This meeting is now being recorded. So, again, welcome to today's webinar brought to you by the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center or the ARC. Please go ahead and type in the chat window and let us know who you are and where you hail from. We'd love to hear from you. So, very briefly, I'm Caitlin Howley and I'm fortunate enough to serve as the Associate Director of the ARC. ARC is one of 15 regional centers funded by the US Department of Education to provide capacity building technical assistance to state departments of education. ARC serves four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. So welcome, y'all. And now I'm really thrilled to introduce you to our presenters for today. Dr. Hover Harman is one of the nation's leading experts on public education in rural America. He's currently an independent consultant and is the co-director of the Rural Math Excel Partnership, which was awarded an I-3 grant from the US Department of Education. It's operated by Virginia Advanced Study Strategies. He's also held numerous state positions. He was Executive Assistant to the Superintendent of West Virginia. He was the Associate Director and Acting Director of the ARC Clearinghouse on Rural Education in Small Schools. His work's been honored by the National Rural Education Association and the Association of Educational Service Agencies. And he's been very widely published in places like the Rural Educator and the Journal of Research in Rural Education. He earned his doctorate from Penn State University. I'd also like to introduce Richard Lehmann, who is an education consultant right now. He's worked at the West Virginia and Virginia Departments of Education for about 23 years. He's been the Director of Secondary Education, the Director of Regional Services, Deputy State Superintendent, Director of the Region 1 and 8 Governor's Best Practice Centers, and Director of Teacher Quality Enhancement, among lots of other stuff I've gone by the night. His experience also includes local education agency leadership. He's served as the Chief Academic Officer for Roanoke City Public Schools and also as the Superintendent of Schools for King and Queen County Schools, which is a rural Virginia division that serves about 850 kids. He's also taught on the secondary level and middle school. He's driven a bus when needed and has taught for the Virginia Community College System and Marshall. And he earned his doctorate from UVA. So we're really delighted to have both of these folks here today to talk with us. They both have real deep experience. Just so you have a sense of where we're going today, these are our webinar objectives. They shouldn't be any surprised to you. It'll look very familiar from the registration page. First is to consider the institutional capacity of rural school districts. Second, to learn about the instructional support capacity of rural districts. Third, to examine some common capacity limitations of rural places. And then finally to lay the groundwork for our second webinar, which is going to focus on how to differentiate support to rural districts to overcome capacity limitations and also to help them better implement state and federal initiatives. So let's get rolling. I'm going to turn things over to Hobart now. Hobart, it's all yours. Thanks, Katelyn. It's a privilege, certainly, to be able to participate in what obviously is an example of how much of technical assistance in the future to public schools in rural America will be through distance learning. And that's good news. I know from experiences with school districts recently in Montana and Pennsylvania and Virginia and other places that people enjoy the face-to-face meetings. And we need that, obviously. But we have a tremendous issue with access to up-to-date information, and so this obviously also illustrates one of the ways that capacity limitation will be addressed in the future. I would like to talk briefly about institutional capacity of rural school districts. Obviously we hear a lot about the weaknesses, or think we do, and each person probably has in their mind what our capacity weaknesses in rural school districts, and we also know that rural school districts or divisions, as they're called in Virginia, have differing capacities depending on where you're located and, of course, the wealth of the state, the capacity of the State Department to give assistance, and other kinds of issues. The work I'm referring to, particularly as the work that Bob Stevens did in 1999 for the rural, especially, that I directed on behalf of the 10 regional laboratories, we've asked Bob to write a document that could help lay out some of the key characteristics of rural school districts from the standpoint of how they can or can't pursue rural school improvement initiatives. And, of course, as we know in the late 90s, and that was a time when there was major education reform, and all of us could quickly agree that the reform wagon hasn't stopped. In fact, there's more and more been thrown onto it. At a time no doubt when there's also terrific stress occurring, not only in urban places, but particularly in rural, from the recession, manufacturing jobs that once were prominent in rural places, of course, have moved overseas, or jobs have been replaced by technology. So the reality is, what was commonly considered capacity limitations pretty much because of the small-scale kinds of institutions that existed in rural America, they now are under particular stress because of the changing in the local economy as it tries to react to the global economy. And some people, obviously, would argue that it's difficult to have viable school systems if we don't have viable communities in rural America. So it's a symbiotic relationship, and in just a minute I'll explain partly why those of us in education deal with those limitations in rural school systems. These, in some part, also are outgrow of the capacity limitations that exist in rural places. So we're in a time of great change. Public education is under numerous kinds of efforts to improve education and, of course, accountability has increased drastically. Some of the strengths, though, that are natural to rural America, or schools in rural America, and these have changed some. And of course, here we know we're talking about particularly schools in the four state regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, and they differ a lot, as we all know. But some strengths that typically exist in rural school systems, less bureaucracy is usually common. Now, there again, as we talk about rural school systems, though, there are considerable differences. And so in county-wide school systems, there may be more central office kind of bureaucracy than might be in smaller ones. But the point is generally, there's less bureaucracy compared to urban and suburban schools, and therefore decisions can be made more quickly and involve a large number of people and people in the community or other stakeholders. And that might not be common in some non-rural places. There's a lower per pupil-teacher ratio, which some will argue, obviously, is better for students, particularly those in high-poverty locations that need additional assistance. So people know each other, and you'll commonly hear people argue that, therefore, teachers know students and their families and social capital also in the community can contribute because of this low pupil-teacher ratio concept. A lower dropout rate, typically, although we know the last reform education producer reported a few years ago that said that the dropout in rural America was about 25 percent of the schools with high dropout rates were located in rural America. Generally, however, those dropout rates are lower compared to urban places, and the dropout rate statistic tends to cluster in certain places across the country where there's high poverty. And so anyone in states that have circumstances in certain locations of their state may well be dealing with schools that have dropout rates, but commonly they're lower in rural areas than they are in urban. There's a greater fiscal effort usually among rural schools. There's the arguments of how the wealth is less in rural places, which by necessity then requires greater fiscal effort because of the small population, so that while there may be inadequate dollars, the reality is there's a high fiscal effort usually contributed by the local people to support public education. Greater parent involvement exists in a large number of rural places because communities are so close-knit, and therefore parents can be involved, however, we clearly recognize that in certain places, particularly with high poverty, getting parent involvement can be a serious issue and getting the kinds of involvement that may be needed, but generally there will be greater parent involvement in a small rural school kind of location. And obviously because of the community and its relationship to the school, in fact where the school may be the biggest and most valued asset, it will usually have more community involvement of a variety of stakeholders. So, also though, and these are the issues that become important as we try to deal with the education reform initiatives that are important to improving teaching and learning for students, a host of items exist, and Bob Stevens pointed these out, then I talked with Bob a couple days ago about these. Bob lives in Iowa now, he's retired, and obviously some may be changing in some fashion, but generally the capacity limitations still exist. We see them here in the PowerPoint, the fewer management support systems that exist in rural places to carry out ed reform kind of initiatives. Greater per pupil cost, obviously, because they don't have economies of scale because of the small enrollments. Higher number of teachers typically are teaching outside the major specialty at the secondary level, and this has become more and more important as we look at the requirements for students having education beyond high school, but perhaps less than baccalaureate, particularly if they're pursuing the technician occupations which are a natural transition from the old blue color economy in rural America to a higher scale, higher wage kind of economy. Less breadth and depth in the secondary program, especially in science, math, and languages. There are fewer programs for students with disabilities, although those have improved some. There are still serious issues as the capacity limitations of dollars and personnel limit the kinds of services that we'd all hope that students with disabilities could receive. There's less availability of telecommunications technology and other access to broadband. This has been helped some with the e-rate and other initiatives. There's usually less physical capacity in general and, of course, less specialized space and equipment for science, math, and languages. So the issue of schools that are perhaps in buildings that are obsolete or cannot have the technology or lab space or telecommunications equipment to connect students to the internet and other resources are still prevalent problems. Less availability of planning support services. Typically, it's who can you get to volunteer for something that can squeeze time into putting on another hat to perform a needed service for kids or for the school system. So the availability of planning support services are minimal usually. And, of course, typically there's fewer evaluation support services in these areas. So the programs that are beneficial to rural schools need to already be based on evidence that they are productive because there's few people in the local school system that have the time to pursue finding those kinds of things. So the institutional capacity of rural communities, as I mentioned before, are connected to prevailing local economic conditions. And these have changed. However, traditionally there is lower per capita income and it's commonly understood in rural America people will be income rich, will be property rich and income poor, especially if they're in agricultural areas. So people may have assets, own land, but that land does not generate income that's adequate. And, of course, in places where manufacturing previously existed and people now are laid off or where there's only one person working and now working at a service industry kind of job that pays less, the