It's such a pleasure to be here and see so many familiar faces, and I'm really grateful that you all came out so early in the morning to hear about social enterprise. So I'm going to kick off by just telling you a little bit about the Sama Group, and I wanted to set the tone for my conversation with Kevin Jones by talking about an experience I just had in Kenya. I just returned from Kenya about two and a half weeks ago. So what is the Sama Group? You heard a little bit about that. If we can just get the next slide up, there we go. So we are a family of social enterprises. Some of you may know us through our largest social enterprise, which is called Sama Source. Sama means equal in Sanskrit. And our mission is to use technology to level the playing field for low income people. We started Sama Source six years ago with a mission to bring digital work to some of the lowest income people in the world. We thought if we could figure out a way to employ people in corners of the world where employment opportunities are really scarce, we could really change the game for poverty alleviation. So we started that six years ago. It evolved into a global outsourcing organization that has employed over 6,000 people and that has moved 25,000 people out of poverty. And we have a model that we call micro work. So we actually work with large technology enterprises, primarily here in the Bay Area, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Walmart.com. And we work with them to take large data projects and break them down into small units of work. And then we train people in low income communities to do this work from local computer labs. And I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like in practice in a minute. Out of Sama Source, we started Sama USA, which is a domestic program that's somewhat similar. Sama USA trains low income community college students and youth around the country to learn how to use their existing skills to earn money online. And so far the program, we started a pilot last year. This program has been able to generate around $2,000 in supplemental income for students who do an 80 hour boot camp. And the average starting income for these students is around $11,000 a year. So we've seen some big impacts using the same philosophy of digital work. Lastly, we kind of went out on a limb and had an idea for the world's first crowdfunding site a couple of years ago for medical treatments. We were traveling through Africa and noticed a huge need for doctors who do surgeries to share word about what they were doing and to be able to attract donors directly. So I'm gonna tell you a little story. This is where I was two weeks ago. This is Mathare Slum in Kenya.  It's by a show of hands. I love that in this audience I can ask that question and like 10 people raised their hands. So those of you who have been to Mathare know that it's a pretty destitute place. I feel like I've seen quite a lot of poverty in my lifetime and I haven't quite seen something like this. There are open sewers everywhere. The community was built on a trash dump. About 800,000 people live in this slum. And I went to spend the day with one of our workers, a young man named Kevin Kiara. Kevin started working with Sama Source about a year and a half ago. He's chosen to stay in Mathare because he actually has a small house that he owns so he's able to save 100% of his income. But just seeing what Kevin's daily life looks like, it's such a reminder of the power of this kind of work. The kind of work we do is a lifeline for people like Kevin. And there are so few jobs that pay dignified wages in a place like this. So I took a photo of this sign as I was walking into the slum. There's a huge challenge in much of East Africa around labor contracting. Young men get pulled out of these communities to go and work as laborers in countries that are building a lot. And many of them get their passports taken and are part of the cycle of human trafficking. And we wonder, what could we do to prevent this? And I feel like that the core essence of what we do at Sama Group of creating jobs is the long-term solution to this. And these kinds of signs are everywhere in poor countries. You're probably familiar with them. So this was walking in, and then we got to Kent House. And he talked to me a lot about what it was like to raise his daughter in these conditions. He was orphaned at age 10, and his first job in the slum was putting his hands in an open sewer to collect little pieces of metal that would wash in from different parts of the slum.  That was his first job at 10 years old. And unbelievably, this young man made it through secondary school. He got a scholarship to attend a secondary school outside the slum. And when I visited him, he took out his worn collection of favorite novels, including Moby Dick, and told me that he was a great fan of literature. And that his biggest challenge was that the kinds of jobs available to people like him in a place like Mathare didn't really rely on his brain power. So he was pretty depressed for a while. He tried many different jobs. He tried making this local alcohol called Chang'e, which a lot of people are addicted to. He tried anything he could do to make a few bucks a day. And then luckily, he was selected into a program that trains young people in digital work skills. And that program is a feeder for Sama Source. So you can see here, it's a program called Nairobots. And they're all over Africa. And they train young people in using computers and also using computers for relevant kind of job skills. So he learned Photoshop, he learned blogging. And then he heard about Sama Source through our recruiter. Since he started working with us two years ago, his entire life has changed. He's been able to put aside money for his daughter's education. He pays for several siblings to survive, several of them still live in Mathare. And he has a completely different outlook on life. And I think the biggest challenge for people like these is that there's a sense of pervasive hopelessness around jobs. And there's this sense that it's never going to get any better. And I think that the least we can do for them is to fuel their optimism by connecting them to work. So with that, I'm going to invite Kevin on stage and we'll talk a little bit about the evolution of this organization. Great, good job. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Remember the lemonade. So Lila, we've known each other a while. Let me tell you a story about knowing Lila when she was a real raw startup. About six years ago, I guess it was. And I got Lila a little gig to be an intern for a YPO-like thing, small group, support group of really experienced social entrepreneurs. Jim Fruckerman of Benetech, Rebecca Masisak of TechSoup, my partner, Tim Freudlick. And so then there was some cause that came along. People were donating to ask, Lila, can you donate? And she said, well, no. And she said, you know, I'm to keep some source alive. I've actually had to give up my apartment. I'm sleeping on the couch of my former boyfriend and I'm eating ramen. And I was like, wow, that echoing green asked the question, what will keep you going when things are bad doing your mission? So I did this kind of small silly thing. I started giving her a check for $50 for protein every month, just so, you know, well, put some chicken on the ramen. But so I've known that now she's a success. And actually, recently did well enough that you just bought a house here. And congratulations in San Francisco. That's kind of, you know, it shows you up to 10 million in revenues, right? House is kind of a euphemistic term for that. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. But the nights when you're on the couch thinking, you know, this is, I've hit a wall. This is not working. What kept you going? So first off, I have to thank Kevin because I don't even know if he knows this, but Jim Furterman, who he mentioned who is in that group, was our very first client. And he gave us a $30,000 contract right around the time that I got the protein donation. Oh, $30,000 and $50,000, so that's good, good. But those are the kinds of things that keep you going. You know, I think for me, the constant validation from the point of view of the workers. And I made it a point, even when it didn't make so much economic sense to go back to Africa and talk to local people. It was the only thing that really kept me going in the end that made me feel like no matter what people were saying in the outside world, and we got a lot of negative feedback early on.  They need food and water and clothing before they can do that. And, you know, it was really hard to illustrate to people that the way they could purchase food and water was if they had a job, so, and there were a lot of... Sure, he minds that, just was getting in the way. Exactly, and I think there are a lot of preconceived ideas about education levels in Africa, and now we work all over the world. But people have the sense that people are poor and helpless and not very bright, right?  