Hi, I'm Megan and I'm Eric and this is The Service Design Show. With The Service Design Show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and the challenges up ahead. My guests in this episode are Eric Flowers and Megan Miller. They are the co-founders of the website called PracticalServiceDesign.com. They are both in-house service designer, Megan works at Stanford University and Eric at Intuit. So for the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like why is jobs to be done, the hottest thing on the select channel with practical service design. We'll be talking about when will cyber services be ready for service design and of course we'll also talk about the ultimate practicality of service design. So if you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. Welcome to the show, Eric and Megan. Hello. Hi. Great to have you here from, you're in the Bay Area right now. At Stanford actually, right? It's a beautiful sunny day today. Yeah, and it's very nice to have you. Eric and Megan, a question for both of you. Do you remember your very first encounter with service design? Yes, I do. So in 2013, I took adaptive paths UX intensive training and they actually have a whole day as part of that dedicated to service design. And it really felt very new and especially to everyone in the audience. We were in Seattle and they were really just introducing the blueprinting concepts and this kind of end-to-end experience lens. And it really shaped the direction of my last several years and my career. How about you, Eric? I have a similar story. I had been playing around with a new kind of deeper format of persona journey mapping that ended up looking a lot like a service blueprint. I didn't know it at the time and I ended up at the Managing Experience Conference in early 2013 where in the workshop the term service blueprint was brought up and I'd never heard it before. And so I went home and researched and decided, wow, service design. This is what I wanted to do and I've been trying to do, but I didn't know that there was a school of thought and resources and real specific things. And so I actually literally made a decision to say, all right, my old career is over and this is what I do now. I need to figure out how to transition. That was three and a half years ago. And how did that transition work out for you? I'm going to say it was a success. The butterfly has left the cocoon and is flying now. And it was really all due to just one certain person who hired me on kind of a leap of faith. So we don't really know what service design is, but we know we want to bring it to this company. I met her at a service design conference and a month later I moved halfway across the company to take my first job as an official service designer just like that. You created your own job at that moment. Pretty much, yeah, in a place where it was completely unknown and with no definition at all. Awesome. I would almost say congratulations. So Eric and Megan, let's explain the format to the people that haven't seen any of the previous episodes and we're going to co-create the questions that we're going to talk about. And I have a stack of papers with some topics here and you also have a stack of papers but with question starters. Yeah. I'll pick one of these topics that you provided me and you'll pick one of the questions that I provided you and then we'll have to co-create the question. Easy as that. All right. Let me go through the, yeah, let me just start with this one because this is probably very close to your heart and very dear to your heart. It's the topic of ultimate practicality, which question starter goes along with that one and who will answer that? I'll start the question and Megan can answer it. Go ahead. Why? Megan, why is ultimate practicality one of the topics that we want to talk about today? Well, so if you're familiar with the work that Eric and I have been doing collaboratively at PracticalServiceDesign.com, our whole MO is about bringing practicality to the field. For both of us who have, you know, recently in the last three years made transitions from doing UX design to doing service design, making that transition was extremely hard. There isn't a big community out here in the US, particularly here in Silicon Valley. Companies haven't really heard of this yet. When you talk about it with your peers, they get a blank stare. So service design, we wanted to create a bridge from this theoretical high level idea of designing for a service to making it something that's extremely practical that we could apply today, tomorrow in our jobs with people who are unfamiliar with the concepts. So this commitment to practicality is really the deeper motivator for both Eric and I in what we do at work, in what we do with the online Slack community, in what we do with all the materials and the blog posts and content that we create, because we truly believe that in order for service design to reach the next generation and reach this area out here in the tech world, we have to make it more practical, we have to come up with a new way to apply service design. Hold on, Megan, because I'm really confused. There are so many examples of service design or service design related projects from the US, and now you're telling us that it's unknown and people will give you a blank stare? How's that possible? So the key to the adoption of people who have downloaded our ebook, there's been almost 3,000 downloads in the last year and the Slack community's got 1,500 people, and so maybe it's just her and I and the people we attract, but the practicality comes down to every day. Every day we get some sort of email or message or some sort of communication from people who are working from the ground up in companies in places that they don't know what to do and the resources and the projects and the case studies and the conference talks. It's not instructional, it's not practical. It's not, hey, I'm one person, I'm a business analyst, I'm a product manager at a huge cell phone company. This place couldn't be less design oriented, but I've heard about this service design. I don't know what to do. No one's going to give me any money. I'm not going to be able to hire anybody. How does one person bring service design and this thinking and mindset and start up a project and get some quick wins up on the board in a place that has no support for it? And so maybe our audience is more of the lone practitioner or the people who see it from the bottom up and not the top down. But I think to your question, when we're talking with all of these digital focused companies, we have lots of friends and peers that work at Google, at Facebook, at LinkedIn, I mean you name it, all any of these tech companies, these tech companies have not heard of or embraced service design. They might be doing some parts of it, but the farthest people have gotten in our world in this kind of technical services world is that they have really advanced UX programs and they might have people doing this type of mapping or activities, but there's no organizational structure in place in these companies to support service design work and there's nobody who's really embracing it as an official methodology or approach in these companies. They're not hiring service designers. No one can work for me. We wrote about this article on the service design network and what it comes down to is tech companies and tech companies, you know, software is eating the world. I mean all these places out here are ubiquitous across the globe and right now the product and the interface and the visuals and the interaction is what rules the decisions. We still see it as an app on a phone. We still see it as something in your browser. Even these companies that you would think have service design baked into their DNA, I think Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and the ones we talk about at service design conferences, they don't have service designers and they haven't actually acknowledged that that's what they're doing and they haven't officially formalized that role. And they might be designing for services and offering services. If you look at like what is service design, what is it trying to accomplish? They're backing their way into it, not knowing that they're doing it and what you do is you end up with a whole bunch of parts and pieces and kind of ideas and you don't realize that you're creating this Frankenstein's monster of pieces of UX and service design and it becomes incoherent and inconsistent to the point to where they end up coming to our website or getting on the slack saying, hey, we've got this thing. It kind of resembles what you're talking about, but at this point there is no one who knows how to wrangle all this together and say, okay, now we truly know how to design for an end-to-end service from the human perspective and not from where we've got all this cool technology. We've got AI, we've got voice recognition, we've got everything on the app, but you know what, no one took a step back and said, how does this serve the need and the goal of the people who are going to use this across their daily lives? And looking from the work you've accomplished with practical service design in the past two and a half years or when it starts something like that, what is the biggest difference you see between the moment you started and the moment where now? So we launched PracticalServiceDesign.com almost a year ago, so it was last November. And since then we've seen an explosive growth in the Slack community and I would bet that about 90, 95% of the people who are joining are people who are where we were maybe two or three years ago who have just heard about service design and really, really want to get into it but they don't know where to start. And it's that helping the next generation of service designers kind of gain some traction, find a way to practice this in their daily lives. So I think we have seen, you know, since starting this project we've seen an incredible amount of interest and buzz and definitely the conversation is shifting and more and more people at companies that we know are really interested in learning more and adopting some of these practices and calling them by the name Service Design or formalizing it. I mean my job is an example of that. A year and a half ago I started this transition. I was working in the web team here as a web and product designer and I was really pushing to do more service design and it took me a while but now I'm managing the service design team that I'm creating here in the sport. So I think that the tides are turning, you know, it's definitely shifting out here but it's taking, it's going to take a while. One final question about the topic you mentioned, a Slack channel. Is it open for anyone to join? Yeah, it's open for anyone. We have people on every continent but Antarctica so if there's any service designers down there please join. So how can people join? What is the Slack channel name? It's taken to PracticalServiceDesign.com. You'll see the community tab there. There's a lot of resources there and you can request an invite. It's free, it's open. We do screen because we want it to be a safe space so we let everyone in for the most part but we want to make sure you're a real person. When I hand check everyone who types in their info I have to go and look up and make sure that they're real and so I've single-handedly invited 1,500 people over the last 10 months. My hand is killing me. You're building a big network. Awesome, I would invite everyone to join so you'll have 1,500 more people on the Slack channel in the next week probably. Let's