d turn it over to Zach. Okay. One second. I just need to share my screen. Can you also my screen? Yes. Okay. Great. So we're here tonight to talk about the winter debrief from this past year about the changes from the, the alternate side parking that we implemented. So tonight we're going to first talk about the winter weather and comparison from this year to the previous year. So we're going to start with the rain, snow, temperature and salt usage. Then we'll take a look at our, a few different graphs. The first graph is a sanding, salting and plowing only graph of both regular and overtime. Hours spent. And then we will look at the same thing with snow removal, a regular and overtime hours. And then we will can look at a graph that combines all of those sanding, salt and plowing and snow removal. And then we'll look at some of the, some of the pros and cons and then we'll talk about next steps and where we would like to head from there. So as you all can, can see in the 2020 season, 2021 season, the temperature was a little bit cooler than the previous season from 2019 and 2020. We had last year, we had about 71 inches of snow. This year we had 61 inches. And last year we had around 18 inches of precipitation and this winter was 13. So not as bad of a winner in terms of severity, but it did also have its challenges. So here's a graph. Many of you are probably familiar with what this graph looked like a year ago. I added another year out. So as you can see this year, we spent, well, we used the 1900 tons of salt. The corresponding snowfall is was 61 inches out. As I just previously said, the temperature was on average 28 degrees with lower precipitation. We had previously talked about the number of overtime hours is for some reason, but this is kind of a correspondent to the actual number of tons of salt that is used every year. So as we get a little bit further, we'll talk about that in more detail. So this graph shows a comparison from 2021 to 2020 broken down by personnel, regular hours from people worked overtime hours from people and then equipment from both 20 and 21. So as you can see, we spent pretty much across the board. We spent less hours doing salting, sanding and plowing, which translated to less cost. Now do also keep in mind that the winner was not quite as bad as the previous, but there are obviously some measurable benefits for moving to this alternate system. When we look at snow removal, it was fairly comparable for the two years. We actually spent a little bit more in terms of personnel cost and equipment cost for this, this winter season in comparison to the previous winter season. But overall it was, it's pretty similar for the two years that we had there. They're close into Verity and the snow removal, regular and overtime hours spent were barely, we're about to wash there, fairly similar. So now if we take a look at everything kind of all together, you can see that in 2020, we had about $70,000 in winter related costs and snow removal related costs. And then in this year, we had roughly 49,000 on the equipment side of things. We had around 215,000 in the 2020 winter. And in the 2020, sorry, the 2020 winter had around 215,000. And then 2021 had 175 or so. And then if we look at the regular hours spent for winter related operations, you can see a fairly dramatic decrease there as well. So what does this mean for, how does this compare with the tickets that we issued for this year? So as you can see, there was a fairly drastic increase in the amount of tickets, which was, we kind of expected because we were regulating a lot more streets than we previously were. So in 2018, we had 2018, 19 and 20, those were all the old, the parking band system. And then this year was the alternate parking band. So as you can see, the tickets have dramatically increased, but the number of van events was this year was zero and that translated into far fewer cars being towed. Just beneath that, you'll see that a breakdown of the violations in 2021. There were 509 violations for even day, 240 in the downtown and 463 for odd day violations. So the no parking in the downtown, the 240 for 2021 is comparable to 2020, the 197. There was two streets added, the lower section of Elm Street and a section of School Street. So it was kind of expected that that number would be up a little bit and it fairly closely followed the previous year. Here is a breakdown of the tickets that were issued by individual street. So we totaled 1200 tickets this year. And as you can see, there were some streets that had a higher level of non-compliance. The major ones were Berry Street, Elm Street, Liberty, Loomis and Summer Street. So pros and cons. I've talked with staff about how they thought this past winter went. They really actually enjoyed having the alternate side parking system. It really gave them a lot of autonomy to do the work that they needed without having to manually go post signs. They could really adapt if the weather changed. So if we started in the morning with doing snow removal on Berry Street and then we had some winter weather and we had to stop and go plow or salt. We were able to do that. And no one really, we hadn't told people that we were going to do snow removal. So it wasn't a big deal.  And that would seem to be very effective. Some of the other pros that we had for this year was we had almost no emergency access issues. We were able to keep the snow banks removed and clear for emergency access. There were a few things early on that we had some emergency access issues. However, we worked to resolve those and one of them was on one senior Crosby. It just wasn't working out. So we reverted back to the old system for that street. We towed very few cars this year and also we had way less complaints than the previous year. We were able to provide in what, in my mind, was a better level of service. As we spoke about before, we managed the costs better throughout the whole winter season and we didn't have to do any manual posting. There were a few times that we did just as kind of, you know, just a courtesy for the snow removal that we were doing. Some of the cons that we did experience, we had to have an employee assist with ticketing. That was a DPW employee. It was a heavier lift for the police department. So we, what we were asking them to do was to go out and to look at a lot of streets during the night and issue tickets. And so five years ago, they had a list of, that was very short and they could really go through the routine in a matter of minutes. And then that changed this year and there was, you know, they had to spend a couple hours each night going out and actually assessing the wrong, who was parked incorrectly and issuing tickets. The other thing that I think took a little bit of time to get acclimated to was just figuring out which side was which and they, you know, they felt like when it was dark out that they had to shine their lights on houses and stuff, which didn't really make them feel completely comfortable doing that. But I think as the winter went on, they got a better handle on it. And but it still is something that we should maybe think about how we want to address that. We did issue twice as many tickets. There were some areas where we had a very high level of compliance. One area in particular was over on Elm Street. Elm Street, even though it's mostly residential, does have a couple of businesses. They have a dentist and a chiropractor and there, the people that were coming into those businesses were consistently getting tickets all year round. And so it would be nice to find a way to have a better solution for them. And then lastly, the alternate side system, it's just not a, it wasn't a perfect fit for every street. I know we talked about streets with only one sided parking, like East State Street, Cedar and some of those streets were ones that we also did have ticketing issues as well. So the next things that were that I would like to talk about are where do we go from here? And I do have a, I have this image. I've been working with a vendor to get some conceptual designs for potentially some signs. So it's an illuminated sign that is activated through either your cell phone or the internet. And the way that it works is when you illuminate the sign, there's a sign underneath it and says no parking when flashing or you can really make the, you can have the sign say whatever you need. So the thought is that it may be a good solution in some particular areas to have a sign like this. You know, the biggest one that comes to mind is Elm Street. It was the area with the highest number of tickets. It was the area that we seem to be fighting the most amount of complaints, appeals. So something like this could, it could help with, it would give us the autonomy to illuminate the light only when we needed to do a snow removal event. With that being said, I will open it up for any questions that you all may have. So just to clarify, so you would be thinking about this sort of a no parking sign that would be illuminated potentially for places like Elm Street or some of these other streets for which this was not working well. Yeah, that's correct. Elm Street is the big one. Berry Street, we had a high level of tickets. However, we didn't have the same type of complaints on Berry Street and they weren't specifically isolated around a particular business. And the, so would that change? If we were going to pursue that, I assume that would also accompany some ordinance language change or not so much. There would be a little bit because the ordinance as written didn't have any. Yeah, you would need to, you probably need to add a section that didn't, that wasn't odd or even, and it was only under a light indication. Right. Okay. Okay. I think I saw some hands. So we're going to go Lauren, Jackson, Connor. Yeah, thanks. This is really helpful back. Thank you. One question I had. So just thinking about, you know, this was obviously a year where there's less people coming into town than usual for a state house business for city. Or state business. I mean, just curious your thoughts, like having reflected back on the last, you know, trying this, this season. I mean, I would just imagine like the non-compliance or like the tickets would go up significantly at least the first year where it was a more normal year where you have a lot of people from out of town that aren't familiar with the streets. Just, just curious how you think this would go in a, in a year with a lot of out of town visitors compared to this year. Yeah. So it was interesting because before I looked, took like a closer look at the data, I would have told you that I thought we issued a higher number of tickets to non-residents, like so daytime tickets. And it was Jack that asked me to, to take a look at it. And when I did that, I found that we issued them like two thirds of our tickets to residents at the nighttime. Well, I assume that the residents, we don't exactly know, but the way that I kind of broke it out is that if it was between midnight and six 59, I generally assume that those were residents getting tickets. And if they were say after 7am, that those were people that were coming into the city. It's not exactly, you know, the, the best because you don't actually, there's, there could be people that work night shift and are coming in. So that was very surprising to me because I 100% thought it was going to be all of the people that were coming into the city because that's where we're, that's where we're hearing most of the complaints. I don't know if the people that were getting tickets were just kind of okay with it. And I did hear from a couple of people that they kind of just told me it's the cost of doing business. And if I get a ticket every other night, you know, that's seven and a half dollars, like I can put that in my budget. So I don't know how much of that there was. There were, you know, when I looked at the license tickets, there wasn't one, I mean, there was a couple license plates that got a lot of tickets, but there wasn't really one that just stuck out. So I don't really know how it's going to be longterm. I think it's would still need to be, we still need to educate. I'm hopeful that we can try it again for another winter and get another kind of season