Hey, this is David Heinrich Hansen. I'm sorry I can't be with you all at RailsConf Kansas. This is a fantastic year to be at RailsConf and I'm really sad to miss it. We have Rails 5 almost ready to roll. In fact, maybe the release candidate will even drop during one of these days. But in my stead, you have something perhaps even better, Jeremy Dare, who I've worked with since 2004 on Ruby on Rails, the framework itself. He is one of the few, actually I think perhaps the only person who's still around from the inaugural core team has committed to the framework going back all the way to 2004. So when people ask, hey, you need 10 years or more Ruby on Rails experience, Jeremy is one of the very few people who can ask, oh, yep, got it. And in addition to that, of course, I work with him at Basecamp and has for many, many years now. It's been an absolute pleasure. Jeremy is one of the very best programmers I know. Whenever there's anything I can't figure out, Jeremy is usually the person I tap and ask. So you're in for a real treat and I hope you all have a fantastic RailsConf in Kansas and I will see you all next year. Enjoy. Geez, David. No pressure, right? Well, thank you. Thank you, David. He stole a bunch of the stuff I need to explain about why David's not here, that I'm not David. I'm Jeremy. It has been 10 years and it's really kind of boggling to look back at that. He was sitting here in the conference room full of anticipation. We had a company meetup last week with Basecamp and we're also looking back at where we've come from and where we've arrived, where we want Basecamp to go. I think Rails has a lot of parallels with that. I was feeling, it was kind of interesting, like, what can you say about something like Rails? My impulse, I work on Rails, I help build Rails, I help other people build Rails and that's what I really love about it. So my impulse is to talk about what's going into Rails, what's next for Rails and kind of a, I can give a litany of all the sweet things and features and things that we want for Basecamp. But really, I love Rails itself, the community that's formed around it, the kind of business we've been able to build around it, the kind of team that we run because we assume that software like this is normal. We're looking back, David in 2008 talked about the great surplus and I'm going to talk about that some more. We're here for Rails 5, of course. And to me it feels like Rails 5 already happened because Basecamp 3 is running it, we've been really pushing to make Rails 5 the best it can be for Basecamp and I think it's also going to be the best it can be for all your apps. David kind of tripped me up thinking about time with Basecamp and I know a lot of you have also had similar kind of tenure and experience with people you're close to, coding partners, people you've been in business with, people you've seen come and go at your companies and you may be rejoined later. I remember back in the dot com era before Rails, depending on where you lived, you could recycle and you'd see somebody that you had left and missed, you'd see them again six months later or a year later and there's a kind of camaraderie in that despite the circumstance and despite feeling like really this dot com role is kind of shitting on us, we're in it together and that was great. I kind of missed that in that period after what happened and Rails came along and it was the first time I really participated in open source in a way like this and it's something I wouldn't have even known to look for but it's something that grew around me. I learned to help others a lot and that's really what I came to enjoy about it.  I'm not DHH and the saying goes that there are a few hard things in computer science, naming, caching, concurrency. So we can say that we hit a race condition. So David's already saying in the six hours of spa, I don't actually know how to say this because it seems like saying spa would not be a thing, like spa is a place. Spa is a thing you get in. But it's a place and it does these long endurance races. If you're interested, if you want to cheer them along, you can find them on Twitter at DHH racing because he has a separate Twitter account because there's so much racing and sorry, Aaron, I warned you before but this was the primo pun and no more puns. I swear, I swear. So I'm, well this is all, I can dispense with this, GitHub, Twitter and you may have also noticed, you might have known me as Jeremy Kimper. I'm not Kimper anymore, I got married. Got married to Renee Davis last year and we combined our surnames. So now we're Renee Dare and Jeremy Dare and I give a shout out to the state of California and the name of Quality Act for making that possible. Reflecting again on Basecamp, I've been at Basecamp for nine years now and it seems like an eternity to me and it really isn't. And you hear all the time about people retiring after a 35 career doing something. And here, my tenure here is just, it's a blip. I don't even know how to think about that yet. And my first day still feels like yesterday almost, even though I can also, I start thinking about the details of what I did, what I'm still doing and I feel like all those chunks of career, the things that, all the efforts you make, all the things I've forgotten, those things how they snowball into what turns into a career. Where my first, my first project was a search engine and using, I think it was solar at the time and reflecting, I think it was something like five years later and I was working on a search engine again. What's happening here? Ten years later, I'm going to avoid the search engine. Ruby on Rails, even longer and also something that I don't really know how to synthesize or make sense of yet because Ruby on Rails has been around now for going on half of my career as a programmer. But, OK, we're here to talk about Rails 5. So here I am, here we are. You're all building Rails apps. Are most of you on Rails 4? Yes? The big pain, the great discontinuity, the meteor strike was Rails 2 to Rails 3. And I will say that we still run Rails 2 apps at Basecamp. And that's part of our legacy. It's something that we've chosen to fully embrace. Even knowing the hue and cry about very real problems with running Rails 2 apps. And we run some apps on Ruby 187, R-E-E. And so we take on a greater kind of responsibility for our legacy and our past. But at the same time, we make our greatest efforts to stay current, especially with new development. I'm not going to talk too much about Rails 5. This was my impulse. I made a talk that was really mostly about there's a bunch of new sweet stuff. I mean, let's get that out of the way. Action Cable is pretty cool. I was a real Action Cable downer at first because I'm thinking like web sockets, you know? Web sockets were kind of cool. And actually, I haven't used them that much. But HTTP2, are we going to leapfrog this? And the thing is web sockets totally work great today. They're at their sweet spot, the prime of their life and their tech curve. Web sockets trying to use them even two years ago is a total hassle. Everybody implementing a different version of the draft spec, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's ended up having complex libraries to handle all kinds of fallback mechanisms. Use some other technique, if it doesn't work, and a big split between should you start with a simple technique and upgrade to the more sophisticated ones, or should you start sophisticated and downgrade? Well, these days in most browsers, most of the time, web sockets totally work. And they totally work for the things we need them for. We design Basecamp 3 around being able to push, to publish updates out to people. And we've done that in past apps. This is not a new thing. These are not even, these are not new ideas. The new thing for us is that this is part of the framework. Working with these things is like working with any other part of Rails. You build a controller, it's what I know. I think about my interaction with resources and action cables built in the same way. So rather than one-off things where I know that my app is going to need to know about, I need to broadcast things out to a bunch of people, so I build it as a one-off feature, now I have this available as part of Rails, and so I start seeing opportunities to use it and seeing the places where it's natural to rely on it. Or I might not have even thought about it before. There are two other big things that I think are selling points and are really some of the most important features of Rails 5 that aren't really features either. First is the Rails Code of Conduct. We also chose to adopt a Code of Conduct. And we, in reflection on this, looking at why we would do this, it's interesting having that kind of perspective, like why would you be in the position of asking why do this? This is something everybody should do. It should be why not. And as we arrived at the decision of why not, why aren't we there already? We also decided to take a step back and look at what it's like to work with Rails, what it's like to interact with our community, and what we look for from contributors, what we look for from ourselves and the kind of commitments we like to be able to make to new people in the community, to new contributors, to know that when you submit your first pro-request, the kind of experience you're going to have, and we'd really like to see this reflected throughout the Rails community, because it's huge, it's not just the Rails committers, it's what it's like when you go into an IRC room.   But the Rails IRC room has, historically, it's bucked that trend, and there are a lot of other places where you can interact with the Rails community, and we've somehow set a tone, and I can credit Ruby for setting these kinds of initial conditions of a good, welcoming, wonderful place to work, to learn, to not get shot down. And you can read this online at rubionrails.org slash doctrine. We've written up, it's really a first draft, a first version of the things that we value in working on Rails together, and we hope you do too. Third one, there's a new start page. When you make a Rails app, there's a new start page. I really should have put a photo here, and I actually, I cut it out, but it's sweet. It really is. We had one of our designers at Basecamp, Jamie DeHensen, redesigned the rubionrails.org website, timely for Rails 5 coming, timely for Rails doctrine, for code of conduct, for projecting what we feel about Rails, and lovely to him to redo all that for us.  So if you start a new Rails 5 app, just wait for it. So I said I wasn't gonna get too much into Rails 5 stuff, like what Rails 5 does. I wanna talk about the how and why of Rails, how we got here, and this is the questioning I went through in a situation like this. Why Rails 5? Why Rails? And last week, meeting up with everybody from Basecamp, and we're remote, and getting together every six months or so, also having this opportunity to say why Basecamp? Why Basecamp 3? And, well, okay, I've got this little splendor in my mind, so this indulged me for a second. Seriously, what is up with this? So, I mean, this is literally a problem I was having a couple of nights ago, as I was putting some polish on this. Like, I've thought about this before. It's the kind of thing that might stick in the back of your head. It's just some knowledge I don't have, and it's, but it became very, very concerning to me that, like, what is Kansas City doing in Missouri? What, did they move it? Did the river, like, shift around it, and the border changed? Like, there's gotta be a reason, right? Some kind of engineering solution. So, so I looked it up.  