Hi there, Davenspiel, Mountain View Dodge. Today we've got a 2017 Quad Cab Express. The nice thing about the Express package is you're going to get them. Color matched bumpers, front and rear. Black badging. This one's going to have the black bezeling on the headlights. Black 20 inch wheels, lots of rubber on this one here. This truck's going to have just under 100,000 kilometers. With the Quad Cab, you get the six floor box. This one's your dual exhaust. In the box, you have the spray and liner. It's equipped on this one as well. Of course, the 5.7 heaven. It's hemmy. It's Davenspiel. Old Dodge.


Cholesterol is essential for proper neuron function as it is needed for the fusion of vesicles with the cell membrane. When there is a lack of cholesterol, this can lead to defects in synaptic transmission due to impaired vesicle fusion. This study found that cholesterol is necessary for calcium dependent fusion to occur as it helps to reduce the energy barrier for fusion to take place. Additionally, cholesterol appears to be important for the formation of membrane deformations and bends caused by synaptotagmin 1, which lowers the energy barrier for fusion to occur. This article was authored by Huda Yasmin Ali Musa, Kyung Chul Shin, Janarthan and Ponraj, and others.


Thank you very much and welcome everyone to the 11th meeting of the 2019 standards procedures and public appointments committee. We will continue Agenda item 1. It is on the decision in taking business in private and our first item today is the committee to agree to take item 3 in private, which is a complaint report from the commissioner for ethical standards in public life. Do we agree on this? We will move on to agenda item 2, a decision on taking business and private, and the committee to decide whether to take future consideration of the report from the commissioner and the committee's draft report on the complaint in draft and private at a future meeting, and also to decide whether to consider our work programme in private at a future meeting. Do members agree to take such items in private? I agree. Thank you very much. We move into private session and I'm allowing the public time to leave.


Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show, where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Once at the time when All Things LGBTQ interviews an elected official, it's a legislator or a candidate for the U.S. House. Well, we have town meeting day coming up rapidly, and we have out elected officials who are running for places on, oh, say, the very city council, so please welcome back to All Things LGBTQ, not talking as a writer and a poet, but as an elected official. Please welcome Sam Stockwell. Thank you. It's great to be back. Well, and it's been a little while since you've been here, so a sort of catch up is you are currently serving on the Berry City Council. So how many terms have you served and what was your initial impetus for wanting to serve on the council? Well, my initial impetus, I've been there about, so I've been there one full term and maybe about a quarter because I filled in for someone for about two months, and a term is two years. So I'm ending my first full term. My impetus was that I was having a conversation with someone who was serving on council and said, I think you'd be good for this. Why don't you try it? And really, I didn't have a great sense of what that would be like. But it sounded interesting and, you know, various a profoundly interesting bunch of communities. So I thought, I thought actually I would not possibly get hired. And I had no understanding of the process, but I did. And then I missed the next time.  So that was two years ago when I got elected. And the thing is that it's so interesting. It's so interesting to figure out how a city works and how a city could be better. You know, as a lesbian and as a sort of a longstanding person who grew up in fairly dire poverty, I have a good sense of what what people's lives are like. But my dismay is that people's lives are so segregated that people don't know. People in apartments on Main Street don't necessarily know people in condominiums up behind me on the hill. So one of the things that's interesting is to think about how you can bring those groups together and how the city can do planning that is truly inclusive for all the groups. Not just the economic groups, but there's a lot of diversity in Barry. And not everyone feels comfortable with city council. And OK, you brought up a lot of issues that I now want to pursue. Barry has a reputation of being a working class community. You're also the social service community. You have the domestic violence, sexual violence program, the homeless program.  I know that there were apartments and housing that are dedicated for people coming out of incarceration. So looking at all of those needs, what do you see as being the priorities for the city of Barry? And what's your vision on how you might approach them? My priorities are affordable and safe housing for everyone and a variety of housing options. And really more walkable and safer streets. I think those two things, there's a ton of other things that I think about. But those are two things that I think are pretty critical to making the city more inviting. The programs that exist for people who are experiencing any kind of difficulty are great things in and of themselves. But there needs to be a way forward and there isn't a way forward for many people. I was at Green Acres just this weekend walking around and in many ways it's lovely. But for people there, there isn't necessarily a place they can go to next. There isn't an affordable house. Like if they're perfectly stable and working at a job, there's still no affordable house they could go to or a better apartment because there's zero vacancy. So they're there and it's nice. And I think for kids, it's a pretty good environment. But there needs to be a way forward. There needs to be a place they can go so they have better roots in the community, which to me means affordable housing. You need low-end condos, you need duplexes. All those things need to exist so that people don't feel like they're trapped. And also, you know, when the housing projects were built, they're kind of out on the hillsides, which in some ways is lovely because there's green space around, which, you know, I think is necessary. But it's not near public transportation. So people there, and that's, you know, Barry City has a fairly low rate compared to the state right average for people who own cars. So public transportation is really important. And there isn't a lot. Does the City of Barry have a development plan for how they would like to see services created and provided or a strategic plan to create affordable housing? There is now a strategic plan. That's one of the things that's happened in the last couple of years. And there's a capital improvement plan. So all these things seem pretty exciting.  So a complete streets means, like everywhere in Vermont, streets need paving. And it's really expensive. I don't think people realize how much it cost to pave the street. But yes, but you would. So there isn't, there doesn't exist yet in Barry City is sort of raiding by street. Like this is an A, this is a B, this is a C. And therefore we're going to prioritize all the C's for paving. So it just sort of happens that if you have to dig up a pipe, that's the street you're going to repave. But it doesn't necessarily meet the need. Barry engaged in a multi-year massive Main Street restoration that didn't get extended through the rest of the city. That was, and I realized that part of it, the priority was to take all of the utility wiring and putting it below street level. So, but that, that initiative didn't extend beyond Main Street. No, it really, it really provided much better infrastructure for the downtown area, which is great because it means you could do additional development in downtown without the, without added infrastructure. That was a great thing, but it didn't extend throughout the city. Okay, so there, there was still a very obvious need of, okay, we invested this money, but. The rest of the community needs as much attention. You made a comment about creating safer streets. Is there a problem with safety on the streets in Barry and what is your vision for what a safe street would look like? I don't mean in terms of crime. Okay. I don't mean safer streets in terms of crimes. I mean, safer than that. It's easier to walk around the city. It's easier to get across the road. The intersections are better. There's more, there's more signage. There's more, it's easier to get from one place to another on foot so that you have more, more people traveling around the city. And my plan for that is, well, we, we did a local option tax last year. We passed that. So we have additional money for, for paving and for sidewalks. And with the complete streets, we can say we can address the areas of greatest need, which is not what we have yet, but it's in the planning. Okay, the city of Barry should be receiving monies from the American rescue plan that specifically was looking at developing infrastructure. Do you have those monies and is, is there a plan of how those can be utilized for the vision that you're sharing? We're still working on the ARPA funds. Some of it we've spent, some of it has been spent on infrastructure already. And some of it has gone to a downstreet project to create more affordable housing, which I'm very pleased to have been part of. Because during COVID, essentially development stopped. Business development stopped, housing development stopped. So that seems good. And the rest of it, we're not sure we're discussing an affordable housing, well, a housing revolving fund and a way of doing private and public partnerships and also with infrastructure. And we have some grants for infrastructure and some earmarks to replace some of the infrastructure. So we're getting, with a plan in place, we can look at the city and say, okay, here's where we are in this part, and here's where we are in this part. And here's where they all come together to create a more workable city, a more walkable city and a more enjoyable city. Is there a specific development plan already in place to address affordable housing or is that one of the plans that is still under development? Well, actually, the current mayor and I and a couple other people developed a strategic plan for increasing housing. And that's still present, but we need to decide what we're going to do with the ARPA funds and how that's going to work out for it to move forward. Is the strategic plan available for people to read if they go on the city's very website? Probably should be in about two months. Okay. It's pretty new. All right. So are there other initiatives that you think the city of Barrie should be undertaking? And this could flow into the, what is it that keeps your interest that you want to continue serving on the city council? I think the other initiatives that are floating around are redoing zoning. And that's a statewide initiative to reduce some of the duplicative requirements you have to go through to do construction or to create more housing. That I think that would be really helpful for Barrie and for most cities. Does Barrie have a well-defined zoning plan? Yes, Barrie has a pretty extensive zoning plan, which is in the process of revision. And there is a master plan that's come out of that. I think last year at least it came out, and it's really nicely organized in terms of its goals. But some of the zoning still needs to change to make things possible like ADUs. So what holds you to wanting to serve on the city council? Well, for one thing, it's really interesting. I didn't realize that I really liked understanding infrastructure and how it worked. Or how you constructed roads