A Bioregional Chief Technology Officer? or Guilds of Protocol Scouts, Mycelial Stewards, and Sentinels?
By Kaliya Young and David Hodgson
This essay arose out of a conversation between Kaliya and David where the quesiton arose Do Bioregions need CTOs? At the bottom of this essay we share more about how this essay came about and how we used AI to write it.
A stand alone version of the slides is posted on David Hodgson’s LinkedIn (some are within the piece below too).
Some organizations in a bioregion want to get off of “big tech platforms” and invite their members onto a new social coordination platform. People sign up. Some find it confusing. Some stop logging in. The complaints trickle in — but there’s nobody whose role is to ask before the decision was made: Will this tool actually meet our needs? What is our use-case even? Who chooses the tool and on what basis? What happens to everyone’s data and connections if it doesn’t work out?
Now imagine you’re at a showcase for regenerative technology. Ten projects pitch. One proposes putting community impact data on a public blockchain. Another plans to deploy AI-driven environmental monitoring across indigenous land. The funders nod. The bioregional leaders take notes. The slide decks are beautiful.
More often than not, nobody in the room asks: Whose protocols are these built on? What happens to this data if the vendor gets acquired? Can the community see what the system is actually doing with their information? If an environmental defender’s name is attached to a land restoration claim on a public ledger, who else can see that — and what might they do with it? What does it cost — in energy, water, and extracted minerals — to run? And five years from now, will it still be repairable, or landfill?
Nobody asks these questions because in regenerative movements it is nobody’s job to ask.
This gap arises at every scale from the choice of which platform a network uses to coordinate, to deploying sensors and IoT devices across a watershed to monitor water quality and soil health — devices that collect data continuously, transmit it to servers someone else controls, and create a detailed picture of a landscape that may not belong to the people making decisions about it. From identity systems and public ledgers to financial infrastructure. Bioregional movements are making technology decisions without anyone at the table whose role is to understand and discern what those choices mean, who they protect, who they expose, and what they cost the living systems they claim to serve.
Every large organization in the world has people whose job this is. A Chief Technology Officer (CTO) decides what technology to use and whether it’s the right fit. A Chief Information Officer (CIO) keeps the digital systems everyone depends on running. A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) protects the organization from digital threats — hacking, surveillance, data leaks. A Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) makes sure people’s personal information is handled with care. Bioregions have none of them.
This Isn’t a New Problem
In 2003, the Planetwork community published “The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet,” arguing that identity and trust needed to be built into the internet’s architecture in the public interest — before commercial interests captured those functions. Planetwork’s leadership approached major philanthropic organization asking them to support the vision. The foundations couldn’t understand what they were talking about — after all, Facebook hadn’t even been founded yet. This illegibility of a grassroots west coast innovation community to east coast “elite” foundations resulted in them reciving no support. Unfortunately the ASN authors were right about what was coming. Microsoft Passport, Facebook Connect, and Google Sign-In captured identity anyway, because civil society didn’t build the alternative fast enough.
In 2004, Gideon Rosenblatt published “Movement as Network,” diagnosing that environmental organizations were “so disconnected that they are barely recognizable as a movement.” He identified three organizational types: Solution Organizations that solve specific problems, People Organizations that build community power, and Resource Organizations that provide shared infrastructure across the network. His finding: the Resource Organizations were missing. Without them, the movement was a collection of disconnected projects, not a coordinated force.
Twenty-two years later, the bioregional technology landscape has the same structural gap — and a dizzying variety of Solution Organizations, each solving a specific piece of the puzzle in isolation.
Community coordination platforms — tools for groups to organize, communicate, and work together: Hylo (stewarded by Terran Collective), QiqoChat, Circle Space, Holons, Weco. Each offers a different model for how communities stay connected and get things done.
Trust and economic tools — platforms for local exchange, trust networks, and regenerative finance: Symviosis, LocalScale, Social Fabric. These tackle the question of how value flows within and between communities.
Protocol and infrastructure projects — teams building the underlying technical substrate that other tools could share: First Person Project, Holochain, Coasys (AD4M), Playnet, Matrix, ThreeFold. These are the various efforts at plumbing — identity, data storage, networking — that everything else depends on.
