Hi everybody My name is Richard. Hey, I'm here to talk to you today about what is best in life? I Usually wrote this talk about a year ago for an audience of web developers But it applies to anyone who works in tech or engineering disciplines or anything on who cares about ethics in tech It's not particularly high level. There's no coding examples. There are some bad coding jokes You've been warned anyway, I named this talk the good life, but actually it's about ethics in software engineering A bit about my background. I started out at university studying engineering mechanical engineering, which I hated and I switched to same philosophy, which I loved and now ten years later my official job title is front-end engineer Go figure, but so I'm a front-end engineer these days, but I usually refer to myself as a developer I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with the title of engineer though. I couldn't really put my finger on why Like maybe it felt like I was claiming some sort of prestige. I hadn't earned I Didn't complete my engineering degree or study computer science. I'm mostly self-taught I like to think I'm all right at my job, but I still feel like I'm hacking things together most of the time Now back in the day many of us who build websites used to call ourselves webmasters or web mistresses Which I still think is an amazing job title by the way I'm kind of sad that I didn't start my career early enough to have a webmaster role in the job history section My CV It's a bit like social justice warrior. Like people use as an insult, but frankly. I think it sounds badass So we were webmasters and web mistresses and then that title fell out of fashion and we became web developers and now many of us have the very professional sounding title of engineers and I don't think that's a bad thing or that we should stop calling ourselves engineers Call yourself whatever you want like you can be a techno Viking or an agile pirate ninja running a full-stack glitter unicorn If that makes you feel better is one there But we used to be working on dinky little websites that were kind of thrown together And now we're working on massive professional operations that form the financial backbone of multi-billion dollar corporations We've come a long long way from being webmasters and web mistresses But a lot of us are still self-taught and didn't go through any standardized training process and don't get me wrong Like this is great It helps ease barriers to entry, which I think is a very good thing But as the industry gets more professional it might be worth thinking about other trappings of professionalism If we're going to call ourselves engineers, then there are a lot of ethical duties and codes Ethical duties and codes responsibility that go along with that title 100 years ago civil engineering was in a similar situation to how the tech industry is now as The industrial revolutions receded behind them engineers found new ways to use all the fancy new technologies they have developed They grew more sophisticated in their approach and their projects ballooned in scale complexity But as these projects became more ambitious There was an accompanying problem a rise in major engineering disasters The turn of the 20th century saw a wave of epic structural failures including some massive bridge collapses And also the great Boston molasses flood which you can see here Which if I had to name my favorite disaster of all time This would have to be it just for the mental image of a tsunami of liquid sugar 50 feet high Traveling 35 miles an hour consuming everything in its path like it's terrifying also kind of delicious Anyway, these disasters had a profound effect on the way the public saw engineering and The force engineers to confront their shortcomings So as a result they began to regulate themselves more intensely and it established standardized industry codes of ethics So what is ethics? Ethics is a branch of philosophy that is devoted to answering questions about what is best in life so questions like these and I know what you're all thinking I can see the cogs in your software developer minds turning over you're thinking that's easy What is best in life both spaces and tabs on alternating lines What is the good life it's when the client is banned from feature requests? We should live by outsourcing our job to China and spend all day on rid it You should behave towards other people by interrupting them when they have their headphones on and the purpose of life is clearly replacing everything with JavaScript You're all monsters So philosophers like to do things called thought experiments which are like real experiments But even better because you never have to get out of your armchair One of the most famous of them is the trolley problem. I'm sure many of you already familiar with it It's a pretty common one these days, but for those who aren't go through it quickly There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks and ahead on the tracks There are five people tied up and unable to move The trolley is heading straight for them You're standing some distance off in the train yard next to a lever if you pull this lever The trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the sidetrack You have two options One do nothing and the trolley kills the five people in the main track or two Pull the lever diverting the trolley onto the sidetrack will kill one person So which is the which is the most ethical choice? So now here's the audience interaction part of the talk quick show of hands no wrong answers, which of you would do nothing Okay, and which of you would pull the lever All right. Okay, cool.  He can see what you're thinking. He's terrified He's begging you not to do it. What do you do? So how many of you would push the large man onto the tracks? But few of this time. Okay, and how many of you would do nothing? All right, well more So the trolley problem has been the subject of many surveys Which tend to find that approximately nine out of ten respondents would throw the switch to kill the one and save the five However in the large man situation the situation reverses and only one and ten people would push him onto the tracks So that mostly corresponds what we got here We're maybe slightly more blood thirsty than that in this crowd, but mostly is pretty similar Incidentally a 2009 survey of professional philosophers found that only 68% of them would throw the switch 8% of not would not switch the remaining 24% had another view or just could not answer So if you're ever tied to a train track by a cartoon villain, you'd better hope that the person by the switch isn't a moral philosopher So why the difference in the two outcomes One theory is that it's because two different parts of your brain are fighting with each other Some researchers looked at people's brains using fMRI machines and demonstrated that personal dilemmas Like pushing a man off a footbridge engage brain regions associated with emotion Whereas impersonal dilemmas like diverting the trolley by flipping a switch engage regions associated with controlled reasoning and These different brain processes essentially compete with each other whenever you have to make a tough tough moral decision Basically inside your brain, you've got a monkey and a robot Literally a monkey and a robot fighting over the controls Every time you have to make a moral decision they do get out The monkey understands something simple like pushing someone off a bridge and it's horrified But it doesn't understand something complex like a mechanical switch So in that situation the gut response is reduced and we're able to throw it through the lever without feeling such a crushing sense of moral horror Now some people have a stronger monkey and some people have a stronger robot Have we seen today and that's great because they're both useful in different situations But this is tricky for we programmers because we work on usually fairly complex problems Which might make it trickier for our monkey brains to trigger some kinds of moral responses By the way, if you think it's hard for programmers to experience the full range of ethical response then spare a thought for autonomous vehicles Self-driving cars don't have meat brains and you can't make a perfectly ethical algorithm You can only make it as good as the humans who programmed it and we can't even agree to whether or not to use tabs or spaces There are some really tricky problems here that self-driving cars will face Like we prefer a self-driving car to swerve into a pile of trash rather than hit someone like just like a person might But computers can make these kinds of decisions quicker than we can So