or what you made, like, all those things about how you put roads together. Didn't really have much of a sense of it. It seems pretty interesting to me. Also, I have an excellent opportunity to meet people I disagree with and stay friends with them. With that, I'm very invested in. It's so easy to walk away from people. You know, it's so easy just to hang out with the people you want to hang out with and saying, you're not part of my club. But we really do live in the same one small space. And we need to keep talking to each other across our differences. And find a way to agree on a path forward. I mean, you know, bears losing population, lost population, and that needs to be reversed if the city is really going to thrive in any meaningful way. I look at White River and look at some of the other cities that have really come alive again. I thought, you know, that's years of work. And if we're going to do those years of work, then we have to agree that this is the work that needs to be done. It seems to me to develop a vision for a city. You know, when cities started, I'm sure it was like someone had a stable and then someone did a copper next door and so it grew like that. Well, we're not that place anymore. So we really need like, well, what do we want. And how do we keep a place that includes people. You know, I go to the city council meetings. Most of the people, you know, it's, it's pretty much the same 20, 20 to five people, unless there's a very, very hot issue. I know there are tons of people out there. I've done visiting and lots of parts of Berry City, and they don't come to council, but I know they have issues. And I want to create a place where they'll come, and they'll feel comfortable in saying, here's what my experience is like. Here's how it will be better. If the apartments, you know, some of the apartments are great in Berry City, but some of the apartments are not great. How do we make them better so that everybody has a decent place to live. A decent and a safe place to live. I mean, safe in terms of heating, safe in terms of the way the apartment is constructed. That should be something we can do for everyone. It shouldn't be something like, that's, that's like paradise. No, that's something we can do. We can create a city that's whose bottom line is not quite so far in the gunner. It's from what you're sharing it sounds like as a member of the city council, you've made it a priority to reach out to the larger community. And that you're hearing varying opinions and voices and get a clearer sense of what it's like for other people to also live in Berry. But you also shared that there are times that you're meeting people who absolutely do not agree with you. Being an out member of the city council and encountering some of those challenges. What's your experience been like. Well, I really haven't gotten anything avert about my sexuality. And I think in part it's a function of my age. If I were younger it may be more of an issue, seriously because because it would be so I don't really hear that much about that in particular.  So, I know there are segments that are appalled by that, but their voices are not coming through. Or they're not loud, or they're not loud a whole lot of opposition. Okay, so with our remaining time. There are six members of the council user for two years each up for reelection. I noticed that one of the council members from another district is the former mayor. Is there a chance that I might be doing a future interview with Mayor Sam Stockwell. You know, the thing that I didn't realize when I started serving on city council was that a you could do it 24 hours a day and you still wouldn't know enough. And if you're really involved in it, it's incredibly consuming. So I think about like, Mayor is a step up in terms of responsibility. I do think about it sometimes story. You know, in the last few months I thought, well, what would that be like and could I could I bear that responsibility in a, in a caring way, and in a fair way. So I do think about that sometimes. Alright, I understand that there is some opposition in this race. So I will say, good luck. Thank you. Thank you for the privilege of spending this time with us. And I look forward to standing in the park with a Sam Stockwell for Mayor's time. Thank you Keith. Thank you very much. Thank you to everybody in the LGBTQ community and watches of our show I'd like to introduce clear McCarthy to the show, who is an extremely interesting person. She has a broadcast podcast, and people can see it on Apple clear or it's everywhere that podcasts are available so they can get it directly from the trans cat website. If there's a YouTube channel and then just all of the platforms work where podcasts are so Spotify and those those. Yeah, all those places. I saw them on Apple but you know just so our audience knows knows where to find these podcasts. And you do it primarily as a place to learn about transgender life transgender people. Right. And, and transgender experience so where are you from Claire and how did you. I know you were a Latin teacher. That is true. I was. And generally, Linda, I just want to jump in that generally when people say, Oh, you were a Latin teacher that's kind of where the conversation ends.  Yeah, I was just this past June retired after 33 years in education. Most of that as you say was as a Latin teacher. The last four or five I was also the school librarian. And by the end of last June, there was certainly a degree of burnout after coven don't want to deny that. But really the deciding moment for me came. I was shelving books in the library and thinking about the fact that there's a war going on against people like me that that opposition has moved transgender to the four of the culture wars. And to the point where one of our two national parties has made anti trans not just rhetoric but legislation, part of their, their national agenda. And I started to wonder why I'm not fighting that. You know, I mean, I think there, there's something to be said for being out and visible in, you know, just I'm a Latin teacher and a librarian it doesn't get any more boring than that, but just for kids to see that. I thought that was really valuable. But I started feeling like I needed to be doing more in this culture war. I started thinking about skill sets and, you know, what do I have to bring to the table, and I realized that my skill set as an educator as a communicator was really my strong suit. And so I created trans cap as a safe space, because that's one of the things I've learned as a teacher is nobody learns anything when everybody shouting. You really learn when you know you're safe in an environment where you can ask questions and actually listen to the responses where you are where the whole objective is respectful conversation civil discourse, and it's just sadly lacking and I thought I can do that. And so I built this platform that, as you said includes a podcast and speaking engagements and and other things. But that's, that's the intent is that there be respectful conversations about it, and along the way. So I've done a number of episodes where they're issue oriented. And along the way I've been finding that this, this is also going to serve as an archive of people's stories. And that wasn't something I had originally planned but it became so evident as I got to listen and talk to people that. Oh my goodness these stories these these need to be heard, the people telling them need to be able to tell their stories. Well if if trans cat can do that then that's that's time well spent. And speaking of that how did you come up with that name. Okay, so I have, I have four cats, which I haven't had the chance to listen to your interview with john Calacchi, but john is is insistent that that makes me a crazy cat woman. But that there's somehow there's a line between healthy pet owner and crazy cat lady and and he maintains that I have well crossed that line. I have four cats, and they started noticing that I was home from work a lot more starting this past summer, and they were, they were concerned that that, you know, are we going to continue to be fed. Did you, did you get fired. And so I explained to them no no no I'm just trying this new venture I want to be a transgender advocate, and they, they came up with the term trans cat. And I said okay, we can do that. And one of them said yeah but you have to spell cat with a queue. The bottom line Linda is that I was out voted. I said that's a silly idea. There's four of them there's one of me, I lost. Well you know that seems like a good, a good explanation as one can get. We had at one time five cats. We have, we have now one. So, I should tell john that next time I please please do because it's important that he have perspective.  And he's got that horse anyway right. Yes, yeah. And so you are in Connecticut. Is that right. I am. I'm in East Adam Connecticut. Yeah, which is about an hour from New Haven about 45 minutes from Hartford. Did you have you always been from Connecticut. No, I moved here, but a decade ago, or so. I was born and raised in Massachusetts. Oh, we're into grew up in West Brankfield. West Brankard. I'm from Chelsea. Oh, okay. Great. It's out East in the important section of the state. As, as any true Massachusetts person knows anything after Framingham is actually part of New York State, as far as they're concerned. Yeah, so we don't count. So I grew up in West Side. I did my undergrad work at Boston University. I got my master's degree in teaching Latin in the classics at UMass. Go Minutemen. And have, like I said, been in education ever since was really, really proud of being a Latin teacher. It's, it's, it's a unique thing. It's a commitment to the subject matter and I genuinely love the classics I love the language I love the literature. I love the culture and so my job really for three decades was to find a way to take this thing that is foreign to most other people's daily experience and make it relatable. And so when the time came where I wanted to move into trans advocate advocacy, I thought, Oh, well, you've been doing that for three decades if you can do it for the ancient Romans, you can do it for your tribe. I gotta say you might be the first Latin teacher I've ever met. I will try to represent honorably. I've just got it since you said the first Latin teacher I had the best principle I've ever worked with. We were having a conversation one time, and he just paused in the middle of whatever I was saying, and said, So are all of you Latin teachers this arrogant. And I was going to be offended and then I thought, No, yeah, no, we really are. So, yeah. I'm sorry. Hey, that's the way it is right. Yeah, I, you know, I do site deny it if I could but there. You know, it's something to hold proud. So, you came out of 55. I did. Yeah. The only way in the closet is, is no way to live your life. And if, if there's one takeaway from trans cat for queer youth. It's Oh, for the love of God, don't do that. It causes so much internal damage. And then by extension, everybody around you is harmed by by all the damage that you're doing to yourself. Coming out. I look at coming out as my, the beginning of my journey toward a healthier life. So teaching then when you. I was, yeah. I came out and then very quickly there after COVID set in and all the madness for the next few years. But I was, as I said that the principle that I was referring to was the one that that I went to when I came out and he was so far above and beyond in terms of supportive. I've, I went to him on the first day of school. And I said, I'm going to, I need to talk to you about something important. And he said, Well, I've got a meeting in two minutes. Can you just give me a synopsis. And I said, No, this needs more time than that. And we made an appointment for later in the day, and I showed up