This is the generative comments call for Wednesday, September 22, 2021. And so let me know if that link works. It does. So do you want me to screen share? Is that what you. That'd be great. Hold on to get out of full screen. Hey, Mr. Caronza here and my might work better if he does it because now my screen just changed. Oh, wait, should be okay. So by screen share. And it was this over here. I just sent Stacy a link and she's screen sharing back. Oh, good. Okay, good. And oh, he recorded a video of it. That's really nice. Cool. So you can watch that video at your leisure, but that map that you see at the bottom was automatically generated with code and Miro. And Max is a mirror programmer, one of the things. So what he did was he took the transcript from our call and then tagged it up so that and because the pattern of a Thursday calls is me playing host and and calling different people into the conversation. That's what this thing looks like. Okay, I will look at it. I guess you want me to scroll anymore. I think we're good because that'll give you a chance to get familiar with it and see what happened and this feels to me like sort of the beginning of a whole bunch of stuff we could just do. And if we were smart about this, we could automate some of the interesting bits. So that, you know, once a call is done, if we like the call. Yes, I will post it right here. Boom, there you go. Sorry, I meant, I meant to do that and then I forgot. I can stop sharing. That'd be fine. Thank you Stacy. You're welcome. And so just for examples. So far through all of OGM I download calls I then up manually upload them to YouTube. I then post about them on our matter most chat I no longer post them, all the recordings to the Google group I just posted to the matter most chats where they're relevant. All of which is pretty automatable like like all that is automatable and then, and then once we have other artifacts like transcripts, we could then, you know, other people who would like to play with analytics or with it would be, it would be a trivial matter but maybe just a little too trivial to do a word cloud of each call so you could sort of see what words popped up frequently during the call or whatever else but Bentley and Pete had written utilities that will strip the just the links. The just the links out of the zoom chats, which is really handy. And Bentley's version has options where you can strip out names of who submitted them or keep those in or a couple other things I don't remember what his options are but, but he was doing that. And then I think it's possible to envision a bunch of things like that which we then, if we can do these and post the results into their generative commons then we're like cooking with gas kind of well then we're cooking with Flint and steel, at least. Yeah, please go ahead. Yeah, something that I've been thinking about this something that would be really helpful for humans is in starting a call. It's really that can be that convening question, like having a question to just come around. I think that would help in terms of finding those connections, but also at the end of a call, if we could come up with the question that was answered in the call, or more than one question. Yeah, you know, that would, because then if people were interested in that question they would know well I might be interested in looking at the call. Exactly. So a couple things. I've been lax about creating agendas for our various calls for a variety of reasons, one of which being I'm just not a good ops project management person. So always having an agenda in front of us is hard for me, although, although not impossible. And I was thinking that that process might be automatable a little bit because, because. So, let me just share screen over here just to talk through an idea, because for example here's where I found the, the, the, the mural that max had created because it was connected to two different OGM calls back. So, you know, basically here's some some prior call links but I just created this link. I just created this link here for today's call because today is, you know, the September 22 of 2021 happy, happy equinox in a couple hours. And what I what the thought I had as I created this thought was, gosh, wouldn't it be cool if this spawned an agenda page on our on the OGM wiki automatically and if my notes page down here was in fact, like the agenda page or something like that. That'd be pretty awesome and I'm not using the brain that way that the notes field is a perfectly capable text editor that in fact, and this is a little bit of a digression but I think it's actually really interesting. I'm running the latest version of the brain which is the brain 12. And between 11 and 12 he took the notes editor and he added backlinks and a bunch of other Rome like features are OAM. And Rome, the cult of Rome is like a, you know, a whole bunch of people are using Rome to do knowledge management and to build knowledge, you know, structures of different kinds, which is really interesting because that's a neighboring community that I would love to involve in what we're doing. And what if I mean, I'm not a coder and the brain is not really code programmable it doesn't really have an API or anything like that. And Stacey an API is basically a way that you can tell a program to do something so a program would publish to you a list of things that says hey, if you do if you do things with this syntax, I can crank up a new file I can post something over here I can give you results to a query whatever. The brain doesn't really have an API right now so it's not, you know, even somebody coding from the outside can't ask it or make it do things. But if it did if we were sort of in a more open version of what I'm using, then there's nothing preventing there from being an automatically generated agenda that fits neatly into a sequence and as well titled and lives in the that we can then, you know, that other people know about the existence so we could create a method for posting items to the agenda to cover during the call this is just a whole bunch of stuff we could have and do pretty automatically and then when the call is post processed and reposted to the zooms or whatever we could put it here and then I don't know if you've seen in Vincent's trove, but he's gone whole hog on events. And so when there's an event on the calendar and trove, we can embed the zoom video there as well which is pretty cool because then it's visible to different communities they can find it through trove. And he also experimented on the last call, he can embed my brain link to that calls thought in trove, and the embed works it basically plays a little frame on that page. So you can scroll down and you can see what you know the note taking I happen to do in the brain in the call and that's pretty cool. And many of the things I just said would be automated is not that you know it's not not that big a deal to do and Vincent is very open to, you know, automations and linkages and other kinds of things that that feed trove. So, sorry, so I'm talking through a whole bunch of different things, but we're not far from having some infrastructure and some automation that might make this more of a rhythm, more easy to do, etc, etc. And so, for example, an agenda could be created for this call right now at the end of last call. So the agenda wouldn't have to be created like just in time at the last minute as we walk in, it could in fact be. Oh, okay, here's the promise and so forth. Okay, and that wraps up a whole bunch of things I wanted to talk about. I also want to show the generative comments page which we'll come back to. And then there's something else I wanted to mention the slipping out of my mind right now. Oh shoot. What was the last thing I just said about when an agenda could be created. Thank you. Okay, I guess I just got it back. So I ran a podcast. Let me just screen share for a second again because I've got them all here. So I ran a podcast for nine years called the week the year 10 weekly tech call from 2004 to 2013. It was weekly for a while then it was bi-weekly but twice as long for the last couple years. I did this with Pip Coburn who was kind of my co-founder but I was almost always the host of these calls. It was audio only. So here's the weekly call archive and just like you saw here, these are some of the calls. And then the only place these calls now exist is in the Internet archive, amazingly enough, because I was paying a small amount to an Estonian or Lithuanian programmer who would post process the calls a tiny bit and then upload two versions to the archive. The reason I say two versions is my connection to the question you asked Stacey, which is that my practice during those calls which had no video and that turns out to be an important thing for what I'm about to say. Somewhere a year or two into the year 10 calls up sorry and you can means conversations about change in Mandarin which I do not speak. And since Mandarin is tonal that it's ye 10 or ye 10 and I have no idea.  But a couple years in Pip said hey why don't you do a summary at the end of our calls and say you know say what we went through. So my practice during all those calls was to take manual notes on my grid, my square rule paper, and I could take 567 pages of notes during one of our calls easily, especially when our calls were 90 minutes long at the end at the beginning they were like 45 minutes long. When it was weekly, they were 45 minutes long when it shifted to biweekly. It got longer it went to the 90 minute format that we're used to now for our check in calls here. And so I would take 567 sometimes eight pages of notes and I would circle as I went taking notes I would just make circles on it to see what the highlights were. And then at the end of the call for five to eight minutes, I would just look through my notes and read back what we did. And then, and that was good enough that we created two different podcast streams there was the full call and the summary of the call. So you could sort of taste the summary and see if you liked it and go listen to the full thing. Problem is me not being an operations guy, the link between the 10 calls and recordings and all that, and the iTunes store where you could go listen to a podcast. That link was never actually solid and never did any audience building never, never went out and tried to actually turned into a legit podcast that had an audience. I mean, we had like, you know, 7080 people that constantly came to the call the calls are really fun and fruitful, but they'd never grew. And so I put it to sleep and I guess 2013 a couple years before podcasting got hot again. I'll add that on video I can't be sitting here take like my my life is pretty complicated right now managing what's going on with zooms. And then feeding my brain during the calls which is what I kind of do instead of the manual note taking. And the way I take notes in the brain isn't quite enough for me to go back and do a summary so like, I'm not taking notes enough to do the same kind of function. And it takes a lot of brain cycles to do that function to do the note taking because I was also looking at the chat which we hosted an IRC internet relay chat. So we had an IRC channel open with a chat that was really juicy all the time. I was busy trying to fix things that broke on the free conference calm audio section where you couldn't tell where noise was coming from. And I had to periodically say hey everybody could you mute the call to do whatever it was not zoom like we're on zoom I can detect who's making noise and if it's my call I can mute them. Right so that a lot more control didn't have that in the nine years like four or five calls had to be just closed down because somebody