 So our next talk is by Dan Lehmig, Director of Benson. It's about supporting content creators of science by Dr. No-Pathetist. After a momentary lapse in technical skill, let's first have a quick rundown of who I am. I'm Dan Lehmig, Director of Benson. I'm William, a Master of Science and I've been there for some number of years now. And the reason that's interesting will become apparent shortly. I've been a member of the committee since 2002, when I made my Bup Silver account and made my first Tribune steps into the scene by submitting a public law which was promptly closed and was completely invalid on the character panel with seven different bugs in one report. And since then, I've been sort of moving through the wider KB community by way of Amaroff, I've been a part of the Calibra project for a number of years and was an instigating member of the Gaining Freedom project which is why the Master of Science thing was important because it allowed me to have some time to dedicate to this project. It is no longer a thing, however, it's still been an important part of leading me to where I am now, which is, as an employee of the Musicians, a part of the KB Store team. And it's... Yes, I'm not always a person. And the Gluon Gaining Freedom thing has helped us cement a vision for social software distribution based around the open-fibrating services. And that sort of allowed us to come to grips with what some of those issues that exist in software and content distribution in the free software community, we have some things and have had it for some time and there is not a problem at all, which is we have lots of content, we have a lot of very active creators, both code, we have a lot of artists, we have really enthusiastic people, and we even have a way of getting that stuff to people. Way over a decade ago, a guy called Frank Karnacher came up with this open-fibrating services thing, which back then was called Get Hot New Stuff. It was called that for a very long time because no one could come up with a term that wasn't buzzwordy to describe what it was, which is then what open-fibrating services is. It's slightly buzzwordy. Get Hot New Stuff as a name. Basically describes it really well. It's a way of getting hot new stuff, which is why the framework that we have to support it has still basically got that kind of name. The problems we've got is obviously we always want to attract more people. We want more content. We have quite a lot of it, but it's always nice to get nice new shiny stuff. We want to get that hot new stuff, right? And then one problem we've got is that we need some way of enticing people in who are not necessarily free software, free culture people. People who, well, have bills to pay. Which also I guess matches most of us these days. It was obviously less of an issue for me as a student because that was being a student. There is some kind of idea that students don't have bills. They just don't know just. And then they have massive debt, and that's just the norm. Whereas when you get a little bit older you realize that you have bills and massive debt and you kind of want to make those a little bit smaller or easier to manage. So we need some way of dealing with this and we want to be able to offer that to people. So a description of some of the texts that we have in insistence which allow us to support that kind of situation. We have this thing called the Open Collaboration Services apart of the social desktop. It was called GitHub New Stuff, but it's now called OCS. Of course you all know if you've used any software essentially built by KDE over the last decade you will have seen these little buttons with a star in it that says get new wallpapers or download which can be on the list for K-Stars being the kind of thing. Basically the same trick that is employed on the Android Store for any kind of large game or anything basically you can't upload anything to the Android Play Store. That's larger than 50 megs, so you need some way of downloading it. We have a similar situation with things like K-Stars where the data sets are somewhere in the region of 500 bits if you want all of it. And obviously you can't stick that on a distribution CD but you can share K-Stars itself which is sort of small so we have a way of supporting that so that's what the K-Stars add up thing is that is also using OCS. And of course over the decades everybody has hated on it at some point or another. I've not been innocent of this myself. One of the most well known issues is a very technical but very silly issue. Basically it was built around what was available on KDE Look at the time which means that we don't have a list of preview images but we have a specific number of predefined potential previews which means that there is a maximum of 10 rather than an arbitrary large number which would have made a lot more sense. However, all of that's apart through all of the various attempts at killing it off or changing it drastically or facing with something else which is still here. And as of last year this is basically the first anniversary of CDART's announcement last year of the main server implementation finally after a decade of attempting to make it happen becoming a KDE project so everything and free software yes, it wasn't at the time and for various reasons but the all of the server side implementation is now true free software if we could make it any freer we would but there are some there's always slight issues with that sort of thing which means that the DAFSA is currently still owned by some commercial entity because that's a protection legislation in Germany doesn't allow for that to be transferred to another and that's actually kind of nice so it means that all of those all of the massive amount of data we have is still there and it's still protected basically means that yeah, it's very nice, it's very safe it's very nice That's actually a component that's which Ah yes, there's the Poisson-Porten project which is helps out the data to the KDE regularly so in case of this commercial entity it will start with KDE once KDE can take both the code and the service and run it itself or someone else from it basically a similar sort of contract to the KDE FreeQ foundation exists for the KDE sort it just allows an external entity to run it but in case the systems not the systems, it's technically still called Hyde or Ron whatever the tool I honestly remember but the commercial entity that currently runs the KDE store has a poison pill in place that if ever they were to do something that the KDE community does not like that commercial entity will lose its rights to host the KDE store and lose the rights