 I'm going to go ahead and get started. Welcome. This is case study session on the Martin Luther King Junior Center. It's about preserving history for future generations. My name is George Domet. I'm the founder and CEO of Palantir.net, Drupal Design Development and Strategy firm based in Chicago. So let me, before we kind of get into things, let me kind of get a show of hands. How many folks here are American? Two, OK. So the rest of you, right. And I don't actually have a really good sense. I mean, Martin Luther King Junior is a very well known figure in the United States. But I don't have a really good sense of how well known he is outside the United States. So go ahead and raise your hand if you think you have a pretty good knowledge of who Dr. King is and what his accomplishments were, apart from what's on my side. OK, pretty good. Excellent. So yeah, so Dr. Martin Luther King, of course, famous civil rights leader in the United States, helped put an end to segregation in the United States between African-Americans and whites. Nobel Prize winner, advocate for social justice, assassinated in 1968. In America, what most people in America kind of know these sort of very basic facts about him. But what they don't have as much a good a sense of is really what the core ideals and fundamentals of Dr. King's philosophy of nonviolence were. In Dr. King's birthday is a national holiday in the United States. And it's also considered a day of service. But in terms of the educational curriculum at schools in the United States, it very often tends to be a very, very brief focus on the civil rights movement. And folks don't really have a chance to get in depth into a very full understanding of who Dr. King was and what he stood for beyond ending segregation and promoting civil rights. So some of the folks who are responsible for helping change that are the King's Center. The King's Center was founded by Coretta Scott King in 1969 after Dr. King was assassinated. It's located actually in Atlanta, in the South, in Dr. King's childhood neighborhood. The entire neighborhood has been sort of preserved as it was during his childhood in the 1930s and 40s as a national park. So when you go to visit the King's Center and Dr. King's neighborhood, which includes the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was a major center of the civil rights movement in the South at that time, it's all been preserved the way it was when Dr. King was growing up with the kind of classic houses. Dr. King's childhood home is in that neighborhood. You can actually tour it. In addition to the King's Center Memorial, which is where our client in this case was located and where Dr. King's final resting spot is, his tomb in this reflecting pool here, there's also an exhibit, a large visitor center that's run by the park service across the street that goes into additional information detail about the civil rights movement, about Dr. King, with lots of really great exhibits. In the King's Center itself, there's material honoring both Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rosa Parks, who is another major figure in the US civil rights movement. And what folks don't know about it is that it's also the largest repository of primary source material on the civil rights movement anywhere in the world. And it's actually located on the top floor of this building. You can barely see over here to the left. And it is literally millions and millions of documents, everything relating to letters that Dr. King received, personal papers, papers relating to the various organizations that he was involved in and that the civil rights movement was involved in. And they were just there, sitting in the top floor of this building in folders. No one was really taking particular care to preserve them. And that's a big part of what this project was about. The other important thing to know about the King's Center, which is run by Dr. King's children, family, and some other folks who are from the civil rights movement, is that they are an organization that's dedicated to spreading knowledge about Dr. King's philosophy around the world. So this project that we were involved in, the Imaging Project and Digital Archive, was coordinated by J.P. Morgan Chase. J.P. Morgan Chase, a large American bank and financial institution, has a division called Technology for Social Good. Technology for Social Good is essentially responsible for they find a deserving nonprofit organization and they kind of bring to bear the full weight of J.P. Morgan Chase's technology consulting expertise. They help fund these projects. This is a lot of really high profile and really well coordinated effort with the full weight and backing of one of the largest financial companies in the United States. So the goal of this project was, as I said before, there were all of these documents located in the top floor of the King's Center building that were just sitting there on shelves and folders. So to really preserve them, preserve them, archive them, and ensure that they would be around for future generations and also to make them available online. Prior to this, the only way you could get access to these documents was if you were an academic researcher who had gotten kind of special permission to go in and see them. And even if you had permission to enter the archive, you're essentially in a very large room with tons and tons of