put us on their musical hold. And we and like Vivaldi's four seasons drowned out our conversation so and if we all got off and got back in the call, it turned out we were in the same place in the call with the Vivaldi four seasons was still going. So anyway, that's like three long stories, but the idea of coming back at the end and sort of recapping is something Lauren put in front of us, and we did a couple times on a couple of GM calls Thursday calls, and we didn't make it a practice. Mostly I think because we were trying to get around the room and have everybody check in. And we usually didn't make it all the way around the room so the idea of taking an extra five minutes for check in would have meant dropping a couple more people from being able to check in, but I like the idea a lot. So that's sort of also why I suggested the idea of a question like I'm thinking like jeopardy. What is, and then, you know, describing what the fall was for you it takes a second it's one quick. Yeah. Also, the Thursday check in calls are meant to be a check in and we've played with the format a little bit and we haven't changed it very much at all. But it's hard to have a question there, although it would be really interesting. It would be really interesting to end with a question in the chat that says hey what question came up for you during this call like like what question are you what interesting question are you left with at the end of this call. So that would be a very simple thing to do and if we did it in the chat. Everybody can do it at their own at their leisure and it doesn't it doesn't require a talk time right it doesn't it doesn't need the serial talk time so that would be really simple to do. But then for calls like today, like, you know, three other days a week we have, I have standing OGM calls that are meant to be about this is the gender of comments yesterday was building OGM. And why there couldn't be a focusing question for the agenda, which is part of the agenda for those calls going in. I'm not being clear because we're talking about like different things we're talking so let me be clear. In terms of a summary, at the end of a call, what I'm saying is if almost the same way each person would say what the title of the show or the call was to put it in the form of a question. Like what what they think, if they had to say what question was answered in the call, how they would title it that's in terms of a summary, in terms of a different call, like a pop up call or a call that's not the check in call, that would be a convening question, so that anybody that has an interest that comes from any direction but is around that question, that would be what kind of connects them. So, just to make sure I get it more precisely. So if at the end of every call five minutes from the end I asked, what title would you give this call. And just let everybody riff in the chat on it and step into the conversation if they felt like it, that would that would solve the function that would do what you're looking for. Correct. This question on my mind. Yeah, just have that word question on my mind in general. Cool. Mark, does that make sense. Would you add or would you riff on that or change it or so the riff would be linking with Jack Park and basically his notion of structured conversation, as opposed to unstructured conversation. And his notion of structured comes from the IBIS people. The term IBIS conversations basically have the ability to be charted into which parts of communication are being done and it goes back to Fernando Flores and speech act theory. I'm certainly, which is going back to John Cyril as well, and other other linguistic and philosophy of language folks. But basically, can we chart our commitments to each other. So can we chart things like do we agree on this do we disagree on this is there supporting evidence is there. Evidence to the contrary. And so starting that type of kind of like metadata about communication is interesting. You know, the question that comes up for me is, you know, going in the direction of deeper philosophic questions like you know what is our relationship with language in reality in our ability to communicate with each other effectively as people, and it's mechanism mechanizability, like, yes, here are here are here are categories that we use to make commitments questions agreements. So, so again I'm riffing not not really having, you know, thought about what you're both talking about that much but but that is certainly what we do in rituals in the Catholic Church perhaps in in some of the Jewish services that I've been to. There's call and there's response there's a leader there's the the followers there's chance. Things have a pattern. They're predictable we can feel familiar and bring people into a pattern and Lauren and Charles were pointed in similar ways in some of the Kiko lab calls. How can we basically come up with light rituals that went cultish that basically could streamline communication and you know get some shared assumptions out of the way so you don't have to keep on revisiting. Interesting, but that's my riff by and that certainly it is a riff and not kind of a more considered kind of engagement. So, so thanks Mark if I may riff on your riff. So, let me go back to screen share for a second because the thing that you were just describing. There was one dead end alley that this speak to speak check theory and commitments went down and it turned into a tool called the coordinator by a company called Action Technologies. The coordinator was basically an email imagine an email system where every time you start an email you have to say, Is this a request is this a reply. It's like, what exactly is it. And the system would track all your open requests all your like like the system was almost like a little project management system behind the scenes that was tracking the status of every one of these things. And the feet that this theory of speech act theory came from Fernando Flores and a couple other people, apparently JL Austin and a few others performative utterances the language game predates it, which I forgot I put in here which is from Ludwig Wittgenstein.  And it was on, it was an untouchable thing, and it wound up being called this because it turns out that humans don't really like or naturally. The beginning of an email decide exactly what that emails purpose is going to be and we're not that concise, and very often we mix five things into one email we, we like overlap where we're subtly we're doing an indirect request so when we're asked to like, make it a formal requests like I didn't mean that. So a lot of subtlety of communication was lost, even though the directness was was supposedly good for us. I was surprised in 2007, which is many years later after the coordinator. Imagine my surprise in 2007 that some of these people have come together and are trying to float a company called for spires to inspire conspire perspire and aspire, which is basically a repackage coordinator, and they pitched me they pitched me their software and I'm like, This is exactly the coordinator isn't it like well yeah kind of. This didn't go any place either. And all of which was a dead end, but not to say that there's like a pony there's not a pony here because what you just said about keep from me visiting the same thing over and over and over again. That phrase is a major reason why OGM exists open global mind, because one of my conclusions after feeding a mind map for 23 years, and you've got experience since 1984. You don't even have a consistent memory to go to, you don't have to go back and revisit all the things because you can go back and say oh this this is what we agreed on over here. And this is the state of our knowledge of this piece over here, exactly. And over here we realize we have three big open questions and if you want to talk about one of those big open questions right now awesome let's do that. And maybe even better and richer and more equitable. Each of us would have our own perspective on those things it's not that we have to agree that there's no open issues in this dark corner over here, because that would be a good way to marginalize people who have important open questions right if there if like Wikipedia there had to be one canonical page for each important issue agreed to between large numbers of people that I think that would suck that would actually break. So this needs to, this needs to be a map or a territory that preserves our own point of view on these different issues. And that's really hard. And that brings me back to the question of how many people are willing to do that or could do that or how could we do that. And that brings me back to how few people there are, you know, as a proportion of the whole population who were obsessively mind mapping or roaming or obsidian ing or subtle castening or as a whole bunch of communities doing personal knowledge management personal knowledge graphs. I have a whole series of subcategories, all of which all of whom I'd like to invite in to our conversation as our conversation expands in order to create a shared memory of some sort. I have a naive assumption to I think two assumptions here. One of them is that for Wikipedia, most humans on earth have not edited ever a page on the Wikipedia, don't know how aren't interested they don't want to touch the thing and break it. So the Wikipedia has been done by tens of thousands of people max, right, who created this vast resource, which, you know, if half the earth's population are online, I'd be willing to bet that half of that half have touched the Wikipedia just by reading a page somewhere. It is extremely well known. It's always one of the top 10 traffic websites. It's in insane number of languages, which is why I can go to the pop world population scale and say I'm willing to bet, even in lots of different places in the world people know about Wikipedia. So, but my conclusion from that is that a few people who are pretty madly obsessed about something building an easy to use shared resource can in fact make something useful for pretty much everybody. So that that's a really important. And then my other assumption. And this one is what is this is a hypothesis to test. And I'm writing this into sort of a proposal right now is that could we do something that is one step more complicated than posting a link to Instagram or Twitter, or Tumblr or, you know, name your favorite socials, because billions of people have gotten extremely accustomed to posting lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff to these meets it's their socials, including hashtags and hashtags are metadata. They're very sophisticated metadata and people are really clever and how they use hashtags, like really clever. And that is a very bright spot for me because for me it's like, okay, so could I crawl inside the head of the, the Instagram thing that just before you post. Could you add one more thing that gives you the visual richness of a semantic map or where does this go in my history, or I don't know exactly how to even say it. I can invent this I'm pretty sure, because, because if there's something simple, almost as simple as Instagram, that gives us the semantic richness of a shared memory. Then we have a whole bunch of people who are contributing to the shared memory. Then this thing sort of takes off a lot faster than if you have to be like a monk, a cultish monk who's mastered a special tool like kumu or the brain, or even Rome, which is just an outliner with backlinks but it's still a specialty tool, right. Right now, right now in order to feed the fungus, you've got to be a monk. Right, you've got you've got to master a tool, and the tools don't even talk to each other.  