 Excellent. So we actually have 50 people already with us on stage. Hello, everyone. Hi, Sally. Welcome back. And we have a very, very special guest today with us, Don Sparling. Welcome, Don. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thanks very much. Glad to be here. So good to have you. We've had a really good day and a half, actually. So we're heading towards the end of the conference, but this is a very special moment, I think, because just a few hours before we had a conference, keynote really about open source, the community, and the power that this has for the public, really. And I really like that you're now going to talk a little bit more about Bernon specifically, right? How the city changed. Yes. What I want to do, should I start now right away? If you want to, absolutely. Just one reminder for the people that are watching this, if you want to share with us what you think, we have the chat right here in the virtual event, and also tweet. So you can follow us at devconf underscore CZ with the hashtag, and we also have an account. So if you want to share anything with us, we're always happy to hear from you on Twitter right here. And just to give you maybe a brief introduction, Don is with us. He is originally Canadian, but he's been living in Bernon for, I think you said 50 years? More than 50. More than 50 years, which is a very, very long time, actually. And Don, you were telling me before that you were a university professor. Is that right? Yes. I was in the English department. I was doing language, literature and things like that. Right, right. And I guess you will tell us a bit more what brought you to Bernon. How I guess you fell in love? After I came to Bernon. Okay, okay. That's excellent. So I think also this is very relevant because of course, Devconf is hosted and really was born out of the Bernon office and the Bernon community especially. So without waiting further, I will leave the stage to you. And for everyone have a great session. And if we have a bit of time at the end, we also have some space for questions and answer with Don. The stage is yours. Thanks very much, Daviano. Yes, I've been here for more than 50 years and I'm a, as you'll probably guess from this talk, I'm a big Bernon patriot. The city of Bernon has been around for well more than almost 800 years. And if you sort of stand back and look at it from the point of view of its economic growth, you can see that there were basically three stages. The first stage was quite long, 500 years or so. And during that period, it was basically a trading city. And then that lasted up to the middle of the 18th century. And then in the second half of the 18th century, it started to switch to be an industrial city, a manufacturing city, an industrial city. And that lasted up until the second half of the 20th century. And since the 1990s, Bernon has been transformed. And it's a city now that's based on the knowledge industry or whatever you want to call it, knowledge economy. And I want to talk about this long period of almost 800 years, but I'm going to try and speak more on the second and third periods and the transition. So Bernon was founded as a trading city. And there were four groups in the city that founded it. Just a moment, I'm very bad at this. I'm not technology. Oh, there it is. So Bernon was founded in 1243. And there were four groups. If you look at the city here and think about it as being divided into quarters, up here in the left-hand quarter, it was settlers from the low countries, from what's now Belgium and the Netherlands. Up here, there were settlers from the German part of Europe. And the lower half here was... So sorry to interrupt you. Are you sharing your screen? Because I think we don't see it from our end. I thought I was sharing my screen just a moment. My mistake. Now I am. Yes. Let's give it a second to see if it comes or not yet. And this. Yes, it's coming now. Yes. Sorry. Yes. There it is. It will be there. Yes, sorry. Perfect. Thank you so much. Yeah, okay. My mistake. So it was, as I say, if you think of it as being divided into quarters, the... From the low countries, Belgium, the Netherlands were up there. The Germans were here. Down at the bottom here were the Czechs. And at the very, very bottom here were the Jews. So there were these four groups that founded the city in 1243. And it was not a major production center the way, for instance, Ghent or Bruges in Belgium that exported masses of cloth in the Middle Ages. It was more local. But it was situated on very important trading routes going sort of north, south and east, west. It was quite prosperous. It's interesting. One of the first guilds that was started was the... The first guild that was started in the city was the wine cellar's guild. It's just south of Brno. It's a great wine country. And here you see a 16th century building. It's a magnificent Renaissance palace that still remains in the city. And it was owned by a man. He made his money in wine. So it's a nice reminder of those periods. In the 16th century, the Czech territories came under the control of the Habsburg family. The Habsburgs ruled this vast empire in the middle of Europe in central Europe, which included not only Austria, but Hungary, parts of modern Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Poland and so on, this massive empire in the center of Europe. And the Czech lands, including where we are now, the Czech Republic, became part of them in the 16th century. And in 1641, the city of Brno was made the capital of Moravia. Moravia is the province that we're in within the Czech lands. And this