100 people register, but I know how things go these days and we are recording this session. So this will be available in the cloud afterward. I'd like to thank Sylvia Gutierrez for joining us today from the Wikimedia Foundation. We will be discussing Wikidata and books. And did you want to introduce yourself, Sylvia? Do you want to wait? I'll do in a while, but I think now we can, ooh, that. First you, and then I'll go. Okay, so my name is Lori Bridges and I'm a librarian at Oregon State University. I am one of the seven co-organizers of every book It's Reader campaign. And you can find more information about the campaign on bit.ly forward slash every book It's. The campaign was initiated a couple of months ago and we started planning. So we haven't had a lot of time but we're excited to see that so many folks are interested. The overall goal is to improve the coverage of books but also literary works and oral stories. And we've chosen the month of April because it is World Book Day on April 23rd. And so we're hoping to get more folks involved. Just yesterday we learned that Romanian libraries are on board and Wiki Conference India is involved as well. Book coverage in Wikipedia is extremely important. I am coming to you from the United States and you may have seen on the news that we have many book challenges. And for those challenges, I have looked at the stats in Wikipedia and those pages are viewed hundreds, if not thousands of times every day. So it's very important that we improve book coverage on Wikipedia. And we will have more events throughout the month, including tomorrow. Mexico is hosting a kickoff event. And so do go to the every book. It's media meta page, excuse me, it's there on the screen and then you can see what events are coming up. And so now it is my pleasure to welcome Sylvia and I look forward to answering any questions that you have in the chat. Thank you so much, Luria. And thank you to all the seven co-hosts that have organized this amazing international campaign that considers also oral knowledge as obviously part of our literary heritage. My name is Sylvia Gutierrez. I am Senior Program Officer for Libraries at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before joining the foundation, I was a Digital Humanities Librarian for seven years and I'm passionate about connecting, enriching and visualizing data. Why? Because I feel this is a way of critical thinking and let's see if you agree with me when we finish this workshop. If I'm looking like this way is because this side I have the chat. So I'm also seeing if anyone has questions or wants to share something, we will have a time to share a little bit about ourselves like who are we? So we'll get to that. But anyways, I got bitten by the Wikidata mosquito in 2014 and ever since I'm a huge fan of this project and I hope that at the end of this talk you're also a big fan because you will see the wonderful things that it can do. So just so you have a little overview of what we'll be looking at today, we will talk about obviously what's Wikidata, the power of linked data through Sparkle queries and also how we can use Wikidata to search the other projects like Wikipedia and Wikisource which are two very relevant projects when we're talking about books and also of course how we can add missing information, how we can add that book we love and we feel that everyone should know about. So getting to know you, would you mind going into that link? I'm gonna write it in this chat as well and it's an anonymous survey and it's just to get to know you a little bit better. So this is like this, I think I wrote it correctly and if you did enter that link, now you can write where you come from and so we have a participant from the United States and there are three other participants typing and I'm excited about where you all come from. I myself and I'm in Mexico City. This is the country where I was born and yeah, let's see who else is joining. What's one nice in Poland? That's great, that's great. Brazil, yay. Wow, Malaysia, that's amazing. I'm so happy to have you all here. I hope, yeah, my English is understandable for everyone and if not, please just ask and I'll be happy to come back to anything that it's not, hey, Brazil is getting bigger. Nice, nice. So we have some more participants. You can still use the poll and but now I would like to know if not in the Slido, if it's too complicated but I would like to know what do you think when you hear the concept of linked open data? You can also write it on the chat, but interesting. Yeah, we see network, relationships, semantic web. I think this is very nice. We see how connections is something that people tend to think about. Interesting that also people are talking about unique identifiers, connecting silhouette knowledge. That's nice. Connecting things that were before separated and now get connected triples. So I see that there are some people joining that do know the lingo, the words of the semantic web. I like also how people are talking about discoverability. So yes, this is why we wanna join this amazing project with Data because it does allow us to discover things as we said, as someone said, I'm sorry, in the survey, the knowledge that was separated, it allows us to discover that sharing. I really like that that work comes up sharing knowledge and metadata is also pretty important for our workshop today because it is a lot about using that metadata that we know from libraries and now connected. Yeah, Wikibase, oh, we won't touch Wikibase today, but do check it out if you are planning to host like your own Wikidata, so to say. If you need to control your data, and that's really interesting, Wikibase is really interesting. So yeah, metadata is getting bigger. Yes, we do think about metadata and we will talk about that. So I'm glad that many things that you also feel like that are connected with Link Open Data appear here. Okay, so when we talk about the Wikimedia projects, many of us think about Wikipedia because I mean, it's the most popular one, the one that has been longer out there and so on, but you might know that there are a lot of other Wikimedia projects that just comments for images and video and so on and that would be great for oral knowledge. Also, there are very nice initiatives from Nigeria and other countries that are looking at oral knowledge doing some recordings and sharing them there, but what we will talk about today is Wikidata and also a little bit about Wikisource and what is Wikidata? So I think many of you know, but just so we have like a sense of how big it is, it's more than 100 million items. We will talk what items are, but it's huge. It's a lot of data, a lot of open data, which is amazing and there are more than 20,000 active editors and more than 300 languages and all of that is why we love Wikidata also because it's collaborative.  Also, one thing we love about Wikidata is how multilingual it is. Of course, not all languages are there, but I hope we will get there and this is very nice and it's free to reuse, which means people doing amazing stuff with it. If you don't know about wikitrivia.tomjewatson.com do check it out. It's a very fun game where you get to organize events in time. So you have three lives, those three hearts and it's Wikidata powered. So there are a lot of games, not just this one, but I feel like this could be a great game about books for instance that you just organize which ones were published first. You see there's the great Gatsby. And yeah, that's a pretty, oh, thank you for sharing the link. And yeah, also there's istropedia or highstropedia, I don't know. And this is another very cool tool also powered by Wikidata and Wikidata. And this allows you to create interactive timelines. So here we're looking at all the books from Dr. Seuss, which is one of my favorite authors. And you see his books in a timeline and you can go to the wikipedia page and learn more about these books. And it's a very nice tool for schools and in general, I think it's, yeah. And it's also thanks to what we said before that it's a huge database that it's collaborative and this is what makes people get so creative. And of course we also have that the CervantesVirtual.com, that's a digital library in Spanish. And this is a project created by Blanca Sanchez and she did this amazing interactive data visualization where you can look at all the female writers in their digital library. So you can filter by their country of origin or the language in which they publish and so on. So these are things that we don't have yet in our digital libraries, but we'll get there. And if we collaborate and if we create better data in Wikidata, we can do all these amazing stuff. So finally, I will say that Wikidata is big, Wikidata is collaborative, it's multilingual and as you said in that survey, it is semantic. And what that means is that elements are connected with meaning, it's not longer the hyperlink that was just one thing connected to another without any specific meaning, just the blue link. Now it is Carolina Maria de Jesus, a Brazilian author connected to the diary she wrote from the favela and this connection has meaning. She is the author of this book. Also, she has a country of citizenship, which is Brazil, right? So again, a link that has meaning, it is semantic and this very resomatic relationships can go anyway, any direction. So Carolina Maria de Jesus is connected to Brazil, but also her book is connected to Brazil because the narrative location of this diary slash novel is Brazil, right? So this is the semantic road. And as you also mentioned, those can be sent as triples and why they are triples? Because it's one element connected to another through a link of meaning. And the way this looks, the way that this looks in Wigideta is like this. Every single one of these elements has a QIT, like a unique identifier. You also mentioned Eurus when we were talking about things that come up to your mind when you think about linked open data. So we have elements and we have properties that connect these elements. This is the way that, you know, knowledge is connected in Wigideta. So let's have a look at it live. I'm guessing you're still looking at my screen and you're, I'm typing Wigideta and that's something you're also seeing, right? Yes, we can see it. Yes, that's great. So I'm gonna write here, Carolina, Maria. And, or I mean, I could also search for Cuarto de Despejo which I think in English it has another name. So this is a good exercise because now we see that there are two things that are called Cuarto de Despejo. So this one here that is actually an album she recorded with music and this other one here which is the one we're looking at. And this is, this is nice because we get a little bit of description here so we can know which one of those two is the one that we're looking for. So we'll click on this one. And as we mentioned, there are QIDs. So the QID for Child of Dark is this. This is the unique identifier that distinguishes this element from all the others. And we also have properties that connect this element with other things. So for instance, this property you will see very often which is P31 and it's instance of. So this is to describe what is this thing? Child of Dark, it's an instance of literary work. We can, this gets very deep, very philosophical. I was never a cataloger. So I am a librarian, a digital humanities librarian but I know defining things, it's very profound and we won't have the chance to talk a lot about this but for now it's sufficient to say that this is the way that you will model most likely the work that you're going to upload to the data. You will call it, if it's a literary work of course you will model it this way. So can anyone write in the chat, what is the QID of literary work? I'm gonna go there and can anyone see? I mean, it's a huge number but at least the two last numbers of that identifier can you write it on the chat? Just that we all know that we are on the same page. Yes, Violet Fox, that's absolutely right. That's perfect, Arden, that's the right QID. Yes, Lori. Yeah, so that's