and I said, Okay, so here's the situation. I'm transgender always have been. I'm going to come out and start living as myself. And he said, That's what you wanted to talk to me about. I thought this was something important. I thought you had cancer or something. This is, this is not a problem. And he and I over the next several months. Isn't it wonderful. And apparently, and this is just the quality of this guy, he spent most of the day, worried that something was really wrong with me and how is he going to respond. Anyway, he and I sat down and we made this meticulous plan over the next few months as to how we were going to roll things out. And what the, because he wanted there to be a concerted message from the district that said, We support this person. This is one of us. We're behind her and whatever needs to happen for the rest of you to find your way to that. Let us know, but we're behind her and I am keenly aware of how rare that is for queer people in the workplace. I am so honored by that. I should point out that as as as Brian and I continued to talk about it. He said, we, you know, we rolled all this out and he said, then he just turned to me and said, So this means I get all your ties right. And I knew actually I said that as a joke but I knew at that moment that he was if he was comfortable enough to joke with me about it. He was going to be fine. This this was one thing I didn't have to worry about anymore. And I am so indebted to him. We're very lucky to find yourself in that. Did you did you expect that response though did you know to know that how they might respond no. I knew that he was an excellent principle so I knew he would respond professionally, and it would be fine. I did not expect the level of deep understanding, you know, of, of making sure every detail that could possibly be considered was considered I kind of expected. You know, and that you get this with with management in any business where they say yep yep no problem. Got you back and that's pretty far from the truth a lot of the times. Oh, Linda so much not the case here. He, yeah, he, he rolled things out to the district administration to put groups within the community. And then we did. I basically did kind of a press conference, I came out to the faculty in one go, so that I didn't have to do it 100 times. And everybody was there to hear it faculty staff. And then the next morning, I came out to all of my students any student that had me in any of my classes or study hall was invited to the library. And I came out to them. And as I was doing that the principal was sending an email to parents of home. So as I say it was this incredibly coordinated efforts, nothing but kindness and were you here. Yes, I was terrified. Yeah. And at the time, my, my Latin five class was these four magnificent girls they were I just adored them. And later that day after we did the coming out in the morning. And when their class time came around in the afternoon, the, the most adorable of the four came up to me and said, If anybody gives you any trouble.  And I knew if Sam had my back I, you know, it's fine. You take care of it for me. And I was reading in your blog which will be really exciting you say you're going to try to work on a memoir soon. I am. I, I have a story that has some relevance for people. If nothing else, I'm someone who was growing up in a time that that today's queer youth really don't appreciate for a number of reasons, but the notion that life was just inherently different in the 60s and 70s. The idea of what the HIV and AIDS crisis meant in the 80s and 90s. These are all things that you might as well be talking about the Civil War with with today's queer youth. And so I think in that aspect, I have something to offer. In terms of a queer audience, I think, even though I was closeted for so long. I think there's a lot of points of connection there that people would find too. And just the struggle with yourself is, and coming out in, you know, it's really interesting and I think people would find it. You know, would add to the canon of some literature that is there now and that that's really important. I was recently given an opportunity to write a short story for a queer romance anthology. And I loved it. I was very intimidated by it because I've never done fiction. I wrote it and I really loved the characters and writing that short story showed me some of what I need to do when I go back to the memoir and reshape it. A dear friend of mine, Kristen Higgins, the author, told me that I need to write scared. She said, you need to write at a point where you're really convinced that you're exposing too much of yourself, and that's where you know where the truth is. And so, and I can see that in early drafts of this memoir, I was still trying to hide behind some things and I think I've got a better handle now on how to do that. And a lot of that comes from doing the podcast where I listen to people open their hearts to my microphones, you know, and it's just, yeah, that's, that's what I need to do. If I want the story to resonate with people. It has to be authentic. And so that's, I continue to work on that but I sincerely hope that I get the memoir out at some point. And in addition to all that. I'm exhausted Linda, but I know you do book reviews. I do. I am as I did three or four years as the school librarian, I got into the into the habit of reading queer themed YA fiction, you know geared at teens, and was just astounded at what's out there. And frankly, really jealous that none of this was there when I was a kid it would have been so much easier. If I had fictional representations for me to go okay I don't really have much in common with this one but oh yeah over here that's me and that too. That's my brother or sister. Right. Yeah, I had a conversation like that. And yeah, and it's so I applaud those authors who are publishing authentic voices. I, I love reviewing them on the on the website and the blog, because it gives me an excuse to to force me to read other things. Yeah, that's an area that has really. Don't is why a literature in general. My goodness. Yeah. And it's, you know, I mean there's there's fiction there's nonfiction there's memoir. So many ways to access it that I am. I am so excited about this I later this week or early next week I'm going to be talking to a writer named Elliott Schrafer. I've been in the works for a couple of months and Elliott last year put out a book called queer ducks and other animals. And it's, it's written for a YA audience but it systematically deconstructs the arguments that we've heard forever, which is that queer is unnatural, because it doesn't exist in the natural world. His book in an incredibly funny and accessible way blows that out of the water and just goes through animals that are could, you know, could be called trans animals that are ace animals that are, you know, same sex. And any he he is just it's so informative but so funny. And I, I took, I contacted him when I first read it and I said I really want to do this, but you've got these other books that I want to read to so I put off the interview a little bit so I could read some of his other books and so I can't wait to talk to him.  Yes, there's a lot of gay penguins.  I do, I think there is yeah. Oh cool. Next time in town I'll have to go check it out.  So I was just, you know, on a less pleasant subject I was going to ask you about any pushback from well, the turf community but also from any other, you know, there's so many laws being passed in, in the country. As you were saying in the beginning where trans, transgender people are really getting slammed.   So let's focus on this group. And then maybe we can divide even the gay community from the trans community.  So I was wondering if you got any pushback from, or have you given any thought to how you would respond to unity. I haven't received any pushback per se. Mostly because I in the few months that I've been doing this I haven't had time to address that that is on my list of topics that I want to do. I want to find a feminist who is willing to sit and have a respectful conversation about what we're calling turf, trans exclusionary radical feminism, which it's probably not my place to explain it but is it for anybody not familiar with it is essentially the idea that women like me transgender women aren't really women and we're guys trying to encroach on safe zones for cisgender women and part in obviously on a personal level that hurts and I want to argue against it. So I understand the necessary, the need to have safe places for women. And, and so it seems to me there is a conversation, a lot more than one conversation to have, I just haven't gotten it yet. So if any of your listeners feel that that would be something they could contribute to please reach out to me because it's, it's definitely a subject I want to learn more about. And that's, that's really something that I've also found with doing trans cat is that I learned something in every episode. And so I'm educating myself, hopefully I'm educating the listeners. And that's that. And you were saying with the attacks. What's really insidious about them is that they're targeting the most vulnerable. You know, all of this legislation isn't coming after the 60 year old. Yeah, it's it's let's deny trans kids affirming healthcare, let's deny trans athletes, ie high school students, the right to compete. Let's, let's make sure there are some states that have legislation up that guarantees teachers the right not to use preferred pronouns. So if I were in this teacher's class and I come out and say okay my name is Claire I use she her that teacher would be protected in saying, Nope, the name on the roster is this this is the name I'm using. It says your mail I'm using those pronouns and they would be protected. So it's, it's disingenuous the the argument that there's somehow something threatening about this. And that's the proof that's in the pudding is that they're attacking kids. And I have no sympathy for that. Yeah. And you know, it's like a divided country because you know like where you live or where we live.  I just, you know, it's awful. Yeah, I agree with you completely. There's something out there that wants to talk to Claire about some more controversial issues. She'd be happy to talk absolutely reach out through the websites trans cat t r a n s q at dot com. The email is there. There's also a form where you can just contact me through there. If you have suggestions for guests for future episodes or topics or if you think you might want to just come and tell your story. That's Linda you were saying you were listening to the most recent episode where I talked to a dozen people at this conference in Boston. What jumped out at you about that. The courage that people had to be able to tell their story. Whether they were scared or sad or overwhelmed or any of those emotions. I'm impressed with the fact that people want to tell their stories they want to tell the truth, their truth. And you know they want to a voice and someplace to put this, this these feelings and to me that was, you know, really heartwarming and interesting to learn things that, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily understand completely because you know, I'm, you know, I'm in the LGBT community but I can't know everything I can't keep up with everything so so something like this is really important to the community. Well I think, yeah, acknowledging that there is that that being trans or being lesbian or being by. It's not a monolith, you know, it, everyone doesn't experience the same things and when you start looking at intersectionality of race and age and economic background and all of these other things as ethnicity and family. I think where all the stories lie is one of one of my favorite moments where a conversation on the podcast just went completely in a direction I wasn't experiencing. So I was talking to a guy named Lucas who is a trans man in Houston. He was talking about male privilege that he was saying he had experienced distinct change in meetings at work where people were listening to him more, and he wasn't being interrupted. And so we were, we were talking about that and he says yeah well having been on the other side of that. I'm much more aware of it and much more willing to say no no that wasn't my idea she said that five minutes ago and you ignored her. And so I said well, is there, is there anything that's a trade off for you so you're experiencing more privilege as a man.  