And how do I start to broadcast? I don't know. That's why I asked you to... We do have attendees. Is there anything to broadcast? This is just open, right? Unless you had a practice session, you shouldn't have to go live. If you see attendees in the room, then you're broadcasting. Yeah. We see Bruce Codum. Okay, great. Good morning, everyone. You can see that we are still learning our Zoom world. This is Kathy Shane. I'm Kathy Shane. And this is the Thursday 8am meeting of the elementary school building committee. And per the governor's orders, I see we have a quorum, but I need to call out everyone's name to make sure they, they can hear us and we can hear them. So I'm going to do that first and call in the order. I see people on my screen. Paul Bachmann. Present. Mike Morris. Present. And Margaret Wood, who's not on the committee, but I can see she's here. John McNano. Here. Steve Schreiber. Here. Jonathan Salvon. Here. Ben Harrington. Here. Here. And Rupert Roy Clark. Here. And as others join us, well, I'll make sure they can hear. This morning, I think you all saw, we had a change in the order on the agenda. And we moved the webpage discussion up first. And I'm only seeing Brianna here, but I know we're expecting Carolyn and Deborah also. Is that correct? Yes. I'm sorry. We'll wait a few minutes for them to join us, but Brianna, you had agenda conflicts. So it was important. We start with you. Originally, is that correct? Yes. Yes, that's correct. Okay. So just, um, you know, so I'm waiting a few minutes for the others to join us. The other items on the agenda, Mike is going to give us an update on, uh, the decision on sixth grade. And for anyone who read the Gazette this morning, we will, we had a preview of, of that decision. And then we're continuing the discussion of designer. Proposal submissions. And in this case, really zeroing in on comparative comments. Either positive or gaps so that we can complete the grid. And then we can continue to do the interview questions. And if we don't get through a lot of that today, I think people can send me any other comments in writing. Just send them directly to me. And we will consolidate them and continue to add to that grid. I still. Margaret, do you know whether Caroline is the leadoff on this web presentation? Correct. Yes. And I did just email her, um, to see if she's joining us. Um, because we do need her to talk about the web.  If that would be. Maybe just if everyone's okay, why don't we start with the sixth grade? Um, yeah, that's a good idea. And then, and then instead of just doing a waiting. So Mike. You're on and Ben, feel free to jump in as well. Excuse me, but on Tuesday night, the, I haven't seen the Gazette article, so I can't comment on that one, but I was at the other meeting. So on Tuesday night, the Amherst school committee voted unanimously to transition sixth grade Amherst students to the middle school in the fall of 2023. And so I'm not going to try to summarize all the deliberation, because that's all public record and folks can see that, but certainly the MSGA project was part, but not all of the discussion. Um, you know, and the opportunity to kind of resolve the infrastructure issues that both Fort River and Wildwood was a reason I gave. And I know some school committee members also agree with that. I think there was other pedagogical and educational reasons that were considered and space reasons by the committee. It will be taken up by the regional school committee next Tuesday night with a potential vote, if not then two weeks after, because the regional school committee has to accept students, not just Amherst students, but potentially students from other towns as well into the middle school for that to happen. So it is a two vote kind of thing. And the first vote went unanimously on Tuesday night. And I think that the next vote hopefully will take place this month because the region has two meetings. And so, you know, I think some of that does set the stage for when an architect is on board, it sets a real direction for me, you know, my role of creating an education plan. And also for the project, given the binary choice, the MSBA offered us of either doing, you know, a K to six, three, 20 or a K to five, five, 25, 75 student school, um, you know, the school committee has that role around great configuration. And I think they're going to make this, this committee's life a little easier. So thank you, Mr. Harrington and your colleagues, Mr. Harrington and your colleagues. Uh, you know, separate from the decision, just having a decision before kind of design starts, I think will be a huge benefit for the work. And actually, I hope it will expedite some of the work. Cause I think we're all, I'll say for myself, I'm pretty, pretty excited to get students out of the current structures and into kind of a state of the art building. Um, that's both greener, uh, and a better learning environment. So Ben, did I capture most of it? Anything I'm missing. Any other questions? So, um, I think the things that I would add are like, uh, things that I can't say before a pending vote. So they were good to go. So I have, I have one question, Mike, and, and I said, Michael. And Margaret. Those who know the MSBA process, since they gave us two possible models. If we've gone ahead and made that decision. Do we alert them that we have. Um, sort of that's part of the question. So, if we're going to be, um, if we're going to be, um, if we're going to be, um, if we're going to be in the first election and doing the short list. Um, can we focus discussions on the fact that it's likely to be a consolidated school. And then we're choosing between two sites. So it's, that's my double related given that that decision is likely to be made. Mike. Right. I'm sorry, Margaret. I, so I think, um, what we should do is after the second election, I do think, um, at that point, when we notify them, I'll ask that question. I would expect them to agree with that approach. Um, Kathy, but, um, it's always a good idea to ask them, um, you know, to, to confirm their concurrence. Yeah, I'd agree. And I think just regular communication with MSBA is just really, uh, they welcome that. Um, so I think that's a good question. I'll put it that way. Um, and so I fully agree with Margaret. I think waiting for the second vote, um, likely makes sense, especially as it's scheduled before the designer selection panel on November 2nd. Um, I think there's plenty of time between those. Potential votes of the regional school committee and that meeting to inform them of that so that they're in the loop. Great. And I, I see that Phoebe has joined us and Allison has joined us as well. So I think that's a good question. I think that you can hear and be heard. And I know Allison, you had emailed me that you're going to have to leave early.  I'm good. Thank you. Okay. Great. And Allison is there on the screen. And I think Debbie has joined us. Is that correct? Although she says her label says, uh, Mike Morris. I was going to see if Debbie got in because she just messaged me. She was having trouble getting in. I did. I used the link and I think I probably used the link from your invitation, Mike. So that's probably why it shows me as you. He's an upgrade. So everyone should be happy about that. Um, no problem at all. So Margaret, how do you want to proceed on website then since Caroline is still not here, I think. She's not. And I'm, I'm actually texting her trying to reach her through teams. I mean, I don't think there was any misunderstanding about the time of the meeting. She does live in Denver. So it's very early for her. Um, I mean, let's, let's do this. Um, let me tell you a little bit about, we've had a couple of precursor conversations about this and I can summarize where that is in the hopes that Caroline is joining us momentarily. Um, uh, so the. As I think everybody knows part of our role as the OPM, we were specifically asked to provide a webpage for the project. And so in getting that started, um, we looked Caroline and I looked at the, the town's website as well as the, um, uh, the district's website, uh, because it seems as though it would be good to, for them for it not to look like a totally other thing. And we have come down on the side of using the kind of branding approach that's on the, um, district's website. Uh, so that it will look, it won't look exactly like a district webpage, but it will look similar to a district webpage, which seems appropriate because it's a school. Um, the, we had a call, um, on Tuesday this week with Debbie, um, and, uh, with, uh, Sasha. And we learned that the district is actually about to update this website. Uh, it's web design. So that was good. So Caroline took the, um, the updated web design and has sort of folded it in to what we wanted to show you this morning. Um, the other thing that we taught, we've had a conversation with Brianna from the town who's on the call this morning, um, just talking about how we might link and, you know, prominently feature the connection to our webpage, which is going to be, you know, it's a free standing, um, URL that is not those, you know, neither the towns nor the districts. Um, and I think Brianna, am I right? And that we ended up with, um, Amherst building project was a URL. That we, um, we talked about using. That's correct. Yeah. So I know you had thrown out a couple. Oh, sorry. That's okay. Go ahead and be on. You have to forgive me. I'm in my car at a public engagement events down in South Amherst. So my connection's not the best. Um, I know that you had thrown out a couple of different URLs and I, on our conversation, I'm not sure which one, uh, was landed on. Yeah. I think we had a later conversation with Debbie, um, and Sasha, and it seemed like Amherst elementary school, you know, so this would mean that for the, everybody else on the call, if, if you Googled Amherst elementary school, you would pretty quickly get to this project page. And then separately on the district website and on the town website, there would be prominent links to this page. Yeah. So this is Paul. So just to make sure that, um, there's no, we will have multiple building projects going on simultaneously. So as long as it's got the word elementary school in there or school in there. Um, so it's not confused with our other building projects. Okay. That sounds good. So unfortunately I'm not getting hold of Caroline. So I'm going to suggest if Caroline doesn't join us, we, we have scheduled on the October 21st meeting to two weeks from now. So I think seeing some visuals would be good just for people to have a reaction to. Margaret. Um, yes, absolutely. And, and one of the things we discussed, um, it actually came up when we were choosing OPMs. One of the interviews I did of another town raved about what a wonderful website they had. So I went and looked at it. And one of the things that was nice about it is you could find everything. Um, you could find any presentation, any background materials, but it was also set up when we started to work with the, when we would start to work with the community, they were doing, you know, community presentations and feedback and quotes from people. So it was set up to really be able to dive down to a lot of detail or stay at where are we right now on the project? So I think that will be its attempt. It will also be our archives. So any of us who want to go back and find the proposals or to find, you know, what we agreed on will be there. So it will be a combination of inviting people in, um, and, and communicating. That's the goal anyway. Exactly. So any comments on it? I know it's hard to comment on something you haven't seen yet. It can raise hands either on the raise hand mode or just like this. I'm going to just, I'm going to just see if I can find the link that she had shared with it. And maybe I can pull it up. So keep, keep going with what you're doing. I guess I would just really, it would tend to reiterate what you just spoken about, that it needs to be clear and, and I think it needs to be comprehensive. Um, so that folks can, you know, we might be six months into something, but if someone in the public says, Oh, I remember listening into a listening session back in February. Can I find that information that, that you're able to get back to that past information with relative ease, I think is important. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, the town is now putting up the videos, the recordings of our meetings. They're not always easy to find, but I saw yesterday they're in a, in a cluster. You know, so you would also be able to, I'm hoping Jonathan to be able to click and say, I want to see that meeting or see that present. So both the physical, if there was a PowerPoint or some kind of chart, you could find it, but you could hear also see the interaction. So at least have links, you know, make it one portal and then we could find things easily. So. So Margaret is looking at her screen, seeing if she can find this. Yeah, it looks like my link to comment on what she sent has expired. Okay. So I can't, I apologize, everybody. I'm stuck because I don't have updated link. So I'm going to keep trying to reach her, but why don't we toggle to. Okay. And they're both Debbie and Brianna have their hands up. So let's, I don't know who I'll do Debbie first, then Brianna. I was just going to let you know that when we met, when Sasha and I met with Margaret the other day, we talked also about other social media. And we decided that for Facebook, it made the most sense to create a separate page for the building project because. We don't want other school related items on Facebook to get lost in comments and questions about the building project. Plus we want to be able to feature it prominently. The way it deserves. So we will be planning to do a separate Facebook page that will have the same name as the website. Great. Brianna. Thank you, counselor. I just wanted to make the point, even if we're not going to look at the web product today, that our point of discussion from the town side is that we can integrate it easily in a number of ways from our website. So that if people happen to the main town site, that they'll have easy access to find the school. Building project page, even though it's a separate site, we'll integrate it in a number of ways. So if this discussion continues until another week, I'm happy to come back and talk about those or show those alongside the actual project website. That's great. And if one thing what we might do is if there is a link that we could share before the meeting, Margaret, then there could be, you know, so then, so we'll commit to doing that. And then schedule it in a way that people can come back. Okay. Okay. You know, one thing that might help because, you know, we've actually seen, but maybe some of you have not seen Debbie, are you able to share what the new, the district's new website looks like, what Sasha shared with us the other day? I don't think I have that link Sasha had the link, but let me look. I'm sorry. I'll have to know it shouldn't. Yeah.  And I think you're rolling that out in October, right? The new web design. Do you have a date that it's going to get rolled out? The rollout is it will, we will stop putting new content on by October 18th so that it can go live on October 22nd. Okay. So Kathy, I haven't had a chance to ask you this, but, you know, I think our goal would be to, to not to roll out the Wix page before the 18th, but we could. I just a question for you all to think about. Well, I think our next meeting. Everyone agreed on this October 21st. So I think it would be good for people to see the prototype before we roll it out. Okay. And that will still be before the designer, the first round of the designer panel. So. So I think the timing with ARPs, what they're doing seems like it should be after that meeting. Yeah. Okay. So everyone can just stay tuned and we will hopefully send some links. So I think we can just thank Brianna and Debbie for joining us. I think we can go on to the rest of your day and yeah, we'll switch gears and go to the designer. Proposals or applications submissions that we received. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Sam. So as, as I hope everyone saw, I sent minutes that Margaret had done yesterday and I sent. The grid that she had originally given to us was some fill in some additional comments, but the continuation of that discussion, I think people should be feel free to zero in in any way they want. Our goal is to collect positive comments, comments that have, there was a gap in the proposal or were they seeking to make it possible for us to do that? I don't know if you did. I wish you'd heard, heard more or potentially negatives, but also to start saying what kind of interview questions do, do you three or four of these. In your mind, individual minds emerge as if, if we could have short lists. You'd hope they would be on. I know Steve last time was volunteering that as we went along, All of this information will provide guidance and more detail comments to both Mike, Ben and I when we're on the MSBA panel so we're not ranking again we're just getting as much of a sense of the committee as possible. I'm going to just open it up for people clicking the raise hand button to embellish on what they said last time or offer new thoughts if you've gone back and looked at either the minutes or looked at the submissions. So I want to just remind everybody that we really cut short the review of the Churowski to application last time we just spent a couple minutes on it. So as part of this conversation today I would like to look back at that one and make sure that the comments that I have are inclusive. First we can start with whatever you'd like Kathy but I think we should we should spend a few minutes on that a sort of equivalent amount of time on that application. Okay, so then I invite comments. I think that's a good point I invite comments on that on on to Rasky to see. I wasn't going to comment on to Rasky to I was going to just make the holistic. Fair game or not not very good. I think that's fair game and, and just the other thing I would say is if, if anyone has either written or other comments they can send them to me, you know without sharing them with everyone and I will compile them as well. But Steve, go ahead. Yeah, so I thought the conversation was, you know, incredibly useful. I mean we have a committee with such diverse backgrounds on purpose, right so we have a couple of architects, but when we have people that are, you know, have not dealt with architects come from all parts of the community so I always find these kinds of committees to be really eye opening. And I think, so speaking as a perspective as someone who is an architect. For me the proof of the pudding is what was built, you know what have you done with all of the information and all of the engagement that you've done so the proof of the building itself. And are you capable of doing beautiful workable sensible billions on time on budget that a community will be proud of. So all of the process before that is really important. And at the end of the day though, we're hiring somebody who's going to design us a significant building for Amherst that will last for we hope 100 years right. So, that's why I look first at the that's where I go first is I look at what have you done for us. What have you done, you know, in other words I don't without even knowing how you got there. I want to know what you've done something that's actually also important. I see much information about this our post occupancy. Like, so there you have you've done a beautiful school somewhere. The post occupancy evaluation of said school did it actually achieve what you said it was going to achieve, you know, other than anecdotes. You know there's a whole body of knowledge about that, but I don't know how we get more of that information. So, basically a third party post occupancy evaluation of at least a sampling of, you know, of schools if there are schools. I think Margaret's going to respond to that. Well, Steve, it's a great question and actually the MSBA about, I want to say about a year and a half hired a consultant to devise an entire post occupancy evaluation program for them. I haven't heard anything about it, but I, I totally agree with your point, and I will reach out to the MSBA today and find out they hired Perkins and will to create the post occupancy evaluation. And I think their plan was to then use it as the basis of evaluating a certain number of schools so let me let me find out where that stands but you know I do think. There is also a question that could be framed for the interviews for instance you could ask a question like, can you reflect on your completed projects, and what was successful and what could have been better and you know what you learn from that. I see Mike's hand is up as well. I don't know about that. You know for Margaret where we end up I know, having gone through the process before talking to references and folks, because we have this completed project list for every firm. And I remember that plays in because I know I, I remember those calls being incredibly helpful in understanding exactly I think Steve's exactly right right everything will look great and then people are in the building, like, you know, and I don't want to pick on one but in our school district that, you know, I happened to work out five or six years after completion I had all sorts of problems that shouldn't have existed. Right. Not aesthetic problems but practical operational problems. And so, you know, I do think that's really important and I just wonder if Margaret you could let us know where in the process might we be able to gather references from, you know, places where folks have worked. That's a great question, Mike. So we have a some reference checking that we are required to do by the MSBA and my office is in the process of wrapping that up. But it's pretty, I would say it's pretty banal. I mean I would call it checking a box for the MSBA process we have to ask them five questions, none of which are about post occupancy. They have to do with, you know, on time on budget, good documents communication. And then people are allowed to make additional comments. So, I don't think that's going to be a good source for this particular issue. What I do think is can be very useful is once we have a kind of shortlist so this is November 2. Right. So we have a short list of those who will be interviewed. I can, you know, quickly give you a list of projects and references and we can think about whether some of the folks on the committee might actually want to have some of those conversations with people in more detail. And that those calls back to this group in preparation for the, the interview process. Or, or we can, or we can do it sooner. You don't have to wait for that but what becomes a little bit hard here is to know whether you should be calling all eight of these firms are calling some subset of them. So, Rupert then Jonathan. Just a question I'm wondering if in any building projects that were lead certified at a certain level. Do they have to do post occupancy m&vs and is that valuable information that we could get. So, I'm not they're not required now by the MSBA to do that but I think that's where they're headed with this consulting work that Perkins and will is doing that they're going to put in place a formal process. You know how far they've gotten on that with the pilot. It's possible that some of the schools by some of these designers have been through that I just don't know. Jonathan. I think doing those, you know, kind of follow up questions to the kind of the