So what really kept me going was meeting people like our workers, and I remember getting a note from one of them on Facebook in the early days that just said, you know, maybe you're not aware, but the fact that we had work at all, we worked in Dadaab in a refugee camp in Kenya, really desperate place. He said, I don't think you understand the true meaning of what you're doing here. Wow. Because people here are so hopeless. Right. And just the exposure to all of these different ways of working and to the fact that, you know, they can be on a level playing field from the middle of Dadaab is, you know, is pretty eye-opening for all of us. And I kept getting that validation from the people in the field and, you know, even when you're feeling really terrible, you're sitting down in San Francisco thinking like, my life is not nearly as bad as that.  You should get a job.  Stop being, living on nothing. I heard everything from Mary Rich to, you know, Moonlight doing this and get a real job to turn it into a big corporate outsourcing company because we were doing, I mean, our revenue growth on the sales side has always been really healthy and we're starting to see really great economies of scale in some areas of our work. And so a lot of my friends are like, why on earth would you build this as a nonprofit? Like you should build a big profitable outsourcing company. But my whole point in doing this was to use our model to show funders that it wasn't actually so risky to move these kinds of projects to really low income places. And to do that, I thought we had to be a nonprofit. And what caused the wheel to turn, the door to open that you could afford a small apartment or live a life where you're not just staring at somebody else's ceiling? Well, I'd say the house was actually the Heinz Award. It's amazing that there are a lot of organizations that exist out there to support social entrepreneurs and it's kind of a random process to get connected to them, but I feel like there was some grace involved in that. In prior years, we had a steady revenue build. We had a really solid management team. We had good audits and so funders were willing to invest in us because they started seeing that we had the capacity to really do good work. And I remember having several conversations with funders who said, look, doing this work doesn't mean that you have to starve.  And especially as an unmarried woman in San Francisco, there's a lot of expenses that you have on your own, right? And I think that that's a huge lesson for me. And I try to tell younger social entrepreneurs, don't try to be a martyr. You're trying to do this for the long run. When did you really think your model was gonna take off? And now you're up at seven figure, eight figure revenues. When did you think it was really gonna take off? Was there a sign that just, hey, we're gonna make it? I'm still really waiting for it to really take off. Our team is all sitting over here and probably laughing at that. We see a lot of evidence of success, but we're pretty hungry for more. And I think one of the things that has made us moderately successful, I still think there's so much room for us to grow. It's just that we have a lot of drive to do more. And we look at the numbers and there's so many, the unemployment crisis in just Sub-Saharan Africa alone is huge. So it kind of forces us to keep going. I think that one pivotal moment for us was when the Rockefeller Foundation last year decided to invest $80 million in digital jobs Africa, which is an initiative that in many ways was linked to Sama Source. We were their first grantee in this category. And I remember talking to their VP of strategy in the early days and saying, look, I really think this idea of bringing digital work to low income communities in Africa is one of the solutions we can embrace for various reasons. And initially there was some resistance at the foundation, but they have a lot of really smart people and over time this evolved into a huge initiative. And I think that kind of validation proves to the world that what's now called impact sourcing is a business model. Is a real business model. Not everybody should keep going. Sometimes when you hit a wall, you know the models. You should know the models not working. I rented some driven folks who should have quit a while ago. What do you tell folks like that? Maybe it really isn't working. Maybe it's not you. Maybe you're not the right person. What kind of advice can you tell people to not be like you? I think a few things helped us out. One was setting really clear goals and saying if we can't hit these goals, if we can't hit this kind of return on investment, that's going to trigger an evaluation process and put us sort of on, not on probation, but at least on alert that at some point we should stop if we don't start seeing a change because we'll just be wasting donor money. And for us that ROI point was always, I mean my concept is, are we doing better than going to Africa with suitcases full of cash and giving direct cash transfers? Right, right. And if we're not, if there's no sort of leverage of the model, then we should really reconsider what we're doing. And with all of our programs, when we started Sama Hope and Sama USA, we set really clear targets. For Sama USA for example, we said, if students don't earn at least what it costs to train them per person in the pilot, then that should trigger an evaluation and we should be really careful about expanding or even continuing to fund it. And luckily that program, thanks to the amazing leadership of its co-founder Tess. Thanks again. Thanks Tess. That program has, yeah, stand up Tess. That program has done remarkably well and I think that focus also made the team realize that we have a goal to hit and we have accountability here. How about Sama Hope? Is it hitting its milestones? It is. We have a goal of treating 1,000 patients this year and we're at about 500 and we have a bunch of things that we're planning for the website to scale it. The challenge, and I'll just add this onto what I said earlier, along with those kinds of metrics, I think you also need to realize that every model has an incubation period and our CFO who comes from Oracle has said to our team, we really think that there's a three year incubation period. Most things can't really get off the ground and show any traction for about three years. And so what we look at is can we fund something for a three year horizon? And is our board comfortable with making a three year commitment? And I think that's roughly the time that you need to determine whether something's going to be a success. And this is the second year for Sama Hope? This is, yeah, we relaunched the site in November last year so we're sort of counting that as a start. And before that, there was like $25,000 in funding from an angel. What's next? Is there a for profit spin out or anything else that you're going to build? So we have three enterprises now which are keeping us really busy. And Sama USA and Sama Source are quite similar. So we really kind of view those as two programs that are working together. Do the US, do it in Africa. Exactly. And what we've realized is that we can use our brand now, which has strong brand recognition, to start thinking about developing one additional business line that could bring us more revenue. So Sama Source is a really amazing business from the standpoint of how many people it can employ and how fast it's growing. But it's not a very high margin business. Low end digital work is becoming more and more commoditized. So it's a healthy social enterprise. But we don't think it's ever going to generate profits that can kick back into the group and fund new ventures that we want to start or subsidize the operations of something that's not as revenue generating like Sama Hope. And so we have a concept in mind. I can't share all of the details, but it's in the beauty category. And it's in the luxury space. And we're evaluating different options for launching a brand that can generate these kinds of returns for the group. And I think at that point, we'll probably take a break. Yeah, yeah. And the beauty category would be sourcing from some of these same people or jobs for the same people. Exactly. I mean, one of the core tenants of Sama Group is giving work. And we really believe that dignified work is a solution to a lot of the problems that we see from labor trafficking to sex trafficking to child malnutrition. And so this is a different method of giving work that involves sourcing, not digital work, but sourcing raw ingredients from low income communities. And I think that there's a huge opportunity in this space to look at categories like luxury, where the margins are really high, but typically go to LVMH marketing budget. They go to these very large corporations and I think very few social enterprises think about tackling that space. Right, right. The luxury and fair trade thing. Altarico is one of our investors and they have a new truffle that actually has all the social value baked in at that margin. But chocolate doesn't quite cover all the social goods. So I'm seeing some people do some interesting thing. Nobody's done anything quite big enough yet. I think Myet is really interesting. I haven't followed the social impact side of that story, but I think they've done a really beautiful job of building a luxury brand that also highlights artisans in developing countries. And I think that that's sort of a riff on the traditional fair trade model that's gaining more traction. Yeah, and then you would be the spokesmodel entrepreneur