Hi, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. The terminology for this thing is up for debate. But whatever you want to call us, we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's great. That's not a problem. We do record our shows every week and they are posted onto our website. So you can go back and watch them later at your convenience. And at the end of today's show, I'll show you our website and where you can find all of our recordings. When we do do the recordings, we include both the recording. We post to our YouTube channel. If anyone has any presentations, any representatives have slides or handouts or documents, we include that. And if there are any links or anything mentioned throughout the show, I add them to our delicious account. And then those are available to you as well. So afterwards, you'll have access to everything you may need. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do, if you see anything of interest to any of your friends or colleagues that has been on the show before or anything coming up, let them know, share, tell people about what we're doing here and have them come and watch the show with us. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, interviews, presentations, book reviews, demos, sometimes we call mini training sessions. Basically, our only criteria is that it's library related. So anything to do with libraries, we are happy to have it on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations sometimes on Nebraska-centric type things and programs we're doing here. But we also do bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have this morning. On the line with us today, as you can see here from every library, is John Kratska. I didn't even ask about how to pronounce that. I'm sorry. John, do you hear any Krista? Is that Kratska? Or is that Nebraska? Oh, gosh, yeah. All right. Anyway, John has been with every library. He's their executive director there. Every library is a great organization that is helping libraries across the country promote things, fight against certain legislative issues, get bills going, help the votes come through, all sorts of different things. He helped us out here in Nebraska. He's going to talk about that later as well. But he's got a presentation here about the librarian as candidate. Whether you like it or not, you might be. Good way to put it, yeah. Yeah, you are. So I'll just hand over to you, John, to introduce yourself more and talk about what you're doing. Sure. Thanks for the invitation. It's nice to be here. The chance to be able to talk to folks in Nebraska and around the country about our work, the chance to be able to share a little bit of the insight that we have. Most of the work that we're doing right now is focused on helping libraries when they have to go out for a vote. And in Nebraska, you guys don't necessarily go out for a vote all the time. Not super often, but when you do, it's extremely important. It's kind of a high stakes moment. Around the country from California to New York to Florida, there's different mechanisms for setting budgets for libraries. And we're focused on that when it goes out to the ballot, when you've got to run a bond to build a new building or to remodel, to run a referendum of some sort, to establish an operating levy. It's a millage. It's a parcel tax. It's a warrant article. There's a lot of different names for it around the country, but it's all about taxes. And it's the taxes that run the place. It's the learnings that we have here about how to talk about taxes on those election days that are also generalizable for other sorts of funding needs that you might have. If you've got to go to a city council, if you've got to go to a county commission, if you've got to go to Lincoln or Springfield, like where I live here in Illinois, if you've got to go and talk about taxes, you still need the folks with you, whether they're voting on it directly as in the public voters, or if they can be with you as constituents of your city council, your town council, your county commission. To bring those folks forward, we know some stuff about how to do that. And it's nice to be able to share that with you guys today. The key element that we always approach our discussions, our budget negotiations, our taking up to the voters for an election day, is that I don't want to see you as the folks who work at the library, the librarians, whether you have a degree or not. I don't want you turning from the person that the kid runs up to in the grocery store and says, oh my God, Ms. Karen, I love you. You're so awesome. Into the tax man, quite frankly. I want to avoid that for you, because the work that you do every day in the library needs to be funded. If you don't have enough salary, I'd like to see it increased. If you don't have enough colleagues, I'd like to see the ability for you to get other people hired on. If you're short on collections, if your program is a little bit short, because of budget, I'll mix that with you. And I certainly don't want to see you turn into the tax man in the process. Okay. Every library is set up as sort of an interesting organization, not sort of interesting, it's a rather interesting organization, because we're set up differently than everybody else is in the library advocacy ecosystem. 364 days of the year, the existing infrastructure of advocacy works very well. The existing infrastructure of advocacy even works well on election day from time to time, but it's capped. Every 501c3 organization, which is ALA where I used to work, ILA, where I was a trustee member for a number of years from my local library here in suburban Chicago, NLA, which does great work and they've been a good partner of ours, the Friends, the Foundations. They're all 501c3 organizations, which means that they're charities, which means that they can do public outreach, they can do public education, they can talk about advocacy, and at the same time, there's a one day of the year, which is a weird day of the year, which is election day, which is why we're set up differently than a c3. We're set up as a 51c4. It means that if you listen to Fox News or NPR, you hear about super PACs, how the super PACs can raise and expend unlimited funds to advance their special interest. Well, yeah, that's us, except we don't have unlimited funds and you are our special interest. Like I said before, we work on local ballot measures primarily. We work on negotiations with town councils and city governments. We also work to support legislation that allows libraries to function as a district by the transit of property. We also work to defeat legislation that impacts negatively the library's ability to function as a district. That's why we got involved in Nebraska with LB969. That's why we're very happy to push hard with the public about getting LB969 to die in committee. Why Nebraska Library Association was such a good ally in that and reaching out to the partners, sorry to the members. We're here for the whole cloth kind of approach. Okay, let me take you through some of the data about what activates voters, so that we can talk also about what activates constituents of your city council, your county commissions, what activates people who are donors, who want to cut you a check for 5 bucks or 50 bucks or God bless and put you in their will. When I talk about voters here, I'm talking about anybody who's willing to give, anybody who's willing to contribute their time, their talent, their good name, anybody who's willing potentially to punch a chat for us on election day. We know a lot about how residents believe, how parents feel, how folks who've got library cards behave, and yet when we're talking about taxes, no offense, this is 364-day statistics. This is about use of the library. This is about people liking the library, maybe even loving the library, but it's not necessarily about people voting for the library or talking about their own taxes for the library. What we know about that doesn't come from these data sets. It comes from OCLC and from Awareness to Funding. It comes from a number of polls and surveys that we've run over the last couple of years. We got started at the end of 2012 as an organization. Since the end of 2012, we've done 36 campaigns, we've had 27 wins. We've done poll after poll and survey after survey in communities large and small, rural, suburban, ex-burbs, red states, blue states. We've covered the waterfront, and we know these numbers to be pretty true still. About 37% of the American voting public, according to OCLC and the From Awareness to Funding study, 37% of the American voting public believe in the library. They will vote yes for the library regardless of what's on the ballot. They'll show up to city council with you if you ask them. They're probably the ones who are your key volunteers in your friends in your foundation environment. They're the ones who, when you send out your annual appeal for the friends group or the foundation, they'll actually respond with a check. They believe. They kind of don't care what's going on in particular, though they really want to know, but they're going to show up and support you regardless. 37% of the American voting public is way below 50% plus one, which we need to win in most states, or 60% in some other states, or 66.7% of the voters we need in places like California and in Oregon sometimes and Idaho sometimes. There's another 37% of the American voting public who will, they will vote yes provided that you can answer their questions, and they have legitimate questions about where the money's going and who is spending their money. The 37% who want to know where their money's going and who's spending their money, some of them just need to be told by another adult. Somebody knocks on their door and says, hey, I'm John, I'm with the library vote yes committee. Here's why I'm voting yes for the library. Here's why I'm going to city council. Here's why I'm a donor. And people say, oh yeah, that makes sense. This money's going to a good place. And the people who are spending it seem like they're spending it wisely. There's another chunk of those 37% though who are more suspicious than questioning, and they're legitimately suspicious about where tax money is going in their town, in their city, in Lincoln or in Springfield or in D.C., some of them are a little bit, think of the side eye to what's going on in the U.N. Those folks have got legitimate suspicions that you may or may not be responsible for creating. The responsibility of creating those suspicions might come from that city council and you're not part of that city government. It might come from something that happened 15, 20 years ago, and yet there's still a hangover in town about how tax money is spent. It might be because your board or your staff at some point or another had some problems. Yeah, we have to own that certainty. We have to assuage those suspicions.   If we get the P, the 37% who believe, who are activated in their belief about what the library is doing and what the librarians, all the folks who work there are doing, and then to assure the suspicious or questioning voter that we've got a plan that makes sense for the community. 