Place-based bioregional initiatives — communities doing the on-the-ground work of weaving and restoration: the Bioregional Weaving Labs (eight active labs across Europe, backed by Ashoka and Commonland), Fraser Lowland, the Design School for Regenerating Earth, One Earth, and dozens more. These are the communities adopting technology, often without the technical capacity to evaluate what they’re adopting.
That’s a lot of Solution Organizations. But almost no shared technology infrastructure connecting them. No Resource Organization providing protocol evaluation, technical due diligence, security assessment, or data governance as shared services. The community coordination platforms don’t interoperate with each other. The protocol projects don’t know which bioregional initiatives need them. The place-based communities are choosing tools without anyone to help them understand the implications of those choices.
The Systemic Investing Field Mapping initiative, synthesizing 42 interviews across four continents in April 2026, arrived at the same diagnosis from a different angle. Their finding: the field’s meso layer — the root systems and mycelial networks that connect individual initiatives into a functioning ecosystem — is chronically underfunded. Funders, they found, “prefer visible trees over invisible root systems.”
Technology leadership is quintessentially a root system. Invisible until it fails. Essential for everything above it to thrive. For systemic change movements to succeed we must invest strategically in the technology backbone.
Two Clocks, a Closing Window
This gap was first named two decades ago. What’s changed is the urgency — and the urgency runs in two directions at once.
Benjamin Life’s Regenerative Accelerationist Manifesto (re/acc) names the first: “We are in a race condition — a competition measured in lines of code written, standards adopted, infrastructure deployed.” The window for building open-protocol alternatives is narrowing. Once centralized identity infrastructure achieves lock-in, once extractive platforms become the default substrate for bioregional coordination, the possibility of democratic, community-sovereign alternatives forecloses.
And technology built in the spi1rit of re/acc goes beyond supporting bioregional movements. It’s fighting the authoritarian stack. The techno-authoritarian endgame — AI, identity, and financial infrastructure concentrated into centralized control — is the force bioregional movements are accelerating against. Vitalik Buterin’s defensive acceleration (d/acc) framework is explicit: selectively accelerate technologies that are decentralized, democratic, differential, and defensive. Technologies that make authoritarianism harder to impose.
The second direction is ecological and material. Every year, AI uses roughly 10x the computational power to train models, demanding ever more energy and water. Data centers are on track to consume 21% of the world’s electricity by 2030. The tech industry already produces over 50 million tons of e-waste a year, climbing toward 110 million tons by 2050. A bioregional movement that adopts an energy-hungry, mineral-intensive, throwaway tool to do “regenerative” work has lost the argument before it starts.
So there are two clocks. The political clock — build open alternatives before the authoritarian stack locks in. And the material clock — every tool a bioregion adopts has an energy, water, and extraction footprint that either honors the living systems it serves or quietly betrays them. You can’t win either race blind. If bioregional movements are making technology decisions without anyone who understands protocols, security architectures, identity systems, data governance, and the material lifecycle of the tools themselves, they’re not just failing to build — they’re vulnerable. Vulnerable to platform lock-in. Vulnerable to surveillance of activists and indigenous communities. Vulnerable to vendor capture. Vulnerable to well-intentioned tools that put the communities — and the watersheds — they claim to serve at risk.
Consider: a public, verifiable record of “this community is doing conservation work on this land” is also a map for retaliation. Global Witness documents hundreds of killings of environmental defenders annually. Putting impact claims on a public blockchain without understanding decentralized identifiers, selective disclosure, and zero-knowledge proofs isn’t transparency — it’s exposure. A Protocol Scout in the room would have caught this. A Sentinel would have modeled the threat. A Membrane Tender would have asked: whose information is this, and does it want to be visible?
These roles don’t exist yet in bioregional governance. That’s what we’re proposing to change.
The Translation Problem
We have to be careful, the corporate C-suite is the wrong model to copy.
Chief Technology Officer. Chief Information Officer. Chief Information Security Officer. Chief Privacy Officer. These titles were forged inside hierarchical enterprises optimized for shareholder value. They assume a bounded organization with a CEO at the top. Information as a competitive asset. Top-down decision authority. Metrics aligned with growth, efficiency, and quarterly returns.
