It’s been nearly four years since Andrew and I posted an update on Octobox. A lot has happened in that time: a global pandemic, new jobs, and most recently the release of Ecosyste.ms, the successor to Libraries.io. Meanwhile Octobox has carried on providing a relaible service for thousands of users, indexing nealy 24 million notifications from GitHub. But it’s starting to look a little long in the tooth.

It’s time for a refresh!

Octobox.io is (in our opinion) the best tool for managing notifications from GitHub. It would be relatively easy for us to integrate notifications from other developer services, but we believe that path leads to ‘another email inbox’. GitHub is and will remain our singular focus.

Given this, we feel that aligning Octobox’s design philosophy and aesthetics with GitHub’s will provide our users with an interface that is as familiar as it is intuitive. Thankfully GitHub open sourced it’s design system, Primer, a long time ago, as a starting point for developers to create interfaces of their own.

Octobox Ltd, the company behind Octobox.io is looking for a front-end developer to update the current interface to use Primer’s design system. The project will include importing the design system, updating css classes and dom elements to use the system, while maintaining the current user experience, and expanding frontend testing to create a robust framework for future development.

If you are comfortable building single page applications in Ruby on Rails, and work within 5 hours of GMT please email hello@octobox.io with a couple of examples of your work, detail about your responsibilities on those projects, and your proposed day rate in USD, EUR or GBP. From there we’ll arrange a short interview to discuss details of the project, and answer any questions you may need to answer in order to prepare a quote.

Please share this notice with anyone you think may be appropriate. Do not contact us if you represent a recruiter or web agency. We have nothing against these organisations, we just want to work with an invdidivual — preferably drawn from the open source community — over established organisations.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Looking for a frontend Rails developer for limited consulting engagement was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For nearly four years Octobox.io has provided Andrew and myself with a vehicle to explore issues concerning the sustainability of open source software. We began our first experiment, creating an open source business and we pledged at least 15% of our revenues to support the community. Within six months Octobox had over 100 paid accounts that brought in thousands of dollars a month in revenue. We refunded 100% of the donations that we used to incubate Octobox in its first 18 months and Octobox Ltd. has since covered 100% of the maintenance costs for its 7,000+ active users.

In 2017 Andrew and I believed and we still believe that the open source community can solve many of the challenges it faces itself, with a little organisation and better communication. Today’s announcement addresses one of these challenges directly:

The opportunities to create a financially sustainable open source project are not equally distributed.

As we wrote nearly two years ago Octobox is in a privileged position: an open source project with an accessible revenue stream that works. We believe that with this privilege comes a responsibility and an opportunity: to improve the software upon which we rely by sharing the rewards that we have derived from it. However, since writing this we have seen a repeated pattern:

Solutions that address the problem of financial support for open source software behave like competitive marketplaces.

In these marketplaces projects vie for the available resources (money, attention, contribution) and inevitably the marketable projects with the exposure, the storied leaders and in many cases the success are the winners. Marketplace-based solutions are great for funding future investments, for supporting projects in which we see potential for a future we have yet to realise. But they will not solve the problem of funding the unseen infrastructure that lies below the waterline. In order to do this we need to adjust our lens:

We need to fund projects based on what we use rather than what we see.

Recently we’ve seen projects like LibreSelery, Flossbank and FairOSS pursue approaches based on the idea that people are not always the best judge of who and what requires our support. Each of these projects incorporates some assessment of exactly what you depend upon in deciding how best your support could be utilised. They each have their own merits and we encourage you to explore what each has to offer.

Over the last three months we’ve been working with Joel and Pete at Flossbank to add support for the Ruby ecosystem and adding payments services so that maintainers can add their preferred payment method. We’ve been hugely impressed by what they’ve already built so far and we can’t wait to see what they build in the future. As a vote of of confidence today we’re making the following announcement:

Octobox is investing $10,000 in the dependencies on which it is built through Flossbank.

The complete list of packages, and the amounts are available in this gist and on our Flossbank profile. If you’d like to claim the investment for your project then please register for Flossbank or contact me directly at benjam@octobox.io.

