Thank you very much big tiger, you know What Jim does for the community is really amazing and it's really deeply appreciated by everybody who you know works with him in any capacity Brian Lyle asked me whether or not I was gonna be able to live up to the title of this talk I have to admit something the title of the talk is a trap Because the real point of my talk is not to show how rails can compete with Or can help enterprises compete with startups the real point of my talk And I hope that you'll agree with me at the end of this is that we make too much of a big deal about the differences between startups and Enterprises and that as a community we should be making active efforts to move into both communities equally. I Also apologize because I have an academic background and this is gonna be a little bit lecture style So forgive me if I'm not making eye contact except for this first dynamic bit You're gonna have to I'm gonna have to coast on that for a little while I also work for a big media company. So there are some pictures that will hopefully keep you occupied So my name is Jonathan Broad as Jim mentioned I'm a vice president of application development for Getty Images It is a pretty big company although pretty small by enterprise standards, which is my subject for today There are about a hundred other VPs in the company including another VP of app dev who runs the back office Development and asset ingestion and data migration teams My organization's niche is focused on creating websites that our customers use to find stuff to buy And that our contributors use to give us the stuff to sell External stakeholders in the language of my people We build and operate about four major sites and a number of smaller sites and a few portals whereby folks upload their stuff to us In addition to stock photography. We are really into news Sports and entertainment photos as well second only to the Associated Press in the US at present There's about 150 folks in my organization including quite a few in this room And I can't say I can't say exactly how much revenue we collect the all these sites because at the moment We're a private company, but I'm pretty sure that it's more than Twitter So how many of you wanted to be a middle manager when you grew up? It is it is Does anyone know why I can't there it is? Why can't I see my my pointer? Oh? Thanks. I'm good. I'm good. I've got it got it So The truth is nobody wants to be a middle manager, right just about 13 years ago Which is not a long trust me not a long time ago trust me on this I just moved here to Madison and I was driving for Union cab while putting myself through library school and volunteering part-time for the rainbow Books are cooperative if you're familiar with the politics of the institutions I'm sure you'll believe me when I say that this isn't exactly how I thought things would turn out My intention today isn't really to represent my company But rather to chat about what we've done and observe and what I've observed over the last five years from my own point of view Working for Getty I'm gonna start with some background to frame things up This whole thing is a Madison story through and through and wouldn't be possible without a few of you in the audience So I feel like it deserves a solid retelling here Then I'll talk about some of the problems that I found in my current position in the company and how reals is helping me solve Some but not all of them. So now we absolutely have to start this wonderful movie Now the sound is important. Okay So a while back I was a librarian or at least I graduated from library school The last library I actually worked out was the tech library I do it during library school where I was given a budget to buy books and teach myself Everything I wanted to know about technology. It was like a degree within a degree I walked out with my diploma and went on to work as an information architect and UX person for the state of Wisconsin That experience could be the subject of a whole another talk So if I sit to say that there are worse places to work than enterprises, but seriously never Never underestimate the value of terrible experiences because they make everything else seem awesome by comparison a Company in town named punch doc was looking for a redesign of their sites search experience There were local startup created by a guy who had sold a previous business in the stock illustration industry to Kodak Which then sold it to Getty actually After I left the state job I had been doing some contract programming and PHP and Java and a bit of Python I was also teaching some classes part-time back at SLIS UW's Library school down the way and this guy whose name was Miles Gershty and his wife was also getting her PhD there I had a reputation for knowing a thing or two about search and information retrieval So when she heard what her husband was looking for In that in that area she hooked us up. I Joined punch doc and went about went about redesigning the search experience Recommended a new search engine led the development of a controlled vocabulary and created a process for playing this vocabulary To externally key worded images We're the first in the industry to use a faceted search and browse interface and a lot of competitors copied us including Getty There's a lot of fun getting it all set up, but there are parts of it that's really started to grind Punch doc at the time was running on top of a custom e-commerce framework built by a local company Burby Networks bought by CDW Now to funk some of you may know it on top of their own proprietary Framework which in 1999 they'd intended to try out on us and then resell to the booming tech industry at the time Stop me if you've heard this one before Needless to say that didn't pan out and we were left maintaining a custom pre struts model to ask Kids they call it server-side MVC Java framework whose lines of code dwarfed the applications as the world slowly moved on around us We were stuck with a very over engineered application Although we did manage to push the research out it was a close shave It was pretty clear to me that we needed to get off our stack if we needed if we wanted to keep making changes Efficiently so I was in the middle of researching the relative virtues of tapestries struts version one web work and a few Python frameworks I'd worked with when I saw it DHH is build a blog in 15 minutes video It spent some time with Ruby previously and admired a strong object-oriented characteristics and its interesting block constructs I went so far as to write a Python library that mimicked Ruby's innumerable methods, but then I'd moved on So that video really blew my mind especially having spent a few years wandering the wilds of the framework was PHP lands and On top of a bespoke Java stack Immediately set about building a proof of concept where I took a fairly peripheral part of the punch-tox site shopping cart like thing called light box named after a thing photo photo editors use to look at negatives and Implement to the same experience in Rails using the same Oracle database as our Java app talk to Despite being brownfield and requiring some hackery to get the Oracle drivers working over Christmas break I'd done the work and I was hooked I Convinced the CTO at the time to keep to let me keep rolling and I hired some more people Dave Heffler Matt Margolis and James Redder all still at the company to help me convert our aged Java application to Rails We approached it incrementally converting one website function at a time. This is something of a theme in my life as you'll see This is a more professional promotional video for getting So no sooner had we gotten a good head of steam going on that project and punch-tox was acquired by Getty images They had hundred pound gorilla bar industry punch-tox had 60 employee employees by then I was the 12th or so Getty had over 1500 Interestingly, it was the first time Getty had ever acquired another image retailer. Usually they just picked up content companies like the CEO's previous business Getty's interest in our company was probably mostly in the customer base I've never actually asked because I prefer to believe it was my awesome team in the search experience we created Nevertheless, they were interested in using our business to experiment with a new IT architecture They were thinking about a service oriented one that would let them run multiple independent store funds while reusing their core platform To ingest search and sell images and other media So my team and I proceeded to shift gears and instead of integrating our models with the Oracle back end We rebuilt them to talk to the soap web services the teams in our new HQ in Seattle were building Soap is of course not something that rails normally integrates integrates with then or now Although if you go back as far as I do with it, you may remember we it used to provide soap endpoints Matt Margolis and I spent a week looking at using soap for our as a client before giving up and writing our own version of Saxon to treat The end point is a dumb HTTP service and extract the content with live XML In the end we did get shit to work and without this architecture and those endpoints I never would be telling you this story right now We launched the new punch doc after a few months. The first few weeks were rough The web services themselves were totally new and broke or slowed down quite a bit Working out how to deal with an unstable and relatively so web service back end and cope with rails as a lack of a good async Or threaded deployment option at the time took some doing But soon enough we were running smooth after the acquisition and integration was complete Everyone in the company was laid off except for me and my team from Getty's perspective. It was a big success To me it felt a little bit like watching your house fall down around you while you stand safe in the last remaining upright doorway After punch doc getty acquired another stock photo retailer Jupiter images And we got assigned to convert their photos comm property to use a web service back end as well The team in Madison also developed a framework for building white label sites rather quickly and built three sites for several sports leagues Like the NBA and PGA tour as well as several internal tools Elsewhere in the company a few more websites were built using the same approach including think-sock, which is growing quickly Currently Madison has 10 engineers managed by Matt Margolis Including Chris Johnson Jeff Carly James Redder Damon Butler John Rebar Joel Andrich Mark Anderson Josh Swan and finally Martin Marty Stitt who's actually been working with me Who's actually been working with me since the search project days? It's been a great team and I just wanted to recognize their accomplishments so Here my story diverges from the Madison teams a little bit The SOA experiment had gone very well for the business They were able to acquire and fully integrate new properties without having to shoehorn their entire custom base into the flagship Getty images site They were also able to enter new lines of business pretty quickly using the same approach which happened a year So later when we launched the think-sock site At the same time the architect of the SOA idea was promoted to CTO of the company and my responsibilities grew to encompass the web Services teams working in Seattle Eventually I was offered a promotion my current position overseeing all the web application services development including our search systems as I mentioned earlier This also required me to start spending half my time in Seattle Which I've kept up for the last three years for reasons that sometimes escape me Actually, it's really just because my wife is incredibly awesome in the work that she does here for the community in Madison is more important than mine Seriously, she was awarded awarded a human rights award from the city this year. I really don't know how she puts up with my corporate shenanigans What I found when I arrived in Seattle Taking on my new role with complex and I use that word advisedly So basically I found a lot of technical debt as you might imagine I found an enterprise monoculture and I found an organization that was