 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco, California, to Moscone West for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with my co-host this week, analyst John Troyer, co-founder of Tech Reckoning, advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests is Erica Kochi, co-founder of UNICEF Innovation, United Nations Children's Fund, and Mike Walker, director of Open Innovations Labs at Red Hat, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming, joining us today. Thanks for having us. I love this story. So, Erica, take a minute to talk about what you're working on at UNICEF. You guys doing a lot of great stuff. You got a relationship with Red Hat Innovation Labs, but you're doing some pretty amazing things. Take a minute to explain what you're doing at UNICEF, some of the projects, and what we're going to talk about here with the school and the magic box, all the greatness. Sure, so at UNICEF Innovation, essentially what we do is take technology and apply it to the problems facing children around the world, and we do that in a variety of ways. I think the things that we're probably most known for is our work in mobile technology to connect frontline health workers and young people to governments and let them have a say in what's happening in the halls of government, and we have a program called UReport, which has five million young people from all over the world who are talking directly to their government representatives. We need that now more than ever. We certainly do, yes. So open source, obviously with Red Hat, big shared vision, talk about the shared mission, like what's going on with there? Where's the connection? Obviously, open source is great for society. We've seen the benefits all around the world. How is this translating for you guys? Yeah, so I've been at Red Hat for a while, and obviously we're the world's largest enterprise open source software company, and I've, as a consultant, been able to see Red Hat and open source software used for many different purposes and every vertical you can think of, but this one was really unique because we found a natural partnership, I think, between some of UNICEF innovation's vision to use open source and open principles for maximum impact for good, and so when I learned about innovation at UNICEF, really by chance, I just ran into a colleague at a meeting in New York and she gave me a few words about it. I said, this is incredible because we can leverage all of what we've learned at Red Hat, our knowledge of open source to impact people and culture, not just for technical reasons, and partner with UNICEF to make maximum social impact for children that need it most. And you got Red House, the technology company, got a lot of smart people there, but with open source, there's been a DNA in your blood stream of the company around democratization, and now, we're out in the open with everyone online and everything, so this is a democratization piece. Talk about some of the things that you guys are doing with Red Hat. What specifically are you celebrating together here? So, we had a great collaboration with Red Hat, their labs program, which really took a look at our challenge of using big data to better understand what's happening on the ground, especially in schools, in countries that are either coming out of emergencies or have limited access to a lot of the parts of the country, and so we layered satellite imagery, information on poverty, other sets of data, so you can really get a clear picture about where we should be allocating our resources and how we should be planning for emergencies. And this collaboration just finished up a couple days ago, and it's really been great. What's some of the impact? Give an example of some of the use cases. So, obviously saving time, money, moving things around. What are some of the impact things that you see with this project? What are some of the things? A lot of countries right now are thinking about how they can connect all of their schools and make sure all of their schools are online, and give children this access to information that's really essential to thrive in the world of today and tomorrow. And if you don't know where your schools are and you don't know if they're connected or not, and you can't see what else is happening in the socioeconomic way in those areas, it's really hard to figure out what to do and where to start. So we're really just at the beginning of that process to try to connect every school in the world, and we're at the moment where we're trying to lay the groundwork to understand where we're at and where we need to go. So the level of insight you're providing once you connect the schools, you can get, people can know what to do and how to align with what's happening. It's interesting, I was just in Puerto Rico a couple weeks ago, and the young kids there have self-formed their own blockchain network between the schools, and they're teaching themselves how to program, because they recognize that to get out of their world and the mess that they're challenging through now post-hurricane, they want to participate in the new economy. So as someone not knowing that, if I know I could help, you're kind of providing a window into that kind of dynamic where, is that kind of the use case, is that how it's working? So it's participation and contribution