Donating $10,000 is the simple bit, how to distribute it among the 462 different packages that Octobox includes directly, or indirectly is another matter. At which point we must apologise. We’re not about to share the perfect algorithm, scrawled on a dorm window in Cambridge, MA. We won’t even pretend we have a fair approach to solving this problem. If you’d like to know more Joel has shared Flossbank’s approach on the Sustain OSS forum.

Our intention here is to encourage others to make similar investments in their dependencies, to make people think a little about their biases when they look to support the software they depend upon, to highlight the fact that we need a number of approaches if we are to ensure the sustainability of the software we depend upon today as well as the software we will build upon tomorrow, and finally to encourage those with the time, the expertise and the experience to join the conversation about how best to solve this problem together.

Thanks

Andrew & Ben

Octobox is supporting its dependencies was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But that’s not the subject of this post.

No, today we are making good on a commitment that Andrew and I made when we decided to work full-time on Octobox.io: to make Octobox an example of how the open source community can solve many of the issues surrounding its sustainability.

Octobox is in a privileged position: we exist as an edge node in the software dependency graph, providing an open source application to end users who can (and do) pay for a hosted instance. With that privilege comes a responsibility and an opportunity. A responsibility to provide for those who have provided for us, and an opportunity to increase the effectiveness and value of the software that we are already invested in.

Octobox.io now has a community of 13,000 users. Around 80 pay for private repository access individually or for their organisation, bringing in ~2k/month of revenue. So, as of today, Octobox Ltd. (the commercial entity that operates Octobox.io) will pay for all of its own hosting and will reimburse the community for the support that we have received over the years. Octobox Ltd. will make a one time donation to the Octobox community on Open Collective of $3,728 which we will then use to make donations and pledges to projects through the fee-free process that allows collectives to donate to other collectives. Details of which projects we select, how much we give and and why will be the subject of a later post.

Of course we would love to give more, and we will. We stand by our commitment to provide at least 15% of it’s revenue back to the community, and we encourage anyone who shares our privileged position: anyone who has the opportunity to generate an income from the work (and sometimes the charity) of the community, to consider the needs of others within that same community who are increasingly asking for your financial support.

Because sometimes it’s more valuable to do less individually in order to unlock the potential of the whole to achieve more.

Octobox.io is paying it forward was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To get you up to speed: back in October Andrew and I left Tidelift to work full-time on Octobox, in November we launched Octobox on the GitHub Marketplace and last month we announced a change in the way Octobox.io will be priced in order to create a more sustainable future for the project.

Today we’re releasing a number of features for Octobox and Octobox.io that improves the workflow for existing users and eases the on-boarding process for new users.

But first, a quick update: Octobox.io now hosts 12,000 users. Our GitHub App has been installed nearly 1,000 times. We are currently processing ~50,000 notifications and ~180,000 updates (webhooks) each day to keep you focussed and productive.

Despite this the project is still nowhere near financially sustainable.

Last month we saw both sides of the reaction to our pricing change. Some of you were incredibly supportive (thanks!), some of you argued that the price was too high. We understand both points of view of course, but we would like to restate our thinking: that doing this lowers the cost of operating Octobox.io by incentivising some to host their own instances, it increases the contributor and maintainer base by bringing some users closer to the mechanics of operating an instance of Octobox and, it raises income to support maintainers like Andrew and myself. All of these are good things for Octobox and its community. That said, we’re continually seeking to increase the utility and value that Octobox provides. Which is where we get to the fun stuff…

Conversations

The beady-eyed among you may have noticed that, back in December we launched ‘thread view’ into Beta. Thread view built issue and pull request conversations right into Octobox, so you can keep focused in a single tab while getting the extra context you need:

One element of thread view that was missing in our initial release was replying. So today we are bringing thread-view out of Beta and launching conversations as one, near-complete experience. Yes, I hear you say ‘it doesn’t support commit-level comments and reviews’, but we’ll cover that later.

