Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with Omer Assad is the vice president GM of HPE's HCI and primary storage and data management business in Sandeep Singh. Who's the vice president of marketing for HPE's storage division. Welcome gents, great to see you. Great to be here Dave. It's a pleasure to be here Dave. Hey, so last month you guys, you made a big announcement and now you're shining the spotlight on that here at Discover. Sandeep, maybe you can give us a quick recap. What do we need to know? Yeah, Dave, we announced that we're expanding HPE GreenLake by transforming HPE storage to a cloud native software defined data services business. We unveiled a new vision for data that accelerates data driven transformation for our customers. And we introduced a data services platform that consists of two game changing innovations. Our first announcement was a data services cloud console. It's a SaaS based console that delivers the cloud operational agility and it's designed to unify data operations through a suite of cloud data services. Our second announcement is HPE Electra. It's cloud native data infrastructure to power your data edge to cloud and it's managed natively with data services cloud console to bring that cloud operational model to our customers wherever their data lives. Together with the data services platform, HPE GreenLake brings that cloud experience to our customers data across edge and on-premises environments and lays the foundation for our customers to shift from managing storage to managing data. Well, I think it lays the foundation for the next decade. When we entered this past decade, we at Wikibon we use terms like software led that sort of morphed into the software defined data center containers and Kubernetes. Let's zoom out for a minute if we can, Omar. Maybe you could describe the problems that you're trying to address with this announcement. Thanks, Dave. It's always a pleasure talking to you on these topics. So in my role as general manager for primary storage, I speak with hundreds of customers across the board and I consistently hear that data is at the heart of what our customers are doing and they're looking for a data driven transformative approach to their business. But as they engage in these things, there are two challenges that they consistently face. The first one is that managing storage at scale is rife with complexity. So while storage has gotten faster in the last 20 years, managing a single array or maybe two or three arrays has gotten simpler over time. But managing storage at scale when you deploy fleets of storage as customers continue to gather, store and lifecycle that data, this process is extremely frustrating for customers. Still, IT administrators are firefighting, they're unable to innovate for their business because now data spans all the way from edge to core to cloud. And then with the advent of public cloud, there's another dimension of multi-cloud that has been added to their data sprawl. And then secondly, what we consistently hear is that IT administrators need to shift from managing storage to managing data. What this basically means is that IT has a desire to mobilize, protect and provision data seamlessly across its lifecycle and across the locations that it is stored at. This ensures that IT leaders and also people within the organization understand the context of the data that they store and they operate upon. Yet data management is an extremely big challenge. And it is a web of fragmented data silos across processes, across infrastructure, all the way from test and dev to administration to production to backup to lifecycle data management. And so up till now, data management was tied up with storage management and this needs to change for our customers, especially with the diversity of the application workloads as they're growing and as customers are expanding their footprint across a multi-cloud environment. And just to add to Omar's response there, we recently conducted a survey that was actually done by ESG. And that was a survey of IT decision makers. And it's interesting what it showcased. 93% of the respondents indicated that storage and data management complexity is impeding their digital transformation. 95% of the respondents indicated that solving storage and data management complexity is a top 10 business initiative for them. And 94% want to bring the cloud experience on premises. You know, I'll chime in. I think as you guys move to the sort of software world and container world, affinity to developers. Omar, you talked about things like data protection and we talk about security being bolted on all the time. Now it's designed in. It's done at sort of the point of creation, not as an afterthought. And that's a big change that we see coming. But let's talk about what also needs to change as customers make the move from this idea of managing storage to managing data. Omar, maybe you can take that one. That's a very interesting problem. What are the things that have to be true in order for us to move into this new data management model? So Dave, one of the things that the public cloud got right is the cloud operational model, which sets the standard for agility and a fast pace for our customers. In a classic IT on-prem model, if you ever wanted to stand up an application or if you were thinking about standing up a particular workload, you're going to file a series of IT tickets and then you're at the mercy of whatever complex processes exist within organization. And depending on what the level of approvals are within a particular organization, standing up a workload can take days, weeks or even months in certain cases. So what cloud did was it brought that level of simplicity for someone that wanted to instantiate an app. This means that the provisioning of underlying infrastructure that makes that workload possible needs to be reduced to minutes from days and weeks. But so what we are intending to do over here is to bring the best of both worlds together so that the cloud experience can be experienced everywhere with ease and simplicity and the customers don't need to change their operating model. So it's blending the two together and that's what we are trying to usher in into this new era where we start to differentiate between data management and storage management as to independent things. Great, thank you for that Omer. Sandeep, I wonder if you could share with the audience the vision that you guys unveiled. What does it look like? How are you making it actually substantive and real? Yeah, Dave, that's also a great question. Across the board, it's time to reimagine data management. Everything that Omer shared, those challenges are leading to customers needing to break down the silos and complexity that plagues these distributed data environments. And our vision is to deliver a new data experience that helps customers unleash the power of data. We call this vision Unified Data Ops. Unified Data Ops integrates data-centric policies to streamline data management, cloud native control to bring the cloud operational model to where customers data lives and AI-driven insights to make the infrastructure invisible. It delivers a new data experience to simplify and bring that agility of cloud to data infrastructure, streamline data management and help customers innovate faster than ever before. We're making the promise of Unified Data Ops real by transforming HPE storage to a cloud native software-defined data services business and introducing a data services platform that expands HPE GreenLake. I mean, you talk about the complexity. I look at it as you kind of almost embracing the complexity, saying, look, it's going to keep getting more complex. As the cloud expands to the edge on-prem, cross-cloud, it gets more complex underneath. What you're doing is you're almost embracing that complexity and putting a layer over it and hiding that complexity from the end customer. And so they could spend their time doing other things. Over, I wonder if you can maybe talk a little bit more about the data services console. Is it sort of another software layer to manage infrastructure? What exactly is it? It's a lot more than that, Dave. And you're 100% right. It's basically we're attempting in this release to attack that complexity head-on. So simply put, data services cloud console is a SaaS-based console that delivers cloud operational model and cloud operational agility to our customers. It unifies data operation to a series of cloud data services that are delivered on top of this console to our customers in a continuous innovation stream. And what we have done is going back to the point that I made earlier, separating storage and data management and putting the strong suites of each of those together into the SaaS-delivered console for our customers. So what we have done is we've separated data and infrastructure management away from physical hardware to provide a comprehensive and a unified approach to managing data and infrastructure wherever it lives. From a customer's perspective, it could be at the edge, it could be in a colo, it could be in their data center, or it could be a bunch of data services that are deployed within the public cloud. So now our customers with data services cloud console can manage the entire lifecycle of their data from all the way from deployment, upgrading and optimizing it from a single console from anywhere in the world. This console is designed to streamline data management with cloud data services that enable access to data. It allows for policy-based data protection. It allows for an organizational wide search on top of your storage assets. And we deliver basically a 360-degree visibility to all your data from a single console that the customer can experience from anywhere. So if you look at the journey, the way we're deciding to deliver this, so the first, in its first incarnation, data services cloud console gives you infrastructure and cloud data services to start, to do data management along with that. But this is that foundation that we are placing in front of our customers, the SaaS console through which we get, touch our customers on a daily basis. And now as our customers get access to this SaaS platform, on the backend, we will continue to roll in additional services throughout the years on a true SaaS-based innovation base for our customers. And these services will be ranging all the way from data protection to multi-cloud data management, all the way to visibility, all the way to understanding the context of your data as it's stored across your enterprise. And in addition to that, we're offering a consistent, revised, unified API, which allows for our customers to build automation against their storage infrastructure without ever worrying about that. As infrastructure changes, the API proof points are going to break for them. That is never going to happen because they're going to be programming to a single SaaS-based API interface from now on. Right, and that brings in this idea of infrastructure as code. And we're coaching to talk about as a service, to talk about GreenLake. And my question is always, okay, tell me what's behind that and if you're talking about boxes and widgets, that's a problem and you're not. You're talking about services and APIs and microservices and that's really the future model and infrastructure as code and ultimately data as code is really part of that. So all right, so you guys, I know some of your branding folks, you guys give deep thought to this. So the second part of the announcement is the new product brands send deep. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Sure, ultimately delivering the cloud operational model requires cognitive data infrastructure and that has been engineered to be natively managed from the cloud. And that's why we have also introduced HPE Electra. Omar, can you perhaps describe HPE Electra even more? Oh, absolutely. Thank you, Sandy. So with HPE Electra, we're launching a new brand of a cloud native hardware infrastructure to power our customer's data all the way from edge to the core to the cloud. The releases are smaller models for the edge than at the same time having models for the data center and then expanding those services into the public cloud as well, right? All these hardware devices, Electra hardware devices are cloud native and powered by our data services cloud console. We're announcing two models with this launch, HPE Electra 9000. This is for our mission critical workloads. It has its history and bases in HPE Primera. It comes with 100% availability guarantee. It's the first of its type in the industry. It comes with standard support contract, no special verbiage required. And then we're also launching HPE Electra 6000s. These are based in our history of nimble storage systems. These are for business critical applications, especially for that mid range of the storage market, optimizing price performance and efficiency.  And then they both deliver a unified infrastructure and data management experience through the data services cloud console. And at the back end unified AI ops experience with HPE InfoSight is seamlessly blended in along with the offering for our customers. So this is what I was talking about before. It's sort of not your grandfather storage business anymore. This is something that is part of that unified vision, that layer that I talked about, the APIs, the programmability. So Omar, you're reaching into new territory here. Maybe you can give us an example of how the customers experience, what that looks like. Excellent, love today. So essentially what we're doing is we're changing the storage experience to a true cloud operational model for our customers. These recent announcements that we just went through along with Sandeep, they expand the cloud experience that our customers get with storage as a service with HPE GreenLake. So a couple of examples to make this real. So the first of all is simplified deployment. So IT no longer has to go through complex startup and deployment processes. Now all you need to do is these systems are shipped and delivered to the customer's data center. Operational staff just need to rack and stack and then leave. Connect the power cable, connect the network cable and the job's done. From that point onwards, data services console takes over where you can onboard these systems, you can provision these systems. If you have a pre-existing organization-wide security as well as standard profile setup in data services console, we can automatically apply those on your behalf and bring these systems online. From a customer's perspective, they can be anywhere in the world to onboard these systems. They could be driving in a car, they could be sitting on a beach and these systems are automatically onboarded through this cloud operational model which is delivered through the SaaS application for our customers. Another big example that I'd like to shed light on is intent-based provisioning. So Dave, typically provisioning a workload within a data center is an extremely spreadsheet-driven trial and error kind of a task. Which system do I land it on? Is my existing SLA going to be affected? Which systems are loaded? Which systems are loaded enough that I put this additional workload on it and the performance doesn't tank? All of these decisions are trial and error on a constant basis. With cloud data services console, along with the Electra new systems that are constantly in a loopback information feeding typical analytics through the console, all you need to do is to describe the type of the workload and the intent of the workload in terms of block size SLA that you would like to experience. At that point, data services console consults with InfoSight at the backend. We run through thousands of data points that are constantly being given to us by your fleet and we come back with a few recommendations. You can accept our recommendation and at that time, we go ahead and fully deploy this workload on your behalf or you can specify a particular system and then we will try to enforce the SLA on that system. So it completely eliminates the guesswork and the planning that you have to do in this regard. And last but not the least, one of the most important things is, upgrades has been a huge problem for our customers. And typically oftentimes, when you're not in this constant loopback communication with your customers, it often is a big challenge to identify which release or which bug fix or which update goes on to which particular machine. All of that has been completely taken away from our customers and fully automated. We run thousands of signatures across our install base. We identify which upgrades need to be curated for which machines in a fleet for a particular customer and then if it applies to that customer, we present it and if the customer accepts it, we automatically go ahead and upgrade the system. And last but not the least from a global management perspective, now a customer has an independent data view of their data estate independent from a storage estate and data services console can blend the two to give a consistent view or you can just look at the fleet view or the data view. It's kind of the holy grail. I mean, I've been in this business a long time and I think IT people have dreamt about, you know this kind of capability for a long, long time. I wonder if we could sort of stay on the customers for a moment here and talk about what's enabled now. Maybe we're talking digital transformation. I joke about the joke and not funny. The force marched to digital with COVID and we really wasn't planful, but customers really want to drive now that digital transfer. Some of them were on the back burner and now they're moving to the front burner. What are the outcomes that are enabled here, Omar? Excellent, so on a typical basis for a traditional IT customer, this cloud operational model means that, you know information technology staff can move a lot faster and they can be a lot more productive on the things that are directly relevant to their business. They could get up to 99% of the savings back to spend more time on strategic projects or best of all, spend time with their families rather than managing and upgrading infrastructure and fleets of infrastructure. For line of business owners, the new experience means that their data infrastructure can be provisioned with a self-service on demand type of capability. They necessarily don't have to be in the data center to be able to make those decisions. Capacity management, performance management, all of that is tied in and presented to them wherever they are in easy to consume SaaS based models and especially for data innovators, whether it's DBAs, whether it's data analysts, they can start to consume infrastructure and ultimately data as a code to speed up their app development. Because again, the context that we are bringing forward is the context of data decoupling it from actually storage management. Storage management and data management are now two separate domains that can be presented through a single console to tie the end to end picture for a customer. But at the end of the day, what we have felt is that customers really, really want to rely and move forward with data management and leave infrastructure management to machine-oriented tasks which we have completely automated on their behalf. So I'm sure you've heard, you got the memo about HP going all in on as a service. It's clear that the company's all in. How does this announcement fit in to that overall mission, Sandeep? Dave, we believe the future is edge-to-cloud and our mission is to be the edge-to-cloud platform as a service company. And as HPE transforms, HPE GreenLake is our unified cloud platform. HPE GreenLake is how we deliver cloud services and agile cloud experiences to customers' applications and data across edge-to-cloud. With the storage announcement that we made recently, we announced that we're expanding HPE GreenLake with as a service transformation of the HPE storage business to a cloud-native software-defined data services business. And this expands storage as a service, delivering full cloud experience to our customers' data across edge and on-prem environments. Across the board, we're committed to being a strategic partner for every one of our customers and helping them accelerate their digital transformation. Yeah, that's where the puck's going, guys. Hey, as always, great conversation with our friends from HPE Storage. Thanks so much for the collaboration and congratulations on the announcements. And I know you're not done yet. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. You're very welcome. And thank you for being with us for HPE Discover 2021. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there.