meant that the links with Vienna became much stronger since we were the Moravian capital. And Vienna, of course, was the metropolis. It was the capital of the empire. And this was crucial for Brno, because Vienna is very close. It's only about 110 kilometers away. That's 70 miles for people in those countries that might still deal with miles. Brno, in fact, came to be called a suburb of Vienna. It was so close. And this was very important because it was very close to the metropolis. And it was a source of new ideas that could come very quickly to Brno. This situation of Brno was a trading city. Last, as I said, up until about the middle of the 18th century. And then we turned into a, we started to turn into a manufacturing city, an industrial city. We can pinpoint this exactly. It happened in 1763. This was the first textile manufacturer. It was a small building, not this one, but a small building like this. With these complicated looms, they were not had, they were hand looms still. They didn't have mechanical machinery. I mean, they weren't steam driven or anything. But they were kind of a leap ahead. Very small scale, but very complex machines and so on. And textiles then were at the core of Brno's prosperity for the next 200 plus years. In the first wave, many of the entrepreneurs in the industry came from outside. They came from Germany, from Belgium, from England, from Scotland. They brought in, as entrepreneurs always do, they brought in know-how and they brought in capital. What was interesting, many of them were Protestants. At that time in the Austrian Empire, it was illegal to be a Protestant. It was a totally Catholic state. And they had to make exceptions for these people because they needed their skills. But this had a profound effect then on the opening up of Brno in the sense of diversity and tolerance. And this could be then observed very much in succeeding years. The second wave of people came in the second half in the 19th century. And we were now getting very big factories. You can see in the first stage, it's quite interesting, you see down here in the lower corner, this is the very substantial, luxurious home of the factory owner. Here's all these factory buildings very close so he could keep an eye on it. But his garden, his wonderful garden was in behind. This was very typical in the city. They were still very much sort of hands-on, even though they came to be called textile parents because many of them eventually got raised to the lower nobility because of their great contributions to the Austrian economy. And in this second wave, a lot of people were still coming from outside Austria, outside Moravia. And many, but also from inside now, and many of them were Jewish. So there was a large influx of Jews, and they became very important in the economy in Brno. Again, we're welcomed and absorbed in this tolerant milieu in Brno. And by the second half of the century, we had massive factories. You can see these gigantic factories in Brno. And Brno came to be called the nickname for Brno was the Moravian or the Austrian Manchester. Manchester as the quintessential textile factory, textile town in England, and us here in Moravia or Brno in Moravia or Austria. Textiles, of course, once they took off, necessitated machinery. Once the steam-driven machinery came, they needed machines. And so the city began to develop the machine industry. At the beginning of the 19th century, we had a wonderful example of what we now call industrial espionage. A local nobleman went incognito to England and bribed people to give him plans for the latest English textile machinery. He smuggled them back inside his walking stick, his cane, and developed his factory this way. But the machine, the textile machines were built and then this led to all kinds of other machinery for different areas. So by the end of the 1932th century, you had these massive engineering works in Brno. You can see what they looked like in the photo. And this is from, let's say, 1900. This is what the factory looks like now. It's one of these factories that actually has been preserved and it's now a sort of heritage site. It's an art gallery. It's social space and so on. We're quite lucky about that. It's not only this. As I said, because Brno was so close to Vienna, it meant that there were all kinds of firsts, not only in these kind of textile things, but in railways, the first railway in the now the Czech Republic was the Vienna Brno railway opened in 1939. Here's a photograph of the first train coming in. It was a huge occasion, of course. They had four trains, each of them with seven or eight carriages. It was a huge kind of excursion for the sort of better off Vietnamese society to take this exciting trip on a train up to Brno for the day. Here you can see them being welcomed in Brno at the time. It's also kind of funny, because on the way back, there was another first, and that was the first railway accident. Two of the trains collided with each other. But we also had the first trams. It was now the Czech Republic. You can see this horse drawn tram, which is still in the property. It's part of the property of the amazing transport museum of the city public transport department. But it was also innovation in all sorts of other ways. Here was the municipal theater in 1882, which was the first theater on the European continent to be lit by electrical light. As I said, this closeness to Vienna meant that the city was always open to new ideas and prided itself on being progressive and so on. We come then into the 20th century, and the Czechslovakia becomes independent. At the end of the