We're back, we're back on a given Tuesday for more tax. You love tax, don't you? You better learn about tax, because it's coming for all of us, the tax man comeths. And this is just the opposite of the tax man. This is Tom Yamachika, he's the president of the Hawaii Tax Foundation. Welcome back, Tom. Thanks for having me on the show. So here we are, just settling in after that incredible episode in Congress. In fact, all episodes these days in Congress are all incredible, about the Tax Reform Act, okay? And today, let's look at some of the implications that have been rolling out over how that affects Hawaii. And I'm sure there'll be other things that'll roll out later. But let's talk about the corporate rates that have been changed at the Fed. Let's talk about this section 199A. And let's see if we can understand what the Fed did and how it affects us. Okay, well, first of all, we kind of start off with the proposition that C corporation, what we call C corporations, what you may call corporations.  And they usually have a lot of shareholders maybe trade on an exchange, whatever. Okay, their top tax rate went down from around 35% to 21%. So it's a big, big drop. That's on net income. On net income. Of the corporation, the C corporation. That's right. There are other kinds of corporations and other vehicles to operate a business in. So there are S corporations, which some people may think of as sub-chapter S, which is what they were called when the terminology first came out. And there are limited liability companies, there are partnerships. Most businesses are conducted in one of those forms, which you call pass-through forms. So in those forms of business, the entity itself doesn't pay tax or income tax. They may pay other kinds of tax like payroll tax or GE or whatever. But they don't pay income tax, instead, their owners do. So it's a pass-through, and the owner reports the income that was earned by the entity. That's correct. Now, because under Trump tax, the individuals who own the businesses are taxed at higher rates, up to 37%, their rates didn't go down so much as the corporate rates did. The way they make up for it is by saying, okay, if you as an individual owner are getting business income or part of a business's income, we, the tax code, will give you a deduction for some of that income. So that would make it just as if the tax rate was a little bit lower on that kind of income. So for example, if you, and I'm just using round numbers, if you have $150,000 of income from all sources, you get $100,000 from a business, the basic deduction that you're entitled to get is 20%. So instead of being taxed on $150,000, you would get 20% of the 100 as a deduction. So you'd be taxed on the 130. Right. So you get 20% of that 100 part, the part you got from a corporation or a pass-through company. A pass-through company. Pass-through company, like an LLC. You take 20% of what you receive from there and you deduct that against your whole income, your entire income. In this case, 150 is your entire income. You get the 20% deduction off the 100. Now your taxable income, so to speak, your taxable gross income, I suppose, is 130,000. That's right. Okay. So if you're making a lot of money and you would normally be exposed to the 37% rate, you get the benefit of this 20% deduction and your tax rate drops to maybe 30%. Okay. So it's still not as good as 21, but it's getting there. It's throwing a bone. Right. Well, but the other thing that you have to keep in mind is that even for corporations, they have this double tax issue, which is that after they pay tax, they pay dividends to their shareholders and the shareholders get taxed again. On the same money. On the same money. Yeah. Right. And this is at the individual rates now. So that's on the other side of the coin. Right. If you have a C corporation, the C corporation pays tax at the corporate rate of now 21%. And when all of that's done, the net is filtered through by dividends to the owners, the stockholders, and the stockholders pay their individual income tax on the amount that comes to them. So it's a double tax. It always has been a double tax. Right. It's a little less at the corporate level. Well, it's much less. It's almost half at the corporate level these days. So that sort of counterbalances what you were saying under this 20% deduction a minute ago, right? Right. That's the other side of that coin. So if you took the same amount of earnings and you passed them through both levels of tax, full boat, you would wind up paying an effective tax rate of a little over 40%. With the C corporation and the dividends. C corporation and dividends. 40%. Yeah. Now that's more than 21%. Yeah. But it's way better than before. Yeah. Now how does that compare to an LLC or a pass-through entity? Yeah, it would be about 30%. 30%. So we actually do better. Yeah. By the way, a pass-through entity would include a REIT, right? Yes, it would. A real estate investment trust organization. Yes, it would. Such as the shopping centers and HRPT, Commonwealth properties that own a lot of property. Yeah, but those would be a little bit different because, you know, number one, the corporation wouldn't pay tax. Right. And the individual, the owners of the REIT, the stockholders of the REIT would pay tax. But they would get the 20% deduction on the REIT dividend. Which is pretty good. Which is a really good deal. Yeah. So what does this mean to us? What does it mean to a small business who is incorporated? What does it mean to us? I'm focused on small business because I think, as you said in your article in Civil Beat, most of what happens is in small businesses in this country.  How does it affect the owners? Well, it would affect the owners. It's a very complicated formula. It took me days to figure it out. And it's based on how much taxable income you ultimately get. If you married filing a joint and get more than $400,000, the benefit pretty much is phased out. If you're a CPA or a consultant or that kind of service business. If you're a regular business like a retail store, it would not be phased out, but it would be limited by the amount of wages you pay. Yeah. So that's better. Again, that would depend.  Right. So, I mean, it's a very complex calculation. Business owners should be, I think, getting in touch with their tax advisors to find out, what's going on here? What would be best for me? Should I make changes in how I do business? That kind of thing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's not only how you report it, it's not only going through that complicated formula for, when does this go into effect for tax year 2017 or 2018? For 2018. So it just took effect. Just took effect, meaning that our calculations are different starting next April, not this April. Yeah, this April you'd be filing a tax return based on 2017. The old law. Yeah, and that's under the old law. Okay, so not only do you get in touch with your tax professional about this for next year's returns, but also maybe you should change the way you do business. How would you change the way you do business? Like some people, if they're in, for example, if you're in a C Corporation and you've traditionally paid out all of your earnings at the end of the year through bonuses or other kinds of compensation, you may want to consider doing an LLC form or an S Corporation form. So you can instead of having the workers of the Corporation get salary which is fully taxable at the individual rates, you make it so that they can get some profit distributions where you can get the 20% deduction. So how hard is it to do that to make that change from a C Corporation to a pass-through Corporation? Well, yeah, again, it's very complicated. It depends on your individual situation and you shouldn't be talking about it. So this is a real benefit to the tax professionals, isn't it? Well, maybe. Maybe a financial. But is this what we expected? I mean, we were, not that I ever bought it, but we were led to believe this would be a positive thing for business, for business. Is it really a positive thing for business? Is it a positive thing for business nationally? Is it a positive thing for business locally? What we've seen in terms of when the National Tax Foundation ran the numbers on just normal people, middle-income people, they found that every Hoy resident, middle-income Hoy resident would be getting $800 more in their pocket on average per family. So, yeah, everybody's better off. Yeah, for $800 for the average Hawaii resident nationally, is it the same? Nationally, it's less because middle-income families nationally tend to get less. Yeah, well, let me throw a little bit of a curve on that. Right after this tax reform bill was passed, it was within hours, days, a couple of days, Paul Ryan stood up and said, gee whiz, now that we're not going to charge you $800 in tax and for corporations a lot more reduction than that. We find we don't have enough money to pay for the social safety net. So we're going to be looking in 2018 for ways to reduce the social safety net because we're going to have the money because we just gave it all back to you because we believe in smaller government and also smaller social safety net. So that includes a risk of reduction of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other things too because all of a sudden in the second shoe drops just a few days later and we find we don't have the money and incredible. And I wonder if they knew that. I guess they did. I'm sure they did. Yeah, this is all part of a plan. So now we here in Hawaii, we may have benefited more than other states with the $800 average reduction in taxes, but we still have to perform under the social safety net to help our people because we care. As opposed to other states, maybe don't care as much. We as a democratic state with big heart liberal values, always, always, you know, it's a wonderful thing about Hawaii, we care. We're not going to let those poor people suffer. So we're going to make up the spread. And to make up the spread, assuming no contributions or reduced contributions from the Fed, where does it come from? It has to come from us, the taxpayers. Yeah, it has to come from the rest of us. So $800 reduction is going to wind up. We're in the state, we're going to have to cover it and maybe more, don't you think? Oh, I think there's some possibility that's going to happen. Yeah. We were talking a little bit earlier about what's going to happen in our legislature once they consider how to conform or not to conform to the federal changes. We do know that yesterday, the governor's package of bills was introduced, including one from the Department of Taxation. Okay, hold right there because that's a cliffhanger. And whenever we see a cliffhanger, we take a break and we tell the people that if they want to find the answer to the cliffhanger question, they have to wait for this break to be over. Okay, as I raise my hand, we will take a break and I raise my hand a second time, we'll be back. And we'll hear the answer to Tom Yamachika's cliffhanger question. Hey, Aloha. Standard Energyman here on ThinkTech Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show, but we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Standard Energyman and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Keeley Iakina and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Iakina. Aloha. Okay, this is Tom Yamachika, the president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel, ThinkTech. It's