Auto Scaling With HireFire

It may seem like a feature only developers would appreciate, but the reality is that, as a small, under-funded community supporting a growing user base, we have to make sure that our infrastructure is as lean as possible. We typically run our servers as hot as they’ll (reliably) stand, ‘perfect utilisation’ is often the goal. But we have a rather peaky pattern of usage: large organisations add Octobox.io to their workflow and we find ourselves indexing tens of thousands of issues, PRs and, conversations which can lead to performance hits at times. So we’ve added HireFire to our stack to auto-scale up our infrastructure when the queues get long, meaning you can get on with getting on. Which leads me nicely to…

Onboarding Using Pinned Searches

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Pia Mancini, CEO of Open Collective and one of the most impactful women working in open source today (vote for her if you agree). Part of that interview centred around a ‘getting started’ flow for people who open up Octobox for the first time.

Talking it through I realised that both Andrew and myself have two ‘pinned searches’ (launched back in November) that we regularly use to do one of two things:

• Highlight everything that was merged, closed or otherwise ready to be archived.
• Highlight any pull-requests that are in a mergeable state, which informs each day’s work.

and that these particular searches are exactly what an over-worked GitHub user needs in order to cut through the chaff and focus down on what matters, especially when they first log in. So today we’re adding these two pinned searches by default: to ensure everyone using Octobox can get going quickly, and continue to make the most of their time each day.

So, What’s Next?

With these changes we feel that we now have enough of GitHub integrated now to make the future of Octobox less about which parts of GitHub it supports and more about our own users, who often have needs that are not supported by GitHub’s services.

So we’re going to be doing more to reach out to you for ideas, feedback and sharing our research findings. As usual you can reach out to us on twitter, gitter or by email or if you’re lucky enough to have the time you can get stuck in as a contributor, we’d love to share our work with you.

To conclude: this is a very long post explaining why we’re asking for additional permissions on your repositories, but we hope it can also be the start of writing the future of Octobox together 🙌

Permission To Write was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s start from the top: Andrew Nesbitt and I have been working together on Octobox.io for the past six months, full time. Octobox is the tool for developers working on GitHub who find notifications infuriating. If you don’t want to miss another mention, if you don’t want misplace another issue and, if you don’t want to manage your workflow though email: you need to try Octobox:

Octobox is a successful open source project: we have a small, but productive community of maintainers, contributors and users including organisations like Shopify who run company-wide instances for their own use. But Octobox.io is also a successful service in its own right: we host ~11k users who have together managed over 5m notifications across ~150k repositories.

But Octobox is not a sustainable project.

Our goal for Octobox is not only to solve the problems developers experience today, but to explore, document and solve the issues around creating a financially sustainable open source business. This means we have to balance the needs of users with the needs of the project’s maintainers. Andrew and myself have been fortunate enough to work on Octobox.io for the last six months while being paid by our previous employer under a ‘gardening leave’ agreement. This has enabled us to make a lot of progress on the project, to get it to where it is today. But that honeymoon is over and we must begin to consider the financial needs of the project earnestly.

Which is why, starting from Monday, you will no longer see notifications for private repositories on Octobox.io unless you pay to use it.

This change is based on one, key assumption: if you’re working on a private project we assume that project has some value to you, financial or otherwise. We know that users get a lot of value from Octobox, and we know how many users will be impacted by this change. We also know that this change will polarise some of those users. But we accept that for what it is and say to those who may be irked by it: Octobox is still an open source project, and you’re more than welcome to install your own instance. The cost of doing so on a service like Heroku will probably be equal to the cost of access to Octobox.io but you are free to make that choice. And for our corporate users: if you want to see more from Octobox then reach out to us on twitter, gitter or by email. We have some great ideas for you, and we’d love to hear what you think.

It’s a tightrope that we must walk but — with your support — we hope that together we can continue to move Octobox forward while creating a blueprint for others to make open source an independent career choice.

Walking The Tightrope: Charging For Private Repo’s On Octobox.io was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ben & Andrew have been working in open source sustainability since 2015. Their first project together, Libraries.io, tracked the most popular packages in open source software. They used the data collected to identify what we now call ‘digital infrastructure’ and to highlight projects at risk — the project still exists but they are not involved anymore.

These days they work full-time on their open source application Octobox.io through their company Octobox Ltd. Octobox is an application that helps developers ‘untangle their GitHub notifications’. Being able to sort through notifications like an inbox outside of my inbox (which I like to keep as close to 0 as possible), what a beauty…

The sustainability of this messy and outstanding community we call open source is very dear to all of us, Ben and I are both part of the organizing group of SustainOSS and Andrew runs 24PullRequests.com every December.

