Thank you for being here excited for another Friday for the fundraising Academy cause selling education ask and answer episode. Thank you again to fundraising Academy for being our exclusive sponsor and allowing Julia and I to truly have this amazing conversation where the entire episode. We are answering your questions so thank you again for joining us today. We want to make sure that we think our sponsors again thank you so very much for your investment not only here in the episodes and the show but truly in our community and sector at large.  We say thank you thank you thank you for helping so many of us continue our mission forward. All of our episodes if you miss them or want to watch them again perhaps you want to have a streaming party with your with your friends and colleagues. You can find all of our episodes archived on Roku YouTube Fire TV and Vimeo. Those are available 24 seven so you don't have to worry about when you sign on for us here these are available at your beck and call and on demand. We are also streaming and plat sorry podcast platform to over 20 different podcasting channels. So if you are a podcaster like I am please go ahead and tell your podcast to queue us up the nonprofit show and you can listen to us wherever you might go. Julia Patrick it's great to be here with you CEO of the American nonprofit Academy I'm Jarrett Ransom your nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and we've got a deck of questions we've got so many questions that have come in you know we have been doing episodes now for going on three years. So again over 500 episodes over 800 video elements and these questions still stump us there's still questions that come in and we think that's a good one so what do we have today Julia well first before we move into this I want everyone to know that you know on the production side we see these questions and we see them in advance and so we're they're not a total shocker Jarrett Ransom the nonprofit nerd my nonprofit nerd your nonprofit nerd does not see these in advance yeah put those glasses on sister I have to because I have to be able to see clearly right I mean you're right I I do not see these questions so they literally are you know impromptu coming from my 20 years of wisdom in the sector yeah it's pretty ding ding dang impressive so let's go to Bridget from Los Angeles California I'm moving forward to another nonprofit in my community to lead a finance department I would like to send an email to my contacts to let them know about this exciting change but I gather from my associates in the fundraising department that this is wrong can you please advise me as to what is proper protocol oh that's interesting very interesting well and even more so that fundraising department in particular is the one saying no no that we're not going to do this so so again interesting here my recommendation is that there is an email that is sent out right so that one of the things I've learned in media and rick de brole has shared this with us here Julia is if you don't tell someone the story they will make up their own story right so Bridget I would love for you and any other staff member that is parting in a very amicable way to send an email to your contacts letting them know that it's been a pleasure working with them thanks for their partnership you have taken on another opportunity that you have sought out right like you're seeing this as a as a personal professional development opportunity and to let them know who they should contact in your absence so that I think is is great I have seen in these emails Bridget where maybe they'll say would love to connect with you on LinkedIn here's my professional profile on LinkedIn so it's really not connecting you know to your next mission or to your next organization you're maintaining that individual return on relationship that we've talked about so very much so for me that's good etiquette that's good business practice it's not poaching it's not saying hey come with me to this other organization it's literally saying it's been an honor to work with you I've chosen the next chapter in my book you know and if you'd like to stay in touch with me personally and professionally I asked you to connect with me on LinkedIn and here's who your contact will be going forward I love that I love everything you said and I agree it especially in finance where people can get a little skittish like oh my god they're having problems you know to say to make it positive and then to make the introduction to the next leader you know which is I think really a valiant thing because I would imagine Bridget has a strong sense and tie to this organization that's not going away it's just a different opportunity and keep it you know positive and keep it connected and I love what you had to say good job good show over that's a wrap that's a wrap hey I have a question for you do you think that the interesting part of the second part I gather from my associates in the fundraising department that this is wrong do you think that this is because fundraising folks have a very strict protocol about taking their their donor investors with them and so that's why that he's or she's getting this message yes I do mm-hmm and again fundraising or not to me we are stewards of the community right and so for me even as a fundraising you know professional I have moved around to different missions especially in the role in which I serve right that's that's my whole jam that's what I do but I subscribe to the code of ethics the donor bill of rights and I it was talking to someone the other day I've seen a lot of donor databases I've seen a lot of capacity opportunities I do not take that information from one client or one non-profit to the other so you have to truly trust in the people and what you hire and what you work with that they too subscribe to that so you know that's what's really important because you know even as a board member you see some pretty information and you don't want that to go with them to the next you know to the next company so it's really doing good in an ethical core value kind of way well and to your point I mean I hadn't really thought of it that way from this from Bridget which is a in the finance area that person knows how quickly people pay their bills who's pushing who's you know what's the financial strength of their relationships and their contracts and their grants and so yeah that's that's an interesting thing well okay let's go on because you know how I love myself some name with health uh oh here we go name with hell but it's from Baltimore so at least we know where they're coming to us from I know I heard I had I heard I had a division in a cultural organization I just found out that the CEO has a dashboard with a lot of data on it apparently this info is distributed to the board of trustees and not to me I think the whole staff needs to see this info why is this so secretive that's a word that is loaded secretive that is fascinating first of all I'd be curious where the data is coming from right so it's program related I'm working with an organization that every month we update you know essentially this dashboard of data points that you're talking about here but it's provided from the staff right so it's provided from the program team uh and the fundraising team the accounting department all of that so it's really fed to the CEO for for their dashboard so maybe I'm gonna play devil's advocate here maybe it's not intentional that it's secretive yeah maybe it's the fact that oh yeah I can share that not a problem I didn't know you wanted to see it um the other thing is most board meetings are open not all so you might want to ask you know if you're able to sit in observe one of the next board meetings kind of like you know be the fly on the wall to hear the conversations I always find those extremely valuable because you can hear with another lens you can you know like you're really listening from a different angle so I'm going to play the devil's advocate stick with that final answer I don't need a phone a friend that the secretive is truly a lack of thoughts yeah like oh I I never even thought of that that's a great idea here you go so I would come I would approach it from that angle I agree and I think that um I love what you said you know that CEO dashboard that information is coming from somewhere in multiple places but I also think yeah you know a lot of times CEO dashboard is so board driven that it's like that the board needs us this is part of the pro forma this is part of your job description this is you know where it always goes in the board packet um you know the board liaison one of my favorite topics you know they're responsible for getting that and distributing it before the meeting so that generative discussion can relate to what's been on that report you don't just distribute that board dashboard at the meeting that's bad bad form you need to get that in advance so it could be that all the function and for and formatting has been board driven and I think it would be a super cool practice for the CEO or the board liaison or board chair to post meeting do a recap that gets sent out to you know C-suite or your entire staff depending on you know the size of it that says hey this is where we're going this is what we discussed you are right these are transparent things except when it is not and generally that will be um something like something such as a CEO performance review or salary or something like that where they they leave the meeting and then they come back to public record you don't see that very often it's not exercised a lot because it's not really a best practice but you are right this information is public anyway so for the most part so it also makes me think about name withheld the strategic plan in which the organization is operating from and there should be KPIs or key performance indicators built into your strategic plan that might be a great way to enter the conversation what metrics could I help to provide you based off of our strategic plan and the goals and objectives in which we've set forth so I think that's a great opportunity again to help you bridge that conversation I love it really interesting really really interesting and especially in a cultural organization like I have like HIPAA issues or something that they can't be you know talking about yeah that that just permits a different set of issues when I hear that okay um Michael from Miami Florida I'm a board member of a nonprofit that serves children and after-school initiatives we are struggling with keeping our development officers they don't last long somewhere I have heard this is a common issue this can't be true is it AFP reports that the average tenure across the United States of a development officer is 16 to 18 months I'm going to repeat that 16 to 18 months is a tenure that's right and any HR professional will tell you that the common wisdom is that it takes a new employee about six months to learn their job the culture where to park where to have lunch everybody's name and general processes so imagine if you bring on a new employee in development a new strip off let's just be conservative four months four months for that person to become comfortable and fully functioning you're left with maybe 12 months of activity I think it's horrific I wonder if that's changed now and for those of you who who stands for the association of veteran professionals that provides the the data on that and I have heard you know 18 months I've definitely heard that and I wonder if that's changed since the pandemic I truly wonder over the last two and a half three years if that number has skewed in any manner so it's a lot to think about here is turnover that's it's standard it's common there's of course ways and how you can help to retain your staff and so that's really what I would what I would focus on is you know really for that continuity is how can we support you what does your tenure look like here you know how can we make this a win-win a successful opportunity so it's frightening Michael I wish you the best I know it's not probably the answer you wanted to hear from us and yes it is true that there is um you know there is some turnover but there are so many great ways to you know keep any of your team including your development officers so I have a question I mean he identifies himself as working for a nonprofit that serves children and after school initiatives that this is just anecdotal but it seems to me that when you talk to or you work with universities their folks stay forever have you have you noticed that yeah is that just me no that's true like a higher ed yeah yeah university kind of like you they don't seem to leave well one of the things I know we're facing and many of the the opportunities that I work within it's the vulnerable of the vulnerable right and so it's a very uh trauma informed community it's very heavy and it's exhausting it's exhausting emotionally it's exhausting spiritually so really baking in and and supporting self-care opportunities personal development opportunities I I do not like it