reference questions are very important I think I would probably wait for until we can narrow it down to the interview list. I was just hoping Margaret you'd also just refresh us on the process. Once we get past the current stage to the finalists. And you know the interview and just for our own benefit but also for the public that might be listening. Okay, so I'll try and just do a brief recap so the date they were headed for heading for right now is November 2. So on that date there's a public zoom meeting. But this year three, the three folks that Kathy mentioned so it's Kathy, Ben and Paul will be attending Mike, Mike, Kathy, Kathy Ben and Mike so the each community is not to have three representatives of this meeting and they meet with what's called the designer selection panel. The stake for other projects has a designer selection board it's modeled on that. So, you know, you think of it as a big group of people sitting around a conference table which is what it used to be, but you don't have to drive to Boston anymore. I can't remember who the chair is right now but you know basically the chair will do at that November 2 meeting what we have done here, which is what Kathy I think has done and sort of in leading this conversation. Pick up each proposal. They'll ask for comment, kind of go around the table so to speak and ask for comments. And then at the end of it. After they, everybody's commented they'll ask for, you know, discussion, and then they'll, you know, give everybody a virtual piece of paper, and ask them to rank their first second and third. Add up all the numbers and whoever gets the most points. I, they do it in this kind of weird way which is I think numbers three, a score of three is the best two and one. So then whoever's got the most number of points globally of the whole everybody who's participating it's about 12 people in total. They become the one two and three. Sometimes if the vote is really close they'll do a fourth so that's on the second, and then two weeks later, which is the 17th. The interviews will occur. They're a little bit less than an hour each. Again, they're public. Same group of people around the virtual conference table. Same voting. So do the interviews. They have a discussion. Everybody votes. And then we will basically be given top ranked 123 and are able to negotiate with our director to negotiate with number one. So Margaret between the second, and then the interviews is when we would do background we'd be individually calling. Yes, we can make additional calls. Yeah. And if we had, you know, Rupert's point, if we had both, how's the school been working for, you know, from the perspective of teachers and staff but also do you have if we're calling a school that says it was net zero has it met those goals. Yeah. And the maintenance staff, how's it working in terms of the operating systems are they complicated was it where they taught how to run the new systems you know we can have that set of questions would just Amherst would just our committee be doing those phone calls. Okay, it's the community's responsibility to do what you know or the in some cases delegated to the opium to do the reference checks the MSP does not do that. But you can say in the conversation. You know, as, as you started doing the interviews can say well we called so and so and they said this was fabulous or not so fabulous. And it can, you know, most of the focus of the final selection is the, you know, the interview presentation, but I think this reference piece can be important if people have time to do that it's time consuming obviously so, but definitely valuable. Honestly, I think given that the MSP is current emphasis on post occupancy evaluation. I think they would be very interested in hearing those things. Any other comments on this, you know, I had also wondered. I just don't know what my time constraints are I for, if we get to the point we're saying our top three or four as a group. And I was thinking that I would drive to a few of the schools that caught my examples where they were completed schools to just literally not see them just as a picture on the screen. And I just have to figure out whether that's physically possible because I don't think I can get inside them anymore I know Amherst is not letting people in so it would be more, you know, a sense of the space. Any comments on this topic, Steve that was a great question topic and also a good interview question, but a very good background reference check question. Can we do we want to start to Rouski to if people have their notes on that to just complete our grid on them. Or when anyone like to start in another place. I'm looking for a group. I have my to Rouski to notes. Kathy, I'm just going to pull up the little summary sheet here so everybody can hopefully see it. Can you all see this. Just to remind us where we were so I folded up all the other columns here but just to recap, since it's been a while. So this is a you know a midsize firm they have actually most of the folks. One thing that's distinctive about them is most of the people in their office or licensed architects so you can see they only have one staff person who's not. They've been in business 14 years, although Peter to Rouski who's the principal was in partnership in the Pioneer Valley with another firm for many years doing public schools before that. They, whoops, they're currently located in Marion, Massachusetts. So what, I'm sorry, Marty, what firm was where they involved with. They were with Peter was with Jones what's that with, well it wasn't Jones was so he was in partnership with Jones. Yeah, yeah. I, my recollection I did ask Peter this number years ago but there was, when the, the, for those, those of you have been around long enough. So the MSBA had a predecessor organization which was the SBA the school building authority. And at some point I'm going to say now it was probably about 15 years ago. It was not a very well run fiscally well run Paul, Paul is agreeing with me, not a very fiscally well run organization there were a lot of issues, including probably most prominently for districts, not getting reimbursed in a timely fashion, and it didn't have a dedicated flow of funds. So about, and again I think this is correct about 15 years ago, they shut the SBA down, and they created the MSBA and they created the dedicated flow of funds. So I think you might remember, I think I mentioned it's basically a penny of our sales tax in the communities where it's spent goes into this pot right, but then it's a global pop. Then districts are applying competitively which is the process you've been through to get into the process. So there was a couple of years when there was no school construction in Massachusetts at all, because they were going through this process of rebooting. And it was at that time that I believe Peter moved to Marion and created and started this new business and he's done quite a bit of public work and some schools, but again he worked on other school projects before he moved to Marion so although yeah and so I do have the right you know 14 years ago so that would have been at the time that there was a so called moratorium on school building construction. So, you know again just going down the list. Peter is the principal. He has a lot of experience the person he is proposing to lead the project has been with him a number of years. He, this team also has new Vista David Steven, who was on most of these proposals but not all. I looked. I don't know if you all saw the second page of this document. I looked at sort of average project cost for the five projects they presented. So his was around $39 million. And I have one completed MSBA project, a couple of others that are in the works. And, you know I think actually it's this one is the one that's done this Hannigan school, we're also known as the Erwin Jacobs elementary school in New Bedford. They have the Raymond Shaw elementary school in Millbury is in construction, and I think pretty close to being complete. They have no experience that was noted with building that zero, the mechanical engineering firm they're using as GGD, who have done lots and lots of schools, although they haven't done a ton of net zero they're working on the Driscoll school in Brookline with Jonathan Levy, and they also brought to the team, Thornton Thomas Seti, who has quite a bit of experience in high performing schools. Well, there's some notes down to look for from last week but you know they touched on most of the items they talked about it programming community art and access, safe and cost effective building operations cost control community engagement they touched on all of those in their thing. They did provides. I think I don't remember what exactly what it was a day lighting example. There were some good notes about achieving program objectives. They did touch on Fort River and Wildwood, they have done CM at risk projects. And I think this is actually important to note, they did their Erwin the school in New Bedford did receive a caudal citation, which is a is a particular it's actually particularly for schools, mostly elementary schools in it, and they were the only one of the firms. And you can look up the citation program if you're interested. They're the only one of the firms that applied that had actually received a design award for this from this educational program. So, last week, we really just touched on this but someone, a couple people made the comment Kathy this might have been you that the, it felt like to you that the priority, the priorities were, it didn't, it felt to a couple I think like a bit of a stock response. So that was where we had left it last week. If anybody has any other comments about the application I would add them in here just to complete the matrix. I'm looking around the screen for any other comments. Mike, you have to unmute. My apologies. I thought they did a fair amount of analysis on the site work the two different sites and I thought that was notable. You know, I have my own thoughts on site stuff and grew most of it but I appreciate that they really did look and it's not a fatal complete needs to be one side of the other and I like sort of clear way of opportunities and challenges they presented it. I think from Sean's perspective they did, you know, a bit on cost control as a prominent feature. So I thought that was a positive use and and I also liked that they did community use and access that's a that's something that I know we've talked a lot about and I thought it was there. I agree with that in terms of negatives. I agree with what's already on the charts I won't repeat what Margaret already has written just wanted to plus one, what Margaret has for negatives. Steve. Thank you for bringing us back to this one. And I actually do think that their diagrams of the in the back or among the best of the proposals that were submitted because it sort of gave enough information that they had been thinking about it but not too much that we actually saw building there. You know, looking at those diagrams and looking at their notes regarding the diagrams, it's certainly got me thinking about the pluses and minuses of both sites but then also where a building could go on on either site. You know, I had forgotten that Peter had worked with Margo and specifically he had worked as, I believe project manager on the on the Crocker farms school. So I only mentioned that. And that was a long time ago but I only mentioned that because we have noted for two other firms that they've had involvement with Amherst schools so we noted that JCJ had involvement with Wildwood and that TSKP had involvement with Fort River then also the Crocker farm sort of restudy so we should just note that there is prior involvement for better or worse with the Amherst schools. I'm looking to see, you know, I have