Approximately 660 billionaires in the United States increased their wealth in the pandemic just during the pandemic by about $1.8 trillion. In other words, the entire stimulus bill was $1.9 trillion, so they could afford to have paid for the entire stimulus and be no worse off than they were when the pandemic started. The very rich in this country have used philanthropy as a public relations device to take away attention from the fact that they are basically cleaning up. Inequality increased dramatically during the pandemic, and the little bits that billionaires and the very rich give out in philanthropy was just a tiny sliver of the amount their fortunes grew during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, for example, provided during the pandemic $100 million to food banks, and everybody applauded. Isn't that wonderful of Jeff Bezos? Well, yes, that was good, but $100 million, that's 11 days worth of Jeff Bezos' income off of his assets. 11 days, folks, over the last five years, the Gates Foundation earned from its investments $28.5 billion. How much of that did the Gates Foundation actually pay out in charities, charitable contributions, $23.5 billion? Doesn't that seem a little bit odd? But worse, it is actually ironically paid for by the rest of us, because you see there's something called the charitable deduction. A charitable deduction or the charitable deduction allows the wealthy to reduce their taxable incomes by the amount that they give in charity. That comes to about $44 billion a year.  If you want to give it to concert halls and operas that you frequent, so you can have your name etched in the marble, go ahead, do that. We'll give you that $44 billion you decide instead of we, the people of the United States, deciding how our tax money is going to be used. Another thing that's troubling is conflicts of interest. I mean, the Gates Foundation provided $250 million to companies in which the Gates Foundation actually holds stocks and bonds. If that's not a conflict of interest, I don't know what is because remember, all of these contributions are subsidized by American taxpayers. A lot of people look at the charitable contributions of the ultra wealthy and they say, oh, isn't that wonderful? We don't need as a country to worry as much about the very poor or about our social safety nets that are coming apart. What they don't realize is that even if you add up all these charitable contributions together, there are small portion of what the government can and should be doing and has done for the poor in the past. So we can't rely on these charitable contributions even if they actually did go to the poor. They would not be a substitute in any way for public assistance.


Thank you for that introduction. I'm Claire Diaz Ortiz and I lead social innovation at Twitter And I'm also the author of a book called Twitter for good which came out a few months ago Which basically talks about how people use Twitter to make a difference in the world and today I'm going to be talking to you about The connection the inextricable connection between mobile technology and social good and this this is a topic that I am Extremely passionate about this is why I wake up in the morning and why I go to bed at night This is what I do in my daily work, and it is what I do as my hobby It is trying to find connections between technology and social good and trying to find a way to make the world a better place Using the technology we have at our fingertips So today I'm going to be talking about the four essential qualities that mobile technology offers that are particularly Poised to creating social change in this world, but before I talk about those qualities I'm going to tell you a story and This story is about the best phone that I have ever owned Now it's here if you can't see it I just tweeted about it also and this is a Sony Ericsson something or other if you heard Chris Hutchinson from milk talk earlier He was talking about some of the crappy phones in Nairobi crappy Nokia phones. Well, this is not much better But this is by far the best phone I have ever owned and I'm going to tell you why and then I'm going to tell you what happened When I almost lost this phone. So come with me. Let's go back seven years to 2005 Where I was working For a stint in Jaipur, India, and it was hot as hell in India that summer and I'm from California and California is warm But nothing like Rajasthan in the summer But more than the heat I Was annoyed because I could not get online I was working at a university The internet was out all the time. I would walk a mile which felt like forever in that heat to an internet cafe It would be out. I was going crazy and I said, you know, it is time for me to get my own connection So I went to a mobile store and an hour later. I emerged with this and I spent what for me was a small fortune on this at the time over three hundred dollars and After an hour with the man in the store He showed me how to connect my Bluetooth dongle to my clunky laptop and how to bring the connection into my fingers and into the laptop And as I left I thought I have all the power in the world in my hands right now. I can do anything and For the next two years I Traveled to over 40 countries the vast majority of that time in rural areas and the way I lived and worked and breathe was through this pathetic dirty Phone and after two years of that travel. I said I want to settle I want to be in one place for a long period of time because I cannot handle all the movement So I went to an orphanage in Kenya now normal people when they say I want to settle I want to stop traveling. They don't go to an orphanage in Kenya to live But suffice it to say that is a story for another day I will tell you now that simply fate collided with me on a road in Kenya and told me this is where I should be for the year so I went to live in an orphanage and That year 2007 was undoubtedly one of the most important years of my life It was the year I met my son Who is now graduating high school in the USA it is the year I started using Twitter I was one of the first residents of Kenya to actively use the platform and it is the year that I Clarified my professional passion for marrying technology with social good Now I'm going to tell you a story about something that happened on one random day in Kenya that changed Things for me and that might have changed things even greater One day in Kenya it was 6 p.m. And 6 p.m. In neary Kenya Which is rural Kenya a few hours outside of Nairobi in the shadows of Mount Kenya right on the equator? It's 6 p.m. That means the Sun is coming down It is coming down fast and it comes down at the same time every day every year Because that is what I just like to live on the equator And I retired to my bedroom to do some work I had a few hours for a deadline. I was meeting in the US at the time I was living in this orphanage as a volunteer running a nonprofit organization But I was still working with my small internet company out in the US So I needed the lifeline of my phone to get my deadlines done each day. So I went into my bedroom I didn't have a desk and I sat down at my bed and I connected my Bluetooth dongle with my laptop and I placed my phone on the window ledge behind me because the window ledge would hopefully get better signal and I connected now if you were living in Kenya in 2007 and you were using the safari calm Internet service, you knew it was not reliable And so when it cut out, I thought nothing of it. Oh, there it goes it cut out again And I fiddled with the Bluetooth dongle, but it wasn't helping and then I saw the notice no device Connected and I said well what on earth is going on now has the phone dropped and I looked behind me on the ledge behind me The ledge of the window and the phone wasn't there And I said oh, okay, it must have dropped behind the bed Or it must have dropped outside the window and I pulled out the bed and there was no phone And I looked out the open window and there was no phone and I said well, this is strange and Then I thought oh a child has taken it It's a silly joke a bad joke but a silly one and so I go to the window and I yell and there's an alleyway outside the Window where all the orphans in the orphanage do their laundry and it was quiet and usually it's full of loud kids Washing things and I go out to that window and I yell Charles Moy bring me back my phone No one said anything and then I said Jimmy Jimmy James. I see you bring me my phone There was no one there and in that moment. I realized what had happened And what had happened was terrifying on two levels and I'm going to tell you why one Well, what happened was is that someone had stolen the phone? This is a closed compound. It had to be a child. There are a hundred and seventy children There are two full-time staff members and there was me Now this is terrifying because I was not going to get my work in that night Surely if the phone was stolen it was going to take me a week to deal with getting all the way down to Nairobi and buying a new phone and coming back But it was terrifying on a second level for much graver reasons and that reason is because the Cardinal sin of living in this orphanage with a hundred and seventy children and two staff members was stealing if you steal You are kicked out and all the children knew this And so I now had in front of me a situation in which I knew a Child had stolen my phone and I knew what would happen Scared I left my bedroom and I went and I knocked on the door of the orphanage manager's office and I said Eunice Eunice something bad has happened a child has taken my phone and she said no No that can't have happened our children. They do not steal no Claire And she said we will go look your room again. We will go search. She came into my room She searched the phone was not there and she said oh my and she said we will go tell Guka Guka is a cuckoo you word for grandfather and the grandfather and founder of this orphanage of two Mayani children's home in Niri Kenya was an 85 year old man who is one of the most famed Christian pastors in East Africa and he had created This home out of nothing out of hope out of sweat out of tears out of faith and these children regarded him as their God But he was a strong disciplinarian We went and told Guka. We said Guka The phone has been stolen and he said oh no, this is bad and he rang the bell And if you were a child at to I to Mayani children's home in that year or in any year around that and you heard the bell You came running fast The bell only rang a few times a year and it meant something bad had happened and so quickly all the 170 children Grounded up into the dining hall where they had recently finished their dinner and they sat on the little benches and Guka said to them a Phone has been stolen and there was silence and he said you know the consequences of this But if you confess now, I will forgive you and no one said anything and Then he said okay. I will give you one more chance if you confess now. I will forgive you And no one said anything So then he said fine everyone sits here in their seats until we find the phone And he called three of the oldest boys And he said search the compound for the phone And we all sat