From London, England, it's the Cube. Covering Discover 2016 London. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillis. Okay, we're back. Cube alum, Patrick Osborn is here. He's the Senior Director of Product Management and Marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Storage and Doug Hazelman, who's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam. Gentlemen, good to see you. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks for having us. So, I've been watching Veeam for years now.  Veeam, Veeam, Veeam. And you guys have just done a phenomenal job of just growing your company, you know, building the brand and so congratulations on that. But how's it going at Discover? It's going great. You know, we've been a long-time partner with HPE definitely on, you know, especially on the storage side with integration with, you know, three-par and store virtual and store once. You know, I've been working with HPE for, I don't know, six, five or six years now and it's been a great partnership.  We also made a bit of an announcement today too, so that's all good. All right, we'll unpack that a little bit, but so Patrick, can we come to you and just set the table for us? What are the big trends you're seeing? You know, give us the high-level perspective and it will dive in. Yeah, so one of the things that, you know, we made some announcements this week in the storage area. We are seeing, you know, this adoption of flashes, you know, through the roof, non-linear growth, you know, more than 50% of the systems that we ship from a three-par perspective are all flash and that's growing. What we see is that that is, it's good and bad, right? It's good for customers that obviously they're seeing a lot of savings from flash, certainly performance. What it's doing though is definitely introducing a lot more risk into their infrastructure. If you take a look at flash from a couple waves, right, people are starting to introduce a little bit of flash for performance, definitely starting to get the economics and check in wave two, you know, it's definitely more accessible for customers, especially in the mid-size enterprise to buy and deploy all flash. And then this sort of third wave, which is, you know, now it's your standard, now you need all the data services that go around it. What we've seen is that has basically increased your risk portfolio from an application density, right? So you can run a lot more stuff effectively on a terabyte of flash than you were able to in the past. So now you've got more volumes, more hosts, more hypervisors, therefore more applications running on that single piece of infrastructure. So what we've been talking about is the highly resilient all-flash data center, right? And it's technologies like three-par and all the data services that come with it, store ones, and then partnerships with, you know, our partners like Veeam that's going to provide that whole solution around availability really at the end of the day. So flash is great. I think a lot of people have used it for accelerating applications, and it's, you know, definitely in economics. You know, it's great economically for customers, but some of the, nobody loves data protection, right? Nobody likes to pay for it at the end of the day. But so now what we're seeing is that people are expecting that to be an endemic part of the infrastructure, and, you know, partnering with folks like Veeam has helped us do that. Are you surprised, are customers surprised when you tell them this, or when you go into customers who are adopting flash and tell them that they're taking a greater risk? You know, I think at the end of the day, people are always surprised when you point out their risk profile. So we have a number of tools and processes we go through to kind of show people what their risk profile is. At the end of the day, you're putting a lot of applications in one basket, right? Then you guys see that all the time. And that's basically kind of what it is. We saw it with virtualization too, right? Now all of a sudden you've got a lot more stuff running on a single piece of hardware. But once that hardware fails, right? So you saw the rise of things like backup and disaster recovery focused on virtualization because it was a different risk profile than running everything on physical servers. And same thing with flash. Well, you've got less copies too.  So, you know, good thing is copy creep maybe gets addressed, but sometimes it's good to have a copy around. Yeah, it's just a failure. And that's what customers, you know, they want to see at the end of the day. It's something that I don't want to go to four or five different tool sets to manage all those copies, right? I want to have an integrated experience, right? We talked about this before, in terms of customers want to buy a vertically oriented integrated system, right? That's going to run a set of applications for them. So they don't want to be messing around with snapshots and replication in another tool, backup in another tool, dev test and copy in yet another framework or UI. Being able to throw that into your storage layer to be able to do application consistent snaps, snap and replicate, offload for backup, offload for test and dev and making copies is definitely something that people are expecting now and we're providing it in our infrastructure. So how did this partnership come about?  But you guys have been partners in the field for a long time. Does that move, that spin merge with micro focus open up new partnership opportunities? This is an example. I mean, in the past you might not have been aggressive about having a partner like Veeam on theCUBE. Was that just coincidence or is that a change because of that spin merge? I think, I mean, we've been working together for some time now. So for us, we've always had a very open ISV ecosystem in storage, right? So my personal belief is that you lower the barrier of entry and you lower the barrier of exit, right? I mean, so if you're open and you have the best product offerings out there, people will choose either breast and breed or a fully integrated stack. So for me, we've been partnering with all sorts of people and you know, obviously we work very closely with HPE Data Protector and Veeam Explorer and we have solutions with that team. Frankly, what we're seeing right now is a very high intersection rate of customers, right? So people that are, who are Veeam customers that are moving up into the mid-range and the enterprise that are using HPE servers, networking, storage, I mean, you guys see that all the time. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's kind of where we're moving. But the other thing was, it was several years ago when it was actually the store once team, that came to us and said, look, we'd like to make sure that we work with you guys because we see your success when we want to be part of that, as part of that open ecosystem. So, and that obviously moved towards other things and now we have primary array support for three parts to our virtual, there were the first array supported on our platform. So it's just, like I said, it's been a great partnership. And you guys initiated that integration, is that right? On the primary storage we did, I mean, it was joint. We said, hey, we want to work with snapshots. And they said, great, here's how you do it. Yeah, and HPE was great to work with. I guess my point, Doug, is that you guys were small, but you're gaining share very rapidly. Now you've hit critical mass and it's like, boom, on the radar, because you've got others as well at that intersection. I mean, I'm sure Symantec pops up in your radar. I don't know. Keep in mind too that these guys sell where we don't, right, and we sell where they don't right now. So you guys are going to capture tens of thousands of new customer logos this year, right? And we obviously want to have an integrated solution so they choose HPE infrastructure. Double click on that. What's the, what are the swim lanes? Well, so what we, the announcement that we put out today was we're now part of the HPE complete program, which essentially means that HPE can now resell Beam Software to any of their customers or their partners. So it's essentially a reseller agreement.  What's different though? You were saying before, there's not a lot of channel conflicts. There's not a lot of what? Channel conflicts. You're saying you're selling different places. Absolutely. What are those places? How would you characterize where you typically sell and what the upside is for you with this announcement? Yeah, so I mean, so I think historically from an HPE perspective, right, you're seeing us in the fat part of the mid-market, especially enterprise and certainly large enterprise, right? I know that the Beam folks have been super successful in capturing hundreds of thousands of SMB customers, the customers that are likely to grow very quickly, you know, individually as well as a pool of customers, right? So your model on from a marketing and freemium and that conversion is very different from the way we go to market. So I think having those two engines working together is our, is our... Yeah, like I said, we, you know, we have over 200,000 customers, they're not the Fortune 200,000, you know. And that's a good thing. You're both getting access to new markets from this deal. But in the why of that is it's been, it's a channel issue, not a technology issue, correct? It's not even a channel issue. We've been working in the channel for several years. Well, I'm saying you don't have the channel to that Fortune 100 or Fortune 1,000. Oh, well, yeah, I mean the sales force and those types of things, yeah. It's not a direct sale, you're not a direct sales organization. But it's not the technology though, correct? Or I mean... No, it's not the technology, scale, performance. Yeah. The feature set, robustness, that's all there. Yes. I mean, we're not really digging into what all there means, but I'll take your word for it for now. Yeah, every release, you know, every release we see more and more enterprise customers joining on.  We're protecting, you know, customers with tens of thousands of VMs and hosts. You don't hear... Veeam is a toy. Yeah. You don't.  Who are you displacing? You must be displacing someone in those kinds of big customers. Yeah, typically we're displacing whoever the incumbent is or was.  Sometimes it's HPE. Sometimes it's HPE. But it's typically, you know, as they're modernizing the data center and retooling how they do things, they're looking at what's the best way to do the specific task. And they realize that maybe the tool that they currently have may not be the best and they go look for best of breed. For customers who are moving from an all-disk environment, investing heavily in Flash, how does that change their DR and their resiliency strategy? You know, from a Flash perspective, it doesn't really change much from our perspective.   