So really this The impetuous of this talk was they approached me at an Ascrus Ascrus was not getting enough residents coming because Department chairs send their residents to either a AO or Arvo Now if you're doing research it makes sense to go to Arvo, but there's no sense to go to a AO I was worthless for a resident, but you know because department chairs tend to be Retina people and you know their ophthalmologists and all they just don't send residents to ask us and so We we made it so that it's free to go and then we put together a resident fellows program And we tried to make it useful and so it was a half-day program You know we give you breakfast we give you lunch and then you know one of them was you know, how do you? You know fill out the forms. How do you choose the code numbers? You know they had Kevin Cochran who if you're in practice you have to pay thousands to get him to you know Come and tell you how to run a practice and he gave talks on how to run a practice and then So they asked me to give a talk on okay. How do you present? How do you do public speaking? How do you prepare a talk? How do you? Give a talk and then also they said you know, how do you prepare a paper? And nobody ever talks to residents about that nobody ever sits you down and says okay here's how you give a talk you just kind of wing it and then Watch what everybody else does and then eventually pick it up So I thought I'd put together a little talk on how to you know prepare for public speaking And I mean the first thing and this is obvious, but but you don't know how many people stumble on this know your material I mean before you're going to give a talk you have to know what you're talking about inside and out and You'd be amazed at how many people you ask them a question You know even at residence day We try to be really nice and we ask somebody a question or when the students give these talks especially at grand rounds you ask them a question and and yes, they've memorized what they put in there, but you ask question okay, well, what does this mean here and They're just clueless and so you really need to research what it is that you're going to talk and Anticipate, you know, what are some potential questions and what people could be asking because that's critical to know how to answer them And I've seen it time after time or especially the students when they prepare You know, they you just do a very superficial talk and it's like, you know, we all know what you're presenting We know that stuff already. So, you know, tell us something new So, you know, always look at all the references dig up the background I mean just take the time and you know if you're going to be giving statistics especially review all your stats because people are going to maybe ask you questions Well, wait a minute this group did this this group did that did you look at it in this way or that way? So preparation is just critical. You really got to know your material ahead of time You know, the second thing is know your audience and there are different talks that we do and for example If you're talking among your colleagues or I'm talking to you guys, you know, it's a different level So if I'm talking to you guys, I have to really just dumb down the talk to make it so you guys can understand it No, but but know your audience and so every once in a while will be asked to talk to Lay people about, you know, ophthalmology to get him excited about what we're doing on a department here And you don't want to put jargon in there. You don't want to just talk scientifically You want to talk at a level that people can understand and so that's really critical to know your audience I mean, it's different if it's students residents lay people is critical because if you just get up there and say Oh, well, you know, flit 2732 gene is da da da da da and make it a generation People aren't going to have any idea what that means. And so you want to say hey listen Macular degeneration is the most common cause of visual loss now as we age and our society is aging So this is a real problem one of the things we've looked into is is there a connection between genetics and this disease and then you Keep it on a level that people can understand that you don't want to talk down to them So that's always a very fine line because you don't want to be you know condescending or anything like that But you want to put it at a level where people can understand it And I think we have a tendency as doctors to put a lot of jargon in our talks and people don't understand jargon now That that doesn't even just mean when you're talking to lay people. I mean grand rounds two weeks ago You know, we went in and the speaker was talking about all these various diseases that Paul Bernstein was all excited and jumping up About I had no idea what the guy was talking about And so you have to be careful to keep it at a level. No, I know So you have to keep it at a level that that people could understand and so remember not everybody knows Your little field of ophthalmology. So always keep that in mind when you talk to them You know, the second thing is what kind of talk is it, you know, there's different types of talk There's going to be the the scientific presentation where it's very much You guys are too young to remember the old TV show drag net But you know drag net was it was a show where the these two very stiff detectives and Jack Webb's favorite line was you know, they'd be interviewing people about what happened at the crime. You could just the facts ma'am You know, and so it's just the facts ma'am is is a scientific presentation. And so you want to keep it Really focused and on key But there's other types of talk if you're a guest speaker, you know, you're giving a speech somewhere else You know, that's going to be a long talk That may be a 45 minute talk and in that case you're allowed to talk a little bit about where you're from Maybe even show some pictures. I always show a picture of Moran or show picture the mountains in Utah or something And so if you're an invited speaker, that's a that's a different audience You're looking at and if you're a keynote, that's even more so because then you have to thank everybody And you think you know the Academy and you think your parents were having you and all that And so it's a very different talk now the length of the talk is critical and there's several different talks You know the average talk at an Academy or you know Arvo or SCRS is a five to seven minute talk So you really have to be concise and follow the outline You know you want to go ahead and present, you know What you're going to study your materials and methods your results and your you know conclusions And you want to be really brief and to the point, you know If you're given the 20 minute talk, this may be a grand rounds talk or this may be a resident state talk And so this is a little bit different and then lastly as you know the 45 to 60 minute talk This is when you're the keynote or you're the presenter and and you know 45 to 60 minutes is a long time to talk And so you want to keep in mind that you want to pace it just right and you want to not drone And you want to make sure that you keep your audience interested And so if you're giving a longer talk then you can intersperse it with you know scenery slides funny slides things like that You're allowed to do that in a five to seven minute talk. There's just no time so in that talk you have to be very very precise Okay, so that said You know you just you spice it up once in a while see if people are paying attention All right, so the slides are the key now Most people are doing PowerPoint or whatever Apple's PowerPoint is called And so you want to go ahead and you want to follow that format good evening So we're in the middle of talking about how to give a talk and so the first thing when you give a talk is show up on time for the talk That's critical All right, so in terms of the slides, what is the order of slides now again? This kind of goes without saying but you'd be amazed at how many people don't do this And so obviously you want to put on a title and nowadays disclosures are critical You guys don't have to worry about this because you don't have any disclosures But eventually in your careers, you know You're gonna have times where you get funding from various companies or you get grants and things and so Disclosures are critical So you have to have your disclosures on the first of the second slide and you have to acknowledge them now Or people will like kick you out of the meeting next year. I mean, they're very serious about this And so you have to say these are my disclosures none of them apply or you know I have a grant for this particular talk where I receive travel to give this talk That's important. You know you want to do your introduction. What are you talking about? People sometimes can't tell from the title exactly what it is. You want to keep it brief Almost like a synopsis, but you want to kind of introduce what the problem is that you're covering and why you're giving that talk You know materials and methods are critical because you want to say What am I doing? What did I do? And so again, you don't want to bog down in details again depending on the talk It's five to seven minute talk You don't have much time to do this but you want to say okay We looked at a hundred patients group A did this group B did this This is what we did to them and when you're doing the materials and methods, it's okay to put drawings in there It's okay to put little listings in there. That's no problem Results are the crux of your talk So if you're going to give a brief talk you want to save about half the time for your results because that's The gist of your talk and so don't spend so much time doing the introduction that you're already four minutes into seven minute Talk you haven't given you results yet And then just like everything else you do discussion and conclusions and so you want to keep your conclusions succinct Because you want people to walk away and say oh, okay, that's what they did. I get it I understand and so you know your conclusion should be a highlight of Exactly what your what your talk was about All right, so the PowerPoint slides themselves Use bullet points use dashes use dots use