This is your House Agriculture and Forestry Committee. We're all here today and I hope you're all doing well. We have some special guests today to, as you all know, we start every meeting with a report on COVID-19 issues. And we are very fortunate to have representatives of our federal delegation here today. I actually don't see Tom Berry yet. He was having trouble getting into the meeting. So we hope that he is going to be able to do that. Right now, I'd like to turn to Erica Cummings. Erica works for Senator Bernie Sanders and we thank you, Erica, for spending some time with us today. We have about an hour to talk with the three of you. And so we'd like to hear any kind of update you can offer us in particular regarding COVID-19. If you want to unmute yourself, that would be fantastic. Thanks, Carolyn. I was wondering who that Erica Cummings woman was. My name is Erica Campbell. There is an Erica Cummings who is in the agriculture world. So I suppose- I thought something was wrong. I suppose that could be an easy mistake. Sorry, Erica. No problem at all. There's a lot going on. See, yeah, so I mean, we were going to start this presentation out with Tom because he was going to do a high-level overview of the legislation passed so far, particularly the CARES Act. I'm on it, Erica. Oh, Erica, excellent. It's got on. Thank you, Tom. So- But really, what's to do?  No, why don't you go, Tom? Because I was going to talk about the nutrition. So I think given the high level on CARES, where we're at, talking about dairy, I think would be best. And then I mean, I almost think maybe the nutrition should be last. I'm not sure. Ryan's going to be talking about a lot of the small business programs today, which I also work on that issue. So why don't you start and we'll go from there. Okay, I'll start. Great, welcome, Tom. Oh, I'm sorry, hi. Hi, everybody. All right, I think we're having a hard time hearing you. Oh, there you are. Welcome. Tom, we can't hear you. At least I can't. I don't know what's going on, but we can't hear you. How is that? Is that any better? That is better. It's not great, but it's better. Now we can't hear you again. Before I'm going to, I know at this point, if I turn off my camera, maybe that will help with bandwidth. Okay. I don't know where you live, but maybe you just don't have the strength to do it from your area.  Tom, I'm seeing. Yes, it's still, we can't hear you at all now. Can't hear me at all. I mean, I can sort of hear you talking, but you sound like you're way far down in a well or something.  So I'm going to sign off on Zoom and call in on the phone line. Well, we can hear you just then. You can hear me now. We can hear you now. I think as long as you say really, no, I think you should just call in. Sorry. We'll wait for you. We need broadband. Yes. We need fiber, actually. We have fiber running up the hill about three quarters of a mile from me, but can we attach to it? No. All right, we'll just wait for Tom. I wish I had some jokes I could tell. We need fiber artists, Carolyn. Yes. Yeah, actually, I told the guys, I'm working on the set of masks that'll bring me up to 100 masks. So the sheep is still in a belligerent state of early labor. I don't know how long she can do this. So if I am summoned because it becomes problematic, I will leave, but otherwise you're stuck with me. Okay, good. We like being stuck with you. All right, no sign of Tom yet. I'm happy to start the nutrition update if that would be helpful. And we can, Tom can, you either interrupt it when Tom gets on or I can finish up and get away. Sure. Yeah. Yes, why don't you go ahead, Erica, thanks so much. Oh, you're very welcome. So for the record, my name is Erica Campbell with Senator Sanders office here in Vermont. I work on nutrition and agriculture issues as well as small business. So just a quick overview of where we're at. Most of the nutrition support that's come through the federal relief slash stimulus bills was actually in the, in the earlier bill, the family's first act. There's been the subsequent CARES Act that had was a very large bill. And Tom will talk about that more as well as Ryan. And when you're ready, if you can hear me, can you hear me now? Yeah, go ahead, Tom. Thanks, Tom. Otherwise, I'll jump in. No, go ahead, jump in. I think that's fine with you. Great care, Erica. Yeah. Yes. Go ahead, Tom. Okay, well, a little disjointed, but I guess so are a lot of things right now, right? Not knowing what you may have covered already, Erica probably started out by talking about the CARES Act. And I think everybody's probably somewhat familiar with that legislation that passed a little over a week ago. And it provides, potentially provides assistance for agriculture in a number of ways. There are small business programs that I understand Ryan's going to take a deeper dive into and all of us have been scrambling over the last week to try to figure out exactly how those small business programs may or may not be of help to agriculture. And we can get into that further as we go forward. And then in addition for agriculture in particular, the legislation does a couple of things. The main agricultural section is fairly brief. In fact, I will read the entire section that is generally on agriculture. $9.5 billion to remain available until expended to prevent, prepare for and respond to coronavirus by providing support to agricultural producers impacted by the coronavirus, including producers of specialty crops, producers that supply local food systems, including farmers markets, restaurants and schools, and livestock producers, including dairy producers. And that's it for- Tom, would you be willing to send that little blurb to Linda so that she could send that out to us? Yeah, I'll send that to her right now. And that's a fairly brief description of how to spend $9.5 billion with a B dollars for agriculture. And so it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I'll point out again that it specifically refers to specialty crops and farmers markets and dairy with dairy and livestock being the only commodity sectors called out, local food systems. A lot of words that we all like in Vermont and described the Vermont food system, but the, how these dollars roll out is left entirely at the discretion of the secretary of agriculture, within those fairly broad constraints of the legislation. So the question has been for the past week plus since this past is how and when the secretary will begin rolling out these dollars. And there's still not a lot of clarity on that. In digging around and looking for some clues, the US House, ad committee chair Peterson did have a conversation with Secretary Perdue within the last couple of days and then made some comments related to what his understanding from Secretary Perdue was. And it was a long, what was said was fairly positive from the point of view of those, to state, well, the crop types mentioned, local food and food systems. Peterson indicated that Perdue told him that in fact it would be directed at those types of crops and not provided to the larger commodity crops that had benefited somewhat disproportionately from the trade adjustment payments that were made in recent years. And so there's, there's indications that there will be substantial funds paid to specialty crop growers and dairy out of the 9.5 billion and Perdue was quoted saying he will hold off on eight commodity growers for now. But of course that will remain to be seen and there's nothing concrete that I've seen thus far. In addition to that, there was $14 billion put into the CCC funds and that's the source of funds that provides not only for the market facilitation program but also covers the dairy margin coverage program. So that account has been refunded, there's money there and those dollars can be and probably will be put out in more like the trade adjustment payments that were familiar with from the last couple of years. And again, there's not a lot of transparency yet on when and how those payments might go out. And the bill also, and I know Erica's gonna get into nutrition so I won't go too far into this but it does provide additional funding for a number of the nutrition programs as well. And I'll leave the discussion of that to Erica. So I think those are between the SBA programs that are to some extent applicable to agriculture and certainly to agricultural businesses, the $9.5 billion for especially crops, et cetera. And the replenishment of the CCC funds and then the programs related to nutrition are the main areas in which the CARES Act has provided funding. I will say, and again, without getting into details and leaving that to Ryan that on the SBA programs it's become evident that the money is gonna run out very quickly and the Senate right now is scrambling Senator McConnell wants before the end of the week through unanimous consent to push more money into the SBA programs because those are becoming very quickly depleted. And so I can take a breath and then get into any of this in more detail or we can have a discussion. Mooc, let the others weigh in as well. Very good, thanks so much, Tom. Erica, you mentioned that you thought Ryan might go next and then you would follow up with the nutrition. Do you think that's a good idea or do you wanna continue? Well, I do because I think that the small business portions of the, especially the CARES Act are just so relevant to agriculture and dairy farms, et cetera right now and it kinda makes more sense to lump those two together. So do you wanna go, Ryan? And then I can jump in on nutrition. Yeah, sure, thank you. I'm Ryan McLaren, I work for Congressman Peter Welch and the two main programs I'm sure you all have heard about from the CARES Act, we have a small business administration are the Paycheck Protection Program, PPP or the EIDL Program, which is the emergency. Erica, help me out here, I've lost the acronym. Oh, the IDLE is, I don't have in front of me, but it's Emergency Economic Damage Law. Economic Damage Law. Sorry, thank you. What was the I again? Injury, yeah, that's it. Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program. Good, tag team. So for the purposes of agriculture, I think it's with the EIDL Program we can start with the baseline at this point, which is that the SBA is not accepting loan applications from farms. And that's an area that we are seeking to clarify as a delegation with the small business administration. It seems relatively clear to us that that was the legislative intent that farms would be included and that money would be available to them. But the small business administration up to this point has taken the view that if you have received a loan through the USDA at some point, then you're not eligible for that program. So the delegation as a whole is working to clarify that and to make our intentions clear that we expected, fully expected in writing the bill that farm businesses would have access to that program. So in the agriculture context, I'd say just stay tuned there. We can keep you up to date on that as it progresses. The other program, the PPP program is open for farm businesses. And so that program is designed essentially to keep people on payrolls, both to benefit workers and employers to maintain that employee-employer relationship and keep people off unemployment. And so businesses are able to borrow up to 250% of their average payroll, monthly payroll costs. And there are a number of things that are included in that, up to $100,000 of salary for each employee. Farms are eligible as long as they meet the small business administration's eligibility requirements, which generally is here under 500 employees. So that would apply to the, I don't know if there's a farm in Vermont that wouldn't be eligible for that under that threshold. And it also applies for independent contractors or self-employed folks.  It's important to note, I think that the program opens to...  I don't know if it's me or you. It's definitely him. Yeah, I'll leave it there. There's some ag-specific components to it. Like, if you have an H2A or an H2B worker on your farm, that would not count towards your payroll costs. Ryan, you froze up. Oh, sorry. And wait, you were talking about a business can borrow up to 250% of their average payroll up to $100,000 per year for an employee. Yeah, and it's a $10 million max total. Okay, they can borrow up to $10 million. Yeah, and that is inclusive of the pay, the salary is capped at $100,000, but you can include healthcare benefits, leave time, those costs in the calculation above the $100,000 per employee cap. It's really just the wage that's capped at $100,000. And then for relevant, for agriculture specifically, H2A and H2B workers wouldn't count towards the payroll calculation because the employee's principal place of residence needs to be the United States. So if you have US-based employees, they would count towards that calculation. And then also, I mean, I think it counts the owner's compensation also. So in the case of a sole proprietor, you're calculating what essentially is your payroll as in what you take home. And sometimes that can be, it's confusing because in a lot of instances, it's not a lot. And so at the end of the, I think it's early June, by early June, if you have used that loan to essentially for payroll for what it's intended, if 80% of that loan goes to maintaining your payroll, then that loan will be completely forgiven at the end of the loan period. So it's really a grant program as long as you're using it to maintain employees in your business. So you can essentially borrow or be granted $10 million as long as you keep your people employed. Could you just say that again? Sorry, my computer muted you. Can you ask that question one more time? I said, so is the $10 million potentially a grant as long as you keep your people employed? Yes, exactly. There are requirements you have to meet as you use that money, but as long as you meet those requirements, it will be forgiven at the end of the loan term. So it will essentially convert into a grant as long as you're keeping payroll on board. And so I think the last thing I'll mention is that there is some concern that this money is running out quite quickly. And so we've been encouraging people that think they might be interested in it, even if you're on the fence, it's worth giving your lender a call immediately most banks in Vermont are able to process these applications at this point. And the sooner it's a first come, first serve thing. So the sooner you get in line, the safer you'll be. There is, as Tom mentioned, a lot of work happening in DC to add money into the program because of how quickly it's been going, but the sooner the better for anyone that is interested. And that's known as the Payroll Protection Program. Yeah, and I sent Linda some FAQs on both these programs before the meeting so she can share them with you all. They're really useful for businesses who have questions. Great, thank you so much, Ryan. All right. Can I add just a couple of things related to those programs? Sure, Tom, and then when you're done, you could mute yourself. That would be great just because of background noise. But go ahead. Yeah, I've been trying to stay on mute, but I might have forgotten you in a minute. We've all been troubleshooting these over the last week. And on the EIDL program, I've dealt with a few folks who are filling out the application. They consider themselves a farm and they kind of put that farm box and you get shunted off the application. It's not available, but Maple is okay to apply. And I've got that in writing from the Vermont SBA folks. So if you're doing any processing, packaging, retailing, and wholesaling of Maple, as long as that's a standalone business from the farm, you're gonna be okay. And then the other is that for our diversified farms, if more than, and people should look at this carefully, but if more than 50% of the revenues on the farm are coming from the retail farm stand, the ag tourism piece of it. And then I talked to a farmer that was in exactly the situation yesterday. They probably qualify for that program and they just need to check a box other than agriculture if they're getting more than half of their revenues from those other, you know, the Maple sugaring, the ag tourism, the retail. If I follow that as the largest amount of the money that they're dealing with on the farm, they're probably qualified. Even though as a farm or agriculture operation, they would not be. And that's the emergency injury disaster loan program. Right. And then one other thing that we've, I know the other offices worked on this too. People initially filling out the paycheck protection program that we saw among the SBA prerequirements that any small business, Ryan mentioned the 500 employee limit. There's also a million dollar revenue limit. And that doesn't get you much on a dairy farm. That's maybe a 250 cow, 220 cow dairy farm depending on the price of milk. And you get bumped at that point, but we've been told that that does not apply to this particular program, just to other SBA programs. So any farmer that runs into that million dollar threshold can go right past it, as well as the information that we have from the SBA. Okay, that's for the EI. That's for the PPP. Oh, okay. All right. So now I'm a little bit confused. Where is that million dollar revenue threshold or cap? For the paycheck protection program that Ryan was describing, the refundable loan, if you keep the employees on. And what was the first thing you mentioned regarding a limitation on that program? There is a- Was that a problem?  Well, I thought you were talking about the limitation that Ryan had mentioned, which was around whether you were going to have a payback we're going to have a payback on the full amount of the loan or a certain amount. So that's a different issue. And I did wanna add a little bit of information there because in statute, it only does say six months of covering the loan. Okay. It's not fully clear yet from Treasury if it's only going to be six months or if it's the two full year life of the loan. And that's on the PPP. But sorry, was there another question that you had, Carolyn? No, I was just curious. I wanna get these programs straight because I'll probably mention them in my weekly article. So on the PPP, you can't make more than a million dollars in revenue per year. Is that it? There's no amount of cap on the PPP, Tom, I don't think. Right, I was saying there is no cap but some people who are applying early ran into that as they tried to apply. And so if they run into what looks like a million dollar cap they should disregard it. Okay, fantastic. Erica, did you wanna add to this? You're muted, Erica. Sorry, I just wanted to mention that right now farm credits across the country are having a lot of trouble signing up to be an SBA approved lender. And you have to become that to be able to give out PPP loans. Here in Vermont, we're slightly better than some other places. We do have VEDA back online to already do this. Most lenders are only working with existing clients or sometimes past clients like Vermont Community Loan Fund is also working with some past clients as well. But if you don't have an existing relationship with a lender, it's gonna be really hard to get a loan and that is definitely potentially problematic in terms of equal access. The farm credits have had a really tough time signing up for this. Yankee Farm Credit is ahead of the curve but they have still not sort of sealed the deal to become an approved lender. Yeah, they have 70 loans lined up. So there's farms ready to sign up for this program and there's just hiccups and bumps in the road to getting certain lenders on and certain people signed up and it's a constantly changing landscape. And so the delegation staff is just trying to be up to speed as possible. But again, it's changing all the time. We've been really recommending businesses and farms to contact business advisors on this to help make decisions. SBDC is extremely up to date on all of the changes. And I think they're also passing that onto the farm viability providers. So, we're really fortunate here in Vermont to have such an incredible network that of people that are trying to understand this