under our belt and then reevaluate the effectiveness of the program with two years data. Thanks. I've got a few questions or observations and I think this is a great report. And then I took up a lot of bills and Brian's and Zach's and Corey's time yesterday and today, trying to get, trying to figure out what this, all this data teaches us. Cause one of the things that I was thinking was, well, geez, 1200 tickets means we're really kind of slamming people. But, and so I started doing my own calculations and Zach did his own calculations about, about the costs. And the aggregate cost of tickets and towing this winter was $18,450. And the aggregate costs for tickets and towing in 2019, which is, I think is more comparable than 2020 was $32,740. So even though we issued a lot more tax tickets in 2021, we still charged Parkers a lot more two years ago when we were towing them instead of taking them, ticketing them. And I think we could all, everyone would agree that it's a lot worse to go out to the street and find that your car has been towed than ticketed. So from that perspective, I think it's, it worked well. Another thing that I was interested in, and I don't think we really have an answer is, you know, I noticed that Barry street and Elm street were the biggest, biggest streets for tickets. And so I was wondering, well, are we disproportionately affecting some segment of the population or people who don't have a lot of money getting hit harder? And it's, it's kind of hard to say that because as Brian told me, the only way we would really be able to analyze who's getting the tickets is by having someone sit down and manually go through all 1200 tickets and figuring out something about them. But although those two streets were the biggest ticketed streets, right under them were, or the next cluster of streets were like Liberty, Loomis, what, Hubbard and spring or summer, summer, I think. Yeah, the Meadow Liberty, Loomis, all of those kind of 40 or 50 tickets. Yeah. So I don't think there's enough information to say that we're disproportionately affecting a segment of the population, although that might bear some further scrutiny. And then I think the last question I have is what happens when someone appeals their, their ticket, what are the arguments, what are the reasons they give and how likely are people to not, or to get their ticket voided if they do appeal? So I think this year we were fairly generous on the appeals because we did have, you know, quite a bit of sympathy with, I mean, a lot of what we heard was I didn't know about this. I don't live in Montpelier. I'm coming to Montpelier, you know, for once a month or not even, I'm coming for a dentist appointment. How was I supposed to know? There was no signage. And then when we would say that there was signage, they would say, well, okay, fine, it's too small. So, you know, I think, you know, in, in general, there were, most of the complaints were the ones that we kind of predicted we were going to have. You know, there were certain places that just felt that we should make an exemption for them because there was a business nearby. And then other than that, it was a lot of, well, I didn't really know about this, you know, I'm coming in. And then, you know, I think the residents that were getting ticketed, and I heard this from a couple people that, you know, some of them just said, well, I screwed up and I parked behind the wrong, you know, there was a couple cars there and I parked, I followed the lead of someone else and it was the wrong decision. And I should have gone and looked at the signs and, you know, that was my bad. So I think we got a little bit of everything on that, on that front. But I think the biggest complaints were that people still didn't know about it. That, you know, they said that they were from out of state or not at a state but out of town. So I think those were some of the biggest things along with signage. The other thing was signage. Either conflicting signs, which we were actively addressing all winter long. If there was a sign that conflicted it, we made sure that we went out and either put a bag on it, took it down. So there was, there were some of that as well. Well, thanks. Overall, I thought this was a great report and it was a successful experiment. I think, you know, we'll, we don't have a lot of residents here wanting to talk about it tonight. But as the fall approaches and we're talking about, if we talk about doing it again, I would hope we get some resident input. Thanks. Yeah. Connor and then John. Yeah, great presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Zach and I appreciate DPW was really nimble throughout this. And that like, if you had a group of constituents, we raised an issue with a particular street, you know, you were adjusting as you want to log. So it wasn't written in stone right from the beginning. Of course, I had was, I, I thought we had implemented a pretty long grace period. This winter where we didn't ticket people. So how many weeks did we actually ticket people this year? So what year we ticketed from 12, eight to right around March 23rd. At that point, the, it was getting to be nice. So the DPW person that was doing the ticketing, I had him go into the street sweeper so we could leverage street sweeping while we were on, still in the alternate side program. And so typically, you know, we're starting the winter ban as early as like 1115. So we're not going to be doing it, but most of that action doesn't occur until like, until you get into December, because that's when the real heavy snow starts coming anyways. And that's when you have your calling winter ban events. So yeah, we probably missed about that front month. Window from November 15th to December 8th or so. And then the end date is always April 1st. So we pretty much went all the way out on that, on that end minus a week. Okay. Donna. Yes, thank you. Yes. Great report. Do you also have the data of how many tickets you voided? You said you were generous. How generous. I don't have an exact number on that. I could get it for you, Donna. That is. It was a little, I tried to get it out of the data. It was a little hard to, it was just a little bit hard to get an exact number on that. Because they're. Yeah. Because part of my question related to that is, did ticketing, do you have it by month? Did people get better? Was there a learning curve for some people?  Well, I saw her car. So I parked behind it and it was the wrong side. And they got a lot of tickets over here, but they just knew it was their mistake. And then they caught on by your second month, they were getting pretty smart about it. So I wondered if the tickets decreased by month or. I could, I had, I had the data and it is formatted in a way that I could do that. Of course I didn't prepare that. At this time, but it's, it's already, it's all readily available and that I could actually come up with an answer fairly quickly on. That'd be, I would like to know. And the, and I do appreciate the ones you've avoided because that's showing that we listened and we're trying, but I do wonder about the businesses are a way that we could give them information that they could insert by the person in their office who makes an appointment, especially on Elm street, that upper Elm street is mostly offices. So we, we did work fairly closely and we gave them the flyers and we know we asked them to like, we had the conversation like, well, do you send out appointment reminders and be an email? Cause nowadays everyone gets a reminder, you're going to the dentist tomorrow. And so like the natural instinct was, well, when you send that notification out, why don't you attach the flyer and say, well, and reminder, make sure you park on the correct side of the street. But I don't know if they actually utilize that flyer in that way. If they really did what they needed to on their end, you know, we tried to support them with that. We offered to give them some cones to help, you know, it put out cones on the days that they shouldn't be parking in front of their businesses. So we made some attempts there. So I'm not really, I'm not a hundred percent sure how else to change that. You know, I think from the person, the DPW individual that was doing the ticketing, there were like a couple of hotspots. Like even on Berry street, it was near the coffee shop, right? That was one of the areas that there was always parking violations on. And at the corner on Elm street, at the, at spring street, the, the dent, there was two locations. There was a chiropractor and dentist and both of those had, they actually, they struggled a lot. They both reached out to us and asked for exemptions. And so those are two locations that if we did get an illuminated sign that I would actually, that I would like to put it there. Because I think that it would, it would help to really reduce probably all of the ticketing, the majority of the ticketing on say Elm street. Well, I want to help them. I just don't want more signs, especially as big as these guys. And so I guess I would hope this next year, are you thinking we need to do signs this coming year next winter? Or are we going to try to just do other things to make it improve? That's, I guess, I'd say, I guess up to you all, you know, we could, we could look at getting one or two signs for trial and see how they work out. The illuminated, the nice thing about the illuminated signs is they would go up on a post and I think I would be able to remove five other signs on the street because on Elm street, there's spring street, there's vine street that like every, there's so many signs because every intersection, you had to put a new sign so that when someone turned on to the road, they couldn't claim that they didn't get a sign that they didn't see a sign, even though that was one of one of the complaints that we heard a lot. So with an illuminated light, you know, the thought is that maybe you could actually reduce some of the signs, but that is one of the other complaints that we heard is like, you guys just have way too many signs out there and you have sign pollution. And I don't really disagree because there are so many signs out there already. Okay. And to go back and you were around, I believe way back when Tom first suggested, we might do something of this year round change, not just winter parking, I thought you also mentioned that we might consider doing alternate parking year round. I would, I would love to still be in the same format right now because it would, we'd actually have the ability to get to the curb line and be on some of these streets and sweep right now. We're, we're weaving in and out and you know, it's, it's so sad to see the debris that's left behind instead of a clean street. I would like to see us to do this year round. I really would that we just, and that people get to know it and we get posted and we able to do it with less signage on the street. So that's where I'm aiming. Thank you. Yeah. And just as a comment on whether or not to move forward with a sign for a particular, for the locations that maybe it was not working very well, or this plan wasn't working very well, that I would be absolutely in favor of that, especially if it's just a couple and we're going to try them out and see how it works. That, that seems reasonable. It also feels like it could be the kind of thing that's like a slippery slope and then everybody wants to sign. But if we can say, you know, that there's, there's some good reason for these particular locations, then that seems fair for now. Jack, go ahead. Yes, I just had one more question. Your, your presentation mentions that doing the ticketing at night was, was burdensome for the police. I certainly see that, but you, there was never an occasion where you were bringing police officers in who were not already on duty that night to, to do ticketing was there. Not to my knowledge, but I would just have to confirm with, with GP. I don't believe that they had to pay anyone over time. I think that they, I think if they, if push came to shove, they were not enforced. If they got called out to do something, then it was known that their priority was policing first over, you know, parking enforcement. That's what I figured. Thanks. Yeah. Other questions, thoughts. Yeah, go ahead, Dan. Yeah, actually I had one question. You know, the one, the one comment that I received from constituents was a complaint about the idea that, you know, especially on sunny days that they had to go back and switch the cars back and forth on either side of the street. You mentioned that the complaints overall were, were less. Does that factor in all complaints, not just. You told my car complaints or, or those types. Is that just factoring in any, any complaint about the system whatsoever? Yeah, I mean, we don't track calls in a way like a dispatch unit would. So it's a little hard to actually like quantify. Most of it is just based off the people that are taking the majority of the calls that there seemed to just be a lot less. There were certain things that we heard like the signs and, you know, I didn't hear too much about having to move it on sunny days or, you know, there was some front porch forum chatter about people kind of disliking it.  