Community Matters. We're talking about tax. You better listen, okay? We're back. We're back. So yeah, you know, so what we have is we have the tax reduction that gives our citizens here in Hawaii a reduction on the average for what, middle class, maybe upper middle class, $800 per annum or something like that. Different for different people. But at the same time, you know, we're left with a burden because the general plan in Washington seems to be reduced the size of government. And that means reduced the size of the social safety net. And since we care about the social safety net, we're going to have to make it up out of our own state funds, which is not so easy because we're already behind. We're not at Puerto Rico yet, we're already behind with tens of billions of dollars of unliquidated, unpaid liabilities here. So we're going to have to find the money. And that's the problem that is presented by Tom's question. What are we going to do? What would the governor say that he wanted to do in his state of the state message? He wants to help the homeless. Okay, well that's part of the safety net. So the question that I was presenting before the, you know, before the break was what are we doing in our legislature about this? And yesterday the governor's package was introduced, there was a bill from the Department of Taxation regarding to internal revenue and formality. And what that was was plain vanilla. And by that, I mean we have a law that says we conform to the federal law as it is in effect on December 31, 2016. That's existing law. So we changed the 2016 to 2017. That's all it does. What that does in practical effect is it'll pick up all of the Trump tax provisions on base broadening. So you would get rid of miscellaneous itemized deductions. You would get rid of probably personal exemptions. You know, but the way Trump tax works is you get base broadening but you reduce the rate, right? And that effect is beneficial for most people. On our side, you get base broadening but the rate stays the same. Which means we will pay more tax. Which means it's a tax hike. Yeah, we calculate our state tax. We're not going to have the benefit of all the deductions and changes that the Fed made, right? Right. So make no mistake about it. Yeah. That looking at a tax hike. Yes. Again. Yes. Here. Here. In Hawai'ine. That's correct. Yeah. Well, don't we need one, honestly? You don't have to answer that if you don't want. You want one? Okay. Do you want to pick one? I don't. Let me assure you I don't. Because if you want to pay more taxes, you can certainly write a check to the government and they'd be happy to accept it. You heard it here on ThinkTech. If you want to give them charity, they're an eligible charitable. Yes. So people think they need charity with all they do and don't do. But anyway, so okay, so I just want to get it straight. So what do you mean when you say you expand the base? What does that mean? By expanding the base, that means there are more dollars that are going to be taxed. Ah, okay. So your gross income is going to be higher because you don't have these various deductions and exemptions and exclusions and what have you. Right. Right. Right.  Yeah. That tax revenue, yes. Okay. So when you say conform to all, conform to the federal changes, you mean we take it in the shorts on that because we lose all these deductions and exemptions. And we don't make up for it in the rate at the state level. We don't change our rates. We don't change the rate. So it's really simple. This bill must be really short, right? It's very short. It's two pages. Two pages. And that's all it says. Yeah, that's all it says. Okay. I guess it's brilliant from the point of view of trying to goose the rate, goose the tax we pay. Yeah. Simple. It's very, very simple.  So what kind of reaction have we had on this? What's your reaction, Tom? It was entirely what I was expecting. I was expecting them to pick up the base broadening which helps them and not change the rate, which doesn't help them. Yeah. So, you know, I always say, you know, the garden of the Finsicantini, what they do in Washington is coming for us. It's going to have an effect. And this is a big effect. This is a big effect. It's going to affect our, what do you want to call it, our tax economy here in Hawaii. It's going to affect what you're looking at and what we're reporting on our state tax return. That's right. I mean, we have, as you mentioned, all of these promises that we've made earlier. We've promised to pay for our state workers. We've promised to pay their pensions. We promised to pay health care for life. And we have to deliver. Huge burden. We have to deliver on these promises. Yeah, sure. Our state constitution even says that those promises are not subject to reduction. So that's really going to put the pressure on state government here. It's not only here. I mean, it's a problem across the nation. Yeah. Well, it's part of the Trump plan, the Republican plan. But let me add one other point to consider. And that is when you pay this higher state income tax, what you're talking about, you don't necessarily get the same deduction on your federal tax. That sounds like a circular thing. So now, after I've been charged more money at the state tax level because of this conformity bill conforming with the new Tax Reform Act, I pay more. But I don't get the same deduction for my federal tax. Wow. How does that work? Well, if you don't make very much, you know, it may not hurt you. If you're middle or upper middle class, your state direction is going to be limited to the 10,000, as I mentioned before. Well, the 10,000. Let's talk about that for a minute. Sure. So you get now, you cannot deduct more than 10,000 from the federal return, more than $10,000 of a combined number of what you paid to the state of Hawaii as income tax, plus what you paid to your respective counties, I suppose. As real property tax. As real property tax. Right. Now, the rate in Hawaii, as I recall, and it's unchanged by this conformity bill is 11%, right? Is that right? Right, that's the topic. Net personal income, that's what you pay. Okay, so if I have $100,000, you know, roughly speaking, I'm going to have a $10,000 state income tax bill. Well, I mean, if you make only $100,000, you're not going to get nowhere near the 11%, but you'll probably be paying 8% or so. 8%. Yeah. And then if I have a house, a common house, ordinary house worth, I don't know, what is the house worth these days? That's a moving target also. Yeah, but maybe, you know, $750 to a million. Okay, so maybe my tax is $2,500, $3,000. Yeah, so even there, you'd be budding up against the limit. Exactly. So you got $8,000 for income tax, $2,000 to $2,500 for property tax. Yeah. That's over $10,000. Yeah, it's over $10,000. Okay, so that means the excess over $10,000, you get no deduction for in your federal return in the year following. Right. Because it's one year lag. Right. So whatever I pay in year one is what I deduct in year two. Okay, now we are probably going to have to ultimately increase those taxes to pay for these unliquidated liabilities, these tens of billions. Some people estimate it at $40, $50 billion of unpaid. We're going to have to handle that. It's the rail, it's the homeless, it's the employee's retirement system, and all those wonderful benefits that we give to retired state employees. Yeah. So we need to, at the legislature, make some tough policy calls on what we're going to have money for or what we're not going to have money for, because the more we obligate taxpayers, at some point, taxpayers are going to either run out of money or they're going to pack up their bags and leave and go someplace else. Yeah. We're going to get there though, don't you think? We already have a net outmigration of people. Yeah. So some people already have made the decision. I don't know if it's because of tax or what, but that, hey, you know, Hawaii's not paradise. Not a tax paradise for sure. Yeah.  You know, that the legislature has to have priorities and they need leadership in this governor or some other governor as to what priorities really count, how they should spend the money. A hundred million on affordable housing, another hundred million on affordable housing, on energy, on sustainability, on climate change. We have to spend money on climate change, or we'll be not resilient. And then when the storms come and they're coming next year, just in time for the tax increase, you know, we'll have to pay a lot of money either A, who make ourselves resilient, and that's expensive business, you know, dealing with inundation, or B, you know, dealing with the damage that a storm creates. And that's in the billions too, if it's a bad storm, you know, you know, cutting a swath through Honolulu, for example, that's a major expense to fix that. Look what happened. Yeah, or even you look at the normal problem of, you know, the shoreline's receding. Right. You have to do something. You can't just wait for Waikiki to wash away. That's right. You know, except the end of the tourist industry right there. So, you know, we're going to have to raise money for these things, hopefully on a planned basis, but maybe sometimes with the storms on an unplanned basis. And that means that taxes are going to have to go up a fair piece of change. And that means real property taxes, and it means income taxes, and then we'll be way over the $10,000 limit allowed. And I might throw in the fact that we're on our own, aren't we? What happened to Puerto Rico? The Fed did not step in and put any money down to fix Puerto Rico. There go Puerto Rico still in terrible shape. And that scenario could follow pretty much the same way here in isolated Hawaii. Yeah, who are you? Hawaii, who are you? Right, same thing. Yeah. So we'll have to raise it ourselves.  Because as people pack up, then your, you know, statewide tax base goes down. Of course it does. I mean, the more people we lose, the fewer people there are to pay taxes on anything. Less tax receipts for the state, less revenue, less money to pay all the bills, increasing bills. So what's your advice at a legislature? Have a plan, make their priorities, be very, very careful about, you know, making these long-tailed commitments and for the ones that we already have, see about how you can rein them in.  I mean, do the legislators know or care about that? I mean, at least they should have some awareness of what they are and, you know, where the money for that is coming from, or not. Yeah. Well, you've frightened my daytime. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming down. This is, we get to play the territorial theme for Puerto Rico now as a sort of going out music with photographs. Thank you very much, Time. I hope we can get you to come back soon and follow on this issue. It's really important. Thank you, Day.