on the benches me and all the children waiting for them to find the phone and half an hour later The three boys came in holding the phone here. It is Guka. We found the phone It had been on a high ledge in the boys outhouse Now I Was a little bit thrilled that the phone was found but I was still sad about what was about to happen in front of me And Guka took the phone and he said since no one confessed you know the consequences of this But if you want to be forgiven in your heart you will still Tell us all you did this now so that we do not have to sit here all night and in the back of the room there was a rustle and A nine-year-old boy stood up And everyone was silent as he said Guka Guka it was me me. I took the phone Nuka looked at him and he said why Because if this was a Western child a nine-year-old who had stolen a phone in Boston, Massachusetts say It might have made sense the child would use the phone the child would sell the phone the child would do something with the phone But this child this nine-year-old is an AIDS orphan. He has no mother. He has no father He likely has no relatives. Otherwise, he wouldn't have ended up at the orphanage since so many children in the community are always clamoring to be in and Surely if he even knows anyone in his small community in 2007 with a mobile phone surely there were some Less so than now there were some if he knew of any of them There's no way in God's green earth that he knew their phone number So what was he gonna do with the phone and Guka looked at him and he said why? Why would you do this and the little boy looked up and he said? to call and Guka said but but you have no one to call and this is what we were all thinking This is what we were all thinking and Guka said who would you have called? and the little boy He said anyone and This was when my heart broke I ran out of that dining hall and I ran into the dark night With all the stars and I started weeping because this is one of the saddest things I had ever heard This was a nine-year-old boy who was risking his life to make a phone call to connect with someone Because do not be misunderstood getting kicked out of this orphanage is risking your life for these children But this is what it happened Now I tell you this story not To depress you But because I think it shows at its core our base human desire to connect and In this story is the kernel of why mobile technology has such a strong power to create Incredible social change in the world around us Today I'm going to be talking about the four essential ways that mobile technology does this the four qualities that mobile technology possesses That are so perfectly poised to creating social change And we're going to start With connection These are some of the children I lived with in 2007 and I've told you why connection is important But now I'm going to tell you about people who are using the essential quality of connection on mobile phones to transform the world This is Mark Horvath And Mark Horvath is passionate about Uplifting homeless populations in the USA Now if you live in the USA, you know that one of the sad realities of our developed nation is that we cannot Care for all of our citizens. We cannot house. We cannot feed. We cannot employ everyone there And as a result there are homeless people in the streets in major cities And if you know anything about charity work, you know that homeless homelessness Is not a sexy charity topic. It is not a cute puppy or a smiling child Homeless people are usually older often men Veterans often times with mental and physical disabilities. They are the people you walk by on the streets and Mark Horvath the man here knows that and that's why when he created a nonprofit organization Aimed to help homeless people connect He called it invisible people An invisible people is The name he chose because he knows what it means to be invisible Mark Horvath doesn't just work with homeless people He has been homeless and not once but twice Once in the 70s on the streets of LA. He then climbed out of that became a television executive traveled the world and And then lost it all again and the second time he lost it about seven years ago lost his lost his shirt lost His house ended up on the streets That was the time that made him realize that he wanted to use the skills He had in technology to help other homeless people And so what Mark Horvath does today is he travels the US telling the stories of homeless on The streets and he does that through video and he does that through audio and then he sends it out through social media And this in itself is incredible because he is sharing incredible stories But Mark Horvath does something much more than this also He doesn't just connect the stories he finds with the outside world He helps homeless individuals connect with one another and when he first told me about his work I said but mark I there's something I just don't understand. I mean forgive me and I and I don't know in a lot enough about homeless populations, but But how do they connect if they don't have a mobile phone? And he looked at me like I was crazy and he said oh you think homeless people don't have mobile phones in the US and Then he told me that some vast majority of homeless people in the US have phones that they've either saved up to buy or that they've Been given by a shelter because shelters give out homeless phones for safety security reasons and he said If I ever became homeless again that would be the first thing I would buy because it is a connection as a homeless individual in the US you feel alone and This is a way to not only connect with individuals, but it's a way to connect with resources that you need and this This impresses me. I want to tell you the story of someone else who is using the incredible power of Mobile technology to connect with the outside world And this person is one of the most amazing people I have ever met and her name is Katie Davis and this this is not Katie Davis I will tell you who this is in a moment Katie Davis looks nothing like this girl Katie Davis is white She's 23 and she's from a wealthy suburb of Nashville and when Katie was 17 She came to her parents and said mom dad. I feel called by God to become a missionary and To work with orphans in Africa and her parents said oh Katie That's such a wonderful desire honey But but you're from this beautiful town of Brentwood and you're gonna go to to college And you're gonna have a great career and they sent Katie on her way But a few months later Katie came back and said mom dad I Found this great opportunity to go to Uganda for just three weeks just a three week trip. Can we please go? And her mother said oh, I guess this will get it out of her system and they went to Uganda It didn't get out of Katie's system and Uganda She realized she never wanted to leave and the only way her mother got her on the plane Was because Katie made her mother promise that she could spend a year after graduating from high school living in Uganda and working with orphan and vulnerable children and So that's what Katie did after high school. She moved to Uganda and She started as an English teacher living in a small dormitory and in a school and Working with orphans at night and after a few months She realized no my calling is to be with the children all day to be with these orphan and vulnerable children all day And she moved into a large house that had four bedrooms And she said what am I gonna do with such a house, but it had fallen in her lap and it seemed to make sense and Then slowly she started her own nonprofit organization called a mazama, which means truth in Lugandan And slowly slowly slowly more and more children came to eat in her feeding program in her yard In her house and she said oh this makes sense This is why I needed such a big house because of all the children eating in my yard And that was what she thought for months until a house fell down on her street and when I say house It's not a real house. It's a shack a shack fell down in a rainstorm and when it fell down The community realized that the people living in the shack were not adults They were little kids two little girls And the community said oh we can't handle this anymore. What are we gonna do? We need to deal with this these children can't be living by themselves in this shack that now doesn't even exist and Katie said Well, I have four bedrooms in this big house. They can stay with me And so they did and a few weeks later when one of the girls started calling Katie mama Katie said yes Today Katie has adopted 19 children Katie runs a feeding program that feeds 1500 children Katie is 23. She's single She lives in Uganda and a house with her 19 adopted children Now some people say That Katie is like a mother Teresa, but I do not agree I think Katie is far more effective than mother Teresa and the reason I say that and the reason I have told you Katie's story is because Katie has been able to galvanize others to come in on her movement And that's because the second Katie landed in Uganda the first time she started a blog a Little blog talking about what she was doing And then that blog grew bigger and then she got on Twitter and then she got on Facebook and now the whole world Starting from her rich suburb in Nashville and reaching out To the rest of the 192 countries in the world can see what Katie is doing and can be inspired Because even if you cannot be Katie and you cannot adopt 19 Ugandan girls and Live in rural Uganda you might be able to do something by following her story And this is how the power of connection and mobile technology has allowed Katie Davis One person to truly influence the world I'm gonna talk about information now. We've talked about connection now We'll talk about information the spread of open information is perhaps the most critical thing that mobile technology has helped us with This is my favorite journalist, this is Nick Kristoff next Chris Nick Kristoff is one of the best journalists on Twitter He's won the Pulitzer Prize twice the first one long before Twitter existed and he is passionate About empowering women around the world. He wrote a book recently called half the sky Which which has had huge success because of its message That we need to help women out of situations of sex trafficking out of poverty out of uneducation And Nick Kristoff has done many amazing things on Twitter He takes his phone everywhere and he reports what he's doing and he along with many other journalists has done an incredible job of Changing what we think about journalism today But Nick Kristoff Hasn't done something as amazing as this in a long time and this was in November when he live tweeted a brothel raid And this is a powerful thing And we maybe forget what this means because we live in a world of Twitter and Facebook And we live in a world where we are getting news in the second that it happens But this could not have happened five years ago and The implications of a journalist live tweeting something so powerful is Incredibly far-reaching now You don't have to be a journalist to create this kind of news though This is a photo from when a plane landed in the Hudson River and this photo was taken by someone in one of the rescue boats and This