But in a world where it was much easier to do the gesture, the speech act of whatever that that is connected and weaves, weaves whatever just happened whatever you're staring at whatever, whatever insight you just had puts it in the right place so that it's findable. That is cool and that's right where I'm aiming. And so, and so one of the things I say is that we're as a civilization we are very easy to spin right now, really easy to manipulate right now the politicians, because we keep going over and over the same things and Donald Trump was the perfect example of this. And one of my wish list items was if the press corps had a persistent memory someplace. And if they agreed they said, here's a list of six lies that Donald Trump is always saying in every press conference every every time he speaks he says these six slides. We make a pact, a suicide pact that the moment he touches any one of these six and we'll show him this list, he'll know that he'll know the list. And we'll say the moment you touch any of these six third real topics we will turn off our cameras and leave the room together, which cuts off his oxygen, because Trump understood that none of the news entities could ever cut off the camera that this model depended on showing the circus he was putting on for everybody. And so, and so maybe a shared memory might have been one mechanism to help shut off the oxygen to a very, very toxic and poisonous mechanism that was eating our society and still is right now. Right. So that's one of my naive hopes about how about how our shared memory could be helpful. And, and when you say testing. So what are the propositions that might be testable where it comes to some of these shared memory ideas. So, I read it just I'll post it. Let me just find it in my brain and then I'll post it. Actually, let me go to empty T minimum viable testing is what the thing is called. This is the article I read. I will copy this link right now. Actually, let me go back to minimum viable testing. So, Stacy are you familiar with minimum viable product. Okay, so there's a whole thing called startup culture, or lean startup, which has come out of Silicon Valley and a whole bunch of people making a lot of startups and they were like, how do we automate this process how do we, how do we like do this more efficiently and minimum viable product says, Hey, at the start of your startup, try to put up your service but in this thinnest bare bones fashion. What is the minimum viable product you could possibly ship so forget about the all singing all dancing brain or browser or email client or whatever. What is the least you could do that proves you can do it. Okay, and that's called minimum viable product and it's it's worked really well like like that gets people somewhere. The problem is that this assumes that what you're designing is your whole product, except some some some piece of your whole product and that's the goal of the minimum viable product. The minimum viable testing says, Hey, the thing you think you're inventing probably has a couple of assumptions buried in it. Could you test those assumptions separately in throw away experiments to figure out if there really is a market there for the really is a thing there. And the test doesn't have to look like your product at all. So you have to be able to kind of liberating yourself from designing the product early and saying, let's test a couple of our assumptions early. And so this article here the minimum viable testing process which was written by Gagan be yummy and published in first round review first round capital is a venture firm. And so I read this and I then took. Okay, there's an MV minimum viable testing framework list the risk is assumptions test your assumptions through tests. Here's the three step MVP process. This is all what I got from the article. And so this is my way of memorializing and making more useful what was inside of this article. And if we were lots of us doing this, that could be pretty useful. So now let me get the link and share it with you all. Assumption right there. Yes, if there are lots of us doing it. It could be blank, pretty useful that. Thank you for helping Stacy and I understand more about the minimum viable test, but it is those propositions to test that I'm looking to. Okay, so exactly. So, one proposition to test is, is there something slight one step more complicated than Instagram that would lead people to create enough semantic metadata to give us brain like or Rome like context. So, I would challenge in a productive way that we need to work on that propositional statement. Of course. That's my best framing all by myself it hasn't been tested by anybody so. I guess Instagram is, is actually a honest question, because I've actively avoided it. Now, now that's, it's almost a heresy of of of Ludditism in today's world it's just, you know what, I don't want to deal with Instagram. Please thank you. You know, I'm sure it can do plenty without me and I can do without it. So, as easy as Instagram is something I don't actually understand. So briefly, I have an Instagram account I barely barely barely use it I really don't like it. I'm all over the Twitter is I love Twitter I have I'm Twitter user number 509 by the way, like I was the 509th person to sign up for Twitter. And I don't have zillions of followers or anything like that I don't know that I've used it well but I love it and I love, I love how I use it. And then there's, you know, Tumblr, and now tick tock I can't stand tick tock but boy, these things are taking off. Like, tick tock view viewership numbers are approaching YouTube viewership numbers right now, which is to me a mindblower, because the number of humans that sit in front of YouTube and spend a lot of time watching videos is huge that's like a gigantic number. And that tick tock is getting close to that is amazing. So I'm using Instagram as a placeholder for for shit that's barely use useful but really popular that if we added a tiny thing to it if we put like a bolt on the side might actually create great social value. And so the thing I'm looking for from Instagram is popularity, and it's ease of use to this point like like lots of people know how to take an Insta photo and what I didn't realize was the Insta app is not a camera app, you have to take your photo and something else and then use Insta to upload it. What kind of crazy on it either so I don't I'm with you Mark. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but like Instagram is gigantic Instagram is also owned by Facebook so it's part of the Facebook conglomerate. But you know, their user numbers are gigantic. So that's what I'm looking for from using Instagram as an example. So this is a pattern. Which was Instagram has roughly one billion monthly active users. So, but this is a pattern that was brought up by my Pete Kaminsky and two different calls.  Right. So, so that, you know that Venom diagram or that plane or whatever that impedance mismatch Stacey these are technical terms that might be a little weird but basically when one abstract concept doesn't map over to another abstract concept kind of like mixing metaphors in programming. That's sometimes called an impedance mismatch, which ties to electricity. In a way I can, I can't yet explain. But anyway, the building a community of practice that basically is able to use tools in common.  Augmenting human communities. How can Jerry Stacy and Mark work together in ways that Jerry Stacy and Mark could not do five minutes ago, or, or, you know, when we go off alone, we can't do. We can't continue to do because we're not together, or or we're not. We can't be getting back to Pete's point. And a point I try to stress is that the training that angle Bart talks about, and the amount of time that humans need to be able to grok something, and especially grok something in concert. It's something that I think we should look at as a resource rather than, oh my God, we can't do this because most of the world won't won't really try to summarize this a wonderful young girl was looking at my mimics, and she said this will never fly. It's all about thinking and people don't want to think. Now, the question that you brought up Jerry the assumption that I'd like to test is, are there mindless kinds of activities. That people can make with that one bolt on their behavior. Less mindless. And in that aggregate add to the aggregate knowledge of humankind, or is it basically just data to sell you stuff. Or as as I love what Bruce just says, it makes the internet more creepy. And so that I'm trying to isolate that kind of propositional test that you wonderfully bring up with this minimal viable test idea.  And Stacy jumping a few if you want to jump in and we're just kind of like batting the ball back and forth here in a really nice way. So several things. So back in 9495 I realized I hated the word consumer smartest thing I've done for 30 years is pay attention to that word and its effects on society. I realized that we had consumerized our lives and we were all being treated as mere consumers instead of as citizens. When you do that it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. And so it's really easy to say, people just want to stay home and be couch potatoes they want to veg out look how many tiktok videos they're watching what it's really really simple to slip in and say people are too done to do this they're never going to do this. And then I've, then I discovered and this may just be a naive belief of mine but it's a belief of mine, that you can, you can talk to somebody who you think is kind of stupid and then, once you find the thing they're passionate about baseball cannabis, what they're like a genius, and they can tell you statistics they know they understand stats, they can they can argue for this team should have fired this manager because this this and this and this they have they have an idetic memory of snapshots of moments that prove some thesis about some player I don't know what it is right, but once you tap into something where somebody has a passion, and it can be the most trivial thing in the world. Yes, you can you can suddenly see that they're not dumb, they're just interested in this little thing. And, by the way, my own, I'm bringing in the first thesis.  I was in a completely different thing which was a week after Hillary lost the election to Donald Trump I realized that I had set aside, all of my wishful thinking about how to redesign the world on a basis of trust, I had set all the side all the that aside unconsciously, as I voted for what I was hoping to be the first female president United States, because I realized that Hillary Clinton was a protector of the status quo, not a big change artist she wasn't going to go in and cause wholesale change.  So I had a I had the same.  And under yes was Bernie and Donald, and under no where all the other candidates, and that flow chart was right. And he was like that like a lot of Bernie people went over to Trump because they saw that Bernie didn't win the nomination, and that the system was in fact fundamentally broken. And I believe that a lot of smart people voted for Donald Trump because he was a fire ship.   Right. So, Trump was a fire ship being aimed at the system, which is broken. So this is a couple different aggressions, but I also believe that once people start to get a sense of agency and the words sort of the sense of agency is really important here. I've had several conversations with my buddy Marie Beard about this and other sorts of things around education and so forth. And this sense of agency is incredibly important in her worldview. It's like once kids get a sense of agency, you can turn them loose they're good but you have to protect that sense of agency and nurture that sense of agency and then they're often running the consumerization that has happened to humans has removed our sense of agency.  