Hello everybody. So our next talk is Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical and Ubuntu. He'll be talking about the design and implementation of the Unity Netbook user experience. So I don't think he needs much more introduction. Mark Shuttleworth? It's a little early to be getting this message over here. It's very nice to be here and great to be back at DevConf. Lots of familiar faces, lots of old friends. Is anybody here actually running Unity at the moment? Evan, a couple of other folks. So Unity is a combination of several years' work inspired initially by this sort of explosion in interest in Linux on the netbooks. We were approached by a couple of some out in Taiwan who want to ship Linux on netbooks but they wanted simplified user interfaces essentially. And so that kicked off a process which is culminated now in Unity. Within Canonical my job description has changed. I'm no longer the CEO. That's gone to a much more capable woman than I am. And in return I get to focus on just the pieces that I'm really interested in. And the design of Unity is one of those pieces. We have a design team based in London who are responsible for all of the visual and user interaction design that we're doing at Canonical. So they're essentially driving this process. But it is an open design process. There is a mailing list called Ayatana. We have quite a lot of traffic on that. We use that as a forum for debating many of the changes that get made and also the just the broader theme of design in Ubuntu and in free software generally. So I'll start off with just going back through where Unity came from. This is the first version of UNR. And there are a couple of things that sort of stand out about it. First it's very much a full-screen kind of experience. A lot of the inspiration for this work came from the PlayStation essentially from game consoles. The idea of thinking of the computer more as a device that you use than as a general purpose computer where you're sort of manipulating lots of different pieces of information. So much bigger icons because another sort of piece of inspiration was coming from the idea that this is all ultimately got to end up being touchable. Touch is very much a sort of a primary interface technique. We preserved quite a lot of the semantics of the GNOME desktop initially. You can see for example the categories that come from the applications menu in a typical GNOME desktop today. And you can also see places. Those are mapped straight from GNOME essentially just from the underlying infrastructure. So we try to reuse as much of that as possible. But focus on presenting people with just the pieces that they're likely to be interested in and just in a way that's sort of simpler for the average user to navigate. And the feedback on this one was pretty good. I think Toshiba shipped it. Dell shipped it. A couple of other OEMs shipped it. And generally got pretty good feedback. It got picked up in quite a few different places. Jolly Cloud based some of their initial work on it. And a couple of other OEMs just used it as a sort of a network interface. For the extra vision of the interface we were trying to sort of make it relax a little bit. So you can see here we took away the idea of sort of places on the right and integrated all of that. We still kept the categories. And so we're still mapping from this underlying idea of a categorized set of software on the desktop. This is what we did with places essentially. We made it its own sort of category in that list. And then based on all of this experience we started the Unity design process. We knew that we were going to do a bunch of work, more work with OEMs. And they wanted an interface that would be appropriate for the projects that they had in mind. We also knew that starting quickly, booting quickly was a real priority. And so we were willing to essentially replace big chunks of infrastructure with completely new code if we thought that we could make things more lightweight. And Unity was in development for about eight months and it first showed up in this which is Ubuntu Lite. And so the requirements for Ubuntu Lite were to produce a really stripped down system which would mainly be used for web browsing. It was designed for essentially a dual boot sort of environment with OEMs. And it was really just designed to be running three or four applications. But which preserved enough of the core of the system that potentially over time it could be upgraded to a full desktop experience. So the idea with this is actually to install it on machines that are going out in the US and in Europe, windows on them. So this is a dual boot environment. And for us that's a really cool idea to try and get to raise the amount of exposure that Linux gets. At the moment, people it's a choice. You have to either get a machine with windows or get a machine with Linux. We figured if we could get this to be successful and popular, you'd have a lot more people who are at least getting familiar with the interface, familiar with the basic ideas and could then easily upgrade to a full system that are removing the windows partition. This little icon over here actually is the sort of dual boot control mechanism over there. And as you can see, we really sort of relaxed it completely. So that categorized application sort of structure is gone and we just have a sort of favorite applications. And so that was one chunk of work. Another chunk of work was up on the top right there of what we call the indicators. But there were all sorts of problems with this. There's no mechanisms, for example, to sort of add and remove applications. There's no mechanisms there for dealing with lots of files in a traditional way. And so in the run up to the last UDS, we did a whole bunch of design work for, again, a sort of a full screen experience that we call the dash that would fit in over here. And so the dash is just a full screen place for dealing with chunks, you know, lots of files, lots of applications. And we have ideas about what else might go in there as well, like contacts and things like that. And so we mapped places up there to the top into the sort of places bar and then created this space over here, which is the dash. And that's not been implemented. It went into Maverick a month or so ago and it looks like this. So now we have the launcher. We have the dash in the middle over here, places driving the dash essentially and indicators up there. And that's roughly what Unity is all about. So in the design process, one of the really interesting things about it is embracing constraints. And it's very interesting, that's a very difficult thing for an open source community to do. One of the wonderful things about the open source community is that it grows as a function of the number of people joining it and their interests. So someone will write a tool that works with MySQL as a database. Someone else joins the community and they update it to work with Postgres as well. Someone else joins the community and they figure about how to make it work with no SQL databases and so it rolls, right? But that's kind of in opposition to this idea that really great design comes from effectively reducing your options and imposing constraints essentially on the process. So we figure out how to balance that. We have lots of very vigorous conversations. But these are the sorts of constraints that we applied to ourselves in the design process. Vertical pixels are the most precious kind of real estate on the screen. So there are many, many decisions and trade-offs that have been made in Unity with a very specific goal of maximizing the number of vertical pixels. Remember, netbooks are the primary audience and they've got screens which are typically wide but not very deep. And even if you're on a larger screen, typically you're spending all day in the browser or all day in a particular application. You don't want a lot of Chrome cluttering up the screen. If you look at a typical desktop today, I don't know if you look at your desktops, amongst people who haven't actually gone in and really configured the system, often there's just huge amounts of wasted space at the top and the bottom of the screen. Basically figuring out how to put pieces together in more and more efficient ways and the trade-offs associated with that. For the netbook interface, we figured that we didn't want people to spend a lot of time doing window management. So the idea was to figure out how to make it sort of maximized all the time. And so you see, again, a lot of assumptions about windows, how window management would work. And then also just this idea that ultimately touch is going to be a primary method of interaction. So we didn't want to do stuff that ultimately was really dependent on having a pixel-perfect pointer because we just don't think that you'll have that on lots of machines that people will want to use Unity. In terms of sources of inspiration, the console really is a great source of inspiration for us. And that's true, I think, for a number of reasons. One, there's an enormous amount of innovation that happens in the console space. Colin was talking earlier about how Linux is so mission-critical now that it's hard to really radically innovate in that. And the same is true of the desktop. Microsoft, Apple, GNOME, KDE, it's really hard to motivate for radical innovation because you're going to break something from somewhere. But in the gaming space, there are no constraints. It's completely free-form. It's not mission-critical. So in many senses, that's an environment that's been free to innovate and free to adopt ideas more quickly. So I'm not saying we spent a lot of time playing games during the Unity design process, but there's definitely a feel if you use it of kind of something that comes from a gaming environment. Light is a theme that we're using. So visually, you'll see a lot of the stuff is designed and drawn with the idea of almost light coming through, light coming out of the screen, looking at the graphics. We use a lot of OpenGL in the implementation. And that's specifically so that we can get at the more modern capabilities of graphics-accelerated hardware. And so a lot of the effects and so on are actually implemented in GL directly. And that's only going to increase. And then the last sort of bit of inspiration we had was that we want people to be able to search for everything rather than navigating to anything. So in the dash in particular, search is the primary means by which you would find something. So the idea is if your search is really, really good, then in just a couple of keystrokes, you can present people with something that they can just touch. And so we're trying to get rid of the idea of navigating through hierarchies and just search and touch as the two ways to get to stuff, get stuff activated, get out of stuff. Okay, so that's the background. What are all the different kinds of pieces of technology that come together in this? Well, one of the first things that we decided to embrace because of the focus on the netbook was the idea of a panel-based menu. So remember I said we're optimizing for maximized applications, which means typically you're only working on one application at a time. And so the potential disconnect that some people experience when you use a panel-based menu on a large screen monitor with multiple windows and the menus are very disconnected from the window, those effects are diminished in a netbook type environment. So we decided to adopt that. So we looked at the existing state that there was an effort to do this in GNOME some time ago in KDE. They used to have this capability in KDE 3, I think, but it hasn't been reimplemented in KDE 4. And this has been a focus of work, a focus of work. We couldn't reuse the old GNOME one because just of the way it interacts with GTK it was a bit low level. And so what we did is we built a protocol over D-Bus where you can export menus over D-Bus. And then we've got a plugin for a loadable module for GTK and the loadable module for Qt which in both cases allow the menu to be exported