Technically, you're so clever ahead of the sun. It's so reasonable. It's so refreshing, I think. I didn't think that. I didn't think that. I mean, I brought paper. Good morning, you. Good morning. I'm sorry. I brought paper, Madam Chair. I hope so. Well, thank you for having me. And I feel embarrassed to hand out paper with all this technology. Because we're a green committee today. There's a lot of extra copies. This is basically my floor report on the field. And you're welcome to ask any questions you have. I'm very happy that the Government Operations Committee has invited me to come here and testify. My name is Dick Sears, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator from Bennington County. So with that, would you like me to start? Yes. Go right ahead. Okay. Well, thank you. For adults in Vermont, cannabis is a legal product. Each year, a significant number of Vermont adults choose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars purchasing the product from a listed market. Here are from the neighboring state of Massachusetts where there is a regulated market. Representative Brownell knows that well. We have a store in Williamstown, Main Street of Williamstown, which is about four miles from his home. That's right. Vermont's current law is awkward because it has legalized the product without creating any safe legal access to it. We saw what this leads to in the news about a store on Church Street Marketplace in Burlington being raided for selling marijuana products. The Attorney General recently changed his position to fully supporting the creation of a regulated market citing the need for consumer protection and open, transparent, and smart approach to public protection. The path to cannabis consumer and public protection has been incremental and well-informed in Vermont. Since 2006, we have taken a step-by-step approach to reform starting with the medical marijuana laws, creation of a regulated dispensary market, decriminalization, and finally legalization. S-54 is grounded in the uniquely Vermont approach and benefits from the research conducted by the Governor's Commission on Marijuana. I might add that much of this bill is a part of what was S-241 that we passed several years ago in the Senate. The Governor's Commission report, as well as information, particularly from Massachusetts, which has got a Cannabis Control Board is moving in the same direction. I was watching a public TV show with two senators and a representative, and the senator said, well, this bill is about consumer protection. The representative said it's about social justice. And another one said it's about the strict market regulations. And I thought all three are right. That's what this bill is about. So the consumer protection features of the bill are replacing the illicit market with a strictly regulated market, provide safe access to predictable and consistent products, information tools for informed responsible consumption, mandatory third-party testing requirements. This is particularly important with edibles. We found that edibles are being sold on the street today and nobody has any idea what the potency is with those edibles. So you may hear a lot of testimony about, oh, don't allow edibles. We've already got them. I'm sorry. There's strict labeling requirements showing potency, requirements for child-resistant packaging, bans on advertising that appeals to children and coverage over consumption, and makes false claims. There are rules related to manufacturing of single-serve edible products, a ban on cannabis products bundled with non-cannabis products. That's that, particularly with the CBD oil from hemp that is now being sold widely. We want to make sure that people realize what it is they're purchasing is not hemp-related. It's actually marijuana-related. And there's a ban on cannabis products that include alcohol or tobacco. There's another part of the illicit market today. There's strict market regulation. There's new dedicated and expert regulatory bodies created. A seed sale tracking regulation is required. Constraints favoring a Vermont-scale business model. There's limited regulated business operating licenses. There are criminal background checks for licensing. People have to be at least 21 to gain access to stores to purchase or possess marijuana. The bans on the gifting for sales loophole, which many of you may be familiar with, where you buy a t-shirt for $50 when you are gifted a certain amount of marijuana. That's been going on in Vermont. Actually, I saw something on Facebook Nelson yesterday and somebody who's operating a little club. Membership only, but clearly, in Beddington are planning on charging you a fee, and that is also what's here. The banned marketing that appeals to children and youth provides for criminal background checks for employees and licenses, allows municipalities to opt out of hosting cannabis businesses and this was a great deal of debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee about the as well as Senate government opts about whether they're knocked in or are knocked out. Obviously, we chose the opt process and you may hear some testimony from the league and others about which way they would like to go. The Senate chose the opt. We were afraid that we'd get into situations like they've had in Colorado where many communities won't bring it in but they want the revenue from it. It requires education of cannabis businesses related to enforcement and employment training and rules related to security and health and safety requirements for cannabis businesses. I want to say a little bit about what's not in the bill which is public protection and the roadway safety that we've all heard a lot about. If there are, in fact, as the RAND report cited, 80,000 Vermont is currently using marijuana. I suggest we already have a road safety problem and we should deal with that separately. But Vermont's DUI or impaired law is more of the strictest in the country. It is applicable to all, i.e. prescription drugs, marijuana, legal drugs. It is against the law to drive impaired to the slightest degree. I have to remind folks of that. The slightest degree standard was enacted in 2015 and is a nearly zero-tolerance standard. So while we all assume for alcohol it's .08, it can be a .02 if you are showing signs of being impaired. That's what the zero tolerance means. You can be charged with a DUI. I think a lot of folks don't realize how tough our laws are currently. Social equity and social justice that I spoke of really, there's a priority for small local producers to ensure a diverse marketplace. It mandates one of the control board members have a background in social justice. Priority is given to licensed applicants that provide good wages, benefits, environmental and clean energy programs. Nonviolent drug offenses will not automatically disqualify applicants. Regulatory requirements unique to small growers. And priority for applicants that are Vermont residents. There's consideration of geographic distribution of cannabis establishments to allow for even distribution of cannabis businesses throughout the state. The bill prioritizes women and minority-owned businesses and career-advanced investment. We established a 16% tax rate to help undercut the illicit market, trying to keep it as low as possible. And a 2% local auction tax to help, it's an uptude to help municipalities with implementation. Massachusetts I believe has a 3%. And what they found there was they also had what's called host agreements and they wanted to avoid that. And the host agreements, for example, in North Hampton Mass, somebody applied for a license and they said, oh yeah, if you can donate $100,000 to the Grills and Boys Club we'd be happy to work on you with a license. We did talk to a device chair of the select board in the Berkshires. Was it Great Barrington? Great Barrington. Yeah, it should be on the list. He was fascinating to talk to because he's been through the local government piece. He said their biggest problem really has been parking. People parking in places that they shouldn't. I'm not going to walk through the bill, but I'm happy to try to answer any questions about our bill. Yes, Jim. Thank you, Senator. In terms of the setup and the structure, you indicated that you looked to Massachusetts in terms of the cannabis control board. We've heard and we haven't dug down to a lot of the details, but a number of states have done it differently like under perhaps their liquor control board or some other mechanism today as you know currently we have another medical marijuana under the Department of Public Service. I'm curious as to what made you go in that direction of setting up a new entity. A lot of it was done. A lot of that decision-making was from the committee on government operations, but we were worried in judiciary that if we put it under liquor control that it wouldn't get the attention it needed because there's a lot... I mean, the bill requires a lot of rulemaking and that board is going to have a lot of responsibility to develop the rules for the implementation, particularly in the first year and a half. We felt at least at this point that it should be its own separate control board. Now, there was some discussion about putting it under... actually putting it under agriculture and not liquor control because agriculture, in fact, the hemp is under agriculture. Agriculture will have a role in the testing and so that was one consideration. I think there are, you know, there's a variety of ways to go about it. I don't know that our... it's perfect that we did model it after Massachusetts. We started out with a five-member board and then cut it to three in the appropriation process, only because you're spending the money for the Canada's control board before you have any revenue. So it was a question of how much do you want to spend in anticipation of future revenues? Thank you. Good morning, Senator Sears. I'm curious to know how your vision would be about how this is going to interact with the homegrown component of this and that I know there's been a fair amount of discussion about the black market, the illicit market. One, does this do anything to address that issue as far as will people still be allowed to... People would still be allowed to grow as they are currently. I liken it to my effort to grow tomatoes every summer. And sometimes I am very unsuccessful and I can go to the market and buy tomatoes, but if I were growing, which I'm not going to be doing by the way, growing marijuana, I have to go to the black market currently. If I looked at what I spent to grow tomatoes in the summer versus what I would spend in the market, I'm obviously not making a good financial decision. You know, one of the things... We went to a couple of American marijuana dispensers that we currently have, and they were both pretty clear about that since the passage of the homegrown, they've seen a 25 to 30% decrease in their business, so that would sort of make you think that more people are growing their own tomatoes. Well, I think it's that, now that it's legal, both the illicit market and the ability to go to other states. The ability to go to Massachusetts right now, but it won't be long before they can go to Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, perhaps New Jersey, maybe New Hampshire, Harvard and Maine, so I think it's going to be all around us. So that's going to cut into the medical dispensary. One advantage of being a medical card recipient would be you're allowed under another bill, you're allowed to grow a little bit more, but you don't pay the taxes. So if I happen to grow some of my own, I have the space and the inclination, and you're a good friend of mine, and would it be illegal for me to work something out with you or whatever you give me goes towards my tax bill? Nope. I cannot charge you for it. It's, you know, and it has to be under an ounce. So it wouldn't be, it would still be illegal. I mean, you can share. There's nothing such as you can't share. It's the sale or the gift in person, some other