Welcome everyone. This is a remarkable webinar because we've got so many people who are interested in starting up their own 23 things group and we just want to congratulate all of you for putting your hand up to be a group leader. It's just a remarkable thing. We've got people listening in from Manitoba, from Maine and from New Zealand. We've got people from all over Australia. We've got people from universities, from government agencies, from medical research institutes. So it's just a phenomenally amazing broad and deep community group. So well done to all of you. So Jerry, I will pass over to you now because Jerry is just going to do a very quick roundup on what's the difference between the webinars, the community catch ups and meet up because we've had a lot of questions about this and as community group leaders I think this is something that you're going to be asked. Hi everybody and welcome. Great to see so many here and I've chatted with some of you and emailed quite a number of you and it's great that we've got to this point of bringing this community of people together. As Karen said I'm just going to kick off by explaining a little bit about the differences between the various communication channels that we have. Hopefully you've all now seen a new and improved website for ANS but also for the 23 Things. What we'll be using the website for is really a primary mechanism for communicating the latest news as well as publishing our things. So as we've indicated previously we will progressively release things roughly on a weekly basis and we will be releasing them through the ANS website and I guess I'll just quickly show you we've got thing one already published so that people if they're interested can have a bit of a sneak peek before our kick off webinar next week but each one will have a similar sort of format. The other communication mechanism that we'll be using is Meetup and many of you will have already signed up to join in with Meetup. This is essentially what we'll be using purely for discussion of things so it's really where we have our sort of interactive virtual component of the program. What we will have is for each thing I'll scroll down to the bottom each thing has three streams getting started learn more and challenge me so that we've got a stream of activities for people sort of regardless of where they are in terms of their exposure and experience with research data. For each of those activities there will be a separate discussion board. I've only set up the first few discussion boards I'll set up more as we get closer didn't seem to be a lot of point and setting up a lot of empty discussion board but the idea here is that it's a forum where you can actually post questions start or contribute to a discussion answer a question it's that sort of virtual component and we've decided to have a discussion board for each stream of activity so that it's sort of easy for people to keep track of what's happening in the particular activity that they're interested in or that they're doing. What you can see here too is that at the completion of each thing people are able to claim a credibly digital badge and Karen will be talking a little bit more about rewards and motivation a bit later on. We envisage that for people running community groups you may or may not choose to use Meetup if you're actually having quite robust discussions within your own groups particularly if you're perhaps a work group where you've got the opportunity to also talk about how you might implement some of these things that you're learning you know how this might work within your organisation you may not necessarily want to also be actively involved in Meetup although what we suggest might be a good idea is if one or two people in your group perhaps on a rotating basis do contribute or keep an eye on the Meetup discussion boards so that you can within your group know what's happening in other parts of the program what other people are raising as questions and issues and a way I guess of being in touch with what's happening outside of your own group. So that's really Meetup quite simply it will just be the mechanism for allowing discussion of things and the individual activities around things. The other thing we'll be doing is having catch-up webinars and the dates for those are on the handout that Karen's put in the handout box. These will be similar to what we're running now but will be for anybody who wants to come along and in this sort of forum raise the question comment on how your group or how you're going with things sort of report back more broadly on how activities are going within your group or indeed for individuals who aren't part of a group. So part of what we want to use the webinars for is to give people a forum for asking questions and discussion discussing things where they may not be part of a group because obviously not everybody's going to be able to be part of group. So again for those of you who are running groups you may or may not wish to participate in the catch-up webinars but again I think probably quite a nice idea is to again perhaps on a rotating basis have one or two of your members come along to the webinars, contribute back what's been happening in your group, ask questions that may not have been resolved within your group and just hear what others are saying and doing. But it's really up to you what's likely to work for your group and you know we're ever conscious of course that we need to help people manage the time that they spend on 23 things. We've sort of put it together with the idea that it should take participants no more than an hour a week to complete the thing and ultimately complete the program. So that's an overview of the website, Meetup and the webinars. They're all there now that you can look at and be part of and some of you I know have also contributed to getting to know your discussion board which is fantastic and we're really encouraging people to introduce themselves and why they're wanting to get involved in this program. So Karen are there any questions on this one? Yes there's one question. Is each level one hour or do we do each level or pick and choose? Definitely pick and choose. So some people might decide that for a particular thing they want to do the getting started you know the sort of the introductory activity for other things they might decide that they already know a little bit about say metadata so they're going to do something that's a bit more challenging in that activity. So you don't need to stick in a particular stream. You can pick and choose depending on your interest and you know whether you've had some exposure to the topic previously and some people may decide that they're actually not going to even do all 23 things that some things are much more interesting to them or relevant to their work or their interests and they'll sort of cherry pick what works for them. So there's no compulsion to stick in a particular stream or even to do all 23 things. It is self directed so it's really up to people to get out of it what they need and want and obviously put into it what they need and want as well. Jerry, while we're there would you like to just show the thing number one? Yes, so each thing will have a similar format where we've got three levels getting started learn more and challenge me. Each thing will have its own page here on the 23 things website. All of these are blank really aside from thing one. So we have the getting started thing which is intended to be introductory. What