the unique identifier of literary work. And as you can see here there is another property called subclass of. Can you tell me what is the PID of subclass of? Can you write it on the chat? That's correct. Anila, Lori, Arden, it is P279. Yeah, so you see we have QIDs for elements and PIDs for properties for the ones that are connecting those elements. And we can see that literary work is a subclass of written work. So written work is anything, a master thesis, a letter that there are many types of written works and literary work is one subclass of this. That's great, Tebogo, nice, yes. So yeah, I think you all got it. You all know now that Wikidita is created with different elements that are connected to other elements through properties. And this is the way we do those connections we were talking about, great. So there are a list of common properties and you can look at them here. And as you can see, one of the most common properties is actually sites. Why this is? Well, because there's a huge movement inside Wikidita that it's really interested in academic publications. So they are connecting which articles are citing other articles. And that's a huge thing in Wikidita. So there was even this conference called Wikisite in which people were talking about this. So that's one of the most common properties. And as I told you, instance of is something that you will be looking at very often. And if anyone remembers, this instance of will be filled with one element if we're talking about a literary, like a novel for instance. So can anyone type what would be, how would instance of be filled if the thing we're talking about it's a novel? What would it be? Do you remember? I mean, you do have the QID above but it was something that it's a subclass of written work. So what would it be? I think it was kind of a confusing question but we can look at it here. Yes, yes, Janet. That's correct, literary work. So as we see here, this novel slash diary is an instance of literary work. Yes. And as you typed before, the QID of literary work is this one, the one that ends with 34. So great. Well, I mean, this is the first WikiData class. So it doesn't matter if we're wrong now, we're learning and we'll get there. So these are common properties. And what is even better? There's this amazing group of people that this project, WikiProject, is linked in the meta page of the campaign, of the Every Book It's Reader campaign. And it's very good. This is gold. This here will be your guide for whatever you wanna do with books because they wrote all the properties that are fairly relevant for literary works. So here, they even did some nice examples. So here you see, for instance, they tell you one property you will be using is instance of, this is P31. And they add in an example, for instance, the autobiography of Alice B. Tocles would be an instance of written work. Thank you, Lillian, there's the link. So that's the same goes for title. That would be a very common property you will be using. And it shows what the name of the property is and also an example of how this is filled. So we all know the diary of Anne Frank and the title here is in Dutch. So that's the way this element, I mean, this property is filled, right? So we will take a look at this at the end when we will add an element to WikiData. But just so you have like a general idea of what are the most common properties you will be using when you model a literary work in WikiData, there you go, go there. And also they are very helpful people. And if you have questions, you can see who are part of this project and you can ask them questions. So do that. Another thing that you will be, let's say confronted with are external IDs. So we already talked about elements. I didn't talk about strings, but we will get there. And the third thing that it's really relevant when we're modeling books are external IDs. So you can go at this link. And I think I can, oops, that didn't go as I planned here. So I'm gonna write the link. Oh, it's already there. Thank you Violet. And this is a query. We will talk about what queries are. Don't get frightened by all this select item, item label. It's easier, I promise. I'll show you how it can be easier. But one of the wonderful things about WikiData is that we can ask questions to it. And unlike chat GPT, WikiData is not making up stuff. Like WikiData is just telling you whatever it's in its database and it's clear where that data comes from unlike chat GPT where we don't know where they scrape their information from. So what I'm asking here is I wanna see all instance of WikiData properties to identify books. And this is why I was talking about external IDs. So this is a way to look at those external IDs. And here we go. So we have for instance, ISBN, that's an external ID. So it's another like a QID from another project. So we know ISBN is one of those identifiers, OCLC control number, DOI and so on, like Google box, Google books ID and et cetera. And we have also from libraries. So for instance, we have an ID from the Deutsche National Bibliotheque from Germany and the National Library of Germany, the Project Gutenberg eBook ID and so on. So there are a lot of IDs that we can connect with WikiData. So going back, we know that there are elements, there are properties, they are connected and this elements can be either information such as the name of the title of the diary of Anne Frank in Dutch for instance, they can be another element as we saw that Guarto de Despejo, it's an instance of literary work which is another element. And we also saw that elements can be connected with external IDs. I think those are the things that are, yeah, the most common things you need to know if you want to model books. So there's a comment there that you can use Chattypity to write a WikiData query and that's true. Yes, you can do that. It doesn't always work and it's not always the right query but it's amazingly done, yeah. Although we would have to also talk about the ethical implications of using something like Chattypity which was trained by paying very low, very low, what is the word, income? No, like, yes, I mean... Wages. Wages, that's the word, thank you. Very low wages, which is very sad. Anyways, let's go do happy thoughts about people contributing, not because they're paid very low wages but because they want to contribute to free knowledge and here we have, now we're gonna talk about the power of linked data. We're gonna squeeze what linked data can do for us and as I said, I promise that we will look at something that makes those queries easier. So if you go here to queryweekdata.org slash query builder or even if you just go to queryweekdata.org and then click on the query builder which is here, this one. Then you go to this easy to use interface and what we can do here is that we can ask for instance of literary work for instance and we can say, because we know that the property we're looking at what we want is instance of, we already learned that. So here you write the property and here you say if it's not literary work or if it doesn't matter what it is like you can add it there. For instance, I could say like regardless of value I wanna see country of origin which I know that that's another property that could be also done. But let's say we want to get instance of matching literary work. So you start typing and it already suggests some elements in wiki data. So I'm going to say I want an instance of literary work and you can always look at the element you're interested. So for instance, here we were with Huarto. Oh no, I think that's the album. I'll go to the book here. So we can see for instance this element it's an instance of literary work and also it says country of origin that's another property Brazil. So let's say I wanna query other literary works that have country of origin Brazil. So here I start writing country of origin of origin. This one, yes. And here I say I write Brazil and I check that I'm selecting the right one soon. So not Indiana, Brazil, Indiana but Brazil, a country in South America, like this. And then I run the query and here I get many literary works that are, that whose country of origin is Brazil. So I can go to the QID, I can click on it and there I see it. I see this book by Monteiro Lobato which is as we asked the literary work and the country of origin is Brazil. Right? So that was pretty easy, don't you think? I mean, now how could I ask for literary work from Botswana for instance, what should I do here? Can anyone tell? Like where should I change the value? Yeah, someone should definitely write a dissertation about the different book titles across languages. I feel like that I've seen that about movies like how different they can be and it's hilarious. Like Elma Street is the way it's called the movie in English and then in Mexico it's something like the nightmare of blah, blah, blah. It's like 10 words. I don't know, it's a huge phrase. So yes, it's really interesting. Great, Arden. Yes, that's correct. Good, Alan. So there's the answer to my question. Here I would need to write Botswana and only with that little change I can do the same query here, run it and now instead of getting literary works from Brazil I'll get literary works from whose country of origin is Botswana and none come. So this is why it's important that you're here. Like we want to make this database more diverse and get more of those works that we would like to see here. Anyways, you know how it works. So it doesn't mean that the query broke. It means that there's no data on literary works from Botswana. Maybe they're modeled in a different way because sometimes people write instance of books. So it doesn't mean that necessarily that there's no information. Maybe it's not modeled in the way that we're asking. But if you know about a literary work from Botswana you can search like a very famous one. You can search for it and we can do that and see how it was modeled. So yes, perfect. Now we know how to build our first query. And yes, this is one of the ways to find the gaps. We will do a little bit more complicated queries. So you know that that's a way of doing a query but you can get a lot of inspiration from the examples that are already available in the Wikidata query service. So if you go there, I hope you all saw I clicked on examples and I can search for other queries that are already available here. So this one is a very famous one which is searching for house cats in Wikidata and getting the picture that is associated with those cats. So here we're asking for an item that has the property instance of house cats. So Q146 is house cat and we're getting the pictures like that that are related to Wikidata. And can anyone say what should I change here in line six? I mean, I can change it also here to get dogs for instance. So what should we change here to get dogs? Actually there's a, I don't know that there's horses but here what we could do is delete this QID then press control space and start typing here dog like this and we see that the QID is Q144. So if we only do that change, I can actually change the metadata here of this. So if I do that change and I click on run, now I will get instances of dogs that have an image. And obviously I could also search for instances of books. I can change that here as well that have an image, right? So you don't need to create the whole query. You can look at examples and just look at an example that might get the things that you need. Just you can learn how to change it and you can change it here as well. So we can see if there are any literary words here, I'm sorry, like that, that have an image associated to them and you can change that also here in the information. So there you go, that's the way you do it. So you now know that you hear, here's the thing you're asking for. So you can write banana here, it doesn't matter but here's the thing you're asking for and you're telling what conditions you want to be fulfilled. So here is the property that you want. So P31 that we already learned that it's instances of and here you say instance of what and you fill this with the