shelves. They're not very well labeled. You really don't know where to even find what it is that you're looking for. So we were actually brought into the project by CNG Partners. CNG Partners was firm responsible for the graphic design on this project. We're, of course, Palantir.net. We were responsible for the website development. CNG Partners was doing the design. As I said before, J.P. Morgan Jays Technology for Social Good was kind of the overall client responsible for coordinating all these folks in collaboration with the King family. So when we started the project, the primary contact was Martin Luther King III, who's Dr. King's oldest son. Other folks who were involved, MicroStrategies was responsible for the Alfresco system that was basically organized, cataloged, all of the information from the digital archive as well as all the metadata. Imaging, et cetera is the organization that was responsible for doing the actual digital imaging of the documents. And then we had our other technology partners, AT&T, EMC, who provided cloud hosting for the documents in the archive, and Acquia who also provides hosting and support for the Drupal site. So to give you kind of a really good visual sense of what it was that this project involved, this is the base that was kind of set up right outside the King Center Archives. These are a group of students and volunteers from Morehouse and Spellman, which are the traditionally historically African-American colleges near Atlanta and also the alma mater of Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King. And they had this entire just huge massive operation that was all centered around pulling the documents out of the archives, going through them, ensuring that they were cataloged and organized in a way that would make them findable again in the future, that the documents, the physical documents themselves were being preserved with, you know, acid-free paper and archival material, that the documents were being scanned, that the metadata was being applied. So there were actually, these documents were being reviewed by groups of King scholars, historians and other researchers who would look at these documents, kind of figure out what they were about, provide abstract as well as key words to ensure that folks would be able to know what they were and find them. So this is kind of the operation they had set up. This is an actual digital imaging station they had and this was custom created by the folks at Imaging, et cetera. And it was really informed by a lot of work that had been done with actually the Kennedy Library, which had kind of, a few years earlier, it had a lot of similar needs around this sort of preserving massive amounts of documents. So this is an imaging station, the document would be light down. Here on this table in the center, you'd have the camera above that would take the image of the photo and then it would go into various programs and other stations for processing and archiving. So overall project goals, this was to help the King Center better connect with a new generation and improve awareness of Dr. King's philosophy. The King Center is an organization that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. It's a very well-respected organization because of the involvement of Dr. King's family and it really are the bearers of his legacy, but they're not a hugely funded organization. They're a small organization and they have traditionally had very limited resources for reaching out to the wider public. Of course, to provide access to all of these documents that the public has never seen before and we'll kind of talk a little bit about what they are. And because our assignment was to launch this site on Dr. Martin Luther King Day to be able to withstand the massive amount of traffic that we were anticipating with a very highly publicized launch. So to step back a little bit and give you a little bit of the history, this was about in August of last year, late July actually. I got a call from folks at CNG Partners and they wanted to chat with me about this project. And so I took the call and when they said what it was, they said, are you interested? And I said, hell yes. And then we started talking about the timeline and realizing that this was an incredibly ambitious project that had to be put together in a very short amount of time with a lot of different players, all those different partners, a lot of different moving pieces. But we knew that this was a project that was important enough that we were gonna do what we needed to do to make it work. So this is kind of the technology stack that went into it. Obviously Drupal was used for the website. Al fresco was the system that was used to store all of the digital assets. Atmos was the cloud platform provided by AT&T and EMC that serves all of the images to the website. jQuery and SAS of course were our kind of front end technologies. So the sex part of me get a little bit technical, not terribly technical, because quite honestly, I'm a business guy. I don't fully understand how all of the technology works. But I had a few conversations with Arthur Falschenbeck White, who were two of the engineers. Arthur was actually the technical lead on this project. And so I think they've given me just enough information to be dangerous. So if I mangle anything, apologies. So the archive, the image, after we go through that whole process where