we have attempting to do with each thing is have something people can go away and do not just necessarily a reading exercise but something that you can actually do a little bit hands on. Then at the bottom of each activity description there's links off to the relevant discussion board in Meetup. So if you want to go straight from here and post some quick comments or questions to meet up you can do that directly from here and there's also a link to register for the catch up the next catch up webinar. So here we've got the learn more activity. Again it's in the same sort of format a set of activities to do something to think about and some ideas to share or discussion starters. So each activity will have some sort of prompt for something that you could share either via Meetup or used to frame a discussion within your group. And then challenge me is intended to be a little bit higher level for people perhaps a bit more exposed to a managing research data. This does start off fairly softly initially but via sort of thing four we're really getting into some of the hands-on more technical challenges. So for people that are keen to dig into XML a little bit of coding data cleansing that sort of thing those sorts of activities ramp up a little bit later in the program. So we sort of start off gently and build as the program evolves. Jerry do you want to talk about the rollout of the things because you've said that there's only one thing currently you can see or what about the others. So what will happen is on March 1 after a very big kickoff webinar we'll be publishing thing two and three and then we will publish a thing on a weekly basis so that there'll always be the opportunity to be looking a little bit ahead to seeing what comes next. The intent with doing it this way and we I guess appreciate your feedback on this approach as well was that it would then keep people roughly together in terms of discussion through meet-up, perhaps people tweeting, discussing it in your groups that people are roughly kept together and the discussions in a relevant so we're not got some people still discussing thing one while others have jumped on to discussing things 13 or 14. So we'll always have three things available to be working on so if you want to sort of jump a little bit ahead or you've firstly if you've had some time off and you want to come back you'll be able to do that and then as they are published they'll stay open we won't be closing them off again. The idea is then at the end of the program we can have some mechanism by which we can sort of zip this up as a package for others if they want to adapt it and particularly for those folks from other locations you may wish to reuse this idea but tweak it for your location with some local examples and things like that so we want this at the end of the program to really be a resource that others can pick up and use in the same way that we picked up the great work done by Michael Witt and his team and have reused it for our purposes. We'd really love to see other people pick up this idea and run with it and adapt it to make it work for them. Okay thank you very much Jerry I'm just sending a reminder about the Twitter hashtag. There it is, we have had a little bit of activity and I do encourage people hopefully this might be one mechanism by which you can let people know what's happening in your group source new members you know identify interested new members and that sort of thing so yes please do use the Twitter handle. For those of you who haven't seen the handouts box before if you have a look down there's a handouts box and there are two hand out one of them is a just a two-page crib sheet I guess for community leaders such as yourself the section that we're doing now is just about the community groups and they look they're all going to take a different form we've got some amazingly good ideas if you would like to just put in the chat box how you are thinking about running your group what I can do at the end of this webinar is I can pull all those that information out and I can send it out to everyone so that everyone's got some oh I might try that might try that the main thing is it's got to be sustainable for you why did they pick 23 things that's an awful lot of things and it's going to be hard for you to maintain your enthusiasm as well as keeping the enthusiasm going for others so keep it simple nothing to elaborate call for help others will be more than happy to give you a hand wherever they can so in point number three at the bottom of the first page you can just see a few simple ideas that we've heard about so far some people are meeting each week and doing their thing together over lunch or have a morning tea or whatever and then having a brief discussion there and then that's it done others are each person does their own thing and then they come together at a time that the group chooses and then we've got a lot of the groups and I'll just show you the the community groups that we've got so far and so I guess if you think of the community groups is a little bit like a training exercise but more based on discussion and getting the group together to form a community where people are comfortable if they sort of confess I don't know what a DOI is and I don't or I don't understand thing number three or whatever that the issue is really getting people and you may find that some unlikely leaders emerge perhaps you've got somebody who is not particularly enough in a high level position but they're really passionate about data and you may find that they're the ones doing the the challenge me list every week and they're the ones leading the discussion so look out for leaders within your groups if we move down now to point number four and this is in the hand out box tips for maintaining motivation I guess the first point I've got there is really critical 23 things is many many many things internally at and we've started referring it to it as 23 million things as we discover more and more things that we we would love to do or want to do there'll be good intentions people will drop out people will get distracted busy some people will start off all enthusiastic and then you know life will take over they may come back it's it's not you personally it's a huge commitment and I guess I've listed there four things that you might want to think about so rewards think about credley badges one group we know is going to have a leaderboard up in the staff room and as people do their things they're going to tick them off to get a bit of you know competition going think about certificates now we and Anne's can only provide a participation certificate because we don't know if people have done anything or not but it might be actually better coming from your director or your executive your university librarian your somebody within your group who's you know who would be pleased to know about how many staff have done it keeping the buzz don't forget lots of you know provide lots of buzz around sending things out maybe even your your group newsletters or you know so-and-so has finished all 23 things or we've got 50 people starting or 20 people starting 23 things wish them all the best and you know ask them about it create communities of practice and support you can see there's four ideas there that you might want to take on board for some things that you want to do but for me the most important one is celebrate it's an exciting thing to do it's a community thing to do it's fantastic so think about the way that