QID of the thing you're looking for. So, great. Now let's look, if you wanna learn more about this and you're like, oh no Sylvia didn't explain this in a way that works for me or anyways or you wanna just do it again, you can go to this tutorial, it's really good and you will go through all the elements of a Sparkle query and so please take a look at that and I think it's in different languages. So feel free to look around and also do look at the example queries that are out there. There are so many good ones. So people have done the craziest queries. One of them is most famous sons and daughters of librarians for instance. And you wouldn't guess who the most famous one is. I did it yesterday and it's Superman. So Superman is the son of, yeah, well, she's a extraterrestrial being but she was a librarian in her other world. So it's very cool, all the queries that you can find there. So go there, look at the example queries and modify, just play around and you'll find many, many interesting things. Now, let's go to queries that could make sense for us, for the campaign of every book it's reader. So what I did here in this query is that I asked for instance of literary work and I ordered them by site link count. What that means is like how many Wikipedia's they have or how many Wiki source elements. So they're ordered by the instance of literary work that has more links to other Wikipedia projects. And this is like a proxy for being famous, right? Why am I doing this is because I feel like if you look at these famous works, you can get inspiration to do, to model your own book. So here you can see Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet and if you look at those elements that are so famous and have so many links to so many Wikipedia's and so on, you can see like all the things that you could model. So here you see, oh, I could add images, of course they need to be in comments or you can see, oh, I could add this property which is inception, title, derivative work. So things that are based on Romeo and Juliet like movies or any other book and so on. So yeah, this query can help you see the most famous literary works like The Hobbit or many other Harry Potter. And when you look at those, you can get many ideas of all the things you could say about a literary work. So like main subject for instance and a form of creative work. So we don't say instance of novel but we say instance of literary work and with this other property form of creative work, we say what type of literary work it is. It's a novel, a diary and so on. And as you can see, they can be filled with different elements. So genre does not to be just one of them. It can be young adult fiction, but also fantasy but also adventure fiction and so on. And one thing we will talk about later is the references. So yes, you can say many things but they will be better if you add a reference to those claims. So here we have for instance, the idea that the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was created except thought about in 1990s. And here we have references that support this claim. So that is about famous literary works. So there you have the query. No questions until now. I'm looking at the chat. I don't think so. No, good. Now we're gonna look at books with external identifier which in this case is the Gutenberg ID. So this is another thing that it's very nice. Once books, I mean once literary works are connected with this and the intervarious we can do things that we cannot do at the Gutenberg page, right? So here in there are a lot of books, very amazing books, free books in the project Gutenberg. It's an amazing project. But I can't ask right now, give me all the books that you have that were written by women authors, right? We can't do that right now. But because the Gutenberg ID is connected to Wikidata, we can do that. So here I'm asking all items that have a project Gutenberg author ID and that person with the Gutenberg author ID is a female person, right? So I'm saying sex or gender, that's the property, is female, like that. And also I added here optional, tell me the country where they're from. So you can take this query I'm giving to you and you can change whatever you want. Like you can say, I am not interested in people who have a project Gutenberg author ID but I'm actually, actually I could change this so it can be more general, just ID, I'm gonna change here and I'll share the query with you. So instead of being the Gutenberg ID with a specific ID, I can say, oh, I'm actually interested in all the female authors who have a Google, no, actually think VF would be a good one right, with a VF ID and who are female and I can run the query. So you can play around, as I said, you don't need to learn how to do the whole query because you can find one that makes sense to you and use it. I'm gonna share the link here, so in case you wanna change the IDs. And as I shared before here, I think I gave you this other query with the external IDs. So here you can see all the external IDs you could be looking at here. So this is gonna take a while because VF is pretty big. There are a lot of elements with a VF ID, but here you could see other, yeah, IDs you could be looking at. So if you're interested at, I don't know, there's, oh, but this is for books actually, but for authors, there are other IDs and you wanna see all of them that are female, you could look at that. So as I have here, this is Wikidata property to identify books and there's Wikidata properties to, Wikidata property to identify people, right? So I'm gonna give you that. Here we can search for QIDs for people and you can use a query I shared and yeah. So VF is one of them. The ID of the German National Library is another one, the Library of Congress. So you can search for all female writers, women writers in the Library of Congress or the National Library of France, for instance, right? You can just change that p-value that we have here to that. And I'm sorry, this is taking a lot of time because VF is huge. You could search for authors with the most number of identifiers. Yes, there's a way of counting that. So what I normally do is, I Google. So I say something like Wikidata query authors by number of identifiers and maybe you don't find that. So Sparkle, sorry, I should have written that, but maybe someone already created something like that. So here you see this is the language to count. So here you have select and you say count. So it would be something along these lines. So you will count the properties and you will say what properties you're interested in. And if you get stuck, like if you can't find the way of, I think it was, if you can't find the way to do it, you can always, there's a place in Wikidata where you can ask for a query. So it would be something along these lines. Like you would count properties. And you can try it, you can try to do it. But if you can't, there's also in the page I shared before, so where I found the query of most famous daughters and sons of librarians, this one. Here you can see that there's another button that it's called request a query. So here you could ask, oh, I would like to do this and this and they will help you create the query you're looking for. Normally it's already there, but in case you don't find it and you can ask for one. So now I'm looking at a question in the chat and it says, hi Sylvia, I'm looking at this. Things fall apart, a great book by Chinua Tseve. And I am curious about all the identifiers. Yes, let's go to the identifier section. So it's this one. So we have VF and so on. And none is routes one to an African library. There's even an ID for a core topic. What would be the problem? How can we get African libraries in there? Yes, that's a great question. So in order to get African libraries here, you would need to create a proposal for a property. So you would need to make a case of there is this library that has this consistent identifier and we want this property to be in Wikidata. So that's the way the National Library did it. So you can see, for instance in here, let me see if I can show you very quickly. They did a case, like they said, yes, we want to create a property that is the identifier for the subject issued by the Bibliotech National Difference. And they said the form of this identifier, so it's an eight digits identifier. And they gave some examples and so on. So no, you don't need to be a National Library. You just need to make a case. Like we have this persistent identifier, that is a requirement. So it doesn't need to be a persistent identifier. So for instance, I did the case for LM which is the encyclopedia of Mexican literature. So this encyclopedia has persistent identifiers for writers. And I made the case. I said, look, this is a very important encyclopedia and it has relevant information about authors from Mexico and now it is a property. So I think, for instance, this writer who I really like I think she has an LM ID. It doesn't. And then I do let me see if I can find it. Yes, this is the identifier. So I made the case for this identifier. And now, yeah, we can add information about them. We can add those properties. Did I answer the question? Was it clear? I think maybe I should tell you where you do the property thing. So create a property data. There's a page where you suggest a here property proposal. So I'm going to add this link here. Wait, why is there like a smiley face? I don't know. Well, I don't know, but I think it's converting one part of the URL. Yes. That part. Yeah. Because it has like two points and a P and it's converting that to an emoji. Anyways, but you see the page here. And that's where you do the. The property. Proposal. So here it says like before proposing a property, please look at the ones that already exist. And it has to be discussed. There. And how can, so I see another question persistent identifiers. How can we get that? So normally. Libraries, especially national libraries. Have persistent identifiers for their authority control. So if they do. Then it's easy. If they do have those persistent identifiers, but if they don't, then it's a little bit difficult. And it doesn't have to be a number. It can be a word. As long as it is persistent. So yeah, that would be the thing that we would need. So for instance, just to spread some good news, there is. This database. The African journals online. And they have persistent identifiers. So that is a property. If they don't, then it's a little bit more difficult. And it doesn't have to be a number. So that is a property. And with the data. And actually, in my example, at the end. We're pretty. Are we ending in three minutes? No. Technically we advertised for an hour, but I set the zoom up for 90 minutes. So it's fine to go over and if folks have to leave, then that's fine as well. Okay. Okay. Okay. So let's go to the other things. Yeah. So I'm going to go quickly through this other query, which is nice. This is a query to look at the narrative. That is not. So I had another query to look at the narrative place. A map that shows the narrative place of. I don't know if it worked, but I have it somewhere here. So just like, let me take a quick look. And what is, what that means is that I'm with this query, I'm looking at the place where. The book is taking place. So to say, I got it. So I'm sharing my screen again. Here. So with this query, which I'm sharing in the chat as well. You can see. Items that have a narrative location that is property 840. And I'm getting the coordinates of that place. So narrative location. And it's an instance of famous P 31 instance of literary work. And here you can see literary works that happen in different parts of the world. Here you can find literary works that occur in a place in Ecuador or Colombia, Nigeria, Congo, Angola, and so on. And if you click on those dots, you'll see the elements. So here, for instance, we have forests of the pickings. That's a book that takes place in Kenya. Right. So that's a thing we can also model and it's cute. I mean, so that's, that's, that's another query. I'm going to, yeah, sorry about that mistake that