It goes deeper than wrong assumptions. The corporate C-suite is the management layer of an industrial technological paradigm — one that accelerates domination, extraction, and separation; that optimizes for profit, attention, and scale while ignoring “externalities”; that designs for planned obsolescence and landfill; that displaces local solutions to enrich a few; that is proprietary, closed, and competitive. A corporate CTO is, structurally, an excellent steward of industrial technology. Importing that role into a bioregion imports the paradigm with it.
A bioregion has no CEO. Its members — humans, ecosystems, other-than-human kin, ancestors, descendants — are not employees. Its information is sacred, contested, traditional, communal, and personal all at once. Decision authority is distributed and often indigenous-led. Its time horizon isn’t quarters but generations.
The functions are real and urgently needed. Bioregions absolutely need what CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, and CPOs do. But the titles, structures, and metaphors should come from living-systems traditions — the design language bioregional movements already speak.
Four Traditions, One Design Grammar
Bioregional work sits at the convergence of four mature design traditions. Each has been thinking about how living systems organize themselves far longer than the corporate C-suite has existed.
Biomimicry asks: how does nature solve this? Life’s Principles, distilled from 3.8 billion years of evolutionary R&D, include: be locally attuned and responsive; use feedback loops; build from the bottom up; cultivate cooperative relationships; embody resilience through diversity, redundancy, and decentralization; create conditions conducive to life.
Permaculture offers three ethics — Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share — and twelve design principles: observe and interact; apply self-regulation and accept feedback; integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal. Holmgren explicitly named governance, finance, and education as permaculture domains. This has always been an organizational design framework, not just a gardening method.
Permacomputing adapts permaculture’s logic to the digital realm. “Care for life, care for the chips.” Design for repair, reuse, modularity. Expose everything — radical transparency about what systems are actually doing. Keep it small. A permacomputing-informed steward asks questions the corporate CIO never would: Can we run this on what we already have? Can we repair it ourselves? Does it work offline? Does it work in 20 years? Is the energy cost worth the value created?
Regeneration provides the test: does this leave living systems more capable of evolving, not less? Not sustainability — regeneration. John Fullerton’s principles — in right relationship, empowered participation, honors community and place, edge effect abundance, robust circulatory flow — and the Regenerative Technology Project’s seven principles for technology specifically both converge on the same insight: healthy systems keep energy, materials, and information moving rather than accumulating them.
The convergence across all four: distributed, locally attuned, feedback-driven, diversity-valuing, edge-respecting, place-honoring, cyclic, transparent. That’s the design grammar for bioregional technology leadership.
The Living-Systems Translation
What does this look like in practice? Here is how the corporate technology functions translate through living-systems traditions. Read them not only as guardians who keep harm out, but as stewards who keep something alive — tending technology so that it serves the community and the land, and lets the two serve each other.
The Protocol Scout (enterprise: CTO). Biomimicry sees pollinators and scout bees — honeybee scouts visit dozens of sites and dance-debate before the swarm decides. They carry information between communities, accountable to the swarm, not the queen. The Protocol Scout is the protocol-literate strategist who shows up to bioregional strategy sessions, funder calls, and technical due diligence reviews. Asks: What is this technology really doing? Whose protocols? Whose values baked in? What happens in five years if the vendor gets bought? Where are the edges where this connects to other systems? (The corporate world already pays for this function — they call it an analyst firm. Gartner, Kuppinger Cole, and others make their living scouting the technology landscape so organizations don’t have to become experts themselves. The difference is who they serve: enterprises paying for competitive advantage, not communities tending a commons.)
The Mycelial Steward (enterprise: CIO). Mycorrhizal networks connect roughly 80% of land plants. Up to 80% of plant nitrogen and phosphorus moves through mycelium. Invisible until they fail. The Mycelial Steward tends the shared digital substrate — communications, identity, knowledge commons, mapping, data flows — that lets bioregional actors coordinate. The steward’s job is to keep energy, materials, and information moving through the bioregion rather than pooling in silos. Asks: What does everyone actually rely on, and who is keeping it alive? What can we share rather than each maintain separately? Where is flow blocked, and where is it accumulating where it shouldn’t?