when anyone brags that they have X amount of pto hours saved up to me that's a problem that that says to me take your darn day you need a break there's a reason we have these breaks right and that we literally need to decompress and so it could be you know in light of the recent um days we're facing that this individual is truly struggling with the current events and the current times and we know that our children certainly have when it comes to our educational systems yeah so there's a lot in there there is it's really interesting um we need to kind of be open to what we're hearing about that you know from sector to sector I really like what you said I mean I don't like it I'm horrified by what you said but I agree with you that it is it is um a division within the sector you know what's harder work what's a harder mission trauma informed work it's really an interesting thing I never thought about it I think I was just lumped fundraising development all together with those people but I think you're right I see your point you are the non-profit nerd thanks hey my glasses okay sister let's go to the next question and this comes to us from shell or Shelley I don't know how you say it sorry Denver Colorado our COO is thinking about combining an organization-wide training session with the board the thought is that board members would learn what we require expect and track from the staff we would also address policies and procedures that we all need to follow do you think this is a good or not so good idea I think you're opening a big can of worms I was like I think this is a great idea I do I think that is too many cooks in the kitchen um I think there's a great opportunity to pair this down maybe you have you know some of your board members some of your staff members again like I just think it's too many people at one given time you know I always say one person has five different opinions so you put all your staff and all your board and you've got a million opinions I love what you're intending to do now that I love when it comes to the transparency of the processes the educational component that I love but I just see this as opening a can of worms wow okay well I totally disagree great I totally disagree and I'll tell you why for the very phrase that you use one person has five different opinions yeah I think that in a policy strategy training if you have a good trainer right if you have a good trainer that the message needs to be cohesive and heard the same there are too many board members that are out of touch with what the policies and the procedures and the structures are of an organization and in my way of thinking they need to maintain that same strategy right there might be some nuanced things or more or less that they need to take on but they need to be precisely held to the same standards if not more and so I don't know I just love this idea I thought it was such a great idea I did this once early in my career as a as a trustee of an organization and a cultural organization and I learned things from that joint meeting that might have taken me years if if maybe never even learning them and it was a lot of things that were more germane to the operational side of the institution but it was really powerful for me but it was not a discussion format you know it was a training it was like somebody's a professional speaker delivering the message and the policies and and all of that so I'm fascinated Jared well I'd love to hear what other people think too yeah that's my thought yeah that's my thought I have not obviously swayed you okay okay well I'm not inviting I'm not inviting you I'm not inviting you to my joint meeting then apparently oh my gosh okay let's talk oh another name with help this time from Santa Fe New Mexico we have a CEO who's retiring and we have not found a replacement yet this is a marketing question of sorts but should we send a press release saying she is leaving we want to honor her service perhaps get some interest from job candidates and yet we don't want her to become a lame duck during this remaining time what do you suggest really good question because we're talking about the great resignation and yeah really interesting quack quack quack quack um I'm going to say yes send a press release send a thank you a gratitude because this person has been a community champion and that needs to be recognized I believe I think it also gives you a great opportunity to talk about what's next even if you do not have that replacement perhaps this you know speaks to a national search perhaps this speaks to the opportunity of bringing in a professional interim executive director right so this is a very strategic opportunity that if done properly will absolutely help during your transition of the CEO and I don't think that they will be a lame duck I think you know again that comes to perception probably in the final couple of months it's a lot of meeting and greeting and thank you and kind of passing that baton which for others it might seem like this person's only having lunch and coffee and cocktails and I mean are they really working yes yes they are they're working relationships and that is what is so valuable to the organization and the legacy of that person the mission and the incoming person I agree I think that's beautifully stated and and I think too that I liked what you said you know honoring that champion spirit of leadership and letting them have a graceful exit and you never know I mean it's positive marketing if the way you present it and move forward also sometimes we associate bad things with people leaving like oh were they first out or oh is there a problem or are they not a good enough leader and to to say no this has been great and even under you know the banner of what were some of the impacts and achievements during this stellar tenure you know it's a good thing you know it goes back to what we said again another shout out to rick de brule people will make up a story if you don't give it to them right so tell them where this person is going tell them why their tenure is ending celebrate that right provide the story right I love that really really an awesome commentary well hey Jarrett it's been another great week it's been another great episode yes it has oh my gosh great questions keep them coming you can reach out to myself or to Jarrett we always want to know what you're thinking we were chatting not too long ago Jarrett offline and we were talking with somebody saying how it's been really interesting now in our third year to see how the questions have changed that's right now I mean they're really reflecting a point in time with these pandemics and the maturation of our sector and so you know we're we're excited for any questions that come our way so keep them coming again we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors without them we would not be here answering the questions that come in bloomerang your part-time controller the american non-profit academy non-profit nerd fundraising academy staffing boutique non-profit thought leader and the non-profit atlas they are here with us day in and day out as we march forward 500 plus episodes whoo Jarrett yes amazing well hey everybody have a great and restful weekend and remember as we remind ourselves stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here next time everyone


Hello, in this lecture, we're going to talk about the master budget. We're going to go through the sales budget, the production budget and the materials budget. At the end of this, we will be able to list the components of the master budget, create the sales budget, create the production budget and create the materials budget. So we're going to start off, we just want to look at the list and the activities that go through the master budget for a production company, and this is similar to many types of budgets when we think about the most basic type of budget many people think of. Well, let's take a look at the income statement, how we did last year, basically divided by 12, make some adjustments and that will be our budget for the months going forward to the next year. That's the most basic kind of components of the budget and that's how any budget kind of starts off. We're going to look at last time's material, what happened, how did we perform and then make some adjustments into the future. As we get more sophisticated, of course, we want to think about other things into the future other than just past performance, like what's the economy going to be like.


Hello everyone. I would like to introduce David Barnard-Wills who is going to be doing a presentation on the EU's Proposed Artificial Intelligence Act as an approach to and driver for ethical learning technology. Just to let you know, some of you may have seen watched David's presentation previously. We had a few technical difficulties during that presentation so this is a re-recording. David very kindly came back to re-record the session and we've included some of the original questions at the end that were asked during that session. So without further ado, I further ado, I am going to hand over now to David for his presentation. Thank you very much. No thank you very much and thank you for having me as part of the conference and thank you for the opportunity to re-record after the massive technical failure on my side. Great. So yes, I'm David and I'd like to talk to you about this piece of regulation that's being proposed by the European Union and some of the implications this might have for ethical educational technologies. A little bit about trilateral research first if I may. We're a technology company with a very strong background in research projects. So over the last kind of decade or more we've been doing a large number of research projects in the European Union, often around issues of kind of the social, political, ethical or legal implications of new technologies. So our ambition these days is to work on developing ethical AI particularly for the public sector to help tackle complex social problems. So some of the services and things we offer are sort of interdisciplinary blend of technology and social science expertise in our kind of socio-tech insights work. We do research and policy advice but we also offer a data protection and cybersecurity service. So we do outsourced data protection officer work and some of the clients for that include people you will know such as University of Cambridge, Victoria and Albert Museum. We're doing a research project at the moment with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and a bunch of other kind of European agencies. So we pay close attention to the kind of the European policy space in particular. So the AI regulation that's come out is a very big interest for us at trilateral. So we'd like to share some of what we're kind of thinking about it with you. So a little bit about me. I'm a senior research manager at trilateral and what that means is I put together research projects. I try and get funded and if they're successful in getting funding I manage some of them. So my team work on projects around like applied security technologies, political language, things like that. So my academic background is in politics but for 14 years or so I've been doing politics of technology and that includes things like applied privacy by design, ethics by design. I've done research on how regulatory agencies do privacy and data protection governance. I've been a research ethics manager across a number of these projects so I've handled the informed consent things, the data protection things that make sure these kind of projects are large scale projects are legal and ethical. But one of my areas of interest is in technology foresight and looking forward and seeing what's kind of coming down the pipe. My structure for this talk today is about primarily what is the EU proposing. So I'll try and give you a kind of a summary or an overview of this proposed regulation. I will talk a little bit about what our perspective on this is at trilateral and then I'll talk about some of the implications for the educational technology world might be and if I have time a little bit about the relationship between this regulation and the broader field of AI ethics. So firstly what is the EU proposing? So in April this year they proposed a regulation which is full title is something like the regulation for laying down harmonized rules on artificial intelligence and it's going to be short version of that would be the AI act, AI regulation or some variant on that. So what's interesting about this is it's one of the first proposals worldwide for a legal framework specifically around artificial intelligence. The aim of this for the European Union is to make the EU a global leader in artificial intelligence but also AI regulation and ideally ensure the development of safe secure trustworthy AI within the European Union but also facilitate a single market. So it's the aim of this is to prevent a kind of market fragmentation with different countries, different member states adopting their own artificial intelligence law. So the idea