Well, I mean, virtualization was a huge tailwind for Veeam. I mean, that really was what put you guys on the map. I mean, it seems like all Flash, let's think about this for a second. I guess synchronous replication at a modest distance starts to make less sense, makes sense on site. But then putting it across the Hudson River, what's the point of that? The expectations and the techniques are changing, right? When Doug talked about modernizing the data center and modernizing some specific processes, what I'm seeing is that there's no more backup window, right? So you've got this huge fan-in of applications on specific infrastructure. So at the end of the day, nobody's processing for eight hours and then backing up for eight hours, right? That just doesn't exist anymore. So as much as you can unload onto the infrastructure, so I can take course from a dataset perspective, but very granular from a time perspective, I can do that over and over and over, right? And then I can do things like selective restore, right? Through RMC or through Veeam Explorer. And what we're seeing as customers, their expectation is that they're checkpointing and backing up and replicating all day long every day. Yeah, so I'm making a copy on site. I'm getting it off site as fast as I can, maybe to a store once or some other purpose-built backup appliance. And I'm trying to minimize my RPO as best I can. Exactly. And get as close to zero RPO as possible, which is impossible. What you're seeing now is that that granular level now is at the VM, right? Or at a much larger dataset, even at a VM data store, as opposed to in the past, it was I'm going to back up and I'm going to go and index a bunch of file systems and people aren't really doing that anymore. Does containerization change the game at all? I think now that you start, so we have a strategy around containers from a storage perspective. What we're starting to see more customers ask for persistent storage options for containers, right? So what we see now is that storage from a container perspective is ephemeral, right? But people that want to have persistent storage options, it'll be either in a software-defined nature or we have a bunch of things like plug-ins with Docker and Flocker and things we do is store virtual and three-par. I think that from a data protection standpoint, it even creates more of a fan-in and fan-out in terms of the number of items that you have to be responsible for. So, and I know you guys have some plans on the container side, so I don't know if you guys want to address that role. Obviously it depends, like you said, how the customer is planning on using containers. But typically where we want to be is we want to provide the availability for the data behind them. So that's kind of our strategy is, maybe not look at containerization support individually, but definitely have that support for the infrastructure behind the containers and have all the data that they're accessing, utilize it. Because your point is most containers you're going to throw away anyway. So if you've got 10,999 don't need backup, but the infrastructure supporting that obviously does for whatever it is you want to persist. You kind of container agnostic is what you're saying there. Right? Okay. A lot of people are running containers in VMs right now. Yeah. Right, because you're in a test dev, kick the tires type of mode. So it fits into the model that we have going on right now. I mean, it pretty much everywhere now with Linux. Yep. I bet it. So, okay, what's next for you guys? Well, for us, we're trying to get everyone on all flash as fast as possible. And the way we're doing that is, we just announced a program called Flash Now. You're bombing prices. We are now bombing prices. We are passing on the value to our customers. Okay. So we announced Flash Now, so you can get an all flash system for three cents a gig per month and then you can actually get integrated data protection into that for additional penny. So we're making it, we're providing the technology, the capabilities from Flash. You see, we actually have a tech preview for 3D crosspoint. So NVMe in three part, we got it running on the show floor today. So you're starting to see new media being introduced, for storage class memory. So all that, we're trying to customers in a consumption model. So maybe the public cloud is good for you for some workloads. Maybe it's not, but you really like that consumption model. We can provide that to you for your storage. Tony O'Neary said you've got 100 customers who are in preview mode on that service right now. What kind of volumes are they working with? In terms of capacity? In terms of the, yeah, the amount of capacity they're buying from you on this pay-as-you-go basis. Yeah, I mean, so it's all across the board. I mean, we're shipping eight and 16 terabyte flash drives now. So if you're configuring 32, 64 drives, you're talking 100 to terabytes on an individual frame, the systems scale up to petabytes, so we can provide that type of scale. Just to clarify, Patrick, what you said, it's four cents a gigabyte per month for all flash and a fully backed up volume. It's completely integrated. And that's a Veeam integration? No, no, they can provide, I'm not going to talk pricing for that. So we're not talking capacity on demand for Veeam yet. This is physical infrastructure. So flash for your primary storage, store once for your secondary storage. Great, okay, and then Veeam license on top of that. Yep, got it. And you get it all through HPE now. Awesome, all right, well listen, congratulations on the partnership and the growth of Veeam and love it. We'll see you guys tonight, I hope. Absolutely. Thanks for having us here. Thanks for having us here on theCUBE again. You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back. This is theCUBE, we're live from the Docks of London. Right back.


For God that wields the dark mule never times. To answer your question, Magnus Sight. As the Magnus Sight movement marches forward to one million subscribers. 102,000 strong! Now, Brother Rotman, he says I have a request. Could you please do a video about why girls never answer the phone when you try to call them even after you manage to get their number? Short answer, she's really not interested. But let's see what the rest of your email says. Here's my situation. So about a month ago, I met this girl that caught my attention in Christina. At an arcade bar on the north side of town. Too much info. She seemed like a really nice young lady who I could connect with. And to top it off, I found her to be very attractive. She agreed to exchange numbers with me. And I said, could I call her on any day or afternoon? But after a total of about six attempts over a period of three weeks, I have heard nothing from Christina, not once. She ain't interested, cousin. I'm just trying to figure out the mystery as to why some broads never answer the goddamn phone. How did you succeed in exchanging numbers?  It's really bad enough that the majority of females I try to get with tell me they're taken or so they claim. But in the rare event that I finally get a chick's number, they never answer the motherfucking phone. Sorry if I sound livid or come off as rude, but this is one of the numerous different reasons as to why I can't ever establish some type of friendship or active dating life within a chick. But along the long term relationship because of lack of communication among other things. Basically, I want you to give your opinion as to why do some girls give their phone number and then leave you hanging despite their supposed interest in you. What to watch out for and how to avoid this in the future because they don't want to talk to you is not a valid excuse. I'm pretty sure it goes deeper than that. Well, look, here's the thing, too. You're going to have to learn to study body language. You're going to have to learn to understand physical cues. Okay, because when a girl's not interested, a lot of times she won't look at you in the eye. She won't look at you. She really won't laugh at anything you have to say if she does this nervous laughter because she really wants to get away from you. She's not interested.  I don't know what it is, but whatever it is about you, she's not interested. So you're going to have to learn to do that. I learned on my own from physical cues. I can just feel when a woman is interested in me or not. I don't have that issue anymore. Now, there are books. There are videos that can teach you physical cues if you can't learn them on your own. Not everybody inherently knows how to read people. It's basically called reading people. You can read the situation. You know what's going on. Another thing is, you said what to watch out for. Well, that's going to be with the body language. Not keeping eye contact. Maybe fidgeting, stuff like that. You know, I got to go. She doesn't want to talk to you when she's doing stuff like that. How to avoid it in the future? Learn body language. Learn physical cues. Another thing is, what was I going to say? It's an interesting excuse. Damn. Sorry, I draw blank. Oh, so when you call them, let me tell you something. When I get a girl's number, I only call once. That is it. That is it. Because if she wants to talk to me, she will call back. And when they are interested in you, when they call back, they will apologize for not being available. Trust me on that. They'll say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just got out of work. I was punching out. I saw you calling. But you know, I wanted to make sure I had time to talk to you. She'll like that. They will apologize. If you call once, she doesn't answer. Make sure you leave a message. And that is it. If she never calls back, she was never really interested.  Okay? I hope I've answered your question. Magnet sites help you out if you have any other tips. But that's it. After you get the number and you call, if she don't answer again, don't call her again. And I should say, since my 10% is this funny, how y'all kind of like started that whole 10% thing, my magnet seat is my sexy ladies out there that watch. So I wrote Magnus. Please girls, please.  Because that's why y'all do it. It's to be nice. You don't want to hurt our feelings. No one likes to say no. That's why being a salesperson, it's hard for people to say no to me. You know, they always say I want to think about it. That way they can get me out of the house and I don't have to say no to my face. People don't like to hurt other people. So they think it'll hurt my feelings to tell me no.  Some men are like this, ladies. I want you to understand. In their life, they see themselves as the chasers.  So for you to say no, it doesn't bother them. It's part of business. It's part of trying to create a relationship with a girl. If she says I got a boyfriend or no, I'm sorry, not my type really. I kind of, you know, whatever it is, you got to say. And I understand some men are very persistent. Just say you have a man. And if he says, well, can we be friends? Say, I don't want to even have a relationship with a man that wants to be my friend while I have a boyfriend, because I know what that means. Like, tell him. Stand him up. Let him know. You know, like, look, I'm not no. I'm not even playing that. If we, you know, so, because that says something about you to the woman if you are the, well, can't we be friends? You actually mean it. I only said that to one girl one time and I literally meant it. I literally meant it because I thought she was cool, yet attractive. And I asked her for a number. She was like, well, that's cool. We could be friends. She was like, ah, here we go. And I was like, no, I seriously mean it. But I think I'm one in a billion. I don't think many men actually say that and really mean they want to be friends.  So don't give him your number. Don't. Okay. Just tell him I got a boyfriend or I'm not dating anyone at this time. Thank you. All right. All right. That's it. Oh, I've helped you, brethren. One million subscribers. Woo.