The Sentinel (enterprise: CISO). Prairie dogs, canaries, lichens — sentinel species that detect threats before the rest of the ecosystem feels them. Also immune systems: distributed, redundant, with memory of past pathogens. The Sentinel watches for surveillance, doxxing, data leakage, and the adversarial use of “regenerative” tech against the communities it claims to serve. Asks: Who would be hurt if this was misused, and how do we make that harder?
The Membrane Tender (enterprise: CPO). Cell membranes are selectively permeable — water and signals pass freely, toxins are kept out. Cells are not fortresses; they are boundaried. The Membrane Tender is the consent-and-sovereignty advocate. Ensures CARE and OCAP principles are honored. Asks: Whose information is this? Does it want to be visible? What’s the smallest amount of data that lets us do this work?
The Knowledge Commons Keeper (enterprise: CDO). Seed banks. Soil seed memory. Songlines. Distributed memory held by many. Curates what’s documented, what stays oral, what’s open, what’s closed. Asks: Whose knowledge is this, and what does its rightful lifecycle look like?
The Companion-Intelligence Steward (enterprise: Chief AI Officer). Companion species — dogs, horses, honeybees. Domesticated intelligences we live with. Done well, reciprocal; done badly, exploitative. Decides which AI tools a bioregion invites in, on what terms. This is where the material clock and the political clock meet: the steward asks not only what the intelligence is learning from us and teaching us, but what it costs. Asks: What is this intelligence learning from us? What is it teaching us? What’s the energy and material footprint, and is it worth it?
Digital Architecture Is Architecture — and Material
Dark Matter Labs (DML) — founded by architect Indy Johar — has done extraordinary work transcending architecture to reach the dark matter underneath: property rights, housing, urban commons, multi-level governance. Their Governing Together framework, their Radicle Civics provocation, their 7GenCities work. They’ve redesigned the governance architecture. The recent Civic Protocol Economies report inspired by DML and other thinkers goes further — naming digital identity, self-sovereign identity, tokens, and protocol-based economic coordination as necessary infrastructure for civic economies. The authors can see that their governance designs need technical protocol infrastructure to actually operate. The redesigned property rights need identity protocols. The urban commons need data governance protocols. The multi-level governance needs interoperability protocols. The authors are pointing at the need from the governance side; what’s missing are the Protocol Scouts, Mycelial Stewards, and Sentinels to tend that technical substrate. The governance architecture is innovative; the guild to steward the digital infrastructure underneath it is the complement waiting to be built.
Digital architecture is architecture. The protocols, identity systems, data governance frameworks, and security architectures that bioregions adopt are as consequential as their physical infrastructure choices. A bioregion that gets its property rights design right but gets its digital identity infrastructure wrong — putting community data on public ledgers, adopting platforms that create vendor lock-in, deploying AI without ethical guardrails — will harm the very communities it aims to serve.
And digital architecture is not only consequential — it is material. This is the point permacomputing insists on, and it’s the easiest one for a bioregional movement to forget. Computing is part of the ecosystem, not separate from it. Every platform decision consumes energy, requires hardware mined from the earth, generates e-waste, creates data that persists for generations, and determines who can participate and who is excluded. A “regenerative” tool built on an extractive, throwaway, energy-ravenous substrate is a contradiction wearing the right vocabulary. Someone in the room has to be able to see the substrate, not just the slide deck.
Tracey Rogers Brandt’s Neighborsheds concept makes this concrete. A neighborshed — the smallest place-based container in a bioregional governance stack — needs land data and people data together. Soil health, water flows, biodiversity and who lives here, what skills they have, who is contributing, who needs support. That’s a Mycelial Steward problem: information architecture that connects ecological monitoring to community coordination while respecting sovereignty, privacy, and governance at every layer — and that keeps working when the internet goes down during a wildfire.
The digital substrate underneath all of this — identity, data flows, coordination tools — all of it needs stewards as much as the land does.
What We Can Learn From
This isn’t purely theoretical. Several models demonstrate that distributed, non-hierarchical technology stewardship works:
The IETF has governed the internet’s core protocols for 35 years through rough consensus and running code — without a CEO, without top-down authority, without membership. Area Directors don’t dictate standards; they tend clusters of working groups, each with its own chair whose job is to facilitate — not command. Nobody is in charge. The work gets done through shared protocols, not hierarchy.