income per capita is lower. Higher poverty rate in rural America is common compared to urban. Population loss has occurred and many of you may have seen in the news in the last two or three weeks that for the first time in history, the 2012 census data reveals that overall population in rural America decreased. Typically, certain locations in the country lost population. However, the overall population in rural America increased annually. For the first time, it's noted that the population decreased. So this is a serious issue, particularly for states that are in, with populations that are decreasing. And, of course, you notice the population composition is changing. Where there are, where there is an outmigration of youth, consequently an increasing disproportionate share of elderly in the population, and there may be increasing minority representation in the population, Hispanics or others, and that migration may typically relate to the kind of economy that exists there. And the effects of the national economy, of course, restructuring has had significant consequences in counties that the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service labels as farming dependent. Many of those experienced terrific declines in the 1980s, and there's been some improvement in recent times, but overall the farming dependent counties have faced significant change based on the global competition. The manufacturing dependent counties I've already mentioned in wind in Virginia in the south side area where this project I am co-director of is focused intentionally on preparing high school graduates to have the kind of math fields that enable them to pursue at least a technician level occupation. And in the farming area, of course, where there's been tobacco and it no longer exists, that's a place of considerable stress there. The mining dependent counties in Kentucky and West Virginia and in the southwestern part of Virginia, those are all under considerable stress and being originally from the coal fields in southern West Virginia, I know plenty of relatives and people that understand how that world has changed and what it means for students and for schools. And, of course, persistent poverty in non-metro counties, meaning that over decades, four decades or more, there has been persistent poverty in certain counties of rural America. And for example, forward in the fifth congressional area in Kentucky, we know has some of the poorest counties in America. So the challenges for school systems and those who intend to help them implement ed reforms and so forth have considerable challenges and that's why these capacity issues become so important. And along with those then, of course, are these capacity barriers of rural local governments. Some of the most common ones are geographic isolation and as we look at the four state region that we're talking about today, it varies, of course, in topography but certainly in the mountain areas there's more isolation. Roads are better in some places than others and the people have certain understanding, more ease and relationships that are different and technology is making a difference of exposing the younger generation obviously to the so-called outside world but geographic isolation affects transportation and a whole host of other issues. Low population density, I've already mentioned before, this is an issue of course that local governments with the small scale institutions, defined in part by low population density, have capacity limitations. Mobility of course is an issue of transportation and whether people can get around, they depend more on their own vehicles and by the way this, of course, as we all know, is drastically impacted with high gas prices. So in rural America, people who commute long distances to get to an urban place to have a decent job, meaning a job that gives you a decent lifestyle of an income enough to feed yourself and family, the issue of high gas prices greatly affects the transportation cost. Lack of fiscal resources that exist in these local rural communities and in many cases that relates to the next item of expertise in human resources, burnout is very common among leaders in rural America because it takes considerable effort to get initiative off the ground and consequently the same people tend to be the leaders and they tend to burn out as well. Personal familiarity is an issue of where people know each other and that has some limitations at times when there are issues that need to be addressed, changes that need to be put into place, but some history background or people of a certain characteristic may not be adequately involved and serve well. Resistance to innovation is commonly noted for rural people in that they tend to be more traditional, they need evidence of change, they tend to hang on to the past as some people would argue they're parochial and provincial, all of those of course classified as resistance to innovations. The reality is as the extension service has proven with agriculture they had to provide demonstration plots in communities where farmers were, where they could see the result rather than thinking that because it was done somewhere else it would work there. So that's an issue of course for assistance for local schools as people argue that innovations in New York City and Chicago and LA and other places that have certain understandings of capacity needs, they don't play out well in rural places where the capacity limitations exist as we describe here. And then lastly a lack of ancillary services really means there are not the government programs and other support services in rural places. Typically it is the family, the church or other kinds of entities that are based on local community kinds of involvement rather than specific formal kinds of programs that are available in other places. So the institutional capacity of rural places have obviously a bearing on the school systems what students have access to and the kinds of assistance they might need. Let's pause to see if there are any questions. I'm going to unmute the phone line. All guests have been unmuted. So please feel free to speak up if you want to ask a question or make a comment. Alternatively you know please feel free to continue to use the chat box. Are there any questions at this point? Caitlin this is Kimberly. Just kind of building off of Susan's comment in the chat box about sequestration. So beyond what Susan is noticing, do the two presenters have they been hearing anything about how rural districts are going to be impacted? This is Richard. I think from what I've heard the big impact could be the loss or reduction of federal funding for different federal programs. Nobody's really sure yet exactly how that's going to impact rural divisions but I think it could have a significant impact on any of programs that are funded through the U.S. Department of Education or the U.S. That's especially true with school improvement kind of funds. Those that we have traditionally designated in Kentucky to go straight to the schools for improvement projects, etc. We know those are hit by 9%. And so it has to do with where states assign the funds, you know, where where we distributed them. It just hit hard in Kentucky because that's been a focus to try to get good leadership development, that kind of thing going on and particularly professional development around math instruction. We have severe issues in those areas. So that's why my comment about this proportion. It may not, it just depends on where the states have directed the monies to begin with. This might be a good time to also mention when cuts come to rural areas they typically have a disproportionate impact. That is usually rural school systems are more dependent on state funding than local and of course federal dollars are used in specific ways. The reason this becomes an issue is because as a state tries to provide technical assistance to build capacity in a district using federal funds, you can just almost be assured if those funds are eliminated the sustainability of that capacity building ceases. Right. And unless the look because it's very unlikely locals will pick it up. And of course the state was using the federal funds for the purpose of technical assistance to start with. So it obviously presents a state with a problem. So the issue of building capacity in leadership is a wise idea. It also needs to be in place long enough to get people prepared. But when those cuts occur the issue of sustainability in an improvement is very much at risk. Of course, if those cuts cause cuts by the state in funds as well, then particularly there will be disproportionate impacts as typically rural school districts have less margin for cuts in their budget because they are more reliable or more However, we have a question from the chat box from Laura. As we prepare for the impact of sequestration, what strategies can be used to help ease that impact, if anything? And that's a huge question. No pressure. Well, and I think part of it, though, is in the answers we just heard. Depending on how a state, in this case, I think talking about state departments, depending on how they have used flexibility and targeted their funds, and also integrated those in with state initiatives for which there is state dollars, then the impact can be different. I guess what I was pointing out is in particular, where a state uses federal dollars and that's the largest share of the the technical assistance is being given, then of course, the credit is going to have a much more devastating kind of effect. Most states that I'm aware of, therefore, try as much as possible integrate their support system of technical assistance and dollar use if they can in a way such that if federal funds and hopefully we're talking about the source of federal funds not being totally eliminated, but being cut. So the integration of state and federal funds in some way try to offset a devastating kind of impact, but it's going to depend on how the state arranges their funds. But there's some strategic things that states could do. Okay, that's helpful. All right, well, next up is Richard. I'm going to go ahead and mute the lines again. We'll have another chance to have some discussion in a little bit. So one second here. All guests have been muted. So Richard's up next. He's going to talk some about the instructional support capacity needs for all districts. So Richard, take it away. Good afternoon. I'm really happy to join the group this afternoon and pass along some information regarding the instructional support capacity. I'm only looking at this from two perspectives, one, from having served as a rural superintendent and also having worked in two state departments education, providing instructional support. So it's kind of a joint effort here in terms of looking what what the issues are. I was lucky enough to be involved in the governor's best practice centers when they are being created in Virginia. And one of the things that was needed was identifying what were those specific instructional needs that were important and valued in local school divisions. And so what I did was design a dissertation study in 2000 that focused on a survey that went to local school superintendents and asked them to identify those specific instructional needs they felt that they really could help and assist them in implementing the new state standards which were being put in place at that time. The study used some of Dr. Stevens 1979 framework for the National Survey he conducted across a number of states, as well as Danielson's four domains professional practice to determine the local instructional needs. Survey was sent to 133 school vision superintendents. There was about a 72% return rate. The findings of the survey were consistent across school districts that were rated in terms of poverty levels, size and location. I think it's important to state that in Virginia in 1995, the state Board of Education adopted the new SOLs. And then in 1997, 98 adopted state testing in grade 358 and in high school. And then cut scores were established. And they were field tested in 1997. This first test were administered in 1998, 97. And then the accreditation standards were revised so that all schools had to achieve a specific benchmark on those state tests in order to remain accredited by 2006. So there was a real strong focus on how do we improve instruction to maintain our state accreditation. The four areas that came out consistently across the survey were the following. First, assisting with curriculum development process. They were really interested in planning and writing customized standard based lesson plans for classroom implementation to meet the local needs. Very important to meet the local needs. They really didn't want a cookie cutter lesson plan. Teachers knew how to develop lessons plans. But the standard based approach for lesson plans hurt many divisions in that they just felt like they weren't ready to do that. This approach really involved four components. One was addressing the scope of the standards. Anytime you look at a specific standard, it usually has anywhere from 10 to 12 enhancing components or enhancing skills that are covered by that standard.  