kind of thing for this, whatever you call that. We need to have a product first, but yes, that's the goal. Yeah, because I mean, people are coming, putting you on magazines and then you're giving the money from the photo shoots to Sama source, right? I mean, that seems to be where the idea came from. So I will say that, and probably other women social entrepreneurs in the room might have thoughts about this, but initially I was kind of conflicted about using my personal brand and story so closely tied to the nonprofit as part of my work. And then at some point, you just realize that that's your job as an entrepreneur is to use what you have to offer to build your organization. And I think because there are so few younger women in tech and younger women in social enterprise and tech, we get a lot of opportunities to tell our story and a lot of invitations to panels and being featured and that sort of thing. So it did come out of that. We thought, well, how could we leverage this more? And what could we do? We're getting so much attention from women's magazines, for example. And unfortunately, the people making decisions about Sama source type work are typically middle-aged men in tech companies in Silicon Valley, not reading Marie Claire. Right, right, yeah. So we do, I think we've been sort of market driven and opportunistic from the beginning. And when we see an opportunity like that, we evaluate it. Yeah, yeah, it seems like it's really there. You get the attention, but then you can source the goods that are incredibly high margin that are going to the same people. And it only works if you have a fantastic team that can execute flawlessly. And I'm really proud of our team. We've built it out a lot over the last few years. And so I'm able to go out there and do my thing and know that the home fires are burning. Do you ever, you're a role model for a lot of young social entrepreneurs because you've built something from nothing. At Sacrifice, what do you tell some other entrepreneurs? I mean, do you get into evaluating, well maybe you should quit, or do you just say, press on? What do you tell somebody? They can be wrongly inspired by your example to keep hitting a wall that they can't break down. Well, I will say that the things that are most worth doing are the hardest, usually. And there were several moments that I could have quit, but I remember reading a Ben Horowitz blog post, he's from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capitalist, and he has this saying, don't punk out and quit. And I think it's often, right after those worst moments that the best moments can come. And last year I had a huge issue trying to push this new strategic plan through and there was some disagreement in our board and it was really, really, really hard. There were several moments when I just thought, I don't know if I can do this longer. And I think doing anything requires, my philosophy is I'm gonna put 10 years into this and see where it is and push through those times. I think the other thing is, my grandmother used to say this, she hitchhiked around the world after World War II. She's a Belgian woman and met my grandfather in Calcutta and she had this motto, trust the world. And when my parents were getting their first mortgage and really scared, she leaned in and told my dad, fear not, the world is beautiful, trust the world. And I think that's kind of true and I think if you allow other people to help you and you allow other people in, you'll be often pleasantly surprised. Yeah, I rented lots of would-be visionaries and that kind of thing and if they're not being followed by people or if people aren't helping and if there's not social capital coming in, another thing I've learned from Echoing Green is what are your volunteer resources and are people giving you more things now? And they did with you. I saw something that you were worth some protein. Jim Structman thought it was worth a $30,000 contract. I mean, that could be an indicator too because the world did sell out for you.  So if you're really not hitting the goals that you set for yourself and if donors are after three years still having issues even if you can show them really good data and I think having a clear impact model that you can be rational about really helps, then I think that should call into question what you're doing. So it's not don't punk out and quit for anything. If a model's not working, you need to adjust it. But I do think that I think that a lot of people quit prematurely or quit before trying to pivot and trying to build something new if what they're doing is not working. And I think it's especially true in social enterprise because it's just so hard. I feel like we have all the burden as nonprofit social entrepreneurs of tech startups but without any of the upside. And so it really is sort of mission and calling oriented work. And I think it requires a certain level of resilience. Yeah, and you, there was a Jim Fruchterman around that you could reach out to in the Bay Area. Sometimes it's hard in a particular entrepreneur I was working with a while ago, a Native American company called Native Touch, they needed to know the distribution for cosmeceuticals. Luckily, I could find somebody at Social Venture Network who knew that kind of thing but I realized that's a real hard thing. So we've invested in a company called Starkrid that finds you the domain specific mentor that you don't have in the Bay Area. What, do you do any mentoring to younger entrepreneurs? I do, I try to do it more ad hoc and I actually, I mentor a couple of the daughters of women on our staff who are younger and they can come by the office often. I really enjoy it and I've been lucky enough to be mentored by a number of amazing people. I met Howard Schultz a little under a year ago and the way he's built Starbucks is so inspirational to me in terms of our mission of giving work. So I feel like I have some kind of a duty to give back. It's also tough though, there's so many demands on your time. There are, yeah, yeah, finding the right ones. We have about 45 seconds left. What would you say to a young social entrepreneur looking at you saying, I wanna be like her, I wanna, I wanna grow to 10 million from almost zero. What would you, how should they follow your path? I would say that the most important thing is to clarify your core values and why you're doing what you're doing and then to, when you've decided on a model to embrace it with grace, grit, and optimism. Grace, grit, and optimism. Yep, words to live by. I like it. Thank you, Lila. Thank you. Thank you for the help. It's great.


I conceive of this whole area of energy as a triangle of technology, policy, and finance. And technology is at the top. That is because policy and finance in our minds exist to drive technology out of the labs and into full-scale cost-effective deployment. When I talk about clean energy, I'm talking about lower-carbon and zero-carbon technologies. It's all of the renewables, not just solar and wind, but hydropower and biomass and geothermal. Nuclear power figures into this. Policy looms large in so many different ways in the energy context, and I truly do believe that it can make or break many energy technologies. We incentivize clean energy through policy, particularly through the U.S. federal government, in a whole host of ways. Policy determines how efficient your refrigerator is in your house. That's set by regulators. We've seen dramatic improvements in energy efficiency technologies. We went from the incandescent light bulb to the compact fluorescent light bulb to the LED. Finance looms large in the development and the deployment of all energy technology. It is a highly capital-intensive business. And the challenge with clean energy technology is that a fair amount of it, when you first deploy it, is often risky. You've got to make sure we tune things up well enough when it comes to clean energy that we can make this jump from the current investment levels of three-quarters of a trillion dollars to more than two trillion dollars each and every year. Where that capital is going to come from is a very naughty question. So one of the areas that I'm interested in is this intersection between policy and finance. In other words, how can policy mechanism drive more capital, lower cost capital, towards clean energy? It starts with basic R&D, basic science. From there, the federal government can get involved in actually helping to commercialize the technology. That is, how do you get the first couple of commercial-scale projects built? This is something that, for example, we use a technique called loan guarantees. One of the largest areas of federal policy when it comes to clean energy involves tax credits for renewable energy. Tax credits can help cut the cost of getting that technology to scale. I believe that all of this that we're talking about in the triangle of technology, policy, and finance is working in many respects. We've seen dramatic drops in the cost of various renewable energy technologies. But having said all that, we still have a long way to go on a whole host of technologies. We really measure our success in the likelihood that a technology is going to get developed and ultimately get deployed. And policy and investment have a lot to say about whether or not that happens.


Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar. We're a webcast. We're an online show. The terminology is up for debate. So whatever you want to call us we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays that's fine. We do record the show every week and then post it up to our website as well. And I'll show you where that is at the end of today's show. The live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your colleagues, friends, anyone you think might be interested in any of our topics. And we do a mixture of things here on the show. Presentations, interviews, mini-training sessions, book review sessions, basically anything if it's related to libraries. We are happy to put it on the show. We do sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations, but we also bring in guest speakers as we have done this morning. On the line with me from Eau Claire Wisconsin is Jennifer Cook and Peter Roderick. You can see their names there on the front first slide. They're from the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library. Good morning guys. Good morning. How's the weather up your way? Are you getting snow this storm coming through? I wasn't sure. No snow today, just really cloudy. Nice, okay good. Same thing here. They're on the line here today to talk about teaching technology to those people that you do have coming into your library or just into your life. Technophobes out there. A program that they've done at their library and they're going to share with us how they pulled it off so potentially you could do it at your own library. So I'll just hand it over to you guys to take over. Thank you. Hello everyone. We're very excited to be sharing our Tech Tuesday program with you. Peter and I worked really hard to bring this program to our library and we're really proud of it. So we're going to go ahead and get started. Yep and we hope that what we present today is a scalable example of something that you can implement in your library regardless of its size. So if you have a much smaller library than ours or much larger it's something you can take parts of and use to teach technology to your patrons. What we wanted to present to you first is a quick outline of what we hope to accomplish today. We're going to talk about the background of our library and some circulation stats in terms of our electronic resources, our early tech help with circulating iPads, how we've provided reference desk help to people with technology questions, basically what the crux of our challenge has been, how we promoted our new Tech Tuesdays program, what the attendance has been like, some of the common questions we get, what are some of the challenges we've discovered and some of the lessons learned. And then we're also, if we have time, we're going to talk about some of the other approaches to teaching technology that we've discovered in terms of our research and we're going to share some resources with you. And we want to make sure to leave time at the end of our presentation as Krista mentioned for any questions you might have or we're particularly interested if you have manners of teaching technology in your libraries that you would like to share with those who are attending today's presentation. So here's a picture of our library. It's a much warmer sunny day in this picture. We have, we're the largest library in our system. There's several smaller libraries right around us within a 10-15 minute drive. A lot of those patrons will sometimes visit our libraries because we're the largest. We're also a college town. We have two colleges here in town, a technical school and a university. We have several high schools and we get over a thousand people through our doors every day. Here's a look at some of our circulation statistics. Now every month our electronic resources go up. Every month we have more free dean users, more free go users and more overdrive users. And I would say overdrive probably is the one that grows the most every month. They have the best books. Of course all of this increase in downloadable media brings more questions to our reference desk. People want to know how to use the services. They want to know how they can download a book. Here's just a screenshot of Overdrive, Wisconsin's digital library. This is what our library uses. We also have Freeding and Frigo. Overdrive has ebooks and audiobooks and it also has we've introduced in the last few weeks the new magazines which is really good and we've had a lot of new users just because of the magazines. Some of our early technology here at the library were our iPads. We were one of the first libraries in the nation to circulate iPads. Starting in 2011 we got a generous grant that was able to let us buy the iPads. They've circulated over 2,000 times so far. We have 15 here in the library that people can check out. They get to keep them for two weeks and then they bring them back and we restore them and take them to the next person. We also have two that are available to use here in the library for four hours so people can use them here with our Wi-Fi. Then we have two for reference for training. We use them at our Tech Tuesday programs. It's been a really popular service and we've had questions from libraries all over asking how we do it and what works best for us. That was some of our early technology. Of course when you bring in an iPad and you have access to programs like Overdrive and Freeding, you're going to start getting questions about it. Some of the first things we did is we created flyers and some video tutorials and we posted them on our website. On our website we still have the flyers that we'll hand out to patrons and those are available for anyone to look at. We also started some iPad classes. We had iPads here in the library for people to use so we wanted to put them in people's hands and teach them how to use the downloadable media. We created three sessions of an iPad class. We had 10 people per class to try to keep it to a manageable size. We had two staff members at the class and as people signed up we asked them to bring their device and to know what their Apple ID and their password was. The second person who was at the class went around the table to help people who got stuck. In every class there was always at least one person who of course didn't have their Apple ID. They didn't know it, they didn't remember it, they were stuck, they couldn't follow through with the rest of the class. So that second staff member was really important for that. If someone wanted to learn what downloadable media was all about or practice with an iPad we did let them use one of ours. We created some fake Apple IDs to let them use that. And then the class kind of ran through going through all of our downloadable media. So we introduced them to freeing. We had them download an e-book. We had them download a song from Freegal. We took them to Overdrive and they did a book and an audio book. And at the time we had one click digital so we ran them through that one as well. We did two sets of the classes. They all filled up and actually some of the people who took the first class were still a little unsure so they took the second class as well. So those were really a good thing to start with here at our library. So again, like I mentioned a couple times, when you have all this technology available, people are going to need to know how to use it. We have three types of patrons that we saw pretty often. We had the first type who would come to our desk, they'd ask about an e-book, how did they get it, they would take our handout and they would go away. They would go home, they would download the e-book, we'd probably never see them again. Maybe they'd ask one or two follow-up questions over the phone, but they were pretty self-motivated there. We have the second type who comes to our reference desk quite often. These are the ones who say, I don't know anything about computers. They have a question, they really want you to do it for them. They don't want to learn, they don't want to talk about it. They just want you to do it for them. A lot of times these are one-time users, they need something off the internet, they come in, you help them do it and you never see them again. Then you have the patrons who are in the middle, and these are the ones that we really created this program for. They want to learn how to use the technology. They want to download an audio book, but they're really nervous and they're really unsure and they don't have much experience with technology. They really want you to sit with them and go through it step by step. We simply didn't have the time and our reference desk to help these patrons. We're a busy desk, we're staffed by two people, we get a lot of phone calls, a lot of computer questions, a lot of people need help finding books, and we just simply didn't have the 20 minutes it took to walk these people through step by step. These are the people that we wanted to help. We also have a few staffing issues. We have people on our staff who are not as familiar with technology and sometimes those of us who are more familiar weren't on the desk, so they weren't really to help them either. That brings us to the challenge we had when we launched our TechTuesday program, which is how to offer assistance to these patrons who have technology questions and have it be more specifically individual and make ample time to answer their questions, but do this in such a fashion that we're not jeopardizing our service to other patrons. A common scenario when we would be helping patrons with their technology questions, maybe they had a question about how to download an ebook or how to use their smartphone or about creating a social media account like Twitter or Facebook, was that once we got into answering their question, you could look over their shoulder and see that a line of people, other customers had lined up. We were encountering this in such frequency that we knew that we had to do something and we had to change our service model. We created TechTuesdays. TechTuesdays is an inception was offered once a month for two hours, from two to four on Tuesday, and you would know that you would come in and you would be greeted by two staff members who would then be there and be able to patiently sit with you and answer your technology questions. One of our earliest challenges was how to get the word out that we're now offering this new service. So promotion became a very important task to undertake. We use social media, so we would post about our upcoming TechTuesdays on Facebook. We created a flyer that we would deliver to our local senior center and other organizations that might be interested in this sort of service. And we also created in-house promotional flyers, and I did speak with Krista and a little later on I'll show you one of those flyers, and I'm going to make it available after this presentation if anyone cares to look at it