Welcome to Disaster Proof, Your Non-Profit or Library Tech. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global, and I'm glad to be your host for today's event. Our expert on the line today is Lars Erich Holm. He's the Lead Tech – sorry, Lead Community Educator and IT Specialist at CARD, Coordinating Agencies Responding to Disasters, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California across the bridge from us here in San Francisco at TechSoup's headquarters. They were created by local community agencies after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake here in the Bay Area, and they address the emergency preparedness and disaster response needs of service providers, organizations that are most connected to the vulnerable people in any community. So they help train organizations to better serve their communities in response to disasters and in preparedness for those. As a specialist for CARD, where he documents technical issues, creates how-to documents, creating deployment strategies for iPads and other technologies, he's helped CARD support agencies in effectively using and leveraging their technologies for everyday operations and for critical situations. So we're glad to have him joining us on the line. You'll also see assisting with chat Ali Bazikian, who is on the back end to help answer your questions, flag them for follow-up, and to help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. We are located here in TechSoup's San Francisco office, and as I mentioned, Lars Eric is across the Bay in Oakland, California. Go ahead and chat in to let us know from where you're joining today. And while you do that, I'll go ahead and take a quick look at our agenda. We'll be covering a lot in the course of this hour. I'll start with a brief introduction to TechSoup for those of you who may not already be familiar with our work. Then we'll talk about supporting vulnerable communities, which is what CARD's work helps organizations focus on, how they can best remain nimble and resilient regardless of the type of disaster that might strike, whether it's a server failure or a huge national disaster or a huge natural disaster. He'll talk about what a culture of preparedness looks like. Tips on going forward, you must back up talking about a bit of mobile preparedness and things you can do to get your cell phone as a really useful tool in your pocket wherever you go to help you respond to disasters. Power sources, how to use social channels to communicate with your constituencies, apps that you can install now, and we'll have time for additional resources in Q&A. So TechSoup Global is a nonprofit network of 63 partner NGOs providing technology resources and donations to more than 615,000 organizations in 121 countries around the world. You can see us on the map here. Everywhere there's a dot, we have a presence and we're continuing to grow in providing services like donations of different technology, applications that are being developed, local meetup groups, two organizations around the world. And we also work with donor partners like Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, and Adobe in providing technology products and grants to the tune of nearly $5 billion. You can learn more about these programs at TechSoup.org. So before we dive in to having Lars Erich join us on the line with his expertise, we want to get an idea of who you are joining us today. Let us know from what role or roles are you at your organization? Maybe you're somebody on the fundraising or development team.   Are you IT staff? Are you working on the social media team? Are you program staff? Maybe you're joining us from a library today. I saw someone mention earlier they're joining from Berkeley Public Library across the bay as well. Maybe you're on the administrative team. Maybe like many smaller organizations you wear many hats within your organization. And if there's something not included on this list go ahead and let us know in the chat. You can always chat to us. We are reading your messages as we come in. So I'll give just a few seconds so everybody can chime in. And this helps us get an understanding of kind of where you're at and whether maybe you want more technical information or maybe less technical information depending on your role in your organization. So I'll go ahead and skip to the results. It looks like 35% almost wear many hats at their organization, not uncommon, followed by leadership, board, or executive directors and IT staff coming in a close third. So with that, that's helpful for us to get an understanding of kind of where you're at in your organization's makeup and kind of what position you may be playing in helping your organization decide on how to be best prepared in the event of disasters or hopefully in any kind of disaster. So with that I'd like to go ahead and have Lars Eric home join us on the line and tell us a bit about what it means to be wearing many hats since that's a big chunk of our audience today and how you can best keep your organization safe and nimble regardless of what happens. Welcome to the line Lars Eric. We're glad to have you. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us this fine morning. As you heard my name was Lars Eric home. Just sort of to be a bit clear about it, my first name is actually Lars Eric. It's kind of like Joe Bob the Tweeters. And as you can see I work for CARD, Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters. And we're going to talk today about how to disaster-proof your nonprofit or library using technology. So as you can see I also wear many hats. You're actually looking at some of the hats I personally own. And kind of the reason I'm bringing this up is because often when you wear many hats for a nonprofit, some of these duties that you do become other duty as a assigned, a hard to prioritize. Those of you who are technically proficient probably got into that role because you made the mistake of basically being knowledgeable. Folks that saw that you know something about computers like, hey Vingo I need you to help me with my computer here. Can you help me out? So anyway, that's kind of what we're going to be doing all about. Just to sort of give you a quick precursor, some very nice resources. If you go to our website, cardcanhelp.org, we can help. We have lots of downloadable tools and resources that we can share with you. Also I noticed that I was getting prepared for this. I'm going to actually have the links to this at the end of the presentation. I run across three threads on the TechSoup forums that we're actually talking about issues about preparedness. It was totally serendipitous. It was a really great thing to have happen. I want to give you guys just a really quick little bit of background because card, you know, collaborating agents is funding disasters. We are a little bit different than a lot of the other preparedness organizations that we may have dealt with. We actually take a slightly different approach and I want to make that clear how we take that approach so that you can actually understand how we're framing things today. We were founded in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Recall that happened during the Battle of the Bay, the World Series, Oakland A's versus San Francisco Giants. That brought a huge, huge amounts of national attention to the Bay area. Sports recorders suddenly ended up having to become disaster reporters. It became really clear that the needs of many nonprofits and the communities they serve were not being met. So we ourselves are a nonprofit. We exist to serve nonprofits and work with community agencies in very focused areas. And our approach is different. We are deliberately fear free. A lot of our training is based on research that shows that long-term sustainable behavior, you can't scare people into preparing. So our models are prepared to prosper.  That kind of ties in very nicely with what Becky said earlier about being nimble and quick and able to actually respond to opportunities. Really fast, take a look at this if you will. Some of the communities that we serve. So as you can see, they're seniors, low income, visually impaired, people who are single, deaf, hard of hearing, limited English proficiency, emergent needs, children, homeless, chemically dependent, medically compromised. These are all pretty important issues. Take a quick look at this and see if any of the people you serve are on this list. Notice we actually have a second slide. Criminals, people who might not be terribly trusting of people in authority, right? People who are physically disabled and they were from minor to major. Sorry about that. People who have cognitive or developmental disabilities. Folks who are away. Pets and animals. Know that people will make life and death decisions based on pets and animals. Cultural considerations. Notice we have religion highlighted there. The way that we would actually give a preparedness message to a member of the wood standing in the church of Latter-day Saints, somebody who is a member of the Mormon church would be rather different in how you might do with some flavors of Islam. Some areas of Islam, especially in the Middle East, actually the preparedness is very different. So here is the opportunity. I actually want to do a quick poll. Did you see on those two slides any of the people served by your organization? I'll give you a moment to respond to that. We realize we'll be sharing tips that will help your organization prepare yourself but we recognize that as nonprofits, as public libraries, as charities, in your communities, many of you are serving constituents, whether it's patrons at your library or people who come in to your soup kitchen or maybe people that you're serving in an educational capacity or whatever it may be that you're doing. And so we wanted to get an idea of how many of you are actually also a lifeline to your communities and working with constituents directly. So I'm going to go ahead and show results here. It looks like the great majority of you are in some capacity serving some of those people that were listed on the slides that Lars Eric showed. Great. Thank you guys. Good. So that's very useful to have. So just kind of be aware that sometimes a comment that once came up during one of the trainings I was doing is that everyone has special needs from time to time. We're just trying to be very explicit about it because in the real world folks don't refer to themselves as access or functional needs or special needs. And people are talking about themselves. They'll usually talk about those kinds of categories. Now when you're actually helping folks it's really important how you frame the message. Disaster preparedness discussions can be very intimidating and threatening. And by the way, I actually have a long history of working with computers. I actually remember not only what Floppy's are but I also remember when Floppy's were. Actually Floppy's I've been working with computers for a long, long, long time. And I've seen people also become intimidated by technology. Our approach is to try to explain any discussions that we have and that's going to be a lot of today's presentation about being positive and empowering. Basically making it so that you can respond flexibly to any kind of new opportunities. Be ready for any kind of opportunity or challenge that comes up. And basically make it so that you guys can work more easily, faster, and more efficiently. So it's not actually about being ready for disasters. It's about being ready to be the best that you can be.  