changing landscape so rapidly and give our farmers advice. Great, Erica, does it make sense then if a farm has not had to take out a loan in the past that they contact, it sounds like VitaVac might be their best chance of making, establishing some kind of relationship so you just muted yourself. Sorry. Sorry, I thought I was doing the reverse there. I don't have the best advice there because I know lenders are, being cautious on taking new folks right now when they have existing clients. And right now, there's one of the biggest challenges between the banks and treasury that they were given terms for these programs that were just not going to work well for them. And they didn't feel like they'd have, there wasn't the risk. It was, there was just a lot of issues for the banks in terms of what risk they were taking on. And so, and just massive unclearity in the programs as well. So, that's why they said, well, if we're working with existing clients, they're in good standing, it gives them some assurance that at least that they can, they have a little bit more assurance there to be able to make it work for their bank in terms of their financial situation. Thanks, Erica. Sharon Fagard has her hand up. Sharon? Yes. Thank you. Do we have any idea when these monies will actually be available? Anyone? That's a great question. I don't know if you have any more insight, Erica, but we, our office has heard from a number of folks, particularly on the EIDL program, because at first the Small Business Administration was making the claim that people could get this grant within like three days. And there's just a, there is a backlog. Once, I guess that might still be true if your loan has been approved, but there's a huge backlog in the approval process of people's loans are still pending. It's our goal and, you know, I think the SBA's goal to get the money out as soon as they possibly can, but it's unclear exactly what that timeline is. Anyone else wanna say a word? Yeah, I'd say very much the intent is to get it out quickly and people have queued up and applied. So from the perspective of how quickly federal grants and loans usually move pretty quickly, but, you know, we'll see, you know, whether it's days or weeks, certainly it shouldn't be any longer than that. I'll add to, you know, to totally confuse you on the terms loans versus grants, that the Economic Injury Disaster Loan, EIDL loan program does start out upfront with a grant of up to $10,000, depending on some issues related to your business. So somebody who just says, I simply can't take on any more loans, there is a grant that's built into that program too, if the person qualifies. And when we move forward to put more money into these programs, which may be happening within the next few days, if things go smoothly, I'm sure that I know in the Senate and probably in the House, there will be a move to include agriculture in this EIDL program. So we'll let you know if that happens and that may broaden the program to include agriculture. Fantastic. Vicki, I see your hand up. Yeah, thank you. I'm just wondering what kind of outreach is being done to businesses or farms so they know these things are available. It always just kind of feels like a rumor out there. And when, when can we do this? Is there specific outreach somehow happening? Vicki, did you see the agency of agriculture did send a newsletter out that included a variety of information from the state as well as there were, I think it was a link to the PPP and some of that information. You know, I think that there could be a little bit, it's from my perspective, from our office perspective, we've been sending information a little bit out to our farmer contacts, but it has been changing so quickly and it's hard to sometimes know like how much you send out and versus how much it's changing. And so we've just sort of let our farmer contacts know, this isn't really rapidly changing environment and letting us know if you have questions. But I do think it's a great question and maybe that's something to ask the agency of agriculture. Yeah. Vicki, I, there's, it started to interrupt, but I was just looking in Diane on Friday, Diane sent out, Diane Boffeld sent a message that is basically a Ford. And the topic is, or the subject is important news and updates on COVID-19. And they cover the payroll protection program, the economic injury disaster loan and a seven step survival guide and one-on-one confidential advising. So you might look for that in your inbox from Diane on Friday. Sure, thank you. Yeah. And I'm putting information out. It sort of seems like we've been hitting all the buttons we can, we've been in touch on almost a daily basis with both of the, with DFA through the folks up in St. Albans, as well as Agilmark and pushing the information out through the co-ops. And then the Farm to Plate Network and other networks, Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association. I think all of us are putting the information out and answering questions to all of those lists. So I would hope that a good amount of us getting out, but we can also provide the documentation just to follow up to this committee as well and sort of all hands on deck to make sure that people know about these programs and they engage. Yeah, and I believe the Farm Bureau is having a call at noon today, actually, just after this meeting to talk about some of these things. And Peter's gonna do a dairy teleconference call tomorrow at two. And I can send that call and information to you all as well. Thanks, Ryan. Any other questions? Anything, any of the three of you would like to say to add to this? Sharon has her, her, her, this hand up. Sharon? I don't, I'm not seeing Diane Boff-Veld's email on my, in my inbox on Friday. So I'll forward this to you. I don't know who this goes out to. I know I get a lot of email from her. Okay, thank you. Terry, you get it? Terry got it. So did you check your ledge email, Sharon? Yeah, okay. All right. Would any of you like to contribute to the conversation here? Any other questions? Okay. Do you want to cover the food security and hunger programs, Erica? Yeah, that's what I, Erica, would you like to move, we can move to that if you'd like. Yes, absolutely. I do want to say just before I jump in there, one more piece of kind of coordinating information and outreach is the Vermont Farm to Plain Network is doing weekly COVID meetings for the food system. And Caroline may be reaching out to Jake if he and connecting with him. Those are really interesting to listen into and there's also opportunities for updates. And it's, you know, it's the whole spectrum of the food system. So it's how our ag producers are doing the nutrition side as well as sort of the supply of food and how it's sort of playing out along the whole supply chain is really, really interesting. And I encourage you to reach out for that. Okay, we are going to have on Friday, we're going to have Betsy Rosenbluth come and talk to us about Farm to School. But is that Jay Clara? You're welcome. No, that, well, no, it's Farm to Plate. So the Farm to Plate, remember, yeah, the Farm to Plate Network so that the broader network and those are just, but Jake Clara, right? You're talking about? Jake Clara with Farm to Plate. Yeah, so not the Betsy's with Farm to School. Yeah. Yes, yeah, Betsy's going to talk to us on Friday. Maybe we could get Jake as well. We have two hours there. Yeah, but I was just saying, if any of you are interested in listening in, it's a great to those weekly COVID Farm to Plate Network meetings. They're highly informative and all the key players across the whole food chain or food system are on it and giving quick updates. So it's just a great place in terms of, obviously bringing people in, but if you are interested in joining that. Great, thank you. Okay, so let's quickly do, I know we don't have a lot of time here, so I'm going to fly through. I did send a document to Linda. Yes, we'd just like her to put that up. She, we're learning about your screen share. I have it up on my screen, so I'm just kind of going to fly through it. So as I was mentioned before, a lot of the nutrition programs that increases in funding and waivers and allowances and slight changes to the programs came through the Families First Act and there was some subsequent additional funding in the CARES Act. So I'm going to kind of go through this by program. So for WIC, we had 500 million in that first act and the biggest piece to that, besides just getting more money to the states to implement WIC is a lot of different waivers. And when I talk about these waivers, some of these waivers were just granted, but most of these waivers were sought out by our state agencies and they had to like almost petition for these waivers. And the delegation staff have sort of been following along and helping get these waivers, but the state agencies have been doing an excellent job. Some of the first waivers they had to get for WIC was just be able to waive that physical presence because how do you get people signed up for WIC without having that? So medical documentation, waivers, so you don't have to do those in person and then sort of some more nuanced things around what's being offered, substitutions, because there's a lot of restrictions on these programs. So that's given the flexibility for our Department of Health to continue to serve WIC and sign new people up as well. So that's been really great. Our Department of Health has done an excellent job there and we'll see if we get any subsequent increases in funding. I don't know what this fourth package will look like in terms of funding, but we're always asking for more funding for all of these programs. Erica, I would ask Linda, if she hasn't loaded this onto our website, if she could do that, that'd be great. Thank you so much. Yeah, sure thing. Again, this is a snapshot in time and I've been adding waivers to this week, almost daily. So it is, again, it's one of those moving targets that that's why I put a date at the top. And I haven't updated it, but I don't think there's any new waivers this week. So in moving onto the Commodity Assistance Programs and Emergency Food, the first bill had 400 million in it. The second bill, I believe, had 450 million in it. What that means is that our food banks are getting more money through the T-FAT program for food assistance in Vermont. I believe that first round of 400 million in the Families First Act, the food bank in Vermont received about, I don't have the exact number in front of me, I think it was about $550,000.  