is that you would have a set of common requirements that apply across the EU. It will be a regulation so what that means is that when it comes into law it comes into it's applied in all member states and they don't have to kind of pass individual legislation to bring it into into into law so the idea is you have a kind of harmonized thing across the Union. Now this is a draft so that means it's open to change it's going to be discussed and debated by the European Parliament and by the member states so the actual law that you can download off of the European Commission's website now is subject to change before it comes into force. A little bit about timelines this process is going to take a couple of years and then it's very likely that it'll be a couple of years after it's passed before it becomes applicable. So we're looking out to 2025 say. Okay so I think we'll talk a little bit about the scope of application. One of the things to note about the Act is that it starts off with a very broad definition of artificial intelligence. It's focused on artificial intelligence as applied in systems, as applied in technology so being used in the world. But there's a variety of things here which could encompass almost anything you might want to call AI and some things you might just want to call statistics. The idea here for the Commission was that this definition should be sort of as technologically neutral and future proof as possible because of the vast pace of change in this field. But it brings a lot of things within the ambit of artificial intelligence and therefore within the scope of the regulation. Where does this apply? So it's going to apply in the EU but also also applied to any AI system that is being brought onto the European Union market or being used in the EU or its use effects of people in the EU. So it has that same sort of extraterritorial jurisdiction that the GDPR kind of said you know if you're processing personal data about about European citizens then this law applies. It's going to apply to both public and private actors. It's going to have implications for providers, developers, creators of AI systems, people who import it into the EU, people who distribute it within the EU and for people who use it. It doesn't apply to private non-professional uses so if you're building a toy AI system for your own purpose then it doesn't apply. It also doesn't explicitly apply to research but it's kind of trigger point is bringing things onto the market. It's also not going to apply in the UK. The UK is taking its own path on the regulation of artificial intelligence. It is setting out kind of roadmaps and plans for that which are going to be applicable in a sort of similar timeframe. So it's interesting to see how they will compare. One of the key aspects of the regulation is that it chunks AI systems up into four categories based on their risk to fundamental rights and safety. So this is based on the idea that from what we know about certain systems and what we already know about their impacts in certain places and also things we think are particularly socially important we can make some guesses about the risks posed by different types of systems. And this is something we've been doing in this sort of impact assessment field for a while but I will take these in sort of reverse order from the minimal risk. Now minimal risk systems are those which the authors of the active visages as having kind of essentially no risk to rights and to safety. So these are things like the automated spam filter on your email account, the AI moving a character around inside a video game to give it a semblance of intelligence. So for these low risk categories developers can choose to reply the requirements from the act or they can just not or they could even adopt voluntary codes of conduct. The next category up are those that are seen as providing low or limited risks. So these are the AI systems in these categories are things like chat bots or when a system recognizes your emotions and changes its behavior in response to those emotions. The only requirement the act would place on these is that they are transparent that by the fact there's an AI system here. So you would need to know you're interacting with machine in that sense. So if you think of the AI, the Google bot that would phone up a hairdresser and book an appointment for you within the EU after passage of this regulation that would have to say something like I'm an AI assistant in trying to book an appointment. It doesn't make any specific requirements on how it would do that but only that it is transparent. Now the next big category of risk and this is where most of the meat of the regulation sits I think are those AI systems that are seen as posing high risks to fundamental rights and safety. So there is a specific list and X3 presents a list of these these topics and there they're kind of all where all the interesting things are. So they're the sort of critical fundamental infrastructure of society things like that. So they are things like education, employment, access to justice, immigration and border control or enforcement, law, critical infrastructure, democracy, biometric ID. It's a bit it's a big list but it's kind of where all the interesting stuff is. And these are the areas which are seen as sort of so important to social functioning that we need some proper protections in place. Now there's also some other additional things so if AI is embedded in a system that already needs third party assessment or if you're using AI as part of a safety system then it's also in here because it's just dangerous if it goes wrong. Now for these for AI systems in this category you get a big set of mandatory requirements on them before they can be put on the market or place into service. And finally we have a set of AI systems or uses which are just seen as posing an unacceptable risk to fundamental rights and safety and these are therefore prohibited. It's not a very big list but it includes things like large-scale social scoring by public authorities so the kind of social credit systems where everybody gets a rating. It includes AI subliminally manipulating human behavior and it includes real-time remote biometric ID apart from some some edge cases and defined uses by law enforcement. So I think this is an important point to focus on is if you are developing or marketing an AI system that fits in that high-risk area then these are some requirements that are going to be set on you. Now each of these gets quite a lot of detail in the regulation so we can kind of you could you could look at that if these seem important to you. But there are things like having adequate risk assessment systems, having good enough quality data, feeding and training system in order to minimize the risk and risk of discrimination, logging to make sure that you know what the system is doing and to be able to allow people to kind of go back and look at what it's done. Very detailed technical documentation requirements which are supposed to provide all the information someone would need to assess its compliance with this law and that would include registration of these AI systems on a database, a centralized database that you is going to create. You'll need to provide clear and adequate information to the user. You will likely have to go through a conformity assessment procedure probably with a third party doing some kind of assessment work and there are other standards around you know sharing information when when things go wrong. There's quite a quite a big set of things here. If you are a user of a high risk AI system on the other hand if you bought one in from somewhere else and I think many people in education might end up in in this bracket you know if you're purchasing an AI based educational technology or educational learning system tool there are some obligations on you. Now they are to follow the instructions provided with the with the AI system to ensure that your input data is relevant to purpose relevant to the purposes you're going to use the system for. You have to have adequate monitoring of the operation system so you need to know if it goes wrong and you need to inform the the provider of what went wrong so keeping logs and all that information that the provider should be giving you now you need to use that to support your GDPR obligations to do a data protection impact assessment. There's some good stuff though that comes with this. I think this is one of the most interesting bits of the regulation for for users of AI systems you know institutional users rather than individual citizens perhaps but there should be this this regulation is going to drive providers to have to create all this detailed technical documentation which should give you all the information you need to tell if this thing is in compliance with the law. Now this will include instructions on how you're supposed to use this AI system but also some really useful stuff on like explicitly what it's intended purpose is what the manufacturers know about its accuracy and its robustness what they know about the seeable circumstances that might lead to to risk of health safety discrimination privacy invasion things like that and what and other things like the last one is really interesting is because one of the things we're learning about AI systems as they become deployed in the real world is they can be quite brittle they can fail when circumstances change or when the population they're being used with changes so this requirement puts in place kind of some need to provide some information on what the expected lifetime of an AI system is and what kind of maintenance or care measures is going to need to keep it keep it functional the regulation create envisages creating these these new governance arrangements so there will be national supervisory authorities who will have a responsibility for kind of understanding what the what's going on in the AI system market now these might be existing authorities interested with new tasks or they might be entirely new organizations so you might envisage some countries might give these powers to their information commissioner or or some others might give it to it to a consumer markets authority or very you know this would be interesting to see what different countries do in this space now they will have certain powers including they can they'll be able to do investigations they'll be able to remove offending systems from the marketplace they'll be able to demand access to documentation and data necessary to do their enforcement activity and they are being tasked with running what are called regulatory sandboxes so these are kind of experimentation spaces where a developer can bring some data to train a system with insight from the from the regulator and potentially allow them to use data that it might not otherwise been able to do because there's sufficient safeguards in place at the level this will be coordinated by new artificial intelligence board chaired by the european commission with representatives from each of these supervisory authorities and the european data protection board the legal penalties for this financial penalties for non-compliance haven't quite been finalized but they look to be around the same type of level as gdpr fines so pretty substantial okay so what do we make of this a trilateral we are glad that there's regulatory waits behind secure trustworthy and ethical AI and the last few years and various kind of scandals have shown us that there are potential harms from the unregulated use of AI i think the world is becoming more cognizant of this of the things about kind of discrimination and bias and being unable to challenge the results of something coming out of an algorithmic process so these are these are becoming kind of more top of mind and it's good to see some regulation responding to this so for us regulation is part of the air i feel growing up and becoming more mature it's one thing to have artificial intelligence used in in in entertaining toys or apps or in games but as it becomes part of the kind of fundamental structure of society as it becomes part of educational systems other becomes part of transport systems as it becomes part of health care it just is going to need to meet more rigorous standards and to will inevitably be regulated and what we are glad to see is the various things that the regulation puts forward so transparency better documentation explainability the quality of data sources developers knowing what's in their data and how that might affect the accuracy of the system those are things we've been recommending to our commercial clients and to our partners in research projects over the past few years so it's good to see those in place now the red lines on prohibited AI could be stronger and that's that would be an interesting place to watch as the as the regulation goes through the european parliament but fundamentally we don't think this is going to strangle AI innovation AI innovation is there's such a demand for the use of AI systems that that's going to it's going to be a strong persistent driver