Welcome to Digital Assets News, to get top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and break down a bite-sized piece of today. We've got a great story about mass adoption, especially as it pertains to institutions. First up, Morgan Stanley, rumor to be eyeing stake in Bitfum, or BitHum however you want to say it. So when we take a look at this story, we can see that mass adoption is coming a lot faster than what some people may have expected and institutions are really coming in hot and heavy. On top of that, we'll take a look at the IRS is pushing back the text downline to May 17th and what that means for cryptocurrencies as far as your crypto IRA. We'll take a look at both of those stories, but first let's take a look at what's going on into the market. So today it is the 19th, 11 a.m. El Paso, Texas time, beautiful day over here. That's 75 degrees should be awesome. So right now we have a $1.8 trillion market cap. Pretty great and everything's up, but you might notice, let's just bring up the coins real quick and let me blow this up so you can see what I'm talking about. When we take a look at Bitcoin, last time we had a market cap of around 1.8 trillion. Bitcoin was around 61,000, but now you see it's around 58, 59. And what's going on is that things are flowing into the alts like they should. So you've got Bitcoin holding, holding perty right here at 59 almost and then a tenor for Ethereum, Binance coin, you know it's down, it's a little bit not too bad. Tet is tether, what else do we have? 5% for Uniswap, 0.65 for Chainlink, 1.24. So as we see, there's a little bit of a bump here, but as you go down, you start to see things like Bitcoin SV. You start to see other different things that are coming around 1% for Sushi, 1.3 for Bridge Oracle, I've never even heard of that. And then the lower you go, the more you will see all these assets getting into it. So again, really everything starts with Bitcoin, but as you see is things start to flow out. It goes into all coins and it'll come back into Bitcoin. And I think this is what is going to be one of those catalysts. So what we're talking about here today, this was interesting, not just because it's a rumor and all these things, but again, in cryptocurrency, whether it's smoke, there's fire, this is what's going on. Morgan Stanley is rumored to be negotiating the acquisition of a significant share in leading Korean crypto exchange, Bithumb. Bithumb, Bithumb, I always say it differently. So this is how much they're planning to invest, $254 to $440 million, which is quite a bit of cash just to put into Bithumb. And it goes to note that not only are they doing this, but this was just after they talked about enabling Bitcoin ownership for their clients with an aggressive risk tolerance. And they have to be pretty well to do of $2 million, $2 to $5 million in assets with Morgan Stanley. And this was the article that they're referencing, which just came out two, three days ago. So when we take a look what's going on here, I mean, look, Morgan Stanley is I think the fourth, third or fourth largest bank in the United States. And if you've got something this big and they're like, you know what, we want to not only recommend it to our clients, which is one aspect.  And just the rich ones, just the accredited investors. And they say, you know what, we want to go one step further. We want to get into an exchange, which I find it very odd, it's a Korean exchange that they want to get into. But I'm sure there's repercussions globally. Maybe they want to get out of the clutches of the American system that is crippling cryptocurrency innovation here. That's my personal opinion. And just saying, you know what, we're going to go this route and we're going to own this because we can see where the future is going. So when you take a look at Morgan Stanley, which is again, big, huge bank, been around for a very long time. The other institutions, it's not just about, you know, should we get into cryptocurrency assets? But they're going to take a look around and go, look at all these institutions getting in, look at all our other banks that are getting into, look at all the different companies that are getting into it. It's not the question of, should we get in? It's when should we get in? And the timing is right now. If they don't get in right now, I think that there are going to be a lot of banks, a lot of institutions and a lot of just corporations that are going to get blockbustered, meaning that they're just going to get passed by, by what's going on in the background. And I think this type of thing really plays a huge part. Not to mention that, I mean, the SEC is looking at affirming a person that gives blockchain lectures at MIT. The CFTC, the person's going to be put in charge there, that is also a very heavy cryptocurrency digital asset blockchain proponent. So if you have these two things, these two people in very high places on top of all these institutions and now banks getting into the fray, not to mention a couple of banks having a nice specialized charter in Wyoming, how long do you think before, and I'm just going to say it, an ETF gets approved. I know we've heard this song and dance for a long time, but I didn't think it was actually going to happen, but I mean, why wouldn't it? Everybody's in the game right now. So why wouldn't something like that actually get approved? The real question is, why don't you make a difference because everybody's getting it now. Now, let me know what you think of the comment section and not financial advice, but even I might actually start to buy a little more Bitcoin after this news. All right, so that's what's going on there. Just real quick, if you don't know, if you live in the United States, which some of you do, actually, I get a lot of my viewers are from Australia. I think it's like 20 some percent are from Australia. So for you guys, hey, this means nothing to you really. So let's go over this real quick. The IRS moves everything back for tax reasons for the US to May 17th. So what does that mean? Really, it just means one thing and that is that we don't have to pay until May 17th. So that means that we can actually spend a little bit more into crypto and digital assets before we have to pay the Pipe Piper, which is Uncle Sam. On top of that, if you have a Roth or traditional IRA or crypto IRA like I do, you're gonna be able to contribute all the way to May 17th for 2020, as opposed to 2021. What am I talking about? I'm gonna bring in Anthony Bertolino. He is one of the heads over there at iTrust. I'm gonna let him answer it and why I am so bullish on using iTrust, especially for tax-free gains and trading within my crypto IRA account. And I'm gonna pay zero taxes on staking Ethereum and Polkadot. So let's jump right in. All right, so that's what we just heard. Everything that's going on with taxes and the deadline being pushed out to May. So what does that mean for your IRA? Well, thankfully, I've got Anthony Bertolino. He is from iTrust Capital, which is what I've been using for the last two years. I've had no problems, fantastic service, and I'm really, I'm excited about what's gonna happen when I actually turn to that magical 59 and a half years old. But the real question is, what does this mean for your IRA as far as pushing these dates back to the middle of May? So Anthony, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. So what does this mean if you got anything to do with IRAs, crypto IRAs with iTrust? Yeah, definitely. Thank you for having me on. I don't think anyone would probably be upset about the taxes being pushed back here. A lot of people, obviously we're crushing it, trying to get everything in, especially people who might have crypto taxable gains they have to deal with and our accountants hate us by now and say, what is this yield farming and this unit swap and all this stuff, right? But luckily for retirement accounts, if anyone listening, you have not made your 2020 contribution, each year you are able to contribute to your retirement accounts in the amounts of six to 7,000, depending on your age. And once that timeline is passed for a year, you can never contribute again. So that sort of tax-free gains for 2020 you would be able to kiss that goodbye forever. And that deadline was April to get your 2020 contributions in. Now it's moved, you have an extra month, right? And so you have until, I believe May 17th roughly to be able to get that final contribution in for the 2020 season, you can still already start your 2021 contributions. And so, you know, from a financial planning perspective, my view is always try to max out those IRAs year over year. And again, if you get it in the Roth, that that's tax-free money for life. Yeah, I like to not be taxed so much. That is the great thing. So yeah, this is one of those things that I was, I have ignorance of, and this is why I rely on you guys to tell me, because when I thought once the year was over, I could not contribute. And then you send an email like, hey, make sure you get your contributions in. So at the end of January, early February, I hadn't yet maxed out my 2020 and I was able to put in just enough to max out 2020. And then the very next two or three weeks, I maxed out 2021. So it was a perfect timeline of where I max both out because for me, I can only put in $7,000 per year. And I was like, well, shoot, you know, everything's going up, I gotta get it in. Thank God I got able to put in more for last year and this year. So that makes sense. And now we got till May, if you want to do that type of thing. Also, yeah. Also, if you're looking for like a video that explains all this stuff, I did a 20 minute video, it's in the description. I'll also link at the very end. So there is that piece. And then, Anthony, talk to us about, because there was this question. I'm not a big trader. Every so often I do some trades on Trinity Trading, but people ask me about trading within the actual iTrust account, within our actual IRA, because they're like, well, can I do this? And then what happens when the bear market comes and I want to get out into stable coins? Because you guys don't offer stable coins. So how does this work? Yeah, that's a really good question. And maybe we need to add some more clarification to the website because people often do ask, hey, do you guys have USDT or USDC or DAI? I want some stable coins. I don't want to hold Bitcoin maybe temporarily. And the answer is we actually have FDIC insured US dollar position. So if you look at USDC or Tether or DAI is a little different. USDC is dollars supposed to be in a bank with additional smart contract risk. These stable coins are built on Ethereum, which are smart contracts. Now what we have is real dollars in a real bank account, FDIC insured. So you have the benefit of stable coins, it's stable, but you don't have any of that smart contract risk. So if anyone's listening, you do want to trade in your iTrust IRA, we have what is better than stable coins, which are regular dollars.  