And then I'm hoping at least they'll have at least 600,000 in that next round that should be coming, that's from the CARES Act that should be coming, hopefully in the next couple of weeks or maybe a month. I'm not quite sure how quickly we'll get that money. The food bank has been doing an excellent job using this money. They are working with a lot of state partners right now their need has been drastically up. Like they're almost like, I think they've sent out food and money to the food shelves around the state and the need is so high that they do have a big concern that they're not gonna be able to meet the needs. Especially as the direct payments to Vermonters, these unemployment benefits are still taking a while to kick in, other support for self-employed are taking a while. And we are going to see an increasing spike in food insecurity in the state, which is gonna be pretty drastic. And they do have some waivers here. Right now we're still trying to get. So the main bulk of that commodity food money is through TFAP for the food shelves and the food shelves in the food bank. But there's also that CACFP funding for adults. Those are like food box, there's like sort of like a pre-made food box that goes out to seniors that are eligible. And they're trying to get some, they've sent out two boxes in one delivery kind of, well, it's not delivery, it's a pickup, but it goes to places all over the state. And they're trying to get more food out, but they are looking seeking for some additional flexibility there that we're monitoring.  Eric, could you just say what the acronyms are? Cause not all of us are completely. Sorry about that. Yeah. No worries. So CACFP is, oh, I'm sorry, I actually put this waiver in the wrong place. I'm gonna send you a new document. I dumped that in here and I was thinking CSFP, that's the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. That's for the seniors. I accidentally put this CACFP in the wrong place. It's actually, this is actually child and adult feeding program, care feeding program. So those are for daycares and adult daycare centers. I'm gonna move that in the right place. And then I added it the last minute this morning. I'm sorry. And I put it in the wrong place. Don't worry about it. If you can just spell out the acronyms the first time around, that would be great. Thanks. Absolutely. And just wanna say one more thing about this commodity food money. We are hoping in this next round in C4, we're calling it the Fourth Relief Act, Stimulus Act, that there will be more money for commodity food. But we would love to see some flexibility in how that's spent. And we, all the offices are pushing for that money to be able to be just given to the food bank, to be able to buy directly from local producers, rather than having to just go through sort of this commodity buying system, which comes in from often far off places. So that is something that we're all looking into. And we will keep you posted on that. Snap. So we had increases in the amount of money overall, just knowing that there would be more people eligible as they lost their jobs. But we have not actually seen any kind of increase in actual amounts per family or per person who gets snapped. So there's a lot of work I think we need to do in Snap and all the offices are working to get a boost in Snap, perhaps change some of the income eligibility and basically just to really beyond just sort of ramping up, ramping it up in terms of allowing more people to access it, which is very important, but changing and making things a lot more flexible. The other piece I just wanted to mention that's not in here, but all of our offices are talking about it is right now, if you're using, if you're on Three Squares, Vermont and you have an EBT, you don't really have the option of ordering something online or doing like a call in with curbside pickup because of the strict rules that Snap has. So that's very problematic when you have somebody at home and they are at risk and they do not wanna be exposing themselves by going into a store. So all of the offices are looking at a bunch of different options. There's possibilities to try to push USTA to do online, allow online Snap purchases or some other possible fixes there, so I just wanted to alert you to that, that we're having that conversation. So for senior nutrition, I just wanted to mention that there was more money in the family's first act for meals on wheels as well as, well, for congregate meals, although they can't congregate. So a lot of those are pickup service right at the, so the senior centers, for example, will be making food and they'll be pickup and then they're doing, obviously, meals on wheels, we've heard the numbers are going up and up, the need is there, seniors need our, you know, sheltering at home, need more food and so we're monitoring, all the offices are monitoring that situation very closely, checking in with the area agencies on aging and making sure our seniors have adequate nutrition. Child nutrition in school meals, there has been an incredible amount of waivers there. Our schools are doing, you've probably heard just a phenomenal job at using these waivers to creatively continue to get meals to students through bus routes and all sorts of different things. There's a whole list of waivers that I included there that our agency of education has done a great job and the delegation has worked with them on securing and I'm not gonna get into all of those, but I'm sure you've heard stories in your community how just incredible this is. One issue that, you know, Hunger Free Vermont's really alerted us to is this, and I'm sure Betsy will mention as well when she comes in to testify that this, when the school's done what's gonna happen and a lot of schools will continue through summer feeding programs, but if a school doesn't wanna do that, they don't have to, there's no mandate that they're not gonna require like they are now to provide meals to students. So we are worried about that potential happening. I think I'll stop there and take questions. Erica, when the schools were to continue the summer feeding programs, would they get the same kind of reimbursements they do during that actual school year? It's a slightly different formula because it's a different program in a way, but yeah, they are, they're still reimbursements and there is actually some pretty good flexibility within that summer feeding program. There's also this, and I didn't write it here and Betsy may know and of course, Inora would know from Hunger Free Vermont, but this something in the last bill that had around summer EBT. So giving students like three squares Vermont cards for their families to be able to use during the summer. And I don't have any information about that here, but I will, I'll work with Tom and Ryan's counterparts in their office who cover nutrition and make sure we get something to you, Carolyn, about that summer EBT program. That would be fantastic. Thanks so much, Erika. Are, do we have any questions for our three guests today? Vicki, her hand is up. Vicki, you've got a blue sky again with clouds. So sometimes it's hard to see your little hand. Vicki. Sorry, couldn't get that button. Erika, you mentioned about commodities increasing, increasing funding for that. And we just heard yesterday how dairy farmers are struggling because we can't consume dairy products at restaurants and such. So our commodities, I'm sure they produce, they provide dairy, but are there efforts to even increase that through the commodities to help farmers? Yeah, we've all been talking about it. And maybe Tom can chime in because we did our offices sent a letter to USDA asking for dairy purchases for commodity foods. And there's sort of this ongoing conversations. We were on the phone with DFA yesterday talking about this, lots of different conversations. I don't think there's a ton of clarity yet exactly how we can do that, especially thinking about it from a Northeast perspective with our plants. But Tom, do you wanna add some stares? Hold on a sec, Tom, you're muted. Okay, there you go. Try again. Okay, I muted myself just with a button here. Thank you for that. Yeah, as Erika said, we weighed in early on with a letter pushing for bulk purchase of commodities, just seeing what was gonna happen in the dairy sector pretty quickly. And we're working on a letter now, Senator Leahy is working on it with the ranking member, Scavano, I'm looking for a Republican sign on and we're also sharing it with Senator Sanders office and kind of all of the above for help with dairy and that would double down and again, request that there be bulk purchases of dairy commodities as well as listening to some of the standards around home milk and feeding programs. So those efforts are being made. And I talked early on about the money that Secretary Perdue has to spend fairly broadly and those dollars, some of them could go to these types of purchases. So it's on the list of things that we're pushing. Thank you. Thanks, Tom. John O'Brien's hand is up. There we go. Erika, last week we heard from Abby Willard, I think, and she said that you could buy seed starts with SNAP benefits. And so if you could help us also with getting both word out to people on three square, but also trying to include nurseries maybe in that too, as far as like a curbside pickup for people wanting to use their three square or over the phone be able to use your card, VBT card, it would be great. Okay, thanks for that. Also, Sharon has her hand up. Sharon, are you gonna mention what Jackie Folsom sent to you? Okay, okay. So Jackie Folsom contacted me and let me know that with the summer feeding program from the schools