but what this will do is is put some controls around that some could walk some quality controls really and meeting those requirements might be a challenge for small and medium enterprises that that is something we acknowledge there are a lot of things there and it's going to take a lot of effort to put those things in place and what will be fundamental to how this pans out is what the capacities and the abilities of the regulators are so and this has been something we've noticed with the with the GDPR where some regulators in some countries are very well resourced they have good technological knowledge they have kind of a willingness to to do enforcement activities and in other countries they are and they are understaffed and under resourced and that has had an impact on GDPR enforcement so you could see you could equally see something like that emerging here it will be also interesting to see the balance those regulators adopt between enforcement so going up to people who break this regulation or versus support and guidance you know trying to encourage people to comply well right telling people how to set up a post-market monitoring system for example and the shape of those regulatory sandboxes will also be quite interesting I think so if I can talk about the implications for educational technology now I think that you can roughly break them down into categories about whether someone is kind of a provider or a user or a researcher and if they're inside or outside the the the EU so if you're using educational technology or producing educational technology with no AI component then this doesn't have any impact on you but I remind you of that very broad definition of AI that I showed you early on in the presentation that lots of things will come under this if you're an educational technology provider that does use AI in the EU you'll need to be in full compliance with this regulation if you're trading into the EU or giving systems you know if you're doing it about open source but you're providing it for free or as a social benefit then you also need to be in compliance with the regulation it doesn't matter if you're getting paid or not if you are an ed tech user in the EU you'll have those article 29 obligations that we talked about earlier and all that access to all that potential information now the if you're outside the EU legally formally no effect but like with the GDPR we might start to see the so-called kind of Brussels effect where this regulation starts to you know other people might start to use this regulation as a model large companies might just start complying with the EU standard because it's an important market and then that standard might become de facto influential around the rest of the place and you might start to see more made in the EU AI sort of you know as a as a promotional tool and you will be able to get more information about AI products because of those the demands this regulation creates for additional information if you're a researcher if you're an ed tech AI researcher and if you're either in the EU or you're interested in participating in the EU's kind of funding programs the regulation doesn't explicitly apply to research it's complaining it's concerned about deployment and kind of putting things into use but horizon Europe does have these requirements these kind of cross-cutting requirements for trustworthy AI which largely map with this regulation so it's similar and if you're doing innovation work that is closer to market or closer to kind of exploitation then you will need to start to be ready to comply with these things towards the end of those projects perhaps if you're an ed tech AI researcher outside the EU I'm not I'm not sure what the implications will be but this will be an area which might preoccupy some of your your European peers so I think it's worth stepping back a bit to see what's the relationship between this act and broadly ethics at ethical AI so law isn't ethics and ethics isn't law they can't be substituted for each other they're doing different things the EU has been active in the area of AI ethics so there's these high level expert group guidelines on trustworthy AI an assessment list for for kind of trying to understand it the AI system you're developing is it is ethical or not and I think interesting for this space in due in September next year there is an expert group on AI and not ethical AI in education teaching and learning which should be putting out some guidelines in September next year that might be quite useful I know that the the framework for ethical learning technologies is more focused on practitioners on the kind of the ethics of of being a learning technologist but I think the there's elements of this regulation which will support some parts of that practice so the kind of requirements from accountable practice compliance with relevant laws obviously it's will help you if you're trying to be accountable and explaining your decision making and things like that and the whole purpose of this regulation is to minimize risks from from AI um it it doesn't of course doesn't capture the whole world of AI ethics right so it's very much focused you should easily think of this not as an AI ethics regulation but as a trustworthy AI or even an AI safety regulation so it's very much about kind of safety risk assessment reliability um having transparency mechanisms in place that allow people to do governance and be accountable and to trace where things go wrong and things like that it doesn't touch on the broader world of AI ethics so um you know when is the appropriate when is an appropriate use case to use an AI system or not what are the implications for kind of a massive industry based around extracting data from people and using that to train AI it doesn't have anything to say about the kind of cultural social impacts of artificial intelligence and it doesn't really have anything to say about kind of professional values of AI practitioners nor does it have anything to say about the composition of the AI industry and who's able to get be part of that and what how that might influence how the AI industry develops so you know but it it's limited but perhaps we wouldn't want to regulate those things um okay that is about everything I want to say about the AI regulation um if you would like to stay informed uh with our work on this as we we're very interested in this and we're going to keep tracking it as it as it develops you can find out more about us and our work at travelresearch.com if you'd like to to ask me in particular a question you can either find me on on uh my email or you can find me on twitter um we have a newsletter um you can sign up on our website um and that will um as we as we learn more about the AI regulation I'm sure we'd be producing content um on this topic for that newsletter thank you so much David and thank you again for re-recording this session for us um I I've made a note of some of the questions that were asked um during the previous session so um I'll ask those again but I actually think maybe you've covered some of them in your presentation the first question was on when do you think when or if do you think other regions will introduce similar um legislation yeah um I I imagine that other regions so the UK the UK is putting forward it's sort of it's sort of starting to think about how it's going to kind of regulate or kind of AI so I think it's perhaps a little bit behind um the EU on this although it's taking a explicitly sort of divergent approach um I think if I was in another country around the world I'd be looking see how seeing how this goes you know in a way I think it'd be interesting so the GDPR became quite influential and in part that's a dynamic where you know an organization a large organization helps to kind of comply with it so it builds the processes to comply with it which means that it's not actually averse to complying with something similar in another jurisdiction it actually makes it sort of simpler um so uh and and you know countries saw that the European data economy did not collapse under the weight of the regulation so um you know there's less less kind of aversion there but again there's like a lack so but whereas GDPR has been influential on other countries regulations it's starting to see that now I think so maybe it would be another what would be another kind of five years yeah wait and see yeah I think so you know we'll pay we'll pay attention to it we can come back in a few years time and see how it's come another question that came in during the live session was um about the deep fakes and the fact that that appeared in the low risk um area um and there was a lot of surprise around that people thought that that was maybe one of the more high risk things that AI is capable of if you any comments on that yeah so um the the EU does see deep fakes as a problem um I think it's less concerned with the technology as the problem the more kind of the proliferation of deep fakes across kind of social media and having a system that's kind of informed enough to understand that an image might be manipulated in certain ways um so that category is around kind of artificially created images so sometimes you'll use you'll use the same technology to make a deep fake to um you know just fill in some background on a film or something or just create you know create a bunch of um uh AI generated faces to put on a website you know just a stock footage or something like that so there's lots of uses for the technology that are not the manipulative um you know propaganda use case that we kind of envisaged when we talk about deep fakes so I think that's where they're sitting with this is is not so much the um the broader social problem of deep fakes but how about how do we regulate algorithmic generated images and content and things like that okay thank you very much and the final question it's sort of a combination of a statement and a question so one of the attendees had commented that there's a lot of hype around AI especially in education at the moment and their question was is the act realistic yeah I think I think it is realistic I think it's um it's it's for example we're not trying to regulate um artificial general intelligence here we're not trying to kind of we're not envisaging a type of AI that's you know smarter that's smarter humans or smarter than humans or things like that it's very much about AI systems being deployed in real world contexts so it is about you know um if we're using a system to uh you know evaluate students work right you know if we're doing something to kind of do it to automate a marking pro an assessment process or something like that then that is a it's not it's not skynet um but it is it is it is you know a thing that might actually work in practice so it's I think in that sense it's quite a practical I mean that you know the practicalities of how this works um you know how it works in practice but in terms of the type of AI that it's focused on is the type of AI that's kind of being put into use and being deployed so in that sense it is a realistic I guess well thank you very much that's all the questions that I had made a note of from the live session um but as you say you've got your contact details there for anyone who has any who wants to get in touch about anything further um thank you once again David really appreciate you taking the time for the alt winter conference thank you very much


Hi, welcome to the end of the fourth week. We are finally done with our course. Monday, we had a final exam which consisted of two parts. One was the grammar and the other one was phonology. And it was mandated to pass both of them separately and score a minimum of 75%. So that was what we did in the morning on Monday. Evening, none of us taught, so we were free to go. Tuesday, Wednesday were the classes where we all had to finish our six lessons and that's what we did. We also simultaneously were very seriously working on the game project which was the last assignment given to us. Like I had told you in week two, we were given a project and we had to come up with our own game as creative as we could. And end of the fourth week on Thursday evening, students come, they don't come and study but they come to play the game. So it primarily had to have grammar content to the whole game. So we were all working on it and Thursday morning, 11 o'clock, we had to present our game to the teachers. And once it got approved at 2 o'clock, we got a certificate and this is the certificate. We got three certificates. This is a certificate one which says that I've completed my course and I'm now an official TESOL teacher. The second one is in Thai. So this certificate allows and permits us to teach in Thailand as well. So it's written in Thai and the final one is this letter which gives us our score and teaching, practicing various other things. And in the end it's written that we complete our course and now we can start teaching and also a line of reference by the head teacher. So this is it. Now let's see where we go from here and we all have a good time. Thank you.