thing, if you said. Thank you. Any other questions for the senator? Morning, senator. Morning. Welcome to the literature. Thank you. They've elected after, or appointed after a few of us that have already been elected. Thank you. My concern is about children, young people, and with the potency of cannabis today, it certainly has a very negative impact when young users are involved. So how important do you think it is in terms of educating young people about the impact of using, with the hope of them, consider using later when their bodies are able to handle it? Well, I think we all should be concerned about youngsters, particularly the younger they are. Referred evidence even under 25 is probably in their brains still developing and there's problems. I answer that in two ways. One is tremendously important. However, if the governor, with all due respect to the governor, if the governor thought it was critically important, he would have put $6 million into his budget for prevention. That's what his health commissioner has suggested for prevention. And I think you, it's fine to talk that way and I have no problem with spending that $6 million. The commission actually recommended, I believe $23 million on prevention and treatment from the cannabis sales. So, you know, I totally agree. But it's here today. And ignoring that it's here today is a mistake to me. And as you know, there's very little the legislature can do to come up with $6 million of new money. So, you know, that's my response to it. I totally agree with everyone who thinks we should be putting more into prevention. On that topic, I happened across a press conference yesterday where the secretary of human services was talking about the need for a comprehensive prevention program. Not just the, you know, do not do this, not do that, but what are the alternatives for our youth? And I think I can appreciate that we should all be thinking about how we are prioritizing the things that we want to provide for young people as healthy alternatives and not just the, no, no, no. Appreciate that. Bob, you have a question and then we should probably let Senator Sears go on with his way. In the context of Vermont marketing its brand, in some sections of the country, Vermont is already known. Has there been any discussion with the administration or marketing or anybody else whether this is going to end up being an issue? I think we're hopeful that the regulations and the social justice portion of the bill will result in something similar to the crap brewery industry in Vermont. And as an interesting anecdote, Senator Ash was in Seattle visiting a friend and went into one of the CBD stores. And there was a Vermont product, Vermont made product there and they said that was one of their best sellers. I think the Vermont brand could be used in many ways in this. And that's where the importance of testing potency comes in to me. I don't, people talk to a lot of people about the illicit market and they have no idea what the potency is and the product they're buying and no idea what it might be like. But I think there's, you know, we have to recognize that the market is here. People are buying it. The people that are selling it are not necessarily the most ruthless people in our state. I appreciate the work that you all have done on this bill. Thank you. And I also very much appreciate the way you've laid it out to help us understand your focus on consumer protection and market regulation. Again, you know, we always know there will be differences between the house and the center and how we do it as long as the goal is the same and that is to bring a product, bring social justice, shoe protection, product that people don't want to use. Thank you very much, Rob. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. We have Graham and Stephanie here now to go through the fiscal note on S54 and so, Jim, you're going to need to fire up that iPad again because I'm guessing Stephanie is electronic. Okay. Stephanie is human. Her presentation is electronic. Thank you. So I am the sort of drive, what's the cost of the board, the cost of three-year period, estimate person. And Graham is the tax revenue estimate person. Okay. Oh, no. So the board was structured in a certain way when the bill came out of the Judiciary Committee and then it was restructured in the Senate Appropriations Committee. That's why there's two estimates in the fiscal note. The board was a five-member board at a lower pay structure in the Judiciary Committee and was decided to be a three-member board member, three members of the board as it came out of the Senate Appropriations at a higher salary level. And so I can give you a little bit of detail about the cost estimate of the board. The first-year cost is not a full-year cost because the members are anticipated to come on late August, September, and then the executive director and the executive assistant a month or two later. So that's the reason that there's, and then there's also some other components of the board cost. So would that be helpful to the committee just to understand the component pieces of that? Okay. So three members of the board, the chair is paid about $107,000, $80,000. It was pegged to 66% of a superior court judge and then the other two members at 50%. So those would be about $80,000 of a salary. I'm just talking the salary, not the fully loaded cost of the position. The executive director and the executive assistant are both anticipated to not be entry-level type positions. So the executive director position is comparable to the chair in salary. And the executive assistant would be around the $70,000, $71,000 salary. So that's an experienced executive assistant. And that's the salary structure in the Senate appropriations estimate. In addition to the salary, there's employees with full benefits. And that's at a 40% estimate. That's an estimate that assumes people pick the family health plan. That's the biggest driver of a benefit, low cost. In addition to the salaries of the board, I've estimated operating costs because it'll meet some space and computers and filming, et cetera. And what I did is I looked at several boards around the state. The natural resource board operating expense had been consistently about $500,000. I looked at the size of their sort of operation versus a five-man operation and proportionally allocated that. So I have about $125,000 a year for operating expenses for the board. And I know the commissioner of buildings was wondering if there was a piece included in that for fee-for-space and rent. And I did inform them that that would be probably in the $47,000 a year range as a part of that estimate. The other two pieces that I'm including in that estimate are some general counsel assistance, not necessarily position, but some general counsel assistance across the three years that's declining, heavier at the front part. And then also some contracting, ability to contract that's also declining over the three years. That's why even though the salaries roll out full, it steps down a little bit over the three years. So that's the source of what is in the bill as it passed out of the senate an $810,000 operation estimated to be in that 960 and then actually dropping because of the contracting costs and some of the general counsel falls off in the third year more. Two other pieces that I wanted to speak to about the bill as it came out of the senate. So these, as it's structured in the senate, it's spending in anticipation of receipts into the cannabis special fund. So there are no receipts in it against which to lodge the $810,000 in $20,000. We think there will be some receipts related to fees in $21,000. There is language in the bill that allows that fund to be made whole by the tax revenue in the event of the timing so that you actually end FY22 with that funding balance so that you can only anticipate receipts if there are really going to be the receipts that you're spending into there. And so that was the mechanism by which we would cover that event. If the fee revenue estimate is off then those receipts would be there but at some point the tax revenue comes in and so that tax revenue would be making the special fund whole so that fiscally you are sound in the structure. That's the, at the other point I wanted to make sure that I was, the joint fiscal office, me, it was adamant about it in the Senate Appropriations Committee because you need to actually have when you're spending, you're essentially going to be deficit spending into that special fund early on and you want to make sure that you have a plan to come back to balance over time. So you're saying that if the licensing fees don't cover the spending then the tax revenues from the sales will make up the difference at least initially. And it's especially because you're spending you're spending in a year when you don't have so you have to actually pay, the licensing fees have to pay the ongoing and the payoff of the sort of one-time debt that you start out with. And so if that doesn't come to equilibrium on its own the tax revenue helps to get that there. Jim. So Senator Sears talked about the recommendation that you've received about $6 million for education. Is that in here? No, there's no, this is, only this fiscal note only speaks to the cost of operating the board. The proposals related to like the health department requested for expenditure those are not part of this fiscal note. And so the Senate did not include any forward appropriations or recommendations about how the tax revenue, aside from this fiscal, make the special fund fiscally whole, aside from that they did not recommend anything regarding how the tax revenue is expended in this bill. And aside from the cannabis bill in the governor's recommend was there an increase in funding for after school programs or backfilling what we used to use the tobacco fund for in terms of prevention activities in school? I mean that's not in the 20 bill as it's, as it's either proposed by the governor or passed in the House right, passed by the House right now. So getting back to the board part which is in a lot of time and obviously going from a five member to a three member or it really is a change in salaries. I mean there's not a significant change in the total cost. There was not a significant change the salary structure and I didn't bring my detail on the judiciary amendment but the salary structure for all five members was first of all five are the same and it was a lower salary structure I think in the $50,000. Okay so on the staffing we've got an executive director and an executive assistant. Is that it? For the staffing there is an allocation of dollars in my estimate for general counsel. I don't anticipate a position of a general counsel to the board but for purchasing some additional legal assistance because they're very heavy on the the rulemaking and things so but I don't, there are only five positions created. It just seems a little top heavy to me. You've got a three member board and two people doing all the work. But maybe I'm reading it to it. So the nature of the work is the policy forming and the rulemaking and then also setting up the registry. So, and that was the choice of the way the Senate's working. Thank you. Moving back to the deficit spending what agency or department would the deficit spending come out in other words? So it would, this bill sets up a special fund and the appropriation of 810 is out of that special fund so that appropriation in FY20 there's no revenue anticipated into that special fund in 20 so it's got zero revenue and 810 of spending so it ends FY20 at negative 810 and that is essentially floated on the treasury of the state. So out of the cash flow of the state? And then, you know, there'll be an additional thing because it has to carry the interest on that and then it has to pay it back over time and that's the structure. Okay, thank you. It's not something that we really think about all that often. John. I have two questions. The first question, you looked at the fees being collected in