It's founded as a Missouri River port town, and Missouri River, what do I call it, Kansas? Well, because the Kansas River comes in from the west. So, let's call it Kansas, you know, after the river. And cool story, Kansas didn't exist at that time. Something, everything clicking here. But Missouri did. And the river was named after the native Kansa tribe, also known as the Kalanation, also making sense. 1854, Kansas Territory. Okay, now we've got a town called Kansas. We've got a territory called Kansas Territory. This is, like, kinda confusing. So, people in the town of Kansas are thinking, that's confusing, right? Yeah, so they renamed Kansas, the city of Kansas. Let's be clear that it's different from Kansas. Okay, so next up, you can guess. 1861, Kansas becomes a state. This time, no problem. No confusion, Kansas, city of Kansas, Kansas Territory. Okay, 28 years later, for some reason, 1889. Kansas City, screw it, we're Kansas City now. So we have Kansas City on the Kansas River, next door to the state of Kansas, in Missouri. And, by the way, there's a Kansas City, Kansas. And it's right across the river. Okay, so now that we've cleared that up. Okay, back to Rails 5, I swear, I swear nothing else. But now you know, like, this was really bothering me. And I feel better knowing that you know. Okay, so this is a huge release for us. It is the release that launches Basecamp 3. It launches Action Cable. It launches TurboLynx 5. It brings Active Job. Active Job's been around since Rails 4.2, but it really brings Active Job to full bloom. It changes the way you build apps that you'll probably end up reaching for Active Job a lot more frequently. Action Cable in particular. Action Cable is accepting a ton of connections and doing stuff. Well, what are you gonna do when you've got 10,000 connections in one process and you start trying to do stuff? You're gonna block everything that's happening on that server. So your typical response is you wanna offload any kind of processing as soon as possible. So the interaction pattern you're gonna see with Action Cable channels is give me a job. Instantly, give me a job. Otherwise, you're gonna be blocking everything that's happening in your server. This is also the Rails that introduces a full API mode. This means the locus of control in your app, if you wanna move it to another service, if you want Rails to be a collaborator to some other place, if you wanna implement in something other than Rails, if you wanna implement in the browser, totally cool. The way that Rails works remains fundamentally the same. You're thinking in resources, you're thinking restfully, none of that changes. So this is particularly something that's, this is not a new thing either, right? Single-page apps have been around for ages now, browser apps. And so it's really recognizing where a lot of the Rails community is headed and is already headed. This is particularly true for some of our larger Rails businesses, as they've grown and have embraced other platforms, particularly if they're like multi-team, if they're a medium-sized company that can accommodate iOS, Android and decides to run on the browser kind of as a like almost isomorphic counterpart to having a client on other platforms, treating the browser as a platform itself. That's probably the biggest change that I feel in Basecamp 3 is the transition to TurboLynx 5. And this is something that's very personal to Basecamp and the way that we work and the way that we've grown. We couldn't contemplate, and I know a lot of you can't contemplate either, creating an Android app on top of what you already build or creating an iOS app on top of what you already build. A team can only do so much and has to make choices about what you do. And especially a small team.  Like, well, you hire somebody, right? You grow into being a larger company or being a larger team so that you can take on those bigger challenges. And we took a different path and I think it's something that we might, it was risky. It's something I think a younger Basecamp might not have done. And we second-guessed ourselves and we doubted several times along the way because we hit some just gnarly roadblocks or like this platform is not meant to integrate cleanly. But we made it through thanks to some considerable effort on part of the TurboLynx team and our iOS and Android developers. So part of Basecamp 3 and part of Rails 5 is the paired release of TurboLynx 5. TurboLynx 5 comes with iOS and Android bridges. This is something you can use to build your own Android and iOS hybrid apps on top of your mobile apps. So you can think in terms of your Rails apps, your Rails resources, you don't need to build a completely separate experience. If you're a team who already has mobile development, this is not a win for you. If you're a team that doesn't, check it out. So in F of TurboLynx 5, how do we get here? I'm looking back, I'm thinking why Rails, why Rails 5? And here's my first thought. I'm getting into David's mind here. So this is David circa 2003. Seems legit, right? David isn't here to vet this, so. That's not wrong, is it? But we can take a closer look. I think there is something to this. There is an element of truth. But really, the story of Rails 5 is also the story of Rails 1. In the early days, let's break it down. We can see, here's David, 2003. It's not just that we need to make Basecamp. It's the sense that there is this, there's an opportunity. There's something that can be done. Here is a single person, 10 hours of time a week. And you could make something in that time. And you could reach further than that. You could make something great in that time. And so I'm imagining him going through this. How has a Basecamp formed? XML, da da da da da da, what?  And lo, Rails is formed. Now there's truth to this. And it's kind of glib, but working with David over the years, this is not too far off working with a sense of anger, not in a sense of screw you and like, but with a sense of higher expectations, having a higher bar, wanting to maximize tools, what you can get out of something, being impatient with Roblox. There are so many things I've recognized that I will let build up in my code. Because I'm thinking like, I'm taking kind of a longer term view and I keep stubbing my toes on the same things over and over again. And you get that frog in a pot effect of like, this is just the new normal. Everything's fine. And maybe it isn't. Maybe take saying like, I'm not gonna put up with this. I'm not gonna spend my week trying to build applications this way. So I think there's a much more positive story to this too. This is also David's story. It's the story of a programmer happiness. And this is the story that we all know has brought most of us into Ruby and Rails. But it's more than just Ruby. It's the web. It's the story of a universal platform that we all have access to. Anybody can create anything.   And it's a testament to your freedom to publish and your freedom to use. Anybody can go to any website. And I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but it's changed the world and it's changed the course of my career and probably all of our lives. And beyond this, it's really a story of the outsized impact of just having these great tools that you can do something on the web as a single person or as a small team that you don't need to work in a big company to have any kind of impact. You can have it on your own. You can be responsible for it. You can own your product. You can be responsible for your customers. These are all things that are essential to small business. And many of us probably don't think of ourselves as small business, but if you're a freelancer, if you work on a development team with yourself, one, two, three other people, you are. And this is the world that we can thrive in. This is a wonderland for what an individual can do. And really at the end here, it's what we see as the surplus that comes from having access to the web, having access to tools like this. And really that becomes Basecamp One. The surplus here is really what made Basecamp One possible. And I think about what David could have achieved with 10 hours a week using really anything else. And you could make a fantastic product. You could make a competent product. You could make a Basecamp One. It might take you longer. You could argue about the differences. But what comes after Basecamp One? It's the products you keep building. It's the world you've made for yourself where you can be happy building the next version or the next feature. You don't have a grudging relationship with your tools or with your work, with your product. And ultimately I think with your coworkers, with what you expect from each other. This again, just is the big one for me. That it's, the barrier to creation is so low.  It's changed a lot over the years. Like it's certainly not the early web where everything seemed balanced. Every consumer was also a creator. But as creators, it's the same world today. We can still, we can launch anything anytime. And for the individual and the small business, launching something on the web is a completely different story than launching something on iOS or launching something on Android. Much less launching something on all of them. And there's little more that's proved more enduring. We've seen platforms come and go. And of course, browsers got the issues.  