The Subak system in Bali — water temples stewarding irrigation protocols across nested watershed scales for centuries. Pekaseh and kelihan subak are technical-ecological stewards, not executives. Accountable to the watershed. Measured in generations.
Kurdish democratic confederalism — rooted in Murray Bookchin’s municipal confederalism — organizes through four pillars: communes, assemblies, cooperatives, and academies. Each maps to a technology governance function: technology communes making local choices within shared protocols, technology assemblies reaching consensus on shared standards, technology cooperatives maintaining shared infrastructure, and technology academies building collective digital literacy.
These models converge on a common pattern: the function is distributed across many people, accountable to the whole, and organized through protocols rather than hierarchy.
Six Questions Worth Sitting With
Before any of this becomes prescription, six questions the bioregional movement should hold:
Steward or executive? “Protocol Scout” lands differently than “Chief Technology Officer.” The corporate C-suite assumes someone who executes on strategy set by a board. Bioregional roles are closer to stewards — people who tend something not their own, with accountability stretching across generations.
Concentrated or distributed? A bioregion probably doesn’t need a single CTO any more than a forest needs a single fungus. It needs the function present in many people, supported by shared protocols. A guild, not a corner office. A circle with a rotating convener, not a permanent appointment.
Inside or between? Bioregional technology leadership lives between organizations — across watersheds, funders, indigenous councils, civic groups, tech projects. Closer to pollinators and mycelial networks than to executives. This raises a hard funding question: funders fund organizations, not the spaces between them. The SIFM calls this the missing meso layer. Rosenblatt called it the missing Resource Organization. It’s the same gap, named differently by every generation that discovers it.
Compliance or conscience? Corporate CISOs and CPOs run on compliance — checking boxes against GDPR, SOC 2. Bioregional equivalents need to be conscience-driven, because the laws don’t cover what matters most: indigenous data sovereignty, intergenerational impact, ecosystem voice. Harder, not easier. No checklist.
Permanent or seasonal? Biology runs on cycles. Pollinators are seasonal. Mycelium has dormant phases. Sentinel calls are episodic. Bioregional technology roles might be seasonally activated — convened around specific protocol decisions, technical due diligence reviews, or threat assessments, then released back into the network. Closer to how the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) works: a recurring container, not a standing org.
Who hires them? If a bioregional financing facility hires a Protocol Scout, that scout serves capital allocation. If a bioregional assembly hires them, they serve the assembly. If they’re held in common — funded by a pooled mechanism, accountable to a council that includes indigenous representation — they serve the bioregion itself. The structure of accountability is the role.
Technology Backbones
The systemic investing field has a concept worth borrowing: the financial backbone — an entity dedicated to strategically mobilizing, coordinating, and deploying capital for system transformation. Backbones generate systemic intelligence, convene coalitions, intermediate between stakeholders, and support governance. The SIFM found the field needs four to five new financial backbones.
We’re arguing it also needs technology backbones. Entities — or distributed guilds — that generate systemic technology intelligence, convene technology coalitions, intermediate between technical possibilities and community needs, and support technology governance.
Project Weave is working to become a technology backbone — mapping the landscape of protocol-based community software, funding protocol interoperability, and developing missing protocols. What’s needed is the broader recognition that this kind of technology stewardship is essential infrastructure — not a nice-to-have, but a precondition for everything else working.
A small financial investment in technology stewardship unlocks massive existing reserves of technical, social, narrative, and political capital that already exist but have no mechanism to flow into bioregional movements. The financial ask is the catalyst, not the totality.
The Trust Question
Before we move forward, we have to talk the legitimate underlying trust issues with technologists and technology because social change movements and organizations have been ill served in the past. The patterns are familiar:
The consultant who parachutes in — speaks the right values language, builds something the community can’t maintain on its own, and moves on to the next engagement. The community is left with a system nobody understands and no budget to keep it running.
The “open source” promise that isn’t. The code may be visible, but if nobody in the community can run it, modify it, or migrate away from it, open source is just a label. Sovereignty requires capacity, not just a license.
The “free” tool that isn’t free. Google Groups, Slack’s free tier, a platform with no subscription fee. It works — until it doesn’t. By the time the terms change, the pricing shifts, or the service shuts down, the community’s communications, history, and relationships are locked inside something they don’t control and can’t export.