move on to topic number two I think it will be, I hope it will be your turn to answer this question Eric. It's the topic of jobs to be done. You have every cryptic topics. What is the question? I'm going to use the dot-dot-dot because there's nothing that really fits. Eric tell us what is jobs to be done and why is this the hot topic that's been going around in Slack for the last month and a half? I'm so glad you asked me that. It's certainly something that is new to me and to a lot of people as a concept. It's not new. It's been talked about in lots of different industry circles and a lot of academic environments and it's never really been connected to service design specifically like I'm looking at it now but jobs to be done, it's just a name for kind of a theoretic construct. It just very simply breaks down to people are trying to accomplish some job in their life. They just are trying to get something done. One super simple example from my real life is into it works with people who are self-employed where they're just a sole proprietor. It's just one person getting it out trying to make things happen. Their job to be done is to save money, be better prepared to do taxes and optimize this really hard life of being self-employed. When they come to us, they're saying I just need help being better at being self-employed. I'm going to hire you and hire this product you have to help me do that. Their job to be done it's not a user story in our product. It has nothing to do with us. They're hiring us to provide a service to get them from, hey, I'm confused. I have to report my mileage to the IRS to deduct it to, hey, I saved this many dollars at the end of the year. Jobs to be done says they're hiring us to perform or provide a service to them. That's what we're being hired to do. There are a lot of ways we can do that. Maybe it's an app, maybe it's phone support, maybe it's a carrier pigeon. It doesn't really matter at first. Once we have a concept of what is the job they're trying to accomplish, then we can go really broad and say, how do we design for that service? There's lots of different ways we can do it. Then as service designers, as companies, as people, we can approach it with customer success in mind because we want to be successful in getting that job done and it really liberates us from just thinking as we provide products and we sell things to we truly perform and provide service to these people. As I connect jobs to be done with service design, it breaks it away from a persona journey or a persona at all or a story and into people have something much, much, much bigger than us, bigger than us people who sell things to them and we truly need to be there to facilitate and assist and that can take a lot of different forms. Do you have anything to add to that, Magan? Yeah, so what I was surprised at was that over the last month and a half, as I mentioned in our Slack community, this topic has been the hottest topic of discussion and I think part of it is that, as we mentioned, especially in this kind of digital services space, very development driven companies, right? Use cases, user stories are kind of the thing, the bread and butter of development focused companies and we really, our community has kind of landed on this like user stories don't cut it anymore but jobs to be done as a different framework, a different lens for looking at whether you're satisfying the customer need is a really useful new way to talk about it and I have to say, as I've been starting to integrate this more into my conversations and my job, framing things this way has just opened up so many people's eyes on what you can do because it's not limited to like, I need to be able to click on this feature. Does this phrase liberate the whole conversation from screens, apps, and it takes it to, makes it channel agnostic? Yes, yes, exactly. And for a digital services space, that's really, it's hard for them to make that leap. So, yeah. And what have people found so far, coming from the practical side? Any practical tips or ideas or insights that have emerged that people can use tomorrow? Yeah, so a lot of folks are using this framework as a way to code their research findings. So what are the, for example, what are the pains, gains, and jobs to be done that you're finding in interviewing users? So it's a frame from which to conduct qualitative research. It's also, if you kind of Google job story, there's a job story format that is out there, it's a simple template, but an alternative to a user story format. And I think that's an incredibly practical way to integrate jobs to be done into a development environment or maybe you use that to define your stories that get in your development backlog. Yeah, go ahead, Eric. Well, one other practical application that has surprised me is that if you can get a way to explain it to other people in your company and to leaders especially, you have your little snippet, you put it in your presentation deck about what you want to do, and I think people who lead companies and organizations or parts of companies, when you explain it when I started to use the phrase jobs and jobs to be done, they instantly understand it because at a high level, that's how they see things, because they might be managing multiple product teams, they're seeing an ecosystem and a large end to end and they kind of feel it. But then kind of the siloed myopic view of people who are focused really narrowly on a part of an app or a part of a screen, they've lost that big picture. So Sue, I've said to people, hey, customers are hiring our company to perform things and we happen to be based in software and financial services, but really, you know, we are just there to serve them reaching a much larger goal. Instantly, everyone's like, yeah, that's what I've been talking about, that's it. Okay, let's focus on that. And then within minutes, people are using the phrase that they're understanding it, and so like we're talking about practical, you're finally bringing people to the level. It opens doors. It opens doors to the service design conversation, and it's hard to do that. I think it's also strongly links to the why of companies, right? Yeah. Why are we here on Earth? Yeah, that's exactly it. Making money is an outcome of how successful you are at making customers successful and what they're trying to do. And they're not trying to buy your product. They're not, they don't even want to have to use it.  That's kind of the ultimate goal, to work yourself out of existence. Yeah, yeah. All right. Interesting. Jobs to be done. Google that. And I think we can, it's interesting to see those crossovers coming from the digital world and things like this moving back into the service design world. I think we can learn still a lot from that. So we have a third topic, and it's called cyber services. All right. I'm going to jump. All right. Wow. Okay. You're just on point with these questions. All right. So Eric, you'll start. When will cyber services or digital services be ready to adopt services like that? Wow. Great question. Geez. So I used the word cyber services. It's just a way to combine two things people are familiar with. And so today, at least in our world, it's all, everything's digital. And the way we're trying to offer service, we don't work for airlines, for hotels.  A lot of times it's human to machine. And if you look at the way things are going, Internet of Things, AI, you've got Siri and Cortana or Alexa or whatever that, what it's called. And bots, bots are huge. Everyone's interacting with bots. So we're trying to come up with ways to serve people's needs through technology and sometimes taking the humanness out of one half of the equation. And voice recognition in AI is inhuman. It's awesome. But we're trying to create these big connected digital services that are software driven. Yeah. So how do we use service design and the ethos, which typically relies heavily on front stage and back stage actors when we're turning those actors into... An omnichannel, too. An omnichannel, yeah. Right, where now we have, from a lot of people's perspectives working in these software as a service companies, it's what they're like, what do you mean omnichannel? We're digital, that's all we are. So it's even just educating people on how you can scale the methodology, takes time. Yeah. So back to the question, Eric, when is it going to happen? When is it going to happen? I think right now the differentiators and the way people are going to start getting advantages is those who embrace the idea of a service mindset, of serving a need, of how do you perform service.  But we have to accept the fact that those things act in service of a larger need. Nobody actually wants voice recognition if it doesn't perform something that enhances their lives. And we're focused, I mean, everyone's focused on what we can do and not how we apply it humanely yet, which is why the Internet of Things is sometimes called the Internet of Shit, nothing works and nothing is together. Yeah. So I guess that's for me the key of this whole talk, applying the humane part to, let's say, touch points in our service design world where people are not involved and still making those humane, right? Yeah, that's exactly it. We're trying to come up with scalable, very smart technological means and taking the humans out of the equation. And if you want to serve people through an AI voice recognition that talks back to you and simulate a human voice as closely as possible, you really have to think, where is the humanity in this and how do we simulate this as acting as something that's performing a service? What's my larger job to be done as a person when it's all digital? Yeah, and the big change that is happening is that those digital touch points that we are creating used to be very one-way. They wouldn't interact with you, but now with bots and AI you actually start to get some sort of interaction and an interaction that we also have with humans. So I guess the big change isn't there.  