to the contents as well so the server component of it is split into three things so we have the OCS file server which is at the CESD central at the content store it hosts all of the actual content it's a wide distributed system and it's a lot more stable not stable, it's a lot more scalable as an architecture than the old one which was very keen but not scalable and can actually run on a single server which if we're trying to do software distribution on the site as well isn't really an option so that was fixed there's the CDN which is really, really small, it's a content distribution network kind of similar to mirror break and then there is the OCS web server which is sort of the bit that most people will see it's got the web store itself so all of the various websites there's three listed here for essentially but there is nothing like 15 of them in total a bunch of historical ones as well so if you want to look into some if you've forgotten that certain things existed like the very, very shiny enlightenment things that exist on there as well there's all kinds of interesting historical documentation on there so all of the content that existed on KD New York and the old OCS web network back in the day still exists, it's just been put to one side slightly still available but not quite so in your face it's also available through RSS which is useful if you want to show a certain category of data on any websites on there there's a bunch of buttons and widgets and things so if you have a piece of content on the store that you want to show to people on their own website you can get a piece of code that you just can search on your website and then it will show down on SS6 and so on and so on I was using my own data which is ancient and minimal so the example there would be the first supporter on the Ryan Haddad concept because no one supports it, that's not a b-side for me it's a very strange little thing and there is perhaps most important for us in this case the OCS API which is a thin access wrapper which talks through the OCS web server through the file server and the important thing here is that we have access to the whole stack now which means that we have problems in the past that yes it would be nice if we could extend KU stuff which I'll get to in a second with some more stuff but we couldn't because getting certain things into the API would take in certain cases literal years so not really very nice for the entirely simple social issues the whole system was wrong Ryan was under a few people so it was just really busy but the end result was that nothing really happened so now that we have that kind of control we can actually do stuff with this and then there's all sorts of other extra little bits if you're interested it's all in the Git repo KU then we have also announced about half an hour after the enhancement of the KU Web Store itself becoming free software on a KU project we also announced a split of KU stuff as a framework which was that we now have in effect three frameworks rather than one it's all still in the same single repo but the effect is that we have KU stuff core which now has all of the non-user interface related functionality of the library we have KU stuff itself which is named a little bit silly because of historical reasons we cannot change the library name which is KU stuff because we have kind of a problem which is that we have to stick with this slightly more but that one is oh yes, so KU stuff core is tier two now the reason for that being an important thing is that the old version of KU stuff 3 depended on in particular it depended on KIO and KXML GUI which combines to essentially pulling in the entire world and we have a lot of projects who were reluctant to use KU stuff because there are large dependencies a problem if you want to distribute on things that are not Linux on Linux it's just sort of it's very very easy do you just say it's a big problem it's a big problem it's a big problem so we needed to be able to split it up a bit kind of the same way so that happened with this and one of the sort of reason for it happening was that we wanted to get a set of quick components made which allow you to access KU stuff and having to require widgets to be added to your project seems slightly silly so that set of very simple widgets now components now which allow you to show and download and manage KU stuff so the sort of most important part here that I was talking about before is the money side of it so this is the technology that we already have so what do we want to do so we want to be able to financially support the people who create the content what we don't want to do quite importantly is we don't want to particularly stick up a paywall and in the content creation community at the moment there is this thing called Patreon which has been the source of much duration between content creators who argue in the variety of ways and some of them are very heavily oriented towards no one will see the stuff that I create unless you pay me so there is already a system for this called Patreon we don't particularly want to create but what we do want to do is we want to make it really really easy that's easy for everybody involved we want to make it easy for content creators we want to make it easy for the application creators and we want to make it really easy for the consumers we also want to make it predictable so that's the thing that things like Patreon does you have a very well defined monthly outgoing and that's really powerful if you want to support someone you you can support them in a number of ways so donation is one way but we can also have a subscription system that's our way of doing it and what we the best sort of thing that came up in the discussion of this was the idea that it should be almost accidental not actually accidental because spending money accidentally generally speaking is quite a bad thing so we have to make it so easy that you can very nearly do it accidentally so yeah that's what the title means it was later now and so there are two different things we have the donation system which is a direct payment system you make a choice I want to give some money to this to interrupt the content in KNS 400 OCS that is a question for through the donation link at the OCS the donation page so that's exposed already the application developers have to implement this because it is deliberately no payment system no donation payment system implemented on the KNS store because we want to essentially pass off that kind of trust to someone else so if you're using PayPal we want PayPal to be the handler of that if you're using Bitcoin we want other Bitcoin