And oh by the way these skills happen to work out well for disasters as well. That makes it much, much easier to help build a culture of preparedness. Something you basically actually do every day. It's a way of being. It's the way you think and act. It just becomes part of your everyday operations. Just as a quick side note, I actually grew up in Alaska. And when you live in a place that's remote like Alaska, it's just part of how you operate. Because you're far away from the hospitals. People depend on each other. So both of the preparedness is very much of a part of that kind of growing up in that kind of an area. By the way, technology is becoming a large part of how we act. Technology is permeating everything. Mobile technology especially. It's really fundamentally changed things. I mean I don't really remember Fluck because I actually remember when you did a lot of his first came in. So in pocket calculators were a big deal and were very expensive. And now calculators are things that stick out of your dashboard. Some of the ways that you can actually use technology to leverage and become more prepared, build a sense of community. It's also a means of communication. You can facilitate your response. You can support your partners to greatly do alerts. Oh by the way, you can raise money. Raising money is often a great thing you can do. So being more prepared, more confident because you've got these connections and your technology is a fantastic thing. And as you can see, it cuts across all kinds of demographics. Small children, seniors, pretty much all cultures use technology as some kind. Now here is an interesting question. This is what I want to ask you guys. This is called the Law of Diffusion Innovation which is basically a fancy way of saying, you know, when do people adopt? When do people actually embrace technology in general? And as you can see, on one side of things, we actually have the innovators. People who like me, for example, especially in my work life, often adopt technology really early on because you have to know what's going on, how things are working. And then you have your early adopters. The bulk of folks tend to wait for the early adopters to work out the kinks. And then they tend to get involved in things like, oh yeah, those light bulbs are really great. They tend to be like an early majority, late majority. Then you have people who just for whatever reason hold that for a long time and finally adopt stuff. And they finally get that new module of cell phone. And then you always have a small group of the people who vocally actively resist. A nickname for those is Katie Dwellers, people who are consistently against virtually everything. These folks probably have some folks like that in your life. Folks like, yeah, Facebook, that's a fan, that's going to die out soon. Twitter, never do that. So what I'm going to basically ask you guys now is if you actually have something like that, this is another poll, where do you feel you stand? Where do you feel you stand on this curve? Go ahead and please mark that now. And these are listed in order that they appeared on that curve, on that bell curve. So innovator is the low front end. Early adopter kind of rising slowly up that bell curve. Early majority, late majority right in the middle of that bell curve. Kind of where the popular, when something gets to that tipping point of adoption. And then there's the laggards and the vocal resistance. And I just commented in the chat that even sometimes the technology-focused organization like TechSoup falls into the late majority, laggards occasionally, some vocal resistance. It's hard as it is to admit that. And it's hard to jump on the bandwagon sometimes especially if you're not sure what it's going to look like down the road or whether it's worth your time. So go ahead and chime in. I think most people have voted, so I'll go ahead and skip to the results. It looks like early majority, late majority, some early adopters too. That's great. And a few innovators in there. That's terrific. Thanks for weighing in on that. Thank you folks. Good. And in my work life, I'm often an innovator, a very early adopter. In my personal life, I actually tend to be early majority. I tend to like to wait for things to tip the kinks out before I actually adopted my everyday life. So thank you very much, Mickey, for pointing out that even technology nerds sometimes hold off on things. All right, let's talk about backup. I worked for almost seven years for a software company named Dance Development. And we made some very innovative backup software called Retrospect. Retrospect was actually at its time, especially in the Macintosh area, really the leader in backups. And I always liked the motto we had. Our motto was to go forward, you must backup. It's a really, really important thing. And I've actually lived with backups. I mean, I'm actually one of these people because I worked for Dance, you know, do backups a lot just because it became part of my life. And it's actually been a really important thing. So we're going to talk a little bit about backups. What makes for good backups? I think there's some like four really key things. First off, backups should be automated. They should run frequently, I think daily at the very least, without requiring human intervention, a minimum of that. So perhaps you might actually have to hook up some devices or swap some media that the thing needs to be done. But other than that, you don't want this to be something that somebody has to remember to launch. And that actually needs the next point though, which is monitor. Do you want to make sure somebody is regularly inspecting the backup logs, documenting media location, et cetera? So there's a certain amount of tension between these first two aspects automated and monitored, but it can be tempting to let the backups run and forget about it. So you want to make it really easy to monitor with everybody wearing all these hats. You want to make sure they have real simple backup logs where people can just make a check off a box or stamp in a date that says, yes, I rotated the media, I swapped the hard drives, what have you. Other really important aspects of backups are they should be redundant and rotating. You should have multiple copies. You should have multiple types. I'll talk about that in a moment. And you should actually rotate these in different locations among different devices. So those two have to go together. They match really well just like peanut butter and chocolate. Now what I mean by types of backups? I like to call this the holy trinity of backups. Three different types of backups. And I think it's really important for an agency to actually have all three types whenever possible. The first type is versioned backups. This is a little bit like a time machine. In fact, those of you who use Apple products might be aware that Apple's built-in backup is in fact called time machine. And this basically gives you copies of your files as they appeared at many points in time. Bootable backups, that's the exact copy of your startup disk. And off-site backups.  Let's talk a little bit about each of these. And by the way, I get interested in this one. I don't know how many guys have a lot of bearings in the audience. Now a really nice quote that I remembered when I was talking about the holy trinity. There is a book called by Arthur C. Clarke called Long Degree with Llama. And he always noted that the Llama would do everything in freeze. It's kind of an engineering concept actually, triple redundancy. Okay, versioned backup, time machine. So what's good about this is that it actually allows you to protect yourself against file corruption that you didn't know about, or user errors. Or if you're writing the great American novel, allow me to go back to an earlier version of chapter because you decided that your current revisions, yeah, I don't like that. I like the stuff I had earlier. Nowadays, this is, I've seen back, the back has changed a lot. Nowadays, external hard drives are so inexpensive. It's really a good idea just to have a large external hard drive. So it's pretty easy to get that hard drive that's at least one and a half times to twice as big as the hard drive that you're doing most of your work on. And that allows you to store a nice session of a nice, nice time range of versions. You should be doing your versioned backups at the very minimum once a day. And frankly, I think it's better to do it much more often. So I have my backup drive, I put it in my computer when I'm here at home, and it backs up hourly. That can be a really, really handy thing, especially working with stuff that's constantly changing, like a PowerPoint that you're trying to grab. Let's go ahead and talk about bootable duplicates. This is also sometimes called a clone. And what's good about bootable duplicates is it allows you to get back to work right away. So if you have a situation where you have multiple machines, you probably want to have bootable duplicates of your most critical machines.  