Right. Good afternoon Tower. This is in Rico's talk on the Debian Community Guidelines all how to be able to achieve total world domination through discussion on Debian Devel. Without much further ado, Emily for the cheerful presentation. Hi everyone, I'm Mariko Vini, someone knows me from Stoff. I've been working in the past probably here and a half on putting this together and I'm not very far into it but it got something kind of usable so it's pretty much time to present it publicly. So here's my recent work, the Debian Community Guidelines which are, well, Debian Community Guidelines started actually with a conversation with Martin Mikkelmeyer when he was DPL and there was complaining of a couple of, well, a few bad answers I was getting from people on IRC or lists when I was asking for things and since my ego is too big and it couldn't have been my fault I started wondering what could have been wrong and so I reported things to the DPL that we could have communication problems and Martin told me something like, where does it see what is good and so on and so I had the idea of starting collecting, well, a list of things that could be, like, good to assert in Debian but that would have been, that sounded too much like the teletabi thing Be Nice Guide, which I soon realized it was a stupid idea so eventually I came up with a slightly different idea for what could be a document that could improve communication a bit in Debian and the idea is to have a collection of what people normally do that works well it is actually very hard to do because the thing you notice in lists is what people normally do that works really bad and so it's been a long work especially because you need to spot things that work well and you need to train yourself to be able to spot that and these things are put down as a list of suggestions for people to work online more efficiently The Debian Community Guidelines are not a policy Many people, especially during the DPL election have been talking about making some social policy that would make it outlaw for people not to be nice in Debian and that's exactly not my approach especially because the more law you put into social behavior the more you bias and screw up social behavior basically so I want suggestions but I don't want them to be mandatory I like to think that I'm not the person that knows social things the best and someone can always have better ideas than me so I don't want to mandate anything and they're not a way to point fingers at people that would just make things worse if we start pointing at each other like you don't respect 0.7.ae of the Debian Community Guidelines that would make things easier in Debian and they're not perfect, they're a continuous work in progress and they're not, hopefully, inquisition stuff so in this talk, why am I giving this talk? I'm giving this talk because I would like to have the guidelines become something a bit more mainstream so I want you to know what is in the guidelines and so since you're not going to read them here I will go step by step through it with you I would like you to tell people about the guidelines when you think it would be useful but not as a finger pointing and I would like you to watch out for potential additions to the guideline because, as I said, it's not trivial to spot useful suggestions for the guidelines and that's something that is better done with different sets of eyes and so in this talk I will go through what is in the guidelines tell you my plans for the guidelines and ask you for ideas of further steps to take with them so before I start, there's some free editorial dogmas that I forced myself to follow because I think it could be useful and so the DCG, W Community Guidelines should be a collection of suggestions and not a collection of blames so you will never see in the community guidelines something like you are really bad if you do that you will never see bad people do these sort of things or at least you're not supposed to see that if you do it's a bug this suggestion must be something useful for all the parties involved in the communication that is the only way for such suggestions to have a chance of being used it makes no sense to suggest something to someone that would just make things worse for this person obviously this person would never follow this suggestion and of course people who's been listening to my usability talk in previous depth conf know brain doesn't hold more than 7 plus minus 2 items so every section cannot have more than 6 or 7 points after the dogmas we go into the beginning and main part of the guideline we go into the index of the guideline I didn't have this slide in my brain the guideline is split in 3 parts the main guidelines which is the most important part is 4 points which ideally should be general suggestions that are general enough to summarize the entire work with the idea that no one is going to read a long document and if someone is in a hurry you want to bring something useful to them as well and then there's a list of more detailed suggestions or guidelines that are communication specific and a list for things that are babian specific so that's the content and we go into the main guidelines it's these 4 you can just listen to these slides and if you're bored of the talk you can just leave after this slide it's the most important one it's 4 points one is strive for quality try to work for quality what quality means is up to every one of us I like the word quality because it can be relocated to whatever is everyone's set of values but the idea is that you want to do your best in everything you do also because everything you post will contribute to the knowledge usefulness and look of babian but it will also be publicly archived and found by others in out of context and out of the time frame that you were intending for that message so you really want to write a good future for yourself so this is a point that helps both people reading your message and both you as of your image you want to work with others otherwise you could just be lonely upstream and have a developing developer take care of you and then work with others means trying to improve the quality of the community as a whole help to improve everyone's packages which could mean co-maintain but you not necessarily have to co-maintain so that's a high to manosh and just help to improve other people's packages by providing nicer tools for them nicer guidelines nicer suggestions how to use tips testing tools whatever that improves the quality of everything as a whole you can share your ideas and plans allow people to help and contribute thank people these sort of things then this is something that kind of helps everyone because you help others and you get help right? and then principle do not change and the rest changes with work so this gives the idea that we have something in Debian that we all agree with which is not much social contract and Debian for software guideline and then all the rest we can change it with our work we don't go very far with just talking but as soon as we start working we can change a lot and the last one is my favorite one well they're all actually very important but the last one is if there is a conflict of some kind especially you see someone that is being arrogant or unreasonable in a conversation it's best to support the one who's being reasonable rather than attack the one who's being arrogant attacking the person who's being arrogant doesn't solve any problem and just makes the atmosphere worse but supporting the one who's being reasonable actually reduces the gravity and the annoyance of the attack so that is kind of something that it's a suggestion that is aimed at having going into a more sustainable kind of discussion even when things go wrong make some sort of fault tolerance tolerate faults in communication so this is the main guidelines now I'll go through the ones that are more specific and people can fall asleep and digest burps are tolerated so I said there's main guideline communication specific guideline and Debian specific guidelines these are the communication guidelines which are in turn split in three one is improving the content one the presentation sustainability of the communication so this is about the content so the idea is that if you want to write messages that have good quality in the content and are useful to people you want to ensure that you are adding information to the discussion you don't it opposed doesn't have quality if it doesn't add something to a body of knowledge well RTFM read the manual is a good example of something that doesn't add much content to the discussion besides saying that the answer that someone was looking for is written somewhere and of course if someone already knew where to read the fine manual they wouldn't bother to ask so try not to repeat your points some big problem we have in Debian is people repeating themselves over and over again that just doesn't help and it works fine to let your point be heard once and not insist unless you can come up with code specification a technical explanation to back it up it's also less frustrating for people who write a message to you if you actually add something else and people will read your message not just keep you you will actually enforce your point but if you just repeat your old point then it's frustrating because no one will end up listening to it and share the help you receive so when solving a problem creates knowledge and knowledge is good to be shared so you can turn an IRC conversation or an email conversation into a blog entry or a wiki page a short tutorial on how to you can encourage people to share the help so I will help you if you then write the results of your problem fixing into a wiki page when you receive help you have to take notes and share them sometimes Bdale was pointing to me that sometimes you give a suggestion to someone on how to solve a problem but you wouldn't actually be able to solve the problem you just put this person in the right direction and this person actually gets beyond what you would have done so it's nice if this person at the end can post what it's done and you could figure out oh damn it could go that far so share the help you receive do some research before posting that makes a very good quality of the content of the message and as well makes you look smart I found out that I look unbelievably smart to the eyes of most of my friends because every time they ask me a question I just paste the question on Google and tell them what I get back and yeah so some friends use me actually as a kind of Google which kind of annoys me but if you do a little bit of research before answering people you really end up looking smart and people will like what you write and know what you want and make sure people know what they want that is a hard one so this point actually expands into four questions that are called Flanagan Critical Incident Technique that could be useful for debugging social problems like if you can't understand what went wrong you can ask yourself or the other person what led up to the situation what did you do that was specifically effective or ineffective what was the outcome or result of this action and why was this action effective or what more effective action might have been expected that if I read it like this doesn't make any sense but I only wanted to tell you that the four magic questions are in here and I've been told that they kind of help so that's about improving the content and the presentation