B: Which reminds me, I need to finish the second report for SustainOSS!

P: Yes you do, my friend… But for the moment: can you tell me a little bit about Octobox?

B: Like Libraries.io Octobox was initially Andrew’s reaction to GitHub’s solution being poor. GitHub notifications are like garden fairies: you might see them for a moment and then they’re gone. Octobox takes GitHub’s notifications and places them in an inbox paradigm, which means no more ethereal notifications. We add the kind of features you’d expect in an email client: archiving, filtering etc. and complement them with live issue, PR and CI status updates to make you more effective and efficient, so you can get on with your work.

GitHub notifications are like garden fairies: you might see them for a moment and then they’re gone.

Octobox is built for anyone struggling under the weight of notifications they receive, or for those who use a workflow centred on issues, PRs, comments and commits. If that sounds like you then you can get started for free by signing in at octobox.io (and installing the GitHub app for maximum effect). We’ll sync all your current notifications (this might take moment) then you’re good to go.

Pro Tips: If it’s your first time using Octobox then you probably want to clear your backlog: start by archiving all your closed and merged notifications — hit the pre-filters in the sidebar, select all and hit archive. Next you might want to merge all the passing PRs, especially those from bots: use the search and filter for `bot:true status:success state:open` (and pin that search in the sidebar). Finally you might want to triage new issues: hit ‘unlabelled’ in the sidebar, that should give you the right list.

P: Oh man, I wish I’d knew this before!

At SustainOSS we defined sustainability in a broad sense, to include maintainer health, community and financial sustainability. It seems like Octobox is aligned with that ideal?

B: Yup. Our goals for Octobox are straightforward: to help alleviate the problems maintainers have today, and to show — rather than tell — the world how we might create a sustainable future for open source software: by building responsible open source businesses that care for their communities and dependencies as much as they care for their profits.

P: You have three options or models for using Octobox: self-hosted, free public repository and a paid option for private repos. Can you talk about these?

B: Firstly Octobox is developed in the open under an Affero GPL licence. Andrew and I are kind of hard-wired to create software this way, it has a lot of advantages early on. A proportion of the initial development was supported by contributors at Shopify and GitHub for instance, and both self-host their own services, Shopify’s runs a larger database than even our public one.

Our goals for Octobox are straightforward: to help alleviate the problems maintainers have today, and to show — rather than tell — the world how we might create a sustainable future for open source software

Going back to our goals: we want to help open source maintainers maximise the time they dedicate (mostly voluntarily) to their projects, to make them more effective with the time they choose to give. There’s no way we’re going to charge them for that, so our financial sustainability relies heavily on paid access for proprietary projects.

Thankfully it’s no surprise that most companies share the same challenges as open source maintainers — an endless stream of notification spam — and they want the same things for their development teams — a developer workflow that works with the tools they already use.

Andrew and I like to test our assumptions by experimenting and proving them out — Octobox is kind of a giant experiment in that regard — our first research question was ‘do people want to support commercial providers, or communities directly’. So we offer the same access to donors of equivalent value on Open Collective as we do those who pay Octobox Ltd. through the GitHub marketplace.

P: What do you expect to see in the community vs enterprise options? What are the incentives for someone to choose one and not the other? I know this is the beginning, but I’m curious to see if you have any predictions.

B: It’s early days for us on this front but we’ll do everything we can to ensure that the service is split on public vs. private projects, so your incentives are to open source your software or pay for access to thing you don’t want to share. Our challenge at the moment is to make this a personal decision rather than relying on an organisation to authorise use of a GitHub app for access to Octobox.io.

My view is that companies like GitHub became successful from the bottom-up: developers started coming into work and saying they had to have access to GitHub because that’s how they worked together.

We’re currently looking for ways to utilise the network effects of developer communities to broaden usage and for ways to let developers use Octobox at work. My view is that companies like GitHub became successful from the bottom-up: developers started coming into work and saying they had to have access to GitHub because that’s how they worked together. So I can see us developing the roadmap — which is public and open to contributions — in that direction, making Octobox work better for teams and to build things in Octobox rather than reimagining GitHub’s interfaces.