this should have been the link. And finally, let's look at quickly just other. I'm going to just post them in the chat. We don't have time now to go in detail. It suffices to say that this is a way in which we can use WikiData to search Wikipedia. So for instance, here I'm looking at authors who are Polish citizen, for instance, and they have an article, Wikipedia article in another language, but not in English. So we do a translation if we know the other language in which this book is in. So here you can, as I said, we can change the country. So we can say, oh, I want to see all authors who are Ghanaian citizens. Right. So I would only need to change line six or here. And instead of writing Poland, I would have to write Ghana. Right. And, and I would get all of them who have an article in another language, but not in English. But you could also be interested in, for instance, maybe she wants to do articles in Portuguese. So she could change this line and just add PT to Portuguese and get all Polish or Ghanaian. So here I could change to Ghana. Ghanaian citizens. And see all of them that do not have an article in Portuguese, but in another language. Right. So this is a way that this is a query that can be used for the campaign. We can look at authors from other countries that don't have an article in our language. So here is the query I did before. And this is for Polish author. So here we have a Stanisław Lim and so on. And of course we could also add who an author who is a woman. Right. So we could add here author. That with the property gender, sex or gender, which is P 21. And then female like that. Like this. Who is a woman. And, and so on. So I'm going to share this link in the chat as well. So here you have that query that can help. Perfect. That's, that's, that's just to say that we can use it to query we did that, but we can also use it to search books in a weekly source, or, you know, literary works. So here I did another query that I'm also sharing in the chat. And this is to look for all female authors who were born. And it's commented so this line won't run, but I can take that hashtag out. And here is to look at all women that were born in India, for instance, that have a work in wiki source. So if I take that hashtag out, you take the hashtag out of the query I just shared. There you would find women born in India who are female and have a work in wiki source in English wiki source. Right. Oh, sorry. This should say wiki source like that. Anyways, so that's that. And let's go to the final part, which is how do we add what's missing. So how do I add the book I want to we did that I first wanted to show the power why we would want to do it, but now let's say how can I do it. And I'm going to live at a wiki data element of a book I really like, which is Amanda written in 1980. And there's a very complicated way of stating that this book was banned. So we won't get there. There's a whole discussion. We can link the links to all the discussion that it's going on. But yes, I'm going to give you some tips of how you can add the book you want. So these are my three recommendations. If you want to add a book to the data, you should have number one. Link to a famous work. So I showed you already a query how to find famous words. You should have a link to a related work. So for instance, it could be another book from the author. Or it can be a book from an author in the region. So here I have a book from another South African author. And just to have an idea of how this book was modeled. Or I can have a very famous book from the region, so to say. So the book I want to model is from a South African author. And the thing I can do is search for another book that was like that. Just take a look at all the properties that I could fill. So here I see this. So here I see a book from another South African author. So here I see a book from another South African author. So here I see this book and I see whatever they have about this book. I'm sorry. So that's one thing. And then you should find references for the properties you'll use. And once I say, okay, this is. Oh, and also, you should look that the author of the book is already in Wikidata because if not you would need to create an element about her. Or him, right? So fortunately, my author is already in Wikidata. We won't have time to cover, but I will give you a link on how to learn more about adding authors. So in this website, learnwikidata.net, you can find more information about how to add an author. But let's say your author is already in Wikidata. So here you have it in hand. This South African novelist. And that's that. That's the first. You have your model ready. You have a famous work you can take a look at. You have a related work and you have your author. Great. Now you will need to search for references. So publication date, main subject, and so on. I have my references. So I have this. Newspaper article in which they talk about Miriam Palli. And they talk also about the book I'm interested in. So they do say that Amanda was published in 1980. So I have a source, right? I also have a source that this book is about the Soweto massacre. So this article, which is from the African journals online database, talks about this book and it says that it's part of the four novels that are about this tragedy, this uprising in Soweto, where they killed 350 children who were hoping for a different type of education, right? So I have my reference here. I also have a reference to the fact that it is a novel. And that the narrative location is Soweto. So I have all these journal articles I already looked for. And so I have my sources. I have my model. And I could even look for some external identifiers. It's not needed, but it's useful because it proves that the book that you're talking about exists, right? It's there. It has a persistent identifier somewhere, right? So now I have that. So let's do this. Let's do it. Let's search for, so I'm going to search for Amandla first. And I already did this because there are many things that are called Amandla, because it's a word that means power in Shosa, in Sulu. So there are many things, but none of this is the book, right? I already did my research. I know none of this is about Amandla. So I'm going to look at it. It's because here I have my author, and I can ask to what links here. And I can see that.  And there's this link to this talk page. So there's no book connected to that literary work that we can. So I now I know that Amandla is not there, and I can create it, right? So when you search for it, and it's you have to log in to your account. This is my, yeah, my WeeData, WeeData account. And since it's not there, I can create a new item here. I can click here or sometimes it even appears here. So I'm creating it in English. That's why you can select another language. And I'm writing the label in English. So it's called Amandla. And I can say 1980 novel written by South African author and medium plan like that. Oh, sorry to see you go and sorry to longer than expected. But yes, so we click on create and now we can add statements. So first thing is instance of and I can write literary work. I can add another statement. And as you can see, it already suggests once I write here instance of literary work, it already suggests properties that are coming to a literary work. So it says, oh, who is the author? And I, as I said, it's useful to already have handy the QID of your author. So here I can write the QID just to be sure that it's exactly this medium plally and not another medium plally. Like that. And I can add the publication date, which is 1980. And the reference because here I have a reference that states that truly it was written in that year. So here. I added that but I can add a reference and say a reference URL. It's here and publish. Like that. So I have references to say that it is true that it was written in 1980. And I can also say that the main subject is so what the so what the uprising, so I can add here main subject. I have the QID this so what the rising like that. And I can add my reference, which was this article. So there we go. We add the reference. So on. So are there any questions until now. Okay. So I'm going to add only the, the ID. So I have, I search for this book in library thing. And I can add everything ID. Sorry, work ID. That's that one. That's perfect. And I will also add the Goodreads ID. And I just wanted to show how it works. So when you search for a book in Goodreads, for instance, a month, you see one edition, right? But then you have to go here to show all editions. And when you click on that, you get the right ID. That's the right ID of the book. This one, which shows all different editions. So that's if you want to add a Goodreads ID work ID. That would be this one. And you can check that when you click, it should show the right. The right information. The same goes for this other external ID. When you click on it, it should show library thing. It should show the right book. So. Yes, there are a lot of lists of books that need to be created. One of them, I mean, you could see, you could use one of the queries we looked at today. And if you see, for instance, like there is no literary works from authors from Botswana, you can make that your, you know, your thing, right? So you can search in WPF for authors from Botswana and add their works there. And in the Weki Projects book, I think there's another list. And the meta page, I think, was I wrong, Lillian? You were going to do some lists of the books that people could edit. And Laurie, I think you were creating also Listeria lists, right? Of books that people could edit. So there's a lot of work to be done. One of them, as I said, are queries. You can search for books that are not sufficiently described. So, for instance, as you could see, even Bessie Head, even a book from Bessie Head, which is a very famous South African author, it's not really well described. So we saw Maru, I think that that was the name of the book. Or I can search here and it doesn't have enough information. So here you see it's very poor. So you can almost give for granted that books that are from Latin America or bi women are not, or Africa are not really well covered. So yes. Oh, you created for Wikipedia, right? But I mean, if they're not in Wikipedia, most likely they're not in Wikipedia data either. So you can create both at the same time and then link them. Yeah, lots of work to be done, but I'm so happy you bear with me and I'm sorry I came 15 minutes after the time. But if you have any questions to connect, I'm here. Yes, my email and let me know if you have any questions. But also, thank you so much, Flori Lilian. Oh, thank you for coming, Sylvia. Great. This is an amazing presentation and I mean, Wikidata is not my area of expertise and I'm still going to go play with it and it was very fascinating. And I've also unmuted Lilian, so she could speak as well. I know she knows a lot about Wikidata. Thank you, Sylvia. Thanks a lot. It was a wonderful presentation and I'd like to invite everyone would like to create some kind of event during our campaign about Wikidata. You can work individually, but if someone are planning to do some kind of specific event, please join us. As you see, there are lots of work to do. It's like a simple label about a title book and Wikidata. It's like a huge work. It's not something small. It's huge. So please let's connect with us and improve the information about books and writers on Wikidata. Yes. Yay. Thank you everyone for coming for everyone that contributes to the campaign and to Wikimedia projects. Thank you.