Massachusetts to develop this analysis. For the fees side of the revenue and I'm going to turn it over. Did you look at it in other states or just Massachusetts because the senator Sears said this bill is partially modeled on Massachusetts law? The fee structure is on Grand Campbell joint fiscal office. The fee structure bears significantly from state to state so in the absence of actually creating a fee structure within the bill itself and our concern is the joint fiscal office about spending in anticipation of receipts. The fee structure in the bill I don't believe is actually modeled. There's no fee structure to speak up but the actual receipts would be similar to what if the state decided to go with a Massachusetts style fee structure that we anticipate would come to fees. It could be a lot less than that if you went with other state models or more than that if you went with some other state models but I think the bill itself says it has to generate at least the amount listed here. If you did in Massachusetts style the fee structure that's what we estimate would get you there. So it's setting a minimum amount for the recommendation to come back on the fees? So the board wouldn't necessarily have to choose the Massachusetts style they would just have to get to the number here. So my second question is you estimated out three years to FY22 so that's basically standing up the cannabis control board but it's really not having a take on a regulatory position. For example if you compare it to the liquor control board I mean they have law enforcement licensing staff things like that. I mean you're not just going to have an executive director an executive assistant starting to do enforcement as well as licensing. Did you look beyond FY22 at costs? So there is a requirement in the bill for them to come back with what should be the structure of the board looking at that. And so we did not say this is what the world will look like after it stood up and what the costs need will be. There was some question about whether or not you have three full-time employees that are board members but for the liquor board those are paid the $50 a day. So look at other structures and say is this the structure that needs to continue. So we did not that report would be coming and then that would be sort of the next phase of understanding what that would need to be. Thank you. So I'm going to be showing the committee the money from the tax. So the Senate bill has 16% state excise tax with a 2% local option. Our office only estimated the potential revenue from the 16% excise tax. You can see in the table there this is what we estimate will be the revenues beginning in fiscal 22 which will be year one of implementation. We put a range around this because there's quite a bit of uncertainty about how quickly the board will get up and running and how quickly we don't retail stores. And so as you can see it sort of ramps up as you go into year two and three and that's consistent with what we see in other states. So that's sort of the headline summary and I can speak more in the details as the committee wishes but essentially this model is a kind of a model of working together with other states. We work, so when I say we myself and the tax department work together to develop a model in November, December of 2018 as part of the Governor's Marijuana Commission and this model was based upon Colorado's model for estimating their first year receipts which came within 1% of their actual receipts. They estimated 67 million for their first year and they actually received 67.5 million. So they were very close. So we thought that was a pretty good model and we also relied a lot on speaking with our colleagues in Oregon and Washington. So we use Colorado because Colorado is a relatively high usage state like Vermont and it's a relatively high tourism state like Vermont and we use Washington and Oregon because those two states have legal marijuana and they also have cross order issues like we would have with Massachusetts. So these estimates are based upon a slew of different data here including population information from the legislative commas the U.S. Census Bureau the usage of marijuana from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health we estimated the price of cannabis using a scientific website called priceofweed.com but that's actually what Colorado has used and used in their model. Rob, as a question. So the very first screen that you saw about the revenue licensing. Yes. And then this one is around just the retail sales correct. The tax. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry. The National Survey of Drug Use and Health was using this which showed that Vermont has the highest usage rate in the country and higher than Colorado. There are various reports put up in Colorado, Oregon and Washington about post-legalization of open usage in those states. So there's two terms we talk about when we estimate revenue. The prevalence will help percentage of your population if you used it and then consumption which is for those people who do use it how much do they consume and so those are the two variables that we try to estimate we use other states data for. So I just want to clarify. Were the highest on the medical marijuana or were the highest on recreational marijuana? Were the highest. So the survey says have you used marijuana within the past month or three months and the percentage of our population that has said yes to that question is the highest in the country. So that's answering the prevalence question. They didn't ask me. So it's answering the prevalence question. So we know that it's something around 35, 37% answered yes to that question but we don't know whether they're heavy users or whether they use it just a little bit. So that's why we use information from the other states to get a sense of in a legal market how much were they seen in their states. And then we had to make some of the following assumptions here. We estimated that consumption by residents so bar models broken down by both resident usage and travelers who would come to the state of the month that residents would consume between five or six ounces a year. Colorado, their estimate was about they did a study about six ounces per year and Washington was around just over six I think. We, in all the other states the price of cannabis fell precipitously upon legalization. However, the revenues continued to grow which sort of means that you know even when the price is going down as the market goes more and more mature you see more and more sales and more and more revenue. With that price drop were they aware of how that affected the black market? Yeah, so the next bullet point there Oregon saw their black market fall off a cliff when that happened. Our estimate is that our market would be still 20% of the market yet in a fully mature market so this is year two we say of legalization about 20% of the market. Oregon's about 15% right now. Yeah, how many of these states have also legalized people to grow their own and process it in a home when you're doing this type of price? You know, I'm not sure whether what the status of legal home growing is in our model we estimated that 10% of remotors will continue to home grow. Oregon's is about 8% right now so we think ours a little bit higher because of that fact that we legalized on a home growing basis we legalized that possession before actual retail sales and so we thought that ours would be a little bit higher if you assume the higher home grow rate then it would be lower revenue. So I'm guessing that possibly legislative council has a sense of that. So all of the states allow home grow except for Washington state you also have and you have a chart with whatever the certain limits are in terms of the states that allow home grow remot has the either equal to or the smallest number of plants that we allow for folks to grow I think we also have to factor in that a number of these states that are all passed by battle initiatives what predated the recreational the adult use commercial market was medical initiatives and so a lot of those states also have very loose kind of medical laws that predate the commercial so you can so you have what you can maybe talk about about kind of the gray market so you have like the illegal market and then you have this other kind of fuzzy space where there are a lot of people who are able to grow under the medical provisions and some of that is closed up since they brought on the commercial but there are still some things that are different between like what Vermont has which is a very very controlled medical program versus what they have in some other states that probably affect some of the numbers the floor is here where's the ceiling in terms of authorization for a number of home grown how large capacity did other states do other states I don't have to look and see but I know that Colorado and I think that somebody I can take a look at it but it used to be able to used to be able to grow for a lot of plants and for a number of people same in Maine so I'd have to go back and take a look at what's kind of closed if they've closed some of that up but some of it has been quite quite large and I think that's one of the issues around how much you move the illegal or illicit market into the targeted market John and then Rob so, Graham please you said that Oregon's black market sort of declined fairly dramatically do we know why? when I spoke to their analysts they said it was because of the price drop of that not just the actual dollar price drop but also just the theoretical costs you don't risk being caught by going and purchasing the legal substance in a store and so they said that the legal market had competitive prices it didn't have the cost of potentially having a fine or even going to jail and so that was their explanation to the extent that the full story I was just wondering if there's some distinction between Oregon and how they chose to regulate marijuana in Colorado and Washington state and some of the other states that have regulated Massachusetts just I'm just interesting because obviously you know curbing the black market I think is important to do in this bill so if there's any lessons to be learned from other states that would be great yeah I mean Oregon's tax rate is 17% I believe so it's quite close to this but they also charge their sales tax to it as well so they would have a higher tax rate than you would have and so do we have data on all the states taxation of marijuana both full tax is not just a special marijuana tax but if there's a sales tax charge if there's a local option tax just for comparative purposes you will okay great yeah I think it's worth having us remember that in addition to the levers around taxation that the illicit market can be reduced by intentionally trying to bring those growers above board you know giving them an opportunity to to come into the legal grow framework and I don't know I don't know how far you all have gone in terms of trying to understand what the marijuana market looks like in your own home districts but and who knows whether they would even invite you in but start asking around because it's kind of interesting to understand how some of these operations have been have been developing they don't want legalization yes right they might not want to because they might like to be able to continue doing what they're doing on the other hand if we're looking at a regulated product that is safe and predictable for consumers I think it's a good idea to figure out how to how to bring those folks above board Rob had a question then Nelson I have to blame my question on Senator Sears because I never thought I would be comparing marijuana to tomatoes but my question is what is the shelf life let's say that I am one of those homegrown types that grows my own marijuana how long is that product good for do you have any idea I have no idea you have a sweet answer depends upon how well it's dried or processed I think that's a question we could ask our dispensaries because they've