photo immediately which was then set out be taken via Twitter was the photo Accompanying the article about this terrible crash for so long and this was just taken by a person. It wasn't taken by a journalist The Arab Spring is clearly our best lesson of this. I Will give one small example from that and that is that the January 25th hashtag hashtag JAN 25 Was not created by a journalist It was not created by Andy Carvin from MPR or from Nick Kristoff or from anyone from Al Jazeera Who was in Cairo on January 25th of 2011 it was created by a 21 year old female student and it Was the Twitter hashtag that brought all the tweets on that day and in the weeks and months to follow together This is the best story though. This is James Buck and James Buck reminds us all that the power of mobile technology to tell information to share information is real time It is instantaneous and that is why it works so well James Buck is a photojournalist and blogger from California and in 2008 again This is not 2011 or 2012 in 2008 James Buck went to Cairo to cover some political protests He found himself in a predicament at one of these protests He was arrested and when they put him in the back of the cop car They did not take his mobile phone and so he sent out a tweet that said arrested Maybe he sent it via a smartphone. Maybe he sent it via SMS. I Don't know but I do know that it said arrested and I do know that within hours This tweet had connected his family and friends back home and the US ambassador to get him out and The next tweet he sent was freed and this is the power of News the power of the information That we can send to be a mobile technology when each of us are journalists and information purveyors and change makers The third thing I want to talk about is geolocation and Disaster relief experts say that Perhaps the single greatest Change in disaster response efforts in the last generation if not the last century has been the introduction of the mobile phone into daily life and into the hands of many of the people that are Experiencing a disaster and we have seen this time and time again And we are almost becoming blind to it Blind to the fact that this has completely changed the way people think about disasters and the way people think about relief Ultimately a mobile phone allows The people in trouble to connect with the people who have the support These are pictures from Japan, but these could be pictures from anywhere. These could be pictures from Haiti or Chile or Turkey These could be pictures of Hurricane Irene I Want to tell you the story of Ushahidi, which is a nonprofit organization that if you know about mobile technology You may have heard of and Ushahidi means to bear witness Kiswahili word It means to bear witness and this organization started in 2008 in Kenya after some political violence there there was a disputed presidential election and Many riots were breaking out in Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa, which is right outside Nairobi in Nairobi And some individuals came together and they said we need to find a way to place The concerns that people are having in this slum on a map so that people know where to go or where to find water Or where to avoid and so they came together this crisis mapping organization called Ushahidi And now there are many crisis mapping organizations that do similar things and this is just one example here This is health map. This is an initiative I helped work on last year nine months after the Haiti earthquake the cholera epidemic struck so far the cholera epidemic in Haiti has killed over 6,500 people disease scientists are saying that the new Incredible way to track the spread of an outbreak is via Crisis maps just like these which you can see it's hard to see from there, but essentially people are reporting Incidences and reporting where relief is and connecting The people that need the support to the people that have the support to give and that's the essential purpose of How mobile technology is changing our response to disasters the last thing I want to talk about is economic opportunity because There is perhaps no sure way to positive change in our world than to create then by creating economic opportunities And this may be the area in which we are most familiar as a mobile user You hear amazing stories about how people are Transforming the way we send money the way we make money the way we work via mobile phones, and I just want to share a small story about this I'm going to tell you the story of Marlon Parker Marlon Parker is a South African and He started a nonprofit technology company called restoration labs It's called our labs and I met him because when I was doing interviews for my book Twitter for good Someone told me there is this man in South Africa, and he has created Twitter schools for gang members, and I said what does that even mean? And so I talked to Marlon, and he said yes in the Cape Flats in Slum area outside of Cape Town. He had Created Twitter schools essentially social media training Schools for gang members who wanted to get out of the life. They had been leading and These schools taught them the tools of social media gave them the phone gave them an internet connection and Taught them how to use it and then provided them with small and micro work opportunities And now Marlon has been involved in many many such endeavors over the years And this was just the one that he first introduced me to one of the others that Marlon has worked on Has to do with agricultural Farmers as you've heard as many of you in this room have heard Farmers lives are changing because of mobile phones And this is a farmer here in Ghana in this picture. He is next to his crop. I don't know what kind of crop I don't know And he is holding his mobile phone and this man is in Ghana But he could be anywhere because what is happening now is that if you are a farmer in the Andes Growing coffee and you need to bring it down to Cusco You don't have to take all your coffee and take all your mules and walk down for five days and then see if the price is right You can use mobile technology to find out Find out the prices find out the information you need So that you can make better sales make more money and what happens to this man after he finds out the information He needs about whatever product he wants to sell is that then he can go and he can send that money He can you and pay side to send it He can send it to his mother in another rural village And she can pick it up at the health clinic to pay her bill and the world is changing because of things like this and Because of the ways that mobile phones have given us the power Someone a an Egyptian blogger told me that she believed that mobile phones were hand with the equivalent of handheld democracy And and I agree with her, but I would go one step further and I would simply say that mobile phones give us handheld power We can share our experiences with the world learn about the experiences of others and Ultimately change the world as a result So I want to share these stories with you today And I hope that as you move forward in the next 24 hours of this conference that you feel inspired To think of ways that you can make a difference using the skills that you have More people on this planet have access to mobile phones than have access to clean water And I will end this speech with the first sentence of my book Twitter for good Because of this very fact the greatest challenge of our age is to figure out ways to use this technology to make a positive difference Now I don't care if you're working with AIDS orphans or if you are doing financial counseling in Seattle You can do something to make a positive difference in the world using your skills and your knowledge about mobile technology And I hope you will do that. Please join me on this journey. Thank you


All right, this meeting has been recorded so that at a later date our information technology department can upload it to the town of Amherst YouTube channel and my camera is off today because I am working from home. Okay, thank you Angela. So we're meeting virtually pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 and I'm going to ask each of you to register your presence vocally so we know that you can hear and be heard. So, Anika. Yeah. Alex Lopez. Here. And Alex Lefebvre is present so. Great. So the first item on our agenda is approval of the minutes of March 22, 2022. Oh, hey Austin we just started. Can you hear me Austin. Cool. All right. So, is there a motion to approve the minutes of March 22. Move to approve the minutes. Great. So a second. Second. Great. Any discussion of the minutes. Okay. Hearing none. Go ahead and take a vote. And Nika. Yes. Alex. Yeah. And Austin. Yes. And Alex Lefebvre is a yes. So the main thing on our agenda today is the May 1 May 1st community outreach event. And I wanted to, as a preface to that conversation, there were two questions that this committee asked of the Jones Library building committee to help us sort of move forward. And I wanted to, since not everybody on this subcommittee was able to attend the main meeting. Last one we had, I just wanted to relay that information. So one of the questions is we had one of the OPM to talk about what the public can influence around public outreach. And so the comment that we got back was that, especially at this stage in the process very early on, we want to collect as much information as possible. But with the understanding that not everything that's being suggested is going to affect the building. And so in doing this, it's an opportunity for outreach and design to call through the feedback of the public. And then, if for example, we're receiving a lot of community feedback. Let's just say for, you know, a sensory room for, you know, people on the autism spectrum, I'm just randomly throwing something out there. It then guides the focus and attention for the continuation of the design of developing the designs for the library. So what the OPM talked about was essentially making sure we have a clear structure for areas where the community can give feedback and those areas where things can't be changed. So for example, the square footage of the building is the square footage of the building that's not going to change significantly. So getting commentary that we think the library should be smaller isn't going to be productive for the community and that's just setting up an expectation that, you know, we don't want to do. There's also some minimum things that we've committed to the library committed to around sustainability. And so, you know, anything more than that is certainly a conversation for the community but we certainly can't decide to suddenly not have the sustainability pieces that we committed to. So historic preservation also has some sort of minimum levels like the sustainability, the exterior of the 1928 portion of the building has a historic preservation restriction agreement on it. So we cannot, no matter how much we would want to do certain things around the library, you know, relative to the exterior because we are required to maintain that. And also, anything relative to that would have to be approved by the historic commission. And the other piece