And the companies that are creating all of these digital services, they're set up in product silos often. And we don't see designers working across those touch points yet because you're still on the team that makes the app or makes the this or makes that feature. And silos are good and necessary for development, but we need a new role. We need these companies to start adopting service design as a new function in their organization. We've been reading the org design for Design Org's book, which lays it out so plainly and simply. If you haven't read it, check it out. There's a diagram where they talk about how do you scale up a design team and how do you have service design, where does it fit? And it's awesome. It's awesome to see that laid out and published and put out there in the world that these companies are considering. But it really, we're still at the beginning of this change. Adaptive Path is definitely a leader in the space. There's others that are leaders in this space, but many of these big companies aren't there yet. Well, just one little add-on to that is in the world of digital, you've got very deep, focused people who are designing for experiences, but I have yet to find hardly any, maybe senior principle level contributor designers that are working horizontally across all this, working in building bridges. So if you're out there, get in touch with us. That's what's missing in the digital world is that I think people are scared to say, but if you're designing for experiences, how can you not be focused on one thing? How can you focus on everything horizontally? And yet customers, they only experience things horizontally over time, either over months or over minutes. Or years. Who's the person in our company is that shepherding the people along these touch points? Who's designing that? No. Yeah, this has been a really hot topic on the show. Who is responsible for the total customer experience? Is there someone responsible? Should there be someone responsible? Yeah. So we're moving through our time and this is a question that I really want to ask you before we leave. You've had the experience, the honor to enter the service design world not so long ago and have a community of 1,500 people around you. And I'm really curious if they ask you, guys listen, I want to get into service design, what is the ultimate tip? What would you say to them? We get this question every day. I mean, this is a constant question. And I mean, the first answer is join the community because you can put your questions out there and you'll get an answer. You'll get somebody answering you. So having that community access is really important. We've created a service design 101 page on our website with some links. And so there's a couple of books we recommend. The main book is Service Design for Business by the Live Work Guys. That's our number one book recommendation if you are just getting into service design, highly recommend reading at least the first half of that book. And just start doing service design. I think that's the other big tip is you have to find a way to try to practice this. And it might mean getting out of your comfort zone and taking charge of an end-to-end perspective that nobody's in charge of yet and that you thought wasn't part of your role in responsibility. So when I first got into service design, I just decided to make up a project and do it and involve my team. And I wasn't in charge of the whole request and onboarding process for new customers, but I did it anyway. And I think for those out there who are really struggling to find that first place to start, come join the Slack and throw out some ideas and we'll give you feedback because that's what that community is about. And if I were to, a lot of times if I were to just tell people, what do I actually do? What am I going to do tomorrow? What I've seen work at tons of companies, big, big companies that have people that come in and they're drowning in the size of their company. What I'm going to tell people then and what I'm going to tell them now here on the service design show is figure out how to build a blueprint of some experience, get a nice big printer, print it out, do the project, have it ready and go find ways for executives to see it. Because I've seen this in some of the biggest, I mean Fortune 50 companies where some little small-time person will do it and executives walk by and people walk by and it's the first time they've seen these experiences that might be responsible for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and they look at it. And where I first, one of the biggest wins I've ever had was to have kind of this crappy blueprint that I printed out on pieces of paper and then taped it all together because I didn't have a big printer and I brought it into an executive review with someone, an EVP who reports right into its CEO and I showed it to him and I put it in front of him on the conference room table and he looks at it and he's a pretty intimidating guy and he looks at it and he's like, this is what I've been talking about when I say end to end. And that was it. That was the start of everything because it was this simplistic visual that he knew about in his head as the boss of the bosses and there's always people who do work in it every day but they're too low to see the big picture and suddenly you had executives and contributors on the same page with the shared knowledge looking at the literal exact same physical thing and that took us two days worth of getting together mapping it out, coming up with some weird formats like years ago when I first started it into it and just being able to see that it awakened everybody to serve as blueprinting to get evidence. Yeah, just bring it. Put it in your face. That's basically your tip. Make sure they stumble over it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and put your work out there even if it's messy, even if it looks like post-it notes. Because I can promise nobody knows the end to end. Nobody does. I have seen a single company that can sit down and say, this is what happens to our customers from awareness to either they abandon us and we need or they become multi-year. I mean, into it's got customers that have been using us for 25, 30 years. Talk about a journey. Yeah. All right. Final, final question. I'm sure you still have a lot of questions, things that keep you awake. What are the topics that you are thinking about? What are your big questions? Name one. Name one. Or do you want us to focus on the things that keep us awake at night because there might be a difference there? Let's keep them on track what services are related things. Absolutely. So the things that keep me awake at night but are also on my mind all the time right now as I'm building out my team are how do I prove the value of what we're doing? So I'm going from last week it was me and one other person and this week I'm the manager and I have an open rec and I got all this expectation from my company to prove because I've made all these promises that service design is the right thing for us to be doing. So how do I really show the value of service design? I know that's a big topic for a lot of people. It's how do you measure and communicate that value that's going to be on my mind I'm sure forever. But it's the big thing right now. And for you Eric. For me one of the one of the scariest parts of service design what keeps me up at night and if people are thinking like oh yeah I want to move to the Bay Area I'm going to do it out there that sounds awesome. I would say right now that person would be ahead of their time and you're really narrowing places are going to get it and really narrowing down where you're going to be able to work and it's scary when you're doing something that you believe in and you can really see it starting to work but it's almost like look no one's going to hire you to do that because we don't get it and so it's like you have to make your own way. Yeah you're specializing yourself out of a job in something that in 10 years you'll have the keys to the kingdom but right now you really have to find inspired innovative forward thinking places who can see like me personally I'm not worried about how things are today I'm worried about how they were going to be in the future and you're going to have to find special people who also believe in that as much as you believe in it and that's what keeps me up at night is did I over specialize? Did I over specialize? I'm finding that people well you know it's still we've been doing this for the last 10 years and we're still we still need to explain and show the value to people and I guess this won't be over tomorrow and I'm really happy that a lot of people see the value and are interested in that and we need to spread the word that's the only thing we can do right? Yeah I mean that's kind of what we're all about is helping make space for that next generation to take root Awesome Megan Eric thanks for your time Well it was great talking about these topics and these were really interesting topics that haven't been on the show Deadmarch so thank you again Thank you so much, it was fun What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Eric and Megan? How do you make service design practical? Let us know down below in the comments If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, check out some of the best episodes and subscribe to the channel We bring you a new video every two weeks For now, thanks for watching and see you in the next episode


Hello, my name is Alder Gunsing and this is my presentation about block-cypher-based tree-ashing. So a hash function is a function that mobs maps an input of arbitrary length to a fixed length output. And there are multiple security notions for hash functions. So common one is the notion of collision resistance, which means that it should be difficult to find two different inputs that map to the same output. But there are also stronger notion required. So one is that it should basically behave like a random oracle so that all outputs are uniformly random and also independent from each other. And this notion is formalized as indifferentiability by Maurer and others, and also specified for hashing by Koron and others. And hashing modes are always built on top of a smaller compression function F, which is often assumed to be ideal. However, such ideal compression functions cannot be built directly. So they have to be built on top of another building block. And the common one is a block-cypher. And there's a popular Dave's Maya construction, which transforms a block-cypher to a compression function using a feed-forward. However, this construction is not indifferentiable from an ideal compression function. So we need dedicated analysis using the block-cypher as an assumption. And this is what Damon and others did for hashing, where they tried to find sufficient conditions for such constructions and also some other. However, it turns out that the paper contains an error and also proves some faulty constructions secure, as was pointed out by Samuel Neves. And in an errata, I provide a quick fix by having an additional condition, which requires also sufficient truncation. However, a more slow look reveals that the error is actually some more fundamental about the indifferentiability setting. It's actually a more fundamental flaw that ignores a major part between the interaction between the construction and primitive oracles in the indifferentiability setting. And this same reasoning is actually present in also many other indifferentiability papers. So two others are also based on hashing, and also four are about the sum of permutations. And this is actually also all the papers that are about the indifferentiability of the sum of permutations. But the flawed reasoning does hold in the sequential indifferentiability setting, where the primitive queries have to be made before the construction queries. So the results can be downgraded to this weaker setting, so we still have some positive results. And in the case of hashing, we had the errata that requires sufficient truncation. But this is not that great of a fix as not all modes can apply this. So in this work, we consider three other finalization options. So the first one is truncation again, but then also with some interesting variations. The second one is an enveloped finalization, which is a generalization from enveloped mercredonkart. And the third one is a feedforward. And the major application is the Blake-3, which is a recent block-cypher-based through hashing mode. And that's an interesting, some interesting properties. One is that the extendable output uses a counter. So for the first output block, the counter is equal to zero. For the second one, it sets counter to one and so on. And it turns out that it has an interesting property, namely that if you know a message and a hash output, but not the offset T, that you can actually compute that offset directly or ideally, that would only be possible by brute force. And that's a consequence. You cannot really rely on the accuracy of this offset T, which is not ideal behavior. But in practice, it's not that big of a problem. So that's the end of my presentation. Thank you for your attention.


