Hi, everyone. Welcome. This is our third lecture in the fall series, if you can believe it. Oh, and actually fall started already. That's wonderful. I wanted to just remind you that CCTV is actually producing these webinars for us this fall. And if you want further information about them, where you could watch this lecture next week and so on. Please check the email you received yesterday from Glenn. The other thing is you've been doing a really good job of the questions. Please keep it up. For those of you who aren't quite sure how to do it. If you touch your screen, you should have a bar that says Q&A and you push that and just type in your question anytime during the lecture or even beyond up until three o'clock and we'll try to get as many of the questions in. So now I'd like to ask Beth Wood, our program chair to please introduce today's speaker Beth. Thanks Carol. Hi everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome Mark Isselhardt as our speaker today. Mark has been involved in the maple industry for over 20 years, and he spent the last five years as the extension maple specialist at the University of Vermont. And in this role he works on original research, and he also provides outreach to maple producers and to others who are interested in learning about maple. Mark has given many, many presentations in Vermont and around the United States on a whole range of aspects of maple production, including sugar bush management, sap collection, syrup production, quality and grading, and current best practices, as well as innovative solutions to support and sustain the maple industry. It's a real pleasure to welcome Mark to our Tripoli meeting today, and welcome Mark. Thanks Beth, and thanks to everyone for tuning in and for your attention. I appreciate the invitation to speak to your group today. So, like all good presentations you have to start with an overview or some sort of introduction. And with maple, I feel like maple is one of those things that everyone knows already, but I think it's a really important to get some terminology out there so we can all be on the same page. Basically, maple syrup is a non timber forest product and that means that it's not the trees themselves that we're harvesting to make this product, it's something from the trees so the trees remain on the land, and can be productive for a long time. This is different than timber harvesting. So, an autumalgam between agriculture and forestry. You know we have forced stewardship which keeps the trees healthy, but we are harvesting a product from those trees so people is a little unique. Plus it's not as visible as other forms of agriculture like dairy farming or vegetable farming. It's also important to recognize that production of maple products predates European arrival in North America. In fact, the land in which we're producing maple today has been and continues to be started by various tribes, Native American tribes including the abnaki. And so it's important to, to make that distinction and acknowledgement as well. And that is is probably on everyone's mind is how maple is made, and we know that the processing technology how maple is converted into maple sap is converted into syrup has changed dramatically over time, and we'll get into pretty good detail on that as we move along. There are a few basics that are that are critical to understand. You can tap any species within the genus Acer, but the trees have to be dormant. In other words, you can't collect sap from the maple tree when the leaves are on. And this is anywhere from leaf drop in the fall, all the way through bud break in the spring, technically you could collect sap during those periods and in fact every once in a while you'll hear about people tapping trees in the fall, getting some sap. It's not commercially viable to do that in our, in our area. And the weather we get in the late winter early spring really provides the ideal climate for sustained sap yield so you have enough of those ideal days of temperature to promote a vibrant maple industry and we'll go into the details about that. What's important to know is that sap is a dilute solution, mostly water but a little bit of sugar, 2% on average but it can range anywhere from less than 1% all the way to three or four. In fact, some individual trees can produce sap that's five or even potentially 6% sugar. It's very, very rare, but on average it's about 2%. What I remember is that sap flow rates are dynamic and unpredictable. And by that I mean their dynamic and that the day you tap a tree, sap doesn't start flowing and doesn't come out at a steady rate until the end of the season, like a faucet, that's not how maple is collected. Obviously if you're from anywhere where maple is produced, you're familiar with this idea of a sap flow event or a run. If you're not familiar with that, this would be your time to learn that. So the dynamics of sap flow are pretty interesting and like all good weather, you really can't predict it. So in other words, we can't take data right now and say next year 2022, we'll have seven great sap flow days and two poor sap flow days. This is no way to predict it that far in advance and in fact it's very hard to predict in the short term as well. I want to share a few graphs and before I do, let me just say that I'll be sharing some graphs, really just to illustrate points. I don't expect you to digest all the information on there. But I don't want you to get overwhelmed with the numbers so much but really try to digest the general pattern. So here's an example of early season sap flow. This is some work that my colleague Dr. Tim Perkins at the Proctor Maple Research Center collected. This is over the course of a couple of days. And I just want you to see is the pattern of short periods of flow, followed by sort of a slowing down of flow over time. The y axis in this case is sort of a measure of how much sap was flowing at any given time, and then the x axis is time. So this is early on you can see trees are producing some sap, but later in the season when trees thaw out more ideal weather shows up, it can actually be dramatically more sap. So over the course of the whole season, depending on how many of these ideal sap flow days occur, will largely determine how good or considered poor the sugaring season will be. This is based on not just work done at UVM, but in many other institutions this dynamic has been well documented. It's a very complex process the sap flow mechanism is quite complex even though people have been looking at it for well over 100 years. It involves a physical model. So the anatomy of maple wood plays a role. There's also a an osmotic component whereby sugar molecules and their interaction with some membranes help generate the pressure to allow for sap flow. complicated fascinating process we're just not going to go too deep into it today. Another basic is sugar makers, the those that are in the business of collecting sap to turn into maple syrup, they have to drill new holes each year. This is sort of an odd angle to look at a drill bit but this is from inside a tree looking new holes every year. And this is a zoomed in picture a highly magnified picture of some sugar maple wood, basically looking top down if you were cut a tree off the stump and had very, very high magnification, you would look. The wood would look like this. So you should realize that those light or white circles you're seeing are actually just a cross section of what we call a xylem vessel. These are the relatively large pipes that during the growing season conduct water from the ground up through the leaves as part of photosynthesis. These are the same conducting pipes that we drill into in each spring to collect sap. The yellow cells in this case are the fibers that give tree strength, and the dark lines are not growth rings, those are actually the the radial prank in the cells that is where the tree grows, it's starch and sugar zooming out a little bit, you can see something you perhaps a little bit more familiar with across section of the tree, and there's an old taphole there. And what's important to note is trees, living trees add new wood every year. They're the natural process of the trees growth. And it's a good thing because a tree is able to wall off and compartmentalize old wounds, not always tapholes that could just be a broken branch or something they got dinged up with a with a skitter or some other natural disturbance of the tree stem. In this case, we're looking at a cross section directly through an old taphole, and you can see on the left side of the picture, the tree has grown for several years and covered over that, that old papal. This process of compartmentalization is very strong and sugar maple it's quite good at walling off that wound and preventing systemic infection. And that's one of the reasons why sugar makers are able to tap trees for many, many years without negatively impacting the trees health. Incidentally, we're working on a long term project at UVM looking at the impacts of modern sugaring, and we'll get into the details but we're looking at a long term project to see is modern sugaring as sustainable as we suspect more traditional methods are. And this picture just shows again a chunk of sugar maple wood that has been tapped for many years, and the tree has internally walled off those, those wounds and continues to grow a few more basics just to cover. There's a very strong linear relationship between tree size and the amount of SAP and or syrup you can collect. We've known this for a long time, but the pattern holds up with both gravity and vacuum. The difference is with gravity SAP collection and by that I mean a traditional system where you drill a hole and connect the bucket to that spout. Overall production is quite a bit less. So we know with the advent of vacuum SAP collection and plastic tubing, we've been able to double even better than double the