if we decide in advance what we want them to do they'll follow our instructions So we probably want to program our car to hit a single adult rather than a busload of school children, right? But what if the adult is a Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher? What if the adult is driving the car? Would we want the car to sacrifice its driver? And would you choose to buy a self-driving car that's designed to sacrifice your life to save others? So some researchers at MIT came up with a nice solution for this They built an app to mine data on people's answers to different trolley problems So they can use it to help them decide how autonomous cars should behave in different scenarios The website is called Moro Machine and you can go there right now and start judging scenarios like this one We have to choose between a male athlete driving a car and a jaywalking baby on the one hand The baby doesn't know or probably doesn't know not to cross on a wave signal But on the other hand it might grow up to be Hitler, you know, so it's a tough call Anyway, Moro Machine is cool But it doesn't help us most of the time because we can't outsource all our ethical decision-making to the internet We're just internet individuals working on our laptops and we have these ridiculous meat brains And we have to make our own decisions about whether to kill baby Hitler So of course we sometimes make the wrong call So let's shift gears for a little and consider the Volkswagen emissions scandal You might recall that VW added special software to millions of diesel cars That would detect when their exhaust fumes were being checked by emissions regulators And change performance to pass these tests As a result they managed to completely bypass emission standards in the US, EU and elsewhere For a period of about five years Their workaround allowed them to emit up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide than what US emission standards allow By some estimates, air pollution causes around 40,000 early deaths per year in the UK alone So it's pretty safe to assume that Volkswagen's technical hack is likely a result in several thousands or at least several hundred premature deaths Plus thousands more cases of asthma and other lung disease And as someone who recently started experiencing asthma symptoms for the first time since I was a child Probably because of London's air pollution I take this a little bit personally So when I heard last year that one of the engineers at VW was imprisoned for his royal scandal, I thought, good But on the other hand, I've kind of got to give credit where it's due Like VW's defeat device is a pretty brilliant technical hack It's ingenious I can imagine that the engineers who created it must have felt pretty proud of themselves at the time But at the same time, you also wonder why nobody spoke up at one of their internal meetings to say, hey pals, do you think maybe we're assholes? How do they get it so wrong? Are they just inherently bad people? So maybe it's because the monkey part of their brain was completely unable to deal with the complexity of the problem You've got cars and software hacks and air pollution And then decades later some people you don't know might die It's all a bit much for the poor monkey to handle So we established earlier that ethical reasoning involves an internal struggle for control And a weird thing about humans is that we can sometimes actually forget to act ethically when we're so focused on achieving a goal That we forget to think about the consequences of our actions Or else we justify it to ourselves in ways that don't stand up to scrutiny that we never stop to properly reflect I'm sure we've all done this at some point, I definitely have And it's led to some of my biggest screw ups When you're looking at a wall of code, it's very easy to forget about the humans who will be affected by your decisions, IRL And unlike civil engineering, it's usually easy to fix mistakes, just roll out a patch or an upgrade In tech, we like to move fast and break things, but we don't want to move fast in oncoming traffic and break people I think the monkey brain is a factor in many of our biggest ethical lapses in tech today Whether it's Facebook enabling fake news and Equifax with their criminally sloppy security Or just JavaScript developers being too lazy to bother making their websites accessible for disabled people and keyboard users I'm looking at all of you and me too But I want to believe that people making these decisions are doing so because they're not thinking hard enough about the consequences and the people affected by their actions However, there's also those who say, hey, I don't know about all that ethics stuff, I'm just an engineer It's not my responsibility Like Mr. von Braun here, who knew he couldn't be at the forefront of rocket research in Nazi Germany if he didn't go along And he didn't hear what crimes he had to turn a blind eye to, blind eye to, as long as he was allowed to play with his rockets So to be clear, nobody is exempt from having to behave ethically Scientists and engineers aren't a special group that get to be amoral and don't have to think about this stuff Ethics contaminates everything Whether you're building rockets or designing algorithms to help police identify gang members You have a duty to consider how they might be used With so many examples of ethically compromised decision making in tech, it's easy to get pessimistic There's some good news though If it's easy for people to act ethically when they don't think about it, then the flip side to this is That it follows that people tend to behave ethically when you remind them to And it can happen even when you do it in subtle ways For instance, some researchers in Newcastle found that just hanging up posters of staring human eyes in a cafeteria Was enough to significantly change people's behavior And made people twice as likely to clean up after themselves If just a poster of eyes can achieve that much, then imagine what else we can do with an What we cannot accomplish with just a few well-placed reminders We want to establish an organizational culture where people tend to act morally And where there are lots of positive examples for us to emulate And I think that reminders are a powerful tool to help us achieve this I mentioned before that many engineering industry bodies introduced formal codes of ethics in the early 20th century These came along with more legal regulations and barriers to entry Which I don't think is good for our industry, but ethical codes are a great idea And that's already been touched on in one talk this weekend These are a great way to remind people to act ethically Because basically when you tell people don't be a dick, they'll be less likely to be a dick We already do this with codes of conduct at conferences and other events including EMF camp And open source GitHub repositories We can do this at our organizations too They don't have to be complicated, in fact the simpler the better This one is from the American Society of Civil Engineers, but you can see it fits on one slide Like it's pretty simple The important thing is to set appropriate expectations for ethical behavior There are loads of other codes of ethics around that you can use as inspiration They are very hard to write, right here Read over some of the different codes, discuss them with your colleagues And think about what sort of ethical principles you choose for your own work Your team and your company You can use an existing code of ethics or borrow different aspects or make your own Once you've chosen an ethical code, communicate it within your team How you communicate it is up to you For example, you could include it in your onboarding for new starters Or add ethical checks to checklists and documentation for new projects Or you could run internal publicity campaigns, maybe like posters on the wall Maybe with some eyes on top of them The important thing is that it becomes part of your team and your company culture This act of communicating expectations is important for empowering team members To speak up if they're uncomfortable, before it's too late A few years ago, I was working for a consultancy Who assigned me to a website project for a client that I didn't really improve of But I got so invested in solving the technical aspects of the project That I didn't stop to think about whether I was morally okay with working for this client Until I was already deeply invested I moaned about the client a little bit, some colleagues And they told me, hey, if you didn't want to work for this client, that's fine But you should have said something that started this project It made me