Alright, why don't we get started. First of all, thank you all for for coming today for this is our community mitigation fund municipal block grant workshop. And So a couple of housekeeping items before we get started, we are recording this. We recorded the earlier session on Tuesday and we're recording this one as well we're going to put these up on the website in case anybody wants to go back and review the presentation. By way of introductions. I'm Joe Delaney, Chief of Community Affairs. And with me is Mary Thurlow and Lily Wallace are our community mitigation fund staff. So, a couple that we will be stopping for questions and answers a couple of times during the presentation. If you do have something that you that you want to ask. If you're outside of those breaks, feel free to use the chat function, which is at the bottom, it should be at the bottom of your, your screen. And you can type in questions there and we'll go through those when we when we break for for questions. You can also ask questions at that time. You can ask that you stay muted during the presentations. And I think everybody. I don't think we have anyone on the phone. Okay, so we don't. And let's see. The other thing is we will be loading up the PowerPoint deck that we have today if we haven't done that already up onto our website. So you'll be able to access that. So we're going to be talking with you. We're going to go over what's new with the program, which is a lot. We've really restructured this entire program from what had been sort of a competitive grant program into a block grant program for the communities. So through the what's new, we will walk you through the application form. We're not going to go through every category of grant, but we'll walk through a couple of them. So you get the flavor of what it is that we're looking for. We have put up on our website. And that will be an example form. So you can go into that and take a look at that. And that will be the last thing that we'll do today is we will do a walkthrough of our website so that we can show you how to find some of the things that you might be needing when you're filling out your applications. So with that, I'm going to share my screen and start our presentation. So jumping right in. What's new for this year, as I said, there's really there's a lot that's new. The first thing is that we have done is we created this two tiered program grant program, the municipal block grant, which is the subject of this meeting, and also the regional agency grant which is designed for the regional planning agencies, the DA's offices and our workforce programs. We won't really be talking about that particularly today we have a separate session on that next week. We've invited all of the regional agencies to that one. So on the grant applications for the municipal block grants. I'm going to hear this a couple of times during this presentation because this is this is very important. Municipalities will be required to submit a single application for the entire community. So what that means is if your community is wanting to apply for some public safety money, but they also want to apply to do some kind of a transportation planning study or gambling harm reduction study. They're going to have to all get together and figure out, you know how you want to divvy up the money and and put that all together into a single application. So if a municipality does not apply by January 31st, the community will forfeit the funds for that year. And the statute requires that applications be submitted before February 1. So that is the only date that is in the statute and and we are bound to that. The third thing is we have provided more detailed project guides. And so everyone who was invited to this meeting or who received an invitation from us, the guidelines are attached to that. So if you would, please open those and take a look at them and download them and save them because you will be needing those as you're preparing your applications. But in those guidelines, what we did was we presented what we agree to be the impacts of the casinos. And then we also provided a list of the types of projects that that that could be eligible to to address some of those impacts. And we also added in some items that are not eligible. We have found over the years that we've received applications that that really weren't eligible for funding. So we try to outline those so communities, you know, aren't wasting their time applying for something that's not eligible. And then we have our administrative costs. A community can now use up to 7.5% of the grant towards the cost of administering the grant, and we put there is a cap on that of $50,000. So, you know, the person who is submitting the quarterly reports or putting together the payment estimates for submission to us, all of those kinds of activities, you can charge some of those off against the grant itself. So hopefully that will make it a little bit easier for communities, you know, to recoup some of their costs. Item number five, we are providing this year some funding for the regional planning agencies. Again, we're not going to really talk about that today. This is, those are for, you know, the regional planning agencies that where the casinos are located. And that said, if some of your communities have sort of a regional type of project or you want to work with a few other communities. You might want to approach your regional planning agency to see if that might be a project that is either better done by them or to be done in conjunction with them. So, that's something for the communities to think about a little bit. The next item is we are converting to a fiscal year. So, in the past we operated on a calendar year but, but really, we work pretty much on a fiscal year basis, where we do our reviews through the winter and the spring and try to get awards out to communities by the end of June which will coincides with the typical fiscal year. The one difference here is that by going to the fiscal year. We're just in line with how the commission itself operates and also how most of our communities operate. But what that would do is that the grants would be starting on July one, which means you couldn't incur any expenses before that. And typically the first payments on those grants wouldn't go out until September or their, their abouts. So that is a change to the program. The next item is waivers. Waivers have always been available in the community mitigation fund program if there's anything that's in the guidelines that that you, you know that you can't meet. You can submit a waiver application or a waiver form I should say. But in this case, for the community block grant program. When we, you know, we sent out the amounts to each community every every community received a grant amount that they are eligible for. And if a community has any kind of a particular project that that would cause the community to exceed that grant allotment, you can request a waiver for that project. What we don't want to have happen, you know, with this program is that, especially if some of the communities who are getting smaller amounts of money if they had a, you know, a large transportation construction project or something like that. The, the grant might not be adequate for that so we want to, you know, account for that eventuality. And the last one is in the transportation category we've made some changes to that we will talk about that a little bit later and in addition we'll talk about waivers, a little bit more towards the end of the presentation. So, what hasn't changed. So what has always been the case and this is basically, you know, we are required to do this by statute. Every project that is done under this program has to identify a casino related impact, and the project that you're proposing has to mitigate that impact. So that has always been the case and, and always will be the case. What we've done is we have tried to make that identification of the casino related impact easier for the communities. So, how do you determine a casino related impact. What we do is to go into our guidelines and look in your various grant categories and in each one you will see that we have added in impacts that we, the gaming commission agrees are likely to be caused by the casinos. What we did was we looked through all of our research, we actually used an outside consultant to do some research in other jurisdictions around the country and around the world to see what other kinds of studies may have been done to identify casino related impacts. We did some, you know, internet searches and other things. And, you know, we came up with those items that we agree would be impacts of the casino. And here on this slide so this griot is the company that we use to help us look at some other jurisdictions. So, all of those studies, or, and all of the MGC research and so on is all on our website. And again we'll walk through the website a little bit later. And the last bullet we have here is other. Any other sources of information that we didn't find that you may have or, you know, they have access to or whatever it might be. You know, if a community is going to use something that has not been identified either in our guidelines or in our research. We also provide some good solid justification for that impact and some studies or some, you know, some kind of backup documentation that would, that would justify that. But what we're saying here is if you use our guidelines, you can pick those impacts, and we accept those as being impact so hopefully that will make your lives a lot easier. And the last new item that I wanted to talk about here is we have in the guidelines, we have suggested grant spending across the categories the Commission would really like to see the money that's in this project. There are different categories that that we have so right now there are there are five categories there's community planning, transportation public safety, and gambling harm reduction, and we also have the other category of specific impact which is basically anything that doesn't fit in those four categories. So we're suggesting is we'd like to see kind of a minimum spending of 15% of the grants in each one of the categories which would then leave 40% to be spent, you know, either a higher amount in any one category. Now, originally we looked at this and saying do we want to make this a requirement, you know, similar to like what they do with Community Preservation Act, and we decided to not do that for this year. So this is not a requirement for fiscal year 2025. We will look and see how communities have done with that. We'll look with that suggestion and, you know, we'll monitor that and see if maybe in the future that's something that we want to, you know, to consider. But at this point, you know, we are not, we are not proposing to do that. So, with that, let me stop sharing here. Again, we'll open this up for some questions. Do we have anything in the chat? No. Okay, any questions from anyone? No. Okay. Oh, yeah. Eric. Yeah, I'm just wondering if the amounts that are available in all the categories and all of the grants there are the same as in the October 13 document. Um, we did a finalized documents that the commission voted on November 16 or so. Yeah, I think there was a couple of, there might have been a couple of revised numbers from that earlier. Okay. Go ahead, Lily. I was just going to say, Eric, when I walked through the website later in this presentation, I'll show you, I have both the memo online and the finalized amounts. Awesome. Okay. And did I see it? Let's see. I think Everett had a question. Deputy Hurley. Did you have a question? Yeah, I just typed in the chat, but essentially, none of them would be a group project for lack of a better term. What is it? Is there new financial limitations restrictions? How much can you ask for as an entirety of a group? Well, yeah, we sent so each community received an allocation letter. Okay. Um, so we came up with a formula where we said, where we divvied up the money among the communities. So you have a set amount of money now and then basically, you know, in your case, you'll probably need to get together with, you know, the police department and with Jay Monty and, and some of your other folks and figure out, you know, you know what with the amount of money that you have available, how do you want to try to divvy it up? Okay. And so we, so we really eliminated a lot of the, the category caps that we had because we're saying essentially, you have this set amount of money that's your cap. Okay. If