37 plus 37, that could be 74%. It certainly is at least 7 out of 10, maybe 8 out of 10 people in town who are interested in what you're going to do with their tax money. They're hopeful. They've got legitimate questions. They're willing to listen to your answers. Okay, there's another 26% though who are not necessarily. They might be users of the library actually. These 26% who probably or definitely will vote no. They might be power users of the library, and yet they're not going to vote for you because they have a belief. It's about taxes. It might be any taxes of bad tax. It might be some ideology around how government should be shrunk. And folks, they might be in there every day using the library and still don't want to see their taxes go to it. Some of them are going to vote no because they can't afford it. I respect that. The rest of it's an ideological approach that I don't agree with personally. I wouldn't have started a political action committee for libraries if I didn't think that progressive taxes that fund the common good were the right way to go in this country. I want to focus on the 37% who believe though for the rest of this conversation, the 37% who want to ask and answer some questions or have their suspicions allayed for the rest of the conversation though.  And that's alright. There's fewer of them if we do the good work of bringing out the 74%. Alright, who are these 74%ers? Well, the nice thing about the data, and again, this is OCLC from Awareness to Funding. If you're a policy wonk like I am, it's a must read even though it's from 2007-2008. A voter's willingness to support increased library funding is not driven by or limited by library use. We've known this now for like 10 years, and yet we still do most of our marketing to library users. We still do it over the reference desk at the CERC desk in our newsletter on our Facebook page. To put some advertising dollars to reach non-users behind our Facebook page is really the ultimate goal in a certain respect.  The folks who are non-users who are believers in the library, the folks who have not been there since he or she was 15 years old, they really actually want to hear what you're doing, not to become a user necessarily. Some of them don't read, and they feel like I got nothing to do with the library. That's cool. They love the fact that you are there personally. There's people in their stead who are taking care of those kids, who are taking care of those seniors, who are helping folks who are looking for jobs right their first resume. They love the idea that there's a library in the community that's doing 21st century library work and there's 21st century librarians provided that we actually tell them. This country is littered with buildings named after families that are too wealthy to ever go into the library themselves, and yet they want it there, ready to roll for those other people. Yeah, we can touch the folks who are users, who are in that 37% who believe, across the reference desk and through our newsletter, but to start refocusing our marketing attention on the fact that their willingness to support increased library funding. Again, this is not just for the ballot box. This is city council. This is in Lincoln. This is in Springfield. This is in DC. This is folks who are willing to cut you a check for five bucks or 50 bucks to put you in their will. It's not driven by their library use, and we've got to wake up to that fact. Also, those folks who are believers, and some of those folks who want to ask and answer their questions, the library is not perceived as simply a provider of the practical. The committed supporters hold a belief that the library is a transformational force. Why am I reading most of the words off the slide? It's because of a word like transformational force being in a data point on a survey. The force that the library is a force for good. Libraries Transform, which is the new ALA library marketing campaign, is doing great work highlighting that, and I love them for it. I want that to succeed wildly, and I want you to be able to activate the belief that people have not just an institution, but because you work there, you are actually the transformational change agents yourself. It's not just the institution. It's also the folks who work there. The factors that determine a resident's own willingness to increase their own taxes to support the library are their perceptions and attitudes about the place you work and the all y'all who work there. The perceptions and attitudes about the library and the librarian are co-equal in what, as factors, that determine somebody's willingness to see their taxes go up, either through City Council or at the ballot box. This is massive. We've got a great vocabulary about I love libraries, libraries transform, libraries change lives, libraries build communities, at your library, geek the library, library, library, library. It's all good. We got that down cold, folks. I'd love to see us bring up the other noun that matters to our taxpayers, which is the librarians. When I say librarian here, I'm not talking about just folks with an MLS. I don't have an MLS myself. I've never worked in a library. I've been on the board of trustees from my local library. I have a lot of respect for the MLS, and yet the kid who runs up to you in the grocery store and says, I love you, Ms. Karen doesn't know what your degree status is, and neither does her parent, who's also going to talk to you about what's going on at the library. I want to see more librarians out there in the world. It's hard sometimes to say, I do this. I know that. Sometimes if we just said we do this, sometimes if we just said let me tell you about my colleagues here at the library, we'd be better off because the perceptions and attitudes about the library can be really well informed by a newspaper article or somebody driving by and seeing that the parking lot is full or by us telling them the truth about where our funding is and what we need to have, but the we of it, the librarians, the people who work there, need to speak about it in an authentic voice as the owners of, owners might be the wrong word. No, owners is the right word. Owners are the responsibility of serving the public. All right. So who are these humans who are really cool and like us and are the 37% who believe? Who are these humans who are really cool and are willing to have a dialogue, ask and answer some questions, have their suspicions elade, their legitimate suspicions elade? Well, let's talk about them. How do we find them? Because you need to talk to them about the taxes in your town. You need to talk to them about the funding needs that you have in for the library. There's no other way around it. It might be a ballot measure, it might be city council, might be going to state capital, might be going to federal, might be going to a big grantor, might be putting the thermometer up on the front lawn for your capital campaigns. You can finally build that new wing. Who are those humans? Okay, to say they are involved in their communities is not a statement. Their communities might not be the library. It might not be civics kind of stuff. They don't show up at town hall meetings. If their community is Friday night lights parents who are in the high school sports, that's their community and they have an understanding about the whole child. It's the same kind of understanding that the arts parents and the band parents and the PTA parents have. Those couple of different sub-communities within education need to all be addressed because we do work with the whole child. Their community could be, you know, the Rotary Club, their community could be the Lions, the Kiwanis, the Moose, the Elks. Their community could be the civic and social organizations. It could be the soup kitchen. It certainly could be the church, synagogue, or mosque. It could be the knitters, you know, the knitters who make baby booties, you know, or the blankets. I don't knit, so I don't even know, you know, how that all works. But I do know that if they're doing it privately and then donating it to the hospital for the premature babies, that's really sweet. It's kind of an act. It's a corporal work of mercy. But if they do it in community and they probably do it at the library, they are eager to hear from you about your funding. I promise you. It might be an awkward conversation at the beginning because you haven't done it before, but they're eager to hear about your funding because they care. They care about a community that's bigger than themselves. They recognize the library's importance to their community and do a child's education. Again, it's not a duh statement. We don't necessarily do a good job of connecting the dots for folks about what story time is, just on its most basic form.  It looks nice. It looks like the kids are having fun. What they don't know now, those non-users, is that it's pre-K literacy. It's getting children ready to read. It's learning to read before reading to learn. It's all those things that we know inside this industry and we've not succeeded in telling the story effectively and connecting the dots for the non-users who believe. They are eager to hear about how summer reading or summer learning is not just like the nobility of putting a book into some brute child's hand. They want to hear about how it holds kids at grade level. It's after school time and the databases that you've got, whether you've got the K.L. or EBSCO or Reference USA or any other ones, that that is not simply, you know, works in the curriculum. Let's really talk honestly about how we extend the curriculum. People get excited about that, that there's leverage going on, that their schools are underfunded and under-resourced and their library is underfunded and under-resourced and yet at the same time we're able to have this blossoming flower of education in our community because, and if we could get a little bit extra funding out of it in order to extend that school day better, extend that curriculum better, they're eager to hear about it. Okay, we said before about how they're not always heavy users of the library, that is very true. They believe the library is a noble place. Congratulations, you all work in a noble place. Let's talk about it from that perspective. They see that it's vital. They are willing to increase their taxes if they're talked to about where's the money going and who is spending the money and they recognize your value, the value of the passionate librarian in the community. There's no differences, folks, between Republicans and Democrats, men and women, age, ethnicity, educational attainment and household income. None of the factors that bifurcate or divide this country politically are at play in the conversation about taxes and libraries. The only issue that comes up is if it's an any tax is a bad tax perspective, an ideology that says any tax is a bad tax. I would suggest that there's ways to work within that environment, that you can actually ask folks who are part of that any tax is a bad tax movement to not oppose the library at best, perhaps, but to look around the community broadly, to know firmly that it doesn't matter if you're in a red state, a blue state, a poor town, a rich town. If you're in a town that's got a lot of new immigrants or it's been there for a million years, that there's a willingness on the part of these people, a belief on the part of some of them, to talk about your funding and we have to be bold enough to go out and ask. Okay, we run a political action committee for libraries, we know a few things. The political action committee side of it from the political sciences, the two biggest issues, if you're running for mayor, if you're running for president, if you're running for town council, if you're running