Right. Whereas, a citizen is interested in building stuff with each other sharing stuff with each other oops one shared car gets rid of 13 purchased cars that's bad for the economy stop the car sharing thing. And all that factors in here. So I have a belief that we can tap week that the experience of building a shared memory is one aha kind of experience that lets people feel a sense of agency. And I use Wikipedia all the time as an example of this. Like, I ask audiences who's use the Wikipedia, all the hands go up. Who remembers the first time they realized how the Wikipedia works and like 50% of people hold their hands up and I'm like how did you feel at that moment and I wrote a post about this called the two oh ships. Right, and people go through two predictable responses to things like Wikipedia and think systems designed from trust.  This is the stupidest thing anybody's ever invented. There's no way this could work.  And then many people leave and they're like I'm not even touching it this is unreliable not going to go there, but most people slip through and start looking at it. And then they discover that there's a there's a Wikipedia page for every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that the and that the pages are actually really deep and good.  And then I think this is just my amateur theory of no proof points for this, but I think that people start going that was cool how do I get more of this. How did that work. And how do I get more of this and nobody knows because nobody understands the general principles that are happening. And the principles of Wikipedia are all about trust they're like, Yes, we leave the key in the door because you want the people who are passionate about anything to find their way to the thing they have passion about and go contribute to the shared thing that's in the generative comments. The principle of Wikipedia is that it's an encyclopedia. It's not allowed to have an editorial point of view. It isn't designed to preserve individual perspectives or other sorts of things it's meant to be a collective asset, which is great it does it does its job really well. But how do we get how do we layer stuff on top of it in ways that are fruitful for for humans is kind of where I'm heading. And so, so Mark, I totally agree and I think that I think that that that gradient between things that are popular but useless and and unpopular but very useful. I'm very interested in where those things touch. Right, because I've been using I've been addicted to a geeky tool for 23 years that very few like the brains perennial problem is getting people to stick to it and use it. Yeah, it's in the boundaries. It's in the in between zero and the one a liminal spaces. Yeah, we have we have a zero we have a one. And that's digital. But there's an in between. So, boy, what you're saying is is useful. Small, small added note, if you go look at any highly popular online game.  And there's a bunch of people who really know it to the point where there's like lots of money now floating around in this as a sport, right. And that is another example of when people find something that that they're passionate about they're pretty damn smart.  And you're muted, do you want to come back in. I think he's answering somebody else. Okay, good. Cool. And I've got to stand up for a sec. Actually, you know, I was typing a phrase. I think it's something that they're passionate about. And boy, I've even, you know, I've still misspelled it, but it takes time to type out in one's notes. Yes, right down. Longer terms, so shorter terms tend to get captured. I think it's just experience.  And I brought this up in one of the OGM calls that it's an us against them.  Sometimes within a couple hours of each other.  One of the questions that could come up that I am getting from the theme of this call is trust versus consumerism. And I certainly think that can be refined. But basically, when we have a simple benefit for ourselves and can integrate that into the fabric of of daily life. Then, let me step back a second. Sure. I'm trying to remember what that notion was not a fine art, but of low art, I think. I think I called it low art. It's not that it belongs in the museum but an art that basically gives a quality of experience to our daily lives. That's not a acute experience that takes us away from a daily lives, but actually makes our daily lives richer. And we need to go away to a museum as much to see this great experience even though great experiences are are absolutely fantastic we do need those experiences, but what do we do in the chronic experiences. I took an architecture psychology of architecture course where we talked about the difference between an acute experience that happens.  You know, but that's the level of attention that someone else can give to a product that improves our daily life in some in some way that we unconsciously are able to improve our lives by say drinking water as opposed to drinking coke. And it's time for me to let Stacey have the last word. No, I just when you said a simple benefit for ourselves. I think that's really key. And for those people that Jerry that you referenced that would never think of doing any, the simple benefit for them is that they feel as if somebody is hearing them.  Yep. Yep. And also, if it's functionally useful for them. So, so Klaus is running a project on community food systems like man, if we managed to sort of create some collective wisdom and leave it at hand. And it was insanely useful for new farmers were trying to figure out how to make a go of it, and that this that this wisdom connected them up to sources of financing or resources that they didn't know about or do it yourself instructions for how to do something that they actually really need, you know, there's the sort of semi documentary the the biggest little farm, which is pretty good, except at one point, the guy acts almost as if he discovers that ducks love snails and slugs. He's got a snail and slug problem on his farm, and they're just like everywhere they're eating everything. And suddenly, voila, guess what, ducks just like gorge on these things. Well, this has been well known around the world for a really long time. You go to China this they got, they've got herds of ducks that run all over the place partly because they like to eat duck but they use them in this way. So, that that I just use that as a tiny negative wisdom that ought to be propagated and easily at hand when you when you have a problem or situation, and a lot of these little aha moments are very contextual. Like, you don't really care about a large flock of ducks unless you've got a farm and a slug problem. Right, or you're raising ducks for for for their meat which hopefully we stop like killing animals for meat soon someday. But, but I think a piece of this is just about like making. I'm, I'm, I'm recently particularly interested in how to and I don't know why even the right word is I call it how to instrument information so that it's more useful. It turns out that instrument is probably the wrong word entirely, but what I mean is at my example comes from one of the pattern languages that that is in one of our neighboring communities so there's a, there's a pattern language called liberating structures, which is all about group process and if you're a facilitator, it was invented by a bunch of black belt genius facilitators, and they're trying to distill their wisdom which is what pattern languages do. And so one of the patterns in liberating structures is called one two four all.  Pair them up, put them in fours and then come back to plenary come back to everybody. Today, the ideas will be juice here they will have met more people it's a really nice group process, and by instrumenting this to be useful I mean one to four all lives in a book, which words trapped by digital rights management. It lives on a web page where it's sitting on a web page waiting to be discovered, but it could be a zapplet. Zoom just launched. And one of our friends Ross may feel that is now at zoom in charge of this project, zoom launched zaps or zapplets I'm forgetting which is what they're called little apps that click into zoom. So imagine, imagine a zoom app that implements one two four all and implements a little bit of facilitation genius. It's like, you're in the middle of running a meeting and zoom you're like gosh I could use some group process and somehow you talk to a little chat bot.   Okay that was two minutes now and watch your phone and then all of the all of the crusty stuff that it's just software it's really easy to do could be done by a zapplet. So, how do we blather rinse repeat on that process on all of the juicy wisdom in the world. You are also describing not to wear at the same time. How do you mean, it's for, you know that for it's the, and I hate to use that term, but that kind of control in interaction is welcomed by people who are familiar. With the process and benefit and people who are unfamiliar with that it's like, I don't want the machine to tell me what to do. It's not so I want to leave things at hand as openly and customizably as possible I don't want to tell people what to do at any point. But, but if you were having trouble breaking through with an idea or something you wanted some ways to do that. I want an easy way for you to discover, here's three different things you could try right now. And then I want it really simple to implement those one of those three ideas as you choose to do it, but I'm not trying to impose this process on anybody I agree. Anyway, are we at the end of the call. If we'd like to wrap it can wrap I mean, I could keep I could do this all day but we should probably get back to our days. I simply need to take what others call a bio break. If this continues to 830 or be happy to, again, join next week. We could also pick up later Stacy how you feel. So much of what you're saying is like over my, you know, it's not my subject area so I'm still trying to figure out after years already other groups. What is it they're looking to do. And because I'm coming from the I'm coming from the motivational point you know like what would cause me to use something. So it's again, and I also I'm looking at the people problems of just people working together and collaborating. So for me, I still like this idea of starting with a question, because that that keeps that choice, but it also keeps a boundary. And I mean this is just what I did when I first came on Facebook, like on my page, I would ask questions, and they would be open ended questions and by. First of all people would respond you know I would see another group say we're complaining about engagement. I had lots of engagement, because the questions were worded in a way that your answer would reflect where you're coming from. Sometimes people will say, Well, do you mean this or that. And I was like, Well, what do you think, because it was all about I want to hear what you're motivated to speak on. So it's a little, it's a little hard for me to integrate everything. That makes sense. And what and the kind of the way you were asking questions was sort of a facilitation skill. I met a guy recently who wrote the book, the book of questions I think I mentioned him a while ago. So he's the author of the book of questions and he's, you know, done well from the royalties of that he has some spin offs of it you know questions for families questions for kids whatever. And he has kind of an algorithm for how do you ask a question that won't get you down a political or religious rat hole, but it's still a challenging and interesting question. And I'll make one up but you know, if you could add 20 years to your life but you had to give up X, would you, which way would you go. Right, or if you could add 20 years to your life but other people would would lose a year, like, but 20 other people would lose a year would you do it. Right. And that's, that's a really interesting sort of moral ethical practical kind of question, and he's got millions of them. And he's basically right now launching an app that does this where you can create questions for your dinner party for your conversation with your partner or whatever. It's an art form. And it's an art form makes such a difference. And so you have the sensitivity to understand that many people don't. How do we bring that wisdom that insight a little bit closer to more people. That's a good question. I mean I'm with Mark in terms of hating that we're so divided, and I do spend.  