your group wants to celebrate some of you are going to be champagne is some of you are going to be cups of tea some of you going to be just coming together at a regular basis but whatever it is it's really important that there is some you know group yes we've done it and the last one keeping in touch if there's anything more that we can do please for you in particular you community leaders send us a message and say oh can you put this up on the website can you change this can you add this and we're more than happy to do it we'd also love to hear from you at the end of the program to provide some feedback there's already three net papers now going into world conferences earlier in South Australia and research data alliance both in Tokyo and in Denver later this year and people are really interested the Japanese have been looking at what we've been doing and they're taking Michael Witt's American idea and also creating a special one for Japan and if you do get stuck send us an email contact us at answers fine but either to Jerry or Sucuk or myself or Susanna any of us and we'll more than happily give you a hand so is there anybody got anything that they'd like to comment about what they're going to be doing with their group there's a number of people have put some things in the the question pod a question from Vanessa she says is there a hashtag for community group leaders e.g. thing O's thing organizers I like it Vanessa so that that could be something that we'll set up as well just some ideas one group each person does their own thing then then invited fortnightly to the community group for afternoon Tina chat with local experts who'll provide local context for example staff from copyright research ethics integrity grant research ID etc so thanks very much Jennifer and Peter another one staff will work through their things individually will meet as a group for each catch-up webinar followed by a discussion another group make a staff meeting at the same time each week Jerry would you like to chip in there with anything I just thought it was might be worth mentioning too that our community groups have formed around different geographic location so you know anybody in the Newcastle area anybody in the Melbourne area so not sort of constrained to a particular organization some groups are across the whole organization so anybody in University X can join and then others within a work group so a library team or some other sort of team so there's all sorts of groups that are forming I guess and and I think that will mean that they will run a little bit differently depending on whether you're a fairly small type work group or whether you're opening this up to across the whole university or a whole geographic area where you're going to get people from perhaps public libraries school libraries university libraries you know a whole a whole bunch of sort of areas that are going to have different different opinions and different exposures to research data if you can see the screen I've just pulled up those in Perth you can see ones for Murdoch University staff Curtin WA health and W University of Western Australia library staff and then Anthea at Netherlands has at she's any participants in the Perth area who'd like to come along so there's a whole range of different things if there's anything on that page you'd like to add or change just let any of us know if anybody's got anything they want to add or update let me know one group is going to set up a Yammer group to share experiences and questions and a comment from Nancy we have no idea how things will go in the US we'll need to do it a bit of brainstorming to figure out how to communicate it's a bit like Hobart Wagga and Calguli all trying to get together so congratulations Nancy on your knowing of Wagga is actually a place Francis is just asking Jerry could you say a bit more about the badges what in and we tried to work out what we could do to sort of reward and provide some motivation for participants it's actually quite challenging for us because we actually don't know when people are going to be finished things and we're not in a position to sort of keep a record of who's doing what so what we've done is implemented credly badges which is just a simply a digital badge that participants can claim a badge each time they finish a thing they're all a little bit unique and you'll know whether it's a badge for thing one or thing two or thing three they've been created to be a little bit unique for each thing and you can actually use those badges if you wanted to to put perhaps on your LinkedIn profile or you know you can do with them what you will but we just thought that for some people that sort of motivate that sort of reward is a motivation it's sort of something to collect and something to reward participants so you do need to sign up for a credly account you'll get prompted to do that the first time you go to claim a badge but after that then it's quite a straightforward process it's just a sort of a click-through process to claim your badge for each thing and we've got a link for claiming badges from each of the discussion boards and each of those thing web pages so it's quite easy to say well done my thing now I'll go and claim my badge so it's no charge or anything like that of course but we just thought it was one way we might be able to offer some sort of reward and motivation it's as I said before it's a little bit hard for an organization like Anne's but this was something we could do relatively straightforward and a question is there any is there a way to see the names of people from your own institution or organization who've registered for the kickoff webinar just a note currently there are over 750 people registered for the webinar what we could do that's a good question actually for the community group leaders I'll just need to check about the privacy issues around passing on but what we could do is perhaps send out to each of the community group leaders the people who have registered from your information for your institution note though that in some really big institutions that you may actually have some groups groups within groups who are registering so we'll try and do that send that out so at least you've got the list one of the is there a set day of the week when we need to do the things no you've I think Jerry we agreed we were going to release them on a Monday is it right yeah I think it was on a Tuesday but again it's this is self-directed so the new thing will come out once a week but it may be that it you know your group only gets together once a month or once every six weeks and then you sort of discuss a few things in one go so what we try and do though is sort of say well if you do a thing a week then and we have got some breaks built into the program which you may have noticed on your poster and I'm looking around behind me and we have built in some breaks there because we acknowledge that there are some really busy periods and holiday periods as well but the idea is then that we are all finished by I think it's about the middle of October if we do a thing a week with those few breaks fact it in but of course some people will find that they have a busy period or themselves are on holidays and they may do two or three things in one week and then not do anything for you know a couple of weeks so if you do a thing a week roughly then you will stay on track to finish middle of October when we sort of wind this program up as I said we keep the resources available for