Mr Goy, can you first tell us about how can we protect content online and what role should different members of society play? I think that it's very very important to protect content online because we can't take advantage of this and we almost have new information communication technologies unless we have something to share on it and that means we have to find a means of rewarding creators, rewarding performers and rewarding in other words the content providers. How do we do that? Usually by protecting intellectual property, by protecting the copyright system. There are certain security measures that in addition one can use. I think what is the different role of all the members of society, what we have to do here is ensure that everyone has a consciousness that what is at stake here really is the question of financing culture in the 21st century and in the digital environment. We all want books, we all want music, we all want films and in order to get them however we have to be paying somehow the creators. Working in the field of content protection, what challenges are you currently facing? The biggest challenge is of course putting it in the broadest basis the technological obsolescence of the legal model. The legal model that we had worked very well for the analog world where you had a book or a CD or a DVD which was a convenient vehicle for collecting a royalty to return to the creators. Now in the containerless world of the internet we have a bigger difficulty and I think the world is still experimenting with various models that will work. Usually subscription models whereby they make available a whole library of content for a relatively small per unit, per capita price. Do you think that ICT with the booming use of ICT can it reinforce content protection copyright protection or it is actually a threat to it? I think we have to work together. I think the content providers have to work together with the technologists, those who are developing the information communications technologies. It is very, very important to see this partnership because it is in the interests of both. It is in the interests of the content providers to have the much greater distributional possibilities that the new technologies provide and it is also in the interests of those providing the ICTs information communication technologies to ensure that they have a very rich content to be able to distribute. Okay, with pirated content being downloadable for free for most of the time is usually cheap. So how can you address teenagers and get them to use copyrighted material and refrain away from pirated content? Well, I don't think you can compete with free. That's the problem. And for as long as it's free there's no means of competing with that and nothing is returned to the creators and the performers. There's not a model that works. We have to pay for content. But people are prepared to pay for content. People pay subscriptions for television for different sorts of television services and they're used to that. I think it's just that we had an intervening period of 10 or 15 years in which music, for example, was downloaded free and we have to educate the public to a point where they understand that it is in their long-term interest to pay something to ensure a vibrant musical culture. And apparently you mentioned that we need to achieve a balance between the incentivisation of content creation and the diffusion of it. Can you highlight on this, please? Sure. I mean, I think that we've seen as a result of ICT, it's really a lowering of price of the availability of content and that's very, very good. And that has been brought about in part because the audience is enlarged by so much. It's now the whole world is the audience. And that enables us to lower the unit cost, if you like. It's very important content providers take advantage of that because if they charge prices that are too high, we are going to see a situation in which there will be you destroying the incentive for people to participate in payment of the creators. Okay, final question. How do you view content protecting copyright in the light of social media and social networking which is really booming today? So how do you view this? Well, same problem. I mean, I think subscription models are one way of doing it. That's very, very important. I think making available content on terms that reasonable and sure widespread diffusion is another way of doing it. I think I'm rather partial to the notion that libraries become available but against payments. Thank you so much. Sir, can you please first tell us about what is your definition of green ICT? What are the requirements for technology so that it can be green? Okay, well I think you need to look at this in two separate aspects. The first is making sure that the carbon footprint, the pollution that is actually produced as part of the manufacture and use of the ICT equipment is minimized and the more and more of the products that are in use, obviously, unless the average energy consumption and therefore pollution of each product goes down, the numbers are just going to keep adding up and up and up. The second half is what ICT can do for other sectors. In other words, the way that smart applications of information technology, of communications and so forth can actually reduce the energy consumption of a whole variety of other sectors from energy supply through to transportation. There are plenty of occasions where people have no particular need to consume as much energy as they do at the moment and if they knew more about it or if they had smart systems which were available to them to control, they would take that control. Okay, so mentioning carbon footprint, what can broadband, how can it be impacting carbon footprint and how can it lessen, can it just tell us more about that? Well, the problem, of course, is that effectively the broader the band, the higher the energy use, that is not, I'm glad to say, a fixed relationship and all sorts of impressive achievements have been made by the use of different equipment, by the use of different techniques that actually the graph does not go up at the same rate as the use of broadband would suggest. Nevertheless, it's like running up a downward escalator. You have to keep on finding ways of improving the energy consumption through different techniques, through different pieces of hardware, the characteristics of different hardware. If you are going to catch up with the increases that would otherwise be used