So the versioned backups, if you decide to have to do a full restore from a versioned backup, that can actually take quite some time before your backup is running. With a clone, you could actually theoretically take that hard drive to a completely different machine, boot up off that, and bingo, you're going. Bootable duplicates should be at the very minimum of once a week. I think daily is even better, but at least once a week. Because then what you could do is come off your bootable duplicates, and then you're going to change the last few days and you can offer your version backup. So also the thing that you want to update right before you do any kind of major software upgrades, that way if things go wrong, sometimes they do, then you're actually able to roll back to how you were before that actually messed everything up for you. Duplicates should be on their own drives or partitions. Partitions are when you take a physical drive and divide them in different new areas. It's kind of like having different ones. And last but not least is your offsite storage. This can be really important because it's entirely possible things could happen in a really low pressure. It protects from all sorts of like low fire, floods, quakes, you know, civil unrest, zombie attacks, that kind of thing. For most folks, and for a lot of the agencies that CARD serves, we have a lot of folks that do cloud packages sometimes. We actually have one food service provider, they're called Open Heart Kitchen. And they actually don't even have a permanent office. They actually work, they actually function using laptops at their location that happen to be at. And interestingly enough, that actually makes them incredibly resilient. They actually are constantly keeping stuff in the cloud and are able to function quite well. They also haven't done the backups made locally, so if they don't have that service, they can actually function. Now, for some reason, cloud services don't work for you. Then the alternative is to rotate two or preferably three hard drives weekly to different locations. If you do that, then you want to keep them away from extreme fever, cold, misracialization. So you probably shouldn't be storing these things, working in hard drives in the front of your car or in your garage. And by the way, it's a good idea if you're doing a hard drive approach to consider encrypting them unless you're in a really safe place like a safety box and box. All really good advice. And I'd love to just chime in because I feel like people learn the hard lesson of backing up once they've actually had a catastrophic backup related tragedy. And at the organization I worked for, one of them, I won't name names previously, we had a single server kept in a broom closet essentially and didn't realize that it was located directly below a sprinkler for the building's fire hazard system.   And we just didn't realize it because we just weren't checking to make sure that they were successfully backing up. And we lost everything. We had to go back through Outlook, through email, through papers, and scan things in to try and recoup all of the documents and our financial data and all of our grant proposals, tons and tons of information that was just lost. And we had no cloud-based backup at that time either. And so our rule became 2x2x2, two different types of backup with at least two different staff people having access in two different locations. So maybe one on-premise, one off-site, or in the cloud. And that became our rule moving forward. So we learned a really hard lesson that day. But never again did we not have at least 2x2x2. Yes, thank you very much Becky. It's really good. I'm actually looking right now at the end of this presentation I have a bibliography. I'm looking at the page right now. It's a quote from the book. It says, there are two classes of people, those who have lost data, and those who are going to lose data. And I'm not trying to be scary about it, just hard drives and media, they just don't last. So what was I going to say here?  And probably the most interesting one was Cuban cigars. I guess a few of the old boys were having a bit of a celebration.  So cool beans. Ninth other aspect of backups, and this is actually really good ties into what Vicki just said, is you actually want to verify that your backups are actually working. So this is kind of a whimsical thing. Every Friday at the 13th. And remember that 13 in some cultures is a highly auspicious number. It's actually a lucky number, not a native number. Do international verify your backup state. Actually try restoring a couple of files confirming your backups are working. Try doing a test group for me, but it will duplicate. Make sure you actually can boot off of it off of your own computer or a different computer. It's just really good to actually make sure that things actually work. Now at the end of the presentation, I'm going to actually list a couple of resources, a couple of suggested pieces of software and such. But it's really hard to actually be absolute because there are a lot of really good products out there. That kind of depends on the platform. I'm certainly going to be available to answer any more detailed questions later on. I want to take a fast pause here. This actually can be a big topic for a lot of people. So does anybody have any kind of questions? We do have a couple of questions that have come in. James asked, would image backups using a Kronis count as a bootable backup? That's one of his questions. I believe so. I believe so. I actually want to check on that. This actually brings up a really important point that I actually said that bootable backups, you can have to use specialized software for that. It takes specialized software to make a backup bootable. No matter whether the software claims to make bootable backups or not, I really do feel you should physically test it. So you say with Kronis? Yeah, I think I said Kronis. So actually try taking the image that you have and using that to actually boot off of. The most important thing is you need backup or running right away. You want to be able to get backup or running as quickly as possible. Great. And he also asked and mentioned that the sprinkler issue is what they're facing right now. So we know we're not alone in that scenario with having a sprinkler directly above our server without actually having ever realized that could be problematic. I want to make sure that we have viable backups of our server. But what other methods can be done? Would a server encasement help? And I've found that even here in our offices at TechSoup, we have a whole big server room and it overheats. And we've got to have equipment set up to kind of help surround those with cooling mechanisms and to keep them from too much humidity, too much moisture. So again, encasement could help. Do you have any advice on that, Lars-Ares? So, you know, and definitely talk to the manufacturers of your equipment and such. You know, like server racks that keep things off of the floor. In fact, I worked for a holy name's university and we had a small microbex. And oddly enough, when they brought the server into the room where it was kept, they didn't bother to take it off of the packing pallet underneath. And, you know, we figured that's okay. There's air flow underneath it. It turned out to be a great thing actually because about a half year later there was a flood that caused water to happen on the floor. And that packing pallet keeping the server off the floor really, really, really helped. So yeah, absolutely the server encasements, you know, things will actually keep the water off of the equipment itself. It's also a good idea. Your servers are usually committed to some kind of an incorruptible power supply, usually called the UPS, for short. You want to make sure that that is actually protected as well because yet another thing that causes damage to things sometimes are power failures or brownouts. In fact, brownouts are really nasty. Brownouts are actually worse than actual power failure because of the power surges. So it's really good to make sure that your underground power supply actually also does what's called lying conditioning.  