of that is that we are pursuing a fair bit of money with Massachusetts historic tax credits. And so the requirements of the state to actually receive those tax credits are going to guide a lot of also what can be done so anytime we're sort of talking about those areas, I think it's important that the public understand that there are certain parameters around those pieces. So we have an existing building program in place. So, and I think that was sort of where the May 1 event we got around sort of the idea of these having this program in tables and so those would be our actually our, our different program building elements program spaces and so getting feedback on what those spaces should look like feel like etc. So to that end at our last meeting we had talked about a May 1 event that got signed off by the Jones library building committee as a go forward. Based on the feedback from this committee. The structure that's being contemplated is an open house from 12 to two on May 1. And we did 12 to two because there is another event going on in town. The May 1 two to five on the town common is the linguistic diversity day it's the final celebration of linguistic heritage month. And so the idea was that people could go straight from this event to that event which is providing food with families of kids from the school. So, what was discussed was having an open house where we would have each program element. And I think per any suggestion it's basically an opportunity for community to come in, get information, talk to other community members get excited get information. And so to that and we're looking at staffing each station with a library staff or committee member of some sort, but then also members of the community who either have a particular expertise passion, etc. With that particular program. I think that's the big picture unless and you want to add anything to that. Thank you for that cover. Okay, so I think some of the key things we want to do today is go through what was in the meeting packet was sort of the tables the building program elements is there anything we're missing from that. So, I think we have 14 tables assigned, I don't know if we want a 15th one as like the information like people want to go and ask questions about what is the committee, what's the process, you know getting those kinds of details. And then the library started reaching out to community members staff members and committee members to see whether or not they could come in and, you know, work these tables. We have tables to fill. So a lot of suggestions needed from either us for the community about who might be interested in coming in to play that role. And then talking about, you know, how are we advertising for this. What do we want to have at each table, sort of all of those details. So with that I'm going to see if anyone has an idea like anywhere you want to start here. Oh, we lost Alex. Well, he's back. Welcome back Alex. I can give a taste just for who's been reached out to so far. So, yes, I love this idea of merging the community members either with interest and or passion with, you know, library staff I think that that is going to expand our audience a great deal. So we may have Dr. Melka Shevaz join us today I know he's trying to and he's absolutely interest he's interested in being a part of special collections table as a as a historian. I think that my mother Deborah Bridges is also, you know, was asked and is interested to come over there as well. So that could be a fun combination. Also, another longtime generational family member that I have on the radar who I hope will join us. I did speak earlier with community member make gauge who is interested in helping out and with a table.  So we can bring in as much diversity around that with people who not only have different interests that all really intersect with what the library has to offer. But also, you know, are they'll be able to reach out to different areas of community and whether that is reintroducing them to what's going on with the library and bringing them in as well as new folks as well. So I think that, you know, especially once, you know, these hosts are better engaged once we have invitations once we have at least like, let's say the date or flyer will be really helpful and I think we'll move, because we, you know, everyone that I've talked to is really interested in this so it's a matter of some of them coordinating does that day were for them and get back so I mean we may end up having a list longer than the tables that we have. That's great. Thanks. I just wanted to ask if there were opportunities for us to also involve our school librarians and use ARPS as a means to get the word out to families. Absolutely. I don't think we've we haven't talked yet about the advertising piece. But yeah, I think any, any means necessary. I know in the Jones Library Building Committee meeting that we had the town manager and finance director had talked about also one using using the downtown websites but then also to the extent that we could use the schools and their outreach. I think we talked about the superintendent newsletter that goes out every Friday. You know, I don't know if it's a fairly long letter I don't know we need to get above above Amherst survival center and maybe in between soccer I don't know that's where in the newsletter but yeah absolutely Alex I think that's that's good. So I guess from this committee, do we. One do we want to look at the different program tables and comment on those do we want to leave that up to sort of what the library is created. Essentially all of our programs plus we added a dream board and the idea for the dream board is, you know, if you, those are the places to put the ideas that are likely not going to go into the into the building they may not affect the building but who knows they might I mean if enough people in the community are saying one thing and it makes sense and it's doable then you know who knows we don't, you know, we want to get that that feedback but putting it in a place where we understand that this is sort of a dream board not a, if I write it on here it should happen kind of thing. Would it make sense to have the parameters board or premise table maybe next to that, just as a reminder of, you know where the the ins and outs are. Sure. There to do that so that's clear. Okay. So, I'm going to add on to Anika's. So some of the people that we've reached out to at the library. So one of the elements that will be more developed in the new library space is sort of the social work literacy area and so I don't know how much people realize that we have a space for a social worker in residence. And so Earl Miller the new head of crest has already come to the library and talked about being in the library and is actually doing a lot of things with the library and so Earl Miller is actually going to come be at that table as well as sort of talk about the crest program and how it will work with the library, as well as hopefully somebody from the literacy project which will also relocate there but they have a fundraiser the same day that may not be a possibility. So we have for universal design we have somebody from the disability access advisory committee in town who's agreed to come as well as some community members who have a lot of experience and passion around around the need for accessible and universal design. We have a lot of people who have interest but we also have a lot of blank spaces to fill so big part of our, what we need to be doing is figuring out how to reach into the community to get more people coming to help out to make it really a community event. So we will reach out to pretty much every town organization and that we have and I'm also noticing that we have good one Memorial and the church with us and so that could be, you know, another avenue to reach out to different churches and the Jewish community center the Jewish community center this could all be our way and if we have like I know we will have social media fires but if we're able to have maybe a printed fire at least a few that could go into different places I know well not everyone is open but those who are open that can help. So I guess I just want to throw out to the group I mean what you know Alex what do you, if at all, what do you envision so it's an open house, we're going to have it for two hours from 12 to one we're going to have children's programming which will act as childcare we couldn't do it the whole two hours but we figured an hour is great. You know, so somebody walks in it's an open house they could spend 20 minutes they could spend all two hours wandering from table to table. What is a committee care where the tables are placed do we want to leave that up to the library. What do we, like, do we want there to be a map do we want to leave that up to the like do how much do we want to sort of outline versus how much do we want to just say to the library, you know it's an open house these are the tables. What are what are people thinking. And what does it look like when you go in at a table, because they're a flip chart or their stickies, you know, are people going to have I mean people have thoughts about how we prepare our community volunteers who are coming in. What to expect what we want them to do. What's their goal. I personally feel it's their house. They probably would know the best setup as long and they would know where to be accessible I think signage and being clear for you know there will be some people who might want to do the rounds and check out every table, and then that may just want to go to their points of interest so I think if you know it's clear to allow people to linger or be in and out whichever they have the time for would be great but I think. I mean if we look I think it might be a little difficult for us here to tell them how to set up the tables I would trust that they would set them up in the best way possible. Alex you have any thoughts or ideas. I totally agree with that I mean. The question of like what does. What does it look like in my head is like it starts with a lot of blank pieces of paper and end with a lot of full pieces of paper. And I trust that. I think art community will be able to fill up as much as we can give them space to and so this challenge ourselves to give them as much space as possible. You know I think just on the dream. This sort of like wish list piece if there's a way for us to set it up so that that's the last thing. I think it's a really good way for us to check in with ourselves of did we capture as much as possible. If the wish list is super full at the end of the night, then we probably can take a look to see what we missed right if the wish list is pretty empty because people have gotten their thoughts in the other 14 tables. Then we've got a pretty good grasp of where we're listening feedback if that makes sense. Do we have any, I mean, this is what three, three and a half, almost a month out. Do we have any sort of minimums as a committee that we want to sort of try to commit to when we have an event and I'm thinking things like the childcare that we're providing. I think the library is conveniently located on public transportation to some extent that