I can't find the right words. How much cognitive dissonance do they have that's that's the best way to say that. And that goes across, you know that in every group it's not that you know liberals are less cognitive, you know, no, they're just as bad. Not just as bad because they tend to be more no but seriously they do tend to be more for education and that in itself has some underlying, you know, stuff going on. Exactly. So yeah this was, this was interest I like hearing it because some of it settles in even though I couldn't explain it. Yeah, still have a, I'm getting closer but I still would like to. There's a couple of people like I would like to just watch you talk to like I have a couple of other people in mind that I would just like to observe a conversation that I wouldn't necessarily understand the specifics, but it would help me to understand other things. Does that make any sense. Totally. Does that make any sense. Cool, I think Mark has done well done well to do his bio break, which is great. And I'm, and I'm realizing I should actually get back to writing a proposal I have to write so we should probably wrap the call. I'm just waiting for Mark to come back. Are you interested at some point in having that pop up call that Bentley also expressed an interest for. And I'm actually having a call with Allison tomorrow so I'll mention it to her as well. Sounds great. Do you mind sending an email describing the call to me and the Bentley and then we can just use that to pick a time. Sure. Sure, I'm just going to use one question. Sounds great. That'll work just fine that should be that should be good. I'm having conversations with Wendy Elford what's happened to my video I don't know but not Wendy Elford, Wendy McLean about her visual idea, which is much more complicated than I thought and she has a eight page for which has a particular kind of what I would call a mandala. So it's a, it's a semi fixed kind of directional information diagram based on Cohen centric circles. That's my first impression. It's deeper than that but I haven't dropped it yet. And I'm meeting with Julian Gomez as well. Who has some kind of 3D kind of thing, which I'm, I don't know the least thing about but hope to understand and certainly this was a good conversation. Thank you Stacy. And certainly there's a lot that we've left untouched. But, you know, step by step one thing I heard and I don't remember if it was an OGM call, or it was a different venue but we all want community but God people. I know it's frustrating. I wanted to go ahead. I wanted to add one thing that I just remembered because back when you were talking about trust and all that kind of stuff and consumer, like, I can go way deep on these topics and these are passion topics for me, and I don't bring them to OGM that much that often. And I'm busy trying to figure out what role these things play in the larger picture but I have a what you know the website designed from trust calm I own and there's a couple things on there like the two oh shit is is an essay that I posted on that website, but you know there's a whole bunch of examples of design from trust in the world. And it's under a thought that has more things connected to it so examples of the relationship economy and action because in 2010. If you had asked me what I did I would have told you that I'm exploring the relationship economy, and I realized only later that much of that work was really about trust. So, you know, nonviolent communications is a nonviolent social action but peer to peer learning open content micro finance. And relationships bring happiness etc all of these things relate to these things in action so anyway, I can, I can go on for hours about this and I'm busy trying to figure out which parts and how much to bring into which conversations in what way because one of my beliefs is that design from trust is a way that people can experience a sense of agency. Because when you trust them again, but what we've done is we stopped trusting people we've built institutions that are coercive and large ways. Because we don't trust everybody so we have to limit everybody's behavior so they do the same thing and do it predictably. And then, when you trust people to like hold each other and be responsible. Good things mostly happen, and and people get the sense of agency. Another example of design from trust is open space have either we've been to an open space meeting. So, so I took a by some weird thing I brought myself in the summer of 92 or 93. I took a class from Harrison Oh and the guy who invented open space. And then, like a decade earlier, he had worked for a year on a chemistry conference that had white papers and keynote speakers and and you know side panels and all this. And he realized at the end of the conference that he just poured his life energy into realize that at the end of the conference that the best part of the conference was the coffee breaks and the hallway conversations. And so he invents open space which is a way of turning the hallway conversations into the conference. And I'm a trained open space facilitator. You, you convene a group you have a focusing question something you're trying to answer. And then you spend 20 minutes at the beginning introducing the process which is counterintuitive and says hey, I'm going to ask all of you to come in and tell us what we should talk about what are the topics that matter to answer this question together. And then you're going to take your question posted on the schedule, which has rooms and times like one hour, one hour slots over over today, and an open space could run three full days. That's a typically an open spaces it's like a three day process. I've run a one hour open space. But, but then you explain the law of two feet butterflies and bumblebees and a bunch of other sorts of things and the law of two feet says, if you're in a conversation and it's not working. Then you get up and go somewhere else because your, your job is to find your way to the place where your interests and talents are best used in this whole series of conversations. And like, you give people permission to go release their genius into the space. And I, I though the one hour open space I did was with the government of Singapore at a conference on national security and terrorism. And the guy I was busy organizing this this with at one point sent me back an email, his name was Patrick Nathan. And he sent me back an email that said, Well, how about if we do this and this and this. And I, and I wrote him back and I said, We could do those things, but it would no longer be anything like open space. And then I explained a little bit about the trust thing. And then his next email back to me was like, Oh God, okay, I get it. And, and what we ended up doing was was pretty good. Like, like on the trust vector in Singapore, which is a high control society. You know, he was making a big leap and it was a big deal, but it was really cool. It was totally fun. What you just, I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. And what you described, that's exactly why I want that pop up call starting with, what are the things we want to measure that would determine how sustainable or grivable a project was. And the hope is that after that, there would be different calls that would veer off, you know, for each one of the, what would the word, each one of what are we measuring what are the sub themes or variables or whatever. Yeah, that would then become its own call. So it's the same idea. Cool. That's great. So if you'll send a note to me and Bradley, like presenting the pithiest version of your question, then we'll set up a call and invite everybody else who wants to show up and on our way. Sounds good. Sounds great. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye.


You know, so the biggest problem everyone to doing this on zoom is that if this were not on zoom and you're not an undergraduate you'd have cold beer this evening in the open house, but that will have to wait for another day. My name is Jeff ball and I'm at the Steyer Taylor Center and I'll just be really brief I'll try to do this in less than two minutes. My background actually is as a journalist. I came to Stanford nearly 10 years ago after having spent a bunch of years writing for a newspaper about about climate change as a business issue about the movement of money around the world and the extent to which that movement of money was affecting corporations and industries and geopolitics, and at the end of the day the environment. So that's what's most interesting to me is is is looking at how money is moving. And what that means for kind of who's winning and losing in the economy, and what that means ultimately for the relationship among nations and for the climate on the work I'm doing here has almost exclusively to do with China, and more specifically has to do with the investment in infrastructure. So, I've taught a class that that is called at the law school policy lab. And that's been for the last two quarters. For the next quarter, I'll be working on this research with a number of students as independent research. So there won't be a class but if this is really interesting to you can let me know. And the research has as its goal really two things in 30 seconds one is the creation of an amalgamated data tool that allows us to compare the carbon intensity of the infrastructure that various Chinese entities are financing in emerging economies around the world with the carbon intensity that non Chinese entities are financing around the world and there's a lot to dissect in that. But suffice it to say that we're pretty convinced that this is a pretty new area of a new way to look at this work that data thus far hasn't been able to look at this stuff in this way. And at the end of the day, the extent to which in infrastructure that's being invested in emerging economies around the world is dirty or clean will do more than almost anything else to determine the trajectory of climate change. And then what we're doing based on that data is a whole robust series of pieces of writing about mapping the relationships in those flows among companies and among countries to determine whether any of this is enough to move the needle on climate. I'm done. Hi everyone. I am my name is Esther Choi and I am a research fellow at SFI working on blended finance. For those of you who are not familiar with the term that blended finance is a strategic use of public and philanthropic capital to catalyze additional private investments. In SFI last year, I came and coming from the Green Climate Fund, which is an operating entity of the financial mechanism of the NFCCC so happy to talk about that experience as well. Today I'll be highlighting some of the follow up research that I'm doing after the scoping paper that we published on blended finance, which is available on the SFI websites. Proposes possible research agenda on the finance that includes first of matchmaking platforms that connect different stakeholders to accelerate the deal sourcing and project financing processes for kind of projects in developing countries. And second, like Tom said earlier, in that country case studies that can complement the currently largely top down globally situated landscape analysis. So I'll be highlighting these two projects in the breakout session and hope to see some of you there. I'm kind of like a browsing through who's joining us and then you know I see a lot of you know familiar faces from the seminar session of finance and investment seminar that I'm leading this quarter and also last quarter so hi everyone. It's a little weird, you know, waving my hand to empty space. But for those of you who are not familiar with me. My name is so young and I am leading financial innovation studies at SFI, and I'm, I'm also a research director of social finance at Stanford global project center. And my background is a development banker. I was actually in the field sourcing develop deploying investment capitals to companies and infrastructure projects around the world. And also I've been working with a lot of you know development agencies, you know, to, you know, launch non financial supports, most of times, it's policy and regulations and etc. And then my background, you know, academic background is also very diverse, you know, econ, public policy engineering, maybe next is my MD degree or something.  