yields on a per tap basis. So where maple is produced largely tracks where maple grows. This map here gives you sort of a bird's eye view of where the greatest amount of sugar maple is growing in the eastern United States. No surprise, the darker the color the more density of sugar maple there is, you can see in Vermont there's there's quite a bit. It's not the only place with sugar maple and your eye might be drawn towards Wisconsin and parts of Michigan have pretty high densities upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania those all have very dense areas where sugar maple competes quite well. So you have to have the resource. And by that I mean the trees, you have to have the climate to, and that's where we start seeing some differentiation where maple syrup is produced. But if you don't have the ideal weather to stimulate good amounts of SAP flow. It's hard to have a thriving industry. And lastly, you have to have the tradition we don't have to but it's, it's strongly correlated with with how big the industry will be in Vermont has a very strong tradition of making maple syrup. It's no surprise that Vermont leads leads the US and in production. Like I said earlier, maple has been produced in North America even before the arrival of Europeans. Many of you will have first hand experience with producing maple either with your own homes and farms or perhaps a family member or a neighbor. For many, many generations, this is sort of the style of production had fairly modest equipment, you had buckets hanging on trees, some means of collecting that SAP either with horses or oxen or perhaps later with mechanized equipment. And then there was the process of boiling it down since raw SAP is 2% sugar and syrup is 67% sugar. All that water has to go somewhere. And the picture on the right shows a sugar house actually up in Westmore, the Skinner property. And it's a pretty typical setup where you have an evaporator, which is a large pan, you have an arch below that, which is essentially a large firebox. And you have a couple of some means of getting that water to, to leave the building. And, and that's how it was done for many, many generations and that technology, technology still works and it works as good as it always has. And people interested in getting into maple, you don't have to tap hundreds of trees you can just tap a few and get a sense of how it works. And, and it's a lot of it's a lot of work, even if you only tap a few trees, SAP is heavy, I carry it around, but it's an exciting time to be to be involved. Like I said, this is the essentially the standard of production for a long time, we actually look at the numbers that were some early reporting in early 1800s that that really highlighted how important maple was to the to the farm economy. And that report we saw that it was estimated that two thirds of Vermont families were making maple not just for home use, but actually more than they could use and actually selling some, and it was pretty clear that that extra cash was important for farm viability on term. In that report they talked that most operations probably produced between 200 and 300 pounds. And at that point it was sugar, we were not producing syrup in those early 1800s was hard sugar. But even then it was recognized that the equipment was generally crude and the quality of the product was was somewhat variable. Jump forward 100 years and Vermont is is leading the way in the US with 30% of the overall crop. 100 years beyond that Vermont we produce 50% of the US crop, and we're going to get into the dynamics of how Vermont got to be such a key player and show that pattern over time, but it is important to recognize that many states in the US produced syrup. Some produced quite a bit historically, but as patterns of land use have changed, they have, they have dropped off in their production. And speaking of dropping off in production. Here's here's a graph that you will want to pay some attention to the, maybe not in absolute numbers but again the pattern. I think you can probably see that there are three distinct eras in depicted in this graph, you have that period from 1900 and 1940, where there was a precipitous drop in the amount of maple syrup production. And that coincides that drop coincides with a tremendous rate of farm abandonment and a transition away from farming economy that we saw not just in Vermont but but across the US. Early on in that period, we saw that there were more than 87,000 farms in the US, the average farm that had maple production averaged about 200 or over 200 taps per farm. Fast forward to to just a few years ago. There was almost 9500 farms in the US reporting some level of maple production on that on average, that number was was almost 1500 taps per farm so number of farms have decreased dramatically, but the number of taps per farm have gone up. And a lot of that is only can be explained by the change in technology of being able to tap more trees with fewer people. The middle period that you see that's relatively flat production. That is sort of what I call the true believers and the folks who were making maple before, and they weren't going to give it up no matter what. And it's a multi generational farms I'm sure we can all name a few in Vermont or elsewhere, but have done it generation after generation it's just part of who they are and part of how they run their, their farm. The last period that 20 years from around year 2000 on we're going to highlight that a little bit but just put kind of put a pin in that and we'll get back to that that rise in production. In a little bit. The other significant change not just the reduction in numbers of farms but there's a dramatic shift in where maple was produced. And here we got to two graphs or to two depictions of where maple was produced in North America, not only the US but also in Canada in their about 1860 or so, and then in the early 2000s and you can see production in that that around the Civil War period was pretty very strong and fairly evenly distributed across the Northeast and Midwest of the US. There was produce production, Canada, both Ontario and Quebec for sure. But when we fast forward to those early 2000s we can see production those mid Midwest states as well as some of the Northeast is really reduced and, and that a lot of it shows a change in land use. Different farming methods different crops. Land values, you know it's, it's land is expensive. But I also want to highlight the impact that Canadian governmental subsidies have had in the growth of Canadian industry. Right now, Canada produces about 70% of the entire crop global sir production crop. And that has come about, not by accident but by intention and there's some good reasons for that. Some of it is tied to dairy policy and trying to encourage dairy farmers to diversify their, their products. The other interesting thing that has changed over that period is what sweeteners were being used. Early in the 1800s, cane sugar believe it or not was the luxury item, it was expensive it was produced mostly in the Caribbean with slave labor, and it was quite expensive, both to production as well as transportation costs. So in that early period, maple sugar actually was quite a bit cheaper than, than cane sugar. I think we can all agree that that that pattern is not held pace and maple is now deservedly more expensive, because it is a unique product, single ingredient, and the cost of production is quite a bit higher than, than cane sugar. So some cities, you know, dairy, not dairy but ag policy has really encouraged cane sugar and other sugar production, but not so with maple sugar.  But that, that flip flop has occurred and is not going back. So with that as sort of a introduction to the history of maple production, where, how we got to where we are now. I want to take some time and talk a little bit about where maple production is now, where it's headed, and, and try to give you some sense because I think most people are familiar at least a little bit with maple. Maple has changed the technology has changed quite a bit, especially in the last 20 or 30 years, but maple is not so visible. I mean you might notice driving around, oh, there wasn't tubing there a few years ago now there is, but the scale of how much the industry has grown is largely invisible unless you're involved. So I think some of this will be will be interesting. When we talk modern maple, we're talking tubing and vacuum, and the reason why sugar makers and the maple industry started looking at tubing and later adding vacuum to that tubing system was really a labor saving device. The sap is heavy, you have to move it from the tree to some collection point, then you have to boil it, and all of that takes people, and it's hard to hire someone for six or eight week period of time to hold sap around. Mostly it would be a family or friends, but as as population dynamics have changed we have smaller families and less people around to carry sap. So the tubing innovation was very important some really fascinating work being done by a historian is actually lives in San Francisco but he's very very involved in the maple industry and he's done a presentation I can share the link with anyone who wants to know, but all about the life of maple tubing and how it came to be in Vermont was right before front of that that really period it's quite fascinating story. But the important thing for you to know is that assuming you have a good tubing setup and it's well installed and there are no leaks, you can expect to see about a 5 to 7% increase for every inch of vacuum and inch of Mercury is the unit that the maple industry uses to dictate the sort of the intensity or magnitude of vacuum, and you can increase vacuum, theoretically, up until the point of the bare metric pressure of that day. So in general we like to say, if you have a really good system very tight, good vacuum pump, you might get close