simply by essentially the development and use of the product across the world. Okay, so what role can governments play in encouraging the use of green ICT? I think that governments firstly have to draw attention to the problem. It is undeniable that ICT has the capacity for providing a huge amount of assistance to attempts to deal with climate change and other environmental problems. But it has also to come clean about its own footprint. It has to understand, governments have to remind it, that this is an industry like many others which is very thirsty for energy, which is very thirsty for some materials in its footprint which have environmental problems associated with it. And that means that government has to keep putting the pressure on the companies so that they understand that this is a way in which they will be judged, judged by their customers, judged by governments who could regulate if they were not able to persuade, and judged by investors as well. And most importantly from my perspective, I come from the International Emissions Trading Association so I'm particularly interested in the impact both as a stick and a carrot that a price of carbon imposed by government or governments can have. Once you have turned the thing that you actually want less of into if you like a cost, a factor of production, then the normal economic reasons for trying to reduce that cost, reduce the usage of that factor of production, come into play, and we all benefit. So what incentives can be offered for individuals or businesses to engage in green ice deep practices? I think the price alone will provide an incentive, even if it's only a rather negative incentive, but if it's a trading environment, then there's the possibility that a company can make enough savings to actually sell those savings to other people. We're beginning to see that approach through the European Emissions Trading Scheme. There will be others as well. What else can governments do? Governments can essentially approach the regulation of the use of appliances and products of a no longer acceptable rate of energy consumption and therefore with a major carbon footprint. So you get an approach which has been used in a number of countries whereby essentially there is a constantly moving escalator, if you like, of regulation. So the top 25% in terms of performance becomes the standard for the next generation and so on and so on. That's the way a smart regulation ought to work to add to the price. So final question, green ice deep for businesses. Is it now a necessity or a competitive advantage possibly or a threat? I think it's all those things together. It's a necessity because frankly it's a necessity not to waste money and if you can find ways of producing what you need at lower cost then you should be taking them. And while that may be rather a dispersed sort of issue across many activities in a business, if you've got a business which for example has a major footprint in terms of use of ICT so that it's got its own group of servers for example, well you start looking and it's sensible to identify the energy use of that group of servers and start saying what could we do to actually improve this. It's a threat because if you don't get that right then you are going to find that the next guy, your competitor, may have got hold of this idea quicker than you and it's an opportunity because you can appeal to all the categories of stakeholders that I mentioned before, your investors, your customers, your stakeholders more broadly by showing that you're a company which actually has a concern for the environment, has a concern for its own costs and is at the leading edge in terms of the overall profile of the industry. So Mrs. Steinman, thank you so much for your time and first we'd like to know more about Converse, what field it operates in and what are your activities? With pleasure. So Converse is a worldwide vendor of software and systems for value-added services, billing and IP communications. We are active everywhere. We have over 500 customers which are telecom service providers, fake, small-mile cavers and any variation of these all over the world as I said. Our systems count over 2 billion subscribers worldwide. So we believe that we understand the notion of the service, the notion of the user and we can envision best what would be the future communication experiences. Great, so the first question would be do you believe that broadband can create new business activities and if so, in what sense? So we're here for quite a while with content and skill and I think that now it's closer to truth because the handsets have such amazing display with such great resolution and color tone and if the promise of the broadband will deliver for example over DSL 50 megabits with home or the 4G and the HSPA will deliver these great paces that they promise then near high definition content will increase usage and will make the whole experience so much nicer because performance will be click rather than click and wait 10 seconds to see something happening. Okay, what are the barriers in your opinion are there to ICT and broadband adoption? Okay, first there needs to be a very mature infrastructure that will guarantee really superb experience. If you remember I mentioned before that mobile internet was introduced with WAP over GPRS in 1995 but the performance and experience were very disappointing. So first we need the infrastructure in place in order to have an adequate experience. Second, I'd say that we need content but really there are so many types of content professional content, TV content, user generated content which is really a huge trend. So this I'm less worried about. Okay, you mentioned also in your speech the importance and integration of web models so can you highlight this in detail? Okay, first I think that the wisdom of the crowds or the idea that many experiences can go to many people as a long tail of experiences we end the ability from the operator to be the sole provider of services. It means that many experiences will come from developers outside the operator and operators need to seek to think how they can deliver these services. Now operators will have to revenue share with developers services that will be downloaded whether they will be long tail or medium tail or enterprises, this we cannot anticipate because in the telecom environment it's not that easy to develop an application and certify it and make sure that it doesn't corrupt the network and be hence it and