And then we had residents on prospect street that said, you know, the cost of, you know, having to move your car every day, you know, it's at the end, at the end of all of this, it's, it's not so bad. Yes, it's a little bit of a burden, but we didn't have to go find a different area to park. We were able to park in our street and it was just on the other side. So was that, did you hear a lot of that, Dan? No. Yeah, not, not significant.  Out of frustration. But it wasn't, it wasn't any sort of overwhelming. So I'm just, I'm just wondering if there is, you know, especially when you talk about the number of complaints that you get or not, how that was sort of quantified. And if there was a specific, you know, because I think, I think the system, if anything, and I think your feedback shows this, which is that for certain snow events, this was a better system, which is people didn't have to find new places. He didn't have a lot of people towed because of a snow event. You know, those pieces of it worked the best. And I just wondered if, you know, if people saw that as a trade off or if people were frustrated, you know, it's a, it's a sunny day. Why am I moving my car? Because I wouldn't have touched my car otherwise. And if there was any sort of line of feedback, it would have been a lot of trouble. But it sounds like that may have just been incorporated with the general feedback, which overall was much lower. Yep. That is correct. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'd just like to note that again, the alternative backdrop to all of this was we used to have a blanket winter ban. November 15th to April 1st. For overnight parking on any street. And people were scrambling every night regardless of the weather. So, you know, we had to find all the parking and, you know, so, um, and that was proving to be burdensome to people. And, uh, so we came up with a winter ban and that had its own setting problems. I think that there's always going to be those trade off. So, you know, I say this, you know, recognizing the best intentions of all people, but I'm sure people would like a perfect system where they don't have to move anything on the sunny days.  Um, So there's going to be, you know, I think one of the things we really wanted to do is weigh the tradeoffs like Zach did with, you know, here's sort of what worked and what didn't and what the impact were to people. And, you know, perhaps do it another winter. Like as Lauren mentioned, when we made, we have a more, more normal usage to really get a sense of how it works and then I, you know, continue evaluating it. The same with the potential alternatives. I don't think we're here to say, you know, buy these signs tonight or anything. I think we're here to say, look, here's these issues, here's potential solutions. We're going to look at them and talk about it again come late summer or fall when we get ready to wind this up. You know, I will say that from my conversations with PD and my conversations with the DPW employees, if we asked them their preference, they would rather go back to the old system. It was less cumbersome for everyone, but that doesn't always nest that, I mean, that doesn't take into account the complaints and the burden that we're putting on, on the residents. And so cumbersome for city staff, but, but definitely not friendly to residents. So the, the biggest benefit to this system and that we had this year was you could adapt, right? If the, if we were doing snow removal on Berry street and we got to Hubbard, Hubbard street and it started to snow, we could stop what we were doing and we could go to snow, it's either salting or plowing and it didn't matter. We didn't have to, you know, our plans hadn't changed. We hadn't put it out on social media that we're going to do snow removal. We hadn't coordinated with towing or any of the other stuff. We had the autonomy to, to do what we needed to do and change really at the whim of the weather. Because that's at the end of, at the end of all this, we don't always, we don't dictate what we have to do. It's, it's the weather, it's the conditions. So. Jay and then Donna. Yeah. I just wanted to point out that I think for rolling out of a new system like this, obviously there's a lot of learning to be done and fine tuning and accommodating, but for, for a new system, I think overall looking at this data, Zach and I, I think it was very successful and I appreciate it. And to me, you know, think, you know, I know Dan heard from folks and I heard from folks, we all heard from people about, you know, sort of that transition into this new system. I think probably one of the main, if not the main reason that it, the rollout was as successful was, was because you were really accommodating.  But we could, we acknowledge that it's not working for you. So we're going to make it work for you. So, you know, having that mentality that it was a partnership, I think was really important. So as we look to, you know, potentially doing this for another season, continuing that sort of partnership, thought we were going to be able to make it work. And so whether, whether it's with, you know, with new lighting or considering how we're accommodating some of these commercial areas like Lake on Elm Street and Lake on Berry Street, I think we'll, you know, help continue the, the success of the, of this new process. So I think we're going to be able to, you know, continue the success of the, of this new process. So I just want to say thanks for that. But I think it really, it made a difference and, and will help this, this, you know, system, you know, be more successful moving forward. So thanks. Donna. This had a couple of questions. One was when you said you liked the old way, you meant the total street ban. Old way. Not me, not me personally, but in terms of the staff, yes. I just want to clarify which old way. So yes, because then you didn't have any problem. They were mostly empty. And that was the same for PD is that it was, yeah, they had very like no issues because there was no one was on the street ever. Yes. You looked really odd parking on the street then. And my second question was, are you, are DPW looking for us to say definitively move forward? We want to continue this and keep fine tuning it. Do you need some guidance from us tonight? Or maybe I can fill that question. I don't think, I think we came into it mostly as just a debrief tonight. If you guys were ready to move forward with. I guess I'll let Bill speak on that. I don't think we're ready to make a recommend, a hard recommendation yet. Last I knew, I think we wanted to talk it all over. I just wanted to give enough support that you continue to refine it and think about what would solve some of the problems. And if it is those signs, those light signs, then what's the cost of that would also be helpful to know. I think we're ready to move forward. So, we've got 2400 dollars a unit. Excuse me. $2400 for her location. So they're fairly similar to the rapid flashing Beegans. That's what I thought. Yeah. Okay. So obviously you don't want to put them on every street and you would have to be a little bit strategic in, in kind of rolling those out. And there is. from the one manufacturer that we're looking at there is a kind of a long lead time so I mean this could be something that we could continue to review the data and we come back in the next couple months and with a recommendation to you all about whether or not we should or shouldn't purchase a sign or how we're recommending moving forward. That would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah. I will just jump in and say that I appreciate all the comments tonight. I think Zach and my expectation was that this was our opportunity just to go over the data to give you the information to hear your thoughts but also so that you can give some additional thought to it and we'll definitely want to come back and talk about this again in the context of do we go forward looking at the lights looking at the options and I would say that you know we did not put out to the entire community half a year in advance or at the tail end of the winter season preceding this past year that we were going to change to this procedure so we came at it and I think while we weren't in a a rush to do anything I think it was something new and changing behavior is something that takes people quite a while to get used to. First they're going to reject that for the most part then they're going to figure out what their problems are then they're going to still potentially dislike what's going on before they actually get into a habit and I think I think that it's in our best interest at least from my perspective that we really think about another year to look at tweak some things whether that's lights or other things maybe different messaging maybe some other ideas that pop up and then make a real decision about whether we're going to keep the system or how we're going to continue to move forward and so I think we've been expecting in the department that we'll have another conversation with you sometime soon. That's helpful so it also well it's helpful to clarify that you really aren't looking for a we kind of vote at this point so but thank you though this has been very helpful it is really useful to know that we yes we did issue a lot more tickets but the towing was way down and we ended up costing city residents a lot less money in total that I think is very interesting um so um great thank you any other comments questions yeah Donna go ahead this is peripheral but being on the bike pedestrian committee I really heard a lot about not cleaning all the way to the curb and and so that's part of why I also want to get cars out of the road when you're cleaning streets is so that the bicyclists do not have debris is there a way to make sure that we do get way over and clean so that bicyclists don't have this debris that they're riding on I mean the easiest thing is to consistently get the cars out of there and so that because it's you know with the debris on the side of the road it it takes several passes before the street's actually clean it's not like you just go over it and it's magically you know all good so you know it takes many passes and it is a little hard to get the brooms like right up tight I mean in terms of like within the last six inches but you know I would say that they're able to ride along the curb within six inches or maybe even a little bit closer but you know they also run the risk if they get too far over that they if they get stuck that you know it can screw up the the brooms if they get it caught on the curb they'll but they actually bend the arm and that has happened and our mechanics really dislike when that happens so they have to be careful and aware of where they are so especially on turns and stuff that's they're usually a little bit generous when they come out of it because they don't want to get that piece stuck on a piece of the curbing but the biggest thing to help get all of the debris to the curb would be to get the cars off the street thank you yeah thanks any other comments or questions okay all right well thank you again thank you appreciate all your work on this all right so we are up to our last business item which is the summer schedule and so for this I guess I'll