So what I provide through my research is I discover what is sustainable finance and why it matters, you know, to whom and when it gets matters, mostly, and how can investors and business leaders can approach it. So what source is available for them to do so, or what else is what what else is should be available, but not available today. So this is something that I explore in my research. During my breakout session, I want to touch briefly upon, you know, those three research pillar that I set for my own research. One is, you know, as a like very traditional like banker or business managers and so on, you know, what are the the risk and return opportunities of, you know, like considering those environmental or ESG factors.  And the third one is, you know, like those advanced data technology, you know, how can we leverage that to better, you know, better manage your climate risks or, you know, like those ESG integration, which I'm going to talk more detail in the breakout session. So those are, you know, brief highlight of my research. And as I mentioned, this topics are also being covered, not only by my research, but all of our research fellow and also some, you know, like a leading scholars around the globe is coming to our weekly seminar series, which is CE 257 or 157. It's given every year, every fall. And we also provide a monthly seminar when it's not, when it's off season, which is winter and spring. So if you're interested in, you know, like, in this topic, any of this topic, please join us anytime. Hi, I'm Mark. I have been with the Steyer-Taylor Center the shortest period of time with anyone. I'm, I think, four months into this. My background is, I've spent about 25 years in the institutional asset management world. Recently, I've done a, I sort of operated the overlap of hedge fund investing, private equity investing in insurance companies. I am doing work on my researches on how institutional investors should think about integrating risks of climate change into portfolio management and portfolio construction. The areas in which I'm working are around, sort of, call it public equity portfolio management and portfolio construction strategies and risk management. Some, some work in how to think about integrating longer term insurance risks related to climate change into decision making by investors and insurance companies, and then thinking about the some complicated issues around illiquid investment decision making with difficult time horizon problems. So that's sort of an application of options pricing theory to private equity investing around, you know, very large unknown risks in the future. And climate change is an important one of those. So I will not use my entire two minutes to allow this to go forward. There we go. Hello, David Rajan. I'm also a fellow at SFI, I, and a principal at Rocky Mountain Institute. My focus is largely on transition finance and policy. And I suppose the best way to put it is, if you're interested in the question of why it is that clean energy is so cheap. And still fossil fuel is being burned in plants across the globe. I want to know why that's still happening and why the transition isn't happening and what can be done about it. That's what I work on working on basically practical mechanisms that can be deployed policy finance regulatory mechanisms that can hasten that transition across the globe. And examples of this include a tool called securitization, which is helping to facilitate the transition of coal plants and other fossil infrastructure across the US today and is helping do that in a way that reduces customer costs and addresses just transition challenges associated with the communities that are negatively impacted. And we're trying to think about what's working, what's not, and what can be generalized about the experience in the US and the transition to the rest of the globe. And happy to talk more about all of that. Hi everyone. My name is Girish. I'm a fellow at SFI. I, before this I was also a fellow at the Star IntelliCenter. I'm similar to Alicia. I'm a Stanford alum. I did my PhD in 2007. And just before coming to Stanford, I was at this think tank that Tom had founded, Tom Heller had founded called Climate Policy Initiative that I worked with today. In the recent past, my work has mostly been on energy policy and finance, while being focused on India. I worked on policy for India's renewable targets, electric vehicle targets, and as well as battery targets. I also worked on financial instruments for catalyzing flow of private capital. And more recently, I ended up working on something that overlaps with today's work, which is a retirement of coal plants. And that's connects with what is going to be the focus of my work for the next year and hopefully we can talk more about it in the breakout rooms. So the idea of transition finance. And there are two connected projects. One is a project on framework for transition bonds. And the basic idea there is in this framework is to not only provide differentiated signaling to investors on grades of transition finance. But also make sure that the so called greenwashing doesn't happen, which is connected to what so young is also working on. So as we're talking about this whole issue of transition finance and grades of transition finance. Then the issue is how do you define these grades and this is very, very intimately connected to what we call transition pathways to stated climate targets. So then it becomes very, very key that we're able to not only create targets for for entities on these climate pathways or the transition pathways but also measure progress towards those commitments. And one way to do this to define these transition pathways is through emission profiles over time, which is mostly carbon emission profiles. And this is where the second project comes in for the next year, which is to develop a framework of scope three emissions, which has to do with emissions throughout the supply chains for business entities and that has proved to be a very horny horny problem. And, and the idea is to kind of hopefully crack it a little bit. I'll stop here and hopefully I can answer more questions in the breakout rooms.


April 22nd with our special guest, Amherst Sustainability Coordinator, Stephanie Ciccarello. Welcome, Stephanie. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Brie. Happy to be here. And happy Earth Day to everybody and to both of you. Happy Earth Day. This is like Stephanie's number one holiday of the year, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, we appreciate you joining us today. In a moment, we are going to ask you to introduce yourself. And before we do that, we're going to have Paul give any general town updates he might want to share. Sure. Thanks. And thanks for being here, Stephanie. Happy Earth Day to everyone. So if this is your star turn in about 10 days, we're going to have the star turn for our finance department because that's when we deliver the town's annual budget, which includes the capital improvement program. And so that will be delivered to the town council on May 3rd with an exciting new presentation, exciting new budget format, all kinds of things happening under our new finance director, Sean Mangana, which is very exciting. There's been a lot of work by a lot of people to get to this point. Some, you know, we're still a lot of work to be done. And Brie, I was aware of that, is part and parcel of pulling this all together over the next 10 days, basically. So that's going to be the big thing that we're focused on over the next week and a half. And once that gets delivered to the town council, it moves to the finance committee. And they go through pretty much twice a week meetings to go through department by department every recommendation or they make a recommendation to the full town council, which in June, we'll take it under consideration. And they need to approve a budget, a balanced budget by June 30th. So that's that's the plan of action for that. And that's, so that's taken up a lot of our time, among other things that are happening. All right, thanks for the updates, Paul. I would love for Stephanie to introduce herself to our audience, if you would. Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Stephanie Ciccarello. I'm the sustainability coordinator for the town of Amherst, and I'm housed in the conservation department. And how long have you worked for the town? If you feel like divulging that? If you want more, well, well, technically, I've worked for the town for going on 24 years now, but officially 21. It'll be 21 in July, July 1st. And why officially 21 and not 24? Was there a? Oh, that's a long. I had quite an interesting entryway into working for the for the town. I started very part-time inspecting silt fences for construction projects that the conservation commission was overseeing. I had been working for a wetland consulting firm, and it was during one of the economic downturns. So there was a real lapse in building and construction projects. So I was actually laid off along with a senior staff person from the firm I was working for. And this was just one of those opportunities that presented itself to at least have some part-time work. And I was a consultant at the time. So that's why those three years, those first three years are kind of as a consultant. And I started inspecting the silt fences five to 10 hours, and that led to attending conservation commission meetings, which then started to lead to more hours, you know, to 15 hours, and then ultimately to 18 hours. And I was there for a while. And at 20 hours, I was made a permanent part-time employee, but that was sort of a few years in. So actually that those first three years. So I was a consultant. And then we created the position of wetlands administrator that had been an assistant conservation director, but they eliminated that position. And so there was really only a conservation director and staff, a land manager, and then the wetlands administrator position was created at that time. But that doesn't say how I got to hear. It's always interesting to hear how the people's pathway into local government, which is something, you know, Breonna and I talk about, and she's been very involved in encouraging