So in this situation, okay, we got it. So we can actually just transfer it over and that's all tax free. If you want to trade within your IRA, trade to your heart's content and that's a way it goes. Perfect, okay. 100%. Yeah, that's the biggest benefit, right? Someone who say, body ether early in the year at 600 and now it's up there at 2000. Maybe people want to take profits and when you're inside your IRA, you never have to worry about giving away 30 or 40% when you just want to take some profits. So it's a magical thing. Yeah, I like that. I don't like paying taxes. I don't know what it is about me. So there is that piece. There was two more things, which is that one, when I first came in here and you guys sat me down and go, listen, this is how this whole thing works.  And then you guys started talking about curve and the way that curve actually cussed at you. Because before that, I was just all about the cold storage and doing the ledger way. When we talked about curve, he said, well, it's a multi, it's an MPC. It's a multi-party contract. And that's very stable, very secure. And he talked about all these different big companies. And now we just learned that curve was purchased by PayPal. So real quick, talk to us about curve. And also the thing that I'm looking most forward to is to be able to actually stake my Ethereum and Polkadot within my iTrust account, within my Roth IRA and getting tax-free gains on all of the, all the coins that I can actually stake with. Yeah, so we've been with curve since inception. A lot of people would say, oh, I've never heard of curve if it was six months ago or a year ago. And it was true. I mean, curve was amazing technology, amazing team, one of the true leaders, the most secure in my opinion. And one of the top five custodians, but they're an institutional player. So most retail investors say, oh, I've never heard a curve. Maybe that's not even good company. And now over the last few months, people have been hearing more and more about them with all the work they've been doing with banks and Franklin Templeton and Etoro. And now finally, PayPal, who has been sort of looking at the landscape to make some key acquisitions, they looked at all the different custody options and they acquired curve. So that shows you just how powerful they are or they're in the progress of acquiring. So, people ask, it's business as usual on our side. I think that it simply will improve the product, probably bring in some even better engineers and I don't see any downsides. Very proud to be working with them. We've recently implemented something called an air gap piece, which now essentially this is like a cold storage 2.0, which don't need to get into the logistics of it, but it's a quite advanced version of cold storage the next evolution in regards to staking. Obviously one of the biggest and best questions. So first and foremost, for staking, it's for for stakeable assets, things that are running a proof of stake system because like lending is different than staking. People often ask that. So first it would be like Ethereum, right? You know, Ethereum 2, the beacon chain is live, money is a lot of money's in there staking, securing the consensus. Now there's sort of two things that we think about. Right now, if we did want to enable staking right away and we wanted to sort of push it forward as quickly as possible, people would not be able to sell. Money right now, ETH, when it's locked up in ETH2, it is no longer liquid, okay? It is permanently in Ethereum until the merge happens. Right, right, right. That's the problem in my experience. Yes, yeah. And so what that is is if people were willing to take that, you know, maybe we'll run some surveys and see if people like that. Now there are options like Rocket Pool, which I think people should really look into. This is a system that allows ETH to be staked, but also be liquid and tradable, right? So we're also looking at Rocket Pool. Then Polkadot is the next one. Polkadot is already live, can be staked. But again, it comes back to Curve, where our security is through Curve. So we need Curve to support things that we do. Curve is currently in the sort of research and development. I don't know how quick to finalization stages it is for Polkadot, but they are working on it very, very seriously. And so right when they'll announce Polkadot staking, I would assume our implementation to go live would be shortly after. And so just know, you know, we do plan on being the first crypto IRA provider in the whole world to offer staking. Like that is my goal, and I will try to seek to, to get that goal as quickly as possible. And good things do take a little time though. I'm okay with that. As long as it comes in, like within next week, I'm good. Not seriously. So you know what, that just, it makes me think about something else. Like if Curve has been purchased by PayPal and they're working this diligently for Polkadot to get it into staking, maybe at some point we might see Polkadot on the PayPal network as far as part of their suite. But that's just, that's just the reach. I'm not going to say, don't listen to me. I just thought it was, it's just the idea that came across my head. All right, so besides that, the last thing I want to talk about is NFTs.  So first of all, let me share my screen so we can see what the heck I'm talking about. So tell about your NFT giveaway it's going on. Yeah, so it's obviously super exciting. You know, we have two different art pieces that we haven't released. So if anyone sees here and reads the blog posts, they are sort of blurred out and this is sort of the sneak peek to say the least. We're very, very lucky to have a lot of artists reaching out to us who want to collaborate in the future. What this is is we want our clients to be some of the first people in the world to own NFTs. So some listeners here, you might have already bought NFTs. I think a lot have not. And I think it's really exciting to be able to get a piece of the future of art right now. And luckily we're doing it for free. And so the coolest thing about NFTs too, is it allows for additional programmability or additional benefits. So our NFTs are not only pieces of art, but or provably scarce in terms of a limited true rare supply, but they have additional utility. And so there's two different ones. People can read the blog post, the legendary one, which we're going to be minting five of those, I believe I would have to double check. If anyone ever receives a legendary NFT, you receive free accounts with us for life. And so if you hold the legendary NFT, your account with iTrust is free forever. And that asset can also be theoretically given to a family or friend. And if they hold it, then they have an account free for life. So this is sort of a digital representation of a iTrust prime client, right? And then for people who can't win the legendary one, because it's a little more limited, we do have the contender edition, which is if anyone makes two referrals in like a 70 day span, there's quite some time, they will get one of the contender NFTs.  And again, this is a free account. So promo code Dan, and you can actually refer people with your free account. And so you tell a friend or family, hey, come make an iTrust capital account. They do have to fund it with at least the minimum, but you can win a contender NFT or a legendary NFT. And even the contender will also give you some free months. And so just take, they take this as a moment to tell people about crypto IRAs, why tax-free crypto is so huge, and get yourself a piece of the future of art. And we are sub, we do reserve the right to give additional benefits to any of our NFT holders in the future. So do not discount that this is our first NFT drop in the first crypto IRA NFT drop in the whole world. And I think people that hold these might have something special for them. Gotcha. Okay, so real quick, just one more time. How do they get in this entrance for these NFTs? Yes, so head to itrustcapital.com, set up a free account, again, use the promo code Dan, and this is a free account. You will have a referral code in there and you can refer friends or family to set up accounts, have them fund it. And it's all listed on the blog post. So itrustcapital.com, the Knowledge Center, or our Twitter, but this is an exciting time. Perfect. I'll link that blog post below in the description. And that is it. So Anthony, thanks for stopping by and answering those questions. Exciting times, right? It really is. Thanks for having me, brother. All right, I'll see you. All right, great. So hope that answers some questions. I'm going to link what Anthony was talking about, the blog post underneath in the description. Also, in the description you can check out. I trust just like I did two, you know, a year ago and so far it's been great. But that is it for today. So look, first of all, thanks for sticking with me all the way and I really appreciate it. If you liked the video and got some value, give it a thumbs up. That helps the channel tremendously. Also, if you would like to subscribe, that'd be fantastic. Things we talk about are very time sensitive and that's just one of these examples. So that is it for today. Thanks for sticking with me to the end. I appreciate it and we'll see you on the next one.


A sneeze and a cough signs the flu season is soon approaching. But what measures are students in DCU willing to take to prevent falling ill? British medical journal experts are questioning why handwashing, quarantine and face masks are not canvassed as heavily as the flu jab. We asked DCU students how they felt about wearing face masks to avoid the flu.  Terrified of needles. Don't like the mask. But I'd take an injection over wearing the mask. I'm not really afraid of the flu because I get sick every couple of months anyway and like I'm okay with that but I wouldn't wear one of these things. Do you know what, do you know what? I've heard that they don't even like after an hour or so they stop working. That's what I heard. Really? Yeah. They lose their filter qualities. Oh really? Yeah. I'm not trying to be bad but like in Ireland you don't need them. But with restrictions from eating and drinking and some questionable looks from strangers, how helpful are the masks really? They actually don't really sell here so I can't really comment on that. We would recommend the flu shot to anybody during the flu season. Ian Mangan, DCU TV News.