of the message is important as well unfortunately but in a small group say the DevTags mailing list there's like five active people it doesn't really matter about the presentation of the content of a message because then it's a little traffic and you can actually spend a bit more time trying to figure out what's the point of a mail but on a big high traffic mailing list people tend to skim through messages they need to bring out the message as efficiently as possible so you want to have the shortest mail which most completely gets the point and that is kind of hard so suggestions for that are put the main point at the beginning and the long details later actually Mako told me a nice tip which is you start writing the mail and usually you start with your reasoning to the main point and at the end you actually clear up your mind while writing and you get to the main point to write in a very coincide form so you just copy it and paste it to the top of the mail so that people can see right away what you are aiming for and what is your point and Mako then added and then you delete all the rest which actually makes sense because yeah one error that we often make is to actually put our cognitive process in the mail and you start the mail with some intention but not with clear ideas and you have the clear ideas at the end but then you feel like you don't want to throw away all that effort you had in writing the mail but at least you can just turn the mail upside down and put the main point at the beginning and leave the rest as like more rational about things that people could or could not skip and that's point one point two is talk with coder patches well that's especially on technical mailing list of course like you don't want to talk with coder patches in Debian project probably but that just make things more clear you can like test them right away that's probably the most efficient form of communication we have in our world when it's actually applicable so and sometimes it's hard to say something in English so and it's easier to say like in C, Ruby, chicken whatever language you know best I like chicken a lot I have never seen it but I can generate bindings of my libraries in chicken so I got attached to it I like the idea that I could contribute to chicken development yeah so you can like make examples on your language of choice and it will generally be understandable by readers unless you like to program in brainfuck but well and then point to existing resources this is actually a nice big one sometimes if a problem has been solved or a point has already been made you can condense your message by just collapsing it into a link and if there's no existing resource which is good enough you can actually create it and like in a wiki or you can improve it if it's found on a wiki so you can actually like externalize the body of knowledge and contribute to make like a wider amount of wider body of knowledge grow up I mean someone could just paste from your mail and contribute to a wiki page but while you are writing and if you have to write a lengthy and detailed mail that could just go in a wiki page and be easily linkable and improvable by everyone interested and use a plain and simple style that is probably one of the most difficult points because I'm Italian I've been studying Latin in high school and when they put that in your mind you don't write simple phrases anymore and I know that the Germans have the same problem even when they don't study Latin and so really I mean languages have different ways of building phrases so that needs a bit of effort but it really pays off I found out that people were not understanding my mails even if they had simple content because they were absolutely twisted so I really made some effort and I don't know if that improved but I like to think that it did right and especially an under nice important point inside use a plain and simple style is try to skip rhetorical writing rhetorical questions and all that sort of things people may not understand them as you've intended to write them and you end up picking up a fight without noticing why if I ask a rhetorical question people may understand that I actually meant to ask that question because I couldn't hear what was my tone of voice when I read the mail and then they could just not answer in the way I would expect them to answer and that mail degenerates so the clearest the better and I wouldn't like this to sound like sterilizing the language of Debian because it's actually really nice to enjoy in advanced use of the language and luckily we have good places to do that like Debian Curiosa and Planet Debian so in a technical mailing list it's good to be simple third and last part of the communication specific guidelines is the sustainability thing you want the conversation to be sustainable you not only want to have good conversation today but you'd like it to have like a good enjoyable and actually productive conversation now and in the future we want to have a community which keeps being good even if it grows up so that's actually a bit more detailed there's more points and it's five I go near the limit of six or seven and I think I cheat because the first point opens in four points more so needs improving so first point is read messages smartly which almost means nothing unless I expand it in exercise your will which is it's up to you to decide if a message is important or not a message is not important if it's the last on a thread especially if the thread is very long a message well a message is important if it meets your needs and motivation mainly it's not important if someone important writes it or anything so that is most important like to read messages according to what I really need what I really want try to interact with human beings instead of single messages like behind every message is a person and a person who is usually nice may get really upset one day but that doesn't mean that the person suddenly became evil or if you have the feeling that the person suddenly became evil then you can send them an email asking what happened in the end like nice things after the deb-comps is that we generally like get to know each other in person and when we see that someone of us is having a bad time on mailing this we kind of figure out that the person hasn't become like an asshole right away but may just be having a hard time or something and try to be forgiving this is like the optimist suggestion which is when you are unsure about the intentions of a message assume good intentions which kind of helps avoid to raise a big noise by mistake and be tolerant of personal differences especially yeah especially since we are people who are very different from each other inside the project nationalities, habits, religion whatever but even if like some of us would probably kill each other when meeting in real life happily doesn't happen often actually happily doesn't happen often so we wouldn't work together as like roommates maybe but we can work together online in like Debian itself and it would be a waste to lose good technical work good technical cooperation just because we have a different set of beliefs outside of the scope of Debian so that's about reading messages smartly try not to become victims of preconceptions, bad mood whatever could be wrong in one day then I have be positive before being negative this is absolutely difficult and I tell you because I tried to do it during the whole writing of the guidelines and try to put positive phrases before negative phrases the result is more rewarding and pleasant to read if I say if I translate this into don't put negative phrases before positive phrases it doesn't sound as good it sounds already as finger pointing it's a kind of a style thing that actually can make like a bug report much more pleasant to read the point is we are used at working with bug reports and the bug report starts with this thing it doesn't work so we are using at starting our conversation with this is broken this sucks we take like a very good proposal that we like a lot and we see there's a small flow in it so we reply to the message we delete all the quote except for the broken part and we say this is broken and all the rest is lost and it goes into the war knock dilemma of deleted because it was good or has then been deleted because it was unimportant or rubbish so we are used that the technical instruments that we use kind of leads us in the direction of just remarking what is wrong and we do it in order to improve but that kind of conditions the way we discuss in a way that goes towards being a little bit unpleasant and if we want to get our message through being able to report a flow in someone's reasoning or work without making it feel like an insult trying to be positive before being negative putting positive phrases before the negative phrases is a very good way of doing it and then give credit where credit is due not much to say about it I think many of us actually put acknowledgments as needed that is also I found out that putting acknowledgments is also useful if you then like need to change the license or need to find out who wrote the line of code and so you still have the name around and be respectful and polite this is just if you write in an unpleasant manner people won't feel motivated to work with you so it's kind of like trivial but and help the public knowledge evolve so you want to have like work to be sustainable by not being wasted so it's good to reply to the list if you have a problem actually Lars was telling me that there was a community in which he was involved in which they would have all the replies to questions being private and then people would post back a summary of the problem solution but he said that he knows of only two people who are able to do that efficiently in the whole world so reply to the list when providing suggestions he's actually a good trade-off and one could take from list messages and make wiki pages and build FAQs and whatever but that's still quite trivial encourage people to share the help they receive I think this is repeated from another part of the guideline so that needs fixing and oh this is a big one sustaining a discussion towards solving a problem is sometimes more important than solving a problem it doesn't sound very clear probably needs rewarding but I'm not native so I don't usually get the best of what English can do so suppose you get like a bug report or you want to improve something and you can kind of see how to do it and you feel that you could actually do it well but you don't have time today so that's something that happens to us and we tend to procrastinate and say okay I won't answer this message I'll flag it important and answer it tomorrow and then after six months you still have that message flagged important and I think we should all remove from mud all the options of marking messages unread, flagging them important and all those damn things I use to forget about the things I should remember so the thing is instead of trying to solve a problem that when we may not have enough time it's good enough to bring the discussion forward so replying by saying I don't have time to fix this now but I would look in that direction try to improve in that point that may allow someone to bring it on and it actually happened to me I tried to do it once and actually people when I woke up the next morning people were almost reaching the solution by themselves and because they could actually build on the good direction I gave