people to seek a career in local government and people come in it in different ways, you know, and yours came in. That's a really interesting path through the consulting world to part-time work because of economic necessities. Then you proved yourself and grew into a bigger role. That's really interesting. Right. Yeah. It was, you know, I really, I didn't apply for technically at least coming in. I didn't apply for job at the town. That just was sort of a, you know, inspect inspecting cell fences was not something that was being advertised at the time, especially back then. It's not something you would have advertised for. So it was just like, who do you know that can do this? And so I was available. And I said, sure, I'm happy to. But it did grow into a role. And then from that role, we had an intern, there was a program that the then director Pete Westover had participated in from an organization called Ickley, which was the Cities for Climate Protection Program. And so we brought in an intern to do a baseline greenhouse gas emissions analysis. And when she was done, it just kind of left the town with starting this process that wasn't going to necessarily move forward. So I asked if there was a way I could have a role in helping with that. And then we created the position of energy task force coordinator because at the time, this intern had created an energy task force to work on the issue. But then she left and there was this group of people with no one to sort of work with them. So I stepped into that role. So then we created another position that was, but this was all part time. I was for both positions, I was only part time like at 24 to 28 hours per week doing both for about nine years or so. And how did that transition into what your current role is? And can you describe a little bit about, I know it's a lot of things, but is there a little description you can give about what your current role is and does? Well, the sustainability coordinator position evolved because we had developed that climate action plan that energy task force group had created a climate action plan that was released back in 2005. And so I was sort of supporting that work very part time, but over time, there became more opportunities within at the state level actually, and even at the federal level to do more work addressing climate change. And climate change sort of at the beginning, this was kind of at the earlier part of people's awareness around this issue, around 2000 was kind of when there was a real sort of shift I think in awareness and public awareness. And that's when people started seeing all the images of the polar bears. And you know, there was just a definite movement that began at that time. So there was more opportunity to start working in this field. And once we created the climate action plan, it identified the need for a role to sort of work on this issue, like a very separate staff position. And honestly, at the time, it was a very aspirational thing to include, we didn't really think it would ever happen. But around 2012, the town decided to participate in the green communities program. And that really required a real focus on addressing climate change through energy efficiency measures and things that we could do on the municipal side. And it was going to it was just going to require more hours. And at the time I was the wetlands administrator position had fully evolved into supporting the conservation commission, we had other staff at one time that had been doing things like taking minutes. But that position basically went away or evolved so that it wasn't doing that supportive role for the commission any longer. So the wetlands administrator took that on. So it was just so much, it was just too much to be able to do both jobs. So we kind of cleaved them off and created the wetlands administrator is a separate job and the sustainability coordinator job evolved out of the need for participating in green communities. I'm going to take a quick moment for those of us who are watching us on Facebook live, feel free to drop a comment and we can ask your question to Stephanie or to Paul, as well as those joining us live in Zoom. Feel free to pop your question into the Q&A or raise your hand so we can hear from you live. We'd love to be able to invite you into the room. So you talked about your trajectory and how that kind of built up but in the last few years there's been a lot of developments in this field and how was the focus of your work changed over time or especially recently over the last few years? Are you seeing different trends, different areas to focus on? I think there's a lot of things that I've seen. The shift, as I said, was really in the beginning. There was just this kind of baseline level awareness of climate change and I think there was a period of time where people were talking specifically about climate change and it became very overwhelming and I think people felt like it was so much that they didn't know what to do with it and I think there was a shift at the state level with the Green Communities Program and how we present this. It became an alternative way of looking at it through efficiency as something like that's a win-win. If you're becoming more efficient with your energy use you're basically helping to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That's kind of one of the pathways of getting there so you're still doing that but you're not calling it addressing climate change. You're more focusing on it as energy efficiency and so it was a more positive spin on it that made it I think a lot more palatable for communities to get on board so that they could do the things they needed to do to address climate change but sort of do it through the lens of efficiency in a way that felt easier. It was kind of an easier sell if you will and it saved money so those efficiency measures saved money so it was just a really I think a really brilliant strategy at the state level to really find a way to present this and so the focus was shifted but I think we're getting back more now to really talking about climate change is the real issue because we are at such a tipping point and the worst case scenarios that we used to see presented 10, 15 years ago we're actually heading on that trajectory. At the beginning it used to be sort of the most that we can do to address this. This is where we'll be the least we can do will be here and we are following the sort of the worst trajectory unfortunately so I think when people call it a climate emergency now like we've moved beyond climate change we're talking about climate emergency now and that's really the level we're at and we really need to look at it and focus on it at that level. And so you know with the change in form of government in the last couple years here in Amherst and the new committee the energy and climate action committee ECAC for all of you who are in the acronym know can you talk a little bit about your the staff liaison for the ECAC can you talk a little bit about what that the role of that committee is and some of the initiatives that that they're handling right now. Sure so that committee was formed through the through our new town council and their their focus is really to address climate change and reducing carbon dioxide emissions and there's also an element of resilience that their looking at as part of their their work as well. They've done quite a bit of work just in the last couple of years in which they convened where they're trying to do some real broad community outreach to really get a sense of where people stand you know on this issue what they're aware of what their concerns are where what they'd like to see happen so they did a lot of polling and outreach at the beginning and now they're working with town with the town on developing a climate action plan we hired a consultant Linnean solutions out of Cambridge Mass who has been a great partner and we've been working with them for just about a year now on on developing this climate action plan so we had a very interesting process for that that the committee was very much behind in terms of really engaging people and community members that typically aren't at the table and we did a real concerted effort to to bring people in to have a voice in our what we call task group sessions we looked at specific sectors of the town in terms of transportation renewable energy land use and we we had specific groups that gathered on those specific topics and people really had an opportunity to to have a voice and to talk about you know the things that were most concerning to them in in relation to climate change in those given sectors I was impressed by that the kind of purposeful outreach you did to look at who's not at the table at these discussions because we have a very engaged community but usually the same groups of people and the people who don't have time or don't come to meetings and I think that your group especially Linnean I think we learned from Healthy Hampshire about how good things you went to those meetings you saw wow they had a really diverse group of people and I know our staff when they would go to these meetings well would say these are folks I've never seen at a public meeting before and is exactly what was needed for this plan so I thought that the thoughtfulness that you brought to that in that ECAC said was a value was really important to the end product that that you're going to be releasing pretty soon right yes it should be completed by the end of June we'll probably release it you know when we present it to the council will probably be like the the official release and that will be some time towards the end of June what was the thing that surprised you most about that process in relation to what you learned from community members and engaging new audiences was there a key takeaway there that kind of impacted you I I just think really how much it takes to really engage members of the community you know the way that things have traditionally been done through no fault of anyone's really it's just sort of a systemic issue right how we have meetings when we have meetings where we have meetings um you know you you sort of get into a sort of pattern of doing things and you don't realize how exclusive it is right because it's just the way well you always have meetings at night and we always have them at town hall and that's just how it is but it excludes so many people and I think going to that those meetings it was really the meetings through the collaboratives healthy Hampshire initiative that was just like a life-altering experience for me I I commend them so much on the work that they do and I also am so thankful that I had that opportunity to participate in that process the meetings were and um held at noon they were held in a church basement there was food provided um and people were so engaged and there were people who um you know there were you know sort of there was English translation at the meeting so there were people who didn't speak English at all um and that was kind of great to be able to be in that situation where I was trying to engage with people where we didn't speak the same language but somehow we were able to communicate with one another um I really I just really valued that experience and it just but like I said it was very life-altering sorry my my audio fell off for a second there um one thing that we talked about a little earlier Stephanie was you know we have the energy climate action committee which is comprised of mostly community members and I believe some counselors are on that as well um that's one way to get involved what what can other people do to get involved in climate action here in Amherst on the local level do you have any suggestions um well I do I