turn it over to Bill yeah this is a terribly complicated issue just typically we've dropped one of our summer meetings um over the last few years it's been in august um we there's no reason to it just seems to be the way it's fallen I think you know when if you if we just drop one meeting then sometimes we go a whole month you know four or five weeks without meetings so I suggested that we split the difference between the two normal august meetings and go on the third week instead the 50th just to have the one meeting in august but you know you we don't have to drop any meetings we can keep our regular meetings we can drop any different one so I just frankly put the one that worked best for me so just full disclosure but we can make it work however so or or you know it might be a little early to decide but the sooner we do the sooner we can plan for it um I will almost certainly not be available for the July 28th meeting but we have competent people here you can get along without me well that could be the one we dropped to other thoughts I also may be gone on the 28th oh we gotta be gone on the 23rd of june I might be as well on that one for the 23rd of june oh Lauren I feel like you're about to say something yeah go ahead um yeah I think I also am likely out July for the July 28th one um I think the earlier July one I can do but I would be remote which might be our first day person one which would be a real bummer that's true that's right huh that's interesting right like do we sorry go ahead wait to solve that problem we just cancel all our summer meetings and then we don't have to decide how it's no business we need to do it's fine uh jack well um or yeah yeah um I I think this proposal is fine you know me I don't like to skip meetings because I like to have our our meet come to our meetings but it sounds like July 28th might be a better meeting to skip than uh then August 25th um and I'd be happy to either solidify that schedule now or if those of us who think they're gonna be missing have a date coming up fairly soon when you'll know with more certainty if you're gonna be away then I'd be happy to wait but for right now if people think you know your schedule I would say let's pick the date to skip and set it up there's yeah so there's a couple of things we could do one is you could skip we could we could skip July 28 and then just do the 11th and 25th in August as planned I'd suggest the 18th just to to break those up but we could just go back to the normal and have the July 28 one be the one we miss or we could do the one just one in July one in August we've tried that before sometimes it gets a little uh much or we could send out um I could have we could send out like a doodle poll of all the Wednesdays in July and August and see who's available on which days and see when we get the most attendance and then decided at the next meeting let's do that we are a little early for this so that we're ahead of the game yeah like I will know for sure whether or not I'm available on the 28th probably within the next week or so so yeah so let's do that but uh Jay did you want to say something um so uh I was just I think a doodle poll makes sense I was gonna I agreed with Jack that if we if it sounds like a bunch of folks would um not be available on July 28th that we should just sort of swap that for the August 25th date um but if it makes more sense to just sort of put it out there and just count our numbers that's fine I guess I'll also throw in since we're talking about it that probably the I'm guessing uh that Lauren's with me on this but the June 9th um meeting will be available but be late um because that's um the uh close the Union Elementary School graduation is happening that evening at the high school so um anyways so just putting that out there I don't we don't need to change that date but just so folks know what's going on that's good to know uh well so and actually that all feels like some good reasons to do a doodle poll because you know maybe in June there's there's a different day that would work better for for more folks um maybe it's the first and third that month I don't know we'll see um yeah we'll send out all the Wednesdays in June July and August and see just just because you are available does mean you're committing to me it just means we want to see which dates have critical mass and assume that the default is the second and fourth Wednesday maybe we'll try to mark those somehow that those are the ones that would be you know tiger's are you assuming the six only one time for that poll 6 30 or are we going to get some options of time let's get the dates first we have to you know if there's one meeting like the ninth that sounds better to start at seven or something well let me doodle polls give you a choice of time too I just I was just people wanted to start later in the summer oh usually people early in the summer to get out and do summer night things but whatever um once we start we never get out early so we start later by the evening well I don't you know that's fine whatever I think sure we can do that too but I was really just thinking let's get the dates lined up and then we can decide the times yeah once we know which dates then I'll be happy to send out the doodle poll tomorrow thanks Mary that's right you're on yay awesome okay so I think we're I think we have clarity about this I don't think we need a motion or anything right any other comments about this okay so we are on to council reports and so I am going to go in the normal order if that's okay starting with Donna Donna sure what you consider normal anymore but I really appreciate getting appointment to most of the committees I asked for thank you and I did want you all to know that I actually was put in as chair for the central Vermont public safety authority board and one of my first official acts was a letter to the senate finance committee dealing with h 360 about broadband and how broadband bill right now propose excludes handheld radios and public safety communication features that also need fiber so we're just asking them to expand their language to the to include municipals to use broadband services to enhance radio systems to plan for the public safety communication systems that will be using wireless in the future so we just are asking them to expand their definition so that municipals can also get money to to use for the broadband in relation to their communication system so I also reached out to our Washington delegates so heads up it's another plea from them to do something and pay attention and any questions you all might have please ask me you can ask Dan he's got a copy of the letter I sent one to Bill and Anne I could be glad to send them to all of you if you're interested so thank you very much great Connor all right a couple of things and I don't want to steal John's thunder if he has a better update on this but I was just texting with Senator Perchlich and our non-us citizen ordinance got voted at a committee on Tuesday it'll go to the floor at one o'clock tomorrow and Senator Polina will push that so so that's huge Senator Ballant the President of the Senate was very passionate and caucus recently said we never treat ordinances like this you know none of my watch we're going to get this passed so that's really hopeful they think they have the floor votes but if you feel like you want to call anybody in the meantime that'd be good you'll probably hear some pretty rough rhetoric about you know some of our immigrant community on the floor tomorrow but again we've got some really good champions for this and I think you know you know John Odom thought of this ages ago right and has really done a lot of work a lot of people here have done work I know Dan did some of the legal heavy lifting on it so that's going to be a great win for our city if we can get it over the finish line I think I'm not sure if anybody has additional information on that but that's what I just heard from Senator Perchlich other item I had my first homelessness task force meeting today really happy to be on that I tell you they don't pull any punches they talk about elected officials and I appreciate it you know we heard some staggering numbers last time when the task force was in and really emphasized hit at home today you know thousands of people are just going to be leaving these hotels pretty soon and you know I think we've had a pretty calm period actually you've seen some like shelter numbers decrease in some cases because you know if it's a choice between that and like a hotel room you might go the hotel room but I think we've got a pretty rough bump on the horizon so we're really going to have to be all hands on deck just to see how we handle that I had an idea I want to float out to you folks I get so much out of like doing some of the work site visits you know whether it be the water treatment or the fire station you know if we're putting money behind positions and it might be limited just because of privacy issues but I think it'd be great if we could get in a rotation of maybe shadow and dawn the homelessness liaison person we have or the social worker we have embedded in the police force or at least just spend some time on an individual level as we consider refunding these positions in the next year there I think you know getting out there and talking to folks there's so much more than a report whatever do and makes it a bit more real so I'm going to be talking to dawn about that but I'll hopefully put something together that folks could maybe sign up the shadow or a little bit so that's it for me thanks great Jay I actually don't have anything tonight thanks Dan so I took a tour as Connor mentioned that we we do with the water treatment plant and got a tour from Jeff Wilson who's the operator and really an impressive operation that he runs up there and I commended the public works and Kurt for the tour I felt better than I ever have having a glass of water after the tour of that facility but I certainly recommend it to anyone who hasn't taken that tour yet it's really an impressive facility that's very well run and a credit to our city and and you know the water that we get is the cleanest in in Vermont for surface water he said we lost only to one like groundwater system and he said that's not fair that's cheating but you know I think it's a really impressive system and and and again you know another asset that we really have to keep our eyes on in our in our city infrastructure Jack Glass is empty Connor huh a couple of points one is that we know we have townwide assessment coming up and I think we've we just saw a bad example of how to handle the public information that aspect of it and so I think that we can learn from the mistakes in Burlington of how to do it better and we're already ahead of doing it better because Bill had a piece in the bridge last year setting out how it works but I think we'll it'll be worthwhile to keep up the public information so that people know what's going on and realize that just because your assessment goes up does not necessarily mean your text bills going up I also have have an article that I will be sharing with the members of the council it was from the actually an opinion keep piece from the New York Times earlier this month titled how lower income Americans get cheated on property taxes and I'll just share that to look at for us to consider if there's anything that we should build into our our system to treat people fairly and I think we do a good job of treating treating people fairly on taxes in in Montpelier and speaking of public works Bill were you going to say something about the award wasn't okay well I will I was I it's not really new news now it's old news but Montpelier Public Works Department got an award for the best local project from the American Public Works Association and it's a it's a big deal for the water resource recovery facility project and this is a big deal and it reflects how well our entire team did on having the vision to do the do the project and then and then bring it in so congratulations to to everybody involved in the project and while we're talking about public works Dan the water water treatment plan when I was working with working on the Murray Hill water system extension I learned that the