bullets. This is not your talk on there People want to listen to you. They don't want to read your slides and and the one thing I found that the people do is they put way too much text on their slides So you don't want to put your whole talk on there Bring notes for you to look at it's okay to do that. That's a I'm getting that It's okay, but but the text on there if people are busy reading what's on there They're not going to listen to what you say so you can expand on what you put on your on your slide But but minimize the text because if you put too much text, it just gets really hard You know photos graphs and tables are really helpful, you know, if you've got you're comparing say two groups It's great to have a graph on there showing you know Here's group A and here's group B and then you put the bars on them Well, look at the difference and so graphs and tables are really helpful, especially if you've got lots of data And so go ahead and use those to summarize things don't put too much information and animation and I have seen people They love computers and so they're playing with them on they've got Flashing back and forth and coming in and out and and that's okay To a small extent, but if you put too much in there again, it overwhelms your audience So, you know, don't put too much just enough now you've heard the saying death by PowerPoint All right, so this is you know, you don't know how many times I see this one you look around the audience and I'll go You know or no nowadays it's different now. They're doing this You know, so everybody's in there doing this so nobody's paying attention And so I mean that's really talked about death by PowerPoint And so be careful what you put in there because you can kill an audience with your PowerPoint now You know when I say don't put too much information and okay, here's an actual PowerPoint slide This is what people use for you know examples. Okay. Now. Can you really read anything out of that slide?   They need to be able to see what you're putting this So keep it big the other thing that's one of my personal pet peeves is is color and And animation okay, so okay, so here's the animation. All right, so again If there's too much going on it actually doesn't enhance the talk it detracts from the talk And so be careful you don't put too much in there And you know, you don't know how many times you see people who have these Complex charts and graphs and there's just so much data there and of course, what do we all say when we do that? Oh, I'm sorry. This is a very busy slide. How many times have you done that? I mean, I've done that I'm guilty. Well, sorry. This is a busy slide. Well, don't say sorry. This is a busy slide. Don't make a busy slide You know keep it simple, you know, so again too much text too many bullets You know fonts that aren't easy to use people have these scrolled fonts. I mean, that's fine when you're what's that? No, that's fine and I'm gonna insult you guys, but that's fine when you're a seventh-grade girl You want the Curly's get him you put the little circle over the eye, you know And that's okay, but but not for people to read it So, you know, that's the problem and again if you put too many different presentation styles You've got different things in different parts of the talk try to be consistent And then people can actually follow your time now again. Oh, here's this. Well, this is kind of a busy slide I mean, this isn't a busy slide. What is that? It looks like an inkblot test So this is the test for you. Okay, I say, well, I don't know about you guys ever seen inkblots You know that the psychiatrist uses, you know, they're trying to see if you're psychotic or not I thought they looked like MRI scans. So I said, oh look, there's the amygdala Now the the other thing that the people often do is colors and the problem is is If you have a different background like, you know, the red background and then you put some lighter letters People can't see it. So you want to have a good background that people can see and again, you know Don't use the junior high girl font, you know, that just it's just not Not the kind so but but remember I you know, first I thought red looked kind of cool And then I actually sat back at a back of a room and watch somebody give a talk Where was the red there? You couldn't read it So you want to make sure that you use a color and a background that people can read that stands out Now it doesn't mean you have to be blah I mean I said people just do the standard which is white with black letters on it. That's blah You don't have to do that. You can put some stuff in sometimes you can put little mountains on or little sunbursts, you know But the key is like look right here, you know, okay There's little little lines up above and below that sets it off That doesn't detract from the talk that kind of highlights what you want to do So when you're making your slides, you know, be sure to try to keep the talk interesting and again If it's a short talk, you don't have time to do that So just hit the highlights But if it's a longer talk like a residence day talk, you know You're allowed to to splash a little bit in there to keep it to keep it fun and to keep it interesting And the other thing keep it light, you know, you don't have to be to be heavy about it You're allowed to put funny jokes or slides now. There's a fine line Between what you can do because you don't want to insult people and so so that's it and nowadays God medical students now Just getting unbelievable. They're insulted by everything nowadays. It's ridiculous. You can't do anything So, you know, be careful. Don't don't do anything that's considered inappropriate scenery slides You're fine especially because we live in the mountains You're allowed to show your slides hiking or biking or whatever mean those are okay because those help to do it You know, I can show slides of where I'm from and so I'll always show my travel slides and so you can show slides like this But you know and you can make jokes about it. I always make sure to take as you know This is the this is where the Oracle at Delphi was and so this is where I go to get Help to predict how the residents are going to be in the or the next year And so you're definitely allowed to do that and you know, you can talk about things now I always joke about this when I show the medical students This is one of the epsons who guards the Tomb of the unknown show soldier and I mean these guys are unbelievable that it's really competitive to do this and it's interesting The two criteria to be one of these guys is you have to be six feet tall at least and you have to be handsome And so I'm thinking man, that's discriminatory, you know short fat guys are out of it forget it So but the other thing I always say is you have to be very secure in your manhood because you're wearing a skirt white tights and pom-pom on your shoes And a short skirt and so you have to have good legs and so but now I have to be careful because somebody may take that as offensive And so I have to it's really iffy whether you can say those those nowadays now It's funny because I lecture the medical students and I give them a talk on ocular pathology and they cut it in half now So I've got a cram all of ocular pathology in an hour and I don't have much time So I cram a lot in there, but I try to keep it light the medical students this year just skewered me I mean they're saying oh, why are you wasting time showing travel slides? Just show the you know what you need and just these picky nasty comments, and I'm like on I'm like on guys get a life And it gets it gets worse every year, you know 20 years ago the medicines would love putting stuff like that now they're all And the other thing is is I give them a complete outline with all the arrows on there and all the legends underneath And I sent it to them separate lanes. Okay, this is what you need to do And I even tell them at the beginning of the talk now you've gotten a complete outlines got all this stuff in there We're just gonna rapidly go through here and again.  So I had to cut it out So again be careful what you show because you don't want to insult somebody so Who knows this is insulting All right, so public speaking You cannot prepare enough for your talk and you don't have to totally memorize it But you've got to know your top cold and so, you know, you can practice practice prepare prepare If you don't know that topic cold, you're gonna be in trouble So take the time to know your topic practice with people your fellow residents If you've got a mentor and attending you did research or present it to them and ask them for comments Get your significant other to sit down with you and show it to them and you know, they'll go ahead and Critique you and say, okay, what do you think of this talk time yourself? You know actually get the talk ready ahead of time Prepare it and time it so timing is critical because you don't want to go too short or too long So when you're doing the the talk prep every meeting now has a speaker ready and here like if it's you know resident Day you want to get it to the people at you know audio visual ahead of time but a lot of meetings they'll have a speaker ready room and so People will have their talk on a stick or on a CD or DVD or whatever But you know, you think that it's gonna work But maybe not and so take it to the speaker ready room ahead of time Plug it in and someone will sit down with you and go over it and make sure it really works and make sure all the Videos if you have videos are linked together because there's nothing bigger disaster than getting up to give your talk and your talk doesn't work Especially if you've got like sound effects and other things in there So go to the speaker ready room get it ready work with the staff Because you want that talk to be ready and again, especially if you've got videos You know, you don't know how many times I've been in a talk and gosh a video. Oh, it doesn't work I mean that the video is the gist of what you're trying to show so make sure that it works You know, the other thing is visit the podium prior to your talk You know, and it's okay Maybe you're at a session at Arbo Academy or something and you know, the podium's there Go there before the session starts and you know sneak