So I'm here, because I'm curious to hear some of your stories. I know we don't have much time, but what is the hardest experience you've gone through trying to convince people about open source within the company, and why it's so important? So the question is, what was the hardest thing about going open source? To explain the value, why we're doing it, why we wanna do it, and this more future-looking aspect of the open sourcing, what it will bring to the company. Because it's a traditional company. Everybody is used to building a product and selling it, and you're done, and you collect the money, but now we live in a very different world of subscriptions and memberships and services. And we're going through that transition just like any other big company, and we had to convince that this was the right way for us to proceed, and we had to have conversations about how we're gonna bring back money and value to the company through open source. But it's a lot of tension in the company, and I think it's a very healthy tension. It has to happen. I think another thing that's challenging is to have people just kind of bite off that chunk of work of open sourcing. And not just open sourcing, but open sourcing, say correctly, right? It's, because the last thing we wanna have people do is just throw open source out there and then be like, yeah, yeah, we don't care about that. I remember someone saying like, okay, well, we were working on this, and now we decided we're gonna cut that project on our team, but we're gonna open source it and hope that the community takes it over. It's like, no. Because that always happens. The only way we're gonna open source this is if you agree you're actually gonna put more people on it so we can help develop a community around it. So I think getting people to think about that and understand the value, the real value of open source is that they're good open source community members and they open source correctly, I think it's just one of the biggest challenges because oftentimes once you start talking about that, then you end up scaring them away or, so I think that's one of the tough balances. Also, we don't have the cleanest, it's probably a huge understatement, we don't have the cleanest open source contribution process really. It's not the most streamlined and not easy to navigate. So a lot of people just don't wanna bite off that complication of having to do the right thing, check with other business units to make sure that they're not killing their business model or whatever, do the right due diligence. That's, to get people to open source correctly is still can be a challenge. Okay, so we have just been told by our lovely minders that we have hit our time. So I want to thank our distinguished panelists for their contributions to the conversation, it's been excellent. I'd like to thank you as the audience for participating as part of the panel, and I would like to thank everyone for indulging my impish desire to see if I could run an entire panel on a single word. Oh. Ha ha ha.