some additional comments on it. Mike mentioned the community use but they give us, they give nice examples both of the Shaw School and the Millbury School and the Jacob School of different ways that the community that they structured the school in a way that the community could use them but also that they could do multiple uses within the school, that it could be a cafeteria but also a music room, giving it an extra place. And they did in, I think it was the earlier life so that's where I think they, yes they worked on the Williamstown School as well so out in our region that they've focused on some. And Tisbury I know has been a tough project for them because it was a town meeting, it didn't get all the way through they're back to design so they're in one that they've come back again. So it's an experience that I would think they probably have something they could talk about learning from. So that that was it, you know, and a few others I Margaret when you said you thought I said then it was they did do the diagrams of the two schools and land but they didn't talk a lot about, you know, topography water level issues slope, where a few of the others this is more in what reading one compared to others. So they didn't do that, and they didn't talk, they did talk about daylighting as a word. But what they said is, we always do daylighting we do it from all, we do it for all projects so I was looking for an example, you know, take a look at this school or that school so I actually have a fair amount of notes on this one, which means I found it interesting because some of the others I went through more quickly, you know, I'm looking at work. Yeah. So I'll stop there. So do people want to go back then we have eight, eight submissions. You know if Margaret's got her grid if you look at the grid on some of them. We said more, and more of what we said was positive. Do we do. I'm comfortable doing anyway people might want going around the group on if you were to pick, and I'm going to say pick four. So we could potentially afford but if you pick four or three that you would hope would be short listed. I did talk about the reasons why, if anyone is willing to jump in that way. Or what whatever to come back to put more information in this grid or to put more qualitative and sort of a sense of the team a sense of the proposal, Steve's emphasis on, you know, the design team, who we're getting as architects. I will just start with that.  Okay, you can also do this by process of elimination if that makes sense. We can do, we can do it the other way that the firms that were on the weaker and that absolutely Margaret, you know we can do one by one weaker and and would hope would not want them to be shortlisted. Yeah, so I, you know these processes are always very interesting because I think there's a very capable firms and any one of these firms can do it. So it's not even a matter of what's the weaker one. I guess it is a matter of what's the weaker one and what's the stronger one, but as we like to say when we do searches. I would say that this person, not because they weren't completely capable but that there are other better candidates. So, I'll just flat out start then. So if I were to choose for, I would choose JCJ with moody Nolan. I would choose LL, I'm sorry I don't know the firm from Worcester. You know, I'm sorry, could someone share the screen again because I was actually basing it on that. I would choose that firm I would choose TSKP. And, and actually those are probably the three that I would choose but if I had to choose a fourth, I would put Jonathan Levy in the mix. Do you want me to explain why. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, so I think that JCJ moody Nolan is such an interesting possibility of, you know, sort of engaging a new from that's basically new to our area and but just brings a sort of remarkable. I'm talking about moody Nolan that sort of brings a remarkable history together with JCJ which is a, you know, very venerable new England firm, I think that that partnership is really, that's a possibility of being exciting. I'm sorry, LPA, LPA firm from Worcester. I think that their work is very competent. I like the fact that they're the really the firm that's the closest to Amherst, even though that's not a criterion. And I like the fact that the team is led by a woman architect. I think I like, I think that of the firms that I mentioned and I think that their design work is most consistently the highest at the highest level, you know, sort of bouncing all the complex inputs. I actually like the diversity. So one of the things that I looked at, well, after the last time we met is the very top of the org chart the top of the organization chart so we have these big complicated organization charts. For me, the most important box is the one at the top. That's basically the architect. And I look at who, who is from who actually those are the people that you're actually going to see. So those are the people that will meet with the community. Everybody else are ancillary so they'll be supporting the architects but they're not the ones that engage with the community. TSKP actually has one of the very few Latina members of its team so I think that I think that further you know they're very few by talk. There are people working for the architect, you know, on the architects on that top box TSKP is one of the firms that has that they do very good design work. And then I'm sorry I lost somebody just walked into my house and is asking a question. We, and I've lost track of what was the firm that I Oh Jonathan Levy. So Jonathan Levy should be in the mix because they're a high design firm, they have a really good track record of, you know, design. I think that there are probably other issues on the way they get to that design but I just want to put them in there for discussion. That's it. Others willing to be brave the way Steve was, but Sean. So I agree with Steve on JCJ and think it was LP or whatever that name is. I think it wasn't as thrilled about based on the proposal. Just because it didn't seem like they had a lot of elementary school experience and the, and the drawings, I think we talked about some issues with the drawings that they put in. And then the one firm I might add in would be denisco I think I like their, I like their proposal I think that they're led by an educational programmer, and I thought they put a lot of amour specific information in there. And I like their drawings at the end and how they thought about the challenges at Fort River. Since we have experience with two of the firms, are there people who've had experience with them who want to weigh in on whether they should be in the mix or not. So you're talking about JCJ and TSK key. Correct. And we should probably throw in for me just talked about. So really three things. I can say for JCJ that they were, I thought they did a really good job with the public engagement piece when they did the Wildwood project. And they were just in the meetings that we had the we had many school building committee meetings they were very responsive to input, and then tweaking their designs based on input that they received from different people so I thought that was one of the major pluses for them. I will comment on a false comment and then I'll give you my three, although a lot of the comments kind of repeated themselves after a certain point. I know JCJ from an experience as a parent during the first round I thought they'd ran the, the, the public engagement things from parents perspective well. And obviously I know TSKP through the Fort River committee. I found them responsive. I like their design creativity. I, you know, they they dealt with well with, you know, kind of the public interaction in during that experience. And, you know, having known Rouskes has, you know, as an architect here in the valley. I think their work has to be very elementary work has to be very kind of kid focused to me which I've always found rather positive. You know, they may not be the high design of some of the other firms but I, you know, for elementary schools I like the kid focused portion of it. And then if you'll bear with me since I was looking at a different chart for my top three. I would choose ACJ, Moody Nolan. Where did they go? LPA or along my French is horrible and Mo Pagano. Yes, sorry. French and Italian I can do but and TSKP those would mean my top three. Here it is. Are you able to share the entire spreadsheet that shows all the firms. I can it will be get kind of tiny. You know, Margaret, maybe if you pull up the one that you did for MSBA that shows the consultants because the columns are less wide. Sure. I mean, I think you can see all eight more easily there but I might be wrong. I'll just because I've only got my one little screen by the way I'm in England. It's also foggy here. It's a clock there or something. No, no, it's one o'clock, pretty close. It's pub time. Does anyone else want to jump in in terms of thoughts Phoebe, Rupert, Ben. Yeah, I will. I, in terms of how the firms that have been here have worked with the communities, I did not participate in the JCJ public sessions but the TSKP I went to both several of them committee meetings and then the presentations they did in the middle and I thought they both, they did very clear presentations and I like the way they interacted with quite pointed questions that came from the audience. They, they went back and forth and they referenced some of the different studies so people might have had different but they, they, and they were very clear. So a couple architects that were in the audience, who know net zero who have been sponsors of the net zero thing came away commenting on that they thought the team knew what they were talking about, which was, for me, as the lay person was good. My top three would have LPA right at the top, partly because of the clarity of the way they wrote, and the way they organized it, I felt that that would be a clarity in the way they would present to the community. And it was one I wanted to really wanted to see the schools they built. So, to, to get a sense of them because they did a nice job of picking out some schools as, as examples that, and they tied them into things we were looking for. So I also would put TSKP and JCJ on my list of three and JCJ for all the reasons Steve said them bringing in moody Nolan my big question on that team and it's something that was captured I'm worried there are too many people on the team. And sometimes that the bringing in a moody Nolan in partnership meant that they are partnering out the education role in a couple other roles. And the one person they dedicated to the team on education wasn't wasn't minority, you know so that the team clearly is minority led so the moody Nolan school examples were very interesting some of them. So I just wanted to know about more about, you know, what, what, what team we would be getting for which things, although they laid that out. It wasn't clear to me that we didn't have duplication. Mike. Yeah, so I think just one that's not getting talked about that that I'd like to put in the mix of the NISCO. You know, they've got incredible amounts of MSBA experience which I value they've got in Western mass looking at school consolidations which sort of all signs indicate that they've got experience with the carbon neutral.  