that the word is, they'll be reimbursed for the food, but not the transportation. Okay. Thanks for that. Yeah, but that's a great, great point and that's very true. So schools will have to, if they wanna keep doing that, we'll have to dip into their own budget. You know, in looking at how we can fill some gaps here, I would suggest and I'm happy to continue up with folks. I also cover FEMA for the Senator and where we have schools or nonprofit organizations stopping up that have an unmet financial need. If the program, for instance, around feeding doesn't cover that, there's a substantial chance that they can be reimbursed by FEMA after providing food, shelter, medicine, et cetera. So I would encourage feeding program schools or otherwise that don't see all their costs being met to confer with the Vermont Emergency Management folks and see if they can apply for FEMA reimbursement for those expenses. Great. Thank you, Tom. I see another hand up from John O'Brien and then Sharon. Sorry, I forgot to put my hand down. Oh, okay. Sharon, oh, your hand is down now too. Okay. We're still getting the hang of hand up and down and muting and what have you. All of this is just to practice for when we go on the floor. All right. Any other questions? Tom, did you wanna say something about dairy? I got, there's a, I feel like an air traffic control person here I gotta tell you because not only am I paying attention to the screen but there's chat going on which is basically sending me messages about the stuff. So if I get distracted, please understand. Tom, did you wanna say something about dairy? Or just see whether we wanna discuss that some. We already talked about the bulk purchases and I'll make a plug since it looks like Ryan's still muted that Congressman Welch, I believe was doing a fairly comprehensive call on dairy. Is that one o'clock tomorrow, Ryan? Yep. And I'll send the info to Linda so she can share it with you all. There's some, we have a cap on how many people we can have on board, but so I would just encourage everyone to register if you're interested with the link that I'll send around. But yeah, we'll be doing a call to hear from the, both Anson at the state and then hear from folks with Agra Mark and the St. Albans Co-op, DFA and the organic folks to just get an update on the state of the market and then we wanna hear from farmers. So if you know farmers that are interested or have questions, please share the info with them. We wanna know what they're dealing with and how we can be helpful. Ryan, thanks for that. We did get a message about that. Maybe it was from you. I know that we noted that participation was limited. So Terry, who is our representative to the Milk Commission signed up for that. And if you think that there's room and we could all be part of it, maybe those of us who aren't committed already to something else could hop on. Yeah, I'll get an update on what the registration looks like and see if we're approaching the cap. And if we're not, I'll certainly let you know that there's some room for you. Honestly, thanks, Ryan. Honestly, I think that if there are farmers who would like to be on that, I wouldn't wanna take one of their spots. I'd rather have Terry represent us and listen and then report back. We could hear from him on Friday as well. So maybe we do wanna limit the number of us who hop onto that call. But we don't, I think my message is clear. We don't wanna take a place that could go to a farmer. Yeah, appreciate that. And I'll keep you posted. Great, thanks so much. All right. Eventually, I just say I'm very, that there's a number of proposals that are circulating. I know that Secretary Talbot has some ideas and the National Milk Producers Federation has put out their agenda. And as I said, Senator Leahy is working with Senator Stabenow and others on a letter to Secretary Perdue. They serve all in approach to open up the Dairy Margin Coverage Program for folks to sign up who are not signed up with some more support for the premiums, the bulk commodity purchases that we talked about and other efforts to help Dairy. I know the National Milk Producers proposal actually has a growth management component as well. But the feeling really is that there needs to be a lot of activity pretty quickly to help get ahead of what is a quickly evolving crisis in Dairy where nobody really has much of a cushion and for the Secretary to use every authority in doing so. Thanks, Tom. Regarding our cheese makers, it would seem to me that they would probably benefit from either the Paycheck Protection Program or the EIDL. Does anybody wanna comment? I think the answer is yes for the most part. I mean, I would certainly encourage them to reach out to their lender of choice, someone they have a relationship with now to explore it because specifically the PPP program would apply depending on their business model and how much of their income comes from cheese and how much of it maybe comes from fluid milk. The EIDL program might be a little bit different, but yeah, obviously they've lost sales to restaurants and shops. So they've been hit particularly hard and we've heard from a lot of them. So encouraging everyone that could potentially benefit to look into the PPP program specifically. Good, good. Thanks. Anything else you wanted to add? All right, I'm not seeing any hands and I'm not seeing Tom, Ryan, or Erica waving at me on the screen. So- It did cross my mind with the video set up the way it is. We don't know whether you're knitting or not. I'm not knitting. Excuse me, my committee knows I am making surgical masks and what I told them earlier was that when I finished this, this batch of 10, I will have made 100. So they're going to hospitals, Grace Cottage, Brattleboro, Springfield, someplace else. Oh, the retreat. I delivered 25 to the retreat the other day. So I've been busy. It's keeping me off the streets. That's for sure. And I'll just also note, I know each of our offices is keeping very up to date lists of resources on our web pages. So a lot of other organizations are as well, but for additional information for any of your constituents who need to easily access what's going on and where they can get assistance, I'd refer you to any one of our web pages. Thanks, Tom. Really appreciate that. Really appreciate everyone's contribution today. Thank you so much for being with us. And if we have any follow-up questions, we'll have Linda reach out to you if that would be okay. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so very much. We really appreciate it. You're welcome to stay with us on the meeting or not. You're welcome to leave too. But thanks again. And thank the senators and the congressmen for all their work down there. I can't imagine what it's like at this time. Just kind of crazy, but thank them for us, please. Thank you, Carolyn. All right.


Well, thank you. I guess it's time to get started. All right, so what we're going to be talking about today is a little bit personal for me. It's a very meaningful thing because not too long ago, I had a totally different career. I was in accounting. And one day I decided that, hey, you know what? I want to try something new. And I started getting into programming. And it was a really long journey, kind of scary. And what I want to do is I want to give the sort of talk that I wish I had when I was first starting out. And hopefully I can help encourage other people to get more comfortable and be able to put themselves out there and be able to get involved in the open source projects that they really want to get involved in. So who am I today? No longer in accounting. I'm Jamie Danielson. I'm a telemetry engineer at Honeycomb. And I work on open telemetry JavaScript. I'm going to prove her as of a few months ago. And so what we're mostly going to be talking about is my journey and getting here and practical ways that you can get started in your own journeys and be able to get more involved in another open source project, whether that's in open telemetry or another open source project that's important to you. A lot of these steps will be applicable to all these different projects. So one of the first most important things that you'll learn with open source is it's public. It's open. When you first start writing code, a lot of it is sort of hidden away for various reasons.  Maybe you're writing some code, you're going through a tutorial, you're doing whatever, and not many people are really seeing what you're doing. You mess up and it's just sort of your own thing. And then when you start coding maybe as a career, even within your company, it's still pretty hidden away, right? You might have internal systems. You might have some proprietary software or maybe an older language or you're getting into something new, but a lot of that maybe your engineers on your team are seeing and maybe your manager. It's still very small. And so one day it's going to be time, whatever the catalyst might be that you decide you now want to go to be more public with whatever you're working on. So one day for me, I decided to open a GitHub account. Now this may be regulatory for some and it may just be a refresher for others, but it's important to keep in mind that nobody is born knowing how to use Git. No one is born knowing how to use GitHub or Bitbucket or any other software, right? Anything that you have to learn, you have to start somewhere and there's really no difference in any of that. And it seems obvious sometimes, but it's important to really take that to heart and know that everyone has to start somewhere. And even when you do know it, especially Git as anyone who uses Git regularly will tell you there's still a lot that you don't know and there's a lot that's still confusing. So when it comes to learning anything, a lot of it's really gonna be the same whether this is public or not, but you learn by doing. You can watch videos, you can watch tutorials, you can read books, you can listen to talks by people like me, but getting your hands dirty and really getting in the code is how you learn and how you grow. And so you wanna start with practicing small things. A