Okay, everyone. So in this session, we're going to discuss capacity building. Okay, I'm just going to walk you through a couple of principles. And then we'll have an exercise where you can think through some of this on your own. All right, so in particular in this session we have three learning objectives that we're going to get through. Please everyone if you could come inside and have a seat. So there'll be three kind of core learning objectives that we'll discuss in this session so we're going to start with just kind of discussing some of the kind of general principles and ideology behind DHS to capacity building. We'll also try to identify the difference between what we call learning and performance solutions I'll explain what these are. And then we're also going to kind of describe kind of how these areas affect budgeting of DHS to capacity building activities. So, back to Mentimeter. Okay, I'll just give everyone a moment to access it. So the question is what do you think of when you hear the term capacity building. I'll just wait till I get a couple more responses. And we have the response coming in. There's a large agreement here right the majority of responses are are the same. Right so training, training on specific skills. Okay. So, we're just going to head back. You can you can enter more responses. Okay, but actually when we think about capacity building what I want to do is just dispel the notion that capacity building is just about training. Okay, that is a very important component. There's no doubt about that. Okay, but as an umbrella term, it also refers to areas of staff development of recruitment of retention. We need to build strong teams on a talked about a DHS to core team in the previous presentation. That is something we need to build, often from the ground up, and we need to think of strategies to keep that team in place. That means sustainable strategies to make sure they're funded to make sure we're recruiting the right personnel to make sure that we have plans in place to keep them, you know, happy and kind of well suited for their tasks to modify their descriptions to make sure that we're evaluating them correctly. So there's a whole other kind of portion here, which is a bit more on the kind of human resource development side that is also associated with capacity building. So we can't just look at it in a bubble and saying, okay, we're going to implement a new system now we focus on the training with the staff we already have. In some situations, this means we're not going to be able to succeed in all areas that we intend to. Okay, so we shouldn't just separate these two out, we should actually think about these two together, because they're one in the same right in the new staff you need to train them, or you change staff's roles similarly you need to train them to make sure that they fit into those new roles. So often we might also assign people new responsibilities. Okay, now you, you're already existing you have previous work responsibilities. Now you're also responsible for implementing DHS to learn everything you can, but we're not going to change your previous work, you still have to do that to you just have to do this in addition, right, and that can create problems as well, because then the person just doesn't have any time. So we have to kind of think about these in line with one another. So we split these off into kind of two, two kind of ideas. So one is learning solutions, and this is our training, a training materials job aids, maybe coaching one on one kind of discussion. Okay, and then we call the second one kind of performance solutions this is how we evaluate our staff, maybe modifying their jobs, hiring practices, you know changing terms of reference or writing terms of reference to kind of attract the correct people, making sure they have the right skill. Okay, working through that other process of making sure all of that is in place. So we're going to kind of discuss both of these and their importance in affecting kind of a DHS to implementation. So just in general, capacity building as a as a concept. It's it's kind of foundational principle of scaling DHS to implementations. We really can't proceed. You know, the way we work is not such that you just hire an outside developer we give you a product, and then you kind of go on your way. Right. So that's not how we work in practice when we're thinking about DHS to we sit down with teams. We kind of understand what their needs are we work with them together and try to build something that kind of works over a very long period of time. Right. Using the system, it requires different levels of skills in utilizing DHS to as well. So we also have to think a little bit about how we segment our teams out, because not everyone has to learn every skill. Right. And that's also reflected even in our instruction team where we have different kind of responsibilities different areas of expertise. Right. And that also should happen within kind of the teams that you're helping. And in designing not everyone has to know everything right you kind of share the responsibility. And there's different models of kind of capacity building based on the challenges that you're trying to address right so maybe not everyone has to go to a configuration training all the time. For example, that might just be a smaller subset of people. So we're going to just because I kind of anticipated that the responses would be mostly focused on training. I'm going to try and spend a little bit of time discussing kind of these areas of human resource development and capacity building there. But here's a couple, a bit more detail on this right so just a couple examples of these different solutions that you can try and think through or work through right so we have hiring practices. And this can include, you know, making sure you have valid job descriptions for your staff, whether they're new staff. Okay, or whether you're recruiting, or whether you're modifying the kind of jobs of existing staff members right. So we know that their responsibilities are in line with what they actually have to do. So there is some accountability there. Okay, we're going to talk about this core team concept quite a bit. And just to explain what it is and what the different roles are, but ideally, every implementation should have a dedicated DHS to core team and we're going to explain this in some more detail. We have various evaluation practices. So we know that there are challenges with keeping staff, especially working for the government. Right. There's often issues with salaries with payment. And there might be more attractive offers, especially once you learn specific skill sets, right, maybe by the private industry, or maybe by others right, but that really takes away then there's kind of this, you know, knowledge drain away from the government from this. So we need to find interesting ways that we can keep staff engaged in the program, and it might not always be through salary because that might be something difficult to achieve right you might not always be able to give someone more money. But there are other ways that we can think about kind of making sure they're they're a little bit more happy with their job in their day to day life. And then there's also this area of job modification right and that's kind of what I mentioned earlier. If you have existing staff that will have new responsibilities. We really need to weigh what it is they will actually do what they will perform what they're responsible for. We can't just, you know, keep dumping more and more stuff on existing staff, because that creates a lot of difficulties for those staff members, and they won't really be happy with what they're doing.  So core teams they manage the implementation and evaluation of DHS to, and they're based in the country that is implementing DHS to. Okay. So for his group, or if the university is supporting an initial implementation. They are not the core team. Okay, they're just there as support at the beginning. And we'll kind of discuss that relationship, how the groups support core team development. Okay, but this team should be based in country. It doesn't necessarily have to consist of only government or ministry staff, you could have some private staff as well, or maybe from outside institutions like a university, for example, involved in this. Okay. But the idea is they live there. Okay, they're there every day. And this team should be dedicated to working on DHS to. Okay. So it might seem like I'm asking a lot, but we're just trying to make sure that things are sustainable as possible, because we want the government to be able to take over as much responsibility as possible or at least this core team right. So, the size of the team can vary right we don't want to just grab is we know it's not easy to fill all these positions I'm going to describe the roles in a moment. Okay, they can consist of roughly four to six people. Now the size of the implementation might affect this a little bit, you know if you're a country of you know 300 million like in Indonesia, for example, you might need more than six people, right.  Right. So it kind of depends a little bit on the context itself, but just generally speaking, we have at least four specific roles. We should have at least four people to fill those roles. Sometimes that's not the case, however, and we do understand that. Okay. So when we look at the actual positions within this team, we have four core roles that we've identified, and we kind of have four extra roles that are kind of providing input into the core team from time to time. Right, so they're not always needed to be involved in everyday kind of decisions, but you will need their input quite frequently. So the four core positions that we advocate for that are part of every core team. Okay, I'll just list them now and I'll explain them in a moment. Okay, are the DHS to operational lead, a DHS to trainer, what we call a DHS to implement her. And some of you put this as your kind of job description at the beginning. So you may be a little familiar with this concept already. We also have a server administrator. Okay. And I'm just going to kind of explain what these roles are a little bit. Okay. So in Anna's presentation just now she mentioned a little bit about donor coordination project planning. Okay, and these are very important components that are sometimes missed. So the DHS to operational lead at DHS to implementations, right, there's often maybe a lot of kind of reliance on external parties to support the planning and the coordination of these projects. But this is very important to build internal capacity to manage those projects within this core team. So the DHS to operational lead is actually kind of a lead person who helps with all this support. Okay. So these are the concepts that we've been discussing, and we'll discuss today on budgeting on planning and infrastructure. Okay, this operational lead. They will understand those concepts. They will have an ability to speak to partners about what's possible. They will be able to kind of filter out good and bad ideas and make suggestions. Okay, and they'll also have a bit of DHS to knowledge as well. Right. So they're the kind of the team lead of this whole operation. Okay, they manage the team they make sure everyone's happy. They also speak to external partners and kind of discuss with them how we can bring together projects and align the interests of the kind of ministry in the situation. Okay, they're also responsible for kind of ensuring that the system is implemented in an integrated fashion, so that you don't get all this fracturing of systems, which can happen, even within DHS to you can have multiple DHS to systems managed by multiple people, and communication is not there. So the ability even to move data or look at data together becomes very challenging, even just within DHS to, but this person will also be looking at an overall integrated architecture which we will discuss a little bit more, because DHS to it's, it's very unlikely and we don't even really recommend that DHS to is