over D-Bus. So this is really great. That top menu over there is being rendered actually by Unity and the application just sends its menu to Unity over D-Bus. We've got it working, roughly working now for both Qt and GTK apps. So they work well. We don't have it working for the Zool-based apps, so Firefox and Thunderbird. And we also don't have it working for OpenOffice. But those will come. Essentially it's just a question of implementing the hooks in the toolkit to D-Bus and they're sort of client-side libraries that simplify all of that. That work was sort of promoted and published as a free desktop.org standard. Again, a lot of what we're trying to do we're trying to sort of elevate the state of the art and then make sure that it works well across both GNOME and KDE and so a lot of the appropriate forums can be free to stop.org. This is the focus of a lot of work right now in 10.10 because this is the single biggest change that's happening in the next edition for 10.10. So they're always amazing. George is leading the charge and there's a list of 80 or so applications that we need to sort of engage with. One of the assumptions, if we're going to export stuff over D-Bus it means that you have to have a fairly standard model of what a menu can look like and so there's been, what we're doing is going through all the applications and trying to find places where people have done stuff in sort of custom or unusual ways and then mapping that to a more standardized sort of model of a menu and then it works over D-Bus menu. So that's that. So it was interesting that global menu guys originally proposed that GNOME adopt this approach but it was rejected. It works very well on netbooks and because of the way we've implemented now you can actually just put an applet on a GNOME panel plugin and use it on the desktop as well. So I think most of the folks who are interested in the original global menu project are now using this. On the other side of the panel we have the indicators. So this has traditionally been a real swamp in the GNOME world but in the GNOME world essentially the things that went up in the panel there could do anything. There were literally independent applications that were just visually displaying themselves in the panel but there was no kind of cohesive view of all of them. That meant that sometimes you had to right click on the things, sometimes you had to left click on them, sometimes they responded to mouse movements because they could literally do anything. Every event was just being sent to some sort of application. So you can use that now with this idea that everything in that top right has to have particular semantics. It's basically a menu. That whole top right area now is one consistent menu. So that is a whole bunch of benefits for example accessibility. If you can get the focus to there then you can navigate around because it's just one big menu essentially. You can even navigate between that and the application menu because it's really all just one big menu. There's a fairly standard set of patterns that you follow for the design of the icons in terms of the way you use colours and a set of user experience patterns around that. That looks fairly standard stuff. There are a couple of areas though where we've innovated. One of the key goals, I did a very silly thing. I mailed one of the Ubuntu lists and said I need some screenshots of random desktops because I just want to get a feel for how you guys organise your desktops and I think Foreonex or someone else picked up on it and I literally got like 2,000 emails of desktops. I got so sick and tired of right click save as right click save as. It was great though because now it's really interesting. If you just flip through those fast you start to get a sense for common patterns in the way people have organised things. Anyway, that top space up there is really precious and there were a lot of things that there was a lot of clutter in that space. How can we, from a design point of view, how can we really reduce the pressure on that space and clean it up. The sort of meme was to have fewer classier indicators. So we came up with this idea of category indicators. We noticed that there'd be an Amorok thing in there and then a last FM thing in there as well. Because someone likes music so he's got last FM and he's got Amorok and they both each want some way to basically indicate status to the user and provide a quick shortcut way of pausing or starting or stopping the music. So we figured, well, you don't actually need to have two of them there. You just need one that says all my music stuff is here and then they can sort of plug into that. And since you've already got an indicator up there that deals with noise, why not integrate it all into that. So the sound menu, for example, the sound menu, the new design for the sound menu is that it's kind of plug-able. The application can go in here, rhythm box can go in here and you can have several sections of this. So if you're running both for whatever reason, if you're running Banshee and rhythm box, then they can both plug themselves in there. And this is implemented now in Maverick and I think it's working quite well. Let's see. I'm muted, but you get the idea.  And now there's a whole flurry, there's a bunch of, now that that API is public, there are a whole bunch of people essentially patching the common music players so that they can fit into that. Really nice. There is a standard, a debug standard called MPRIS for a media player, remote interface specification or something like that. And we've had to extend that a little bit, for example, to make it possible for the indicator to know a bunch of playlists, because that wasn't in PRS before. But now you can go in, I don't know that I've got any playlists set up here. So you can go and pick playlists and just manage everything straight from the indicator. Similarly for messaging applications, we already have people up there that have like an email thing and then they'd have a Gmail notifier and then they'd have something for IRC and something for a bunch of others. So we've passed all of that down into the messaging menu. That's sort of up here. Now I don't know if that's in, I don't know if any of this stuff has landed in there yet. But this is a category indicator for all messaging applications. And you can launch the applications from there as well. So from a user experience point of view, you don't have to tell someone, you know, go into the menu and start the application and then go over here and find your email. Basically you just always go to the messaging menu. You can open up your mail application, you can see if it's running. So this little indicator over here tells you this little thing over here, tells you that it's running. So by the end of 1010 we should have the messaging menu sound, session, clock, me menu, that you manage your presence on multiple different network services. For the network menu we hope to replace network manager with connection manager. Connection manager is the joint Intel Nokia effort. And it's a very nice sort of back end, the separation between front end and back end is very clean. It has various other things to recommend it. But there's no GNOME sort of interface for it that we could use. So we're building a new UI onto Conman on the back end and that's going steadily. There's a library called Libindicate that you can use to put custom indicators into the panel and it's really straightforward to use because all you have to do is generate a menu. Remember all of these things are just menus. So if you know how to create a GTK menu or a Qt menu, all you're doing is creating a menu and then saying to the indicator framework, here's the icon to use, will you put up a menu or an indicator for this one. So the combination of Libindicate and Debuss menu works very well. There are some specific APIs also for some of the category indicators like the sound menu and the messaging menu where you specifically describing what you want to do because they're different, each of them is different. And we also had to build a piece of technology to allow menus to be specified in desktop files and the reason for that is that we wanted to be able to expose some actions that the application could do if it was running when it wasn't running. When the application is running, of course, it can connect over Debuss and say, here is the menu that I want to display, but we have to have some way of knowing what menu to describe when it's not running. So for example, I think that these things over here, the menus are displayed even though the mail application isn't running at the moment. So the launcher, this is the big chunk of new work that landed in May. The launcher uses Clutter very heavily, so a lot of the animations and effects around it are Clutter-based. It uses GL directly, quite heavily. So a lot of the glow effects are rendered in GL. Try and load as much of the processing onto the GPU as possible. And this has been really the focus of a lot of the user experience design work. There's a hell of a lot that you have to encapsulate in that. Is something running? Is something calling for attention? Is something how many windows are there associated with the particular application? Which window has the focus right now? There's a lot of rich, semantic content that has to be distilled down. So it's been quite a long design process. But it's come together very nicely and I think people will be happy with 1010. A couple of new technologies had to be built for that. There's a framework called BAMF. I have no idea why it's called BAMF. But essentially it's a new model for tracking applications in windows. This is like an unbelievably horrible under X as it is today. But just knowing what applications are displayed, what window actually has the focus and so on is really quite tricky. And so BAMF takes care of a lot of the details there. We reused again the bus menu and the desktop file menu definition structure that we had from the indicators work. We reused that for quick lists. So you can go up and you've got a capability like that. And that comes from, that's again using the same technologies because the menus can be specified in desktop files. They can be present even if the application isn't running. It is implemented at the moment as a mutter plugin. So mutter is metacity plus clutter. So you've got kind of clutter on top of clutter. All in a spectacular attempt to make an uncluttered interface with lots of sort of trying to pass through clutter to get to the underlying GL. And then this last piece, the DASH and what we call places. This is again implemented in clutter. The architecture here is you have a complete separation between the thing that's rendering the interface and the demons that are essentially producing data to be rendered. They talk to each other over D-Bus and it's designed so that you can have multiple things going on at the same time because you may well want to issue a query, a search query for example, over lots of places. So you might say, show me find files like this and that might shoot off to Google and do one query and kick some processes off looking at what's on your hard disk and send some other thread spinning off to Amazon and you want to integrate all of that. So it's designed to have lots of things going on and synthesized and rendered by something that won't easily get distracted from the rendering. There's a library there called LibD. LibD basically defines the data model of what can be rendered over there and then LibUnity is kind of a command set up and ticked down library. If you want to put your own content into the dash like this then you create your own daemon that talks to it it uses LibUnity to sort of register itself and then it uses LibD to publish the data that it wants rendered. You can also plug into the dash itself custom renderers so they will take the data from off D-Bus and then render it in an appropriate way. So using D-Bus for everything allows us to do stuff in a way that's really quite nice from a cross desktop perspective. So you could for