up to the podium and see what it looks like They put sometimes they'll have a pointer. Sometimes they'll have a clicker They'll have a computer there sometimes and every podium is different. You see where the microphone is And so you don't want to get up there at the last minute and say, oh, where is this? And so take the time ahead of time visit the podium and go up there and do that now You know, look at the ways to advance the slides as I said, is it a clicker down here? Is it a mouse is that it just forward and back slide and Then you know, is there a pointer, you know, do you use the button on the computer to use the pointer? That's really helpful to do that Now once you're at the podium, how do you actually give the talk and you can do it several different ways? When I first started like, you know, you guys are going to be starting now I would take an outline with me to the podium where you would actually have either the PowerPoint there You'd have notes to yourself or something like that And so you can take that with you some people if they did debate in high school You know, they have little cards with them other people have different ways of doing it You can even bring your, you know, laptop or your, you know, MacBook put it up there and do it However, you want to do it is fine, you know after a while when you've done, you know 500 of these things, you don't bring anything with you. You just use the slides to cue you But when you're first starting, I think it's a good idea to do that Or the other thing you can do is, you know When you're in the audience ahead of time and your time is coming up to talk, you know You can have that outline with you and just kind of review it before you go up But the worst thing you want to do is you don't want to be reading from a script Okay, so occasionally you put in a You know, you put in something see if people are paying attention.  I don't say how many people at Gina go and You know, don't don't look at what you're reading look at your audience because you've got to engage especially if they're falling asleep So if you're in a smaller room and you look right at somebody they set up They start paying attention and so, you know do that But if you're in a bigger room, you may not be able to see them because the other thing that's gonna be hard is When you're at a big meeting and you're on the podium, they video it So it's not even a lot brighter than that. You can't see anything You just look out and there's just this blackness out there. So don't worry about that You know, have your cues or whatever you want, but don't read from a script Because it's really just just it gives for a bad talk You can change your voice tones a little bit. You can go up.  He was a teacher. I think in the wonder years, too He was like a science teacher and the volcano's go off and it was in the Don't drone.  That's no problem You know when you put the bullet points This is what I was talking about with your bullet points put the highlight But then expand on it in your talk and that way people are listening to you Rather than looking at the slides and so use the bullet points as a highlight But expand on it. So again, look at the audience And if you're looking at your notes look up once in a while now I find a good trick pick out a friendly face and if you can see the audience There'll be somebody who's kind of smiling or they're they're nodding Well, you know, I see, you know, Julia's nodding there, you know So look at that friendly face periodically and that helps, you know, get your don't you know If you look at someone in the room Don't do that so so find a friendly face But the problem is is when there's a really bright light out there and you can't make eye contact I tell people do the thousand meter gaze, which is you just you look into the blackness and so Some people get nervous with public speaking now. Everybody's different.   It's like No But if you do get nervous in public, you know There are some tricks and the first trick is if you don't like looking at people that makes you even more nervous Then what you can do is you can do I call it a thousand meter gaze And so just look beyond the first row out so they think you're looking at them But you just look out into the blackness and that way Sometimes people get a little bit less nervous and so look out into the blackness. I like to make eye contact But if that doesn't work do the thousand meter gaze Now pace yourself You know, don't talk too fast. Don't talk too slow This is where practice comes in because time yourself because you don't want to be Pressured such that you have to talk so fast that people can't understand you But if you talk too slow, you're going to run out of time and so try to pace yourself and try to keep checking yourself And and I've got to admit I am the only time I've ever been nervous And I didn't even realize it as I gave what's called the being course talk And it's the big talk at asterisks and you know, you're there and there's 2,000 people there And then it's the opening session and they introduce you and I got up there and I realized for the first 20 seconds I was talking really fast Unfortunately, I recognized that right away and I said, what are you doing?   I'm tired today. I didn't get any sleep. I mean don't people hear Everything so be careful. Don't talk about the basketball game last night, which was great by the way But don't don't talk about that and so people hear everything when you're in the O.R. All right, so Enough about talking and so I want to talk a little bit about writing but just to highlight When you're giving a talk, I really can't emphasize enough Prepare your materials and so you got to know your materials cold and then step back after you think you've got your talk written and then say, okay If I don't know anything about this and I'm just going to be looking at this Am I conveying to the audience what I want to convey and look at it that way or again Maybe have somebody else have one of your peers look at the talk and then when you practice your talk Practice in front of people actually put the timer out there And you know time the talk that you're going to have to do and practice in front of people and ask them for criticism Okay, how's this slide? How's that slide? Are the tables good? Are they bad and?  I mean it's like you know studying right before you walk into the test Don't do that but just kind of look at the highlights. Okay I'm gonna talk about this this and it's okay, and then you're set.  No your material So if you're gonna write a paper know what you're writing and you really Dig into what it is that you're writing about look up all the references look up all the other papers Know your material cold before you even start so then look at your data Review all the data know it is you're gonna write look at the look at the references Review the statistics sit down with somebody and know that all ahead of time now again types of papers are just like types of talks Because they're different there's case reports, you know case reports are again Joe Friday just the facts ma'am You know so you want to just put the Brief essentials in there. They only allow you so many references They only allow you so many words so many pictures and so that's a really different paper now routine scientific article Is almost like your regular five to seven minute talk, you know, it's your your introduction You know materials and methods results discussion conclusions. I mean that's your your usual paper now review articles are different Because review articles are much longer. You need to cover the entire literature. So those are huge undertakings I mean those are very difficult to do and then of course technique papers are different because those are kind of the fluff papers Those are just in this neat. We did this thing and you know, those are ones you want to have videos linked to them And you want to have pictures in there Okay, so steps in writing the paper I mean the first thing is you've got to gather all your data Because you want to know what it shows before you start writing you review all the references I find an outline really helpful and you know start with an outline You know what it is you're going to say you can do it as an outline You can do it almost like you're doing the PowerPoint But put the skeleton of what you want to say in there before you start adding the parts to it And I find that helpful now the order of the paper, you know, this is again It sounds silly, but but you know how many people turn in junk to the journal that doesn't even have these this stuff in there But you know, you want to do a title on abstract Introduction materials and methods results conclusions. Okay, so how do I write a paper? And again? This is just from experience. I write the paper inside out And what I mean by that is when you are going to write a paper It really looks like a big thing when you're going to sit down and do it You know, you know how to start it. Oh my god. How do I start this? So write up the part that's the easiest first and that's the materials and methods I mean, you know what you did because you did the study and so write that first it gets you started and So write the materials and methods out completely, you know, as if that's going to be in the paper Then the second thing is you write the results Then you do all the results you put in whatever tables you have you put in whatever you've got write the results then go back and do the introduction and Then after that you do the discussion and after that you do the abstract and conclusions. So do that last And so if you start in the middle inside out, it's kind of like when we're learning Faco here, you know Again, we're all OCD we think we're going to learn Faco from step one to step 20 No Because steps, you know one and two can screw up the whole case and so we kind of start inside out So the first thing you do is you remove some cortex you put in an I well Then you do the Faco then you do the one then you do the rex is it's kind of the same thing with the paper Write the materials and methods first because that's what you know already Then do the results Then you can go ahead and do the introduction and then the discussion then lastly You'll do the abstract and conclusions. And so