And just, you know, I'll say that, you know, this is why we have a diverse team so I know that some folks really value high levels of design and some of the aesthetic aspects and I'm not here to disagree with that. I would say that's lower on the list of my priorities and I'm really going to be careful with my comments here but having been principal at Crocker farm and come into that school a couple years after the renovation was done and seeing the beauty of the school and the functional issues that it had. I'm less suede. I'm not saying I'm right. I just want to be explicit of my biases. I'm less suede by my quote unquote high design and then I am about kind of cost control, green school functional pieces having day lighting all those pieces. You know, at a probably bizarrely higher level than, than other people on this team so, so I know there was some kind of critiques of Dennis go and some of the other ones, other firms, Jonathan leave it like I said the last time like I liked it it looked neat. It really makes me anxious looking at those designs and the drawings and looking at some of the costs of their prior projects. I want to be like I'm just being broken record I'm not right this is just my perspective and having gone into Crocker farm and seeing leaking skylights or daylights whatever from the from the ceiling, five years after they were done. You know, great to have them great to have the natural light on a practical operational level to just problematic. And I'm not against skylights and not making that broad statement but I think living the experience I've lived as a principal and in this current role. You know, if I, I could easily live with a, you know, slightly less expensive, incredibly functional, wonderful green school over spending more funds on high levels of design. And again, this is one person on the committee and so I thought the nisco checked all the boxes that way for me and you know for me, you know I advocate at least for them to be considered in the mix. Steve Jonathan, no offense, hopefully no offense to our architects and the team because they bring a lot of value. Yeah, Mike, I, you know, the disco was up there if I had done for for me I liked it and the one. The one gap is they talked quite a bit about Fort River but they didn't talk about Wildwood so you know I think they're aware that we have a choice of where we're doing and the challenges. They did such a nice job on Fort River on challenges that I assumed that they would would have done a good job on the other, and it was a space issue. So, you know, comments, it, you know, we've or thoughts on top three top four, we Tecton has not come out, neither has the DRA Chorowski to got some positive comments so I'm just, I'm taking lots of notes. I don't see any. See. Yeah, so, you know, thank you. Thank you Mike for those comments which I think are incredibly important. And I'm Jonathan I want to weigh in here also high design does not mean more expensive. In fact, sometimes high design means less expensive. So high design means making the most with the resources that you have and being able to balance multiple kinds of challenges including cost community input. You know, etc, etc. So they're, they're absolutely there's some high design that is more expensive and there's some low design. That's more expensive also. So, for the issue I in, you know, a lot of people are talking about tennis go so I will also they're not on my list because in some ways I see what to me is seems like a camel almost like maybe they're trying to be, you know, a little bit of this a little bit of that. And so I didn't see sort of a rigor in the design, but the other conceptual problem I have is that we're hiring an architecture firm right so you know basically the. This is what we're doing is we're hiring an architecture firm with a bunch of consultants. The people of this particular firm who has the name to this scope and I'm not sure that that's the Dennis go whom the firm is named after I think it's a second generation firm. Yeah, so can can Dennis go as the original founder is a founder and night in the 1970s. Yeah, this is his daughter who is now. But she's not an architect so she's a president of the firm but not an architect so to me that is that sends off an alarm and the reason is like we wouldn't hire a law firm. Where the head of the firm is not a lawyer, we just wouldn't do that. And so it's, it's legal to in Massachusetts that's legal to have a corporation with the president. The president can be a non architect, as long as I think it's a majority of the partners are or are architects. Yeah, but it's something to pay attention to so the. I think it's the only one of the group in which that has that structure where the president of the firm is not an architect. And so yeah, and it is somewhat unusual. But that sends off an alarm. And particularly when that person's name, even though it's second generation is the name of the firm. So, Jonathan, I need myself. I'll lower my hand too. I would echo some of what Steve said I don't I don't want to get into a debating match that's not the intent between kind of Steve and I and, and Mike, but the good design excellence and design is not necessarily comprehensive and it is a more holistic approach. And I do but I do firmly agree with Steve on the topic of, of, we're hiring architect, the architect should be an architect should be the lead. And I think this role here is is both one of design, but it's also marshaling the, the larger group of all the other designers. And that's, that's a particular skill. That's important. And it's a fun it's one that's often overlooked in discussion of, of, you know, how buildings look, but you don't get to that end line with a with a great functional building a great building that's very economical. Unless you've got someone who knows how to marshal all those, those separate diverse trades and I'm not saying they can't do that, but I feel more confident when when there's an architect in the lead of that. I said, you know the reason I didn't have Jonathan Levy and my top three was as much as I'm impressed by their design skills. They didn't, didn't seem, it seemed to lead too much into that as their as their top thing and didn't seem very child centered to me so I was kind of trying to balance my top three. Um, if, if I'm, if Sean's hand is up okay I'm looking for hands up yeah. Yeah, again just going back to the comparison between denisco and Levi or levy. I mean the the projects that levy highlighted I don't think they highlighted one elementary school. So again thinking about, you know the the lawyer example, we want to hire a, you know criminal defense lawyer for some other type of law. And so that was one of my biggest issues is that they know this is an elementary school we talked about being child centered, and they didn't highlight a single elementary school is unless I missed it. Whereas the nisco I think all five of their projects that they highlighted where elementary schools and they just have a pretty extensive list of elementary school work. So I think that's what made the difference between those two for me to Mike sand is up. I appreciate Steven Jonathan's perspective on that it's no critique of high design it just, you know, I know the town's finances are limited and you know I get anxious when I look at things that, at least from the lay perspective and I'm certainly don't have the background to make this statement confidently look like, ooh, that's not good and I think the dad on Jonathan levy when I look at prior projects looks outside perhaps where we're mostly headed. I'm happy to sit down, you know, on the nisco I just thought, you know, they check a lot of boxes I do value experience of the conversation we had prior to this one, having multiple projects completed having multiple, you know, consolidation projects completed successfully in our area in western Massachusetts. And stuff matters to me I tend to think past performance predicts future performance so that's, but I'm willing to let that go, I think the other three that that I had in my top four were similar to what's been described earlier, you know, LPA, JCJ and TSKP. I found the only didn't go fan I'm happy to be the only business go fan and then, but I just, I just want to at least enter it into the conversation because I do think, again, I value people who have had successful MSPA projects that are somewhere to this one. And I think their track record, you know they have a long track record they've got a local recent track record in the city of Springfield, which is out here and multiple consolidation projects that I've heard good things about so. I'm happy to let it go but I just wanted to at least explain why I was thinking about it and certainly wasn't a critique to the field of architecture, my apologies if it was perceived that way. So, a couple things, just to add to the next year so. Sean to your comment, the field school, the field elementary school by john and ladies office is an elementary school. I would encourage anybody who sort of, you know, wants to kind of look at it, it is a sophisticated building relative to the design comments so it doesn't read and it isn't photographed with, you know, a little kid vibe. But, you know, to some degree, I would say that's marketing, you know, you could send the photographer out with a different set of requirements and you might get a result. The other thing I'll say about Jonathan Levy's firm is at least one of their schools and arguably two other schools I'm thinking in particular of the Dearborn school in Boston, which is also in their portfolio was really designed to be a very kind of. What's the right way to put this. It was designed to be a showstopper. And it is a showstopper. It's a, it's a middle high school. And I do agree in general that, you know, except for the field elementary school in their portfolio. They have not done as many elementary schools as most of the others. When you do a showstopper design, it is expensive. The MSP will share some cost data with this group. Prior to the interviews and you know I think you're going to see some of that reflected in the relative costs of projects. And that's also, you know, worth taking a look at when it comes out there because there are there are differences between this group within the set of designers. So Caroline has appeared. But she said she did not get the invite. It would, it went, it went out to the email. Sorry, Angela did send it out I saw that she had invited all three but we can I saw, I saw an email saying she'd send it I just didn't see. Yeah, we don't. Yeah, we don't see. Yeah, I am send her mine this morning. So let me give her a moment let's give her a moment just to see if she can join while we wrap up comments on this. So does anybody else want to speak up about their thoughts about the choices. I, I think my top three were covered actually had LPA JCJ and then did this go as well. I did not include what's different for me was I don't know that I would put. So let me see if I can find it TTS KP is that what it is. Yeah, at the top, I had some real and I and I, I understand that we have sort of in Amherst have firsthand knowledge of them and that people were sounds like people were pretty impressed. So I choose with their proposal. And so I, I, and I think we talked about it last time. And I talked about it last time. And I think that, you know, if they're going to be in our top three I think there's some, especially having experience with us previously with Amherst before. There's some real questions in there about, you know, what we saw in their proposal versus what they saw when they were involved with us before so I just wanted to put it out there because it sounds like they're, you know, they may be in one of our top few. And I think that that's a. I felt like some of their some of the things in their proposal kind of missed the mark about who Amherst is. I think those are some significant sort of questions to kind of figure out with them if they've been here before if they have experienced what's up with us if we've been impressed with what they brought to us before. You know, how do you kind of reconcile that. So that's all that's all I wanted to say. Ben's hand is up. Yeah, just, just to kind of tag on to that they like so overall with, you know, with