example write a cute implementation of exactly the same thing and use all the same places daemons just rendering in cute and or if you didn't want to use clutter for example because you didn't have the graphical horsepower then you could just do it in GTK as well separating out the representation display the rendering from the actual data model has proved quite useful to us already in that regard and that's it. So Ayatana is the name that we gave the overall design initiative we called it that because it's the word that Zen Buddhists use for awareness so the thinking is that we've lots of great applications and the application when you're working on an application that application defines what you're concentrated on but then there's all this other stuff going on around that things like notifications things like your system status whether you connected what's happening with your battery and so on and so forth and that's kind of in your peripheral awareness so that's where the term Ayatana comes from. It's all hosted on launchpad.net and should ship for 10.10 netbook edition Are there any questions? Yeah, not yet So Hi Henry I do a a conversion should try it out My question is I believe that Buddha is the base for Google Chrome and I couldn't help but think to myself all the time that surely Google Chrome isn't aiming for netbooks and doing very similar things so I was just wondering are you working together are you looking at what they're doing so the Chrome OS team did start with a development environment but they've moved on from there I think for Chrome OS their desire was to sort of build more in the same sort of way to build an embedded device so they've actually switched to Portage, Gen2 Portage as a build system. Oh you already like that Right so there's a that's this stage I'm not going to go at all on the architecture or approach that they've taken and there hasn't been much cross-pollination from a user experience point of view for quite a long time I don't know it's coming along You said you're on that you're looking at search and touch as the primary face and you said you're looking at search and touch as the primary interface and I'm curious how especially when we're talking about a touch-based device that has no keyboard how are you going to think of balancing that out in particular how does the search part work if all you're doing is touching So any substantial touch device is going to have an on-screen keyboard but you don't want I think the real key there is that you don't want to have to type a lot right so it's about two things first it's about the way that it's presented in the interface like how hard is it to get to where you can start searching and then also it's about the quality of your search you know if I can just type three letters on a tabletouch it's an unsatisfying way to type right finger finger finger but if I don't have to do a lot of it then that's probably acceptable But are you exploring ways to be able to start searching without using keyboard at all? It's to a certain extent yes if you look at if you look at this you kind of tell us where you want to be searching and so we could potentially bring stuff into hot cache so this is a view of the applications so this is what is essentially what was menus in the current shell and so if you're searching here we know you're searching for applications and we can search first across things that's fast and then slightly more slowly we can search things that aren't yet and then even more so we can go search the web for stuff that you know don't yet know about but that might match I can't think of any other cunning ways we could start to search before you've typed anything but the telepathy module isn't implemented yet so just back there Hi I'm glad to hear that you're working on search a lot more as an interface and I think I think it's really useful one thing that I find a little scary is you say that it's like getting rid of hierarchies so hierarchies as the primary interface I think you are pretty flawed but certain people we have humans have this remarkable ability to like keep a map of physical space in our brains and some people and others like you see people have incredibly messy offices and can find stuff and I think that in a way hierarchies kind of represent that so like it's good to focus put maybe more in the focus search but I mean if it you can't replace everything that's interesting so I think I agree with you where you've got natural categories natural categorization especially where you've got categorization that's common across lots of different people's machines so a little bit of that, you know the internet category the office category of software letting people sort of inviting people to kind of come in and have a look and see what's there sometimes when you make search the only way to find something people don't know how imaginative they can be search for teleportation machine you wouldn't because you couldn't possibly believe you know anybody can have one what is interesting though is how something that's perfectly natural for most of us which is directories for files and other directories is astonishingly difficult or just astonishingly broken for typically in users so I saw that first I actually sat and watched people using the system to see things like for example people would receive a file by email and they would save it and then they would want to either email that file to someone else or open it in some other application and they couldn't find it they'd been presented with all of the information they needed to but it just didn't stick in some way so I just noticed that as we were watching user testing people were like what the fuck is off the street and you know sort of intellectual arrogance you say well you know ordinary users don't understand this stuff but I'm fine and then I started to observe just my own use of it and I spent a lot of time trawling through especially where I've got disks of lots of stuff that I know like photograph collections and things like that it's on the disk I know it's on the disk but it's not a particular time especially over years we've got data that you've built up over years I don't know if you guys have some experience so I'm getting older, getting dumber so I need to try and get the software usable by the time I hit my 70s so that I have a personal mission so I'm really coming around to the view that actually even for even for the very smartest users that may be a waste of their smarts you know like if we can just get it so that you can start typing and get what you want that's much better I think there are a lot of gaps that we have to close in there but that's kind of where I think we have to get to and I think the web has taught us that it's possible to do an amazingly good job with CIRC let's just see if we can get back to that I don't know that I'm yet ready to say make the file system opaque you know but there are many cases where for example you really shouldn't hit the file system for that case if someone who got emailed a document saved it and then tried to open a document in something else where the file is still to work for example you know I should see the stuff that I have been working on most recently immediately and then I search on top of that you know very, very cheeky at least that's the design thinking I mean the nice thing about having we've got this real flourishing at the moment the Nego guys are doing really interesting work I don't know if anybody's looked at it it's radically different, it's really cool it's innovative there's Android Unity I think it's pioneering certain things there's the GNOME shell if you've looked at their design it's also quite different so KDE4 this is actually a very interesting time for innovation and creativity and I'm pretty sure that we'll all emerge from it in two or three years time I'm very happy I would just as you were mentioning about search about finding things I was thinking about something I would read about it's being developed against the Zeitgeist so the Zeitgeist powers this oh thanks again the Zeitgeist guys that started out on the really coming from the Ubuntu community with Lotfi is kind of the champion on that and I'm right George we embraced Zeitgeist pretty much immediately we've used it and they've been debating its adoption in GNOME I don't know what to say to some of that it's not yet so again that's sort of useful, we have embraced Zeitgeist it means that it will kick ass if it works well then we'll prove that GNOME might be more likely to use it maybe KDE would be more likely to use it conceptually it's really interesting Zeitgeist is a way of organising metadata about how you're using stuff and when you're using it and where you're using it so potentially for example you can walk into a room and say when you hit that button, that top button over there you see the files that you last looked at when you were in that room or in Central Park or in Baku shop so it's just a really interesting project to sort of rethink the metadata that we track about what files we're using for example when I was reading this email I was surfing with that kind of correlation so yeah, Zeitgeist is absolutely embedded in that so have you thought about how you want to cope with where it goes the surface in use is at least on the web because they just can't guess the right keyword so they're thinking in a better way in order to find is there a way that in the interface searches token on for me I need to switch out of search mode into hierarchical mode at least I can eventually tell us that our entire tree and find it that way yeah, this is the biggest tree the semantic structure of what you see on the screen is that you've got the place entries the first thing on my screen we've actually moved the places into the laundry as an expert to see how that works for us so you can have multiple place entries it's the sort of top of your structure and then inside of that you have sections so you can't see it on here you would see it on that so there are sections over there and then you actually have groups as well so that's the kind of hierarchical structure and you can nest quite clearly into that and then the semantics is to how you search so you can just search just inside of that or search everything it's not we're not trying to build a file browser you know, we're not trying to build a better noise so I think we'd probably set limits on how much we would try to support that kind of click through trolling but rather invest that energy into getting the search right Mark, I'm going to give you your oh no, it's Kurt moment first you mentioned about getting things right before you're seven and Christine and I would like you to come and meet our two new children they are in harvest so we've got genetically ready organs for my question sort of relates to all of this do you think you run the risk of by simplifying this interface to such an extent that you start giving users the impression that they're new Ubuntu or they're new Linux whatever this is on their computer that they haven't seen before this is a simple operating system and when you want to get real work done that's when you reach for the Vista or Windows 7 CD or OS 10 CD and what this is mostly meant for it's a utility operating system it doesn't really do that much do you see any sort of potential problem there and if so how do you plan to address it look I think it's really hard to argue against simplicity even people who have really complicated important heavy duty things to get done don't really want the rest of the operating system crowd in on them while they're trying to get that done the really interesting experience my folks have always had I doubt for example an Ubuntu PC well for the last six years he's had an Ubuntu PC and a Windows laptop and he needed the Windows laptop was sort of dying so I got him a new one and I didn't even think about it I just with Windows on it anyway two or three days after after we set it up he came over and he said listen do you mind installing a Ubuntu on that new laptop because it's much