all the images are scanned and digitized and all the data is applied and everything, those are managed in Al fresco. Are you guys pretty much familiar with Al fresco? Who will raise hands? Okay, so Al fresco is another open source content management platform similar to Drupal. Although while Drupal is optimized for web publishing and web application development, Al fresco is really designed around document management, asset management, that sort of use case. And so we knew because we were working with Drupal that we would be able to talk with Al fresco, we weren't responsible for the Al fresco implementation. So we did what we could to make sure that we had a really close connection with that team who was responsible. And I'll cover that in a little bit. So the archive assets, so the actual images themselves that get fed to the website are stored in the cloud using AT&T synaptic storage as a service, which is a platform built on top of EMC Atmos. The website, as I said before, is hosted on Aquias Managed Cloud using the Amazon web services platform. And we built the website in Drupal 7 using, among many other modules, we used Zen for the base theme, and on the front end, which I'll demonstrate, we had some pretty heavy needs for interactive functionalities so that involved CSS3, SAS, Compass, and jQuery. So this is kind of the overview document of how things worked. So we've got, and this is the one that makes my head spin a little bit, but I'll do my best to walk through it. So the end user here gets information that's fed to them both from the Drupal website and images that are fed to them from Atmos. So the images live in Atmos. The rest of the website lives in Drupal. Alfresco feeds images to the Drupal site, which then runs them through a queue, creates derivatives, throws them up to Atmos. We then use the migrate module to pull the non-image, the non-document data, the metadata and whatnot from Alfresco. Once again, run it through Drupal queues, throw it out to the node, then use Drupal to tie these two things together. Might be asking, why don't you have the image content living on the same server as the Drupal site? The reason for that is we had access to this fantastic Atmos Cloud. The AT&T folks were providing a tremendous amount of storage and this was for scalability. The number of documents in the archive is around a million and the number that we wanted to be able to put online totaled at a couple hundred thousand. And so based on our storage requirements, we knew that putting it in the same place as the Drupal server was not going to work. So we kept the Drupal stuff on Drupal, have the images on AT&T, EMC, Atmos, and then, but then we used Drupal to tie them together and serve them to the user. So just kind of digging in a little bit into the way that we pulled the metadata out of Alfresco. In this case, we took the migrate module and we integrated that with Alfresco's CMIS interface. CMIS is the kind of API standard that Alfresco and a few other CMSs uses. It's kind of an open standard. Drupal doesn't actually have a lot of really great support for CMIS. There is a CMIS module, but for this use case and for the very kind of limited amount of stuff that we were doing. And on the advice of the Alfresco team, we decided to kind of minimize use of that as much as possible and really lean heavily on the migrate module to pull stuff in. This was needed to be very robust because as you can see, some documents have over 200 related pages, images, lots of different fields associated with each one. Also enabled us to be able to use Alfresco's authoritative place if we needed to take anything off the website for any reason. If we had a document that went up before it was ready or if there was some information that was wrong, that can be pushed to Drupal from Alfresco. Drupal cues, and this is where we're kind of testing the limits of my technical knowledge here, but this was essentially used for basically generating the images. So we would have the images pulled in and they would start off in their raw form, somewhere between four megabytes and 100 megabytes. They're being scanned at about, I believe, 400 DPI. So they're pretty large in size. Then we use the Drupal cues to create derivatives, both a primary and a secondary derivative. And we pushed those out to the Atmos Cloud for serving to the end user. Yeah, in preparation for launch, we actually had to have 12 virtual machines running to generate the derivatives. We launched with somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 documents in the archive. So, and that all happened in the kind of final two weeks before launch. So we just kind of threw a whole bunch of processing power at it. So the Atmos file storage, we created a custom stream wrapper that connected, again from Drupal to Atmos services. We tracked the Atmos IDs and then translated that to match the information we have already in Drupal from the information we've pulled in from Alfresco via Migrate. And we had to be very careful about how we set this up, especially during development to make sure that while we wanted our production environment to be able to remove images if necessary, we didn't want the staging and development environments to be able to do so. So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and talk kind of about the process and collaboration, how we made this work with all these different