base? Absolutely, participation is key for young people and they need to really learn how to acquire the skills that they're going to need to become successful productive adults in the future. And school is one of the entry points to do that. So that's really important. And everyone loves that too. Yeah, I'm kind of curious about the structure of the project. Today in the keynote, Jim White started us off by saying, well, we can't plan everything. We've got to be a little bit more agile. Here's a framework for how to really approach problems when we really don't know what the outcome or even what we're going to hit. So can you talk a little bit maybe about the structure of the process and did you know, did you start with a blank piece of paper, or how did you figure out the pathway to the ultimate outcome here? Yeah, I can take it first. That's a great question because at labs we experiment with ways to get fast feedback. And really in a very short amount of time, usually one to three months and a very limited amount of funds, how can we make maximum impact using open technologies and open practices? So the project was already in progress like most IT projects are, right? There had already been some research, we have data scientists to work with. And one of the first things we did was really talk about really our concerns and fears about how we might work together using an exercise called how might we. We kind of came together and said, how might we solve this problem or that problem and just got it out on the table? One of the aspects that I think work really well is dedicating a small team in a residency style engagement where we worked off-premise. So Red Hatter's left their office, UNICEF folks left their office. We came together in a COLO workspace in New York City that was fairly convenient and we all focused on a tough problem. And we decided really early on that in order to make sure that this problem actually would be usable in the hands of end users in the field across the world, we needed to get face to face. So we made a trip to Latin America to work with a UNICEF field office to get fast feedback on prototypes. And that helps us adjust what we ended up shipping as the product at the end of the two month cycle. Erica, how was the outcome for you and your team? It was great. I think one of the things that really aligns Red Hat and UNICEF is not just a commitment to open source and the values around that, but also this agile methodology. I think that to really move something, a product forward or a program forward, you need to step away from the daily part of life and move away from the email and the connection to the laptop and the phone. And I think we were able to do that. I also think that you need to ground truth things. And so that trip to the field and to really understand the context and the problems that people are facing is completely critical to success. And that's like an agile program. You kind of get out on the front lines. I'm trying to ask about the data. I'm really intrigued. So you got multiple data sources coming in. Love the satellite thing. You're changing lives, but you're saving lives too. As you're talking about humanitarian real-time efforts here. What's the data science thing? What's the tech behind it? Is it ingesting data? Is it third-party data? How does it work? I mean, can you share some of the mechanics on the data science piece? All right, you want to take this? Yeah, I think there's probably a lot we can talk about. I can talk about data all day. Love data. But some of the things that I think were fundamentally really exciting about this project and about what UNICEF innovation has done. So let's take, for example, Facebook. They have a whole lot of data, but that's one company and it's sort of one lens to the world, right? It's quite broad and we get a lot of information, but it's still one company. What UNICEF innovation has done is found ways to partner with private and public companies and private and public data sources in a way that maintains the security and integrity of that data so that it's not exposing proprietary information, but they've been able to create that community, essentially, that's willing to share information, to solve a really tough challenge for social good. And so we have actually a really wide variety of data at our disposal. And our job was to create a sandbox that allowed data scientists to really both proactively plan for things that might happen and reactively plan when events occur, when we don't even know what that event might be. So I like to think back to Jim Whitehurst's speech last year at Summit where he said, planning is dead, we've got to try, learn and modify. I think that's exactly what we aim to build. A platform that hasn't been planned for any one event or action, but provides the flexibility for data scientists to try, experiment, pull different data together, learn from it, sharing maps. We integrate a geospatial data and maps to be able to pass this along quickly and then modify based on the results so we can more quickly achieve something with the greatest impact. That's awesome. Yeah, so for example, if you take, you know, you take like, for example, epidemics, right? So many factors, there's so many different types of data are needed to really understand what's happening in an epidemic. For example, tixika, you have