realize that it was okay to say no to client projects at this employer But also that the appropriate time to do that is before you start work The later you leave it, the harder it is to do So the next time a dodgy client came along I felt more comfortable expressing my concerns up front Rather than just procrastinating it for later And we ended up turning down the client If we establish policies ahead of time that say that it's okay to speak up If you're uncomfortable, we can avoid these kinds of cop situations I tend to think of it as being a little like encouraging developers to submit bug reports And point out problems in your applications or your processes If everyone feels empowered to speak up, then you're all better off On a related side note If you speak up about ethically dubious practices at your place and your employer doesn't listen You may have a duty to report it to the authorities or otherwise make it public A basic dilemma in engineering ethics is that an engineer has a duty to their client or employer But an even greater duty to report a possible risk to others From a client or an employer failing to follow the engineer's instructions A classic example of this is the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster NASA engineers raised warnings about the faulty O-rings and the boosters And there are dangers posed by the low temperatures on the morning of the launch But managers disregarded these warnings and failed to adequately report these technical concerns to their supervisors It was later argued that in these circumstances the engineers had a duty to circumvent their managers And shout about the dangers until they were hurt I mentioned building ethics checks into processes as a regular reminder to encourage ethical thinking as early as possible A friend of mine who works as a psychotherapist tells me that their training includes ethics checks as a core part of the processes So whenever they're trying to make a tough decision, there are these questions they can use Which are designed to trigger different types of emotional responses So here's a few examples here The first one here, which I think is quite a monkey brain question, is a good one for triggering emotional reactions like shame Would you be happy for everyone to know the decision you've made? So for example, if you're considering being lazy about making your site accessible Imagine there's a disabled person sitting next to you and think about whether you'd be comfortable explaining your code choices to them The second one seems designed to trigger more of a consequentialist response It's maybe a bit of a more rationalist robot brain approach Do you think the consequences are acceptable? The last one reminds me of Immanuel Kant's Category Comparative That you should only do something if you're okay with it being a universal law If there's any professional philosophy here, please don't judge me, I've got this wrong, but that's my take But you should only do something if you're okay with it being a universal law So that's two, Kant's your thing I think these are a great start, but feel free to build off them or tailor them to your own work Finally, we can encourage developers to develop more empathy for their users by encouraging them to meet them in person A great way to do this is to get developers to sit in on user testing sessions A nice additional benefit of this is that empathy for your users helps you design better user-centered solutions So, win-win So these ideas are just a start, they won't fix anything They won't put a stop to the fact that a small helpful of mega-corporations own our digital lives and strip-mind them for profit But you know, like one step at a time By the way, if you have any questions or suggestions, please come chat to me afterwards Or get in touch with me with using any of my imaginative online handles Thank you


Hey there guys, we've been talking a lot about success, but we haven't talked about growth turning into success in any YouTube channel. On today's episode, let's talk about that, but before we do, you know what to do. Like, subscribe, and gong to that bell. Hey Freedom, what's up? My name is Nolden, welcome to Freedom Central, the homophobe freedom content. Like I said a while ago, we will be talking about growth on how to become a really successful YouTuber. On this episode, we will be giving you tips on how to exactly do that. So without further ado guys, welcome to Freedom, quick tips. Number one is commit to a schedule, hopefully multiple times per week. Like we always say in our previous videos, content is king. Content is king, scheduling it is the key. Hopefully you will be able to put up content every week, but if you still can't do it, it's fine. Put in your best videos per week so that your audience will be viewing your videos every time. Number two is developing a sustainable video production. What does this mean? Well to have a sustainable video production means that you will need to make things happen every day. Sustainable means you can make videos about a topic and have millions of ideas that you can talk about. You have to think about the equipment as well. Will you be renting them out? Do you own them? If you rent them out, can you keep up with the rent? Or maybe the set?  You gotta factor in your expenses so that you will know that you can sustain the project or the videos that you are creating. Number three, hook your audience in the first few seconds. When you begin a video, always have hook for your video. A hook is something that will keep your audience inside video. Your videos will be the most important part of your YouTube channel. You have to offer them something that will keep them watching, but also you have to give them the satisfaction that you offer in your videos. Number four, intros and credits should be short. Intros and credits are dandy and nice, but don't make it too long. One to five seconds of intro is good, but if one third of your video is just pure introduction or credits, then it might be time to change them or shorten them out. The main focus of your video should be your content and not your introduction. That will be the least of your worries because you'll need to do your introductions though to make things interesting.  When your audience are finished watching with your videos, you will want them to browse your previous episodes and let them continue watching your channel. How can you do that? Well, here's how you can do it. End cards are your heroes. You can include your videos, your channel, and website. If you have one, always make sure your audience is interested in your content because if they are, end screens will be the ones who will continue their journey into your channel and to your videos. Hand some more watch time hours and more people viewing your videos. Number six is leave out distractions in your videos. I'm guilty about this guys. I have a lot of outtakes when I'm creating videos. I have like 20 minutes of fluff because I always stutter. I have long pauses and a lot more. I cut out all of the distractions so that they won't be boring and distracting. Also, if you have things in the background that distracts people like the lights you have or maybe a flipped up computer that shows a different video and other things, you will need to remove everything that will distract people from watching your videos because if they do get distracted, chances are the message that you want to impart your audience in your videos will not go through to them. Number seven, design good quality visuals like your thumbnails. Always make great quality content because your visuals will be your vanguard.  You have to relate to your audience what your content is all about. Your thumbnail must be able to explain what your videos are going to be like. Never ever make visuals that will mislead your audience. If you do that, that will kill your channel and we don't want that to happen. Number eight, create longer videos. Longer video is a better video in general because it will help you have that watch time up. Also, if your videos offer more time, it will help you get more ads in it. Usually the best duration of the video is 8 minutes to 10 minutes long. And that's it for freedom. Let us know down below if you have other tips for us about growth on how to become a very successful YouTuber. Share this with a friend who's just starting out on YouTube so that you can help them out in the long run. Before you leave guys, please leave a like, subscribe and gong that bell. My name is Noel guys bringing you tips on how to grow your channel. Always remember, freedom, quick tips. I'm going to be seeing you guys on the next episode. Goodbye.