been working in this marketplace for a while thank you Nelson tell them how you can it's preserving my question is what impact did you see in these other states and other type drugs when they legalized this that's a very good question that's not something we asked like you're talking about alcohol consumption or even other illicit drugs that's not something we looked at that's something that we considered at least for the revenue that we'll use marijuana more that they drank less we might see less alcohol related revenues but in the experience of the other states that I asked Colorado about it they didn't they tracked actively where they saw a specific decline but they didn't see like their alcohol their alcohol taxes fall off a cliff but they couldn't definitively say that they didn't want to have an impact on their tobacco or sorry they're what I'm looking at is other illicit drugs that have been sold out there once you legalize what impact does it have on the dealer that's probably selling the motor to the stuff yeah I don't know if I have a good answer to that hard to have a fiscal analysis of that yeah well how's the crime rate changed I think those are probably best answered by people you know in public safety you know we can do some exploration of that so put that question in your parking lot and we'll make sure that we come back to it Bob maybe another part of my question we had discussion about the security of our voter lists some of the things we're doing in other states where they have done this to the Fetch Committee that's a good question that's a policy question so we should actually let them get back to their their fiscal analysis but put that on the list of questions to ask legislative council I think those are all really good questions they're there to help you with that there's one more assumption I wanted to add that we assumed remember I talked about prevalence and consumption we assumed that although Vermont has high prevalence that our consumption was a little bit lower than other states because our population is older we have our median age I think is 8 years less than Colorado's and it's I think 4 or so years less than Oregon and Washington so under the assumption that older users consume a little bit less and modestly less we're not talking a huge cutoff but and then finally so the question is how does this estimate compare to what other states did and this is someone that we go to Steph and I go to these fiscal analysts conferences they say figure out ways to show your results or whatever in interesting ways so this chart what it attempts to say is okay what if Colorado Oregon had the same population and tax rate as we are proposing in S54 based upon their actual revenues that they've brought in and their taxable sales what would that equate to Vermont so what this is showing you so the Vermont estimate range is that high low you see and you can see year 1, 2 and 3 what we're saying is that we're going to be relatively similar to these other states the high end so the high end of year 1 basically says that we'll be a Colorado we'll be a Colorado type state and if on the high end of year 3 it means that we'll be basically Colorado on the low end will be a little less than Washington so Washington in year 1 here theirs was passed by the outlet initiative and there was not a whole lot of thought that went into it but they had a really slow start up time and you can see their line is pretty steeper so the second year they sort of put in the rules and stuff and the licenses and that's when they started seeing revenue so year 1 here the low for Vermont would be that we saw slow licensing and we saw slow retail sales because of that licensing and so it took us a little bit to get going year 1 of high means like Colorado everyone flocked to us because it's a tourism state Vermont has a specific appeal so at the low end year 1 you're saying 4 million for Vermont which once you take out the revenue that you need to backfill the fund you're not looking at a whole lot of extra revenue on that low end to do some of the prevention and public health outreach that we were talking about earlier not with that year year 1 which is 2022 in this picture that would be true if we make the low end and we have a deficit in the fund you're not likely to have much in the way of excess capacity in that attack and so I think you'll hear a lot of talk about oh the other so and so state had made this much money in revenue this many in sales everyone be mindful you have to adjust their population and just by tax rate that's essentially what this tries to do this model was created in mid December there's since been some news reports from Massachusetts and California that their first year estimates have been ambitious they've missed because their licensing is taking longer to get up and going I'm not saying that these we're going to be towards the lower end but the more data that we get that shows other states legalization and their first year process I'm not saying that we would have those issues but it's something that we would keep our eye on potentially revise this and going forward with new data so how did your assumptions account for remarks, demographic shifts in terms of slow population growth becoming a much greater state as you mentioned older people you know consume yeah it's in two areas one is we adjusted the consumption level down relative to the other states for that older population and two the population the sort of cornerstone of these estimates is the population of Vermont and then from there we backed out marijuana users from from the national survey drug use and health that prevalence question had to use marijuana in the past month and so the projections for population which come from the legislative economists aren't incorporated into this model so that would those projections project that Vermont will be becoming an older state going forward so that's how it's incorporated yes has your study focused exclusively on the revenue side or have you taken a look at the expense side as well as far as were there any increases because of public safety education healthcare where did you just focus on the income side so far the revenue side there is no projection assuming the market is up and running on those indirect costs in the future in this fiscal note we were talking about population was there any populations in any of these states and this became real because of marijuana what was the fluctuation I don't know if you can tell unless there was a spike Oregon and Colorado are some of the fastest growing states in the country there are a lot of factors that would influence that those states are emigration they have faster growing economies than Vermont but I mean the analyst I spoke to did not mention any population growth from marijuana specifically and I don't believe I've seen any study that has seen people moving to a state simply because of marijuana tourism for sure that's one of the reasons why we looked at Colorado's experience because they are high tourism states specifically for marijuana we are a high tourism state and we're not even legal yet and so we anticipated we'd be sort of like them and that's why we used their model for estimating what our potential tourism revenue so I think to close the loop on the question about indirect costs there's no sort of indirect revenue impacts either in this fiscal note yes that's true right I mean when we were touring the Milton facility we saw the specialized processing curing room that was manufactured by a Vermont company I happen to have a constituent who has a security business who would really like to be able to tap into some of the market around providing security for grow facilities and retail facilities so you know I think there's a lot more that maybe we would like to be able to predict in terms of what the benefits are to some of the ancillary businesses and I would guess that we could probably find some of that from the states whose markets are a little more fully developed but at any rate is that anything else you would like us to know or understand no that's it the one thing I would add just tangential at that point I hope to Colorado about their experience with any did they count any certain not indirect but a little bit more direct so the very example was does this have any effect on your grand list your municipal grand list he said potentially because a lot of their marijuana processing facilities occupied old vacant warehouses but that's not something they quantified for state revenue purposes we do have a few empty manufacturing facilities great any other questions for these fine fiscal people thank you thank you for coming to join us


The development of evidence-informed deliberative processes, EDPs, has been gaining momentum as a way to ensure more legitimate health benefit package design. EDPs are a practical and stepwise approach for health technology assessment, HTA, bodies to enhance legitimate health benefit package design by engaging stakeholders in deliberation over the values that underpin healthcare decision making. This paper outlines the theoretical background of EDPs, summarizes the practical guidance provided in 2019 and discusses its potential impact on health policy. This article was authored by Rob Baltusson, Martin Janssen, and Ouija Ortwin.


What is your favorite pump up song? Put On by Young Jeezy It depends if you need pumping up like you need to seriously go and headbutt a locker or if you need pumping up like you're just getting up in the morning You're going for your longest drive of your life Oh that type of pump top, okay I have the tiger It just gets the veins going I got a couple from Macklemore If there was one it would be like Can't Hold Us by Macklemore Soulja Boy The U I mean yeah cause my life is U so everybody love to see it


Boomer month day two chat Boomer month number two game start You'll talk my favorite character this game is vile. Oh vile. What is vile vile is the first boss, right? It's been so long since I've played this man There's definitely gonna be some things that like I forgot about but what I noticed with Donkey Kong Especially in the early part of the game how many things I did remember because I beat Donkey Kong years ago But it took me obviously took me forever It's a struggle to beat this game. Wait, is it? Oh My oh no, no, no, no. I thought they despawn I died on the first level. I Don't ever remember dying on the first level stop losing HP. Doesn't it not matter don't you wanna?  Can you? Hey, I've never died to this boss See like he avoids you You can beat him. I don't think so.  You shouldn't expect to defeat him. He is designed to be a war machine Remember you have not reached full power yet If you use all your abilities you were designed with you should become stronger You may even become as powerful as I am I'll scout ahead and collect as much information on Sigma's fortress as I can I'll meet up with you there X I know you can do it Nathan and thank you for the touch prime dude That would always start with him and get the speed boost choosing penguin first.  I have hidden caps like this one If you find and use them, you will be able to increase your powers step into this capsule See an acceleration system boost your speed Cool Nice any man tonight, maybe late night. I bet I could be in a speeder on yeah, I bet you can too Maybe I should rematch the chairs Okay, dude debated so hard dude Lost to Ginny that's not Ginny. He's almost dead. I was gotta chat almost got it I was here to climb walls my groin like that. You can with enough training Wait what I only died once Show me those wings of the chameleons open. Yeah, like it doesn't oh, oh this guy.  Yeah, I think I think whatever I used to play this before Really? You gave me a little like What a twiddly a twiddly wink of help I'm trying to jump and dash at the same time. It's so hard.  