coping with constant organizational and business change I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about technical debt as a concept because I think others have covered that base pretty well I also understand that there's a difference between deliberately acquired technical debt and just messy crap But I'm not going to differentiate Calling systems messy crap hurts people's feelings and the main point is that regardless of how it came to pass Bad code is on the books and in production and has to be measured as an ongoing operational costs to the business But I did want to say a few words on monolithic applications sex related to the talk that we saw earlier today in the sandboxes Which is that although they are petri dishes that have cultivated all the technical debt that I personally had to wrestle with over the years And by the way what I mean by monolithic in this case is just a web application that manages all of its external concerns All the external concerns of a business usually talking to a single database and there's bonus points if stored procedures or sprocks are heavily used over time these monoliths become a surefire way to Accumulate a lot of technical debt very quickly because if you're growing rapidly and a lot of compromises are because a lot of because you're growing That rapidly and a lot of compromises are being made to chase dollars It's just too easy to take shortcuts and break down any half-hearted attempt at information hiding and proper modularity It's really a sociology problem. Not so much a technical one But I do feel like monolithic apps are getting something yet something of a bad rap I've seen more than my fair share of them as we all have I'm sure and one thing to keep in mind is that the Reason you're looking at them and having to maintain them is that they survived the larval stage in some startup somewhere What's more one of the reasons? It becomes rather hard to work up the courage to change them Is there's a lot of money is flowing through them every day presumably because some somebody somewhere is finding them useful Although so I had bought Yeti some more time It had not solved the underlying problem as I hope I'll explain presently but it's worth noting that I've seen the code bases of quite a few of these sorts of applications over the years and The one thing I they're all basically monolithic in the sense despite being grown in complete isolation from each other and on diverse platforms I'm sure that there are similar to many many other applications out there solving similar similar problems for different industries than ours If left unattended rails will grow effortlessly effortlessly into one Although they have the same problems. They also have the same successes and it's hard to argue with that What it means in this context is that what get he had was a very successful monolithic application It was becoming root bound like a plant. It's left too long in a small pot What had made it successful so far was now hindering its further adaptation. So so it is great It's a great great pattern and in some way shape reform. It's a wonderful way to grow software It's basically the idea of the lots of little hills. It was being discussed earlier By so I don't mean whistler soap necessarily or the official according to Hoyle or Thomas Earl Enterprise architecture strategy We're currently using plain RPC endpoints with adjacent serialization Not everywhere, but mostly It is it is a wonderful way to keep applications cohesive and minimally coupled in a way that any rapidly in a in any rapidly changing Environment that's already running in important services for the business and tunneling a custom RPC protocol through HTTP Gives you some independence in terms of design and the stack of the applications talking via that channel But implied in a true service architecture some well real isolation between the code and the data behind a given endpoint When I arrived on the scene this had not actually happened And I spent a good deal of my time in the first year or so drawing attention to the problems that this was continuing to cause What made solving this problem particularly difficult is our flagship site was also directly sharing the same code DLLs It's all C sharp and the same databases that were being managed by the web service layer That meant then that meant that until it also started consuming the web services The protection of the service boundary would not allow us to change the underlying implementation or to extract and isolate the data Yet alone doing do a serious refactoring of it. We couldn't really start until we had already finished, which is a big red flag. I owe quite a bit to the flexibility the SOA strategy did give us personally But being able to rack up more technical debt is not a great thing if you don't have a plan for paying it down Let me pause and share with you a wonderful diagram from a wonderful book by Stuart Brand who founded the whole earth catalog in one of the first And which was and one of the first serious online communities the well and also the long now foundation It's kind of a big deal and his book how buildings learn is the best book on software design that has nothing to do with software design that I've ever read He talks among other things about the shearing layers that exist in buildings and the way that they buffer buildings from things that change at different rates For instance furniture and other stuff can move on a daily or weekly basis constantly adapting to human needs space planning non structural walls or partitions and such may change Every few years as tenants turn over Core services like heating and plumbing change maybe every 15 years or so depending Structure may or may not be altered or extended at all during the life of the building and at least in the physical world The jurisdictional site is more or less permanent often outlasting many buildings Although it might change as the laws of the land change and governments rise and fall a great book from a great quote from the book is Architecture we imagine is permanent and so our buildings thwart us because they discount time. They misuse time One of the themes of my experience has been that the way that is has been the way that our visions of software mislead us Both as they are being built and afterwards because they don't take into consideration how quickly or slowly changes will flow through them so I need to make a Couple architectural terms clear James Copley and actually makes a similar point to Disturber brand and his book lean architecture, which I also highly recommend He's the the person who came up with the DCI architecture. It's a lot of people in the rails community. You're talking about currently The most basic basic shearing layers that he identifies Specifically in the context of software. He describes as what a system does for customers versus what a system is Which means how it is organized to do the business of the customers What systems do changes more frequently due to market changes and opportunities? While the while what systems are changes much more slowly with the evolution or addition of new businesses and fundamentally new business models into the enterprise We call our web service dependent web app sporkles for historical reasons My boss basically spoke up at a meeting and said it's like us a portal and a spoke together the web services at the hub He lived to regret that I Think they're actually I've done that myself. I'll talk about that later I think they're a best understood as our user experience systems What we actually do for our customers in an interactive sense our web services fit Copley and idea of the services So here's another problem Even if we did manage to complete our SOA strategy and build a set of services around our core processes I was also increasingly alarmed at the duplication inside the sporkles. We were building on the SOA platform Even if we moved get images comm on to the services a lot of the work That our e-commerce business wanted us to pursue required parallel changes across all these different sites that each brand Had increasingly they were being unevenly applied because of the time constraints and therefore It was becoming even more difficult to coordinate these changes across teams leading to even greater inconsistencies between the applications for no reason The SOA strategy had systematically discounted the amount of sheer effort that was required to build and maintain these sites And also the volume of ongoing changes that the business required Also the fact that the ongoing changes the business required contained a predominance of work in the user experience side of things Not the core services Even if so has succeeded its effect would be blunted by this fact In a complex system you must optimize the whole and constantly seek information about the true constraints holding your performance back It's not enough to have a vision of the future Like Stuart Brand like that Stuart Brand quote about architecture in the physical world often our business It's all too easy for vision to miss or misunderstand the dimension of time applied to systems how they grow adapt and die Architecture both physical and virtual is ultimately a visual art and find its most natural expression in the diagram Visions of the future should be accompanied by stories about how we'll get there because stories enter our bodies through the ear and The ear is the organ that we have that is the most sensitive to time as we repeat the story to ourselves We will notice a problem much sooner than we will if we rely solely on an architectural diagram In short as we added the story of our experience building sporkles to the map of our service architecture We'd found a gap in it. It was incomplete in two senses both by being incomplete in its execution and in its concept because it had Underestimated the effort that the sporkles were taking to maintain One more Stuart Brand quote, which I just love Books on the history of architecture outnumber books on the history of real estate 1000 to 1 yet real estate has a vastly more influence on the shape and fate of buildings than architectural theories and aesthetics Well, I'm talking a lot about architecture. Currently what I'm really talking about is real estate So this is the second problem that identified when I moved to Seattle It's easy to look at enterprises as a class and point out that they tend to be insular as they grow the value of sharing information With the outside world decreases as they try to become more efficient the gap between what the systems do and what they are Grows wider and more complex mappings between them Are built to try to bridge the gaps? This insularity I've come to call the autism of idiosyncrasy It's a kind of natural Galapagos syndrome named after the islands Darwin discovered To have diverged quite a bit from any mainland flora and fauna due to their genetic isolation Startups have a very different problem, but display a similar malfunction They are under constant pressure to prove themselves. They share information with their communities in an effort to get noticed and survive Because so many of them are fated to fail. They magnify the differences they find between themselves and their doomed competitors Freud had a phrase that captured the syndrome well. He called it the narcissism of small differences It's also called bike shedding getting hung up on small details rather than big problems. I Lumped the programmer and hypermasculine side of startup culture under this label as well The stereotype of developers in this environment captures it well the rock star narcissist extraordinaire Underlying this narcissism is a fear of failure, which is compensated for by an aggressive by aggressive status-seeking and that is also monoculture So that's one way of describing a problem that I saw and struggled with Another part of the monoculture in our enterprise was the influence of a tool and technology vendors such as Microsoft Such companies sell you solutions to all your idiosyncratic problems comforting you There was just a little bit more with just a little bit of configuration unique to you these solutions will save you money This isn't actually totally