Hi, Gielco. Do you hear me? Yes. Okay, just a moment. I'll see if I can get in touch with the room to see if they can hear or see you. Okay, it looks like Emerald is saying that they can see in here. So, Gielco, if you would like to share your screen to do your demo, I think we could get started. I think you're the only demo this month in credit. Sure. Let me just share a screen. Can you see it? Yep, I see it. Can I start? Yes. This is Gielco presenting for credit May 2017. Hi, looks like I'm the only one today. I'll try to be quick. I've practiced. It should take exactly five minutes. So, for years we had Selenium tests in Ruby. And now, since recently, we have Selenium tests in Node. It's all documented on the video editor. Take a look at the Selenium landing page. Specifically, there is Selenium Node.js documentation. And today I'll be talking about how to write a test. So, this page here. So, here it is. So, there's a couple of things you can do. You can write a test for core or for any midwiki extension. So, since core or midwiki core already has some tests in Tesla Selenium, take a look. There's really and all that. We will be talking today how to write a test for an extension. So, there's a few examples already in Garrett. So, for related articles and visual editor. But I think the simplest one is this one. So, what I'll be talking today is documented here and in Garrett. So, what are we going to do today? So, we'll go to a new page. We'll create it. And we'll enter this text. So, a simple example and close. We'll save. And then we'll check if the formula has been rendered as an image. So, that's all. So, this is a simple test that we'll implement today. So, as I said, this is in Garrett. It's not merged yet. But you can take a look. We can get it using the tutorial machine. So, there's three files. One of them is readme saying how to enable the math extension. Well, how to provision the math rolling and how to get the code from Garrett and how to run all of the tests or just this one. So, how a simple test looks like. So, this is it. So, the first few lines we are setting up the stage. So, we will be using the built-in Node.js assert library for assertions. And there's a couple page objects here. So, edit page is required from the MiWiki Core. So, it's already merged there. And this one, math page is in the math poster. So, a simple test as math should work for addition. So, I'm not super familiar with math. So, this is really a simple example. I mean, with the math extension. So, in this variable page name, we'll just get a random string because we really care what the page name is. We'll use the edit page edit function and provide it with this random string. And with the simple formula. And then we'll just assert that the math page here is one has this particular image and that it exists. So, a quick look at how this math page is implemented. So, it's really a simple implementation. There's only this image. Element on the page. And it's just an element on the page with this CSS selector as we saw here. And I don't have the other one in Garret. So, the edit page, but I do have it anyway. So, this is a slightly more complicated page object. So, it has these two sections. So, this top one has some elements on the page. So, content and save, for example, are just elements with CSS selector. So, open function, provide a bit of name, we'll open the page, we'll already be ready for editing. And this edit function, provide a bit of name and content, we'll use this open function from above. We'll use this content element and set value to whatever we provided and use this save element and click it. If we go back. So, here it is, right. So, that's all. I just have the time to run the test. And you'll see another Chrome opening. It'll be really quick because there's just one test. And my five minutes, I'll rerun it just one more time. Hopefully, you could see anything going to hang out. So, it's opening, entering text and checking if the image is there. So, that's pretty much all I had for today. The important thing is to remember, there's this Selenium Lightning page on the .org. If you have any questions, there's ways how to get help. That's all. Okay. Thanks a lot, Jelko. It'd be nice to do stuff in JavaScript. We ran some surveys and talked with people and people said they would prefer JavaScript or Ruby. So, we provided it too. Yeah. Right. And I think that's it for credit for this month. Thanks again, Jelko. And thanks for those of you who tuned in. Have a nice day.


Okay, this is 5.11, here Dave has a house and he is trying to improve the insulation and the contractor comes up with an estimate of $775, he is using natural gas to heat the home and we are trying to calculate how long will it take Dave to recover his investment. And this is a typical problem that uses an equation for payback period equal to CI, cost of insulation times R1 times R2 times efficiency divided by cost of energy times again R2 minus R1, this is the final R value minus initial R value times HDD times 24. Do we have all the pieces of information for this formula? Cost of insulation, cost of insulation it should be in dollars per square foot. So Dave has got an estimate of $775 to cover an area of 1200 square foot, roof area happens to be 1200 square foot. To cover this area with insulation it costs $775, so we can calculate the cost per square foot. This happens to be 65 cents per square foot. That's what we want per square foot. Do we know R1? Yes we know, R1 equal to 16, R2 equal to 22 and the furnace efficiency E is equal to 0.86 and we also know HDD. HDD is 6000, we know 24 hours. Only thing here is we need to calculate the cost CE, cost of energy. And we are paying here or Dave is paying $9.86 per MCF. Remember MCF has is basically 1 million BTUs. So the price would be $9.86 per million BTUs. So this would be equal to 0.00000986. If we plug this into this formula here, 0.65 times 16 times 22 times 0.86 divided by, this is 0.00000000986. R2 minus R1 happens to be 6 and 6000 is the degree days and 24. This should come out to be I guess 23 years roughly. This is kind of a long time period to recover the investment.