the long term but in terms of having this sort of program with webinars and the meetup discussion board etc that will wind up at the end of the year. Just showing on the screen at the moment there's this PDF calendar that shows you the green is the break weeks and roughly what will be so the thing number the weeks when you need to do it and the other one that you can have is a word version so that for your group if it doesn't quite fit with what you're doing then you can you can edit it and change the weeks and also add your catch up times you can take out anything so please download that word version if you want to create your own good question is there any more information on the topics other than the title at this stage because a lot of the topics we're still weight a lot of movement in the research data sector and some of them you know the things won't be done until October or you know September August October that sort of time so some of them we haven't quite finalized the links we've got what we want to achieve but the links we have a link for everyone but just we're waiting so what we could do for that you for the group organizers just so you've got a bit more information and we might be able to send you out something as well to just give a bit of a an idea what's happening with the topics please remember that nothing is set in stone we've tried to use international examples as well as Australian examples we've tried to send people literally around the world to have a look at what's happening because data is global and Australia is a global player in data so but please you know particularly for our American Canadian and New Zealand counterparts and anybody else who's listening if it doesn't work for you you can take the general concept of the thing and just substitute something if you've got something that's really amazing that's happening in your university again you might take out the example that we've got say we've sent you off to University X or Medical Research Y or whatever is the example but when you contact your group you might like to say look here's the 23 things example but we've got a fantastic example here you can use this one instead so please feel free to customize the things as they work best for your group a question our liaison librarians have asked whether the content would suit researchers PhD students yes Jennifer we've had this question a lot and we think PhD students and researchers probably asking them to do 23 things you know talk about time poor and distracted those two groups would probably come up at the top so what you might want to do is you might want to take a few of the things bundle them together and offer them a one hour or one and a half hour short course which might get people involved but doesn't doesn't require them to plod their way through the 21 things obviously that's only going to work after the things are revealed someone did mention to me that they were thinking about doing that it was to actually do the things themselves this was somebody I think working in an IT office or a library I can't recall quite which but to go through the program themselves and then to cherry pick what they would then bundle into a program for high-degree students and perhaps researchers and and then tweak the examples for their own organization the interest areas so again I guess adapting the program for a different slightly different audience and just as I said cherry picking me the activities that they think would be of particular interest I'm not sure that they'd be too many you know PhDs and researchers that actually want to know a lot about metadata crosswalks you know I might be wrong maybe my passion but I don't know that it's everybody's passion so my comment would be that there are probably some great activities in there for PhDs and researchers but perhaps not all of them will be equally applicable and I guess that brings us to all what about after October what happens to 23 things then after October the meet-up group will keep it open until the end of the year and then after that we'll close off the discussions but we've also got a second poster the poster that you can see here when you click on it actually has all the dates on it but we have a second poster that doesn't have dates and so for next year the dated poster will come down and the things will be changed so that they'll be similar I'll just show you for example this one one getting started will be the same but it will probably stop there so the last bit about sharing will be taken off so the things will still be there but it'll simply stop at here it is and you can actually use those any way you like and you can download them and you can change the examples just on whether or not you've got a something if something happens a catalyst event happens at your institution let's just say you've been asked to support a new research data policy or something oh you're going to introduce data management plans that's not until thing 15 and yet we're doing it really soon contact us and we're happy to to release the that thing to you for you to use or change or to give you some ideas to get started so don't feel that you as community organizers have to wait all the way through if there's something that you can see that would really make learning better for your groups contact us and and we'll send you the information we're asking not to you know repost etc to try and keep the excitement of the things rolling out each week but if you need it we're more than happy to share it early we've got quite a number of people who have put some ideas about how they're thinking their group might run at the webinar next week we've got a few people who are just going to very quickly pop up and say oh this is our group this is how we're you know thinking of running our group so that people who are involved in groups can also give a bit of feedback as well and they can help you with running your own group next week's webinar we'll go through meetup and we'll be saying the same thing that we've said to you that people can choose to use it or not choose not use it it's entirely up to you people could do and we think this is going to happen people will do all 23 things all by themselves and we will never know if they don't contribute to meetup if they don't claim a badge if they don't join a group and that's fine but we're hoping to enrich our already very large community by using this question I think I'll expect I'll know more about how our groups will work after our first meeting on March the 9th and I think that's probably the case for many people once you've got the group set up and you think oh yeah this is probably how we'll work it'll obviously change as time goes on but if you could just drop us an email that would be great and then we can make sure that the the community groups page is just up to date I think it's yep the community groups this one here I'm just changing it now on the screen so just making sure that it's up to date and adding any or changing any information for example some of you might have said oh well you're thinking of running it this way whatever way then monthly until October for CSIRO is planning a kickoff one and then monthly you may want to change that to something and just let us know Jerry I'm just my other comment was to that really we've putting it posting the information up about community groups so that others who may be interested in joining your group are aware of it so if don't have concrete details if things do tweak and