so yeah instead of it's best not to try to solve a problem but instead to bring people forward as much as one can according to the limited time of the moment and this is the end of the communication guidelines there's two more parts that mean how to like how to bring long threads to conclusion or how to cope with flamers but I skip them especially because one is almost empty I could use more suggestions but one suggestion I've already followed if you receive an email that makes you angry the first thing I do is I turn off the computer and walk a couple of miles and get back to that email a week later right yeah that's another important one as an alternative solution I generally write the angry email and get it out of my system and then don't send it and then if I'm still angry about it the next day I edit all the anger out and say the reasons why I was angry yeah so coping with emails that make us angry could be like either have a walk go to the fridge or something or write a very angry reply and throw it away without sending it what oh you keep it okay so I write the angry reply and keep it there and bring it back later and so maybe you would cut away most of the angry part or you're not angry anymore so you don't go into that vicious circle in which you answer with an angry reply and the person answer while you're still angry and you beat each other within half an hour yeah so this is BDL the two suggestions I throw out to the people about this all the time are number one if you read something that gets your blood pressure up then absolutely immediately sit there and type out a reply and don't send it this does two things one it allows you to get all of the stuff that you're frustrated about out of your system and down into a file somewhere and if you don't send it immediately but instead go off and do something completely different when you come back and look at it you're not going to help and in the meantime six other people have already called them whatever and you don't have to the second piece is that if there's a particular thing in the middle of somebody's post that you want to reply to that you think is wrong or you need to correct or you want to add some valuable information to or whatever your definition of the reply is focus on that one of the things I've discovered is that sometimes when discussions go the most wrong and they get the most bile built up and they get into these huge long threads it's because people are putting too much stuff in each message and it makes it hard for people to figure out how to either just sort of take or not take that thing you know if you put 20 points in a message and one of those irritates the other person they're likely to respond to all 20 points and it'd be a whole lot simpler if you know we all figured out how to respond to the thing that we really need to respond to Thanks B-Dale Did everyone pick them up? Do I need to repeat it? Right, so from there we go into the W-Specific guideline and I hurry up a bit because I'd like to have a little bit of Q&A and I think I have like 5 minutes so yeah so it's about package management, there's a couple of well it could be added to the developer reference there's a few suggestions on how to work with others and where to publish bizarre dark trees and that sort of thing and how to handle bug reports and simple stuff I skip over I guess they need improvement unfortunately the more you go through towards the end of the guideline the more the quality of the guideline decreases a bit because I always start reviewing them from the beginning and my brain is bored when I'm halfway through so what to do on the future with the guideline is well my first idea is to add it to the new maintainer process documentation I wouldn't ask questions about them because it's like but I would just like to suggest people who have a read and that may make their interaction with Debian more efficient and get into the core of the work more I mean faster and then I could package the guideline in Debian and respond to bug reports that could be like issue tracker to add suggestions to it publish on the Debian website that would get translations as well and then have it linked from the beginning and that could be useful like I was thinking the Debian mailing list pages but not as a policy please that are just intended to be suggestions and then see because there's overlap with the developers reference and maybe I should sit down later on with ABBA and if there's other maintenance of the developer reference and actually work together if we should merge what keep a watchful eye for things that could be added because it is I mean every time I talk with someone about it there's new ideas coming up so now I want to know what's in the guidelines I try to illustrate as much as possible during this time I would like you to tell people about the guideline possibly again not as finger pointing but if you think that there could be a useful piece of knowledge for them and then what's out for potential additions to the guideline and let me know and that's the website I mean the address where you can find the guideline and you can just pull them with bazaar look at commits I do and that's just published over there so this is the introduction and I have a few minutes for questions I'd like to have more but well we can do our best in this time you have a part sorry I'm Roland you have a section of your guidelines about online communication I would suggest adding just one more guideline is take it offline if you can I mean come to DebKonf if you happen to be able to meet the person in real life that diffuses any possible frameworks you can have with that person later flames there's actually another addition that came to my mind recently which is use your friends actually I had this coming in bits and pieces from different people but DD is that you should not be alone against the whole Debian project and we have a few people who are in this unfortunate position it really doesn't bother your friends if you actually talk with them and discuss an idea before bringing it to the wide public that helps the idea to improve that you get supportive people turn down your idea it really helps and I've been talking with someone who was really frustrated because every time they made like a suggestion into a list it would get like good critiques and bad critiques and they wouldn't know what was the most important and I suggested well discuss them with friends oh I don't have friends make friends you are at linux there's Debian developers go out and know people and try to remember their names and that is like something I'd like to add to the guideline but I still have to figure out a good wording for it somebody mentioned coming to events like this there's another thing that I don't think gets used often enough and that's the just pick up the telephone option I'm intrigued at how many people seem to you know get all worked up about somebody hasn't been responding to emails hasn't answered my mail I asked them an important question you know why can't they be bothered to answer and when someone me or someone else finally gets around to picking up the phone and calling them you discover that they've had a death in the family or their company fell apart or something like that happened and it's part of this taking it offline going out of van thing but I think sometimes we forget the simple stuff like this yes you know an international phone call is not free but it's darn cheap compared to sitting around being unhappy for the rest of your life and there's VoIP there's VoIP now so but we can hi my name is Mark Allen I would like to second that comment telephone if you are at work and you're in the same building with a person and they don't respond to your email and they don't respond to your telephone walk over and visit them in their queue or find them in the cafeteria I send email if I don't hear it back in one day I'll try a telephone message if I don't get a response on my telephone message in a day and I don't get a vacation indicator I will walk over to their queue with their area and try to find them and see what's happening okay time's up so feel free to bump on me later and I don't know what that means in English actually feel free to step on me and is that correct I don't know like feel free to talk with me and propose additions patches are the most appreciated so you make the effort of adding things using the dogmas that I came up with and see how difficult it is well too slow of a laptop to get to the dogmas so you make an effort to actually follow that and it's fairly difficult but it really helps you to get your radius clear and thanks a lot for being here and well see you next week on


I didn't know that one out of every two fish was farmed instead of caught. Aqualiger has been is just repeating the patterns of the wild which is feeding small fish to big fish. You know they go out and catch 20 million tons a year of herring and anchovy and menhaden these little bony oily fish. They grind them up and press them out into a fat ingredient called fish oil and a protein ingredient called fish meal and those are commodities that are internationally traded and those are the key ingredients to make aqualizer feeds that's how you get these special proteins and oils that these marine creatures require to be healthy. Fish meal has the price band of fish meal has more than doubled and it's gone up between five and six x since 1995. We like dirty CO2 because that's cheap or people might pay us to take it and our bacteria you could say eat or remediate a lot of the things that the EPA is actually concerned about these bacteria that can take the CO2 and use the hydrogen and grow. The proteins in those bacteria are intentionally very similar to the proteins of the small fish that the big fish eat in the wild puts off about 1.2 million tons a year of CO2. We could make 600,000 tons a year of our novo meal from that. Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. We are still at IndieBio demo day. We are talking to David Say now from Novo Nutrients. What's up? Hey, thanks for coming on the show. Great to see you again. Yes, absolutely. And also congratulations on finishing up the pitch and getting the company rolling. So let's talk about this. So and as we talk about making neutral food from CO2, as we talk about that I want to also give us the quick bit on that and then we'll get into the detail but I also want to know about who you are and how you even got to this point. So give us the quick bit and start with the how you got to the point where you're at. Okay, so I graduated college at the dawn of the commercial internet and I developed a taste for entrepreneurship in that context. And then in the early 2000s I realized that I didn't want to keep making e-commerce sites for baseball cap collectors and that kind of thing. I wanted to do something that was more important for fundamental human needs. And so not long after that I discovered aquaculture which is to say I really had no idea where seafood was coming from before that. I didn't know that one out of every two fish was farmed instead of caught even at that time. That's the stat line. And now it's more now it's a majority of seafood is farmed. And but there was this incredible pioneering work being done by people in the open ocean like using the other 98 percent of the earth's water surface that we don't do much with to grow food. Like Jacques Cousteau said we must farm the oceans as we farm the land and he was like way ahead of his time but that's starting to happen now and it's an incredible resource. So I got actually got fired up by reading an article in Wired Magazine and then I found that one of my one of my college classmates a friend of a friend had independently developed an identical interest and he was a very successful serial entrepreneur. And so essentially he had the money I had the time and we started a group called Aquacopia together originally as the aquaculture Investigator of his family office and later as an independent fund manager company with a venture fund. And so how did you go from Aquatopia to Novel Nutrients? It's Aquacopia like corn. So basically it was always clear to me that one of the biggest opportunities in aquaculture was what you feed the fish because everything else is very specific a salmon farm is very different from a tilapia farm which is quite different from an oyster farm or a seaweed farm. The one thing that like not all but many of those things have in common and almost all aquaculture has in common is you got to feed the thing so you can eat it. And everything in the ocean has evolved for hundreds of millions of years to eat other things in the ocean. Yeah right but on land for the last 20,000 years we've gotten good at producing a few things oil seeds and grains mostly and there's not much of an overlap between those right fish and shrimp in the ocean they want to eat other fish and other shrimp that's not what we can grow in our fields and so there's this fundamental technology opportunity actually a biotech opportunity to serve that. So you have to grow ocean food to feed ocean food that we want to eat. Absolutely yeah or has it at least simulated be nutritionally equivalent to it. Yeah yeah okay so now yeah so keep continuing. So really you know what aquaculture has been is just repeating the patterns of the wild which is feeding small fish to big fish and so you know they go out and catch 20 million tons a year of herring and anchovy and menhaden these little bony oily fish they grind them up and press them out into a fat ingredient called fish oil and a protein ingredient called fish meal and those are commodities that are internationally traded and those are the ingredients to make aquaculture feeds that's how you get these special proteins and oils that these marine creatures require to be healthy but those are commodities that have been under tremendous pressure and the prices keep going up and up so like even in the time that I've been in the business since 2004 fish meal has the price band of fish meal has more than doubled and it's gone up between five and six x since 1995. Whoa and that's the wrong way we want it to drop. Yeah I think so if we want to preserve our oceans and not over fish them and if we if we want good food to be relatively inexpensive if you're going to eat an animal you need to control the cost of what you're feeding that animal and you want to do it with something that is also doesn't have contaminants because you know that mercury and things like that will end up in people so there are a lot of reasons to try to make use of inexpensive resources to generate feed and I met this company Novo Nutrients before it was Novo Nutrients when they were more of a little more of a science project and realized that they were taking untreated industrial emissions of CO2 basically pollution and turning it into nutrition and that blew my mind. Yeah and what how does that work what is the CO2 that is being transitioned to nutrients? So it's a lot like the way that that those plants in the field work right if you're if you're a stock of wheat uh it's using photosynthesis to take CO2 from the air and solar energy and then you know that's what grows the cells in the plant forms the wheat that eventually you know is in bread um there's some water and soil right nutrient as well exactly and so we need exactly the same things we we also use water uh we also but not nearly as much a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the water that you would use to grow a plant on land and we need a little we need a little bit of nitrogen and phosphorus and sulfur like the elements that you want but the biggest thing that we need is CO2 and then secondarily we need hydrogen so in our case it's the same kind of CO2 capture that plants do we're just doing in an industrial setting where the CO2 is being made anyway by a cement plant or by the you know milling paper um making steel these are all things that produce a tremendous amount of CO2 that has nowhere to go besides the sky and so we give it a second life in a very valuable way. So the CO2 that is a byproduct of steel and these massive industrial processes can then have a novo nutrients yeah section of the of the yeah basically you just got it you get the CO2 to us and we feed it to our bacteria okay and now let's okay cool so let's talk about this so the CO2 comes to you what does novo nutrients have that you said feed it to the bacteria yeah okay and then they keep telling us about that okay so this is actually the core of our intellectual property and the heart of our technology whatever you can tell us yeah which is to say it's a framework for designing consortia consortia consortia means different kinds of microbes that work together where the hole is greater than the sum of the parts and so in our consortia the core primary producers are these bacteria that can take the CO2 and use the hydrogen and grow but then there's another layer around them of secondary producers other species other strains that can't survive directly on CO2 and hydrogen but the waste products of the prime producers give them what they need to thrive and so in this way like consortia in nature which are you almost never find a microbiome itself because in the same way that nature absorbs a vacuum evolution is going to use all the resources that are available in an area and basically you know organisms are going to evolve and move in until almost all the resources are used and at the microbial level it's it becomes these consortia and so that's our our patent application or one of them at least is around a very particular subset of all the possible consortia that is specifically designed to to be able to produce nutrition very efficiently quickly and inexpensively from industrial CO2 so what exactly happens the bacteria is a bacteria that takes the CO2 and uses that to do what that enables it to grow and exactly so these are microbes that grow by cell division yes so it's exponential growth and we're just giving them the food that they need to split to make more bacteria and then that those microbes are the food that the aquaculture wants yeah I mean it's fish meal exactly that the proteins in those bacteria are intentionally very similar to the proteins of the small fish that the big fish eat in the wild so the a profile of a protein is like what amino acids are in it which of the building blocks of protein are in it and to what degrees and so our inventor and founder Brian Sefton designed this consortia specifically to try to get an amino acid profile that's like an anchovy which is sort of the gold standard for marine proteins and so we've gotten it's very interesting to see the graphs next to each other we've gotten quite quite close but what's even more interesting is if you take away the fish meal amino acid graph and put in the nutritional needs of a specific animal like a salmon or a shrimp because that's really what you want to you don't want to necessarily substitute for what they eat you want to substitute for what they should be eating what would be the perfect protein for them and there's this concept of an ideal protein which is actually that and we're doing some work to try to achieve ideal proteins but that would be next generation for us that's not what we have today yeah yeah interesting so then there's this you kind of you put it as a golden standard yeah maritime marine protein it's called the the the good stuff is called super prime fish meal super prime fish meal yeah interesting so then the same composition of amino acids that make up the proteins and fish meal you have bacteria that is yeah we're we're close oh close better and some worse than others but we're working on this is really a first draft for us what we have today and we have many ways to improve as we go to mark two mark three and so forth and then david how receptive are the fish in the aquaculture to eating the fish meal so we uh we just did a test actually um so the usda and the us fish and wildlife service have a joint lab in bozeman montana where this is pretty much all they do um yeah our tax dollars at work but in this case you know to create better and cheaper seafood is really is mainly what they're thinking about and so uh they set aside 200 trout half of them got the control diet which had the super prime fish meal in it and half of them got a diet which was gosh i think it was about 40 percent nova meal which is much higher than you would actually use in a real situation but they wanted to see is it safe that's the first thing yeah and yeah the safety levels were like almost identical but then it it also you could also measure growth and what we saw was especially as time went on and the fish were bigger and therefore um you know it would be more expensive to feed them because they eat more when they're bigger our growth rates were better than than the control and so that's like very promising for us yeah so yeah growth rates is huge and then also i'm curious if the the cost to feed becomes much less as well yeah so um you're not going and taking a crap loads of fish from the ocean to feed other fish exactly so if you look at the publicly traded companies that do that right they're companies that especially have fishing fleets they go catch the fish they process into these ingredients they sell the ingredients the publicly traded ones um seem to have around a seven percent average profitability right um our gross margins should be 60 percent at scale yeah now that's not all going to that's not going to translate to all the corporate profitability but there's a huge difference there huge difference and so sustainability that's all it takes you to instead of take wildlife yeah yeah and so that means that our production cost is just much lower yeah and that's the simplest way to say it now now can you use just any co2 does it have to be like a somewhat clean source of co2 you know we like dirty co2 because that's cheap or people might pay us to take it and our bacteria actually eat a lot of the things or you could say eat or remediate a lot of the things that the EPA is actually concerned about in emissions are we not then eating the co2 the dirty co2 because then if the bacteria it's the co2 fish eat the bacteria then we eat the fish so then so digestion is all about breaking things down yeah and when the bacteria take in these compounds their chemoautotrophs they get food from chemicals so they're actually their chemical reactions going in the bacteria that taking apart the molecules that would be problematic for people so when they take apart the problematic molecule then that what what occurs so that it's not there then at all well it's it's like the same elements can either be something very benign like a healthy protein or it could be a poison right so a good example this actually our bacteria can take apart cyanide so we would remediate cyanide if it was in a in a in a flu stack that the one thing