lot of times people think, okay, I wrote this code, I did this once, I got this. I know it, what's next? What's the next step? But the thing is it takes a while for that to really sink in and be something that you're comfortable with. So what you wanna do is you wanna really build up that muscle memory. Repetition is key here. It's not going to feel natural to start. As we just talked about with Git before, it will still feel unnatural years later. But some things will get easier as you go. Continuing to run a lot of the same commands, doing a lot of the small little things over and over again, gets a little bit easier each time you do it. And after a while, you might realize you start memorizing some of those commands. And that's kind of a nice feeling where now you're starting to build up some confidence. You're gonna keep building this confidence over time because you're going through the same things over and over. And the things that you realize, one day you'll wake up and say, this was really foreign to me when I first started, but I kinda understand what I'm doing now. We're still small. We're still starting on a small scale and that's okay because again, we're starting somewhere and we're building up over time. So for me, I started with a private repo on GitHub. I think you have as many as you want today, but that was back when you had maybe one or two and then you had to pay and I wasn't ready for that. So I started with a private repo and said, okay, ready to go public now. I don't wanna spend any money, so let's try this public thing. And so what I did, again with starting with those small little steps is I opened this public repo, which was a blog using GitHub pages with Jekyll. Now some people may have seen this before. This is a pretty common way I think to get started with GitHub. But what I really wanted to do was I wanted to go through those steps of what I knew was gonna be necessary when I decided to do programming for a living. And so what I mean by that is what you can see is, this is a PR to my own repo. No one else is gonna approve it, but I wanted to go through the steps. So I had these commits for each and every little thing that I did. I had these commits that explained what I was doing in here and I had a PR that I could then go approve and feel really good about that. So I got into the flow. This was building up that muscle memory, building up that repetition, getting comfortable. So the next step was forking another repo to make it my own. I saw that it had done all the work for me of all these nice styles, all this build up for these blog posts. It seemed like a really great idea. So I thought that would be really cool. So I saw this PR, I forked it, I did what I had just been doing, making these changes, opening a PR, feeling really good about what I had done. And then I realized I actually opened the PR against that repo instead of my own. This was mortifying to me. In fact, even looking this up brought up all the feels and really I felt a lot of shame. Like I felt like I needed the dog cone of shame as I went through this. And I thought, this is it. My career is over. It hasn't even started yet. And I'm so embarrassed. I'll be laughed out of programming forever. Like what happened? But do you know what actually happened? Absolutely nothing. No one cared. No one commented. There's no thumbs down on there. As you can see, I just wrote open to an error there, but there was a lot of panic behind that. But now this is an archived repo. No one's ever seen it again. No one, no one cares. And the thing is, as I've realized now, people do this all the time. You don't get put on a no hire list that I'm aware of. I am currently employing. Thank you, Panico. But I got through it. And this happens to everyone all the time and so the thing to keep in mind is you're going to be wrong a lot. And that's okay. When you're working the open, you're being vulnerable. And being vulnerable is really hard. Standing up right here right now is really hard. But each time that you do it, you get just a little bit better at doing it. And when it comes to the internet, well, internet is kind of around forever. It's hard to get away from that. But the only way to get better and the only way to get from point A to point B is to keep going. And point B is to face that vulnerability and be uncomfortable and just keep moving forward. So now let's go to the point where you're ready to do something on purpose, to someone else's repo. So we're going past the shame. We're going past the whips, all of that. And now we're ready to look at a new repo. Maybe this is an open telemetry repo, another open source repo. The thing that most of these repos will have in common is that they're going to have some kind of contributing docs. And we're going to talk about each of these individual docs. What you're going to see is a readme is going to be very common, contributing docs, issue and PR templates, and then things like discussions, wikis, pinned issues, things like that. So this is a screenshot, or a couple of screenshots, I guess, from open telemetry JavaScript. And what you'll see in a lot of these, again, is a readme that's very common when you first go to a new project. And it's going to talk about how to work with the project. And in fact, from the readme, there's a link to the contributing guide itself, which has a lot more detail. How to, you know, what you need to install to get this running, how to run these tests, how to lint things, go through these to help set up your development environment so that you're more comfortable working with the repo or the project that you're looking at. And one thing to keep in mind, a tip for later on in this presentation, is that as you're going through this process, write down anything that feels a little weird, anything that isn't super clear, because the best person to actually update the contributing guide is the person who's first learning how to contribute to that guide. So write those things down and be prepared to contribute that later. A lot of repos are also going to have these things called issue templates. If you haven't seen them before, they're kind of neat, where you want to open an issue of some kind. So there's these different templates depending on what your issue is about. So you might have something like, in this case, we have a feature request here. So the idea is I've maybe used this repo before, but I have something that I'm seeing isn't actually available there, and I'd like to have this get added in. The idea of these individual questions that are on there, is both to help guide you in what kind of information might be useful to have in this issue, and it's also helpful for the maintainer of the project to understand what your use case is, what you're going for, and any alternatives in this, which is helpful because maybe you've seen this particular feature somewhere else, and maybe you have some ideas of how that can be implemented here. So in this report, the biggest thing I can say is having a reproducible example of what has gone wrong is the fastest way to get that bug fixed. The reason for that is, especially some of these repos are really huge, and so it can be hard to understand exactly what steps you took, what version you're on, how to get to that state of getting to that bug, because once you find where in that code something is wrong, it's a lot easier to narrow it down and get a fix. So if you're finding the bug, having that reproducible example and having details around it, you might even get some ideas on how to fix it, and a maintainer might even want to help you move forward in getting a PR to be able to fix that bug. A PR template is something that happens when you go to actually open that PR on a repo, and again, it's there to guide you on what's useful to include in a PR, including what issue is being resolved. This is really valuable because it's a bug report and it's a bug that you're trying to fix, or it's a feature that you're trying to implement. You've already had all the conversation on the issue, you've already gone through and discussed with other people on the project of maybe what's missing or what needs to happen. So by the time you get to the PR, this is just an implementation detail. This is just, here's how I am solving this particular issue, and here's how I've done it. Now you've already gotten over, what that particular thing is, you're just trying to get through the details of how to make that actual change. So one thing I want to point out that's really important, and a lot of people don't think about it, is that non-code contributions are incredibly valuable for open source. A big part of that is going to be public documentation. It's a very common way to get started. Think about when you first went to a new project, whether it was open source or even if it wasn't. You went to documentation. You don't know how to use this thing. And if there's no documentation, you don't know how to use it. So the software is relying on documentation for people to use it, and you being newer to the project are going to be really helpful in writing down the documentation that helped you get to the next point of using it. This is from an article that I saw that said that developers see about a 50% productivity boost when the documentation is reliable and up to date. So if you think about how good the software is or how valuable, think about that number, and think about it doesn't matter how good the software is if nobody knows how to use it. So making sure that there's documentation there for people to know how to use it is incredibly valuable. The next thing is examples. Some repos will have some examples and some will be a little sparse. Some might be a little bit older or not as maintained. But I think that's a good example. So I'm going to talk about how to use the different features of the project and it might even be used for different kinds of testing, or when we talked about bug reports, having a reproducible example can say, I used the example in your example repo when it broke. You have this very contained piece of where something has gone wrong, but it's also helping you get more familiar with the project itself and helping others who might be having problems with the project. There's a thing that people talk about where if you really want to learn how to do something, you write about it. If you really want to learn how to do something, you teach someone else about it. So if you come across something, maybe you're looking up on Google, you're trying to find in the documentation you don't know how to do something by the time that you do end up figuring it out. If you can write a blog post about it, maybe add an example about it.  