easier to use I think a lot of easy to use is a question of familiarity and so on and so forth on the one hand but on the other hand I think we're really moving to the point where the new interfaces for Linux are genuinely easier to use than the stuff that's been built up and built up and built up in Windows environment where they can't afford to change too much and where so other pressures on like the pressures on OEMs to install more software before they ship and everything he makes it more crowded and slower so yeah there is a chance that if we put kind of crisp clean clear things on there people think of them as devices and therefore not as sort of proper power or general purpose computers but I suspect the flip side is more likely that people want to spend more of their time using this device just because you know whenever they want to get something done they can quickly get it done at least that's the goal um and if I could just add I mean if you're talking about the notion of a simple interface and people say oh you simple things I don't remember when OSX came out that was exactly the reaction that a lot of people had to look at the screen it's got this five things sitting at the bottom and it hasn't seen some of them up gotten in the way of people also they can also use it for serious work as well yes but Apple is very very indebted manufacturer well that's so what I'm going to say is that Apple is good at making something that people lust after that they want to use wouldn't it be nice if they felt that way about Debbie and that's what this project is all about right because if we get this right and it ships it then I think people will feel this way it will feel like wow this is fantastic I think we're in a position to better than Apple that's the goal we set two years ago I think we've got another two years till 1204 squeeze plus one and let's get it done yeah so I really like that you're improving search but I find that when I search for files there's two modalities if I know something about the file then it might be worth searching for it but often you don't you're just fishing for something and then like someone was saying there there's a territory in there and it's going to be in there no matter what you do because for the inside stuff it's still going to be there right so I thought it was a bit weird you said I'm not yet thinking about making it opaque but why would you ever because it seems to me that they're orthogonal right I mean make search as good as you can maybe somebody else wants to make the hierarchy basically browser there's room I think for alternative sort of storage models you guys have worked in one of those firms where they have these effectively they've replaced the file savers as dialogue like in lawyers for example with something that basically maps to this huge document management system that they've got where they track which client, which case etc etc etc so obviously in a firm of 500 lawyers all of them could be working on different cases for different clients over a 20 year period you don't just want arbitrary people making up a file hierarchy so they build these systems that are sort of custom purpose built storage systems just for them what's interesting is that the world takes you've got hierarchical files and folders all those custom things and I think what we're going to move to is more like you've got search as the standard and then if you could potentially have hierarchical files and files interface where you set it up and you craft it that way and you also have those for industry specific vertical markets to sort of storage your document management systems as well so yes I guess I'm agreeing I think there will always be a room for someone who wants to craft files and folders and do it that way but I think we can improve the experience dramatically for the average user who in a week we may actually process no more than a couple of hundred files it's not that much and so it's easily within what we can handle from a search perspective and we can we can take away all the burden for you of having to track that you know where did that go what happened to the file I got this over IRC I guess we could track for example yes you've got that in a file from this person so you can start searching from the name of the person and see the file that they sent you that sort of thing it's a computer to do the work the way I tend to work with files is either in two ways either I have a specific file like a photograph but it's own item it's own identity and I have these actually full folders or the files and the way of course the way we have a file system means that all of the organization in a way the classification for the photograph is in a folder because it has it in certain ways or this folder that actually contains a project full of folder because it's because of the technology that we're using but actually when I think about it the project is one thing even though it's a full folder and Mac does this with the applications and there are other DNGs and other various properties where they have archives as these items and then you can search for the archives and that makes more sense whereas when you go into those objects and you have folders, Derby folder and your project folder that's when you need the navigation, the hierarchies and the various other things because you do have a collection and you are thinking about the whole thing as an item whereas when you're thinking about your photographs it's only when you start to think about galleries and maybe printing more of them out as a collection that that kind of you know you need to have a more structured view I was wondering what your thoughts are about collections and whether we should be searching for collections I think collections are actually tricky because we don't ingest enough metadata in them to search to necessarily be easy if you went to the holiday to 50 pictures you may well not write enough about them in metadata and so on to be able to search between them you can get to the collection Holiday in Spain but you won't so easily get to one of the 2,000 pictures that you have in mind I guess the online services have a huge advantage because they start to have enough data and enough compute power they can look at the photographs and do face recognition so you can show me photos of Jenny and outcome photos of Jenny without you having to mark them up I don't have any brilliant ideas I can believe this sort of idea that in some settings you want to work with collections and that this model isn't going to work very well for that so it's just following up on what you just said you've got beta metadata where the photo was taken you've got where who's in the photo, how many people in the photo there's a whole bunch of metadata the user doesn't have to put in that you can do through either inspecting or except here we've got one, two, three minutes left I became a Debian user when I updated that to Debian and I like to usually a lot of Debian users they think of Ubuntu as this whole sister project that just took away some of the publicity but actually to me because I came through Ubuntu it means a lot like a path that Ubuntu then it brought me to the world of Debian now when Khanical says that they're going to you spoke earlier and you said that Khanical would partner with VMs to provide this as like a second OS or for netbooks I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that and just explain what kind of plans you have I assume of course Khanical is a four product company so they have some business plans perfectly it's of course part of the whole thing so I'm just wondering what kind of ideas are the future thank you for sharing your story of meeting Ubuntu and then going on to Debian that's quite a common pattern now this has been quite a fun big con for me because A I've been doing it six years now and know lots of great people but also because it's much harder to call lines of affiliation there are a lot of people who spend time with Ubuntu spend time with Debian upload packages to both places and everybody's life easier add your name to one of the lists of contributions to Debian I'd be appreciative now shipping millions of PCs around the world with Ubuntu pre-installed with Debian derivative pre-installed I see no reason why that number won't grow by an order of magnitude just if I look at the dynamics there Windows XP expiring there's huge and growing demand for computers in parts of the world that have never had it so therefore aren't quite as pressed against so they'll be attached to Windows as as folks would be what people want to get done with computers it's amazing it's been a very long time since anybody said to me but I can't focus on it you know what I mean it's much less issue now and the diminishing issue but we've got the web to think for that so while I can't go into the specific plan I might have with the vendor last year when the Yellow 4 Microsoft came out and said that Linux on the network was dead that was I think a slightly premature declaration of victory on the behalf so then we continue to want to take free software to the whole world this year will be a good one for that and one last question I got okay very specific question about the messaging I've been using it on one of my computers it collapses email Twitter and chat there are many completely different things that have different time to respond to maybe very quickly is there any thinking about splitting them up or is there a very specific reason why they are together there is a nagging inconsistency in the relationship between the messaging menu and the presence menu presence menu is for example I've signed into this IRC channel I want to be online or change my status and the messaging menu is where you deal with responses so maybe in future we map the instant messaging real time sort of stuff over to the presence menu we haven't figured that out it's kind of an open question we debate it nobody's preferred anything that we can all look at it's exactly right I think the critical thing with messaging menu the application decides to use it's the facilities the facilities that the messaging menu exposes there's a section per application and they can put I think up to seven entries in that so the initial you know if you for example if your mail application puts the names of the last people who sent you email it would be that useful a mail you probably want to get a sense of how much mail there is you know over 20 unread messages or something like that however if your mail application have the ability for you to sort of tag some people in your address book and say I want to know when this person sends me an email that would be useful so you could go and have a look and you see immediately or I've got mail from Jane that would be useful and you can go straight to that sort of important and then the other facility which is a shared facility is that you can not online now but if I went online for example and someone pinged me and I wasn't looking at the chat window then that would be there's a way of basically saying there is a message in here that needs your attention and again it's a question of how sophisticated the app is in how it uses that facility and if the app just goes green all the time then you kind of start wearing a facility anyway we're out of time thank you very much and I'll see you then