don't just sit down and say oh shoot abstract What am I going to say? Get started and then it'll flow and it's a lot easier that way And especially once you start finishing all the results then you'll say oh, you know This is what I really want to say and that makes it easier All right, so plan your time carefully and I call this the rule of ten or zero So you say oh, this is easy. I can do this in ten hours add a zero. It's a hundred hours It's not arithmetic. It's logarithmic. And so the first time you're sitting down to write, you know Some kind of a major paper you think oh, yeah, I could do this easy add a zero and people you'll say nah Nah, he's it and then you sit out of doing you say oh my god. He's right So it takes like you know logarithmic. It's ten times as long as you think it's going to take So plan out your time accordingly if you think it's ten hours It's really going to take a hundred and so give yourself lots of time to do this Don't put it off till the end and then try to do it You know like you did in early college when you know You're writing papers and you're up at 2 a.m. Typing and you guys didn't type a month. You're up at 2 a.m. at your computer Computing, you know I'm trying to put it together So don't wait till the last minute And then again don't forget when people get bored throwing some Throwing some slides that that you know make a little bit fun Okay, so the final preparation of the paper. I can't emphasize this enough read it read it again Put it down read it again. I mean you don't know how many times when your brain Sees something you read what you think it should say not what it really says and so Read it reread it reread it over again spell check And you're lucky now you've got no excuse you've got computers now that do this for you You don't have to pull out a book and look it up like we used to have to you know You've got a computer does this automatically spell check. There's no excuse for any misspelling in a paper anymore You know the other thing check for proper grammar again grammar just just drives editors nuts and so Check for grammar and I have great respect now for people who write papers not in their primary language I couldn't imagine writing a paper and like you know mandarin or something. I mean that's That would just blow me away and there are people from China and from Japan who are writing papers in English And that just that's amazing to me that they can do that when it's not the primary language But you know check for proper grammar and this is almost like when you're practicing for your talks Have other people read it have peers have friends have colleagues and this is where people can help you I mean even like secretaries anybody read it to see if they'll pick up awkward sentences, you know grammatical errors spelling errors and So have people read it ahead of time because you don't want a Reviewer to send back your paper and say yeah, well, it's a good idea, but the grammar is so bad It's not worth taking so you don't want to not have a paper accepted Just because you didn't take the time to you know, check the grammar and check the spelling and you know Make sure it's well written Check the quality of figures and graphs because nowadays when you submit papers you do it all electronically The journals have ways of checking it and if you don't have enough You know Mega pixels in each little picture then they won't accept it And so each journal has you know their requirements and so make sure you check and meet those requirements So follow the instructions for the authors You don't know how many times we get papers that come in where they've just not followed the instruction Just blatantly didn't follow them and we don't even review those. We just send them back.  It's right there when you go to the instructions for the authors It tells you step by step How you should do it and how to format it and you know what the photos should be in and so spend the time to Follow the instructions now where to send it people often say, where do you send this? What do you do? This is where your mentors your superiors People who you've worked with can be very helpful because they'll let you know Because you know when you're writing a paper and again, we all do this. We're biased This is the greatest paper in the world. I'm gonna send this to ophthalmology. I'm gonna send this to you know IOVS, this is the greatest paper and then somebody else can look at it and say yeah, well, it's okay But you know, maybe that's not the right place to send it and so Talk to your peers and not not your peers I'm sorry your mentors and people who have a little bit more experience because they can guide you on where to send this Because that'll save you a lot of time. I mean we all think our stuff is great But you know send it to the journal ophthalmology ophthalmology accepts about 15% of what's sent in there So unless it's a great paper, they're not going to accept it That's gonna kill several months of time plus make you feel bad when it gets rejected And so be realistic about where you're gonna send it to and that's the key thing realism again Be realistic about where you're gonna send it to now on the other hand. I Often tell people well, you never know give them the right of first refusal And so if you say okay, this isn't so timely that if it doesn't get out in the next month It's gonna be an issue if you say well Maybe this is a good paper to good journal go ahead and send it to good journal once and then if they reject it Then you can send it to you know, maybe a smaller journal. So that's okay But just realize ahead of time that that's a that's a moonshot, you know, that's like when you're applying for residency Well, okay, I can apply to Baskinem, but it's not gonna cause you any harm, but You know, who knows? All right, we're almost there. We're almost there. So I Love this slide because whenever you ever watch, you know medical shows on TV The OR has always had this gallery there, you know, and the students are watching up I've never seen an OR with a gallery at least in the US. I haven't So what happens when a paper sent in and this is kind of like a black box first of all either the editor of the editorial staff will briefly look at a paper and Then see where it's going to be a sign and and what they're going to do with it And then once it's assigned to a particular editor or sub editor They'll send it to probably at least two peer reviewers And you don't think they spend a lot of time, but you know as an editor I do 12 hours a week now doing this and so it's a lot of time and you pick out reviewers who have expertise in that area And the other thing a good editor will do is is even though we think we're not biased we are and So especially an ophthalmology, they're papers that are put together by company a And of course company other a says no those aren't any good and and I have to spend time worrying about okay This guy is a on the speakers bureau of company a I'll never say shill But you know there's shill for company a and this is for the other company So you have to make sure that you send it to neutral reviewers and be careful But there's usually at least two Peer reviewers in addition to an editor a sub editor who looks at it But the final decisions rest with the editors or the sub editors And so I have actually on occasion will even override or you or you will say oh we should reject it This is bad and then I review the comments. I say, you know this this Guy's really not on the money. He missed the boat and so I'll override them The other thing we do as editors is we actually grade our reviewers And so if we have a particularly good reviewer we grade them high if we have a bad one We grade them low and then we just don't use them anymore And so we actually grade our reviewers because all reviewers are not equal But the final decision is with the editor the sub editor. Okay, so first of all if you get a Form back that says yes, we you know, we we're recommending revisions. That's good news Because right now most journals are so overwhelmed. They'll just reject it if there's any questions So if you get a letter back that says, okay, we are going to you know recommend these revisions Then that's great news. That means chances are is if you do, you know what they ask and answer the questions You'll get it accepted. So that's actually good news. So don't you know, don't take that badly The biggest mistake I find is that people don't we read the reviewers comments carefully And so every once in a while, I'll get a paper and again I hate to stereotype it from a you know, very pompous German professor You know who's never wrong and basically they'll just send a long letter back totally refuting the reviewers and not answering Them saying our paper was perfect the way it was and and I mean that's when that just gets an editor going So I'll just reject it. I'll say well, you didn't you know respond to the reviewers questions You didn't answer them therefore you rejected and then I'll get a really nasty letter back a very haughty letter back professor chairman and so on so, you know Deutsche University, whatever her you know, so but You know, we read the reviewers comments carefully and answer them And so if you disagree with the reviewers, that's okay But go through everyone and so if you get a list of reviewers comments and there's 20 of them when you send the comments back to the You know editor when you send in your revised paper, you actually do a letter at a time. So okay in response to reviewers question 1 Yes, we agree with the reviewer. We're going to change it on page 5. Here it is If you disagree, that's okay And you can say I respectfully disagree with the reviewer on this point We already discussed that here and we don't feel that's necessary to discuss it further here or yes That's a great point But we just couldn't do that in this particular study and maybe we'll do it in another study But answer every point don't just kind of let them slide or else they're not going to do that So again, be careful when you dispute a reviewer You know, it's okay, but explain it well and so say, you know The reviewer said this but really what we meant was that and here's why and explain it And if you do most editors are pretty good and they'll say, okay, we'll buy that.  