P: What are you thinking in terms of governance for both the community and octobox.io?

At the moment the Octobox community is quite small, there are about 90 contributors, ten of whom are maintainers with commit access. Due to it being a small community we’re able to keep everyone informed about what we’re doing with the company and Octobox.io and we keep channels open for feedback. As we grow the community we’ll be more explicit about the governance, following something inspired by Elinor Ostrom’s principles for institutional design. I have a plan for popularising this approach over at tldrgovernance.com which you could call a pre-announcement of sorts :D

The main thing that we’re doing at the moment is playing both sides of the financial sustainability model. By being members of both the community and the commercial entity we are able to let the users decide who they wish to support predominantly. As a protection measure Octobox Ltd. guarantees at least 15% of its annual revenue to the community, forever. In time we’ll use this to support paid work on Octobox and to distribute funds the maintainers of our dependencies. We believe that if every company who builds their profits on open source software did this then there would be no open source sustainability problem, at least not as we have begun to define it today.

As a protection measure Octobox Ltd. guarantees at least 15% of its annual revenue to the community, forever.

P: Which types of projects do you think this model will work for?

We’re fortunate to be in the position that we are. We are able to provide a direct service for end users that they will (and do!) pay for. We’re in the same category of project as Sentry.io in this regard, so I would say that this approach is appropriate for any open source project with a hosted ‘de-facto’ public service, or the ability to create one.

P: Any last thoughts?

Let’s face it we also had the freedom and the privilege to be able to be able to do this. Andrew had the time to dedicate to the start of this project and — due to the terms of our exit from our last employer — we’ve both had the financial support to get Octobox to where it is today over the course of the last six months. I sometimes talk about a solution to the sustainability problem as ‘creating a system that’s not based on privilege and philanthropy’, for the moment though I think our responsibility as a community is to share the income that we are able to create through direct user-services today with the maintainers who will provide for us tomorrow.

P: Thanks Ben.

Thank you Ben & Andrew for untangling Github notifications!

Octobox.io: taming those garden fairies was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is because GitHub Notifications are marked as read and disappear from the list as soon as you load the page or view the email of the notification. This makes it very hard to keep on top of which notifications you still need to follow up on.

Most open source maintainers and even some GitHub staff end up using a complex combination of filters and labels in Gmail to manage their notifications from their inbox. If, like me, you try to avoid email, then you might want to try Octobox.

Octobox is designed with exactly that problem in mind. Firstly it adds an extra “archived” state to each notification so you can mark it as “done”. If new activity happens on the thread/issue/pr, the relevant notification will pop back into your inbox. You can also star notifications that are special to you.

This puts the control of when to clear notifications back in your hands, you can work through your inbox at your own pace. It also means you can always find old notifications, which, on GitHub, disappear a few days after you’ve read them.

The other problem that GitHub power users struggle with is the sheer number of notifications they get, some users are getting 200+ notifications every single day. Octobox helps to tackle this in a number of ways:

• Filters: you can filter the notifications in your inbox in pretty much any way you can imagine; by repository, organization, type, action, state, CI status and reason and keep notifications from bots alongside your regular labels, author and assignees.
• Multi-select: Archive and mute a whole bunch of notifications at once, allowing you to stay on top of even the noisiest repositories with ease.
• Search: Combine a wide range of powerful search filters help you get straight to the notification you’re looking for and focus on just what you need, then pin your favorite searches to the sidebar for easy access.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Quickly navigate, triage and manage your notifications like a pro using Gmail-inspired keyboard shortcuts for every function, no mouse required.

Octobox started life as a side project in December 2016, since then it’s grown to help over 10,000 people manage over 4 million notifications and the project has been downloaded almost half a million times by developers hosting their own versions. It’s now one of the most popular open source tools on GitHub.

Last month Ben and I announced that we’re going to start working full time to make Octobox a truly sustainable open source project that can financially support itself and the community.

Today we’re expanding the scope of Octobox and launching on the GitHub Marketplace, offering new, paid enhancements for private repositories on Octobox.io with a two week free trial period.