Second, there was a certain sequence to the standards. And when a teacher is developing that lesson plan, they need to be aware of are there enabling skills that need to occur prior to this standard? Or are there enabling steps to the standard that need to be part of an instructional strategy? Third was articulation. How do these standards link together with other standards? How are they hooked together between grade levels and twink schools and courses? And then finally, alignment. This was one of the hardest things I think for many teachers was what's the domain level, the level of learning that the standard is written at? And how can I make sure that my instructional strategies and curriculum is written at the corresponding level so that I'm teaching by teaching a knowledge level, I'm actually using strategies that relate to knowledge. Second aspect of the curriculum and development process that superintendents were wrestling with was identifying web-based instructional resources. At this time, more and more websites were available, a variety of them at different levels of expertise and different levels of use. And many superintendents felt that teachers simply did not have time to research, review, suggested sites, as well as identify appropriate alignment with those sites in terms of what they were trying to teach. So this was a time issue. And they just felt they did not have the staff, or in many instances, the expertise to go in and do the searches across the four content areas that could assist teachers in the curriculum development process. Second was exploring models of best practice for teaching and learning. This dealt with identifying and implementing best practices for standards aligned teaching strategies. You know, the best practice term came from the legal and medicine profession. It's been around for some time. But what it really was, what are the proven practices that will have the highest success rate for the most children or people that are being served? Many teachers knew how to teach certain concepts, but they weren't aware of what is the best strategy, what can be the most successful strategy? The other aspect of this is a strategy that may work in an urban or suburban area, where you have additional resources, where you have children who were well prepared to learn that strategy may fall flat in the space in a rural area. Superintendents wanted strategies that would address the needs of their students. Don't talk to me about what happens in a school division that has 184,000 students when I only have 850, and I might only have less than 300 in elementary school. I want to know what's going to work in my school so that I can be the most successful with my students. The third component was programs for at-risk children. And here we're identifying proven practices to serve at-risk children in a rural school division to meet and exceed state expectations. The focus is on children not on a schedule to graduate from high school or to the next grade level. A lot of research suggestions associated with low SES, attendance issues, behavior problems, a large number of children living in poverty and rural issues. I can tell you firsthand, when you have a free and reduced lunch rate of over 65%, it has an impact on the number of children who are in an at-risk situation. The number of children that are failing to be on grade level by third grade can impact their success. And then you get to the upper grades, the number of children that need additional services in the rural setting to make sure they graduate on time can be an unbelievable task and an additional cost to the local school division. And finally, enhancing instruction, content specific techniques and materials. Many superintendents were looking for specific curriculum, instructional strategies and math, English, science and history to meet the specific needs of their students. And additional resources can enhance and extend and reinforce the learning, online websites, virtual field trips, online tutorial classes, community college classes. Whole list of different strategies can be used to assist in that reinforcement, enhancing learning. And they were looking for some assistance and guidance and how to best do that and build that in their curriculum process so that teachers didn't have to go looking for it, that they actually had those resources within their curriculum document. So those were the findings from the study. And like I said, they were consistent across the school divisions that returned the survey. Great, thanks so much, Richard. Why don't we pause again before we move on to exploring some specific examples of rural capacity limitations. So I'll unmute your phones and then you'll be able to speak up with any questions or observations that you have. So one moment here. All guests have been unmuted. Okay, feel free to ask a question or make an observation or comment. Okay, well, we can go ahead and move on. There'll be another opportunity for discussion later. So at this point, I'm going to turn things back over to Richard and Hobart who are going to examine more closely some concrete capacity issues, first focusing on rural constraints in terms of implementing new federal and state initiatives. I'm going to mute lines and turn things over to Richard and Hobart. All guests have been muted. All guests have been muted. Are we back? Sorry, my bad. I'm on it now. We are now officially on slide 15. I'm going to kick this off and then Hobart and I are going to go back and forth on different issues. First, some of the examples of the capacity limitations are related to implementing federal and state curriculum standards. This is an ongoing, as we all know, an ongoing issue. The standards are constantly being updated, revised, and so whether we're talking about common core standards or state standards, there's a sense that this never ends. And so there's always a challenge at the local level to be able to update and implement the new standards in time lines in a timely way so that you have enough time for teachers to be trained and students to be assessed. There's a low capacity to develop instructional classroom materials, trained teachers, mentor, implementation, or evaluate results. A good example in my school division, my director of teaching and learning and also served as my director of assessment was a part-time person. I could not afford to pay a full-time director of instruction, so that person was there only part of the time. That was the only person. He was a generalist. He would dealt with K-12 education. I had to not have any other content specialist in my central office. So there was nobody else to turn to to assist teachers in developing specific curriculum locally. Now, I could go and participate in regional programs from the state or regional programs from higher education, but in terms of having somebody local, we were on our own. That was a major issue. We didn't have a reading specialist to turn to or a history or language arts specialist to turn to to help lead the curriculum revision and update. That was an ongoing problem at a local division. Like I said, we were limited access to content specialist in a division. It really hurt your ability to make the changes you need to make to make sure that you're not only changing the curriculum, but you're monitoring the implementation and you're preparing for the assessment all along. And then adequate time and resources for principals and teachers to develop necessary materials. In most instances, my teachers were stretched to the limit. They were not only teaching, some of them were serving as lead teachers. They were assisting with other programs. I did not have assistant principals. I only had one principal in each school. So the principals were fully consumed as well. So there just really wasn't additional time. I had to end up extending the day sometimes, providing evening meals for teachers. Sometimes we use our work days as part of the writing process. And then at other times teachers simply volunteered. They took homework. They did it on their own time.  So there were some real difficult issues that simply haven't gone away as curriculum standards continue to change. Well, and Richard, we might add, of course, this is a good example as the National Common Core comes on board. It will be an obvious challenge for school divisions and districts as they have circumstances like yours. The whole issue of it's not enough to hand teachers' curriculum. It is much more the issue of what will be the specific supports of instructional materials and those kinds of things that teachers need to perform the role successfully as a teacher. And, of course, that may be more challenging in high-poverty kind of places. So a second item that Richard and I thought we ought to mention as an example of rural capacity limitation is this issue of enhancing teacher quality. And I was involved initially in a study when Richard became superintendent of that district and another couple of people and I, former superintendents in rural places, looked at the capacity of the central office. And part of that was about asking teachers what they thought about the central office in terms of its help. And I know there isn't anybody in this conference call that doesn't know in this country the concept of central office is becoming a support system more than a compliant office location is an important transition to building capacity for teachers doing better instruction. So the notion of teacher quality in a place where most of the principals and teachers lived in a neighboring county like Richard's created some very immediate kind of issues when you start talking about school improvement initiatives and sustaining anything because it was obvious that teachers were hired away in many cases after they were upgraded including projects that are funded by the federal government and they're intended to create capacity in places. Some of the very people that they're improving are people who leave and it's pretty well known someone who comes from someplace else to be a teacher in a rural community will usually leave that place unless they have connections or become connected with more than just the school. They have to maintain or require some connection to the community. So part of this feature out of classroom to receive training presented issues from the very basic limitation of there's a limited pool of qualified subs available to start with and then when the teachers upgraded they leave in Richard's case in about three years and the result of course was the division had to start over and so there's a constant churning of turnover and school improvement initiatives of any kind fail to gain traction and be sustained and of course the other note here if a teacher is not living in the county it means the teacher can take another job and likely not have to move particularly live in the neighboring county so the issue of reducing commuting time which is real especially in times of high gas prices and the fact that they might receive higher pay and not have to leave their current residence is a particular challenge in terms of recruitment and retaining teachers and a lot of other issues around this topic I know here we're giving examples to expose some practical realities of the limitations we've talked about the institutional limitations that I mentioned in communities and in school systems and Richard's limitations around instructional limitations let me build on that just a little bit hope it