that everything works with the reliability and availability that the audience expected to work. So there are difficulties but thinking about the new models of rewarding developers using viral marketing and rewarding people proliferating service to others is very important and I think that we will see it happening very soon. So final question you mentioned that to the era of silo, MMS and SMS are gone or will be going? So can you highlight this and why you said that? I would like to correct myself and say that we are on the verge of a new era where not only silo, SMS and MMS will be usable but also they will be used as a delivery mechanism for many, many other applications. They will be the facilitator for many developments coming from the web, coming from independent developers like we just discussed and maybe if operators will allow open APIs to these facilities many applications will use them and increase traffic and increase revenues for all people involved. Thank you so much. State, thank you so much for taking the time to for a quick interview and first we'd like to know since this was the topic of the session today what is your definition of digital identity and how can one protect it? Well obviously as you know from today's from today's sessions on cybersecurity that digital identity can be many, many different things to many different people and that's why as we are talking at an international level about one, whose responsibility is it in terms of cybersecurity and protecting digital identity and then also what are some of those standards and principles in order whether it's at the government level or all the way at the consumer, personal level to protect our digital identity and digital age. Okay so when dealing with the topic of cybersecurity what approach should we take? Should we take a fear or threat approach or how can we deal with the subject? Well obviously there are incredible opportunities that come with our connection to the internet and to broadband and so we certainly want to talk about all those possibilities from distance learning to e-health to e-commerce you know absolutely as we've heard the ICT is having a huge impact positively during this economic downturn so while we want to celebrate all the positive parts of this wonderful connectivity we also do have to think about the risks and the dangers I am particularly concerned about those risks as they apply to our children and youth. Are you with being concerned about malware detection tools and security tools or educating people about the concept of cybersecurity first which should go first? I think that these are all issues that we have to deal with hand in hand as you know we have many countries that are very sophisticated and have had years of experience with both the good parts of the internet and connectivity and also many of the dangers and they may be farther ahead than many of the nations in many of the developing nations who are just now getting citizens connected and so I think that all of this goes hand in hand first of all to your point we have a whole new vocabulary of words that we have to deal with and then of course we have to figure out what are the best solutions to try to solve those specific issues and I also think to your second point it's extremely important that we begin to educate all of our citizens about cybersecurity that this cannot be just a discussion for international leaders but this needs to be a discussion for all of us consumers everywhere in the world. I'm interested to know more about the Child Online Protection Act in detail what does it entail and what does it call for? Yes I'm very thrilled to have been part of the steering committee here at the ITU developing guidelines for educators, for parents, for children and youth and for the industry. These guidelines are trying to take the best of what has been developed all over the world based on research and what is going on in other countries so that we can then share that information. Some nations are going to decide to take different guidelines in some nations the private sector has stepped up for instance providing curriculum to every middle school student in the entire country. In some nations I think that that is being done through government either through law or regulation so for instance having curriculum that may start at the kindergarten level and go all the way through high school but I think it's important that we're not only teaching our children the skills for instance keyboarding or researching online but we're also teaching them about some of the real risk and dangers that they can find in the online digital world. So my final question would be in light of the booming of web 2.0 and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter how do you view children's safety online and cyber security broadly? Well of course it's concerning both as a parent and as a policy maker as our children become more and more digital I had a quote the other day a statistic from some research in the U.S. that our kids are consuming eight hours of media in six hours which means that they're not just on one screen they're on multiple screens and so really I think that there is a need for a larger dialogue about raising informed and good digital citizens so that they can show good citizenship in the digital world just like they do in the real world. Thank you so much for this interview. Mr Kirk thank you so much for taking the time for a short interview and first we'd like to know how we see the global strategy for telecos how important is it in the meantime? I think a telecommunications provider can't succeed unless they're being very local in their marketplace you have to understand what people want what drives their needs how the societies are developing how their workplace is developing how their families are communicating and so forth so you absolutely have to be local but in being local you need to bring to your customers in the marketplace the benefits that you can achieve through global scale and through global connectivity because many people have family, have friends, have contacts who live in different parts of the world they want to be in touch with them we need to be providing them with that platform as well. How do you think local talent is important for a teleco that is aiming to enter a new local market? Well I don't think you can understand a local market if you are not local so getting local talent into your operations as fast as possible is hugely