First World War, the whole Austrian Empire collapsed, and Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent state. One of the first effects was on Bernault. You see here a map of 1919 when great Bernault was created. Up until then, Bernault had been the historical core of the city. It was surrounded by all these small little villages and a couple of other municipalities. In 1919, these were amalgamated, so there was this great leap forward. Suddenly, we had a city that has twice as many people, seven times as much territory. And the First Republic then was brought sort of a new dynamism, I would say. Bernault had previously been dominated by German speakers. Now with the addition of all these new villages, it was about 75 percent, most of these new villages were Czech-speaking. It was now 70, 75 percent Czech-speaking, 25, 30 percent German-speaking. And there was an effort on the part of the Czechoslovak state to build up Bernault as a genuine Czech city. So three new universities were founded, a lot of secondary schools, the highest legal universities, the Supreme Court and so on moved to Bernault. And the cultural life sort of took off. This was a young democracy, Czechoslovakia, progressive democracy, and so Bernault was a kind of emblematic city for this with modern trends, modern trends in the arts, in architecture. This functionalism became the main architectural style, this very democratic style. It didn't have all sorts of complicated ornament and all the rest of it. Sleep lines, minimalism, roof terrace for instance here if you bring in nature on your roof terrace. Family house this way, public buildings were built in this very clean architectural style. And there are some amazing buildings in Bernault dating from that time. The Villa Tummenhap was a UNESCO World Heritage site. It was by the German families Wanderer, first open plan house in the history of architecture. It's what I say symbolic, that in fact it was built for a Jewish couple that were among the leading industrialists, textile families in Bernault. Again, textiles were still at the core of Bernault's wealth. This is another functionless building, the cafe area, this gorgeous absolutely minimalist cafe influenced by the Dutch architectural style, the steel. And the industry was moving into new fields as well. Bernault started producing cars, this wonderful Breufke cars that they started producing. The Brenga, the armaments, the main armaments factory was in Bernault, this was the main light machine gun that was used by the Allied forces in the Second World War. I have the photo there of the soldier carrying a Brenga in the Second World War, because he's a Canadian soldier. I thought this was really nice. So I'm going to take a look at some of the armaments that were used in the Second World War. This is a Canadian soldier. I thought this was really nice. I added it as a little bit of nationalist propaganda. After the Second World War, the Second World War and its aftermath were pretty catastrophic for Bernault. Huge impact. It was the most badly damaged of any of the Czech cities and of course there was a human population, most of the Jewish population, 90% of the Jewish population because of the Holocaust and all over Czechoslovakia in 1948 and 1945 the German-speaking population was expelled. This hit Bernault very hard because it was the Czech city with the highest proportion of Germans, so roughly 25% of the population vanished overnight in May of 1945 and hardly was it recovering from that when the Communist era came in 1948, lasted 40 years. That meant isolation, that meant difficulty to travel, it meant difficult to have any books, reading material, whatever from the West. The presence of foreigners was in the city of 400,000. There were five of us native English speakers in the communist years, five native English speakers in the city of 400,000, hard to believe. And it particularly meant stagnation, it meant buildings unrepared and crumbling, it meant little investment in infrastructure, it meant minimal innovation in industry. And when the communist system collapsed at the end of 1989, it was followed very quickly by a total collapse of the Burno economy. They couldn't compete, cheap Asian textiles flooded the markets and textile factory after textile factory went bankrupt. Factories that had been producing these low quality goods subsidized could no longer compete on the international market and they began to go bankrupt and so the question was what to do. And this is when we moved into the current phase of Burno technology economy based city. We were very lucky after 1989 to have a fairly enlightened city council and they set up task forces who visited western European cities that had gone through this similar economic collapse 10, 20 years earlier. And on the basis of that they created the strategy of reinventing the city of Burno as a city for research and development for information technology. It was based on several key factors one was the universities. Burno had six public universities it had the highest ratio of students to the population of any city in the country. These universities covered virtually every field from the humanities right through science and engineering and all the rest of it. It was the first informatics faculty in the country that was founded in 1994 and so on. There were some local quality products particularly electron microscopes and so the idea was on the basis of this very good educational complex they could then attract foreign firms international firms to come to Burno and a combination of the city of public institutions the