Mae tynge oedlau hynny, o fe mwyfio, nid yw'r fforddau. Y cwylwyr yw'r ystod o bwyswys ar gyfer y cael cwestiwn cyffredinol, i gydigiariaeth i gydigion pobl yn cyfosibl, yn gyfer os pwyllwydd i ddadig sy'n gwyllfa i ddefnyddio a gwyfelly ar gwyllwy. Alexander Barnett Ysgrif Weinidog ond, gyda'r amser cymygwsoedd o wnaeth hyn gyffredig, cyfryddiaeth hwnnw, iawn cyfligio ar gyfer Ysttwins. Kevin Stewart? O'r eu cyfreithwyr, mae Llywodraeth sefydlu chyfr wedi ffac guysigio sydd y Cymru yn cyfrifwyr gyda rai cyfrithwyr siwet.jalad yn 2010, Llywodraeth sefydlu ar gyfer 12 miliwm ydw i gyfer cyfreithwyr cymru ar gyfer Llywodraeth seciwet, ten Parks and City, a ryw deithasol darwch ddwyb. Allocations are made at a local authority level and are not disaggregated to constituency level. Local authorities are responsible for choosing the areas where measures are offered and the types of measures. They are required to focus on areas with higher levels of fuel poverty. Alexander Burnett I am sure that my constituency will welcome the minister's warm words. With the existing Homes Alliance showing 20,000 homes in Aberdeenshire West are cold homes, will the minister support the Conservative manifesto commitment to allocate 10 per cent of the capital budget to energy efficient measures? Kevin Stewart What would have been useful if Tory Governments had not cut successive capital budgets and beyond that if they had dealt with schemes appropriately south of the border? We are spending £103 million to tackle fuel poverty and to increase energy efficiency this year, which is £103 million more than we are spending south of the border. In terms of his own constituency, area-based schemes to install energy efficiency measures have been carried out across the West Aberdeenshire area, including Inch, Echt, Huntley, Afford, Aboyne and Bancrie, with further schemes planned for Monimusk, Lumsden, Rhiney and Huntley. If Mr Burnett wants to join with me and ask his Tory colleagues south of the border to increase capital budgets, I would welcome his help in that regard. Mike Rumbles To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of how the loss of jobs in the oil and gas sector has affected homelessness in the north-east, and what action it has taken to mitigate that. Kevin Stewart Both Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire councils have advised that there has been no increase in homelessness presentations in either area. That is supported by Scottish Government statistics, which show homelessness applications in both Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire fell continuously throughout 2015 and in the final quarter of that year, at its lowest level for 14 years when electronic recording began. In addition, both areas have seen a reduction in private rental costs. The homelessness legislation provides a safety net for all unintentionally homeless households. That is a strong form of mitigation if people are in danger of losing their homes. Additionally, all 32 local authorities are focused on the prevention of homelessness through the housing options approach. That enables a local authority to look at all the options available to households, which may include a homelessness application. Mike Rumbles It is quite clear from the minister's reply that neither he nor other ministers in the Scottish Government have made an assessment of homelessness as a result of the downturn in the gas industry. It is a rather complacent response. I do not think that it is good enough to ask just Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire councils historically what is happening. There is anecdotal evidence to say the least of which I can make them available if he wishes to pursue this, and I hope that he does. Kevin Stewart I am certainly not complacent when it comes to the north-east of Scotland. As I stated, the homelessness stats from Aberdeen City and Shire and Aberdeenshire fell continuously throughout 2015. There were new homelessness statistics yesterday, which shows that homelessness was dropping. I will say to the member that I will analyse that further, but what I will say to Mr Rumbles is that this Government will continue to focus on homelessness. We have some of the best homelessness legislation in the world, and he can be assured that I will continue to scrutinise all of the figures. Maurice Corry A new report has been put forward by Your Move, and it found that typical rents rose by 1.3 per cent in the month after the introduction of the land and buildings transaction tax surcharge. It has also concluded that rent controls would not help matters. Maen nhw, rwy'n credu i'r cwyrraeth, Mr Corry. I called you for a supplementary to the question about homelessness in the north-east. I think that you have gone on to your own question. I am sorry, I think about, yes. Maen nhw, rwy'n credu i'r cwyrraeth. I don't know. Maen nhw. Rwy'n credu i'r cwyrraeth. If their name is on the order paper for a question, they do not need to press their button. They should press their button for a supplementary to another question. Maen nhw, rwy'n credu i'r cwyrraeth. Maen nhw, rwy'n credu i'r cwyrraeth. Colin Beattie To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the meeting of the joint ministerial working group on welfare on 16 June 2016. Angela Constance I am pleased to say that the Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Jobs and Fair Work and I had a productive meeting of the group, and I look forward to this being a meaningful way of taking forward the important work of transfer and social security powers and welfare benefits to this Parliament in the years ahead. At the meeting, we discussed terms of reference and set out a programme of work over the next 12 months. I have written to the relevant parliamentary committees updating them about the meeting, and we will continue that process following future meetings. Colin Beattie I thank the cabinet secretary for her response. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that there is a sufficiently strong working relationship between the Scottish Government and the DWP to the extent that it will ensure that the cabinet secretary is satisfied that robust data provision will ensure that welfare benefits transition is seamless and no Scottish recipient will be disadvantaged? Angela Constance Mr Beattie is right to highlight the importance of robust data provision and that sharing of information. It is early in my relationship with the DWP, but I have been encouraged by the meetings that we have had. I believe that both Governments have the safe and secure transfer of benefits as a priority. I am clear that we will work hard to ensure that no one will be disadvantaged as a result of the transfer of powers. Ensuring access to data will be part of the process. I am pleased that it is marked as a priority area over the next 12 months. Adam Tomkins I thank the cabinet secretary for keeping the Social Security Committee fully informed of the meeting of the joint ministerial working group. It is important to have a common understanding of practicalities and timetabling of commencement in relation to the transfer of social security powers. Does the cabinet secretary envisage that that common understanding will include any sort of transitional period where some functions of the Scottish Social Security Agency will continue to be administered by the DWP? If so, does she have any sense of how long this period might be likely to last? Angela Constance I am grateful to Mr Tomkins for his question and for recognising that, as a Government, we are determined to keep committee informed every step of the way, not just about notifications of the joint ministerial working group but also the outcomes from those discussions and, indeed, we will release the joint community following every meeting. Game scales are important. We have a manifesto plan over the next five years. The detail that we will get into and that we have commenced with UK Government ministers is about commencement. He will have seen that there is a tranche one commencement. The Secretary of State for Scotland will have to take that through by order, through the UK Government. He is hopeful that that will be done before the UK Government or the UK Parliament rises for recess, but we need to carefully work out not just commencement dates for tranche two but also how we will work together to implement the various responsibilities that are coming our way. We will lead legislation and, crucially, it is about how we deliver the powers that we get. We will be working hand in glove with the UK Government so that we have a plan in recognition that we have not done anything of the scale or size before in the history of devolution. Question 4, Bob Dorris. To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to ensure that housing allocation in the social rented sector takes consideration of tenants in moderate housing needs. Kevin Stewart. Under housing law, social landlords, that is councils and housing associations, are responsible for the allocation of social housing in Scotland and are expected to allocate their housing on an objective assessment of housing need. In general, those with the highest need will be given the highest priority. I believe that that is the right approach to allocating a limited resource. We recognise that there are many people who would like social housing, but are having to wait a long time for a suitable house to become available. The Scottish Government is committed to preserving and expanding its social housing stock as part of creating a fairer society. That is why we have legislated to end the right to buy on 1 August this year, which will prevent the sale of up to 15,500 houses over the next decade and why we have already announced our bold and ambitious more-home Scotland approach, which will deliver at least 50,000 affordable homes, 70 per cent of which will be for social rent. Bob Doris. I thank the minister for that answer. Those in moderate housing need can wait many, many years for an offer for a suitable home, given that those in greater housing need to understandably allocate homes first on that priority basis. However, everyone should be able to have the prospect of having their housing needs met at some point in their lives. I therefore ask the minister whether he would give consideration acknowledging the independence and flexibility that social landlords have to give greater priority to the