Like I would encourage anybody 10 years ago to work on the web, to become a web developer, to become a web designer, to bet on the web. And I don't think that's changed. I would do the same today. And I think we all will, 10 years from now. The web's gonna remain a place to create, like none other. And Ruby, of course, is why a lot of us found our way to Rails in the first place. Ruby, so I was looking back on this a little bit and it was kind of like looking back on Rails. And Rails seems, it feels normal these days. When Rails came out, it was audacious. And of course, David was too. The way that he pitched Rails also positioned it as something that other things aren't. So it's being purposefully exclusionary. Like you aren't these things. But it was really to get people's attention. Like maybe these are the things you want. Maybe these are the things you want to include. And in 2003, Ruby was audacious too. The idea of using Ruby in a production environment, a toy language, are you kidding me? No, and now Ruby is completely normal. Ruby is considered mainstream among a certain set. It's still something where you're not deploying Ruby at Google, but for a startup, a small business. And many companies adopting something like Ruby and deploying it to production is just another choice on the menu. And at the time it's really because Ruby had a spark like none other. Ruby was designed for programmer happiness and it does sound completely normal now. It's something everybody knows. But there's something left out there because Ruby's become a professional programming language too. Which has been a huge struggle growing pains in the Ruby community. Going from something that's the domain of the intrinsically motivated, those who found Ruby and built it into identity and to see it become something that's professionalized is almost like taking something away. But I think that's why Ruby's succeeded and why particularly in some professions in places like Rails, in small teams, in places that look for this kind of relationship with their tools and with their product, why Ruby has thrived. Because it's more than just happiness. For me, it's fluency. It's love of the language, of the community that's grown around it. Ruby is, I can say, my native tongue. And in a world where, especially in a tech world where you're supposed to want to be a polyglot. And I can write other languages, but there's something special about Ruby to me. Ruby feels like home. I really feel, I suppose it is like developing a more personal relationship with your tools, with my tools. And I like other languages, but I love Ruby. It's wonderful to write. It's wonderful to read. See, go, JavaScript. I'm totally sweet, rust. Hey, Swift is cool, and they're all fantastic, but the things I learn and I can use, but it's a completely different story from coming home, from opening an editor and just knowing in me that this is, I know how to create with this tool. And I feel the same way about Rails. And before we get to the surplus, what about the first step? Why Rails? And of course, it's because Basecamp needed to be built, obviously, right? But Basecamp, so Basecamp actually started as, I believe, a PHP prototype. As David was looking for something quick and you can make it happen and got frustrated along the way, like this is not something I want to keep doing. And so, built Rails along the way. This is where we joined my story with Basecamp and Rails. I had my own story of Rails before Basecamp. I did, I was doing freelance work. I did PHP, Java, and I had found Ruby because I liked the language. I don't know why I liked it. I remember learning Ruby and Python around the same time, and I liked them both, but Ruby had that little kind of something special. And so, for fun, I would look at some client work I was doing and just think about how could I do this in Ruby? Is this even possible? And in this era, a lot of the Ruby libraries were kind of like transliterations, copycats of another language does something, and it seems to do a pretty good job, so let's bring it to Ruby. And so, as I tried building my own apps in Ruby, it didn't feel right. It just didn't feel right, because it felt like I was building my Java servlet app, and I was just writing Ruby instead. And then Rails came along. I felt at the time like I had a pretty good collection of Ruby tools. I had my own kind of set of conventions, things I'd use, and Rails was enough of an eye-opener. It did so much of what needed to be done. It was a complete vision of doing web development end to end. It wasn't a vision of here's something that I've seen someone do, I like Ruby, so I'm gonna make that too. It's a vision of I wanna create products and I wanna use Ruby. It's a vision that I found easy to see myself in. And so it's hard to deny. I can see myself doing this, but let's do it. I worked at CD Baby, and I had already had my kind of come-to-rails moment. And so that's how I ended up at CD Baby, because Derek Sivers also had his come-to-rails moment and was looking around for a fellow Acolyte. Somebody else know about this? Have you heard? And he actually looked me up from a who-is entry. I'm like, who does that? But I was surprised, pleasantly. And from the who-is entry, I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and he didn't know that I had since moved out to Portland where he lived. And so this was like, manna from heaven. Your who-is entry said this, and look, Karma's coming back to me. It's meant to be. So I had my own, let's do something with Rails, let's change the way that we build products, experience before Basecamp. And this was entirely mine. I really liked this, and it's something that made me appreciate what life was like when I decided to join 37 Signals Basecamp, because it showed me it's not just Basecamp, it's not the Basecamp experience. And it wasn't the CD Baby experience. It wasn't the me freelancing experience. It's really the experience you're all having. If I ask why Rails, then why Basecamp? It's really why CD Baby. It's why GitHub, why Shopify, why every one of you has chosen to use Rails and you've built successful apps, you've built successful companies. This is something that I saw myself and I think you saw in yourself too. This is something that we can all do. So really, Rails is built to power teams like Basecamp, and it's also built to power teams like yours. It's designed to build products like Basecamp and it's designed to build products like yours. And the big one is that it's designed to sustain businesses like Basecamp, and I think it's also designed to sustain businesses like yours. Ruby on Rails itself is a surplus engine. It can create this for ourselves as individuals so that we can do this as a business. To me, this is mind blowing, like as a freelancer. Like I can do kind of tech work and I have my role. Like I can make something happen. I can build a web app. And the idea of like a startup, having been through the dot-com arrows, like, you know, Muckity Mucks do that.  Anybody can do that. And a lot of people did. So really, it's that we can rely on Rails in product team and business. And I tell this story knowing that it's many of yours too. The big thing for me today is that we're still a small business. Basecamp is still a small business. Like we have a large footprint, but we're wearing a larger shoe really. We still aim to build outstanding products. We still use Rails the same way we did when we were a young company. And we all do, right? We all aim to build the best. And nobody sets out to build crap, right?  And we all share these basics. And looking back, I felt traces of Basecamp in CD Baby, the things that I really appreciated about Basecamp and that I also saw there. And I also saw things that I really appreciated and loved about CD Baby. I saw them in Basecamp. And I can even think back. Like I saw these things in an enterprise, like Java Mill or two. And I felt the best traces of all these places in Basecamp today. But Basecamp did feel different too. I think the big thing that I noticed was that it got a lot of things right for the kind of people doing work there. For people doing creative work, this was a company that was built for creators to create products. I mean, it was founded by a programmer and a designer, after all. But CD Baby felt this way too. CD Baby was built by a creator who had this idea that we could make this kind of creation together and was able to invest that same sense of ownership and pride in everybody who came through. It was just infectious. This is something we're doing together. You're not a cog. We rely on you. These are the kinds of things that I love seeing in Rails companies. That this is the Rails ethos that I'd like to see if I'm somewhere else and I'm gonna use... It's not even using Rails. If I'm gonna do software development, if I'm gonna work on product somewhere, this is the kind of world I wanna live in. And it's having that mindset of creating a better place to create, of designing a workplace that you wanna work in. And this is what I feel like Basecamp really cultivated in me. And this is somewhat of a your team that cultivates in you, looking for some of these same things. So my story, the things that have stood out to me and that are really the why of Basecamp and I think probably the why of many of your teams. What we look for from each other, focus, limit our appetite. We're small businesses. We have small teams. We rely on everybody seeing the big picture and owning their product, having a sense of how things fit, having an intuition for what to work on next, being able to identify your point of greatest impact. And how do we know where to focus? It's having a sense of value, knowing which lines of code to write. I mean, it sounds kind of silly, right? But there are a lot of lines of code out there that could be written and some of them are just don't matter, they're muck work or you're working on the edges of a problem. You're not tackling the center.  And if I've learned anything, this is probably the most valuable skill for a programmer to have and to cultivate. Knowing which, I'm not gonna say it again, which lines of code to write, but it really is seeking value, identifying it and building an intuition for it. Because it's what's gonna serve you in the next project and the next project and the next one. And this is the big one. As a team being able to seek out the epicenter, working with a small team especially, you're often not orchestrated, you're not having somebody tell you what to do or having a gantt chart laying out the sequence of things that need to be done.  You need to find points of accord. Don't nip around the edges. Don't back into a problem. Don't get stuck with sunk cost. Find your highest risks. Find your greatest unknowns. Find what you want out of a product and tackle it straight on. You're gonna yield the greatest wins and everything will fall in place around them. Together we can't do this alone. Especially in our teams, we don't have divisions. There's no wall to throw something over. There's nobody to dump something on. Sometimes you're a team of one or two and we each own the product in its direction. Something I've struggled with is there can be a dark side to this. You can cultivate overwork. You can cultivate workaholicism. I don't know if that's a word. It can cultivate a kind of 110% effect. Like you need to be crushing it. You don't need to be crushing it. You just need to be doing a good job. And part of that is taking responsibility for what you can possibly do and looking out for each other.  The flip side to this is that ownership is personal. As we develop this kind of relationship with our products and our tools and our teams, this is what I was feeling with Ruby and Rails itself. This is a personal thing and yet it's also a professional thing. Like how do I think about this? Are you supposed to tease these apart and treat them separately? I don't think so. I think I hope by being mindful you can avoid seeing this play out poorly because it can. When you have a personal relationship with your product, that can turn into negative things too. It can turn into hoarding, can turn into politics, gamesmanship, guarding and kind of defense, the kinds of things that reflect a selfishness about your work or your work in relation to others, a stature within a team rather than a team working together. And if we can act it all out together, I mean fantastic, we're in concert. And this is when things really friggin' click and the first feelings of joining a new team and getting your sea legs and having those first experiences of like, this is gonna work.  