Good morning everybody I'm Tommy O'Brien coming to you live from TFNN 10 a.m. Eastern Time Wednesday morning 30 minutes into the trading day and we have markets trading to the positive side right now S&P is up nearly 50 points trading 2916 Nasdaq up 169 trading at 8888 and the Dow up 402 points trading 24,442 Russell is leading the way yet again up 2.7% trading at 35 points in the positive at 1337 oil catching a bid up $2 and 94 cents at 1530 and we get the gold contract negative $4 and 20 cents at 1718 will start off and we're gonna start it off with first quarter GDP shrinking 4.8% the number they were looking for 3.5% gross domestic product falling 4.8% in the first quarter according to the government numbers released Wednesday that provide the first detailed glimpse into the deep damage the coronavirus wreaked on the US economy that number coming out this morning jumping back to the charts will start it off with crude crude making it up to $15.83 right at about 9 a.m. This morning catching a bid finally given up a bit from those highs at 1528 right now gold contract with volatility in both directions 1716 jumping back to the indices Nasdaq 100 lagging a bit the Nasdaq still not above where we were trading at early Tuesday morning the high there 8944 currently trading at 8883 and that's with Google trading up big numbers this morning almost $100 for Google as they come out with their numbers last night not as bad as the market feared S&P above the highs we had yesterday currently trading 2914 the Dow 30 right near where we were above those levels but made it above them briefly currently trading 24000 for 33 we mentioned Google numbers and there's the headline number as alphabet stocks rise more than 7% their earnings 987 a share slightly below the estimates but revenue almost a billion dollar beat for Google 41.16 the market have been looking for 40.29 Google shares so far this morning up 95 points 95 dollars not points at 13 2720 and we got Microsoft after the bell today that's up 2.3% we get Tesla after the bell today as well up 3.2% stay tuned folks coming back at 10 o'clock with Tom it's fed day as well a decision at 2 o'clock a press conference to follow and we get oil inventories at 10 30 this morning stay tuned folks we'll be right back


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Everybody forest here ripping 21 22 Chronicles soccer hobby 6 box number 5 random teams I'll show you the results right here. You can always find them late in sports cards calm Thanks for joining everybody and good luck Arturo Vidal Relic card or inter Milan the 500 to 99 is Giasi Perspezia green spectra. I think 505 green spectra Yvonne racket ish nice. There you go severe nice racket ish Got Kazimiro jersey card to 500 real Madrid. Good pack to 99 Ruben Duarte a la base Naldo base You know my pie auto it's a 500 for Brighton Hove Albion It's a 99 Adam Armstrong for Southampton. We're sorry about six gold coming up Gold Flux Felipe Anderson Go Lazio Felipe Anderson gold at 10 There's an auto Nicholas Bordiso for Inter Milan the 500 throwback hit there Origins auto tail Hernandez to 99 AC I mean there's nothing else going on right People would rather talk about things like that than Whatever I bring up Gold Flux to 10 for LK Omar Mosquerel Very nice to gold fluxes in the past two mini boxes here Relic card paid 3 to 99 FC Barcelona tonight 299 Luis Suarez MLB draft stars now People were seeing Drew Jones, I don't I don't think it's gonna be him though. It's Andre Jones his son really I Don't I think he's high school 250 points random to all at the end Townsend to 99 Everton Alessio Romagnoli noir auto to 199 AC AC having a good break as a cracked ice to 23 Denzel Dumfries, right? Yeah, Dumfries There you go inter spotlight noir auto Real Madrid monster card Junius C Yeah, monster hit there Real Beckham got cracked ice Jose Fontan for Kelta or stealtha Eric dear or dire to 500 on the rally card for his spurs Yeah, I'll do those some pretty nice quads Almost like mine got cracked ice at 23 is Cannot read the names Edward for Crystal Palace Can't read the names on those Not a drew Jones haters. He should go number one part of the Orioles gonna take him He's the best player in the draft for the Orioles gonna take him. I don't know he's an outfielder, right guys Got Jersey or patch card Leandro Bonucci to 99 for Juventus rookie Thomas Henry Venezia be weird at the son of Andre Jones was not an outfielder silver prism is Bela idea That goes to Why does it not say the team name one sec? Serginio desk Jersey Carter to 99 FC Barcelona and to 99 Joe Felix Let's you go. What club is that? Villa Real Villa Real silver spectra Calabar for Chelsea Jacob Ramsey Origins on a rookie for Aston Villa Kenny Lofton son is a power forward That is a blue rookie from origins. Oh some Printing air here Charlie Cressor some damage I'd say And the car's not like damaged, but that like it's all Not finished there essentially or maybe just was like wiped off There's a Cresswell to 99. We'll send an empty box and wrapper for that one I'm sure everybody's cheering Rob Manfred currently Got a fun little itch Jersey Carter one 99 for Verona It's a 99 Mattia Aramu for Venezia or Aramu Aramu That's true Roger Clemens son is an outfielder too, right? Silver rookie spectra is a linear for get off a Tony Cruz Quad relic auto to 289 Real Madrid Nice cruise Cracked ice who else but Tony Cruz 23 That's awesome silver select rookie pure Lee's Malou for Norwich James Ward Prouse Relic card to 500 for Southampton To 99 for Norwich is Max Aaron's One more box That appoints random. Is that a leaf blower outside? It sounds like a leaf blower 7 p.m. It's wet all it's a rain How are you gonna blow leaves around I just rained blue select is Joseph Ricalo for Torino now numbered Stefan de Vrij to 500 relic card for Inter Milan Impoli to 99 rookie Ricardo Marquisa We're nice Simone auto from Origins for athletic club act ice David Alaba so hard to read man. Real Madrid cracked ice at 23 David Alaba Daniel opponents relic card for the Wolves to 250 Three of five Leandro Tressard Brighton Hove Albion. I'll do it 250 points random to all nine times whichever name is up top get the points one two three four five six seven eight nine Junius is up top Junius recap relics Daniel potents last if on the fry James Ward proud Siobhan Illich So Jean Yodest Bonucci Dire or dear got paydry Kazamiro Arturo Vidal autos Simone Tony Cruz Jacob Ramsey Alessio Romaniole Burdiso Neil Malpie and a David Beckham noir auto for Real Madrid That'll do it. Thanks again everybody. Got basketball coming up


Good afternoon, everyone. It is June 14th and this is the site subcommittee of the elementary school building committee. We have to the extent they're available we've invited the full committee to attend, should they want to so I will keep an eye out. Seeing we have a quorum. I'm going to call the meeting to order first making sure people can hear and be heard. Rupert. Yeah, I'm here. Paul. Present. Phoebe. Hello. Hi Phoebe, Ben. Okay, I see you unmuted Ben, but I'm not hearing you. And now you're muted. You're unmuted. There now, now you're visible. But can you hear us. So what, what do we do all hope that. What is he hope that he can reconnect Rupert are you in the same room or different rooms. Yeah, I think he's plugging his headphones now into a different into a different laptop so it might work. And it says he's connecting to audio. Can you hear me now? Yeah, yes. Okay, so, and today there's a broad set of issues related to site. And I'm going to turn it over to news go and what we're going to be updated on is meetings that have happened beyond the subcommittee with the athletic teams and with some around the site on the site layout on the playing playing fields, the community fields, but also the playgrounds. And we've had some very productive meetings and Donna, I believe Bill Brown is here because he's part of the overall layout and has been part of all the playground and layout. Correct. Yes, thank you. And Bill, I, I don't know if you can turn on your camera but anyway, Bill Brown is with browser dinner they are a landscape architect for the project. So they are involved, everything, everything site and including playground and everything. Bill, can you hear us? I can hear you. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yep. Thank you. I am turning this over to the Dinesco team to run it in any fashion that makes sense to you. We have two more people both Tammy and Alicia said they could make an afternoon meeting so I'll keep an eye out for them if they can join us or not. I am going to share my screen then and since we have had numerous meetings with various constituencies. And it seems like just about every aspect of the site is changing in a little way we're just going to go through those meetings and the elements of the site. And give an update and then a preview for the next meeting when we actually have those designs incorporated. Again, Kathy, I will ask you to allow me to share. It's my other function. Master, got it. You should be able to now. So beginning at the beginning of DD we starting point with the value engineering changes incorporated from SD some of the very first comments were to revise the site in terms of the drop off loops and main plaza so that is being incorporated into the design and that feedback came from the public and the site committee itself. So we are. We did make this area larger, we are going to incorporate by cracks, and just an overall design of that area is ejecting to move the vehicles away, and then we have some continuing meetings that we are setting up with our consultants to, you know, make changes to the geometry. Turning movements, bike and pedestrian circulation is all going to be incorporated in the design updates so some geometry changes to the plaza and the loops will be shown in the next time we meet with a fully developed site plan. So we also got some feedback on the athletic fields to the north of the school itself. We met with Ray harp and Recreation Commission, the Department of Public Works, people who use the fields in town and got their feedback. We will have a follow up meeting scheduled next week with Gilbert and DPW in terms of infrastructure that we will be providing we've gotten sort of comments on what would be incorporated, and what we should include the base project for a comfort station attached to the what we will do to the site in terms of making sure DPW can access the fields in terms of curb cuts and where that would be located. We also got comments on the requirements for storage of people use the field so whether it's a container or something like that, there will be an area set aside, just so that the people who will be using the field can use it fully to the extent possible within the project. As part of an earlier site subcommittee meeting, and then in meetings with Tammy and the school administration, we are moving in the direction of consolidating the two playgrounds and to one place surface area with space around it that can serve the function that this rectangular play area served in the past as or in past iterations of the design. So there would be one board in place play surface larger than any of the existing individual playgrounds. But it would include play structures at either end for different age groups and swings. We had a fairly detailed meeting with Tammy about what should be included. And then we also heard reference for multiple parties about just because I was playground in Belchertown, which is the photo shown here so like this playground there will not be fences around the playground or play area north of the heartscape play area. There will be age appropriate play structures. Plus area in the middle or depending on how the layout goes for there to be free play on a soft surface outside of the fall zone and safety areas for the play equipment and swings. And then one other comment that we did here is that swings are very important. There will be a couple of groups, including inclusive swings at either end of the playground. So that is going to be incorporated design. The next time we meet we'll have a plan to review at least of the area itself, if not the equipment. Yeah, Tim, if I could just jump in just just for everyone's benefit, we will be going and looking at different playgrounds and around this is, and these were concepts and ideas were just want just want to make everyone understand this isn't final right so this is just the beginning of the playground discussion, but it was great just to confirm that consolidating and that by pushing the play equipment and the playgrounds further into the site that fence is not required so from there will continue to further this conversation and design. We also received comments about the