it takes care of the transportation issue. You know translation services I mean are there any sort of minimums that we want to and that could be through volunteers in the community. We have a really strong ESL program you know who knows. So, are there anything that we sort of want to make sure that is happening whenever we do an event. Just any event that we do specifically at the library or. Yeah, I mean I think anytime we're doing a community outreach event do we sort of have like a minimum that we want to ensure that we can have the, as many people in the community participate as possible and removing as many barriers as possible. I think that I think the child care was a great idea. And child care refreshments. You know, I mean seating I think that that would be probably taken care of with the with the library maybe not as much so if we do something that is out without within the community, which I do think at some point that we should think about actually going out into the community as well maybe you know as we discussed before partnering with events that are already going on somewhere and you know help helping them out and having a presence there as well. I mean that's always draw people I think of you the information refreshments, making sure it's accessible and, you know, update is great. And I think also carrying on from this May 1 event, hopefully utilizing and having some of these members carry that on with us so as we are going to other events, we're just kind of bringing that whole community feel with us and hopefully having us as well being invited to come and to come to other events and partner to get the word out as well. So, one of the things I was thinking about, and I would be interested to hear from everybody else about each table is large blank pieces of paper per Alex. But also, maybe a place where people can sign up and leave their contact information like I want anytime anything's happening on teens like I want to be there or you know it just gives people an opportunity to either sign up generally or sign up to keep to stay informed about that specific program so a sign up sheet. I also thought it might be nice for each table to have maybe a little bit of information about the program. Like for example, you know, you know, right now, social worker and residents there's no square footage because they're, you know, we don't have it but it'll be 104 square feet is done or you know something to give people an idea of, you know, now this is what we have. This is what's being envisioned so you're not just saying we have a team space but you're saying it's a team space that's x square feet which I think helps people maybe a little bit in terms of understanding what's currently being visioned and what they can add on to or give more details. Makes sense. I just want to say kudos to all those people who have a lot better spatial visualization than I do because square footage is not my strong suit. And I really appreciate the way that that it's played or that it has been supported and talked about here. I think that just on like the norms. One thing that I want to say is a, I sort of want to push ourselves to like with each event, try to try something new in our invitation or advertisement. We're not just advertising in the same places to the same people, but that we're being conscious of what is one new thing we're going to try so that we potentially reach a new demographic. And specifically one, one that I want to just keep bringing up is like, how do we reach out to those people who felt that they were excluded from the conversation right and would the, with the folks who were talking a lot about this but from the side of not wanting to see it be renovated come and give their ideas in this moment. Do you have any thoughts Alex about how to do that. I mean, ostensibly, someone was putting up signs that said vote no. And those people have a list of where they dropped off their signs I would imagine. And so if we could reach out to that person and say, we'd like to, you know, we want to open this event up to you and your folks and like, this is a reality for our future. We, we want this to be a conversation and not just amongst people who voted desperate. And on a positive note we have at least two of those people who are, you know, in support and will be helping with the tables for the May 1 event so I think that that's also will be helpful. Yeah, and I definitely agree with you with the visuals I'm a very visual person, but like I know sometimes when people hear like 100 script I'm not necessarily like the square foot visual person, but people sometimes here like 100 square feet they're like that sounds so small but then it's like if you have a visual and these are usually for spaces where it's one on one, then you know they can see like this as an intimate space, which, which then makes sense. But yeah, so I don't know I mean I'm sure if we're having all this maybe like the. I'm sure there'll be a map. Right well I shouldn't say I'm sure, but if there's a map of the building kind of where the programs are maybe you know color code where people can get an idea. So, so here's where it gets interesting. So, so there is a schematic design that was created by the architects back in 2006 team when thank you. It's been long but not that long in 2016 that was submitted with the application. And that had all of the program elements in certain places, and then the sustainability committee requested changes around creating a net zero ready building. And also the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners wanted our large meeting room relocated to a different space and as the largest room in the building. Everything shifted. So our current schematic design is just that so I mean at one of the schematic design I think I provided in the last meeting packet was that design with the library actually putting their own ideas so things aren't settled at this point and that's exactly I guess the point of talking to the public like the public's not going to inform where things go in the building because that's a jigsaw puzzle left to the architects and the library in terms of what works best but we don't necessarily have. We don't have a schematic where we can say this is where it's going to be located because that's all still going to be sorted out that's part of the process that we're going through right now is ultimately where things go. And we do know the rough square footage of it. So I'm not sure we will get to a point where we can show pictures, which is not necessarily there yet. I don't think. We have library staff as long as the as long as the folks who are at the tables, have all the tools that they need to best communicate and, you know, answer questions within reason and and they're aware of where the parameters are and I would imagine that so because they would have someone from staff with them as well. But if if if people are spread out and we have more tables I think is, as long as people have as much and they're armed and powered with as much information as possible I imagine that as it says especially the first one and formal and as we move on I think we'll have more concrete information. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So having, having put forward for the staff to be able to take information for when they need to follow up with someone is going to be really important because I know I often hear someone say something at this sort of thing and then I'm like I think I get that and then on Monday I'm like, what was that. Yeah, okay. So I guess, relative to the May one event, and he is working on the invite. And then also any key you've had some conversations, we've had some conversations with the community participation officers. I don't know if you want to share a little bit about that where you are. Yeah, so yeah, so we did have a great conversation with community participation officer and many other things Brianna, rather town hall and that was a really nice conversation. And also, she's willing to help us as much as she can time a lot it and she was talking about a program that I believe she'll come in and talk with us about excited I will mess up the name and all the other things but this program basically provides additional tools for outreach to make it more convenient for people and accessible for people to be able to participate within online meetings so and then just in general outreach getting worked out. So I think that will be very beneficial for us. We also have Jennifer moist and who is going to be scheduling a meeting with all of the CPOs which will be helpful. So that I think that that's going to be exciting for us. And then there's also Sammy the owl who I was introduced to today and Sharon chair was just was great about that she just yes for input and she has a youth group that you know will be kind of Sammy will have a spring makeover and yeah so have like just some pop and whatever and hopefully that's something that you know we can interchange by keeping that fresh with invites but then bringing it back and connectedness of the I'm Sammy and I was quite excited to to learn the author and I'm a fan and the illustrator so I think that this is you know just a community like this is, you know, an illustration from the community about the library I think that's great we're also looking at images of there was a tree with hands this type of thing like that that was growing and I think you know that could be more of our motto so to speak or metaphor because we have this expanded growing new library and we're you know we're definitely tasked for expanding the audience and the community that will utilize the library and fill it up so I think that will be great and was there. I also wanted to point out that the group that Brianna will be introduced as to they were specifically introduced interested rather in working with us so I think the community participation officers in addition to the community that we're working out with that's in different areas I mean I feel like you know we're in a better place to go much of action like I feel action now around this so I think that's great. Thanks. So before I move on to the next agenda item I guess I want to just check in with this group and find out our folks comfortable with any kind of rolling with the invite and then you know we're going to use. You know the schools, the community participation officers, the community partners of the library as well as volunteers I mean I don't know the extent to which this community wants to sort of like sign off on the flyer or or who the initial outreach goes to or whether you know. We let the library do its outreach plus what we're doing and sort of see where we are and then as Alex said at the next meeting we see you know how do we maybe need to communicate differently or do things differently. Do we need to meet again to plan further may one or do we have we do we feel like we've said enough about what we want to see happen. Thanks Alex. I want to go back to the point that I think both an ego and Xander made. And that is the question of how much is it going to mean to anybody to say it's 150 square feet. So the question that I'd like to just return to is whether or