And he said that as soon as the cop got out of the car, his hand went for his hip. And that sort of that sort of experience something that I would never have for myself. That's what I want trans cap to be I want people to listen and learn things oh my goodness I never thought of that before. Oh yeah that that must have been terrifying. Yeah. And so, so those sorts of moments of intersection are what I strive for. Well in these last moments we have Claire do you have anything that you would like our audience. And I encourage people with with their stories to get in touch. We have quite a few here and I will certainly send them in your direction. So, anything you want to share with our TV audience. Well thank you for listening. That that you would listen to anyone from Connecticut is his heartwarming thank you. But just if you're looking for a space where you can listen and learn and not have raised voices and rhetoric and, and, and all of that stuff that's not conducive to learning. I'm on over to trans cap. I would love to have you and do all do all of those social media things follow and friend and tweet whatever it is people do. Recommend and share and comment and I don't. I'm old, I don't know. Hey listen speaking of old, you're not old, but speaking of old. I, I was like I got on your web page and I thought, wow, this is really cool. Oh, thank you. Did you do this. I built yeah I built the website myself. Yeah, mind of teachers you know or something I don't know but well I, I spent six years back in the late 90s early ox, as the IT director for the school district that I was doing. And it was, it was at a time when school districts believed that pretty much anybody could do that job that, that, you know, if somebody had an inclination and wanted to learn. Great, like, let them do it the idea that you had to have a professional in that professional position and quite caught up with education. So I, I had some experience of website building and maintain and maintenance. I'm right, right now I am old dog new tricks I'm trying to teach myself tick tock. So I've been making tick tock videos and, oh, Linda, nothing will make you feel older than trying to fit in and take time. But it's, but it's fun and it's so that it speaks to again that I'm, I'm learning as well. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed meeting you, and hopefully we'll get to meet in person one day. That would be lovely. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. And until next time remember resist.


Luckily I'm not an intellectual, I'm a poet. Wonderful. I have two things. Well, maybe more than that. The first thing is a political thing. I come from Poland and you remember this, the beautiful solidarity movement who created some new, a real solidarity among the oppressed ones which was a beautiful human energy in it. And it created a democratic state after 1989 which was not flourishing but building its own future and relying on law. And now some of these same people from the solidarity movement have created a government which denies the achievements of solidarity and which goes against the law. And these are the same people. It's not people from the planet Mars, Venus and Mars. They're from the same movement. So it's a deeply disturbing thing that some mechanism of envy, of desire, of political ambition are pushing them to these ruthless actions. The good thing is that there's a very strong resistance. We have a civil society which is not capitulating. So the thing is not over. I'm pessimistic but optimistic as well. But I'm here not as a politician, I guess, but as a poet, right? And Rob wanted me to say something about the beauty, the art. And I feel a little bit like someone coming from distant provinces because you talk about power and politics and poetry has no power at all. Very few people read poems nowadays. And yet it is a kind of secret power. You could define poetry as the revenge of the introverts. We introverts, we have our secret world. We listen to music. We read poems and we read philosophy. We have no institutions. We live outside the institution. So I won't help you here. I feel like in the Russian literature there was a notion of an unnecessary human being. The representatives of the Russian intelligentsia were defined by Turgenev and by other writers as unnecessary people. Self-ironic description. These people are not producing any wealth. Later, unfortunately, they produced the Soviet system. And the revolution. But poetry and art, I mean, it doesn't make sense to speak separately about poetry together with arts, with music. There is kind of, as you say, a repository of some lucidity. Poetry gives us moments of lucidity. Poets are different from storytellers. We don't tell lyric poets, don't tell stories. We react to moments of lucidity. A poem, a good poem, is a record of a moment of lucidity. There's no story in it. There's no lesson. There's no moral lesson. But the lucidity itself is a value. Because for a moment we see better. We understand better. And this is what means to be human, to have these moments of lucidity. So please tell, let poets live. I started this morning with telling you about the drop of wine. In the ocean, which can transform the ocean, one drop of wine was published in the New Yorker in the week right after 9-11. And it was a poem. It was a poem by our friend Adam Szagiecki. And many New Yorkers now know this poem by heart because it was for them that drop of wine that transformed the experience. And I've asked Adam to read it for us at the end of this conference. Please, Adam. Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days and wild strawberries drops of rose wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships. One of them had a long trip before it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees heading nowhere. You've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You have to praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain flattered. Return and thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world a grey feather, a thrash lost and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.


True story, my very first week at Google, that song you just heard, Size Gangam Style, hit one billion views on YouTube. First video to ever break a billion. Every single company meeting for the next month ended in everybody doing the little horsey dance. So welcome to Google. So today I'm going to talk to you about a theme of fives. We're going to start with five tips for using analytics to drive CRO. Then we're going to look at five ways to drive conversion with personalization. And I'm going to finish with leaving you with five things that you can start doing today. I was listening to a random talk about a month ago, maybe. And I heard him say that you can't do SEO without CRO. And there's been a lot of speakers so far at Moz that have talked about search or intent and meeting that search or intent. And that's what this is about. So I want to take this one step farther and say that you can't do CRO without analytics because you need to know what's going on on your site when you're doing all of these optimizations. So by transitive property, you cannot do SEO without analytics. Sweet. We have many factors that contribute to low conversion rates on our site. So first up, user experience. Are you delivering a good user experience to people when they land on your websites? Is your site content personalized? Does it speak to the users when they come to your website? I think this goes back to that meeting your search or intent. Do you have actionable web analytics? Does your data that you're collecting actually help you to understand what is going on on your website? And finally, do you have the development resources that you need to do all of this? I know that for me personally, in my many years of actually doing analytics and optimization, this has been a real challenge to the point where I've gone on long endeavors to build server-side testing tools with engineering resources that I scrapped together to be able to get around having web dev resources. It's a problem, and it's something that you can solve with tools often, but you can also solve with grit. So the first thing I want to talk about is understanding your customer behavior. And we're going to do that with our tips for using analytics to drive optimization. So tip number one, implementation to track conversion rate optimization. If you are using a tag management system, a TMS, you likely have a data layer. And you can use that data layer to collect custom information. So let's look at an example of what this might look like. Now I'm home in my hometown of San Francisco, and I'm feeling a little lazy. I'm craving some Italian food. I go ahead and I do a search for Italian food delivery, specifically in this case from Postmates. And I click on that first result for Tommaso's restaurant. And I get taken to the Postmates website. Now this so far is a good experience for me, the end user. But for Postmates, if you look at that URL, you can see that it's just an individual URL for this restaurant. They don't have any indication of a category like Italian food or a city like San Francisco. And so in their analytics data, they're not actually able to drill in and understand these characteristics about what users are searching for and arriving to. Now I've been given permission to pick on Postmates a little bit here. My fiance actually was recently hired to drive growth and SEO there. So thank you so much for letting me pick on you. But here's something they could do. Again, they can use this data layer to collect custom information. They can have a page subcategory of Italian. And they can have a city of San Francisco. And they can take this information from the data layer and send it to a custom dimension in Google Analytics. And then they can slice and dice all of that page information, that landing page data in Google Analytics by these custom dimensions to know so much more about what their users are looking for and how they can then optimize that process for them. Another way that you want to use implementation to track what you're doing is to use campaign tagging to distinguish for variations. So you guys, if you're familiar with Google Analytics, you might have heard of UTM tracking. That's what I'm talking about here. So first case, email testing. You want to tag all of the different CTA buttons in your emails with UTM parameters. And specifically, you want to tag them with that additional parameter of UTM content to know the difference between these buttons. Let's say you have two different emails that you're sending to test headline copy. You want to make sure that you're tagging them individually to know that one was from headline A and the other was from headline B so that you can track that traffic all the way through your website. Similarly, if you're doing PPC, you're doing ad testing, use that UTM content field. I like to use it to track my headlines with my ads. That way, very clearly in Analytics, I can see which headlines were working well for my business. And finally, social media. If you're doing social media, if you're posting