next 15-20 years made the difference. The city set up a very effective strategy development office which gave priority to this new development and it's continuing, it still continues right now they have a very ambitious strategy for the development of the city up till 2050 which is a long term thing in 2020-50 A lot of the public institutions accomplished some major achievements initiatives. The Czech Technology Park was founded immediately in the first Czech Technology Park in the country founded by a Burno native who had emigrated after 68 and became head of BOVAS in England, one of the largest building firms in the world and they came back and set up this Czech Technology Park in combination with the technical university and the city of Burno the Masaryk University created a new campus which is the largest university infrastructure project in central Europe in fact bringing together the medical faculty part of the science faculty and many research institutes the sports faculty as well and then four of the universities got together to create a university of technology with different centers this is the European Institute of Technology and the Burino University of Technology has one center Masaryk University has another center and so on and finally there was an international clinic research center it's the only health research center funded in Europe by EU money these major research centers private was more interesting sorry I don't need this anymore I'll get rid of it the private sector the private sector was more complicated because just get rid of that for me was more problematic because there was a lack of infrastructure here I got involved in the around 2000 2012 I was head of the international office at the university and several times a year several times a year the check-invest would bring a potential investor to Burno they would take me out to lunch because my job was to talk to these people and tell them what a wonderful city Burno was and the university base and so on and after a while I said it's interesting and none of these firms seem to be ending up decided for Burno and I asked the check-invest people why this was and he said well the problem is there's no state-of-the-art infrastructure a firm an international firm comes to Burno and says we'd like to start here yeah it looks like a great place we want to start in six months and then check-invest would have to say well unfortunately there's not really any proper infrastructure maybe in a year or two years and that was the end of things so it wasn't until private firms were established and started building building parks of various kinds business parks then the place could turn up and this happened around 2005-2006 and since then it's been this incredible kind of very very steep curve and the result has been the transformation of the economy transformation of the infrastructure visually of course transformation of the makeup of the city because university research institutes plus these international firms in Burno have brought a lot of foreigners to the city there's certainly well over 50,000 foreigners in the city now it's a city of 400,000 certainly well over 50,000 let's say 15 percent of the city population now and Burno has become known abroad it's it's very common now to see articles being published in leading western newspapers The Guardian, The New York Times and so on about Burno various aspects of Burno can you can you hear me what's the problem yeah we can hear you sorry I took the liberty to remove the presentation from the screen so we can see you okay I'm coming to an end now anyway so it would be coming well known abroad and so on Burno of course until recently was utterly unknown abroad my favorite story about this is when my bank in England sent me a letter in the 1970s in Burno it was addressed to me with my address in Burno and the person who had sent the letter typed up the letter from Burno had addressed it to Don Sparling and my street address Porno, Czechoslovakia Porno, Czechoslovakia Burno was just something that didn't even look as if it could be pronounced well Burno is a little bit better known than it was in back then and the city itself has been very much transformed it's a very lively city it's a very young city it's a very experimental city one of the experiments I'll just have a little this is the commercial bit at the end the city of Burno in order to help attract foreigners cooperates with us or we cooperate with the city there is an NGO which is largely financed by the city also by many of the leading international firms in Burno and our job is to be a place where people who are thinking of coming to Burno who already have agreement with firms who are coming to Burno people who are settling in Burno physically people who have problems in Burno foreigners highly educated foreigners there are the people that we work with and we are the city is very happy that it's able to do this but it's interesting it was the first city in this country to come up with this idea or we presented it with the idea and they accepted this idea that the city should be making these extra efforts to attract foreigners to Burno so that's it for now thank you that was perfectly on time first of all but also super interesting well if anybody has any question please write it in the chat and we're happy to ask them while he's here I did have a little question for you Don that I was thinking about because you were describing of course how Burno at the beginning being close to Vienna there was a geographical benefit of course in kind of offsetting some of the work there the cost of