I think it's a little bit too loud, so I wanted to talk about social aspects of open source and for those of you who have been here on Wednesday in the main track I gave a small overview so some of the the first slides are the same but then I would expand in more detail. So one of the things I I mean open source is so popular and it's just such an incredible thing really if you think about it there is so much great technology but what I really like is the whole community around open source like coming to a conference like this you know meeting people from all around the world and just on a daily basis participating in open source projects collaborating with people all around the world it's just it's just really exciting but at the same time for people who are new to open source sometimes it can be a little bit challenging you know how do you get started or what are the things you have to consider what are the things you have to avoid so I'm going to talk about some of these social aspects and so first of all a lot of people talk about the open source community and and I think and I think that's to some extent it's a mistake because there are actually many many different open source communities and they differentiate themselves in many different ways so you can't assume that every open source project works in the same way if you look at different projects they actually operate in different ways and if you want to get engaged you need to know what the differences are and so some of those differences can be in terms of technologies right you know some you know different programming languages or the different things they do and then some differences can be in terms of the the infrastructure you know what kind of bug tracking system does the project use what kind of CI system there is a lot of a lot of diversity out there even though nowadays with GitHub I think I think a lot of projects are using the same sort of infrastructure and processes but if you look at some of the large open source projects they have their own infrastructure you know they have different bug tracking systems or just different ways of doing things and then the processes are also different like how for example do you submit a patch I mean nowadays in many cases it is submit a you know a pull request but sometimes you have to send patches to mailing lists like there are different ways of doing things or how do you get the change accepted also how do you become you know an official developer in the project there are a lot of different like a lot of differences another area is governance so how does the project work how does it operate how does it govern itself we have some projects where you have sort of a committee some projects which has several you know core members core contributors and then some projects where you have like one benevolent dictator who at the end of the day makes makes the decision another difference is in terms of philosophy so and you can see that in a number of ways just in how projects approach things one good example is licensing where on the one hand you have permissive licensed projects like BSD Apache which basically the philosophy is you know freedom open source means that you can do whatever you want and that includes taking the software proprietary but then on the other hand you have the like the the copy left people who basically say well the software the freedom needs to be preserved for everyone so that means you can't do everything and then another difference is the culture just just how you know the project is how things happen so I'm involved in Debian and I can I can tell you a lot of things about Debian you know it is one of the most popular Linux distributions we have a lot of packages we've done a lot of cool stuff and and I could go for all of that but I'm gonna skip it now because when I think of Debian really I think of the community I think this is what really makes Debian special and you can see here a picture of the world where the various Debian developers are found so we have a lot of people in Europe a lot of people in America and then we do have some people in Asia although I'd like to see more people another picture is this so once a year we have a conference Debcon and this is from Debcon in in Edinburgh and this is really for me what Debian is all about that those people and I've been involved in Debian for about 20 years now and and some of those people have known you know for 20 years and it's just amazing how you know we grow up together we see how people change and also you know when I travel I can I know people everywhere around the world you know I can meet up with people I can maybe stay at their places and this is just really incredible what open source has allowed me to do it to understand different cultures work with those people so community has has a number of aspects so one is etiquette and norms like basically how you behave or how you you know do things or things you shouldn't do then there are also rich rituals like you know certain things we tend to do which sort of show that you are part of this community and another thing that's important is history so sometimes when you when you when you come to a project and you knew you look at something and you like why are they doing things in this particular way like it doesn't make sense you know if if you would do it you would do it in a different way but then you go back in history and you see oh because of this thing you know which happened ten years ago this is why you know things are the way they are now and and with open source it's it's really interesting because a lot of the history is actually available in you know mailing archive so you can actually find out you know why things are the way they are and and and that also includes like things like like personality conflicts I mean I just have to be honest open source I mean it involves people and generally we want to work together we want to collaborate but obviously not everyone gets you know along with each other and and the history you know that might also explain certain things you know maybe you know something was implemented to work around someone or things like that and I mentioned rituals and and actually let me go back because this is such a good example so you can see here so this is in Edinburgh in Scotland where people were killed and so basically Debian got some kills done and we actually have our own pattern so Debian actually has a specific killed pattern and and it's quite interesting because nowadays when you go to Debcon you can always see some people wearing you know wearing kills and if you see them you might think oh well they're probably Scottish right that's why they wear it but no actually it's it's a Debian tradition I mean not everyone wears it but some people do and and you only understand it again if you look at the history of how these things happened and now people people so show it to show you know that they are part of the project that they belong to this community sometimes we also talk about tribes you know you belong to this tribe so anyway so back to two norms and an etiquette so the thing is with humans is that violating community norms is is really bad it just it's very obvious if you if you get something wrong and it's interesting that for Asia I'm here in Asia because I'm from Europe and when I travel to Asia I get things wrong right and and again I probably shouldn't even say Asia because there is a big difference between Singapore and a lot of the other countries but for example in Europe when I eat noodles you know I'm not allowed to make any noise because if I make noise that's impolite but I think here you know I have to make noise it shows that I like the food and there are a lot of these these norms that as like a foreigner you don't know you know when I come here I do things which which violates your norm and and it's very obvious but the thing is you also see oh you know he's a foreigner he he is not supposed to know all of those things you know you cut me some slack and it's the same with open source so one example is email because usually our interaction is based on email and that's how you make your first impression they always say you know the first impression how you know when you meet someone for the first time that's the most important and your first impression with open source is probably gonna be on an email on a mailing list you send an email and some people get it wrong and and again I mentioned before that there isn't the open source community a lot of the things I say now only apply to more traditional open source communities a lot of the more newer ones actually are quite different in this way but historically sending stuff like HTML email to a mailing list like people really really hate it and if you do that it's obvious you're a foreigner you know you you don't know how the project works you know from here you're not one of us some some people also send garbled patches because they use they use stuff like outlook another thing I often see is long email footers so especially companies they have those legal requirements to state you know the address and the CEO and all those details text numbers and it's like 20 lines of of email and people in the at least in the past again things are changing really hate that kind of stuff and another another example is top posting and this is actually a really good example which also shows that these norms change over time so in the past if you would top post to a mailing list so top post just means that you write your reply at you know at the top of the email like people would really really hate it like you would have to do it this way you know you quote and then you send your reply you quote some more this is in line and in a lot of a lot of you know the traditional up source communities like this is how you have to respond if you if you top quote people hate it but this is actually such a good example of things changing because now top quoting is getting much much much more you know widely used and I also do it sometimes so so what