the only system that you are using you will have other systems. We need to think about how this fits into that integrated design overall in the country. Alright, so this person kind of has a big picture kind of role, but also does understand a bit of the operational principles and how DHS to works. We have a specific role for a trainer. Okay, and this person will also understand DHS to so you do have you know roles in training where maybe you have someone who just creates materials and things like that, and doesn't really understand the subject matter. We don't recommend that in this situation. We do recommend that this trainer does also understand how DHS to works and can create material based on their own experience with working with the system, and with speaking with the users in the field. So they lead the development of various training materials of support documentation job aids etc. Okay, they provide both training of trainers. So for example to their own staff that their own core team staff maybe our staff at the province or district level who will train other people. Okay, we often work on this model, and they will also support direct end user training. So maybe people have challenges with accessing the system or performing basic operations. So it's kind of a wide variety of skills that this person will kind of contribute to. And they can focus also on both fundamentals concepts. So maybe for people just getting started, as well as advanced concepts because there will be at some point in time, the need for that core team to expand their skills and kind of learn more advanced about how to kind of configure and work with DHS to. We then have this implement your role. And this is our kind of broadest role, I will say that this person often has a mix of many different responsibilities. We have a mix of program expert, as well as maybe someone who understands DHS to configuration very well. They could be maybe be more focused on a health area, right and understand that health area very well, and be able to speak to partners and other people within the ministry to understand their public health needs and requests, they could be very DHS to focused and kind of really understand how to configure the system, operate the system, explain features within the system. There's a bit of a mix here in terms of responsibilities that this person can have, but they often just to kind of summarize they often lead that requirements gathering and configuration process so it might be the same person speaking with various units in the ministry of health, but also subsequently configuring those requirements that they've discussed. Okay, they're also responsible for developing solutions for integration within that broader system. So at that top level you kind of have to think about, how does DHS to fit in with all the different systems that I have. Okay, but then this implementer will actually be responsible for actually making this work. So we often see like in diagrams or conferences you see arrows between system to systems or something like this. The implementer actually is the one who implements those arrows to make sure system one can talk to system to. Okay. They also develop implement and evaluate what we call standard operating procedures. So these are kind of best practices and guidance for the implementation. The last row we have is a server administrator, and this person probably doesn't need to work full time as a core team member can work about half half the time, but you do need a dedicated person. And this also depends a little bit on your hosting needs and your hosting requirements which we will moment later on in today's sessions, but this person manages the server. Okay, the DHS to application and any other related web services so maybe there's an email system or SMS system, any type of related infrastructural service, this person should kind of have some insight into. And even if you're hosting outside. So you're working with an external provider, you should still have a person within your team who understands these basic principles. So you can set up backup procedures, you can talk to the hosting provider to make sure all your specifications are correct. Okay, you still need someone there, even if you've outsourced your hosting. So there's a number of different kind of competencies then that I've described that this team much much might have. So just to summarize right so they need to kind of understand quite well. DHS to system design and analysis. So this is really discussing requirements with users, understanding what DHS to can do and translating those requirements from kind of discussion over to actual kind of features that people can actually use. Right. We also have to have the team responsible or understand DHS to customization architecture. Okay, what we call metadata which are the variables that we create in the system. And this also includes aspects of interoperability, because we want DHS to to communicate with other systems. And we need an understanding of how to implement some of these in practice. It can't just be a discussion with boxes and arrows and workflows right we actually need to someone to sit down and make that work. Okay, we also need them to kind of understand DHS to implementation best practices. So we discussed some of these principles over the last couple days, but just some examples include harm is a harmonization of forms. I had some questions actually from a couple people. What if I bring data into the system. It's the same data but it's collected by two different programs and the values don't match. Okay, so very common occurrence. It's something that we need to work through and figure out which data value do we use. What is the source of our data. Right. And this is someone who kind of needs to sit down and go through everything and speak with the Ministry of Health about this and how they can kind of improve their practices on this data collection tools. We also need kind of a bit of understanding of data use and how to kind of set up good visualizations and indicators for the programs. So, one area that you will find probably in practice is if you sit down with a ministry, or a unit within the Ministry of Health, and you say okay, give me your dashboard. Okay, and they'll just kind of look at you and say, okay, I don't even know where to start. Okay, that's an often kind of frequent occurrence. So sometimes they need a little bit of suggestions, showing them, you know, how DHS to can display data what's possible to give them some incentive and ideas to kind of think through their own planning. Planning and conducting training of trainers. Okay, this is also something very important. So this is where we actually train other people to perform training in the field. It's really the only way you can scale. So if you if you think about training thousands of users potentially a team of four to six people will not be able to train 1000 users right, you will need to subsequently share those responsibilities with others. And then this project management and administration component is also very, very key to this whole operation. So some some kind of core principles and some words of caution that I'm going to recommend. And I'll kind of use a real example here in a moment. So, so these positions, they're not empty titles. Okay, you can't just say okay someone DHS to is new it's exciting. There's funding coming in for it.  You cannot appoint people in such a position.  They're going to be working on the configuration they're going to be understanding requirements. We're going to have to meet with a lot of different people and kind of come to a consensus. It's not always easy work. Right. But the idea is that these people need to kind of be ready and I think it is quite rewarding in the end right. So the persons in these positions, also at the beginning in particular, they might not have all the skills that I've been listing out and that I've been describing. And that's okay. Right. You're not looking for the perfect person. I think that's kind of the enemy here right. You're looking for a person with potential who's willing to learn and work with you. Right. And kind of gain skills over time. This is a long project with a long horizon. Okay, and we want that team to be there for a very long time as well. So we don't want to discourage people at the beginning, you know, saying, Oh, sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. We don't want your help anymore. That's not what we want to do. Right. We want to encourage people to learn. We want to put them on a path to success. The team itself. So I mentioned a lot of these teams there's not enough budget for right. So the team itself, you need to advocate for kind of dedicated support for this team. So they can invest in their own learning. Right. That is often an issue where, you know, people kind of say, but why don't you know how to do this. Well, that's not really the idea. They might not have all these competencies at the beginning. Right. And that's what we're trying to highlight. The team itself, as I mentioned, we're often involved in this training of trainers approach. And then we have the HIST network and I'm going to just briefly touch on this. We'll talk about it more later. The HIST network, we're always here. We're always here to support you guys. Okay, but over time the amount that you depend on us should lessen. We're not looking to stay in the country and just make money off you guys for eternity. That's not our model. Right. Our model is to provide a lot of intensive support for for the beginning portions. Slowly we taper off. And then you ask us questions when you need help. Right. But for the most part you're able to handle the day to day operations on your own. Okay, so I just want to kind of go through a little bit of how core teams work with you in this process. Right. So I just listed out a little case here. The country is in the process of implementing DHS to they want to create or increase the capacity of their core team. So partners with the HIST network in order to get started out as the HIST group support development of the core team. All right. So, as a start, any new activity that they're working on is conducted together with the core team. Say you ask for new data sets, new indicators, new dashboards, and you want that implemented in the system. In an ideal scenario, the HIST network will sit down with members that have been identified and perform this configuration together.  Say, okay, everything set up. Now you can use the system. That's not what we want to do because that means that the team doesn't really understand how it works. Right. So it can add time at the beginning when you're implementing a lot of new stuff because people are learning a lot of new skills. So you can kind of add this into your timeline a little bit because you know you're working back and forth with the HIST groups or the HIST network and kind of trying to understand well how does this work. How do I make this? How do I implement this? The EPI program asked me for this report. Can I make it? You know, and what do I actually need to do to get there? So there's a lot of back and forth there and the kind of support should be there for that. Right. Gradually over time, the core team should kind of take more and more control of these tasks. So a good example, especially where core teams can start is with end user training. So for example showing people how to enter data, how to access dashboards, view indicators, things of this nature. Now maybe at the beginning the HIST group has to be there and help with the initial training. Right. But maybe the core team should try conducting that training with the HIST group there. Right. And the HIST group can kind of step in and support where needed. The whole idea is to get this group to kind of this core team to kind of gradually take on more and more responsibility over time.  