impossible and for a certain segments of business problems that probably is the most appropriate way to go I Think that the total surface area of that sort of problem in most industries shrinking rapidly. However, and in the area of technical Problems that can only be solved by empowered and skilled engineers given a wide latitude on their tool chain is growing More and more technology is contributing to the top line of the balance sheet revenue growth in addition to its traditional place in the enterprise Saving money through automation aka shrinking the bottom line In short monocultures can feed monolithicism and degrade the system's overall usefulness for end users pretty rapidly due to low barriers for bad ideas and approaches to be accumulated The efficiencies of the monoculture turn into pathways for contagion Back to stereotypes in my problem at Getty my private archetype of the enterprise developer is a Roman legionnaire They can and will use whatever tools available to build a bridge and so the tools themselves have become less important They value the homogenous and disciplined environment that recognizes their skills and treats them with respect They're not really attached to a particular mission or purpose and don't care much who they are fighting or why What they love is a challenge and the opportunity to exercise their skills to build or tear down effectively and efficiently They want their stuff to run well and to be recognized as excellent by their peers Balanced with peers who are passionate about the user experience that can build amazing things in short order However, when combined with a monolithic app and a typically successful enterprise is isolation from the realities of the market and customer life This archetypal attitude starts to cause problems internal debates about design patterns and problem-solving styles spill out into the code base Although I have no time for startup rock stars the sort of developers who really care about the user experience are discouraged to give up trying The UI enters a negative feedback loop of neglect and frustration So I found my team's skill and delivering consistently great user experience is lacking The feedback I got from our user experience group was that they had to keep things simple for my teams to be able to reliably execute Their designs and I couldn't blame them. The front-end code was unorganized and hard to change They were actually many developers. There were actually many developers who cared about this and were top-notch engineers But they there weren't enough to keep to keep things consistent yet alone to Get together and actually improve things Many of the most passionate people working to improve our UI left to join rail shops Which you can imagine I found particularly annoying It's easy to poke fun at the oddities of these idiosyncrasic Organizations and their susceptibility to being sold a bill of goods by tool vendors Keep in mind though that the corollary to this in the startup world is architectural masturbation and that desperate That desperate need to differentiate yourself from your competitors by using the stack to juror and the latest no sequel persistent strategy Enterprise naval gazing is just the flip side of this attitude once competitors are no longer an existential concern felt on a daily basis Eventually naive optimism and ironic narcissism and in the same place, which is cynicism naive optimism ignores difficult realities that will be encountered along the way to the promised land and Cynicism ignores our ability to plan and aspire to change and the need to choose new paths despite encountering obstacles Monocultures both enterprisey and entrepreneurial breed cynicism because there's always a gap between the way things are supposed to be and the way that they actually are Think critically and strike at the root of your problem with conviction Then on the theme of constant change I'm going to quote Michael Nygaard in length, and I really recommend that you watch his His lecture called architecture without men's tape because it's pretty brilliant In every organization of any size the steady state is always Superposition a superposition of many different waves of change originating at many different places and sweeping through the organization at different speeds Some of the waves are technological and some of them are market-driven The waves of change travel slower than the structural change of your organization itself You will never reach the end of that series of changes Obviously I and the rest Well, this quote really says it all in my opinion. I've seen acquisition after acquisition including the one that I wrote into Getty I've seen major new lines of business launched and new business models added I've never seen ever any business model taken away though With all this change new code bases are added and stripped away people enter the organization and people leave Revenues grow and falter careers are made and destroyed and Thus evermore pressure put on these core monoliths and their monocultures and their roots deepen and push against their containers a lot Of value is left on the table when people code and ideas enter the business, but find no place Obviously I and the rest of the Getty Madison team are an example of an exception To some of this process of change in that the architecture of the organization extended itself to provide my team and I an Opportunity to try some new things This therefore isn't so much a particular problem that can be solved as is a constraint on any solutions that come into the enterprise I wanted to build a path for others like me to follow me into the business So I'm gonna talk about two solutions to the problems. I just described that I've been pursuing one is my own coinage called the Unisporcle and the second is the use of rails and other open source projects to try to Strike at the heart of the monoculture that I found a destructive So what the hell is Unisporcle? Basically instead of n number of brand named web applications which change rather often are theoretically unbounded all talking to each each one Talking to each one of the services We invest in web applications focused on one particular part of our overall function and functionality That n is much more constrained than the brands and most of the web apps that we've been building are similar enough that variation Within a single application is minimal Each Unisporcle becomes slightly more complex to be brandable, but that's more than compensated for by the reduction in the overall responsibility and increased cohesion In addition, we've been pursuing a rigorous standardization of our CSS HTML patterns and JavaScript in pretty much exactly the way that Roy the speaker Following me will describe as I know his work well, and it's inspired us directly Overall this change was targeted squarely at reducing the overall complexity of our e-commerce applications We can execute functional changes in a single application test it out on a minor brand for statistical impact and then deploy it across all of our Experiences of the flip of a switch Additionally, and this is really important We don't have to wait for getty image comm itself to be completely moved on to the web services to start refactoring the services Once part of getty images comm has been moved over we can have a rolling wave of change by replacing parts of that site with this new implementation and then Being able to extract data and refactor our implementation while other parts of getty images and the services remain bound up together One of the nice benefits of the services sporkle split was always the promise of being able to provide an opportunity to focus more on the qualities particular due to technical domain and this remains a benefit and then as And then adds additional focus on the particular part of our domain not spreading knowledge of Subscriptions or registration light boxes across a number of otherwise unrelated brand applications branded applications Instead of dedicated Service teams and diverse disconnected sporkle teams. We can have cross-functional teams that become more deeply familiar with a particular domain It provides another seam to decouple teams geographically too if we can collate both services and web app capabilities and minimize the coupling between functional areas By avoiding monolithicity in the web application area We also provide some opportunity to vary our stack framework or language as appropriate Just as the service boundary gives us a contract that can be met by different solutions This isn't an original architecture or anything I cobbled together the beginning of it from a variety of descriptions of other company systems including Amazon's In addition, we've been making key decisions about the design and integration points only as we need and we will continue to do so Continue to do so Nor is this just another Architectural fantasy the first of these applications is due to launch next month and we'll be starting to parallelize the work across multiple themes from there when complete perhaps by the next mad ruby conference I'm pretty sure that we'll have the highest revenue rail site out there. I think that's pretty cool Sites, I should say so let me mention some other stuff that I've worked on to solve some of the problems I mentioned particularly particularly the monoculture problem One of the nice things about open source is that it is not just It is just not homogenous in addition to rails which is obviously the subject of this talk I found that my most die-hard enterprise developers on my search teams are absolutely loving a recent change We made to start using the solar search engine and the Hadoop ecosystem This is an example of the true benefits of so whatever however you describe it and our ability to explore a new solution Domain safely below the service boundary We're also starting to get involved in submitting bug reports and I assume and I hope soon patches back to solar Just as we can use a best-of-breed solution in search even though it is not a net product I argued the benefits of using rails to build the unisporcles. I argued that it is more productive When we looked at the facts because we had a couple of rails teams to go by turns out that it does not It is not faster in our enterprise To use rails in terms of the kind of calendar time that it takes to to build a sparkle But it is more efficient and then it takes less people to do that which I attribute to leveraging all of the frameworks and what not that rails provides Obviously being able to do the same amount or more with fewer people is something that appeals to a lot of business folk Of course, it is a good framework and has many libraries to address common web application concerns It's easily learned by web developers of many backgrounds, which we've kind of proven at this point We've taken a lot of the dot-net developers that were very familiar with MVC style applications and I'm honestly astounded by how quickly they've taken to rails It took you know, they were basically affected within eight weeks with a little bit of help from Jeff Kissinger's Company and Jim Weirich It's also a great and dynamic community not just flattering you guys And I think that's really important because A community is really what gets you out of the trap of the sort of the autism of idiosyncrasy as well as the narcissism of small differences By choosing to use rail rails inside of Microsoft shop within the same within the same cross-functional team. It's a little odd In this case, I decided was okay because I had the support of those programmers who enjoyed the heavy contact with customer problems Those who don't like that are free to work in the services layer only Anyone who can and cares to you can move freely between the layers That's sort of the value of a cross-functional team that's focused on solving problems and not, you know What part of the stack that they're most affiliated with Then result is that we have a home for multiple types of developers where they can pursue their own vision of quality as They seek to add value to the business without compromising due to technical boundaries Generally open source is a great strategic antidote as I said to