players, all these different technologies of play. Everything was in a state of very rapid development. And as I said, we came on at the end of July. We had our kickoff meeting at the beginning of August at the King Center. We actually were not able to begin production in earnest until November. Martin Luther King Day is actually the third week of January. So we had a very, very limited amount of time to make all of this work for a very, very ambitious project. So having really good project management and coordination was absolutely vital to the success of this project. At Palantir, we use the red mine ticketing system to manage our projects and tickets. What we do with red mine is we actually have, we expose those tickets, not just internally but also to our client. So the client is able to review tickets to see the progress that's going on, is able to comment, is able to create new tickets as needed. We also shared some of those with some of the other partners working on the project. We had regular scheduled check-ins between our technical team and the different partners, particularly the folks at Micro Strategies, the Al fresco team and the folks at CNG who were doing the design. Those were kind of regularly scheduled progress updates, very kind of simple, you know, identifying what blockers were, how progress was going. For both Micro Strategies and CNG Partners, as well as the folks involved in the overall project management at JP Morgan Chase, we had kind of, as well as the folks at Acquia, closer to launch, we had kind of a back channel hotlines going. So if we're working, for example, on something related to the Al fresco CMIS integration and we're running into a blocker and we need some question answered, we were able to pick up the phone, call someone over at Micro Strategies and get an answer right away so that didn't block our effort. You know, similarly, if one of the folks from JP Morgan Chase wants to know what's going on, how we're doing, get a check in, in addition to the regular scheduled calls, they can also contact us directly. We also set up, and this is really important, I think, for anyone who's working on a project like this, where you've got these sort of challenges, we had weekly executive calls. And these were calls between me at Palantir, between our lead project manager at JP Morgan Chase and between one of the principals at CNG Partners. And this was a checking call, particularly as we got toward the kind of second half, the later stages of the project, where we would be able to deal with issues that had basically bubbled up or escalated and hadn't been dealt with through the regular check in process so that then we were able to go back to our teams and say, you know what, we really need to take care of this issue because this one is really important. And to identify the sorts of things that were necessary for launch. So my next few slides are actually some screenshots of the site, but I'm gonna do something that's a little bit dangerous and I'm actually gonna try to show you the pages on the live site, which I try to never do in a presentation, but I think it'll give you a little bit of a better experience, a better understanding of what this site was like. And if it doesn't work out for any reason, I still have my pretty slides. So let me find. Oh, there we are. Excellent. So this is the homepage of the King Center site. We've got a few sort of rotating homepage features. Talk about sort of different major key stories. I find my mouse here. There we are. I think it'd be helpful if we kind of jumped right into the archive. This is a section of the archive on intersecting movements, the way that Dr. King worked with and coordinated with a wide variety of different groups who were all kind of attacking the problems from the issues faced by the civil rights movement from different perspectives. And so you have a lot of different information on here. So the basic view in the archive, the default view is this sort of tile view. This is all kind of randomly generated. You can see when you scroll over, you get some information about each of the items in the archive. So maybe we'll just go to this one. So this is, oh yeah, if we scroll down, we actually load some more. So this is kind of an endless scroll. Very cool fact. This is all done with jQuery. I'm gonna just pull up this particular item right here. Again, this is all using jQuery. There's not a single bit of flash used on this site. That was really important. We have tried it out on an iPad. It seems to work pretty well, even though that wasn't one of the platforms that we were testing for. You can get a kind of a sense here. You can obviously view the document, move it around. Zoom in and view it up close. So I think we're kind of loading in the higher resolution version there. View the abstract for the document that just in a very brief couple sentences tells what it's about. And view, some of these have, this particular document doesn't, many of the documents have actually transcribed versions, particularly for Dr. King's handwritten speeches. And then we also have all sorts of the different genre topics and other kind of metadata associated with it so that you can find related information. What's also really cool about this, and I will talk about this a little more in relation to launch, are these social media sharing tools, enabling folks to use Twitter or