Okay, about a lesson learned on core team planning. Okay, so I'm not going, I've worked with a number of countries. I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with a number of different countries and I'm going to present a real life example here. So in DHIS2 we have a user role called a super user. Okay, and this role means that I can do anything inside of the DHIS2 system. I can access the data. I can create variables. I can modify forms. I can do whatever I want. Okay. Now the country that I was working in I was brought in a bit later into the implementation. Okay, and this super user term became a very politically charged term. Now typically we would only, if we look at the different core team members that I identified, we would only give this to very experienced core team staff. So maybe like three to four people in the whole country would have that particular role. Okay. But in the setting that I was in, we had extremely senior level people with this type of access. We had external consultants, people who were not in the country with this type of access, and it created a lot of chaos. So this was the deputy director of the Ministry of Health. Okay, the director of the HMIS unit. We had several UNDP, UNFPA, WHO staff with this level of access, and none of them had been trained on how to use DHIS2. But they wanted to be a super user, because that meant that they were kind of at the top of the hierarchy within the DHIS2 configuration. The team itself had a very good core team. They were about four to six staff members that we were working with, training regularly, and they were very skilled. But they were also a bit younger, a bit less experienced than these other staff. And that was an issue. Okay, even though they knew more about the specific subject matter. So about two years, we warned them at the beginning actually. So when I came in, I kind of saw this and I warned them and I said, you know, we can't have this because it's going to cause us problems down the line. Eventually your system is going to have many issues if people start doing things that they shouldn't. We should give this authority back to the core team. And, you know, no one really listened to me and that's fine. I was also quite young at the time. Okay, but then about three years later, the system just became completely unusable. Okay, no one could, no one could log in. You couldn't import any data. You couldn't create any single report, because all this duplication of information had been created. You entered in the wrong places. If you tried to bring in legacy data, you couldn't match the data with anything, any existing structure in the system. You had users with all kinds of access that had been created by WHO, by UNFPA, by others who should not be creating users, giving access to all their partners and friends. Okay, people are seeing the data without the authority to see the data. It created a lot of problems. You could basically destroy that system and build it from the ground up. I'm just outlining this process here. I'm not going to go through it all, but it took it took us five months to rebuild their system for five months. They basically couldn't use their system. We had to go through these extreme steps of rebuilding each component, and then really ensuring that the core team is empowered because in parallel to this kind of detailed configuration. We really worked to advocate for the core team to get their authority back to perform the work that they need to. It was a kind of key critical missing step, where it just kind of evolved into the situation that got out of hand. So, my point here is that we really need to advocate for the right people to be part of this, and really need to kind of build the skills appropriately. Right. So we need to be a bit more careful in terms of how this is going out. It is not a political appointment. It's not an empty appointment. We also shouldn't be sending them to trainings to conferences to meetings. That was also another issue. Right. We had the deputy director come to an Academy of some kind it was very technical training. Of course they did not really learn anything they were not interested in sitting there and dealing with the details. Right. So just a bit of a word of caution that this core team really needs to be empowered. They really need to take responsibility need to advocate for them to have the right type of role within the system. Otherwise, you don't want to end up in a situation like this. Right. And then you know you could you could blame it on DHS to or whatever you know that happened a lot to DHS use a terrible system let's not use it anymore. There are many other donor interests. You don't want to implement your own system DHS to isn't working anymore. Right. So you'd also don't want to get into that situation you've invested in a platform. You're using it for several years.  And that can also create a lot of trouble. Right. So, this whole idea can can have some impact on kind of how you work through things. So let me see. Okay, so this is this second part here is going to focus on learning solutions. This is the area where I think a lot of you are more well versed in right this involves training basically right. So we have various types we have in person training online training, we might have various manuals or videos, other types of supplementary tools that we provide to individuals. The checklist is some examples here if you want to review some of them. I'm sure you have your own training materials that you've developed. We have a lot of documentation and guidance on actually conducting trainings on various steps you can take to support that process of building learning solutions. This takes a lot from kind of adult learning principles basically. So you can just open those up and have a few at some of those resources. One of the areas that I'm going to talk about is the DHS to Academy, and then I'll also focus on end user training and talk about how they kind of supplement each other. All right. So you're here at a DHS to Academy. So let's just talk a little bit more about this. I know a lot of you are also interested in learning more about the configuration, for example, and some of the other stuff that we're not necessarily focusing on in this particular course. So DHS to Academy, it's a global or regional training, you know, and it can take place in person or online, right? So it can introduce either kind of latest features, apps, or concepts, or kind of best practices for implementation. Right now we're focusing more on the implementation component. Okay. It's meant to train core team staff. Okay. And this is where my word of caution comes back into play. We don't just send anybody or try not to have anybody come to these academies. We really want to focus on upscaling the core team staff's capabilities. Okay. And we don't really send end users to these trainings as well because we were talking about a lot of advanced principles in these courses. Now, one thing that we should make clear is that these are supplemental to in-country trainings. They do not replace them, right? So the idea is to give you a solid foundational basis on specific skills. So for example, if you want to learn about how to configure aggregate data sets, okay, you might come to the academy and just learn about this in general. But your configuration is always going to be specific. You might have translations, specific indicators, specific forms, and you need to kind of make sure that you can manage all of that, right? Not just like a generic overall solution. So this is kind of meant to provide a foundational basis. So when you go back to your country, you can have more, much more detailed discussions on the configuration. So this is kind of the training model that we have right now, okay? We have our fundamentals courses at the bottom, okay? And these are our very, these are our introductory courses, right? If you've never used DHIS-2 before, this is where you start, okay? It gives you a good background of how to use DHIS-2, of how to configure some basic forms and indicators, data sets in DHIS-2, okay? This is completely online. It's free to use at any time, okay? We then have our level one academies, okay? And our level one academies tend to focus a little bit more on DHIS-2 use and configuration. I'll go over some of the courses, okay? These are delivered by our HISP groups. So we have HISP Southeast Africa, which delivers our English academies in Africa, West Africa, which delivers in French. We have the Portuguese-speaking community. We have Asia, right? So by region, we have these academies and the HISP groups are responsible for kind of considering requests in that region and contextualizing that material. But the curriculums are standard, right? So it doesn't matter if you're getting trained in Asia or Africa, we use the same curriculum, okay? Yeah, at some point, we're going to have to consider how to have academies in Arabic in this region as well. We then have these level two academies. You're at one right now. This is typically delivered by the same group of people core team within our team. And these can focus on implementation aspects a bit more perhaps than technical topics, but we also have technical topics for this as well. So our courses are changing all the time. So rather than list them all out, I've just listed categories for the courses to give you a better idea of what we do offer, right? So we have courses specifically focused on system use, both for aggregate and for tracker that talk about things like data entry, using both a computer or laptop or a web device, as well as data analysis or visualization of the data. Once again, both for case-based and aggregate data. Okay. We also have courses that focus on system configuration, and we split this up into three categories basically aggregate tracker or case-based data and Android configuration. So there's specific kind of configuration principles if you're using a mobile device. Okay. We also have some courses on development processes. So this includes app development, both web app development, as well as Android app development. So if you want to create an application of some kind. Okay, as well as server administration. So this is dealing with the server managing the instances, upgrades, things of that nature, and integration. Okay, this is a new course that focuses on interoperability specifically. For example, implementation courses. One was right here this RHS course. We also have specific courses on tracker and Android. And then we have subject specific courses. We have a new domain education we're dealing with data quality. I focused on a couple of features yesterday, but our data quality courses five days in length. Right. So it's not something I could cover that quickly. And then we have logistics and community health and other examples disease surveillance. These are kind of given on an as needed basis. So we offer a number of different courses. And as I mentioned, these courses are to give a foundational basis to