change as you go along that farm we're really just trying to use this as a mechanism to connect individuals to groups or for people to see oh there is no group in my institution or my area perhaps I'll start one so we're not it's not that we want to keep tight tabs on what you're doing it's just really a mechanism to share that information across the community question from Mary who's just said how do people join my community group if your group is up on this page you'll notice that there's I'll just use the slider you'll notice that we've included people's email addresses so I guess they'll dull email you or they may know that you meet at a particular place at a particular time and they may just come along yeah we envisage that you know that's why we ask for a contact person or a couple of contact people and an email address so that people can connect with you via email at least initially and and then you know you can communicate how you wish after your group gets going so it's as I said it's really this is like a matching service rather than a mechanism for people to actually you know connect directly through that list and Mary just said that's okay but what if it's not what if the information isn't online then I guess you would need to pass it out maybe by email lists for groups that you are associated with or you know contact a few people that you know might be might be interested in it and then they can pass it on thanks Catherine she's just said at the March 1st webinar we'll highlight how to join a group so we'll make sure that this is this page is up to date so if you could actually go in that page and just check that the information that's up there is still current and it appears as you wanted to appear and just email Jerry or any of us the contact details are on the website for any email that you can use and it'll get to us somebody has made a comment here they're using an internal staff only wiki for the group so it won't be accessible to the wider institutional community and you know whatever works for your group the main thing is that we would really like to be in touch with you because for some of you this will be the first and only time that we interact with you you go off you'll do your groups you'll do your things and we won't we won't know necessarily how you're going so we're really keen on getting some feedback as we go through I'd like to particularly thank you all again for volunteering to be a group leader or thinking about being a group leader and if we can provide any help whatsoever please yell out and we'll provide information if you need more resources if you notice something's broken or or you've got a fantastic example that you think could be included don't forget as community leaders if you need a sneak peek at one of the other things that we're not up to yet please contact us and we'll send you out the details particularly and then you can give us some feedback if it worked or didn't work before we actually get to the thing so again everyone thank you so much for being part of 23 things it's just been the most amazing experience for Anne's and for all of the people who've worked on it and we particularly like to give a shout out to Sue Cook of the CSIRO in Western Australia Sue has just supported us all the way through and she's been a part of the the group team who's been putting this together and she's had some fantastic ideas so it was a big team of us here in Anne's who've been working on it Jane Frazier and Catherine Unsworth Rowan Brownlee, Jerry, Susanna, myself and Sue have been the ones who've sort of been pulling it together but there's been a really big team so it's been a great experience and we're looking forward to all of you creating community groups that are just going to make research data and absolutely go to occupation for the years to come and thank you to everybody and I know there's quite a few of you who are in this webinar today who suggested activities, links, examples and things so it's been a real community, real community event.


So Will Jones is the director of the community engagement and outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana. He comes from a legacy of civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C. He's an experienced speaker and community activist. He works on issues of social justice at the local and national level. He partnered with drug policy advisors and leaders in D.C. in 2014 to found two is enough D.C. to raise awareness of the predatory practices of commercial industries targeting communities of color with substance use and helping to reduce marketing and improve policies that drive inequities. He's been featured on TV, radio, print outlets talking about cannabis policy. One of the reasons that we invited him is that so many of our staff and our partners had seen him on various things and really appreciated his perspective. He's been on NBC, Reuters, TV, CBS, BBC World, Al Jazeera, C-SPAN, Washington Post, Puffington Post. He's earned an MPA from George Washington University in the School of Public Policy and Administration. And then just like all of us, we have lots of different experiences that bring us to this room. And he's also a husband and a father and serves as a D.C. firefighter and EMT. So, Mr. Jones, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so excited to have you. I invite you to unmute your phone and talk and I'm going to mute myself. Thanks for that introduction. Good evening, everyone. It's great to be here with you all and share as a keynote speaker. And congratulations to those that are receiving awards this evening for your work in prevention. I think that's such it's an important field in the work that you do is so important. So congratulations to you. I'm going to talk about perhaps what may be the next frontier in prevention for you all there in Vermont and definitely in other states. And that has to do with cannabis policy in legalization as I know that's coming to you all, I believe in October of this year. And so I'm going to give a brief overview of kind of what the field is looking like right now. But also specifically focusing on how legalization has been impacting minority communities. I know that's one of the things that was discussed in one of the questions earlier this evening about advertisements, the level of saturation of advertisements in certain communities. And so that's something that you guys are already aware of. So I just want to help us, I guess, see, you know, as we're celebrating the work that's already been done to also kind of give a preview of maybe how the work may change in the future and just things to be aware of in data and trends that are happening so that you all can continue to do the great work that you are doing. So let me share my screen. I hope that works. There we go. So again, I'll be focusing more narrowly specifically on the impact of legalization and commercialization in communities of color and the intersection with social justice. But I think there will be some things that will broadly apply just across legalization as well. And since we just have 10 minutes, I am going to be going to this faster than I might ordinarily go through it. But my contact information will be at the end and very happy to dig deeper into any one of these slides. You know, to follow up with anyone, whether that's by email or phone conversation, or even over Zoom, you know, I'm happy to dig deeper on any of the topics that I touched on. So when it comes to marijuana legalization, there's