for dog catcher, it doesn't matter, the two biggest things that any campaign does, well you worry about the weather, you know, if it's the first Tuesday of November and we've got a blizzard, the alpets are off, unless you've got enough money and enough volunteers to have people bust people to the polls or drive them to the polls, you know, and campaigns do that all the time, big campaigns, small campaigns. The two biggest things for any campaign, well have they been given a reason to vote? Where's my money going? Who's spending my money? Have they been mobilized? Has somebody actually asked them to vote? But the two biggest things, one is does the voter have a personal habit, tradition, or culture of voting? Are they a voter? Big presidential elections, you see this every presidential election, there's people who come out to vote and there are people who are voters. When they come out to vote, they'll vote for the top of the ticket, they'll vote for a couple other things and they'll fall off because they came out to vote for a candidate, they're not a habitual voter. The habitual voter is like me, quite honestly, I get the sticker, I bring my kids, I let them punch a chat, we go for ice cream afterwards because I have a value. And if I don't know what's on the ballot, then I'm going to vote based on my hunch or my suspicions. I need to hear from, as a frequent voter, I need to hear from any campaign that's out in the field, otherwise I'm going to vote based on how I feel in that millisecond that I'm considering the ballot measure that I've just read for the first time. No, when we work on campaigns, we make sure that the get-out-to-vote group that we work on as every library goes to all the frequent voters and tells them what's up, to activate the 37% who believe, to assure the 37% who are suspicious or questioning, and then to just check in with the 26% because we don't want to do much more with them other than know who they are so we can avoid them in the future. The biggest other thing that we have available to us is some personal contact with the candidate or the issue. Has anybody actually talked to them about what they believe as a politician? Somebody come to their door, knock on their door, and said, hi, I'm John. I'm running for mayor. This is what I believe about our small town. Hi, I'm John. I'm with the Obama campaign. I want to tell you about what my guy believes. That's why I'm voting for him for president. Those little moments of personal interaction and contact are massive. They're drivers for voter behavior even though the presidential campaign is spending a billion dollars. Advertising, contact through social media, the knock on the door still drives voter behavior more than anything else. We have that available to us. We have that available to us whether we're running a ballot measure and we can send out the vote yes committee and say, let me tell you about my librarians. We have that all throughout the year available to us. When it comes to prepping our neighbors to be good constituents with our city councils, with our state legislators, we have that personal contact. Our thesis with every library basically is that nothing impacts voter behavior more than the perception of the institution and the people who work there. We've talked about that before. There's an awareness of some sort that something's going on that requires funding. Fundamentally, what it comes down to is that you are the candidate in whatever funding race it is that you're working on. The librarians are the candidate because nothing impacts voter behavior more than their perception of you and the place that you work. Your candidacy can be done in a way that is dramatically similar to somebody who's running for mayor or somebody who's running for president even. Dramatically similar to that because folks want to hear what their candidates believe. Folks want to be convinced by their candidate that they're worth backing. Folks want to be convinced that the vision that those candidates have for their town, for their country matters. And yeah, some people don't like the candidate. That's cool. That's why we have races in elections. Your library is not something to hide behind in any kind of funding discussion, whether it's going to city council, going to state capitol, going to DC, or going out to the voters directly. Your record is not something to hide behind when it comes to asking folks for money that shifts the landscape as a donor. I use the word incumbent here for a very particular reason because whenever you're talking about taxes, whenever you're talking about candidates, there's always an incumbent.  You run against the incumbent, you say, get rid of that shyster, I will take care of you. To run as the incumbent for the library is to probably and boldly say, new money extends our success. To run against yourself is something that you sometimes have to do very honestly, which is new money fixes problems. New money fixes problems is a conversation that the believers want to have if it's the truth. New money fixes problems is a conversation that your suspicious voters want to have because they want to hear about it. To run as the incumbent institution is cool, but who's spending my money? Who is spending my money? If we can step out from behind the institution and embrace our candidacy, that's one of our big goals here with every library. Hey Krista, I want to take a pause here. I want to see if there's any questions that come in or people sitting there in stunned silence about our thesis. Good question. Yes, does anybody have any questions? Use your go-to webinar interface, type in your question if you want to, or if you have a microphone, just type in and say, I have a mic, please unmute me, and we can ask your question that way. Nobody typed in anything while you were talking. I'm hoping that, I'm assuming that means they're just very wrapped, you know, attention. Oh, that's so cool. I'd be remiss if I didn't want to. I'm just, I don't know that I had any questions. The librarian is candidate, your idea of that, as I mentioned earlier to you, is something that I think is very important. Yes, that many librarians do have issue, trouble with talking about themselves and what they are doing and what we're doing in our libraries and any library staff, really, rather than, as you said, just about what the library does. And I think it's good that we can start thinking about that. And as I said, having your elevator speech and whatever you need to do to quickly get someone's attention about whatever the issue is that you're working on for your library, whatever voted is, whatever bond issue, whatever it is that's coming up. We do have a question just came through, actually. Yeah. Someone's to know if you provide good scripts for all librarians who are approached to have ready for citizens, like cue cards, for example, like something of here's what you can say about this particular issue. Sure. Well, I've got some, I've got some, some messaging that we're gonna, I'll go through to high level. We don't really like to provide a toolkit. We're not a toolkit kind of, kind of organization. What we can do and we love to do is be able to work with small groups and, you know, conference-sized, you know, presentations on developing the local legitimate script, you know, based on some of the guidance that we have for top-level messaging. I want everything to be localized. There's this idea that, what is it, it won't tell stories families, right, where they're like peculiar and they're unpeculiar ways. Everybody is, no, everybody's community thinks it's unique. It is kind of unique, but it's more peculiar than anything else. But I want to get everything localized for you. So yeah, I can take you through that right now. Let's go there. Yeah, I mean, there's certain, yeah, there's going to be something, and like I said, when you work with each group, like when you're here with Lincoln, you make things specific to that look at location, yeah. That's going to pay attention of the people you're trying to convince, obviously. Yeah, there's two tribes of those people. One tribe is, okay, I said before about how user status doesn't matter and we need to reach out beyond user status to the non-users, but when you begin any kind of conversation, if this is like your elevator speech, Krista, the idea that if you know it's a user, you start your elevator speech with as you know, even if they don't know, because as you know brings people into the conversation. It lets you push information to them and it lets them kind of become activated as a member of an insider group. That's not a bad thing. They're users of the library. They've been inside literally. Like as you know, at three o'clock in the afternoon, this place fills up with the high school right around the corner. The Wi-Fi goes down. Everybody who's over the age of 30 flees. As you know, we are the only place in town that does X, Y, and Z. As you know, without the funding that comes from this request to city council or this ballot measure, we can't. We'd like to. Going into that kind of a mode, to the non-user, I would highly recommend starting your talking points or your elevator speech with as you can imagine, because they're capable of imagining it. If they're a believer, this will activate their belief. If they are a questioner, it brings them into making the answer their own. As you can imagine, with the high school right around the corner, at three o'clock in the afternoon, this place fills up. The Wi-Fi goes down. Everybody who's over the age of 30 flees. As you can imagine, we're the only place in town that does X or Y or Z for those kids. As you can imagine, without the resources that come from this ballot measure, this funding request to city council, this thermometer that we've got on the front lawn, we can't. As you can imagine is a beautiful thing because you're going to hear back from non-users. Yeah, I can't imagine that. That's really amazing. I had no idea. You're also going to hear back, Nat, I can't imagine it. I don't care, and that lets you get away from those people and move on to other folks. Yeah, and sometimes you might need to. You may think you can convince everyone that the library is a great place, the non-users, but you do have to realize you might not, and that's okay. Yeah. Move on to someone who else is more receptive. One of the things that we tend to do in our marketing, though, and I'm always bothered by it, is that the only bar that we set, we set a very high bar for people to become library lovers, they've got to be a user. We always say to them, if you'd only come in and see it, you would understand. I don't have to go on the dingy with Greenpeace to try and save the whales myself in order to understand what those people at Greenpeace are doing. And to be supportive of them, yeah. I don't have to experience an Iranian or North Korean prison to fund the ACLU. I don't have to have my cold, dead hand be opened up in the gun pride out of it in order for me to check to the NRA. I can learn about it without having to experience it myself. We always tell people, you should come in and see it. Now, let's just be more narrative about it. Okay, so there's some high-level messaging that works around the country that I want to share with you. It's really basic. It's elevator speech. It's cocktail party. It's the person who you're talking to who cares. They care because they're involved in their communities. They see that the library does something good in the lives of children and for education. They see the library somewhat as leavening. And they're still yet they're a little suspicious maybe because taxes in town get spent really weird. All right, so some high-level messaging here. The library is educational partner. We need to start saying things about story time or its pre-K literacy. We've got to say it out loud. Some are reading, holds kids at grade level. We have to say it out loud. The educational day is extended. The curriculum is extended through our resources. We have to say it out loud. There's a difference between partners, by the way, and sponsors. We've got a lot of organizations that sponsor us but are not necessarily partners in our educational space. That's perfectly fine. Some of them are going to be legitimate partners though where they're contributing equally either through time or treasure or talent. Some of them are only going to be sponsors because they're going to catch you at check and yet they want to see you at work doing this transformational stuff or an education. There's a whole deck of information that we don't necessarily share well which is that the library is an economic development engine in the community. And that phrase, an economic development engine is something that I would encourage you to do. You could also use the phrase, the library is a retail anchor.  