what I'm trying to say so I don't know if you notice this comic where is what Waldo I think Waldo has different names in in in all kind of different languages but you have to to find him somewhere in the picture and he's really hard to find and and that's what I'm trying to say is that when you join a community you don't want to stick out in a negative way you know you should try to blend in you try to learn the culture and do things in in the way that the community expects but at the same time of course you should you should build a reputation for yourself you know you should stick out in a positive way by making a good contribution so I wanted to talk a little bit about corporate involvement and because it's it's getting much more common nowadays that people like software engineers who have like a traditional corporate background and they are being told oh you know you should work on this open source project we want to get engaged you know can you start working on this open source project and the culture between you know a corporate environment where you do in-house development can be quite different to the open source world and sometimes that's a big learning curve for people so one example is writing down information in open source we really like writing down everything we enjoy you know communicating on a mailing list which are archived or in chat systems which are archived and this has a lot of benefits because other people can get involved they can read what's going on and they can participate but a lot of a lot of the corporate culture is to just you know get a room and talk about stuff and sometimes corporations even avoid writing down stuff because you know they don't want to be taken accountable later another thing is distributed development versus co-located development so if if the whole team is in the same building you know you get used to just shouting across the aisle and again if everyone is in the same building you just get a meeting you talk about it and then everyone knows what's going on but there is no need to really write it down but we've open source we always need to write things down and sometimes we meet at conferences and have you know chats in person but then it's important to go back to the mailing list to document what you have discussed what you have decided because there are a lot of people from the project who won't be able to be at the conference technologies obviously are different as well but I think the you know learning the obstacles technologies and tools is very easy and something that some people need to do is if they work in a in a corporate environment they need to adopt different styles you know if you if you work internally you know in the corporate environment you have to behave a certain way you have to follow their traditions and their rules but then if you work on the open source project you have to adopt a different style and you have to do what they do so this is sort of a skill that you you need to you know work in different ways depending on on what you do another big difference is is being open community is all about being open you know the work is is in the open and this to be honest can be a big challenge for people especially if you're new to open source because internally if you if you create the patch yeah your colleagues your manager might review it they might give you some feedback you may have to change it but if you do it in open source suddenly the whole world can look at your changes and they can critique them right and this stuff is archived you know forever and this can be a little bit scary and and again that's also a cultural thing because like for example in America and the US you know they're quite direct with giving feedback and they can be quite blunt whereas in some Asian cultures it's you know it's all about saving face and you know saying things indirectly so this is a big challenge I think for a lot of Asian contributors to be involved in open source which are really like the culture is a very very Western dominated in many ways another thing which which is like it like a challenge for some people but I find it really rewarding is that with open source you work with your competitors like obviously your companies compete on some in some ways but on the open source project you might collaborate you know with them so if you look at the Linux kernel you know that has people from Intel and AMD working together side-by-side IBM and HB are working on Linux side-by-side but then they compete in other areas so this is something which which is very you know unusually in a way and I actually have this example so I have a friend and he used to work at HP so I used to work at HP we both worked at HP and he was working on the Linux kernel and then one day he moved on the country member he moved to Google or Red Hat but he still continued working on the Linux kernel and so he told me that his family asked oh so he changed jobs what are you doing now and he said oh I do exactly the same I do before you know I worked on the Linux kernel before and I work on the Linux kernel now and they were like how can you change employer and still do the same stuff and and and yeah and I think it's incredible because again it comes back to friendships even though we change employers you know my friends they still stay around in the same you know environment yeah we might work for different employers but we all work on the same project yeah documentation NDA can be a problem with like corporate involvement so one of the questions is why should you get involved in open source in the first place because open source it means you know you can do anything you can take the software you can modify it internally in your corporate environment there is no need there is no requirement to give it back but there are a lot of benefits in doing so because at the end of the day upstream so upstream is basically the project where you get the software from they are the authoritative source so if you make changes internally the project doesn't stand still and they also move on and they make changes and then for you it's a it's a huge maintenance requirement to to you know get your changes into the new version but instead if you take your changes and you put them upstream then you can just adopt the new version without any changes and in fact other people might get involved and improve the changes you have made so so one of the things I see in terms of corporations getting involved in open source is they don't understand that in the long term open source pays off but in the short term it can be more work because you need to get up to speed to contributing to the project you need to do all that work to get your changes in and that's a lot of work but in the long term it makes things so much easier for you so this is sometimes a challenge explaining to management you know why do you need to work to invest all of that time now well because it pays off in the long term another another reason for getting in involved upstream is getting new ideas I always I mean you know some of the big companies like Google they hire a lot of smart people right but there is no single company that can hire all the small smart people in the world and again that's the beauty of open source is that you know you have all those smart people working on the same project and it doesn't really matter who they work for you get those ideas from all of those people and you can also contribute your ideas so how how to get started with open source so it's very hard to give like a step by step how to because a lot of the things depend on the project every project works in a different way so the way you get engaged the way you contribute are very specific to the project but obviously some of the things are generic so one thing I always recommend is that people start by using the software and then when you use the software I'm sure you're gonna find things that don't work and then you can find a bug report or maybe the documentation is accurate and you can improve it and the more you help out the more opportunities you find to get involved another thing that's important is that in open source you have to be very independent there isn't really anyone in open source who tells you oh you know you should be doing this you should be doing this it's very like people very self-determined like you get involved you do something and you contributed so don't wait around for people to tell you what to do just do something and and I mean a lot of projects nowadays try to make it easier by having sort of mentorship programs where they either describe certain things that are easy to do you know here are some bug reports which are easy to fix or here is you know documentation area that can be improved and also they provide guidance like they work with you to get you up to speed but a lot of projects don't have that so you just need to get started and then and then contribute and see how things work so one of one of my advice is find a niche find something that hasn't been done before because if you just do something which everyone does where you can make a contribution but it's it's gonna be you know but if you do something completely different then you know your impact is much higher so and in open source there's always something to do like no software project is perfect right no project is finished there is always something you can contribute so just start by using the project and you're gonna find a ton of stuff that you can improve one of the really nice things about open source is that as you get engaged in projects you build up a reputation you know people start to recognize your name and if you do a good work they will record you know they will associate your name with that good work they know they can trust you they know that if you do something it's going to be high quality and the great thing is that that reputation if you want to change employers that stays with you you know people can look at your your github your repository or they know name your name and that makes it really easy to get