three core arguments. And actually, if you forget that just for anyone that's not aware of the organization that I work with, Sam here, I'll say we're a bipartisan national organization. And we work on issues of marijuana policy at the local and federal level. We provide education as well as working with legislators. And our goal really is to see marijuana policy move forward in a way between the extremes of incarceration and arrests on one hand. I think we all are aware of some of the harms of just treating substance abuse as a criminal justice issue. But we're also want to avoid the extremes of commercialization on the other hand. And so we're navigating that space in between that in ways that can move marijuana policy forward in a way that doesn't negatively impact public health. So back to the three core arguments. And that's arrest and incarceration, business equity initiatives, and reinvesting in communities harmed by war and drugs. Those are the most common topics that I've heard in this space. Again, specifically when we're talking about issues of social justice and marijuana legalization. So I want to analyze these things really quickly, just give a bird's eye view of what's going on in this space and again, think that we can work out for in the future. I think it's really important though to start out to remember our past and not that long ago in all of our lifetimes in the 90s.  We just sell it.  That was their explicit marketing tactics in our lifetimes. And so we have to be very aware because one of the questions that I often pose people actually that I always pose people and why I have this slide up is why do we think things will magically change if the same companies are just selling a different product, right? And so here you see these slides. And again, if you do not remember anything else that I say in this presentation, if the rest is kind of boring and droning on, I hope you remember this slide and this question sticks in your mind. But you see here in this, that's me and my daughter actually a couple of summers ago. Now I went to get her some ice cream at nearest convenience store to us. And this is what it looks like in 2022. And the closest store where I lived at the time and when I began working on this issue, the closest store to my house in any direction was a liquor store. And so I think we need to think honestly if these companies that you see here in the picture behind me are now just selling a different product, why do we believe that anything will change in terms of how they market, who they target and who has the most negative health impacts from these addictive products? And so we're seeing a lot of similarities between the tobacco and alcohol industries. We're seeing investments from big tobacco industries over nearly $2 billion from Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris. We've seen investments from the alcohol industry, so Molson Coors, Corona, Blue Moon, Heineken and others. Again, and this is a very lucrative industry, the Washington Post said that it can bring in more than NFL if it's legalized at the national level. And so to me what I see taking place and how it appears to me is that issues of injustice are being appropriated by corporations and by businesses that are looking for a way to change laws so that they can for profit, for their profit. And so just as an example, this was the campaign that was ran in DC that said legalization and discrimination. And I always say if you think that the systemic issues of discrimination and equality in our country or your state are going to be solved simply by creating a new lucrative industry, you have a naive and very shallow at best understanding of the depth of these issues in the United States and how they persist still in 2022. And in many ways we see the history repeating itself again, tobacco companies that not that long ago are partnering with organizations in minority communities. In this quote from Brown and Williamson, tobacco companies is really insightful. It said clearly the sole reason for B&W's interest in the black and Hispanic communities is the actual and potential sales of B&W products within these communities and the profitability of these sales. This relatively small and often tightly knit minority community can work to B&W's marketing advantage if exploited properly. And I will repeat that last line if exploited properly. That's what these companies are doing and they're on the right where you see PACS, Marijuana Policy Project and Houseplant making the same types of partnerships in roads in minority communities that tobacco companies did in the past. And this is important again if you're a brand like PACS or Houseplant or whatnot, you want to have that instant name recognition, that instant brand recognition in a community with your product. And so we're seeing again some of the same patterns take place unfortunately. These are just some quick images on the left. You see Big D Lickers and then Benning Heights Market. Again, when I'm working on this issue, some of the actually the ecosystem in my house. And on the right we see some marijuana related businesses in Colorado. You're really similar to me, but more importantly I think is the placement. More importantly to be aware of this is a placement. They're disproportionately located in communities of color. One pot shop for every 47 residents in Denver, Colorado. More pot shops than Starbucks and McDonald's combined.  You see a McDonald's or a Starbucks replace that with a dispensary. Add some more and that's the level of saturation that we're talking about, particularly in minority communities. And so I'm going to breeze through these again. Most of the time already, but I want to give just again a bird's eye view of what's happening in terms of rest incarceration and the other two topics. So even the ACLU found that extreme racial disparities of marijuana arrests persist even in legalized or decriminalized states. And what we're seeing is that even though there have been reductions in certain categories of marijuana arrests, very specific categories of rest marijuana related rests, the overall rate of arrests of African-Americans in Colorado, Denver and in other states as well has remained unchanged or even gone up in these states since then. And again, to me, this is because there's a systemic underlying issue that is not being addressed. And even if marijuana is legal, if you haven't dealt with those underlying issues, holding people out of forced law or bias accountable, holding those departments accountable, then you're going to have the same issues pop up in just a different excuse. Maybe they'll say, well, it's legal, but you have too much on your person or you're using in a place where you shouldn't, or there's a whole host of excuses. And I don't want to paint law enforcement with a broad brush either and say that all of them enforce law with bias, but for those that do, they should be held accountable. Legalization does not hold them accountable. And so we see persistent, if not increased, bias in arrests depending on, there's multiple ways to interpret this data, but we can just say, again, overall arrests increased. Certain on view arrests are more likely in Colorado than the years following legalization for Blacks than prior to legalization. The juvenile arrest rate, this is very important school to prison pipeline because it's still illegal under the age of 21. Minority youth, according to the data, best available data, that was