layout and location of the full size basketball courts and half size courts that are part of the partscape recess area. Half courts will be turned to face each other so full court game could happen at recess not necessarily fully striped court like the other full size courts but the baskets will face each other. And then the full size courts will be adjusted a bit further here to be parallel to each other as we continue to work by the site. So we had a good meeting with Jen Reese about the outdoor learning program and what needs to be accommodated. There was a good discussion about the program for what we currently show on the site plan. There was a learning classroom with the shade structure and then there the other learning opportunities the cultivation beds to be pollinator garden and the forest for garden. There was some discussion about moving the classroom, the outdoor classroom if you will away from the garden beds because both of those could be in use with different classes. There could be a time and then, you know, it could be distracting or a little confusing to have them have close proximity so we're looking at adjusting the site so that the shade structure is a little bit removed, you know, and to make sure that we accommodate for recessive so that's happening so some of these elements will be moving around but we have confirmed that we are accommodating the program. So looking forward to when we develop the site plan with all of these comments in mind. As Donna mentioned will be out in Amherst July for a meeting of this meeting and we'll have the new designs sort of overlaid on the existing conditions so you can really get a sense of where the elements are located. How large they are what the adjacencies are and how it occupies the site as it exists now how far you will be from the existing building and where these place structures and amenities will be. So that was sort of a brief overview of the meetings that we've had the elements that are changing in the site plan and we just wanted to really open it up for further comments and what we want to incorporate as we move forward and any questions about any of those elements. We're a nice small group so just chime in or raise your hand, you can do it more formally. What while we're waiting I have, I have a question about basketball courts. What is, I live up in North Amherst and we have a mill river recreation area that has two full size courts and what I noticed the other day Paul when I was out there, the half court. There's two semi circle half courts. It's attached to one of the full side courts, though for a continuous surface. Between the two full size courts there's maybe a two foot or three foot strip of grass. I'm just whether whether that's a good design, whether there's something downside to it. It's Tim, if you needed to do the outdoor classroom. If one of the courts was near, you know, if you think of them swiveling around so I don't. I haven't noticed that before because I play tennis at me or wherever I don't play basketball. So Paul, I know you know more about basketball than I do so it's a question. Because I just saw a somewhat different configuration. Again, really rely on Ray harp or recreation director for his informant. The other thing up there they have eight foot baskets instead of 10 foot baskets for the smaller one so I assume that those half course or those half course regular size baskets or eight foot baskets. That has not go ahead. They could they could decide that.  Right. Yeah, I was going to say they're adjustable over there to this the two on the side for shooting there. Those are adjustable. Yeah, they go up and that's what I was going to say Paul they go up and down. This is just I went over to look at them just because we're staring at this. Okay, so get Ray, Ray harp and anyone else who is basketball. So it was as I said a question and an observation rather than a suggestion. I just I like all the things that you've identified.  I like all the things that you've identified Tim and I appreciate that you've talked to all the people who should be talked to and heard from and listen to and seems like you've tried the best you could to accommodate that so. So I appreciate that and I thought the other insights on the outdoor learning space with the as price is really wise one because you have conflicting uses there potentially so. Good job. I had a question about, I know that we've received a lot of public comment on the athletic fields and sizing and all that and I'm wondering if that has been looked at or talked about or anything like that and then my second question was. I thought that we had received a really fantastic sort of comment. And of course I had it in my mind earlier about who sent it in about the direction of the parking and affecting the concrete area and all of that kind of stuff and I'm wondering if that had been looked at or talked about all because I thought they were at the very least in my sort of lay person perspective interesting ideas. That was Pam Rooney sent that in. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Responding to the two questions in reverse order. So we did get Pam Rooney comments and they are very insightful. She suggested angled parking which and one way drive lanes which could narrow. And reduce the total amount of impermeable surface and with that reduced costs somewhat, but the site. And the parking is designed for, let's say maximum flexibility with angled parking, you can only go one way and park efficiently there if you narrow the lines there is no flexibility in turn of. Getting around someone who is possibly not getting all the way up to the front of loop and not following drop off procedure, if not strictly at school hours say there is someone who decides to park at the athletic fields here that would totally block the drive lane so the comments were all thoughtful and well received but we are moving forward with the most flexible site design possible because we have to acknowledge that not everyone follows the signs and if you design it thinking that everyone will you may at some point be disappointed. And then the meeting with the users of the athletic fields. They did have some good comments on layout, all of the amenities that are going to be attached. Essentially, we are providing the largest area possible within the constraints of the site. We discussed the skinned softball infield which does, you know, limit your flexibility a little bit. But we also discussed, you know what it would mean to actually expand and not just costs and complexity but there are hard limits in terms of what land setbacks and to expand the athletic fields. So we're actually replacing more than 5000 square foot of lens that might not even be permittable. So, there was a good discussion but the actual configuration of the fields themselves the lines if you will, are up to right harp the recreation department users of the fields and the project itself is just providing the maximum amount of space that it can within the constraints of the building using the school and all of the regulatory setbacks. And PB, I just want to, you know, should be rest assured that when we're getting, especially the kind of detail comments they go directly to the design team. And I usually get an acknowledgement that they have received them so it's not, you know, in an inbox. Yeah. Oh no, absolutely and I figured that I just when I had, when I read most recently Pam's comment I was like, you know, that's a really interesting thought and so I wanted to I assumed that it had been at least talked about and all of that kind of stuff and I wanted to make sure that we, you know, that we were hearing sort of what the response and how that went and all of that kind of stuff because I think I just want to make sure that the loops get closed. No, no, I agree and and Tim provided some specifics that I forwarded to Pam on on the logistics of it so it was, it was a full circle loop because I also thought, oh, never would have thought about that. Right. So my, I guess my question is on, I'll do the cost question when you come and talk to us more on the full meeting but also when we're walking the site. If we're moving the two playgrounds together to be consolidated and making it somewhat larger for some of that extra space. So my question is going to be does the total amount of, what do we call it poured in place is that the right word, I call it rubber, you know, the soft surface does that diminish it because that big space that says play right was $240 to $170,000. I mean it was a big price tag that you had separated out. So just, I don't need an answer for it now but it would be good to know that because it's part of the SD design estimates and if it frees up some money may be able to go to the playground equipment budget the field amenities budget, you know, somewhere else so it's just, it's a future looking question on, or if the canopy for the outdoor learning space wasn't included, you know, I'm just looking for it's it's all related to the site and if we move from one can we be reusing the money or saving the money I'm not saying we have to spend it if we save it yeah. Yeah, I think I think Kathy instead of. I don't think at this point we can really get into okay well we saved 500 square feet therefore 500 right. Let us just rerun it there's some grading implications. I don't know how the place surface, the port and place place surfaces are going to be that big, just combined so maybe a different shape but the intent there is. Margaret she's going for a walk outside was like sorry. So, you know, I think it's premature to be saying that but you know what we do know from from the conversations is that it will certainly help consolidate the play areas right so we're not creating to combining the play equipment which right now all we have is a budget so that to might be changed. I wasn't asking for specifics but just to keep it I know you're keeping that overall because there was also a question of how much Phil goes on the athletic bill, you know just, you know, if, if things kind of even out that would be not a bad thing, you know like we've already our goal is to have it reduced but but I think I think Bill would and Tim would probably kill me if we committed to some kind of number just yet so. So the one other thing I heard during particularly the discussion with Jen Reese was simpler was better in terms of she sent some pictures.  