So that can actually be a really good thing. Does that help? Cool. Any questions about backups? You know, I'll be available to answer more things at the end as well. Great. I think we can go ahead and move forward, but keep those questions coming in. Anyone who has them, we will have more time at the end for some more questions. Keep those questions coming. Absolutely. Okay, here's another aspect of things. And if you go to CARD's website and go to our Tools and Resources section, you'll actually see that we have a whole section of tools that you can download and print at will. We call them potty posters. It's part of our potty poster initiative. What I'm showing you here is our potty poster about how to program your cell phone. And by the way, the idea behind potty posters is that you can basically print these out and hang them up in the restrooms. Because we found out that people will read stuff that's in restrooms. People will read it. So if they're going to read stuff that's in a restroom, might as well make it something that is actually educational. And by the way, it doesn't have to be in the restroom. It can be in the lunchroom. I know in some universities they actually have these in the hallways outside the classrooms. It's a great tool to download. If you guys did nothing else, I'm going to actually pause and look at this list. If you guys actually have your cell phone available, if you actually could actually grab that right now, or just take a note right now, pick one of these things to do on your cell phone right now. Make your cell phone done. Awesome preparedness tool. The top one right there, some of you folks may have heard about this, but call it, it's called Ice Your Phone. Ice and Sort in Case of Emergency. And what that's about is basically programming your phone in the contact somewhere, having the word, having the letters Ice, I-C-E. The motivation for that initially is that a first responder, if he found me unconscious, if he or she found me unconscious in the ground, in my phone, in my pocket, they could pull my phone out, scroll down the list looking for Ice, and actually see who my emergency contacts are. I personally have things like I-C-E Dash, Wife, Dash, Martha, I-C-E, Dash, Daughter, Dash, Monica, or Daughter, Dash, Megan. So it's actually several I-C-E's. Even if your phone is locked, there are actually ways you can often still access this information. It also just makes it look easier on your brain, however, like in a case of emergency to actually go to your phone and actually look for I-C-E and quickly call those contacts out. What are the agencies I did training for is Girls, Inc., and Downtown Oakland, and their emergency contact list for their entire agency is actually programmed into all their staff cell phones as I-C-E number one, I-C-E number two. It's their phone treatment. Your emergency response phone treatment is programmed by their staff and their cell phones. Making sure you've got the number. I have this in my phone. Sorry, go ahead, Becky. I was just going to comment that I have this in my phone and learned this from you guys. A few years ago. And I have one that's ICE out of area that goes to my mom in Michigan. So if you're in an area where you have natural disasters that happen in your region where emergency responders may need to reach somebody who's not in the region, it's great to have a person who's not in the area. So I've got my mom in Michigan programmed as ICE Patricia Weekend. So you can use it in a variety of ways to help preparedness and responders really know who to contact if they come across you and need to get in touch with somebody in your family. Yeah, it's an awesome, awesome thing. Actually, it's also great, I have with a name like Lars Eric who probably won't surprise anyone to know that I actually have family in Sweden. So international phone numbers can be an especially good thing to have programmed properly in your cell phone because under stress it can be really hard to dial those. So it's awesome. Yeah, and your phone, what happens when your phone doesn't have reception? We'll actually be talking a little bit more about that later as well, but actually your phone can be a fantastic preparedness tool just by having information in it. So even if you can't make calls on your phone, even if your phone's not connected in any way, it's actually still a little in your pocket resource for things like your medications and medical conditions, you know, daycare providers, you know, pictures of yourself, copies of your important documents, and there's various apps we're going to talk about later. On the right-hand side you'll actually see an example of something we like to call a tear sheet. It's really easy to print these out. We usually print them up a third of a page. You can do your local print shop and do these pretty cheaply for you on little pads and something you can actually pass out. So this is an example for Oakland, some phone numbers that are Oakland specific, you know, Bay Area Rapid Transit, or Safety Ambassadors. Some of the numbers here they'll let you as poison control. That's national. So you can actually make an example for yourself of numbers and it's perfectly great to keep in your wallet or purse or stick on yours or drink. So phone trick number two, and it's very easy to look this up, but if one of you folks told me your cell phone number, and you also told me your provider, AT&T versus Verizon versus Sprint for example, it turns out that almost all of these have a phone number. It's possible basically to craft an email address that will go email to text. So if I drop my phone in a bucket of water and destroy it, but I had access to a computer, I could still send texts to you folks by using these special email addresses. From your end it looks like I texted you, from my end it looks like an email. So very easy to look up, as a matter of fact, the links are all set up, but actually you'll see there's a little eHow exactly about how to text a cell phone from your computer. It's a really handy trick. I'm actually going to go back and go back a slide, because you can actually very easily make groups where you can then, with one email address, text your entire staff. There's other apps for doing that as well, but it's just a really handy trick to send anything to them. All right, next consideration, we're talking about technology. In disasters, you might not have power. You might not have electricity. How can you get around that? There are bazillions and bazillions of options for this. There's actually a whole plethora of products. And by the way, I noticed that a lot of these products have very unique and even quixotic names. I actually just grabbed a really very recent article than just a couple of months ago that looks at 30 of the juiciest portable battery chargers money can buy. And they've got my names like Ingress, and Oxel, and MTech, and SinThorter, and really cool names like that. So very easy to find this. I find this out. It's actually a whole series of little batteries and things that you can have available. Morty Case, our executive director, Adam W. Jones, actually has a case where you can actually flip the switch if she's got more power. Car adapters. And by the way, a really good habit to get into is to actually have your phone plugged in whenever you're driving around. Another habit is to give your friends car chargers. Adam W. Jones, our executive director, likes to give her friends car chargers because that way she knows that if she's in their car, she can charge her own phone with it. And car chargers are often very adaptable. A super super cool present that you can give people. I'm actually showing you a photograph here of two of my own.  They're very expensive. The red one actually costs about $15. The one on the right actually was a present for my wife for Christmas. And I don't know how many of you guys are campers, but it's kind of funny because campers actually, you think that can't be, I don't know, the idea of taking technology out and camping, I'm kind of starting to get away from technology frankly.  And they really drop in price. A lot of the things here are under $200, some keys are under $100. That can actually be a really quick option if you can ask. All right, social media. Social media is a way that you can actually stay connected. And a really important point to note is a lot of these platforms here actually have funding and infrastructures that governments and agencies can only dream of. You know, Facebook actually has server farms located in northern Sweden and other side of the world. They're really committed to getting things back up and running quickly. Facebook is marvelous for HAC. They're doing your partnerships ahead of time and being engaged with government agencies and officials. It's also a communication tool that frankly a lot of people are already familiar with. A lot of people, even if they don't have Facebookers, you have a Facebook account just to see if you can already follow stuff. I already actually know some agencies that actually have a Facebook page that's specifically for emergencies. In addition to working for CARD, I also teach the Tolman's class at the Aikido Institute here in Oakland. And I have a colleague who went to Japan a few years back to practice Aikido, it's a traditional Japanese martial art, and also study Japanese in travel. Shortly after Curtis got there, they had an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by a reactor meltdown.  We discovered that Curtis was okay by his Facebook page. He posted messages and said, Hi, we're okay. We're going to leave the pension so not going to be a brain.  Another way you could actually do this would be via LinkedIn. LinkedIn is actually the social media that people use that don't actually like social media. And this can actually be a fantastic way to build up a network of connections with partners and agencies. You can use to have updates very Twitter-like. And it actually links very nicely with other applications. So your Twitter feed can actually go through LinkedIn. You can see things like I'm okay and all of your professional colleagues located here. And notice I'm near half the members outside the U.S. So you have actually has a really good international scope to step tech suit those. Twitter. Twitter is the rushing media, whatever media, social media. I'm not going to actually talk through this, but when you look at the slides later this kind of describes how Twitter works. We'll do what I apologize. The statistics at the bottom here are actually dated. The last time we checked the service actually does $1.6 billion. That's B as in billion, queries per day. And as of May of this year 2015 Twitter has more than 500 million active users. So this stat is actually dated. My mistake for that. My apologies for that mistake. Twitter is actually a really, really great way to stay connected. It's actually instrumental in a whole series of disasters. H1N1, Center for Disease Control, a lot of control over room or control by staying, by monitoring that. So I actually personally found out that things like BART, I actually find out why BART will stop in the tunnel before they say anything over the PA system. So whether you ever tweet or not, it's a great way to basically stay connected. Keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening. This is actually a nice example, in fact, when a card was actually at the emergency response center for Occupy Open, Twitter let us know what was going on. Okay, this is going to be really, really fast. Heritage apps. And rather than give you guys a boring