I want to get a collection of old consoles I think that would be so cool to have this capsule contains an enhancement For your heritage Which will allow you to make some series with a headboard Okay, nice. So we got the head. We have the legs or the head and the feet. I guess legs too Is that like the speedrun strategy to go off the side? Nice Okay, so we did storm eagle.  I think I can I love this game, man So we'll go armadillo octopus After octopus we'll go Boomer co-anger To this guy and then the last level is chameleon. I'm remembering the I'm remembering the method, dude The hadouken isn't there yet. You have to get like the full. I don't remember the exact thing Wait, I can't get the hadouken now, right? I have to get the full armor first, right? Yeah, of course girly girl Okay, uh, let's do this Oh Oh, yeah, and it breaks the armor. That's right. I'm gonna go here again. Even though I should go here I'm gonna go here first Because I want to go and I want to grab the stuff. I want to grab the the Why does this hand look so good today? Dude, I look good every day. Isn't this the How do I do this? Oh, there it is This caption contains a part Which may increase the capabilities of your experts You can use it to buy your own action weapons Bannananana. So yeah, this is it Buzzy, thank you for the 17 months, dude. Okay, so let's do uh, let's do octopus next stop sucking me These guys just keep sucking me, dude Okay, I need to go, um Rolly polioli Doesn't this guy have two weaknesses Oh Okay boomer quanger I always one thing that I did really really poorly I never I feel like I never used any of my uh, I never used any of my uh Special Wait, I'm zero lives. Oh frick. If I down this boss When I write down the code I because I didn't have a pen and paper I remember I didn't have a piece of paper. So like I would just like not write down the code Okay, finally the last stage karma chameleon I don't know what his actual name is. I can't remember sting chameleon. I know Wait, well, does he have a weakness? I thought storm was his weakness That's always how I used to kill him. This castle contains a new type of body armor Dude full tier. I got the five piece set bonus full set. Look. It's not a transmog. Okay. The stats are good You see the prefire. You see the skill. You see the technique. That's just like how I like played the game. Oh Finally, we found signals fortress Let's go In Let's go in and put an end to his war against humans And twitch's main form of generating revenue is oh It's special present now Into the castle please Nice, there it is it Oh, dude, I remember dying on this thing so much I remember dying on these jumps so much, dude Am I gonna die once you're today? Oh, that's why I just left Wait, wait, wait, wait. I got an idea. Oh all the guys are gone. Okay.  I'll take him on What's happening? What is vile's voice? He's small.  Uh wait scripted.    It really doesn't matter how much energy you absorb x who are still far too weak Prepare to be terminated. It does look like both I was trying to do again Wait, oh, this is this is uh, this is weakness. I remember now Yeah, nice. I remembered Everybody x4 was x4 the one with the ninja x I've I've taken too much damage Auto repair systems can't handle it power is fading fast your power Is greater than I thought you destroy sigma He's dead. Oh spider spider ice. Oh, no Right Yeah, oh my gosh.  I used all my subtents One hit away. I got a hundred percent a hundred percent a hundred percent.  Is this it chat? Is this the end? There he is chat. It's sigma. What a sigmas voice could have been Welcome I see you managed to get here by yourself Very impressive. I could destroy you But I would not rob my pet of that pleasure. He knows how to deal with betrayers Wait, what is this? Ice I thought it was ice I thought I thought it might be ice, but then I was like, no, it can't be ice because Ice is so many things. Oh, it is ice. Okay, never mind. I had a hunch. It was ice, but I'm like, no I feel like we've done ice too much lately Am I gonna one shot this guy? I can't it's sigma. I think sigma is rolling Excellent job. X I see why zero counted on you You were almost as good as a hunter as I was but your power level But the destruction has arrived. You shall regret ever having to find me. I think he had rolling shield, right?  Nice Okay, nice Nice there it is Okay, it's busted. It's hard to pull it off though. I was gonna go for a hannouk it on the head Is that it? I got it now I got a plan. I a this is it. This is the run. This is the run. This is the run There's no way that I lose at this point Just in case just in case I pause them all. I can't be destroyed by you Don't listen to us without the humans my rook boy brothers could have ushered in a new age Nice there we go The war has ended For now and peace has been restored But those who sacrifice themselves For the victory will never return exhausted Ex gazes at the destruction he helped cause And wonders why he chose to fight Was there another way? Standing on the cliff The answers seem to escape them He only knows That he will fight the mavericks again Before he finds his answer How long will he keep on fighting? How long will his pain last? Maybe only the X Buster On his hand. No, it's for sure Feel strong, man Feel strong, man There it is, dude Mega Man X Boomer Man game number two Mega Man X. This is one of my favorite games of all time Some of the early games for Boomer Munder are on playing some games that I've played before right with Donkey Kong Country and Mega Man X And uh, I really really love these games and getting a chance to uh I guess take the time to stream them has been uh really really cool so far So even though it's just the first two games, I've been having a really good time Uh, we are going to keep the stream going, but I'm just kind of closing it out for the youtube video Because I'm going to post this on my S-Fan Streams channel again YouTube S-Fan TV Uh, S-Fan Streams is the alt channel where I'll post these on probably Discord, Twitter, Twitch Reddit, Instagram, everything is S-Fan TV Chat, say bye, YouTube. Everybody say bye, YouTube. This game is a blast. I absolutely love it I hope you guys enjoyed it as much as I did Um As Mega Man, eh, would you look at that?


Show me the data. DevConf is an engineering conference.  And Serena and I have been engineers all our lives. We believe in the value of data. So as we started thinking about diversity, we naturally gravitated towards, well, let's see what studies are available. Let's see what the data tells us. Turns out that it's really hard to find data on diversity in open source communities in particular. A lot easier to find data about diversity in businesses because they have reporting requirements. But we've been examining lots and lots of data. So why would anybody care that a community is diverse? Well, you guys are all self-selected, right?   Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there's always one, yeah. But there are lots of studies, but they tend to be management studies that show the business value of diversity. There are studies that look at corporate boards and corporate profits that then correlate that to the diversity of the board, but there's not so much about engineering communities. So some of the engineering community stuff is work that we are assuming extrapolates from those corporate studies. But we know that there is value to diversity because we see it all around us. So why does it matter if an open source community is made of people that look alike or have similar life experiences? Like, look around, we have the benefits of the limited diversity that we have in the room and in the communities that we have today. And the experiences that are different with each person helps to gain variety within the group. So we can learn more about each other this week when we're at this conference. You can even go, I know last year when I was here, there was a candy swap at one of the tables in the community room. And with a diverse group, you can likely find a lot of differences as well as a lot of similarities between you. So hone in on the similarities that you have with people that you are different from because that can help create a connection and then create trust on that. And diversity, when you find it, is a lot more fun. So here's the reason that businesses care. Diversity creates change, which is the engine for innovation. So if you, probably a lot of you here are Red Hatters. And we always talk internally about open source communities and innovation. It's a powerful driver, right? Well, diversity creates challenges. A community that's diverse has a little more friction in it. And diversity shakes things up a little bit and that's not a bad thing. Ideas that are challenged get to prove their worth. And if everybody in the room agrees that something is a good idea, that probably says you don't have enough diversity in the room, right? Because nobody raised the question. So right there, we see value in bringing different experiences into the conversation. It's hard to fix a problem that, it's hard to fix a problem if you don't have multiple perspectives on that problem, right? And as a code base gets out into the world and encounters users and encounters the need to interface with other code bases, the original developers experience issues, problems, difficulties that they didn't anticipate. It helps to have multiple perspectives on what those problems are because that gives you better insights into how to fix them. If you knew about the problem to begin with, right? You would have coded around it to start. But clearly you weren't thinking about that problem. So if you have multiple perspectives, you can even think of that as a specific skill set that you want to have on a team. We want to hire that as, well you want a team to have multiple ways of looking at things. And I'm just gonna add on to that a little bit as you talked about the development perspective and I'd like to talk about the design perspective as well. We often use PRs to document our designs. And sometimes when people put up a PR with the design they get a little frustrated if there's a lot of questions around it. But oftentimes especially with design there's not necessarily like the right answer. So having a bunch of questions around a specific design is just as important as, documenting questions around a technology or a PR or how you're accomplishing a task because we want to be able to make sure with the user experience that we're addressing a multitude or a range of different types of people. So open source means innovation. It's about collaboration and inclusion. Everyone has a platform and everyone is empowered. So we have rules here. Sometimes we have rules. It's about being transparent. It's about allowing everybody to provide input. And let's say again, like everyone should be able to provide input. That means all of us as community members need to make sure that people feel safe enough that they can provide their input and that we listen. So as an example, if you have an intern on your team who's just joined and is 18 years old, listen to them. We can often learn, well we always learn from them as much as we can from anybody else. And in my case, I happen to be one of the only women in the distinguished engineer community at Red Hat. So it's one woman out of 56. And it's great that the people also listen to me, right? So everybody needs to be able to be involved and make an impact. Think about brainstorming that can occur with a diverse team. If you have a room with two or three people that think alike, you can brainstorm and you can come up with a solution, but it would likely be much better if you have a diverse room of people with different roles, with different towns, from different backgrounds, and get a lot more ideas out there. So collaboration helps foster creativity, which results in innovation. What do they say? The way to find the best ideas is to start with a lot of ideas. So how diverse are open source communities anyway? Clearly, different communities have different levels of participation from other groups. It turns out that it's really hard to get this data, but we've found several studies that can give us some of the information. So GitHub has done studies. They've got two or three studies that they've done annually. Also, there are some numbers out on Stack Overflow. And so Stack Overflow's annual developer survey, it turns out, looks at a lot of the information around participation. We've specifically started with gender differences because it's one of the easiest to measure, right? We went looking for studies that could give us the numbers. And here's one of the ones that we found. So this is from the Linux Foundation's open source leadership summit. So it's circa 2017. According to that study, 11.6% of the GSOC participants, yeah, 2018 participants were women. 