Facebook or other social media to actually link to a specific document and tell their friends about it. And this was something that was really, really cool to watch on launch day. Again, kind of going back to one of our major goals, which was to increase public awareness of Dr. King's work to provide more than just that kind of very shallow, brief overview that they might have already and to really kind of dig into who this man was, what he did and what he was talking about. There are some amazing, amazing items in these archives. In addition to some of the highlights, I know we have a handwritten version of his Nobel Prize speech. We have an early draft of the March on Washington speech, the I Have a Dream speech that doesn't have I Have a Dream in it yet. We have one of my favorite, favorite things. And then we can pull it up. These are, these note cards. So these note cards are actually little handwritten index cards that Dr. King had. And these are just little ideas. And he would write these down and there's dozens of these. And he would just write down different ideas or thoughts or concepts that he wanted to think about and to have at his disposal. And he would use these when he was putting together speeches and writings. And these are all handwritten by him. These are just sort of amazing things for folks to have access to. And it really demonstrates the depth of his thinking, not just about civil rights, but about matters of spirituality, non-violent philosophy, non-violence philosophy, ways to bring together what he called the beloved community as well as his major principles. So jumping back to these slides here. Yeah, this is actually right. This is the draft of the Nobel Prize speech. Just one of the really great highlights you can see where he's crossed out things and changed his words. It's really, really cool. And you can kind of get lost in this. One thing I forgot to mention, you saw that tile view at the beginning. For folks who are maybe looking for a particular document, we also have really great search tools. And there's also a more standard kind of list view where you can browse content and actually see the information without hovering over it. But the idea behind the tiles is really to give folks kind of a sense of discovery as they're going through the archive. So launch. We had no idea how much traffic this site would get. What we did know was that there was a lot of publicity planned for it. And we had essentially the entire weight of J.P. Morgan Chase's marketing and PR department behind promoting this launch. So we decided to be prepared and we worked with the folks at Aqua as well as the folks at Swasta who specialize in cloud hosting. We ran pre-launch performance testing. We ran a couple different rounds of it. Tweaking every time as we go. We made a few tweaks to the site. Made a lot of tweaks to the server configuration to make sure that we could hit our numbers. And we actually ended up successfully testing 25,000 simultaneous simulated users. And so the kind of metric here is basically what if 25,000 people like all clicked at once on a page on the site. We wanted to be sure that we could handle that kind of traffic. As it turns out on launch day we were covered BBC News, USA Today. ABC News was actually mentioned on the evening news. CNN had both a broadcast story on CNN Headline News, also on their website. A whole bunch of different international media outlets talking about it. Chase.com was promoting the site on their homepage. They had a special promotion at Madison Square Garden at the Knicks games that were going on that week. It was in addition to a exhibit booth which you'll see in a minute. They also had a, on the Jumbo Tron they were also promoting it. So, you know, so everyone in theory could have tried to pull out their phones and try to access the site at once. So that was something we were looking out for. And of course on 16,000 Chase ATMs, ATMs, the cash machines or Germany, Geltautomat. And so they were promoting those on those homepage screens. So we ended up actually serving only about 175,000 unique visitors on launch day which was a few orders of magnitude below the amount of traffic that we could accommodate. So everything went very smoothly. Everyone was very happy with the launch. And because we were hosted in the cloud we were actually able to, you know, after we had done this massive scaling up to get ready for launch day we were actually able to very quickly and easily scale the servers back down so that we could handle, you know, the more kind of everyday amounts of traffic after launch was over. So yeah, this is actually the screen from my local bank back home. This is the message that was on the ATM screen. So that was launched, that was in January. We took a few weeks off, we all caught our breaths and then we started on phase two. And phase two, which is actually I believe in its final throws of development right now and should be launching very soon, is share your dream. So share your dream and this goes back to a larger part of the promotion around this effort was about getting people to engage with Dr. King's ideas and to engage with the archive and to really put themselves out there by writing down their dreams and sharing them. So share your dream will allow folks to submit and share their dreams online. We also have, as we'll see, a ton of dreams that have already been collected