You can also get the same enhancements for private repositories by donating or becoming a sponsor on Open Collective, same price but the support goes directly to the community.

Here’s just a handful of developers who depend on Octobox to get their work done:

Sean Thomas Larkin (肖恩) on Twitter

Trying Octobox for the first time ever. Never felt so relieved and saved in my life. @github notifications can be crippling, never again. 💪💪

Gary Ewan Park on Twitter

I have only been using this for a couple hours, but I am already finding it invaluable: https://t.co/w9479HvfFa Kudos to everyone involved!

geoffrey huntley 🦝 on Twitter

If you maintain open-source software and don't use octobox then you are missing out. Upgrade today -> https://t.co/n3HjDgTuDQ https://t.co/De7iikTKOj

Serdar Dogruyol セド on Twitter

If you're suffering from too many Github notifications, Octobox https://t.co/Fhpi15YmVy is definitely a life saver 💯😍

Alyssa on Twitter

I've been using https://t.co/zTEfYtwm96 for a couple of weeks. It's awesome for keeping up with/managing lots of GitHub notifications.

We’ve also got a whole host of new features planned for the coming months, including:

• Snoozing notifications until later
• Gmail-style automated notification filters
• Localization and internationalization
• View comment threads right in the Octobox interface
• Team discussions and direct user-to-user messaging
• Highlighting important notifications to you
• Allow replying to an issue/pull request directly from Octobox

To keep up with everything that’s going on and even contribute directly to the project, check out the open source project on GitHub.

Untangle your GitHub Notifications with Octobox was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s not much we need to say about our time at Tidelift other than we accepted the risk of joining a new company and it didn’t work out. What we will say is that during our time at Tidelift we had the opportunity to evolve our own thinking about what open source sustainability means and how we can have a positive impact today.

While there is still a disconnect in the exchange of value between open source users and maintainers we believe that the community can solve many of its own problems with a little more context and better communication. This theory follows Elinor Ostrom’s alternative strategies to solving the issues discussed in ‘Governing the Commons’ helpfully summarised by Nadia last May (thanks for the kick Nadia ❤). Our next company will focus — in the first instance — on building tools as a community, for the community to overcome these challenges.

You may already be familiar with our first project: Octobox.

Octobox was launched December 2016 as a reaction to an issue Andrew had as a maintainer of number of popular open source projects: the constant stream of notifications that needed triaging and following up. Octobox helps him spend less time managing notifications in much the same way Gmail helps him spend less time managing email:

Since its launch octobox.io has helped another ten thousand developers manage over three million notifications and the project has been downloaded over 350 thousand times by developers hosting their own versions. Octobox is now one of the most popular open source tools on GitHub.

Octobox already has a dedicated community of maintainers, contributors, supporters and sponsors. Our first priority is to begin building a sustainable income, for ourselves and our community. Our second is to demonstrate that our approach is repeatable and scalable, proving that we can solve this problem for ourselves.

Andrew and I believe fundamentally in testing our assumptions and backing up our decisions with data. Today you can help us with our first piece of research:

Do you prefer supporting a commercial provider, or the community itself?

We are expanding the scope of Octobox and offering new, paid enhancements for private repositories on octobox.io. What you pay for does not change. But how you pay will have consequences for those who support the project:

• You can can pay by donating or becoming a sponsor on Open Collective,
• or you can buy through the GitHub Marketplace.

Andrew and I have created a new company Octobox Ltd. This company will operate octobox.io and will develop and support Octobox as an open source project. Octobox Ltd. will provide private repository access to those who donate an equivalent sum (or more) to the community as pay directly through our alternate channels. In addition the company will pledge at least 15% of its revenues for use by the community to further the open source project, forever.

The Octobox project will continue to collect donations via Open Collective and operate a transparent ledger of income and outgoings for the project — including, for the time being, the costs of hosting Octobox.io. When it is able the project will pay maintainers for their time, including time spent operating Octobox.io.

Either way this as a win-win for us. As part of the Octobox community we want to see Octobox become a sustainable project. As members of the wider open source community we want to prove to ourselves (and to you) that we can overcome these challenges together and become an example for others to follow.

Goodbye Tidelift, Hello Octobox was originally published in Octobox on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.