Alright, I got once again, welcome everyone. My name is Leonardo de Flores. So let's talk about this designation of Cuba on the state sponsors of terrorism list. So basically, this list is something that the United States applies to countries that quote unquote repeatedly provide support for acts of international terrorism. And what it amounts to is a set of sanctions that restrict us foreign assistance that impose a ban on defense and exports and sales. Restrictions on control on controls over experts of what they call dual use items. And then kind of in, right at the end they add miscellaneous and financial and other restrictions and it's under that category of miscellaneous that we see most of the negative impacts applied towards Cuba because of course, there's nothing else that designation. The other sanctions that come come about with this designation already kind of covered among the embargo and the 243 sanctions applied by Trump during his administration. So Cuba was and if I'm generally speak too quickly during these things don't worry about it if you're trying to take notes because a lot of this information isn't one pager that we're going to share with you in a little bit. And as we all know, Cuba's addition to the SSOT list came about in the waning days of the Trump administration, it was politically motivated and has no national security justification. And it's actually having a really negative impact on the Cuban people. And it's been a bit difficult actually to tease away those impacts from, say the embargo itself or other type from sanctions but it's been three years now and now we kind of have a better idea of what the SST designation is doing to Cuba. And really, when we look at the pretext given by the United States government for including Cuba on the list it's it's absurd, because they included Cuba because of what they said was a refusal to Columbia's request to extradite 10 members of the ELN, the National Liberation Army, who were living in Havana, and because quote unquote, Cuba harbors US fugitive. Well, when we pick apart this claim it's it's really actually easy to pick apart because first of all, the only reason that these members of the ELN were in Havana was because of Pete's talks that Cuba was hosting between the Colombian government and the and the ELN negotiators were granted safe haven as part of the peace process in fact Cuba and other countries that took part in Norway was one of the other grantor countries. They signed an agreement prior to the peace process taking place, where they would they specifically said that they would grant safe haven to the negotiators to ensure the sanctity of the peace process. And because of this kind of willingness to create a help in this process of peace for Colombia one of the longest standing if not the longest standing civil conflict in the hemisphere. Cuba was punished by the Trump administration. And the State Department under Biden. Well, first of all, we thought that Biden would immediately remove Cuba from this list when he came into when he came into office but that hasn't been the case. And in November of last year the State Department in its country reports on terrorism. They had this little blurb about Cuba, and they themselves admitted that Cuba's extradition refusal was due to peace negotiation protocols exactly what I've explained, and also they admitted that Colombia had subsequently dropped the extradition requests. In fact, Colombian President Gustavo Petro characterized this request as a betrayal of previous agreements signed in the form of protocols with Colombia, Cuba and Norway. So there it goes the major justification for this Cuba's placement on the SSOT list, because Cuba no longer wants these ELN leaders extradited and because they themselves have said that there's, you know, it wasn't justified in the first place. And then regarding this issue of US Cuba fugitives well one of the things that we've seen is in this letter to President Biden written by over 100 lawyers and equal scholars. They note that failing to extradite US citizens on criminal charges has never been used as a justification for placing Cuba, or excuse me for placing a country on the SSOT list, aside from Cuba. And furthermore they say that Cuba's issuance of asylum to these US fugitives does not meet the statutory definition for sponsoring terror laid out by the three laws that define international terror. So by no means within the law within the facts. Is there any sort of rational explanation justification for Cuba on this being on this list of state sponsors of terror it was purely political and vindictive move, mood, move, excuse me. Furthermore, you know when we're talking about this with people I think one of the things we have to emphasize is that the Cuban government throughout 2023 engaged in all sorts of cooperation with the United States. They cooperated on law enforcement there was a there were talks with us on law enforcement in January 2023 of Cuban border guard delegation came to visit the United States in March 2023. And Cuba in the United States held anti terror measure discussions in April 2023. So, would the United States really do all of this with a real sponsor of terror. Clearly the answer is no, and clearly you know there's no justification for keeping Cuba on the list. And when we're talking about doing advocacy around SSOT. I think we can break down the impacts of Cuba's design, designation to kind of three broad categories. One is the national security argument. And, you know, I think some of us might say you know that this list is illegitimate illegitimate in the first place but I don't know that that's an argument that's going to go very far with the Democrats and Congress that we're trying to convince. But what might go far is quoting former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes he was he served under the Obama administration. And right after Trump placed Cuba back on the SSOT list. He said that Cuba's inclusion and I quote risks delegitimizing what should be a tool that is used to punish actual state sponsors of terrorism. The second category, broadly defined is the impact that it's having on Cubans. You know, the Cuban deputy foreign minister was in town I think it was in either in September of or October of last year and he held a meeting at the Institute for Policy Studies here in DC. And he said that 30 financial institutions pocket banks lenders that sort of thing. They left Cuba within weeks of the SSOT listing. And that has basically severely limited the banking options for Cubans and organizations working in Cuba. And on top of that, one of the impacts of this SSOT list is that citizens from more than 40 countries traveling to Cuba are then become ineligible for us visa waivers.  Well, before it used to be pretty easy because you could just go to Cuba and then have your visa waiver and fly and get to the United States but now rather than having a visa waiver you have to go through this very long process through the US consulate in your country and where your visa may or may not get denied. And so, if you're faced with that prospect, the really the easiest thing if you want to visit the United States is to just not visit Cuba. And we're seeing a very direct impact on Cuban tourism, tourism, which is a major employer in the private sector. Other impacts are that Cubans living abroad have had their bank accounts frozen and transfers blocked including remittances. You've had companies refuse to sell medical supplies to Cuba. You have you've had entrepreneurs and the private sector in Cuba, facing obstacles to financing and reduced demand and we've had e-commerce platforms having stopped offering offering services. So widespread impacts mostly revolving around financial issues or the tourism issue. Finally, the third kind of broad impact category we can talk about is the impact on the United States itself. Well, one of the things we've seen in the last couple of years and we've seen it a lot on my news is that the number of Cubans coming from the number of people coming from Cuba to the United States migrants has increased significantly. Well, in the first year after the SSOT designation, CBP encounters of Cubans at the US-Mexico border increased by 274%. That was just in the first year alone. And then on another impact on the United States is that US NGOs that are doing work in Cuba have had their funds frozen and shipments of humanitarian supplies blocked. So this is work that has already kind of cleared a lot of hurdles regarding the embargo and then this extra sanction that's slapped on them makes their jobs more difficult. And finally, you know, it's not just us here in the United States that are talking about removing Cuba from the list and pressuring the Biden administration to remove Cuba from the list. There's massive international support for this, starting with 18 former Latin American and Caribbean presidents and prime ministers who wrote to President Biden about removing Cuba from the list. As I mentioned before, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, he's repeatedly insisted on removing Cuba from the list, as has AMLO, the president of Mexico, Brazilian president Nulada Silva, Chilean president Gabriel Boric, the EU foreign policy chief, José Borrell. Even the British ambassador to Cuba called the designation deeply unfair. In fact, Buddy of the Beast came out with a new video about this very issue about the international support for removing Cuba from the list. I'll post the link in the chat in case you all haven't seen it. So what are we asking for Congress? Well, we want them to do more. And to do more, we really should first recognize what they've already done on this issue. Because there's been four congressional letters at least that have mentioned removing Cuba from the SOT list. The first one came December 2021. About two years ago, a little bit more, when 114 members of Congress, basically the majority of the Democrats in the House called for lifting sanctions on Cuba called for a better, more humane policy towards Cuba and for engagement and for removing Cuba from the SOT list. And then in May 2023, there was a letter about the impact of sanctions on migration that called the designation, the designation being Cuba's inclusion on the SOT list as quote unquote baseless. And then finally, just in this past couple of weeks, we've had two more letters one, a letter in January congratulations to all the folks in Massachusetts who worked so hard on this, because the majority of the Massachusetts congressional delegation wrote to President Biden specifically on this issue, and among the other things they called it a very vindictive policy. And we'll have we have links to that letter on our website so you can take a look because it has really excellent arguments for removing Cuba from the list. And then finally, I think it was last week, Steve Cohen, a representative Democrat from Tennessee, also wrote to President Biden calling for Cuba to be removed from the list. So for these folks who have already kind of done something, we're going to ask them to do more. We're going to thank them, of course, and we're going to ask them to do more. And then for the rest of the Democrats, we really want them to pressure President Biden in a significant way to remove Cuba from the list, because basically it all comes down to a broken promise from him. He promised he would go back to the Obama policy of engagement when he was running in 2020. And then his incoming administration pledged to Congress that it would start the process of removing Cuba from the list, even telling members that the review was already ongoing. But last month the intercept