list, we actually have like a whole series of slides that we go through. But here are some nicely recommended apps. I'm going to spend a few seconds talking about each of these apps, and then we'll be available for questions later on about them. GroupMe. GroupMe is a fantastic way to get messages out to large groups of people. Dropbox. The guy who founded Dropbox kept losing his USB drives. He got tired of that and founded Dropbox. Dropbox integrates really, really well with many other apps. So it's a great way to keep yourself in the cloud. One Password. I could actually talk at length. This could be a topic all into itself about how to keep your password information safe and secure. Fortunately, and that you can chime in on this real quickly, there's going to be a webinar on cyber security sometime this October. So it's quite tech-suit. I highly recommend checking that out. Yes, we will be having one October 1st. So watch out for that coming soon. October 1st. Coming soon to a computer near you. So remember, if your cell phone doesn't actually have any reception or connection, you can still have all these apps that will give you information on first aid and CPR and being able to locate where things are. If you do have a connection, you can do a police scanner and actually monitor what the first responders are up to. You can make recordings. You can capture things that people are saying, or you can actually record something and play it back over and over again to save your voice. There's something called the Incident Command System. It's used by responders. It's actually a great way also to form a team, Johnny on the spot. And you can actually have an ICS reminder on how to do things, on how ICS works, all the different aspects of it. Being able to actually scroll and message over and over again can be an awesome thing. Remember your CPR? Maybe not. Maybe it's good to have an app reminder of that, especially when you're freaking out. Priyaj, actually knowing how to actually do medications properly. There's a cool app called Megaphone that amplifies your voice. Social media is a great way to stay connected for emergencies, but there's also a specialized app called Nixle. Nixle is actually a way that you can actually connect to what your responders are doing, gives you alerts for your areas and so on. I actually noticed that when I traveled out of state, Nixle automatically started giving me messages for my new location out of California. I thought that was a pretty nifty thing. Skype? Remember Skype? You don't have to have video. Skype can also just be audio. It's an alternate way to handle things if your landlines are down or your cell phone isn't working. And typing that as well is there's an app called Line2. There are other apps that allow your iPad or your iPhone or your smartphone to be able to act as a telephone to themselves. Here in the Bay Area we have a public transit information provider called 511. So wherever you guys are located, I think there's a really good chance that you have a similar app. Weather! It's always good to know what the weather will be and whether there will be weather. So in the area of the country that's more important than others. Siren Machine, one of my favorite clips from a TV show called The Big Bang Theory has Sheldon waking up one of his roommates with the alarm that's on his phone. A lot of you folks are probably familiar with Google Translate, which is a handy thing. Cubico is good to know about simply because it does not require a connection to work. So if you don't have a connectivity, this could be a great way to go. News aggregators like support actually can keep you abreast of things that are happening. In fact, I know that support whenever there's a major incident or major anniversary often has a specialized section. So that's pretty quick, but that's actually because it's less boring than giving you just a single list. It's really easy to do any of these things. So the thing that you'll want to ask yourselves now is what is one of the things that you guys are going to do? What you're going to do? Are you going to program your cell phone? Are you going to download an app? I would like each of you guys to please commit to taking on to one of these things before the end of your day is done. It's not hard to do. It's fast, fun, and easy. And it actually just increases your preparedness to no end. Thank you very much to all of our supporters. This is an indication of some of the people who have funded this in the past. Here is a little bit of resources I promised you guys, so tools and resources. You can look at our research and download our potty posters. We actually helped with TechSoup create a document called the Resilient Organization, a guide for disaster planning and recovery. I love this document. We were part of the collaboration that made that, and at this URL is that document and some other resources, things you can download. These are the three articles I mentioned earlier. An inside view of how you can harness technology to support disaster relief. That's a really interesting read and it's important. Five ways library supports disaster relief. Our executive director, Annemarie Jones, actually in the first 10 years that we're professional life worked for our library. I have fallen fond memories of libraries. We love libraries and librarians. Libraries are awesome. And libraries actually, you may not realize that they can actually be a huge support for this. There was a poll that was done on the single most important thing you could do to prepare for disasters. So check out those articles. They're really handy. Here are some links about solar panels. REI and a little radio that was done fairly recently. Retrospect is the software product I used to work for back when Dan's existed and now is owned by a company that calls themselves retrospecting. It's a little bit high-end, but it's kind of worth knowing that this is actually a software that companies like Pixar use. There's also the first product capable of backing up over a network. So if you're backing up a number of machines, retrospecting can be a good way to go. By the way, quick side note, check this out. Pixar actually has a little video talking about how they saved their own bacon when they actually deleted a huge series of files from one of their upcoming movies. And they were able to restore that information from a backup when the employees were sleeping. Another piece of software which is also both Windows and Mac OS X is called Data Backup 3. It's so close to engineering. That's good for people who are in a tighter budget and it's also geared more towards like individual users. And then here's a repeat of the battery charger you guys can buy. Take control of backing up your Mac. Even if you don't use Macs, I really think that's actually still a really good way to go. It's really easy to generalize as advice. That's actually one of the first places I got the idea of the Holy Trinity backups. The book down here, Complete Guide to Backup Management, is actually probably out of print. You can go to the link here. That's actually the book that had a story about the Cuban cigars and so on. And a lot of the knowledge I gained in the early on was encapsulating this book. I'd like to thank you guys very much. Please go to this slide and feel free to connect to me to ask me any questions you guys might have. Or you can also connect to our Executive Director, Annemarie Jones. We're actually suffering from a bit of a chance crush crisis at this moment because our government funding is actually not funding this quickly as it ought to. Please, if you found anything I talked about today in any way useful or the idea of fear-free preparedness really appeals to you, please check our Go Fund Me account. And please check out the open and closed article. And you give everything you can to support us. Thank you all very much. I think I kept that pretty close a little long, but I'm going to hand it back over to Becky. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much for that Lars, Eric. And you shared that tidbit about Pixar. And I think it was the Toy Story 2 that almost didn't exist because they lost like 80% of it when their servers all died. And they had somebody who was actually teleworking, telecommuting, who had saved a copy of it at home. And they were able to retrieve it from that. So her remote work actually saved that in like two or three years' worth of work that they'd done on that movie already because they were able to restore it from her work, which is just crazy to think about a company as big and prominent as Pixar potentially losing everything. Before we get into other Q&A, I just wanted to mention some additional resources here through TechSoup. One of them is an app that we've been working on through our division called Caravan Studios. It's one of our projects here at TechSoup. And they are working on a whole series of different apps that they have created with community input from the communities that are directly meeting and requesting technologies to help them meet some of the needs of their communities that are being served. So this is one of them called Four Bells. And it's currently in a pilot program. They're testing it out. But it's essentially to be able to deploy volunteers with specific tasks like we need somebody to come and deliver food. We need somebody to help set up beds in an emergency shelter. And your volunteers from your community can say, yes, I'll come and do that, or yes, I'll help with deploying information online, or yes, I'll help with your communication, or whatever it may be. It helps you get your supporters who already care about the work that you do deployed quickly and in a voluntary capacity during a disaster. So it helps you connect those volunteers to the tasks that need to be done during any emergency. You can check out more at fourbells.org or also at caravanstudios.org. And they are creating a whole bunch of really interesting social good apps like Four Bells, including one that's to help people find lunches during the summer for youth who are looking