with their familiarity with Amherst and you know how many times they've interacted with us I think that bumped them down on my list I still have them in the top three but I had them at number three personally in is absolutely because of the. So I'm kind of looking at this from the political standpoint to we have to sell this project to the public. Or you exhibit. I don't want to say a lack of willingness to learn about who we are as a community but I think the way they depicted this as like this you know, a colleague rural little town. That didn't sit well with me but the ease of working with them I you know I was moderately impressed by so not moderately I was impressed by that, the fact that they were responsive to the, you know, our our input. And I give them extra points because they were here for the, the passing of a net zero bylaw and I think they took a great deal of interest in that but I just think they kind of missed the market as to who we are kind of call. Yes, I just sort of build on. I think she's accurate on that. I think the things that we should be thinking about our, are there any that we do not want. I mean what we could what the value we bring to the MSBA is like, these are the firms we do not want like we, these are not acceptable. And if there's a handful of firms that we say we really love, then we would bring those, you know, bring those forward. I think, you know, when we talk about our experiences with the firms that have done business with the town before, you know, public outreach and the connection with the public is a key component but also the work product is really important as well so I think we want to look at that comprehensively in terms of, of how that all worked out and I wasn't here for most of them but so I think the people who work directly with them are the most, most advantageous to hear from. I'm sure that the firms that no one has named are DRA, Tecton, DRA and Tecton so far. I mean we focus a little bit on Churroski too. So, Mike, Mike's hand is up. I actually have to run to a meeting so I'll say this and then I have to depart but, you know, for me I think I said the four, you know, for me where Deniscoe, JCJ, Lamaro Pagano and TSKP. I struggle I appreciate Phoebe's comments I spoke about it last time so I'm not going to repeat myself. It's a real concern. It's a real concern. It continues to be a concern. It'd be perhaps less of a concern if they hadn't already worked here. I might be more less bothered because I'd say oh maybe that because that is the reputation of Amherst you go far away people might believe that but it's a hard one so you know for me the other four were below the level I'd feel you know just for me personally so DRA, Jonathan Levy, Tecton and Turroski too you know in terms of kind of the rule outs for me again just as one individual. And again I struggle in the same way Phoebe and Ben talked about it. And I do have concerns that they've you know MSP experience is more limited with TKSP as well and you know I know I'm, I'm very aware of I try to be aware of my biases anyways and I do have a bias towards people who have done this before with, you know the MSPA and you know and I like the people right so like I've met them, I worked with them I agree with everyone, you know Jonathan, what Kathy said and you know I am struggling how much to weigh that for both the firms we know versus the documents we have and so I'm trying to be the way I'm trying to think about it is I'm not including my past experience. With those firms I'm trying to look at their proposals because in some ways it may not be, it's useful information is also perhaps not fair for me because I was, I was heavily involved with one and pretty involved with another. And that's, you know, I might think that about the other firms but I don't have that experience so I'm trying to weigh it just on the proposal not necessarily on past experience so you know I've got for that for me, you know in that mix and then for that are not in that mix but I just appreciate Phoebe for coming back to that point because I think in this particular community, rightfully, and thankfully, people want to be described accurately and there's a number of people in our community who don't feel like they're part of the public process. And that's for good reason. And, you know, I think language matters and if folks would see that as a public document and feel like well they're not speaking to my Amherst, you know, the Amherst I work for the Amherst elementary schools is the majority of students identify as kids of color. Right, a significant percentage of our students live in dense housing. And so, you know, we talked we don't need to rehash this I get the other perspective it's just a line but I feel like when you're describing the potential client or, you know that you're working with, you know, it's not a line that should be just taken casually it's really describing who we are as a town so. Anyway, those are the four I have I can probably hang out for a few more minutes. Can you report what the what the far, but what we're sorry. Yeah, so Dennis go and I'm just reading on the order that they are on the chart, not in order of how I weigh them. So JCJ with mood and Nolan, Lamarro Pagano and TSKP. Yeah. Thank you and I'm sorry I'll have to leave in two minutes my apologies. So I see Steve's hand is up and on the the other thing we're going to just just let me say one thing because I'll move it to the next time we meet. So some of these things have started to indicate to me, types of interview questions we could be asking, including about the diversity of our student mix, how does that matter, you know, special needs programs. So think, keep thinking about interview questions as well. Steve. The whole list is the same as Mike's, except for denisco. So I'm going to take Levy off my list or Levi, because I don't think it's a good set. So I'm going to stick with those three. So, but other than that I agree with Mike and I agree with the comments about that single line and the TSKP proposal. Surprisingly, they also had one of the more interesting descriptions of diversity and you know, so. I hope that the marketing person is listening to this because that was insane to leave that line. So, yeah, Jonathan. I would just, I would agree with what Steve said and it is particularly, it's particularly ironic given that the founder of the firm is non white. You know that they're there in their own history they should have been a bit more sensitive to say the least. The editor was needed on this one with with with what are we saying here. So I'm seeing no other hands up. So I just want to, before I open it up for public comments and I see there are hands up, or there were hands up in public comments. We have scheduled a meeting for October 21 two weeks from today. And we can focus on interview questions there we can bring back the discussion of the web. And Margaret had two other items that we were trying to put on the list the agenda before we get into the world of we do have a designer and one was we have to talk about the larger schedule but one was how the MSBA reimburses so people understand with the reimbursement formula and the other. And this is a bit more long term what we can't do do's and don'ts when this goes out to a vote so what we can do as a committee or what we can't do. So I just wanted we do have that next meeting scheduled. Margaret you have a comment before I opened up for public comments. I think it has joined, but we may not have time to look at the web page now so I'll leave that up to you, Kathy. I think it would be better since Mike had to leave and Allison had to leave. She told us that earlier that she may be short circuited on some of the morning meetings but if maybe check with Carolyn at eight o'clock and I'll make sure she gets there two ways in one is as a member of the public, the zoom link and the other is the individual thing so I think it would be better. Does everyone agree not to back to web at this point. Okay. Okay. I want to open it up to public comments, and we have one public and his hand is up. So Paul, I think you're hosting you will have to do. I can't bring him in. I'm not coho. Oh, I am. No, I am coho's. I can, I can bring him in. Did you promote him already. Bruce, you are, you have joined us. Bruce called him. I've listening to all of this for what it's worth my three, the same as Michael's and Steve's and Jonathan's but that's not what I have to say. Two short things. Firstly, my experience with JCJ in their first their Wildwood round was very positive as well as far as their preparedness to engage in public comment because I was all of the public comment related to day lighting, and I was very aggressive and committed to it, including making day lighting models, offering people views through them using metrics to measure and so forth. And the design team and did the whole committee and the process was very dignified that effort quite admirably I thought given that I arrived somewhat late and had every indication that they would continue to engage with that project that have gone forward so I was very impressed with that they as a design team were quite positively prepared to engage in someone like me who was coming along, essentially from the outside so I imagine that and Doug Roberts, I think, he is still involved and he was the fellow who I was mostly connected with on that process so I was, I endorsed a lot of what's been said in that regard. Secondly, the TSPK process, I was only involved in that in one of the public engagements and Jonathan you can help me here, but I was particularly impressed with the way into that meeting they brought in this, this kind of volunteer squad of facilitators. It was one of the best and most effectively facilitated public engagements that I've ever been involved in and I've been involved in a lot of them over the years. So whoever put together or thought of bringing that squad of facilitators. They seem to be available and and so forth I think they probably Connecticut based, but it was a very useful resource that that firm brought to that process and I thought it was worth stating that and no matter who is involved perhaps recognizing that that resource may exist and if it was able to be replicated in the way it was at the Fort River engagement, it could be a very valuable thing to be using. I need to say again, I'm so impressed with all of you and and how you're working together and and there seems to be no stones unturned. From the point of view of somebody sitting and watching this from the public. I feel very, very, very reassured. That's it from me. Thank you very much. Thank you Bruce. Since we have no other members of the public, there are no other public comments right now. The next meeting is October 21. If you have any additional thoughts, please send them in and any initial thoughts Steve you actually I took notes. Last time you said that would be a good question to ask them. I will go back to my notes on that and the tape is rolling so I can actually hear hear hear what you said. But similarly, some other issues have come up. Margaret suggested one on daylighting. So if we come up with five or six, I thought we had for the opm selection process for those who were on that subcommittee I thought we had excellent questions. In the responses we got to see teams thinking and and and either addressing it directly or bringing in other examples so the interview questions I thought helped a lot sift through. If you have three or four front runners which one starts to emerge so please do, if you think about that and Phoebe you bringing in, you know sensitivity to who we are as Amherst you know who our children are do you know what the mix is that will be in the school. We can probably phrase that no way that brings that out as well. So, I think I'm seeing no hands up any last minute comments from the committee. I think we can adjourn and we are adjourning at 932 so we were extremely efficient. Thank you everyone. And I will see you again at eight in the morning in a couple weeks.