and have a copy of it that they may want to repurpose for their own library. And that same sort of approach led to us to do sort of the same flyer information on our in-library video displays. A real common occurrence was it would be in the point of helping a patron, a word of mouth suggestion that they do sign up for or are aware of our TechTuesday offerings. So when we're helping people and we get to a point where we realize that their question is going to take too much time, then we would try to encourage them to come to TechTuesdays. But here's an example of our TechTuesday flyer. This is one that we just recently used up through December. And you can see there it lists what we do and we don't do. I'm going to read these out because it's important. We suggest that we'll help with the following usage of your personal devices such as e-readers, tablets, laptops, and smartphones, basic computer skills, how to save files to a USB flash drive, office productivity software, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, internet searching, library resources, social media, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. So we're not confined to just devices. We're also helping you with software and for basic computer skills. And another thing that's extremely important to get across early on is the things that we will not be able to help you with. And we have had people who've come in with more involved technical questions that are really beyond the scope of what we can help with. For example, they want us to run diagnostics on their computer, troubleshoot issues that are not related to our database offerings or overdrive, but are really in-depth sort of tech questions that we really don't have the time or resources to help with, and then install software, which is something for a number of reasons we don't want to be involved with doing. So we just try to be upfront about that, give them an idea of what we do do, when we offer it, and then what we're not able to help with. In terms of promotion, our best promotion by far was a news release we created. So we have the help of a promotion department here at our library, and they helped us draft a news release that went out to the local media entities, radio, television, and newspapers. And we had a, just a short notice you can see to the right there that was featured in our local leader Telegram, our largest newspaper here in Eau Claire. And I think we kind of lost track that we had put this news release out, and Jennifer and I came in to do our normal monthly Tech Tuesday, the following Tuesday after it had been the Sunday paper, and we walked up to a table that had, you know, had standing room only. We had, I think, close to 15 or 16 people there, and sure enough, when we surveyed how they heard about our program, they all said it was through the newspaper. So, you know, don't take it for granted, we have a lot of maybe even non-library users who are avid newspaper readers who will check those community events, bulletins, and we'll discover your program and be very excited to join you. So that's a little bit about how we promoted it. I would say, you know, in summary, by far, the best, the most success we've had in promoting is in word of mouth, just getting the word out, and when we are addressing or having a conversation with a patron at our reference desk to make sure to promote that we have this as an option and encourage them to come and make sure that they understand when it's offered. Jennifer is now going to talk to us a little bit about what sort of attendance we've had. We were really excited when we launched the program that we had six people right away at the first one. We hadn't done a whole lot of promotion for the first one. We were going to see how it was going, but we had six people. As you can see, we did have a couple bigger ones, including the one in March, which was after the ad, but overall, the attendance has been really steady. We have four, five, six people every month. Some of them are brand new users. They have a specific question. They get it answered, and they're happy. Some of them are repeat users, something that we had gone over the month before, and they had played with it, and they just had a couple follow-up questions, and they'll come back, or they have a whole new question, and they had remembered that they got their question answered the month before, so they'll come back. So we have a little mix of both, repeats and new people. Some of the common questions that we've gotten at Tech Tuesdays. A big one is our downloadable media resources that we offer our library users. Overdrive is probably our biggest one. People come in with their tablet and they want to know how to download a book. They're not, they're a little nervous. As you can see my picture here, this is one of my favorite couples, Joan and Ben, and Joan had gotten her brand new Kindle Fire for Valentine's Day. She really wanted to know how to download a book. So I sat with her, and I took her through it step by step, and we got a book, and she was very happy. Freeding is another one. That one is another one of our e-book apps. We get a lot of questions on Freeding. Email. We have people who are confused about email. I have one lady who comes in, I think almost every month, she's confused about the difference between typing in gmail.com on her web browser, and using her email in the gmail app that she has. So oftentimes, she'll mean to send an email to someone, and she's on her internet browser, and she'll type in like Florida. And all these articles about Florida will come up, and she's confused because she really wanted to send it to her aunt or her friend. So that's a kind of a common question. We'll get questions about other apps. I want to download a game. How do I do that? I need a game that doesn't require Wi-Fi. It works here in the library, but it doesn't work at my house. So we'll download the app. We'll turn off the Wi-Fi. We'll see if it works. We get a lot of photo questions. People have a full flash drive. They want to take more pictures, but they don't know how to get it onto their computer. So we'll do some of that. We help them set up new devices. We've had people come to Tech Tuesday. They have a brand new device in the box. They hand us the box, and they're like, I don't know what to do. So we'll help them get it set up, create their user IDs, get their Apple ID, and kind of get it set up. Oftentimes, these are some of our repeat customers because one Tech Tuesday will help them get it set up, and then we'll tell them to play with it, and they'll come back next month with another question. Cloud storage. No one understands the cloud, and we get a lot of questions about the cloud. Some of the other things we get asked about social media. I helped a lady create a Pinterest account and taught her how to pin things on different boards. We get questions about Skype or FaceTime. One time a lady wanted to learn how to FaceTime, and she didn't really understand how it worked, and you can see the other person. It's actually FaceTime's my son at home, and he popped up on the screen, and she thought that was pretty funny. We've had people do it right at Tech Tuesday. We teach them how they email someone right there at the class. So that's kind of fun as well. We obviously helped with a lot of other things. Those are some of our most common ones. Along the way, we've had some challenges. So these are some of the most common challenges that we have encountered. The first one is passwords. People forget their passwords. They have a list of passwords sometimes, and they don't know which one is the password. So we're ready to download a book, and we're going to download the Overdrive app under their iPad, and they don't know their Apple ID. This is a big one, and there's not a lot we can do about it. We can take them through the process when you've forgotten your password, and it gets emailed to them. Sometimes this is a little frustrating for people, and once they hit a snag, they're a little less reluctant to continue. So passwords is a big one. Another big one is just the reluctance to learn. We don't get as much of this at Tech Tuesday as we do just at the regular reference desk, but we get more of the fact that people are afraid. They're afraid to touch their device. They're afraid to just play with it. They're afraid they're going to break it. So what we like to do is walk them through step by step and just tell them the best way to learn is to play with it. The picture we had earlier, Ben and Joan. Joan is so afraid of her device. She was afraid she was going to break it. Attendance is sometimes a challenge. Large attendance, 10 people, the weeks that we've had 10 people, that was hard. We can't get to everyone at once. We have to go around the table. Everyone wants a question answered. It's a little challenging. It's a little nerve wracking when you go out there, and there's 10 people, and they're all ready with the question. Small attendance is a little bit, it's not a big challenge, but we're ready to help, and we've set aside those two hours off the desk, and if there's only one person, then we want to be available in case someone shows up. So that one is a little hard as well. People not being able to work their device. They just don't know how. They've never played with it. This one's hard to. We really have to just teach them the very basics, how to tap the screen, how to type on that little keyboard. So that one's a little hard as well. And this is a big one. People come the next week. We've walked them through step-by-step, how to download an e-book or an app, and they've forgotten or they want to do it again, and they come to the desk, and they see Peter and I at the desk, and we're working our regular reference shift, and they sit down with their device, and they want us to walk them through it again. And like we mentioned earlier, one of the reasons that we developed Tech Tuesday was we don't have time to do that at the desk. It's hard, and we have people lining up. And so they're kind of expecting the same thing that they had the week before, and we just can't give it to them. We have to encourage them to come back to the next Tech Tuesday. Okay, so in the course of doing this service, and we've done it for about a year and a half now, we have learned some lessons that we want to share with you. And the first one I have up here is to create expectations. We have our, you know, we have a couple tables that we set aside for doing Tech Tuesdays, and so people find their way and are seated there when we show up. And before we even start doing Tech Tuesdays, we say a little piece about what we can and cannot do, and we also explain to them a little bit about how Tech Tuesdays is handled in terms of there's more than one person here usually, and we're going to try to help everyone. They have to be patient because we are going to be moving from