that we can't you can't take apart right our elements so we have to avoid elemental contaminants like mercury like arsenic or radioisotopes which is also is that also why you can't like take mercury out of this whole fishing seafood dilemma is because it's something that limits our ability to take that element out yeah i mean the mercury gets in through the water and up through the food chain from like the very smallest creatures plank the phytoplank and so once you get a tuna how are you going to get the mercury out are you going to like go sell buy like sell by sell sure even even then i don't think we have the nanotechnology for that so the best thing is prevent the mercury from going in in the first place and for us that means if the smoke stack has a lot of mercury coming out of it we don't use that smoke stack and there are billions of tons a year of co2 from different kinds of sources and so it's easy to avoid or relatively easy to gravitate to the ones that are producing the right kind of dirty co2 yeah for us yeah and then it's so interesting about how the bacteria breaks the molecule to the point where we're not actually there's a chemical process that goes on that makes it so that we don't eat that and i'm speaking generically but yes and this is what we try and do on the show we try and get down to the i can't guarantee that every possible you know problematic molecule could be broken down but we've looked at we've looked at the main ones that are actually present in fluid gases and we're confident that we can find sources in cement plants steel mills oil and gas facilities pulp and paper mills and bioethanol manufacturing among other those are just the top five just does a strange question i guess as you scale over time the amount of fossil fuels that we use decreases over time so where do you get your dirty co2 from them well so there are a lot of industrial processes that are not related to fossil fuels that just have to create co2 so oh interesting like so cement for example that just the the chemical process for the formation of cement produces a ton of co2 for every ton of cement approximately right and so you know down the street here if you go to cupratino there's lehigh cement which is part of the heidelberg group which one of the largest uh if not the largest cement group in the world and that particular facility um puts off about 1.2 million tons a year of co2 and we could make 600 000 tons a year of our nova meal from that whoa and that's a lot the state of california limits these guys to releasing the amount of co2 that they did in the late 70s or early 80s and so if their co2 wasn't being emitted that's right they could make more cement which is what they're in the business of doing so there's a lot of value here yeah not just in this incredible protein but in also just make you know reusing the co2 and preventing it from going directly into the atmosphere now are you positioned right next to the cement factory or are you positioned at a centralized location where the cement factories from around the world ship their co2 to you well so the there are cement factories that are significantly bigger than the one in cupratino there are ones that are four million tons a year or more right and at four million tons that creates two million tons a year of product yeah which will be valued at around three billion dollars uh which means it's it has the same value as the annual production of soybeans from nebraska which is like 330 million bushels um that's a lot of protein and so it it we don't we won't need multiple sources coming to one point we can we can take the production to the inputs and the inputs are co2 and hydrogen so that's the other part is the hydrogen the hydrogen okay okay and then now just give us the kind of the the you know the fish and meal that you make the super fish fish meal that you make that that then is fed to aquaculture systems around the world through what would be this right yeah would it so so there are multi billion dollar companies all they do is they make feed and some of them make feed for pigs and chickens and fish some just make feed for shrimp some just make feed for salmon and so these feed milling companies will be our customers feed milling companies feed mills okay cool yeah so then you sell to them and they go and distribute it to salmon or shrimp or whatever exactly because well they're in the business of buying a wide variety of ingredients mixing them in different recipes and creating these feeds which are a lot like they look a lot like and are a lot like a dry cat or dog food and then that's their product that they sell the farms or they sell to distributors okay great um is there something else about nova nutrients that we should know on the way out yeah um everything I've just described is natural and will be regulated as such but half of our team is our synthetic biologists and they're thinking about what kind of engineering can we do to create even higher value better performing products and so a lot of the things that today are considered that get put into feed like vitamins enzymes carotenoids which are really good antioxidants right omega threes are things that we can have our bacteria manufacture internally and then they won't have to be added to feed because we'll be delivering these this value added protein meal that's enhanced with all these valuable biochemicals and then our customers and females won't have to buy those things separately they'll get a nice bundle um and and that opens up all kinds of possibilities and the reason why we can do that is because we have a generalized bio manufacturing platform that we have chosen to use first in animal nutrition and aquaculture because it's that's just such a great initial market um but it represents a fraction of what we can do man this and are you are you how where do you sit on like the long term push for with companies like finless that are working on growing the actual fish in the big bioreactors we see them as potential customers for us because we create nutrients from non-nutrients and companies like finless and new age meats and Memphis meats take nutrients and turn them into food so in a sense they're actually very much like a fish farm so they would take directly from you we think we can produce products for them yeah yeah right because they want proteins and fats that their tuna cells can take up and grow and replicate these tuna cells are not interested are not capable of taking the small molecules and reproducing the way that our bacteria can and so yeah we we really want these new food tech companies to succeed because that's a market where we can get in on the ground floor and provide a higher quality protein to them and and other things that they need at a lower cost and and this is also true for for the plant based meat companies right so uh with your ripple or beyond meat or impossible um you're out there buying a lot of specialized proteins from made from peas or lentils but really what you're interested in is a high quality protein that doesn't cost more than it has to and so yeah we really want to be a foundation of the food system whether people are doing cellular agriculture plant-based meats or doing it sort of the old-fashioned way by raising pigs or chickens or uh Mediterranean sea bass I would have never stumbled upon that this notion that you can have bacteria consume microbes consuming CO2 that then can feed evolution's amazing man and and yeah we didn't have to build it right it was out there for us we just had to put it in the right framework yeah put in the right framework yeah and again it's it's it's it's the it's the design of the of the selection of the specific amino acids that make those proteins that then can be fed to the our core intellectual property is a framework for designing consortium microbes yeah consortium not just bacteria but our patent application also specifies specific types of yeast micro algae yeah other fungi yeah that can all work together and we're just enabling the growth not only of our workhorse bacteria that can work that can live on the CO2 and hydrogen directly but dozens of other species that have their own special properties that can now indirectly live on CO2 and hydrogen that's the magic the the consortia of microbes can use the CO2 as the fuel for them and do they then make the specific proteins that you want to feed the fish yeah we don't have like precise protein by protein control right yeah but you can change the it's like an orchestra so you can we want this many violins we want this many trumpets we want this many french horns and that's the that gets the sound right you can't get it exactly like you're not going to get the sound waves exactly what you want but you can get very close and sort of you know close enough for government work this has been so interesting again like you said evolution so fascinating you just got to put the right parts of the piece to get pieces together and boom you can do almost anything like this this is nuts as humans we've now evolved to the point where we can use other evolution and guide it and so yeah directed evolution hopefully with lots of stewardship and love for planet earth and absolutely like taking CO2 from these cement plants and putting it into fish feed this is so so interesting Dave thank you so much for talking to us really on our show it's been super fun thanks everyone for tuning in much appreciated


I think he just graduated. He either just graduated or he's about to, he's like on his job search right now. And he's doing that program that you mentioned where you work like primary care and NHSC, is that right? All of the service work. Yeah, yeah, he's doing that. So his job search is actually a little bit more complicated cause he has to find a clinic that's part of that like network around. So he's actually having kind of a tough time finding a job at least right now. Really? Yeah. In California? I see so many job offers in Cali, but maybe a lot of them are not through that program. They're just like private, you know? So can I figure out to the reservations in Arizona? Probably. Where I was from? Once to. It's okay. It's okay. It's just like the drive out to the reservations is long. So like you're talking about like an hour or more commute. There's that. Yeah, those NHSC things like financially for some people, they definitely make sense. And it's definitely very honorable work, but I know a few people doing those. And man, it's you, your heart better be in it or you better be able to just like really deal with some misery cause it's very, very hard work. It's hard work. There's a reason the government subsidizing it. It's because those patients either, all of them don't speak English and you're constantly using a translator which is extremely frustrating or they're just like very tough people to work with for some reason or it's an area nobody wants to drive to or live in. Like there's a reason the government subsidizing this stuff. Oh yeah.  So, and also finding a job as we just saw from I think his name is Mario from Mario. It might be kind of tough to find a job when you're signed up for this program. So there are some downsides. I hope he talks more about it when he posts more cause I definitely want to see like those aspects. Yeah. Yeah. When we collab hopefully by the time we collab maybe he'll have found something and maybe even started working and he can talk about it. Yeah. I'm excited for that one. Yeah.  Hopefully it happens.