both the autism of idiosyncrasy problem and the narcissism of small differences We can all talk about the problems that we face in common without compromising on effect on Compromising our competitiveness the benefit of open source to startups is obvious But I believe we've only just begun to see the true impact of this on larger companies The future is a more open place of platforms protocols and communities by linking many firms together We've also gotten more involved in meet-ups around software craftsmanship and of course rails by sponsoring conferences like this one Overall open source combined with our SOA and unisporical strategy give us a lot of Room to acquire new teams new technologies and new businesses without relapsing into monolithism monolithism and monoculture too many monos so Despite kind of setting up Unisporical conversation and pointing in the direction of rails as a worthwhile stack I have to say that when I came down to it It was only the sudden influx of dozens of PHP programmers into my organization due to an acquisition and integration and Two conversations from my boss about my plan to use this opportunity to shift the web development focus Of my organization towards rails and away from dot-net for any of this to happen The integration of the developers happened at just the right time as we were just in the middle planning our approach to building the unisporical And I totally changed the economics of our ability to shift gears and focus more people on the unisporical in rails because I rightly argued that it would be quicker to Retrain PHP developers on rails and it would be to retrain them on dot-net or replace them The first time I brought this up was at the worst possible moment after a long and difficult conversation with my boss about a different matter I mentioned the opportunity and immediately regretted it because the flow of the conversation had just given He had in the flow of conversation He'd just given me a big concession and so he would want to take something back to compensate Which he did he closed the door on the possibility What I was arguing for would require his strong support and a lot of effort and at that point in time He decided it wasn't worth it. I Was crushed that after all my careful planning. I shot myself in the foot So much depends on timing and keeping options open until the last possible moment But 20 minutes after I left his office. He texted me and asked me to argue my case again for him next week I did that and that conversation went better. I Mentioned this so you can appreciate that despite all my plans and goals and desires The building of valuable things come down to loyalty trust and teamwork In closing I'd just like to say that even though nine startups in ten will fail and 99 and 100 enterprises might be terribly dysfunctional places to work That's no excuse That's just a small difference if your motivation is to make the world a better place for as many people as you can using whatever means necessary Find real problems look for every opportunity to solve them and above all be patient and stay positive but critical I found this great expression of the sentiment a while back and I'll leave you with it We have no choice but to go out among these alien powers which we create and to try to direct them to human ends


Asalaamu alaikum warahmatullah, welcome to another HOD live event. As many of you guys are very excited, you can tell I'm excited because this is I think over 40 events and the last time we were here 60, I think it was 61% or 64% of the people at the event matched up and that tells you something we did worked. So as you can see this room is full and there's a reason why it's full is because what we do is quite different than typical speed dating events. We do things differently and alhamdulillah this is what attracts people. In fact, believe it or not we have people from all around the United States including Canada in today's event. You know one of the most common things I get from people is it's hard to find someone who's serious about getting married, right? I talk to this person, doesn't work out, I talk to this person, doesn't work out. Well tell me how serious someone has to be to take a flight, to book a hotel and an Uber and all this other stuff just to come to see you. That to me is a sign of seriousness plus every single person here is signed up on half our dean which is also a point of seriousness. Why?  I don't think I can get someone to answer 158 marriage questions but you guys have.  We are going to do activities and we're going to have fun. So I'm looking forward to it as you can see I'm smiling and you guys seem to be smiling too. A little bit nervous because it's the beginning but don't worry by the time we're done you guys are going to have an amazing time. This room as quiet as it is right now listen how quiet it is. It's going to be super loud, lots of laughter and it happens every single event. Are you guys ready? I'm ready let's get this thing started. All right let's start. Bismillah


Okay, and we are live. Good morning, Todd. If you'd go ahead and check your test, your audio and visual, that would be great. Perfect. We can hear you. That's great. Good morning, Tony. If you would go ahead and check your audio and visual, that would be great. Number pace. Hello. Hi, can you hear me? We can. Wonderful. Hi there. Good morning. Good morning. Chair Thompson, while member rumble is going to try to connect in, he is reaching out from someplace with bad reception, so I don't know if you want to go ahead and get started at this point. Okay. I think in the interest of time we should get started. Hopefully he can join us. Good morning, everybody. I'm going to go ahead and read this on vacation. So I'm chairing today's meeting again. And so I'd like to call this meeting order. Thank you all for for attending today. I'm going to go ahead and read our provisional language we need to include on the agenda pursuant to government code section 54953 E and the recommendations of the health officer of the county of Sonoma. Member is in business improvement area advisory board members will be participating in this meeting via zoom webinar. Members of the public may view and listen to the meeting as noted on the city's website and as noted on the agenda. Eileen, could you please review how the public may comment on today's meeting. Members of the public who are coming in via zoom may use the raised hand feature and for those that are calling in press star nine to be recognized and you will receive a prompt to let you know that you're able to speak. Thank you and the recording secretary will now take roll. Member pace. Here. Member rent area. Here. Member Anderson. Here. Chair Thompson. Here. Let the record reflect that all members are present with the exception of member, we're very old and member rumble. Thank you. Okay, we'll move on to item two on the agenda public comments. This is the time when any person may address matters not listed on this agenda, but are within the subject matter of the jurisdiction. The public may comment on agenda items when the item is called each speaker is allowed for three minutes is allowed three minutes. I do not see any members of the public Eileen could you confirm that we do not have any other public comments at this time. That is correct nor were there any voicemails or emails for this meeting. Thank you. All right, let's move on to item three approval of minutes. Minutes from the May 26th the meeting have been distributed for your review. Are there any additions or corrections to these minutes? If not, do I have a motion to approve the minutes as written. I'll make a motion to approve. This is Tony. Great. Thank you, Tony. Is there a second. Thanks Donna. Thank you. Thank you. The recording secretary will now take a roll call vote. Member pace. Yes. Member Renteria. Yes. Member Anderson. Hi. Tara Thompson. Hi. Let the record reflect that the meeting minutes have been approved as submitted. Thank you. And now let's look at our final agenda. We have two items in the agenda. We have two event support applications. Today we have two event support applications. One is the beer city application that was continued from our last agenda. In May. So that is item 4.1, a request for beer city, Santa Rosa taking place downtown and out of place to play park. including marketing. Their anticipated attendance is 1,630. And they are estimating 50 room nights. I can go over any other details as needed, but are there any specific questions from the board about this request? Not about this request, but if you could review our overall funding status that we didn't have to report. Of course, yes. So currently we have $14,000 remaining in this year's budget for event support. At our last meeting in May, we approved funding for beer fest and Snoopy's totaling $12,000 and then previously back in March we approved 24,000 total event support. So that leaves us with 14,000 left. So did you say that we approve for beer city? Beer city. Is that a different beer event? Beer, no. Beer city is a new request this year. Happy, thank you. Any other questions? Otherwise we can go ahead and just put a motion on the table for this one and have discussion. Does anyone wanna go ahead and put a motion on the table for any amount of support? The requested amount again is 27,250. Obviously our remaining budget left is only 14,000. So I'm not sure what number you might be comfortable with starting at. I have one more question. Oh, sure, go ahead. Is there any other events on the horizon that may possibly ask for support before the end of the year? I don't know. Yeah, I know. I was hoping, I think Charlene is not available to attend today's meeting. I think she's out right now and Peter's not on the call yet. I don't believe. So I don't know what we might be anticipating between now and the end of the year in terms of events that the city is permitting. There are no other large ones that we normally see get this event support but that doesn't mean that there aren't others that I might not be aware of. Chair Thompson, member Rumble has just joined us. Great, perfect. Welcome, Peter. I don't know if you're able to address that question. Todd was asking if there are any upcoming events that we still might be receiving event support requests for? Yeah, I apologize, Charlene's a little bit closer to that question than I am. But I don't believe we have big asks sort of in the wings pending that are for this year, for 2022. Now, I do know that we've got some stuff lining up for early 23 and beyond, right? And into 23, but I don't believe that there's many pending for 22 at the moment. Can everybody hear me? I'm sorry, I got a really bad reception. Yeah, we heard you. Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that. So any, and before we do the motion any other questions we can try to address then we should go to public comment before we put a motion out. Okay, let's go to public comments for this item 4.1, Eileen. We do have Adam Ray, who is the event organizers hand is raised. Just one moment. Adam, you should have the ability to speak if you could confirm that you are able to see the timer that would be wonderful. Yeah, I can see the timer. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you so much. First and foremost, I wanna thank you for not having public comment on camera. It's very generous of you. I did submit in April and then again after the last meeting a proposal for the Santa Rosa Turkey Trot and that seems to have not been distributed to the board and that's fine. The reason I bring it up is to us, to my company that the window of time between Thanksgiving and February 25th or Bear City is kind of one big marketing window for us. We expect about 2,000 people to the Turkey Trot. About 40% of them come from out of town and we look at building engagement then and marketing to those people all the way through to Bear City on February 25th. We've got a database of about 3,000 people that have taken part in our Turkey Trots and Bear City is now actually a franchise of events that'll take place in Calistoga and Alameda. So, what we're describing in that proposal for Bear City has a lot of lead up to it where we really feel like we can effectively market Santa Rosa in February during February. I feel like the plan that we are offering is a pretty aggressive one. It's not easy to propose something like that in February and we thought of it specifically to address what we thought was a need in Santa Rosa to fill in that period of time and then we've got this good marketing surround. We are a marketing agency with expertise in advertising nationally. So the things between those two events, those two proposals, the idea of what we could build Bear City into in that real down months, we can deliver on those promises. And I thank you for considering the proposal and thank you for whatever support you can give and welcome any questions of course. Thanks, Adam. I just wanna jump in really quick and say the Santa Rosa Turkey Trot application is on this agenda. We'll be discussing that next. So we did receive it, it is on this agenda. Sorry, I was muted. Any specific feedback or questions following that public comment? Otherwise we should go ahead and put a motion out on the table for discussion. Okay, so does anyone wish to make a motion to support this event? I'd make a motion to support any amount of 7,250 which would be advertising and marketing materials if they outlined them in the request. Great, thank you. I'm sorry, how much was that? Sounded like 7,250. Down that. Correct. Is there a second? I will second that, it's about what I was figuring. Okay, I need discussion. I'll just add my thoughts that given our total remaining budget for the year is only 14,000. I think that's about as much as we can do given we have another request. So I feel comfortable supporting that. Tony or Peter, any other thoughts? Shall we take a vote? Sounds like it's time to vote. Okay. Eileen, could you please do a roll call vote? And again, the motion on the table is to support the Beer City Santa Rosa event with $7,250 for advertising and marketing. Absolutely. Member Pace. Yes. Member Renteria. Aye. Member Anderson. Aye. Chair Thomson. Aye. Member Rumble. Aye. Let the record reflect that the motion has passed that event support will be approved in the amount of $7,250. Great. Thank you, everyone. Okay, we'll move on to item 4.2. This is a request for the Santa Rosa Turkey Trot taking place downtown on November 24th, 2022. As Adam said in his public comments previously, this is the other event being put on by his company. They're requesting $7,500 for advertising, marketing, and PR. Their anticipated attendance is 2,000 people and they are estimating about 20 room nights. Are there any questions from the board about this request? There are no questions. We'll go ahead and take a public comment for this item as well. There are no hands raised at this time nor were there any voicemails or emails for this. Okay. I just want to make sure I give Adam an opportunity. If you want to make any additional comments since we are reviewing this event, please put your hand up. Otherwise, we'll just move on. Okay, go ahead. And Adam, you should have the ability to speak and if you would just confirm your ability to see the timer, that would be wonderful. Yeah, I can see everything. Thanks very much. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. Yeah, just a quick comment on the Turkey Trot. These are, as I said in the comments, the goal around the Turkey Trot, we have a large percentage of people who come from out of town. A good number of people, only maybe about 10% they come from out of state. So the idea and the plan, and obviously people aren't going to travel across country just for the Turkey Trot. But what we're trying to do is make sure that they have a choice to stay in Santa Rosa and we market that to them. And they're coming to visit family usually. And then two, that we create as many hooks into business. So people are spending money, specifically in Santa Rosa and in downtown businesses, in the lead up and especially during that week after when everybody's on the holidays. So that's a lot of what's in the kind of marketing plan behind the Turkey Trot. Thank you very much. Great, thank you, Adam. Okay, would anyone like to make a motion to support this event? Well, since our budget now is down to 6,750, we do have limitations there. Is anyone interested in putting forward something for that full amount and wiping out the rest of our budget or is there an ultimate idea there? Okay, I will go ahead and make a motion. Oh, sorry, anyone chiming in? Is that you, Peter? No, I'm sorry, I was just, I think about to do what you're gonna do and say, just to take us off to put a motion out there for either the remaining balance or something like 5,000 and can't really read the room, I'm sorry, but I'm open to, I'm open to certainly wanna support the event. I was headed more towards 5,000. Okay, well, Peter, would you like to make that a form of motion to do 5,000? Sounds like Donna would second that. Be happy to. Right. So move. I'll second it. And you'll second it, perfect, thank you. Okay, and any discussion, any thoughts from anyone on this? I think we all wanna support the event, we just have a limited budget left. Yeah, I have a thought. If there's more applications coming in the beginning of 23, wouldn't that come out of 22's budget like the year 30 beginning of 23? We're supporting that with 22's budget. So if Peter, if you thought there might be more requests for support for the beginning of 23, I'm thinking we should kind of read some money in the kitty in case something else comes through. So why would it be a favor of more along the lines of like 2,000? Well, I wanna clarify something. And I don't know if we can get this answer right now, but I'm still a little bit unclear on how in the past this board has handled the event requests that are in the next calendar year. Eileen, because you've helped process those payments, do you know would the event support for the Beer City event come out of next year's budget or how does that work in the past? So it's really dependent on the timing for issuance of the payment. Because if we're issuing in January, then there would be, because the city's calendar year is different than the board itself. So there will be additional funds in January. So if we were to issue the payment, then yes, that we could leverage the 2023, but if we are making that payment earlier, obviously, that would be coming out of the 2022. If I can add just a little bit additional context to that, we pay in a rears based on performance, based on the awardee providing a report and documenting and demonstrating that they spent the funds in accordance with the committee's direction. And so even if an event happened in January, it would necessarily be funds out of 23 budget, not 22 budget. Okay, so I might suggest then that we put an asterisk next to the support that was just approved for Beer City because it will be coming out of a new year's budget. That's the way I'm understanding that. So we really currently, before we take any action on the Turkey Trot, still have $14,000 remaining in this year's budget is the way I'm understanding that. That would be a good point. I wasn't tracking the date, sorry. Okay, so I mean, I think it's fine for the board to approve an event, event support. It's just a matter of what your budget we're taking it out of. So I think we can accommodate that on our end in terms of how we do our budget and when the funds are being issued. And so for the purposes of the board to make a decision on the next event support application, I think having in our minds that we still have $14,000 remaining in the budget is the best way to proceed. I am going to go ahead and ask Adam.  I'm happy to hear any additional comments that you might have. Yeah, cool. I was gonna just ask everyone, would any event like this, is there a sort of basic cost to set up and run an event, just kind of like a fixed cost? You know, even when I have to pay? No, every event is slightly different. I mean, in terms of like set costs for permits that they may need to use city property, things like that, those are all things that are somewhat set, but depending on where the event is taking place, how many streets are being closed, if any, there's a lot of variables that change the cost for the event. If traffic control is needed, et cetera. So no, there's not really one fixed number that applies to all events. Okay. And then they pay for sanitation, portable restrooms, permits. Correct. Say maybe $2,000, just... I really don't feel comfortable providing an amount of budget. Every event has its own budget. Okay. Okay. Looks like Adam put his hand down or Adam, do you still wanna add anything about the Turkey Trot? Yeah, can you... I was just gonna add more on beer city. You know, it is, I mean, my intent was to try to be as eager and early as possible with the board. If it's better to consider this in January, and if it's more likely to receive more support, we could pull back beer city until, you know, later in the fall or something. I just looked to the council of the board on that one. Yeah, thanks, Adam. I think, well, we just started the action on it. I feel like we already have decided to support the event. I think it's just a matter of the funding year that the funds, the calendar year and the funding being adjusted to next year's budget year. So I don't think that there's a need to take action to go backwards now unless the committee feels strongly that you'd like to reconsider that vote. Thanks. Okay. Seeing no thoughts on that, I think we'll go ahead and go back to the Turkey Trot. I'm not clear on exactly where we left off as there's still a desire to do a $5,000 event support, a motion for $5,000 for event support, or knowing we have 14,000 left in this year's budget, is there a desire to do the full 7,500? I'll go back to Todd. Todd, can you hear me? Is that, I think you had suggested more like 5,000 or was that? I think I was left. I kind of wouldn't, I'm not really a big fan of spending money for out of 2023's budget. We don't even know what we have. I think we're leaving the beer city funding coming out of the 2022 budget. But then again, I'm not applying that. That's not my area of expertise. I don't know if that's a possibility. But to me, this is your marked money that we don't even know how much we have yet. I'd prefer to spend what we know we have at this point and then worry, take it out of the 22 budget and then for events that are applied for in 2023, take that out of the 23 budget. Then again, I'm not a finance guy. I don't know how that works on the back end. That's just my thought. I would be trouble with 4,000 for the Turkey front. I think the motion is still five for the Turkey truck, right? So unless folks really want me to amend that motion, which I'm happy to do based on the majority, I think that's where we're at. Regardless of the question around what 23 budget will be, which will likely be the exact same as it's been for every year prior. Yeah, and I just want to clarify, okay, we already took action on Beer City. That's the event that's taking place in 2023. I think we can easily accommodate the amount of funding and recognize which budget it should come out of next year's budget for the Turkey truck, which we are on now. This happens in November. So that does still fall within this calendar year. And the motion on the table was 5,000. I don't think there was a second to that yet. Is there someone? No, I did second it. You did second that. Okay, sorry. So we're having a discussion about that now. That's what's on the table. I think we should go ahead and take a vote on that. And if that, or if someone would like to make another friend, an official friendly amendment to that, please speak now. Otherwise we'll go ahead and take a vote on the 5,000. Okay. I'll go ahead and take the vote. Member Pace. Yes. Great. Member Rinteria. Hi. Member Anderson. Hi. Member Rumble. Thank you. And Chair Thomson. Hi. Let the record reflect that the motion passes with an amount of support of $5,000 for the event. Great. Thank you, everyone. Okay. We have completed our event support application review. So we'll go ahead and move on to item five on the agenda, which is the approval of the draft 2021-2022 annual report and the 2022-2023 work plan. A copy of this document has been distributed for your review. Are there any questions from the board about the report and work plan? And I'm happy to share it on my screen and look at any sections of it as needed. If I may, I just want to give, I don't know if Rafael's on the line, but I really want to thank him for his work with Charlene and putting this together. And I don't think that there's very much that's changed or different than prior year reports. And I just want to acknowledge the good partnership there with the city. So thank you. Thanks, Peter. Yeah, Rafael's not on today. He's on vacation, but I'll pass that along. I'm sure he will appreciate that. All right, well, before we put a motion on the table to approve or otherwise, let's go ahead and call for public comment. If there are any on this item. There is just one moment while I share the screen and Mr. Fisher, you have been given permission to speak if you would confirm your ability to see the screen, that would be great. Yes, thank you very much. And a beautiful day here. Sorry, I need to turn this one thing off here. Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I wanted just to be sure that the short-term rental situation is properly represented in this report. Obviously, short-term rentals provide an income to the scheme. And so again, it's important that we note that there isn't representation on the SRT BIA Board. The additional required components of the report I would imagine should include the legal question that's in the courts now as to whether the SRT BIA is legally constructed and is actually being operated within the law. So that's a question that's going to be answered sometime in the next few months, apparently. There's also then a dispute about boundaries. So regardless of how that question is answered, certainly the pursuit of justice is going to require representation on the SRT BIA Board or perhaps a adjustment of the boundaries. And again, that this isn't mentioned in the additional required components is a little bit perplexing. But it's not unusual because we find that the financial presentation is really lacking. And as a side note, our research group outside of the short-term rentals more about government openness has embarked on a rent sharing index calculation. And we find that the SRT BIA and related activities rank really high on that. So we're going to need to get down into that as we've been doing over the last couple of years to figure out how we can adjust that for the public good. Of course, there's a lot of information missing about short-term rentals. And that's a little bit perplexing again because that is an important part of the quote unquote tourism economy and has all sorts of additional impacts. So it'll be interesting to take the equity flow chart and apply it to the short-term rental ecosystem. And we'll see that it gets very high marks indeed. So, you know, it's basically like that 2023 is going to be the rise of the short-term rental with solidification of fact-based regulations and processes that are good for our community, everybody's community, our whole city and our economy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Frasier. Great, thank you. It doesn't look like we have any other public comments at this time. Can you confirm, Eileen? I can. We have no additional raised hands at this time. Great, thank you. All right, do any board members wish to make a motion to approve the annual report and work plan? So moved. Thank you, Peter. Second. Tony seconds. Thank you, Tony. And Eileen, could you take the roll call? Oh, well, any discussion? I should not ask first. Any discussion or thoughts? Okay, seeing none. We'll just go ahead to a roll call vote, Eileen. Member Rumble. Aye. Member Pace. Aye. Member Anderson. Member Rinteria. Aye. Chair Thomson. Aye. Let the record reflect that the motion passes with a unanimous vote. Great. Thank you, everyone. That is the end of our agenda today. Unless there are any questions from the board, I will now adjourn. Thank you for your time.


This program provides an introduction to post-trial criminal proceedings. The focus of the program will be on sentencing. Two judges will assist us. Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, District Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, will present an overview of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and discuss mandatory minimum sentences. Judge Richard P. Conaboy, Senior District Judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, who also serves as Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission, will explain the approach used by the Commission in developing its guidelines. This program will also serve as an introduction to the more in-depth sentencing workshop that will follow. The workshop will build on the information we'll be covering to give you a better grasp of the Sentencing Reform Act and the intricacies of working with the guidelines. The Sentencing Reform Act, which we'll also refer to as the Act from now on, sets forth contemporary sentencing policy. The Act is codified largely in Titles 18 and 28 of the United States Code. Title 18 of the Code, which is concerned with crimes and criminal procedure, contains those provisions of the Act relating to sentences. Title 28 of the Code, which is concerned with the Judiciary and Judicial Procedure, contains provisions relating to the Sentencing Commission. Now Judge Taylor will explain the major components of the Act. First, the Sentencing Reform Act states the fundamental purposes of sentencing, purposes that guide both the setting of sentencing policy and the court's imposition of sentences in individual cases. Under the Act, the court's sentence should reflect the seriousness of the offense, promoting respect for the law, and providing just punishment for the crime. It should also afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct, protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational training, medical care, or other correctional treatment. To help achieve these purposes, the Act required the United States Sentencing Commission to develop a set of guidelines to be used by the courts in determining criminal sentences. The Commission's enabling legislation includes a number of congressional directives concerning the content of the guidelines, directives that express the basic policy considerations underlying the Act. For example, the guidelines are intended to reduce unwarranted sentencing disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar crimes. They're also intended to provide sufficient flexibility to permit individualized sentences when warranted by factors present in a given case. The Act requires the court to apply the Commission's guidelines in sentencing offenders unless the court finds that there exists in a particular case an aggravating or mitigating circumstance of a kind or to a degree, not adequately taken into consideration by the Commission in formulating the guidelines. In that event, the court may depart from the guidelines. That is, impose a sentence that differs from the sentence prescribed by the guidelines. Of course, in the event of a conflict between statutory and guideline authorized sentences for an offense, the statutes prevail. In other words, the sentence imposed by the court for a given offense cannot be greater than the maximum sentence authorized by the governing statute, nor can it be less than the statutory minimum in those cases in which a statutory minimum applies. The Act also requires the court to give reasons for each sentence it imposes and establishes a limited right of review of sentences on appeal. For example, the defendant may appeal a sentence that is above the guideline range or the government may appeal a sentence below the range, and either the defendant or the government may appeal a sentence on grounds that it was imposed in violation of law or imposed as a result of an erroneous interpretation of law or an incorrect application of the guidelines. The Sentencing Reform Act also abolished parole. The Act continues the U.S. Parole Commission in existence until 1997 to administer old law cases, that is, crimes occurring before November 1, 1987, the effective date of the Act. Judge Conaboy will now discuss the statutory mandates that control the United States Sentencing Commission and the methods used by the Commission in developing its guidelines. The Sentencing Reform Act gave the United States Sentencing Commission responsibility for developing a set of uniform federal sentencing guidelines. The guideline system developed by the Commission in 1987 was the first step in an ongoing process to assure that sentences are fair. Fair to both the offender and society. The Commission's mandate is to assure that such fairness is reflected not only in the individual case but also in the overall pattern of sentences in all federal criminal cases. All of this is to be achieved under a system in which the terms of a sentence and the reason for it are clear to the offender, to those charged with implementing the sentence, and to the general public. The initial sentencing guidelines for individual offenders were developed in large measure by using an empirical approach based upon past sentencing practices. The Commission analyzed pre-guidelines sentencing practices through a review of 10,000 actual cases and pre-sentence investigations. It also studied the differing elements of various crimes, the parole Commission's guidelines and statistics, and data from other sources. The Sentencing Commission's purpose in doing so was to attempt to develop guidelines that contained historically important distinctions among offenders and among offenses. After analyzing this information, the Commission developed a list of what it believed were relevant distinctions in creating the present guideline system. The framers of the guidelines tried to include all of the major distinctions that according to the data they analyzed made a meaningful difference in pre-guideline sentencing decisions in a statistically significant number of cases. In any given case that includes a relevant distinction not reflected in the guidelines, a sentencing court is permitted to depart from the guidelines and to increase or decrease the sentence as appropriate. The Commission continues to review the application of the guidelines and submits proposed amendments to Congress each year. These amendments result from comments from the judicial conference, from individual judges, probation officers, prosecutors, defense counsel, and other authorities in the field of criminal justice. In addition, the Commission relies heavily on the ongoing and detailed analysis by its own staff of thousands of cases involving defendants sentenced pursuant to the guidelines. Finally, let me conclude by encouraging your participation in helping the Commission in its continuing effort to achieve honesty and fairness in sentencing. The Commission plans to intensify its own efforts to determine whether the guidelines are achieving the goals set out in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. We welcome your comments and your recommendations based on your experience in applying the guidelines. The Commission firmly believes that the development of the federal guideline system is an evolutionary process that will benefit greatly from your active participation. Before we examine how sentencing actually works under the Sentencing Reform Act, let's define some of the terms we'll be using. At the outset, let's be clear what we mean by the term guidelines. Many people use the term guidelines informally to describe the entire product of the Commission's work under the Sentencing Reform Act, but the word also has a more technical meaning. One of the main purposes of the Act is to direct the Commission to issue guidelines governing the sentencing process. So the Commission's guidelines may be defined more precisely as a body of legal rules issued pursuant to statutory directives that are to be applied in imposing particular sentences. The Sentencing Reform Act also directs the Commission to issue policy statements. Numbered-like guidelines, but specifically