person to person, so we might get you started on a task and then check back in with you. So it's very important that they have that understanding before they sit down, and they don't think that it's going to be just, you know, direct one-on-one help because while we do a lot of that, it's not always the case that we're able to do that the entire session. And we also let them know how much time we have. So, you know, we're going to be there for two hours. We are not able to stay later because we have to get back on the desk or do something else. So, you know, just sometimes we'll get people who will have a very broad question for, you know, what they want help with. They'll say, I want to help with, I want to learn everything, and we can kind of help them by saying, well, in the time we have today, what's the first thing you want to learn? What's the most important thing you need to master today? So talking to them about what time we have and letting them know is a really important thing to mention up front as well. And, as I mentioned before, having to help everyone. We want to make sure that they know that, you know, they're not going to sit, and this has happened enough that it's worth mentioning. We've started to help, say we have a group of six people, and we've made our declaration that we're here to help everyone. Well, and, you know, oftentimes we do have one person who just feels like they're not getting enough attention, and so we really have to, you know, it's important to stress that and to, you know, check back in with them and say, explain to them where we're at in terms of I'm going to be with you shortly, or I'm just finishing up with this person. I'll be with you in a second. How are you doing, you know? Those kind of things are very helpful to check in. And, as I mentioned when I showed the flyer, we always are up front with about the limits of what we can do. So, you know, we've had people who brought in servers or printers and wanted to help set them up, and it's kind of abstract, and we can't really do that, so we don't want to get too far in the conversation without letting them know, letting them know what we can and cannot do. And this is a really important one. Jennifer and I both claim to be proficient in technology, but by no means experts. So, we offer our patrons patients and a willingness to stick with them and to, you know, to learn with them at times. So, we're not adverse to bringing up a YouTube video or downloading a manual or discovering something with one of our print manuals. So, these are all approaches we take, and they don't speak to being an expert, they just speak to someone who is interested and is willing to work with you. And some of the key lessons we learned is importance of when we're starting our program, we want to learn everyone's name right off the bat. So, we introduce ourselves, and then I go around using those sort of mnemonic phrases and stuff to, like, associating someone who says their name is Kathy with, oh, okay, my aunt Kathy, I'll remember this person by that. And so, I have a clue and I'm able to use their name as often as possible. It really helps in terms of the whole conversation to continually reference their name and return to it. It just makes them feel more welcome. Break up the steps into small parts and avoiding overwhelming concepts. So, if we're going to be talking about downloading an e-book, we're not going to quickly go through all the steps and overwhelm them and then expect them to follow through. We're going to break it down into, like, these are the three main concepts we're going to be doing. Here's the first part. Let's just do this part. Okay, do you understand that? Okay, now we're going to go to the next part. Very important to keep it simple and slowly work your way through it. And then not just taking over, using it up as an opportunity to let them do the steps. So, not feeling frustrated that it's taking too long, but wait and have patience for them to do the steps themselves. You're empowering them by doing that. So, you want to make sure that you are resisting your desire just to get to the solution quickly. They have to learn and they're only going to learn by doing. And this has a kind of a wonderful offshoot of our program, is oftentimes we'll have people who have more technology skills than other attendees and they are recognized right away and they say, oh, you know, I've done this before. I did this last time I attended Tech Tuesdays. Let me help you with this. And when we do, when we do do our introductions, we break the group into, you know, some people have questions about their laptops. Maybe some people have questions about overdrive or e-readers. So, very often time, a person in one of those little subgroups is more of an expert and will chime in and will help out while we're helping another patron. That's great to see. It creates an environment and a culture where we're helping each other. And as I mentioned before, starting from the beginning, always starting for the beginning, making sure that they accomplish it on their own, work through the steps, and then once they get to the end, for example, when I'm helping someone with overdrive, I will log them out and I'll go back to their desktop of their whatever device they are and I'll say, now let's find that app again and I want to see you do it. So, you know, just so they feel extreme confidence that they can do it on their own. And that means beginning over, starting over, and going through and reiterating and strengthening your conversation with them about all the steps you've discussed. And the big one we did is Jennifer's already spoken to the fact that we've had a lot of reaction to this Tech Tuesday program. We've had interest, we've had people asking when it's going to be offered again, we've had people show up more than once, and we've had times when we've been overwhelmed by the number of attendees. So, after some consideration and after exploring other options, we decided to expand our offering and offer individual one-to-one appointments rather than just our monthly drop-in. So, now we offer our Tech Tuesday, normally on the second Tuesday of every month, but the first, third, and fourth, and maybe even fifth Tuesday of the month, we'll do a one-to-one appointment and we'll schedule it. We have two staff members who help with these, and they're either at 10 a.m. or at 6 p.m. So, we're also exploring making it more convenient to your schedule. And this is a great option. We have had to limit it to one Tech Tuesday appointment per patron, because we had some patrons who just started to want to sign up every week, and we wanted to be fair and equitable to other people who will be interested in our offering, but it's been a great alternative and a selling point to say, it's been great to get started on this competition with you about this technology question. Would you like to set up a one-to-one appointment when we can spend the whole hour just you and I working on something?  The first months that we've done this, we have booked up all of our appointments, so we're at a point now we're going to consider whether or not we need to offer more one-to-one appointments, but we also felt it was a good idea to keep that drop in as well, because we want to basically brand that as an opportunity that's going to happen every month, and people have become comfortable with expecting it on that second Tuesday, so we don't want that to go away. So, we're just adding to it to make sure our service is, you know, complete and available to everyone. And this is an example of what I mentioned earlier about scalable. Maybe you just want to do the once a month and see how it goes, or maybe you want to start with appointments. These are both options, and we've tried them both, and this is what's worked for us in our library. And I mentioned some other approaches. I know of another library in Wisconsin that's tried doing training requests that come by email or phone. They direct them towards a staff person who has proficiency or expressed an interest in helping with this type of question. So, they have kind of a master list and say that this staff person is particularly strong on cloud issues. This person is great on setting up e-readers. This person is really great at answering questions about social media accounts. And so, depending on what the question is, then they will email. They'll do a short reference interview, and they'll send the details of the patron's request to that person and have them follow up with the person. Another one is doing what we've already done in the past is handouts and website tutorials. It's kind of a foundation of tech service and libraries. You have those handouts you can hand to someone, or you reference a already created webinar or tutorial on your website, or another one that's created elsewhere, and you have it available and so people can go and consider that. And we have done a Tech Penning Zoo. It's something that's great to do like around the holidays, this time of year, where you have a bunch of different types of devices available and staff there to answer questions, and you just have them around. Last one we did was in one of our meeting rooms, and we had about, I guess we had about eight or nine devices spread around a table, and you could look at, we had sort of supporting flyers that explained some of the different features of each device, and we had staff people there who were ready to talk to you if you were interested in picking one up and playing with it. So that's another thing you can do to encourage people to be hands-on with their technology and to try new things. Another approach that's seen by a local library here in Chippewa Falls, which is a neighboring town to the north of Eau Claire, is technology taught by teenagers, and it's always a very attractive idea. So they did this back in November and early in December this year, where they had high school students come in and avail themselves to teach technology on a weekly basis, and it's such a great idea to match those two communities together with helping each other learn about technology. All right, so I wanted to offer some additional resources and then leave time for some questions at the end, and we're very anxious to hear what you want to hear more about. The Wild Wisconsin Winter Web Conference is held here in Wisconsin yearly, and we really enjoyed a presentation called Six Essential Skills for One to One Tech Instruction. By Crystal Schimpf, and I believe that you can probably find that online, it's still archived. There's also this e-reader detective module for helping to instruct people on how to use e-readers. Some other digital literacy resources I have here are the PLA's Professional Tools for Digital Literacy and digitalliteracy.gov. It's a destination for digital literacy resources, and wanted to direct you towards that. So I am now going to turn back over