How about some girls hockey but Midgee hosting international falls and the Broncos strike first in the first Morgan Rasmussen ends up with the loose puck and fires at home that makes it one nothing but in the second Jack's answer on the rush Hannah Eller off the rebound goes upstairs for the finish we're tied at one but international falls with the pair in the third this won the game winner Amber Tillender beats Brooklyn DeLapp for the score they go on to win three one if you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS


I think digital has changed journalism in two ways, two very fundamental ways. The first is how we distribute the content that we make. So primarily we use to distribute content via radio and television. As the internet came along, increasingly we distributed via websites as well. And now you've got the next generation of digital products, primarily social media and apps, which allow alternatives to distribution as well. And we keep learning about how we can best use them. But it goes deeper than that, because the way you distribute your content starts to shape the content you make, because what works on Facebook may not work on Twitter, may work on Instagram, but may or may not work on the television. And so what we're having to do is approach a story with a number of different mediums in mind and then make informed decisions about what form a story should take in which medium, whether it's TV, radio or any number of different digital arenas. And so what perhaps started off as a distribution issue is now becoming actually completely fundamental to the nature of our journalism. I think aggregation is right at the centre of the digital experience and whether content produces like it or not. Actually what we're all doing on social media is aggregating the things that we want and when we go on to social media to look for stories, for instance, we're looking through an aggregation of content that's been created by our network of friends and colleagues and people that we know online. So aggregation as an activity in the digital arena is absolutely central and it's not going anywhere. There are clearly issues if a website is pulling together a lot of content that it hasn't produced and then presenting it and then making a profit off it, but that's when media regulation comes in. Each country will have its own approach to what can and can't be done. I think the example of Google News is an informative one though. When Google News started a lot of content producers were outraged about what it was doing, but actually Google News survived and now is an essential way of delivering traffic onto content producers' websites. So for me aggregating is central to how people are going to consume news. Clearly you can't have any individual or company illegally making money off someone else's content. That's about regulation but so long as it's within the rules, aggregation is going to be right at the heart of the way that we all consume news but we also distribute it as well. I don't think I would say that a group of two people or five people is going to be a threat to an organisation the size of the BBC. I think what we do at the BBC and what that group of people might be doing are two quite different things. What I think is certainly true is that there is now a greater variety of sources on any story that you are covering. There is big legacy established media like BBC News.  I think increasingly the big beast if you like, I don't just mean BBC News are competitors as well, are understanding that it's time to acknowledge the contribution all of those smaller operators are making when we look at my show Outside Source. It's called Outside Source because it combines the best that we have inside the BBC with the best of the rest of the information that's out there and as such I don't see individuals or small groups of people who are producing journalism or just simply sharing experiences and content as a threat. I actually see that as a huge opportunity for us to improve the accuracy and the breadth of our coverage. I'm not sure I'd be so bold as to tell India media companies what to do. I also think you need to be very careful about generalising about revenue models that work. People might be prepared to download a TV show that they want to keep and watch multiple times with their family. If it's news they might not want to download it, they might just want to see it then and there and so if you want to make money off that content perhaps you're going to have to put some advertising around that or apply a subscription model. So I think the first thing to do is don't believe any generalisations about media consumption or any generalisations about business models. There is no single business model that works. There is no single approach to distributing content that works. You've got to look at the product you've got, the best means you have of distributing that content to the audience. Once you've decided that by all means work out how to monetise it but you need to go through this step by step by step and think about the product you're making, the way you want to distribute it, then start applying revenue considerations but whatever you do, don't go looking at other media which aren't like yours and draw in conclusions. This is an incredibly fluid situation and the best thing you can possibly do is look at lots of different examples, try and learn different lessons from different organisations' experiences and then apply it to your own and come up with a unique strategy for you which hopefully in time will pay dividends.


It is my great pleasure to welcome our first keynote of INA 2021, Courtney McClellan. Courtney is the current innovator in residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She has a long history of making art and sculpture and thinking socially at the intersection of media and civic life. And most recently she's been thinking a lot about annotation, which is why she's here. And she's going to share that thinking with us today. Courtney, the floor is yours. Thank you so much. I appreciate the invitation to speak here at Hypothesis. And I want to further thank Hypothesis Scholar and Residence, Ramey Collier, for making this connection. And I'm just thrilled to speak with you all today. What I sort of thought I would do today is introduce myself just a touch more, but focus on talking about contemporary artists using annotation because that's what I am. I'm a studio artist. And then the bulk of the time we'll spend talking about the development of my Library and Congress Innovator in Residence Experiment Speculative Annotation, which will launch this July. So in just a few short weeks. Again, just sort of a follow up of that introduction. So I'm a visual research based artist and I live in Atlanta, Georgia. My work covers a range of media, including sculpture, performance, photography and writing. And the project I made for the Innovator in Residence program is the first web-based application I've ever made. In subject, my work often addresses speech and civic engagement. And I've served as a studio art faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Georgia, Georgia State University. I have my MFA from Tufts University. And most recently I was the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan. So just a little bit about the Innovator in Residence experiment and program. So as I said, my project is called Speculative Annotation. The program at large is a creative research residency funded by the Library of Congress Labs. And innovators such as myself work with Library of Congress collections and staff to create a short-term experimental public project. In this case, a public art project that intends to enrich the work, life and imagination of the American people. So in order to kind of start thinking about annotation and sort of how I became interested in annotation, I think it's important to think about how contemporary artists are using annotation. It's a trend that I've seen in the last, certainly five or six years, but probably reaches much farther back. And I've seen many artists using annotation in their practice. And so I thought I'd share just a couple of artists that I think are using it in interesting ways. And this will really just be a brief touch on them. So hopefully if you're interested, you can follow up more about their work. But I wanted to give just a little bit of context. So this first artist I'm sharing is Bethany Collins. Bethany Collins is an artist living in Chicago and makes work about the intersection of race and language. Collins regularly responds to historical documents, songs and literature. Collins uses annotation in one form or another in almost all of her work. And in this case, I'm showing an example of Collins Eraser series in which she erases printed text using a black magic eraser so that much of the text is unreadable. So it's really kind of leaving behind just some kind of trace of language and then sort of highlighting certain aspects of the text. I think this work is particularly that she did a series about the Odyssey. Another artist using annotation is Wendy Redstar. Wendy Redstar is a multidisciplinary artist who in this case created a series of annotations for an exhibition at Mass Mocha in North Adams, Massachusetts. This particular annotation is an annotation of an elder in her tribe. And so this is an annotation of Medicine Man. So a little bit about Wendy Redstar. So raised on a core reservation in Montana, Wendy Redstar's work, and this comes directly from her website, is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Redstar seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. The last artist that I would just touch on today to think about annotation is Laura Owens. And so Laura Owens is primarily a painter, but in some ways, especially with the topic thinking about social annotation, I thought Owens was a great example. As part of her mid-career survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Owens created a series of emojis that could be downloaded by attendees. And so this you can see on the right is the emoji palette that she created so that people could annotate each other's language with her unique and specific emojis. And these could be downloaded and used on the premises at the Whitney, but also at large. So these were things that sort of left the gallery, jumped off the wall and existed in people's kind of social annotation life of communication. So I think this brings up kind of one broad question, and I certainly don't intend to speak for all artists, but mostly to kind of touch on an idea about why artists might be interested in annotation or why artists annotate. In many ways, it's the same reason scholars, journalists and scientists annotate to share opinion, to record information, to provide context or to react to the archive. Annotation is also a form of reframing or protest and offers the ability to draw attention to resonant passages or ideas. In addition to written text as a form of annotation, artists also have other tools at their disposal to share information. So some of these tools will kind of look at a little bit later, but something like line quality. So how the line is made, is it thick, is it thin, is it kind of wiggle, does it gesture in some ways color choice, the ability to collage and or a way to layer images. So in thinking about me specifically, as I was looking at these other artists and found so much inspiration and how they were using annotation, I realized that I was less interested in how I might annotate something and more interested in how others annotate. I'm somebody who has always loved finding notes in library books and who finds, you know, fascinating