my experience was none of my principles and about 80% of my teachers lived outside the county they lived some place else and commuted in and that's a sheer nature of the fact that there was no grocery store in the county there was no drug store there was no department store there were mom and pop gas stations and that was about it and the school division was 70 miles long and 12 miles wide so you had people commuting in at least an hour or more every day and an hour or more out every day and when they could travel through another school division or lived in a school vision it was awful tantalizing for them to pick up a salary increase and commute a much smaller distance so as we said soon as I had teachers trained at a university or through a university in state program to enhance their skills they were they're gone there you know I started back over at scratch this is a real concern how to maintain that there's quality at teacher quality which is such a key component to improving student construction in the school guys I wanted to jump in and let you know that we have about 10 minutes left okay we'll get we'll get rolling supporting technology initiatives is limited capacity in terms of technology infrastructure in most school divisions and limited staff not only to put it in place but to maintain it in my case people who wanted internet had to get satellite the school divisions had a T one or T two lines but the county refused to pay for we had to take them out of our money in order to maintain those lines and so there was an increasing need to expand our capability in using technology but it was not available any place else unless you had a satellite this over okay if our slide will go back to the previous one the increasing data use capacity of course all of us know that the world today of the public education is demanding evidence of results and that being driven by the use of data all the way from what teachers receive as professional development to what they implement and how it drives student assessments and the other issues associated with teaching and learning so in many of these places there's nobody funded as a position in the district to do data analysis so therefore to say data is going to be used means somebody has to crunch the data and present it in an understandable way and so whether principles are doing that or they've signed it to counselors or there's a volunteer teacher all these become a capacity issue in these schools and the past must be performed at the school level usually because other persons are not available to district office there again though capacity is going to differ among some school districts in rural places particularly in countywide school systems usually it's the most capable volunteer in a lot of school places school rural school places that end up getting these assignments a limited ability to warehouse data on numerous state initiatives implemented in the school division over several years in other words what works under the conditions of that school context means everything is partly about what this means to be discussing rural what is the context under which school improvement is to occur what's the population of students what capacity you have among teachers to perform necessary teaching roles but the continuous starting over and not having any access to previous success creates a certain issue of using data and then of course how do you give value to proceed compliance reports so so often where there's very few people the notion of what may be a well-intended state initiative that requires a report is seen as nothing more than compliance rather than an effort of a document produced to help people use it for the purpose of recognizing data points out improvements that could be done if discussed too often it's just perceived as a compliance report with no value so giving value to those reports becomes an issue finally providing leadership for school improvement many in many cases there's unrealistic expectations and demands on principles to accomplish all of the initiative with without an assistant principal to share the load they have everything they have to do and implemented initiative and make all the meetings and supervised all the implementation and so there's there's just no way it can be done in a satisfactory manner and therefore we wonder why did the implementation go so badly well many times it's all on one person to try and make that work there's a limited capacity support school leaders principals and lead teachers during early stages of implementation in a new initiative you they really need help they really need guidance it's easy for them to get off on the wrong track in the wrong direction and therefore you lose time and resources that with a little assistance a little help can make all the difference in the world and by help I mean help I don't mean telling I mean being able there to hold their hand initially and help them do what they have to do important difference and finally limited capacity recruit retain principals for high poverty rural schools especially if they choose to live outside the district because of undesirable housing and other amenities we didn't have any suburbs we didn't have any groups of houses it was a low density population and so there was simply no place for them to live where they could have a grocery store they could have a drugstore or any other evening life but so those were major issues in terms of recruitment we're on a time issue Taylor so why don't you go ahead and do your summary and we'll we want to get the questions I know from people with what time we have left sure absolutely as we kind of prepare to close out today's conversation I just want to summarize some of the key things that we've heard first it's lower in complete implementation is very probably associated with the institutional and instructional support capacity limitations that rural districts confront people systems and resources are often at a premium in rural places in rural districts just by virtue of what the context is it's isolated often it's persistently poor you know there's low population density all those things have an eventual impact on the district people are especially important and when girl when rural district service farm team recruiting and retaining local capacity in the form of great teachers and leaders is an ongoing challenge as they get trained and then recruited elsewhere fortunately assistance with specific needs some of what we've talked about today support from intermediate units and strategies to help build capacity can help rural implementation and that's going to be the focus of our second webinar which will announce in a little bit here but I just want to make sure that everybody had a chance to ask any final questions or make any last comment so I'm going to go ahead and unmute the phone line all guests have been unmuted so please feel free to speak up if you have a question or want to make a comment or an observation Caitlin this is Maureen I thought this was a very interesting presentation and and I personally would like to thank the speakers thank you so much that's very kind I know here by the way we're talking about rural school district limitations and capacity Richard and I both have been at the top of state departments and we're well aware that state departments themselves have certain capacity limitations and I know that the next webinar Caitlin will flavor that in a way to recognize those issues we'd be particularly interested in people from the state pointing out the realities of their rural schools in terms of these capacity issues have they tried initiatives and seen these kinds of limitations surface are there's some more prominent than others we'd be particularly interested in that question being answered I believe that's a great question over at night you know I think as I've been looking at some of the chat that's been going on in the chat box Susan already from Kentucky for example has mentioned a number of things so we may want to review that later as well okay well I'm going to go ahead and close this out and unless you have our question that you just have to get on the table please feel free to jump in I do want to announce that our next webinar is scheduled for Tuesday July 30th at 3 o'clock eastern time our presenters will be hoping again and Dr. John Hill who is currently the executive director of the National Rural Education Association this webinar is going to kind of bounce off of this one and it'll focus on how states can differentiate their support to rural districts to both address capacity limitations and improve the likelihood of successful local implementation of state and federal initiatives so we'll be sending you an email invitation to that shortly and it will also be posted on our website at this point I would like to ask you to quickly fill out a very brief evaluation survey it's just three questions I put the link here in the chat box you're welcome to just that point and click I won't take any time at all it's entirely anonymous we'll also send you an email later with a request for some additional feedback so we can make these kinds of presentations as useful to you as possible I'd like to thank our presenters very much for their insights today and invite you to connect with us whenever you can see us on the web on our website you can follow us on Twitter we have a YouTube channel where we provide access to all of our archives webinars and our Pena County television show and you feel you know use old-fashioned methods you should give us a call as well we provide a wide array of services you know your goals are our goals in lots of ways and we have a big array of strategies that we can provide to you so any final thoughts okay we'll be in touch soon with an invitation to our follow-up webinar thanks very much folks have a great day


Well, if you've been watching this channel for a while you probably know that I create these videos for my classes, right, I make this video content for, you know, basically it replaces the lecture and then class time is discussion time, which is fine, but sometimes the really the most interesting stuff happens in class discussion. Now, you know, if you're following for a while you might realize, wow, this guy hasn't made any videos for a while. Actually, I have been making a lot of videos. I have been making a lot of videos. You may or may not be aware of this, but I teach several online sections, usually about four online sections a semester. And I've been trying to mimic discussion using videos and it has its ups and downs. It has its successes and sometimes not such great successes, but it has its ups and downs. And I haven't made them public. I've just had it for my courses basically because, you know, I'm sometimes not always confident in the quality of it and I still have to use it. So, and I've actually been remaking an entire course in light of what I learned the first time around. So, I haven't made it public, but I think I'm going to. I think I'm going to. I'm still not done with the introduction of philosophy courses, but they're on their way. They're almost done, like three quarters done. So, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a whole another playlist with the videos, the original lecture videos followed by the discussion videos. Now this might seem a little confusing because they're meant to be, the discussion videos are meant to be used in conjunction with particular questions and I have the questions loaded into the learning management software, that sort of thing. So, you might get, you might say, what the heck is going on here? I, you know, if you get lost and confused, I suppose you can always send me a, you know, a comment or a message saying, I don't know what's going on, can you clarify and maybe I could put something in the description that would help explain what's going on.  No, I've been making lots of videos and I think I'm going to go ahead and release them. You know, if you like them, let me know and I'll keep them up there. If you don't like them, let me know, I'll take them off. So, yeah, just to, just to let you know what's going on. I haven't forgotten about you guys. I've just been busy with work that is kind of going through its, you know, its own birthing process, so to speak. All right. Thanks for watching. Spread the word.