Super awkward the truck all comes All right. Oh, this is still recording. Yeah.  Yeah happen to mine. I was scared when I was looking this is a few months back I was scared that I gave it away or something That's like and I'm on the casket like what a God awful jacket. Hello and welcome to a Trash or treasure okay. I was gonna look at your sub zero Whatever Gotta get it right. Hey Kelly and No, I doesn't he say here's some they said look at your sub zero. I thought he said here is sub zero here is sub zero Do we just watched it last week these socks and these are good socks Like I found these found these tucked away in the back of the drawer.   Okay.   You're too good for me.  We're gonna bring to you Okay, let me start today today, okay, right? Got a phone call some guy hi so and so there's like no no, they're not here. I think you got the wrong number. Oh, okay Two minutes later get a phone call hi so and so there I said no I kind of hesitated a bit is like no Got the wrong number. Okay Two minutes later phones back hi so and so there I said no no you just phone here I said this is the wrong number.   Rule the world then The movie starts off with one of our main characters rose reading a book called the three Mothers and it tells a story of these three sisters who rule the world through Tiro tears tears fear and darkness No here.  I don't think it's madame is it? I don't know This shirt, you know, it's a great shirt.  It is directed.  Yeah, it's never changed How many years do you want to hold on? Like Carl had a good point. He's like, do you really want to sell this? I think no Yeah, you just want to hold on to it Ned Ned me the lender. No, I was Dusty bottoms right yours was dusty bottoms. Yeah, no, mine was dusty boy. You're dusty bottoms You were lucky day lucky day.  Hello and welcome to another episode of frightfully forgottens Again, you're drinking The movie was directed by Ken Hughes and it was written by him He did what's up? No, I thought he wrote it. No, you just stay over here Then I'm gonna bump things here. Let's lift it up. There's a lot of innuendo things and a lot Maybe need more boo Another game for me It's funny at work There's a board room that we were sitting in and there's the like the head of the table and one of the guys sat down And he kind of looked around well almost like he didn't think he belonged at the head of the tail. That's a lot of Larry David this is that guy off Speaking of that that episode of Seinfeld that's the show back Which I never realized that's not his name. No Kramer calls him that like Kramer says show back But whenever they mentioned him earlier in the movie it's shell Bach. Oh She says she'll bet. Well, she makes it funnier. He says his name wrong, right? Yeah, that's right.  Okay And until next time Maddie didn't have a cigar.  Yeah, do it a bit on a bit of an angle or something Yeah, and until next time keep drink. Oh, you say it. No, don't you do. Yeah, and until next time keep drinking Well, it's not worth losing your head over God


out there in internet land.  So you'll notice that you can see and hear all of us on screen, but we will not be able to see or hear you. But that doesn't mean you can't communicate with us. You'll see on the bottom of your Zoom window, there's a little icon called Chat. And if you open that up, you can type in comments or questions or just say hi. And we'll be able to know that you're here and you can chat with maybe other people who are watching or if you have questions about the sound or video, that's where you can leave those. And then later on, towards the end, if we have enough time, we'll be able to take some questions from you. And to do that, there's another icon on the bottom of your screen that says Q&A. So that's where you would type those questions for our wonderful panelists. And we'll remind you later on to do that if you do have any questions. So I suppose, yeah, I guess we can kick things off. So welcome. Thank you, everyone, for showing up. It's great that you're all here. We have a great night talking about art, plan, talking about plein air. And we'll talk a bit about what that means for those of you who maybe don't know. So before we get started, it's important that we recognize and be thankful that the lands on which we gather for cultural activities are part of the territories and unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples in West Vancouver. It's the Squamish and the Slewa Tooth peoples. And we are ever so grateful as guests to be able to be there on those beautiful lands, all those mountains, and trees, and seashore. We're going to be talking a little bit about those lands as well, because that factors into plein air painting. I will be your host this evening. My name is Stephen Snyder. I am the Gallery and Communications Coordinator for the West Vancouver Community Arts Council. We're a not-for-profit organization that advocates for and fosters and promotes the arts in West Vancouver. And our co-host this evening will be Taryn Erkhart from the West Vancouver Memorial Library. And Taryn will be monitoring the chat, so she'll be the one answering any of your questions or anything there. So now let's turn things over to Bryce Tupper from British Pacific Properties. Thanks, Stephen. Thanks a lot. Hi, everybody. Great afternoon to talk about art. I guess it could be true for most days. But yeah, my name is Bryce Tupper. I'm the Vice President of Planning and Development for Pacific Properties. And we're extremely happy to be back again this year in the face of all the adversity to help sponsor Pain on the Mountain again on the slopes of Holyburn Mountain, which is at the future site of our next mixed-use community, Cypress Village. And we wanted to capture the natural beauty of the area in art. And it's our fifth year doing it. And I took a look at all the art of the 12 artists on Monday and again today on Bellevue Avenue. And it's amazing. I think the bar keeps getting higher and higher. So it's amazing. I encourage everyone to take a look at it. Of course, the event couldn't be possible without the help of a lot of people. I want to first thank the artists for participating days out in the heat. It was a hot weekend, wasn't it? Last weekend. So they earned every stroke for sure. So thanks to the artists. We had some jurors that stepped up and helped us. Bobby Burgers, Laurie Goldberg, who I think is on the panel today, and Martin Kemble. So thanks to jurors. We couldn't have pulled it off without Ruth Payne, our art consultant. She keeps everyone in line, keeps us straight, gets things done. Thank you so much, Ruth. And of course, I mentioned that the art currently is along Bellevue Avenue between 15th and 14th Avenue, 14th and 15th Avenue, exhibited in the storefront. So Maureen O'Brien of the Ambleside Dundray Business Improvement Association helped pull that together with a lot of the shop owners there. And you can walk down there. 24 awesome plein air paintings exhibited there. You can purchase them some awesome deals, beautiful paintings. So I encourage you to, after the art talk, do a bit of an art walk and check that out. And again, thanks to Sil Perce for hosting our talks and talking and giving exposure to plein air. So I guess with that, it's my job to kick this off a bit with the announcement of the winners of this year's Paint on the Mountain Planner Art Competition. And I'll start with the second honorable mention is Sonora Singh with a piece of art that is titled BPP2. So dear to my heart, the name. I think it's the second of the first, second of the two paintings that he did. So thanks Sonora, a beautiful, beautiful piece. So congratulations on that. The first honorable mention goes to someone familiar with the competition. It's not this one, I don't believe. It is the other one. It is Shirley Williams, Enter the Light. So congratulations Shirley. I think she's been a participant for the last five years. So amazing work as always. It's beautiful. And the grand prize winner this year, 2020, Hang on the Mountain Planner Art Competition, Maria Joseph Hans for Shadow Play. So congratulations to Maria. Again, she's participated every year and always delivers amazing art and always look forward to the product from all the artists this year. And so again, like I said, go take a look along Bellevue, it's pretty beautiful. But now I'll kick it back to you Stephen and I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thanks for that Bryson. Yes, congratulations, artists, that was wonderful. It's great to see your work. All right, so I guess it's probably a great time to introduce the rest of our panel. Let's start with our artists. So let's go with Maria if you wanna introduce yourself and say a little bit about you and your artistic past, I suppose, in career. Sure. So I have a studio here in North Vancouver. That's where I am right now. And I've been working in plein air for about 15 years. And before that, I've just been painting and photographing pretty much my whole life. So being outdoors and landscape is like my number one, my number one subject matter. It doesn't matter whether I'm painting or photographing, it's what I do. So it's very easy for me to make that jump to being like in this paint on the mountain event, which is exactly why I applied to be a part of it and wanna be a part of it again, hopefully in years to come. But yeah, it's just wonderful. And I paint in oil and not sure what else I can throw in there if you have any other questions that you think I could answer directly, that'd be great. That's great. Awesome. And then, well, Shirley, let's introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Shirley Williams. I came to painting through a career in interior design. I graduated from BCIT many minutes ago, 43 years to be specific, where I learned to draft and render. So I was able to hone my drawing skills in throughout my career. This was pre-computer aided drafting. So I really had to learn how to make the scene look believable. So I credit a lot of the ability that I've been able to draw from now on that experience. And as well as that, I've been working with kids and community programs for 30 years. I left interior design about 13 years ago and have been painting en plein air for maybe eight, nine, eight, nine years. And I'm loving it. It's a natural transition for me. I love to paint from life, whether I'm painting bouquets of flowers and from my garden in my studio or out in the field. I love to have that connection with the live, with the live object. Yeah, I love it. That's wonderful. Excellent. We gotta love it. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. I'm sure if you could introduce yourself. Sure. So hi everyone. My name is Surnur Singh and I came here in Canada last September. I'm in my first year of college and I roughly saying, I kind of started drawing and painting in sixth grade. So I was fortunate to have like good mentors and people who guided me. So and I started doing live painting almost three to four years ago. And I'm still learning and still trying to improve my skills. And like it's so inspirational to me all these really amazing artists. So it's been a really great experience for me painting plein air. Awesome. That's great. And now let's move on to Lori Goldberg who's here as one of the jurors for the competition. And Lori is also an artist. Yeah, so welcome Lori if you could introduce yourself a bit. Well, thank you very much for inviting me to be part of all this and congratulations everyone. So I'm a visual artist painter and particularly been painting, I don't know, I guess since I was born. I think I ate the paint first and started moving it around. So I'm kind of known for my large semi-abstract that West Coast imagery but I usually just oppose it with stopping to disrupt it. So kind of take something that's beautiful and change it up. So my work is diverse and it also for the object and see all the different types of ways of exploring that with the landscape. I'm also an educator, I've been teaching as long as I've been painting and I guess I'm known mostly for teaching at Emily Carr for the last 20 odd years and continuing education. Cool. Well, thank you everyone for being here tonight. So let's talk to a little bit about it earlier. Paint on the Mountain is a plein air painting competition and for those of you who aren't familiar with what plein air is, it pretty much means just to paint outside, painting in your natural surroundings. And it's something that, what we know as plein air today is a fairly recent actually, kind of around the 1800s in Europe was one of the first times that painters were able to carry their work with them because paint was now available in tubes. They didn't have to stay in their studios. Big gallons of paint or blocks of paint, they could just take their affordable easel and some tubes and they could go out into the landscape around them and paint what they saw. And that's exactly what these amazing artists did this past weekend was they went up to Hollyburn Mountain and sat themselves down and painted away and painted what they saw. So that's what plein air is. And that kind of leads into our first question of the evening. Why do you paint plein air? What's the draw of it for you as artists? Let's start with Sonor. Okay, so for me, plein air painting is like, it's really different from being painting from an image. And when I'm painting outdoors, it's like I'm looking at the subject or the landscape in the real life and I can see the colors and experience the environment and atmosphere more, I'd say more precisely or I can capture it in a better way. So I guess that's why I love plein air painting. And it's also like a good experience being out in the nature instead of, you know, like a square, just a room or a studio, I guess that, yeah. Shirley, why do you paint plein air? Oh yeah, all of the above for sure. It's definitely an excuse to get out. And there's almost always a little adventure attached to it, something happens or it's, it just, it's a fabulous excuse to be outside. But mainly I enjoy having the opportunity to connect on a deeper level than I would be able to with a photo reference. And it energizes me, I'm gonna say. I, having that direct connection, it goes straight to the heart. And I'm gonna say I'm the happiest running out there. I'm really and truly love it. And Maria, why do you do it? For all of the reasons they just didn't do, gotta say that. And it is certainly true, I, Shirley and I actually paint together quite a bit. And when she says she's the happiest outside, it is true, she's like crazy happy outside. So, but I would say, and one of my main reasons for going outdoors is like, is the idea of direct observation. Like as we all know, like painting from a photograph, like the photograph never seems to really replicate exactly what we see. Like if we were standing there looking into sunset, right? And we take a picture and like at that time it was like, that doesn't look like the sunset I'm looking at right now, right?  And that's something that becomes really important when I come into the studio to make bigger paintings. So now I can actually take my photo reference and really turn them into paintings about really being back in that place. So I only ever really work from my own references for that reason, because I can't really relate to someone else's picture of a place. So yeah, it really for me is about that direct observation. And I am like, I just love nature, I love mountains in particular and the coast. So I actually live in the perfect place to do what I do. So yeah, and I'm pretty happy when I'm outdoors that just that whole, as Sunore really touched on that, you know, that sensory experience of being outdoors. It's, you know, I mean, there's all these distractions that suddenly come in that we don't get when we're in the studio, right? Like, you know, the wind is gonna knock everything over or it's boiling, boiling hot, like it was this past weekend, whatever it is, like, you know, those things affect, I believe those really affect what our overall painting turns out like. Whether it's something specific or not in the painting, it's really, it's probably gonna be related in some way to someone's response to the paintings that we make. So, so everyone probably feels really hot when they look at our paintings. It was boiling hot when we were painting them, but yeah. So, yes, love being outside, that's my thing. Thank you. It's also hard to appreciate how quickly light changes. That's right, yeah. When you're out there and you are faced with it, because I think technically it changes every 15 minutes. And especially if you're in a sunny environment, like we were on the weekend, thank heavens it was sunny, but it just makes for a more challenging situation and you naturally rise to the challenge and connect yourself to it and work with it. And you have to be fast and smart and make sketches. Yeah, it's like, it's quite the experience for you. That leads me to one of our next questions. Were there any obstacles that popped up on you this weekend that you were not prepared for, that you've had to sort of overcome? Anyone feel free to jump in? I'm gonna say that I was prepared because I brought the bear spray. Right, I thought that's what you mentioned. I brought the bear spray, but I didn't actually have the nerve to look at the bear that was right around the corner from us. Maria spotted him.  Shh, but I wouldn't work. I am a cheetah. She made me carry the bear spray. I did. Because I had to show her how to use it to click off the end cap and read the directions that are like tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, but yeah. The bears were definitely as interested in the berries as we were. So we did a lot of like berry eating as well. And I tend to trip a lot on the job. So I'm gonna say that there were rocks in the wrong place for me. So that was an unexpected issue, but I had to deal with. I just wanted to interrupt. I would just say something because when we were, I asked Ruth, I said, did they see any wildlife? And they said, well, I think that we saw some deer, but I don't know if they actually saw them, but they didn't know. She didn't know that you guys had seen a bear. That's really interesting. I think there were a lot, I think there were a lot. Oh yeah, yeah. So I know that, like, I think it was, oh shoot, well, I told Maureen about the bear because it was just up from where she was painting.  And they had definitely seen the bears and had, and we'll see, and Elizabeth Austin, I think they'd both seen the bear up a different bear because there was a lot of scat everywhere. So it was like, there's an awful lot here. Maybe I won't paint there, but yeah. Well, does that factor in when you're painting outdoors, like the fear factor, or what's behind you? Yeah, yeah, I tend to make, I take my paintbrush and like knock my tripod often, just to like make noise.  And, you know, so if a bear comes around, they're not really interested in you, but they don't even know you're there. So, you know, it's good to just like make noise and so that they remember you're there, right? And go somewhere else to go eat and munch and whatever they do. That's the factor that people have to know what would take the courage to go out into the forest. So Nour, you're new to this country. I don't know if you knew that or not, but. That's right. Yeah, Maria told me about bears and surely we were talking about like the bears could come. I was like, yeah. But similar to that in India, like I'm from a place, a region like I'm from Punjab, which is a very hot region and we have snakes there. So when I used to go like out painting, so in fields or in like farms, so there was always a danger that I'm quiet. I'm painting that there could be a snake crawling around and if I step on it or something, that was pretty dangerous. And there are many other like poisonous creatures too, which are, which move like crawled around. So yeah, but still I never knew that there were bears around. I also saw a garter snake. That's the other thing. You did? I didn't know that. It's just a garter snake. So see, Sonora, you're quite lucky. Like we don't have the poisonous snakes that you have. So I would rather be in bear country than your snake country.  I would say it was great. I didn't get to see everyone, but luckily one painting I was doing was kind of out in a very like easily passable area. So I did get to talk to people because they were like going by sort of things. So that was really nice. Everyone, I find like in events like this, everyone's just always really helpful.  So, so yeah, it was really nice.  And it's so good to have one that's feeling a little more similar to that up here because there really aren't many. So yeah, I had a nice time with people. I did as well. It's, I find it a really friendly environment. I'm encouraged by it. I think it's nice to know that there's people in, even though I can't, I don't have a visual connection to them or necessarily an auditory connection. I know they're out there. We're not the only ones, me and the bears. But it's, people are so generous. I think it's a lovely environment. It really is. And it's such a pleasure to meet new people, this guy in particular. Yeah, same here. Same here, like it was just wonderful.  And because I've not participated in many events like this and people were just amazing. And we were meeting new artists. And me, I was just around Shirley and Maria all the time. Like they were painting on the spot. And I was very close to them where I was painting. So once in a while I was checking like what's the progress there or talking nonsense and disturbing them. But it was sort of wonderful. Yeah. And even the organizers like who, people who were present there from British properties, they were really nice and courteous and pretty good. Yeah. Wonderful experience. So there's someone in your painting, Sonor. So who's that? So which painting? The one that we showed that one. That's Shirley. Ah, nice. That's Shirley. Excellent. She was painting ahead of me like on the same road. And I was a little behind on that road. So she were into the scene. And it's really great to have a subject matter who was sure. Excellent.  