10.4% of OpenStack contributors are women. 9.9% of Linux's kernel contributors are women. I find that one, by the way, difficult to believe. If you, okay, right? If you poke a little closer at that one, you'll see that 6.8% of the actual code submissions are from women. And so there's clearly a difference here, right? I mean, we can measure the number of identities, but can we really, we can measure the number of pull requests, but how do we map some of this stuff, right? If 9.9% are women, and only 6.8% of the contributions are from them, there's something in the middle here, right? One of these things is not like the other one. Let's see. And where's Perry? Yeah, I'm sorry, Perry. I'm gonna out us. I hate to say it. Only 3% of the Red Hat kernel population is female. And we try really hard to hire women. So I know, right, that in the wider world, it's also really tough. Okay. So imagine a world where everyone in the room looks exactly the same or have the same background, like everybody at this table. This would be fine if the people at this table were developing something for users that look like that, and the sales guys look like that as well, but we know that that's not the case, right? So we're representing a number of different roles here. We need to make sure that we have diversity by role, by gender, by geographic, as Alon mentioned, and which is something that we didn't even pick up on with all of our research is English as a secondary language, which when you started saying it, it was like put a bell and we looked at each other. We take that one for granted. Yes. Yeah. Which is sad. And we also have to make the point that we are focusing on women, but that's because that's where we are. Okay, we have a bias. We do have a bias there. So again, you had some really good points in your conversation there. So I think the main point here is that it's not, it's not also all about writing code, right? You're writing code for users. So open source communities initially were also all comprised of just developers. And they were 100% focused on what they were doing, what they were writing, what they wanted to focus on. But was there a roadmap where their use cases, was there a design where their personas, did they consider any of that? Did they think about how the users were gonna use the product? Did they think about how they were gonna learn about the product? Gotta go to the next slide. So complimentary skills are an asset, right? You look at this right now and let's take it a step further. Here's a small example of development without design. So somebody created this as their initial webpage. Anybody, can you make sense of that? I mean, it's pretty hard to read. If you knew to put the cursor up at the top right-hand corner of the page, what you'd actually see was this. So if you had a designer along with that developer, you could've probably figure that one out beforehand and save some time, right? So before 2013, open source was, UIs were just doing enough. But starting in 2014, they started to invest more in user experience. This is from a number of reasons. Our competition, we're actually now competing with a lot of the big companies that are investing a lot of money in UX, right? So a few years later, we're now seeing a lot more investment in the practice of UX. Again, we can take Red Hat, for example. I joined the company in 2014 and we had a UX team of 18 people. We're now at about 106, which is amazing. So think about how things could've changed in open source if the community was more diverse by role at the beginning. And think about the diversity of users that you're trying to go after and all those different experiences. So do communities reflect corporations? Well, I'm really sad to say this. It's really kind of embarrassing, but the data that we found strongly suggests that corporations have made a lot more progress than communities have in attracting women into technical roles. The studies that we found show that corporations now are more diverse than communities are. Which, if you look at some of our numbers, I mean, it kind of makes sense. On the internet, nobody knows.  I had to get a cat picture in. Anybody who knows me. So, as we said, it's really hard to get data on open source participation. You have to rely on guesses based upon gendered names. And there are open source tools that you can use to try to go and examine profiles and try to determine gender based upon profile. And some studies have done that. A lot of it is self-reported, though. So GitHub did a huge study. They had like 5,500 responses. And of all of those responses, 95% was white male. Which says that people of color and females were 5% of the folks on GitHub. Oops. I'm just trying to. Are we? I think we're up. Sorry. Hang on a sec. Okay, so I'm lost. But we're moving on. Professional computer programmers. The numbers according to the government, the US government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that 22.6% of professional computer programmers are female. And that actually maps pretty well to some of the corporate numbers that we've seen published. So Wired published this table, which shows over time how participation of women in technical roles has advanced in companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook. So they've grown the role of women in technical jobs from 14, 15, 17% in 2014 to 2019 numbers anywhere from 20 to 23%. Intel has similar numbers by the way. Intel's participation is like 20, 21% at this point. A lot of the numbers that you find are a little bit misleading because when companies report their numbers, oftentimes they're reporting women overall. And so there are lots of women in roles like finance and human resources, right? And that can kinda inflate the numbers. So if you look at overall numbers for any of these corporations, they're gonna be higher. But technical roles, which is what I personally care about, right, sorry. The numbers are significantly lower. If you then compare this with the numbers from open source, right? The GitHub numbers that I just quoted, you see there's a real big difference. It's changing a little bit. So we found a study that looked at participation in hacker spaces. And there it, especially that tends to be a younger demographic. And there the rate was like maybe 20% of the participants are female. So we think that this might be shifting over time. I just wanted to call one thing out here too. It's interesting that Microsoft and Apple are considered, you know, more old school and more founded in the 70s. But their numbers are still so high. So I thought that was a good feeling, I think, in the corporate area. But now let's go back over here. Yes. So years of experience by gender. This slide actually gives me hope. These numbers look at women in technical roles and the years of their ages, right? I'm sorry, not their ages. They're years of experience. What this slide is showing is that for zero to nine years of experience in technical positions, 66.2% of women fall into that category. 52.9% of non-binary, genderqueer, non-conforming, all self-identified, right? Of people in technical roles have less than nine years of experience. And 50.1% of men in those roles have less than nine years of experience. But what this slide I'm hoping says is that the pipeline is expanding. It's a different demographic as you get younger. So this gives me hope that more women are coming into the field. We'll see if that's actually true. Oh, another interesting study that we found talked about the overall development roles. This I think this was from what Stack Overflow from the developer study. They looked at what roles women tended to move into, right? So what do you think the most popular technical roles are with women? Designer. That's one of them. Testing, yes. That was a big one, yep. Yeah, no, not so much, yeah. See that one? Yeah, yeah, documentation. Documentation was one. Yep. What was that one? What the project made? Oh, project made? That one was like right on the border. So that was like 50.50. Yeah, support is another one. No, SRE tends, that skews mail, which was interesting. Yeah, yeah, let's hope. Another one was data scientist, right? Women are coming into data science. And then, let's see, what else? What else did we have? I missed one. I missed an interesting one. The difference between, yeah, anyway, anyway. There's one that I missed, but that was, oh, wait a second, front end development, that was the other one. Yeah, web developers, yeah. So that was really interesting. But the backend, the database, the DBAs, the database, that skews mail. And I'm also just gonna call out to UX again at Red Hat. So Red Hat, we have about a 50.50 breakup in our UX department, which is interesting. And it was aligned with this, because we have front end development and we have design in there, as well as research. But it's interesting that we kind of align with those numbers there, so. Yeah, so we're reinforcing stereotypes everywhere. Yeah. So this goes back to the numbers that Denise had talked about with the GitHub survey. So it was actually an open source, the survey was included open source users and developers. But what these numbers actually are about is the demographics of those people who answered the questions, right? So on those respondents. So the 95% of the people who took the survey were male. 3% were female and one was the non-binary. So why are open source communities predominantly male? Can we figure this one out? Like it would be nice to understand. Or maybe it was the survey just missed a lot of these other roles that we talked about, like designers and front end developers. Maybe it just did go to some of those communities that were more focused on the back end. We don't really know. Yeah, except that we know that communities are different, right? So some like the GNOME community have been great at doing outreach. And so for years, they've been putting focus on things, projects like outreach, right? So we see more folks from those communities. So here's where we get to talk about cultural stereotypes. Can you spot the genius? Well, I bet there's one here that you can probably name and maybe two, right? So curiosity, intelligence, perseverance, productivity and a big chunk of good luck to get the visibility are characteristics that are associated with genius.  Real talent has never been in huge supply. And it can be easily to overlook talent genius when it doesn't fit into your mental mindset, your first impression of what it should look like. So Ada Lovelace, Alice Bell, tragic story there. Charles Turner, Jocelyn Bell-Bernel, Srinni Ramanujan, some people have never heard of these amazing people. And yet probably everybody's heard of. So true confession, I have biases. Probably every one of you does as well. There's a fascinating link through the Harvard Business Review that lets you go and take a test of your biases. And I forgot to put the link in here. I'm sorry, but I'll share it later. But when you go and take these tests, you really discover that, yeah, I guess I'm like everybody else, right? Yeah, I can't get, it's hard to get beyond my biases. It's a loaded term, but we can't not have biases, right? Because none of us have unlimited compute power. And a bias is the brain's attempt at efficiency. We can't, or at least it's really hard to recompute everything all the time. And so we set up these mental shortcuts for ourselves. It's perfectly normal, it's perfectly natural, but sometimes you have to just step back and say, hmm, am I looking at all the data? Have I been sufficiently proactive?  