people. They're not meant to replace any type of in country training. So if you wanted to learn about interoperability, you might attend the integration Academy, but when you go home, you still have a lot of work to do. Okay, it doesn't end just with the Academy itself. Okay. Now supplemented with the Academy training is end user training. All right. So we also want to make sure that we're training kind of end users at regular intervals. Right. And there's a combination of approaches you can use. But if you're scaling up your system, you really want to focus on making sure everyone is comfortable with utilizing that system. Right. So if they're new users, people who've never seen the system. I always recommend that the training is done in person where possible. Okay, but after that, especially if they become more a bit more experienced money becomes an issue. Right. It's hard to travel to all these places and train thousands of users. So there might be other approaches such as online training or remote coaching that you can use to supplement in person efforts. Right. And I say end users, but we can take these end users and separate them into many categories. So we can have users that enter data. We can have users that help with configuration and maintenance of the system. We can have specific and many focal points who might be more interested in data analysis. Right. So there's a number of different distinctions here. And we need to kind of train all these different users to fit their role as best they can. Now, one kind of specific principle to keep in mind here, training needs to be continuous because DHS to is not a static system. Right. It'll expand. It'll change. It will be modified. Right. There will be new features. You'll upgrade DHS to from one version to the next. Right. So we always need to keep a kind of long term training plan where there's continuous training available, both for our core team. Okay, because they need to learn the new stuff in order to train people. Okay, as well as our end users, because they need to, you know, the core team needs to train them to use this, or you're not going to be able to implement new programs, new features, new reports, etc. Okay, so I'm actually going to leave this for now because we're going to talk about budget later. All right, so what I want to do is actually, I have a bit of an exercise for you to think through your core team and plan this out a little bit. So if I go back to Moodle here. Okay, so in this implementation considerations section. There's a capacity building exercise here. Okay, so what I'd like you to do, and what I would suggest is that you sit in your country teams to do this. Don't try to do this alone. You will need to maybe talk to other members within your country. All right, so open it up. There's two documents. One is a PDF document that describes the exercise, and then there's a supplemental tool here, an Excel sheet. Okay, and I'll open both of them up. And I'll just describe describe the exercise a bit before we get into it. Okay, so this this exercise focuses on your core team. Okay, developing and identifying members within your core team. I've identified four roles as part of this process, right, an operational lead implementer trainer and server administrator, right. And what I've done if I said here there's full, we have full job descriptions for these roles. So I describe them a little bit, but if you scroll down to annex one, I kind of have full terms of reference for each of these roles. Okay, so you can read through those just to give you a bit more background on each specific role. Now what I'd like you to do is think about your own context and try to identify staff that might be available to fill each of these four roles. Now, as I mentioned, these staff don't need to have every single competency that is listed in those roles. Okay, they need to kind of have the potential, or be willing to kind of learn new skills to fit into those roles so they might need to have some basis. You know, you probably shouldn't select someone with no computer engineering background or very little computer knowledge to be your technical implementer right that might not be appropriate. Okay, but what I'd like you to do is think about your own context and just identify who might fill these particular roles. Okay, these four roles that we've identified. Okay. So if you're not able to identify a person to fill that role. Okay, because that might happen you might not have anyone at the moment, who could fill that role. Okay. But then what are some next steps you could take in order to kind of build support around filling these roles, do you need to hire someone new, do you need to look outside, do you need a bit of extra support. Are you not sure and you need to ask us questions. Okay, just try and think through that process a little bit if you're not able to identify someone to fill these roles. Okay, so the next step is once you have identified those individuals. As I said, they might not have all the skills or competencies. Okay, that I'm describing, and that's okay, because even within our team, we don't have all those competencies. Okay, it's very common, right. So there's a second sheet here. It's called capacity building needs assessment. I'll just open that up. Okay. And what you can do is for each staff member that you've identified, go through this and identify which skills they currently have, and which ones they might need some extra support in. So for each role, you'll see here, here's the implementer role. Okay, maybe I'll just zoom, try to zoom in as much as I can. Okay, this is the implementer role. And we have a list of skills that this person should ideally have. Okay, and we have descriptions of those skills as well. And then in the, in the third column here, you have the current status, and there's a dropdown menu. And it's probably pretty small, but you'll be able to see it on your screen. So the categories are not yet achieved, early understanding, adequate understanding, mature understanding, right. So just to kind of gauge their current capability, their current capacity, right. And what you want to do is take each of those staff members that you've identified. And you could do it theoretically, if you don't have anyone identified, you could actually take one, you know, even if you just take one staff member maybe and work through this exercise. But it's not meant for criticism. Please don't use this as a tool for criticism, right. That's not what it's meant for. It's meant to identify areas they need supported, because we really want to make sure that they have these skills. And, and you know, this will lead for opportunities for training for them. Right. So we have the implementer role by scroll down the operational lead. Okay, all of them have different skill sets, the server administrator and the trainer. Okay. So you don't want to be able to take, you know, one person might perform more than one role in your team. That's okay. But if they're only performing the inter. Let's say you've identified them as the implementer, you would only fill out the implementer section for that staff member, you would have another copy for the next role. Okay. Okay. So the third part of this exercise, you might not get through it all right now. And that's okay. Okay. After you have identified your staff member. Okay, and I would just say take one staff member and perform the needs assessment or one role. Okay. Don't try to get through all four. It's going to take too much time. So let's say you've identified a trainer, just go through the trainer role. Okay. After you've identified those members, you've gone through the needs analysis, you need to make a plan for training for that individual. Okay. Because the whole idea, like I said, this is not criticism. This is building up an effective sustainable plan. Okay. So we have an example of a training plan, a template. Okay. And I just put academies in here. Okay, but this should be a combination of academies of local trainings. Okay. Of maybe coaching support. Right. That this person can regularly have. Okay. And I put a two year horizon as an example. This year and next year, you could do maybe starting next year, for example, instead. Okay. But the idea is that, you know, you want to be able to make sure you have people identified for these roles. They know what their responsibilities are. You know where kind of there are areas in which they need further support, and you've identified actual ways you're going to build their skills. Right. I would say don't assume that you just leave it to the person, and then they're not able to do that. Now the next part of this is actually budgeting for these because this does cost money, of course, but we will talk about that more later on. So to summarize, there are three components to this exercise. Identify your core team members. Okay, try to assess their current skills and knowledge, and then develop a training plan for those core team members. And I would say just try to do this, you could identify all four members perhaps or all four roles, but just focus on one role for actually assessing their skills and developing a training plan. Okay. Any questions so far, maybe when you have a look. Or any clarification maybe from Hanine and Abdulraman in Arabic. Okay. Yes, Sean Paul. And it's just to appreciate this strategic way of identifying and transfer, I mean, creating identifying and transferring their capacity to this team, because practically this is what we need for efficient implementation of the HIS too. And by experience, I wanted just to brainstorm something, I mean, to ask anyone to brainstorm how maybe efficient to create this core team, because we have seen that even though it's good to include different expertise, either part of the HMIS or the from outside of the HMIS, but those members of the core team who are from outside of the HMIS, you know, they have other assignments from where they are working. And most cases they are not paid from the HMIS, they are paid from where they are located. So it's good also to analyze and see the availability in terms of time, because if you assign them a lot like operation manager or system administrator yet they have other permanent full time assignments, you likely to fail because they will not be full time for core team assignments. So maybe that's think I want just to highlight it's good when you are formulating these teams go to see and even to consider the availability of the core team, especially when they are coming from outside of the HMIS team. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for Paul. Okay, so I see some people discussing already so I'm just going to walk around. Okay, if you have any questions, raise your hand will come and help you. Okay, but we're going to work on this exercise until lunchtime. I'm very engaged in the exercise. I really appreciate seeing that. So what we're going to do. I know some of you. Maybe you haven't had the opportunity to work through the entire exercise. Okay, so we're not going to ask you to do anything with it quite yet. Okay, continue working on the exercise together through the remainder of the day. Tomorrow because we have more exercises today. Okay, we have several exercises related to these implementation principles that tie together. Okay. So throughout the day you might not get through all of it. Okay, but tomorrow we're going to have a chance to reflect on these exercises all the different components. We will talk about infrastructure as well later on today we have some exercises there as well as architecture. Okay, and tomorrow we might have either a bit of an open discussion or have some, some people present back. What they've done or where they are right now in the process. So we can reflect a little bit more and share some experience regarding where we're at. Okay. So, so thank you very much for engaging I hope the exercise has been useful, continue to work through the exercise, the remainder of today, and tomorrow we're going to look at the exercise, both from this session, as well as the other sessions together Okay, we'll explain the other exercises momentarily after lunch. Okay, so lunch is ready. So please it's in the same area as every other day. Enjoy your lunch will come back in one hour at 130. Thank you very much.