designated as policy statements, these provide guidance on the application of the guidelines and the appropriate use of statutory sanctions. The Act directs the Court to consider any pertinent policy statement issued by the Commission in imposing sentence. In Williams v. United States, the Supreme Court held that where a policy statement prohibits the district court from taking a specified action, the statement is an authoritative guide to the meaning of the applicable guideline. The Court also held in Williams that the district court's failure to follow such a policy statement resulted in an incorrect application of the Sentencing Guidelines that should be set aside on appeal unless the error was harmless. The Commission's guidelines and policy statements are contained in this book, the United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual. The manual also includes commentary, which serves as an interpretive aid to the guidelines. Commission commentary often includes application notes, defining terms used in guidelines or illustrating conduct governed by them. In Stinson v. United States, the Supreme Court held that commentary interpreting or explaining a guideline is binding on the Court unless it is inconsistent with the guideline, violates the Constitution, or violates a federal statute. As both the Stinson Decision and Commission Guideline 1b1.7 recognize, failure to follow such commentary could constitute an incorrect application of the guidelines, leaving a sentence to possible reversal on appeal. Of course, the Commission's guidelines, policy statements, and commentary have all been developed to achieve the statutory purposes of sentencing as defined in the Sentencing Reform Act, so the wording of the Act itself should also be consulted in resolving questions of guideline application. Now let's talk about how to use the guidelines to determine sentences under the Act. We'll be referring to both the provisions of the Act and the Commission's guidelines manual as we do this. And we'll use a hypothetical bank robbery case to illustrate how the guidelines work. Chapter 1 of the manual describes the Commission's basic approach to the guidelines. It also contains guidelines that provide the ground rules for determining which conduct is relevant and the basic rules for applying the guidelines themselves. In Chapter 1, the Commission notes that two of the options it considered for a sentencing system are, first, real offense sentencing, in which the court sentences the defendant on the basis of all harmful behavior associated with an offense, regardless of the precise charge on which the defendant is convicted, and second, charge offense sentencing, in which the sentence is based only on conduct relating to the precise charge on which the defendant has been convicted. Let's use our hypothetical case, involving a defendant who robs a federally insured bank while armed with a pistol to illustrate these two approaches to sentencing. During the robbery, defendant Hanson brandishes the pistol, but does not fire the pistol or assault anyone with it. As Hanson leaves the bank, he is arrested by an off-duty police officer. $12,000 of the bank's money is found on Hanson's person during a search incident to his arrest. We'll say Hanson is charged only with bank robbery and is later found guilty of that offense. In charge offense sentencing, Hanson's sentence could be based on nothing more than his conviction for violating Title 18, Section 2113A, the bank robbery statute. The brandishing of the pistol and the amount of money taken would not necessarily be considered in determining his sentence. But with real offense sentencing, Hanson would be sentenced on the basis of all harmful conduct that occurred during commission of the offense the guideline addresses. So the brandishing of the pistol and the amount of money involved would be factored into the sentence. The commission describes the guidelines as basically a charge offense system with a number of real offense elements. This means that the guidelines first assign base offense levels to the specific crimes the defendant has been convicted of. The guidelines then call for the court to adjust the offense levels by factoring in certain frequently occurring real offense behavior, such as that occurring in our hypothetical case. To do that, the court must look at behavior other than that falling within the elements of the charge of conviction. As we'll see, introduction of these real offense elements creates the need for more fact finding at sentencing. Let's explore the Sentencing Commission's guidelines in more detail. We'll begin by examining how categories of offenses are established under the guidelines. Chapter 2 of the manual contains guidelines assigning numerical levels to specific offenses, such as drug trafficking, conspiracy to interfere with civil rights, or robbery. As mentioned earlier, these numerical levels are called base offense levels. The commission has assigned a base offense level to each offense in Chapter 2. As we've seen, the base offense level for robbery is 20. The base offense level is then subject to adjustments for specific offense characteristics. Certain commonly occurring circumstances associated with the particular offense. Our hypothetical robbery case involved the following specific offense characteristics. A financial institution was robbed. This increases the base offense level by two levels. The defendant brandished a gun. This increases the base offense level by five levels, and more than $10,000, but less than $50,000 was taken. This increases the base offense level by one level. When the base offense level for robbery is adjusted to reflect these specific offense characteristics, it results in an adjusted offense level of 28. Chapter 3 of the guidelines manual then lists five more generic adjustments, categories of information relevant to any offense that may warrant further adjustments to the adjusted base offense level determined in Chapter 2. For example, an upward adjustment applies if the crime was knowingly committed against an unusually vulnerable victim. A downward adjustment applies if the defendant clearly accepts responsibility for committing the offense. If other offenders are involved, the defendant's offense level may be increased if he or she played an aggravating role in the offense or decreased if he or she played a mitigating role in the offense. Other adjustments apply if the case involves multiple counts or a defendant who obstructs justice. Whether or not a particular adjustment applies in a given case depends in the first instance upon the court's findings. For example, whether the defendant has clearly accepted responsibility is a determination that the sentencing judge is in a unique position to evaluate as the commentary to guideline 3E1.1 recognizes. In making that evaluation, the judge exercises considerable discretion. In our hypothetical case, let's say defendant Hanson threatens a witness while his case is pending trial. The adjustment for obstructing justice applies, and Hanson's offense level is increased by 2. So Hanson's offense level, in other words, the category of the offense for sentencing purposes is now 30. Now let's discuss how the guidelines establish categories of offenders. Basically, the defendant's history of criminal conduct or lack thereof determines the offender category that applies to the case. Chapter 4 of the manual covers the offender's criminal history and criminal livelihood. It tells how to assign points to the offender's prior criminal convictions in order to assign the offender to one of six criminal history categories. The more serious and recent the conduct, the more points it gets. For example, in determining the defendant's criminal history category, three points are added for each prior sentence of imprisonment exceeding one year and one month. Two additional points are added if the defendant committed the instant defense while serving part of another criminal sentence or within two years of release from imprisonment on a prior sentence. Let's say defendant Hanson served 18 months in prison following a conviction for assault, and he committed the bank robbery within two years of his release from imprisonment on the assault charge. Hanson has assigned three criminal history points on the assault conviction and two points for committing the bank robbery within two years of his release from imprisonment on that conviction. The total of five criminal history points places Hanson in criminal history category 3. Chapter 5 of the manual determining the sentence includes the sentencing table and provides detailed guidelines for the use of all sentencing options permitted by the Act. The sentencing table is in the form of a grid with offense levels on the vertical axis and criminal history categories on the horizontal axis. The table is also divided into four zones, A, B, C, and D. We'll discuss the significance of these zones later in the program. With the exception of a sentence of life imprisonment, most combinations of offense level and criminal history category on the table result in a sentencing range expressed in months of imprisonment. By statute, the maximum term in any range that includes imprisonment cannot exceed the minimum term by more than 25% or six months, whichever is greater. However, the court may substitute life imprisonment for maximum ranges of 30 years or more. So the maximum sentence for ranges at the highest part of the table is life imprisonment. Now let's calculate the guideline sentencing range for our hypothetical case. We do this by finding the intersection of offense level 30 and criminal history category 3 on the sentencing table. As you can see, the sentencing table yields a sentencing range of 121 to 151 months for that offense level and criminal history category. This is the applicable guideline range. Of course, calculating the guideline range is not the final step in determining a sentence. Decisions must still be made about which sentencing options apply to the case and about departures. Let's review the court's sentencing options first. Sentencing options available to the court under the Act include probation, fines, restitution, and imprisonment. The commission's guidelines, policy statements, and commentary relating to these sentencing options are found in Chapter 5 of the Guidelines Manual. Let's look at probation first. The Act permits the court to sentence an offender to probation unless the offense is a Class A or B felony, that is, a felony carrying a maximum term of 25 years to life, and the defendant is an individual. Congress has specifically prohibited probation for the offense, or the defendant is sentenced to a term of imprisonment at the same time. Also, the Act requires that a sentence of probation for a felony offense include a fine, restitution, or community service as a condition, absent extraordinary circumstances. The commission, believing that even short confinement terms have a deterrent effect, imposed additional limits on probation. Where the minimum term of imprisonment specified in the sentencing table's guideline range is eight months or more, a sentence of probation is not a within guideline option, absent a departure. The Sentencing Reform Act also includes provisions for a period of supervised release following a term of imprisonment. Supervised release is not the same as probation. It is imposed in addition to, not in lieu of, a period of imprisonment. It involves a period of post-release supervision by a probation officer that helps enforce payment of fines, restitution orders, or other court-ordered conditions. The guidelines call for the court to impose a term of supervised release to follow imprisonment when a sentence of more than one year is imposed or when required by statute. The court may order a term of supervised release to follow imprisonment in any other case. Many Title XXI drug trafficking offenses require imposition of a specified term of supervised release. What about fines? In fact, defendants may be sentenced to pay a fine in addition to any other sentence imposed by the court. The guidelines say that the court shall impose a fine in every case, except where the