Have I oversimplified a little bit? And if I just step back and start thinking a little bit wider, can I maybe see the potential in this person? The potential rather than perhaps a past history of accomplishments, potential that might make them a really distinguished and interesting member of our team to fill a role that we didn't even know we needed, right? Steph, thank you for that one. So just try to think a little bit more, a little bit wider when you meet somebody and toss your biases, at least briefly, before you slot them immediately. When we have biases about age, about gender, about color, about race, about ethnicity, all this stuff, right, try to dump them and take the time to recompute. So what are corporations that do and that we're not? So, okay, Cindy Lauper said it best. Money changes everything. Corporations have thrown a lot of money at recruiting to find diversity candidates. And wouldn't it be nice to have a huge budget to go and attract females and attract others who might be different into the field? We do a lot of grassroots efforts, right? And there's a lot invested in grassroots efforts, but boy, it would be great to have focus right from the top with a huge budget to go along with it. But corporations also have legal requirements that they have to think about and that motivate their hiring. And in recent years, a really good development has been that they have to report their diversity numbers publicly. So for instance, if you go to Red Hat's website, you can see our numbers for diversity and technical roles. And I'm embarrassed to say, unlike some of our competition, 14%, right? But we are on a mission to do better. And we're kind of in that middle ground because we recruit a lot out of open source communities. We're motivated to help make open source communities more diverse, because then everybody gets better. So what can communities do? So be more inviting. Successful projects have an on-ramp, right? So here's some things that you can do in your community project or conference to be more inviting. And Alon, actually, his presentation before us has, was much more detailed on some of the things that we're gonna be talking about, code of conduct, that type of thing. But if you have a website, show interesting demographics on your site. Here we have a picture of the Grace Hopper celebration where you see a number of women that do look different. Here's another one, which is the, what is it, the GitHub Octogados community. There's all kinds of fun things you can do within your community to have it look more inviting and look like you wanna attract different types of people with different backgrounds, right? So be patient. When people are coming in, be happy to guide them into new open source communities. Provide a list of open issues that are welcome to be taken by people who are new and be really patient when they put up their PRs, right? Because the worst thing you can do is put up a PR and say, oh, this is all wrong, right? Yeah, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. So when you create these communities and you wanna be more inviting, make sure that you invite your friends too. And it can be a really fun effort. Other things that you can do to increase gender diversity, you can consider speaking at a women's conference or go to the hackathon and be a judge. You can attend a Grace Hopper conference and even at those things, you can also recruit there. I know that we do that, right, at Red Hat. To address age diversity, there's different things you can do like partner with educators at universities. You can look into mentoring opportunities with high schools that are nearby and heck, you can start at home, right? If you have children, start sharing what you do about work with them. Let them know that you can learn from them just as much as they can learn from you. I did that. And I have got a daughter who works at Red Hat as an interaction designer. I have a son who's a cloud architect. So it kinda worked for me, so like, it's fun. Nothing better than when they're all grown up, you come home and talk about work. It's actually pretty fun. Kind of sad, but fun. But anyways, you can also bring- Christmas dinner table must be funnier. Interesting, my parents are like, what?  I think there's a national day now. I think it's April 23rd this year, 2020. All across the world, you should be able to bring your kids to school. I mean, bring your kids to work so that they learn more. Let them learn about what you're doing. And also, you know, I was talking about children, but specifically for girls. Let them know that it's okay to be smart. And it's okay to like math and science. Like, getting kids at an early age to understand that, and getting the sons to understand that it says okay too for a sister. But it's really important. And I think people are doing that much more now than they did when we were younger, right? When I was a computer science major, and I think I was one of two girls who graduated in my grade. Hopefully it's a lot better than that now. And different cultures have different stereotypes, right? Or different ideas about what jobs are suitable for women. So if you look in some geographies, computer science, the classes actually are skewed. Female, I was amazed. So there is hope. It's just that in Western Europe, in the United States, in these cultures, it's over time the stereotype has become that this is not a good job for women. We can do better though. We can change that stereotype. So, get to get, steal good ideas from each other, right? So Fedora started out doing a candy swap. People from different backgrounds bring in candies from their culture and explain it. And everybody gets to try something different. Now I see we're doing it over here, right? There's a candy swap going on just on the other side of the aisle over here. Which is great, you guys should check that out because it looked like there was some really good stuff. But that's just one idea, right? You can do, this is a photo from here last year. Steal the good ideas that you see at other conferences and promote them. So, D&I communities are terrific support group mechanisms, right? But we should also consider, well, the primary goal is to be supportive. We don't wanna be looked at as not being, like not letting other people come in and see what we're doing, right? So allow the outsiders to get a glimpse of what it's like to be inside. Open up the doors and let people see that.  So, like the whole thing with bias is sometimes it's just an inherent bias. They don't understand what it's like to be in your situation. So sometimes it's completely really unintentional, right? But if you let them join in, that will empower others to understand what it's really like. And as this is saying, knowledge is power. So the more we educate, the more hopefully we can help change. So, the future will be different. You've already seen my hopeful slide, the changing numbers on the age demographic from Stack Overflow. Can you spot the genius in this slide? Yeah, me either. But the genius is in there somewhere. So first, I want you to meet the Space Ants. The Space Ants are a Lego League team. They are from a small township in South Africa. 2019, they went to the Worldwide Championships in Lebanon and won. Some of these kids had never been on a plane before, right? Some of these kids had never left the country, never left the township. What I love about this, what I truly love about this are the Crazy Divas. The Crazy Divas are from a different township in South Africa. And in 2012, they were one of the first to get to a Lego League championship in Malaysia. And they didn't win, but they came back and shared their experience. And when they got home, they started mentoring some of the other teams. And now look, 2019, South Africa, a South African team is winning. It shows you the value of what you do when you contribute. There's lots of projects going on. So like Colab is a project that Red Hat sponsors, right? Where we bring kids in and help them write games. There's another project called the Rose Project. There are STEM outreach projects everywhere. And it's the thing that's gonna change the demographic over time, because people are going to become convinced that it is possible for me to do this thing. I'm old enough that when I first got into computer science, nobody told us we couldn't do it, right? It was still a brand new field. And nobody said you can't, because there weren't enough people writing code. There was no stereotype yet. And it's like, well, okay, sure. I guess I can do that. And then suddenly there weren't any women anymore. And now we're starting to see women come back. And it really is exciting for me. I'm really hopeful that we can get another generation back here. An open source is a thing that's gonna get them in. Okay, so how can you make a difference? As we just saw the numbers saying, open source, the numbers in open source are less diverse than the numbers that are in corporations. So what are we doing wrong? And how can you make a difference? Kind of seems like an oxymoron, because open source is supposed to be open and inclusive. So like, what's the problem? So even though maintainers set the example, anyone can help change the culture, right? So call out bad behavior. And in fact, everyone can help change the culture. Yes. Find ways to call out bad behavior. I don't know if anybody in this room has any suggestions. It can be in a meeting. It could be a comments on a PR. Sometimes you can take somebody aside and talk to them other times. Maybe it's better to gently say something in the room. Who knows? But being able to help change. If you see bad behavior, don't let it go, right? So I'm still in Rain's favorite phrase, right? We don't do that here. We don't do that here.  Because it establishes a community norm. And people are social, right? We're social creatures. We follow the pack. And we don't do that here, says a lot about the way that a community operates. Sometimes it's hard to stand up for somebody else. Although it can actually be easier to stand up for somebody else than to stand up for yourself. So when you see it, defend it. And it also say the maintainer is very impactful in order to say that. So that if you are the maintainer, be even more conscious about it. And it's also much easier for a woman to stand up for a woman or other examples of. But if you're standing up for somebody who's not the same minority as you are, it makes a bigger difference, right? Think of just a question. A question from a maintainer in our audience. Well, I think it's really interesting to be a private discussion on this more effective. However, that takes away the impression of getting to the new people that almost are correct. Yeah. So because from a certain perspective, it's important to imprint upon their brains at that moment. We don't do that here. Right. And they don't have the golden experience in hiring a person, but at the same time, you may not give the impression of the new people that we fight to be a better person. I agree with you. It's a quandary, right? Because your goal is to change the behavior, and yet your goal is also to demonstrate that you're changing the behavior. And so, yeah, it's going to be an in-the-moment call.  Gently. I really like this example as well, because it's like you're not really putting somebody on the spot and reacting in a negative way back to them.  