We have the best gate count. Besides maybe the grocery store, people leave their homes, they go shopping, they come to the library to reward their children. People leave their homes, they come to the library, they go shopping. If we're not open on Tuesday nights and we're not open on Thursday nights and we're not open on Sundays, how does that negatively impact the rest of the retail community that people go shopping to? How can we as a neutral provider of information and recommendations potentially be a partner with the economic development corporation or the chamber on like all the restaurants in town get to do a taste of my hometown, you know, at the library? The chance to be able to show off and recommend is something that we should do more locally and not just for authors. The other aspect of us being an economic development engine is that our technology and access to technology, our databases, which we need to start talking about as business analytics and market intelligence, which is what they truly are. Help folks who have an idea, build the idea into a business and take it to market. That our technology allows people who've got a second job or second business that they're running, the eBay store, the Etsy shop to do that with a stable broadband connection. It allows us not just for the workforce literacy aspects of making sure that the workforce knows how to do their jobs. I'm sorry that the workforce is basically literate, but then the data sets that we have in the trainings we've got, the mango languages type stuff that lets people do job skills creation and building. Economic development engine is huge because we don't talk about what we do for bricks and mortar or web 2.0 businesses well enough. Okay, the social leveler conversation is something that the American public loves like crazy about libraries. Every single story that's put up on boing-boing or on Buzzfeed or on Huffington Post or any of those places that shows off that the library accepts people without fear or favor, that it lets people who've got an idea research it, who've got a play, like we shouldn't, we should be exhausted by telling that story and we still haven't told it enough. Where are my taxes going that lets everybody actually participate? Where is my neighborhood growing through smart taxes? This social leveler thing is still one of the single biggest drivers for people to understand that the librarians and the library matter in the 21st century. Don't be shy about the other two as well. The place of discovery story, the place of personal refuge, the librarians were the only people in my life who understood me. After school I went to the library and read all the Nancy Drews and all the Hardy boys because I was a latchkey kid, that the library was a place when I was young, I could learn about myself, I could do art, I could now do STEM, like if we can talk about STEM education and STEM access in the same way that, sorry, a little bit of a cold here today. So that being said, these stories are top level stories for people who, at a cocktail party, are very interested in it and it's got to be short, it's got to be tight, it's got to be about a paragraph at the most and you can do a good amount of advocacy in that paragraph. There's a few other things that are activating around the American public that we're doing when we're out in these campaigns. Like I said before, we've done 36 elections to date, we've got another 15 to do the rest of this calendar year. We've had 27 good wins, we've helped secure about $100 million for libraries, we've done negotiations with small town city councils, with big city, big county commissions. When we talk about the library we should be talking about an incubator in the community. We should be talking about how the library incubates not just ideas, not just the educational stuff, but businesses, how STEM and the arts programming incubate the next generation of craftsmen and artisans, how our community identities are incubated through this being the one place of neutral contact, of active neutral contact. If the community's on the way up, how do you grow it? On the way down, how do you save it? How do you weather a recession together? Then there's the idea of the library being leveraged. The leverage about being a retail anchor, I talked about before, we don't talk enough about how our grants, our leverage, our tax money that lets us match a grant, our tax money that lets us staff a grant, our ability to be, the library in a certain respect is, I don't know if this sounds weird or not, but for grants and capacity building, we are shaped like a cash register for money to come in from the outside. It might be money coming in from Lincoln, or from DC, or from some national organization, but to talk about that leverage that we can do by being shovel ready, but then for the day in the morning. If you've got questions you should start typing them out, but for the day in the morning. John, we do have one question going back to when you were talking about how to talk about it. Someone did want to start off the question, wanted to know, is there a good response to, I don't need a library because Amazon, the internet and streaming and everything, and she answered that because you were talking about that, but related to that, how do you, and this is in this librarian's words, how do you hold your temper and avoid pointing out the fact that the person is completely out of touch and out of date, and in her humble opinion, extremely selfish? I love you. I agree completely that that is, yeah, I have that same issue with people who don't know or friends of mine who get snarky about libraries, and I kind of just look at them as dumbfounded, like are you really, and I kind of lose it, but I'm trying to get a better way of responding. So my colleague Peter Bromberg, he's on our library board. Peter's at South, or at Salt Lake County, he's assistant director over there, he's a Princeton public in New Jersey, assistant director over there at one point.  You know, just your classic second city upright citizens brigade kind of improv stuff, which is that you never say no in a scene. You never say but in a scene. You always say yes, and you always say and in a scene when you're doing improv, because otherwise it shuts it down. By saying yes to it, it doesn't mean you agree, it means that you can diffuse the other person in the scene, and by saying and you can either add to a good idea that the person had at the beginning of the scene, or you can redirect it. And yet it's participatory. Yeah, we don't need libraries, everything's on the internet. We have Google. Yes, we do have Google, and what's behind the paywall right now is massive, and you didn't take any of the cleaners by it if you don't have your library card. Oh yeah, we got a Netflix account. Yes, you do, and isn't that lovely? And there's a whole bunch of people in town who don't. To be able to use that improvisational cue, yeah, I understand that seeing red the moment that you get when somebody's talking like a complete ignoramus, and yes, and it's on you, because quite frankly, you are the only expert on librarianship that that person is ever going to meet, and it is your great burden, and I appreciate it. I appreciate it very much that you're going to take that extra step with that person.  We've been staring at this slide. We know this to be true now. We've got to talk about ourselves. All those things about the libraries, leverage the libraries, incubate the libraries as an economic development engine, the libraries, educational partners, all cool, and yet the voters want to know not just where their money's going, but who's spending their money. This is really key. In my own personal experience of being a librarian, I know this to be true, is valid, and it's something that you can strongly talk about. You are an expert in 21st century library work. You can strongly talk about it, and people are actually interested. All right, a couple quick tips. A couple just quick tips, the take-homes here.  If it's not just about the institution, it's about the people who work there, my big tip to you, even if you can't afford $5 a day in social media advertising, is to change your postings on social media from something like 10 o'clock, Storytime Friday in the bunker room. To Ms. Karen invites you and your kids to Storytime. Storytime is more than just fun. It's first language literacy and pre-K readiness. Ms. Karen loves your kids, and she wants to see you guys out there at 10 o'clock on Friday in the bunker room. Changing that little bit, where you put the humans into it who are doing the work, the librarians, the staff who are doing the work, it's a real big driver. And then you can use that social media posting to connect the dots for people about education, about economic development, about refugee discovery and leverage. The other big thing, I'm sorry, I just bounced out of here, is that if we are the candidate and we don't have anything that we're running for right now, I would highly recommend using some of the things you have to do when it comes to your strategic planning and your surveys for the state library, the state library commission, in a way that the candidate would do it. A candidate who's a good candidate goes out and knocks on doors and says, hi, I'm John. I'm with the library. We're out today going door to door in this neighborhood to do our strategic planning survey. Yeah, we've got a survey monkey. We were really happy that 50 people responded to it. We need to find 50 more people who aren't library users, and we're coming door to door today because it matters so much that we get your opinion and your perceptions and your attitudes about what we're up to. And if you're looking at me right now and you're thinking to yourself, I don't have a place I can do that door to door, that's fine. Go to the hardware store, the grocery store, the feed store, the pediatricians office. I can go somewhere and do it with a clipboard. And you end your conversation with them saying, thank you very much. Here's my business card. I'm your librarian. It's nice to meet you. The