defendant establishes an inability to pay or that payment would unduly burden dependence. Thus, under both the act and the guidelines, fines are not alternatives to imprisonment. Ordinarily, when a fine is imposed, fines may be within the range specified by the fine table found in Chapter 5, Part E of the guidelines manual. There are two exceptions to this requirement. First, when a fine in excess of $250,000 is permitted by statute, the statute governs. And second, when the guideline applicable to the offense in Chapter 2 of the manual provides different criteria for imposing a fine, these criteria take precedence over the fine table. The fine table is composed of ranges of offense levels and corresponding ranges of fines. Thus, for example, offense levels from 20 to 22 require a fine falling within the $7,500 to $75,000 range established by the table. Guideline 5E 1.2 I requires the court to impose an additional fine on the defendant, that is, a fine sufficient to pay the costs of the defendant's imprisonment, probation, or supervised release. This additional fine may not be imposed if the defendant establishes an inability to pay or that payment would unduly burden his or her dependence. Moreover, the total fine imposed by the court cannot exceed the maximum fine specified by statute. The Sentencing Reform Act also requires the court to consider the need to provide restitution to any victims of the offense in determining the sentence to be imposed. By statute, restitution, payment of money, or services to the victim of a crime for losses suffered as a result of the offense must be ordered as part of a sentence for certain offenses. Or it may be imposed as a condition of probation or a supervised release in any other case with an identifiable victim. Finally, what about imprisonment? The Sentencing Reform Act requires that in deciding whether to impose a term of imprisonment, or in cases where imprisonment is required in determining the length of the term, the court consider the nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the defendant, and the purposes of sentencing as stated in the Act itself. The Act also requires the court to recognize when considering the option of imprisonment that it is inappropriate to impose a sentence of imprisonment to promote the rehabilitation of the defendant or to provide the defendant with other correctional treatment or training. What about alternatives to incarceration? The Sentencing Reform Act allows the court to provide as a condition of probation that a defendant reside in a community treatment or corrections facility, be placed in custody for intervals of time, or be placed in home detention during non-working hours. The guidelines permit these conditions to be used in fashioning alternatives to incarceration in certain cases. These alternatives are best examined by referring to the zones on the commission's sentencing table. If the applicable guideline range falls within zone A on the sentencing table, that is, when the minimum term of imprisonment specified in the applicable range is zero months, probation is always available as an alternative to incarceration. If the applicable sentencing range falls into zone B on the table, requiring a minimum term of imprisonment of from one to six months, the minimum term may be satisfied by straight incarceration or by one of two alternatives to straight incarceration. First, by probation, provided that the court also imposes a condition or combination of conditions requiring community confinement, home detention, or intermittent confinement for the entire minimum term. Second, by at least one month of imprisonment, followed by a term of supervised release with a condition of community confinement or home detention for at least as much as the balance of the minimum term. In effect, a split sentence. If the applicable guideline range falls within zone C of the table, requiring a minimum term of imprisonment of eight months or more, probation is not available as a sentencing option. There is only one alternative to imprisonment for the minimum term in zone C, and it is again the functional equivalent of a split sentence. That is, a sentence of imprisonment for at least one half of the minimum term, followed by a term of supervised release with a condition requiring community confinement or home detention for at least as much as the balance of the minimum term. If the applicable guideline range is in zone D of the table, the minimum term must be satisfied by a sentence of imprisonment. While we're discussing sentencing options, we should also note that under the Sentencing Reform Act, organizations are sentenced pursuant to the same goals and purposes governing the sentencing of individuals. The Act requires that an organization found guilty of an offense be sentenced to a term of probation, a fine, or both a fine and a term of probation. In addition, depending on the offense involved, an organization may be required to forfeit property, provide notice of its conviction to victims, and provide restitution to its victims. Chapter 8 of the Guidelines Manual contains guidelines and policy statements for the sentencing of organizations. Let's consider departures next. Departures are covered in Title 18, Section 3553b of the Code, and Chapters 1 and 5 of the Guidelines Manual. When is a departure permitted? Section 3553b directs the court to impose a sentence within the guideline range unless the court finds that there exists an aggravating or mitigating circumstance of a kind or to a degree not adequately taken into consideration by the Sentencing Commission regulating the guidelines that should result in a sentence different from that described in the guidelines. The Commission says it wants judges to treat each guideline as carving out a heartland, a set of typical cases embodying the conduct that each guideline describes. But when the court finds an atypical case, one to which a particular guideline linguistically applies but which contains conduct differing significantly from the norm, it may consider whether a departure is warranted. The Commission refers to Section 3553b departures, those based on aggravating or mitigating circumstances not adequately taken into consideration in formulating the guidelines as unguided departures. In Chapter 5, Part K of its Manual, the Commission has identified 17 aggravating and mitigating circumstances that it has not been able to take into account fully in formulating the guidelines and may thus provide the basis for a departure. These include such circumstances as death resulting from the offense, disruption of a government function, the defendant's diminished capacity, and terrorism. But what happens if a case involves an aggravating or mitigating circumstance other than one of the 17 identified by the Commission in Chapter 5, Part K that may not have been adequately considered by the Commission? As the Commission recognizes, the very nature of unguided departures makes it impossible to develop a comprehensive list of them in advance. The Guidelines Manual states that any case may involve factors, that is, aggravating or mitigating circumstances that have not been given adequate consideration by the Commission and may warrant departure in the discretion of the sentencing court. So whenever such circumstances are present in a case, a departure from the Guidelines may be warranted. The Commission also refers to guided departures, those resulting from suggestions for departures found in the Guidelines themselves. Commission policy statements and commentary suggest a number of such departures. For example, Policy Statement 4A1.3 states that the court may consider an upward departure if the applicable criminal history category does not adequately reflect the seriousness of the offender's past criminal conduct. It then provides guidance for selecting the extent of the departure. The Act also requires the Commission to reflect the general inappropriateness of considering the education, vocational skills, employment record, family ties and responsibilities, and community ties of the defendant in recommending a sentence of imprisonment or the length of a term of imprisonment. The Commission's Policy Statements in Chapter 5, Part H, deem these specific offender characteristics along with age, drug use, mental and physical condition, military, civil or charitable public service, other prior good works, and lack of guidance as a youth, not ordinarily relevant in determining whether a sentence should depart from the Guidelines. The Policy Statements also say that several other characteristics, including the defendant's race, sex, religion, and socioeconomic status may never be considered in determining sentences under the Guidelines. This is a complex area and you will need to become familiar with the law in your circuit concerning the nature and extent of your discretion to depart. The Sentencing Reform Act directs the Commission to ensure that the Guidelines reflect the general appropriateness of imposing a lower sentence on defendants who provide substantial assistance in the investigation or prosecution of another person who is committed in offense. Commission Policy Statement 5K1.1 governs departures from the Guidelines on the basis of a defendant's substantial assistance to the authorities. Like Section 3553E of Title 18, the statutory provision allowing the court to impose a sentence below the mandatory minimum, Policy Statement 5K1.1 permits the court to depart only after the government has filed a motion to departure on the ground that the defendant has provided it with substantial assistance. You are likely to encounter frequent requests for departures based on substantial assistance. So in reviewing the manual, you should take a particularly close look at Policy Statement 5K1.1 and the commentary following it. You should also look closely at the case law interpreting these provisions. In instances where the defendant has cooperated but the government has decided not to file a motion for a downward departure, the court may still consider the defendant's cooperation as a factor in choosing a sentence within the guideline range. In Burns v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the defendant is entitled to some form of notice before the court imposes a sentence that departs from the guidelines. The court held that before a district court can depart upward on a ground not identified as a ground for upward departure, either in the pre-sentence report or in a pre-hearing submission by the government, Rule 32 requires that the district court give the parties reasonable notice that it is contemplating such a ruling. In a footnote, the court in Burns indicated that under Rule 32, the government is entitled to similar notice of downward departures contemplated by the sentencing court. The court left the question of timing of the notice to the lower courts. Most appellate courts have held that the requirements of Rule 32 are met when the factors warranting departure are identified as such in the pre-sentence report or when the sentencing court advises the defendant before or at the sentencing hearing that it is considering departure. In either case, the court must give the defendant an opportunity to comment on the proposed departure before imposing sentence. Departures play a critical role in guideline sentencing. If judges conscientiously exercise the power to depart in appropriate cases and give adequate reasons for departures, they will serve the interests of justice in two ways. First, they will sentence appropriately in cases where a particular guideline linguistically applies but where conduct significantly differs from the norm. And second, they will identify possible imperfections in the guidelines and thus provide the commission with the feedback it needs to fulfill its statutory mandate to refine and improve them.


Is that the best running back group in college history? Yeah, arguably, yeah. And it's a post-second with Alabama, post-second. I think y'all might have had it, though. We definitely had it. There's one in two. Georgia number one, Alabama number two. Like, look at that running back room right there. It's pretty crazy.  That was absolutely insane.