year that I was doing it Montpelier water system was rated the the best tasting surface water system in the state of Vermont and whatever else you hear I think our public health is is well protected and the and the quality of the water is is great too so that's all I've got thanks today Lauren thanks yeah just one thing just wanted to remind folks that we right now have a community equity survey out in the field we're trying to hear from at least 300 community members you can find it it's been posted to front porch forum it's up on Facebook it's up various places or find my email address and I'll send you a link if you are having trouble finding it any other way up on the city website but we're really hoping to hear from a wide swath of people so anyone who wants to send it around to folks really want to be getting that input to inform our our equity work that we're doing through the social and economic justice advisory committee and we're on track for some I think really interesting input for for council in the coming months from that process so looking forward to that that's it for me tonight thanks okay uh question for the oh wait is yeah I guess it is my turn uh question for the council uh do folks have any interest in taking tours as we have in the past of different city facilities and I know um uh just for just thinking back to last year we had the town town meeting day and then boom we were in COVID so we really didn't get the chance to do tours last year um I'm seeing some nods thumb scale of like yeah I'd be interested in doing some tours okay I have even though I've done tours multiple times I feel like I always get something out of them I think they're really helpful for us and and honestly like I think it helps us make better decisions on you know when it comes to things that pertain to city departments so um is that something that I can uh just pitch to you there Bill to to arrange maybe this isn't maybe this is a doodle poll thing as well no that's okay but I mean you thought you're talking about group all of you as a group or just sets them up you know I know some of you some of them you folks have been doing them individually and others you know have some we've done them a bunch of different ways we've done them some years where we warned them and had you know the council go and other times when we did them in groups of three or you know however you want to I'll just say I really don't want to happen yeah I appreciate going together with other people because I know I learned from the questions that other people ask um but I realize I can be more of a bear to schedule um but Dan go ahead I'm just gonna say I like the opposite I like I like the you know just being alone and sort of getting the full attention that the the operator you know as opposed to sort of the tour group but references it's all good no worries um other thoughts well we they're available to anybody at any time whether you want to do them as a group or individual I mean obviously we schedule them and for some of our folks it's obviously easier to do two or three than seven but we will make it work however you want to set it up yeah Donna go ahead well I just like the interaction that we had as a council there was a of just doing the the visiting together whether it was three or four of us or all of us it was enjoyable on that way to be outside the council room so if you post them then we can all decide what we can do and that's helpful yeah and everyone may not be able to go to all of them or you know they folks might want to do some on their own that's okay um but I I'm picturing tours of all the major departments not just to get familiar uh you know especially sorry uh well I'll say I'm especially interested in um the updates to the water resource recovery facility I know that's an ongoing project but in as much as it's available for a tour that I think would be very interesting yeah I think they've asked us to wait about a month before we tour have people touring just because of the construction status maybe as it wraps up it'd be nice to tour to see all the things that just got completed so maybe what we'll do is just set up a series of tours dates and let you all know that this is one the group tour is and those that can make it make it and those that can't can are welcome to go to that particular thing on their own I imagine we do police fire water treatment sewer treatment the DPW garage rec facilities if you want to include senior center um city hall if you want um so okay you know you get too many that starts to wear people out you all out so okay schedule them over the next you know one one every other week over the next 12 or 14 weeks or something so that's not too much great okay thank you awesome and by we I mean Mary I know what you meant okay great also just a heads up that seven days got in touch with me asking about just opinions on this bill that would allow utilities more freedom making decisions making authority or giving more authority to municipalities instead of having to go through the charter amendment process all the time so anyway just just a heads up there's an article coming out about that soon I hope you spoke in favor of that madam there I sure did many charter amendments that we have passed over the past three years my goodness yes I have lots of examples to draw from anyway um so that is it from me uh john sorry I was having button issues there uh nothing nothing all's good and bill so the only thing I really have other than thank you jack for reminding me to thank DPW for their great work and for their national award uh is not great news we just heard today from congressman welch's office that none of our projects were recommended for funding so that was a bummer so we will now figure those in with um you know our recommendations for federal funding interestingly we also got I think it was today or yesterday something from senator sanders office soliciting requests for funding uh I don't know if this is a different pool or whether senators and you know whether they're all gonna so we intend to resubmit them all through senator sanders office and see how we do there so uh there you go that's that's all I can tell you about those so um but we are then being at least informed a little bit about this we will be working on our presentation to you about federal federal what we expect for federal money what we see is the lost revenue component and what probably would have been done if we hadn't had to cut our budgets for for that money and then uh you know what else fits in and obviously you'll have some room to move that stuff around yourselves um we we still haven't got the guidance yet on those funds so we're still just working off the loose descriptions that we've had we're hoping that before you know by the time we actually present to you we will have more specific guidance from the treasury about exactly how those funds can be used and what what restrictions there are and those sorts of things but um we're you know we yeah we have a fair amount of lost revenue so I think a vast you know a lot of it will fall into that category that we can you know things that we were just going to do in our budget projects equipment those kinds of things that we had to cut out so hopefully we can restore some of those so we don't fall too far behind so that's all I have sorry to end on that note it's okay it's good to know you can still reapply with sanders office we'll see I will all right one thing seeing Constantinus's name still on the uh screen reminded me um to remind you all that in addition to what we were just talking about the police we actually have all four of the our unions we're going to be negotiating this spring that's will be a first for me you get two of them two of them well first of all having four is new because the police supervisors union is a relatively new unit but both DPW and police are actually a year over we just held them in with their agreement held them in abeyance throughout COVID to sort of see what happened financially and didn't you know just extended them and then fires is expiring on June 30 and then the the supervisors one is new so obviously that's that's just so you know that'll be a huge lift um you know a time thing but at the next meeting I was going to schedule um an executive session with you all just to talk philosophy and issues and if any of you would like to participate on any or all be a council rep on the bargaining committee or uh to talk about how we include the police issues and those kinds of things in what is you know normally a pretty straightforward bargaining process um and being respectful of the collective bargaining process and its impact on our budget so that's all just a heads up no reason to discuss now okay all right thank you all right uh well everybody thank you uh and that's the end of our business so without objection we're going to adjourn 10 40 who seemed earlier you know how it suddenly became 10 40 45 minutes on the consent agenda set us back that's all right okay have a good evening everyone good meeting folks see you next time


I thought we'll do a quick temperature check in the room. Following up, Dr. Batra is always a tough ask. How many people really think they're going to take away something from this session? Show of hands is good. Excellent. Because by the time I walked from that door, right to this corner, there were about six people who told me all the best. I was wondering, why should I be the only one taking pressure? So, great. We'll start out by actually a simple pop quiz, right? It's the simplest thing to do. Let's actually figure out how many people here, how many people actually pay attention to their data, and how many people genuinely going to walk away with something more meaningful than the first slide itself. What is India's rate of inflation? Any guesses? Actually, how does it even matter? Because you could argue it was about 7.9 the last month. It went up to 7.04 in May. The quarter likely estimated at a 7.5. But what do these numbers even mean to us? And that's the problem with data. We keep confusing ourselves with numbers being data. And that's not the reality. When you look at this graph, you will suddenly realize the moment you start contextualizing timelines, trends, relatives to how data is moving, they will start throwing directional insights at us. And I'm not saying this means a thing to this session. All I'm saying is that there is a lot of people in this room who may feel. We use data very data-centric. And so we thought when we started out noise. But that is not the reality. And that is what we'll explore. Because invariably what we think is data is nothing more than anecdotal evidence, what we keep terming as gut feel, intuition, and quite frankly, nothing but opinions. We keep using data to substantiate what we think our hypothesis should yield and keep hiding behind the fact that we are very data-centric. At least we were when we started out. And there are a few reasons to it. But let's understand were we the only ones that felt this way. Because PWC did a recent study where in the midst of the biggest crisis that the world went through, 91% CEOs in the US felt their businesses will organically grow this year. Of course, something that the key takeaway there is that they were US CEOs. But the fact is that they still all feel that this will happen. I also feel I'm absolutely sure I will lose weight this year. But these are all statistics used to substantiate what we think is data. Warren Buffett, another such specimen, basically said, I have checked all electoral tables. The lowest death rate is in six-year-olds. Therefore, I chose to eat like six-year-olds. Data suits convenience. Of course, it was a joke. But this is what happens with all data, that we make it suit what we think works for us in businesses. Because constantly, what we are grappling with is this. These are just not amoebic shapes. This was the best attempt at what I thought were brain and the gut. There is this conflict. There is a constant dilemma for intuition and reason. And this is something that we all go through. And I'm not saying one is right, and therefore there is a purest way of running a business. You need all of it. In fact, the most successful entrepreneurs start out with maverick ideas and great gut. They're blessed with incentives, why they do well. You'll always find arguments. So the one extreme is Napoleon, who said 90% of war is won on intelligence. And on the other end of the spectrum is Steve Jobs, who basically said, past is past. Future has to be built on what you think you can rely on. It could be intuition. It could be karma. It could be luck. You can figure out whatever works for you. But it is only directional. The past only tells you what the future may hold for you. Absolutely true. Therefore, what is the relevance of data? How and why is data so important for all of us? And that's the question that we'll keep asking ourselves. Why does this predicament even exist in the room? This predicament exists for a simple reason that most founders start with great visions. They have big ideas, and unfortunately, very small teams. So when noise started out, we started out with a six-people team that believed, we'll do this. Of course, the ideas change. There are people who buy into that vision. The vision changes. The fact is, those six become 16. And you are at all points in time counting on the maverick of these individuals. It is people who are more important than there are systems, processes, or data.  