to 28 or 29 inches vacuum or inches of Mercury vacuum, which can translate into a doubling or even more the amount of SAP you would get if you didn't use that technology and so big, big increase in the amount of SAP produce. The other significant change in how maple is produced is the advent in the adoption of RO or reverse osmosis technology. So this technology, you can think of as a, as a filter, a very highly engineered filter, but it uses this technology to remove water before that boiling step. Atmospheric boiling in an evaporator even the most fancy one is a fairly inefficient process. RO technology allows for very dramatic decreasing the amount of fuel you need to boil the SAP and the syrup. This is a picture of one of the membranes that is used in reverse osmosis. It's a little abstract I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail about how it works. But if you look at the picture on the left, I want you to focus in on the fact that it looks a little bit like the end of a roll of paper towels. It's all spiraled together. Between those spirals is a very highly engineered membrane that allows water molecules to fit through, but not the larger sugar molecules. It doesn't do it voluntarily. It really would rather not go through the membrane, but with enough high pressure and equipment designed to handle it, you can force that water to go through that membrane. And by using that technology, you can dramatically reduce and take perhaps 80% of the water out of the SAP before you have to boil it. This slightly fuzzy graph again is really meant to illustrate the pattern, not so much that you hung up on the numbers, but I think everyone can see that on the left part of the graph. The y axis is depicting how many gallons of SAP you need to make a gallon of syrup. And then the x axis is showing you the, sorry, go back up here. Sorry. Okay, so the x axis is showing you the essentially the sugar content of the SAP coming out of the RO. So if raw SAP is about 2%, that's where you get to hear you hear quite often it's about 40 to one 40 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. So if you were to take that SAP and go down and concentrate it to just 5% sugar from 2%, it would really only take you about 15 gallons of SAP to make a gallon of syrup so tremendous gains and efficiency.  So the gains are smaller and smaller as you get higher and closer to serve density. So let's jump back real quick and remember that period of time I was focused in on the end of the, that long period of relatively stagnant production in the US. So here we're looking at a period from 1990 to 2020. There's been more than three and a half time time growth of us maple production, a lot of that is focused in Vermont by the way. That growth has a lot of explanations of why it's happened but it's happened quite dramatically and largely out of folks view because again it's happening in the woods. It's not like pastures being converted to hemp farms or Christmas trees or some other form of agriculture that's quite visible from the road. It's a lot of it's happening happening in the woods. In this period of time we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of operations maple operations that are relatively large, and that's a term that isn't well defined what is a large maple operation. To some having a few thousand taps is a large operation to some having 10 or 20,000 taps is a large operation. We have operations in the 8090 to 100,000 taps. In fact there's even one that's getting close to half a million taps so it's not a well defined number. But we do know that there has been tremendous growth in that largest operation size. The reason that that's happened has a lot of there are a lot of reasons. The technology has certainly helped it. The fact and I'll get into it, the price of syrup has been stabilized, maple is notoriously variable based on a good year or bad year. And that has been allowed to be stabilized some, and there's also just increasing demand consumers are interested in pure products, simple ingredient products. They're driven demand, not just in the US or in North America, but with global and so I mentioned stabilizing the bulk price and the system that they have organized in the province of Quebec, which produces huge amount of the world's maple syrup. It's not sanctioned entity. It's something that is completely legal, but through legislation and rulemaking, they have organized themselves in an organization that takes them the whole crop from Quebec essentially, and manages it with a supply type system, management type system, and can control both the supply but also the price given the high amount of market share. The graph here showing the variability and bulk price, and you can see up until when they instituted the marketing tools, just after the year 2000, the price could fluctuate dramatically. It's hard to grow an industry and sell products, not just to consumers but to larger food manufacturers. It's very hard to keep those accounts if the project if the price can fluctuate all over the place. You know they might buy it for a few years and make a formulation of a new product, but they're not going to stick with it, if all of a sudden one of their ingredients doubles or triples in price. So, after those prices were stabilized, they also instituted what's called a strategic reserve. So, maple syrup is something that can be stored for a period of time on multiple years without losing quality. And so they are allowed through part of this organization to hold a reserve so if there's a poor year they can sell some out of the reserve that allows for prices to be stabilized. What's interesting and helps explain some of the dramatic growth outside of Quebec is that there are no quotas on your production outside the province within the province of Quebec. You are paid for up until you're allotted quota of production. If you want to grow your quota there are ways of doing that, but it doesn't happen overnight. Outside the province, there is no quota. So, you, there's an incentive to increase production, assuming that the price is favorable based on your business and your cost of production. Other things that can can factor into the variability of whether or not an operation is is sustainable or not is the number of taps breaker trees are not evenly distributed across the landscape. Some properties will have a good density of trees, others, not so much. So, producers investing in land that have a good density of trees and are careful stewards and keep their crop trees healthy and do good forestry over the long term will be by and large profitable over the long term ones that have marginal sites are not well suited to growing sugar maple or perhaps red maple might struggle even with best practices and in better technology. Another thing that we've seen change over the relatively recent period is how serve is marketed. We've all picked a dozen places to go by syrup just within a mile or so of where we live or at least 10 miles of where we live. There's a lot of maple around in Vermont and the market can be somewhat saturated. But we're in a very small segment of the world, and there are a lot of people in the world. What we've seen with as production is grown, it's grown in the largest producing size classes. So has the increase in the amount of syrup sold in the bulk market, which means a producer produces syrup, probably puts it into a barrel and then sells it to another business, which we commonly refer to as a packer, and they buy syrup many different farms and many different producers, and then they sell to other either price club like Costco or Sam's Club or large grocery chains, really anywhere. So they're the ones doing taking that wholesale account and selling it. A lot of these very large operations just don't have the capacity to sell direct to consumer and it takes a lot of time and expertise, and they'd rather focus on making the best product and making their yields as best they could. So, what's interesting in Vermont, we've seen a change from about in a very short period of time 20 years, about little less than half the crop sold to the bulk market with the balance of that crop being sold and either wholesale or retail to 90% just last two years ago, I guess I should say so close to 90% of all the syrup in Vermont is sold in the bulk market. And I think I've highlighted some of the reasons why that is, but certainly that there is a cost to marketing directly to consumer, especially in a modern era with the internet and lots of choices for people's attention. It can be challenging to reach out and deal directly to consumers. Another big change that we've seen in the last 20 years is the rise of organic maple syrup, and anyone who's been involved in maple production for any amount of time or lived in an area where maple is produced might have a bit of skepticism about, you know, what is organic maple syrup. And it's true, there are not a lot of synthetic chemicals or other practices in making maple syrup. And it is to be able to market your syrup certified organic you need a third party certifier. So you can have the most organic product, then let's a third party certified certified certified is that your product is organic meets the standards, then you can't use that label. And as consumer demand for organic products of all types, not just maple syrup, but as that demand has grown. So is the demand for organic maple syrup. And so producers are doing the work to get certified. So having inspector come, look at your production records, look at your forest management plan make sure you're using the appropriate materials and opening up your books essentially on on your practices every year. And for that producers are paid a premium. So it is worth their worth the time and work in order to get certified. So growth in in demand, not just production, but demand of organic syrup as well. And I would expect