Shock as teacher proposes to a high school girl. Various pictures have been making rounds on social media after a teacher went on one knee and asked his alleged girlfriend who is also in high school to marry her. Students who witnessed all of this, captured the moment as soon the teacher was trending. The girl rejected his proposal but the teacher is now allegedly in big trouble. Many people took to social media to express how inappropriate this was and how the teacher should be fired for this because it is unprofessional for him to even be with a high school girl.


I'm Marius. I've been with the guest team for two years now. What were you doing before you were in the guest team? Oh, I was working on permanent state channels and actually mining software. My name is Guillaume. I've been working on the guest team since 2017. Initially on a project called Whisper. It didn't work out, so I moved on to more core development and currently working on the topic of stateless Ethereum and vocal trees. Before that I was an engineer at various non-crypto related companies and I'm very glad not to work there anymore. I'm Peter. I've been on the guest team for about eight years now. I started working on Whisper and figured out that it won't work out in about two months. Essentially, Ethereum is my first real job. Hello. I am Matt. I've been on the guest team for four months. I've been working in the Ethereum space for about four years. It's also my first real job. I worked on the cool team previously doing various R&D efforts on future ideas for Ethereum and now working on the JSON RPC for the guest team. This panel was supposed to be an ask me anything, so it would be super nice if you have any questions, starters. We work up with the news of Arbitrum making an accusation for Prism. How do you, how your team looks for an accusation and do you think Prism will be a leader consensus clearance for Ethereum? I actually just heard it two minutes ago before we went on stage, so I didn't really read anything about it or made up my mind about it. I think consolidation is, it's always this two side of a coin, right? We want to be as decentralized, we want to be as distributed as possible and that also means that the team should be independent. On the other hand, if you have like a bigger company working on different things, they can achieve stuff faster. So let's see what the future holds for Arbitrum and Prism. Let's just add to that. I think the theorem vision long term, the idea is that the clients will be, or the most important clients will be maintained by fairly important companies. Whether those companies grow out of the INCO system or external companies that's up for debate, but I think in general it's good for Ethereum if you have solid, well-funded teams behind them. So whether this particular case is good or bad, I mean that's up for debate, but the idea is okay. Alright, I have a question for you guys right here. So thank you for being here. You guys are rock stars. So this is a question for the ones that have been here many years about what is your most memorable experience working for Geth? I remember DEF CON 2, the Shanghai Attacks, so I don't know what's your experience about that. So I would like to know what's the most memorable experience for all of you for? What is the fondest experience working with the Geth team? What about the merch? Like how do you celebrate it? Was that a happy celebration?  The merch celebration was basically okay it's done now, let's move on. So for me I think the most memorable, I haven't been in this team for that long, the most memorable thing I think was the Greece interop where we worked on the merch together with all of the different client teams, consensus layer, client teams, execution layer, client teams in a really nice hotel in Greece and we spent like the whole day sitting in the basement hunched over our computers working while it was like 30 degrees outside and after the third day I made the decision that after dinner, after lunch I'm going to take one hour or two hours to go to the beach to enjoy life a bit between working in the basement. And as a, I'm in space around five years so as a go developer I had the opportunity to read your code and participate in something in your discord. But after the years passing I was feeling that less and less maybe or you're so occupied or with less support I could saw you less and less in discord, also the documentation will become more and more outdated. Now after I saw Peters I think last year one of our tweets that say oh we need more support, the other stuff, did you get some support for the Ethereum Foundation to support your team and maybe to hire new people to help with the documentation and the stuff because you did an amazing work, Go is still being a good platform for building stuff but I see a lot of people say okay I'm going to use Rust and other stuff but we have a very good base knowledge in Go that you guys built. So how is the future for GAF? So basically this is my question. Yeah so that's actually a very good question and I'm kind of happy that I have a positive answer for that is that well in the past most of the documentation that we wrote or stuff we published were all written by us and I mean that's kind of nice, it's kind of we have to be the origin for those but we didn't really have the capacity to do it and for the past couple months we've actually had somebody on the team who helped write documentation I kind of feel that we still don't help him enough but we're trying our best plus it was seen as initiative to actually revamp our entire website which will come in a few weeks, months I'm not entirely sure but there again we kind of a huge shout out to the EF, essentially Ethereum.org website team because they are the ones doing our new website and so we know that there's a lot of things to improve but there we have received an enormous help from the EF towards improving it. I'm sure there will be a lot of things that still depend on us but things are getting better. Also regarding support on our Discord and everywhere I think with the increasing complexity of Ethereum and the increasing demand of shipping stuff just being there, like our time being spent on supporting individuals in the community is very limited and we need more people from the community to take over to help educate others about how to use Gath and this kind of stuff. Yeah I just wanted to answer the question about the future of the Gath team so far people were quite positive and upbeat so I wanted to be the downer here I think it makes sense that so much of Ethereum has been relying on the Gath team before there's been an effort like the help also comes from other teams like for example the consensus layer clients are taking part of the burden away from us there will probably be this kind of other efforts in the future and hopefully we can just become a bit more redundant in a way and that would be true decentralization. Also talking about support if you guys have experience with Gath and want to help us with the Discord yeah we're really looking for people who can do it although I know if you guys can work with Gath like you have experience then you probably get better jobs elsewhere but you know just for technical support yeah This is Sina by the way he's also part of the Gath team Yeah so Sina didn't want to be here but thank you for being here But Sina gave a good lead into my question which is to ask everyone who's in the Gath team either on stage or off stage where do you most need help individually like in parts of projects you're working on whether it's like strategic stuff for the future or like something right here right now Is there anything you can share with us as community to help us better support what you guys are doing like can that work? The first thing that comes to mind is please be polite on PRs Yeah so I guess with the Gath team our bottleneck our single actually single bottleneck is poor request reviews we have a lot of very nice members on the team who can really turn out code super fast maybe a few people way too fast like Gary and we can't keep up with him and we also have a lot of external contributions and there's the problem is that the code is super sensitive so it kind of always boils down to a couple of people having to review everything and having to do a lot of context jumps to review them and unfortunately this is our Achilles heel because we have absolutely no idea how to solve it definitely more people on the team more reviews help but it's not an easy to solve situation because we can't just hire somebody to do code reviews since I mean the entire network kind of depends on it so that's we're really open for suggestions on how to solve that I think two things also come to mind for me the first is helping create better onboarding mechanisms for people to contribute to Gath right now it's kind of you know look at the code base, find something to fix look at the issues, find something to fix I'm taking you don't like your onboarding experience no I think my onboarding experience has been excellent it has been such a fun time working on the Gaths no but I think seriously a lot of people have talked to me saying I have no idea how to start working in core development and you know some people like work through that filter themselves and they find issues and they start contributing and they end up in that position but I think that we could build some mechanisms for more people to contribute and I had this idea that I've started working on a little bit is like having some sort of like capture the flag that has like basic flags for people to capture where you do like a core development task like add a new opcode or fix some sort of bug or go through an invalid trace of the EVM and you're able to resolve it and run a program and verify that you did it correctly and so that's like a very you know binary system of like I did this right and so now I can move on to the next thing and then once you go through that then it's a little bit easier to come into the whole Gath process and figure out like okay why did they not like my PR how do I get this PR to be accepted and everything so I think that would be a cool thing for people to contribute if that's something you want to contribute to I'm happy to talk offline about that then the other thing that I think that we could use help with and I think like all of the execution layer teams could use help with is working on the JSON RPC so that there's an interface that's a little bit more standard across all clients I think the ideal world is that a client is just simply a black box and no matter what client you're running you can always interact with them almost exactly the same through the JSON RPC and we're trying to get to that point but we're still not quite there and it's just generally one of these things that's not as high interest for a lot of people and so it gets put on the back burner for the most part and I guess one more thing I would add is that no shade for the other execution clients but very often I do feel that the guest team is driving a lot of the changes a lot of protocol changes, networking changes so it's kind of a bit asymmetric in that we are the ones bringing the for example the networking EIPs to the table and everybody else just well okay if it's backed out and if Gath implemented it then we'll just roll with it and I mean that's perfectly fine just it kind of means that our tasks are always not only to maintain Gath