new jobs so how to get involved so one of the things I always say is I mean I'm sure you're eager to get involved you just want to start but take things slow the first thing you should do is observe observe how the project operates and the great thing is we hope so this is very easy to do you can just subscribe to a number of mailing lists and you can read and then you can see how people interact how do people discuss how do people make decisions who are the people who have influence in the project you see all of these just by observing you know the mailing list conversations and try to understand the culture try to figure out how the project works and don't assume that it works a certain way that it works like a company or that it works like a like another open-source project and if you make changes then contribute them back so that's it I think we have some time for questions thank you one idea that I've been that I've been trying around with is for for companies to more so traditional companies to implement an open-source culture within the company itself I'm just wondering if you have seen this done anywhere so so make sure that there are no sort of clans inside the company if people are open about the work that they're doing and invite other departments in to come and take a look and for coats with the company and then spin that off see see the advantage of having multiple stakeholders and contributors and then spin that off in finally into an external project after the momentum has been built out right yeah I think there are there are two things I see so one of them is called inner source which is basically where companies adopt open-source methodologies internally so you know they use stuff like like git and pull requests and and bug bug tracking systems and and basically they adopt open-source methodologies internally but sometimes it is for proprietary code so there's never any plan to actually you know up like get it open so like get it out out of the door it just internally to facilitate collaboration and for example when I worked at HB we actually bought a license for GitHub to to to create this this environment and people were saying like I mean it was like a big company with 300,000 people and it was like you know why are there so many silos why the different teams not working together why do we not know what the other people are doing and by having this inner source you know some of those challenges can be addressed but then I think the other thing is which I think is more aligned to what you said is is where people sort of start doing open source internally but with the plan to to eventually get it out there so one thing for example I see is that you might have a team where you have some experienced open source developers and some people who don't have the experience and basically they provide some internal coaching so you do stuff internally there's internal code review and once the team decides yeah it's ready then you approach the open source project you actually submit it outside but but yeah like the whole inner source model is getting quite quite popular and and hopefully some of that will be released as open source as well but some of it is just you know proprietary software development done in like a more modern way actually I have a question so archiving this email list and PR so those have kind of a personal comment or like information does it anything violate GDPR things or anything because it's archived forever right so this is actually a really big topic for a lot of open source projects right now because we have traditionally relied on I mean open source is all about being open about being transparent we don't want to hide you know problems or things so we you know the whole idea is to archive stuff as as much as much as possible but at the same time you know projects need to comply with with you know the law and and so now you know if someone wants something removed that the project would have to do that I don't think I think it takes some more time to see how it pans out in reality I don't think we have seen like a lot of you know requests for remover but it's definitely something that the various projects are aware and working on any other questions we have like two and a half minutes okay thanks so much yeah thank you please give a round of applause for Martin in that way


Welcome to Perspectives of Global Justice. This is your host Beatrice Cantelmo. Is climate change real or a hoax? In a 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body charged with reaching a consensus view on global warming suggests that scientists are essentially 100% certain that global warming is an occurring factor and 95% certain that it's a man-made process. President Trump's administration does not have a size-advisor and relied on climate change skeptics for guidance on energy and environmental policy issues. On March 28th, President Trump signed a sweeping executive order that calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Clean Power Plan, which unites towards eliminating it. The new environmental executive order eliminates a metric for assessing the economic effects of the carbon dioxide emissions known as the social cost of carbon, rethinks how policy makers consider climate change, and encourages the US fossil fuel production along with new promises, new jobs, restoration of economic freedom and more prosperity for our nation. Hopefully the new executive orders will take years to be replaced. Until then, states can still continue to move toward clean energy, but they will lose major pharaoh incentives to do so. Lucky for the state of Hawaii, we have Blue Planet Foundation, which is led by a very experienced advocate in the fearless leader, Ajat Mikulina. Blue Planet Foundation is a champion organization that has created policies and programs to transform Hawaii's energy systems to clean renewable energy solutions. More than ever, Blue Planet Foundation remains committed to lead the way for global change by using awareness, education, advocacy, and a lot of love for the earth to remove the obstacles that stand between us and a future free from fossil fuel. Today's perspective on global justice welcomes guest Shem Lalour, Clean Transportation Director of Blue Planet Foundation. Well, welcome to our show, Shem. The address is going to be here. So for our viewers who do not know about Blue Planet Foundation, could you give us a little overview of this beautiful organization? Sure. So Blue Planet Foundation was founded back in 2007 by Hank Rogers. He's well known in Hawaii who's famous for developing video games such as Tetris and other games. He also owns a number of other companies. Blue Planet Foundation is a nonprofit that he started and our mission is basically to get Hawaii off of fossil fuels. And what was the main driver for saying, hey, let's switch gears. Let's not use fossil fuel energy anymore and consider green energy alternatives? Well, I think there's a lot of evidence, obviously, that climate change is happening and I think for Hank Rogers in particular, he became very concerned about the impacts of global climate change on Hawaii's coral reefs and on the shoreline due to rising sea levels. So we obviously as an island state, we are right in the line of fire for some of the major impacts of global warming. So Blue Planet Foundation is well known for its strong policy-making advocacy work and also a lot of programs that's implemented here in the state to make that happen. To might giving a little bit of an overview, a timeline since 2007 worked. We have been able to accomplish as a state. Sure. So like I mentioned, we were founded in 2007. We do a lot of advocacy, a lot of education. We've been advocating for incentives for the solar industry, wind industry. For several years, we fought to get a renewable portfolio standard that would see us to 100% clean energy. We actually got that pass in 2015. That was our bill. It took several years, but we got a pass in 2015 and that as most of the viewers will probably know, by 2045, all of 100% of Hawaii's electricity sector will be renewably powered. So that was a major landfall victory for us two years ago. Now we've kind of turned a lot of our attention from the electricity sector, which we've made a lot of progress to the transportation sector where we have not made a lot of progress, which also consumes almost a comparable amount, about the same amount of energy as electricity sector. We haven't made a lot of progress there and that's where we're really kind of focusing our efforts at this time. And so I'm so excited to have you here today so we can talk a little bit about it. Do you know on average how much percent of fossil fuel energy do we use for transportation for the state of Hawaii per year? Sure. So of our total oil imports, about 28% is used for electricity sector and about 27 or 28% is used for the ground transportation sector. The remainder is split between air traffic. Air is about 25 or 26% and then the rest is for military and marine and those kind of things. So the really two big chunks is ground transportation and electricity. Like I said, we've made a lot of progress on the electricity sector. We have a lot of work to do on the ground transportation sector. The other big piece will be aviation. That's a little bit of a difficult one for us to handle locally because aviation is much more of an international issue. It's not as easy for us to make changes on a local level but that's maybe a later project. So for now, really ground transportation is what we're relying on. It's nice to have that large long-term vision for transportation and aviation but for now with transportation, I hear that we have a new bill being considered by our senate. So HB 1580. For our viewers who have never heard about this bill, what it is all about and what are we trying to accomplish if we have it passed and implemented into law? Sure. So yeah, House Bill 1580, HB 1580 is a bill that is a little bit different from the one we passed in 2015 which was a mandate which is basically all of