I, if I put my email in the chat, would I be able to get a copy of that? I'm inviting from an invite and I haven't had that information yet so I would love it. Thank you very much. Sure. So I see a question here. What is the timing for approval notification? So, so we would, we'll get your applications in at the end of January. And, you know, we will start reviewing them immediately. But our target is to have all of the awards done before the end of June. So that, you know, so that they're all of the stuff is awarded for the start of the fiscal year. And then let's see. Another question that came through here might come through during the waiver segment later, but I'd be curious if there is or will be any sort of guidance and vice on waivers, or if that will be at the discretion of the NBC staff. So in our guidelines, there is some, there is a section on waivers and talks about what you have to submit and, and what you have to essentially prove on the waivers. Essentially, the waivers are going to be subject to ultimately the commission will approve those waivers or deny those waivers, and they will be based on they will be looked at on a case by case basis and certainly will be based on whether or not there's available funding. If it's a financial waiver, we have to make sure that there's available funding for that. In the current year, it appears that there is, you know, there are some funds out there that would be able to to be used. So, but again, we would have to at that time we would have to look and make sure that there's there are available funds. Another question came to are there any James Floyd I see a hand up there. Thank you. Just a question regarding regional efforts. Bapern is a regional radio system that it's separated into sections of the state. And it's a system that's really, really aging. And it's one of our abilities to have interoperability with communication with state police. Nima femur and all these other things and again really at the end of the day. These are essentially soft targets that if they were to be a critical incident. We need to have something a regional system such as a paper and system that supports that. So the block grants really don't cover that in a sense. If I understood it correctly because it's going to it would include multiple regions that would overlap. How would we approach that. So I think what you what this sounds like to me is that this is really more of a regional agency grant. You know as a as a public safety agency that covers multiple communities. So, so you would not apply under this block grant you would apply under the regional agency grant. And we're having a we're going to we're having another workshop on those regional agency grants next Wednesday, next Wednesday. If you'd like us to send you an invite for that one, we can certainly do that. And but that would I think would have to be the approach and of course one of the things on this is, again, we have to we have to make that nexus to the casino. There has to be an identified impact of the casino to fund any of these types of projects. Yeah, not a problem at all really it's it's really come to a really the 911 report one of the biggest failures in 911 was the inability to communicate interagency and be per and actually facilitates that so it would be supporting that so I think we can do that. Thank you. Okay, so so that I think that would be your avenue is is the the regional application. There's another question here are any of the attachments project specific or are all attachments required for the submission. I'm not exactly sure I understand the question. Can you hear me. Yeah, yeah, I'll try to clarify sorry. I haven't made it all the way through the attachments and so I was trying to understand like the environmentally preferable product form I'm like is that for every project or is that for certain projects so I just didn't know if somewhere project specific, or if everything in that attachment packet has to be submitted with the application. I'm not talking about. Yeah. Okay. I'll go back and review it. I, it's called environmentally preferable product form so I just know that's not a, is that something. Was adding. Yeah, it was part of the application and combines. Okay, so firstly, I'll go out of order here a little bit. You don't need to go you don't need to go through combines at all. Okay, no.  That makes it 100% easier. Thank you. Yeah, we got we got rid of combines. We still have to go through combines as a state agency, but we found a work around so that everybody didn't have to file through combines so wonderful thank you. Great, great. His boy, I have no idea what that form is. Yeah, I was curious. Okay. Alright, so any any further questions. That was all that was in the chat. Okay. All right, just another grass. I'm sorry. Yeah, if people want to just send me a quick note if you want to receive a copy of the allocation letter to send me your email address and I'll send it off to you after the meeting. Okay, Joe. Okay, so let me go back to the presentation. Okay, so I think we just talked about this a little bit. The application process. And again, please read the guidelines before filling out your application. You know, there's a lot of good information in there. Now, and again, you all of the municipalities have received a proposed grant amount letter. So that went to your CEOs, mayors, town managers and so on and we did copy a number of other people in each community. So if for some reason a community has not received that letter, please let us know. But I believe we've verified with all of the communities that they that they have received one. The applications have to be submitted by 1159pm on January 31. We'll have a time stamp on these things when they are emailed to us so we'll know when we got them. We can't receive them after that. You know, I would what I would say is, if you have an application that you think still might need some work, get it into us anyway, and we can probably just, you know, take some supplemental information later if we need to. But we obviously want to see them as complete as possible. And again, the municipalities may only submit one application for the entire community. We will not accept, you know, a separate thing from, you know, previously we would get something from a fire department or police department, you know, planning department or public works department. Sometimes in some of the communities, we get them from all of those different agencies, we will no longer allow that it needs to be one application, and it will have some parts in it for the different projects, but it will be a single application that will be signed by, you know, a municipal employee who has signatory authority we figure that will typically be the mayor or the town manager or town administrator of some sort. And with that I'm going to turn this over now to Mary and she's going to walk you through the application itself we came up with a kind of a fictional town that we that we did and and just so you can see what what an application might look like. I'll turn it over to Mary. Good morning everyone. So I we wanted to show you this because we really want complete applications this year we do not want people to say, see attachment be or whatever so we're just going to walk through very briefly. And this is what we want the municipal application to look like the municipal grant manager information is critical because they are responsible for collecting the applications and attachments for submission of the full application. The municipal grant manager will receive this information from the contract for each category. As we get into this to the applications you'll see that each category of grant will have its own project contact person and municipalities will need to be able to update any changes which occur to these listings. It's really through contacting everyone that I've noticed that there's a lot of turnaround this time of year so we really would appreciate being updated whenever there's a change in your contract management. It's really critical because when selecting a municipal grant manager that they are responsible for the quarterly reports so the municipal grant manager will compile the quarterly reports from all the project contract people within the municipality for submission to the commission. So, if people can just keep in mind that if there's a change in your employees please. Let us know. Next. Okay, here is the budget category summary. And I just wanted to draw your attention to a couple of things. You'll notice here that the total fiscal year 2025 allocation is 400,000. If you go down to the total of the application you'll see that it's 1477 300. So I just wanted to call your attention to that and we'll explain in a minute. And I also want to call your attention to the public safety and the and the transportation. So this means that there's two specific projects for each of these two categories, and this is the total of those two applications. Let's see. So the grant applications the proposed grant amount was sent out by letter to all eligible municipalities on November 17 as Joe said, and so they're aware of how much funding is available when filling, and then let's go to the next page Joe. Okay, when filling in the description in your categories, please be sure to distinguish it from other grants. The goal of this is to provide like an example. It would be great if you could if you would say the goal of this application is to provide a boardwalk from A to Z. We do not want people to fill in these descriptions saying that this is for community mitigation grant that doesn't help us distinguish between the different grants. You will also note that the descriptions here see as you can see a complete street study of Main Street from Linden and Conversion that these are two different grants. The grant that is going to need a waiver form would be this grant here the 1075 $1,075,000. The overage is caused by the transportation grants and the application would be for that the difference so that you can apply boy I'm having a hard time getting words out today I'm sorry. So you would need to file a waiver form for this multi use path construction. Let's see. Okay. All right, we can go to the next one, and then this one the applicant certification. Again, we need to be sure that you have someone with the authority to commit funds on behalf of the municipality to sign the document. And that's about it. Okay, we're going to turn this over to Lily now to to walk through some of the nuts and bolts of a couple of the specific applications or categories. So, as Joe just said this is going to be the meat of your application you can kind of see here, the different parts that are going to make up the whole municipalities application, all fun different colors so you can feel free as a administrator to just, you know, cut cut out the different pieces and send them to the appropriate departments and then recompile them back together. So you can hit the next.  