think there's you know there's there's so many opportunities I think we're in an area where there's kind of there's like an overabundance of choice of how you can get involved um but there are certainly organizations um like um Mothers Out Front is one of the leading organizations in our area there's a very organized group of moms and also I believe some men are involved as well um who really are are really taking the mantle of this at the community level and they've partnered with the town on several initiatives and I would say that that's definitely one way people can get involved um I think even people attending ECAC meetings right now they're virtual sit in on an ECAC meeting I think there's going to be opportunities um in the future especially as we once we start to implement the climate action plan one of the things that really has to happen is you know um residents really have to sort of take on and embrace um their role in uh addressing this issue of climate change and I think that's something that you know there'll be opportunities as this moves forward and the plan is unveiled and programs are unveiled I think there'll be opportunities for people to get involved at that level I could see for for instance one example might be at some point we'll probably do some programming around um air source heat pumps where we'll probably advocate for residents to install air source heat pumps and that might be very that might look very similar to the Solarize campaign that we did a few years back where we had a team of residents that really kind of were the ones that went out and did the advocating for it um did signing up you know helping people get engaged in and how they could sort of follow up and install solar so we'll probably do something similar to to that kind of initiative and I would say there'll be opportunities like that moving forward and is that all part of you know you're thinking about what the town is going to be doing in the next five years or 10 years is that really part of that climate action and resilience plan that you were speaking about earlier that's coming in June will that be a road map for the town on how how they should move forward with the work there's a section of it that's you know so the the town council passed three goals if you will the first one is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent by 2025 then to reduce them by 50 percent by 2030 and then ultimately to be carbon neutral by 2050 those are very lofty goals so our plan can't it we don't know what's on the horizon in terms of what kind of technology or opportunity will lend itself so it's hard to go all the way to 2050 with a road map so we really kind of have focused on the road map piece of this being to 2025 and the rest of it is just sort of bigger aspirational suggested things that the town should do in terms of policy in terms of advocacy in terms of like some practical things we might be able to do down the road so the road map is to 2025 but the rest of it is really sort of like here a list of all these other things we want to look at and then as we move forward you know we'll come back to this and we'll you know maybe create another road map as we go forward it's kind of hard to tell that far far ahead I think folks in the audience if they if they have questions no good already do it could be this or anything all right yeah so we do have a hand in the room so Ken if Ken if you could unmute and introduce yourself thank you I'm Ken Rosenthal I live on Sunset Avenue Stephanie I think what you're doing is terrific it's so important for us now and for the future and I think we should all be grateful I may be wrong but I think that in the healthy Hampshire initiative I don't think I've seen named participation from the University of Massachusetts if I'm wrong please correct me if I'm right what I would really like to ask you is since it's such a major player economically and with its assets and resources and with its activity and commuters in this in this area how are you engaging them in the work you're doing thank you that's a great question Ken and thank you for the compliments I appreciate them so UMass is has developed their own climate action plan but we do have representation from the University on the Energy and Climate Action Committee so there's a liaison it's not specifically that what we're doing with the EZAC is directly partnered with the University but there is that connectivity if you will so that so that there can be more dialogue I do work with Ezra Small who is their sort of equivalent my position at the University level and we are partnering on like for instance the the Valley Bike Program is something that the University partnered with the town on so so there are sort of individual initiatives that we pursue together but I think in terms of the you know the specific goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions they're sort of developing their own plan and I think ours will reference that and I think once our plan comes out there may be more opportunity to do more together I think we you know once our plan is unveiled and once we have an opportunity to have them take a look at it there can be more dialogue around some of those things thank you you're welcome thank you Ken for your question and I think something that kind of relates to that is you know you know what are other surrounding communities around Amherst doing are we on par with them are we ahead of them and are there regional collaborations that you know especially in Western Mass it's important to have those collaborations can you talk a little bit about some of that sure sure so so we are Amherst is a member of a network called the New England Municipal Sustainability Network and Northampton is also a partner a collaborator and a member of that group and so that group has given an opportunity for us to have to sort of be around the table where everyone sharing ideas about what they're doing at the municipal level and we share our challenges we share our aspirations we share our initiatives and so we've been able to have conversations like again to bring a valley bike but it really is one of the greatest examples that sort of evolved from a car ride to one of our NEMS network meetings so Wayne Feiden who's the planning director and Chris Mason who's the energy officer for Northampton and I were together and just talking and we both identified that having a bike share program was something we both wanted to sort of advocate for within our communities but it was so difficult and challenging to do and then we said well what if we try to do this together and then it just sort of evolved into this bigger effort it's huge and now it's really huge and the game changer for that that was so smart that you did was to make them assisted so that you know it's a hilly area and and it's sometimes people like oh I can't climb that last hill up by Emmer's College or whatever it is and but with the with the motor assist electric assisted motors it makes it so easy right exactly and you know it's funny because that was not what we were necessarily proposing or looking for we had always considered having at least some electric bikes as part of the program but we didn't think it would be entirely electric but the weekend came along is like this sort of fairy god company out of nowhere you know that bestowed upon us all of these electric bikes and it really it was an entirely and a game changer I'm not sure how well we would have done without without them that's great and great and now it goes all the way to springfield and the whole pioneer valley yeah right exactly I mean that was the goal really when we started we were five communities and the university and now I think we're up to nine or ten maybe and it's continually growing you just brought on another community right west springfield west springfield just came on yep east Hampton joined chickapee joined I believe Agawam so it's you know it's it's exciting and then exciting to be part of something and watching it grow so and again that was you know a collaboration that started with a conversation in a car I miss those days yeah right exactly that's right so we we are coming up at the end of our half hour I told you it goes really quick Stephanie so I'd love to invite one last time any any questions from our multiple channels of audiences here feel free to put that into the chats or the comment or raise your hand now but while we're waiting for that I'd love for you know any calls to action that you have for people our community members or things that you didn't get asked yet that you want to leave people with especially on on earth there sure yeah well happy earth day I can't believe I didn't start with that but um yes I think that the one thing that we are realizing especially with our climate action plan is that when you look at you know the emissions pie if you will in the town the municipal sector is really small and the university is a big piece of it but so is the residential sector and buildings especially so we really need to find a way for people to um get engaged and be committed to addressing climate change sort of at the individual level so we really are advocating for people to try to do what they can in their own homes um and hopefully the programming that the energy and climate action committee will participate in or advocate for um will will sort of help our residents be able to do that and homeowners be able to do that and businesses as well and how about you Paul any any last questions or thoughts from from no I mean I'm I know the group is working the ECAC has been working so hard and I'm really excited about the the level of detail they're getting into and I think you know the other thing I always think about is you know Stephanie and the town had done this 15 years ago right I mean the climate action plan that was on the forefront of what cities and towns and messages were doing so the town has always been working in this area it's a it's a new phase now but I don't I don't think I think we still want to honor what has recognized the work that was done previously by other people so and it really is immense all all of the different um projects and programs you have going on and grants and just like you said earlier it needed to be a person but maybe it needs to be five people who knows but um we appreciate the updates on yeah and all this important work one thing I want to add was you know that in the council did have this as a major goal and what they're important the important message from the council was that they wanted us to look through every every issue through the lens of climate action and sustainability and what's the greenhouse gas emission you know we're looking at pomeroy village what kind of intersection what's the greenhouse gas emission for the different options so everything we do and we're trying to build our budget that we're going to be presenting on May 3rd with this as part of the deliverables so that we can start to practice what we preach and doing it in our own operations well and I have to say that you know we did this 15 years ago but there wasn't this kind of commitment as there is now I mean they're really and I think because there is more understanding of really what the stakes are and so I think you know a credit to you and the council and and staff you know and the residents of the community who really know that this really is something we have to do it's really an imperative it's not really a choice anymore well we want to thank you for your time today Stephanie we know you're very busy we hope you enjoy the rest of your earth day and thank you for all the updates sure thank you so much it was really a pleasure thanks have a nice day bye everybody bye all