Thanks everybody for showing up. This will be a talk on Windows Server Containers for application runtime. Hopefully you're in the right place. In case you haven't seen this yet, there's fire exits on either side of the room or at the back. So just be aware. I'm Sanjay. I'm on the Garden Windows team out in New York. Work for Pivotal. And I'm Matt Horan, a software developer at Pivotal. So what do we do? What does the Garden Windows team do? We're formerly the greenhouse team. That team was tasked with doing all things Windows in Cloud Foundry. But Garden Windows, what we do now is just containers. All we do is make containers. We also contribute to the application level runtime bits for Cloud Foundry in terms of the Windows side of that and also for .NET as well. For as a resource in the Cloud Foundry org, we also help out other teams when they need to write software for Windows. We lend our Windows expertise and Windows knowledge so we can share that within the Cloud Foundry organization. So why? The charter of our team, as well as the Bosch Windows team, is to expand and help out with the .NET experience on Cloud Foundry. And we do this by leveraging our knowledge about Windows. We want to improve the .NET developer experience and Windows operator experience for Cloud Foundry. We want to reduce the burden that it may exist for leveraging Windows within Cloud Foundry. And of course, we want to help CF development teams get better at using Windows and developing for Windows. So what have you been working on? So the high-level things that we've accomplished in the last year include build pack improvements for Windows, maintaining the legacy Windows 2012 R2 stack. Legacy, you say? Well, the Windows 2016 stack was released as generally available just this year. So we're really excited about that. Stem cells are available for the public IAZs, GCP, and AWS on Bosch.io. Sadly, AWS is not supported at this time. Please complain loudly about that so we can get support on AWS. And in CF deployment, support for Windows Server 2016 is no longer experimental. So we're completely fully supported in open source CF deployment. And we've also been exploring high-level pragmatic parity features with Linux. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that. Initially, we did not support the build pack app lifecycle on Windows cells. So you could just push a Windows application and we'd kind of figure out how to run it. But now we actually have full build pack support. And we've converged with some of the Linux features that have been introduced in the last year. For example, profile.bat.not.sh support and profile.d support. So you can extend your applications with maybe an APM agent or some other binary blob that you need to inject into your application. You can all do that with the profile.d script. And now it's a lot easier just to build these extensions. We can have third parties build their own build packs and bring their application support to the platform. We've also added context path routing support to the HWC build pack. This was an off-requested feature from a lot of customers with production.net workloads. A core part of our work is also maintaining the Windows 2012 stack. We haven't been doing much active development on this, however. Just small reliability improvements and bug fixes. Because we've been encouraging people to move to the 2016 stack, any new platform features or any pragmatic parity features are being targeted for the Windows 2016 stack. And this is because of the inherent limitations of the containerization on Windows 2012. There's worse, I guess you could say, isolation and resource limiting on Windows 2012. Containers share the host registry, the host file system. There's no network isolation, no ability to limit bandwidth, and there's a very significant vulnerability. If you have a process that starts up a console host, it's actually possible to escape the container. This is mitigated on 2016. It's also mitigated on 2012, but in a reactive manner, we have a piece of code that actually guards against that. But we don't feel confident about giving this level of isolation to customers and putting our super confident stamp on it. So we want to encourage people to move to 2016. So the 2016 stack allows us to adopt some of the well-established CF development practices. We've been working closely with other standards, the OCI standard, for example, and moving towards a closer collaboration with other core CF teams. So I see some gardeners out in the audience here. We initially started implementing support for 2012 by just running our own implementation of the garden API. In doing 2016, we worked closer with that garden team to come up with a new abstraction that made it a little bit easier to share some more code. Sanjay will talk about that a little bit later. But ultimately, the 2016 stack allowed us to improve the experience for .NET developers and operators when it comes to the applications they're putting on the platform. So initially, when we started implementing this stack, we started with what we called the 2012 R2 parody. So we only supported, well, we didn't even support the BuildPack app lifecycle. We just supported pushing a bunch of code to the platform and we figured out how to run it for you. Eventually, we did bring the BuildPack app lifecycle. And today, that is the only lifecycle that we support. So you cannot push an OCI image or Docker image at this time. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. We also decided to bring in support for application security groups so that your applications would be isolated from any other parts of the platform that they shouldn't be able to talk to. And we brought resource limits for memory and disk. We really targeted allowing you to push the same class of applications to the Windows 2012 stack in the Windows 2016 world. So we weren't really thinking about any new features that we could bring to the platform. We just wanted to get everything working. So with that, we get some automatic improvements over Windows 2012. We actually have file system isolation. Each container runs in a read-write volume that is unique to it that is not shared with any other containers or the host. We actually run containers based on a container image so we can decouple the application, the common application dependencies from the stem cell and they can now just be in a container image. It's following the same pattern that we love on the Linux side. We also have real bind mounts and 2012 R2 bind mounts are just implemented as sim links, which brings its own set of problems. And each container has its own registry. Now each container, if it relies on writing things to the registry, reading things from registry, you can do that in a more isolated manner. We actually also have more process isolation, real process isolation. We can set CPU limits on containers. Users are unique to containers. Users are not able to see anything on the host. We can make a non-admin user inside of our container. We use the username VCAP to follow the common patterns in Cloud Foundry. And we can actually, any container process cannot see processes on the host. Everything is isolated inside of the container. And perhaps the biggest one of all is the network isolation. Each container has its own network, quote unquote, namespace, it's called a compartment in Windows and we can actually do a bandwidth limits on these. And this, by far, I think is the most important is a bit of improvement that we have. So this is just a diagram of the components on a cell in the typical Cloud Foundry deployment. Got the Bosch agent controlling everything. Got the shared components between Linux and Windows. Same code bases, but compiled for the different operating systems. We got the REB, the Metron agent console and the route emitter. And there you can see the larger box for Guardian, which is the same garden server between Linux and Windows with a few differences. The main components of Garden that are important are the three plugins. So there is an image plugin that sets up a container file system. Ours is called Groot Windows on Linux you may have heard of GrootFS. Then you have the runtime, which actually runs a container. Linux uses Run-C, which is a common OCI runtime plugin that is used all over the place in container D. We have a similar one called Win-C. Does the same thing on Windows, talks to the host compute service to run a container. And then in Cloud Foundry we have either the built-in networker called Kawasaki or Silk, which is the default network CNI plugin in Cloud Foundry. For doing any sort of application security group and container networking, we use a plugin called Win-C network. And that talks directly to the host networking service inside of Windows to set up all that networking. There would be a box for the group that was just discussed, but I guess I deleted it. So we've been targeting the Windows Server semi-annual channel release, which is a little bit confusing for anybody who's been in a Windows operator for some time. This is a concept that was released in, well, starting in Windows 10, but then also came over to the Windows Server world. And so we decided to jump on the semi-annual channel release for a few reasons. We've been actively collaborating with Microsoft to get improvements to containerization integrated into the Windows kernel. And those changes show up in the semi-annual channel, not in the release that came out in 2016. We also see other improvements coming down from other Microsoft partners being integrated into that semi-annual channel. For instance, we now have sidecar container support. What this allows you to do is run processes that are not the primary purpose of your container in a container attached to the same network, but not using the same resources. So you can apply different resource limits and also isolate those processes. For example, maybe you have a health check that makes sure your application is running. Well, that doesn't have to use the resources that your application itself uses. But Microsoft has essentially been moving towards the six month release cycle for these major Windows releases. And at the end of this year, they'll be releasing new, what's referred to as a long-term support release, Windows Server 2019, coming out in 2018. And that'll have some of the new features that we've seen come to the platform over the last year as those first class supported features in the platform. So this will be an area where we're looking for feedback from the community in terms of, should we stay on the semi-annual channel over time, or should we move back to one of these long-term support channels? So we'd love your feedback on that. So I'm going to do something crazy. I'm going to try to do a live demo. These always go well. So let's see how that goes. All right, so can you see this over here? Yeah, you can. Awesome. So what I've got here is a virtual machine running Visual Studio 2017. I've got a sample application on here that I've published and pushed to Cloud Foundry. When I pushed the application, I also pushed a couple of other things that will be of particular interest for this demo. So what I'd like to show you is remote debugging of an application running on Pivotal web services. So this is Pivotal's public deployment of CF deployment and all of the open source components that we contribute to. So on PWS, there are Windows cells for internal Pivotal use only. Unfortunately, we can't open that up to everybody just yet as much as I would love to. It's not quite there. But I've pushed up this application and along with it, I've