Welcome and thank you to everyone that has joined us on this Monday. We have Gregory Nielsen with us, so excited to have you with us, Greg. And Greg will be talking with us a little bit or a lot of it about cultivating board champions. And I am thrilled to hear more about this because one of the key points over the last year has really been the focus on boards. So before we get into the conversation with Greg, we of course want to make sure that you remember who we are. If we haven't met yet, Julia Patrick is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, the nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. We are so excited to have the continuation and the investment of our presenting sponsors.  I like to remind you that these companies exist for you truly. They are here to help you move your mission driven goals forward. They are all online. The majority of them have a huge tech base. So if you have not checked out any of these presenting sponsors, please make sure you do. They are fantastic. Many of them are tech agnostic and really are here to help you again with your number one goal of serving your community. So please join me in saying thank you to our sponsors. And again, thrilled to have today's guest, Gregory Nielsen, President and CEO with Nielsen Training and Consulting. Now Gregory, you're in Kentucky, is that right? I am. I'm based in Louisville, Kentucky, born and raised in New York, but now based in Louisville. We are so thrilled to have you. So welcome, and we would love to have you tell us a little bit more about your consulting firm. Absolutely. Thank you, Jarrett. Thank you, Julia. It's great to be with both of you today. And as you mentioned, my name is Greg Nielsen. I am actually an attorney by background. So I have taken a really circuitous route to where I am today. I started my career as an officer in the Army Jag Corps, and I was stationed at Fort Knox, which is what brought me to Kentucky. And I was trying court martial cases around the country as a litigator. In 2008, I made the transition to nonprofit leadership and served as a nonprofit CEO of two different organizations for a little over a decade. One was a pediatric healthcare nonprofit and later the Center for Nonprofit Excellence. I launched Nielsen Training and Consulting in 2018, and now I'm a privileged guy. I get to work with nonprofits across the country, mostly in the areas of board governance, our topic today, strategic planning and organizational development. Wow, what a background. I did not know that background. So for those of you transparently, Greg and I have been connected through social media and many nonprofit forums that are online. So we've kind of maintained this colleague, you know, partnership. What a story, Greg, that is fantastic. And I launched the Raven Group in 2009. So I know in 2008, when you really made this shift in your career, that was not an easy time. My goodness, it was, it was crazy. As you know, I had no nonprofit experience at the time. It was 2008, taking over as a first time executive director. I had three board members in that organization and the board met quarterly. So if you want, if you're thinking about a segue to our topic today, let's try and go fundraise with a lawyer at the helm who has never raised a dollar in his life. And three board members. That was the, that was the mission that we had back in 2008. So it was a trial by fire. And you could not charge billable hours because that's not the model of nonprofits, but I love that segue. So talking about cultivating board champions again, you know, the board members have, you know, made or break us throughout this last year. Many organizations have been very successful in the nimbleness and how their board has, has really leaned in to the opportunities or challenges. But we are thrilled. And I know that our guests today as well as watching the recording want to hear more about, okay, how do we do this? How do we create board champions? So I think the where I usually start with a group is, and particularly if you're doing this in a board meeting or at a board retreat is close your eyes and think about the best team that you've ever been a part of. Maybe it was a sport. Maybe it was a club. Maybe it was a professional, you know, a corporate group that you've been a part of what were the characteristics of that team. And I suggest if you ask your board members that question, you'll hear we all understood our role. There was a place for everyone. I felt like my talents were utilized. I knew what was expected of me. I had the support to succeed. There was accountability. So when we think about how to create board champions, what we're trying to replicate for our board members with our board members is that experience of being part of the most successful, most empowering and inspirational team they've been a part of in their past. You know, I love that approach because it could be your church choir. It could, like you said, it could be a sports team. It could be a neighborhood association. That is a really great idea because so many folks come to nonprofit board service. They haven't had any board service, or they've had a lot of it, but it hasn't really been that great. Right. What do you bring to the table? You know, I also like it because it gives you it gives you an opportunity to refer back to that image days, weeks, months later, right when the board inevitably hits difficult patches because all of our boards do. It gives us a chance to refer and reflect back by going down this path. Are we creating the type of team that we want to be a part of? Are we subconsciously promoting any dysfunctions that are going to inhibit our ability to meet the mission down the road? So I have a question and Julie and I are notorious for what we what we call as curveball questions. So boards tend to have a term limit. Some organizations adhere to this and some do not. You know, if we've been around the block enough, we know this to be true. How do you bring that same example of close your eyes? What was the most successful group that you were a part of into recruiting additional board champions? So either we're looking to grow or we're looking to kind of replace those term limits. How do you use that in that scenario, Greg? I think that it's twofold. So first it's about being honest with the prospective board member about where is your board today, right? So if your board is not in that ideal state, right, you haven't achieved that ideal team atmosphere, it's important to be honest with prospective board members and say this is where we are today. These are the challenges that we're experiencing. These are some of the issues that we're wrestling with and trying to solve. But our board members have talked passionately about this is where we want to go. These are the characteristics that we want to nurture and cultivate in our board. And for the following reasons, we think that you can be a part of helping us get one step closer to that. When I'm approached about serving on a nonprofit board, I want to know why me, right? I want to know you're not just seeking to fill a seat or get to an arbitrary number of board members, but there's something unique that I can bring to the table that I can bring to the team that helps you get one step closer to what you're trying to build. That's great. Now, when it comes to really, you know, building this when it comes to healthy habits, I'm sure there's ways where, you know, some board members may take over in a unhealthy manner. I'm not, you know, I'm sure that happens. But talk to me about, you know, how do we really move the board champions to be healthy? So, Jared, there are really, I talk about five key habits of healthy boards. And I use that term habits intentionally, because we all have habits, right? The key for our board is understanding what are the habits that we have that we want to memorialize, that we want to be part of the culture of our board. And then what are the habits that are not serving us well that we want to break. And so that metaphor of habits resonates with board teams. But it's about understanding how do we intentionally step through this in a way that makes sense for our board, because there's not one singular, I can't pick up a textbook and say, if I do these five things and just these five things, magically, it's all going to work out. I have to do it in a way that's comfortable and makes sense for my individual board. So it starts with the first habit and Julia articulated it beautifully before, which is expectations, right? Healthy boards define the expectations they have of each other collaboratively. So it's not me as the executive director or the board chair saying, okay, every board member is going to do these 10 things, sign on the dotted line, and we're good to go. Healthy boards develop the expectations that they have of the team collaboratively, right? So think about a board retreat. Think about in a board meeting posing the question, what do we expect of each other? We expect a certain level of attendance. We expect a certain financial commitment or participation in fundraising. To me, it starts with that expectations piece as the as the critical first habit of a healthy board. One of the quotes I've heard is people support that in which they help create, right? And so if the board is closing their eyes at the very beginning and saying this, this is what I recall to be the most successful, most productive, most efficient, effective organization or group in which I played a part of and now what were those healthy habits and having those expectations and being able, I don't know, accountability, right? Hold each other accountable in those expectations is critical as well. Board members need three things in order to be successful. They need expectations. They need support because as Julia mentioned a few minutes ago, board members don't come to our board necessarily with prior positive experience, training as far as their roles and responsibilities. And then the third thing that board members need and they crave it is accountability, meaning what does accountability look like on this team?  