this trend to continue. So right now we think it's somewhere in the 60 to 75% range I bet that would continue to go to go upwards. I also ask, you know, how much syrup can be produced, you know what what what is their left to tap, and this is some work that was done by a person out of Ohio State, looking at what, what amount of utilization occurs currently. And again, I don't expect you to digest everything about this graph, just recognize that the red color represents the potential taps that are out there. And then under that are some numbers that talk about what percent of those potential taps are currently being tapped. It may not come as a surprise but Vermont leads the, the nation in utilization at just under 12%. So that means, based on some predetermined metrics, you know, accessibility and size and various things, 12% of all the maples sugar maples that could be tapped in Vermont are being tapped. But even that's misleading because within the state there are pockets that have more and pockets that have less. And generally speaking, you'll see a higher rate of utilization where there's more maple producers. So for instance, in Vermont, Franklin County has roughly it's estimated that about 50% of the tappable trees in Franklin County are being tapped. And now anyone who is from Franklin County or if you're no sugar maker, they probably want to know where the other 50% are because it seems like every tap every tree is tapped in Franklin County. But in fact, there are more to be more to be tapped in other parts of the state, the number is quite low, you know, a single percentage or, or low teens. And that really has to do with land use patterns, land ownership costs and various things. And that's Vermont that leads the country, you have other states where, if you remember from early on in the presentation I showed some pretty high densities in Wisconsin and Michigan. They have a very low percentage of utilization 2% or in Michigan's case, you know, less than 1%. And this I think it's at, you know, choices about how to manage the land what crops to to to manage the land for in those states, especially in the northern part of those states. The focus tends to be more on northern hardwoods forestry and forest products and less so unable, although it is growing. We do know that there is increased demand and that will likely involve conversion of stands that were managed historically for timber products to sugar and we're seeing that in Vermont. And what's interesting about that is that there can be a bit of tension between those that that focus primarily on northern hardwoods forestry issues, and those that are focused more on production. And in my work, I'm trying to do a little bit of discussion and coming, you know, building some consensus on best practices for management of northern hardwoods for maple production, because it is a alternative land use, and things have changed so dramatically that people are certainly seeing those changes, especially if they're in the business of managing forests. So that's a lot to a lot to digest. I do want to leave you with a couple, a couple of quick points. We've talked about demand is grown by 20%, both in the US and similar rates globally. Part of that has to do with COVID we had a lot of people being home more cooking more at home trying new things. And although we heard from maple producers who relied on in person sales either through a gift shop that touched their production or some other, perhaps a wholesale to a restaurant. We did hear about those operations suffering from the lack of opportunities to sell their product due to COVID. We also heard dramatic increases in demand of online purchases and and just from the large packers selling a lot of the syrup globally. The sales are up 20%, which is a huge number if you think about it. We don't necessarily think that pace will continue, but we do think it will be strong going forward because a lot of people, it might be there have been their first time trying real maple and once they do. And in the case that they'll go back to purchase the real thing, if they're accustomed to corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. And then you also have the issue of totally new uses of maple. And what we have right here shows the new product launches in the United Kingdom. And it's, it's pretty interesting, just in that, in that five year period between 2012 2016, just in the UK, there were 184 new product launches.  All sorts of new products coming online, and people, people enjoying them, and potentially buy more and more. So the industry feels pretty good about where things are headed. There's still a lot of education outreach needed to get folks aware of what maple is, how it can be used to try to break people out of that. And the idea that that maple syrup is only up for pancakes or French toast and that's it. By and large, you know, pandemic, not withstanding the people's meal choices and how they, how they have changed and there's not as much sit down large breakfasts happening around the world as perhaps they're used to be. There are, there are some bright spots and there's a lot of syrup being made, and now we're, we're just in the middle of the end of September but the new maple season is coming up. And it certainly looks like they're going to be headed into the year looking to produce more and more we've had reports of quite a bit of purchase of new tubing and taps so we think the industry is continuing to expand, especially with that increased demand for the finished product. And with that, I recognize we are just about out of time until our question and answer period, and I appreciate your, your attention, it's a lot to cover relatively short period of time. And before we get into the details of the Q&A I just want to make sure folks are aware that although I primarily work with maple producers or people looking to get into maple production, I am available. If you have maple questions, feel free to reach out to me. Thank you, Mark. And we do have a lot of questions on a variety of different angles. One is, does the taste of maple syrup vary with the type and variety of soil? That's the classic terroir question that we've, we have not studied extensively. Anytime I get a question about maple flavor, I typically come right back with flavors weird, you know, flavor is an odd thing. It's, it's the chemistry of the thing you're consuming. It's also your upbringing and what flavors you're used to and which ones you like. And if you have a cold and we're just so many factors that go into it. There has been some work done to look at the teasing out subtle differences and geology and other things. It's just difficult to say for sure. Other factors like if you have a job and you only boil every other day rather than boiling every day, you know, all these things can impact flavor. So that's kind of a long way of saying there is potentially an impact on flavor based on where those trees are growing. It's not the only thing that can impact flavor. And if you're interested in marketing your particular syrup against others based on your unique geology. It's probably going to be a steep climb to get your consumers dialed into that it's probably. Again, business of marketing is not my specialty but you might have a more winning strategy by just educating consumers about maple and differentiating it with artificial sweeteners, rather than trying to split, you know, one little region of maple production from another. Okay. Which US states are currently, well I think you've already answered this the leading customers. No, we haven't answered this particular angle I don't think are there certain US states that are currently the leading customers, and are there certain four countries that are the leading customers of Vermont maple products. Yeah, so. Obviously, we sell quite a bit of syrup in Vermont, but there are, there's pretty strong demand in the Midwest. We get some man from the Southwest. It varies a bit. A lot of times if you have an area where folks perhaps have a connection to the Northeast but now live elsewhere, you'll see increased demand. There has been some recent work done I would probably want to review to before I start ranking, you know where each state falls probably refer to that before giving you an answer. In terms of international consumption. We see quite a bit of demand in the UK, Germany, Japan. There's a big ones right now. They're trying to explore a few other places, but it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a conundrum do you start from zero in a place where people have no connection, and you have to start and educate them all about the process or do you try to increase demand in areas where it's already known and just try to boost their consumption. So, we'll leave that the marketing, marketing experts. Okay. Another question. A few years ago, there was news of at least one large scale industrial maple production company coming to Vermont. As this actually occurred. Right, so I touched on this a little bit when we were talking about utilization and what parts of the state. I'd be referring to an operation up in Essex County in Island pond. That's a very large operation they have. It's a little hard to tell but they're in the hundreds of thousands of taps. So that place exists. It came online, essentially from zero. What's interesting though is now that they've gotten so big. If you look back at the, the records, there was actually more growth in other places like Franklin County. Over that same period of time, but it was in an area where there already was quite a bit of maple operations. So, it's very dramatic to go from zero to 200,000 or 300,000 taps, but there was even more taps added in areas where we just associate with maple production. So, yes, there are large operations in Vermont. And I would imagine they'll be continued to be some, although that one is a pretty unique. Franklin