length of wait on housing waiting lists with social housing providers and what guidance exists to offer flexibility or recommendations in such matters. Some of my constituents will never, ever get a move. They will be a long period of time and those in greater need to move in quickly, understandably and get their house, but others are trapped forever. Kevin Stewart. Social landlords already review their allocation policies periodically. In addition, when we implement the Housing Scotland Act 2014, we will be introducing changes to the law and allocations. We will publish guidance on those provisions later this year. Social landlords will then need to review their individual allocation policies to ensure that they comply with the revised legislation when that comes into force. As part of that process, landlords will of course need to consult tenants and applicants about their allocation policies. Given that landlords will already be reviewing their allocation policies, I think that we should give some time to make sure and see what happens there. Social landlords can already give points for time spent on the waiting list, as long as that does not outweigh points given for housing need. While I recognise that some applicants are frustrated by having to wait a long time for an offer of housing, I think that giving priority to those in greatest need is the right approach. I reiterate that one of the things that this Government is doing is ensuring that we meet that ambitious target of 50,000 affordable homes, 35,000 of those for social rent, which will help some of the folk that Mr Doris has described in his question. Alex Johnstone Having rejected the UK Government's approach to the under-occupancy issue, can I ask if this Government is considering any action of its own design to try to free up the vast amount of space that is within the social rented sector that is simply under-occupied and is not being addressed? I am very surprised to hear a member of this Parliament defending the bedroom tax. What I will say is that this Government will get rid of the bedroom tax as soon as we have the power to do so. I think that there are other means that housing associations and councils can take in terms of dealing with some folks who are maybe in a house that is maybe too big for their needs now. Some authorities have previously helped people with housing new moves and have offered grants for folk to move out of houses, which maybe have too many bedrooms for their needs. However, one of the things that this Government certainly will not do is that we will not penalise the most vulnerable in our society with the regressive policies such as a bedroom tax. 5. Ivan McKee Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the Scottish Government how its proposed planning legislation will ensure that new housing developments comply with the aspiration of the Scottish planning policy. Angela Constance Presiding Officer, we will bring forward proposals for further planning reform, including a planning bill later in the year. In the meantime, we expect development plans to reflect the Scottish planning policy and its commitment to enabling the delivery of new homes. Ivan McKee In the Rob Royce area of my constituency, where work has begun on what will ultimately be a 1600 house development, the local community is rightly concerned about the lack of clarity around the provision of local facilities in an area that is already suffering from lack of such provision. Is the Government minded to accept the recommendation of the independent review of the Scottish planning system, which states that we need to put an infrastructure first approach to planning and development, including the provision of local services and social facilities? Angela Constance Presiding Officer, we certainly agree that there needs to be far stronger links between planning for housing and its supporting infrastructure. Communities need far more than homes to live in, which is important, though they are. We accept many of the recommendations of the independent review of planning, but we are considering all the recommendations in more detail. Mr McKee talks about the infrastructure first principle as an approach for planning and development. We will set out a full programme of planning reform later in this year. Thank you, Presiding Officer. With reference to the same report and with specific reference to the principle of collaboration rather than conflict, inclusion and empowerment, will the Scottish Government give consideration to reinstating the requirement for local authorities to notify the Government when their development or city plan has been breached? And if not, what plans do they have to give community some other alternative in ways of addressing such decisions where the city plan has been breached so that they feel much part of the system? Angela Constance Mr McKee raises some important points. The purpose of the planning review was very clear. I think that it's time had come. I think that there is a cross-party consensus that we need to review how planning operates in this country, not least to ensure that we are able to achieve our ambitions around increasing the supply of affordable housing. However, the point that she raises about community involvement and community engagement is very important. I was pleased to see that the independent planning review did make some important recommendations in that area. We are, as we move forward, we want to get some early wins from the plan in the review because not everything will require legislation, but it won't be too far in the future before we're ready to respond in detail to the 48 recommendations that came from the review. We're not getting on very quickly here, so I could ask for some shorter supplementaries and shorter answers from ministers, please, if possible. Your time has come, Mr Corry. Thank you, Deputy Prime Minister. I apologise for the early intervention there. To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to tackle high rents. The Office of National Statistics' most recent official statistics show that private rents in Scotland increased by 0.5 per cent over the last year, from April 2015 to April 2016. The Private Housing Tenancies Scotland Act 2016 will provide clarity and predictability in rent increases where rents can rise only once in 12 months, and tenants will have a three-month notice of changes to enable them to budget accordingly. In addition, councils will have the ability to apply to ministers for a cap on rent increases in their area for up to five years. The Scottish Government continues to value social housing with affordable rents and gives it a high priority for funding because of the security and protection that offers people who are on low incomes or who are vulnerable in other ways. We are committed to building a further 50,000 affordable homes, 70 per cent of those for social rent. Maurice Corry. Does the Scottish Government agree that the best way forward is to solve the issues of high rents is to tackle housing shortages and build 100,000 new homes over the next five years? Kevin Stewart. We are committed to building 50,000 affordable homes. As I pointed out to one of Mr Corry's colleagues a few weeks ago, his amendment the other week, which talked about 100,000 homes, 50,000 affordable homes from Government, and 50,000 in the private sector, would be a decrease in what has happened in recent times. Last year, the private sector built 12,000 homes in Scotland, and I hope that we will be able to build many, many homes across all 10 years over the next parliamentary session. A quick supplementary please, Mr Finlay. At the election, the housing minister posed with a poster stating that it is time for rent controls in Dorsan 11 rent campaign, and I welcome his public commitment to that. So today, will Mr Stewart set out the timescale for introducing legislation to enact his pledge? Kevin Stewart. The private housing tenancies act addresses the problem of excessive rent rises for sitting tenants in the private rented sector. Local authorities will be able to apply to ministers to set a cap on rent increases for sitting tenants in areas where significant increases in rents are having a detrimental impact on tenants. We should wait and see and analyse what happens when those powers come into play, and then analyse that and take other decisions after that. Question 7, Neil Bibby. To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the impact of post-offices on town centre economies. Angela Constance. Presiding Officer, as was set out by the Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills in his written answer to Mr Bibby last month, the Scottish Government recognises and prioritises the importance of our town centres and local high streets through our town centre action plan. We also recognise the importance of post-offices to local communities and economies in Scotland. Post-offices and postal services are, of course, reserved, and we have made it clear to both the UK Government and Post Office Ltd that they have a responsibility to ensure that the availability of existing services is maintained across Scotland. Neil Bibby. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. The cabinet secretary is aware that post office Ltd are proposing to close paisley crown post office and move services into a WH Smith store. Thousands of customers have signed the CWU's petition against the move, but concerns are not just limited to customers and staff. Concerns have also been raised by local businesses about the impact on the town centre economy by the reduction of a footfall at the current location. I therefore ask the cabinet secretary if she shares with me concerns about the impact that such proposals could have on town centres. Given her remit for town centres, will she speak to her ministerial colleagues and use the Scottish Government's influence to urge the post office Ltd to reconsider in this particular case? The Government is always more than willing to reiterate our views either to the post office Ltd or to the UK Government. We recognise that post offices are important to local communities and local economies. As local members, we will all have experienced post office closures or relocations in our constituencies. Obviously, relocations are preferable to closures, but post office needs to be transparent about what is driving the particular proposals that are for Paisley. I note the member's motion on the matter. It is crucial that local people are listened to and that they deserve the facts and the opportunity to be part of a solution as well. 8. Alison Harris To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to address occupational segregation. Angela Constance Occupational segregation is a complex and deep-rooted problem, but we are determined to make progress. That is why it is a top priority for the Government's developing the young workforce programme, which has set very ambitious targets to increase the gender minority share in the most imbalanced college subject groups and modern apprenticeship frameworks by 2021. We are also investing up to a total of £1.5 million over the next three academic years through the Scottish Funding Council in a programme of equality projects across colleges and universities. We will also look to the new advisory council on women and girls to help us to identify what additional action is needed to be taken by us and others to tackle that very serious issue. Alison Harris Occupational segregation is one of the barriers that prevent women from fulfilling their potential in the labour market. It is vitally important that women have the opportunity to work in traditionally male-dominated industries. A report from Close the Gap shows that the latest figures in science, research, engineering and technology professions are 78 per cent male-dominated. What steps is the Government taking to ensure that women have the opportunity to learn skills in STEM subjects to enable them to embark in careers in science, research, engineering and the technology sector? Angela Constance That is a subject that is close to my heart. Ms Harris is right to say that occupational segregation is indeed a barrier to women either entering the labour market or reaching their full potential once they are in the labour market. It is most certainly a drag also on economic growth. It is very important that we have a systems-wide and a very comprehensive response to this issue. It is something that I am sure will debate in more detail this afternoon. I would point the member to the important work that we are doing around developing the young workforce, which is about challenging some of those stereotypes. Of course, we need to start challenging those stereotypes much earlier and well before children get to secondary school. I have touched on the work that both the funding council and Skills Development Scotland are doing in terms of their specific action plans, but it is important to recognise that entries and passes in STEM qualifications are actually increasing. Although, when you scrape below the detail, there are some concerns around computing science, for example, and we have more women in our college sector studying science and maths and engineering. We also have more science undergraduates as well, but I do not think that we dispute that there is still some journey left to travel. To ask the Scottish Government what issues were discussed at the first meeting of the joint ministerial working group on welfare. In addition to my remarks earlier to Mr Beattie's question with regard to our programme of work, we also discussed at the joint ministerial working group commencement of the 11th of the 13 welfare provisions in the Scotland Act 2016. Richard Lyle I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. We already have seen the incredible uptake of the Government's Scottish welfare fund and its help that it is offering to those in communities across Scotland. Therefore, I ask the cabinet secretary what the projected impact will be on the further social security provision as a consequence of the austerity agenda being pursued by the United Kingdom Government. Angela Constance We know, Presiding Officer, that the impact of austerity is severe. The previous UK Government's package of welfare reforms actually took out £2.5 billion from the Scottish economy in 2015-16 alone. Today, we have also published our annual report on welfare and it demonstrates I think the scale of the challenge and the squeeze and incomes as a result of austerity. We will always do what we can to protect people from the worst of those measures, but we have to recognise that we will gain powers. Over 15 per cent of social security spend in Scotland, 85 per cent of that spend will remain under control of Westminster. That means that we cannot redress all of the unfairness that exists in the current UK Government system. Monica Lennon To ask the Scottish Government what consideration it is giving to reviewing the planning guidelines on the proximity of waste management facilities to residential areas and community facilities. Kevin Stewart Thank you, Presiding Officer. Scottish planning policy is clear that planning authorities should consider the need for buffer zones between dwellings or other sensitive receptors and certain waste management facilities. We have no plans to review the policy at this time. Monica Lennon Thank you. I draw attention to my register of interest as a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and an elected member of South Lanarkshire Council. I am disappointed to hear that. I would like to ask the minister if he would undertake to meet me and my constituents in Whitehill and Hamilton where a decision was taken by the Scottish Government to grant plan permission on appeal, which is out of step with its own guidelines in Scottish planning policy. I note the planning review and the commitment to empower communities, but we have a very recent example of public trust being broken. It is very much a live issue, and I would welcome the minister coming out to try and learn some lessons with my community. Kevin Stewart I am quite happy to meet Ms Lennon to discuss that. Scottish planning policy paragraph 180 is clear that development plans should enable investment opportunities in a range of technologies and industries to maximise the value of secondary resources. I do not know all of the ins and outs of the Whitehall decision. I am willing to meet Ms Lennon if she contacts my office, we will arrange that and maybe we could possibly do that before the end of term. Richard Lyle I thank the minister for his answer. It is actually Whitehill and it is in my constituency of Onyxton in Belfast. What powers local authorities have to recall decisions made in relation to planning permissions and waste in my facilities near residential areas and community facilities? As I know that Ms Monica Lennon is at Stoller Council in South Lanarkshire, what action would South Lanarkshire take to recall that? Planning authorities have powers to revoke planning permission under section 65 of the planning act. Where planning permission is proposed to be revoked, agreement of Scottish ministers is required. Where planning permission is revoked by planning authorities or Scottish ministers, the planning authority is liable for any claim for compensation, so planning authorities have the right to revoke that planning permission. Gordon Lindhurst My question is to ask the Scottish Government when it last met representatives of the retail industry to discuss Government investment in town centres. Angela Constance The Scottish Government is in regular contact with the Scottish Retail Consortium and other partners, such as Scotland's Towns partnership, to take collective action to revitalise Scotland's town centres. Most recently, officials attended the Scottish ratepayers forum meeting with the Scottish Retail Consortium on 20 June, where a number of issues were discussed, including investment in town centres. Gordon Lindhurst I thank the minister for that answer. From the answer, she no doubt is aware of the concerning figures that have been released by the Scottish Retail Consortium, showing that Scotland's high street has seen slumps and sails with falls across all retail categories, dropping some 3.3 per cent year on year in April of this year. I appreciate that there has been a welcome slowdown in that drop just in the last month, but I am sure that she agrees that the Scottish Government should recognise the important contribution that town centres make. My question therefore, as a supplementary, is this. Will the Government today commit to supplementing the first two tranches of the town centre regeneration fund that were originally successful in ensuring proper funding to continue the essential services and shops that we see in the Scottish town centres? Angela Constance I can say to the member that I am indeed aware of those figures. It is important to recognise that, in terms of the work done around the town centre action plan, which was a result of the national review of town centres, the Scottish Retail Consortium was very important members of that review group. One of the main findings of that work was that town centre regeneration has to move beyond the provision of retail. It has to have wider focus on public services and community enterprise to complement the retail offer in a town. There is a wide range of actions that are required, but not just by Government. I am also conscious of time, Presiding Officer, but I am also conscious that the finance secretary is sitting just two seats away. Obviously, as a Government, we will bring forward our spending plans in due course, but as a Government, we have invested a considerable amount in regeneration. A lot of those regeneration funds are also available to town centres, but there has been some very targeted funding for town centres. To ask the Scottish Government what impact reductions in local government budgets are having on communities. The 2016 local government settlement funding package was firmly focused on the delivery of joint priorities to deliver sustainable economic growth, protect front-line services and support the most vulnerable in our communities. The shared priorities will improve outcomes for local people. We have protected the council tax freeze for the ninth year, providing much-needed financial relief, particularly to vulnerable groups. We have invested £250 million in integrating services and improving educational attainment by maintaining the pupil-teacher ratio in Scotland schools and taking into account the £250 million for health and social care integration. That means that the overall reduction in local authorities' total estimated expenditure is less than 1 per cent. Neil Findlay I do not know what planet the minister is living on. In communities across