kind of pieces of detritus on the street that have text on and the people have shared grocery list, etc. And so I particularly began thinking about how other people annotated and how we might be able to facilitate that through a project with the Library of Congress. So I was particularly thinking about students and teachers as an audience for many reasons, both because I think they could actively use the tool and also because I think there sometimes are an underserved art audience. So I wanted to think about how I might stage a space for them to annotate historical material and primary sources from the Library of Congress. So just a little bit to kind of articulate exactly what speculative annotation is. Speculative annotation is an open source dynamic web application and public art project. The tool presents a unique mini collection of free to use items from the Library of Congress for students, teachers and users of all ages to annotate through captions, drawings and other types of mark making. Working with curators of the library and students and teachers in the classroom, I developed speculative annotation to provide a way for students to speak back to history. Speculative annotation connects items from the past with the day to day experience of users. It was made with a K through 12 audience in mind with the hope that the primary sources from the library's collections would be used by educators. The items are shared with contextual aids including curators, annotations and links to additional resources for further research on the library's website. The tool, as I said, will launch this July. And I wanted to go ahead and note a few important people to the project. So speculative annotation really wouldn't have been possible without a team. I am not a developer and so that was one of the kind of important things to build a team so to facilitate the creation of this project. And of course, everyone was inputting on creative choices as well as technical ones. So other people I wanted to kind of highlight are Jamie mayors senior senior innovation specialist at the LC labs. Adam Arling, who was the developer for the project. Jess Vue, who was our UX consultant and Olivia Graham, who was a graphic design intern. So just to kind of touch on why we call it speculative annotation and why that was important. So for me, I have been defining the speculation and annotation as the following speculation is engaging in or projecting on to future events. It's theorizing and imagining without knowing. In our case, we're thinking of annotation simply as a note of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram. So examples include margin notes highlighting and thought bubbles. And we'll see examples of all those in the tool. An additional question is why think about speculative. That sort of been an ongoing conversation and certainly was important to the inspiration of the project. So when thinking about speculative annotation, the tool enables students to analyze and examine historical materials through hands on engagement. History is an enduring mystery. Speculation is a form of investigation. This tool allows students to question and examine the point of view of the creators of primary sources. In response, students annotations are an interpretation. We're asking students to make their insights visible and in doing so join history's record. So that's kind of one important factor is that we're wanting students to develop some visual literacy skills and using the tool and we want them to find value and let them know that we find value in their joining history's record. Speculative is also a reference to speculative fiction, a term that covers fantasy to science fiction. While the presentation is going to focus on the topic of annotation, the essay I selected to annotate speaks to the topics of speculation and imagination. It is from science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin's introduction to the left hand of darkness, and this is an essay that I have thoroughly enjoyed and have used in many contexts. I hope you will annotate it with consideration for how Le Guin sees the relationship between the past, present and future, as well as the role of the artist in relation to this interpreting this particular topic. So some goals we set out for speculative annotation. And I'll say that my residency started in September and it's a year long residency so these were sort of goals we articulated very early on into the project and tried to kind of keep on returning to when we were making design decisions and choices along the way. We wanted to place K through 12 students in direct conversation with primary sources from the library's collection. We wanted to share these items with context, for example, asking curators and experts to annotate the items so students and educators can understand their history. And I'll return to that particular goal, because that was one of the biggest changes in design decisions we made. We wanted to provide a space for users of all ages to have a depth of experience with individual items from the collection. We wanted to connect items from history with the day-to-day experience of citizens and application users. And we wanted to explore technical solutions for supporting deep engagement with a singular item across formats at the library. So I'll say that's another kind of difference here is that many of the previous, so there have been three previous innovators and residents and most of them, they have done projects dealing with large data sets. And so this was a slightly different project we were selecting individual items to try to inspire deep engagement with students. So I'm going to show a brief video of just what the tool looks like and kind of demoing a small annotation. So as you can see here, there's a toolbar to the left. There is the ability to save and download at the top. You can also access some of your saved annotations in the top right if you're working on something. And one of the goals we set out is to make things very simple. That was something early on we heard from students to have kind of simple choices as not to make something so complicated. So there's a text tool, there's a drawing tool, a highlighting tool, a shape tool to kind of isolate aspects of an image, and then the stamps. So students can jump right in to starting to annotate. There's a limited color palette at the top. So some of this was to, and we kind of kept on going back to how is this an annotation tool, not necessarily a design tool, although it employs visual cues and material and hopefully is visually engaging. And the item we're looking at that's being annotated is a telegram from Aaron Copeland, who is a composer. So that was a large portion of our time and I'll talk about that in a bit about even just selecting items that we think would be exciting and viable for classroom users to use. So it's not a tool where they can pick anything on the library site, but instead currently there's a subset of about 40 items that people can select from to annotate. And there were some kind of technical limitations about the tool. So again, that's partially why it can't be used across the entire LOC wide. There were sort of limitations. It was also that we couldn't have a server. So everything is accessible and saved in the browser. So if you look at the metadata panel right now, and then there's also the staff annotation, which I'll talk about later. So that's just a very basic demo and introduction to the tool itself. So the process of creating speculative annotation. It was a highly collaborative and creative process. And throughout the process, my team and I conducted three kinds of research. First being studio experimentation and design. The second being collaborative curation of the speculative annotation mini collection with library staff. And lastly, the user testing class visits with students and educators. So a little bit about the studio experimentation. I wanted to stage a space where students felt valued with a conversation about shared history. So part of me was trying to do this to make this visually appealing to give them freedom to respond in ways they'd be interested in. And also to provide them hopefully with some interesting tools. In preparation for this, I worked in a printmaking studio to explore markmaking and printing processes in order to consider annotation as an artistic medium. Monoprinting and collage particularly inform the tool and can be seen in the hand cut stamps. So one of the things that sort of I think most unique about the tool is that there's a series of hand cut stamps that I cut myself that students can use to code or layer or encode by that. I mean, like add, you know, exclamation points, add stars, things that they're interested in use them as kind of visual cues in the actual active annotating. So I wanted the application to feel touched and handmade even in digital format. So that was another thing is thinking again about my love of finding notes and library books was this was partially to make something feel touched and unique and personal. These principles guided many visual choices in the resulting site. Along with my team, we designed tools and features and speculative annotation to contrast the visually to visually contrast the archival material presented in the mini collection. The color palette was inspired by colors regularly used for annotation like fluorescent highlighter yellow diverging from the muted colors of many of the age artifacts and allowing for annotations to be highly visible. Many of the stamp forms like an arrow or a pointing finger also allow users to draw attention to particular aspects of the historical items, while thought bubbles and punctuation marks offer a way to share ideas, opinions and emotional reactions. The curation of the mini collection. This was where I would say a large portion of our time went working with curators library staff and field experts we developed the mini collection in parallel with the creation of the speculative annotation website. Library curators provide a host of contemporaneous examples of historical annotation from the collection. Rosenwald and rear book curators for example shared that medieval manuscript materials that included ample margin space with the expectation expectation that scholars would add their own notes. At the time books were rare and expensive to create and scholars would often travel to a manuscript and document their findings directly in the same book. These historical examples of annotation influenced the layout of the tool for example the need for extra space around an item to allow for such annotation. Library staff also proposed works to be included in the speculative annotation mini collection. Through conversation with experts around the library several key themes related to storytelling and imagination emerged among the items. And that was again part of that speculative question how do we invite storytelling and imagination through the tools and through the items. The topics that covered and regularly address these concerns included civil and human rights the creative process and technological development. We worked with 12 different divisions at the library to create this collection for students and teachers. And so much of our time was sort of talking about to them about their needs finding out what might in their collections might be a standalone item that could be engaging and inspiring to students. We did user testing and again that sort of one of those things are from my kind of perspective I thought about it a lot as like community outreach but we were also of course doing user testing to find out what students and teachers might want from a tool and how