pushed the Visual Studio remote debugger. It's a X64 app. So I've copied this X64 app, MSVSmon, XZ, and all of its dependencies into the published directory of my application. And I've previously CF pushed it. So it is running. I'll show you it running over here. So here it is. It's just a Fortune Teller app. It's got a front end that talks to back end and tells you your fortune. And so now I'm gonna use CF SSH, which is a new, well, it's not new to the platform. It came along with Diego, but it is new to Windows. That allows you to SSH into an instance of your application. Now I only have one instance of my application right now, so when I see if SSH, I'm gonna go right into that one instance. Along with this command line, you'll see that I have a dash L 4022<PHONE_NUMBER>. So for anyone who's worked with the remote debugging tools, you might know that 4022 is the port that the remote debugger listens on. So now if I forward this port, and if everything works, I will have a connection to my container forwarding that port from my local host to the remote. And if I take a look in my container, hopefully the MSVS mon is already running. So I started this up earlier. Oh, is that too small? I don't know how to make this bigger. Sorry. So if I go back to Visual Studio, I can attach to a process. And it hopefully remembers that I did this just before coming into this room because I did not trust that this would go well. But it went well. It connected. Here it is. So if I hit enter here, I think I attached to the wrong process. So it is connecting to the port forward that I have going into my container. Here I have an hdbc.exe, which is the hosted web core exe that's running this sample application that I've published. So now if I click on that, my remote debugger will connect to that instance of MSVS mon running in the container. It's going over the conference Wi-Fi, over the internet to server somewhere in Virginia, over SSH, it's a little bit slow. But eventually it'll come up. If I go back to my application and reload it, hopefully I'll land in this debugger. So this is just kind of an example of something that you can do with CFSSH and the other functionality that's been enabled by the 2016 stat. But here you go. One of the things you can do is you can launch that remote debugger. And now my application's misbehaving. Okay, well, I don't know what's going on so I can jump in here and poke around at the actual code that's executing in this instance of my application running on Cloud Foundry. I don't know how this is gonna go. So I'm gonna cancel. Oh boy. I'm gonna click continue and my application should finish loading over in this window, hopefully. Or maybe I broke it. Oh, I think it did finish. Well, I think that went about as well as a live demo can go. So I'm pretty happy with that. Yeah, I totally broke that application. So yeah, that happens. All right, just gotta get this set back up. Now, where's my presentation? It's presenting somewhere. I think it's presenting there. So some stuff that still needs some improvement is, we need, we've been working with Microsoft and talked about adding. They cannot see this. Sorry about that. All better. So we've been talking with Microsoft and as Matt said, we wanna be able to get some of our feedback into some of the semi-annual releases. And one of these things that may never be fixed in Windows but we hope it could be. So the common deficiency between Windows 2012 and Windows 2016 is that you can actually exceed your memory limit allocated to your container by creating a memory mapped file. This is something in the Windows kernel and artifact of job objects, something that may never get fixed but it is a fact of life for now. One thing that we do hope gets added to the Windows, to HCS Gym, to the Windows kernel is the ability to limit the number of processes in a container. We could have a reactive implementation that does something similar to what our guard does on Windows 2012 but we would like it to get into the actual kernel. Containers are also semi-privileged and what I mean by that is if you were able to get administrator level access as a user inside of a container, you would be able to actually affect some things on the host. You can undo some of the file system quotas that are set on your container volume and some firewall rules that are set up for administrator users would actually also set up for users that are not administrator users would not apply to you either. So this is hopefully gonna be mitigated in the future when we move over to Windows Server 2016, the 1803 release where we use the native HCS Gym access control lists for our networking implementation. And also Matt mentioned the fact that we do not support CF pushing Docker images at the moment. This is a pretty big sticking point. This is something that people really wanted to start to use, however, there's a really tight coupling between the container image and the stem cell that you run a container on. So for example, if I am trying to run a container based on a 1709 kernel container image, but I'm running on a VM that is based on Windows 2016, the long-term support, the Windows will actually tell me that I cannot create a container based on this container image. So you can imagine that this would stop us from providing the zero downtime upgrade guarantees that we want to give with Cloud Foundry. You'd have to have a very complicated deployment where you deploy a whole bunch of new cells, migrate your apps over, plugin deploy. And that's just not really the experience that we want to introduce with this feature. We want people to be able to just CF push their Docker images and let them live on the platform. So if we were to stick to a long-term support release that has all the features we want, we may be able to start to introduce this, but we cannot at this time. And so in addition to getting parity with Windows 2012 R2, we wanted to get pragmatic parity with Linux. So we wanted to enable existing features of the platform for dotnet developers and improve their experience. But we also want to set ourselves up for the ability to integrate with new features in a timely manner, not be chasing Linux. And we want to be able to smoothly be able to work with that, just compile the code on Linux and Windows, and then it should just work. So some of the existing features of the platform we've been working on is enabling volume services, particularly enabling a SMB volume driver and volume service. We're working with the Diego persistence team lending our Windows knowledge. So they've been working on that. They're pretty close to getting that done. We've also been exploring container-to-container networking. This is a really big, rich track of work, very technical track of work. And we've been working closely with the CF networking team to try to integrate with Silk, build a CNI plugin that we can use since Silk is similar to Flannel, but which is used in Kubernetes, but we want to build one that's specific to Cloud Foundry. We've also been talking with the route integrity team, the routing team about integrating with the Envoy proxy on Windows. Envoy is not currently supported on Windows. We've been working with them to lend our Windows knowledge, to build it for Windows and see if we can integrate it in the platform, working with them and Diego to see where this takes us, see if it even works, see what the effort will be to get it working. And in addition to all these kind of platform features, there's also kind of a more opaque feature to the user that the garden team is starting to use container D for their runtime back end for garden. And we want to be able to integrate with that as well. We want to get the same benefits that they're getting there. So we're trying to contribute to the open source containers community, contribute to container D and build a win-see-backed runtime for container D so that we can have the same integration, have the same benefits with Windows and Linux. Cool, so at a high level when we think about our roadmap, we're really focusing on three different types of applications. Enabling green field application development and deployment right to the platform, that's easy, right? If you're building a cloud native application from the ground up and you're leveraging Steeltoe or some other framework there just to build your application and run it on the platform, it's super easy, right? But that's not every application. It's only a subset of your applications, right? As an enterprise. And so we're also enabling the lift and shift of certain applications to the application runtime. And that means extending the platform with certain bits of support for those applications. For example, integrated Windows authentication. This is something that we have not supported to date but is an impediment to lifting and shifting a lot of applications that are already out there for running on your internet. And so those are the kind of things that we're thinking about that we want to enable immediately on the platform. Then there are things that we're not so sure about. And so when it comes to certain classes of legacy applications or commercial off the shelf software, really weird exotic deployments that don't fit into the application runtime model. Well, this is where we're kind of thinking what makes sense. And this is really where the container runtime comes into the picture. And so the Garden Windows team has lent a lot of its knowledge and experience in working with Windows server containers to the container runtime team. And so now we're working on trying to get CFCR running on Windows. And so that's sort of a long-term thing that we're looking into in order to enable this class of applications that don't necessarily fit in to the existing application runtime model. All right, that's all we have. So we're always hiring at Pivotal in New York. So you want to come work on Windows, work on Windows containers, give us a call. We love pull requests, love feedback. So if anyone wants to start using WinC, start using Guardian on Windows, start deploying Windows 2016 cells with Sea of Deployment, definitely do that, give us some feedback where it's good, where it's bad. We'd love to hear from you. Any questions? Sure, so for Pivotal web services, the timeline is unknown. So there are two kind of modes of operation for Windows server containers. There's a shared kernel, which is what we currently support. And then there's Hyper-V isolated, which we do not currently support. The shared kernel isolation is really not suitable for an environment where anybody can just push their application code and run it. There are still known exploits and still things that we cannot protect against, but Hyper-V does provide that level of isolation. We don't currently have support for Hyper-V, but if we do look into supporting that, that would be the time when we get supported on PWS. But if you do have a relationship with Pivotal in particular, we are exploring ways to open up PWS access for certain customers of Pivotal. So that is a possibility, but not for a general developer use, sadly. Yeah, Hyper-V containers are very, very heavyweight. They're basically VMs. So that's why we haven't invested in those yet, but if we see feedback that we need that sort of isolation, I think that's something for the future. It's legal and licensing. So we've been in touch with Amazon. Other customers have been in touch with Amazon. Other people complaining on Microsoft forums have been in touch with Amazon. And so really, the thing that will push this over the line is more people complaining to Amazon and asking for support. So if you want AWS support for 17 or nine images, go complain to Amazon. Add yourself to the list. What was that? Are they in Azure? They are. Azure, GCP, those are on Bosch.io right now. Anybody else? All right, thank you.