The well-meaning technologist who doesn’t listen. They build what they think the community needs rather than what the community actually asked for. The tool is technically impressive and solves the wrong problem.
And the cultural mismatch that runs underneath all of it. A technologist who doesn’t understand that an indigenous community’s “no” to a feature isn’t resistance to innovation — it’s a governance decision. A developer who treats a community’s slow, deliberative process as inefficiency to be optimized away. Technology that encodes one culture’s assumptions about speed, scale, and transparency into a tool that another culture has to live with.
The trauma is real, and proposing new technology roles for bioregions immediately raises the hardest question: who do you trust to fill them?
The good news is that values-aligned technologists are already embedded in these movements — people with deep industry, enterprise, and government experience who also understand watersheds, indigenous sovereignty, and regenerative governance.
We exist. Some of us know each other. What we don’t have is a visible, accountable structure that lets bioregional communities find them and trust us.
What Comes Next
The instinct might be to hire someone — post a role, write a job description, find a candidate. Or to commission a technology assessment from an outside firm. Or to form a committee. Each of these assumes the problem is a gap in an org chart. It isn’t. The function lives between organizations, not inside any one of them — in the meso layer the SIFM found chronically underfunded, the space where funders prefer visible trees over invisible root systems.
What’s needed is a guild.
The first step is to gather the guild — not to assign it tasks, but to let it meet itself. Many of these people have been working in parallel without knowing each other. What the guild takes on after that should come from the guild itself. The first act of a mycelial network is to connect the nodes that are already alive.
And this work has a lineage. Remember the Planetwork community and the ASN from the beginning of this article? The people behind that vision didn’t stop. A core group that did the intellectual work behind the ASN, and people inspired by it, have spent the last two decades building digital identity protocols that work for people and communities, not for platforms. The Internet Identity Workshop grew out of that lineage. Project Weave grows out of it now. The guild we’re proposing is the next expression of a commitment sustained for over twenty years by people who understood what was at stake before the rest of the world caught up.
The IETF has had protocol-aware leadership for thirty-five years. The Subak system in Bali for centuries. The bioregional movement has been making technology decisions for a decade without it.
It’s time to tend the digital substrate the way a forest tends its mycelium — and to remember that the substrate is made of energy, water, and earth, and answers to them.
If you’re a values-aligned technologist working in or alongside bioregional movements, we want to hear from you. Google Form Link [we know…part of this whole challenge is that the tools from big tech work and we have to really work hard to create the alternatives]
Kaliya Young is a digital identity expert (know as Identity Woman), co-founder of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), co-convener and facilitator of the [SF] Bay Delta Bioregional Unconference, researcher on the IETF’s regenerative governance patterns and most recently co-leader of Project Weave an open-protocol coordination infrastructure.
David Hodgson is co-founder of the Global Regeneration CoLab and co-organizer with Kaliya of an IETF Learning Journey in November 2027.
Where did this article come from?
This essay grew from direct experience with the gap it describes. Kaliya attended the Bioregional Financing Facilities meeting where MaEarth and Hypercerts were presented and was deeply distressed by some of their technical choices. She has been in dialogue with David Hodgson since the beginning of 2026 about technology and the bioregional movement, and David was inspired by Kaliya’s IETF research paper to ask how bioregional governance could learn from and experiment with IETF patterns and practices.
Two weeks before this article was written, in conversation, we asked ourselves: Do bioregions need CTOs? With that prompt, Kaliya spent two hours using the data in her highly curated Obsidian vault — many hundreds of documents covering economics, governance, regeneration, full of white papers from organizations pushing the edge like Dark Matter Labs, RadicalxChange, r3.0, and many more. In this context she began prompting Claude to consider the question, developing a research document that ultimately reached fifty pages. From there she prompted it to write the first version of this essay. We realized that version didn’t include the Regenerative Technology Project framework explicitly and wrote a second version that did. This proved too much for one piece and we rolled it back, arriving at Version 3. From there Kaliya spent many more hours editing and refining.
AI was instrumental to the writing of this piece — and so was our intellect and knowledge of the question we are asking, grounded in years of experience with the high variability of technical knowledge amongst leaders in this movement. We hope it prompts a needed conversation, and we look forward to talking with other technologists embedded in this movement about how we work together and uplevel the technology choices across it.