reported that all these promises weren't kept, and that the process of removing Cuba from the list hadn't even begun. And I mentioned this intercept article, but it actually had a very significant error because it said that there was some sort of six month process for removing Cuba from the list. That's actually not true. President Biden could remove Cuba from the list in as little as 45 days. And that comes from Congressional Research Service and what's actually written into law. He basically would have to inform Congress today that in 45 days he's removing Cuba from the list because over the last six months Cuba has not supported terrorism in any way, which is obviously patently true, of course, that Cuba has not supported terrorism. So the White House is dragging its feet, the State Department is dragging its feet, and we're really trying to push for Cuba to be removed as quickly as possible because as we know as we get closer and closer to the elections, this is going to become a taller and taller task. I think I'll end there with an issue of the impacts of the SOTI designation. If you have questions about that in particular, please say that for the end, because I want to switch it over now to Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, co-founder of Asedda, and she's going to talk about some of the best practices for contacting your member of Congress. Hi. Thank you, Leo. I'm really sorry I'm quite rushed. I thought you were going to be shorter, Leo, and I was going to be able to leave for another webinar that I have to speak at. So I'm sorry to be quick here, but we have so many people on who are so good at this. I see Lisa Vellante, I see Marilyn McKenna, and many others who do lots and lots of lobbying. And in fact, what I have to say is, do as I say, not as I do, because I think a key thing for lobbying is to try to have a good relationship with your representatives. I certainly don't have that when it comes to mine. In Frederica Wilson in Florida, who is my representative, I finally had to run after her down the hall to try to get her to talk. She was more interested in what hat she was going to wear than the people suffering in Cuba. And Rick Scott, who is my senator in Florida, I just got approached by the police today in Washington that I'm going to be banned from his office for an entire year. So this is, it's not easy to be lobbying, especially when you have people like Marco Rubio and Rick Scott as your representatives, who are absolutely terrible, but assuming that you have somebody in Congress who is not that bad, or you can claim other people because you're important too. Do you have kids that live somewhere? Do you have parents that live somewhere? Were you born somewhere else? You could claim other representatives as your representative. I live part time in Washington DC, so I have no senator. So all of those senators are my senators. So let's not be too restrictive about who represent us. But it is important to try to have a relationship with your representative and your senators. Most of the time when we do lobbying, we're not able to see them directly. We see them more at town halls or public events.  If you've cultivated a relationship, then you're doing it right. Meetings I find with Congress people, oftentimes you have to go with representatives of various organizations and be a coalition that they think is a significant voting group for them to agree to meet with you. Otherwise, you're meeting with the staff. If you're in the home district, nowadays you can meet by Zoom with the staff in DC if you want the foreign policy person how to get the meeting. Oftentimes there's a form on the website. I find they rarely answer the forms on the website. Then you have to go to the next thing which is to call their office. You can go to house.gov or senate.gov to find information about your senator. But you can also just call the switchboard 20224 4131 to be connected with anybody in Congress and call their office and say, if you don't know who you want to speak to who is the person that works on foreign policy issues. I find going through the scheduler. I usually don't get a meeting going directly to the person who does the foreign policy work. It's easier to get that meeting. As I said, some could be on Zoom and some could be in person in their, in their home district and some can be in person in Washington DC. And I hope there will be people coming to DC more often to do this advocacy work. Once you do get that meeting, it's important to be prepared to do your homework to know what they have said on this issue to be ready to make your case in a very concise way. Always good to have a personal story to tell, but don't go on too long. What I have found in these meetings is that our people want to talk and talk and talk and not give time to ask questions of the person we're meeting with. Oftentimes the person we're meeting with doesn't want to talk. They just want to represent their boss and not compromise themselves by saying very much. But you want to push them to actually be the one to talk to give you some information. Stay on the agenda. Have your main talking points. Make sure you know who is going to speak to what issue. And, and have a clear ask what is it that you're calling for now Leo gave us some of the asks. So obviously we will have those. And then the issue also really important is the follow up. Who did you meet with thanking them what were the issues raised that maybe they didn't know about that you could send them new information about. And those are the basic things I would say is the relationship building. If you are able to do that and stomach. Some of these people who have such a horrible position when it comes to Cuba. Thank you. Thanks so much for the I know you have to run. But thank you so much for your time. I think that was helpful. Let me pass it on over to Natasha co founder of a city. I'm hoping everyone can hear me okay. And then my connection holds up. Saludos from from Havana. If for some reason my connection goes out they will hop and say you all know so I'm just going to follow up a little bit to what both. Yeah and Leo went over which is the background and what to do with that background now and we are channeling that on January 24th into an advocacy day. For Congress and and for the White House but specifically we're really trying to get our members educated informed and activated around this issue. But the White House know that they're expecting that President Biden will be either informing them or acting on his own to remove Cuba from this list. Certainly, by the end of his first term. We recognize this an election year but this is something that's often been done kind of in the shadows and there's no reason that this couldn't couldn't be done now despite Senator. Secretary of State Blinken's statement to. Congress of a few months ago to the contrary that. They weren't reviewing I had any intentions of removing Cuba from the list which is precisely why it's really important that we raise our voices on this and so I'm going to share my screen with you all to show. What the asset is kind of digital and in person advocacy day. Looks like I'm hoping everyone can see my screen here. So on the 24th what we want is just a wave of phone calls and emails to members of Congress. First as a constituent because we know that that's the voice that congressional offices most listen to as a constituent you notifying your member that this is an issue that's important to you. That you want them to be educated about and that you expect them to take action on even if they're not on a key committee. They're likely a member of a caucus that's important whether it's the democratic caucus or. Farm or agricultural caucus or trade or banking or any of these have. Some type of jurisdictional authority over issues related to Cuba and some of the sanctions and or legal restrictions. So on our website this is just or the link has been shared in the chat as well. There's a couple of ways to get to our SSOT kind of landing page. But right at the top you'll see here our digital toolkit space. So on the 24th. If you are in DC or you can make it to DC. We really encourage in person meetings for the reasons that Medea spoke about. It's really important to be able to build those kind of relationships with your congressional offices with the member directly person preferably but if not certainly with key legislative staffers. And then while you're on the hill you can also just take a moment to go visit other offices even if they're not your representatives. To let them know how you feel about this issue. We really also want members senators to be. Brought into this conversation we've seen historically. A lot of our activism and advocacy work being focused on the house for various reasons but we also know that the Senate plays a significant role. A number of senators have reached out to the White House specifically on this issue. Their senators and key states whose constituencies are really interested in shifting our policy around Cuba whether it's for trade purposes and for expert purposes. What travel tourists for. For tourism purposes whatever it may be. And so looking at kind of a statewide statewide representatives as senators is really important to also get them educated and engaged on this on a landing page here you'll see your SS OT toolkit. There's a few buttons advocacy education communications. These are different resources for you so if you are education page will take you to where we'll have like a background. A one page backgrounder. And I believe it's up here here's the one pager so this is you can print this you can leave this with the staffer if you're doing an in person visit you can download it and email it as an attachment. If you're sending staffers a direct message just as something that you leave with them around SS OT and so that they have kind of a reference sheet. You can just also use it as a reference point for yourself if you just feel like you need some additional talking points. You'll also notice on the website here that there is some just background information as well on our education page on our advocacy page. This is where you'll find all of the take action button so sending a message to the White House directly sending a message to your member of Congress when you click on here. Like you right here you'll be able to find your member of Congress once you fill out this form it'll automatically tell you who your member of Congress and your two senators are and it'll send them an automatic message. The same with the White House. There is a little exception here for the. I think Natasha is breaking up. I don't know if it's just for me but reason I mentioned earlier about the recent letter that was sent by a number of members of the Massachusetts delegation. This is. Sorry, you're okay. You were just logging for a second. I thought you had got disconnected, but you're good. Sorry about that. Do you want to email? Oh, sure. Why not? Yeah, I can take over if you let me see your screen. Sorry. Sorry about that. Oh, no problem. One second. Let me just pull up the asset a website so you can go through it. Okay. Can you see my screen? I think so. All right. So we were on the take action toolkit. Natasha went through the advocacy button or the education button. And then when we were on the advocacy button, if I'm not mistaken, right? So here we have several ways we can take action. I think Natasha went through this first one, sending a message to your members of Congress. Of course, we have a way to send the message to President Biden. The content of these letters is similar, but not exactly the same. I think we're kind