electricity has to be 100% renewable. This one, HB 1580 would set a goal to have all of our ground transportation powered by renewable power. It's not a mandate and the reason why we've strategically not done a mandate is because the electricity sector has a very limited number of actors. You have the utilities and a few other small set of power companies basically. With ground transportation, you have literally millions of actors. You have individuals who purchase cars and so it's a little bit more difficult to have a mandate and to have a body that could officiate over that. So we've decided to go with more of a goal, a target, if you will, that would have us 100% renewable ground transportation by 2045. Same year, same target year as the electricity sector but just a goal and basically what we're trying to achieve by this is to start getting everybody's mind focused on the same end game. We're not saying we're going to take away people's gasoline car though I'm sure there'll be some people who have a classic 1969 Corvette in the year 2045. We're not trying to take that away from people. We're not going to convert it into... We definitely could What we're going to do is get all the car dealerships to think okay by 2030, 2035 all of our cars will be electric that we're going to be selling. We want the condominium associations to start thinking oh we actually need to start developing a plan to install charging in our building because 2045 all the cars are going to be electric or hydrogen. So we really want people's mindset to change but we're telling them this is where we're going and we need to start planning for that and that's where we think the value of the target is is to really get everybody on the same page start planning the infrastructure that we need start planning all the little tweaks we're going to need to make in the transportation system and infrastructure that we need to do the sooner we start planning for those things the smoother our transition is going to be. Absolutely and I'm so happy that we have an urban planner in you as a background to be able to actually bring our state to that frame of our vision. I mean ideally that we could hit the moon but if we aim at the stars and get there that's amazing too. So where are we at in terms of our transportation situation for the state of Hawaii? Give us the good, the bad and the ugly. Well it's pretty bad and ugly is where we're at. We have pretty good geographical gifts in terms of sustainable transportation. We have limited driving range because we're islands. Our good climate should mean that we could walk and bike a lot and that we could even our electric vehicles perform well in warm weather. So in what we have in terms of geographical and climactic gifts we could be doing a lot. Unfortunately we've built cities and islands that are really dependent on the personal automobile which uses a lot of energy and a lot of space and because we've invested so much and built everything around the car we really don't have capacity and service quality in alternative modes of transportation like public transit, walking and biking and so we really have a long way to go. Basically about 80% of all the trips in the state are by personal automobiles and we just don't have the quality in alternative modes that we should have so we have to make a lot of ground there. And then we actually are doing quite well when it comes to EVs or electric vehicles compared to other states. Part of it is because we don't have because we have island states and we don't drive as far the range anxiety which is one of the major barriers to electric vehicle adoption has not been as big of a problem so we've had a lot of people that have purchased EVs the ratio is higher than most other states but we still have a long way to go still EVs just make up about half of 1% of all the cars on the road today. So for someone who wants to be more and align and really do that transition and say I wanted to buy an EV car I wanted to utilize public transportation more also the bike but then you have to consider the cost the initial cost aspect of buying a new car and now with the new executive orders that just being put in effect and that does not support green energy actually supports a few energy and then most of the state incentives that people perhaps would have to be able to do that transition may not be there what would be your advice for somebody to start with small steps so even to plan maybe 2-3 years from now to start transitioning more to that Well that's a really good question so as you mentioned the current administration we have in Washington is not one that we can expect to rely on for leadership on clean energy or clean transportation there's a lot of skepticism in the administration about global warming and about renewable energy and clean transportation technologies the good news is that the market where the market is developed both on clean energy like solar energy and wind and also for electric vehicles has advanced far enough where I don't think we necessarily need or I should say I don't think that the administration can really thwart the progress too much I think that there's also an opportunity because the federal government is not one that we can rely on to push forward the clean transportation and clean energy agenda I think there's an opportunity for the states to take a bigger role and that's one of the things that we're advocating for with the state legislature and with counties as well is that it's time for you to step up and take a bigger role so specifically when it comes to electric vehicles in the last five or six years we've seen battery prices drop from about $950 per kilowatt hour to about $150 so about five or six times cheaper in a five or six year period of time so electric vehicles most people traditionally they have been quite a bit more expensive than traditional cars that's becoming less and less the case so you can actually buy an electric vehicle for a reasonable price compared to comparable models that are gas powered and then the price of operating a car because electricity is a cheaper fuel than gasoline it's cheaper to actually own it so I think more and more every year it's no longer going to be a decision between driving a clean car and saving money I think they're going to be both in the same camp you can save money and save the environment at the same time and there are more and more electric vehicle models coming on the market especially this year we're kind of at the end of what we call the generation one of electric vehicles and we're stepping into generation two generation two vehicles really starting with the Chevy Bolt with a B we're going to see the driving ranges go from about 100 miles to well over 200 miles on a single charge and the prices are coming down to a very reasonable level so I think over the next few years we're going to see really an explosion of EV adoption in Hawaii and that's going to put a lot of strain on infrastructure so that's why we really think there's a role for planning at the state level and with the utility level how can we provide the infrastructure that's needed to support the huge influx of electric vehicles that we expect to see in the next few years right and I really look forward to those concepts and the planning aspect of it after our break which is happening shortly and yeah Hey everybody, that's Ian social media manager here at ThinkTek Hawaii thanks for tuning in sorry to break into your show if you're listening on the podcast thanks for listening, watching on YouTube we appreciate the subscription etc if you are a long time listener or viewer of ThinkTek Hawaii every day five to six hours a day streaming stuff that's happening here in Hawaii that matters to everybody worldwide basically there's a lot of stuff that we've got going on and we're excited about many of them 2017 is going to be really cool right now I can tell you that we are on iTunes where you can listen to all of this stuff now really excited about how that's going and we have just started on the street feature where we take a camera out to the street five to you guys out there and getting what people in the local community out what they want or are thinking about and sharing that with you we're really excited about all that stuff we're really excited about you guys watching and following us on all the social media sort of things, Instagram, Facebook Twitter, all that good stuff look for us, ThinkTek H.I watch us on Olelo thank you so much everybody here appreciates it welcome back to Perspectives on Global Justice this is your health, spirit, risk and telmo and we are going to start our second part of our segment on climate change and blue planet foundations green transportation energy so we were talking about the entire process of creating a vision but also the infrastructure for the much needed changes that we need as a state to be able to achieve our goal and to become less dependent on fossil fuel 100% goal of not being dependent by 2045 many states think that this is quite bold and unattainable what do you have to say about that? well I have to say that they're wrong there's a lot of skeptics about the achievability of 100% clean transportation and I think that our vision so blue planet foundation we actually run a program called STICH or the sustainable transportation coalition of Hawaii it's a coalition of a bunch of stakeholders that are interested in clean transportation and we are kind of administer the program so STICH we've kind of set out a two part vision of what clean transportation or sustainable transportation is by 2045 and the two components are first of all we envision that by 2045 half of all of the trips in the state will be by alternative transportation so walking, biking public transit other mobility options like Uber, Lyft or Autonomous taxi technologies which are being developed and a real scaling back of the personal automobile which takes a lot of resources energy and a lot of space and also a heavy reliance on the personal automobile has some real equity challenges