County hit both historically and currently such a big producer of maple syrup. Well, I go back to that graph or the slide I had where they have the resource, they have the climate, and they have the tradition, and I would say Franklin County is a strong agricultural county to begin with. And maple was an important part of the farm economy. And so as Franklin County has remained strong in farming, so has their footprint in maple. So you have new operations in Franklin County, but you also have multi-generation operations that continue to grow. So, I think you probably the best answer is, Franklin County is very strong. Not the only farming county in Vermont by any means, but very strong and they continue to hold that. So that leads us into another question is, are there young people going into the maple industry these days? Absolutely. Yep, we do. And there are people who are starting from zero. There are people who have never tapped a tree before but get hooked on it. So there's the next in the line of generations getting into it. So it really is all types. I've been really happy to be involved in the regional tech centers. Many tech centers in Vermont have a maple program associated with their diversified agriculture classes. And we've been able to work with them to develop teaching materials that bring in the newest research and the best understanding of how maple is produced, but not only best quality but also most sustainable. And we've actually incorporated that into what's called a CDE, a career development event, just essentially a competition between schools who do maple education. And they're not flying to see these high schoolers who maybe they have their own small operation, or maybe they're looking to start one when they graduate. There's a lot of interest for sure. That's encouraging. On the other side of the coin, how do you envision that climate change in Vermont might affect the maple supply and industry. Sure. Climate change is a big topic we could spend an hour just covering all the variables so I don't want to, I want to respect the complexity of the issue, but say that climate change is already impacting maple producers we're seeing tapping earlier and before we're seeing season and earlier before, and we're seeing an overall contraction and the number of days that have ideal SAP flow. This, at the same time we're seeing yields go up. And a lot of those that increase in yields can be explained by adoption of best practices, modern tubing and vacuum. So, you know, that's, that's one thing. When we talk about climate change. I want to talk about the timeframe to mean there are short term risks. There's sort of middle term risks, and then there's long term risks. And each one has an amount of uncertainty associated with it. A short term risk, I would say is similar to the situation we saw in 2000, just this past spring, but also maybe more so 2012. In March, we had five days in the 70s some people even gotten into the 80s. And that had a dramatic impact on SAP flow SAP quality turned. And the SAP flow really was reduced as a result of those warm temperatures. We saw a little bit of that in 2021, but not quite as dramatically. That's the biggest short term risk. Midterm, I would say, risks of invasive species, really dramatic flood events that hurt infrastructure, wind events, ice storms, those sort of things that hurt the resource. And long term, it, and by long time I mean 100 years or more, I think we're really talking about where to sugar maple fall, is it remain as competitive in the landscape as it was before. There's some argument to be made that it's not going to be as competitive in the future, and that we might see more red maple become more, more dominant, the tree being tapped. So, try to keep that as short as possible but it's a trick, it's a big overview. It's a pretty dense topic. That was really helpful. Do maple trees, are they subject to disease and infestations and if so, are they able to heal. Yeah, well, that's also a big topic. Sugar maple has been called the Goldilocks tree, you know, it likes it a little bit wet, not too wet, likes it cold, not too cold. So, it tends to be a little less competitive on a wide range of ecological niches so you're not going to see as many pure stands of sugar maple just naturally, as you might see for other other species. And there are sugar maple specific pests, there's their pests, insects and diseases that are more generalists that can impact sugar maple. All those things are an issue. If you have prolonged periods of drought or dry conditions that can also hurt sugar maples health. We're coming off of a summer with relatively low moisture so it is a bit of a concern, not full on drought conditions but it can be an issue. And defoliation from things like forest tent caterpillar can be can be a stress. So when you add those together, it can certainly be be a concern. But natural systems have a way of adapting and adopt it. The week don't survive and sugar maple has been around for a very long time as a species so, you know, there is a natural mortality every year, but that's some of those ones that are pre pre stressed might might not make it but in general, in the short term I think we're okay. However, there's always the unknown, you know the introduction of an invasive insect or some other pest. Elm trees had saw a dramatic impact of the introduction of Dutch Elm disease so I'm not saying that there isn't something that could be introduced but right now things like Asian longhorn beetle, which is a real concern because it favors maples. Those tend to be able to be contained, as opposed to something like emerald ash borer, which doesn't feed on maples, but that one they've got a lot of hard time containing. Okay, I think we have time for one more question. Could you talk a bit about some of the research that has been done, or is being done at UVM or at your research center regarding maple. Oh that's that's a big question to. Boy, I'd love to have you highlights. Yeah. Just a little bit the long term study we're doing, looking at modern levels of SAP extraction high vacuum, comparing that in the same stand and the same growing conditions with more traditional SAP collection the gravity and no tapping. A study that people ask all the time. And, although I call it sort of our coolest boring study because at any given year, we report, but you really need to have that long period of data collection for it to be significant. So I'm excited about that project we're nine years into a long term study but people tap trees for more than nine years we have to continue that study. I'm encouraged by the diversity of questions that we get to ask means everything from tree health, sugar bush health climate change all the way to why does syrup taste the way it does and then my new chemistry involved in one serve versus the next and we have some pretty fantastic facilities at UVM to do those questions, just so you know the proctor maple research center is part of UVM or plant biology department. We have, for instance, building with two evaporators commercial sized evaporators that we can try to answer some questions about the chemistry and flavor of syrup at a scale that's relevant. So we're not doing in beakers we're not doing it, you know, one, one time, one day another way another day. It's very controlled. And it allows us to ask some of these questions like the ones that have been asked already, but you know, in a scale that's relevant to sugar makers, which I think they really appreciate. So I'm pretty excited about that. Yes, Mark, thank you. What an interesting talk on a treasure of Vermont. Thanks for having me. Well, of course we love having you. Thank you everyone and we hope to see you all next week. Have a good week everyone.


today we will be seeing a small topic from oral pathology or oral medicine that is pulpolyp so pulpolyp so there are two types of polyp actually one is gingeral polyp and pulpolyp so gingeral polyp as a name indicates it starts from the gingiva and similar with the pulp so pulpolyp is also known as proliferative pulpitis or chronic hyperplasty chronic hyperplastic pulpitis okay its nature is chronic and it is hyperplastic okay overgrowth and inflammation of the pulp sorry so that is chronic hyperplastic pulpitis it is chronic in nature it is overgrowth of cells with reaction to the inflammation of pulp so it is a irreversible type of pulpitis so it always seen on tooth with extensive K-res exposure and mostly on the young pulp okay mostly on the young pulp that is recently erected tooth which is one to two years of age so in those cases we can see the pulpolyp and resulting from a long-standing and low-grade irritation okay so there will be a long-standing that is why this chronic nature is there chronic nature okay long-standing and low grade is not a high-grade infection very low-grade infection which results in granulation tissue so what are the causes of pulpolyp so mostly it could be due to K-res that is a large open cavity okay so K-res will be like large open cavity and a fracture tooth causing trauma or the dental K-res in young resistant pulp and also it could be due to the mechanical irritation of chewing and bacterial infection okay what are the symptoms so mostly the pulpolyp is a symptomatic it will not show any symptoms okay but masticatory stress can lead to some kind of tenderness it is due to the mastication now localized bleeding mostly it is asymptomatic okay and its appearance is pinkish swollen tissue okay mostly it will be a pinkish one and it will be inflamed and swollen tissue mass so the differential diagnosis we can say the proliferating drinkable tissue proliferating drinkable tissue with a differential diagnosis so the treatment options so how do we treat pulpolyp the first thing is elimination of the polypolyp tissue followed by first we need to eliminate the polypolyp tissue followed by extirpation