Opening bug reports might seem unintuitive of how am I helping here? I'm just saying that there's a problem. But the thing is, if something's not working, the maintainers might have no idea whatsoever. Because when you're working on code, you're not always looking at it as an end user, and you're kind of head down in the code, so you need someone to come in and say that something isn't working. And that's really helpful to know. And again, we have the issue template of filing a bug, how do I reproduce the bug, and again, you might get tips on how to fix that yourself. And finally, being involved in the community for a project is good. We'll talk a little bit more about how to get involved in different communities like the open telemetry community, but that's going to be helpful in just having another voice in there and making more awareness of the project that you're trying to work in. So now that you're working in this project, whether you are working on a PR it's important to keep in mind that we're all human beings and we really want to minimize situations of confusion when we can because we're all coming from different backgrounds, different levels of experience, and different expectations of different things. So I really love this graphic. I'm not sure if you can read it from out there, but it's about switching seats with 14A. And what may have seemed really clear to this attendant about saying to switch seats clearly wasn't as clear to the person as you were in moving it somewhere else. And so what ends up being really obvious to one person could be perceived completely differently by someone else. So that's just a way of saying don't make assumptions about what other people understand or whether or not what you're saying is coming out as clearly as you think. It's good to think about where other people are coming from and if there's a way that you can be as clear as possible, then you want to do it. There's this saying of make the implicit explicit, which means that, again, it might seem implied, it might seem obvious, whatever it might be, but you're better off saying it and maybe even saying it again. And it might seem like you're being repetitive, but if anyone's ever heard of Rule 7, it's usually used in, like, marketing. But the idea is that someone needs to hear a message seven times in order to act on it in order for it to really stick. So the same can still be true when it comes to different kinds of communication is you might just have to say it again and say it more clearly and just make sure that you're both understanding the same thing. And if you're ever unsure in a conversation that you're having with someone, ask the question. Not only are you unsure, there might be other people who are seeing this back and forth or maybe also involved, but they have the same question as you do. Maybe they're not speaking up or they're really thankful that you're actually asking, but there's no clarity for everyone who's involved in that conversation. The simple misunderstandings can really happen for anyone and think about even something like auto-correct. How many times you've written now when it came out as not or something like that and it completely changes the meaning of whatever it is that you're talking about. So you're better off asking to make sure it's clear. There was this really awesome back and forth that I saw. This is the open telemetry documentation repo and there was an issue open at one point and someone came in and opened a PR to make these changes. At some point, it got a little bit quiet and so the first thing you're seeing there is a maintainer saying, hey, I'm just checking in. I want to see if there's anything that you need for me in this repo and I love that. They're being proactive. They're asking, what do you need to help this get through? We want to help move it forward. And then the person who contributed this thanked them and admitted, I'm actually curious. I don't know what the next step is. And later on in the thread, they said, you know what, I'm actually new to GitHub. I don't really know how this process works and I'm unsure of how to move forward in this. And so they went back and forth and the maintainer, I don't have all the back and forth. It was a long conversation, but they were very clear about, you know, here was a suggestion that was made. You can click this button that says commit the suggestion. If you're not sure about what this person said, why don't you respond to them here in this thread? And there was this back and forth and by the time this went through, this PR was approved. They went through all the suggestions, all of that. The contributor thanked the maintainer so much for helping get them through it. And the maintainer now was able to help someone make their first contribution and they were excited. They said they can't wait to do another one. And so I want to applaud the maintainer on here and just in general point out how valuable this back and forth was for, I think, everyone involved and something to keep in mind as maintainers, if you've ever maintained an open source project, to help folks who are trying to work on your project, and both of you can move forward in a better way and help them out when they're not so sure. So now we've gotten to where we're contributing. Maybe we're ready to open those issues or ready to open those PRs. We want to be more involved. And it's really important to point out this important fact of you need to keep showing up. So when we want to be involved in a project, we need to have a lot to it and really consider consistency as being maybe one of the most important things. Some people think that if I want to get involved in this project, I need to make this big fancy new feature. I need to make a splash. I need to make a name for myself. But really what's more impactful is having those small, consistent interactions with the project, with the people, with the community that's going to make a difference. So if I want to be consistent showing up, I'll have a link in my resources is related to, for example, their special interest group meetings or SIG meetings that happen roughly weekly for different languages. And so there should be a link for a calendar where you can attend those. Those are totally open for anyone who's interested. And keep in mind that every interaction that you have with people is building trust.  Oh, I saw them comment on another issue over there. So over time, people start to know you and you start to know them and you become teammates. Even though you might be on other sides of the world, you might work at different companies. You're now teammates on this project together. So it is who you know when you're trying to get an issue resolved or you're trying to get a PR in, but it's not quite what you think. Again, the idea is that over time we're building up this credibility and you're more likely to gain traction on issues in PRs. If you're known in the community and you're known that you're going to keep showing up, you're going to keep coming to these meetings, you're going to keep working on this repo and, you know, people understand that you know where you're coming from and what you're trying to help with. Because even if a feature that you want to add seems really great or a code chain seems really useful, in reality, every bit of code that you add is going to add overhead to the project. In fact, adding more code might be such a small percentage of what goes into adding something new to a project because you have to think about how that code now interacts with the rest of the code. If you add a new feature here, we have to now keep that in mind for all the other tests or all the other features. Does something break something else? So it's important to keep that in mind. And with that, there's this saying, I don't know if anyone's ever heard it, which is free is in puppy, not free is in beer. If you give someone a beer, they can just enjoy it. Thank you. I appreciate that one-time gift. You move on. But if you give someone a puppy, there's a lot more to it. You have to feed the puppy. You have to play with the puppy. You take care of the puppy. And so when it comes down to it, the other maintainers on the project want to know that you're also committed to helping take care of that puppy because they don't know if they can take on another one. So that's why it's important to just keep showing up. And so, again, I know a lot of this is focused on open telemetry, but really it's going to be very similar with other open source communities. The contributions to repos, again, whether those are, whoa, issues and things. Special interest group meetings, SIG meetings, which again are totally open to anyone who's interested in going. Just so you know, it's kind of like you show up at this assigned time in a Zoom meeting. You don't need to turn your video on. You can just hang out, see what people are talking about. Sometimes there's an agenda with just some topics. Sometimes it's bug triage, but anyone is welcome to go to those. There's a community Slack for open telemetry. It's specifically the CNCF Slack. There's hotel channels and open telemetry channels that you can look for in social media. I guess right now it might be mostly LinkedIn, maybe a little bit of Twitter or X or Macedon, but you might find some people to talk to there as well. So just as a recap of everything we just talked about, it's really going to start with learning in public and gaining confidence each step of the way, being vulnerable, putting