This is the other thing that people get perturbed about it can be up to six months After you get that paper, you know, accept it in there to see it and print So I always tell my research fellows, you know, they want to have this printer before they start residence It's like it's not even a printer when you're an intern Maybe when you're the resident now the fact that journals are electronic now is cut the time down some then a lot of journals are now Doing e-publications ahead of time. So once it's officially accepted, you know, you'll see it'll say, okay Available electronically maybe in you know in January when the print issue won't even come out till like April And so it's available early and the thing is is once it's that got that electronic tag on it that counts as a real article So you can put that on your CV and you know, you can claim credit for that But but just be patient don't get anxious It's gonna come out eventually so patience is important Now if it's rejected following the first submission say just you know, you send an ophthalmology and they say yeah This is fine, but it's rejected Take the reviewers comments and say, okay, why did someone reject this and then see If I can answer those comments in a revision and then send it somewhere else So sometimes the reviewers comments are really helpful. Hey, listen, you didn't discuss this you didn't discuss that It's a good paper, but and when you revise the paper Don't just send the same paper to another journal Look at the reviewers comments because we'll always forward them to somebody and use those to make it a stronger paper And then try to send it somewhere else And so use that as an experience don't get discouraged You know use it to make it a better paper And so as they said in the godfather, you know, one of my favorite lines is there. It's not personal business You know when they're killing somebody and so if you get, you know paper rejected. Remember, it's not personal You know, it's business. Just just business. So Don't take it personally just say, you know what these guys bless you You know, they're only accepting anywhere depending on the journal from from 10 to 30% of all papers And so don't take it personally Just learn from it try to send it somewhere else try to make it a better paper Don't get discouraged. I mean use it as a learning experience And sometimes you'll find that you know every once in a while, you know After I get over the first thing and I say, what do you mean? It's rejected Then I'll look back and I'll read the reviews comments. I'll say Yeah, that really wasn't that good of a paper. Let's maybe think about you know Maybe continuing the study but in a better way or beefing it up here or adding something here and Uses an experience and maybe you can make it a better paper by if you can extend the study or you're in the lab You could do more tests or something use it to make it a better You know a better one and then of course what everybody says whenever you get beaten down They see well, it's a learning experience, you know, I love when they say that. Yeah Well, you just got hit over the head with a hammer, but it's a learning experience Use it as such All right, and so again practice makes perfect first time you do a paper. It's excruciating second time It's a little less bad by the time you do a hundred of these they get you know You get pretty good at these and so just like anything else just like doing fake. Oh's You know practice makes perfect and eventually you'll get good at doing this and you'll be able to crank them out quicker All right, that's it questions


Going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards ripping the finest choices of Sterling sapphire eight box baseball mix number two random Team style. There's a look again At your random results right here Again, we I was able to do this and put the Lincoln chat before the stream crashed So what we're also gonna do is I have all 30 participants in a randomizer I'm gonna roll the dice the top three names at the end of nine times. We'll each get Five are five gold packs a piece. So good luck everybody one two three four five six seven eight and nine Alvin Evan and Alvin so Alvin's gonna get ten and Evan L will get we'll get one or five I should say so congrats to Alvin and Evan Alvin s Evan L Alvin s again good stuff there everybody Thank you all again for getting this Sold out do appreciate it very much Again 14 to go on Sterling breaking next everybody 14 to go to go on Sterling 14 to go All right. Well. Good luck here everybody. Let's get started on this. Let me just double-check make sure we got all the right product here We do in fact start with two of home sapphire Got you cam got you Pueblo and Abraham Toro see something big out of this man Got an orange of Justice Sheffield to 25 nice one there congrats Mariners Hey, we're in DJ. La Mayhew. Well, it's Rick Scoobal Thomas says is Uki and Julio Ulyas See something big out of this man Lindor Walker Vladimir Gutierrez Blake Snell Snellzilla potential Si young one Purple John Carlos Stanton nice one there seven to ten for the inks And Nathaniel Lowe Manny Margo Christiana a Litch Mr. Yelich Valdi Matthew Boyd and Josh Naylor Good luck cam. Yeah. Good luck cam razor pretty solid in Choice and in Sterling as well because you got Caminero and then you got really Guerrero as well So there's a couple of decent names and that they're okay, and they're not great in this obviously with Homeboy Trey Turner Marcos de Plon Lucas G. Alito Renfro Drew smiley and you on one car. That is a gold Toronto talent nice one there congrats Blue Jays Boba shot and Lattie Jr Tyler Stevenson No clue. I have too many. It's hard to keep track of Bobby Whit and Frank Swindle and Herman Marquez Steven Rodding's David Boatie nice one there gold of 50 for the Cubs and Alex Bregman God Davis with two spots in Sterling and Megan with a spot in No huddle, so thank you there Megan and Davis We are down to 12 to go on the next one everybody 12 to go. Yeah, they're not bad In Sterling, they're not bad at all. Honestly. They really aren't What do you want to do next? With a mood for Sterling Is this the fortnight lobby go Mitchell C Xavier Isaac Michael Harris rookie to 100 Trish and Casas Nice one there on the Sterling silver for the Red Sox rookie to 99 of a bell bastidas Congrats on that Tigers Kevin Perrata. Yasser Mercedes Adley Rushman Riley Green Michael Harris rookie Otto. Nice. There you go, Atlanta Congrats Braves very nice Oscar Gonzalez and Jordan Beck Corbin Carroll rookie Shay Langler son 99 DL Hall For the Orioles and 75 Jackson holiday. There we go Orioles. Congrats Baltimore Go to Ramar's Congrats Ramar's good stuff, dude Good stuff Color match Jackson holiday. We'll get that into a mag for you. Congrats, buddy. Nice one there Thank you as well Wayne picking up a spot in Sterling. We're down to 11 to go 11 to go again every break that sells out five Gold packs random off to everybody to one person in Said break that sold out chase the lauder. Nice one there prospect Otto for the Guardians. Yeah, absolutely remarks Congrats, buddy. I sit there man Good stuff on the holiday So 125 Jordan Beck that Mitchell I want to say right there with the rocks. There we go Mitchell. Congrats, buddy Nice one there Jordan back on the wave Hunter Brown Josh young rookie Eric Brown jr. For the brew crew nice one Milwaukee Axel Merrill jet Williams Anything. Oh, is that a printing plate? Yes, it is and it is Sam Zavala Nice one there one-of-one printing plate for Slam Diego That's Alvin dude Alvin and Padres one-of-ones. It's so weird, dude Nice one there. Congrats and thank you to Adam V taking a spot in Sterling as well We were down to 11 ago. I believe now or 10 to go We're down to 10 to go on Sterling everyone 10 to go on Sterling. Yo, suede the Paula base auto for the Dodgers Cassis and James Altman Yankeel Fernandez nice one there again, Mitchell with the rocks. Congrats, buddy Nice one there. Mr. Yankeel It's pretty good prospect. He was like a top Top, what was I gonna say 100 at one point? I don't know if he's still there, but he was at one point Alex Ramirez 100 Brown to 150 nice one for the Astros got a Henry Bolt base auto for the athletics congrats there Brooklyn And the last Sterling box. Good luck here everybody Our last sterling mini box. I should say tiny box, but Christopher Morel, that is Mason hour going to the raise there. Yo cam nice one there, buddy Mason power hour Roshan's Ruiz and Alvarez rookie. We'll do choice next two boxes. Oh choice Two boxes. Oh choice. That is the wrong 23 Bowman Chrome HDH Nine to go single digits everybody breaks next it's a 150 junior Marin going to the Royals Larry with a spot Steven with three spots. So that means we're gonna be down to Six to go six to go everybody. Very nice. Thank you all appreciate that Base auto is Jesus Galiz for the Dodgers Jesus Galiz first base auto and First base auto of Hans Montero congrats on that Yanks. Very nice Very nice Hans Montero Hans Mons as we call them Hans the Mons Kristen Monroe first base auto for the Angels Nice one there Oakland or not Oakland Los Angeles angels Got a Jesus Bastidas first base auto going to the Yankees nice one there Yanks very nice very nice and Purple is Jair Casanova 250 purple auto for the Braves congrats on that Braves very nice 14 out of 250 All right, lastly we've got some finest everybody. Let me Tell you about Sterling again really quick again just six to go on Sterling six to go Breaks next everybody again five goldpacks will be ran off in every break as long as they sell out to one lucky winner per break One lucky winner per break every break that does sell out tonight Tonight I saw tonight nine is Garrett Mitchell. I just want to hear for the Rangers Josh Young 31 of 99 World Series champ going to Alvin Alvin there you go Alvin good stuff, dude I'd say that's probably Maggable at this point in time Congrats on that Alvin good stuff buddy. So far and J ran World Series champion Josh Young Josh Young refractor rookie as well Josh Young box evidently very nice Two 250 Adley at Ruchman nice one there Orioles two at 21 out of 250 base and base Paul Goldschmidt Alvarez and Zach Wheeler Joey Manassas refractor rookie for the Nats to 300 Logan Ohapi for the Angels Gabby Moreno Christian the Elich Naylor and Joey Votto Riley Green rookie rookie auto Michael Massey nice one there congrats on that Royals Tom C picking up three spots and three spots in ten bucks. Thank you Tom Appreciate you buddy three to go everybody three to go with this tape, but I don't like the design of finest baseball Yeah, that you might be on an island on that one Freddie Freeman You may be on an island on that one shape. I do like finest. I do I do enjoy finest. I have to say I get it You're doing it. I think it's year-to-year. I would say like last year wasn't the best. There was a lot of edge issues last year This year the quality has been a little bit better for sure, which has helped it a lot But I mean it's just it's so iconic. That's the thing. You know what I mean. Oh Treasure chest we go Treasure chest everybody.   