temperature, right? Mosquitoes only breed at a certain temperature. You have poverty, which really indicates standing water where mosquitoes can breed. You have socioeconomic factors. Does the house, more likely, does it have mosquito screens or not? And then you have the social, right? What are people talking about? What are they concerned about? And I think like a really interesting picture emerges when you can start to layer all of these kinds of data and that really helps us see where we should be focusing. It's great discovery information, using the data to drive kind of where to look at and where to focus efforts. Yeah, exactly. And also a global footprint, right? In previous decades, maybe this would have run on a PC with some sort of a proprietary GIS thing or yeah, I'm not even sure, right? You'd chip around disks maybe, but I mean, not to be too product oriented, right? Built on OpenShift, we've seen a whole lot this week, right? These global footprint, it could live on any cloud. I assume that's a piece of it, right? It global accessibility now for the resulting application. Absolutely. And we want to take what we've done in one scenario and apply it to many others and many other locations. And so being open source is key for this because we wouldn't be able to do this in other locations or replicated just as easily. You can hand it to the local folks, have them again adapt it or take it further. Yeah, or have other people work on it, whether it's academics, other companies, us, yeah. Nice, nice. I love this structure, like how it's agile. I got to, Eric, I got to ask you about this because we're seeing a big trend with open source. Obviously that's well on its way to becoming. It is the standard of doing software, but mission driven technology activities aren't just nonprofits anymore. You're starting to see collaboration, the jobs act that Obama put in place really set the table for new kind of funding. So you've seen a lot more younger people coming in and saying, hey, you know what? I can build it on the cloud and grants over but the code can just live on, right? So you're seeing a new flywheel around mission driven non-profits and for profits. A new kind of entrepreneurship culture. Can you share insight into how this has developed? I'm sure you see a lot of it. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. Share them, please. So I think that as technology companies become so much more influential in our lives, they're not just showing you the news anymore, they're moving into every aspect of our lives, whether it's into our homes or even inside our bodies. They're occupying so much more influential role in an individual's life. With that comes a tremendous amount of responsibility. And I think that while it's not enough to say you should do good because it's the right thing to do, I think that employees also really demand it. I think that, you know, and that shift will occur because employees realize that they want to be doing good in the world and if they're going to be influencing so many people's lives, that's really, really important. It's a new citizenship model for the younger generation. Certainly millennials want to work in a company that's not just the profit, hunger, motive. But also there's some dynamics going on with the infrastructure world. You look at Facebook as a classic example, you know, the word weaponizing content has been a bad thing. But we've been talking about in theCUBE, there's actually a reverse of that, polar opposite, which is you can weaponize content for good, meaning that all the same principles that do bad things could be used for good things. So this is where we're starting to see a lot more people saying, hey, let's do more of that and punish. So the new kind of rules are developing in society. So I find it fascinating and I'm just curious, is this known within the societal entrepreneurship culture or what's your view on how to do more, how to do better? I'm doing a lot of work in what AI is going to be meaning, what it's going to mean for children around the world. And, you know, there are so many opportunities. We've been talking about some of them, but there are also a lot of risks, right? What does it mean when your child's best friend is a robot? What does that change about us, you know, as human beings? And so I think it's, you know, you have to look at both sides and you have to be very conscious about designing the technology that you want to see in the world that's going to make the world a good place to live in. And I think that there definitely is an awakening that's going on. This is a first generation set of problems that social entrepreneurship brings, just society. I mean, who sets the policy? Which side of the road the cars drive on? Or, you know, there's new issues that are evolving that have never been seen before, you know? Cyberbullying to all kinds of things happening. So congratulations on all those success. So what's the forecast for Red Hat innovation that has more of this? You're going to continue to double down on it? What other things do you guys have going on? Yeah, so labs is growing quite largely. We are now live in North America, EMEA and APAC with plans to extend to LATAM in the future. And we're growing quite quickly in terms of our ability to execute. I guess, you know, the labs team is relatively small, a small number