on many different channels, you want to have individual tracking links for each post, for each channel. Here's an example from my own blog. This is a little old, it's back in the day when Google Plus was still kind of a thing. So you'll see some posts on there about Google Plus. But what I did here was for every post, I tagged it for either being from Twitter or from G+. And in the content field, I used the content field to track the headline of the article, the name of the blog post that I was driving traffic to. And by doing so, I'm actually able to then do an analysis. Where I see that when I blog about Google Analytics, I tend to get a lot more traffic from Twitter. But when I blog about Google Tag Manager, I actually get a lot more of my traffic coming from Google Plus. I did a little more digging, and what I figured out was there's actually a very strong Google Tag Manager community on Google Plus. And my articles would be shared in this community, and that's where all that traffic was coming from. I wouldn't have been able to do this level of analysis so I would figure that out and then to start sharing my own content there had I not tagged it properly from the get-go. So tip number two is analytics goals to track CRO success. So if you use Google Analytics or really any analytics tool, you can set up goals in that tool. So prior to my role as the evangelist for Google Analytics, I spent a lot of years as a practitioner. And right before I moved to the GA team, I spent two years actually building and running an analytics and optimization program internally at Google for what was then the Google Apps for Business group, what is now the G Suite group, if you guys are familiar with that. And they had a three-step sign-up process to sign up for Google Apps for Business. You can see it here in this funnel. Step one, two, three, and the goal is that they completed this form. And I tracked every step of this funnel with goals, and here we have a goal flow. And what I love so much about this report is I can actually track my drop-off. I can see that I have huge drop-off from step one to step two here. And when I went in and I kind of dug around and tried to figure out what that might be, I realized that the message that we had on our home page when people went into step one didn't necessarily resonate from them to what they actually saw on that step one page. So we experimented with putting different messaging on that page and trying to make that a less jarring experience, and it definitely helped to improve this drop-off. But this was a good starting point for knowing where we should look to optimize first. And this is a custom report in Google Analytics. I'm looking at just some custom variables, custom dimensions down the side. Across the top, though, I have all the goals for this web business. I have goal one, that they step one of that form, step two, step three, all across the top. And what I like about this is that I actually am tracking micro-conversions, that they went from step one to step two of that sign-up funnel, and I'm tracking macro-conversion, so that they actually signed up and completed that form. And this is a great way to, again, look at that funnel in a different format, in a table format, with much more granularity. So this is the next one. They are customer errors. They're a large publisher out of Europe. And they are doing a lot of testing. And they actually count on a lot of their traffic coming from SEO. That's the majority of their traffic that they get is organic. So they really care that their user is getting that searcher intent. They're meeting the goals when they search and land on their website. And one of the ways that they're tracking that is they actually have their analytics goals set up to match what they're testing. So they're using Google Optimize, which is our A-B testing software. And what you can see here is the integration between Google Analytics and Optimize actually uses the same goals from GA that you have set up to track your business goals right to your optimization goals. So they have things that are very publisher-centric. Somebody went two pages deep on their website or three pages deep, or they clicked on a sidebar post. And these are the things that they are optimizing against. Tip number three. Your site can tell you what's important. So I think many of you are probably familiar with this report in Google Analytics. This is a site search report. You see some heads nodding. Great. So who has a search box on your websites? Are you using site search? Yes? Good. If you're not, you should. This is one of my very favorite reports in Google Analytics because it is actually your users telling you exactly what they want on your website when they're there that they can't find right off the bat. So in this case, we're looking at my blog again. I see a lot of search terms for Tag Manager and Google Tag Manager. So clearly, people are looking for content on GTM. I might want to consider blogging more about this. But I think this is especially relevant for SEO because these are the words that you should be optimizing that content towards to meet that search or intent all the way up to funnel. So this is another tool. It's called Crazy Egg. It's one of my very favorite tools outside of Google Analytics for heat mapping specifically. Don't use Google Analytics for heat mapping in page analytics. That thing sucked.  Don't tweet that, please. I might get fired. But what I really like about Crazy Egg is it actually tracks all of the different clicks on your website. And you can do a lot of different things with that information. So prior to my Google days, I worked at a company called the Apollo Group. And I was specifically working on a career portal. We spent a lot of time developing this new web page that brought together a lot of different resources for our students to help them build resumes and find jobs and find counselors and all of these different things that somebody would need as their completing a degree and getting ready to go into the workforce. So after spending so much time developing the site, we were really excited when it launched. And we started to look at the data. We had three main calls to action on this page, three big boxes right there above the fold. And we were really, really surprised to see that our three main calls to action weren't getting any clicks. We were like, what's going on? We spent all of this time developing this content. We see that we have a lot of people coming to this page, but they're not actually clicking on the things we want them to click on. Why is that? We put Crazy Egg on there. And what we found out was, in fact, people were clicking there. They were clicking a lot on these boxes, these images, of what we wanted people to go to. But my developers hadn't actually made the images clickable. The only thing that was clickable was a tiny link in the description below. And that was easily missed. So that was a huge missed opportunity that we were able to find with Crazy Egg, fix it. And we saw a huge spike in people actually then going to those resources that we really wanted to drive them to. Tip number four, key analytics reports to pay attention to. So normally when you hear about a talk about analytics to drive your optimization, you think, great. Somebody's going to tell me about Google Analytics reports the whole time. I felt like I had to tell you about a few. So that's this section. So first is our devices report. And this is just a report looking at all of your different traffic by desktop, mobile, and tablet. And that's cool, but that's not the thing I really like about it. What I like, if you look all the way to the right, is the goals. So in the conversion section here, you can see that you can actually change. You can toggle between all of the different goals you have set up in Google Analytics. And I can see that some of my channels or some of my devices are performing poorly. In this case, tablet and mobile are significantly underperforming web. I happen to know that in this case, the mobile sign up flow was pretty awful. It wasn't optimized. But I have that data now that I could take back to my teams and say, hey, we're getting a lot of people coming through here. They want to complete this funnel. They can't, because it's such a crappy experience. Let's optimize this. And we have the browser report. So here you can see internet explorer significantly underperforming our average. Now you might say, why do we care? Who's using internet explorer anymore? There are a number of people still doing that, though. If we click in, we can see that it's actually a few browser versions that are the culprit here. I happen to know that the business had stopped supporting IE8 some time before, but there are still a significant number of people that we're actually trying to go through our sign up funnel with IE8. So maybe I should use that information, take it back to my team, and say, we might want to support this a little longer. OK, site search. I already covered this, but this is a little different angle here. So this is our search term report. And across the top, we have all of our goals. And what I'm doing here is I'm actually looking at which search terms are driving conversions all the way across my funnel. So I like this. This is a custom report. You can easily build this with any of the different goals that you have set up in Google Analytics. Finally, and especially relevant for this audience, our search console integration. So here we're looking at landing pages as well as queries. And this is the integration to hook up Google Analytics to Search Console to be able to get all of that Search Console data within GA. OK, last tip in this section, qualitative surveys as zero tie breakers. So I'm a huge fan of qualitative surveys. I can't tell you how many times I have run a quantitative test and it came up flat. And I needed an answer. So specifically, back in my Google Analytics, sorry, Google Apps for business days, we worked for months on a whole site revamp. Lots and lots of people spending all day, all night thinking about this website redesign, doing a lot of work. Finally, we're ready. We test it. What do you think happens? It fails. It failed by a couple of percentage points. So we dug into our analytics data. We figured out what were some of the triggers that we could or the levers that we could pull and try to optimize this. And we did that. But also, on each version of our test pages, on the tests in the original, we put the same qualitative survey. And what we found at the end of all of this was after we made these additional optimizations, our results were pretty flat between the old site and the new site. But of course, as any marketer knows, you spent all of this time, your CEOs, your executives, they want you to go ahead and push out this new site after such an investment. And if there's not really a big difference, what's the harm? Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad. That qualitative survey saved us. It actually told us that people overwhelmingly preferred the new website. They found it easier to use. They were able to find the content that they wanted more. They liked the look and feel. It was just more intuitive to them. So we're able to confidently say, even though the quantitative numbers are flat, qualitatively, we feel good about this. And I'm not the only one to say this. I know several people have already touched on surveys being super important here. And so I just want to add on to that and say, this is something that you should definitely be considering. It's the voice of customer telling you how they are using your product. I'm going to switch gears a little bit now and move into driving conversion with personalization by providing a personalized experience to your users. So Gartner did a little study. They found that 89% of companies expected to compete mostly on the basis of customer experience, which means if you're not trying to deliver that personalized experience, you are not going to win. So again, this is a five ways section. I'm going to go through five ways of using personalization to drive conversion. So the first one is understanding the market with personalization at mass scale. And in this case, what I'm going to say is that you don't actually have to do anything to personalize. This is the Google Apps for Business website early on in my days there. We had a headline that said, Discover a Better Way of Working. And our marketing team loved this headline. They thought it was this holistic message that spoke to the suite of software tools that we were selling. We were selling Gmail and Docs and Drives to businesses. We were going to help them discover a better way of working. And engineering took a look at the data.  We know that 80% of people who sign up for Google Apps for Business only ever use Gmail. So let's change the headline. Thankfully, we said, oh, let's test it first. OK, great. So this is what we tested. We had our headline of Discover a Better Way of Working against a whole bunch about Gmail. Engineering, especially like this last one, get email for your domain. Marketing really hated it. You can imagine that is not a marketing friendly message to put out in market. But marketing also said, there's no way that's going to win. That's laughable. I don't care. Test it. Put them at ease. What do you think happened? That's right. Get email for your domain. Not only one. It blew it away. 20% increase in sign ups for Google Apps for Business with this headline. I happened to be on the other side of the world for a conference when this test finished. Two weeks later, I was getting ready to go to bed. And I started getting frantic pings from my VP of engineering saying, you better launch that site. And then I got frantic pings a few minutes later from my VP of marketing saying, don't you dare launch that new headline.  I'm not even there. I can't really talk to them real time. After several hours of negotiation, well into the night, what happened was we decided that we would go ahead and launch this new headline. Mainly because engineering said, you know that testing tool that we built for you? Well, if you don't launch our headline, we're going to stop supporting that. So we launched it. But I spent the next several hours of my night building some follow up test plans that we ended up launching within the next two days to again test a more marketing friendly version of this headline. And after a couple more weeks, what we ended up with was get Gmail for your business with subtext of and Docs Drive and Hangouts and all these other things that you can do with the suite. Couple lessons there. One, again, you don't have to do anything, but understand who your users are to personalize. And two, when you're going to test, make sure that you have sign off from all of the different parties involved. Otherwise, you too may lose many hours of sleep trying to get everybody on the same page. Understanding the market with personalization at a local level. Again, Google Apps for Business. This is our US website. And I don't know what your business is, but at Google, it's very common that you will have one marketing template that you translate for all of the locales that you want to have a website in. So this was our Japanese website. US, Japan, they look pretty similar, right? Have you ever seen a Japanese website? They don't look like this. In fact, they are busy. They are so busy. They have confetti flying all over the screen and widgets everywhere. And at me as an American looking at this, I'm like, oh, it's overwhelming. I can't even understand what the message is. But this is how they do business. This is what they like. This is what speaks to them. And so as you can imagine, this website did not speak to them. And we heard this over and over and over again from our Japanese team. And finally, we said, OK, let's test something a little bit more local. We didn't go all the way to crazy widgets all over the screen quite yet. But one of the things that they said was, hey. You see that gray button in the upper right-hand corner? Let's go back to the English version. It says contact sales. Nobody in Japan is going to click that button and submit a lead form online. That is not how you do business in Japan. We want you to, they want a hand-held process. They want to meet with the sales team and understand a walkthrough and have printouts to take back to their executive teams. And this doesn't work. So let's get rid of that button. Let's replace it with a guide. So we did. We tested this. We created this guide. It was a three-step flow, poorly translated to flow of available. They called it a guided flow of what you had to do during this 30-day trial process. And it was printable, a big print button on it. They could print it out, give it to their executives. It was much more of a Japanese way of doing business. And it killed it. 693% increase in clicks on that guide and an 8% increase in people actually signing up for a trial of Google Apps for business, hugely successful. And because we didn't learn that we needed to do things at a local level, we tried to test this in the UK and the US and it failed miserably because that's not how we buy enterprise software. We took this a few steps further and we tested many more things in a more Japanese style. So on the left was a mock that we made of various things that we wanted to test. In the middle, we wanted to do a much more local hero image. And on the right, about a year later, this is the website that we ended up launching. And it was the first time for that business that we broke the template at Google and gave a unique website to a unique audience. And it performed so much better for them. So the third level of personalization. Understanding the referral source with personalization at the traffic level. Slightly newer version of the Google Apps for business website. We had a Gmail landing page. If you clicked on an ad that led to a landing page for Gmail, you would land here. And it just had a headline of Gmail. We had an inclination that if we tried to bring over the headline of the ad onto the landing page, it might help with conversion. So we tested a headline that said, get Gmail for your business or for work. And we made the landing page say that to you. It worked. It had a very nice increase in continuation through our trial sign up flow process. And that's because we were using consistency of message. Number four. Understanding the customer with personalization at the action level. So last year, I had the opportunity to speak at the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative conference. Really cool conference if you've ever had a chance to check it out. The best of academia with the best of analytics loved it. This was their event website. And I had gone to this website to sign up for the event as a speaker to register. And a couple of days before the conference, I came back because I wanted to check the agenda. And this is what I saw. The event is sold out. But they knew that I had actually already been here, already signed up. And so instead of sending me this kind of bland experience, they could have tried something like this. Just by knowing that I had already been there before, I'd fill it out their form, they could say, we're looking forward to seeing you there. And that would go a long way for me to feel like it was a personalized experience. Just by knowing that I had already taken action on that website. So the last level of personalization is understanding the customer with personalization in real time. So this is Light in the Box. It's an online vendor, kind of like an Amazon. And I'm on their website, and I'm searching for digital cameras. And I do a lot of research. I may even add one to my cart, but I don't check out. Now, as a good marketer, if I put on my marketer analyst hat, I'm going to go into Google Analytics. This is a report in Google Analytics 360. It's called a Custom Funnels Report. And I'm going to build this funnel. I want to understand what's going on in this process. So I see that a lot of people have visited this website. Many have looked at that digital camera page. Some may have even added to their cart, but very, very few have checked out. Pretty bad checkout conversion rate here. What's cool about this report is if I click that red arrow pointing down from any of those steps, I'm going to get a box. In this case, it says, hey, we know that 2,346 people fell off at this stage. They didn't check out. Would you like to create a segment and remark it to these people? Of course I do. I'm a great marketer. I want to bring them back to my site. So I'm going to go ahead and do that, create an audience, and remark it to those users. I can also share that same audience with something like Google Optimize. And I can make sure that not only am I giving them a message in the ad I'm remarketing to, to them with something like get free shipping on your next order. But when they come back to the site, I can then serve them a personalized experience with that same message to that same audience that says, welcome back. Get free shipping on your next order. So my last section, taking action. Five things that you can start doing today. First, make sure that you implement to track your relevant data. Remember that postmates example. Second, explore your analytics data for optimization opportunities. Third, identify your key metrics and your secondary objectives. Make sure that you're tracking them in goals so that you can use that information across all sorts of reporting. Fourth, build personalized examples, experiences. I give you five examples of how you can do this all the way from doing literally nothing but understanding who your customer is all the way down to providing a very personalized experience based on the action somebody has taken on your site. And finally, measure, analyze, and repeat. So we had a theme of five today, five tips for using analytics to drive optimization, five ways to drive conversion with personalization, and five things you can start doing today. And remember, you can't do SEO without analytics. And one last thing I want to leave you with, this is a little bit of a side note. I am very, very passionate about the women in tech, women in analytics community. I've spent the last few years of my career really promoting this. And so I just wanted to leave you with a few resources. If you're interested in analytics or data of any sorts, the Digital Analytics Association has a women in analytics group. It's an amazing community to have conversations and meetups. If you're on Measure Slack, there's a women in analytics channel. If you're not on Measure Slack, you should join it. You can join at join.measure.chat. It's a wonderful place to talk about anything in everything, measure, measurement, data, digital, related. You can start a group within your own company. I know so many people have done this. At Google, we started a women at analytics group. And we have meetups within our analytics group to get our women on the marketing side and the sales side to meet up with our engineering women and hear that tech versus business perspective and really promote each other. And we have men involved in this organization too. And it's really been a very fruitful effort to get people excited and to really build allies within our own company. The Google Analytics Handle on Twitter has created a women in analytics list. This is a list of well over 100 really excellent women in the data and measurement space. Great list to follow. Finally, I blog about this topic fairly often. I've got several posts up on my blog. And this sticker, I actually have a few of these with me. If you track me down, if you want a women in analytics sticker for your laptop, go ahead and find me. I've got a few to hand out. So thank you very much. It was really a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