of, you know, tailoring our message to our audiences, of course, and you can. Personalize the message and change it. You don't have to use our standard of that language we've already set out, but you're welcome to. Of course, this is the. The action contacting President Biden right there. There's also when we were doing force act, but we're not doing that at this moment. We have sample emails to your state legislature and to the government governor courtesy of the NNOC. These are just Google docs. We have a list of your representatives and senators foreign policy staffers. I'm going to click on that briefly just so you can take a look. It's organized alphabetically by state. You'll see the members title and their last name. So Senator Tuberville happens to be 1st. And then as you scroll, you can see the foreign policy staffer according to be gov. And this was updated last week, we're going to be continually updating this every couple of months so that you have the latest information. So this is the way as media was talking about when you're building those relationships. These are the folks you want to build them with the staffers that are dealing with foreign policy. And you'll find the phone numbers are for the offices. The staff for emails are here. And for those of you who ever come to DC. The Capitol Hill address on all the way to the right hand side. If you happen to notice an error, please just contact us at a set it and we'll fix it. And I'd say errors because we're using service called be gov to create this list. But sometimes it's not exactly right. And you'll see some staffers listed who aren't the foreign policy people and will suggest someone else. And so we'll take care of those areas and fix them on this spreadsheet as soon as we hear about them. Go back. And then let me go back to the toolkit because actually, we, I just realized there's the wrong link on the education page. If you go to a set it.org and this is you'll be able to find it in, you know, by tomorrow we'll fix this link. But if you go to a set it.org slash sot, you'll get this page, which is basically my presentation from earlier tonight. And it's got all the links for all our sources. Feel free to share this page it's got some of the videos. This is the belly of the beast video that's embedded here. We have some quotes from some of the presidents, and a way to download and print the PDF or download and share it. And this is what it looks like. This is the actual document that we're going to be leaving behind at the office that we go to on the 24th. And please feel free to share this with people that you might think are interested and of course with any staffers that you build relationships with. I think we have one more interesting feature. The zoom menu overlaps with the browser menu making it hard to navigate at times, but communications. You'll see a couple of buttons that say it's coming soon, but we do have a phone script. Under the advocacy page we had the list of the phone numbers for for your members of Congress and the staffers names. And here is a phone script just to make it a lot easier to call it so you feel comfortable calling. You know, basically, the people they have on taking the calls are the lowest of low on the total poll, but they do take copious notes, and they record every call and it and they record every email. This is much more important and makes a bigger impact than email, but please try to do both. And if you can be in DC on on January 24. Please let me know we're going to be setting up a Google forum for those of you who are coming to DC, and we'll send it out to the list and let me know because we're going to be meeting at the Rayburn cafeteria at roughly 10am and then from there we might depending on how big the we'll split up and we'll go to different offices and then if we have meetings we'll go to those meetings of course. Let me stop share I think this is a good time for questions. So I see one in the chat already are there local coordinators or do you recommend individual actions. I think at this point it's better to do individual actions if you're talking about at the, at your own district level, because that way you personally get a sense of who you're the people who work for your representative are. If you do have a local organization, I'm thinking, you know, the great work done by say Massachusetts peace action in pushing for this letter that was just sent by that with by their delegation by their congressional delegation. Yeah, please invite any sort of organization that you organize with locally to take part in this advocacy day and work together to, and if you're inclined visit their district office if it's not too far. I want to see another question, would the Cuban border guards be working on the border at one time. You know, I don't know that that's the board, I mean, possibly but it mostly refers to the maritime border so it's basically the equivalent of kind of the coast guard. Also feel free to just ask the question raise your hand and ask the question rather than type it out to staffers and local congressional offices usually just refer to foreign policy staffers in DC. That's a really good question David. If they do, you know, tell them that you live where you live and that you like them to take an interest in foreign policy as well. But either way, it's good. If they recommend you directly to a foreign policy staffer, because then you can say well so and so from the district office told me to call you. And that way the person feels kind of more of a sense of responsibility and taking care of you as a constituent, because it's passed, been passed on to them. Are there US senators in support of overturning the SSO T who are reaching out to the undecided or uncommitted senators. You know, I don't know that they're reaching out but that's one of our ass so if we go back to I'm not going to send it I'll put post the link rather than share screen again. It's a little complicated to share screen and switch between windows. But if you go to this, send a message to your members of Congress action, and I'll just post the link here. You will see on it a list of the seven, or no excuse me other eight representatives and senators who have recently sent a letter. And one of the things we're asking them to do is to reach out to their other colleagues to be more vocal about removing Cuba from the SSO T issue. Laurie asks, is there a form we need to fill out to join you in DC. If you have something we could share to others and DC that's them to join us without being the toolkit. It isn't toolkit right now but it will hopefully be on there by Thursday. There's, you know, the formal just make it easier for us to organize but if you can't find if you can't, you know, fill it out for any reason. I think that we're going to be meeting in the Rayburn cafeteria at 10am on the 24th and leaving from there. You know, we'll have some signs to make it clear who we are if you can't tell who we are already. And then. All right, are there any other questions. If not, we, we did have set aside some time for announcements for other organizations that are doing Cuba work I know that I don't see has a big campaign. Very soon. I don't know if John or Cheryl would like to talk about that briefly. Yeah, I, I, I come in. I wasn't sure I could make this, but I can now. Oh, thanks for. So, um, basically. We're building on what a series already doing. We are calling up with calling a meeting tomorrow, which will be talking about various ways in which. People can be involved in his advocacy campaign. Partly what a series already recommending letters, the emails, the in person visits to the members of Congress. And we've got an imaginative bingo card campaign cards that will introduce tomorrow. But we're also going to be talking about. Working with medium term members of Congress state senators. Governors, try and get them to actively lobby the White House to take your off the list. So, um, I'm going to put in the chat the link. That link will take you to register for our meeting. We've already got something like 90 people registered. It's taking place tomorrow night at 8pm Eastern 5pm Pacific. So this is in tandem with a series. So if you're able, please join that meeting. And for those of you who already registered, I'll be sending out more information about the bingo card later tonight. But I don't know if anybody else from the campaign wants to add to that. Could you explain how this is how this campaign ties into what the effort next Thursday, or next Wednesday is? Well, it's a series. This is a training, which many members of our NFC have joined as well. A series focuses on 24th to try and get the maximum action on the 24th. We support that. But we know that not everybody can do things on the 24th. So we're really saying to people, if you can't do the 24th, do it within the next two weeks from the 22nd, 23rd through to the 3rd of February. So they're working together and we'll be directing people to a series website for a series, wonderful tools for them to use. So this is a, yeah, this is two wings of the same bird. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing I'd add is that, you know, NFC has been doing a really excellent job in terms of work at the state level. And that's something that is said, it doesn't take on. So, so the campaigns overlap, but also in NFC's goes a bit further in that regard. Rita, I saw that you had your hand up first. Yeah, hi. Thank you for all this. I'm one of the people that developed the bus, the blockade bingo initiative. And I really want to encourage people to check it out. It's the purpose of course is motivation and to make this a little more fun. And I think that it, the card is going to be useful because it includes the flow of 1 column is about is all the steps about making phone calls. Another column relates to letters and other column relates to scheduling visits with things we're talking about tonight. So the card is also an advocacy guide, I hope. And the, and just to say that we really encourage people to engage with it to play it with a couple of others, perhaps in your area. Do it as teams because a lot of times working with a couple of other people motivates each other to actually take the steps so you can, you know, talk afterwards about how it went. Or do some of these things together on 1 computer or whatever. There's lots of ways to do it. But, but I think that camaraderie is important. And really build spirit and it doesn't hurt for these staffers to see that there's multiple people engaged from the same area. So, I'll leave it at that, but I really hope it tomorrow night is not a duplicate of tonight. So they're really complimentary and I really encourage as many of you as can please come join us tomorrow at 5, 5 to 6. Thanks. Thank you, Rita. Lisa, I saw you're up next. Go ahead, please. Okay. Don't forget the local offices. One of the best ways to, to get respect out of Washington is to when you really have developed some camaraderie with the people that are right in your community, and they have established that you are a friendly constituent. Then they can also help make appointments for you and your chances of getting in in front of your representative or actually greater because the local office is vouching for you. But that's one thing I want to say the other thing is NNOC that I was very impressed with the toolkit you're showing and I have to admit that I haven't actually looked at it yet yours as as much as I should. And I want to say that the NNOC also has a toolkit, and part of that is a group of that we have been working very hard to get resolutions all over the United States and sometimes if you're going