Those are the first times where you can really feel like we're in this together. I can trust not in just how this iteration is gonna work out, how this project's gonna play out, but in how the next one is and the next one and the next one. It's what allows you to gather up your sense of trust and cast it out in the future and see what it pulls in. And in this sense really our team, our firm is our greatest product. We do all this work together and we create one thing after another and what we're really creating is the ability to keep doing it, to build a better team, to keep choosing our tools, to create the place where we can create like this. And bar none and I think base camp is base camp's best product because it's the place where we can keep creating base camps, it's where we can adapt to the future and where we can trust and feel that this is not, it's an unknown, it's a risk, but it's not something to quail against and to be afraid of the future. It's something knowing that when I think about five years from now or 10 years from now, it's gonna be great. I have no idea what it's gonna look like but I know that we're the group that can do it. This was new to me. I know it's probably familiar to many of you because you've done it. You've cultivated and nurtured a team into being more than just a collection of programmers and designers and marketers and writers and business people and that feeling of crossing the barrier into something that's self-sustaining and becomes something that you continue wanting to be a part of. When you've grown together and you matured, the things that I felt were the kind of resilience that come from a team like this, the kind of wisdom that you gain and you build an identity together that this is something that can endure and you can do it again and again and again. You've really built an engine for surplus. So thinking of Rails as this kind of surplus engine, what Rails offers over a mainstream tool is also something that you've all probably built in your own teams. Looking for the best you can make with each other, looking for those points of surplus, choosing to magnify them, choosing to identify the best points, choosing to shed places that don't work. It's really awesome. Your team can do things that are crowd 10 times its size couldn't.  And really, this probably boils down to like any team that's getting a shed done together effectively. The big things for me here are that the surplus engine beyond that, once you have a team like this and you work on it, it becomes a recipe for endurance. You reinvent yourself over the years throughout products, throughout new ideas, and so have we. I'm sure you have too. The surplus engine is healthier than ever and it's no accident. We design, we maintain, we adapt. And when we think of this just like our tools, this is something that we're on the lookout for. You debug, you have legacy. This is something that we're all responsible for. And a new kind of sense emerges. For me, a sense of permanence. And this is also an interesting one, a kind of a bedrock sense that I feel from the Rails team, from Rails committers, from the Rails community, from my colleagues at Basecamp. And it's the rarest thing that I've experienced is it's also something I wouldn't have known to look for or even to identify that we've set sail together and we've made it again and again and again. We've done it so many times, we've forgotten times that we did it. It's basic trust in each other. And what we don't need to do this, again, 110% battle mentality. We aren't an invading army. We aren't trying to beat a problem. We're trying to build something. We don't need the extra 10%, even the extra 20%. If we even see this, like I've done this on occasion where I feel like there's, I've got too much riding on my shoulders. And the answer, the natural answer, the immediate answer is, well, I'm gonna do more. I'm gonna, I'm not thinking like, well, I'm gonna crush it. But like, I'm gonna put in that extra 10%. I'm gonna try to make it happen. And come out on the other side and burned out a little bit. Sent the team kind of topsy together and why? We didn't need to do that. What we really rely on is patience, focus, keeping focus, willfully maintaining our constraints, being disciplined about it, being cautious about growth, what we choose to take on. Openness together, having strong opinions, holding them loosely, being willing to share without fear of somebody who's gonna shoot this down, a kind of psychological safety, step one. Being open to change in general, being open to revision, everything's up for reconsideration. Insight, simple one, like not being afraid of new things. In some place like base camp it's been around a long time. Working with Jason and David, they're like, they're strong voices in the community. And it can seem, especially to a newcomer, like shit's figured out. Like all the insights have kind of been had, like not even. If anything, we've codified what it looks like to do product development and to design a business for that time. It's perishable, it's gone the next moment. And we're still learning. And persistence, the biggest one for me as a programmer is just most of the difference you can make is showing up with it, bringing your game. It's 90% of the battle. I'm doing a great job, obviously, but weathering the ups and downs together, sustaining each other, being patient, and trust. Okay, back to Rails 5. So that's my story of really, kind of a pie into what I look for from community I'm in and that community is base camp, what I would look for in a new place, what I would encourage any of you to expect from each other, to expect from your teams, and to create for each other.  And our story is a lot like yours, and your story is a lot like ours. So, why Rails? Because we love Ruby, because it's home to us, it's home to me. Why Rails? Because we love the web, like no place else. It's a platform for creation, open to all of us. It's like none other. Why Rails? Because these are the kinds of teams and relationships and businesses I wanna see in the world. And I see Rails as this surplus engine. That's why Rails. And more than that, so are we. We make this happen, we invest in ourselves, we trust each other, we do the work that matters, we build great products, we build this great surplus. This is going back to 2008, eight years ago, David looked back on five years of Rails, and at this time Rails was old, five years old, got all the things that have changed. Let's gauge where we are relative to the mainstream. Like how do we even judge that? So here's what it looks like in 2008. So there's the difference in what you can do with Rails compared to what you could do at the time. And what do you think it looks like today? Well, here's my view.  If anything, I find myself in the same boat more than ever. 2016 is a very different place than 2008, but the kind of surplus that Rails offers is very similar because Rails hasn't entered the mainstream. What Rails has done is entered a different kind of mainstream where Rails is commonplace, it's acceptable in worlds where it wasn't in 2008. It's 10 years, and so what are the bets that have paid off? If we're looking at this 10 years from now, what's gonna be the same? So the big bets at the time were confessing commonality. We're all facing the same challenges, we're scaling the same mountains, and the audacious part of Rails at its beginning was that we don't just present a set of tools that you build your product from, make your own choices every time. We're all in the same boat. So you're getting flexibility. You don't need to set a new route of the same mountain every time. Classic convention over configuration. And really we've had this omakase from the very beginning. Pick your choices when it matters. Pick your choices when you need them. Deciding that tech matters. This seems of them all kind of probably the most stale to me because like the tech matters. And in 2004, tech wasn't necessarily your choice. Tech was something decided in a boardroom and the agenda should be set by those doing the work. The big one was that we care about us. Programmer experience matters more. Ruby's designed to make programmers happy and this was like, what the hell?  It should have these other kinds of characteristics and constraints. Well, 2016, these are all as true today as they were in 2004, 2008, 2012. So what was the bad news? We thought we'd lose the surplus. There's no way market's gonna let this endure, right? Well, a few hypotheses. Mainstream copies rails, what do you think in 2008? Highly unlikely. 2016, well, it happened kinda. It's no XML setups. Everybody does convention over configuration. It's commonplace, awesome for everyone. Flexibility, still kind of a no-no in mainstream tools. Like you want to be able to have the kind of choice to build things the way you want. But it's commonplace in tools aimed at teams, products and businesses like ours. Deciding tech matters, we had faints toward this with adoption of Go, Swift, JRuby, but the agenda's still set elsewhere in the mainstream. But it's commonplace in tools aimed at teams, products and businesses like ours. You care about us? Yeah, still same faints toward this with Go, Java 8 and making things more and programmer friendly. ECMAScript, six and seven. Pushing languages toward programmer fluency, happiness, making them a joy to write and read. And this is commonplace now in teams and products and businesses like ours, but not the mainstream. Mainstream is budged a little, but it isn't looking to copy. So another option, Rails goes mainstream. What do we think in 2008? Maybe. It seemed hard to imagine.   Retain our surplus. Is that really so bad? But can it scale? Let him ask. Have a little thud act as its own barrier to entry. Well, can it? Yeah. It's been proven time and again, even Twitter. But something interesting has happened, 2016. Ruby is not the choice for the mainstream, but it's definitely the mainstream choice for teams and products and businesses like ours. The bad news? Probably not bad news. We still have a surplus relative to the mainstream. And well, going mainstream against among Davids is fine as long as we're all challenging Goliaths. Last one, dramatic alternative. Is this gonna come up? So there are gonna be a new approach that builds a greater surplus over Rails. 2008 thinking probably what's gonna happen.  We've seen alternatives rise, some quite notably, but none to mount a new great surplus. We've seen cousins really, partners. We've seen something different, envision a new platforms, maturity of old ones. And there's one notable, phenomenal newcomer that's changed the web development world, node. You got it. That's probably the biggest impact I've seen on the web development landscape. And being able to think in JavaScript, it gives me, it harkens back to my feeling of what it feels like to be in Ruby. And I feel that way for all the JavaScript programmers who are stuck on the front end, who felt like they're in a front end box. And they get an enormous instant surplus. They already call JavaScript home. Talking about it needs to be isomorphic. Well, no, it doesn't. It's not a determinant of success. The new JavaScript surplus for all these people is that they have a home language on the client and the server. They aren't boxed in front end developers anymore. So they can love JavaScript the same way I love Ruby. Can own the whole stack and really makes me thrilled that the front end is bursting out into end. So JavaScript's not my home, maybe my Airbnb. But our surplus does share common roots and common aims. And most notably, the real platform that's emerged for all of us is the browser. This is true for Basecamp 3. It's true for apps that are calling themselves client-side. It's true for apps that are single-page apps. It's true for pretty much all the apps we build. We all rely on DOM APIs and things that only became possible because the browser improved. Kinda, it's a lot better than it was. We can hit potholes, polyfills, and we can thank everybody for making it better. These are all evergreen browsers now. They used to look like this. Just like, great, the web. We can all create on the web.  