they might utilize it. So that was sort of a big part of the efforts particularly last fall even into the spring where I was visiting classes while we were carrying out these other kinds of research. And right now we're looking at the list of classes that I visited which we would not have been able to create this tool without their engagement and support and particularly I'm thankful to them during a really challenging and difficult teaching year. I virtually visited classes throughout the development of the tool. These visits began with sharing the library's free to use digital collection and asking students to annotate them with the applications with which they were already familiar. We learned from the writings and drawing students made and listen to their advice about what they wanted. When the tool is prototype students and educators tested the site giving feedback and brainstorming solutions to educational and technical challenges. For instance students shared that they most often handed annotated with a highlighter. So a highlighter was added to the toolbar. They also wanted to be able to zoom deeper into images allowing for a more detailed view of a given item. Finally students suggested ways to make the tool more user friendly. For example they requested that the text tool be contained within a bounding box allowing students to write longer annotations that can wrap to multiple lines. Speculative annotation aims to foster visual literacy and interpretation of primary sources across subjects. The tool is informed by methods of historical analysis, literary close reading and studio art critique. And I think that brings up something important. You know you can see here the classes we visited we didn't want to make a tool that was just for history classes. We thought that these primary sources had need and had utility in art classes and photography classes and language arts classes. So that was really important to the practice and visit to the how do we make a tool that is flexible enough that it could be used in an elementary school language arts class and in a high school AP government class potentially. So I'm going to share just a couple of examples of student annotations. These were some of the ones we collected and we studied and learned from. And we did receive special permission to show this work of mine or so we did go through that process. And again just simply by having them share these with us. We were really engaged with what they wanted what they used what was exciting to them. How might the tool be transformed and of course as I already said they gave some really concrete and useful feedback as well as sharing these annotations with us. I know as the topic and thinking about the hypothesis tool about the social annotation I did want to address that in this talk. So currently students cannot co-annotate on speculative annotation simultaneously. That was something again that was limited by our inability to have a server. So although students cannot edit edit the same item on separate devices in real time they can share. So they can download and share these annotations one another and their teachers. It could be a direct email it lives in a PNG file or it could be sharing using hashtag annotate LOC and that's something that we hope will see people activating. We also hope that teachers can share their tools and resources and ways they've used speculative annotation in a similar manner. In the most simple and direct way we do hope that teachers might be willing and thinking about modeling the annotation for students. So the biggest addition and I think it's sort of to be my favorite addition to the tool as we've been working on it is LC staff annotations. So I think I noted in the demonstration that there was a small button on the lower left hand or a button that was orange that said LC staff annotation. And as we were talking to staff and as I mentioned kind of speaking to the 12 divisions we were working with we regularly heard concerns about how to provide context. And rather than seeing that as a problem I really saw that as an opportunity. So you can see that there was a metadata panel to provide very straightforward information about who made it where it was made when it was made. And there was also links to kind of additional research students and teachers could use. But I thought it would be interesting and to provide a way to have some personal understanding of annotations from the curators themselves. So I think this provided a couple of things one it's a model of how the annotations might look and what they might be used for. But I also think it's a way to kind of put students not just in conversation with history but at conversation with library staff. And so and in fact this for me was inspired by a project that was created at Isabella Stewart Gardner in which a contemporary artist asked staff and security guards to describe the famously missing paintings. So I wanted staff at the library to spend some time describing and looking at the tool looking at the items that's from their area and annotating them. So it was sort of a great joy and we asked them to annotate with several topics in mind. So one it could be providing additional historical context. It could be telling a personal narrative. It could be asking questions for students to respond to but about half of the items in our collection have these unique LC staff annotations that students can can access. So this one I'm sharing right now is an annotation of a Rosenwald manuscript material that we were including in the selection by curator Stephanie Stillo. And I also just love how wonderfully visual it is. This is an annotation of a photograph of the pecan sheller strike by Maria Guadalupe partita. And this annotation was another kind of great addition and enriching who Peter, who's we're describing here also created a podcast associated with this tool. So we wanted to kind of engage the students and the story that she was telling and then hopefully they'll go listen to the podcast she created also. So it's also a way I think of hopefully kind of drawing people into the larger story of each item in the collection. And lastly, this is an annotation of a Patsy Mink manuscript material done by Liz Novara. So this these annotations I hope will really enrich the project and also kind of exist as gyms to find in the tool itself. Before leaving I wanted to give an additional thanks to Adam Arling, just for you and Olivia Graham who were integral to this and I want to give additional thanks to Jamie mayors the LC labs team. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at a couple of them. Emily Kirkpatrick, the National Council of English teachers, cleanest Asian printmaker and just hydro and the team at triple I F these all these are all people who are vital to this project. In addition to the area specialists and the many teachers who who gave their time and resources and students who engage the project along the way. So from here I'm going to invite you to annotate on the selected at text, which is again the introduction essay to the left hand of darkness by Ursula Kalik when, and I'm also available for questions. Are there any questions I can answer. Yes, Courtney. I've been kind of monitoring the chat and the questions that they come through and thank you so much for that presentation. It's really refreshing to step away from the text tool and really immerse ourselves in the visual. A couple of questions here and then maybe we could move over to the reading that you've selected for annotation. I'll start out actually with one of Alex's questions if there were. I can show it on the stage actually, if there were unexpected uses of the tool subverting it for other needs, making the tool their own and making it appropriate for their contacts. Did you decide to resonate with you as something that happened during the project. So I'm wanting to make sure I understand the question so I think there's be one thing of where the students subverting the the tool. So there's one thing is that the only way to use the tool is to use items from the library's collection so it's not a space where somebody could upload an additional image so they can annotate something extra. The tool itself is open source so we're hoping that other cultural heritage institutions might want to reuse the tool and another context. And so that that's sort of one intention and hope in the larger process. Great yeah and Alex did confirm that you had anticipated his meeting right. Okay, good. I will say that I see that Jamie mayors the senior innovation specialist that I work with is in the chat and answering probably some of the technical questions. We can also invite Jamie up on stage if that would be helpful. Jamie, do you want to do that? Are you just going to field questions in the chat? She'll have to chat respond. Maybe while she's thinking about that, we could another question from Chris Aldrich and I'll again show it on the stage here. Does the tool have a way for students to take their annotations or data with them perhaps to put in a notebook commonplace book for future thought review or building upon? So the one place so again because it doesn't have a server, there's no way of like logging back on to a different computer. However, the information does stay on, you know, and within the kind of browser that it's in. So for instance, in my case, I have many saved annotations that I can pull up because I'm reusing my same laptop. So you can reaccess those as long as you haven't cleared your cache. However, there's not currently a space that you would sign on again, like I said, from a different location and be able to access another annotation. Got it. And actually, your colleague did say that they would be willing to come up on stage. So I'm going to see if I can make that happen as well. Give me a second here. Hi, I'm not very camera ready. I'm like literally an overalls. But I am I am happy to answer. There's some like technical questions about accessibility that I can happily speak to I saw several of them and I was trying to answer like one by one but it might be easier if I just share it here. But only if that's helpful, I can continue to do it in the chat whenever you guys want to share Jamie. I put this one question up on stage so people can see the context. Yeah, so the Library of Congress when it produces applications in in production they have to be section 508 compliant. My team and LC labs has a different workflow because we're an R&D like part of the library and so we create like fast build prototypes to test a concept to see how popular it is with the public. And we do this through a number of ways. But one of them is through art projects and that we sponsor such as hosting residents like Courtney. So hopefully that helps for context so spike of annotation is an experiment. It's produced as such. We host it for a short amount of time so it'll be hosted by the library for two years. And then if the library decides to adopt it and to put it into production, then it goes through the process you know as required by federal institution with 508 compliance etc. So hopefully that helps for context because I don't think that that is, you know, apparent especially because the application certainly doesn't look like a prototype it's beautiful. So that's one thing I saw and then another one is I was saying this in the chat but in case like people didn't see it because I was typing it fast. So there are several colors from the color palette that that do have accessibility compliance and it's a little bit more complicated because there's a light mode and a dark mode so there's colors that have accessibility compliance like based on what the background mode