And what are people best at? Gut. Most opinions, actually. And that's how businesses are formed. That's how all startups take shape. The easiest thing is, let's marginalize cost. There is some people in the room who will relate with this. All text apps, all solutions start out with what's the easiest plug-and-play, a conversation that played out on this very stage 10 minutes ago, that you have Shopify, Shiprocket. Come on, let's e-commerce. But are we looking at data? Are we really looking at what is it that I need to do? Or I will be another me too in this space. And because speed and agility are important, we decide that bias for action takes precedence over everything else. Who will sit to study data? Data is not relevant. We are very young. We don't have history. All of those things play out. Most importantly, the environment is such where a bit of risk works. There are people saying, kuch karlo, data figure out karleenge. Let's go with what I believe in. This is a vision. I have a great idea. Magic will happen. And magic does happen. And I'm not discounting that. Therefore, in this whole situation, again, back to the macro question, why is data even important? Data is important because if you look at hard facts, hard statistics. Less than half the company is world over invest in big data. In India, this number is a paltry small. And when you talk about small Indian businesses, it's a scary sight. We're not investing in big data. Do we see the merit in it? Maybe yes. Why are we not committing to it, therefore? Because that conflict of the gut continues to be our obsession. We are so obsessed with the idea that my idea is perfect. We will hit home and let's go for it. The other way of looking at it, and let me start building reason here with this group. Are we willing to hedge our business on gut? How many people here have a pension for mathematics? Quick show of hands, one is good. Two is even better. Let's just say about five people have a pension. Simple question. What is the probability of hitting success if you are taking decisions on gut? Statistical probability, mathematical probability. 1%, 50. Statistical probabilities, success, failure, one out of two, 50%. Agreed. The advantage that I'd like to give myself is that if I start adding a little bit of data, chances are I can push it north of 50. And who doesn't like a little extra credit? The bigger problem to deal with it is that when you are starting out businesses, things will go wrong just because they can go wrong. The Murphy's law is not that things will happen contrary to what you believe they will. Things will happen because they will happen. So you've got this. You've got the fact that chances of success on gut are 50%. You also got to account for variable change, the biggest variable that plays time and it's changing every day. So we were just informed that we had three product launches. You have to account for the fact that there are 13 more that somebody else would have been planning to do. Therefore, speed and agility are important. But most importantly, as you become larger, your risk of wrong decisions is larger. So cut yourself some slack, rely on some data that can potentially reduce the risk of those decisions. And for me, that enough is reason to believe that let's follow data. And that's what happened for us. The reason I'm saying this is that ironically, it's not an either or decision. Let's evaluate. In the current given scheme of things, we I'm sure safe to believe that lion's share of the business is digital or growing digitally. We've had disagreements or agreements on this, but for convenience sake, we know for a fact that there is massive growth coming from that sector. We know for a fact that customers are more dynamic than they ever were. Getting a grip on who the customer is and therefore predicting likely behavior is becoming more and more difficult for marketers. We know that customer experience is more important than ever. People are going to stores for experience, but that experience is still relevant for us. That's the only differentiator. We also know that personalization, retention, a lot of this is becoming important. Acquisitions are more expensive. And we know that cookies will be a thing of the past. And if all of this is true, where do we stand on the ability to read data and therefore leverage it? And whilst it may seem that I have spent a lot of time setting context, the reality is what my first slide said, that data is in your DNA. You either are data-centric or you're not. Keep telling yourself that as an organization, we believe in data, but there are various stages of how organizations use data. So sometimes asking yourself these hard questions is important. Are we really data-centric? Is there a cultural emphasis on collecting data to start with? Are we an organization that believes we should correct data? Are we an organization that actually makes investments in hiring or upscaling people for data manipulation and calculation and analysis and all of that? Are we an organization that is willing to commit across verticals that decision-making will be centered to what the data tells us and not what five people or gray hair in the room say? Are we willing to let go of decisions that are contrary to what the data says? And I'm saying this out of having gone through these labor pains when we were building noise up because there are times where data will tell you that there is X likelihood of success of a product. And you can choose to go ahead with it or not. And sometimes it is the passion, belief or opinion that takes precedence. And if we do that, we're making two mistakes. We're making the mistake of letting go of a viable idea and the opportunity to make this one successful. And therefore, building a DNA culture, building a culture or DNA or data in the system becomes imperative. You'll realize that it all starts with data denial. We all start data. We know. There is also a case of data indifference. And these are two stages that most organizations are very happy being in and still calling themselves data-centric. The other two that I've highlighted are the ones that will have the lion's share. Most people in this room will be a part of organizations that are data-aware and data-informed, but not necessarily taking decisions based on what the data has to say. It is only the last step where you can truly call yourself data-driven. And I'm not going to comment on this because this is self-evaluation. And this should tell you if you really are data-driven as an organization or not. Therefore, when I keep saying data culture, la, la, la, la, la, what is it that worked for us and what did not? There were some first principles that were drilled deep in who we are as a business. In our business DNA, we basically said that the business model is geared towards data, which means what? Which means we are one of those rare brands and a lot of you may not know that started out by our own website. We had our own brand store before we even dreamt of going to marketplaces. Contrary to popular belief, that's how you start understanding, connecting with your consumers, your own consumer insight, and you build the brand basis those insights. It's fast, it's efficient, but that's the only way it works. Second bit, we realize that there is a large degree of products where we are not being able to capture the life cycle of the consumer because FMEG, a lot of times people will come buy a headphone, go away, relationship is transactional, you don't know who the customer is, bought somewhere in Roper, I don't know where he bought from, took home, chose never to speak to noise again. No social listening, no tools, nothing came in handy. What do you do? You activate their warranty and bring them back. You build an app where the experience of a watch is built on that app. You build a firmware upgrade that allows the customer to come back. Of course it may seem like cheat codes, but these are not cheat codes. This is how we geared from bringing out the first truly wireless product in the country with a hard pivot to saying that we'll do connected devices but we'll focus on watches because that's an ecosystem that we understand and that's an ecosystem that will allow us to understand the customer better. So it was a part of the DNA, it is not a mistake. It had to make those hard pivots. Of course, a lot of you would say, it's very simple, right? Big data, this, that, do you realize how much those tools cost? Of course, we're a bootstrap business. We have zero external capital. We have to fund every decision that we take.  ROI is more important than anything else and imagine the ROI for this. Imagine sitting in a room having to explain somebody the ROI of this. What did we do? We went to old school. We said, we will speak to our customers every week. If it requires a Zoom call, we'll get on a Zoom call and cometh lockdown, bliss. People were at home, they're saying, okay, we'll talk to you and we'll tell you everything that we have to tell you on the brand. Imagine the power of those 200 Zoom calls that you have almost 3,000 people on who are willing to let the brand grow, co-create with the brand and imagine the richness and anybody who's a call, research scholar here will tell you a sample size of 3,000 is gold mine. We put a 3I model in place. We said for all products that we'll do, we'll have products that are iterative, which is how all technology products are done. We will do products that are innovations, which is basically saying, I know what's next best, gut and gumption. But more importantly, we'll do products that are based on insight. If customers come and tell us lockdown, we don't actually get to figure out when to take the hand wash break or how frequently to do that, we put a reminder. We have a watch where you actually have a hand wash reminder. People in lockdown said my use case has changed on TWS. Now I need it for much longer duration, but I want the battery to last. I want the weight to be less so it doesn't stay in the air. We came up with the solution. And I'm just saying this is insight and insight driving design, product development, the core of a business. And this is what data can do. This is not numbers. This is not statistics. This is hard data speaking to you. Most important, and to my mind, the most important line in the entire deck, be open to failure.  