other big thing that you could do that everybody could do as the candidate right away, September is coming. September is library card sign up month. If we are thrilled that we get 15 people or 50 people or 500 people signing up during an average week who are coming into the library willfully coming into the library, that's an extraordinary barrier. What if we went out and knocked on the door and said, hi, I'm John. I'm your librarian. I'm with the friends of the library. I'm a volunteer this week. We're going door to door in the neighborhood because we want to see if you need a library card. This most basic form of enfranchisement to all the wonderful things that go on there. No, you don't. That's cool. How about anybody in your family? No? Okay, that's cool too. How about anybody on your block? Because I'm your librarian. Here's my business card. It's nice to meet you. It's a massive way to meet people, to break down barriers, to jump over the reference desk or the CERC desk. I guarantee that if you were to do library card sign ups door to door, that you'd have kids yelling at their parents, mom, dad, the librarians are here. There would be a lot of fun to do as well. I got some tips on our website about how to do that. Last thing, here's our website for our petitions, for our sign ups, for our events. We're hosting two events at annual conference in Orlando. If you click on events here at action.everlibrary.org and scroll down, you'll see them. One on Friday night is a benefit for us, a fundraiser. The other one is for a new foundation that's been set up by the Herd family. Cynthia Graham Herd was one of the folks who was unfortunately murdered a year ago in South Carolina at the church. She was a librarian in Charleston and her family set up a new literacy and civic engagement foundation. We're doing a benefit with the Black Caucus of ALA on Saturday night at annual to raise funds for that new foundation. We also have our petition platform, and I'd love it if you'd sign up for our newsletter. We do a lot of stuff that is focused on the public, that teaches through demonstration. I'd have you involved and looking over our shoulders, something that I welcome very much. Okay, Krista, I hope this was a good little run through here. I hope that there's some Q&A. I'm happy to hang out and chat some more. Here's my cat that could help you need us. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, thank you, John. That was actually very, that was awesome. Yeah, very, engrossing, yes. Everything you said is just, I'm just sitting here. I wish, sometimes I wish we did have our cameras set up for this because we don't always every week. A lot of nodding and uh-huh, uh-huh. Yes, of course, of course, coming from me. Yeah. We do have a couple of comments, questions that did come through also. And actually, one person did say, props to you very much. So, the only thing better than the information presented on the slides is the complete webinar. It should be your acquired viewing for every advocate, supporter, staff member, and library school student. Hey, do me a favor, email that to me at john.crosscut, everylibrary.org. I'll put you up on the website. That's beautiful. Absolutely.  But another issue she says, I repeal the encounter, because the community I tend to interface with is the argument of library as equalizer and open to all, yet still not as accessible to individuals with disabilities as they might want it to be. I'm not sure that this seems to me as something that the libraries need to work on. Yeah, when it comes to ADA and what not, yeah. Yeah, if you've got an ADA change, it needs to be made to your physical plant, your space, and that's going to cost money. Let's talk about that honestly. Let's talk about that aspirationally. There you go. If they say, but you're not accessible, say, well, help us be. Help us be, yeah. And how do we get there? The, and then if it's an issue of budget that prevents you from doing blind in the, in the handicap better, let's talk about that honestly, you know? And it doesn't have to necessarily just be writing a grant. It could be about changing the allocation from city council in order to get that done. Absolutely. Another comment, I guess I'd say here about strategic planning. So what else here from the library Christian says, it's strategic planning. We ask them to ask people not about the library, but about their views of the community. For example, what are the major issues you're concerned about in this town? See what they're interested in, what they're worried about, concerned about thinking about, and then, you know, connecting that to what the library does. I'm with you on that. The, if that's the Harwood model, if that's the World Café model, if that's the, what's the other one? I can't turn a blank on it. Yeah, that's exactly right. Mike, my feeling on what to do with your strategic plan though, afterwards, I'm kind of agnostic about the approach that you take in building your strategic plan, as long as it's legitimate and open, transparent, consultative. I would love to see, okay, if the librarian is the candidate, then how does a candidate, you know, begin to surface among the public? We've just gone through this with presidential candidates. You know, the first thing that the presidential candidate does in order to be seen as a legitimate candidate, one of the traditional things that they do is they write the book, you know? Like, it takes a village, make America great again, dreams from my father, you know. Dreams from my father did more to bring President Obama, then State Senator Obama, onto a national scene than anything else did. If we named our strategic plans, dreams of my hometown public library, or dreams of my hometown, what would that do to actually talk honestly about our hope and our vision as a library for doing librarianship in our town? Dreams from my hometown library would be a hell of a title. I'm kind of agnostic about how you get there, you know? Pull up their heartstrings, absolutely. Yeah, and talk about your goal, you know? Yeah, they're talking about the ADA, this is saying my brain is responding to that, which she's asking about it. She often sees reluctance on the part of library administration to put money towards services for, and quote, their term, so few in the terms of ADA. We don't have that many people, so yeah, but the ones that you do, it's going to make an impression on, and yeah, that's the library administration. Well, maybe that's actually, as a candidate, you go and get someone in the community to really come at your administration about it. I would bet you a nickel that the compassion in the community is massive, even though it's only for a few people. And to find that out is part of your planning process, you know? Yeah, right, and just to give you a point, we need to change our attitude about them, yep, absolutely. Right. All right, any other last minute questions or just exactly at 11 01 central time, which is when we, I started things up for 10 01. Anybody have any last minute questions you want to throw at John while he's still here for you? Of course, you've got his contact information there. Definitely connect with them on Facebook and on their websites. I am, I'll tell you that, so I'm keeping up on what they do, of course. We have had just some comments for you, John, saying that agree that this was, agree about the previous comment about the praise for this session. She's a little upset. Where was this when the city council was slashing our budget to 40 by 40% last fall? She wished we, she had known about you guys to help out in their town. Well, we can come back around, drop an email, we can come back around and start rebuilding. Yeah, it's not over. You know, you can always, yeah, get things back. And she also said this has been a top five CE hours in all the years I've been doing this. Wow. Awesome. Yeah. I will send you these comments. Like I said before, we're interested, we're eager. Most of the work that we do is pro bono as well by the way. That's the beginning. We do this for free. We're donor supported. Our donors, coming in at this page, $5 a month, $10 a month.  Rosen Publishing. We do all of this to the best of our ability for free, for the libraries. If we've got to travel, we do ask for travel reimbursement because we want our consulting dollars to go further. A lot of what we do is just all virtual, you know, we never actually even set foot in town. But to have the librarian, to have the person on this webinar, the person who's listening to it later, have it kind of activated in your heart or in your guts about where to go with this, we'll take a confidential contact from you as well. I mean, I don't want to get anybody in trouble. So we can work with you though. Yes. Reach out to them and see what you can explain what's happening in your town and see what could be done. I don't know, that's how we did it here in Nebraska. There was, you guys didn't actually come here. It was all done through online resources, through emails to our advocacy people here at NLA. And it worked, yeah. All right. It doesn't look like any more urgent questions are coming through right now. That's okay. If you do have them, contact John later and he'll be able to talk to you. So thank you very much, John, for coming on the show for us. I'm glad we finally got you on here. I've been, as I said, watching what you've been doing for a few years as you've been doing this. And I was glad to finally get you out there. Get you on our show to share everything. It's been a real fun. Yeah. All right. I'm going to pull back control now to my screen here. There we go. All right. So that will wrap it up for this week's show. It has been recorded and will be posted here on our website. This is our main page right here underneath our upcoming shows is where all of our archives go. So later this afternoon, most likely it'll be done at the mercy of the processing through YouTube and getting all that up, but it'll be posted here. This is last week's show. We had a recording on YouTube presentation. I don't know, John, if you have your slides somewhere you want us to link to or how, if you share those or not, we can do that. And any links that we have, I've been collecting into our delicious account, which has been being temperamental this morning. So I'm not sure if I can... They just changed their system a bit. So take it a while. But they'll be up there whenever we get our recording up. So when it is ready, I'll let all you guys know, send you all emails about that. I hope you join us next week when our topic is why use Google Books. Devadre goes who's here at the Nebraska Library Commission is going to talk about the resources that are actually really good in there. The free resources in the Google Books program that you can use for research and projects and things. So sign up for that and any of our future shows. Also, we are on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, please do pop over there to Facebook and like our Encompass Live page. I post notices about shows. Here's my reminder for this morning. People could pop in on the fly if they wanted to. Reminders of upcoming shows. And when our recordings are available, or I'll post it on here. So if you are big on Facebook, please do give us a like over there to keep up on what we're doing. Other than that, that wraps it up for today. Thank you very much for attending Encompass Live. And we'll see you next week on the show. Bye-bye.