from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, saw that there was actually, well, it did actually drop a small bit for white youth, I think 5%. It increased 35% for Latino youth in 54% for Black youth. So just things we got to be aware of moving forward. Adult arrests kind of already touched on that. And again, I'm not going to dig through all these numbers, but just to show you're tracking them, we're talking about them in the trends are that even after legalization that the, there was no significant decrease in arrests in Black arrests in Massachusetts here, you see a decrease after 2020. That's when COVID hit. So every state across the board saw significant reductions in arrests after when COVID hit. In the same story with incarcerated population, I know in DC our prison population was decreasing for several years prior to legalization. Same thing in Colorado. And then for some reason, after legalization, that decreased change in increase. I don't have time to fully break down this slide, but just to say there is no state that post legalization in the years following legalization saw any significant reduction in their prison populations. While, and this is what the second dotted lines are, there actually were some significant reductions in prison populations on legislation that was passed that was actually specifically narrowly targeted at criminal justice reform. So it's an interesting contrast there. And why in my opinion, marijuana legalization is stealing the oxygen from the room from greater reforms that could be done in this space. Just California again, don't have time to break down what's happening there. But just in, there was a, if you go back here, there was a small bump, not huge, but in 2017, small bump in their prison population, which is right after they legalized, and then it continued on its prior trajectory. Business equity initiatives, people, I think this quote from the founder of the National Diversity and Inclusion Cannabis Alliance is very insightful. And it says, people had dreams and hopes of building generational wealth. And it's done just the opposite. It's ruining lives at this point. Because these promises of equity are not being upheld nationally, it's still less than 4% ownership by African Americans in the cannabis industry. Even within the medical marijuana industry, which has been around a little bit longer, even in places like New Jersey where it's been there for 10 years, only one license holder was black. And so there's a lot of concern by people that are excited about legalization, but are seeing how this is actually hurting, not harming the equity isn't being realized. And people that have made investment, made dreams, and things like that are really just being left out to dry and it's creating hurt rather than help. One other quote I'll just highlight as time is really up on selling your business dream as a social justice movement. This is from the president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association. And so then again, you see headline after headline after headline, repeating the same story that the promises and they sound wonderful. I will be the first to say that these things sound great. But the reality is, again, headline, headline, headline, so many more. They're not materializing. The systems of inequality are still in place. And so we're not seeing the promises for equity take place. Just more headlines again, don't have time to break all of this down, but just to show you that there's so much that's there and that is not being addressed by legalization when it comes to equity initiatives. And then lastly, reinvesting communities harmed by the one drugs. Again, great idea.  And then what actually happens is the racial wealth gap is actually being compounded, not helped. And just to emphasize that point, I have a very short video from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. It's less than a minute and I like sharing this video because again, for our organization, Sam, this shouldn't be a partisan issue. Sometimes it is, but it shouldn't be. And so we're looking at what people are saying on both sides of the aisle and then trying to take a step back and say, so what are the overall takeaways that we can have from this? So, you know, she is an advocate for legalization, but even she is saying, hey, this is compounding the racial wealth gap, not helping. So I'm going to play that really quick. Let me make sure I have my audio shared computer sound and then I will be done. Compounding the racial wealth gap right now based on who is getting the first mover advantage. According to an industry trade publication, 73% of cannabis executives in Colorado and Washington are male, 81% are white. In the state of Massachusetts, just 3.1% of the marijuana businesses in the state were owned by minorities and just 2.2% were owned by women. Is this industry representative of the communities that have historically bared the greatest brunt of injustice based on the prohibition of marijuana? Absolutely not. It doesn't look like any of the people who are reaping the profits of this are the people who were directly impacted. That's correct. And so again, just wanted to share that to say people on both sides of the aisles are seeing that a lot of these promises aren't painting out. And then again, I bring it back to that initial image I showed in question of, you know, why do we think anything's magically going to change just because old corporations are selling a new product? We already know how they operate. We know who they harm the most. And you guys work in prevention. So I think we just have to be aware of this new frontier moving forward. This is just a personal side. I always tell people kind of, what's my why? Why am I motivated to continue working on this issue and be passionate? When a lot of people tell me, hey, the train's already left the station. Why are you saying anything? And for me, it's just important to say what my truth is to share that I have that in my family history. That's my great-grandfather and great-uncle. They were the first to sit in desegregate schools in Washington, D.C. And I draw an interesting contrast on the right there. You have John Boehner, who's now going to make $24 million if marijuana was legalized at the federal level. And I say, you know, there's not always a big paycheck at the end of the day if you're doing the right thing. And yeah, I know you all working in prevention. You would love it too if your paycheck for working there in the community was $24 million. Unfortunately, we don't always have that paycheck, but the work that you guys are doing is so important and that's something to be proud of. And that's why I continue to speak out on this issue so that, you know, I can look back and say, hey, I spoke up. I shared. I did my best to speak the truth as we're moving into this new frontier of marijuana legalization and commercialization. This is, again, my contact information. So happy to continue the conversation or dig deeper into any of the slides or topics that I went through. I think it went a little bit over, but I hope that was some good information for you all. Thank you. Thank you so much, Will. Thank you for your patience with us as we got things going and for doing this and for multitasking through all of it. That was amazing and impressive. And I don't know how long you'll be able to stay on with us. I know you're going to have to jump off, but thank you for coming and for your time today. We really appreciate it.