Total minefield. So what sparked this C change? I don't really know. I got hand wavy, kind of. I don't know how to say that. What, WG, what wig? But these guys, they changed everything. Splintered from the W3C to fix, well to get rid of XHDML. HTML5, it's what we all rely on now. It led to browsers competing on standards, on completeness, on chasing the cutting edge, trying to jostle to set the pace for new standards, to set competing visions of the web, for being predictable. I mean, this is the norm now. The list goes on. We have an increasingly full-featured platform to build on. For the first time, we can even contemplate full-fledged browser apps. Nearly all of our apps today are browser apps. Few are built to run without using DOM APIs, much less without JavaScript. At the greatest reach, we have browser-installed apps. We have single-page apps for rich, responsive UI. We have single-page apps to wriggle out of having a server at all. It's when you want to take on state management and browsing context yourself. And we have, let's say, multi-page apps. This is Turbolinks, PJAX, Stacker, and Basecamp 2. They're all working with a managed browsing context, which is really kind of a degenerate case of a single-page app. You're using these APIs to be able to interact with the browser. We have web components, custom elements, ShadowDOM, Polymer, and this is just the beginning for the browser. This is the golden age. So what's a dramatic alternative? Nah, not quite. We've gained an awesome new partner.  They're all evergreen. You can count on all of them. So to teams like ours, this is our surplus magnifier that the web is a platform that we can count on, free vitalized, works everywhere. We can put it on equal footing with native platforms. Turbolinks 5 magnifies it further for us. And this is amazing if you're in our shoes, and I think many of you are. You wouldn't have contemplated going multi-platform and you can do it. Check out Sam's talk. I can't believe it's not native. Give Turbolinks a shot. If doing an iOS app is something that wasn't on your plate or you hadn't even thought of, think about it. It's a huge opportunity for small teams and small businesses. The bad news, looking like nut. It's rad news. Even better, teams, programmers are seeking surplus. They're finding us. They're finding Rails. New programmers, starters, kids, they're finding us because of this kind of surplus, because we're approachable, because you can start and build with Rails from square one. So, I'm feeling good, full surplus, magnified, engineed, but not. So, what's up with Rails 5? Almost. Beta 4's out for a week. So, here's how we're looking. I'll give you some large, irrelevant numbers. Shitload of commits, bam, crushing it. Look at all those merges. That's all since Rails 4.2. Like, who knows what's in those? Thank you, Rafael, our resident merge and patch monster and gatekeeper to all Rails quality. And it's more than just headliners. Check out Sean's talk, all the features you haven't heard about. You can find out what's in all those friggin' merges. Befeatingly, the new in Rails 5 track has even more to tell. Look for this tag. This is deeper dyes into Rails 5. It's on schedule, it's on sessions. You can find out about Action Cable, TurboLynx 5, Testing Rails 5, using RSpec with Rails 5. I think, going a little deeper even, look behind the magic. You can find out about Active Job, what Sprockets is gonna look like. It's Sprockets 4, Source Maps, the innards of Active Record, what goes on when you boot a Rails app, what it's like to test, and hell, can you fit a Rails app in a tweet? Find out, that's actually a session. So, we're here now. Basecamp 3 is running Rails 5. So can you. We're working hard to polish up a release candidate, and we're gonna do it this week. I swear, I swear, I swear. Aaron's gonna ship it. So, thanks to everybody who's contributed. There's still time to pitch in. There's a ton of poll requests. I know those were big numbers before, but you can add to them. So, long live the surplus. Long live Ruby. Long live the web. And, well, every one of you. Thank you, and have a kick-ass Rails Conf.


Good afternoon, everybody. I first want to thank the Knight Foundation, Alberto, Jennifer, Sam, and our fairy godmother, Robin, for pulling us all together. It's quite an accomplishment. And I also just want to say how honored and privileged I am to be sharing a stage with these four people. It has been a pleasure over the last month to get to know them and to get to know their incredible stories, which they're going to share with you. So the economic tsunami that has hit the newspaper industry has been, as you all know, particularly destructive to local news with potentially very dire consequences. Corruption goes unchecked. Institutions that impact our everyday lives are not held to account. We lose our eyes on the street and our understanding of what's going on, both across the street and across town. And we lose our shared knowledge that bridges divides and we become more divided. And this tsunami is accelerating at gale force speed with, as Ken Doctor put it, the financialization and consolidation of the industry by businesses whose primary interest is cutting costs to maximize cash flow, consolidation for maximum efficiency, whatever that means, and to make money until there is no more money to make. Just consider what's happened in the past four months. The two largest news chains, Gannett and Gatehouse, merged, taking on $1.8 billion in debt and plans for slashing $300 million in operating costs. That's 261 newspapers and 30% of our local news coverage. Warren Buffett sold his 28 papers to Lee Enterprises for 70% less than he paid for them. The Tribune Company is now controlled by Alden Capital. I need not say any more about that. And on February 13th, McClatchy declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having experienced the two-fisted punch of an 80% drop in ad revenues over the past decade, and about $535 million in unfunded pension liabilities. That's 30 newspapers, including Miami's beloved hometown paper, The Miami Herald, which is punching up against all odds way beyond its weight class with grit, determination, and commitment. And I just want everybody to give them a round of applause. OK, enough doom and gloom. Here's the good news. All across the country, local news is being revitalized in the public interest and as a public service with a incredibly wide range of models, for-profit, nonprofit, newsroom collaboratives, startups, and transformation to new ownership models. But there is a common ingredient for success and sustainability, and it's called local, local, local, and then I will say local. Local civic leadership, local attachment and roots, local community involvement, and local investment, be it commercial investment or philanthropic investment. Joining me in this conversation are representatives from two such institutions, both of whom have faced dire financial circumstances and, quite frankly, existential crises, retooling and restructuring their news operations to chart a sustainable path forward. Our first speakers are David Huland, editor of The Anchorage Daily News, and Diane Kaplan, president of the Rasmussen Foundation, based in Anchorage. And I think they win the award for longest distance traveled. Take it away. Thanks, Julie. I have the privilege of being the editor of a local online and print newsroom with about 30 people in an amazing, complicated, interesting place. We cover a medium-sized city and everything that goes with it, government, schools, crime. But we also cover Alaska, this huge place with an international economy, complicated natural resource battles, climate change, recall campaign against the governor, and a couple hundred communities sprawling across this huge area that really face some real challenges. We do that with a newsroom of about 30 people. All the challenges facing local news that we've all been hearing about, they're real, they're serious.  And just to get something straight right from the beginning, I don't have any magic for how to solve the local news crisis, but we found some paths that, for us at least, give us some hope for stability and sustainability to be able to continue to serve our community with local, original reporting. If you don't know us, we came very close to not existing. We were a long time a McClatchy property. We were sold to an online-only startup. The thing ended up in Chapter 11 in 2017.  It could have gone a lot of different directions, but we were purchased by a local family with no publishing experience that had a strong interest in maintaining local news and continuing local news in Alaska. We had a big reorganization, painful downsizing, but we were profitable within a year. We've embraced a big shift to direct reader revenue. And for us, that really means an emphasis on digital subscriptions and digital audience. And partnerships have become, as part of that, really important to us. On the national level, there is a whole group of entities that are here at this conference that have been hugely helpful to us and local news. The Knight Foundation, Pointer, American Press Institute, LEMFEST, all those are working to support news organizations, change their business models, develop best practices, and really helping to nurture a community of news organizations out there that's developed. We're working now with the Facebook Journalism Project on a digital subscription project that includes our friends from Salt Lake City, actually. Solutions Journalism Network, they were actually, they had a couple of people up in Anchorage in our newsroom last week doing training for our newsroom on maybe changing some ways that we report, not just focusing all the time on problems, but sometimes looking for fixes. That's at the national level, but for this thing to work, it has to be local, local, local, understanding the community, working with the community, serving the community, ultimately serving the community. And so another way we've worked with partners is to find new ways to directly support local reporting and expand our capacity for it. And that's really central to everything, is strong, original local reporting. We're now in our second year working with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. We're taking a deep, sustained look at sexual violence in Alaska and failures in law enforcement across Alaska. ProPublica has underwritten the cost of a full-time reporter, which allowed us to hire reporters behind that person over the past two years, and also gave us support to just do that project in a way that gave it more power and impact than we could have done on our own. So that's really been a great partnership. We're excited to have reporters