to Krista and to see if you all have any questions, and like I mentioned earlier, particularly interested if you have approaches to teaching technology in your library that you'd care to share to everyone in attendance today. Thanks for your time. All right, great. Thank you very much Peter and Jennifer. Yes, we do have some questions that have come up, and many of them that you actually ended up answering, I believe, but we can go through them anyways here. Oh, we do just have one comment. Someone said, they love that you are the experts, you are experts and willing to learn with the patron. In downloading manuals and finding videos you're modeling for the patron how they can find info for themselves, exactly what you said about empowering them. And I think that's really important, yeah. Someone did ask about if your time is what's two to four, but you did explain that you've expanded it now. But another question that's good to from the same person, is it mainly seniors who are retired who need the service? You talked about what kinds of things they ask for, but what kinds of patrons are you helping? Is it a whole range? We have seen mostly seniors. Every once in a while we'll get some younger people, but a lot of them are seniors. I wouldn't say they're all retired. No. And I would say that our appointments, especially the evening appointments, are from some, do have some younger people. The two to four, once a month, we do see a lot of older people. So I would say mainly seniors, but some of the other as well. Yeah. And that's just our library. It may be different at yours. Exactly. Yeah. It's going to vary depending on what your population is. Yeah. And then someone would know if you offer this out in the middle of the library or do you have a closed off room for this? So when we created this program, we thought it very important to do it right out in the middle of the library. So we wanted people to walk by it and to pay it to take note and say, what's going on over there? And to ask questions for it to be not necessarily disruptive, but to be in the whole flow of things that's happening in our library. So it's unlike other programs we've done, our meeting rooms are on a lower level of the library. So you have to go out of your way to get to them. And they're really not noticed by the programs that are happening down there. It's hard for you if you're just normally using the library to be aware of them. So we very much have felt it important to have it directly out and open. And so we have signage. We experimented with some arrow signage to get people to the tables, but that hasn't been necessary. People become comfortable with it too. And it's close enough to our reference test that if someone comes up and wants to know where it's being offered, we can just point them over there too. But yeah, definitely great idea to have it just right out and open. We felt. Yeah, definitely convenient and right where they can see it and get to it. Let's see what we got here. What's your no show rate like for the scheduled appointments? Do you have people that don't? We've had a few, but not very many after the first couple weeks. We realized maybe a couple people were forgetting. So we instructed one of our assistants. Whoever was working Monday, they do make a reminder phone call and then the few that we've had not show up. That's really stopped. People really do keep the appointments. And if they booked an appointment say a month in advance and we allow we usually have appointments available two months out and they get that reminder phone call on a Monday. And now they have a conflict in their schedule. The fact that we've made that reminder phone call allows them to call us back and say, Oh, sorry, I'm now not available. You can open that up to someone else. So we haven't got to the point where we have a waiting list, but you see that sort of courtesy and that's and we really haven't had a lot of no shows since we started doing the reminder calls. That's good. Yeah. Next, so where do the devices for the petting zoo come from? Does the library purchase these or staff have their own that they loan? Where the actual equipment come from? A little bit of both. Our library we have since we have what do we have? We have iPad airs. iPad airs. We have Kindles. We have a nook. We have a surface sort of tablet and Kindle fire. So and then to augment that, we'll ask other staff members to bring in their other devices. But we've never had to like specifically rent or purchase something just for technology petting zoo. So also related to that, if it does it get really busy for the petting zoo? How do you make sure someone's concerned? How do you make sure the devices don't disappear or walk away, you know, with the patrons that are trying to use them? Like security, basically? I think that's a really important question. It's something I thought about when we did ours. So I think we overstaffed because we wanted to make sure we had someone who could stand by the door. It was someone who wasn't directly going to be distracted by helping someone and could kind of pay attention to this. But honestly, we don't haven't done another technology petting zoo in a while since we started this Tech Tuesday service simply because we didn't get a great response. We did it last winter and thinking that it would be a great thing to do around this time of year on the holidays and we were kind of underwhelmed with the number of people came. So we almost had a one-to-one ratio between people who were there and people we were helping. But I would say this, this is not always the case. I know other libraries have done technology petting zoos and been welcomed a lot of patrons. So keeping the security thing in mind is a great point to bring up. We also have theft detection things that I have on all of our in-house like our Kindlefire and our iPad. I put a theft detector thing on there. So if they tried to go out the doors with them, it would beep. Right. And that's something you just have regardless of the fact of having the petting zoo. Right. Yeah. All right. Someone says that I teach classes for Apple and Android devices and for all of our downloading services. Oh, I teach classes and we offered appointments but found that people would come in and just assume they could sit down with someone at any time. And I know you said that they started doing that. That's why you set up the appointments. Are you still having that kind of issue? You've kind of gotten the word out that you really got to come at a time when we set this up or do you still have on the fly people that you have to? I really don't think you ever get away from that because once people get accustomed to recognizing you as a person who helps with the technology, they see you at the desk and they want to come up and ask you or they reference you to someone else. So I mean, the best we can do is to encourage people when they come with the questions to reschedule or to come back when we have more time. We can gauge how in depth their question is and try to answer quickly but then say this is all the time I'm going to have right now. Kind of like how we would approach more in depth research to take a reference question. Yeah, I was going to say any reference question, not even technology related, you may have to do the same thing, yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of the equivalent of saying I'm not able to help with it now but I'll call you back as you know, when's the convenient time to reach you? Well, we can say I can't help you with this right now but we do have these appointments that might be convenient to your schedule. Can you come back for one of those? So people seem to appreciate that but I would not, I would be dishonest if I said that we still don't confuse people and people really still really like the one-to-one and be able to head us up whenever they see us so. Yeah. But that's great because we're creating this culture of conversation about technology and they don't feel, they feel comfortable asking us questions and they get new questions and they, you know, they want to work with us. Right, right. Someone says you mentioned that Nook users have to bring in their own computer to make, to do the interface. Do you not have computers with Adobe Digital Editions in the library that they can do that with? We don't, we don't have Adobe Digital Editions on any of our computers and it's for patron privacy because they have to put in their own information. Right, yeah. And someone really wants to learn how we do have a laptop, we can demonstrate it with like our account but in order for them to do it on their device we really recommend that they bring in their own laptop because again, once they get home, they have to do it on their laptop anyway and so it's better to get it all set up on there so then they don't have to go through the whole process again at home. And this could be something, would this be something that you might also have some sort of a handout with like step by step instructions too if they don't bring in their own, so yeah. Yeah, I have instructions for every possibility on our website. And those are something that's freely available if anyone's interested in looking at those instruction handouts that we have, you could just visit our library website, ecpubliclibrary.info and you'll see, you'll find and if we can help you find those instructions. They're on the, right on the main page there's a downloadable media tab and they're all right on that. Yep, there it is, right there, yeah. And I'll just mention while we're talking about that any of the links that were in the presentation for everyone watching, I'm grabbing them as they were mentioning them and we put them into our delicious account here at the library commission and they'll all be collected together for you guys to find them later. So you don't have to try and write down the URLs or search them out yourself. I'll give them all to you afterwards. Thanks, Kristen. Let's see, what's this next one? Oh, someone just explained the same way they do it that they detect times a number at a number of libraries. I'll show them how to do something then back out and have them have them do it themselves. And people seem to refer the personal hand, the personal hand holding like what you're doing rather than just being directed to videos themselves. But they'll take handouts and things to go home and do it like what you were just describing. So basically work in the same way as someone else, another person's library. Here's the last one we have so far. I work in a small library and the only employee, we are not overly busy and I usually have time to give one-on-one instruction but I do have requests and have considered having a small class but I'm not overly wise when it comes to technology. I would like to brush up on myself before holding one. Any tips for a crash course that's a broad range of