to go into an office to have a piece of paper and say look there's other cities have done so that people because because there's nothing Congress is full of cowards. And so it's really when you give them and show them that other people have taken a first step. What you, I think it was Medea when she was saying that they don't like to speak because they don't like to, you know, they would they want to hide in the wall there. And I see that everybody else is out there, it gives them more courage to think about it and to follow through because nobody wants to be the last one either. So, those are just two things the NNOC to to that or that maybe a series should also connect to and make as part of their toolkit we can have one or two or whatever but it's a useful thing to have also. Thank you. So, we do have a lot of some on these on this take action page from my set of.org, we do have a button that says pass a resolution locally and that has information that was provided by the NNOC. I thank you for that because those are really such useful tools, you know, I know in DC it wasn't this past year that we passed the local resolution against the embargo to that we don't have senators but if we did I think that would be something very useful to bring up to them. Is there anyone else that would like to share any sort of tips or have any questions. Now is the time. I don't know how to raise the hand. Okay, go ahead on. I was talking to my delegate Jerry Colony, Colony Connelly, the other day, and he's he's basically in fact I'd send the letter prior to that he I told him that he'd forgotten it, but this was an informal event. And his comment was well you know what's in it for us, lifting of sanctions are more broadly lowering the, you know, reducing the embargo. What can I work, you know what, what will Cuba give up in return for this action. And that was good question, I didn't have a good answer but I think we needed that's the kind of, it does represent the thought process that a lot of these delegates are engaged in. Yeah, I think that's a good point on I think one of the things we can say to that, rather than saying what will Cuba have to give up, it's more about what the United States will have to gain. What they will have to gain is that they will be in sync with the rest of the hemisphere which is denounces the blockade denounces less so he listening every year. I think it would go very far towards improving relations with Latin America, not just with Cuba with every country in Latin America as the United States were to stop this. And internationally is where well it would generate goodwill I think when when you face it that argument I think pointing out the UN vote every year is very important. That's how isolated the United States is. I don't know if others have a better answers to that question or that point I think it's a good point, you know, what to do when when faced with this sort of question thanks Cheryl please go ahead. There's a question from friends in Europe who want to support our current campaign. What's the, is there a direct way that they can email or contact representatives or congressional committees so that they can, they can be part of it. You know, today we're trying to figure out a way to have a button to send a message just to members of the House for an affairs and Senate for our affairs and the related subcommittees. But many of these systems that we use we use one called every action and there's a bunch of systems that different organizations use on limited to constituents only, because that's what members of Congress really push for and they have basically marked things as spam or in mark even entire systems like what we use a spam if they get messages from people like four messages that are not from constituents. So it's difficult in that regard Cheryl for folks in Europe I would suggest two things one, the send a letter to Biden works because you don't have to be a constituent. And two, to contact your embassy in that country in the United States, you know say that you and to push them to bring up the issue with the State Department. Okay, thank you I'll get back to them on this. Let's go ahead please. My question goes to, of course we've seen all of this on TV about all of the people coming across the border in humans are in that number two so it's not just limited human. But my thinking is lifting or taking you go off of the list. Wouldn't that go to help people from leaving. Because I'm, you know, the whole reason people are leaving is because they can't see themselves. There's no economic basis for them. So, you know, the question came up. One of our participants said that the senator asked him what are we gaining. What is Cuba going to give up. Well, we're going to gain less people at the border. And Cuba, what are they giving up they're giving up starvation. They're giving up having to keep their people under pressure. I'm just so alarmed at not seeing our representatives and collectively. Everyone not seeing that the reason people are leaving home is because of the economic conditions and then the violence, but the violence comes from the economic condition. So, if we improve those economic conditions, it will begin to deter and mitigate some of these other issues that we are having with people leaving home. I just wanted to put that out there and I welcome anyone comment. Help me out on this because I'm just really not seeing and I need to help in processing this. Thank you. Thank you, Ross. Yeah, that's a really important point that we included in our one pager is the impact on migration. You know, it's really when we're talking about the S of T designation in particular it's really hard to tease out the effects of. Well, is this related to so T or is it related to one of the Trump sanctions or is it related to the blockade. Well, I don't know. And we don't know for the most part, but these are all very symptoms of the same disease right which is the US policy towards Cuba. And so, so when we're faced with that question that that Hunter that brought us, we have to talk about everything we talk to talk about, you know, international relations which I mentioned before but your point migration and that's a big issue for Democrats because they're getting trounced on that. You know, US policies towards Cuba and Minnesota and I were one of the drivers in migration of those countries. And of course, you know, I think there was a very important comment in the chat about trade and how, you know, people are representative senators very interesting trade, and that's a market that will open up for Cuba. Oh, a question about Senator Menendez and then I'll take your question Nancy. Senator Menendez. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think a lot of us remember, I can't remember what year it was but when he was under it before and he beat the charges. So we'll see if he happens to not beat the charges and he doesn't win his reelection that I think that's going to open up some opportunities. There's a lot of opportunities actually but it's we shouldn't take it for a given that just because Senator Menendez might not be in the Senate anymore that things are going to change because the State Department really likes to drag its feet. And for the most part they use Menendez as like, like a scapegoat, they'll just say oh we can't do anything about Cuba because of Menendez and they just have him as an excuse and there's a fear that they're just going to find a different excuse if Menendez leaves. If he does leave though I think that's going to be great for the people who love Cuba because he's very much a sticking point in terms of improving Cuba policy. Go ahead Nancy. Hi, just a couple of comments and an announcement the comment in regard to, you know, what can Cuba do for us and I think everything that was mentioned so far is good on a foreign policy standpoint, but you can also do to, you know, practical and tangible things like when we were working on, you know, the syringe campaign and saving lives campaign, you know, we could, we were asking also that we could collaborate with Cuba that we can get their technology and their medical know how and so, you know, and other things like agriculture and imports and all types of things and I think whoever you're lobbying to you'll just have to make a bullet list on what you think would be the priority for whoever you are lobbying. So, just want to add that also in an announcement that in addition, I'm with building relations with Cuban labor as is Ross and I don't know who else on the call, but we are also joining in the NNOC campaign, but we are also continuing to get relations passed by labor bodies unions and Central Labor councils as pressure, especially in Democratic swing states and where they're, you know, during the primary seasons for certain representatives who would be pressured if they did not have labor support. So, if you're interested in doing that if you're a union member and you know a new union member or have union labor contacts, please join us on the 23rd we're having a zoom strategy meeting. Thanks. Thanks, Nancy. That was two great points. The first one. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons, you know, and I mentioned a couple and I'm glad you mentioned the medical cooperation and the Cuba's biotech industry, which would be so could be so helpful to us. And then the other point about finding out what your representatives interests are what your senator's interests are, you can go to their websites. It's usually like, I don't know, my govern.house.gov. That's generally the pattern for the website of your representative, and just see what sort of committees that they're on. Many of them, you know, if they're on agriculture, you can talk about the importance of Cuban of Cuba for the agriculture markets. They're on some sort of health committee you can talk about Cuban health, you know, so tailor your message to your representative I think that is a good strategy as well for kind of building these relations. I don't know. Oh, so another question from Mike Goodman, how do we respond to those bring up the issues of pain hijackers and Assad's core with respect to SOT. Well, the SOT is meant to talk about a state's sponsoring terror right now, and to remove that Cuba from the SOT list, all of the Biden has administration has to do is point back to the last six months and say Cuba hasn't supported terror in the last six months. You know, Assad is a core and the other US fugitives in Cuba. They're not participating in any sort of terrorist activity so that's one of the arguments we can use. The other is that those, according to the actual laws that underpin this designation. The fact that Cuba has given asylum to US fugitives is not, you know, should not come into play because it's not related to international terror as defined by the US code of law. I don't know if there, I mean, if there's someone has a better answer for that please feel free to chime in. And if not, then I think we can call it an evening and I want to thank everyone so much for being here tonight and encourage you to participate on January 24 and to invite others to participate. Check again on the asset a website where we're going to be updating it over the next couple of days, making a little, making it easier to navigate and also adding some more tools including the form if you're going to be in DC. That way we can keep in touch easier and please, if you are going to be in DC, try to set up a meeting with the foreign policy staffer of your representative's office so that we can go and chat with them about SOT. Thank you so much everyone for being here tonight. Have a good night. Thank you.