not the existing schematic designs as tentative and revised and they are going to be should be there. We're on the library website. So, I just think it would be helpful to people, you know with all the qualifications that things are going to move to get a sense of what it is that people were imagining in the first phase of the schematics. And I think you might want to talk with Sharon and, you know, get her thoughts about this but I just worry that if there's nothing there. I mean, I, you know, speaking for myself, I think I'm best able to begin with something and then react to it, as opposed to just tell us what you want in the room. The image of what that looks like and where it is, you know, located though it might change might be helpful. Thanks. Anyone else comments before on May 1. I agree with what Austin just said is I think you know when you look at you know some of the best visioning sessions happen when there's either a whether it's a virtual or a model of what you're talking about. So even, you know, if it isn't perfect something where you could get an idea of it, at least be descriptive of what that's like because you know for a lot of people you're right if you just tell them swear footage doesn't really doesn't mean anything. That's possible. And my concern if we, I think it might be helpful. I don't know if we have to schedule a meeting on this date but if we have a good amount of community members that are ready and willing to participate it might be helpful to have a meeting to hear their thoughts and just kind of be on the same page. So I think it might be helpful for the event to hear their questions if they have any and ensure that all of the tables are set up. Yeah, I agree. Anything else. I guess the only other thing that I just want to name is May 1. May 1 is International Workers Day. And so I have not been part of the labor movement in Western math enough to know if that is going to class with anything that is planned elsewhere, but just wanted to acknowledge that in a previous life in Chicago if you tried to reach me on May 1 you would not. Okay. Thanks, Alex. I think at this point, I think we have enough people with it penciled on their calendar that we should move forward, but that's good to know. Okay, so the next item on the agenda was just talking a little bit about a preliminary outreach plan so we know. Oh, the last thing I wanted to say too was that we also will at some point circle back with the OPM prior to this event. Just to make sure that we sort of have everything we need from the OPM, you know, they will be working with us as well in terms of just information and how we're communicating the public and documents and things like that. Preliminary outreach plan. So over the next four to six months let's say this is what made it could be OPM is because that will date will be more certain is really probably the most critical time to be meeting with the public and terms of where the most public feedback can be incorporated into the designs because the further along we get the tighter the designs get and the less room there is for feedback. So recognizing that I wanted to get a sense of what the community, what this group envisions over the next four to six months, you know, frequency of how many events do we want to try and do. Are they online versus out in person are they some at the library some out in the community. Are you know what should we be using these meetings that we're having, you know, part of the meeting for admin and part as a community outreach session and so just want to get some thoughts and feedback around sort of the next six months and if people have thoughts about that. While we during this time where there's as much flexibility and freedom so to speak with this that we would probably I would I would think have more meetings to this is also engaging creating larger email lists and getting people's information. And as we move forward where we're moving larger passing along the information back and forth and where we're you know getting getting tighter in terms of what can and cannot happen and having to make decisions and, you know, zoom or this type of meeting that's more administrative and administrative rather would become more appropriate and appropriate more frequent. Alex or Austin, you guys have any thoughts. Sure, I agree I think we ought to meet as much as possible with in many places as possible we ought to be going to rather than having people coming to. It's good start to have them come to but it's really good to go to the thing that was in my head is that the process right will be iterative at some point. Oh, the, in the design development schematic and then the design development choices are going to have to be made. And we'll want to engage people in a conversation about we thought we could do this and this but maybe we can only do this. And I think we want to keep that in mind that as we go on we want to make sure that people are helping us when the choices need to be need to be made. And working as you said with the opm to get a clear sense of what that timeline is. I think is the key to guiding what what how the outreach process should look as we go as we go forward. Yeah, and my understanding that's what I was incredibly inarticulately trying to say a minute ago was that the opm before this may one event we will have a better sense of the timeline and so our information table will have some of the information that we don't quite have yet because at the last meeting, the committee voted to authorize the town manager to move forward with the designer, which is sort of the thing we've been waiting to do for the process to get going so. Yeah, I would just say. We should be able to tell people on May 1 when the next meeting is where it's going to be so that we keep building one thing to another. And I love the idea of having it moved to different places so also somewhere in that in each event, giving ourselves the space to capture would you be interested in having a committee meeting near you. Okay. So we have six people in the audience today. One who has a hand raised but I know we were hoping to have some folks in the audience today because would love some public feedback or thoughts around you know that may one event future events what people would like to see what would be helpful. That kind of thing so with that. And if someone wants to participate and provide some information or has a question just go ahead and raise your hand. And Angela can you let in Kami which looks like you have already done that. So Kami you're in the room you seem to unmute there you go. There we go. Hi. Hi. Because I raised my hand earlier. I'm sorry. Yeah, I'm so sorry I just missed my husband for the first time. Are you responding as I raised my hand earlier. Your hand was up and we were to public comment and we're inviting anybody. Great. I am well I I passingly when we're talking about advertising this event. I haven't heard you mentioned the friends. And so I'm here to be manning a table on the disability access availability and accessibility for the disabled community. But also, if there's things like refreshments are talking about outreach. Definitely I'm happy to to discuss this with the friends at our next meeting but they should be in on this if they aren't already. Yes, thank you know that's an excellent point which I did not mention I did mention this to yes, I have made that comment about the friends and we were I think just sort of getting a loose date but just getting I can take this to Marion is a new president, and we can get like would we like to have if the friends is great for trying to organize sort of welcoming or even staffing it a little bit to direct people or, or have a big sale or something like that. I think that might sound that may not be what we're looking for but they're often good for that. Anyone comment thoughts, I think the friends are wonderful we definitely want to have all of the friends involved in this for sure. So, they could be involved in some at some other level but anyway, if that was wanted. They could do that. Yeah, absolutely. And that was it. Thank you. Yeah, no if you if you want to take that back to the friends. I'm as, as long as the library is okay with freshmen's I assume that would be out on the lawn kind of thing and like refreshments stay outside I don't know exactly what that looks like yet you would probably be better than you guys. I also know that we still are predominantly masked in the library it's optional but most people do mask in the library. You know what it might be too complicated this time around that's exactly right. Okay. Yeah, so. So maybe we don't do the refreshments for this one maybe that's when we go out to the community and we make sure we have refreshments. But definitely to the extent that the friends are interested in helping us to staff the tables and in outreach that is 100% desirable welcome and would be fabulous. Okay, so. So that's another conversation to get specifics on what you're looking for I think they love to. So let's just do a little outreach before our next meeting and find out what what tables need staffing or what could be helpful there. Great. That would be perfect thank you. Okay. Thanks Kimmy appreciate it. Anyone else out in the audience have anything they want to question thoughts. Okay, seeing no hands. Okay. I think those are the main things that we wanted to cover today. So is there an interest in using these meetings as we go forward as maybe part of the meeting being sort of the administrative thing and part of it being inviting community or people are into this meeting to discuss different things.  I think. I'm sorry, my apologies. No, it's okay I was just saying I agree I think it's more engaged way to connect people, introduce people, you know, I mean we can be building community and doing outreach like well I think we should like we should be doing outreach within the meeting. And I think that's an excellent way to do it. Yeah, I was gonna say I could even imagine using sort of using the people who are staffing the tables are not using the people but empowering the people who are staffing the tables to report back in future meetings, knowing that we probably wouldn't be able to get in there from all 14 of them in just one meeting but if we can break that out. So that we're getting not only those who have volunteered to lend their expertise but also to capture what they heard from the community as well. I think it might be a really good way for us to stay in touch with everyone. Yeah, that could be our next meeting was like the next two three depending on you know how many people there are biting them and whatever that whatever the topics are can be in that meeting. And then just on a on a side note are always not the next meeting okay I'm going to be gone for one of our meetings so I just somebody will have to report into will be April break. I will not be here. Okay, good. Unless anyone has anything else they want to. I think we're, we're done. I'm going to go ahead and call the meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for everything. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Angela. Thank you. Awesome. We're adjourned. Bye.