Oh, this is so fire It's a 50 Trey Turner to 50 DL Hall rookie to 50 worlds finest Shohei Ohtani Congrats on that angels to 50 headliners flatic Guerrero jr. And a 50 is Nick Prado Oh, this is so dope, dude Very similar Spencer Pretty much honestly. Yes, Ben's Corey Seger to 50 Matthew Libetor to 50 Nolan Gorman to 50 Matt Olson to 50 and Oscar Gonzalez to 50 They're giving away gold packs for hitting all the gold cards. It's a golden Tuesday.  Shipe to 50 That is a world's finest Tim Anderson to 50 That is Vinny Pascantino to 50 Logan Webb four of 10 on the gold auto. Nice one there. Congrats on that Giants four of 10 It is not an error Jay plan ahead No, yeah, Jay Blazin. They they have these it randomly inserted super hard to hit. This is the only way to get gold Yeah, I got these gold mini diamond ones. They're all exclusive to just these box I mentioned how much I love finest. Yeah. Oh, there he is now. Mm-hmm. There he is. Jacob to Grom to 50 To 50 is Christian Yelich Uh, to 50 Mike Piazza to 50 Stanton and to 50 Manny Machado. All right to 50 is Mookie Kyle Tucker to 50 worlds finest Gunnar Henderson to 50 nice one there. There we go Orioles Congrats on that Baltimore Timothy V with a couple of spots Phil K picking up a 10 box sterling spot and a 10 box in both baseball and basketball And Evan L picking up two spots. I believe we are now sold out on sterling everybody. Thank you all Tim Anderson to 50 and Michael Harris to 50 nice one there Yeah, Steve, you came just in time Just in time for the treasure chest Let's keep it going everybody Oh, man. JJ Bladet to 50 Uh, Manny Machado to 50 nice one there Got Randy Johnson the big unit to 50 Raffi Devers there you go again. Shipe And J rod to 50 as well for the Mariners. Yeah, they're streaming tonight on Shizna's Steve and Sean That's gonna be a mess Michael Toglia rookie to 50 Headliners Mariano to 50 Uh for the inks that is a Sandiel Contra to 50 Hey, Ronald Acuna to 50 and Shintaro Fujinami to 50 Shane Beba Bobby Witt Nice Corbin Carroll to 50 there he is That is a rose or a rivalries of Mark McGuire to 50 And Alex Bregman Alvin also has the diamond back in this so Alvin picking up the Corbin Carroll Let's go Alvin. Let's go Alvin. Hell yeah The Pasquatch to 50 Hoseil to 50 Headliners is Vladdy Jr to 50 We've got a Marcus Simeon to 50 And Bryce Harper to 50 God, these are so cool, man Hunter Brown for the Ash Rose to 50 World's finest Mr. Trey Turner to 50 Justin Verlander to 50 That is going to be a rookie Josh Young to 50 nice And Ken Waldechuck to 50 as well. What a two boxes of finest here, man Just sitting in the front of the shop as well. Yep Chris Bryant to 50 world's finest of Goldschmidt to 50 Ethan Small to of 10 on the auto nice one there congrats on that brew crew Okay, congrats on that brew crew Christopher Morel to 50 and Juan Soto to 50 as well All right quick recap. This is all baseman soon Quick recap for you all uh, Michael Massey Jesus Bastidas Kristen Monroe Hans Montero. Oh, we pulled our boy again Jesus Galiz Henry Bolt Mason hour Yankeel Fernandez Yosue de Paula Eric Brown Jr Chase the lauder Michael Harris rookie to 250 a gyre Casanova Junior Marin to 150 Jordan back to 125 to 99 a bell Bastidas 10 Logan Webb Uh, as well as an Ethan Small to 10 magged cards we had Josh Young to at 99 and Jackson Holiday to 75 That'll do it for the break everybody. Thanks again for the fill up next is Sterling


at DebCon for every year for at least that long. I don't remember exactly when we started doing this. I think we actually had one in Edinburgh, but I don't remember before that. In any case, what we would like to do this morning is talk just a little bit about what SPI is, and that includes sort of an indication of who the people are that are involved in software in the public interest. A little bit about the history of the organization, what the list of our associated projects are. We always try to provide a little bit of a snapshot of what the organization's financial status is, and then hopefully that'll only take a few minutes, and we can spend as much of the rest of the time as people would like, answering questions, talking about other things that SPI could do in the future, and so forth. So, software in the public interest is a U.S. non-profit corporation organized under the IRS 501C3 category. Our purpose is to provide infrastructure for free software projects. This is the current list of officers and board members. Those that are not italics are not present here at DEBCONF. I'm actually very pleased that in our recent Board of Directors election, Gregor's Peterson is our newest member of the board, and yet another person not particularly affiliated with the DEBCON project, so over time, SPI is becoming a little more broadly representative, and that's a good thing.  Great, so when it comes time for questions, I'll drag them all in and we'll see what we can do from there. So as I mentioned, what software in the public interest is as a non-profit organization that was originally founded, wow, was originally founded to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software. The origins of SPI were that it was created in order to serve a need that the DEBCON project had, but the people that founded SPI realized that these same needs would be felt by other free software and hopefully open hardware projects. And so the organization was set up from the beginning to not just be able to provide services to DEBCON, but to be able to provide it to a number of organizations. From the DEBCON perspective, SPI is the organization that holds DEBCON funds in the US and other assets like trademarks, domain names, and the copyright to the DEBCON logo. SPI was incorporated in June of 1997 in the state of New York. As I said, we have 501C3 status, which means that financial contributions made by individuals or corporations to SPI in the United States may be tax deductible. And I've already talked about the fact that we support a bunch of other projects. And this is the first of a couple of slides showing some of the logos of the organizations that we provide services to. If you don't recognize all of them, that's okay, because I have a hard time putting all the names and faces together, too. But over the last couple of years, we've ended up with quite a few associated projects. In the last year, the two new ones are Chakra and the Manaworld, as far as I can remember. I think those are the only two new ones in the last year. We are currently in... Zero AD, I thought, was before that. I don't know if we've gotten them on the list, but I thought that was... Oh, yeah, yeah, here it is. I think that was before DEBCONF last year, but I'm not 100% certain. There are a couple of really well-known, high-profile projects that we're having conversations with right now, but it's premature for us to talk about that publicly. The nature of the relationship we have with these projects is that when they become associated with software in the public interest, they have the opportunity to take advantage of our mechanisms for managing financial contributions for babysitting assets of the kind that I talked about earlier, and we have the opportunity to help connect them with competent legal assistants when they need it for contracts and other sorts of things. But we don't try to control the behavior of these projects. We don't tell them how to organize their project internally, which is one of the things that differentiates software in the public interest from some of the other financial and legal umbrella organizations that provide services to free software projects in other parts of our community. In terms of financial status, our most recent Treasurer's Report was as of June 30th, which that's the last one I saw when I was looking last night. The funds that were holding in trust on behalf of other projects were sitting just shy of 650,000. There's about just shy of 81,000 in general reserves for a total of about $729,000. This is the first of three pages showing the balances of the funds held in trust for different organizations. I will point out that the DEBCONT 14 earmark, I suspect has been tweaked a bit since then, since we are all here and I'm sure monies have been spent that were gathered to. So one of the things that's happening is for an event like DEBCONT, sponsors who are based in the United States who want to sponsor that event will channel their funds to SPI and then we help to get them to where they need to go to meet the actual needs of the event. But as you can see, there are quite a few projects and here's the second page worth. And you know, at this point, DEBCONT is still one of, if not the largest, from at least from financial assets standpoint, organizations that we're providing assistance to, but there are a number of others that have gotten to be fairly significant as well. And then there's mostly defunct OSU Next project that we still have $2.92 from. Okay, so anyone who agrees with the principles of SPI is encouraged to join the organization, apply and become a member. Those who participate actively in the free software community. And by the way, if you're here at DEBCONT, no question, you qualify as participating actively in the community, may apply for contributing membership. And the only real distinction is that contributing members get to vote and get to help select the board of directors. And that's the URL you can go. Is that, is the about SPI still the right place or? I'm