of the pulp provided tooth can be restored so this should be removed with a periodontal curate or spawn excavator so we can use a periodontal curate or spawn excavator sometimes bleeding will be there but it can be controlled by pressure so the pulp tissue of the chamber is then completely removed and temporary dressing is sealed in and contact with the completed radical pulp tissues so we are not removing the radical pulp tissue at the first sitting where as a radical pulp can be removed on the second sitting okay first we are curating all the pulp tissue polypolyp tissue in the coronal part of the granulation tissue and then we are placing a temporary dressing and we are sending back the patient and in the second visit we can remove the radical pulp and if we have time we can do pulpectomene okay if we don't have time because if the radical pulp removal taking lot of time means we can keep it for the next sitting the pulpectomene can be done on the third sitting okay so this radical pulp removal is done on second sitting and this temporary filling process will be done on the first sitting so that's how we manage pulp polyp so that was all about pulp polyp it's a very small topic from oral pathology it is very commonly asked a short note for university exam so you can write about its causes its introduction part its symptoms its appearance its differential diagnosis and its treatment part the first second and third sitting and you can just differentiate between the pulp polyp and the chinchawal polyp so I'll come for the new topic in the industry and more thank you


Okay, hello. This is documentation team onboarding for two GitHub roles. These roles are issues coordinator and issues reviewer. So, you can find here in Docs Handbook. Can you see this? Should I zoom in or is this visible enough? I'd say you can zoom in a bit. Okay, that's good. Good. So, this is Docs Team Handbook. We have Get Involved, Team Roles, and Non-Project Roles. So, we are going to talk about issues coordinating and we have issues reviewer. So, here you can find what our responsibility is, how to do the work, and some onboarding sessions you can watch to get familiar with documentation team and everything they do. However, this can be outdated very soon or completely wrong because I just wrote this by things that I've been doing. Maybe we will find better workflows, so don't be afraid to propose changes or, you know, maybe propose another role, whatever. This is not set in stone. This is just something to start with. So, the things are happening here, GitHub.com, WordPress, documentation issue tracker, and issues. This is where everything is happening. What you should be familiar with is, first of all, labels. So, we have different sets of labels. Here we have a WordPress version. Then we have project-based labels like Advanced Administration, APIs, Blocked Editors, Advanced Administration. Let me show you. We go to documentation for developers. This is Advanced Administration Handbook. So, the label applies to that. Then we have, we saw here APIs. That's for Common APIs Handbook. So, that's what we mean by project, by Handbook. Blocked Editor is usually referring to this, even though Blocked Editor has their own GitHub repository and issues there and documentation, but sometimes people report issues in our repo as well. Code reference is for this one, which is shared with the core team. Then we have bug, like something wrong with displaying docs or images not showing. So, it's not really a problem. It's not information in docs. It's just something that is structurally wrong. Content review is something that started with reviewing end-user docs and removing two technical information that is not for end-users, removing from the docs. So, it started there, but it can be applied to any content review. Contributor Day, we create issues for every contributor day with some onboarding documentation and list of tasks that we are going to work on. So, this is the label for those issues. Contributor Documentation applies to these contributor day, but also applies to other things, like when we have to update this handbook that we have, or anything that is concerning documentation for contributors. Like this we are making right now is a contributor documentation. That's what we apply. Dev Notes is when the WordPress release happens, so Dev Notes should be written and published. Some of members of the documentation team are reviewing those, so that's happening as well. Developer documentation is umbrella for all of these that we have, even though we don't maintain all of these handbooks. We don't maintain WPCLI, REST API, coding standards. As I said, Block Editor has their own repository, so that's kind of shared. Teams is shared with the Teams team. Code Reference is a hybrid handbook, so parts are maintained by the recommendation team. Parts are generated from the code and WordPress playground is the new one coming from another team, so we are not maintaining that one either. But most of it is maintained by the recommendation team, hence the developer documentation. Duplicate, if we get a duplicate, but it's really difficult to know with a lot of issues when something is duplicate, but when you know it is, just mark it. Enhancement suggestion for improving the existing docs or improving the whole handbook, if there is a discussion about it. External links, we have a policy that we are trying to complete and apply for reviewing external links in documentations because we want all links to be actually beneficial for end-user of the documentation and not to be marketing or commercial, non-existing or pay gateway or something like that, so we want to review all the external links. Field Guide goes together with Dev Notes. Field Guide is post-published during the WordPress release. It's a collection of all Dev Notes and some more documentation, what's new in the release. Good First Issue should be an issue that is easy enough or simple enough for new contributors to contribute. We had a lot of Good First Issues that are too complicated, have too many tasks, so right now I'm working on restructuring Good First Issue. It should be only one task. It should be possible to complete without anyone's help within 30 minutes, so that means that it should have clear directions about how to do the task and only about the task, not explaining all the handbooks and all the documentation and how theme is structured because that's just overwhelming. So I'm working right now on restructuring all that to have a real good first issues so people can be not scared when they try to contribute to the documentation. His screenshot is when issue needs screenshot, but it has already and we will see on the second page there's a labeled needs screenshot. Help Wanted was not really successful. We probably didn't define it very well and like you just with Help Wanted on every issue, we need help with every issue, so I'm not sure about that one, but we have it. Help Hub feedback. Help Hub is a end user documentation. So if you go here, here is end user. This is our end user, but I just click on category and here, for example, this is the article for end user and I'm not logged in. So what we get is comments on this end user. Here are comments and these comments are not publicly displayed. So this is actually the feedback for this article. How can it be improved if something is missing, if information is not good, if layout is broken, whatever. Any feedback with this article, anybody can post here and those comments will appear here as they are in WordPress install. It will never appear here and this is the feedback that occasionally I'm collecting. I also need someone for that but that's another role. So from time to time I go through all of this. Sometimes we have spam like this one, this is spam. So we did that but the actual feedback, I take it and create issue for each of them so you can see how it looks like. It has the URL of the article. It has the username of reporter and quoted the content of the comment. Then we have high priority. Internal tasks are usually used for something that we need to fix in our repo, something to create some new workflow or when we have a triage then we label those issues with internal tasks, invalid when it's not invalid. It's not for us. Medium priority meta is when something is wrong like layout is broken. So something that we or colors are wrong or something like that that is actually built by meta. So that's how we label that. Migration from codecs, we still have some documentation at codecs that is not migrated to other places. Maybe we don't have the right place for that. Maybe it's outdated. Maybe it's a lot and we still don't know how outdated it is. So some parts are waiting when we are migrating that to WordPress. We label migration from codecs. Then again, mix.davnode comes with field guide and davnodes for WordPress release. Mobile app is the newest one. It's a end user documentation but for mobile app. Needs discussion. This one is as well unsuccessful as Needs help. We have these 19 for centuries now and this is probably something we should discuss about and maybe change it somehow. Needs screenshot, you saw the one that has screenshots. So this screenshot. New document is when we have a completely new document that should be written so it's not updating the existing documentation. This is mostly happening with end user documentation when there's new block or some new feature that doesn't have its own article yet. Performance. I created this one for performance documentation that is mostly now moved to advanced administration but some places are still in end user documentation. Plugins is for this plug-in handbook. Question. When you don't really want something to be created or maybe you want, you just don't know, you want to start discussions. So this is like Needs discussion question kind of similar. Recategorization project. This