transaction analysts to do it because it's a very big thing to convince people to pass money through you and again it's one of those cases where we don't particularly want to scrape money and the easiest way of convincing people that we're not scraping funds off of your transactions is not to do it ourselves so we're passing that off to someone else and then you know the money goes directly through PayPal and then you come to a creator but very specifically we don't scrape any other for ourselves there is then the Klingons which is the automatic so that's the sort of predictable outgoings and almost accidental part so it's all done automatically it's happening for the last two months and none of you have noticed unless you suddenly got a unless you have some stuff on the KB store that was popular and you suddenly got some money in your PayPal account that you didn't know where it came from it's interaction based as it says currently one download equals one cent that is always subject to change if you have ideas for this please come and talk to us there is the point here that this is the known outgoings the idea is that Klingons are supported by users on the site who have a known outgoing every month there is not so provision for this but the idea is that you have the ability to pay a sum every month which then gets distributed amongst the creators on the site it's not an appointment and it never will be but if you want to that's done again and then there is a month to pay out for it where again the donations are instant pay out and that's those are the two important things the outgoings that you've got are varied you don't particularly know necessarily what you are spending every month but you can spend essentially whatever amount you want and on using the Klingons system, the automatic system you have a set amount every month you know exactly how much you're paying to support the creators in the and the live distribution it's a very very short month which basically is again because I've only got a small amount of things on the Klingon store which is all very old consequently not very active but it shows you where it is so once you've logged in if you click on your user icon and click on Klingons it will show you a pay out run down possible payments payouts for this month and it gives you it gives you a very very itemized run down that you've got and so yes obviously this is all ancient stuff that have been going on in my profile page it says that the first thing I opened up was 13 years ago essentially one of these things comes right up contemporary but yeah so the idea is down here is anything that can be changed at any time at any rate and that's the important bit here please if you guys have ideas for what would be good as a metric for for getting what sort of stuff this is really good what should be being but yes that's the past the Klingon system as with all sorts of things if you go in settings payment you can get your PayPal address and your Bitcoin public wallet address which is anyway yes the next slide is please tell us please come and talk to us there there's some URLs and where the project is on the barricade and so again it used to be that you had to go through a person who was certainly a part of the but not a part of the infrastructure these days if we had ideas of the KV store it's on how to get it yes so thanks hey so you've been looking at faturing and it's very I've used it very US centric I was wondering if you've been looking at TP as well which seems to be more set up in Europe TP that's basically kind of like a paturing for the mess with the taxation in Europe that's just on the side but no repression is more for payment so you're going through Bitcoin and PayPal right now currently yes we have plans to have more than those and active plans no but that is with the proviso that we are currently focused on the moderation technicalities around the site but general plans but we would like more methods of payment yes definitely so and some other thing you're looking to need our pay as well again you might want to get in touch with them they have fairly similar ideas and concerns so there are some ways I don't know either to or something I can see very similar directions very cool anybody else I have a question you said you can find a person a support or creator is it possible to find a project that is the technicality of the implementation there is no reason why you couldn't create an account on the trading store for a project you support all the donation payment all that is done on an account basis so whoever has uploaded the content for a certain project gets the donations and funds for that project which is also a part of the whole moderation system is the project manager who is going to take care of what he gets access what I have shown just before on the account was the way you put in the information of looking down on your wallet so whether or not you as a person are uploading it you can just you can just set back to the project information but I would probably suggest if it is for a specific project create an account for the project that we then share that our creator team shares that but it is supposed to be shared that sort of thing so create an account for the project and upload the project's content in that account rather than as a person do you know european european they have sort of the problem with group I mean developers and groups groups for organizations and they decide democratically how much should they take from the nation and they have some really cool ideas that you should look into yes you can actually I mean overlapping ideals and specifically again because they are focused on what I can tell on the payment side of it that is going well it makes a lot of sense to let european handle the payment side and then having the PD store handle the contract distribution side because that's what the store is really good at and has been for some time so is it possible that some you get a content creator against a sum and he can find another product and not automatically a money guard it comes up on his store and you are and the version wants to find another product he doesn't want to use but wants to contact I mean like that would be interesting yeah it's not like any kind of progression you can do if you just leave her away okay they have that money because everyone can receive and they see what the rest room you get it's a fun free distribution system yeah that would be good definitely something that people want to do and the creator people everybody that sort of uploads artwork and everything to the store yeah thanks all for this talk and a lot of applause