starting this summer from Report for America. They're gonna be focused on covering healthcare and public health in Alaska, which is one of the areas as the news ecosystem has kind of shrunk up there, that's not being heavily covered, we think there's some opportunity. And we're experimenting with direct local support for reporting funded directly by a group of Alaska nonprofits. Several years ago, we developed a partnership with a group of nonprofits led by Rasmussen Foundation. We spent a year reporting on the impacts of alcoholism in Alaska. This group of nonprofits paid for a reporter and a photographer full-time. We retained sole control over the content, had a contract that reflected that, it felt like we were, that was pretty early in that whole process of developing these partnerships. So we're in the early stages of developing a new partnership, similar to that, that's gonna, we hope, take a sustained look at homelessness in Alaska. That's just one more path to independent, original, local reporting. We're looking for ways to do more. So what gets said here in Miami stays here in Miami. So everyone be truthful and transparent. So raise your hand if you had your first drink of alcohol, not including communion wine or Passover wine when you were 12 or under, 13, 14, 15, 16, under 18, not until you were over 21. Oh, no one raised their hand. Okay, so I came to Alaska for two years and that was 35 years ago, like a lot of other people. And since I've been there, I have never met a single person who hasn't experienced misery because of someone drinking too much, even in my own family. More than 10 years ago, a board member of Rasmussen Foundation who is a superior court judge, she's now on the ninth circuit, was coming to the end of her term and she said, if we don't do something about alcohol before I leave this board, I'm not gonna be able to live with myself.  They were requesting domestic violence, restraining orders, divorces. It was children in need of aid, but it was really all alcohol. Four of the five leading causes of death for Native men in Alaska are alcohol related. So we convened 20 Alaska leaders and we decided to create a new way of thinking and called it Recover Alaska. So those of you who raised your hand at 12, 13, or 14 listen up because we learned very early on the most significant factor in determining if a person will have problems with alcohol later in life is the age of their first drink. Most teenagers think most teenagers drink. In fact, most teenagers do not drink, but if most teenagers thought most teenagers didn't drink, they'd be less likely to drink. And we knew right there we needed a media strategy if we were gonna be successful. The first time I approached the Daily News and it was David's predecessor and suggested we have a partnership, I think he said something like I'd rather have my teeth worked on with a rusty drill than take a penny from the Rasmussen Foundation. But by 2013, things had changed and the time was right. So as David said, we funded one reporter, one photographer and the state of intoxication was started. It won national and regional recognition and included photography and videography. Here is the Recover Alaska website. And in the second slide that you'll see is Darlene Trigg. She's an Alaska native in Nome, Alaska who formed a patrol of safety officers. And it was really important to show an Alaska native in a problem-solving role, not as a victim, not as an abuser, because most people in Alaska think most people who have a problem with alcohol are natives. And in this slide, you can see Art Ivanov who just found out that his friend froze to death outside as a result of drinking too much. We never expected video to be part of the project. It wasn't even in the contract, but it ended up being one of the most powerful parts of the program. Heidi Case moved from Utah to Alaska to access better treatment for her son who had fetal alcohol syndrome.  He's upstairs. Sorry. Trying to think how I would describe Jacob. He's a sweet kid when he wants to be, and then he has that other side of him. You know, it's an everyday, constant battle with him, trying to get him to do anything, really. I actually knew something was wrong with Jacob before he was even born.   It's all there is to it. I've had a lot of time, you know, to process. And the hardest thing is just knowing that it won't ever go away. Two critical elements to getting to yes from no. First of all, we presented the Anchorage Daily News with a copy of the contract between the Ford Foundations and the Washington Post and with the LA Times. And I think that presented that this was gonna become a model that every newspaper had to look at. And secondly, we brought in five or six other funders so it wasn't just Rasmussen Foundation in the Anchorage Daily News, and we did it through a fund at the Alaska Community Foundation so there was some distance between the funders and the newspaper.  And if you're not comfortable with that, this isn't the thing for you. Thank you. Thank you, David, and thank you, Diane. True words have never been spoken. Our next speakers are Paul Huntsman and Frazier Nelson. Paul is the president and CEO of the Huntsman Family Investments and the publisher and soon to be not owner, but owner of the Salt Lake Tribune and for business innovation for the Salt Lake Tribune. Take it away. And I should say the folks who have created the unprecedented first step, the first for-profit news organization in America that has successfully convinced the IRS to convert it to non-profit status, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you, Julie. So as Julie mentioned, I am the publisher and owner of the Salt Lake Tribune. I hope next week to be the chairman of the board as we legally make the transition to a nonprofit. We put our application in this last winter. I expected a ruling with a lot of questions in February is what I was told. And we received a letter from the IRS last November accepting our application as is. So we spent the last three months working through the transition and we're just right on the cusp now of legally now moving all of the assets into a non-profit entity. But I'm so grateful to be able to share a little bit about our story with you today. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, of civic-minded individuals, as well as philanthropists. And as Julie mentioned, my day job, which I thought I'd be spending the vast majority of my time is in investments, not too dissimilar to what you would find in private equity. And when the opportunity came up to acquire the Salt Lake Tribune, which four years ago was in financial turmoil due to some short-term decisions that the hedge fund owner had done to the paper, I realized that as I looked at our community going forward that our community simply would not be able to function as it has been. And as we look at all the challenges and opportunities going forward to not have the paper of record for the last 150 years in the state of Utah. And so as we've gone down this journey, I do not have a background in journalism. I never expected to be a publisher five years ago. I went around the country and I visited with a lot of the leaders, many of you here in the room, Alberto being one, the Lenfest Institute, and so many others. And I realized that the pathway that we needed to go down to, and again, it was all about long-term sustainability, the business model for local newspapers is completely broken as the industry has been shifting from a print product to a digital product. And I think every newspaper and community needs to figure out what that right pathway is. And for us, like a lot of problems that was mentioned and challenges that was mentioned earlier this morning, problems are solved on the local level. We had to bring the stewardship back to the local community and have some leadership and to be able to solve this moving forward. This is something that we would not be able to do without the strong support of our, not only of our community leaders, but our citizens at large. And so we're very early on in this experiment and so far the community has been very, very supportive. We're very encouraged by what we're hearing and really, really grateful for the position that we're in right now and very confident that we're gonna be able to sustain this longer term. Well, I wanna again thank everyone for being here. I also wanna just give a shout out to my sisters in arms who've really been with us from the very beginning. Jennifer Preston at night, Terry Quinn from the Texas Tribune and Annie Madonia from Lenfest. You know, these women, and there are so many in the room have taken steps forward. We may be the first print and legacy metropolitan daily to become a nonprofit, but there are many models out there that we're able to not put, to find a point on, steal from very generously. So I'm like Paul, I don't come from the journalistic background. I've spent my life in nonprofits and public service and some work with foundations. And in some ways I kind of see myself as the test case for a person that would pay more for the news that is so important to all the work that I've done in my life. And when Paul approached me and said I have this idea to turn the paper into a nonprofit, it really just felt like a natural. And I had absolute confidence that the IRS would support our idea because newspapers are, as Alberto said, just clearly for the public good. The only difference with our model is that now that public good is shared between our institution and the community that we serve. The leadership of the paper, the way we interact with the community, our accountability to them has deepened by our becoming a not-for-profit. And our vision, and it's one I hope that we'll be able to share our success with you over the long term, is to really help create a new and sustainable model for institutions like ours that are the paper of record in their communities, that are vital to the civil and civic. And I wanna emphasize civil and civic discourse that we need in our state to become the state we wanna be in the democracy we believe we are in the United States. Our model is really adaptable. When we approached the IRS, we said, everything we're doing now we want to continue to be able to do. Sell advertising for as much and as long as we can. Sell subscriptions, which aren't necessarily deductible because they are good in a service, but continue to receive the revenue from the community that values what we provide to allow philanthropists, national, for those of you in the room, national philanthropists as well as local philanthropists to support this model and to support the tool that journalism brings to our democracy. We're also doing more community engagement work and we'll look for ways to deepen our discourse with the community. The only thing we don't do now is endorse candidates, which from my point of view is really helpful because Paul's brother is running for governor. So if things weren't complicated enough, being able to give that up. But we certainly will continue to have a very strong opinion page. One of the nice things too that a nonprofit model allows us is to provide and amplify the diversity of voices that can be on that opinion page. So we're reaching deeper into the community to find a place for again, that civil