Live from the Hilton at Bonnet Creek, Orlando, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Vision 2015. Brought to you by IBM. And now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Hi everybody, welcome back to IBM Vision. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and this is theCUBE. Check out ibmvisiongo.com. It's our digital interactive experience here. Jane Hendricks is with us. She's marketing manager for Predictive Analytics at IBM. Jane, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. Great, thank you so much. It's good to be at theCUBE. It's good to be at Vision. So we should have a crystal ball out here. Predictive Analytics, that's your world. What is Predictive Analytics all about? Oh gosh, Predictive Analytics is a little bit of something for everybody. So at its heart, it's technology. It's also a business practice. It's also a user experience, if you will. So Predictive Analytics allows you to tell what the future may hold and to do it with confidence, to do it in a way that you can take this to a boardroom and say, I know what the future will be and this is how I know it and you better listen to me. So that's what Predictive Analytics is under the covers and the rest is kind of how you implement it. So the technology of predicting used to be sort of let's look at what happened and let's assume past this prolog and then sort of put some probabilities around it and it's like Jordan Ellenberg was saying this morning, you can build a model. We can turn some knobs and we can make it say whatever we want. If we don't want to spend that much on mitigating a disaster, we can sort of lower the probability or the impact of a disaster. And so what's different with Predictive Analytics today? I think what's different with Predictive Analytics today is one, people understand that numbers can lie I think people understand numbers in a way that they haven't in the past potentially, right? People are embracing data. And I think Marcus, my previous, he talked about data-driven decisions, how organizations have come to this realization that they need to use the data they have to understand what's going to happen next. So what's really changed is this notion of it being in the hands of more users. It's more of that team sport approach, right? So you have people who are corralling data. You have people who are applying the math to it. You have business users who are taking their business intuition and looking at the math that's being applied. In some cases are applying the math and suggesting ways to make it better. And all of these folks working together are applying this technology that used to be in the back corner, I think, right? It used to be the, how do we say it? It used to be only the very few who did this. Now it's everybody. Now everybody's kind of taking a turn with predictive analytics. And that makes it more pervasive. That makes it more acceptable. And I think it makes the situations of these, let's just turn the dial a little bit. It makes it a lot harder. It's not in the back office. It's so visible. So is this Benjamin Disraeli Nirvana? You know, the highs, dam lies in statistics. What would he say if he were here today? Finally, we have a means of addressing this problem. Absolutely. I think it's the time has come, right? So we have the technology. We have the tools. We have ways of deploying it, right? So it's not just coming up with the answer. It's the means of taking the answer and doing something about it at a deep level. So you have all of these steps, right? All of these pieces, all of these jigsaw puzzles that have taken years and years to build. Now they're here. And now you can actually do something with it. And I think that's what's really exciting. And that's why you see all the people here. So go ahead. That's just to say, and how do you see the propagation move from the back room? Are people asking for it? Are the people coming out and say, hey, you can do this now. You've never done it before. Why don't you try? Is it a top-down directive that says you must have more data behind your suggested decisions? I mean, how is it actually kind of moving through the organization? What do you see in the field? You know, we see flavors of everything you've just described, right? People, it's what I started saying. People come to this. It's kind of, they come to it from a lot of different angles. So I think what we're seeing now is it's kind of this bottom-up approach. It used to be kind of a top-down mandate. You will bring data. You will defend your decisions with data and people would say, okay. And they defend their decisions with data and they try to adjust the dials. They try to defend a decision that maybe they already had with the data at hand, right? But now it's more of this bottom-up. It's this groundswell. The tools have gotten easier to use for folks like us. For folks like me, I'm in marketing, right? What do I have to do with predictive analytics? I shouldn't even touch it. And yet I can't because the tools allow me to play with the data in ways that you never could before, beyond standard dashboarding, beyond reports. To actually find meaning and build models that I can then take to an expert and it's not throwaway work. The expert looks at this and says, you know, you're onto something. Let me refine it. Let me add in some advanced capabilities. Let me really test it out. And then you can turn this over up the chain and say, you know what? Now we've really onto something. Let's deploy it. So I think it starts off at the bottom when people are using these tools. They may use many different tools. They're learning this at university. They may use R, right? Everybody sort of R. Use some open source. They use tools like Watson Analytics. Incredibly easy and yet there it is, it's doing predictive analytics. And then they kind of move up the chain to more sophisticated tools. Once you start, it's kind of hard to stop, right? And as these users are finding meaning, they're finding things that are informing the business, you get better and better and better until you're actually able to change how you do things with data. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's like buying a boat. You thought I was small, keep getting a bigger one. If you're, yeah, exactly, right. People process in technologies. We talk about it all the time on theCUBE. And they always say technology is the easy part. Of course, talk to the guys in the lab and ask them if what they're doing is easy. But nonetheless, you're bringing the technology to the table that we haven't seen before and it's game-changing. But I'd like you to discuss the people part of it and the process part. Let's start with the people. What kind of skill sets do I need to create a predictive organization? Because I've got this entrenched disinertia of, well, let's turn the dials and my agenda-driven decision-making versus the citizen data scientists that you guys are promoting. So let's start with the people. What kind of people skills or mindset changes do you prescribe to organizations? I think at the heart, it's not, a lot of people will start off and they'll start talking about the skills, right? You need to understand statistics. You need to be a data, and I don't think that's true. What you need are people who are passionate about data, who will let the data tell its story, right? There's people who are afraid of that and there's people who aren't. And the mindset that you want to have at your organization, if you really want to be data-driven are people who are not afraid of what the data will tell you. Because sometimes data will tell you things you don't want to know and you don't want to hear, right? So you have to, once you take that off, I think the possibilities are endless. Does it help to have statisticians? Of course it does. Does it help to have data scientists? Of course it does. Does it help to have DBA administrators who really know data? How do you structure it? How does it live? What does it live with? Text analytics, all of these different kind of technical analytical capabilities are important, but without this mindset of I'm gonna let the data tell me its story and I'm going to feel good about it, no matter what that story is. All of these other skills are not as impactful, right? And you can learn bits and pieces. I said it's a team sport. You don't need that one smart guy who knows everything, right? People come to the table, they come from their backgrounds with lots of different analytical puzzles and it goes back to technology. I'm a marketing manager. I love predictive analytics. I've been in technology. I think all my productive life, right? All of my career has been spent in technology. So technology can help all of these different folks work together, some technology, not all. And the technology that enables everybody to work together, right? If it's backed by that mindset of I'm gonna let the data talk to me, it's incredibly powerful. That's what we see transforming businesses and professions and industries. So I want to explore that a little further if I can. Sure. You've got a lot of experience in this space. So you meet a CEO at a cocktail party and he or she says, hey, Jane, help me. I'm frustrated with my organization. They've made decisions based on their own agenda and I want more data. What should I do? Okay, you got this Watson analytic stuff. Let's assume I bring it in, but how should I organize my teams?  Should I get the data scientists? You were saying that's nice to have. Is that where I should start? Where should I start? I would tell them to start with folks who understand that data's not scary, right? I'm going back to that. Folks who are comfortable working with data. Folks who are used, I wouldn't say used to because nobody's used to it. Folks who are comfortable with this notion of, okay, I have this data lake, right? We talked about data lakes. What's in it? We're curious. We talked about data oceans, by the way. We like data ocean. I think eventually it's going to be, I don't even know if it's eventually, I think now it's really more of a data deluge. I can't say it, right? It's not a swamp. Some places it's a swamp. People will start off like, oh my God, I don't have enough data. I guarantee organizations, they have plenty of data. It's not a matter of finding the data. It's a matter of being comfortable enough to say, okay, here's my big data store. Let's see what's in it. I'm going to see it. I'm just going to point something at it and see what's in it, and I'm not scared. Those are the kind of people you need to bring to the table, I think. It's that mindset, and I'm sure you've seen it. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to communicate, no question. So I'm going to now communicate to my organization, hey guys, we're going to be data-driven. You hear about this data-driven, so we're going to make decisions as a team. We're going to put the data in the hands of all of you folks, and let's talk about it. Let's analyze it. Let's not have somebody hiding behind a model with a set of assumptions that we don't really understand, that's going to take us hours and hours and hours to unpack because it's so complicated. Here's the data. This is how we're going to go forward. So that's a starting point. I think it is a starting point, and it's being for the CEO and for IT and for the technical leadership, I think it's important to allow them to let users access data, right? Because some of it is, in the past, it's been a matter of we need to control it, we're scared what if it gets out, single version of truth, whatever. Let folks play with it. If you're really going to be a data-driven organization, you have to sometimes take some of those breaks off, let people lose, let them play with the data, let them kind of understand it at their own pace in their own way, and then you can all sit down and gather those perspectives, and that makes for a very, very strong process. I was going to say, but there's still this cognitive leap that they have to make. Even if I have all the data and I do reports, traditionally it's been backward-looking. I want a data-driven decision. I'm looking at data as to what's happened, modeling it, doing it ever. It seems like there's another leap then to then let the machine come back with the predictors with some confidence level that I feel confident enough, ah, maybe I screwed up the moment. Maybe I put the wrong data in. How do people kind of get over that hump between looking back and being kind of data-driven in terms of what happened versus really letting the data set the course for them? It seems like a bit of a leap. It is a leap. It's hard. It's not a trivial, we talk about that, it's like a switch. It's like self-driving cars, right? Which is just- It is. You know, when do I take my hands off the wheel and have the confidence that we've set it up the right way and this is good stuff that I should get behind? Yes, I agree. So you do need, as an analyst, right, somebody who may be used to, I hate saying the old way, because it's not the old way, it's just a way. You're used to a certain way of looking at the world. You're used to, okay, here's the stuff in front of me, this is what's happening today. Now I'm going to trust this algorithm, this funky thing, to tell me what's happening and not only am I gonna trust that it's doing it right, quote unquote, whatever right means, but I'm going to actually change my behavior based upon whatever this thing is telling me. Is that something that is very easy for a mind to do? When we talk about it, of course not, but when you're actually sitting there and you're free to do this and you're able to do this yourself and you can see what's happening, right? You see it on the screen. So if a tool, again, technology comes in here, right? If the tool is accessible enough so that you're comfortable using it, I think it can help you overcome some of those objections, right? If it's something very difficult, then you're going to be more hesitant. You're going to think it's more of that black magic, right? It's a little bit black box, but if it is accessible, if it's something where you can kind of control the environment, you can look under the covers, you can validate it, there's guidance, right? There's communities, there's other folks talking about it. I think it can help you bridge those gaps as a user. Well, I would imagine most importantly is that you can have little victories, you can start to get a positive feedback loop that, okay, I did it, it worked. Okay, now maybe I'll trust it a little bit more, I'll go out a little bit further, I'll incorporate a bigger decisions based on the data that's coming back. That's one way of doing it, or you start small, you do something little, you gain that victory and you say, okay, I started this on a little Excel spreadsheet, right? I'd make Excel data, look at this, I build a model, I'm so proud of myself. Let's add in more data. Let's try a different technique. Let's see what my data science buddies are doing over there and let's incorporate their smarts. You see what I mean? So you can grow in so many different ways, but it always starts, I think, with feeling that you can actually do it, period. Do the analysis. Yeah, so I'm excited, I want to jump right in. So I got this data lake or data ocean, I've got some financial data and I got sales data in there, I got my social data in there and I want answers, I want answers to my questions, I want to know what questions I should be asking. Okay, so I have all this data. How can you help me? We can help you do pretty much anything that you want, of course, but the first thing that I would start with is okay, you have all this data, that's great. What we would start with is what are you trying to achieve? Right, you have to start backwards before you can go forward. So I want to understand my business, I want to understand where my opportunities are, how I should be optimizing, let's say my sales teams. Good. What products should I be investing in? Those are the kinds of questions that I have and then what other things, what are my blind spots that I should be asking? Yep, see, and right there, what you just said, that's what will guide what you do next, right? Because you're clearly starting off from that sales perspective. Other folks can start off from, I am really worried about fraud. I really need to understand the risks to my business as opposed to what are the opportunities. Somebody from like police departments, we work with police departments quite a bit, they come to us and say, you know what, I need to understand how to deploy my troops. And all of these questions will assume certain, how do we say it, the application of a certain technique potentially, right? So one may be an associative, what are the things that people do together? That's what I need to understand. What are the drivers for X, Y, Z? That's what I need to understand. And once you set up the business problem, you understand the kind of data you have, right? Where it's coming from. That's where the technology A will help you put the data together in a meaningful way to achieve that business problem, right? Help guide you through what are the various, there's so many different analysis techniques that you can apply. I mean, it's an endless thing. But what you're trying to achieve and the data you have will figure out the stuff in the middle, right? So then you do the stuff in the middle and that's the fun part. That's the part I really love. And you try a whole bunch of different things. You figure out which one gives you the best answer. And the best answer could be the most accurate, given the technique, right? The kind of mathematical accuracy metric, or it could be what makes the most sense to your business. Okay. And then you take the next step. In practically speaking, I put this data into your predictive analytics cloud. I structure it in some way, or how do I get started? So one of the advantages is that you actually don't have to have a really predefined structure in the first place. If you want to put it in the cloud, that's great. Because I don't really know. And that's fine. And that's most people are like that and we wouldn't want to say, okay, your data must be perfect. If your data is not perfect. Can't help. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. That's not a good message, right? Right, of course not. Data's never perfect. Nobody has perfect data. So we have the ability to work with your data wherever it's sitting. It's in the cloud. Fine, it can stay in the cloud. It's on-prem. Great, let's keep it on-prem. You have it mix and match. That's fine. Let's mix and match it. You have that kind of, let's say, freedom to do whatever it is that makes the most sense, right? Sometimes you may say, you know what? I have this data sitting here and I really think that I want to move it to the cloud. Awesome. Or you say, I don't want to move anything anywhere. That's awesome too. But wherever that data is at, so to speak, and that's my Chicago coming out, wherever that data's at, you can work with it. And one of the things that we do from kind of this performance perspective because of this data deluge is we push the analytics closer to wherever that data is sitting in the first place. So instead of doing all this moving things around, let's take the analytics to the data. Let's make it more efficient. Let's make it sing and dance and come back to your business problem. Okay. And so to engage with you, I need some software, right? So I acquire some software licenses from you. I got to run it on some hardware somewhere whether it's in the cloud or on-prem. Or both. Or both, absolutely. And then that software that I acquire from you is what? It's Watson Analytics. It's some other predictive software. It's a combination of things. What is it? It is whatever makes the most sense for your users what you're trying to achieve. So Watson Analytics? Absolutely. We also have a full predictive analytics portfolio from the SPSS acquisition and that has Modler which is a awesome workbench and it can be deployed in many different ways. There's statistics which is used by millions of people worldwide. So it's really the tools that make the most sense. Okay, like you said, if I have R, I can use R. If you have R, you can use R right alongside of the capabilities we have natively and that's an advantage, right? Not everybody wants to program. Some people wanna program everything. Some people wanna program something. Some people wanna have somebody else program stuff for them. That would be me. And the advantage is we allow you to do any of that. If you wanna program it 100%, awesome. If you hate this notion of code that you just wanna do GUI, great. Or the people in between where you have the code behind a GUI that somebody like me can use and I don't have to touch the code but I can do all the fun and cool stuff that the code allows me to do. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So okay, great. So we're at the cusp of this sort of new, I feel like we're at the cusp anyway of this new dawn of this new era of analytics. Where do you see it all going? Let's be predictive. Where do you see this in five to 10 years, Jane? Let's be predictive. Where's my crystal ball? I don't see it. I think in five to 10 years you're only going to see things. More people are going to be predictive analytics users. I think you're going to see this. We won't have this kind of fear of data, right?  Everybody will be a predictive analyst, I think in some way. I also think what's going to happen is you're going to see predictive analytics getting infused and embedded into applications. You see this happening now but I think you'll see this more and more. So pretty much anywhere you have data it can benefit from that forward-looking view, right? Right now we're kind of scratching the surface but I think in five, 10 years as the tools get smarter, as we have access to more types of data, things like geospatial, right? We only started playing with that. So the analysis gets more sophisticated. The user base, the people who are doing it, I think will explode. I think everybody wants to do this now. Think of Watson analytics and everybody can do this, right? And it will become a lot more pervasive. You'll see this in more and more and more applications. Imagine a world where analytics is as pervasive as search in applications and everybody can use it. Jane Hendricks, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you so much, thank you. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. We're live from IBM Vision. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.