for summer lunches that qualify during the school year but may not know where to find a good meal. That one's called Range. And they also have another one called Safe Night to help people fund beds for domestic violence shelters that have run out of space or people who are experiencing trafficking and need a safe shelter to sleep in. Your supporters can reach out and help fund a bed for them for the night in a place where they may be out of shelter beds. So they're doing some really great work at Caravan Studios, so we're always excited to talk about what they're doing. And you can find some of these apps available for Windows phones, Google Play, and in the Apple iTunes App Store. Additionally, we've got a bunch of different backup resources. So for those of you who are looking for backup tools, we have partnerships with companies like Symantec. So if you need backup exec, or you need system recovery backup programs, or you want to have a cloud-based backup service, these types of things are available. You can search backup on TechSoup.org to find a whole bunch of different options. You can also find things like Box which donates access to their cloud-based files sharing content management systems. So if you want to have some redundancy, maybe you have an in-house server and you're looking at going to the cloud, this might be a good option for you. And also Microsoft has things like SharePoint and OneDrive, so you can access any of those kind of things as well. For those of you who are in libraries or running public computing centers, we also have DriveVaccine. I wanted to mention that quickly because this is a rollback system similar to StudyState or DeepFreeze. So this is available depending on how many licenses you need in different batches for folks who are running public libraries. But there's a lot on our site that you can find. If you just search backup, you search disaster planning, you'll find all kinds of resources and content, blog posts, stories from libraries and nonprofits that have helped serve their communities through disasters and the tips and things that have worked for them. So feel free to check it out, see what else is in our site resources that might be useful for you. You can also continue the discussion in our Tech Planning and Policies Forum. So if there are questions you have today that didn't get answered or things you want to learn more about, you can always go to our forums and engage in conversation there as well. So I'd love to go ahead and have a couple of minutes before we wrap up for other questions. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them in the chat. Mary Beth just chimed in to ask whether you'd get access to the slide presentation via the email. You will. You'll get the full PowerPoint. You'll get the full recording of today's webinar and we'll include a bunch of links that we'll call out in the body of that email so you can just click right through to those. So question for you, Lars, Eric. When prioritizing the different things that you can do, since there are so many different ways that you can help better prepare yourself, I really love the low-key simple things like programming my cell phone to have ICE. I think that's great.  But where would you recommend people start as far as top priorities for helping ensure their organizations are doing at least a bare minimum? What's the best place to begin? Well, first off, I think program the cell phone is easily one of the easiest things you can do. And it just becomes a habit as well. Just getting to the habits, like always capturing cell phone numbers. I actually, both I and Annemarie are in the habit of just like doing a fast save of any kind of calls we receive. And a really great fast story is that a colleague, a coworker, who had her phone had died and couldn't call her daughter. Annemarie was able to call her daughter on her behalf because she had called on Marie once and she saved the number. And nowadays, you know, having tons and tons of numbers in your phone isn't necessarily a hard thing. So grabbing a couple apps for your cell phone and just building up certain habits about having numbers pre-programmed on your cell phone is a fantastic way to go. And that's just so easy to do. And it's so empowering. It's probably the biggest return for the least effort you can get. I'm probably biased because of my background. I mean, I worked for a company that made backup software for like seven years. So, you know, I think really, I mean, having backups of your information is just like so super important. You know, personally speaking for the Oakland Hills Fire, we were kind of below Highway 13 on Park Boulevard here in Oakland, which wasn't too far away from the fire. It wasn't too close, but we thought we might have to leave. And the first two things that went in the trunk of our car were the diapers and the photo albums. You know, saving those photos. I mean, nowadays a lot of people are less worried about their photos because their photos are shared in the cloud and so on. You know, so I've always kind of felt an appreciation for the importance of backing things up. And while it sounds kind of daunting, you know, the range of products that are available, much of the products you showed that, you know, some of the products that are referred to, it's actually not so hard. It's actually not so hard. Hard drives have become so extensive. The backup hardware is a lot cheaper than it ever was.  I certainly agree with that, having learned the hard way myself in the past. And you know, I would agree that it doesn't have to be that difficult, especially these days where more and more installed software producers and creators are also creating cloud-based versions or cloud-based access to a lot of their resources. Now if you serve certain communities where you have sensitive health data and you're restricted from being able to keep some of that online, that's understandable. But there probably are a lot of things you can keep safely online, and that you're doing the checks and talking to those different providers to make sure that their security and encryption and all of that is sound in your agreement before you move to them. But most of them, especially if you're a smaller organization having just a server in your store room or your broom closet like in my prior organization, is often going to leave you much more vulnerable than having something hosted in the cloud where it's part of Microsoft's or Google's or one of these big huge companies, Amazon Web Services, whatever it may be, where they've got tens of thousands of servers in these huge server farms in a huge variety of locations around the world that are redundantly backing up with lots of redundant power sources. And even though the risks of breach are there for sure, I mean there's risk of breach in any situation, they're probably much less likely to really lose your data completely than you are with something happening like the sprinkler destroying your server in the broom closet. So good advice. Just to address your last point about security, maybe you can't store stuff in the cloud for security reasons or you have to check into that. Most good backup products, especially the mid-range to hire and have encryption as an option. And the encryption is actually quite strong. And there's also separate encryption products that you can actually encrypt stuff before you pop it on. Right. One of our folks who does a lot on security talks about a program called TrueCrypt that they really love. So if they have specific documents or data that's mission critical but it's got sensitive data, they use TrueCrypt to add an extra layer of encryption and it's free. So I'd love to go ahead and wrap us up since we are at the top of the hour. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with Lars Eric. Thank you to our audience for chiming in. And please continue to let us know in the chat what one thing you learned today that you're going to go back and try and implement or maybe you already did something during this call. Maybe you programmed something into your phone or maybe you're going to create that cheat sheet with the local emergency numbers that will not only help you and your staff respond better but also help your communities that you serve. Since 76 or 80% of you said you serve some of those vulnerable communities. And go ahead and keep in mind that you can share all of this information with your friends and colleagues so that they can also benefit from having some tips on helping better secure and keep their organizations nimble and resilient in response to any disaster. I'd like to invite you to join us for upcoming events and webinars. Next week we have two different events. One for libraries in particular or those of you who may have public computer labs if you're a nonprofit. We'll be talking about managing mobile devices and how you can check those devices out and make that easier for you. Then we'll be talking next Thursday with the CEO of GrantStation about how to make your grant request sparkle. This is an event that is normally charged $89 and it is free for TechSoup participants next week. And it will not actually be archived on our website. So you need to join us live to get the best out of that one if you're looking at grant proposal writing. And then we'll be talking about how to navigate the world of donated and discounted technology on September 24th. We'll be joined by folks from the independent sector and Good360 as well as TechSoup to talk about all of the different ways you can access donations and discounts on your technology. So join us for those and keep an eye out for more coming in October. Like I mentioned, we'll be doing one on cybersecurity on October 1st and many more after that. So keep joining us in the months and weeks ahead. You can find us on TechSoupGlobal at TechSoup.org on Facebook and on Twitter. So we hope you'll join us there. Lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk who provides the use of this platform for us to present these webinars to you on a weekly basis. We hope when you close out that you'll complete the post-event survey so we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you all so much and have a terrific afternoon. Bye-bye.