civic dialogue. We're also creating a longer term solution called the Utah Journalism Foundation. This is an endowment, our immediate goal is to raise about $60 million, 20 by the end of next year. And the earnings from that endowment will go to support not only the Salt Lake Tribune, but also emerging voices in our community. We're concerned about the rural communities in our states that are losing their local journalism. We're concerned about emerging voices like our really large and vibrant refugee community in Utah, our tribal nations, our large Latinx community. We want to make sure that as people lose their local journalism, we're there to help support it. And I think that becoming a nonprofit opens up all kinds of really exciting, exciting opportunities for collaboration, for deepening our engagement with our members, for community ownership, community accountability, and incredible community journalism. We look forward to sharing our progress with each of you and thank you for all the cheering that you've been doing for us. It means a tremendous amount to us. So the way this is gonna go is I'm gonna ask a few questions and then we're gonna open it up in about 15 minutes. But I wanna start with you, Diane. You and Russ Musin have been real pioneers in forging the notion of philanthropic support for journalism as core part of your mission. How did you convince your other philanthropic partners to do it? How did you build the base of support in your local community so that this is business as usual and not just a one-off? It's become very complicated. In the old days, you could put an ad in the Anchorage Daily News and on the Channel 2 News and you'd reach the entire state pretty much. There is no way to really get information out very efficiently anymore. So it really requires if you're involved in issues like we are and homelessness is a very complicated issue and it's not easily understood and it's easily misunderstood. So this time around it actually was easy. I think we're gonna have seven or eight other partners who are gonna fund it and it's been very easy to get them to do so. First of all, we all wanna have impact with our philanthropic dollars. And there's something about a newspaper that is not social media, it's not radio, it's not TV. You can place a newspaper on the seat of a state legislator so that when they get in their chair, it's sitting there and the front page is about alcohol and it had a very direct impact, the reporting on policy. So if you're serious in philanthropy and you're trying to change public norms, change public policy, you can't do it without a media strategy. And I think we have all figured out it's gotta be part of the plan. Amen. Thank you. And David, just as a follow up, last night, Mindy Mark has said something that really struck me which was that given the constraint resources she was dealing with, she had to create some priorities in what her reporters were focusing on and those priorities were accountability, investigative journalism. And this is a tension in the newsroom because part of your job is covering the school board hearings and covering the zoning hearings and reporting on who's running for what office. And just if you could give a few minutes on how you balance those tensions or how you deal with those tensions in a constrained resource environment. As everything has shrunk, it's just gotten harder. And there needs to be more horsepower for local reporting, all the way around. Investigative reporting, accountability reporting, it's hard, it's time intensive, it's expensive. But we've also, we've found, I think, like pretty much every newsroom has found, public, the community really values that kind of reporting. So we're trying everything we can to get support for that kind of reporting, but that's not the only job we have. It's not the only thing that our community expects from us. And that really is the rub. I mean, it's covering institutions that are important day to day. And for us, it's just covering important breaking news is important for us online. That's a big part of our audience. And so it's just trying to make smart choices every day and hopefully building more resources as we go along. Paul and Frazier. So getting the IRS to give you, I guess, a preliminary approval because it's a five-year test process means that you've got to prove two things, that you have a governance that's an independent board of directors representative of the community you serve, and it means that you have to build a broad and diverse base of support. How are you planning on doing both of those? Well, if I can just highlight the second part of the question of building out a board, we're gonna be holding our first board meeting this Friday, which I'm really excited about. And as you talk about a diverse board for a newspaper, just take a look at who our core reader base is. It's white, it's highly educated, it's center left, and you can almost draw a fairly narrow circle in terms of the geographic region in Salt Lake City of where most of our readers are from. So as you look at a broader, diverse audience, to me, my priority in building out a board was to go young and when I mean young, I mean very young, as in the 20s, more of a technological oriented group of individuals as well as begin to reach out to our diverse populations who I believe that the paper in the past few decades has not done a very good job in reaching out to. And then we also have to maintain a presence of our existing readers, which is the group that I just described. So as I'm collecting this group, we've got individuals that are in their late 70s and we have individuals in their mid 20s with a wide variety of ideological backgrounds of coming at it with a variety of different understands of technological tools, but all with a passion of journalism and wanting to solve this and wanting to broaden the reach of our audience in terms of how is journalism gonna look and what is our focus gonna be as we enter into 2021? So I'm really looking forward to this very, very diverse group of individuals and the challenges that I have given them to really look at broadening the appeal of our journalism to reach a much broader and a much younger audience that needs to be much more engaged in journalism. Great, and part two. Yeah, in terms of diversifying the funding source and to make sure that we don't have just one or two major funders. I mean, that's the big public asset test. We launched a drip campaign, a drip fundraising campaign right after we became a not for profit to explain to our readers, newsletter readers as well as paying subscribers what we were up to and what we asked them to do. And I'm really pleased that to date we've had almost 2000 people come forward with a donation, not even tied to access to the paper, but just saying go team. And those grants have, those gifts have ranged from a dollar to $10,000. And this was just in a very light touch. We're also establishing a major gift program and of course we're getting the support of our key local foundations. I think that the diversity of the size of gifts says something. I think we also have surveyed our readers and asked them what, and people who weren't readers and asked them what life would be like without the Tribune and would they be willing to support it either by subscribing or by making a donation. Granted, it was a group of people that we thought were enthusiastic but we heard that 80% said they really couldn't imagine life in Utah without the Tribune. That is astonishing to me and what we need to do is convert them now to supporters in a bigger sense but that's very, very, very I think hopeful for our future. It's very promising. I think I probably have room for one or two last questions. I'm gonna go back to David and Diane. You have both been extraordinarily entrepreneurial and seeking out every possible local and national resource to build up and beef up your reporting at the Daily News. What has that meant for the newsroom? That must have created some sort of tensions or changes in how you actually do your job every day. There's just been so much evolution over the past few years that I think that has become just part of it although kind of at every step, I think what we've at least tried to do is find a way to do these things that maintain our core values. It has to do with its local, it has to do with maintaining those journalistic values as the thing's evolved and I think that's what I'd say. Great. Should we open it up? Yes, questions. We have Mike Brenner's question up here. Thank you and it's so nice to have a happy panel. Something good going on. So I guess my question is, is there a limit to this? Are there communities or newspapers where you feel that the nonprofit model or the approaches that you're taking or is there sort of a minimum viable product limitation here and if so what is it? What are sort of the minimum requirements for a community or a paper to take this path? I have a thought about that and I know that there are many of you in the room represent community foundations. I think that the path that you all have taken to place funds to support local journalism in a nonprofit like a community foundation is open to any newspaper, any media organization of any size. There's nothing that really would prohibit you from creating a contract with the local community foundation to do certain types of work. We're not saying that every organization should take the leap that we have. I think Paul's a really unique person who's willing to give up a tremendous asset and the power that comes with the voice of a newspaper to the community. I mean Paul, honestly, it's a remarkable thing for someone to do and I don't know how many other Paul Huntsman's there are out in the country who would be willing to turn over an institution like this to the community it serves. But that doesn't mean that there's things along the way along the continuum that couldn't be used by other communities and other papers. Hello, my name is Ira Perman. I'm with the Atwood Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska, a foundation that is built on the prior fortunes of the media. And first I'd like to applaud the four of you for being pioneers. You really are doing some remarkable work that is inspiring the field certainly. The Rasmussen Foundation and the Daily News inspire the work that we do. I have a question for Fraser and Paul.  And you're looking for funding to make that work. In 1967, Congress put in effect the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides public funds for broadcast entities. 