Yeah, not our community. OK, so Vincent was the next one. Yeah. Yeah. Some people like it too much, and that's fine. Yeah. I do. I do. Yeah. I tend to, it moves it over, like, we don't do that here, but we're still moving together. Moving forward together, so that's humor. And this humor is not artful. It is absolutely artful. Yeah. It's not how that was done. I don't own that. Yeah, of course. Well, I assume good intent, right? Yeah, we need a shot of stuff. It doesn't matter. Yeah. I think stuff is rocking the look. Yeah, sir. You had a question. So I'm sorry, and I think the good thing about that is, because it's a merge patch, it's sort of set as a rule. So the programmers get quite strict about code form, acting, and compilations first. So it's like part of your style guide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting way I like that. What community is that? Oh, it's like Key Lime. Oh, OK, Key Lime. Good. So see, look. Key Lime, a welcoming community. Bring your friends. Mm-hmm. Having a mentor or sponsor definitely helps, right? It helps that person be able to gain more self-confidence in that. How do people in the Key Lime community request help? Is there a means they can just? So as soon as somebody shows interest in the first issue. So you'll reach out. You're a busy man. That's awesome. Scaling. Well, by that time, you'll have mentored enough people into the community that they'll pass it along, right? Gentlemen in the back, yes. Please. So we are able to do this so dependent on the people we have in our community. So for Dora, for example, we focus a lot on women because a lot of times women are the ones who are in our team. We get to do things like the candy swaps. We do speak a native language hour at our next group. Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah. These are things that we are enabled by the people who show up willing to help us with these ideas. And so if you're looking for a way to make a difference in your open source community, see if there is a group that is trying to think about these things or address these things. Hang out in their IRC or chat group, wherever they're hanging, wherever they're mailing lists or discussions are happening. And your voice, I really think that so many of these communities are volunteer-oriented. Who shows up is a huge determining factor for. It's like, Dora, we don't want to reach out to a group that we don't have personal experience with because we don't want to misrepresent that group in some way. It helps to have someone who's guiding us in the right direction. People look out in your own communities and if they don't have one, maybe start one. That's great. Yeah. I think you were next. Mary, right? No, Kira. Kira. Yell. But it's not enough. So it's great that you just said that because that kind of almost could be an answer to some of the numbers that we found, where the number of women in the community was larger than the number that was contributed because they don't feel safe or confident enough. And I'm sure that's also with other minority groupings, for sure. Well, Nels made a great point yesterday about code reviews. Can you repeat that? That really made an impression on me. Yeah. And I like that. It's like I conform to this style. Yeah. Well, it was do the review. And did they write it the way that I would have written it? Well, maybe not. But does it get the correct result? Yes. So gee, there you go. And also on that as well, just quickly, we found that article last night when we were like re-looking at some of the facts and numbers. This is about 1 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. And one of the things that we did find in one of the articles was that oftentimes the number of comments on a PR is substantially more if it was submitted by a woman than by a male. Now, of course, this was diversity in women that they were investigating. Like they were looking at, yeah. But still, I mean, I don't know that we know that for sure. But it was in an article that we did read, so. Neil, I think you were next. Sure. That's my job this year. Yes. Hugh. And this plays into diversity and quote, meritocracy, whatever the hell that is. There are, because there are, in engineering, just as in writing, there are many ways to get a point across or solve a problem. And from a maintainer standpoint, sure, you have to maintain a style, and you have to make sure things function. But it also has to be really important to let people have their own voice. At least something that we can start the conversation about, right? Because let's say, is it correct? Does it get the result that we needed? Yeah. Yeah, Larry. Yeah, I just wanted to make an observation.  We're old, Larry. Come on. We're old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, we're a protected class. Yes. Yeah. It was the third to 40% years. Those are the days I remember. Yeah. But then, last two years ago, I taught in this past semester I was teaching in the, there's a high dropout in this class. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Swimming back whatever operating system. Seriously? Yeah. Oh, right. So something is changing. The historical perspective on this is that originally, software development was not considered a cool work. Yeah. Back in the back in two days. We don't go back that far. Not that far. Yeah? Great software. And the men were great. That changed over time. And then what happened was the home computer started to favor males because males would sit at home and play with the home computer and have an authentic advantage when you got into the actual classroom environment and moving on to the other. And I think... We found a statistic on that, by the way. They were looking at what age were you when you wrote your first line of code and that age was significantly older for women than for men. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that Raspberry Pis give us a great opportunity now, right? Put your hands on the hardware again. Yeah. Yeah. It's like so much easier and more fun to be directly involved and to see the immediate results of what you do. Yes. Katja. Oh, sorry. Well. What was the point of the statistic you put up earlier about open source being very, very shortly male-dominated? I think it was 3% or something for all those candidates. Yeah. According to that survey, right? So what is the assumption that that is vaguely accurate to somebody? To a very equal war out of what I see in industry. Now, I appreciate your point is regarding different countries and different branches. I mean, the gender balance teams that I've worked with in India and the Czech Republic and Poland are vastly better than America and the UK. You know, on the order of 50, 50, 60, 40 at worst. Whereas in the UK and America you're talking maybe about being a candidate out of 25. Mm-hmm. But that aside, why is the open source community given the reduced barriers to entry or perceived reduced barriers to entry so far from where it should be? So I don't think just investment alone explains that. Yeah. Do we have more data or is that something that's not going to be looked into enough yet? I think it's scary to put your code out in public because you put yourself out in public and you open yourself up for criticism. And if you're not part of a community where you trust that they are going to not stomp all over you when you do that you're probably not going to put your code out in public and therefore you're not going to participate as much. That's my personal theory and we are out of time, but can I just say thank you all for a fabulous discussion.


Hey guys, welcome back to come again. I'm Shannon as usual and this week. I'm gonna be reviewing the shodo Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan God SS Vegeta from Bandai So stay tuned. Alright guys welcome back as I said, this is the shodo Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan God SS Vegeta from Bandai I just got this From in the mail today. I ordered it off Amazon. He's actually smaller than I expected I'm a little disappointed in that because This was a $20 figure And he's pretty small as you can see compared to the 2001 Android saga Vegeta He's actually quite a bit smaller. So Yeah Not too impressed right off the bat Um, so let's go ahead and take a look at this packaging All right, so you do have a nice look to the packaging Um, not too bad. You got it in Japanese as well Bandai 2016 The lineup so far is Sun Goku and Golden Frieza as well as Super Saiyan God Vegeta Oh and that was Super Saiyan God Goku too Um The rest of it. I can't really make out because it is in Japanese So let's go ahead and open this guy up and take a look inside Does seem to open very easy Now that I say that There we go Okay, he does open up fairly easy He does come with extra hands He came in kind of a clamshell type packaging Very small very Let me go and Let me go and lower this back down a minute Very small very comparable to the old mask MASK figures Um, that's about the same size as they were Um It's pretty disappointed in the size for the price I expected him to be a little bit bigger. Like I said, there he is next to the Android saga 2001 Dragon Ball Z Vegeta figure Um, I've had this Vegeta ever since he was released But he does have a lot more articulation than this Vegeta as you can see the android saga Vegeta He is quite dusty sits up on my shelf Just has standard arm rotation at the shoulders No elbow joint no wrist head swivel Legs up and down and knee No ankle tilts no ab crunch no waist Articulation that's it on him All right guys, sorry about that. I had my camera set on super super high definition It was saying I only had like five minutes of filming time and I was at like four minutes something seconds So I had to go ahead and change that to a Standard high-def But as you can see he does have Head Swivel it rotates all the way around plus a neck rocker Giggity giggity Can move kind of side to side get that little uh, oh no, you didn't Yeah, as well as up and down He got the shoulder swivel All the way around As well as the joint go up and down As well as the bicep swivel Right. Oh, whoa That was unexpected. He lost his arm Uh, as I said or as you saw it is on a ball joint um They come apart very easily Then you got the elbow joint Which is just a standard Man for the price these things sure come apart awfully easy to wrist Once again on a Not really a ball joint, but a peg system Can change them out very easy To change out but The pegs aren't really all that long. I don't like that and they don't stay in very well They don't stay in very well at all. I'm sorry guys. My kids are walking around in the background So you'll have to bear with me All right guys so He does have the head turn all the way around Go up and down or up and down and then He's got another ball joint I don't know if you can see it right there at the neck too.  They come apart really easily I don't like that for the price. I don't really care for that um You got the uh, let's see You got the waist go up and down Turn around See does yep ball joints as well then you got The hip can't really go out that far because of this part here And that's same with both sides Then you've got what it looked like there was thigh swivel, but there's not um, so you got knee articulation Uh, no calf swivel, but you got the ankle rocker On a ball joint once again Comes off very very easily. I'm not liking that at all And the peg system for the hands very loose Sorry about that guys. I got the windows open. It's a nice day out And the size I can't get over the size difference. I mean he's just so small for For a $20 figure, you know I really expected a lot more than what I got I think I may have to return him Which is sad because I really like Vegeta. He's probably my favorite Dragon Ball Z character But he's just for the price. He's not worth it. I mean this Vegeta From the android saga Hold on So Again for the price it's not Not he's not really worth it um I mean I The paint job is good I really like the look He fits There we go He'll it looks like Vegeta. I mean he really does but And I mean I love the paint Pain is really good the hit Everything just Comes apart way too easily Um, he's so small It's just I don't know I may just I'm I probably will end up returning him, but This is it guys The uh, Shodo Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan God SS Vegeta from Bandai $20 on amazon I honestly don't think it's worth it. I really don't So there you have it guys. Take care