So does that really factor in or how do you prepare for that? Sort of aspect of the day? Didn't really affect me, I guess. I mean, I was, like most of the time I was not thinking of that as a competition. Yeah, it was just like enjoying the outside. Nice. Yeah, I think that's true. You can't really, well, at least me, I can't really think about it as a competition because then I feel like I'm trying to make a painting to please someone other than myself, which some people are really good at, but that's why I initially was trained as an illustrator, but I left illustration early on because I'm not good at that. I'm not good at making the painting that someone else wants. So yeah, I basically need to just sort of forget that or try, which is really hard, but try and forget sort of the situation that you're in.  Like, did you, you know, and sometimes you don't want to hear that the other person's already got like two done or I think Tatiana said the first day that she had like three starts on the go. And I'm like, three stars. Whoa.  So I have to say one of my favorite hashtags is just painting outside. That's like one of my Instagram hashtags because that's kind of how I feel is like you just got to take like what you do and put yourself outside and do it. So, I think. Nice. That's awesome. And just a reminder for everyone watching, if you have any questions for any of our panelists, you can type those into the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen. Lori, what was the jury looking for this event? Well, there were a few categories and I just want to first of all say that all the work that I saw and I would say that the other two jurors would say the same is that they were all in high level. I mean, it was very difficult to make choices with who would be the winners. But we were forced to do that. We did. So whoever did not get into the winning circle, we did not worry about that. And I'm sure you're not that you just carry on painting. Well, forget about that whole part, which they're already telling me that. You guys don't think about that when you're out there. It's your art and you just carry on anyways, whatever, winner, loser, doesn't have anything to do with it. But it was really, I quite a, I enjoy the process a lot to analyze and construct my answers. And I have my own method, but I guess I can speak for myself. It's probably the best, but overall, and I will in a sec, but overall, we're all looking for a sense of place, what that felt for all of us. And then the technical aspects of it and the composition and the uniqueness or the originality, which within that genre, it's not, there's a certain style that you can fall into. And I think that there was a lot of exploring that and everyone's own language, which I was really appreciative of. So by looking around, and I kind of worked, so for myself, I worked from, first of all, the intuitive, like what's my gut? What's my first, where do I go to? Where am I curious about? Then I would go to those pieces and look at them. And then I would turn my back on them. And then we would go and have a conversation because we really needed to be distracted because it's really overwhelming, room for a while.  I don't know, do you want me to share our method? But it doesn't matter. But anyways, we just had, there would have to be a consensus of three totally different art related jurors to come together to make that choice. So it was not, some of them came easy, some of them was whatever. It all flowed so nice. Actually, it all flowed so nicely. It was a wonderful experience. And yeah, and I just also wanted to say the images that you put up on the screen do not do justice to the work. The work is flat, looking the colors aren't as true. And also, you really don't see the vibrancy of the life force that's in the artwork. So anyone that's seen them on the screen, you got to go see them in real life to really appreciate what they look like. And then experience that, yeah, you know, and it's always surprising. And, you know, Sonora was a real treat because, you know, he's 19 years old from what I've been told, right? Yeah, that's right. So you're just at the beginning and there's something really exciting about that. And your work is all very, very, you know, highly skilled as a watercolorist in particular, you know, one of the hardest mediums to work at because it's a one-directed medium.  Your work will evolve and get stronger and I'm excited to see where it will go in your future. So you've got the whole future ahead of you. So that's exciting that that you've got. Thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, I could talk about the other two works too, though. I found really attractive to what, you know, attracted me with Shirley's work. I felt like I could, I really found Place was a huge one for me for your work. I felt like I could just be right where you were. You drew me in to where the artist would be sitting. And you were so immersed in the forest. That's how it felt like I felt like I could not get out. Like, you know, I love the story of people that come from another part of the world and they go into the forest and they go for a nice happy hike and realize that, you know, you don't do happy hikes in the West Coast forest. You get lost really easily. True. Oh, I think maybe we've lost Lori temporarily. That's okay, I'm sure she'll pop back in. So we can move on to maybe some of these. We've got a few questions from the audience already. Let's go to one. You've got Jan wants to know, what do you take with you when you head out to paint? What are your supplies? What are your materials? Who wants to answer that one? Well, I mean, it depends on your medium, but if you're doing oil, so I paint in oil, so that's gonna probably be different. But yeah, if I paint in oil, I've got a tripod set up with actually a paint box that attached, it's built to attach to that tripod. And so there's a gazillion different kinds of setups out there. And I think the most important thing is to find the one that you feel comfortable with. Because honestly, as we talked about, like painting outdoors, anything can happen.  So basically coming up with, just I'd search it out online, like all the different setups that you can get, but I personally have a strata easel. That's my main go-to easel. So you can just go to stradeazle.com and take a look at theirs. I love it. It's pretty indestructible because it's metal, but I've got everything I need, my paints, my brushes, my easel and my tripod. I'm sure I'll forget something because I always do.  But whatever you do, make sure it's really transportable because if you want to go into a different place to paint, it makes it really hard to drag all of your stuff in. So I hope that helps a little bit. I say, Senor, do you want to tell them about your setup since you did watercolor? Sure, I can tell a little about watercolors, I guess. But I won't talk about my setup because it's not really good. I would talk about good setup. So like when you're doing watercolors, so you need like easel, which is like the surface of the easel could be tapered to your requirement because watercolor is good when the water is flowing down. And if it's really, really steep, so water will flow down really easily and your color will not stand like, right. So you need that to be adjustable really quickly. So when you need it to be adjusted. And another thing is that you can, well, I like to set sometimes because I get tired and I cannot focus on my painting.  So, and that is also it. Another thing is I like to carry and there's, I can show you, yeah, I have right here. So I have this thing, I don't know what to call it. It's like a spray pump and you can spray water on your paper which will keep the color alive. So, and when we are painting outdoors, it dries really quickly. So you need to keep the surface wet until you're done your work or wet on bed, whatever you're doing. So, yeah, and always like being comfortable with where you're sitting or standing is really important. Your surface must be always in the shade. That's what I think. I always want it to be in shade. Hmm, sounds like a bit of a workout. Yeah, that's right.  A stool, it's fairly handy but if you want to see, this is a safe. And away he goes. A little show and tell. Like this tool. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do. Sometimes I keep my supplies on it. It's accessible, right? Thanks for that. You're welcome. Totally. We've got another question from the audience. This is pretty interesting. Does your color palette change depending on if you're indoors or outdoors or do you still gravitate towards familiar colors that you would normally use in other paintings? I'll answer that one and then I'm gonna pass it over to Maria who's the color expert. I tend to use a pretty limited palette, meaning I don't put that many colors out onto my mixing palette. And I tend to use the same ones in the studio as well. If I'm painting outside of the traditional landscape hue family, I will introduce colors that I wouldn't bother taking out into the field like bright pinks or unusual oranges. But for the most part, I've got maybe six or seven colors that I take with me. Maria. Yeah, she knows I'm a bit of a color crazier. But probably I should preface this by saying I'm quite fickle about color. Things go in and out of fashion with me like really fast as far as the color goes. But I mean, I generally have my standard palette which is a set of about a warming cool of each primary basically if that makes sense to people. For example, cadmium red light would be a warm red and alizarin permanent would be a cool red. So anyway, we can talk more about that later when we have like the five hour zoom session. But yeah, so it depends on where I'm at, what I think I'm gonna paint, but I'll have like that basic set and then maybe I'll replace one or another. For example, like if you went to the desert Southwest and the skies there are definitely different blue than we get here in DC. So sometimes it's nice to have to know that, oh yeah, I wanna bring, you know, Magany's blue key with me because that's gonna really help me get to that sky color like that blue that they have better than having to try and to mix it just for my standard palette or something like that. But generally speaking, it's nice to keep a plein air palette of colors the same because then if you bring that painting back and you're using it to make a bigger painting, you know exactly what you use to make those colors. So it can really help you out. So as soon as you start adding those weird things, it can really mess you up later, but you gotta make notes. I'm a rather copious note taker sometimes, so. So yeah, I like to make notes about all my colors and I love color, so yeah. That notion of making notes is interesting, Maria. Do you artists find that when you're painting on plein air, that's kind of it. You know, you've been out in the wilderness, you've painted your piece and it's done or do you find that that's more of a warmup for maybe a larger painting that you would then move into the studio? Do you ever use it that way? Well, all I answer that one real quick is just that for me, like plein air painting has two purposes and they aren't mutually exclusive. However, like when I go out a lot of times I'm thinking I just wanna go out to get reference. So I don't worry about making a painting and then there are other times when I know like, you know, we're doing this event and I need to come out with like actually making a painting and so those are kind of like two different things. However, the first one sometimes turns into a really good little painting, right? So yeah, so I hope that isn't too