but also somehow to try to advance the execution layer features whereas the other clients are kind of I feel that they are sometimes just playing catch up and this is fine for them which is less fine for us I think that that also goes that not only goes for features but also for the testing so a lot of the testing efforts right now are driven by Gath and we're currently trying to build out a new team within the Ethereum Foundation specifically for testing for cross client testing so in the past it has been Gath is the majority client and we have to take care of the network so we have to make sure that everything is really well tested and we can create tests that can also be used by the other clients but in the future we would like to get to a state where researchers and the testing team create tests for everyone and so we don't like and they don't have to rely on us doing the work for testing and something kind of in this area is also there's Gath Gath is its own monolithic piece of software but there's a lot of I feel there's a huge gap still between the solidity development world and Gath and I would really love to see a lot more tooling developing in between like to bridge this gap so I don't really have any suggestion about such tooling but I feel there's a gap here that would be great to fill I have to think about questioning because what I really want to do is just use this as an opportunity that I may never have again to say just how sincerely appreciative I am of everything you guys have been doing over the last couple of years from one developer to another I know that sometimes that doesn't come through as much as it needs to and it's just what you guys have done has really helped me personally and get me involved in the ecosystem so if I came up with a question right now does Clef have any future? So whether it has a future or not I would say so Clef was one of those projects which we really think would be very very useful however I kind of feel that we as developers kind of took it to a point where it's secure and it's highly unusable because it's very very console based and everything and the only way to make Clef more usable or friendly even the least bit is to actually turn it into a product and unfortunately I will admit that that is way outside our capabilities because there you would probably need a UI team you would need a completely different team to do that work and whilst I do think it would be super awesome it's again the question is we could hire somebody or multiple people to work on it maybe get an EF to work on it but there are a lot of other wallet software out there and the question is is it worthwhile to try to compete with them I'm not sure so I would say Clef isn't going anywhere but I don't really see it going into product quality either so it's probably it will be a bit in this limbo space for now But something that we are currently thinking about retiring is the personal name space and the wallet within Geth so if you are depending on that we are sorry no actually there is a discussion to be had but we would really like to get rid of this Yes so definitely that's the direction we so Geth is kind of like this huge monolithic monster and that was kind of born out of the necessity of Ethereum launch there was no other software so the clients had to do everything but obviously having your accounts managed by a node is a bit wonky that was partially the reason why we built Clef and we will definitely try to take Clef up until the point where we can remove account management from Geth and hopefully it should be as easy to manage your accounts via Clef as if you were managing it via Geth but I think that's the threshold and if somebody picks it up awesome if not then it will be used as kind of as a developer tool in the future So a long time ago there used to be a very nice proof of concept running Geth on Android and I feel that now after the merge maybe it's more relevant and it can be actually useful that people are running their own clients on Android so I think that's the trick being done on that So originally when we shipped Geth for Android we shipped it as a full node which obviously doesn't work anymore then later Joel shipped the lite client it still I wouldn't call it really production ready but it kind of worked however it turned out that the pre-merge lite client is still too heavy for a phone so now that we are post-merge we can somehow pick this thread up again I think it definitely would be interesting however usually with mobile phones at Android you have very very strict limits on how much, I mean okay on iOS you have very strict limits on how much your background process can run Android is a bit more relaxed but you're still eating battery very very fast so I could imagine some LES client or some lite client on demand with your thing then very temporarily just pull some data from the network and that's it then I think the post-merge world is kind of compatible with that so I think that would be interesting however at least using the Geth code base I think it will always be a bit heavier than ideal so if you were to really, so the Geth lite client even if we ship it as production ready we'll probably more cater towards running on a laptop and if you want to run it on a mobile phone in a production ready environment my guess would be that it would take a different team maybe a slightly different approach to get there No so it's like an additional thing that we have to maintain and we would whatever Android users cross-compilation is always broken and there's always something that's just there and so it never really works and sometimes is a bit clunky the code that gets produced and so I think another team just building a lite client from scratch for mobile phones especially after Verkle we will definitely see some stuff there and I hope that at that point we can get rid of this So there's also a bit of a roadmap issue here it seems that you know now the direction for Ethereum is to have all of the day-to-day operation happening in rollups and having the core layer be something more not going to say inaccessible but maybe not the thing you do on a day-to-day basis is the case if that trend continues I don't think it makes sense to worry about mobile because no one is going to try to access the layer one from a mobile One more thing I would add is that it's an interesting twist post merge world that before the merge even a lite client had to have a lot of connections I mean you either connected to a trusted server which kind of beats the purpose or you had to connect to multiple lite servers you kind of got the ground truth kind of followed the correct chain based on proof of work Now post merge you don't really need that because you have the signatures so in theory post merge you could connect to an untrusted Web2 provider and download the necessary data and you could still verify it so this kind of opens up a bit of a different design direction for making Ethereum trustlessly work on mobile phones Can you repeat the question? Yes, this level is good so what's your take on the open Ethereum parity saga and what can the community, what can we do to make sure that alternative good clients don't die again I think that's I think that's inevitable so in my opinion good clients will die I mean look at the guest team currently has is about 10 people now I would say that out of these 10 people you have probably 4 to 5 people that are kind of more familiar with the very very internal details now should these 4 or 5 people leave it is very very hard to find replacements for them and this is essentially what happened with parity okay the leaving it was a bit different but the idea is that if you actually manage to simultaneously lose enough of your main contributors then it's very very hard to onboard enough people fast enough so that the project survives and I think that it's as bad as it is to lose a client I don't really see what you can do I mean the same happens in open source software too that eventually you have a couple maintainers that just I mean life happens they go to the other side of the world and they don't have anything else either because they get bored or whatever reason and I'm not sure that yeah so I think it is a very real chance and it will definitely happen that good clients will die there's always a I mean one way to protect it is if there's a very very good funding behind it maybe they can always decide that it's not worth it to keep going so it's I guess that it boils down to the fact that you need this is why we would need client diversity because that kind of affords us good clients occasionally disappearing and I think within the guest team we're trying to prevent this by onboarding new people and making sure that the new people that come in get familiar with a lot of the different parts of the code but it's very hard for us being relatively new to meaningfully contribute because there are so many just invariants within the code that are not explicitly stated and so sometimes it happens that we break an invariant and it's usually Peter who has all of the invariants in his head and says okay we're breaking an invariant here don't do this this is going to fail at some point and it just takes a long time to actually learn all of these invariants that are implicitly in the code plugging back to one idea I was talking about before just the fact that for example we kind of spun off consensus if another one of those steps happens in the future like maintaining a client becomes easier and easier so that would be a good like forgot the word but it would be a good way to make clients not be at risk of dying but until we do we simplify the protocol it's going to happen and one thing that I also really like on the roadmap is the perch where we try to eliminate some of the old outdated stuff and so for example history expiry would allow us to delete all of the rules that we have for executing all transactions and at some point if there's a way to execute them in a different client and all of these caveats but it would make maintaining a client a lot easier another issue that we always run into is that someone wants a feature and we don't really think about it and care and implement the feature and merge it in and two years later or sometime later we realize that this feature is not really used by anyone and we cannot change something because we would break this one feature and at that point we have a decision to make either we just don't do anything or we delete the feature and someone is going to be upset and we don't want to make people upset but it's inevitable with the way Gath is right now I guess just one final thought there Mario said that if we implement the purge and get rid of a lot of features then that would really help other clients get up to speed so currently it's very hard to write a client and starting a new client is essentially impossible because Ethereum is moving so fast that you never catch up but I guess once we reach the point when Ethereum starts to ossify that would be a nice place when actually new client developers can join in because then you can actually say that you can't just specifically for iOS that has these properties and they can work on it for three years without the protocol constantly changing the invariance and I think my expectation will be that when we reach that point of stability we will have the original clients be quite marginalized by new clients that are very very focused to some specific