yourself out there, and being able to keep moving forward even if you mess up, which you will. Again, that's okay. When you do start getting involved, make sure to read the contributing docs. That's going to help you understand how you can interact with the project and it's going to help the maintainers understand what your questions are and really keep in mind that non-code contributions are really valuable. There are a lot of people who really start to understand a project through adding that documentation and over time become maintainers even of the actual code because they've become an expert in that documentation. But you can also stay in the documentation as well because again, without the documentation that project is not going to exist long term. When you're communicating with other people be as clear as possible. Avoid misunderstandings. Avoid making any assumptions and if you're unsure about any back and forth that you're having, just be sure to ask the question. And finally, just keep showing up. Consistency is key and that's how over time you do get to the point of being an approver. Like in this case that I was for the Open Telemetry JavaScript project this took a while to get here and a lot of it was just consistency and continually showing up. So by doing that, you get to a point of you're just starting out to getting more comfortable to building up that credibility and building up trust with other people in the community and then ultimately being around and having more work to do honestly but it's a journey and I would say that it's worth going through. So thank you for coming. I don't know if anyone has any questions. I think we have a few minutes. I think there's a mic right over there if you don't mind hopping on there. Hello. Hi. Thanks a lot for the talk and encouraging people to contribute. How do you reconcile that with the expectations of a manager, for example, because you say if you show up more time for more computerizing or you maintain inside an organization do you have any tips on getting the message across if you want to contribute? So you're asking, I think specifically how to get more how to get more involved from your company like how to get your company interested in having you more involved is that the question? Sort of. I mean you can obviously do it in your free time but you might as well take some of your work time to contribute to projects that the company might benefit from and can you share any other conversations you've had in that direction? I guess it's tricky but it might depend on the project itself I also look at it in a way of like depending on what the project is there are different ways of getting involved. For open telemetry specifically like one thing that Honeycomb is is it's an observability platform where people can send their telemetry to Honeycomb so it's obviously very much in our interest to make sure that open telemetry is successful and it's really important and so I understand that that's a condition that I get to be in but there are of these other ways of talking with other people are finding a way that it's specific it can specifically benefit your company so if you're doing observability in any way sometimes it's a matter of pointing out issues that maybe would help your company get something working better I also think again depending on the specific thing I almost think of like with volunteering like some people are able to volunteer time and some people are able to volunteer money and so there are some open source projects that are run by just individuals who are doing this maybe in their free time or maybe that's a big thing for them and sometimes they'll have things for sponsors and things like that but I don't know if I have specific feedback on a company involvement in open source projects I just wanted to ask you in regards to the special interest groups I think as far as I know I think with open source projects in general if you have any recommendations for how to choose a special interest group in general but also for open talent perhaps Sure, yeah so what's interesting is I think the first special interest group meeting or SIG meeting that I went to was for the collector and that was really interesting because I was kind of first dipping my toes into the community and understanding how these things worked and I went to those meetings I don't know every week for maybe a few months and then at the time I realized well I'm working a little bit more on the programming languages themselves so I'm going to try JavaScript in this particular case I chose JavaScript because that was a language I was more familiar with and more comfortable with and I spent more time in there but I've also spent time going to the Python SIG meetings or going to the Go SIG meetings I think it's sort of like asking what language should you start out with when you're first learning to code which is to say that there's not a perfect answer one size fits all it's a combination of what's interesting to you and what kind of what clicks for you kind of finding your spot in the community and going to the different meetings and just get a feel for how those things go again it's very open you have a calendar there's an open telemetry public calendar and you can go to any of those meetings and just kind of say hey is this the kind of stuff that I enjoy working on or am I maybe interested in looking at another language the one thing I can say too being here is there's a lot of people that I've met in person here that I've interacted with on other open telemetry projects so I think it's just a matter of seeing what kind of speaks to you when you go in that room thank you we're all set thank you again everyone I appreciate it thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks thanks


God has no luxury of thinking in percentages, most of us we think in percentages when it comes to people. If 80% of our city would come to church, most of us would probably roll up to go into all the world, make this type of scripture, say, well, this was done, B plus. God doesn't think like that. You don't think like that. I remember when one of my brothers who was kind of not doing well with the Lord, well, not just not kind of doing well, going really bad with the Lord many years ago in this particular time, I remember when my parents were extremely troubled for him. They were so troubled that me and my wife, I remember one time actually rolled up to my parents' house and we didn't go inside because I knew they would be sad because of decisions that my brother was making. He still lived in the house, but he was making very poor decisions and it broke my parents' hardware. We would come in and we would sit down at the table and you could see this grief, this pain and I hated my brother for that.  I got five siblings. You got five children. I'm like, okay, I'm doing somewhat okay, not the best. I'm doing all right. I'm like, the other sister, she's doing okay. The other brother, he's doing good. He's doing okay. The other sister, she's doing, I'm like, just one knucklehead. I'm like, mom, that's 80% of success in the family. You can let go of that joker. Just let him go. I mean, let's just maybe change his last name. Get rid of him so we can have a happy family. I mean, we don't have to worry about my brother. Let's be happy about four siblings and let's not worry about that one. I mean, okay, he's struggling, but let's worry about the fact that we have four that are doing good. It's amazing how my mom couldn't think like that. It's amazing how the four who were doing good, it almost didn't matter if one wasn't doing bad. God has no luxury of looking at tri-cities in percentages. The Bible says he leaves 99 because one is not doing well. The heart of the father is not the heart that you and I have. And when you and I get closer and you see the sadness, so you see that love that he has for people sooner or later, if you love God enough, you're going to try to do something just to kind of say, you know what, God, I don't feel like that, but because I love you, I am going to start sharing that. I'm going to do something about people that you care about so much because somebody's saying, man, and I remember, you know, numerous times I would meet with my brother and honestly, not because I was his youth pastor, but because my parents were troubled. I remember praying and fasting for that reason, not necessarily because he wasn't doing so well, but it's because I would see the grief on my parents' hearts. And I was so close, the interesting part, most of you never knew that grief. My parents would come here and you would see them, you would never know that this was going on in their heart because you were not close to them. And when we are not close to God, we would come to worship many times, we would think everything is fine until you get closer to the heart of God. And you will begin to see why the cross happened in the first place. You begin to see why the Holy Spirit was sent in the first place. You begin to see why that God established the church and gave us these commands to bring other people to Jesus Christ. And something will begin to ache, you begin to realize that the purpose of your whole life is not really for yourself, it is for the heart of God.  Can somebody say amen? God cannot afford to have a small vision having a big heart. God's heart is so big, it fits the whole universe. It's so big he was willing to let his son come on this earth and actually die by this rebellious sinful heathens so that few of them perhaps by the grace of God will hear this message be saved and have their lives changed. That's how big this heart is. He stretches his hand and says if east to south north and west come he says all of you I'll wipe all of your records clean forgive all of your sins and we start fresh you'll be my children I'll be your God this is how big his heart is so don't blame him for wanting too much he gave in too much he sacrificed too much he loves too much and I'm glad he loves too much because if he would not love that much I and you would make it in part of the plan because somebody say amen