sion at this point. Thank you Mr. DuPont. So then I guess I'll the question then before the the board which will request you know ask the applicant how they would want to proceed is whether the applicant is looking for us to proceed to a vote at this time or if the applicant is seeking a continuance to do further research. If it possible I'd like to get more research done and be prepared with the plans and the analysis of the lot. So Mr. Vellorelli so we have currently a hearing scheduled for December 21st where we have three cases that are on the docket already and then earlier this evening we have continued two additional cases to that evening so that brings us up to a total of five. That's correct Mr. Chairman. Have we set any dates out beyond the 21st of January? We have 21st of December. 21st of December thank you. Yeah no we have a lot. We have many cases almost ready to go but we have not set any dates beyond the 21st of December at this time. Okay. I'm just nervous about adding a sixth case to that evening. The first date in January I believe that we'd be scheduling for is Tuesday January 11th. Mr. Klein if that helps I would prefer to go if possible probably in January to be totally prepared and make sure that I do get research done. Okay. Depending on the vendors and how I can turn this around. That would that would certainly be very helpful. So the Tuesday January 11th that would not be too far out for you? That should be fine. Then I would before the motion to continue the variance hearing for 25 Highland Avenue to Tuesday January 11th 2022 at 7.30 p.m. So moved. Thank you Mr. Dupont. Seconded. Thank you Mr. Hanlon. So vote of the board Mr. Dupont. Aye. Mr. Hanlon. Aye. Mr. Rourke. Aye. Board. Aye. Chair votes aye. We are continued on 25 Highland Avenue. Thank you Ms. Bann thank you to all the butters and neighbors for coming out this evening. I appreciate your patience. Thank you very much everybody. Mr. Chairman. Yes sir. Just for a minute I'd like to congratulate Ms. Bann for she's a lot of technical information and one of the more informative type of presentations that I've seen she's she's done a good job and whatever problems there are in this case have to do with the underlying facts and with her presentation which I thought was excellent. Thank you for that Mr. Hanlon. Thank you Mr. Hanlon. Appreciate it. Next on the agenda agenda item number six docket three six seven five one thirty seven Robbins Road. I greatly appreciate the the applicants patience as we move through all the cases this evening. So if I could ask the applicant to introduce herself and tell us what she would like to do. Hi my name is Ji Zhao and I live in the 137 Robbins Road and the reason I'm here is we propose an addition. It's a little bit larger than 750 square feet and also we want to enclose the front porch. So this is for both we apply for the special permit. Our house is really small. We have we only have two bedrooms and one bathroom and then we have one we have four people live in this house. So have one boy and the one girl. They're 15 years old and the 13 years old so they both need their own bedrooms. So our proposal is adding one extra bedrooms and the two bathrooms and by the way our house is the smallest one in the neighborhood and we we live here more than 15 years and we kind of have one point we're thinking to looking for the another place kind of more away from here and at the end we decide to stay here because we do love this neighborhood very much so we hope we can just you know still able to stay here and expand house a little bit to fit our needs. So the current addition actually we meet all the requirements for the setbacks and the heights but the only thing is a little bit bigger than kind of 750 square feet and on the top we add in one bedroom on the second level I we want to use kind of attic for my own kind of the little office there because for now I'm working at the office at home so I do not have any place to work so I use our kind of a dining room now to work so that's the whole reason we hope to adding to use up the space on the attic to you know that adds up the square footage over 750 so that's why we're here today. Thank you and then you said in the front so there's currently an open deck at the front that you're enclosing as a mud room. That's correct the our entrance in the front and now it's like a three by three feet it's very small so we don't have closets we do not have a kind of just a basically nothing there so we need a mud room to put our stuff there so that's pretty much but we have is an open deck so the idea is we just close this up. Okay so the plans are in front of us this is the demolition plans we have basement first floor so this is the extent of the current front porch that would be enclosed. Yeah it's kind of yeah it's around the same location of a front porch we kind of close so the idea is there. Okay and then just the expansion then is on the side and the rear is the main. That's correct. That's correct. So on the the side addition here on the first floor is only the first floor the second floor is open deck the the mud room is only a single story and then at the rear of the house at the second floor level is the the master suite and then as she mentioned the the attic floor at the top of the house would be the the office or studio space up here which would have a small deck right as well. Yes and the reason for the for the roof we can you know again this house is really small and we kind of like to adding the solar panel on top of a roof so that's why we're making the roof like a pitch roof on the one side so that side that we can facing to the sound and the second they can kind of maximize the size of the roof otherwise we don't have kind of a space to put on so then so this is the rear elevation correct yeah the house this is the side facing down the sort of the north side facing mess out and then this is the street elevation so that this is the current existing house and then this is the first the main addition and this is the modern addition yes and this is the uphill side the south side of the house so are there changes being made to the the siding of the existing house or is that is it just the addition that's going to be it's just an addition we don't touch the existing house for now okay is there what are the materials that you're proposing to the hardy boards so we're thinking of that so kind of still working on the materials it depends on the cost that we say but we're trying to kind of match more close with our surroundings mm-hmm there's a pierce because the addition appears to be very modern as opposed to the house which appears to be much more traditional yes and that's how you had added you have windows on the mud room which was a question that had been raised by the planning department when they first reviewed the plans um and then the only question I had on the exterior here so the the addition is really sort of an independent piece that sort of clips onto the roof here it's very independent here on the front it definitely has a very different appearance that by only questions here on the side where this wall sort of morphs between the addition on one side this this piece is part of the addition and on this side of the house it's part of the it's part of the old house it's sort of being done like the old house yeah so yeah we we asked for this part here we're going to kind of continue with the kind of existing facade materials and then just for now we kind of propose with kind of now but in the future we may kind of update the our old kind of the house or facade maybe in the future but for for now we just propose what we show here and then here we have a couple of sections through so this is the through the addition um that that's the episode this is the the large slope that faces south which will be utilized per solar and then this is sectioning in the opposite direction showing the staircase coming from the second floor level up to the attic floor level right are there questions from the board and at the moment um go ahead and open for uh public questions and comment um again if you would like to just speak if you can just raise your hand using the reactions tab or if you're on phone dial star nine and the first on our list is mr more yes i thank you mr when steve more peed monster you seem to be speaking on every case tonight feeling overly verbose um i i i i would just like to comment first on on uh compliment the applicant on their sort of imaginative um approach to dealing with a a significant space problem this is this is kind of a different construction style and i have to say initially i was put off by it but in in looking at it repeatedly i'm thinking now it's uh it's an interesting interesting new design i think i might from a stylistic point of view not probably decrease all the vertical lines uh because they clash with the horizontal lines of the adjusting units or collaborating i can't quite tell that um and maybe the design guidelines might help some of the siding issues which the applicant is considering in terms of dealing with uh dealing with the two styles but but i do want to compliment them on their imaginative solution um secondarily as a tree committee member um i did want to ask a question about the trees on the property it's hard to tell um what's going on in the backyard there from the aerial photographs are there putting mature trees on the lot can i uh yeah can i answer the question yes please do if you move down i think we have one aerial photos from the kind of the document to your uploads for this application um we we keep all the trees on the side we're not going to touch any of that and on the back we have currently we have one kind of a low almost like a bush it's like a bush it's not really like a trees between tree and the bush so that we're going to remove but for the other trees we don't we're not going to move any trees on the side and say the bigger trees is all stay wait but we're going to trim kind of trim makes us not uh spreading that far to touch the building but we'd love to keep all the trees there mr chairman that's that's excellent news i um uh the only trees that are affected by the bylaw are in the setbacks and they're eight inches or greater um i'm very happy to hear that trees are being um maintained and i would just suggest again that during construction i'm not sure if you're going to need to use the open space that's there but you protect the critical root zone around the mature trees um and the the tree board can help with that do you have it do you currently have a tree plan as i asked the earlier just no wait we don't have a tree plan um i think probably you need to get in touch with the tree warden uh i'm i'm trying to figure out whether or not this particular job activates the bylaw i believe it does because it's a certain percentage increase to your footprint um just and and the only purpose of the tree plan would be to register that uh your trees on the property and talk about the critical root zone protection of the tree warden it's something which uh you probably do need to accomplish before you move forward okay i think we can do that thank you mr thank you mr more any further questions from the public do not see any we'll go ahead and close public comments um further questions from the board i think i said the uh department of planning community development in their um their review they had let's go to the and which they have already incorporated some of uh overall they maintained it only to the small parcel size and the placement of a portion of the current driveway with pervious surface reduction in proportion for a portion of usable open space is acceptable and is consistent with the zoning bylaw which concerns about aesthetics usable open space and tree plan be satisfied the dpcd recommends approval there are aesthetic concerns they were concerned about um in the original plan the mudroom didn't have windows um and those have been added and they're also concerned about the um the high number of different roof surfaces um which you know is not in keeping with the original style of the house but i think is um somewhat in keeping with the the style of the proposal um i know if mr mills was here he would probably be a little concerned about where the hollow water is going to flow um but i think the applicants in a position to address that um there aren't any places that appear to sort of trap uh trap flowing water or trapping snow and then the the other thing they had question was the was whether a tree plan was required and as mr moore said that's something that can be worked out with the with the tree warden and there's something that the so that the building department would be looking for as a part of the application process anyways um any for anything further from the board if not the we can entertain a motion mr chairman mr handlin um just one moment we have our three standard conditions we haven't actually had an opportunity yet to make a motion on any case tonight but i i wonder a if if maybe we need to explain what the standard conditions are as we usually do in our first case of the night and secondly are there any other conditions that members of the board uh feel are appropriate i can say that that i don't have any in my mind so so without more i'll just i'll just leave it at that okay um so the this is your hand noted the board has three standard conditions which it applies um to special permits um the first is that the final plans and specifications approved by the board for the permit shall be the final plans and specifications submitted to the building inspector of the town of arlington in connection with this application for zoning relief should be no deviation during construction from approved plans and specifications without the express written approval of the arlington zoning board of appeals but just that what we are approving tonight is what we're expecting you