Hello, welcome. This is Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. This is part 2B in my series on capturing the Pinwheel Galaxy. If you haven't watched part 1, the link is in the description and you can just watch the first hour and 22 minutes of that all about the capture process before switching over to this video, which will show how to pre-process in a program called CERL, which is an open source and free processing software that is available on all platforms, basically imaginable. It's basically any Linux OS, Mac OS, or Windows. So I'm going to start here. I just I've opened up the website CERL-S-I-R-I-L.org and just to show you the different download options. So if you go up here to the download menu item and then scroll down, the first thing you'll notice is that it is free, but they do accept donations via PayPal. So you can donate right there. There's a couple options right here at the start about downloading scripts and installation from sources. Just ignore these because if you keep going down, then it says choose your OS and most of these packages will include both the program and some of the scripts. So you can then click on any of these operating systems. The first seven here are all Linux operating systems, and then we have Windows, Mac OS, and then a few others. So I'm on Mac OS, I'm going to click Mac OS, and you have the option of installing via Homebrew, or you can just download the zip file and drag and drop the application to your applications folder. So that's what I'm going to do. I'll just mention here while we're on this page though, that if you're on Windows, you can just download and install their file right here, the automatic installation, or if you're on one of these Linux OS, they are mostly available through very common package managers like the advanced package tool on Debian or on Ubuntu. So it shouldn't be hard to install, I wouldn't recommend installing from source or anything like that, I would just use one of these pre-packaged things down here. Okay, so we'll get this all installed and then jump right in. Okay, I've now installed the program and opened it up, this is what it looks like when you open up the program. The first thing that I found out about it is that you can do a lot of things manually just using these tabs up here, or just like PIX Insight, people have written scripts that allow you to speed up your processing by taking care a lot of the manual tasks for you more automatically, so those are available under scripts. And the first thing that I tried, and there's more scripts available than this, but these are the ones that it comes with initially. The first thing that I tried was this DSLR pre-processing, because that's exactly what I want to use it for. And if you just click on it, instead of giving you any information or letting you pick your files or something like that, it just right away runs the script. But this is sort of cool, this is a little console here that shows you any errors or things like that. And I can quickly see by reading through this little log of what the script did that it's expecting for me to set a working directory because it couldn't find anything in my pictures file, which I guess pictures directory or folder, which I guess was the default working directory that it was expecting, then it the script failed. And I know that because down here in blue, it says script for DSLR color camera pre-processing needs four sets of raw images in the working directory within four directories biases, flats, darks, and lights. So what I've done is I've created a folder here on the desktop called M101. And inside that folder, I've put biases, darks, flats, and lights. And you can download all of this data from my website, the link will be in the description. So you can follow along with this or use your own data. But the key thing here is if you're using this script is you need a working directory or folder, and then inside that folder, you need four sub folders with these exact names lowercase, biases, darks, flats, lights. Okay, so how do we set the working directory? What we do is we go down here to this blue button that says change dur dot dot dot. And if you hover over it, the little tooltip tells me change current working directory. So that's what we want to do. I'll click on that button. I'll go to my desktop and click on M101 and click open. And here in the log, it says we changed the current working directory to users, CFIUS desktop M101. Great. So now let's try running the script again. So I'm just going to go up to scripts DSLR preprocessing. And now what happens is you can see it's immediately taking those files and doing something with them. It's reading in the bias files and gives you some information about them and it's decoding them. And right down here, it gives me a little one liner about what it's doing right now. So it is converting the raw bias files. And then down here, there's a little progress bar. And just like with deep sky stacker, if you've used that program, this progress bar does not indicate the entire process, but the current task. So the current task is reading in and converting all of the bias files. And so it's almost done with that part of the process. But as soon as it finishes that part, it will move on to the next part of the script, probably taking all those bias frames and putting them together, then moving on to the darks, and so forth. So this is going to take a while. Yep, you can see what it's doing now is it's stacking the bias frames. I know that because right there it says stack bias. And so again, this will take a while. You can watch it as it goes if you want to, or you can just leave it and come back. I don't know how long it'll take, maybe an hour or something like that, maybe longer because we are working with a lot of files. But anyways, I'm going to skip ahead in the video until this is all done and we'll see what it puts out. Okay, it has finished with the script. And it tells us right down here at the bottom of the output log that the total execution time was four hours 41 minutes and 23 seconds. So for 383 images, so for 383 images with full calibration files and everything else, that's how long it took in serial. I'm working on a MacBook Pro that's a few years old. Okay, so it finished, but where is our image? Well, if we look in the M101 folder, you can see we now have a new file called result dot fit. And the reason if you recognize this icon, this is the pics inside icon is because operating systems usually have something called the system viewer, which basically means what's the default open command. So on my system, the default for fits files is pics inside, which is why we're seeing that icon. But we can also open it back up in serial. So if we go to the file menu and choose open, this is something I find a little confusing why it's grayed out here. I feel like this should just be set to any files. But for some reason, it's set to raw DSLR camera files, you have to click in here and find fits files. And then you can select it and open it. Okay, and serial opens up two windows. We have this window, which separates out the red, green and blue channel. And we have this window, which is a composite RGB image. And we're not seeing anything right now, because this is still in its linear state.  So we can change it from linear to something else. I'm just going to choose auto stretch. Okay, and now you can see this bright green image. The reason we have this black border along the bottom and on the right is because there was some drift through the night. And serial doesn't chop that off for you. So it is all registered, but it's just leaving the full frame. And that's why we see that that edge, we can easily crop that out later. Okay, the other thing that's interesting is we've turned on the auto stretch, but nothing seemed to happen in the red channel. But let's check out the green channel. Oh, really bright. And the blue channel looks more normal. So in this case, the red channel was really weak compared to the green and the blue. That's reflective of my local light pollution. So it's nothing to be too worried about. In any case, there is a lot of things that you can do actually right in serial with this image processing menu. And we can try some of these out. It does have a color calibration and a photometric color color calibration. Let's just try. Actually, I'm interested what this is. So let's see here. Image parameters. Let's type in M101. Find pinwheel, that's correct. Our focal distance was 360 and our pixel size was 6.25 microns. Let's see what it does. Okay, it took a few minutes. I think it's done. It doesn't say done in the output log, but it did change the image. And it does look a lot better, actually. So that was well worth it. Let me actually zoom in. Wow, look at that. This really worked. I don't like the zoom feature, but that looks good. It really brought out the blue in the galaxy and the star color looks good, too. So actually, let me explain what that just did. What it means by photometric color calibration is it looks for stars in the field where they're of a known color. And then it takes those and it bases the rest of the colors based on those stars having a known color. And so it's also a feature in Pix Insight, but I didn't realize that it was here in Serial. So this is really great. I'm going to go ahead and close that. And actually, I really even just like this auto stretch. It looks really good. So let's see if we can figure out how to apply the auto stretch. I'm going to go back to linear for a second. I'm going to go up to image processing and down to histogram transformation. There's our histogram. And if I just want to apply the auto stretch to the image, I can click this button and then click apply, I guess seem to work. Wow, that's really nice. So actually, this program has turned out to be really, really great. I'm surprised I haven't used it before. The one thing I don't like about it is that the interfaces are quite clunky. I'm having trouble sort of understanding how to zoom and know which one should be on top and that kind of thing. But other than that, this program is really, really good. I don't know everything about it yet. So just bear with me. Let's try this remove green noise next. Is that of a dialogue? Maybe? There it is. Okay. This is the recommended option in most cases. Okay. I never, and I can't change the amount. Okay. Well, let's just try it. Yeah, like that. Sure. Okay, let's see what else is in that image processing menu. Oh, there's a background extraction option. Okay, let's check it out. Okay, so it's very similar to Pixinsight's automatic background extractor. Let's try it. So that's where it's placing the samples. Can we... Oh, you can also set samples manually. Left click adds samples while right click removes them. Can I just move a sample? Oh, well. Let's just try it with these, with this automatic generated samples. Apply. Close. Wow. It's pretty good.  