was created by Estela when she was doing the recategorization of end user documentation. Self-assigned is when you use our automated workflow and you actually assign yourself to the issue. That's when this is applied. I will show you all the workflows and all the organization that we have but we will get there. Then we have these status labels. So we have to do in progress, review, ready to publish and done. And this is actually the kind of most important for someone who is going to be performing the role of issue coordinator and reviewer because this is what you're going to search. Then we have themes which is for this handbook but these are mostly maintained by the teams team. Tracking issue was created at the beginning of the repo. In my mind, it is the issue that contains a lot of other small issues. This is the place where you follow the progress of a bigger feature. However, it's not used everywhere like that so I'm not really sure anymore. I don't really use it unless there is one big issue that contains a lot of other issues. Triage is when we create issues summary and tutorial review. I have no idea what it is. This could be, I don't know, something to find out. A typo when the issue is really, really small and you can fix it right away like in a couple of minutes but you actually need access to the documentation to be able to fix it. User documentation is for the whole end user documentation so it was here for all of that. And one fix when something is really not for the documentation team or it doesn't apply or it shouldn't be like when people come and give us a completely new structure of the documentation and say you should do it like this, like we are not. And workflow user story, this is something that I added because I'm working on better workflows and trying to understand each role coming to the repository and using like someone who is completely new and someone who is a season contributor but also someone who is maintaining the repo and someone who is just reviewing something or working on building the workflows behind. So we need to find all the workflows that work for all which is difficult but because many different user roles are using this repo and we want to make it as simple as possible for all of them and to enable them to just do the work not to do manual stuff that shouldn't be done or are just time consuming. So that's what these user stories are. So these are the labels that you should be familiar with and there was supposed to be a documentation about that in our there should be documentation about it in our handbook but I didn't have time to write maybe someone will after this video. So now when you know the labels and you know this is like these status labels are the most important because when I want to work on something and maybe I want to work on something that you know if I want to start working on something I don't want to step on someone else's toes so I want to know that these issues are not even started they're not in progress they're not I just want to start working so when I open this label these really need to be the issues that nobody is working on. Also you would need to be it would be very helpful for you to get familiar with this search with advanced search features. So if you want to label to search label status to do but you also want to search like 6.4 you would add label 6.4 and then you get this but maybe you don't want to work on good first issue because you want to leave that to new people so you say minus label and then you get you know that then maybe you want just high priority then you'll again add or maybe you want to find the label you to find issues that are created only by you maybe you just want to work on your you can find them here and maybe you know hold on maybe you want from specific date maybe you created a bunch of issues at the contributor day and that contributor day was perhaps today or you know the 6th November and you want to say created and then you start with year 2023 minus 11 it's year month and day so today there were no created or maybe you updated a bunch of issues so we want updated and there should be a different date let me try to find something where updates were actually made maybe here so these are open issues created by myself and updated on 25th October so use this this is very helpful tool and you can see here advanced search syntax so you can see the documentation for all of it you can search by username by many different things I found the date and labels like filtering labels very very useful so those are the labels now I want to show you the workflows so here we have github and we have issues template and workflows first let me show you issues template this is something that appears when you want to create a new issue so these are all the templates that are created here and you can change them there or you can create new ones I created these for for good first issue so when you open with first issue for alt attributes you have everything ready all you need to do is change the label here the WordPress version here add the title add label for the WordPress version and put the URL to article here and everything is ready so you have all the documentation how to create how to check these alt attributes also for headings for screenshots for videos so this is something to help you when you create new issues and to help other people you know to have everything there it's consistent if you want to change something on this first issue change it here so this is how it looks like there's a table but this is the template and if you go to edit you will see this please be careful with formatting this because it can become if it's not formatted properly it will not be visible there and it won't be used but everything that is showing in the issue itself is here so you can change that when you are done changing but just make space so you can commit change create new branch new full request and it will create new branch so uh why doesn't give me option let me refresh yes so here you create full request and once it's merged I have ability to skip the review just because it's easier and the template is updated it has as you see here another space so that's how you would edit template I suggest you go there and read all of these you will find it's very easy to create one and very easy to edit one what is very helpful for example here we have screenshots so we already have labels that apply to this issue once it's created so you don't need to you know think about that and it's the the title is almost ready everything here is ready for people so it's very it's simplified for you when you create issue you just put what is different and that's it it is just a couple of things and then we have workflows these workflows are automatizations and for example here are all actions that happen when someone comments on the issue so here we have issues so when let me just see here's one so what happens when you type review like this slash review in the comment then what will happen the label status review will be applied at the same time if there is status in progress on the issue it will be removed here remove label here add label if there is status to do if there is status done it will be removed so only status review will be applied so what we need to add here there is a new label status ready for publish that needs to be added here as well then we have when someone comments slash assign so at this moment it needs to be to have a label to do and also to not be assigned to anyone else so I need to change this and I'm not sure yet how I will change if the other person is assigned but this should definitely be removed like this status to do this was just a starting point test and I think it's successful I think we should have this because github doesn't allow everyone to assign them it allows only people who are contributing to uh who are members of documentation team and who are contributors to this repository so they can assign people and they can change labels so I think this is very helpful for people that they can self assign that and you see here this label is applied so what happens when issue is not assigned to anyone else and it has status to do and someone comments slash assign what will happen uh this status to do will be removed and it will be a status in progress and uh this issue will be assigned to the author of the comment so this is very helpful I want to work more on this and do more work close with that and also we have just these two keywords for now assign and review if found in comments things will happen then add to project this is also very helpful so when you create issue from this repository and you apply for example 6.4 label it will automatically be added to 6.4 project now if you go the other way around if you create issue in the project it will not have these labels so this is why it's better to create issues from here now some of you don't care about this because this is important only for people who are working on WordPress release or in the squad and they are populating these projects but we have other projects as well so we have our handbook project where we apply contributor documentation label so when this label is applied there is a project where this issue will be added automatically also we have issues added to advanced administration once you add advanced administration label then for general and user documentation when help have feedback you saw that one from when I create from comments issues and user documentation is applied then these issues go to general and user documentation it doesn't matter which version then we have add to 6.1 6.3 and 6.4 so you can also add here you know more automatizations for this what is important this needs to have a unique name so you see it doesn't matter it will not have appear anywhere actually it will in actions but it doesn't really matter how you call it it should be something that