of specialists, but we are all of Red Hat. So the way we operate is based on what we're trying to achieve together. We will look at all of Red Hat and sometimes even outside of Red Hat to figure out who we can bring to the table to help solve that problem. And so it allows me to work with our engineering, with our business units, even with our marketing. So we brought marketing in to the first meeting, not simply because we're creating a marketing event, but we realized we need to advertise internally and externally what we build in order to gain adoption. It's part of building a community. And what I've found is because labs has an objective that goes beyond simply a technological objective, we're aiming to change ways of working and to change culture. It's really easy to build a lot of interest and adoption among all Red Hatters to bring them together to solve a tough problem. A really interesting facet about labs. I know you do these pop-up labs and I think this was, you know, you don't necessarily make people come to you. You can come to them, but I think, like you said, it's important to get outside your office and your day-to-day for these focused projects. Talk a little bit about your approach to that. Yeah, so we've learned a lot. You know, labs is almost exactly two years old. I think we launched in April of 2016 at OpenStack Summit. And one thing we learned is, you know, the world is a big place and we can't necessarily have a physical lab location everywhere. So we do have first-class facilities in Boston, Singapore and London, but I would say the large majority of the work efforts we've done to date have been in what we call pop-up labs. And what that allows us to do is create that immersion and focus on a tough challenge by getting people out of the office, but also provide the ability to go home at the end of the day and have dinner at your home, which a lot of people enjoy. And from the Red Hat perspective, we've got a lot of folks used to travel so we can make that happen, meet in the middle, and it's been a good hybrid approach that we end up doing more and more. Great stuff. Here's my final question for you to take from Jim Whitehoff's keynote today. How is blockchain changing this effort? Yeah, right. We're doing it on the blockchain. No, it's been five years from now. Well, I mean. Yeah, token for good, token economics. That's absolutely right. And I mean, Erica, you might want to weigh in as well, but I think, I love blockchain. First of all, I love math and I love the science behind it, but I love the fact that it was developed in the open. It was debated in the open. It's radically transparent. You can see all of the transactions of anyone in the chain and it's being used in ways that no one ever dreamed of. I mean, it was meant for a universal currency, but, you know, think about this. We might be able to use it as a token system so that we can actually ensure that humanitarian efforts that are done are actually recognized by people that may not otherwise have funds, right? Some of them with very little money can still use. Well, also proof of stakeers. Just to make sure the money gets put to use. Absolutely. In the end point of all this. I mean, it's a responsibility. We're using it to exchange electronic health records securely and privately with the people that need them and only the people that need them. So I don't know where blockchain will be in five years, but I am optimistic that I think the mathematics and the fundamentals of blockchain are sound and I think more than anything, it's the community that will drive new applications of blockchain and really define and answer that question for you. Well, I know we'll be in New York next week for the blockchain for a consensus event and there's a lot of events going on. We've seen wealthy entrepreneurs donating Bitcoin and Ethereum, it's just a really great project. So, and a lot of young people love the blockchain and crypto. So who knows, got to be on that lab. We're definitely looking into it and we have a couple of experiments around the world that range from trying to do some smart contracts, you know, in country environments to taking donations in blockchain or I mean, sorry, in cryptocurrencies. I think that there are a lot of exciting applications for it in this do good space. I also think that there's a tremendous amount of hype and you really have to ask yourself the key question of like, does this need a central trusted authority or is there one that exists that already is great and do we need to record every transaction? If you can answer those two questions, then you may be going somewhere. And well, great point. The other thing I would answer that I agree 100% and that is that blockchain and crypto are token economics and not the ICO scams but is an efficiency, heat seeking missile. It targets efficiencies where there's inefficiencies and that's why I see a lot of the action going on and you know, efforts and for good are highly inefficient. So, hey, you knows. Well, we love blockchain. As you can tell, we talk about all day long, smart contracts, token economics. Thanks for coming on and congratulations on your project. Thank you. For good, good stuff there. Live coverage here, day two of three days. Live coverage here in San Francisco, the Red Hat Summit 2018. We'll be back after this short break. Stay with us.