sub task some use case for caring so much of the Ethereum ecosystem on your shoulders what is the current sustainable business model for Gith and probably other clients that want to copy that and the follow up question is what is the plan to do something similar to what's being done for the core protocol we want a certain percentage of it to be staked as a security a percentage of the total value so is there some sort of research going on on how do we get certain percentage of the development effort in the Ethereum ecosystem to be going towards get security to answer your first question it absolutely makes no sense to write a client I think there's no business model behind it it's currently most of the clients are funded by not fully funded by the EF we have absolutely no income I'm assuming other clients usually how they try to fund themselves is that many clients get grants from other projects so that they support different blockchains different layer 2s different scaling solutions that's one way to somehow try to build a business model around it but at the end of the day since Ethereum is kind of like a public platform a client as a client you cannot really make money out of it it's yeah so that there's no business model behind creating the client itself the only thing that I would say is that there's the protocol what's the protocol protocol guild yeah exactly that allows projects for example DeFi projects to allocate a percentage of their token distribution to a pod and out of this pod client teams get right now they get bonuses and this is the general idea behind it was not to fully fund client teams but to provide an upside that they wouldn't have if that they currently don't have and that they would have if they were to switch to DeFi because we've seen a lot of good client developers just say okay I can make ten times the money if I create the next token and so the protocol support protocol guild thingy is like a way to give some of that upside from the DeFi projects I appreciate it I was wondering if you could start experimenting with things like maybe Kodark funding towards PRs you said there's a big backlog of PRs and only a couple of people that are capable of reviewing but you could imagine that with some sort of Kodark funding you can't hire or at least bounties for other people layers of developers to review and write tests and integration new tests before it gets to core developer so I guess this depends on the granularity generally people do do that at the EIP level so famously Uniswap is pushing certain EIPs very very hard and I'm assuming they are actually funding the people who are doing the necessary research doing their sorry presentation etc etc to get an EIP through now that I don't think that really works at client level because we've tried for example at some point we gave out a couple bounties for some work the place where it kind of backfires is two fold one of them is that you usually get contributions of not the greatest quality because a lot of people see that oh there's I don't know one ether bounty on this so let's just jump on it so you will have 10 different implementations all just kind of trying to hack it as fast as they can to get the bounty so the code is not the best it requires a lot of effort from our side to somehow try to fix it up or try to guide that person and the other side is that after the bounty has been paid out since this was a bounty work they just disappear and maintenance is our problem so we kind of have more problems than gains with funding PRs at that level what we have done previously is we have funded research teams for example who have helped us on the discovery protocol the discovery v5 we I think Felix was managing a small research team at I'm not entirely sure which university and the EF was funding them for a year or so to just investigate find possible solutions to different challenges write some papers that one works so that definitely works but at the client level I feel it's a little granularity I just wanted to say to the original question of what is the business model for clients there's no reason to build the client there's not a lot of money in doing this it's always going to be considered a public good but I think one way of making it sustainable is like Mario said this protocol guild project in a way that people can help make this sustainable for the long term is whenever you're developing new projects to consider adding a small allocation to the protocol guild in your initial token launch if some of these if this would have been something that was around in 2018 or 2019 when a lot of these blue chip v5 protocols were starting we would have over a hundred million dollars dedicated just to core development and so I think like going forward it's like a good thing to consider because you want Ethereum to be around for a long period of time and the best way to do that is to make sure that the people who are making it happen continue having the funding that they need to do it and adding to this we not only do is there no business model for a client but I don't think there should be because otherwise you would kind of adapt your strategy to increasing their revenue stream and you lose your independence basically my question is related with what Mario just said and well I'm still a student and I'm still trying to figure out what I want to work on after I graduate. I see the stuff that you guys do and I think it's amazing and I still see something more on the application side of things so my question is really why did you decide to go to core development and stay in core development instead of going to something higher in the stack because it's way more fun and way more interesting and so for me the big thing is also I want to work on something that makes sense to me where I have the feeling that I'm doing something good for the creator of humanity and I don't think DeFi is a lot of the DeFi stuff is this and so that's why I was so interested in working on the merge helping push the merge because I felt like this is the biggest thing that I'll ever be part of regarding the CO2 consumption and everything and so just having this big level of my work can my small work can have a really big impact that was something that was pretty magical from the beginning and that's why I am in core development I don't know about you guys it's not the money I mean with that so my answer is kind of boring because there was nothing when I started working at Ethereum so I think Matt's answer would be much more interesting since he did have the choice of picking one or the other picking one or the other isn't working on protocol versus working on Dapplayer stuff I mean I originally started working on the Dapplayer when I came out of university I was very interested in how the types of applications that you could build on Ethereum and I was very interested in dispute resolution because I had done a lot of e-commerce and buying and selling things on the internet growing up and I was frustrated with the way that these systems were built and so I was very excited about this as an application on the protocol and so I joined Consensus and I was working on something pretty similar to this and just immediately realized that A, the user experience for Ethereum at that time and still today was too bad to really onboard hundreds of thousands of users to have this dispute resolution system and even if 100,000 users decided to show up tomorrow we didn't have the scalability to support that many users on the protocol and so that was kind of where I started getting really interested in protocol development. I was like this is broken, we need to fix it so that we can build an application on it and I've just slowly become more and more indoctrinated in the idea and now I'm kind of at the point where I feel like I would rather be a small piece of a very large puzzle that I feel is going to become extremely important and impactful for humanity rather than trying to build an application that may or may not have any kind of impact for anyone. So I guess your reasoning for joining platform development was you guys suck, I'm going to fix it myself. Naively, maybe so. Yeah, I don't do that for humanity, sorry, you guys suck. No, yes, of course. I think also it's where the biggest problem like the impact indeed is going to have reverberating consequences in the future. So that's where it's the most interesting but it's also simply because you want to have good tools to build better societies, to build better companies, to build better software and I think simply the core I mean if you want to work on your tools you always end up working on the core no matter I've worked on Linux kernel before it was the same thing, you get dragged into the protocol as long as you want to improve your tools. Hi there. I have a question about databases, the underlying database and get as being viewed as a database. You guys have talked about get as being monolithic and wanting to remove or modularize components and I was wondering since database through it had been traditionally kind of constricting aspect if there were any changes to that coming up and this question comes from seeing a remote DB option in the command line options and not being able to find any documentation with respect to that. So that's a very nice technical question. So one aspect I'll ask a previous question. A lot of people sometimes ask us on social media why did we pick level DB and that was also my question I joined the team and Jeff's answer was because Bitcoin was using it. So that's essentially how get started out using level DB. Actually we've tried switching databases many times. Generally what's not so visible from the outside is that databases are kind of built up, have two components. They have a storage layer which is kind of like this very dumb layer that just has some very primitive ways to store data and retrieve data and then they build on top various transaction mechanisms, journaling, all kinds of stuff and most people kind of convoluted to and most people don't realize that level DB is essentially a storage engine. It's not a full-fledged database and there have been databases built on top of level DB that have all the bells and whistles. Now the issue is that the moment you are adding if we were to use something higher level then essentially we're not only paying the costs of the storage layer rather we also have to pay the costs associated with running the transactions running indexing the tables etc etc So at this point since Gath was kind of architected from day one to just use a storage layer as his database, if we were to plug in any full-fledged database instead of it everything becomes just insanely slow because Gath was not architected to use these high-level primitives. Gath always assumes that it has more or less direct access to the data and because of that it's we've tried we have a lot of BRs trying different databases and they always crashed and burned. One thing that we currently are working on actually Jared is working on it is to switch out level DB to pebble. Pebble is kind of like a next-generation version of level DB but it's still just a storage engine. As for remote databases the problem is that one of the bottlenecks of Ethereum, running an Ethereum node is disk access, IO operations per second. Now the moment you move the data away from the node actually the bottleneck is getting way way worse. So it's instead of making things better you are making them a lot worse. Since accessing I mean usually you have if you want to access an SSD a modern SSD can do maybe half a million IO apps per second. That's not the high-end SSD that's a payable affordable SSD. You cannot do 100 million roundtrip times on the network per second so it gets slower if we go down that path. Of course you could always say that we could create an Ethereum node architecture which has a remote database and then you could have multiple clients using that same database that's a very interesting architectural decision but that is essentially writing a completely new client from scratch so you cannot really retrospectively retrofit Gath to use it it would be its own new client. Hey guys, seconding all the previous comments thank you for the incredible work you're doing in the ecosystem.  