So please everyone, just one word, this will be the lightning talk session if any of you wants to join and talk about please or her project for a couple of minutes, that's the last call because we will be starting very shortly with the first presentation about Athena project right now. We have currently five lightning talks so if you want to join, please keep your talk shorter than let's say 8 to 10 minutes maximum. So reach me if you have something for us and also enjoy the lightning talks in a few minutes. And do you have her remote for that far? And the what? I don't have it. Ah wait, I'm sure it won't. Okay, hello. So I come from a new project and we call the project Athena. There we have a bit of confusion with Intel but we're not from Intel, just to clarify. We've had a couple complaints about it. Doesn't work. So what is it? So it's a virtual world similar to Second Life or VRChat. It was created by the company, High Fidelity, was started by Philip Rovesdale who created Second Life originally and after he left Second Life he went on to create a new world which he called High Fidelity. Kind of the idea of that is that what's High Fidelity representation of reality kind of understanding. It's not about audio. So the commercial project is almost entirely open source. In that there are just a couple bits missing. There's an audio codec which we've already replaced and there are central services which manage user accounts but are pretty trivial and actually optional. So that's not that we could deal. It died unfortunately a couple weeks ago mostly because of management reasons. I think the technology is actually quite promising but they didn't really have much of a business model and had trouble finding users. In some ways the very attractive to me nature of the project works against business interests because it's extremely distributed, extremely open and so you can't really make anybody pay any money for it. I'm not quite sure how he convinced people to give him money for that but we're very lucky so we're not going to say no to it. So once it died we've picked it up, we've mirrored all the documentation, all the content that there was and we are continuing development. So what is it?  What do I mean by that? You can run your own server anywhere like Linote or any other provider. Each server itself is composed of different pieces like for instance the audio mixer which is an environment with an audio chat. So you can actually run the audio on its own server if you want to distribute it all. Even the physics is distributed in that actually the server hands out pieces of the world to simulate to clients. It's a quite interesting idea that I'm not sure is entirely stable but well it's there. It supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. There is experimental support for the Quest and for Android but it's not entirely stable yet, it still needs work. It runs on Windows, Linux and OS X of course and it's written in modern C++ and scriptable in JavaScript so it's actually quite convenient. If anybody here worked with Second Life for instance it's much, much better in that regard. Second Life is a huge pain to live all for. So since this is a gaming subject here, what's the gaming potential? Well, it's a 3D engine with VR, scripting, voice chat and networking. You can set up your infrastructure. It's not a centralized thing so you can just host it yourself and do whatever you want. Everything can be scripted including the UI and well it's not in itself a gaming engine. It's more a social world in which you can make games. So think for instance creating games in Second Life or in Minecraft. The idea is that you have an existing world in which you already have users and you are just kind of adding games on top of that because well you already have your virtual neighbors or whatever and you want to play chess with them or you could make certainly something more complicated. Right, so I'm going to show you a couple very short videos about what it looks like. Have in mind we, most of us are developers who are into graphics artists so actually the project has had some trouble attracting artists due to its very open nature in that in Second Life artists can control very well their creations, their distribution and their usage. Here it doesn't work like that. Philip Rosedale wanted to create the kind of web browser of VR in that it's pretty much like trying to protect images on a web page. You can just copy it. Assets are loaded over HTTP. So here's a VR point of view. We have this tablet kind of thing with which you can manage the entire interface. It needs some work but well it does everything. I mean you can use the entire functionality from there, get into the debug menus so it's quite complete in that regard. One piece of functionality that I quite like is that there is the concept of zones. What are those? You can define parts of the world in which the environment changes. So for instance one thing that I found very lacking in Second Life in that you can create a dark basement in there because the world has global lighting and that's always the same. Under the high fidelity technology you can just define a chunk of the world which changes how the environment is lit. It's going to look again and you should see again. See? Here it changes. This is a kind of development kind of environment. It's not very pretty.  We can have flexible geometry which you can actually touch and interact with. And you can animate your avatars in that you build a skeleton in Blender. One member of our community actually created a great plugin for rigging avatars and converting avatars content to be compatible with our world. It's very convenient in that way. So we have a small team and quite a few contributors already. We started a couple months ago more or less because we've been always slowed down by the main company in that it wasn't very good to work with as an open source project. It was hard to make contributions. We moved much faster so actually when it died we actually started getting more stuff done. Several of the ex-employees of the company actually worked with us. I actually just wanted to add that it's actually been used commercially. There's actually a children's TV show I think in Italy that actually uses this technology. They actually use render part of it in VR. If anybody is interested, I can show you later. Right, so why are we here? Well, we're mostly getting started still in that the project died quite recently. The shutdown was announced a bit more than a month ago. So we've been working very hard on getting a release process, replacing closed parts with open source code and just getting a better feel for the code base and working as a good team. So we still need more people and specifically we don't have currently an OSX developer which will be very good. Android is also kind of post right now but it works. We have C++ developers but always could use more certainly. It's a very large project and of course 3D artists since it's a 3D world Well, it's not going to show anything if we don't have any content. Right, so here's our website. We mainly communicate while discord. If you're interested in this at all, you should definitely join it because this is a very kind of yearly part of talk on our part. We're still getting used to this. The main code base has been around for a long time so it's not completely broken or anything but still you might run into some sort of minor trouble so definitely come to us and ask about it. We have in-world meetings if you actually install the client.  We have a bunch of developer community meetings. This is a kind of a philosophical sort of discussion. We actually have a professional that set up shop in our little world and talks about philosophical topics. And today we even have a bar trivia competition if you want to use some kind of random fun and socialize with the people that are there. And that's it. Thank you. By the way, if anybody wants a bookmark, a physical one, I have cards. Thank you. Okay. Hello, I'm Jan Ciasul from Costa Rica. I'm coming from an open source organization called Spacebeam. We are organizing a side event for FOSDEM which is a StarCraft Root War AI tournament, bots for bots. In our group we see StarCraft as a good test bet for artificial intelligence research because the uncertainty that the game has in chess or go, both players have access to the work. Both can see what the action of the other player is. StarCraft is completely different. We have been seeing, in this scene, this is a scene with 10 years of continuous tournaments and continuous work for companies that come and go. We can talk about, or we have bots made from Samsung. We have bots made from Facebook, just for mention two of the biggest companies. But we have been seeing participation, maybe not in tournaments, but on the research aspect of other colorful names from industry. Currently, the state of affairs in the aspect of competition was that only Windows bots can compete. That's kind of a shame. We built this competition in order to enable support for everyone using Linux and everyone using other languages. The idea is to be more inclusive about the tools that you can use to build the thing. We have support for a project called TorchCraft built by Facebook. With that we have access to the PyTorch ecosystem. We built this tournament. We have 12 bots registered, 11 submitted at the end. This is the conference where I was in theory coming here to present the results. But for technical issues, the tournament haven't started yet. I'm here to give you my face to the people that register and say I'm sorry, but we are actually going to have a tournament. It's running as soon as we fix the technical issues with our container system. We are developing everything from scratch because there are actually solutions for running bot versus bot competitions using Docker, but Docker don't have really good support for the GPU. So if you want to train machine learning models that have good access to the GPU, that don't require a demon running with root in your system, for that we use Singularity, the container solution for our environment. To be kind of specific, our tournament manager died when we started a 31 container because we have an IP issue that we need to fix, but that's my blocker on the technical side. But what we plan to do, my community, what we plan to organize is like an event that is like a side event for FOSDM and use hopefully this game development room every year or the FOSDM event every year to let you know about our community, to invite you to participate, to invite you to, of course, not only build bots for Windows, to have the tool and the power that the Linux ecosystem with all these languages and the kernel that we all use a lot for this kind of endeavors. That's what I'm coming from. We plan to make this an annual event. This is the first time that we are organizing it. We are having a rough start, but we are compromised with this idea that use StarCraft GoodWare as the sandbox that it is to test the development of new algorithms and make progress on the field. So that's it from my side. I hope that this kind of thing interests you and if you want to learn how to make bots and compete or you want to learn a little bit more about the scene, actually we are like four bot developers right here in this room. So if you have questions, you can ask me on the hallway. That's it. So thank you. Thank you. The next one, it's open console. Now StarCraft on the front. The person here will be more allowed to make an ad for StarCraft. Young next time, I think. Yeah. Just have a few pictures. Just like what they are trying to do with us, I think it's a nice environment. I think we can add it some more. Maybe. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm not. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is just for recording, right? Yeah, just for this. Okay. Any idea? Any idea why this might not be working? Where is our problem? Okay. Everything seems to be in order. Maybe try a USB or something. Sorry. It's my left of the thing. It's an USB open. So I'm not sure. Oh, thank you. Okay. Can I start? Yes. Hello, everybody. My talk is introduction to StarCraft AI. And I just realized that we should have switched up the order of presentations with Jan Cessu. So I don't know how many of you are into StarCraft. As you can see by my shirt, I'm very much into it. And I'm not counting the answers, but it's not enough. So we have this thing called Student StarCraft AI tournament. This is very interesting. We have this thing called Student StarCraft AI tournament. This is where it all began. And don't let the word student confuse you. This is a tournament which is a yearly bot versus bot tournament. That means that people code up their AIs that play Brood War. And these AIs have a tournament. And someone wins mostly bragging rights. So this is the page. And the bots are programmed in C++ or Java using something called the Brood War API. The Brood War API kind of emulates the cause and the ways that humans interact with the game. And there are also always debates how much control we should give to bots. But pretty much a bot can do everything a human can do and not more. And obviously some things are working differently. We are directly issuing comments to the game engine. So it's basically a hack inside StarCraft. The bots are not seeing the screen. I guess many of you have seen Alpha Star performing. That's completely different. This is Brood War. This is not SC2. That's not to say that SC2 AI is a bad thing or you shouldn't pursue it.  But this is better. This is Far Predates Alpha Star. It's about 2010 when it first started. And there is a live stream also. Sorry for the bad potato quality, but I didn't want to take up too much bandwidth for showing 10 seconds of game. So these gender bots are AIs by Haupen. And actually ADS is the AI written by the Samsung team, which won some tournaments. I don't know exactly which ones, but it's a quite advanced one. And that's enough. You can watch it anytime because it's a 24-7 stream. And there is a YouTube channel as well. There is a weekly broadcast basically. Now it's the tournament stage. There is a yearly tournament and there is an ongoing competition. And later you can watch the reports casted by some very good casters and also me. So yeah, that's it. What I want to also show you, it's something called OpenBW, where some talented developers or much like Crazy Fanatics, reverse engineer the whole StarCraft Brood War engine, and it is available to you on GitHub. Now what I want to show you, it's basically one file. So it is quite hard to decipher it and we don't really need to use it. The BW API or Brood War API is a self-contained package. But you can look inside the code of the OpenBW and it's functionally identical to StarCraft itself. So much so that even the bugs and quirks are reproduced. So there is also, you think I'm joking, but it is necessary to emulate the level of play. So you can do like the extractor trick if you know what that is basically tricking the game into overusing your supply in the game and who doesn't play StarCraft now have no idea what I'm talking about. So regarding competitions, there is the yearly students StarCraft AI tournament and there is something called AEWIDE and it stands for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. Yeah, this is an AI conference, very prestigious, some smart people say smart things there and sometimes we get in and there is the student StarCraft, not student, but StarCraft AI competition which is organized by the same crew. So if you write about it, you can talk about it and also you win some bragging rights within AI circles with this I like to think. So that is the brief overview. There are some other competitions going on mostly yearly or yeah, I think they are yearly. For example, the conference of games organized by I don't know which university in South Korea and there has been serious AI research going on in the area of StarCraft. Samsung and Facebook had some teams who competed and wrote about and quite graciously developed some frameworks that we can use. I'd like to comment Facebook on this. I know Facebook is a company you might have opinions about them but the tools that are provided by them freely and accessible for everyone are good in this particular scene. That's not a judgment of the company itself. Let's skip that. So about me, I skipped the introduction in the middle of the talk. My name is Chonko. My background is an enterprise job developer.  And I have a site called Making Computer Do Things. The name is someone asked to please describe in simple words what you do. So yeah, I make computer do things. And I view myself as an unsolicited community ambassador for this whole community. I basically make them talk when they don't want to. And there is some things I do in this site. And first of all, when I started out, I wrote about myself. And it's called Jumpy Dogo Bot because I have a way of naming things. And you see this is a 30-part basically guide and developing some good code and of course a lot of memes. So basically let me just grasp into it and memes, bad code and Java. What more you need. And this has 30 parts. There is the Undermind Podcast. Play on the Overmind. Again, if you're not into StarCraft, you don't know what is that. That's my shirt as well. And there I view, not interview, interview both authors, developers, and anyone interested in the scene and some not interesting people, I'm sure. So recently I started to branch out into more StarCrafty things, presented this scene more to gamers as well. And the latest episode I had an interview with Freakling, a famous StarCraft map designer. So everything that can be possibly related to the Brood War AI scene, but it is mostly about Brood War AI and talking with members of the community and basically having fun. At least I do. And I abuse them verbally. And that's it. Another project I do. It's called the StarCraft Human and AI League. And yeah, this website I threw together in 10 minutes. So I'm very sorry for that. And this StarCraft Human and AI League. Basically, if you want to play against these bots, then you have to download something called Drop Launcher, which is kind of very much outdated. And you have to import some files and it's not working. You have to look it up in the Internet. And this is the step when all the gamers just leave the room and if you're not a developer, you don't have that kind of endurance to tinkering with things. So my project is, it's schnell.com. Schnell with this, I guess. And it's a tool. It's a persistent online platform for you to play against Brood War AI.  And there you go. There is an introductory video. I will not play it because we don't really have the time. But that is something that you should check out. Unfortunately, it's not public yet because I don't have infinite time. It is just entering the beta stage. I must commend that the community is helping me a lot with this. And I have a lot of health testing and solving technical problems. Also, the few words about the community. In the students' talk of the AI tournament page, there is a link for our Discord. Please join us. Please interact with us. You can bring your memes as well. And the community is usually people who played Brood War back in the day. So that means we are kind of older and thusly more experienced and more experienced in development. Have more development experience. That's not a judgment in any way, shape, or form. It's just a statement. So basically, we can and we are coding and dissecting and cancel everything. You can interact with people generally in AI research circles as well. One of the guys I'd like to mention is David Churchill, an AI researcher in the University of Alberta who is organizing the aid conference tournament as well. And, yeah, if you want to learn coding, I guess most of you know something about coding by now. But if you want to learn coding, learn Brood War, development, or sharpen your skills, it is a good place because we love to solve problems and we love to go into the nitty-gritty details. Like I presented, there is a guy who decompiled the Starkov engine. So that's the level of engagement you could expect from us. And I also have some online presence as well. This is my YouTube channel also making computer do things. Everything is called that. I have YouTube Twitch and the site. And here, there is a live AI coding stream. The point of this is we made an AI that can beat the stock AI sometimes if the moon is right in three hours. So it's not that hard. It's not that hard you can get into it. Writing some basic bot is certainly achievable in a human timeframe, but maybe writing a good bot now takes a lot of time. Currently, the supported frameworks are C++ Java, meaning technically any GVM-based language can be used. And one of the top bots, Purple Wave, is written in Scala. And that's actually a guy named Dan Gent who wrote it with a Facebook AI researcher. So I'm just name-dropping here to be more famous or something. So yeah, he's a good guy. So this is three hours and 19 minutes. That's about half an hour of silliness, I think. So yeah, you can do that. And finally, regarding presenting this scene to gamers and talking about the snail project, I was recently on something called the Pylon Show. You might have heard about it if you're into startup. This slide is like 90% bragging and 10% actual information, but go watch it. And there is also Netorot, aka Antiga, who is a community organizer in this. And I think this is all the surface-level stuff I wanted to say about this. Yet again, it would have benefited us to switch the order of this presentation and TorchUp. TorchUp is another language we kind of support. It's Python and we want to extend to a lot of languages if that is possible. The BWAPI team is working on that. And eventually, it will get done. Thank you very much. Let's all come in. He's on your pocket or a belt? I think you're ready to go. He's sharing your resume. What? Yeah, we'll walk it out. Okay. Two other people started working on it again and they're hitting it off and seeing their commit messages and it's like a youth thing and they're writing the Lex area, which is almost complete. Well, here was one of my first commits. Can I walk again? I'll stand here. I was really powdery. It's shown or after the image is shown or something happens. Thank you. And that's when it's using lingo. And one of the things was we get an argument but here was this or if there was an argument and lingo was an easy language to use to read. You could say beep and beep but you also could say beep one or beep 100. So even a simple beep function has a little bit of logic to check okay, is there a function or not or is there a parameter? And yeah, it's cool to work on small things and actually see the progress and progress and I hope that someday in like, I don't know the time frame but we'll get to replay my safe cracker game with everything implemented. Yes, that was it. I mean, I would love for more people to join. I mean, it can be humbling. It's hard to start something fresh and in a project where everybody is already more developed knows everything and you're starting anew but yeah, if you want to work on a game engine with we end up playable games, go check Scam out and see if you can work with us. All right?