1,400, I understand. Would you be interested in hearing ideas of expanding that to print media? Well, I'll just say that this is a unique comment. I don't know if all of you will understand as it relates to Salt Lake City, Utah. So Salt Lake is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Mormon Church. There was a story that just came out from the Washington Post about their balance sheet being over $100 billion. And so the question that I've received by many is would you accept a contribution from the Mormon Church? And I often dovetail that as well. Would you accept a contribution or would you allow the government to subsidize your work as well? And I've really thought a lot about that and I'll be honest, I'm not sure really what the answer is on that. Would considering and looking at how reckless some of our politicians have been as it relates to different organizations that they don't like that are funded, would I wanna be tied into that or have our newspaper associated with that? I think that we can meet the funding obligations from among the community. There is so much money out there in the country that philanthropic funds that are trying to find their way to good causes. And what I've seen that if you appeal to those individuals, those organizations, those foundations, there really is a willing appetite from members of the community that really wanna support regardless of their ideology or background. They all wanna see a strong and vibrant local newspaper. And so again, I would be very hesitant to accept federal funds. But I think that the funds are there among local philanthropists. Thank you, we have a question back here. My question is for Paul, I'm Marcelle Epley, the president and CEO of the Long Beach Community Foundation. I'm here with Mark Ian, our board member and David Summers from the Long Beach Post. And we've been exploring models in Long Beach and one of the question marks kind of in my mind is in terms of your board. So I heard you say that you're having your first board meetings soon. Yes. Have you thought about the challenge between sort of the control of the board versus you as the publisher and the staff and the editors and I don't know if you're relinquishing control over it's a policy board. Like what is the role of the board and how much do they really have access into the day to day and the decisions of the newspaper? Sure, sure. So we've got to, so one of the first documents that we drafted was the bylaws of the newspaper. There's a very strict wall between the board and the newspaper itself. The role of the board is not unlike any other nonprofit board. It's provide the resources to the newspaper to ensure that they can do their job. And so the newspaper and myself, we've had a very good working relationship. I've really looked at my role over the last three years is to ensure that the newspaper has resources to do their job, to provide independent journalism to our community. And I really look at our board, obviously we've got bylaws in place and so I'm not too concerned. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year. Will there be, I think the greater concern is when I go out and solicit seven figure donations from members in the community and when there's stories that are about them, I expect to be getting calls from them. And so will that be a challenge? Sure, but I think that's just, I just think that's the world that we're gonna have to work through. And again, we're sort of transitioning into this era, but I'm not concerned with the board at all because again, we've got very strict bylaws in terms of the board's role and responsibilities to ensure that we have resources. Dan, you wanted to add something. Sure, before getting into philanthropy, because let's face it, nobody, when they're a little kid, somebody says, what do you wanna do when you grow up? Says, I wanna be in philanthropy. We all fall into it from somewhere. I run the Alaska Public Radio Network, which is a 26 station network, news network, basically morning, noon and night. And so I would say not all federal money is the same, not all government money is the same. Would we have taken direct support from the federal government for news programming? No, we would not. Did we take money from the National Endowment for the Arts for Arts Programming? Yes, we did. Did we take money from the Department of Commerce for equipment? We did. And in addition to that, with public radio underwriting, we had money from oil companies, from banks, from telephone companies, all of whom were covered by the news. And I don't believe it ever affected anything that appeared in the news. Who took the phone calls from the angry companies? I did.  I didn't agree with you. I am so sympathetic by what just happened. You know, you deal with it. But I think, did they cancel their underwriting? I can't remember anyone ever did. Occasionally, an advertiser will stop advertising. They almost always come back. Why? They want to be associated with us, because we're popular with the public, the public values us. And they know if their name appears at the end of the news, it's positive for them. So you just manage it. I wouldn't say at all that I have a big issue with government funding. Hi, Laura. As for Minsan Francisco, I had a question for Diane and David. And I just wanted to know if your coverage of alcohol and alcohol abuse has led to a change in the amount of money that has been awarded from the legislature or made a difference in the laws or the public health initiatives that have, and has there been a different kind of support for programs for recovery or more education that is coming not from the news, but really actually in schools and public health organizations? Absolutely. So probably the biggest outcome we can show is that the age of people having their first drink is going up. And the incidence of binge drinking is going down. The incidence of underage drinking is going down. Can you attribute it all to the coverage? Of course not, but we definitely think it's a factor. In terms of funding, there was significant funding that came from the legislature for Recovery Alaska and its efforts. Everything about trauma-informed care. So a lot of people who have issues later on behavioral health experience trauma as children and getting that more embedded into healthcare provision across the state. The new, we have legalized pot in the state. A significant amount of that money is going into after school programs for kids to try and provide healthy alternatives. And I really think Recovery Alaska has been successful actually in changing the alcohol laws in the state of Alaska. So for example, there are very severe penalties for young people who drank and were caught.   And it just happened because people were angry about some, it was a young person driving, killed a cop on the road, and it was an overreaction. What happened is the penalties were so severe. This may seem counterintuitive that law enforcement officials were reluctant to enforce the law because they didn't want to saddle a kid with an alcohol charge that was discoverable if they wanted to get into the military, go to college, get a scholarship and so on. So it wasn't enforced. So we actually had a change to like a parking ticket and you could get rid of the parking ticket if you attended alcohol class. And so clearly, and the background of that was the coverage in the Anchorage Daily News. We did a similar project after that with the Fairbanks News Minor, which is now a nonprofit following in your footsteps as well. So I think there was a direct relationship between awareness among policymakers and from that coverage. But just to add, that's really not something we set out to do. We really were kind of doing our own thing. There really wasn't coordination like that. We were doing a deep exploration of the problem. And I just really want to emphasize that that we were solely in control of the content. The funders didn't know what the content was before it was published. And if it had impact, that was great, but that really wasn't our objective. It was to show the problem and the community could react as it chose. So here are four portraits of civic leadership. And I want to give every one of you the last word before we end this session, but I also want to thank you all for your extraordinary leadership and energy and enthusiasm and leading the path forward. So last words. If any news organizations or funders are considering what we're talking about, I would just, my advice would be that there has to be some level of trust going into it, but there then needs to be very clear agreement what the rules are, where the lines are that everybody understands entering into it. I'd agree. And I think the last thing David said, each of our organizations went into this relationship with different objectives, but they were complementary and I think the outcomes were good for both organizations. I'd say there are a lot of experts in this room. We've benefited from the help of the news revenue hub from our friends at Lenfest, from Facebook and Report for America. There's so many tools available to us that no matter where you find yourself on the spectrum of a for-profit to a not-for-profit, take advantage of the wonderful investments that have been made by some of the major foundations in this nation to uplift all of us. So this last week I just watched the docu-drama of George Washington and I was reminded of the fact that in an age of disruption and where change is happening at lightning speed that the work of journalism has not changed since the time of George Washington and the way that we consume it, the way that we deliver it will continue to evolve and change but the hard work that journalists do has never changed from the foundation of our country and will not change. Thank you.


Come Tuesday 29 June 2021, some 2,167 grade 6 students across the island are expected to sit the common entrance examinations. Chief Education Officer in the Department of Education, Dr. Fiona Phillip-Meyer expressed elation that despite the many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, students are finally able to sit the exam. She shared words of encouragement. You've come this far. It has been challenging for you, but I also saw the joy when I went into the various schools and saw how our grade 6s, I would think for the most part, loved being back at school. So we want you to take that energy into your common entrance. We want to encourage our parents to be kind to our students, to not put undue pressure on them, to really enjoy the moment with them, to applaud their efforts, to appreciate their skills, but to wish them well. As they move into the final days, it is just time to relax with family, and we do hope that whatever results come out, we can be pleased with them. We are part of the universal secondary school education program, and so every one of our children gets an opportunity, but we want to make sure that whichever secondary school they go to, they are pleased with their own efforts. And so we wish them well, wish our parents well. The chief education officer also indicated the move to Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment, CPEA, which will assess students on a continuous basis. We note that we're moving into CPEA in the next two academic years. There is a progression. A lot of training has happened for our teachers. We continue to work with our parents in terms of information, and the CPEA is the Caribbean Primary Exit Assessment run through the office of CXC with us, and it is another opportunity for us to look at other skills and not only the traditional sit-down common entrance, but assessments as we go along throughout the period of time that will also contribute to the students' end grades. I'm sure that many parents can look online to find out more information about the CPEA, and similarly, we are providing parent meetings to give our parents more information in a more intimate and small group setting. Chief Education Officer in the Department of Education, Dr. Fiona Philip-Meyer.