to build and if you're planning to make changes you need to let us know before you make them um number two is the building inspectors hereby notified they used to monitor the site that should proceed with appropriate enforcement procedures that anytime you determine the violations are present and the inspector of buildings shall proceed under section 3.1 of the zoning bylaw under the provisions of chapter 40 section 21d and institute non-criminal complaints if necessary the inspector of buildings may also approve an institute appropriate criminal action also in accordance with section 3.1 um which is just that um you know the construction will occur by the law um and then if there are issues this is how they resolve and then uh condition number three is the board shall maintain continuing jurisdiction with respect to the special permit grant which is just that after the issue is so the special permit the board still has jurisdiction in regards to what we the portion of the project that we are approving the things that the department of planning and community development had mentioned um the tree plan I think uh mr velarelli would agree that that will be handled um as a matter of course um and I do not believe the apart from the request for an arid setback addition being a large addition I don't think there were any further uh issues the only other condition I would recommend recently which is uh we have a better version of it already um it's essentially that uh the addition of a mud room to the front of the building cannot be considered within the building footprint or excuse me the in the foundation wall term basically what that just means is that the there are parts of the zoning bylaw that relate to the location of the foundation wall which is the front wall of the house and so because the uh the proposed mud room will stick out in front of that we are saying that that does not establish a new line of the front of the house in front of the current location anything okay are there any further seeing none it's me mr hamlin mr chairman I'm sorry did you call on me or is there another I did okay mr chairman I move that the uh board approved the application before us subject to the three standard conditions and the fourth room relating to the position of the foundation second thank you mr hamlin second second thank you mr dupont any discussion of the proposed motion none a vote of the board mr dupont I mr hamlin I mr rower work I put your forward I the chair votes I uh the special permit for 137 robins road with the four conditions is approved oh yeah thank you so much you're very welcome thank you good luck patience this evening okay thank you oh that in mind um so upcoming meetings um there's a meeting on Tuesday December 21st so the board has a good long period of rest um and then after that we now have a meeting on Tuesday January 11th those are our next two hearing dates to really raise some stuff from last night um so now having uh concluded tonight's hearing we have two other board members who are looking for um stepping down from the board uh Aaron Ford our our second associate member who joined us in April 2020 is now stepping down from the board having served in by far the craziest time I think the board has ever seen um greatly appreciate his patience and participation in and everything uh over the last uh year and a half destroyed greatly appreciated and uh Sean O'Rourke is also leaving us as a member um he had joined the board as an associate in April of 2017 and became a full member in September of that same year he's also leaving the board as of tonight's meeting uh it's been a tremendous pleasure having him with us for the last four and a half years we really appreciate his service with the board thank you both mr chairman it's been a pleasure we're both very welcome thank you guys yeah thank you guys we'll miss you no absolutely likewise thanks to everyone else for your participation in tonight's meeting of the Arlington Zoning Board of Appeals appreciate everyone's patience throughout the meeting especially would like to thank uh Ruth Valerelli Vincent Lee and Kelly Lanema for all their assistance in preparing for and hosting our online meetings uh please note the purpose of the board's recording of this meeting is to ensure the creation of an accurate record of the proceedings it's our understanding the recording made by ACMI um we'll uh for the understandable part it's made by ACMI will be available on demand at ACMI.tv within the coming days and if anyone has comments or recommendations please send them via email uh to zba at town.arlington.me.us the email address is also listed on the zba's website and that concludes tonight's hearing i would ask for a motion to adjourn mr mr chairman uh mr more uh i'd like to make one comment before you take the vote to adjourn sir um in just uh hearing uh mr Owens comment about it's been a pleasure i'm not sure that uh he might look at the past year as a as a pleasure of the four years if you serve um i've sat through many of the meetings related to both phone right placing and 1065 rms ad um and i just wanted to express uh my appreciation for all of you board members to include mr revelak unfortunately who's not here tonight um for all the hard work that you've done and the way you've been able to approach this whole series of issues and many many public opinions on the 40 b applications and all the other things that are going on this year um with equanimity and a little bit of humor and patience i i've been very impressed by what i've seen in the board since i've started to attend the meetings i mean it's after 11 o'clock now and this was a regular night supposedly after last night they're here right there at night um the schedule has been extreme and um let's forget the people that come before you for one or two nights forget that this is all of volunteer effort on your parts um some of which are a love of town some of which are a love of sort of advocation but honestly it's a it's a ton of work and uh i just want to thank you guys for all the work that you do for the retiring members the current members that are that are continuing on i've been so impressed by what i've seen so thank you very much thank you mr mortin thank you sir thank you mr mortin really appreciate that mr mortin okay with that we will ask for a motion to adjourn second vote of the board mr duPont aye aye mr handlin aye the drawer work aye mr ford aye the chair votes aye we are adjourned night guys night guys have a good night everybody's you have a great thanksgiving all right that's good everybody hi thank you bye great


Good morning everybody and a very warm welcome to the second day of the ALT online winter conference 2021. I'm Emma Jane, Events Manager for ALT and I'll be doing your welcome this morning and also shortly introducing my colleague Emma McAllister. So we hope that you had a great day yesterday and if it's your first day today, you are very welcome. We've got an absolutely packed programme for you and also some social things to look forward to. So a little bit of history about the winter conference. The first one was in 2014 and unfortunately it got snowed in. So since then, since 2015, we decided to move the winter conference online and since then we've had more than 2,600 participants. So if this is your first conference, welcome and if you are seasoned pro welcome back and thank you for joining us for another year. We'd like to extend a special thanks to our sponsors and partners for this event, Moodle, our scholarship sponsor, Open Academia who are publishing partner and we'd also just like to say that we are still committed to the open COVID pledge for education. So a little bit about the team behind the conference. We've got Emma McAllister who leads basically our tech team who's been putting together our interactive programme for you and I will hand over to Emma very shortly. We've got Marin Deepwell who is CEO of Ault and I'm sure that some of you will get to see and speak with Marin throughout the day. Jane Frankel who is our finance officer but Jane is your go-to lady for all things help desk and you can contact Jane through Discord or through our help desk email and I'll give you a little bit more information about that shortly. We have Christina who is our administration's officer who will also be chairing and moderating some sessions for you today and Christina also looks after all of our communications and social media and we're really happy to have back for another event the study group team of Claire, Johnny and Caroline. So Caroline and Claire you'll get to meet today they'll also be chairing and moderating some sessions. So we've got lots of different ways for you to engage with our conference and enjoy it. We've got our hashtag which is AultseaWinter21 and you also would have received in your joining instructions your day one and your day two emails a link to join our Discord social space and it was absolutely amazing to see more than a hundred people on there yesterday. So if you haven't signed up yet for Discord please do so and Emma will be able to talk you through that in a second as well. If at any point you need help on our website you can go to our help and orientation pages the link is here and you can also go to the help desk on Discord. If you prefer to you can also email us at helpdesk at ault.ac.uk so please do get in touch no query is too big or too small. So a little bit about how to navigate your way around the day to day if you're new to our interactive program once you've logged in you will see a screen like this. Today we are on day two and then here you'll see a little blue icon on the right hand side and if you click that it expands the menu to look like this where we've got all of the sessions listed. To find out more about a session please just click on it the screen will expand and you'll get to see more about the speakers a synopsis of the session and you'll also be able to just click watch and that will take you straight to that session. All of our sessions are recorded and are available immediately after that session so if you've got other things going on today and you've missed something that you really wanted to see don't worry just navigate back to that session in our program and you will be able to watch the recording. If there's a certain speaker that you're interested in you can click on the speakers that lists all of our speakers in alphabetical order and that will take you straight to their session. We do know that it's coming towards the end of the year and it has been a little bit of a trifling time over the last couple of years so we do try to put your well-being at the heart of our conferences. We have got 15-minute screen breaks between all of our sessions so please do take a break step away rest your eyes. If you need a little bit of a break don't worry all of our recordings become immediately available after the live session. If you just want to have a little bit of a chat you don't fancy watching a session at that time please do hang out to our Discord channel where you can have where there is a dedicated hangout area and you can chat to people. There's also a day dedicated day two session chat area and today during our lunch break if you fancy a little bit of festive fun we have our Ulzi Winter 21 quiz of the year so please do join in for that and I hope that you enjoy it. I'd just like to draw your attention to our artwork for this conference and we've now worked with the London College of Communication for a couple of years to produce artwork for our events and the winner for this event was Banya Dancheva a student currently studying on the BA illustration and visual media program at the London College of Communication and it's absolutely wonderful to see how students view learning technology through their eyes and the creativity that they come up with and it's great to be able to feature Vanya's work during this event so thank you very much to Vanya for letting us use her artwork. You should have now received your Winter Conference participant badge which comes from badges at alt.ac.uk or and if you're a speaker you would also received a speaker badge and we are re-issuing those so if you're newly registered please don't worry you will receive one of those in due course. So please familiarise yourselves with our netiquette and our code of conduct again that's available via our help and orientation on our website and like I've previously mentioned recording recordings are available via the interactive program as soon as they become available we do have live captioning available for this event as well and closed captions are available on recordings So just to draw your attention now to what we're finishing up with at the end of today is our learning technologist of the year awards 2021 this is open to all and anybody can attend this event and we've got different awards being given to individuals and teams and they are hosted by president of ALT David White and chair of ALT Helen O'Sullivan So please do join in if you can for the learning technologist of the year awards at the end of the day to be able to celebrate some of the amazing achievements that the community have made over the past year. So that brings me to the end of my introduction again a massively warm welcome to everybody we hope that you have a fantastic day and without further ado I'm going to hand over to my colleague Emma McAllister who can take us through another wonderful ALT seed body welcome and orientation this morning Hi Emma Hi Emma Jane thank you so much and hello everyone we're going to take 10 or 15 minutes now to get familiar with our social space for the conference which is on discord if you weren't here for the welcome session yesterday uh discord is the social excuse me the social space that we use for conversations about conference presentations sharing resources and messaging and just general chat for the conference it's an