important at the same time and we've just had this experience in Qatar starting our new company there you need the expertise of managing a telecommunications company and if you are going to be part of a larger group as Vodafone in Qatar is you need also to understand the operating systems of that larger group you need to benefit from the technological expertise so as you start it should be a mix of the talent that you bring in from outside and the talent that you bring into the company inside the country as you develop in the country you should be bringing on the local talent and that's hugely important so we see ourselves having a professional development function which is critical but it's not confined to a country like Qatar so we would hope that the best people were recruiting in Qatar into the company wouldn't see their future only in Vodafone Qatar but they would see their future in Vodafone So final question, how do you think consumers' communication needs are changing or evolving currently? I think they are evolving very fast and they are evolving in all sorts of different ways and that's part of the beauty of what's happening in telecommunications now you used to have a rather defined set of services, voice, text and so forth now you're starting to see all sorts of social media, different forms of content different ways of interacting coming into the industry and that's opening all sorts of new potential and I think our job as service providers is to make sure that our customers can benefit to the maximum extent that they want to Mr Ericsson, thank you so much for your time and we'd like first to ask you about the conversions of CT and IT and what it means for consumers I think in general it would be more and more difficult to decide what is telecommunication and what is sort of pure internet these are merging and I think the important thing is to make sure to put the end user in focus and make sure to come up with a good solution that the end user is willing to pay for to the extent that you can continue providing the solution Green, ICT and how ICT can respond to climate change is a very important topic nowadays so how do you agree on ICT, is it an opportunity or a threat to telecommunications? Absolutely, an opportunity because the whole ICT sector only contributes about 2% to the man-made carbon dioxide in the world and then there's a course we have to make sure that we reduce our portion our 2% and work very hard with that to walk the talk and become credible and then there is also the whole 98% where we can help by reducing the carbon dioxide but by using ICT in a clever way and there are many different studies down there but somewhere in the range of 15 to 20% out of the 98% can be reduced by using ICT the right way so if you look at it, we have 2% over here then we can reduce 20% over here that's sort of a 10 to 1 payback of using ICT so definitely it's an opportunity and I think really as we go forward now for the COP 15 and so on we should look to the ICT sector for solving the problem to the table Cloud computing is a very important topic nowadays how do you think it has an impact on carbon emissions? that is one solution of many because the carbon emissions will have to work with how to reduce power consumption and make it more as effective as possible and if the cloud computing is part of that then of course it's part of the total solution finally how do you envision the telco industry in the coming 10 years we can see more and more broadband I think we have only seen the beginning of broadband and as broadband now goes mobile today we have 4 billion mobile users and 1 billion fixed users and if we look ahead 5 years we will have 4 billion mobile broadband users and 1 billion fixed broadband users to the extent we can still separate what is fixed and mobile at the time so we only seen the beginning of a broadband explosion Mr. Inseta Mor, thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to interview for a short interview first we would like to know about ISOC what it is and what its activities so the internet society was founded in 1992 by two of the fathers of the internet Ben Sirf and Bob Kahn and our primary mission is to support the open development evolution and use of the internet for the benefit of people throughout the world we do that largely through activities in the areas of technology policy and development and for many years in fact have held a number of events, workshops, training courses etc to help developing countries actually build their own internet capability with the US government doing its control over ICANN what is your take on this we are very happy to do that its something we have actually encouraged them to do and in fact have supported for some time now the original model for ICANN was a private sector led multi-stakeholder organization I think it was appropriate that the US government for the first few years of its life provided some additional oversight was a new institution, a new model that support was very helpful and we are exceedingly happy that they have actually lived up to their original commitments in the 1998 white paper how do you think the future internet will look like I actually hope it looks largely like today in terms of users having the ability to create, to develop to choose the applications that meet their needs and one of the things we are quite concerned about that under the guise of better protecting users or better serving their interests that we start to restrict the ability of users again to choose or create their own applications are you with or against changing the current structure of the internet certainly not against it I just don't think its actually an appropriate path today we will have the current internet with us for decades and decades there are applications and services deployed today that we all will continue to depend on there are many new internet like networks coming up, sensor networks a network of things our strong desire is that those networks actually interoperate with the current internet and that we ensure that we have a globally addressable, interoperable internet Final question, how do you think web 2.0 will change the future of the internet will change the future of the internet or change the future of society I guess I know for a while when technology was developing people were sort of bemoaning the fact that we moved away from physical interaction some concern that we have come to an electronic world I think we have almost come full circle in the sense with things like Twitter where people can now on a very international basis on a global basis actually hear from other like interest parties and frankly those that have different views I think we have created a very international community that can easily share their interest so we are very supportive again of developments nobody would have assumed that Twitter would in fact get the following it had and one of the things that we are actually very interested in the Twitter model Twitter is actually built on an open platform and the ability that users have to actually adapt that platform by putting the hashtag facility which allows as a convention for actually grouping topics the at sign to support replies those were all user developed and deployed on Twitter they did not come from the organization so I think that is just further sort of proof of the viability and scalability of the open Internet