technology? So basically for her to learn, for the librarian to learn about it before teaching themselves. Well I know in our library consortium which is the Indian Head Federated Library System they do have some basic computer skills and technology sort of webinars and resources like that too. Learning Express is something as a database that we subscribe to in here in Wisconsin. That offers some easy technology classes. Linda.com is a database in our library. Khan Academy also has a great number of courses and I can't tell you how often I just lean on YouTube. I simply go and I look to YouTube about whatever I'm looking for and someone's already done the work. Someone's already explained how to do this process or use this software or to set up this device and I really benefit a lot from looking at those videos. I'm guessing there's probably maybe something in Nebraska and your overall library consortium too that maybe offers some technology. Yeah we have various databases that we do have here but I'm just including the general ones here because we do have people attending today from all over the country. So yeah as I would just say look into your local yeah see do you have a state library who offers things or some sort of consortiums that you're part of that would have already signed up for some of these things that aren't free and out there. Oh yeah there's also the someone just mentioned another one here I'm gonna get up the link go ahead Jennifer while I get this one up. Oh I was just gonna say you know it's the same thing I tell my patrons just practice. Sometimes people will come in and they'll ask me a question I have no idea so I just like push buttons. So pick two or three things that you really want to teach people and just practice them over and over and over and that's what I tell my patrons to get really you know get really comfortable with those three things and then add a fourth thing later so you know just play with it. And I hope sometimes as I know a lot of people are just afraid to just push the buttons or whatever as you said that people who are afraid of their technology to begin with but I wonder if seeing you doing it and seeing you being so comfortable. You know as an example I think it's a good example yeah. Can I take people out all the time? Yeah the one that someone just also suggested the Goodwill Community Foundation it's GCF Learn Free and I'm adding it to the links they have a lot of good free tutorials as well. Yep that's one that so I've offered by our consortium too. A couple of people mentioned that someone else actually mentions tech boomers have you looked at that yet they're actually new it's a new website just created in the last year where they have a lot of resources and we're actually having an Encompass Live about that in a couple of months but have you heard of that at all tech boomers? No no. Well I don't know much about it myself yet because we haven't had the show yet but it's a free educational website for teaching people basic computer skills and some of the things they even have on there is things like how to buy things through bestbuy.com how to go watch things on I'm just looking at their stage now how to use espn.com so even not just you know technology things and they've got facebook linked in twitter so a lot of short little things too and it's also free. A lot of some yeah but we do have a we just happen to have them they're going to be on the show in a couple of months let's see what else do we have for questions ah someone has a suggestion they learned from the library of of in this I assume state library of Virginia someone who is unfamiliar about or uncomfortable don't know how to use the touchscreens like tapping things swiping things moving things around have them download and play angry birds that games or they teach them how and that's true yeah that how to swipe things how do you tap things how do you get into different sections that a game could help them you know a gamify it it's a great suggestion yeah any other questions from anybody you can type them in I've gone through all the ones that are on here so far I'm just making sure I haven't missed anything and while we just if anybody has any other questions type them in we'll grab them I would just ask Jennifer and Peter we usually do when we do the recordings put up the a link to the slides or I can put your slides on our slide share account if you have a preference for that um we'll probably share them and you can upload them yourself on your slide share that's fine if I can list anything if you have it somewhere in yourself that's fine too don't we don't right now okay no problem yeah email it to me afterwards we'll get that out to all you guys the only last question we have which is a little off topic are you the same Peter that worked on mystery science theater 3000 I am oh my gosh all right sorry a little fan girl and going on here I guess I just told the off topic are you going to be coming back with the new kick starter that they are doing that they just successful no I uh this is the working as a librarian as a second career for me so I've kind of left that that career behind and I've been asked many times but yeah I worked down at the show for the last three seasons original show and I'm very excited that it's coming back but yeah the name was familiar and also to someone else in our audience here yeah that is coming back now anyway so anybody have any last questions about libraries or technology to ask I just like to say to everyone this as a closing this has been a really good program for us and every day that you do this and you see how happy people are after they've downloaded their book it really makes your whole week so you know if you need an ego boost put this program and you'll feel it every week it is yeah some of the things you're mentioning I recognize from my own interactions with people here or my own family trying to get them and once my mother has gotten into she's all about Apple and iPad now and it's been very you know teaching her how to do things on there my sister and I both are librarians so she kind of bounces back between us for technology help but I am that's the same kind of thing as you get in the library as well that suddenly she's now doing things and sending me stuff and texting me and it's yeah yeah it's very good yeah they can get there so does anybody have any we're almost well we still got about five minutes left in the hour anybody have any of their last minute urgent questions they want to ask before we log off you will have do you have their contact information here I'm sure Jennifer and Peter will be happy to answer any other questions you have the slides and the links and the recording will all be available to everyone afterwards probably later this afternoon I'll have everything processed and ready to send out to you nope it doesn't look anything anybody has anything desperate they need to ask right now so I think we'll wrap it up thank you very much Peter and Jennifer this is great I just said at the beginning hoping that this is something that people can use to scale to their libraries I think you've given a lot of good information that they can will be able to do that and use a lot of these tips wherever they are because a lot of this definitely can be the smallest library person single person can put together something like this maybe for them it might only be one hour a week it's going to vary as you said depending on your population at your library thank you we're glad to be here yeah thanks a lot everyone for attending all right I'm going to pull back presenter control to my screen here now let's see if we can get up there we go and this is telling you this is our delicious account where I've added a lot of the links to here I'll go through the slides make sure I didn't miss anything when you guys send them to me and add them as well as I said the show has been recorded and will be available on our website over here is our Encompass Live website where we have our upcoming shows and down here right underneath all of them is linked to our archives where we post see if we have one that has recordings links and slides I'll go here so they'll be there for everyone to watch and as I said later today we'll probably get all that organized and everything will be ready to go so look for that there also join us for any of our other course our sessions we have coming up our shows here through December January and into February already are listed so please do go ahead and register for any of those next week on the show will be our best new teen books of 2015 this is a Sally Snyder who is our coordinator of children's and young adult library services every year at our annual conference does two different sessions best new teen teen books and best new children's books next week she's going to be on the show with you with the librarian here at one of our middle schools Elkhorn Grandview middle school talking about new teen books that they came across for the past year and you can see on our schedule the companion show for that new children's books will be on January 6th the first day of the new year so definitely join us next week for that one and for her other ones and anything else we have here and also if you are a big Facebook user and Compass Live is also on Facebook go ahead and like us over there so it gets loaded and I post reminders of when the show is starting like I did here we if you come in on the fly when our recordings are available I announced it on here as well so you can see when recordings are available if you are our Facebook user so if you are big on Facebook pop over there and give us a like to keep up on what we're doing other than that that wraps up for today's show thank you very much and we will see you next time on Compass Live bye bye


Hi, my name is Xu Wendell and I'm here to talk about the state of innovation. So there are five aspects of innovations mostly needed, including the public health, employment skills, natural energies and resources, information technologies, and the city and the society. So the main gaps of innovations mainly include the talents, also the policymaking issues, and most of the award is who is the right player into this innovation game. The private sector is actually playing a much bigger roles than before than the public sectors. Before maybe the local government would just jump out and making a policy or point a direction where the whole society is going to go. But nowadays with the technology development or with the more freedom of individuals and the private sectors, actually companies can be decisive like what kind of aspects they want to invest on or what kind of technology they want to bring into people depends on the mass public's needs instead of government's giving a directory policies. But after all, it's all about the encouraged difference and individualities in such a global sense of communities.