I really do believe, and maybe it's a Pollyanna approach, but that people want to succeed, that they want to do well. But where we miss is that expectation in that tracking of what it means to be good. And then pretty soon, if they're not performing or the board's not performing, it's very easy to disengage because there's so many other things going on in life. And rather than keep up, you know, keep in the fight, so to speak, it's just so easy to pull away. And so for me, if you don't start out with that expectation setting and measuring, you just are going to get so far behind. It's going to be really hard to pivot, it seems like. Unless there's a total crisis, and oftentimes when I've been on boards when that's occurred, you have a sloughing off, you automatically have people that leave and say, yeah, you know, I can't do it. Julia, that's a great point. And it leads right into the second habit of healthy boards, which is recruiting meticulously. Right, we alluded to it a few minutes ago and we said, we don't want to just fill seats on the board. And thinking through healthy boards are able to articulate who's on the team. What are the skills talents perspectives that we have represented today, where might we have gaps, and then have a specific intentional recruiting plan to fill some of those gaps. And that includes everything from skills and talents, all the way to diversity of thought diversity defined as broadly as the team chooses to. Okay, so now you've really gotten me thinking here. What are what's the next healthy habit that we need to have orientation. Right, if you look at the data and it's backed up by by talking to board members, the single most important attribute that a lot of our organizations overlook is a really thoughtful orientation process. How many times do we see the binder approach right here is our new board member hand them the binder with the bylaws and the the last 12 board meeting minutes and expect them to be great. Right, what we know from talking to board members is that without a thoughtful orientation, it takes the average board member nine to 12 months before they feel comfortable making a contribution to the board. Right, a thoughtful orientation program can cut that amount of time by 75%. Right, because if I know what's expected of me if I've had a thoughtful orientation, where I've had an opportunity to sit down with the executive director. I've had an opportunity to sit down with the board chair. I've had an opportunity to meet the staff and see the programs for myself. I immediately feel like I'm part of the team. I feel like I know how I can make a contribution. And you can you can engage. Yes. Yes, 9 to 12 months that was a that was a shock to me. But it makes sense. And again, I've been with too many organizations that don't have an orientation, and they do the binder approach. Here you go. Go get them. It's intuitive. Right. If we were to start, you know, think about for our board members there, nine to five Monday to Friday job. Right. If they started that job, and no one gave them any orientation, they didn't have expectations, they didn't have support. They didn't have a thoughtful orientation. How long do we think it would take them to excel as a lawyer as a doctor as an engineer, whatever career path they were in. It really is no different when we think about our board members. Yeah. Okay, so now, healthy habit number four, number four as we get down to this is where the rubber meets the road right healthy habits need to be able to govern effectively. And this is where we can see a lot of customization and individuality. How often does the board meet what's a comfortable meeting frequency. What about the board meeting length. That were super effective at an hour other board meetings that go longer or shorter. What about the use of committees. Is that going to be an effective tool for governance. This is where we have to customize as a board and talk about how are we most effective governing this organization. Let's resist the black and white approach of we have to have committees or we have to meet this often or this frequently or for this length of time. And let's talk as a team about in order to get the job done in order to be effective and be a great team together. What does that look like for us. Now Greg does that stay the same. Are we also amenable to seeing how that might change over time depending on what is, you know, in in our atmosphere. I'm a huge proponent for having that be changeable right composition of our boards change. It's reasonable and unrealistic to think that the exact same way that we govern with our board five years ago is the exact same way to govern today. We have a different list of challenges we have a different mixture of personalities and leadership and communication styles, and the world is changing. Right. The past two years have taught us nothing else. Think about if we tried to govern our nonprofits, the exact same way now, as we did, you know, three years ago, right. Things have just changed a lot of us are on zoom a lot of us are meeting virtually. It has altered the way we can govern our organizations the way we put our teams together really. Well, and I'm Jared and I talked about this all the time but you know we are huge fan girls of board portals. And for so many organizations, just that technological engagement has been new and was probably pushed by the pandemic. Because it was such an innovative and evolving thing. So that I've got to believe you're seeing more and more of that in the government's issue. Absolutely and a lot of it has been triggered by how to manage the virtual meeting, but you're right there's also other opportunities for board portals and how do we share documents, how do we share information, how do we protect our data some key data that we want to keep confidential how do we protect that so technology definitely plays a huge role in conversations around that fourth habit of governance. So okay drum roll number five. The final one is the one that is most overlooked by nonprofit organizations so really hit the drum roll right now, and it's evaluation. Good team. What do healthy teams do think about a sports team, we're in the middle of football season right now, what do coaches do at the end of every game. They watch film, they evaluate, what did we do that went well, what did we do that we want to improve next time out boards are the exact same thing. It is so healthy and such a great habit for boards to hold a mirror up to themselves and their own performance and reflect and say, where have we succeeded as a board team, where do we still have challenges, and perhaps most importantly, one of the my favorite aspects of evaluation is it allows boards to set priorities. When I ask boards, what do you want to do in the coming year or what do you want to improve. I always worry when I hear a lot of general answers we want to be more engaged we want to raise more money we want to be a better team. It's hard to know what that means, if I'm a board member. Instead evaluation helps us know, okay, our three priorities for the next six months nine months 12 months are X, Y and Z, and this is what we think we can accomplish in that timeframe. So again, evaluation and being able to course correct is a is a wonderful habit for healthy boards. Huge nugget I love that fifth one it was well worth the drum roll.  There's been a lot of changes there continue to be a lot of changes so being able to course correct, having to refocus or shift really like what is it that we want to do in the next six nine 12 months, and how do we get the buy in to be as effective as we possibly can. That is a wonderful, wonderful healthy habit tip. And you're going to talk to us about you know when these champions do get together, and they're healthy and there's they're hitting these healthy habits. And maybe they're ready to really look at, you know, translating bold visions into reality. What does that look like in a in a healthy organization with a healthy board. It starts with having a strategy that we all believe in that we can be a part of and that we can envision for the future. As a board member, I have to have a piece of ownership in that I want to be, you know, play that critical role in strategic planning to identify what is our vision for the future one year two years three years whatever your time period is, and then how do we all fit together where do the puzzle pieces fit together. What resources do we need what challenges do we anticipate, and how can I, as a board member, play the most possible to help advance that vision, right so it's about understanding what is our strategy, ensuring the organization has a bold strategic plan in place. That's realistic. That's feasible that takes into account challenges and resources needed, and then understand how do we take that plan. And how do we flip the switch into implementation, because what we know is we see a lot of nonprofit organizations, I was certainly part of sub in the past right that have great strategic plans, but we don't know what do we do on day one, how do we begin how do we take those first initial steps to translate that that strategy into action into implementation. And that's like your, you know, your welcome board book. So many organizations I see they work on these strategic plans that are just tomes, you know, and then it goes into a book and here it is. And then it sits on that shelf until it's like, Oh, no, the year's coming to an end we better get out that book and see where we are. How do you take that hard work and all that thought leadership and keep it front of mind. So the strategic plan document just like board development is a living breathing document. Right. There's a lot of great parallels