go ahead and get started and let a few of the stragglers from lunch come in as we get going. So if you're in the back of the room and having trouble seeing the slides, or you just want to jot this down for later to refer back to, the slides are available on GitHub. If you hit that URL, you'll be able to see the same version, hopefully the same version of the slides I've got here unless I forgot to push my last changes up. So about me, I've been building Drupal sites for just about eight years. I actually have an interesting story in that I didn't do it as a hobby beforehand. I actually showed up for the first day at a job and they said, we just standardized on Drupal and your first task is to learn Drupal. So eight years ago I started building professional websites on Drupal and I've been doing it pretty much ever since. Right now I'm the director of engineering at chapter three, so I've got a big team of developers and I manage those guys, talk a lot about Drupal sites, spend less time writing code these days, but try to do some patches when I can. And if you want to get in touch with me, mark at chapter three and I'm MRF on both Twitter and Drupal.org and probably message me on Twitter, you'll get a quicker response than if you email me. So to start out with a little bit of a controversial statement, everything you do about Drupal is wrong. And Drupal is not a content management system despite everything you've heard, everything you've read, everything you've seen, Drupal is not a content management system. So Drupal is a piece of software, like that's pretty fundamental, I think we can agree on that. But what it is, it's a piece of software for building content management systems. So you know that first time you go to Drupal.org, you click this link, you think you're getting a fully functional content management system that's going to solve all your needs. And what you're actually getting is a starting point. Like you've got to start building your own content management system. It does probably very little of what you need from that download and install step. So congratulations. You just became a software developer, whether you really wanted to or not. Question? Close? Okay, that's loud. We'll do the opposite. I'll move the microphone away. Is that better? Okay, we'll go 50-50. So we've got a room full of software developers and you can become a software developer now without writing a line of code. So with that kind of under our belts, you know, that's sort of the philosophy of the rest of this talk. So software developers think a lot about complexity. So what do we mean by complexity? So as all IT professionals, you know, love Dilbert, we're going to find out about complexity from Dilbert.  So we all have to deal with complexity. It doesn't matter whether or not we write software or we're just a Drupal administrator's complexity is part of our lives. And so when it comes to the world of site building, complexity comes from a lot of different places. And it's not always clear where that complexity is going to be coming from. So what I did to try to get, just wrap my head around what makes a Drupal site complex, but I didn't really want to go into any, you know, customer's projects, you know, and throw those up on the slide. They might not be too happy about that. So I went to three of the more popular Drupal distributions and tried to do some comparisons, you know, from the command line to see what makes these complex or more complex or less complex. And so OpenATrium seemed to top the charts in all measures. So file count is where I started. Now, whether or not file count makes something more or less complex, it really depends on how much code you put in each one of those files and what each one of those files is doing. But, you know, setting all that aside, 8,000 files is a lot more than 1,000 files. If I wanted to step through everything OpenATrium is doing, it would take me eight times longer than it would take for me to step through everything that Drupal by itself is doing. And so, Monopoly falls somewhere in the middle there in terms of the file count measure. This is probably a little bit more accurate for the site builders in terms of how complex the site you're going to be getting when you install this CIS show is going to be. So with OpenATrium, just run the install and you have 210 modules enabled. As compared with Drupal 7, if you run the basic install in Drupal 7, you have 33 modules enabled. And once again, Monopoly falls right in the middle with 117 modules enabled. So I don't know about the rest of you, but I might know what a good majority of those 210 modules do, but there's a good chance that each one of those modules does something I'm not expecting in a way that I'm not expecting it. So when you start with an OpenATrium site, you have a lot more complexity there. And so, another way you can measure complexity is this is from OpenATrium's install page. And so, in the install requirements, it's saying your PHP memory limit, you should probably double that before you even install OpenATrium and maximum allowed packet size for my SQL. We'll probably double that as well. And, you know, your max execution time, I don't know what the default is, but I don't think it's 60 seconds. So we're going to bump that as well. And so what this is telling you is, like, we actually got some weight with those modules and with that file account. Like, all of a sudden our CMS is doing a whole lot more and a whole lot is happening at every request that wasn't happening before because Drupal's base