Overall, that's quite impressive. Just want to try to see the galaxy up close. Where are you? Just zooming around and seeing all these background galaxies. There's another one. It's a little bit, it's a little bit not saturated enough for my taste, but other than that, this is really impressive. You know, I can't say I know how to use some of these other ones, so I'm going to stop there with this and we'll move on to GIMP. But really, there's actually not that much we have to do in GIMP at this point because Cyril took care of all the heavy lifting of by removing the gradient and balancing the colors. So with a, you know, really easy automatic processes. So this is really nice. I didn't realize how powerful this was. It's sort of like it has some of the best features of Pix Insight in a free program. Okay, as and for bringing it into GIMP, I don't want a fits file. I want a TIFF file. Now, you might be more familiar with like JPEG or PNG, but those reduce the accuracy down to eight bits and add JPEG is a lossy format as well. So you really want to TIFF file here for moving it to GIMP. And so I'm just going to call this M101 Cyril. It did finish. Let's see if I can open it, then it's done. Yep. Okay. So let me close out of Cyril now, quit Cyril, or maybe just have to hit the little red button. Are you sure you want to quit? Yes. Okay. Okay. And then let's open this TIFF file in GIMP. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to crop this to just this central part. There's a lot of weird stuff going on along the edges, registration artifacts and strange banding and things that we don't want. And I also feel like the galaxy gets a little bit lost when it's so swamped by this image scale. So I'm just going to open up the crop tool. It's the third row down four over from the left. And I'll zoom in here on GIMP. You do shift equals or plus to zoom in and minus to zoom out. And I'm just going to find a section like that. Okay. I'll hit return to accept the crop. And then I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate this in case I mess up anything. So to duplicate, you can just right click on the layer over here in the layers panel and choose duplicate layer, or you can go up to the layer menu and choose duplicate layer from there. I'll call this duplicated layer curves. And I'm just going to open up the curves command from the colors menu. And I'm just going to reset the black point here just by moving this the black point the shadow the point all the way over here on the zero over. And basically what that does is it resets this point as the zero point. I'll hit OK. And let's just try now applying a little bit of an S curve. So I'm going to go back to the curves command colors curves. And I'll just drop a point down here sort of in the blacks, bring that down. And then a drop a point up here on the other side of the histogram and bring that up a little bit. And you can play around with what looks good to you. It looks pretty good. Hit OK. All right. I think at this point, I might want to duplicate again. And I'm going to call this saturation. Okay, I'm going to zoom in on the galaxy. And I'm going to go back to the colors menu, go to hue slash hue dash saturation and just try bringing up the saturation value. I'm going to bring it up to I'm going to max it out to 100. I think that looks really good. You can see the blue arms of the galaxy. You can still see the nice yellowish core. That looks really awesome. Okay, I'm going to click OK. Let's zoom back out and see what it did to the whole image. It did bring out some of this color noise in the background. If that bothers you, you can definitely deal with it. Let's do this. Let's duplicate this layer again. Just right click and choose duplicate layer. And I'm going to call this mask. And what we're going to do with this mask layer is we're going to zap the color. So I'm going to go to colors, desaturate, mono mixer, just hit OK. Now we have a nice luminance mask here. And we want to make the luminance mask a little bit more aggressive. So let's bring up the levels and just do something like something like that. So what I'm doing is I'm basically just knocking out the background by bringing the shadow slider way over here. But I also brought in the mid-tone slider a little bit to the left to preserve the brightness of the galaxy and the stars. Okay, and then because I want to use this mask to target the background and protect the saturation in the background and protect the galaxy and the stars, I'm going to invert it because white selects and black protects. So we want the sky to be white and everything else to be black.  It looks like that now. And I want to apply this mask to a new layer. So let's go ahead and duplicate this saturation layer. I'm going to call it dsat bg for desaturate background. Then I'm going to select this mask just to select all. Copy it. Just do copy visible. And then I'm going to click on the dsat bg layer and right click on it and choose add layer mask. And it doesn't matter yet what I pick here. I'm just going to click add. Just do a white layer mask. Then I'm going to click on it. Just left click. And I'm going to paste. So on a Mac that's command V on Windows it would be Ctrl V. It paste in as a floating selection and we just want to anchor that down into the mask. So I'm just going to hit this anchor, this green anchor button right there. And what that did is now the mask is, that we created is now the layer mask on this desaturate background layer. So let's go ahead and turn off the visibility of the mask. The reason we're still seeing this is because I alt clicked it, but we can turn it off just like that. Okay. And one thing I'll point out here in GIMP is when you have the layer selected, you'll see a yellow dotted line around it. And when you have the mask selected, you'll see a green dotted line around it. So now with this layer mask applied, we want to select the actual image in that layer. So we want the yellow dotted line. And now let's desaturate and darken it a bit. So I'm going to go back to the colors menu, choose hue dash saturation. And I'm going to turn down the saturation and turn down the lightness. All right. This is looking really good. I think the best yet we'll see if pics inside can beat this. I'll hit OK. And this is looking good. Like I said, there's still something that's bothering me, which is this streak right here. I think what happened is something went wrong either with the flats, like I turned off the camera and the sensor got cleaned or I don't know what happened. But anyways, what happened was that there was like a dust mode and then the dust mode got streaked because of the drift in the system. So I want to fix that just by evening it out with the rest of the background. And the way we're going to do this is open up or create a new layer from what we're seeing right here. So if we go to new, if we go to layer, there's an option, the layer menu, sorry, there's an option for new from visible. So go to layer menu, choose new from visible. And it creates a new layer called visible. I'm going to rename that touch up and I'm going to add a new layer mask to the touch up layer just by right clicking and choosing add layer mask. I want to make it black. Full transparency is what it says.  So with the mask selected, I'm just going to grab my brush tool over here in the tool panel. I'm going to bring the hardness of the brush down to zero, mine already is, but if it isn't turn it down to zero.  And we're going to try to make it the right size so that it's the same width as this aberration. So right now it's a little bit too small. So I'm just going to increase the size just a tad a little bit more. There we go. And then I have white selected, that's the foreground color. And then I'm just going to draw where I see that aberration just like that. If I look at the mask now just by doing option click or alt click, that's what I drew in. Looks like I went a little bit overboard over here. So let me just try to even that out now with black. I just press D to get my black as the foreground color and I'm just going to even this out a little bit. Let's look at it again. It's looking pretty good. I just want to get a little bit of white now down here. I'm just going to hit X to switch the foreground and background color and paint that in a little bit. Okay, almost there. Painting in black a little bit right there. Okay. So now that I've painted in that mask, let's now actually click on the image part of this layer. So you should see a yellow dotted line down here. And let's go back to the colors menu and go to curves. And I'm just going to bring the curves up a little bit more until it's basically the same color as the background around it. Now you can see there's still a little bit left over where I need to paint in the mask a little bit more. So I'm going to click back on the mask. I'm going to grab my brush again. Have white selected again. And I'm going to make it a little bit smaller and just paint in those parts that I missed. Okay, that's looking really good. So I've evened out that background. Let's go zoom back out and see if we can see it. Nope. I think that really did the trick. So now I'm just going to do one final curves. So I'm just going to do another layer from visible. And I'll just call this final curves. Do colors, curves. And I'm just going to reset my black point one more time just a little bit. And just a little bit more. And then just do a slight s. Yeah. So that's pretty subtle. Let me just bring it down even a little bit more. Okay, I like that. So this is just about finding the right black level, basically. So I hit a point right here so that I wouldn't change this up here. And then I just did two little points down here in the shadows and just lowered those a little bit to just try to get this dark sky level at the right darkness. Okay, I actually think this is our best yet. I'm going to go ahead and save it. If you want to return to it in GIMP, just do save the normal save command and I guess I will. Sure, I'll just call it M one oh one zero. And GIMP. Okay, and then I do the export to save it as a JPEG. I'll just change the file ending here to JPG to do export. I'm going to do 100% quality hit export. And we can quit out of GIMP now and open up our final result. Just make that full screen. And so this is really nice by using serial to do the color calibration and stretch and background extraction. We got a lot more detail and good color out of this. So I think that I am going to probably stop doing my normal thing of doing deep sky stacker plus Photoshop and deep sky stacker plus GIMP and just switch completely to serial because it just has some killer features that are very similar to what we get in pics insight that I think everyone will really benefit from. So this has been an amazing video for me personally and hopefully you got something out of it too. All right, till next time. This is Nico Carver from NebulaFotos.com. And in just a minute here, you'll see all the people that support me on Patreon. If you want to support me on Patreon too, the link will be in the description. Thanks so much. Clear skies.