Alrighty, so this is gonna be somewhat of a new series. I wanted to start it last year, but I never got around to doing it. So I'm gonna start it now and I'm gonna start it with my home park. Basically, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna tear this park apart and go over what I really hate about the park and what I really would like to see them do with certain areas of the park. I'm gonna do this for every park that I visited, but of course, Canada's Wonderland is first. And obviously on the screen to start, we have Time Warp. So I think everyone agrees that Time Warp is one of those coasters. It's not a terrible coaster. A lot of Americans that come over and ride it really love it, but it does not belong at a park like Canada's Wonderland. Canada's Wonderland is one of the most attended seasonal theme parks in North America. And it's just a very kind of like low capacity slash small scale coaster that's designed for almost like a boardwalk or a park like Michigan's Adventure. Nothing like Canada's Wonderland. So definitely would like to see that get replaced. What I would like to see it get replaced with kind of comes into play with this next coaster that I'm gonna go over. So we have Flight Deck. Flight Deck is sitting right next door and it is also a coaster that no longer belongs at Canada's Wonderland. Now it is a very tossed up coaster in terms of opinions. You have some people that love it and then who will love it usually don't understand what else could replace it. So the general public who love it don't understand that there are inverts out there that will not hurt you and will not try and kill you during the ride cycle. And that is why they may not hate it. So what would I like to see replace these two coasters? Well, obviously either a B&M Flyer or a B&M Wing Coaster would fit this place really well and invert could also fit really well. And I would send Time Warp over to Michigan's Adventure or another small scale park to help relieve that. Marketplace. So looking outside inwards, it looks beautiful. So Marketplace is one of my favorite places to eat right now. The food is kind of mediocre, kind of upscale. It depends on the day you go. Sometimes they have really great food. Sometimes they have really bad food. The food does change daily, which is weird. And I really like the theming on the outside. I love the sign. Everything about it is amazing. But the minute you step foot inside this building it is falling apart. It is not something that should be presented to the Canada's Wonderland audience. It doesn't match the area steaming. It's like the flooring is falling apart. It's a little like painted concrete and the paint is chipping. The furniture is just falling apart. The signage inside, the artwork is great and everything. It's just the flooring and the food that I wish they would improve. And then actually alongside it is the old beer garden that they no longer use. And I wish they would bring back. It is a perfect area for a bar. I'm talking a fully licensed bar serving any alcoholic beverage that you would like to purchase. I would love to see something like that in the rear end of this building. I think that would be phenomenal. I would love to go order a strawberry daiquiri or even a martini or just even like a rum and coke or just something different from beer and soda like beverages from inside the park. Now that brings me over to Riptide. Riptide, you may be asking, what do I have against this ride? It is a great ride. We used it in a lot of our ride challenges for the 2019 season, but there's something about it that just doesn't belong. So Riptide is a ride that I think doesn't need to be removed. A lot of people think it's gonna be removed shortly because it does have, well, I should say it has had a lot of downtime. I'm gonna say this ride has had next to no downtime. This season and I'm there quite often. I'm there almost all the time. I'm already at almost a hundred visits for the season and this ride is up and running almost all the time, but it just doesn't fit in. Theming wise, right behind it, you have Dragonfire, then you have Spinivator, you have the themed kind of castle right next to it and then you have Riptide. With racing stripes painted onto it and this sort of like mechanical theme. I don't really know what it is. It just doesn't belong. I would love to see it re-themed because I don't think it needs to go. There's no need to remove it. It would look really awkward in this area without a flat ride and if you're gonna remove it, maybe put something in like a scream and swing and theme it to the medieval area. I would love to see them completely re-themed Med Fair and not necessarily re-themed. That's a poor word choice, but kind of like upgraded steaming so everything belongs, which is gonna be the theme of this video for the next probably two minutes. So then we have Drop Tower. Drop Tower is another ride that doesn't need to go. It's amazing. Craig loves it. I love it. It's great. I actually like it better than I liked the taller drop rides at Great Adventure, but it doesn't belong. It's themed to, who knows what? A race track, I guess. You're racing down the tower. Is it themed? That's the racing stripes and in rate beside it is Speedway, but it just doesn't fit in. These two attractions, Speed City Raceway and Drop Tower need to be re-themed. Drop Tower I could see being painted like it was over at California's Great America. I would love to see them paint some sort of like castle tower. Look to it like the brick stonework going up and then maybe even add like decal at the top to make it look like the tower tops, with that uneven look, I guess, and have it themed to like storming the castle tower. I don't know, like you're going up and storming and then something goes wrong.  Anything, Speed City Raceway sits in the way of a RMC renovation of Wild Beast, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon. So at the current moment, I just don't see how this fits into the storyline of MedFair. Maybe they could partner up with a PlayStation game that gives it a medieval fare theme, like maybe paint the carts to wagons. I don't know if you're going to keep it, fix it up or hide it a little better. So it's kind of like on the outskirts.  I actually find it unbearable now. Breathing in the fumes from the go-karts, it's that bad. On a really hot summer day, I can hardly breathe in the line of Leviathan. Even in the Fastlane line, it's just, it's gotten really bad. I don't like it. I think these need to go. They should have been built over an action zone, but I know Paramount, blah, blah, blah. Wild Beast. So this is an attraction that I would love to see get RMC'd or removed for a better attraction. And that could be any attraction, maybe even a Mach Double Launch. Anything pretty much at this point to replace it. I think the wooden coasters at Canada's Wonderland don't really fit into the lineup anymore. It's an upscale park. It's starting to define itself on the world stage. And those are attractions that I would like to see be upgraded or removed. Shockwave. So this is another attraction that just doesn't make sense in MedFair. It's right at the exit. I would love to see them to define the exit of MedFair over here. Maybe even have more castle gates as you're exiting. Right near Shockwave. Shockwave can stay in, theme it to some sort of torture device or something. Just repaint it. I have no idea. Maybe even theme it to like some sort of battling ram or some sort of contraption that's designed to destroy a castle wall. Have the castle walls right next to it as you're exiting MedFair. Just something unique like that would help greatly. Again, these are very expensive ideas added up in total. It doesn't need to take place over a year. But I would love to see these things happening over time. The fly. So this is one of those things I've talked to a lot of people. It sits in Frontier Canada now and it just doesn't make sense. And a lot of people actually discuss does it sit inside Frontier Canada or does it sit inside the mountain area? Regardless of where it sits, it doesn't fit its alpine theme and it doesn't fit its Frontier Canada theme. So something needs to be done. I just don't like it. It kind of like has this lost identity now where it's kind of like in between two worlds and the worlds haven't even fought over the identity of the fly. I've heard a lot of people saying make it an indoor attraction. That would help with even Winterfest, having it open to your Winterfest. You have a family coaster open to your Winterfest. And theme it to Northern Lights was an idea I heard that I really like. Have it like you're inside the building and there's almost like Northern Lights and the Arctic maybe theme it to something like that.  