install requirements are, I think you can do 128 megabytes of PHP. The packet size, I've never had to increase that for a Drupal, a plain Drupal 7 site. And the max execution time could be much lower. So we already know our, a lot more magic is happening. We're not sure what that magic is until we start clicking around OpenATrium, but that site is, inarguably, more complex than a plain install Drupal 7. So how do we get there when we're building our own sites? Like, how do we avoid creating our own copy of OpenATrium? You know, there's years of time invested in making sure all that stuff works together. So when we're building our own custom Drupal site, like, how do we avoid creating that kind of complexity? And so the architecture of the site is where we avoid this. So, you know, everybody goes into every project with good intentions. This comic illustrates it really well. You know, it's best of intentions. This time it's going to be perfect. I'm not going to make the same bad decisions I did last time, but requirements come in, deadlines creep up, and all of a sudden you end up with, you know, something that's, it's a usable house. Like, you can do lots of things in it, but it's probably not what you had in mind when you started working. And so, so in the world of site building, this happens when you're picking modules. So this is when you start to build that ladder, you know, build that next section of that house. Like, every time you download a module, you're bolting on another feature to your site, whether you needed it or not. So how do you go about picking good modules? And how do you go about picking as few modules as you need? So I actually borrowed this from a presentation I did a number of years back just saying, how do you interact in Drupal contrib space? And so there's a lot of information on that project's module page that you can decipher to kind of make your module decision. So this is from Views. And we all know Views is an extremely healthy project. And the way we can tell it's a healthy project is three hours ago, DeVayner was making commits, and he's made 2,000, over 2,000 commits in the five years he's been working on it. And not only is he been working on it, but we also have hundreds of commits, thousands of commits from other, other maintainers. So this, to me, says this is a very healthy project. This is bug-free or very bug, you know, very few bugs in this code. And I can probably guarantee that if they find something critical, it's going to be fixed soon because people are actively working on it. Another way to find out information on the Drupal project page is look at the number of installs and then the maintenance status. So they want more help. It's obvious from this page that there's a whole lot of work going on. So there's probably an infinite number of help, the amount of help they could get and still need more help. But the development status is under active development, which means they're not, they're still adding new features, they're still fixing things, they're still working on this project. And we can tell it's been installed a whole lot of times and that number would not have grown as large as it did if it wasn't working well for a lot of people. So that's a pretty healthy module that we can add to our stack and the complexity is probably worth bringing along. Another thing to look at is how often a release is coming out. How many releases, like have they been working on this thing since Drupal 6? Or did they just start working on it for Drupal 8? There's a lot of good information on this page as well in terms of the health of the module you're adding to your stack. So this is where we come to special cases. I was just showing the information for views. There's a lot of modules and the second you download and install them, your site, it just folded on a whole new section. The minute you turn that module on. So we're going to go through some of those special cases right now. So my favorite from this list is panels. So I started spreading this rumor and I don't know if it's made its way around the Drupal community, but panels was actually a fork of Drupal. We just never called it a fork of Drupal because it was done as a contrib module and nobody knew the difference. But it has its own display layer. It has a new structure that replaces blocks. It has visibility rules that don't have really anything to do with the rest of Drupal Core. And if you look at all those things together, it's like, well, we replaced huge chunks of Drupal with panels and we do it in an entirely different way. So you add panels to your site. All of a sudden you have this forking complexity. Is it done with Drupal Core? Is it done the panel's way? Is it done on these three pages of the panel's way? And is it done with Drupal Core on these three pages? And all of a sudden that has to be picked apart by the next person working on the site. So I would say of any module you add to your site, panels can probably, it can add a lot of complexity. But if you use it carefully, you can manage that really well. It's an extremely powerful tool for the exact same reasons why it adds a ton of complexity. So display suite it's guilty of the same thing as panels in a slightly less manner, which is that it takes over what usually happens in the theme layer, what usually happens in a module file or, you know, in an HTML, a chunk of HTML in your template. And what display suite does, it says that probably wants to get managed in the CMS itself. So then all of a sudden you have two places to check. Is this happening in display suite? Is this happening in my theme layer? Is this happening in my display suite theme layer and panels if we decided to go with the display suite panel's combination? And so every time we add a layer, you know, we're adding a new section to that house that we had in that first picture. So what you want to do is be really careful about every layer that you add. Is display suite offering something valuable to the people working on this site? Do they not know how to code in having a UI? Is that extremely valuable to the people I'm delivering this site to? So you need to start thinking of each feature in terms of does this bring value or does it only add complexity? Like, you know, what is this feature bringing to me? So views. You know, I just showed you it was a really well maintained module. It's a really stable module. But it also has its own rules for what gets displayed and how it gets displayed. So it suffers