you understand and it has to be unique then you give the name to this job and you just copy paste all of this and then you change here you check which label it needs it needs label 6.4 so you check you don't run all these tasks to all issues only if 6.4 label is found then you need URL to the project and this is URL to so it's not like hidden anywhere it's the actual URL to the project here it is so you just take that one without these views so when you click on different tab you get the views you need just a URL to the project and I okay this one copy paste this is the talking that I added to the repository and it's just copy paste and then here again you have to say this label now when you have multiple labels like here no it's here help have feedback and user documentation if I want both of these labels to be applied as a condition to be added to the project then I say label operator and but if I want either of these then I would say or and that's it um now we are taking more time than I expected but never mind the label when assigned so here when you assign someone automatically status in progress will be added and status to do will be removed I had other workflows here but it was just messing up I need to think through the logic here label when closed so when issue is closed all the other status labels will be removed and status to do will be applied status done will be applied label when labeled this is interesting right so when we have APIs or code reference or plugins or themes so any any label from the developer documentation project then we will have applied developer documentation label so because people usually forget to add that one but then we don't have the right number of all of that when new issue is created this is what we do we create comment that says heads up WordPress docs issues coordinators that are you folks you will be pinned when new issue is created so that you can check the issue and label them properly so this is already in work but nobody is getting notifications or someone might be getting and this is a notifying team based on issue labels so when block editor is labeled fami gets notification when has screenshots it's fami and akira user documentation again both of them when plugins then there is mike because mike is a rep for plugins handbook and fami and akira are reps for and user documentation then we have themes and reps for themes documentation so you see the the logic here when things are labeled we ping the people who are in charge for this advanced administration have yet status review docs reviewers again you folks will get notified when status review is applied so those are workflows again i suggest you go there read it's fairly simple if you're a developer it's fairly simple to create new workflows you just have to know the syntax and there is documentation about that at github it's really detailed it's up to date it's good documentation so you can learn stuff and how to automate things if you have any ideas how to improve things that's how that's where you can do that so now when you are familiar with the repository how it works what's there what's the work for issue coordinator well you know things are happening here people add more issues people add comments but nobody knows that nobody goes there unless they're pinned and sometimes even when i'm pinned i get a lot of pins i don't have time to go there so what you can do here you can find you know sort by recently update perhaps and do this once a week so go through or you can set the dates here and you know go through issues from last week go and see open each of them see if it's in it has right labels maybe it's it says it's in progress but person commented like i'm done ready for a view you know and they don't know there is the workflow there so you have to change the label basically you want to make sure every issue is properly labeled and in proper column in project if you have permission now i don't know how that works from here because permissions at github are rather complicated and it gets even more complicated when you involve projects but if this is if this said review and here it says to do then this should be changed you know basically github issues coordinator make sure that all the issues are properly labeled and in state where the actual status is so when i go through them like this i don't think i don't open this like to do and it's actually ready for review or something else i when i want to work on this or on any issue if i say that if i search for status to do i want them all to be status to do because it's very i saw it on many kudrums their days it's frustrating for people they're like oh good first issue and they open and it's miles of tasks or status to do and then you know a lot of things already done and this is wrong like we have self assigned and status to do so my workflow failed and that should be changed so we found another bug for issue reviewer what you want to find is uh go to labels and find the review label and preferably they are all labeled properly so these are really ready for review we can change the label to make it like ready for review or something like that if in review is not clear or is confusing maybe i don't know and then so some issues need two reviews so you can be if you don't know about this like okay maybe you don't know about this topic but you want to review just to make sure like everything is here it has screenshots what was the task there should be a list of tasks and you check that all the tasks are done so there are screenshots this is the content change there are no typos uh this is the also this is wrong all the titles should be in a sentence case so you should be familiar with uh with style guide as well a good thing is we have highlights so you can go fast through things that should be um applied uh basically we have the most uh errors with the titles titles should be sentence case not title case uh so when you see something like that you know you can comment like can you please uh do this task as well or just comment like hey this is ready for publishing our first review is done and then you label it properly when there is ready for publish or you know still in review we can add another label for first review second review something like that so those are the tasks let's just to move things forward and to make sure that no uh issues are stailed you can also search here and sort them by the least comment the least recently updated so these are updated like the the further ago and you can go and go through them and see what's happening there what should be done how to move things forward so that's basically it uh do you have any questions so do we need to have some additional access of the GitHub repository uh yeah yeah probably um I I can add you like collaborators and teams let me just see so I can add you here or I can add you to a documentation team there's also docs reviewers team that I created there there was a time when I couldn't add people here that it had to be approved but there is now a place where I can add people by myself so we don't have to ping anyone else and I can add you to the documentation team or docs reviewer or both uh or here like I don't know exactly what is the difference um but if I add you to the team then it is zero so you just have to ping the team you don't have to ping the specific person uh and you will have access to uh actually change labels and you know move things forward and and assign people if they don't know how to assign themselves uh or the label doesn't allow them so you you will get that and you will have uh you know all the access that you need with that okay is there anything unclear or I mean I know there's a lot a lot of a lot of points will come when we start when I start working on it yeah there's a lot and I even didn't know how much is there I thought we will have enough for you know 30 minutes but this is something that was built over a couple of years so and when you don't know all those things it seems complicated but uh now we have this recorded it will be uploaded to uh WordPress.tv and uh it will be available so I think once you get the hang of it it's just a matter of habit of coming once a week spending a couple of hours you know going through the issues and and uh if more people do that then it's less time and we have updated issues and uh over time it will be less work but maintain consistently yeah okay well if there are no questions then we can wrap this up I will upload this when once it's converted and feel free to watch it again and if you have any questions uh or anything maybe you don't want to do this after this session maybe you thought it was something different maybe it's too much I don't know uh so uh the next steps is you think about this and let me know if you're still interested and uh if you have any questions if you have any suggestions please uh send them to me in in Slack or you know in Docs channel wherever you find them find me wherever it's easier for you um just add them and we can continue from there if you're not interested in this no hard feelings you know it this is something that I I've been doing and you know other people partly have been doing from time to time uh but we don't really have a person who is dedicated to this and it would be very helpful for everyone if we had a few people dedicated to this and it will move things faster so that's it take your time think about it and you know just let me know if you're not interested just let me know I'm not interested in that yeah I'm ready for the I'm ready for the issue coordinator okay good good thank you uh well we will then talk um I I feel it's a bit I have to watch it uh two three times because I have no idea about the programming site yeah so we can let you know that's fine that's perfectly fine thank you so much for your time uh and yeah we will move things forward from here thank you thank you thank you bye bye