Yeah, so their online is both a fillable PDF and a word document I did just check that that was updated so if you're having any trouble with that again we will be walking the website later. So we have two examples that I'm going to walk you through real quick. This first example is a community planning grant, you'll see that your community planning grant. Each individual discrete project is going to need a name so that we can make sure we're all talking about the same thing. And then each project will have a project contact so we've made space for two contacts and then we ask if you have you know a whole team working on this that you just circulate circulate it internally. But just give us if you want, you know, one or two people that are going to be the key person for this. With this new style of grant we assume that the main administrator of the grant is not going to know the nuts and bolts of the every single project. So this will be the person will be contacting if we have questions or we want to check in on the status. So the first section is you know the big piece we're talking about identifying the impact of the casino. So there's two main ways that you can do this. The way that we're suggesting if it works for you is that we took all of that research that was done through the mass gaming commission through griot. And we made lists under every single category in our guidelines. So you'll see on the right side here I have a screenshot of our guidelines. And you can see that this community decided to utilize the first impact here under a negative impact saying that competition from the gaming establishment had negative impacts on their businesses. So what's really nice about this year. I'm sure for anyone who's applied to the previous years, you know, you don't really have to drag that out. You know, we are accepting that as a completely valid reason for this grant. You can just copy and paste it right over. You know, if you want to add a sentence or two just describing particularly in your town how that works. You know, we'd love to have it. But at minimum if it's in the guidelines you can just drag it right out. And the more complicated piece of this is going to be if you don't use something that's directly in the guidelines. So if you're not going to use something that's directly outlined in the guidelines. That is also totally fine if there's something that's happening in your community that you'd like to address with this grant program. You're just going to have to do a little bit more legwork in this first section to describe to us, what is happening. What is the impact, and you're also going to have to provide us a little bit more detailed research or evidence on this so you know, previously for public safety is crime statistics, whether that is, you know, a traffic map that you know your community has been a traffic study. But again, if you are not using an impact that's been identified. It still doesn't mean that it's you know not a valid project. You are just again going to have to go into quite a bit more detail explaining what's happening and how that is something that we should be mitigating. Yeah, just to add on to that. As many of you probably know from previous years in doing this, you know the identification of the impact was probably the most difficult thing in the application. And, you know, and we have had to deny many applications because we didn't have sufficient, you know, evidence that that that an impact really existed. So, if you're doing this, this second method where you where you're giving us an impact that's not included in the guidelines. You will still need to do that justification that you had to do previously. And, you know, we need to have sufficient evidence that shows that that's a legitimate impact. Great. So, then, again, like we've very made a very simple looking form but it is a little deceptively simple. So in section two is really where you're going to have to put in what your mitigation is. So this here is a pretty abbreviated mitigation just because of the size of a slide. It would be kind of unrealistic for me to fit, you know, three pages on a slide. In this example, the town felt that they were losing business so the way that they wanted to deal with that was increased signage. So they said that they were going to do signage with their restaurants, hotels and shops, and they were going to use the funding to get a consultant to come in and design it and then have their Department of Public Works make the signs. And then they were going to use this to mitigate by having the casino have some of these signs around there so that patrons that were coming to casino could know about the other resources in the area. So you can see here that below this we also have a mock up of some great stock images from the internet, but of this community signs. So this section should be the bulk of your applications. We really do want to see details if you have scopes if you have budgets if you have diagrams anything that can help explain the mitigation will really help that our review team to understand the project and what you're asking to do. And then you'll see in a later slide that there is also a detailed scope that you'll fill out but this is more again like the narrative piece of your application. So as I put here, you know, this should be the longest section of your application. So show you can hit the next slide. So here is my second example is kind of looking at the new combined transportation planning and construction application looks very similar just enough different fun color. So you'll need to put again a title you'll need to put again a project contact. You can see that this applicant chose from the guidelines and they picked two different pieces about traffic congestion and traffic safety. And then took that and then they use that as a rationale of the issue and then went through and said that they wanted to do a study for multi community shared path to the casino. We've seen this come out from a couple of different communities. And then the piece in the bottom is going to be covered by Joe and a little bit just about the new construction subsidies so we are changing how this looks and how the guidelines are what is going to be eligible to be funded. So if you are applying for transportation, please read that very carefully. And then you can see below that we have the example of a grant budget. This should be a pretty detailed breakdown of your line items. This is how the projects are going to be reviewed. Looking through each of the things if you know we are looking to amend different pieces we want to make sure that we're looking at each discrete piece of your project. So you can see here that they identified five different tasks. We're going to fund a couple of them, but then they were asking for the million dollars for their project construction. They provided a, you know, very pretty big timeline we don't need you to say that the construction is going to begin, you know, March 3. But we do need to have a general timeline so that when we're checking in with you on the for the progress of the grant, we know where things stand and if there's anything that we need to be doing differently. So, I think the next piece goes back to you Joe. So yeah there was a couple of changes in the transportation application as you can see that from the previous one that we've combined transportation planning and transportation construction just into a single transportation category, but we've also changed the subsidy for the transportation construction projects previously, we said that we would pay up to one third of the project cost to a maximum grant of one and a half million dollars we're still keeping that one and a half million dollar maximum. We have created kind of what now really winds up being a sliding scale that smaller projects receive a higher subsidy. So right now what we're saying is we will fund 100% of the project cost up to $250,000 and then we'll fund up to 30% of the costs above that amount with a maximum again of the one and a half million dollars. Now, most communities when they come in with transportation construction projects most of these only come in with probably one project. What we're saying what we're saying here is you can't come in and say we want to do five different projects that are $250,000 and get 100% subsidy. What we're trying to do here is say that we realize it's smaller projects or sometimes it's it's harder to define the funding for that particular project. So, in this case, if there's more than one construction project, it's all additive you have to add the total costs of the project together, and then figure out the subsidy from that. I think I'll just go back to this previous slide you can see that we do the little in part two of this application we do a calculation and they're saying in this case, the construction project is estimated to be $3 million. And based on the guidelines, the grant would be $1,075,000 which is 100% of the first 250,000 and 30% of the amount in excess of that or the 2.75 million. So, and again this causes the town to exceed the grant allocation of $400,000 so a waiver request needs to be done for a project of this nature. And then a couple of other things in the transportation planning category. We added some of the maps into the guidelines that show where the distribution of traffic is going from the casinos. And what we're saying is transportation planning can be done. But it can't be done on just sort of any road in town it has to be on those kind of major routes to the casino. What I'm saying here that any road that's carrying at least 1% of the casino traffic would be eligible for work to be done on that road, but anything that's, you know, really not identified here would not be eligible. Now of course if the community does have some additional information that shows that another road that's maybe off one of these roads is significantly impacted by traffic and has something that can that can demonstrate that we will certainly do that, but our baseline is saying, if it carries 1% or more of the traffic it's eligible if it's under that it's not. And also, you know, we've done a lot of bike paths multi use paths. In this case that for projects that communities want to do the community has to demonstrate that any kind of a multi use path or bike path will connect into an existing path network that would provide access to the casino. So if a community were doing a bike path that was, you know, not going in the direction of the casino, you know that's that's really on the community themselves. So, we do need to see again that nexus of, you know, how maybe employees, particularly or patrons might, you know, use a bicycle to get down to toward the facility. And let's talk about waivers. Again, we say you can request a waiver from any requirement of the guidelines. And that has always been the case. But here it's like if the municipality determines that the proposed grant allotment is insufficient to mitigate identified impacts it may request a waiver for any of those specific projects. And what we're saying here is that this waiver is not really designed for kind of the routine expenses but for, you know, a significant project that would otherwise not be able to be funded under the grant. You know, if a community says well we've got $400,000 and we're putting 100,000 in each of the four categories, and you know, in one of the categories, the community says well we could really use $102,000. And that's not the kind of thing that we're talking about here.  But this is for something where if the community again at a $400,000 allocation, and you've got this million dollar project, it's clear that it could never fit in the allocation so that's what really what the waiver is for. The waiver forms are on our website and also, you know, we discussed them in the guidelines as well. And with that I'm going to turn this back over to Mary just to once again walk through the application submission process. So as, as we mentioned before, we, we, we always have to post through combines, but what we want applicants to do is to submit their, their applications through us at MGC CMF at mass gaming dot gov by January 31. We just found that too many people had issues with the combine system and things were getting lost in the ethernet. So this way they come to us and then we we upload them on to combines after that we've received them. The applications must be submitted as one word document, please try to integrate and label your relevant attachments as part of your application so if you're sending something in for a specific impact please make sure that the attachment is labeled for the specific impact application. If you have any questions prior to submission please contact me contact any of us we're happy to talk to you about it. Any questions are good questions, but we really are emphasizing that the due date is the 31st at 1159pm. You've been working on a an application and are waiting for information from an outside source for your application. But don't think it's going to be in on time for you to submit by the January 31 deadline, submit the application and let us know that you're waiting for information. Because it you cannot come back to us on February 2 with whatever information you are waiting for and apply then it doesn't work that way. So I'm hoping that you will feel free to contact Joe Lily or I with any of your questions. Yeah and just adding on to that Mary there's one thing that I did want to mention. We talked about each community receiving, you know, an allocation amount for their grant. If for some reason your community can't identify projects that add up to that total you can come in with a lower amount. You know we'd love to see everybody come in for the for the for the total amount but you know if for whatever reason, your community only identifies, you know, one or two small projects, come in with that anyway.  