from the same issues that display suite does. Whereas am I within the views UI changing the output of a field instead of using a template to change the output of a field? You can do that with views and a lot of people do do that with views. Am I doing it consistently in views or only sometimes in views? So you need to think in terms of that I have this layer of complexity, do I want to use it? A lot of modules bring layers of complexity that you don't have to use. You can just use it for what it does best and not focus on the complexity. Domain access probably escalates this to a whole different level. How many people here have used this module? So what this allows you to do is build a Drupal site within your Drupal site. So all of a sudden you have another potential complexity which is which site does this feature apply to and how does this feature apply on this individual site? So it is this content type available on this site as well as this site. When I change a field on that content type does it change the field on both those sites? On all eight of those sites? On all 16 of those sites? Domain access opens up huge possibilities for setting up a really complex, fragile system. So when you add that to the stack you need to be really careful and deliberate about why did you add this? Why did you architect it this way? Like all those decisions need to be made really deliberately. Organic groups as similar to the ones we just discussed it creates a bunch of access rules. It does it in a really clean core compliant API compliant way but all of a sudden a piece of content is not showing to a particular user and you have a whole chain of things to check before you can figure out why that piece of content is not showing to that particular user. So the question is is this something I could have done with published and unpublished and I added organic groups to try to solve the problem or did the previous developer who was building this site add it to try to solve it is he using this model for the wrong use case? Organic groups is really powerful if you have a social site where there's a lot of different users and they do have access to different levels of content but you can use it on a site that doesn't have that requirement and add complexity without a lot of benefit. So rules, I think rules is probably the most interesting case.  So touring complete means basically any programming language that's touring complete is capable of solving any software problem. So rules is within Drupal and it's touring complete. So I can build any piece of software possible with the rules module because it allows me to do false and true values. So what that means is I have an infinite ability to add complexity to my site with the rules module and you can do all the same things you do in PHP code with the rules module and even without turning on the custom PHP filter within the rules module you can still do a whole lot of unexpected things with the rules module. So I press submit on my content type. I expect it to save the content edits I just made but the rules module can intercept right there and do a dozen other things. A dozen other unexpected things. So introducing the rules module to your site should be done deliberately. It should be I have a requirement that my client needs to go into the UI and be able to change the behavior of things like content submissions. Well rules module is perfect for that. It shouldn't be used as an excuse to avoid writing some clean custom PHP code that does that one condition. Like it shouldn't be used as a fallback for doing things in a much more clean way. So only add it if you need it and your requirements are driving it. So this is what we're trying to avoid as well. It's another image of what we might create if we're not careful. So this is somebody did a scale model of the Homer car from Simpsons so I don't know if anyone's seen this episode but Homer finds his brother who happens to own a car company. He lets him design a car and doesn't check in with him about what he's actually adding to the car. The car is so expensive to build it ends up bankrupting his company. It's got a lot of cool features.  A much planer car can get you from point A to point B and if that's all we really need you to do is get from point A to point B because we don't need everything this thing brings with us. Next up is data structures. So architecture data structures complexity that's something that software engineers think about all the time. So they spend a lot of time planning before they start writing code and I feel like with site building we suffer that Drush DL and listing out a half dozen modules it's really quick and easy to just start adding complexity really really quickly. So there's a lot of measure twice cut once. There's a lot of just cut cut cut cut cut cut until you have a site that works. Thinking about data structures is another spot where I feel like here is where planning serves you the best. So what do we mean by data structures in Drupal? First of all we have a problem here and it's apparently the hardest problem in computer science so we're not alone in trying to solve this problem because we need to figure out a naming system. Luckily with Drupal and especially Drupal 8 we don't need to worry too much about cache and validation but naming things still is the cross to bear for the site builders in the room and actually more so than the module builders because we're naming a whole lot of things when we're site building. So this is how a site builder thinks about data. They think about adding fields. They think about content types. There's a lot of data structures. Normally in historic software development used to be the developer. The developer was sitting here writing my SQL tables. They were looking at it from this angle which is, is it a long text? They're really thinking about this in a fundamental deep way and we've got check boxes. We've got autocomplete fields. We can add 10 of them in 5 minutes. So we're about 100 miles an hour and we're not sitting here. I mean this is slow to create this so you have to be more deliberate about it just because the process is slow but not so with adding fields and adding content types. So there's a lot of data structures in Drupal and content types is the most important one. So content types has been with us for I don't know. It was there in Drupal 4. That was the first version of Drupal I worked with. I'm guessing content types preceded Drupal 4 by a number of versions