manufacturing and so on and so forth from what you know right the resurrection the technological resurrection of Burno did that depend on geographical elements too or was it really the human capital that was still present in the city despite you know World War II and what happened in that period of time I think it was the human capital the closeness to Vienna was not so important I suppose the main importance now of being close to Vienna is that they've got a big international airport you know Burno has a boat international airport but it's very small and has very very few flights right but otherwise no it depended on internal capital of course now it depends on external, internal human capital now it depends on external capital coming in because the growth of the of these firms in Burno is phenomenal even during COVID the numbers of foreigners in Burno increased and we need the foreigners from outside and so the the aim has to be to make the city as attractive as possible for foreigners and that's part of our job in the expanse centre of course but the city of Burno knows everything it can as well in terms of providing services if possible in English and so on and so on so it's we're sucking in capital from we're very fortunate I should say it's not so much Vienna what we're very fortunate in is being beside Slovakia I hate to say it but there's a huge brain drain from Slovakia and we're we're first in line because the receiving end of the you know 70% of the foreign students at Maserich University are from Slovakia and you go into the centre of Burno and you go into shops and you hear as much Slovak almost being spoken as you hear Czech so that human capital has been extremely important for us very good point we did actually receive a question also in the QA session I know that we're almost out of time but this is a very good question so I want to take the time Miro is asking how did you end up in Burno 50 years plus I came thinking I would teach English for a year it's very strange it was after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 but I had visited just before the invasion and I found it a fascinating country it's a beautiful country it's got incredible historical resources you know chateaus and castles it's got beautiful countryside and very very amazing people and so I visited before the invasion it was after the invasion and I was thinking I've been studying in England for two years finished that and I thought I'd like to stay in Europe for another year and after the invasion I became very curious I'm from Burma in Canada capital city of Canada and I'm a political junkie my whole life has been interested in politics I was very curious after the invasion because if you know anything about the invasion in 68 it took a long time for the invading Soviets to really close down the country and still seemed as if some of the gains of the Prague Spring could be maintained so I was very curious to see what actually was happening on the ground so I came thinking I would teach English at a language school for a year and then go back to Canada and I was here for a year and then I was in Prague for seven years then yes I met a woman I got married and it's always sure we know this right and so then I came back she didn't want to go to Prague and she didn't want to go to Canada which was also exceptional many Czech women were very happy to marry a foreigner and move abroad so I came back and at that point of position came up in the university so that's my story that is a fascinating story we also got one last question hopefully this is a quick one but because people are really loving by the way the stories they're really having a good time do you think in your experience is it absolutely necessary to learn Czech or Slovak to be able to live there and access the doctor obviously you know if you have Czech you can access them better but I mean of these 50,000 foreigners that are here there are not that many that are fluent in Czech well some of them are not I mean yes no this has changed totally it's because of the presence it's like a chicken and the egg kind of thing in my opinion the thing that came first was this sharp surprise in the number of foreigners and people realized they just had to learn English and be able to communicate with them it was also helped by the fact that English back around 2000 was introduced as a compulsory subject in schools from grade 1 so you're getting a whole new generation of people who have English but no you can certainly come here I encourage people to come here and we're here to help you as well there are many problems I mean what's a better introduction seriously knowing that there are people like you right that are helping people getting there and I have to say that when you were mentioning before how during the manufacturing textile phase people from Bernau were going to learn from like Manchester the secrets of textiles I think there are many cities in Europe now Munich where I live at the moment they should learn from Bernau how to welcome this how to make things accessible what's actually happening in a city like Bernau I know that we are over time I really want to say thank you Don this has been super super interesting thank you so much thanks for giving me the chance as I said I'm a great Bruno Patriot that sounds great to everybody thank you so much for taking this time with us have a great time for the rest of the afternoon and we will come back together at 7 for the quiz with Radek remember that there are prizes to be won at the end and for closing this thank you again thanks very much bye bye ciao