And I think at this point. We've got some questions. Can we. We're going to do the website walkthrough first and then we'll do some questions. All right, so I'm going to stop sharing. Okay, so if everyone can see my screen. This is the Massachusetts gaming commission website. Just a quick little point out it is mass gaming.com not mass gaming.gov as you might suspect so just make sure you're seeing that. If you go to your about section here you can scoot down to community mitigation fund. And then you will see our new and updated website. So there's a lot of great information for you to use here. This is our main piece which has the combines posting. And as well as the trainings that we currently have. We will be posting all of the training videos, as well as the PowerPoint here, probably this afternoon. So this is kind of your little basic background on the program. If you go into the side rail on the left, you'll find a piece for the application guidelines. So right here if you click, you will get our full program guidelines as we noted you really should read through those fully and make sure that the people that are filling out the different applications are reading through their sections fully. As there have been a lot of changes and there are a lot of great resources to strengthen your application. Eric asked for earlier here is the final allocations by municipality and then if anyone in your community is wondering why that was your allocation there is a memo from the October meeting of the commission on the final funding numbers. So one of the pieces that Joe pointed to earlier was all of the great research that has been done. If you get a chance, both internally the gaming commission has one of the strongest research agendas in the country. So there's a lot of really great research that you can use there to bolster your applications. Specifically, if you are looking for funding for a community engaged research study the commission has a bunch of those that you can look through to get some ideas of what might be relevant to your community. Joe had mentioned Rio which is a third party that we use to create slide decks on that then led to a lot of the choices of impact so there are three of them one of them is specifically on economic impacts one is specifically on public safety. And one of them is on priority population so if you are applying for anything related to any of those three groupings these are some pretty in depth slide shows that will give you some examples. And then for those applying for transportation, we have uploaded both on core mg on course distribution maps as well as their table mgm distribution table and map and ppcs distribution maps so please use all these things we put them up there for your benefit, and they will really help strengthen applications. So, again, if we go to the left side, you'll see a section titled FY 25 forms. If you click on here you will get into the actual applications. So, for municipalities you can click right here and get your application form. And we also, as we said, made a fake application for the town of Sudburnham that you can kind of read through here this one I think is about 25 pages. But you can kind of see and get a feel for what an application might look like. And then if you are applying from a waiver make sure that you're filling out the municipal waiver form. If you are a municipality. And then our regional applicants will use these forms. Also just as a fun note for everyone who currently has a grant, if you're looking for any of these forms they are still on here for your waiver request form your budget. And all of those but please make sure that if you are applying for this year's waiver, you use the municipal FY 2025 waiver. Another great resource on our website is that you can click and find every single award that we have granted from 2015 onward. This is our archive just click through a year. And then you can go through these and see some of the things that were funded previously, just because they were funded previously doesn't mean that we would necessarily fund your project. You know word for word copied it over they are taken on a case by case basis, but you can see all these applications if you're looking for projects that you might want to do in your city you can see what has been previously awarded. So that is kind of a brief run through of our website. Okay, I think we will open things up for questions again. I'm going to start with what's on the chat. Let's see where we left off. One second. Okay, the first bit is the allocation what's listed on page 29 of the guidelines. I believe so. Is that we did include that as an attachment. Didn't we. Yeah, no trouble navigating here. Okay, I can run through that. What are the limitations on waiver requests. Is it a number of waivers over time a dollar amount. What are the criteria for consideration of waivers. So I think in the guidelines we have what the specific requirements are for a waiver. I don't remember them exactly off the top of my head, but there isn't a limitation on waiver requests. For instance, let's say you were doing a transportation construction project one of the things that we require is that they have to be ready to go basically within a year. So we understand that people are necessarily going to have that project ready to go that went right when they apply so we're saying that for this coming year your project has to be ready to go by June 30 of 2025. So we don't think we, our project is going to be in the ground until September 1 of 2025, you could request a waiver asking for an extension of time. So, so that's the kind of thing now as far as a, you know, on the on the financial amount, you know, we haven't specified that is, you know, a number of the number of waivers or so on but, you know, I think, we envision it as being sort of like there's going to be a single project that is going to that would cause your, you to go over your grant amount. And then that would be, you know, a single waiver request for that. So then the next question is on the transportation planning eligibility map how recent is this data and is will it be revisited periodically. These did come out of the original environmental reports that were done for the casinos. One of the things about updating this information is, you know, the studies that the facilities are required to do. Don't really break down all of the locations where the traffic is going like they did originally. You know, they're only looking at like traffic intersections and looking at changes and levels of service and things like that so it's you know, trying to update that I think we would have to kind of go back and work with the licensees and what we're going to try to do is get some additional data from them regarding their patrons and employees and where they're coming from and so on. We're not really able to do that for this year. But you know we have to get that data we got to get it anonymized and make sure it's what we're looking for but yeah we, we do want to try to update those numbers and that would affect. Of course, part of the grant amount is based on traffic so that would might modify that as well. My question our municipalities encouraged to apply for more funds than allocated. I wouldn't say that necessarily. I would say if there is a clear need in the community to address a specific impact that would cause you to go over that amount. You know you can do that. I think we looked at this as kind of a conversation we're saying you know that a community could possibly have something that would that would go over their grant amount, but you know at some point. There would not be any excess funds that we that we could even award those grants. So you know it right now we do have some some extra funds in the program where we can do that. But if that surplus that's in the program is is is whittled down in future years they may there may not be money so I would say you're not encouraged to apply for more funds and allocated. But if the community really has the need, you should certainly feel free to do that. It's for a funding waiver is that only to exceed the overall amount or could it be used to fund more from certain categories than others within the overall amount. So for this year we're not requiring spending within the different categories. We gave a suggested amount for the categories but that is not a hard and fast rule so so you can move money around in the in the categories as you see fit. So you would not need a waiver. If you were using more money in one category than enough. The waiver would only be required if you're going over the total allotment for the community. So we've met for again talking about updated traffic. Stuff we certainly want to try to do that. Just we're not really able to get that done for while we were making all the other changes to the program this year. And then let's see. Oh do categories need to be equally used no the answer is no they do not. We want to see communities spend money among the different categories because we know that there are impacts and all of those. I guess what we were kind of getting at when when we looked at this originally is we don't want to see a community say like we want all of the money to go to public safety or what all of the money to go to construction and you know to the exclusion of other things that are worthy in the community. And that's why we thought about. We're not requiring money to go into the different categories but again, we are not requiring that for for this year. We'll see in the future what what what else we might want to do. Also asking where can the suggested split between categories be found. That is in the guidelines. We're asking you know 15% of the grant amount be spent among those four categories and 40% that leaves you with 40% that you can put sort of wherever you want. And again that's just a suggestion. At this point, no, no hard and fast required. Okay, and that is everything that's come up in the chat. Are there any other questions from folks. All right, none appearing. Thank you for coming. And as Mary said, if you guys have any questions, any follow ups to anything feel free to reach out to us via email phone call, carry your pigeon whatever whatever way you want to contact us. You know, if you have ideas for projects and you want to bounce them off of us we're happy to listen. We can't give you firm decisions on things. You know when we're talking about an idea but we can give you some guidance at least on on how you might approach some of these things. But again, thanks for coming. We wound up having a pretty good showing. I think we're up around 40 folks on the call today we have 75 people at our meeting on Tuesday so we've, we've reached a lot of folks and you know what if there's anybody else in your communities that you think needs to needs to be involved you know we'll have all of this information up on our website. You know we really look forward to this new process we think it's going to be, we're hoping it's going to be easier for all of you we're hoping it's going to be a little easier for us as well. But you know we're really looking forward to this. January 31 is our deadline, and you know we look forward to working with you guys over the next years. I guess happy holidays to everyone and we'll all be in touch. Thank you.