And we've often heard paralysis by analysis. Sometimes we are so absorbed in actually just studying and going over data again and again and again that we don't realize that it's lost relevance. And we just go chasing an insight. Be fast to learn. But most importantly, be tried to pivot. Because if a data insight is contrary to what you've been doing, it's directionally telling you that you might hit roadblocks. It doesn't mean that, okay, let's stop the project, let's do something else. But be prepared to look at what it might entail. Course correct. And most importantly, what data should we look at? Should we look at our own data, competitors, industry, world? What data should we look at? Because some analysts will get source-espaired data, they'll have a cut for everything. The reality is, you are a different business than your competition. We keep letting us, why do you compete like this? The fact is if I start reading their data to apply it to my competencies and resources, we will end up with failure. Important, what was the measurable impact? We got a fuller, richer picture of the consumer, and I told you how. We got our pricing decisions right. To understand what is that right sweet spot, and we're in a business where pricing is everything. When you take the overarching mission of saying, I will democratize technology for India, where price is everything, then getting a price right is the first step. We identified some new trends. Real green shoots, and that's how you get to doing smart glasses. For you to figure out that there is a real use case, there are people who don't like the idea of things sticking in their ears. How can I use guided audio, fit it in a form factor that works and present it to the world? We improved forecasting, it helped us manage our inventory better, nothing better than this in a bootstrap business. And we improve customer service. This is really a differentiator, because if you're not listening to your consumer, we, the strap line for the brand by the way, and this is the height of irony, is Suno Dilkashore, which is listening to your inner noise. But when it comes to taking decisions, we've been listening to that consumer noise. And if you're not listening to consumer noise, you get nowhere. We adjusted for a lot of decisions, right down to a stage where we had to pull out products because we realized that the data was telling us we'll head for failure. And that was the best money we ever saved. What did it get us to? And since we're talking data, let's look at some hard data. We became the number one smart watch brand eight times in a row. Yeah, it is worth celebrating. You know what's worth celebrating more? We were the number two TWS brand. And we climbed up to this spot from ninth position, having beaten Samsung now. The app is rated number two on the Play Store. We are behind Aroge Setu. Do the math. In the global arena, we are the number three basic smart watch brand. And the best part, we became India's number one bootstrap D2C brand. And that's our story. Data got us here. I'm sure it can for you. Thank you so much. I'll just leave you with this thought. I saw some cameras rise up. People taking pictures. If it's really meaningful to you, if you really want to take away something, this is a slide. Please take a picture. But what it tells you is make a commitment. Figure out what your DNA is. And I'm sure if we can, you can. I'm open for questions. Happy to take them. I think we've got time for two of them. Yes, we'll take about a question. One question probably. Yes. So data gives you direction and you have this gut feeling that crunches your experience over the years, right? That's also kind of a data.  So the problem is too prompt. The problem is when you set it up like, I have strong experience and insight, it is essentially discarding the fact that data could counter that intuition. And I'm, like I said, that there is no substitute for either. But the only mirror that you could have for your instant going wrong is to triangulate that, look at data and figure out, are you likely to succeed or not? This is like a coin toss. Right before the coin lands, you know exactly what you want. That's your heart or the gut. But if you're looking at data and you're willing to spin that coin thrice over, then I think we're making a mistake, right? Yes. Let's take just one more question. One more question, that's all. Just one more question, one last question please. Let's quickly circulate the microphone in the interest of time. Let's just keep it very. Make round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. I had spent much more time in business world. Operationally, I don't spend any time. I come to the events and we had our, which was the one in Bombay, which was a jury meet in Bombay at the JW Marriott, pitch 30 under 30. Yeah, okay. Ruel and me were at the jury meet and I was going one day before that, I get a call from another player in this segment, large player, possibly the largest, I won't give you the name, but they have something to do with water and rain and so on. We only have one aquatic friend that is larger than us. Yes, that's it. That's the one I'm talking of. I haven't given its name. And he said, oh, one of my colleagues is applied, but there is somebody from the competition. So maybe my colleague won't want, and I have had this issue in BW Legal World, a lawyer called me saying he has his ex-partner who will not let anyone win. By the way, that ex-partner voted for five of that guys. So I must tell you, I was sitting in the jury meet and I have only one vote, so I can, but Utsav made sure, because he believed in that guy, he championed in the jury and that guy won by unanimous, because sometimes we have these notions about other people that they will not do this, they will not. So I just want to compliment Utsav and I said this to Utsav and after the jury meet that Utsav, you're very kind and gracious that you let, he said, this guy is so good, he should have won.  Okay. And now your question. So Utsav, my question is around the metaverse and we know AR, VR, XR, the biggest challenge is the headset or the glasses. So what's your view and again, how we talk about data, that will be the ultimate data collection engine in the future, so how that can be monetized? So first on the device part and second on the data part. So I think being a bootstrap business through Galilee comes to you naturally, right? The biggest virtue to take away is timing. You have to learn to prioritize and you're absolutely right, the Oculus is the future, where we want to lead experiences in the third dimension. There are three problems. The first problem is knowing when to trigger off the hardware for mass adoption. And are you in the business? So for us, we are very clear that we want to be players that speak to the bottom, the mid and the aspiration, but we are not in the business to solve the problem for three people. Right now that is a problem for three people. As for the second part with regards to the data collection, I think the data that you will get will probably be the richest. The bigger issue is what do you do with that data? And how do you draw intelligent insights to be able to make meaningful solutions for those customers out of that? A lot of times you realize that people are willing to leave and this is a statistical number of 67% apparently, I'm guessing it's a rounded off number, but 67% people are willing to leave their data behind with brands if it enhances the experience for them. And if people leave this data behind for you, which is a peak into their lives, it becomes the responsibility of brands that operate in that segment to drive the highest experience for them and be judicious with what they are doing on that data. Personally, we feel it's about a few months out there. It will to start with not be data about the individual, it'll be data about the life of that individual. So you've got to be cognizant of how you're saving it and how you're using it, but I think we are living in times where people are more than happy putting their lives on social media, let alone share data. So I'm not exactly sure if it serves the purpose to something, but I'm absolutely certain that that is directionally putting us at a level where people are willing to put their lives for third dimension experiences that could be customized by brands around them. So, exciting times ahead. Thank you.


What's up everybody? It's Chris from the Rewired Soul.  I just jumped into this because new information came out about the Zoe Quinn situation and Alec Holoka who sadly took his own life. And it's, it bums me out. Like this is such, such an awful, awful story. So those of you who don't know Zoe Quinn weeks ago came out with allegations against Alec Holoka. They were dating. She said he was emotionally abusive.  And yeah, cancel culture came after him and he was fired from his job.  Well, yesterday I did a video and many others did a video. An article came out from Anna Slats from the post millennial showing some old tweets from Zoe Quinn that made it questionable of, you know, how like was that relationship, you know, really abusive? Like she was painting a much different picture.  They were in love with each other. They were supporting one another and working on projects together. They even did podcasts together and they painted this whole different story. And something I talked about yesterday, which I'll say again, and this is just from a history of working with literally thousands of people who, you know, have struggled with, you know, trauma and things like that. Like it's not a good way to gauge to be like, okay, well they were putting on a happy face out here so nothing was going on, right?  He admitted, you know, that he used to have a lot of issues and he was working on himself. And that was, that's what's so sad about this story. But the new article that just came out from Anna Slats, I'm gonna link it down in the description again for you to check out. It's awful, man. So basically after this story kind of blew up, somebody messaged the author of that article, Anna Slats, and sent a bunch of DMs and they kept anonymous, but it was DMs with Alec from 2014. And Alec was talking with somebody about his relationship with Zoe Quinn and it's a much different story. And we need to talk about this because this is something that we see just constantly when it comes to toxic abusive relationships. But anyways, it looked like, you know, Alec wasn't the only one, you know, who may have been abusive in this relationship that looked like Zoe Quinn was as well. So the first thing I wanna talk about is this, like in the current state that we're in, like calling people out with this intent on ruining them is just so awful and disgusting, right? Like I am a recovering addict and alcoholic. I've had my own traumatic past and dealt with suicidal thoughts and everything like that. And today is National Suicide Awareness Prevention Day and everything. I'm like, I believe in us sharing our stories to inspire others. And it's difficult because when you look at like what Zoe Quinn did and blasted this out on Twitter, which led to Alec taking his own life, it's messed up because people should share their stories but what's the intention? Like what's the motivation behind it? Like something that I've had to do just throughout, you know, my clean time these last seven years is whatever I'm doing is like, what is my motive? Why am I doing this? Am I doing this to help others? Am I doing this for personal gain? Or am I doing this to destroy someone, right? And when we have the motive to help others or inspire others, then yeah, you know, like it becomes a tricky situation. But the sad part about this is, is especially with public figures, like I know a lot of you who are watching this situation unfold more, like a lot of you know about what happened with Pro Jared and Heidi, right?  Like why?  But we all get to sit back and judge, you know, these other people who are going through it publicly. And it's like, dang, like I can't even imagine. And there's just such a lack of empathy, right? Like whenever one of these stories comes up, people choose sides and then whichever side you choose, then a bunch of people go and they attack the other side and that person and everything. And you know, Pro Jared made it out on the other side to clear up his name, but Alec lost hope really quickly and took his own life.  And the criticism of Zoe Quinn that's been coming up is if what she was saying was true, that she should have gone to the authorities, not the first step, the first resort being blasting it on Twitter, right? But for all of you in the audience, like just look at what's going on. Like I sit here and I wonder, like when we look at how we lost Edeca, right? A couple of months ago, I asked myself, I always ask myself, the people who were spamming Edeca with clown emojis and photoshopping him, you know, as a clown and things like that, I asked myself, I'm like, do any of those people feel bad, right? Do they feel any remorse that Edeca took his life afterwards, right?  