that are going to be shared online at launch. And this, like I said, ties into the larger initiative to encourage engagement and to help provide folks with a deeper understanding of Dr. King's philosophy. So this is an exhibit booth. This was created by the folks at Sanji Partners and a lot of the branding and design and everything really derives from the work that they did for this booth. They had one of these at Madison Square Garden in New York City before launch. They had one of these set up in Washington, D.C. for the unveiling of the dedication of the Dr. King Memorial, which went up last August. And when you go into the booth, you'll see there's this kind of dream wall in the background. And the dream wall is where they've kind of physically put up all of these notes with all of these dreams that people have written down as they've walked into the booth and shared them. And this is one of our volunteers here who's manning the booth. You can see she's got all this paper and notes where you can write down. You'll get a piece of paper. You can write down your dream. And then what's really cool is, so they take the dream and they actually have like a little simulated digital archiving scanning camera right there in the booth. And so they take the digital image of the booth. And so if you remember, we took a look at, that was the one that was actually located in the King Center archives themselves. This is just a kind of a little mini version of that. So it obviously is not capturing things that archival quality, but what it is is capturing them at a resolution that we can use on the web. And so these are the actual designs created by CNG partners for the Share Your Dream feature. So we have these note cards. And the idea is that we want folks to be able to take a look at dreams and explore them by keyword and by geographic region. So you can kind of see, if your dream is about love, you can click on love and you can kind of see all the different places and dreams that people have had about love and where they come from. We also have, yeah, so this is actually a close up of one of the dreams. You can see where using kind of tag clouds, where folks in this region are dreaming about the different ideas that are expressed in here from the transcription that's taken, as well as kind of the larger geographical map. So this is where folks in the United States are dreaming about happiness. And so that is, of course, it's simulated. This is all from the design comps, but when we launch, we're gonna use that information that's been taken from this booth that's been touring around, as well as allow people to add their own information online to this feature. So that's the material I have, and so if folks have any questions, I'd be more than happy to answer them. I also have a few links to some resources, obviously, kingcenter.org, the case study page on Palantir.net where we talk about the project. Follow Palantir on Twitter, follow me on Twitter if you want. I usually tweet about non-drupal things, but it's if you want to. And then, of course, make sure you rate the session and evaluate it. I'm actually gonna be talking about this project at a few other events this fall, and so it would really help for me to understand kind of what I hit well if I talked about some of the things you wanted to hear about, if there were things about the project that I didn't talk about that you wanted to hear about. And, of course, let me know if you have questions, raise your hand. There is how many developers who are working on the project, and how you manage that in the U.S. a notoriously difficult time between November and June holidays? Yes. So can you go to one of my things? No, well, so we actually, we close at Palantir between Christmas and New Year, and what we did is we actually timed that along with the client QA period. So while all of our folks got that break, then that was the period during which the folks on the client side were reviewing and submitting QA tickets. We came back at the beginning of January. We had basically a week and a half to address the QA. We did not, we had a team on the Palantir side. I think there were probably around half a dozen of us working on the project simultaneously. I don't have the exact figures that kind of feels like that, just based on my recollection. We definitely had folks who put in long hours on this, but we also have really, we had a really great project manager on the project, and she was really, really good about making sure as we went through. And of course, the scope of the project did change. When we got started, it was this Share Your Dream functionality was originally gonna be part of the original launch scope. And we had to cut back a few times in order to reach that kind of minimum, viable experience for launch. And so we were just really, really careful about that. We monitored our burn rates and resourcing and the scope very carefully. Again, that was that really direct coordination, particularly with the folks at JP Morgan to make sure that we were managing expectations properly and that we weren't gonna get into a position where someone was gonna get in over their head. So that's, yeah, I mean, we definitely had folks who put in long hours on it, but I think we were, by and large, able to kind of preserve people's Thanksgiving and Christmas pretty well. Other questions? Well, thank you all very much.