Scotland, bus services are being cut, jobs are being lost, community groups are losing funding, and education attainment gap is growing. That is bad for our economy, it is bad for social cohesion and the wellbeing of families, and, as always, it is the poor and vulnerable who suffer most. Will the minister commit today to making it clear to her Cabinet colleagues that she will not tolerate any real terms cut in her departmental budget? Angela Constance Of course, Mr Findlay is his usual constructive self and the way he conducts himself in this chamber. Perhaps I would just remind him of a comment that was made by councillor John McGinty, Labour leader of West Lothian council, who I quote on 18 February. He says, "...we have a budget that focuses on and meets the needs of local people, whilst protecting services that have the greatest impact on the most vulnerable members of our society." Kenneth Gibson The cabinet secretary would recall that Neil Findlay abstained on voting for her against EU membership when it was debated in this chamber last month. Can she tell us for Mr Findlay's benefit what the impact of Brexit is likely to be on Scotland's public finances on top of the £1.5 billion that was cut from 2016 to 2020 by his better together allies in the UK Tory Government? Does she share my astonishment at the litany of Tory MSPs who come here week-in, week-out demanding more money to be spent across the board when it is their Government that is cutting our budget? Mr Gibson, your question is over. The Chancellor has said that tax rises and spending cuts will be needed to deal with the economic impact of leaving the European Union, but he has stopped short of announcing an emergency budget. What is clear is that there will be an economic impact, and this will feed through into public finances. Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Economy is engaged closely with Her Majesty's Treasury and counterparts and other devolved administrations to further our economic interests. Of course, it is for Mr Findlay to account for the positions that he holds. 13. Mary Evans To ask the Scottish Government how rates of house building in Scotland compare to the rest of the UK. Kevin Stewart Presiding Officer, the 15,954 new-build homes completed in Scotland in the 12 months to December 2015 equates to a rate of 297 homes built per 100,000 population. That rate is higher than all other areas of the UK, where it was 261 in England, 219 in Wales and 287 in Northern Ireland. Over the lifetime of the previous Parliament, we surpassed our target by delivering 33,490 affordable homes, and within that 22,523 social homes, including 5,992 council homes. Since 2007, our sustained high-house building has enabled 41,000 more homes to be built under this Government that would have been built at England's lower per capita rate. That is the equivalent of a new town the size of Paisley. Mary Evans Can the minister provide an update on how many jobs are expected to be supported by house building schemes over the course of this parliamentary session? It is estimated that our 50,000 affordable homes target will support approximately 14,000 full-time equivalent jobs a year in the construction and related industries in Scotland over the next five years. In addition, it is estimated that our current help to buy scheme will support around 2,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the construction and related industries in Scotland a year over its three-year lifespan. It may well be higher than the rest of the United Kingdom but, nevertheless, Scotland has a house in crisis that needs to be tackled. The Government has committed to 35,000 social rented houses over the next five years. Do you have a national house build plan in place to deliver how many of those will be built this year and what planning is taking place to ensure that those houses will be built, much needed houses, year on year? Our more homes Scotland approach is bringing all aspects of that together to ensure the delivery of those 50,000 affordable homes and 35,000 for social rent over the parliamentary terms. I can assure Mr Riley that I am having conversations on a day and daily basis with our partners to ensure that that ambitious target is met. That ends parliamentary questions. May I ask everyone to note that we only manage 13 of those and that is about the length of the questions and indeed the length of the responses from Government ministers. Can I ask people to think on about that over the summer perhaps?


Here's the best advice in the world you ever get. Completely stop looking at that. Okay. This is what I believe. I'm sharing that with you for nothing.  It's people that just really, really need help. And if I just ignore them, then I'm basically turning my back on the industry. And the whole reason I'm doing this is to increase the industry. And so it was a decision I had to make. How am I gonna do this? I don't have time. Well, yeah, I do. I can carve out an extra hour every morning from 4.30 to 5.30 to answer those DMs. So it was literally out of necessity, but it ended up being something more than that, because like you say, my personal life, just getting up that early, and I love it. I love getting up that early. Now I get up and actually feed my daughter before I start answering the DMs and get my wife, let her sleep, and then I put her back to sleep, answer the DMs, let her go to the gym. And that's my morning routine right now. Hi Ricky. So inspired by you, I started my email list. I had a goal before 2020 to start it. I now have 350 contacts in there. My question to you is, I have a 50% click-through rate. Is that good, or should I tweak some things? What's a good click-through rate, open rate? What have you been seeing? Here's the best advice in the world you ever get. Completely stop looking at that. Okay. Here's the thing, with open rates, everybody's concerned about open rates and click-through rates and da, da, da. The thing is, is that most of the people on your database that aren't opening it up right now, that are part of the percentage that aren't opening it, are gonna start opening it when they become interested in two and a half years. Then they're gonna start opening it because now they're interested in doing something. They're gonna open it for about two months straight before calling you. Your best client isn't even opening up right now. So why are we worried about open rates? It's not the open rates. Here's what's the most important thing to me. The impression that they saw it in their inbox every Wednesday. They didn't open it, but they saw your name in their inbox consistently every single time. That's what means the most to me. It's the same thing with social media. I didn't get enough likes, but how many impressions did you get? A thousand impressions, you got four likes, but a thousand people actually saw you're doing an open house. That means something just because they didn't double tap doesn't mean they didn't see it and they know that you're out there working. We gotta start valuing impressions just as much or more as the open rate. I don't look at my open rate. I don't care if people aren't subscribed. I don't care about any of that stuff. That's true. Hi, my name is Greg, Jayte Douglas Solomon. So you get up at 4.30 every morning. What time do you go to bed? About 10. Yeah, that's my question. Yeah, about 10 o'clock. I don't really go to bed. I'm more kind of passed out kind of deal. What is the content that you have in your email each week? Lucy, we're gonna start where I left off with you. You know, I got a link that goes to the past two weeks of new listings. Some people that go there, they can always keep up with the new listings. Boom, that's very valuable right then and there. Then you got the closed sales, place where they can search property. Then I got links where people can go and see everything on the market, different subdivisions and stuff. But as far as the content I change out, like this week was, today was my day and I did stats. It was condo market stats for the year 2019, the whole year and December, the month of December. We get those stats from a college close to us and they sent it to us. So it came out like three, four days ago. And every time it comes out once a month, once every, actually, yes, every month, I'll use that information and kind of use that as kind of, so I have links and this is what the prices did. This is what inventory is doing and stuff like that. Informational statistical type of email. Last week, I got what it was, but I'm sure it was like an article, something happening in the area. The week before was like a new development that got approved. It's like a half a billion dollar development. You know, it's just breaking news type things. You mix it up, put some market stats in there, do a little self-promotion every now and again. Say, hey, I sold this house in three days and stuff like that. But don't do too heavy of self-promotion. We're not there to self-promote, we're there to bring value and to bring information to them. But just follow my emails, just follow and watch them every week. You can go to my Facebook page and just scroll back and look at all of them from the past.  Like you, I used to wake up at four in the morning, after reading the middle of the morning good book, but like you, I have a new father and a third, he's seven-month-year-old and I find challenging to take care of him at the same time while following the routine. So that kind of throws it off. How do you find challenges being a new father? I love challenges and there were a couple of times where I couldn't put her back to sleep.  And so I stayed with her, didn't go to the gym. What did I do? I just went to the gym midday.  Like if I could go in the gym guys, it's gonna look wild up here. You know what I mean? I got a problem with food, you feel me? So you understand what I'm saying? You just go with it, man. You don't let it hold you back, but you take that time for yourself. You see what I'm saying? When I go to the gym, I got to have funds in and it's just like, I don't care about my phone, but this is my time. I'm gonna enjoy this, you know what I mean? I'm gonna give three word answers for three questions. All right, go. I've read it. Love it. Rentals. What about them? Do you do them? No. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Do your rentals. What do you eat? All the time. I like that one and I will leave it with that.