So when I look at these situations, like there were people just blasting Alec, all right? And again, I don't think many people think he was 100% innocent. It sounds like it was a mutually abusive relationship, but the people who were just going after Alec, like do these people feel bad? One of the biggest questions I have is like, the game developers, like the studio that fired him, like do they feel bad? Like imagine, imagine you losing your job over a breakup, right? Like imagine your ex-boyfriend or your ex-girlfriend coming in and talking to your boss.  You know what I mean? So I look at the employer who fired Alec over this, like that is bananas. It is crazy to me how people don't sit back and assess the situation and say, okay, should we? And I've talked about this before. I get it because part of it is with the current climate, especially online, the mob goes after the company and says, you need to do something, you need to get rid of this person. And companies are more likely to appease the consumers who are putting money in their pocket, than they are to back their own employees. I think the only time, the only time I can think of when people rallied behind somebody being accused of some bullshit was James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy, the director of that. And the cast came and rallied behind him and said, this is messed up, right?  But to see an employer not like have the back of somebody is just mind blowing, right? But here's the thing, like we need to understand that like so many of these things, so many relationships are mutually toxic, you know?  But when you read through this article, this new article, you see the fear that Alec was in. And listen, it's something that I don't even wanna talk about. I hate talking about it. But yeah, today with it being National Suicide Prevention Awareness Day, there have been a lot of articles being spread around and stuff like that where like the suicide rates of men is extremely high.  And as far as people who got it good on planet Earth, it is white men.   It's so hard. But when you read Alec's conversation, this was around the time that Gamergate was going on and he was debating on coming forward with his story. And just because of the climate, like he couldn't do that. He couldn't do that.  And I know what women have gone through from what they've told me, right?  It blows my mind.  I can't imagine being scared to walk down the street by myself, there's so many things, right? But we need to find this balance because there are certain groups that are just classifying all these dudes as bad dudes.  Like I've talked about it a few times on my channel just because I'm really open and I share my story to help others. But I have been in many abusive relationships, right? And I wasn't 1,000% innocent. Like I have had women say the most awful things and just emotionally and verbally abuse me. Like I had no self-esteem. I was a drug addict, alcoholic. I would take whatever I would get. I would have women in my life who would just berate me and talk down to me and all these other things, right?  I was just a hot mess and I was dating hot messes, right? And it's something that can happen to both men and women. And like the thing is, it's like we just, like we got to get out of those relationships. We got to go to therapy. We got to break those patterns and everything like, but man, for all the guys out there watching this, I just want to say like the answer, the answer is not being angry at women, all right? And it's this thing where we got to work together and find common solutions, but just sitting in this black and white thinking, saying all people are this way, or this person's just automatically shitty and all these things, like we have to get down to the little nuances and have conversations. And I don't see, the sad part is I don't see us going backwards, right?  Just say, okay, is there evidence that this is true? Is there a chance that this might not be true? Should I engage in this? Should I not? Like you guys, we are not designed, like nobody on earth would ever tell you, hey, it's a good idea to run purely off emotions and get rid of logic. Nobody would ever say that.  This is why we need to pause.  And I'll finish with this. From day one, since I've been covering this story, I do not, I don't know if Zoe Quinn is lying. We know from Alec's own statements before he passed away. And his sisters that some of this stuff was true. There are other people who know Alec had emotional regulation issues, right? But the issue is, is that we didn't know both sides. If both sides would have came out, this story would have looked way more different. More people would have probably rallied behind Alec when it first happened. You know what I mean?  But, but yeah, like do yourself a favor and please read those messages. Like we have to start empathizing with people a little bit more. And something I talked about yesterday is hurt people hurt people, all right? Like I run a commentary channel where I talk about all sorts of subjects. I don't think that we should live in this like fairytale world where we should never criticize people. But like we need to be able to have conversations without it turning into these angry mobs.  So I don't know. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's gonna happen to Zoe Quinn, but this is all really, really messed up. Like I don't know if there should be legal action or what. Like I don't know, but people really need to understand the power they have when it comes to posting things online, especially people with such a big following, man. Especially people with such a big following. Anyways, check out the article from Anna down in the description below. And yeah, I'll see you guys next time.


Water resources are essential to the ecosystem and social economy in the desert and oasis of the Dharim River Basin, northwest China. Expected to be vulnerable to climate change, it has been demonstrated that regional climate models, RCMs, provide more reliable results for a regional impact study of climate change on water resources, then general circulation models, GCMs. However, due to their considerable bias, it is still necessary to apply bias correction before they are used for water resources research. After a sensitivity analysis on input meteorological variables based on the SOBL method, we compared five precipitation correction methods and three temperature correction methods in downscaling RCM simulations, applied over the Kaidu River Basin, one of the headwaters of the Dharim River Basin. Precipitation correction methods applied include linear scaling, LS, local intensity scaling, LOSI, power transformation, PT, distribution mapping, DM, and quantile mapping, QM, while temperature correction methods are LS, variance scaling, VARI, and DM. The corrected precipitation and temperature were compared to the observed meteorological data prior to being used as meteorological inputs of a distributed hydrologic model to study their impacts on. This article was authored by G.H. Fong, J. Yong, Y. N. Chen, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


Mae'n ystod i ei wneud o'n cwestiynau i gywbeth ymlaen nhw, mae'n irmwysig yn cael ei dweud yn y norm. Mae erbyn yig oedd yn cynnod oherwydd rhan oherwydd y peth ac mae'n ymlaen i ddweud i chi eich ddweud, ac mae'n ymlaen i ddweud i chi wneud. Mae'n gweithio arwaith yn teimlo ymlaen ddigon i fynd i'r llwys â Chwan'n Cysmol. Yne mi ddweud i ddweud i'r teimlo a'r pwysig i'r cy考 o'r cyffredinus yma yn Cardiff. It's a very friendly welcoming conference of enthusiasts who have a can-do attitude. I think the thing I'm most looking forward to at the conference today is the sheer number of amazing people that are here. This conference is... I mean, there's always good papers, good keynotes but it's all about the people really. Open education is something that's critical. It's about sharing the best things that we do. follow the sessions we do. It excites me is the ability to get more minds, more experts more narhyses around the world to think about and contribute to human knowledge in the same way that you can on Wikipedia. I think the exciting thing is that you're not reinventing wheels all the time. So you're able to take good quality materials, repurpose them for your own courses or whatever and then actually make that publicly available again that or the people can build on that further Felly, rhai ddechrau'r ddweud gyda'r gyfrnod yn gwybod ffasol i gael gwybod mae'n mynd i gael arwythnos o blygu yn i'r gweithio o'r ffasol.  Fe dweud ymgyrchu mor unrhyw o bryd i'r gweithio'r content oherwydd i wneud i'r gweithio'r cymaint i'r ffau yw'r ddod o'r cymaint. I don't think there's a compelling reason not to make educational content open. We're funded by the public sector. Doesn't matter whether funding comes from a funding council or whether it comes from students who are funded from the public purse through the loan system. So why should higher education, who are being paid by the public sector, hold stuff to themselves, make it look as if it's private? I think the biggest challenge that we're facing is just lack of awareness. So in the United States there about 75% of the faculty don't know about OER. While there's high quality materials out there I think very often people will take them and use them but they perhaps don't have the confidence to repost them once they've repurposed them and actually I think there needs to be much more of a culture of doing that. There's still a fear I think among many academic staff but if they make their education resources open it will almost jeopardise their jobs. You know to some extent their teaching identity is contained in how they create their content, how they create their pedagogic experiences for their students and I think letting go of that is seen to be very difficult. Things are getting better. Progress is being made but it's still a long way to go before we get to a situation where we all want to be in, where resources are much more openly available and the digital learning is is totally mainstreamed. One of the things that Creative Commons does is we ask governments and foundations when they give people money to build educational resources or to build research resources to require Creative Commons licences on what's publicly funded. The future for me is that universities and what we do become relevant to the whole community that we're not seen to be working in ivory towers pursuing our hobbies at the public expense. I would certainly hope that the future of open education in Wales is that it becomes a part of everyday practice so that all staff who are engaging, all staff engage with it and repurpose materials and post them and it is just something that is done, not something that people have to remember to do. There's always a problem of time with making any change in education but I think once you get a critical mass of enthusiasm that really helps to get the ball rolling and I think we're seeing that happening now both in Wales and elsewhere.


Studying the Emigre? Here's how you can analyse this poem. In terms of structure, this poem is written as three stanzas. Ellipsis at the beginning creates a fairy tale-like opening. We can see that the speaker romanticises the country that she's from. The Anjom Mont After Child shows that the speaker has a vague memory of the country she left behind. She is an unreliable narrator. The somatic field of light here shows that the speaker only has nostalgic memory of her home country. The metaphor and alliteration here presents time as an enemy. The more time is passing, the less she remembers of her country. This simile shows that she was so young when she emigrated and left her home country that she's forgetting the language of her home city. This hyperbole creates tension. We get the sense that she had to leave her home country because it is now a dictatorship. Yet the simile and the personification here shows the speaker still sees her city as beautiful. She never loses faith in it. This oxymoron hints she may never be able to return.