At one point, and I this is Paul this is also for you. We talked about if we are taking down trees at Hickory Ridge, Dave Zomek had said maybe we can save if they're potentially usable at the site, you know, and so that's a discussion that the town or some of the public movements we had. So I just, my question here is, when would you need to know that you have logs available in in the design, the DD phase, or is that farther enough in the future that we can work on. So that that's the question. Place to cost and also design, and are you buying benches and outdoor seating, or can they be created. I can answer the question with regard to the logs and the trees and the benches. I think that there is not a whole lot of cost savings in terms of benches versus reusing logs for seating, because in order for a log to be used and turned up right. It needs to be cut, it needs to be finished. It needs to be waterproofed and then it needs to be dug into the ground. I think that in general terms there's not a whole lot of cost savings in that regard, and by taking a log and sort of sawing off the top and then using that as a seating area. Again, there's labor involved in doing that. And the complexity is such that you may save some money but not a whole lot of money and doing that. With regard to the logs and the branches and those sorts of things that may be coming off site or on site. I think we need to look at the trees that are coming down and get an estimate of what we think that we can save as part of the removal and demolition. And then we should see if we need to supplement what we have on site with what is off site. But that really doesn't need to happen until you know part way through doing the construction drawings. And just we have done some of that work at Kendrick Park, the, you know, Alan Snow tree warden did take some of the trees there and craft them for some, you know, landscaping materials and things like that just as a recollection of the trees having been there before. So, I think that is something that you do, you can do that actually during construction even almost. Yeah, so I think the question is, is it prudent for us to just carry a cost for it now. Until you have a quantity or commitment, or would you like us to remove it. It sounded like it's kind of heavy lifting, but you've been there before and I know you had some volunteers saying this would be a great thing to do so we would just need your direction whether we just carry the simple seating as Jen was requesting as part of the cost and then we can just kind of keep that in the back of our mind. Yeah, I think I think you should keep the cost there as if we had to purchase it and then. Yeah, we'll alert the tree warden to say, think about this. And he's very, they're very creative with how they handle things. Awesome. Thank you. Alison, welcome. I just want to make sure you can hear and be heard. I can. Hello, everybody. Two days to go. I'm doing my best. Thank you for letting me join at this really strange time, but thank you. I had an opening I could get into here. Great. Alison, just, you know, rather than go back through this, if you want to, we will we have the meeting on Friday, but I'd be glad to talk to you separately or, or have Tim run, you know, at a time that works for you just a quick series of pieces that have changed maybe the most important one, Tim you might want to do the playground areas, just so Alison can hear that part, because that was a meeting that. Yeah. You're muted Tim. Thank you. The playgrounds. We talked with Tammy and from some input from previous site committee meetings. The open play area and the structured playgrounds will be combined into a single area without fences with the playground in Delta town as an example of what it could be. What is not shown here and this design is on corporate is the free space outside of the safety area for the equipment and things are but you know that one consolidated area versus the three spread out will, you know, allow more efficient use of the site, a more inclusive feel for the playground and address some of the concerns that we've heard over the course of supervision. One of the concerns you. Yeah, that was the major one that we heard when we were able to speak to Tammy. So, any other I know Rupert you were able to be in a couple of these staff meetings but any other comments on this, because I, I also like it to Paul said that the changes made sense, and this is what will be coming out of still as as recommendation recommendations or potential changes to the full committee. I just like to mention for those people who weren't at previous meetings. My concern about how we talk about year round use of the playgrounds. So clearing snow and ice we can't really use the icers on that surface. So I think it's important that we don't have expectations that that we can't meet. There will be plenty of times in the winter where it's covered with snow or it's just too icy. And I think we need to be upfront with that so that we don't disappoint people later. And if we all turn into Miami then we just won't have to worry about it anymore. I'm sorry I just want to make sure I understand it. Rupert are you saying that the playground surface underneath the structures would become icy and they wouldn't be able to be diced. Yeah, I mean, it's a challenge to clear snow from a rubber surface. You know, I don't think we can use plows snowblowers might chew it up. So we're talking about a lot of work by hand. And even if you stay on top of things, you get a bad combination over the weekend or whatever you get ice build up it rains it freezes. And it's just important to realize that we're not going to have 180 days 185 days of perfectly cleared playground play. And but we could use sand or something right. I don't think that will work. The sand doesn't actually melt the ice. It gives you a little bit of a traction on it until the sun shines on it and then the ice starts to melt the sand goes down and the ice reforms on top of the sand. I want to follow up on this. It is true that there will be snowy icy days. Snow does melt faster on the rubber surface that it does on other colleagues grass cover, and the surface will still be soft when a turf natural will be hard. But that being said, Bill, can you offer a little bit in terms of the recommended maintenance or snow removal. Yes, Rupert, Rupert's right. We, you can't really plow it or use snowblowers on it. So what normally happens is, and it's similar on synthetic turf fields as well is that there is some heat build up with the playground rubber surface and it does tend to melt quicker than some of the other surfaces. But but also realize that all around the school. There is asphalt play area. We need to have that area cleared for fire truck access as well. So there are a lot of asphalt play areas that will have painting on them in games and you could even clear where the basketball courts are for play as well. But with regard to the areas for the play structures. We really can't put equipment on it and motor to remove snow. And can you use a you can use a broom you could you can to the extent, you know, you can brush it off. I mean, if it's really nice. Yes. So that Paul that would also be true of Kendrick Park and grow off right now that we that I mean not not that we had a lot of snow and ice this past winter but that the dairies that weren't the rubber surface were accessible. Yeah. Yeah, so we don't, I don't think we remove snow from our park areas or playground areas we just let them melt. Yeah, Kathy and obviously, Mike is not here but I think him recognizing the complexity of utilizing those areas was why he was advocating for that field that could be have snow removal whatever but back back to Rupert's comment just making sure everyone were managing expectations. Yeah. So I have a question about like, I mean and maybe this is just continuing conversation that doesn't need to be but what do we do. What do we do now, when the playground is on grass like some of the cracker playground and that kind of stuff like, how would this be different how would it be, how is it different on wood fibers how is it different than grass how is it I think the reality is if it's super icy out, you know, my kids have come home and been like, well we didn't go out today because it's super icy so I'm just trying to figure out, is this different on this surface then it would be on another surface. What happens at Wildwood, Alison would know what happens with the Wildwood on these days. I mean the swing sets are over wood chips summit, some of the places right yeah. So snow is not anything that we worry about because the children don't slip but if there's an ice storm. We will shut down the wooden play structure. If it's too much ice and we can't make it safe. So, what will happen is they'll spread the ice or out. And hopefully that will work fast enough for the kids to get out. When I was in New Hampshire, they did not use the ice or they used just sand, or, you know, they spread that out on the playground to help with the slipperiness and that pushed off, then they spread some more. So, in my mind, I can just see that we need to have some sand available so that we're not shutting the playground down if there's an ice storm. But I don't think I'm hearing from Rupert that that would be difficult. It's a temporary solution but it is something that just gets us through the recess time. Any other committee comments. I have a request, nothing related to playground and snow and that kind of stuff. Tim, you said that the next time we see this it'll the changes that that you guys have talked about and met about will be, you know, will show in all of this. And I was wondering if we could add things like, and I don't know how far ahead this is going but if we could add things like lanes that kind of stuff. And I know just visually for me that's helpful in terms of trying to figure out traffic flow and and we seem to be at a point where you guys are doing that or done that and I'd like to be able to see it so if you're, if you're making all these changes anyways if that was a possibility that would be really fantastic. We can certainly indicate how travel will happen on the drawing it may not be exactly how the parking lot eventually gets striped but we can certainly do what we can to make it a bit more clear how things are going to operate or intend to be operated. So I'll add to that once we have our final drawings now that we know sort of ideas of what we're doing we do want to run them by par our traffic engineer to make sure that the radius is and everything works so it's preliminary at best so just we'll just put not not for construction. Matthew can you share Tim's response with to Pam runes or put that in the path if you haven't already. Because as I look at this I sort of, it seems to make sense to you know they have two one way lanes because you always have that third lane available. Well, just to expand upon what I said to them so. Yes, there are two lanes. They're somewhat long though. You know, and it's a long way to go to turn around, which is a minor consideration other thing to narrow the overall footprint of the parking lot requires angling the parking, which increases the overall link not a lot but it does and this came just on the heels of expanding the plaza so you'd be pushing back against that and other suggestion Pam made was to after the drop off area, reduce the width of the driveling, but then that creates a choke one say somebody forgot a book or a lunch and they stop so so the comments were all good and in a perfect world would save money and paving, but they would also limit things that happen from day to day so. Okay, good. Thank you. I will. I just, I found it Paul, I'll send it out to everyone. So what one of one of the, I think I said this at the very beginning but I know Alison joined a few minutes after we started. The team is planning on coming out to Amherst, and we'll try to find a date that works for as many people as possible and Phoebe if you're on the road you won't be able to physically be there. So on the site side, it would be actually to walk some of the area so that we get a sense of, you know, this is here and there, and talk about the layout and on the building side. The building as they've changed some of this configuration there's more space in front for bike racks, for example, and you'll see that on Friday they added some pictures of bike racks on where the bikers could be so. And, and then the other request is they would actually visit some of the parks that we have and Crocker. So they'll see what we're seeing and we know. And, and this Jessica's boundless area in belcher town so just, it's a visual in and it'll be set up so all of that happens in a day so if you want to come into the building one you'd be able to see the bricks the materials, or the site. It would be walking and getting a better sense of what this layout, you know how much and as Tim said the overlay of it compared to what is there now, without just the Fort River School being plunked in. So, are there any other comments for now. And we're, we'll be posting this set right away in this in the multiple folders, and I sent some of the summaries on Jen Reese on the outdoor learning actually responded on the types of plants as well I mean we have terrific staff that really is paying attention. And if I don't see any hands, I'm going to see whether anyone and there's several public attendees. And if anyone there would like to make a comment.  