All right, wake up pay attention. Let's get this party started. Am I ready to go? Can I go? Can I go? Ooh, I'm timing. All right, I'm gonna give you very quick things. I made these slides just now so I haven't thought this through so it will show. Essentially I'm gonna talk to you about what originally started. I named it the BDSM project. It's now the SM framework as a subset of that project. The whole idea behind it is essentially that servers should be submissive. So essentially what is this? The SM framework? What is SM? Well, it's an acronym because I couldn't really figure out what the hell the name it. System Stack Scripting Management Framework. That pretty much sums it up. So what it is, it's got a core to it. It installs to opt SM if you install as root by default. It's got a command line interface that it supplies to you. It has modules that it supplies as well. We'll get to those in a few minutes. And the modules have an API. Get to that again. And then the whole point to it is that it enables you to write extensions. So you ask what the BDSM project does, what the SM framework does. The answer is whatever you need it to do. The idea is that it's a framework to enable you to write system level scripts and distribute and share and do all kinds of useful things with them. So what is an extension? Basically it is a directory. It's a named directory. It has a bin directory. You put executable scripts in this bin directory. That means that it's actually language agnostic. Language agnostic, but actually doing it in shell has some significant advantages. So you make a shell directory inside of your extension and you make a functions file in there and you can actually put shell scripting functions in there, which if you add scripts into your bin directory, executable scripts that are shell scripts, then they will automatically load in these functions in there as well as other things. So now what we have here is we have the core CLI. We have our extensions. But the point of the modules that I showed you earlier is that the modules API can be used by extensions. There's a lot to it. I'm not going to go into it, but basically you have an includes file inside of the shell and you can include the module APIs. And depending on what modules you included, you may have other auxiliary directories like configuration, templates, depending on what modules you include. And there's also this useful little CLI mapping file, which basically allows you to map command line actions, like I have a deploy extension I'm working on. You can type SM space deploy and in the bin directory of that extension, there is no files. So it's actually being mapped to a shell function in the functions path or runs my file.  You can install them easily by SM and ext install name URI. So you give it a name. This is what you're at, you know, SM space if you're installing an engine next one would be SM space engine X whatever give it a URI that can be a file system path of any valid URI. And then you can also have sets of extensions.  And you install them similarly. So what's the scope of this project? Well, the scope is you have your operating system. It has an underlying package manager. It manages your operating system and all that stuff. It does damn good job at it. Don't mess with it. Just use it. And then you have your application stack. So everything that defines your runnable application stack, use the SM framework to script that into submission. And then on top of that, you add a content management system like chef. And then on top of that, you have some distributed thing for managing multiple servers probably. So the scope of this is supposed to be a single system, scripting stack management framework. Again, it's the BDSM projects SM framework. I have a GitHub organization for it as GitHub.com slash SM. And it's just like the RVM website, but BDSM or if you're at work and they block stuff like that, you can actually do SM.beginrescuen.com as well. If you have questions on this, ask me later. Enjoy.


In order to reduce the hardship caused by the removal of fuel subsidy, support the environment and to provide efficient and affordable modern transport system for the people of the state, open state governor, Dakbar Beaudu, has unveiled compressed natural gas-powered buses. The unveiling of the buses makes open state the first state in Nigeria to achieve search feeds and stakeholders commanded the governor for being proactive. The governor said the buses will operate across different states, different areas of the state including Shagamomuwe, Ibarfor, Beggar Aziz, adding that it is part of the multi-modal transport system initiated by his administration. He said the buses will operate along campuses and other busy areas to reduce transportation problems among students, workers and traders. We have given some buses to our in-infarct capable civil servants and workers. We will be providing some buses for the use of our students and campuses. These are better. They are more efficient in terms of consumption of fuel to cost. They are cleaner and there are more sustainable means of transportation anywhere in the world and we are starting that in the first state in Nigeria.