for low income households and also for the 35 to 40% of the population that doesn't even have driver's licenses so we really want to see an increase in alternative modes and the quality and availability of them to that really reduce energy usage and also solve a lot of the traffic and equity issues that we have in the current transportation system and then the second part is as I mentioned before we talked about transitioning all the vehicles to renewable energy sources so I'm going to touch base on a very controversial sole issue for the state of Hawaii which is our rail road some people are adamantly against it some people say this is the only way to go so I would like for you to elaborate a little bit on where is the Blue Planet Foundation with the rail road and if you support or not what's your argument for against it so there's a lot of controversy around the project and most of the controversy has to do with the cost of the project so obviously it's very expensive and the recent increases in costs are alarming and our costs are very concerned ultimately though we really believe that it's important to have a very healthy mix of transportation modes and really the cleanest and most cost efficient modes of transportation are walking and biking so that's where we really that's the holy grail for sustainable transportation is walking and biking and to do that you have to build neighborhoods that are unbikable that means you have services and jobs within walking distance or biking distance of people's homes larger sidewalks bike lines and loads that respect the bicyclists the problem is you can't really build neighborhoods like that unless you have a really robust public transportation system so if you're thinking about public transit as just something that you add on top of something that's a accoutrement to our current transportation system then it's easy to understand why people are really upset about the cost of the project we like to flip that upside down and say no the public transit is really the backbone of our entire city not just transportation but also our land use we can't build walkable neighborhoods without a really robust public transit system one thing that a lot of people don't know is that our current public transit system here on Oahu the bus has really been at capacity since the early 1980s it's a little bit technical but essentially the main problem is that in urban Honolulu the buses get so backed up behind each other not so much the other traffic although that complicates things but it's really the buses are getting in each other's way and so the buses in urban Honolulu average about four to eight miles an hour it's very slow and so it's really difficult for the city to add more buses overall because all the buses get stuck in urban Honolulu the rail will really help that problem by clearing out urban Honolulu and really providing a very efficient way to get people in and out of urban Honolulu which will make it a lot easier to provide better bus service all over the island and there's really no way we can increase our current public transit capacity without the rail project but because it's expensive it really doesn't make sense to just build the rail and expect a very small shift from cars to transit you really have to because it's so expensive we feel that the city and county of Honolulu really should go all in so go big or go home actually go big not even go home there's no way back so what that means essentially is right now in Oahu about 6% of all trips are by public transit we think that number should be north of 20% right now about 76% of all trips are by personal model bill 45% especially trips coming into urban Honolulu and we really think that we can actually be able to say that the rail project can't solve traffic congestion we actually think it can it just depends on how many people you switch and the city and county has a lot of tools actually that can get people to switch from cars to alternative modes the rail is essential to make that possible but it's not the only tool in the toolkit right so let's talk about all the tools in the toolkit that people don't think about it so biking renting by the hour perhaps walking right so the way we think it's the best way to do it I think the best example of how to do it would be to look at a city like Vancouver so in the late 1990s Vancouver as a city set a goal to buy 2020 have more than half of all the trips in the city be by walking biking and transit and then they coordinated all their land use and transportation policies all towards that single goal so they built really high quality bike lanes they built high quality sidewalks they expanded their already fantastic public transit system and then they supported things like car sharing, bike sharing services and then all the developers when they came in to build projects the city required them to include amenities that made it possible for people living in those neighborhoods to walk and bike to grocery stores and restaurants and stuff like that so they had a really holistic approach and the city and county of Honolulu really needs to do that they can't really do that without the rail project because the limiting factor right now is our capacity in the public transit system most people don't realize that and so that's really something to consider what would you say to people who have 2-3 cars at home and say I'm not going to give up my car and I'm not going to use public transportation because I think there is a part of the reeducation and helping people understand the parks and the advantage of doing this switch what would you tell to someone who is very resistant to those kinds of changes I think there's a really I think there's a fallacy out there that's very common misconception that people think that culture or people's attitudes about cars is the primary thing that dictates their behavior and all of the data suggests that's not true so if you took 100 people from Honolulu and you stuck them in Tokyo or you put them in New York City you would find that almost all of them would be getting around by walking and taking the train the biggest single factor that dictates how people get around and the cost structure so if we build cities where it's possible and convenient to get around without a car people actually tend to switch pretty quickly the problem is it's really hard to make those changes it's really hard to improve bike lanes the King Street cycle track is a really good example the mayor has said several times that the most controversial thing that he's done during his administration has been the King Street cycle track even more controversial than the rail project that's because people are very resistant to anything that cuts into their vehicle traffic and that's understandable we've built a city where we have so many cars that we've taken every square inch of the street and so it's congested and it's contested space and so we can't really improve the bike network and the pedestrian network without taking away from the cars and so it's natural we're going to have some pushback and it's important that we fight back against that pushback because really there's no other there's really no other solution we can't continue expand the roads it's impossible and also I think that's the part of looking at other places that already have taken that leap and they're doing so much better than we are and say hey if they can do it so can we so we have a few minutes left for our show unfortunately but I would like to cover some of the activities that Blue Planet Foundation has planned for our day and also around green energy efforts for this month and the following month so what's exciting and what's happening in the coming weeks the biggest thing is actually next Thursday the 20th of April we're having a huge rally at the state capitol so it's our clean energy day it's a rally for 100% clean ground transportation we have 700 elementary middle and high school students that are coming to the capitol 700 are they coming from all over the state mostly from Oahu but there may be some from other islands I'm not sure exactly but we also have about 10 vendors that are going to be having those in the capitol rotunda so some of those are Hawaii bicycle and we bike share Hawaii a few others that just share information about clean transportation alternatives we're also going to have an electric vehicle ride and drive event so we're going to have a Tesla and a Toyota Mirai and a Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 and others that anybody who has a driver's license can come and actually test drive the vehicles it's going to be from 10am till noon and it's we're going to have some speakers represented Chris Lee and others are going to be speaking about clean transportation all this is basically building support and showing the legislators that there is a tremendous amount of public support for setting this 100% clean transportation target right well that's amazing and it's so wonderful that 700 children are planning to do this they get it they do they really do and any other events that you are scheduled to you know we always have a number of EV ride events around the state we don't have any planned at the time at the present time but we do about one every month and a half or so we're planning to do our electric island drive again this year we did one last September where we had individual EV owners basically drive through urban Honolulu in a caravan with flags that was for National Drive Electric Week so we're planning to do that again this September we have our annual fundraiser in September as well and we do a lot of community events throughout the year but those are the the big ones that's wonderful well thank you so much for being here and for being such an amazing inspiring leader to help us you know move to a new era of green energy you know for our state and hopefully a leader for the rest of the globe well welcome to Prospectism Global Justice this is Beatrice Cantelmo and please come back next Friday and check us out again a hui hou