not sure that URL is actually right, but again, checking things in the middle of the night. In terms of getting involved, we have a monthly board of directors meeting that's held on IRC on the hash SPI channel on the OFTC network. There's several mailing lists. There's one that is only accessible to contributing members and one that's wide open. But joining those lists is a good way to see what's going on. They are relatively low traffic. I've said several times in the past that you know that we're doing well and the organization's working the way it's supposed to when you sort of don't notice that we're there. And over the last couple of years, there have been times when we've been sort of embarrassed by associated projects that had needs that caused us to have to scramble around and get information and data together. And that reminds us that we can always use more assistance. If people have time and are interested in helping with our various processes, those are things that we would very much be willing and able to take advantage of. And then there is, as I said, there are several members of the board and officers that are here at DEBCOM who are happy to answer questions. So with that, I don't have anything else presentation-wise to throw up. I'd love to open the floor now to questions, comments, suggestions. Oh, come on. I realize it's early, but, Tom. What differentiates SPI What differentiates SPI from other fiscal sponsorship organizations and how might you guide prospective projects to one or another? So there are, so the other project that I think we probably coordinate with or communicate with the most is the Software Freedom Conservancy. And the Conservancy takes a slightly more active role in the projects in that they have certain expectations about how a project is going to govern itself. A lot of the projects that they provide services for are actually paying developers to do work one way or another. And so particularly within the context of the 501C3 regulations, there's just a set of constraints about how money has to flow to prevent this from being abused in various ways. And they are frankly better set up to handle that and to take that more active role in the relationship with the project. So between those two organizations, we point to each other all the time. We often tell an organization that's coming and asking SPI about the possibility of association that we think they should go talk to the folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy too before they make a decision because it kind of depends on the nature of the project and what their needs are as to which one of those models is more appropriate. There are a number of other umbrella organizations, the Apache Foundation sort of pops to mind where the rules of organization are yet different. In that case, they sort of have a pattern that they expect a project they're incubating that's gonna become part of their ecosystem to follow. And they don't really provide services to anybody whose project doesn't fit well within their existing sort of software hierarchy. There are other foundations like that, but I think quite frankly within the sort of context of the kinds of services SPI provides the sort of interesting alternative to some projects as the Conservancy. So from the experience you've had, if I'm an individual software, free software developer and I say start a project and initially it's just me and then later I've got 50 contributors and it's growing to the point, are there particular threshold events or things I should be looking out for in terms of, oh, I should become affiliated to some umbrella organization or at what point would you recommend I be looking at doing something like that?  Because if someone just sort of hands you some money, then there's two things that happen. One is there's the question of what are the tax implications of that gift slash donation? And then the second really is what's gonna happen from a governance standpoint? I mean, okay, if you've decided you're gonna have a little meetup somewhere and you need $250 to reserve a room at a hotel somewhere to have the meeting, that may be a one-shot event, the money comes in, the money goes out and there's no significant consequence. But if somebody says, oh, can I sponsor that event to the tune of a thousand bucks and now you spent 250 and you've got 750 left, whose account does that go in and how does it get looked after and how do you know the person that provided that donation is gonna feel good in the end about what happened with that money? Those are, that's probably to me one of the strongest potential trigger points for deciding that it's time to sort of get your act together and get associated with some kind of an umbrella organization. I think the key message is I don't think fledgling free software projects should ever start by thinking about creating their own nonprofit entity. This has happened various times in the past with projects large and small. Thanks to various shenanigans of different kinds in both directions in the US, the IRS now looks very, very carefully at nonprofit organization founding processes, particularly for things that matter to us. And as a consequence, I think that both because it can take a long time to be expensive to get a separate nonprofit setup and because of the fact that most people starting free software projects would really like to focus on the software and not think about all of those things, that picking one of the set of currently existing financial umbrella organizations to associate with would be the right answer. Now from SPI standpoint, if you're a developer and you've started a project and you think it's gonna be the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's not yet time to come talk to us because one of the sort of criteria that we apply is is this a substantial and significant free software project? What does that mean? Well, we have some projects that only have a half dozen or so participants. So it's not really about headcount. It's sort of something we have to decide on a case by case basis. It might have to do with the volume of money that's flowing through in donations. It might have to do with how many people are involved.  So there's no sort of hard and fast criteria really for that. But I think anytime you get to the point where you're crossing a threshold in the number of people involved in the organization where you're starting to think about how are we going to sort of make sure that as we go forward assets that matter to us are being well taken care of and that somebody doesn't run away with them. Those are also times when it's good to start thinking about this. Generally, do it sooner rather than later but not when you're one person with acute polycode you just put up on GitHub. Other questions? You mentioned free software and you also mentioned open hardware. It's interesting that we're in a point in our movement where the open source initiative has deliberately said they do not want to tackle open hardware licensing. And so what that's meant is we've had the TAPR open hardware license and we've had other various open hardware licenses come along. And so my question to you is based on your experience what does the future look like especially now with the so-called internet of things coming on and hardware hacking becoming very popular what does freedom look like for hardware projects and how can SBI help? That's a really good question. So when SBI was started the founding documents talk about open hardware and open software. The only activity that I can recall that SBI has been directly involved in around hardware was an early attempt that Bruce Perens was spearheading to create a hardware branding program. And this was, it was way too early to really have a chance of working but it was in some ways analogous to what the Free Software Foundation is now doing with their respects your freedom branding program. And it never really got off the ground. And frankly since then our attention has been almost entirely consumed by services being provided to our associated free software projects. So to some extent I don't think SBI as an organization has a great answer to your question certainly doesn't have well-formed organizational opinions. Personally, as you're aware and I'm happy to tell other folks in the room the open hardware products that Keith and I and others are involved with under the Altus Metron banner are all licensed under the Tapper open hardware license. I happen to think that license is interesting in that it's trying very hard to provide GPL-like behaviors around hardware designs. And I like that a whole lot better than gee I slapped a Creative Commons attribution share-like on it and walked away. But we have to the best of my knowledge zero examples of any legal precedent being formed around any of the open hardware licenses that people are using right now. So all of that is a little speculative. Having said all of that, if an open hardware project came to SBI and said we'd like to associate with SBI I think we'd apply the same criteria that we do to free software projects. We'd ask what is it they want and need? Are there sort of transaction flows compatible with our processes? Or does this feel like something else we could just say yes to? Or are there set of needs so different that it just doesn't make sense? SBI certainly doesn't want to get involved in sort of hardware production distribution and any of those sorts of things. That's hard and different and really not appropriate for a 501C3. But I could see holding project trademarks and domain names maybe managing some donation flow for a conference associated with a free hardware community or something as being the kinds of things that could make sense. Whether we'll ever have a project come to us and ask for that, I don't know. Other questions? Yeah, over here. So it's regarding machine donation. I would like to donate a machine here in US. This machine is going to be a power machine from IBM. And the way that IBM works is they prefer much better to do a long-term loan other than a donation. So is it okay for you? And the second question is regarding, we have a machine, another machine in Brazil and we are going to have a third machine in Brazil as well. They are doing some