You could go down so many routes that are cheesy Canadian themes or if it's in the alpine area, if you're gonna put it in the mountain redefining the mountain's alpine old classic theme with this coaster would be awesome. If you don't wanna put it indoors that makes sense as well because that would be extremely pricey. And it would also be an eye sore. So again, with the indoor theme and the indoor building it would be a complete eye sore to the area. So I would like to see more of an alpine theme or maybe even the lumberjack log theme that it was discussing. The food buildings at Canada's Wonderland. Don't even get me started. I hate it. I hate it. This park does not know how to do food. It frustrates me beyond belief. The only thing good that this park does is have the fast lane lines for people with meal plans. That's the only thing that they do right. In fact, I love that. But having one to two cash registers open on an extremely busy day. This is a bad example because this isn't a busy day. But there are sometimes hour long lines just to order your food and then you have like a 30 minute wait to pick up your food. It's atrocious and they need to fix it. That is like number one on the list of things they need to fix. I cannot stand it. I know the average guest can't stand. That park needs to do so much with food and we'll get into a little bit more of that further on in the video. Whitewater Canyon. So you're probably like, why is Whitewater Canyon in this video? It's great. It is a great attraction. Not much needs to be done but I know that something's coming down the road. And I guess we'll see an upgrade or maybe even some sort of forbidden frontier attraction take over the Whitewater Canyon area. It could go one of those couple of routes. Action Theater's old plot of land is definitely sitting there waste. Wasted by not being used. They're currently using it for winterfest storage and some sort of musical festivals in the school year but it also has an empty plot of land that could be used for a flat ride to fit into the frontier Canada area. Even the building could be turned into some sort of 4D kind of theater attraction that showcases Canada, like flying over Canada, something similar to that. I would like to see that building turned into. There's just so much potential in this area and I would like to see them utilize that to the fullest. It's just so much potential back here. Again, I definitely see a forbidden frontier type of attraction coming back into the Whitewater Canyon area and then Action Zone or sorry, Action Theater being changed into some sort of attraction other than storage and an employee break room. There's just so much potential back there and hopefully Wonderland utilizes it. Again, this is an area of the park that still is a complete forest and there's just so much they can do back here. And again, we're hearing that forbidden frontier is most likely coming to Canada's Wonderland and I'm expecting that 2021 may be the year for the forbidden frontier attraction and the only place that really makes sense is either dinosaurs alive or the Whitewater Canyon forest area. There's just so much potential back here and they may not even have to remove Whitewater Canyon. They can probably fit that into the storyline somehow without removing the attraction and then redesigning the queue line and exit area and removing corn stalkers. From what I've heard corn stalkers has been on the rumor mill to be removed or moved. So this is all adding up to a forbidden frontier attraction for 2021. Now that we know that Canada's Wonderland is most certainly not in the running for a 2021 coaster. So it makes sense that forbidden frontier would probably be the 2021 addition to Canada's Wonderland and 2022, 2023 is most likely gonna be the coaster year for Canada's Wonderland because we know that Kings Dominion and Cedar Point are gonna get coasters in 2021 and those are two bigger parks and those are gonna be two big coasters. And I know that eats up the budget and there is no room for another big park to get a coaster.  Behemoth, why is Behemoth in here? Well, it needs to be repainted. This coaster is definitely fading and I was expecting a repaint for its 10th anniversary but that didn't happen. So maybe it's 11th or 12th anniversary we can see a repaint. I would love to see them kind of like actually give this coaster an identity. A lot of people are like, well it has an identity, it's Behemoth. I would love to see a color scheme match that identity. I'm not liking the Cedar Fair color scheme that they gave Behemoth when they first built it. Again, that was under a different CEO, a CEO that I completely hate and I find to be one of the dumbest CEOs I've ever heard of for the Cedar Fair chain or Six-Wegs chain. It was a horrible person selling off land that they shouldn't have sold off but I would love to see them give it kind of like a brown or some sort of monster paint scheme that matches the Behemoth name and maybe a new sign. I know a lot of people disagree with me. I just don't like the big letters Behemoth. I would have liked to see it in stone out front if they were gonna go down that route but the water park is another area that needs investments. So the water park is extremely small for the capacity that this park sees on the daily basis. Again, this is a bad example. This was a cold day that we filmed this video. We actually filmed it last week and it just needs more water slides. They need more water slides. They need a better kids play area like those play structures that a lot of the water parks around have way better now. Wet and Wild is an extremely better water park just down the road from Wonderland. So in my opinion, there is just no point to go to Wonderland's water park. Grab a season pass to Wet and Wild and avoid Wonderland's water park. I just think it's completely a nightmare to find a spot in there to have clean access to showers because there's just too many people and to wait literally like an hour to get on one water slide. It's just not worth it. Go to Wet and Wild. We went on a busier day and it was still very manageable. So I can only imagine non-busy days. Definitely one of those water parks you have to go check out and avoid Canada's Wonderland's water park until maybe next year with the cliff jumping and then hopefully maybe future years more to do. Mess Hall. Mess Hall is a miss. I hated the food here. It sucked. It looks like all the guests hate the food here. This place never has a line even on busy days. So I think they completely failed with the food choice for this building. And I have to be honest, I'm not liking the chef for Canada's Wonderland anymore. The food is a joke this season. I want to see it upgraded. Action Zone is another part of the park that I would love to see upgraded. I find it to be the ugliest part of the park. It looks like your average non-themed theme park or amusement park in this area. This building right here is my least favorite building in the entire theme park, the arcade. I just want to see it be taken back over by the international fair that they used to have. I want to see the Asian building come back to Backlot Cafe. It had a really awesome Asian theme. And I just want to see all those like Mayan themes come back and Action Zone be slowly bulldozed. Kingswood. Kingswood is a part of the park that sits there in waste. It needs to be utilized. I think they need to be holding more concerts. If they're going to keep the tent area, I think they need to be holding events. They could be selling tickets and getting people into the park to spend money by having more concerts and stuff in this venue. They have a big washroom in the back. They now have like the venue building that they just built last year. And they have the massive tent that can hold like, I think I heard a crazy number of like 15,000 people that tent can hold. So they should be holding events there for sure. Again, this is that new building they built. It's just a perfect area for them to be holding events. And it's big enough that they can literally house the people out there and have them kind of have range into the park. They have a ticket booth and everything. I would build it outside ticket booth as well. Utilize this event in the winter even, like have like those concerts in the fall, like on weekdays, you know, have music artists come on Fridays and perform at Friday night when the park's not open on a Friday. There's ways to make money with this venue and they just don't seem to be utilizing that. I would love to see them utilize that in the future, especially since they're investing money into the area. Again, this would be another area that I would love to see them maybe even add a full functioning bar to if they're gonna start utilizing it for events. Just something unique and again, some more way to build profit outside of the actual dry and wet park. We do have a hotel coming, so I would love to see the hotel paired with more events at the venue. I think it would be extremely beneficial. Again, we come back to the action zone and you have this extremely ugly area that paramount literally plastered over top of beautiful theming and ruined the whole Taft era of Canada's Wonderland. And I would love to see Cedar Fair fix that. Again, most of the problems that I'm pointing out about Canada's Wonderland are not Cedar Fair's fault. Not sitting here crapping on Cedar Fair because Cedar Fair is literally cleaning up what Paramount did to Canada's Wonderland. And you can tell that they do care about the park and they are definitely fixing a lot. So this is just something that I'm hoping that Cedar Fair kind of like fixes over time. Back Up Cafe is one of the ugliest buildings in the park, especially on the inside. It takes extremely long to get your food and you're sometimes not even allowed to sit in that venue building back there. And half of the building is never in use. You're not allowed on the right side of the building. It's for events, even when they're not holding events, you're not allowed over there and it doesn't make sense. And they remove the pop machines, which is super annoying.  It's just so inconvenient. Wonderland needs to fix that again. When it comes to food, Wonderland does not know what they're doing. I'm sorry to say, I love Wonderland, but they have no idea how to run food and restaurants. They need all new people in that park for the food and beverage or Cedar Fair needs to invest more. I have no idea what's going on. I'm not gonna point my finger because I don't know. It's just not working and they need to fix it. Every other park is getting beautiful restaurants and Wonderland is serving chicken fingers and fries still. I have no idea. They need to fix it. They don't have an identity of what they're trying to serve. Again, Mess Hall was an example of that, just a complete fail and I would love to see that fixed. Anyways, hope you enjoyed this video of what I think Wonderland needs to fix in the coming years. Don't forget to hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't and share this video for others to enjoy. And don't forget to comment down below what you think you would like to see come to Wonderland in the coming years. Thanks so much for watching, guys. Have a good one. Bye. Bye.