between strategic plans and board development. And what we know is that just like strategic plans need to be kept a part of every single board meeting. So why are we having this report on this particular topic taking board time on this discussion, because it applies to pillar number one of our strategic plan. Board development is the same thing. Sometimes the temptation in developing board champions is to do it once a year, the checklist approach, right. Let's have a board retreat, we'll do a presentation about roles and responsibilities, and then we'll check the box that we have developed our board team for the year. What we know from healthy nonprofits is that board professional development is the same as our staff professional development. I used to love as a nonprofit executive that in that role that critical role that I played in making sure that our staff had the training and support and development resources necessary. It's the same with our board members. What are we doing at this meeting this month to improve the skills talents make our board members one step more comfortable in their role right so rather than thinking of it as a one time event. Think about board professional develop as an as an ongoing process. I love that you said that I couldn't agree more. And one of the things I cannot help to hear Greg is potentially how transferable these healthy habits, creating these board champions transfer into the committee work into staff into maybe a young nonprofit professionals group. So it seems to me that many of these wonderful nuggets and ah ha's that you've shared with us today about cultivating his board champions is really transferable throughout the culture of the organization. Am I, am I seeing that right and you just use the critical word of culture. Okay, it's so important that these habits become part of the culture of our organization. So it's not shocking for our board members when we talk about conducting a board self assessment. This is not a remediation or a punishment for our board members. It's simply part of the fact that as an organization, we believe in continuous improvement. We believe in holding a mirror up to our own performance and making regular corrections along the way and celebrating what we do really really well. So it's all about building that culture and there's not a huge difference between our board and our staff. Right. It's not like our staff has one culture and our board has a brand as a totally different culture. It's about what do we want the culture of this organization to be and then each of those different groups plays a critical role in developing that enhancing that and then owning and sustaining it as well. We don't want to just be the caretaker of the culture as the executive director as the board chair. We want champions at every level of the organization. Yeah, it really needs to be woven into the fiber and the fabric of the organization. And I'm thinking to even bringing that into the orientation this this is my binder if I were a mind this means binder, like bringing it into the orientation so that even that piece of it is saying, how might we improve upon the orientation and being open as you said Greg to constant improvement or at least the openness the willingness to consider how we might continue to improve our processes and our systems. I think that is so fantastic.  So you might as well be intentional and embrace it and ask the tough questions that it necessitates, because it's always going to be evolving. And the more you can be proactive and be intentional about the culture you are fostering and creating. I think the more successful you can be. You know it's so fascinating. It's hard to believe our time is almost up today but I would say in almost 400 episodes. You're one of the very few thought leaders we've had on that has drawn a direct parallel between the culture of your staff and the culture of your board. So often we separate those two, and we get all focused on one or the other, and we don't pull them across. And so I love that you said this, because I think to Jared, you made this comment you know if you have that healthy habit. Those habits moving across both to both sides, the organizations can be better for it. It's not an either or. And I also love and maybe this was unintended by you Greg but I love that you just gave permission for people to ask the tough questions, and I would love to to echo that and say and please don't wait nine to 12 months if you're a new board member. The presentation will help, but I love that, because I do think that often those tough questions. They, they're tough that it's exactly what they are, and as a fiduciary agent of the organization. Right, it is, it is your duty it is your obligation, it is your right. I've heard it now from perhaps a non practicing attorney but one that is definitely serve, serve that role, I don't want to endorse that as a as a legal statement, but well hey this has been amazing and it sounds to me like we can all use some of Gregory Nielsen's information and wisdom. And this is information check out Nielsen consultants really important. You know, Jared and I from day one we've been all about training we really believe this, and it's been so fabulous Greg to have you on talking about that that you come from this really a guest institution of Jack. It was Jack right. Yes. Yeah, I mean it's just really impressive and so we are just so thrilled to have had you in your wisdom on I have to tell you I did not know all this before you came on I just thought you were another great consultant. So that's even better huh. Yeah. I've been joined by my sidekick the nonprofit nerd herself to ransom CEO the Raven group again we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors about you. We would not be here. Wow. Another great way to get off the week and thank you. I love it I mean no pressure Greg but you definitely had a home run. Our room, our virtual room was packed because clearly this is a topic that our, you know, sector friends really need to to focus on they want to learn more about so thank you to you Greg and thank you to our sponsors that have allowed us this conversation today. It's been wonderful. Hey everybody as we end this day, and we launch into a new week. We want to remind everyone to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks Greg.


So there are many Galaxy Z Fold videos out there, but this one is all about the S Pen, and I think this device adds a lot more with the S Pen built into it. Now, the Z Fold has S Pen capabilities within the internal display, not the external display. I'll repeat, you cannot use it on the external display, only the internal display, which has the Wacom layer and allows the functionality of an S Pen. Now, you can only use two S Pens with the Galaxy Z Fold 3. So there's a Z Fold S Pen, which is great. It's small, it kind of fits this device.  So that is the ultimate S Pen. Now, that S Pen has a switch on it, which allows you to switch between S Pen Pro functionality and Z Fold. Why is that? Well, two things. When you switch to the Z Fold functionality, it allows you to use it on the Z Fold, because it retracts. So the Z Fold S Pen and the S Pen Pro when using it in Z Fold mode, retracts in if you press too hard on it. So prevents you from jabbing or stabbing hard onto your device, which is great. So you don't have those kind of issues when you're writing or using the S Pen on the Z Fold 3, which is awesome. Now also the S Pen Pro, as I mentioned, has Bluetooth functionality, which the Z Fold S Pen does not. So speaking of the S Pen itself for the Z Fold, the Z Fold S Pen is nice, it's small, compared to the S Pen Pro or even the Galaxy S21 S Pen, it's the smallest of all three, and it just is really functional. Now, let's talk about S Pen features. That's something we like as note users. I myself am a note user. So sitting on this device is great because you've got a lot of large real estate. First thing, of course, you can write anywhere on the device as well as also picking out the S NotePad and just writing on there. So that's something that's great. You've got that quick access menu where you can do more things and you can add a few other functionalities to it. So you can go ahead and say, take a screenshot by just using the cutout tool if you want to. You can open up all your notes. You can also add things like the magnify feature if you want to magnify things on screen. There's a translate feature as well. So there's so many features you can add to it with the S Pen, which is great. But of course, I just love writing and drawing because I'm terrible at drawing, but it's a great feature to have on this device. And I think a lot of people will like it. There's also a S Pen case for the Z Fold 3, which allows you to slide the S Pen on the back. It's a really nice looking case and I think that's when I'll go with my Z Fold 3 and I think it fits it right well. So that's something to take note. In terms of pricing, I'm not exactly sure. They really didn't give me pricing, but I would say it's probably around $69 or so. Just don't quote me on it. Now, the other cool feature, of course, with the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is that you've got an under-display camera under your large display, which is great. So which means you've got that full real estate. You can game, you can also watch content and that doesn't block anything for you. So that is pretty cool. Now, there's so much more to the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and I'll be doing more videos on it. Give me videos coming next. So if you have any questions about it, let me know. Or give me your thoughts on the Z Fold S Pen. Is that something you'd be picking up or you just don't care about it? And I remind you guys again, one more time, please, you cannot use the S Pen on the front display. You can only use it on the internal display. So always enjoy entertainment.