Rudy you are with us. Yeah, hi Kathy Rudy Perkins. One thing more about the field layout that wasn't clear to me until our meeting with soccer and ultimate folks the other day Tim was that even getting a few extra feet in any direction on the field actually helps in terms of the field where in front of the nets, because as Desmond Fitzgibbon was pointing out by adjusting where exactly they locate nets, they can the hardest where is right in front of the nets apparently you're in soccer I don't know that much about soccer but So at first I thought well if we can't get a whole other field. What's the point of going to any lengths to adjust the design to get, you know, five or 10 extra feet in any direction. And it was after the meeting particularly as I was thinking about what Desmond said that I realized there is an advantage so if there are ways that don't involve like wetland replacement or significant reshaping of the playground space or anything that or grading changes I realize you're factoring all those things in but if you can get an extra five or 10 feet in one direction or both directions that may help us prolong the usability of the fields in any given maintenance period. So, I thought that was a good point of his that I'm like, and I talked to him a bunch of times and was not aware of that, that aspect of increasing the field size which I think is worth thinking about. Thanks. Thank you Rudy. Okay. I'm bringing Tony and now to Tony, you're with us. Hi, thanks. Yeah, these are great changes. I really appreciate how responsive to nisco has been to all the input they've received. Just a couple of things. I'll second what Rudy said about getting a few extra feet, if possible, on the athletic fields. It did seem like it's really close to getting three full ultimate fields without overlapping on the skin didn't feel too much. So if there's any way to tweak that I think that will be really helpful. Regarding the basketball hoops, Keith Burgoyne who's the PE. Oh, sorry. Keith Burgoyne who's the PE teacher at Wildwood shared some input with me which I forwarded on to you. He asked for 10 foot hoops, he said the lower hoops are a problem with kids hanging off them and bending them. So he highly recommended sticking with the 10 foot hoops. I had a question about engineered wood fiber and how that would perform in ice and snow compared to Ford in place. If you can put sand on that more easily if it can be plowed. If you can use a snow blower on it. How does that perform. And then regarding Pam runes suggestions. I thought there were three lanes in the exit driveway. Currently, and that her proposal was to go down to to north of the cross path. I just wondered with that exit driveway how many cars are you planning on parking along the side how many can queue it seems like it's a really long distance and would it be sufficient to have queuing up to that first cross. I don't know what it's called the halfway mark across the parking lot that cut off like if you had to exit lanes north of that you talked about the choke point Tim but I wonder if there's enough queuing to go down to two lanes for part of that part. If that makes sense. And I think that's everything I had yet thanks again for these changes it looks great. So, rather than asking for any direct responses now I think what we'll do is that's been put into the both take a look at both sets of spaces there's still a series of other. We'll still take a look now on other looks so. One of the things I think we will be hearing on Friday is we. Where are their deadlines where we have to make certain decisions so that right now it's this is still in the works and I know Paul there's a meeting next week with staff. We're focused on things like comfort station and, you know, storm water drainage just on. There's a follow up meeting. So, on, because it matters whether the comfort station exists at all, whether it needs water, or whether it's compost. And so those are all open questions right now. So, so on Friday Donna and Tim, you know, giving us a sense of we need a decision on certain of these by whatever the date is. And then some of them can be left a little looser, because we've got to we've got enough of a budget for it we already that we can make them later that would be terrific. So we're closing comments. Rudy your hand is still up I didn't know whether you had another comment. Okay. Well, I want to thank everyone for joining. It's been an intense set of multiple meetings of which I missed the first, but someone said to me on the council isn't this an exciting phase as opposed to the anxiety phase and it is. Some of the building design changes or changes or flourishes, it's, you know, additions are, are looking quite beautiful. So I will see everyone on, or we will see everyone on Friday at 830. And this meeting is being recorded so if some of the people who couldn't make it, I will try to just send the recording directly to them. Who said they were going to try to make it. So we post them anyway, but we usually don't post the recordings till late afternoon on Friday. Thank you. Thank you all. This meeting is adjourned at whatever time it is 1250. Thank you. Thank you.


planting and program support for things like shade tree planting emerald ash borer programs uh tree stewardship programs um and there's a few other kind of focus areas that are in that memo we ran this by the municipal infrastructure commission too to get some feedback on um they seem supportive of pretty much everything that you know all the options that we presented um and this grant application it's due december 18th i believe so pretty quick turnaround to get that in and then all work pretty much has to be done um by this time next year so any you know we couldn't apply this to say like main street or something like that where it's you know future future construction it's it's a quick turnaround so um counselor duncan if i miss anything um feel free to jump in but that's that's pretty much the the gist of this grant i will only say that this grant is only available to us because we became tree city usa and that's like the it makes us really competitive in vermont because you can't even apply unless you meet certain criteria and we're one of uh less than a dozen communities in a state that meet the criteria so we really are competitive and um having td bank in town i think helps a little bit so any questions from council howl did you i saw you go off mute no i'm sorry no cool mic you also unmuted i was just waiting to oh let me just any public comment all right would someone like to move to approve the td green space grant application so moved second motion by jim second by mic all those in favor please say hi hi hi motion carries a note to other counselors follow jim's lead find us grants actually i feel like how may have also done this for us in the past so um item k housing stability update with heather that jim gave us a headline for earlier yeah um i am not going to go through this this is the quarterly report um of the same housing stability indicators that i look at just to give us an early detection system for if we are looking at something like an evictions cliff what i want to add is that as jim mentioned we had a couple major property owners um come in speak with the housing commission as part of our review of the housing stability information and between the two of them it's over the two people who came in it's over 300 units that they represent and between them they said that there was exactly one tenant that they were looking to evict and the person that is in that situation is someone who maintained their job throughout but simply stopped paying rent in march and hasn't paid since and has not responded to any outreach or attempts to assist them so there is one eviction that they were aware of that would be going forward but generally what we're seeing um based on this data is that we are not on an imminent evictions cliff um but i will say this i'm seeing that more people have been able to pay their rent um over the period considered here part of that maybe because vermont used our cares act funding in really useful ways with the rental housing stabilization program with the mortgage assistance program and those programs are about to run out um so i would say that overall the systems that were put in place have been working but we are seeing growing concern and less confidence among renters that they'll be able to pay their upcoming rent despite the fact that more people were able to pay over this period and i think in part the uptick that we're seeing in covid obviously raises concerns for people that there may be shutdowns furloughs etc so still very much worth monitoring but between having the two property owners come in and having deke from the wedewski housing authorities speak with us we are not overall seeing an increase in evictions coming at this point but we'll continue to do these monitoring reports every quarter i'm happy to take any questions that you may have thank you for the overview questions from council jim this is mostly just to kind of reinforce that point around i think my takeaway from hearing these stories is that what was done worked and all of those supports are no longer are going to be gone by the middle of the month um so we know we heard about the enhanced unemployment benefits the payments to households the cares act funding um and those are all kind of sun studying so uh and also the discussion of the housing commission centered around the fact that housing is usually one of the last things to get cut from your budget so as we see meals on wheels reliance go up food reliance go up um that this is going to be the the trailing indicator not the leading indicator so thank you heather for continuing to compile this data on a regular basis i think i'm glad that we're keeping an eye on this and it was somewhat unique among our gathering of housing commissions to have wedewski taking a proactive monitoring role so i just want to appreciate that as well um yes i think that that takeaway is really important to consider if there isn't more uh federal action and more funding available um we could be having a different discussion and i'm glad that we will be able to you know look at this again next month and and keep on keep on on top of things any other questions any questions from the public well thank you heather um and we will move to our final item l a 2020 plan report out uh jesse can talk to us some more uh so i won't really um the only thing i do want to draw your attention to here that i did not i failed to mention city updates is that we have reconvened weekly um huddles with vdh the city of berlington and our community partners as the coven numbers are um increasing to to just make sure that we are all coordinated on messaging translations testing sites um out of that came our daily testing site here in wanouski so i just wanted to circle back to them make sure you all knew that we weren't doing that um happy to answer any questions on about the updates on here again the new text is in red but much of it you have heard about tonight any questions from council also glad to hear that those huddles are reoccurring given the situation thank you for sharing that so i just had one thing to bring up and that's i think when you you worked with staff to put this together we had had this sort of discussion that this would be in place for maybe six months and then we would have our regular priorities and strategies discussion at a you know bigger picture level and it is just feeling to me like that that is not appropriate anymore and like this is what we're working with for the rest of this fiscal year um because the situation hasn't improved right so just wanted to pulse check that with everyone else here definitely agree i think from staff's perspective we feel like this is a good summary of our priorities um and so i'm not sure much would change if we revisited it at this point any uh public comments all right any last thoughts or questions on item l so this brings us to the end of tonight's agenda i would take a motion to adjourn so i'll move second motion by mike second by jim all those in favor please say aye hi hi motion carries meeting is adjourned and thank you all for your time this evening thank you one thanks