building on Deben. Is there anything that we need to do with this machine because they're going to be fully located for Deben? So is there any kind of contract that we should do in order if we are going to proceed having those machines as, because we're still discussing with GSA, if we are going to have those machines or if we are going to have only US. So what is your suggestion on this case? Well, to first order, SPI would largely be involved in things that are going to be donated in or hosted in the US. I don't know that SPI itself has any particular value to add or reason to want to be engaged in hardware that's being made available for Deben in a place like Brazil. That would actually probably be a better question for the Deben project leader and or whoever's managing assets on behalf of the Deben project at this point. In terms of managing something as a loan instead of an outright donation, I see no reason that that should pose a particular problem. Someone somewhere just needs to sort of keep documentation about the status of that and where it came from and who it needs to go back to if and when. And that certainly seems like something SPI could manage. So, I don't know. We have the past and present secretaries both in the room if they'd like to speak up. So I certainly remember seeing something about this query come up and I think that the response at that time was, what was the benefit that SPI was adding in that case? Because it wasn't an asset that Deben would own. It was going to be an IBM's asset. It was a query about whether SPI needed to enter into this Loot and Contract or whether IBM could just give access to the machine to DSA without needing the overhead of SPI being involved. I agree with B-Deal. I don't see a problem with it. It just wasn't clear at the time when someone was asking whether or not it was even necessary. Yeah, excellent point. I don't see any value that's really being added by SPI being involved in that kind of a transaction as long as the asset continues to be owned by somebody other than our associated project. We don't need to be involved. If you'd like us to be involved to help manage that, I guess we could be. It does tie into one of the things that SPI offers in that we are at least a legal entity that can sign contracts such as that if a donor requires that, that is what we can do. We've had a number of cases in the past where one of our associated projects wanted to enter into an agreement of some kind or other and needed a legal, someone legally authorized to sign on their behalf and I and various others on the SPI board have been called upon at various times to assign things and fax them back. That's not a big problem. I will admit that in the context actually of DevCon 14, there was a request for a Signatrona contract that I pushed back and said, no, sorry, I can't sign that. And it had to do with the terms that a particular potential sponsor wanted to place on their sponsorship money and it just was not compatible with a free software project. And they meant no harm by it. It was just their standard corporate agreement thing. They just were surprised that I actually read it and said no. But, you know, sorry, it happens. Other questions? Thanks. I'm just curious if SPI has investments and any kind of, so if there's an investment policy? Not as well organized as you'd like. The funds that we have are broken into several different accounts and they're in different places with sort of different terms associated with them. We, until the last year or so, haven't really been managing an asset balance that made doing something more than parking it in a modestly interest-bearing business-oriented account would have made sense for. And frankly, our advice to our associated projects is to not accumulate financial assets. We would really prefer that our associated projects use the donation stream that's coming in and if they need more, later ask for it than to be keeping big reserves sitting around. Having said all of that, I think as we hit, we're now sort of in the three quarters of a million range, it certainly makes sense for us to be considering that and it's something that a couple of us have had conversations about but we've taken no specific action yet. There's sort of this balancing thing because most of those funds aren't really SPIs. They're being held in trust for the various associated projects and so while there's a big central balance, if PostgreSQL comes to us and says time for us to run another event, drain our account, we need to go spend all that money, the answer would be, yep, okay, here it is. And so we have to be careful about long-term investment vehicles because while we have a more substantial balance now, if you saw it, it's spread over a lot of small sort of trust accounts and trying to do things that have fixed duration, even like certificates of deposit gets a little concerning because we need to maintain the ability to respond with appropriate liquidity to those project requests. Yeah. So what are you doing after you have an entity that's enrolled in your program and they've been with you for a couple of years and it's probably never come up? They ask you to drain their funds, you provide their trust funds back to them and then they're spending the money in ways that are not consistent with your original program. So we've never actually had an incident yet where an associated project consciously set out to do something that was in violation of the 501C3 legal boundary. We've had a couple of cases where a project started with an association with SPI, grew to a certain point and decided it was time to do something different. One interesting example of that is the Genome Foundation. Early in the Genome Project, they were an SPI associated project and when the Genome Foundation got started, obviously they moved to that context. It depends on the nature of that transition as to whether we have the ability to transfer their existing asset balance or not. So for example, if someone wants to move from 1501C3 to another 501C3, it's not very hard for us to arrange for their assets to follow them across that transactional boundary. If they all of a sudden decide, ah, we're done with this, we wanna incorporate and run this some other way, then we can't just transfer their balance out of a 501C3 to some sort of a commercial context. This has led actually in the last three months, we've had a couple of interesting conversations about okay, is it time for us to review and improve our life cycle documentation around what happens when a project vaporizes? I mean, I sort of jokingly referred to the project that has less than $3 asset left with us. That project started off with a certain amount of impetus. They had a couple of objectives that were not met. All of the folks involved realized as a consequence of that that it was never gonna go the way they wanted to and the whole project kind of vaporized. And fortunately, we weren't left holding six figures worth of assets. It was one figure worth of assets. But, and I think in sort of in the absolute limit, that'll fall into our general reserves and we'll do something appropriate with it someday, maybe if we have to, I guess. But this does raise the question of what are the criteria under which we are willing and able to declare our project defunct? We've never really done that before. We had a couple projects where they seemed to go unactive, they didn't have any assets. We poked them and they said, yes, sorry, we should have told you that we're often out of things now and we just quietly passed a resolution to take them off the list and that was easy. But when that happens and there's still assets being held, it's not so easy. So I think one of the action items we have this year is to try and review those elements of our sort of existing process, life cycle documentation and work on them some. In all honesty, if somebody consciously did something that violated our 501c3 status, we'd have our legal counsel involved quickly and we would take whatever the actions were that were deemed appropriate because protecting the ability of the rest of our associated projects to retain their current legal and financial status is far more important to us than looking the other way when somebody does something inappropriate. Yeah, as a spy affiliate project, the experience I've had is that the spy funds management is not as hands off as it would appear from this conversation. Every expenditure from one of the spy affiliates is actually managed directly by this treasure of spy and the funds are transferred from spy to the target, whatever the project is. So if I wanna go buy a bunch of computing hardware, the funds aren't transferred from spy to me and then from me to the hardware vendor. The funds are transferred directly to the hardware vendor. So the availability of funds, an inappropriate usage of funds is pretty minimal because you would have to confuse the spy treasure into thinking that some inappropriate expenditure was conforming to the rules. So there are actually very fairly strong guarantees that it can't happen today. I appreciate you bringing that up, Keith, because perhaps not so obviously, I don't actually ever use any of spy's money. So yeah, any other questions? Okay, well if there are no other questions, I will thank you very much for your time in attendance. I hope that if nothing else, any of you in the room who are not currently SPI members or have not currently requested conversion to the status of contributing member will go back and do that because we would very much like to have your attention and involvement in our processes. And some of the questions that were asked, there are particular areas of expertise or insight that you would like to contribute to the organization. Please let us know. We're always very appreciative of additional help with all of the things that we try to do on behalf of what, as you saw, is a really interestingly diverse list of significant free software projects. Thanks again. Point is that I knew that we had some issues with people signing up to be members in the past. If you have had a problem signing up to be an SPI member, whether it's a member or a contributing member, please come and talk to me and some partners. We thank you for those issues.