is. And there's also tags for the tools. So that's there but I in general because the tool is so heavily visual know it hasn't been tested with a screen reader, and the tool is open source, and we would absolutely love it. If anyone had feedback or wanted to fork it and had ways that they thought that the tool could be more accessible like you know in the short amount of time. So we did a dance basically we kind of do with all of these experiments where we made it so that it could be accessible, you know with the resources that we had and then if the library chooses to adopt it which we really hope it does it's been pretty amazing so far and it seems to be useful but can't say for sure what the organization will do. Then it will meet all of the requirements before it goes live live as a permanent tool. That was great so thanks for being willing to join us on this for the moment here actually pop on the stage. That looks like there might be one other question from Mark and then maybe we could turn over to doing some annotation on on your selected text Courtney. I'm going to put it on stage. And this is for Mark what if you could have a server and what if there was a button to save annotation.png an image file to the internet archive. Have you imagined what it might be like to actually save these artifacts digitally. So I'll try to answer and then Jamie if you have a different thought on this. So the biggest desire we've had for a server is so that it could be more of a social annotation so that students could be on the same image and be writing and also that they could share. Share them more easily that way so that's sort of a long term dream. We haven't gone heavily down that path because of limited expectations because it's a government institution about collecting personal data. And so we've always known that not having a server was one of the limitations but of course if somebody else was using it or if there was another way to kind of manage this the thought that students could co annotate or that a teacher could have you know every sort of it's you know in many ways what's fun about a hypothesis that people could be all one image together and be sharing ideas. So we love that possibility we just know that currently that's not feasible. Jamie would you add one thing to that which is that we spent money Courtney spent money and we spent money did a lot of extra work with our developers so that actually the architecture for this to be set up with a server is all in place. It's just that as a part of the context that I was giving before that this is a prototype that we don't use servers with the experiments that we launched that's something that will happen later. You know if the library chooses to support it as a permanent app and it goes into production, then it'll put resources into that and setting up all of the, you know best practices for how to store PII or not etc. So that's just a part of the technical constraints of this particular project. But the architecture is there and it was really fun. I mean if folks are interested it seems like they are in some of the technical aspects. The way that the tool works and has been set up for simultaneous annotation and this includes layering between the curator annotations, you know being able to layer on top of those or layer, you know having students in the same classroom layer their annotations on top of each other. The architecture set up in the JSON manifest file incredibly lightweight without PII so that basically if there was a server. I don't know if this is interesting to people but I'm just going to share it. That essentially the app is set up so that those markings are packed into a JSON file without PII and so your server is essentially hosting this really, really lightweight JSON file, and then it just recalls it back or recalls like multiple lines to layer. So the architecture is at Marling our developer is amazing and he set up a really eloquent like solution for this that would be really kind of sustainable and lightweight for any organization to host. So if there are folks out there that would like to use speculative annotation in that way it's a really lightweight. And then we also heard from folks as well. I love the idea of Internet archive as a way of archiving things. And the other thing I was going to say was that we also had some suggestions about using GitHub as a way of acting as a server affordance so if you were a GitHub user. You know this this app could be something that you could connect to your GitHub repo and it would store your annotation manifest files like within your own repo for you to recall them again and use them in the tool. So that's how it's set up and I hope that was easy. I think it was there's a lot of really deep technical geeks here in the audience and they're already grooving on that. So thanks for sharing that. If, as we move over to the essay. If someone here wanted to maybe get involved in a technical level or start to think about this. Well, how might they, how might they do that is there a way for for citizens to get involved. Oh my gosh please please do we it is a lot of overhead for us to get things published in a public like Library of Congress GitHub repo because obviously it needs to be scanned and everything so that we're not accidentally passing you know bugs like to folks who want to fork it or package it. We do a lot of work and we put a lot of resources into making sure these tools are open source, and that is exactly what we would like to see I mean we would like for you to get involved, I'll be one of the repo managers they'll be other people on the lab staff. We would love issues pushed we'd love to see people forking this we would love to see people using this in different contexts I saw chats about, you know, if someone wanted to set it up like using GitHub as a repo, like in the architecture that I was describing. Please do and there's other ways that you can get in touch with us at LC labs on Twitter. We're a technical team at the library. We love hosting conversations about the experience that we put out so that's one way. And we also have a newsletter that you can sign up to and you can find that information at labs.loc.gov and then once the tool launches in July Courtney is going to be doing a roadshow at a bunch of different venues and we would love to do some type of community Twitter chat so maybe there's a way for people in the hypothesis community to get involved in that. Great, those all sound like really really good ways to get involved. There's a lot of people here who spend a lot of time on get get forms of different kinds, not only GitHub but others too. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to invite Courtney to come back and kind of close this now because one of the reasons that we're working with this virtual manifestation of I annotate to have readings associated with sessions, so that the conversation can really start to happen maybe even before the session during the session and then continue on after. So it's actually okay if we don't have a whole lot of time now to do any kind of synchronous annotation. But if we would Courtney maybe we could just introduce the idea to them and maybe I'll share my screen so I can show it up here on the screen. Give me one just one second here, and then I will also ask you to explain why you picked this document and the first thing I just wanted to let people know is that in the external program for this conference there's a program built into air meets the platform that we're meeting in that where you can see the schedule and get to things. But there's a web document outside of the outside of the platform where every session is listed. And then as we get the session details for each one there will be a link to that. And so if I navigate now you'll see the session details for Courtney's session here today and you'll see that she has a place for an annotated reading which is actually this excerpt from Ursula K. Le Guin's left hand of darkness. And so would you, and I'll just say that you can open the hypothesis sidebar, and you can see other stains is already started to annotate on it and known, known, known annotator, but you can sign up or and or log into your hypothesis account right from there. So, Courtney, would you explain why you picked this text. Well, knowing the audience I thought that the talk itself was going to focus a lot on the idea of annotation. But I didn't want the term speculative to get lost in the mix and so for me this is an essay that really introduces, you know, Ursula K. Le Guin is often going to use the term science fiction that I would kind of suggest that we're speaking about a more kind of broad speculative fiction to and thinking about what speculation does. And so this is a writer who writes fiction talking about the utility of speculating imagining thinking about the past and the future and the way they relate to one another which is of course the hope here that students will will help them imagine the future. So it's sort of this this time travel goal, this kind of poetic text that is also still very I think accessible and concrete and it's a text that I love, and that I have taught in in many contexts and often So hopefully it will be an enjoyable read that will help kind of inspire some interesting thoughts about speculation imagination, the past, the future, and certainly was integral into me proposing and creating speculative annotation so this is sort of an inspiration text I would say. That's great and we can see people already doing that and so we invite everyone throughout the conference to come back to these documents and continue the conversation there. We can have a lot of ineffable chat here in the conference venue itself. But when we have it out on these documents with annotation it'll it'll actually have a more lasting quality to it. Well I really want to thank you Courtney for being here today and kicking off this conference was just fantastic to hear what you're doing and your thoughts on other artists at work. Is there anything that you'd like to kind of leave us with as a parting gift as we head on to the rest of the conference. I mean hopefully the text itself will will do some of that but really with this idea about how annotation is visual as well as information it is artistic. In any format the way the text you choose the way it's laid out there's information in that kind of method to and so I would just sort of encourage everybody to keep on thinking about how annotation is an artistic artful gesture as well as the information educational and formative gesture and that those two things can fit together beautifully so hopefully we'll see more of that. Well thank you so much for being here I'm sure we'll see all sorts of emojis flying across the screen chat chat going on there is a little emoji button on the bottom that you can use to send little signals to the screen which is a form of annotation as well. I'll just let everybody know that you can also visit the lounge area here in air meet and you can actually meet up you can sit down on the table and meet with other people so if you wanted to have a conversation maybe with someone that you were chatting with here in the session you could just go to the lounge right now and start to have that we will be having our next session starting in just about five minutes it's a panel on digital literacies. And so hope you'll tune in for that and we're here all week right we're starting every day noon eastern running till for the official program and then four to five we're having a social hour where you get to bring your favorite annotation and talk about it in the crowd. So thank you Courtney. Thank you all thanks for having me.


Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Another Monday, another episode of the nonprofit show. We are so thrilled to have you here tuning in with us either live or watching one of our recordings. Today we have Chris Bobilock with us and he's going to talk to us about your financial transparency for your nonprofit. So before we get started with our conversation with Chris, Julie and I of course want to make sure that you remember who we are. We've only done 600 episodes together but we are working towards another 600. Julia Patrick, thank you my friend for creating this wonderful platform. Julia remains as the CEO of the American nonprofit Academy, and I get to have fun each and every day alongside as your co host.  And we are honored to have the continued support and investment from our presenting sponsors. So thank you very much to Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy, National University with the fundraising Academy, nonprofit nerd, your part time and controller staffing boutique and the nonprofit thought leader. I like to remind you that these companies show up day in day out for you. And so please do check them out and of course if you missed any of our episodes. Also thanks to our sponsors we can allow you to find any and all of these episodes on Roku. YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo and for those of you that are podcast listeners.  You know again I shared today we're going to talk about finances and we're going to get down and nerdy with Chris by the lock here, director of finance and operations thrilled to have you Chris welcome. Thanks very much really happy to be here. Chris and I started working Jarrett several months ago and I don't even think you know this on a series of training videos. And it's a partnership with the American nonprofit Academy and chasing in company that only do nonprofit accounting services and so we kind of came together and said what are some of the topics that nonprofits need to know about. And whether you're in leadership or a board member. I mean, how does this all work and so Chris and I started chatting really an interesting process for all of us really had a lot of fun learned a lot. One of the things that Chris first said to me was about transparency. And we started having some conversations about this. And I was like, Wow, we need to get you on the nonprofit show and really talk about this because this isn't something that we're we think we understand what it means but we really don't. And so that's kind of the genesis of this discussion. And so sorry for that long winded introduction or recap. But I wanted to start us off and have you explained to us what is financial transparency and how can it really be a cultural piece of any of our nonprofits. Yeah, okay so we might take it a little bit further than financial transparency but that's really the core of it and think of it like in interpersonal relationship right how do you build trust in interpersonal relationship well with honesty and being genuine transparency and in sense nonprofits have relationships with their stakeholders. And so the same same rules apply you need to show honesty need to show transparency. And that's how you build credibility with your with your stakeholders and so you know this is something that I believe is fundamentally important to not only each and every nonprofit but the nonprofit sector as a whole that that that whole idea of being transparent being being credible. And it really does start with culture. And because you have to have a culture within your organization for this to work and now realize you know we did a we did accounting and chasing episode on this and one thing I didn't mention was really CEOs and executive directors and nonprofits really need to think about first of all their internal culture is their internal culture is transparent. Are they sharing information with their, with their staff and the key leaders of the organization and then from there you need to go to the board of course and hopefully you're being transparent with the board of everything because they're fiduciarily responsible for the organization but you know again is that level of transparency there. And that if those are in place from that you can develop a culture of transparency that is external to your stakeholders. So again that that word culture is very important and everyone needs to buy into it and everyone needs to support it and believe it's it's important. That makes a lot of sense and are there requirements for transparency, especially with financials because I know the 990s. That's public information so what are the requirements of being transparent requirements for very the 990 is the is the big one the form 990 needs to be available to anyone who wants to see it upon request and there's a. The fact that form 990 that takes up some key private information that your auditor provides, or your tax prepare can provide you. But it at that needs to be available. Beyond that, every state has different rules and regulations as to what needs to be presented so you need to be well aware what you're the state in which you were incorporated and what that state, that state requires. This is not so much about what's required it's about what is what you're going to do that's sort of the right thing to do and it's going to help you as a nonprofit build stronger relationships with those that support you. I love that you said that because there's a big difference between being compelled to do something. You know we use the word compliance all the time versus offering it up and saying this is the right way to operate. It's really an interesting thing and I see what you're saying about going back to the concept of culture. So let me ask this question and who is actually benefiting from this and when we talk about financial transparency. Who's our audience. Yeah, so first of all, you know I believe as I mentioned at the top, you know that the nonprofits benefit from transparency and the nonprofit sector as a whole because it just builds credibility, all around for that for the sector and the nonprofit. But when you think about stakeholders you think about all the people that come into contact with your organization and, you know, certainly their donors, their, their grantors, volunteers, not just the volunteers that help you on the front lines, deliver your mission day in and day out by the volunteers who are on your board and committees. You have partners probably you have vendors, you have the people who benefit from your services and their stakeholders as well. So everybody that whole sort of ecosystem of stakeholders benefits from a transparent culture and I think nonprofits need to generally operate with their eyes wide open to who their stakeholders are and how, how this type of culture and transparency is beneficial. We were talking to one of our guests and this makes me think of it here as well is don't share anything that you're uncomfortable with it getting out past, you know, a certain ripple effect so if you share with a certain stakeholder group have the assumption that it will be shared beyond that circle. And so I can only imagine that it makes us think and maybe pause. Okay, what are we sharing and are we truly comfortable with this information getting out beyond the intended recipients. So how much do we share like what's the best practice for you know a baseline being transparent and then even, you know, I don't know going above and beyond that baseline what does that look like. Yeah, so it can it can look like a very, a variety of things. First of all, if you Google on nonprofit transparency you're going to find a few organizations that have done checklists of things that that should be shared to be considered to be transparent. And that's a good that's a really good starting point, but it could be for instance, your organizational documents to start your nonprofit letter, your articles of corporation, your bylaws, the form 990 certainly if you're audited your audit report. Your list of board of directors key staff members and maybe it's their backgrounds as well so people understand who's on your board and what experience they have in the area. Key policies are helpful as well, because you know a lot of credibility has to do with, are you protecting the resources you're being given because essentially people are saying you know, I'm going to give you or you're actually with the nonprofit is saying to you give me your money, you give me your time and we're going to turn it into something better for the common good we're going to make it into something better. So they want to feel that that's actually going to happen. So conflict of interest policy whistleblower policy give people give people more comfort that you're, you're doing the right things to make sure that there isn't fraud or misuse of funds. If you have a strategic plan, you might want to share that if you have an annual report. Certainly you'd want to put that out. And I also don't want people to feel intimidated by the amount of the work, you know, it doesn't. I guess back in the day when I grew up and things were printed we talked about you know the glossy annual reports now their PDFs or their shared digitally or whatever. It doesn't mean a 20 page report it could be a couple pages that just summarize. You know what your funding is how you're using your funding the number of people you serve and what your what your goals are, just to give people an idea of your path and and where you're where you're trying to go. So, don't think that you need to put hours and hours and hours into a fancy formal strategic plan or or annual report it can be just a little bit of information. People get sensitive about well what about bad things that happen to our organization what if we have a bad financial year or there's there's something about organization. Well, to be honest be transparent means sharing it all sharing the good and the bad, but you don't just share the bad. And that with no information alongside it you may share okay we had a bad financial year. But here's what the board and the organization are doing to get back on track this is what we're doing to take better steps to get our finances back in order to get to serve more people to serve more people more efficiently, whatever the story is for your nonprofit what people want to know is that they again can trust you can trust the information that you're getting organizations that typically hide information. You know that they're probably looked at a little bit more critically as to whether people want to invest their time and resources there. Yeah, that's very interesting you know to not share just the good but to share the real realistic which might not be so so sunshine and roses. So how do you recommend we share this beyond posting it on our website or there are other key ways to disseminate this information. To be honest putting it on your website is really the key way to do it and maybe you do it under your about tab everybody has an about tab, and you have you could have a link under there that says transparency or could say financial information or whatever you want to call it and you basically just package it all under that one place one stop shopping for a viewer. They can find, again whatever financial statements you want to provide information about your board of directors about about your policies, everything that that you feel is part of becoming a trans transparent organization and to be honest under the about tab it could be under a couple different links under that tab but but you get the idea you go one place a person can go one place under the information they need. Maybe there's three or four years of 9090s maybe there's three or four years of audited financials there so people can see the trend is sometimes. Again, you know we've all been through tough times last couple years there's probably some that have maybe gone down a little bit after to not after 2019. But on the other hand, for growing organization they can show a really nice trend of how you, how you've grown over the last, like I said three or four years. So that's really the best. I think the best way to do it. And, you know we've talked about watchdog groups a little bit and guide star and watchdog groups will go to your website and they'll look and see what you have published there and that that impacts their ratings guide star although not a watchdog group has different levels for the information that they provide an organization so you might want to go look yourself up on guide star and see how they have you ready because I think it's there's a bronze silver and gold kind of level within guide star that depends on the information you're willing to share to people so you know there's a lot of a lot of pluses that can that can happen by just making it available. I'm fascinated because when I was thinking about this I was thinking about like this is current, you know the here and the now. I hadn't thought about going back a little bit and, and having some of those older pieces of information to give us context and to show the trajectory of where we've been and where we're coming, where we're going to I think that's really interesting.  