Quick question. If you were to hypothetically re-architect Gath from scratch today, knowing everything we know factoring in the merge, what would you do differently? I think we would at least I would be more careful about the features that we accept into the code. There's some stuff that barely anyone uses but it's still used and something that kind of bugs me is that we write a lot of small tools and instead of having them separate from the client, they end up somehow in Gath and I would have a stronger policy of not including them for example, the ABI gen stuff should in my opinion be a different thing but I already know what Peter is going to say but then you need someone to actually maintain it and if it's not in the client it's not going to be maintained if it's not in our code base. No, I actually agree with you. No, so I just wanted to add what Marie said that previously it was brought up that the problem is that when Gath was started we had to be this monolithic thing that does everything and this kind of leaves its mark on the code base and it's very, very hard to get rid of stuff and I mean we could get rid of stuff but some people somewhere always depend on it so I think if we were to start over Gath from way back eight years ago it would be this exact same situation because we would need to make the same tools and so I don't think the fact that we have a lot of legacy junk in the code base that's not a bug it's just the way the ecosystem evolved so I don't think that would have been preventable if we were to start over now then all of a sudden you can rely on all the awesome tools that people created and that allows the client to get rid of a lot slimmer I think a lot of stuff changed over the last one year and a half but especially what changed significantly I think a lot of other networks appeared that actually locked a lot of billions of dollars that actually are like Gath forks with some changes and was it somehow useful for you to take a look on it are you somehow monitoring what is happening over there and so are there any cases when you somehow inspired by some changes in these clients and you want to bring them into the Gath the original Gath and some cases when some bugs were opened in Gath forks that actually are pretty close to the original Gath as well one thing I wanted to say is about bugs so whenever we find a bug in Gath then there's usually a lot of different clients that are that are also vulnerable to this and so we are looking into them and making sure that they are not before we actually before we actually fix the bug and publish it the problem there is in which layer once are we going to look and are we only going to look at Ethereum alliance layer once or not and so I think the way we handled it up until now is that we kind of look in the biggest ones and just send them an email that hey you should expect an announcement at a certain point and then we are going to make a public announcement because we don't want to be king makers we don't want to say which client which fork gets the bugs first over another fork and there's also been bugs that have been exploited on other networks before they were exploited on Ethereum and we are kind of like not really monitoring them the other networks but we are trying to be on good terms with the other client devs I guess one kind of satellite question here would be that way back there were a lot of drama around when it turned out that we fixed the bug and we haven't necessarily announced it other networks had a problem with it people very often asked us why don't we have a standardized way of reporting bugs, reporting vulnerabilities have usually what big web 2 companies do is that they have their own little private consortia where they share bugs and then when they publish it everybody in that consortia already updated and we people were always very vocal that we kind of felt that that's a bit problematic because in the blockchain world if we were to create one of these consortia it's not really clear whether everybody in that group would be friendly or how friendly they would be so usually what we try to do every time we found a hairy vulnerability or bug is that depending on the nature we always try to announce external people or give enough details to external people, external teams to minimize any potential damage now for example in the case of Ethereum what we did is that if we knew that we are going to fix something that that only affects minors or if the minors are good then the worst that happens for average user is that their node crashes usually what we did is that we just gently pinged a couple of the bigger mining pools that hey we will release a release you really want to be on this release nothing more just a gentle reminder that it contains something that you want to run and by having the majority of the hash power updated the network is kind of safe and there's not much damage that can be done but this is kind of completely arbitrary bug by bug decision on how best to proceed how best to minimize any damage anybody in the either in the Ethereum network or the external blockchains that use Ethereum so we really try to be as friendly as possible within the limits of keeping the Ethereum network live hey it's me again I just want to add that apart from the people sitting here and some of us off stage we also have people watching the stream from the team who is from far away who couldn't make it unfortunately and yeah who is from far away trying to contribute to the conversation so somebody asked about the remote DB flag I have an answer to that so it's basically it does the low level database get over RPC so basically you can have you have a node on a server and you can have your local node connect to that to the remote one for some only read operation so for example if you do DB metadata command locally then it would basically give you the metadata of the remote node that's it do you see snapshots as the get solution for the state database layout for the first year of the future yes one question we are in this beautiful Columbia South America Bogota I just want to know what each of you have like most loved about Bogota so far hiking in the rain at the waterfalls I actually I actually really like working from here it was really fun with like we had some workshops all of the client and today we had a really nice working session in the morning yes if you haven't noticed Marius is the new workaholic on the team it was really nice just getting the people in the room that need to be in the room and work on some of the interesting things that are coming up and I'm really really really excited about the new stuff that is coming for Ethereum I also enjoy the hike quite a bit that's the only time I was at the hotel besides coming to here so I heard different Matt I heard different I also really like the energy at DEVCON it's been a while since we've all been together and I think it's easy to forget that the community is so large now and there's so many people excited about this protocol I'm not very energizing for myself Jared tells me the food no yeah the food has been nice I like the hotel as well no but I don't know I saw the center the other day when we went looks quite interesting I guess we will explore more this weekend after the work is done one last question who from the team is not on the stage today besides Sina who from the team is not on the stage we have Jared beside you so shout out huge shout out to Geord in the back Felix who's in Berlin Martins in Stockholm and a giant actually a giant shout out to Gary to any of the Gath meetings for the past three plus years due to him being stuck in China and the Chinese rules on leaving the country and coming back due to COVID are super strict insane shout out to him for still tolerating us and working for us without all the upsides of having the fun like we are having now big round of applause guys thank you so much


Hi everyone, welcome back to our YouTube channel. My name is Jolie Greenbaum. I'm the executive assistant at Kearick Immigration Law. And today we're going to be discussing the importance of updating your agency application, otherwise known as the humanitarian and compassionate application. So at our office, we typically submit updates for agency applications every six months. And the main reason for that being that the processing time for these applications are quite long, ranging from roughly one to two years. However, given the current pandemic situation, the processing time can even exceed two years because of the backlogs with IRCC. And it's important to keep in mind that the main essence of an HNC application is to demonstrate an applicant's establishment in Canada. So given what I just said before about processing times, we would need to demonstrate to the officer that throughout the processing of this application that the applicant continues to establish themselves in Canada. So what we do is that every six months, we work with our clients to gather more supporting documents, demonstrating their continued establishment in Canada. So what that might look like would be collecting documents regarding volunteer work, community work, taking courses in Canada, English language courses, French language courses, different technical courses potentially, children being admitted into different schools in Canada, stuff like that to show that the applicants are continuing to integrate within Canadian society. And it's important that if when you initially submitted your application, you didn't have enough time to gather all these supporting documents that would fully demonstrate your establishment in Canada, these six months updates give us as a firm an opportunity to gather those documents with you and submit them to immigration. And they give you as an applicant the opportunity to continue to take part in these establishment activities that you can do in Canada, such as I mentioned before, community work, volunteer work, and stuff like that. Because activities like this and physical proof that we can submit that to immigration will only strengthen your application. And by submitting these updates every six months, it very clearly demonstrates that you as an applicant are one, continuing to establish yourself, and two, that you're dedicated and committed to becoming a permanent resident of Canada. And this is what ultimately helps our applicants stand out from other applicants that don't submit updates for humanitarian and compassionate applications. So if you have any questions regarding agency applications, please do not hesitate to contact our office and we'll be more than happy to assist you. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.