confusing. Not at all. That's a great question, by the way. Yeah. Right. That's awesome. So do any of you have any tips for aspiring plein air artists? Do it. Yeah, for sure. Do a little bit of homework up front. Talk to people that work in the field, the medium. That's probably your first go-to would be to connect with someone that can take you along with them. And there's a lot of information out there, particularly some of the border. There's materials to be had that are beyond what we can get here in Canada. But having said that, I think we're catching up, which is great. It's definitely the plein air movement is a lot stronger in the US than it is here, which means that there are more options for materials and Prashad boxes, which are what those little units are technically called. But I highly recommend just doing it as Maria says, but if you're feeling nervous, I think it helps to spend a little bit of time in the backyard getting to know your equipment. Even if you're a seasoned in-studio painter, I think it's helpful to just give yourself a couple of hours a day and get used to the scenario, get used to how it feels to be outside in the elements. And the number one tip that I would have once you're out there is to not rush in. I find that most people like to do sketches beforehand. And I, for some reason, I just don't work that way, but I do take my time when I'm in the field. I take my time connecting to the scenes that appeal to me and the chosen scene really has to connect on a very deep level before I go in with it. But it can take me an hour and I've in the past spent too much time looking for the right thing and have not taken it as seriously as maybe I could have. And now I just, I allow it to infuse me, I guess, is a good way of describing it. That connection is really important to me. So don't rush it. And if that means you need to do multiple sketches to feel like you're composing a scene that makes sense for you, that's phenomenal. I have great admiration for you pre-paint sketches. But spending the time and connecting yourself is primary. Nice. So, Noor, what do you do to prepare? Prepare? Yeah, find yourself some buddies. I'm sorry, I didn't get like, to prepare a painting? No, the planar experience, what do you do to prepare? How do you find your chosen site or your chosen subject matter? You were very careful at it. I watched you. I am, but I kind of don't want to be because like there's artists that I admire, Joseph Zavukvich, who's a watercolor artist. He says like, there are no bad subject matters, only bad paintings. So I wanna paint any scene and I want it to be good. But yeah, I'm kind of picking sometimes. All right. Yeah. Awesome. So I just wanted to remind everyone, Bryce had mentioned it earlier, but you can see all of the paintings that were created this past weekend in some shop windows along Delview Avenue in West Vancouver. So it's pretty cool. So let me just see. So that is, so you can see it. It'll be on from today until August 31st in the windows of Crema, Stitigen Jewelers, Oxygen Yoga, Jones and Company Bespoke Framers and Phoenix. So yes, we're taking a walk. Don't check it out and they're for sale. You can also go and vote. There's a people's choice for all of the paintings. So you can, if you can't make it out on the street or if you're on the street and then wanna go vote, check out paintonthemountain.com. And you'll see all of the paintings by all 12 artists there. So you can vote for your favorite that way. It's a nice interactive way and a great way to see all the artwork. Something else to mention is that well, these three amazing artists were part of it. There was a whole bunch of people out painting on the mountain. So we're just gonna give a shout out to all those other great talented artists that we couldn't fit everyone in today. There's gonna be a lot of people talking. So everyone else who was painting on Paint on the Mountain, we had Elizabeth Austin, Maureen Conley, Mo Gosh, Tatiana Mirkov Popoviki, Jan Pointer, Nigel Sutcliffe, Alfonso Tejada, Shannon Thiessen and Ann Willsie. So you'll be able to see all of their work at paintonthemountain.com where you can vote and in the shops along Bellevue Avenue. I think now we'll get Taryn back on because there's another opportunity that we have in West Vancouver to see some planar sketches. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for just including me in this event. And Stephen, we just had a question from an audience member about how to view the images during this COVID time if we can't get out and walk around the neighborhood. I know we have a lot of people that are a little more isolated. So I'm just gonna share my screen to just show people exactly how to get to the website. Excellent. Yes, so just bear with me here. So I hope everyone, I'm gonna see if I can get my spancy dancey cursor which I've never used before. Ooh, can you see my cursor? Yeah. And you can see plate on the mountain, paint on the mountain, the screen? Yeah. Great. So everyone, if you go to Cypressvillage.com event slash POTM, paint on the mountain, you can also go to paintonthemountain.com. And you'll notice over in the right, it'll say vote for people's choice but it also has, yes, I believe if we click on that and then click here to vote, you will see all of the paintings listed and you can view them. So that is the easiest way if you aren't able to get out and about. And I'm just gonna shut that down. And just an aside, this gives me an opportunity to mention a few things going on at the library. We do have an art gallery, a virtual exhibition on called Hand-Drawn West Vancouver. It links slightly with the Plain Air initiative in the sense that Emma Fitzgerald, who was the artist, she is a sketcher and did everything out of doors and in plain air, just not with oils or watercolors but with just a pen and ink. So on our art gallery page, you can see here Hand-Drawn West Vancouver, it's a little virtual flip book that you're welcome to visit and flip through. Emma is also commentating on all of the places she sketched in and Emma's, she did a reading with us and you can view that on our YouTube page called Hand-Drawn Vancouver. And another shout out, we're recording today's event and both Stephen and I will be posting the video on both the Silt Purse YouTube. Is that correct, Stephen? Or? West Bend Arts Council. Thank you. It will be also on the West Vancouver Memorial Library YouTube page so you can share it with friends and family and it will be there for a time in Memorial to watch again and again. So thank you for just letting me be part of this. That's awful. Thank you for sharing all of that. Taryn, yeah. So I guess we're coming to a close. So thanks everyone for showing up tonight and sharing your words of wisdom and sharing your artwork with us. Where can people who are watching, where can they find more about you or more of your work? I'm on Instagram, ShirleyClaireWilliams and also my website is ShirleyClaireWilliams.com. Maria? And my website is just my full name, mariajosenhans.com. And I also am on Instagram and Facebook and there's links to my Instagram and Facebook page on my website as well. For me, you can go to Instagram. Sunur is my first name and it'll pop up for sure but you can write my last name as well which is S-E-M-B-H-I-S-M-B and that's my Instagram where I post my artworks. I also have a behance that I don't post frequently there but after a couple of, like a while I do post my works over there as well. So yeah, check them out. Hey. Awesome, that's wonderful. Yeah, and go check out the paint on the mountain site like Taryn just showed you. Vote for your favorite and if you are able, check them out in person along Bellevue on the art walk. That's pretty exciting stuff. So thank you to all of our wonderful panelists and to British Pacific Properties and to everyone who helped put this amazing event together. It was pretty wonderful to have this experience this evening with you all. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you and thank you so much for hosting. Thank you so much. And thanks to British Pacific Properties for having this event. Even though they didn't have harmony arts and everything it's still wonderful that they were able to get this together and do this this way. It's really nice. Yeah, thank you all. And thank you for everyone who showed up tonight to listen and to see examples of this work. That's what art is here for is for you guys. Yeah, so thank you. Enjoy the rest of your evening and please stay safe and stay creative and we will connect with you later. Take care everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye.


That's a fun question people always say. What in the world do you do? You know what, the park is closed. Do you take vacation? We actually get busier in the off season than we are in our regular daily occurrence of delivering the day with excellence because of all of the work that happens in the off season to keep our brand at its highest level. Our lightning rod attraction is getting in an entirely brand new track. And we really took a hard look at what we could do to make this ride run consistently. It's gonna be a really smooth and repeatable experience. So that's gonna be a huge accomplishment for our maintenance and attractions teams. I can't wait to show the public what it's gonna be like. One of the most iconic structures that we have on property and one of the most unique places is the chapel. And we're giving the church a brand new facelift, a brand new roof structure and repaired all of the footers for the church and it's gonna get a new paint job. And I think we're gonna have it looking very pretty for the 2021 season. Hickory House is one of our famous barbecue places on property and it was right across the street from the American Eagle Foundation. But it was always really difficult to be able to see the eagles and enjoy a meal from the Hickory House. So we're transplanting the blacksmith shop down to the old pottery barn and giving them a brand new environment to work from. It's gonna be able to be more interactive for the guests to be able to see our craftsman's firsthand. And we're having a new dining area for the Hickory House that's gonna provide a lot more comfortable seeing for our guests and joining themselves at the Hickory House. You'll notice that there's a whole brand new flooring system at Front Porch Cafe that we put in to make it a lot easier for our guests to get in and out of that building in a more comfortable way. The flour and food, it's an amazing, immersive experience to see. One of the fun elements that we're adding into it is a chalk experience, not only for the kids that are arriving, but we're gonna have some chalk artists that are gonna be doing some art along the sidewalks. The entertainment program that's coming up in the flour and food, we're theming it to the melodies of spring. Think of it as very inspirational music and lots of live acts to support that umbrella theme. We're not only gonna be activating our indoor theaters again, but we're also not gonna lose what we gained with our outdoor entertainment venues. On March the 13th, we get to open our 2021 season. So I'm really looking forward to it. I know our entire team is really excited about welcoming everyone to the Dollywood Parks and Resorts.