Three men have been charged in connection with an October heroin trafficking case on the Red Lake Reservation that resulted in the shooting deaths of two people. 23 year old Franklin Jackson, 24 year old Christopher Sullivan of Minneapolis and 24 year old Brian Boardman also of Minneapolis have been charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin. Sullivan and Boardman were also charged with using and carrying a firearm during the drug trafficking crime. According to the indictment between October 1st and October 21st last fall three men, the three men conspired to distribute heroin on the Red Lake Reservation. Then on October 21st, their alleged trafficking activities resulted in the shooting death of two individuals identified as JR and RB in the indictment. The case is the result of an investigation conducted by the FBI Headwater Safe Trails Task Force and the Red Lake Tribal Police Department. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland news, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


So that link between sending your kid to school because they actually get food and the link between a full tummy and learning is huge. So as part of a passion project we looked into it a lot. We have managed to work with every meal and they put these food bags into kids' backpacks while they're in the class so they can have food, a food source during the weekend. It's really inspiring and so but the way they do it is they take in obviously donations and then they come and buy products like ours. So we work really hard with our value chain to make sure that we could we could figure out a way to make that affordable and as close to parity with what they were putting in at the time. So instead of it being a fruit cup I'm going to replace one serving of fruit with a Brainiac apple sauce.


Income tax 2021 2022 software example, other income part number two, get ready to get refunds to the max diving into income tax 2021 2020 tow. Let's start tax software. You don't need access to any software to follow along, but you might want to have access to the form 1040, which you can find on the IRS website irs.gov. Starting point single filer Adam Smith living in Beverly Hills 90210 100,000 W2 income. 12,000 550 standard deduction for the single filer 87 450 at the taxable income mirrored on our equation in Excel 100,000 12 550 87 450. Then we calculate the tax on page number two that at the 1515. We're going to be focused on schedule number one now looking at line eight. So this is schedule one part one line number eight. And we were down here at jury duty. We saw some of the other ones up top in a prior presentation. These are usually things that are a little bit more unusual to happen. Jury duties fairly usual to happen. Usually the dollar amount is inconsequential to the tax for the most part, not the most material thing oftentimes, but you want to make sure that you're reporting it properly. So that you make sure that you have everything on your side on our tax return populated in a similar way as the documentation that's going to be provided to the IRS to make sure that things are are processed properly. There could be some exceptions to in terms of like how your employer is going to reimburse you are they paying you for the jury duty and so on and so forth. But in general, the the items that are being paid by the employer reported on the W2 and the jury duty. So if you get information for that you get the documentation for that and we want to make sure that we've got the reporting properly done so that it lines up and the tax return processes smoothly. So I'm just going to put the 250 so there's the 250 it's going to sum up down below if I go then to page one of the 1040 it's going to flow in through to the line eight other income. And now we're at the 100,250 we can mirror that in our equation here by saying that if I go to the additional income let's add one for jury duty duty jury duty and jury duty and this is going to be 250. And that's that's what I need my dog jury and then I got to pick up the jury duty every once in a while you know. Any case that pulls over to page one page one of a 100,000 we're at the 12,550 standard deduction 87,700 on the taxable income. And that should mirror what we have on our tax return that's not the tax return 87,700 is that what I said it was 87,7 it is indeed page to calculate in the tax at now the 1575. So<PHONE_NUMBER>075. So there we have that one let's go back on over let's run a different scenario, bringing this back to the norm back to the starting point jumping on over to the schedule number one. Then we got the prizes and awards they can be a little bit confusing in terms of the tax treatment on specific scenarios so if, and they're more unusual as well there so if you have questions about the prizes and award information, then you can look at you could start to research there on the form 1040 instructions, but a lot of these items on on line eight are going to be items that you might receive documentation for. And you're saying okay where do I put this information and if it doesn't fit anywhere else you might have to you might put it here and if you get a 1099 or something like that. You would think that your first thought is maybe I need to record it basically an income. So I'll go to the next one then we've got activity not engaged in for profit. Now this is fairly common one or or some people could have income for example for things that they're not doing to engage in for profit and it's important to distinguish what that is because there's pros and cons of reporting something as basically a business which you might report say on a schedule C versus something that you might report here as say for example a hobby. So if I was to go to it to the schedule C note and this this often has people often there's many arguments that are made oftentimes for people that want to report it on the schedule C. Why would you want to report it on the schedule C as opposed to a hobby. Well because then you might get all these deductions and if you get a bunch of deductions you could not you could possibly right wind up with a loss and a loss would be good because you might be able to take the loss against other income.  So on the other hand if you don't have any expenses you would rather record it as a hobby because then you're not going to pay Social Security and Medicare. So let's take a quick look at this. We'll say let's say I had income and it was wages. Let's not not wages. I got schedule C income and let's just say it was 100,000 or 1000 1000 I mean 1000. Okay. So then if I if I go back on over on the 1040 now that 1000 is flowing through from the schedule C. It's going going from the schedule C ultimately on over to the to the 1040 and it flows into the 1040 but there's other consequences. So this is actually bad because I'd rather have that 1000 not reported here. If I don't get any deductions because on page two as you can see I've got this other tax which is Social Security and Medicare. That's the self employment tax. If you just have $1000 you have no other expenses then you don't want to report it as as schedule C income subject to self employment tax because that would that would result in more taxes right you'd have to pay the self employment tax. So but if you had a bunch of expenses related to it so if I had more expenses 2000 of expenses let's say 3000 of expenses now I would like to report it as a schedule C business. Because now I have a loss so I have a loss which is then going to pull over to the page one of the 1040 and it's going to be a benefit lowering my other income which is a benefit for taxes. The iris is skeptical of losses so there's many businesses that people are into and it also has to do with whether the iris thinks the business would be fun or not right.  The iris is more likely to say hey that sounds kind of like a hobby you know and you've got like five years of losses that you're riding off against wages and we don't like that. You know so they might then qualify it as a hobby which means you wouldn't get those deductions if it was a hobby you'd have to record the income although the income would not be subject to the to the self employment. So so if you could take the deductions that would be good just remember if you have like more than three years of deductions in a row or losses in a row. It's more likely the iris is going to shift their position and put the emphasis on you. You have to prove that you're in it for business as opposed to the emphasis being on the IRS that they have to prove that it's not a business related item. Now if you go back to the to the 1000 and you just had the 1000 then you would rather report it over here. If you didn't have any other expenses you don't want to report it as income then generally you'd rather report it some place over here activity engaged and not for profit. And I'll put a thousand there bring it on back on over to the home page so that totals up to a thousand pulls it up to the 1040. So then there's the 1000 and that brings up the 101. I don't have anything on page two for other taxes social security and Medicare. I can mirror that on our worksheet. I could say okay additional income. This is going to be I'll call it hobby income instead of whatever they call it there 1000. And so then there's another one that we can line up in case it comes up sums up to 1000 pulls over to the first page of the 1040 for the 101. We still got the 12,550 standard deduction that should bring us back to the 150 I would assume. So if I go back on over 100,088 450 and the the 15255 15255 I mean 15255 would be the tax. Okay, so there's there's that one. Okay, so then let's go back on over to schedule one. You got stock options. Now oftentimes if they came from the employee or you would expect hopefully the stock options to be taken care of. In essence within the W2 possibly if there's some part of employee compensation. So it would be taken care of there but if it's not then you might have to report that other income here income from rental of personal property. If you engage in the rental for profit but we're not in the business of renting such property. So you might have a situation of that you can look into the instructions for the 1040 more detail there. We'll talk about rental on a schedule E in a future presentation and then we have the Olympic and Parallel Olympic medals. This is probably a more unusual type of situation. So you're probably not going to see that too much. But if you do, you could take a look at the instructions and see how much of that might be taxable that could be benefits or non taxable component depending on the income level. And then you've got the section 951 inclusion and so on taxable distributions from the ABLE account. So you can look in the ABLE accounts in general to see more information on that if you get some documentation related to it. That's when you probably want to dive into it and then other income. If anything else you get if you say hey I got this 1099 or this form that looks like an income reporting form of some kind. For example or I have some income that they're telling me about that is not. I think I have to include but it's not in any of these items. I don't want it to be subject to self employment. Then you might just write on the line write on the dotted line what it is and add it down here to include it and other income which of course within pull over to the first page of the form 1040 1040.