I'm going to, I'm going to put that one a little and it said that's really back to the, you know, kind of comfort level discussion we were having at the beginning. The staff, the board need to be comfortable with what they're showing now I would say eight 10 years of nine nineties is probably too many I'm thinking to two or three generally, you know what the most recent history of the organization. But because you know if you're doing this for a long, long time someone doesn't want to go go there and see all those nine nineties necessary they're really interested in what's happened and in more recent time. Very interesting.  Oh, on the nine nineties, a lot of a schedule opportunity. And that is that you get a chance to put your narrative forward and talk about your organization in a way that sometimes, you know, you don't get to right. I see now how this really fits into not only being transparent, but maybe connecting with people that you don't even know you're going to be connecting with that they seek you out. And they find information and then they make judgments or decisions about working with you before you might ever even know. You actually just said working with you you know I didn't really touch on this, but think of the current labor market and trying to hire people. Well what what do you want them to see when they come and do their research on your organization. Did they want to see an organization that has nothing out there about them you don't really get a feel for who they are and what they want to see an organization that's forthcoming and sharing information you can understand where they're going and what they're doing and you know again is we're all struggling in this labor environment to hire good people you really want to put your best foot forward so there's another there's another advantage of doing something like that. And it goes back to the, the culture right and so if you are an employee or potential employees seeking, you know, a new opportunity, you're right Chris you know just looking on websites to find out what is the organization sharing. So I think it's a very frustrating transparency and their communication and culture from the onset, and then to watch that journey, you know, perhaps through the interview process and onboarding process so I've never connected those two in such a cultural way so thank you for bringing, bringing that to the forefront for me. I have another question and, and Jared and I talked about this a lot and that is, you know, oftentimes our boards are comprised of business people who come at at nonprofit board service with a benevolent heart and attitude, but they don't always you know that the, as you would say the cultural differences or the performance differences. How hard do you think it would be for some of these board members to be comfortable with the dissemination of so much financial information. It can be difficult for some I mean I've worked with, you know, treasures of nonprofits who come from very large companies and feel that everything should be like that fortune 500 company that they came from and it takes them a little time to realize that you know that's not the way the nonprofit world works but I think, you know it needs to be explained carefully and, you know, again, there's lots of different kinds of for profit companies there's their single ownership for profit companies which are very tightly held the information's very, very private but then there's companies that sell stock that are on stock exchange and they're owned by the shareholders and the SEC requires a certain information is provided. So I kind of think about it that way your stakeholders are your owners, they're the people again that are giving you the funds to operate. So what information do they need to keep supporting you. That should be the driving force. That should that should be the reason why you want to do that. Now again, how much information and exactly what information that's still, you know that still needs to be vetted out and and agreed upon. I understand why some people would say well I would never you know I wouldn't share that or anything but yeah you you learn after a while that the benefits really are there. I have to share to Chris that I and I know I've shared this on the show before Julia is that, you know, I was really taken aback by a very savvy donor that they did their due diligence in the financials and you know these other charity watch dog kind of platforms and they said you know right now we're not comfortable making this large investment because and they you know shared the points. If you can get this you know improved then yes let's circle back in about eight months and so I bring that up because investors, donors, supporters, they become savvier and savvier as our access to data becomes more and more accessible. So, you know whether we share it or not. I really think that you know if there's if there's a will for our donors to find it or air any stakeholder group, they will. So why not provide it, you know. Yeah, well, you know we're an accounting firm that serves now profits of the first thing we're going to say of course, is that you're fine financial data needs to be accurate and of high integrity you got to be able to produce financial data that makes sense and so any potential grantor or any potential donor can look at them and say, Okay, I understand financially where your organization is. But then going going beyond that and doing the things we're talking about today I think only strengthens only strengthens the case for someone to want to give you money and of course, the more money that's involved the more important. This is going to be. A curve ball question and we're notorious for this but I just have to. I know I just have to share Chris that you know even though we are doing the work of the angels there are times when bad things happen right and there have been cases of, you know, financial misuse and embezzlement.  Very good question. I hate this question but I love this question. So, so when we're talking about sharing the good and the bad it doesn't necessarily mean all the bad some of some things are are to be dealt with internally or within the board structure. And, you know, if it now if it's public if it's become a public thing or something that might become public in the newspapers on the way on somebody's website and which there are millions now. Then you need to address it very proactively and you need to say, you know, we understand this happened where, you know, possibly embarrassed that this happened, but we've taken a B and C precautions to make sure this never happens again. And that goes from everything as serious from a serious to a fraud incident to, like I said, a bad, a bad financial year where donations go down. Explain it there's usually there's usually an explanation there's usually some some reason or some type of comfort you can give your folks that this is this is a blep we're turning this around but this is what we're doing this is how the board is involved. Some organizations have gone as far to share portions of board minutes or finance committee minutes to show that the board has taken action that there's been very, very distinct action that's taken. Now, I mentioned on the recorded thing, you know, you have to be careful how your minutes are written and all that minutes can be written very different ways and some are overly detailed and those are the ones you might not want to share on a website but but if you want to, you know, if, if you just want to state that our board has taken this action to, you know, prevent something from happening again or percent or make sure something does happen in the future then. Sure. Great. Yeah, no that's a great point. I like you know adding the minutes in there if appropriate so thank you for knocking that curveball out of the park. It's not only annual meetings for organizations that have annual meetings, where all their members are involved in members after proving this annual meeting many should be, should be sure. You know, my takeaway from that is that you almost are couching the issue of whatever the problem is in relationship to the future and prevention. Did I hear that correctly I mean you're. That's absolutely right I mean things are going to happen from time to time that are not the way we plan them. But really what it comes down to with a credible organization and organization you want to invest in is how do they handle that situation how they move forward from it. And so you want to show that you're a proactive organization that cares about doing things the right way and that you actively take steps to to make things better. Well, this has been great again. I, Jared, like I said when I first met with Chris. And I just thought this was such an important thing to be talking about. And I don't know about you, Jared, but I don't feel like enough of us are talking about it. Maybe we're prodded when something bad happens. But just as a matter of culture. I just loved having this discussion on the nonprofit show today. It's an important one. Thank you, Chris. Really welcome my pleasure. Hey, Chris Bavillac director of finance and operations at Chasen and company. I want to really quickly before we let you go. Chris talk a little bit more about counting on Chasen. This is a series that your team and I worked on through the American nonprofit Academy. Really, really interesting. I think of it as kind of a primer for those people that are working in the nonprofit sector, but not might not know really what they should be doing. They have a lot of passion and they want to work on the mission, but they need some more information about how to be specific and to be successful about, you know, the accounting interactions. And so, Chris, we have a little over a dozen, I think episodes. I think it's exactly a dozen. Okay, not a baker's, but not a baker's doesn't just doesn't. Well, really interesting from compliance to budgeting to auditing. Really, really interesting topics that I learned a lot. I did have some hair on fire moments Jared on camera. I must admit where something came up and I was like, holy moly, I didn't know about that, you know, and so these are all free. You can go to Chasen and company or counting on Chasen.com and and get free access to this. So it's not gated, which is remarkable. You can get to this information. So it's really been amazing Chris to have you and your team help us out across the sector because we need accounting help, undoubtedly. Yeah, I know we're very proud of the series and thank you for giving us the opportunity to partner with you on that. You said 12 topics that we started with that we thought were important to nonprofits things things for nonprofits to know it will raise new questions for people no doubt it will maybe direct people down a certain path that they hadn't thought of before as you mentioned those hair on fire moments. And, you know, we hope to that was sort of our kickoff launch of those those dozen topics and we hope to add some topics, some new topics over time, and that it's beneficial and love your format that you can watch it as a video or you can listen to it as to it as a podcast while walking the dog if that works for you so. Yeah, it's it's really been amazing and like I said, I learned a lot. I expect to continue to be learning any learning more. Again, everybody, thank you for joining us. I'm Julia Patrick I've been joined today by my trusty sidekick Jarrett ransom, the nonprofit nerd herself. We are not able to do our daily program more than 600 episodes without the support of these amazing sponsors, many who have been with us from day one. Blumerang American nonprofit Academy your part time controller, the nonprofit nerd fundraising Academy at National University staffing boutique and nonprofit thought leader. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out so that we can deliver a fresh and new approach with the nonprofit sector each and every day. So we thank them very very much. Hey Jarrett. It's been great to have another thought provoking episode. I'm so delighted that we could have this conversation with Chris. You want to sign us off today. Yeah, I would love to. You know, every day, we have been showing up as as we said for about the past three years, the conversation conversations evolve and so Chris thank you for shining this light on accounting and transparency it is very critical to our sector, especially as we move forward so thanks to all of you for joining us for this Monday. We like to give Monday some fun fresh feelings as well because Friday gets all of the fun, but we hope you'll join us back here tomorrow we've got a great lineup this week and until then, please stay well, so you can do well.