as well. And so content types, what we need to think of as we're stacking them up is, do they have a good name? Does that name make sense for now? Does that name continue to make sense in the way that content type gets used over time or should we rename it to make it more clear? Fields. Same rule applies here. Do we want to share fields across content types? Do we want them to have the same name? Do we want to create new unique fields for the content types? Do we want to prefix our field names with that content type name so it's obvious both in the database and in the content type that field when we're adding it from a view we know which content type it belongs to. So as you're adding these things you really need to think deliberately about how the whole system works. A lot of times we fall into that same trap. We're bolting something on here, we're bolting something on here, we're bolting something on down here and there's no sort of overall consistency in terms of what's getting built. Taxonomy as well it can be really complicated or really simple and it helps a lot to have this all figured out before you start building it out. You can fall into the trap where you have two taxonomies on your site have really similar content but they differ by like two or three terms. So you really need to think about the sub-front. You need to name it in a way that makes sense to both the back end content administrator as well as a future site builder that's going to come into the site and try to fix things. Menus as well. We're storing data and we need to think about is each sub-menu going to be broken off into its own menu to support our theme? Does that make the most sense when you're administering that site later on as a site builder? So you really need to think about, deliberately about when you're adding a menu, how you're adding a menu, how the menu is named and how it's stored in the database. So because we have the ability to create these things so quickly, sometimes we don't do it in as a deliberate fashion as we could be doing it. So upstarts. I first did a talk similar to this a couple of years ago and I thought it was funny then to call these modules upstarts but you'll understand why in a minute. So flag and flag-like modules have probably been around for five or six years but they kind of changed the way you were able to build Drupal sites. So in older versions of Drupal, like Drupal 5 and before, content types were really it in terms of places to store things. So people would rely on content types for everything. And all of a sudden in Drupal 7 especially we started to get a lot of other places to store things and modules that could change our storage module. So flag and flag-like modules, what those lie to do is just take an on-off checkbox on that content type. You can do the same thing in a field but what you want to think about is do I need to add another module to do what I can do in a Boolean field? Like maybe not. You need to think about your own site in terms of whether or not that makes sense. Reference fields. We just got a whole other way to complex the indoor site. So we all just need to start thinking about is this content type just a pseudo content type? And does it store data that's only linked to from other content types? And you can go down a huge chain of references that require references that require references and it might take somebody like a couple of hours to unpick all those deep references within your site. So it's another way we need to go into really deliberately and think about the storage and is there a better way to store this? Do I even need to reference this content here or can I just have views do the reference work for me? Field groups is another way to organize content. So it's kind of an alternative to references. It's like maybe these fields can be available on this content type and I don't need to reference them elsewhere. So you should be thinking deliberately about how my content is getting stored, how my content is getting used and what's that going to mean long term for my site? So just to sort of sidetrack for a minute here. A lot of the meat of this presentation came from inheriting a lot of sites and just building a whole lot of sites. At chapter 3 we sometimes launched 2 or 3 sites a month and so there's a lot of ability to experiment and see what works long term, what doesn't work long term. And what we've noticed is every time somebody tries to save a day's worth of work on the site building phase, they created 2 weeks worth of work in the maintenance side. And I didn't always early in my Drupal career get exposed to that because a lot of times I built a site for a client. I said here you go, here's your site and then that was it. I didn't really know long term how easy that site was to maintain or not. And working with distributions, working with modules like panels a lot of times you can work really quickly in the site building phase and that's good for a certain extent, but you need to think in terms of the long term how easy the site is going to be to maintain. So field collections is another one that just spidering complexity once again. Field collections allow you to have an entity that's referenced from your content type. So we don't need to store a separate content type, we're going to just have entities attached to our content types. And this all sounds well and good when you're building the site, when you're clicking check boxes, when you're working really quickly and everything seems to be going smoothly. And then three months down the road somebody says, you know what, we want to translate that site. And you start to realize that the translation interface it doesn't really take field collections into account. Field collections are a new edge case, it's not part of Drupal Core. And so all of a sudden we have one system that doesn't know about another system and we're doing a lot of work to make the two talk to each other. So we save half an hour in the site building phase and we ended up adding three weeks for the work in the bug fixing phase. So you got to think in terms of that, you know, do I really need this module just because it exists, just because Drush DL module name takes me 30 seconds, is it really worth adding it to my site? So another data structure, you know, when you're talking about programming they're always talking about lists. So in Drupal we've got our own way to store lists. Like I said, Drupal purely on the site building side, we could build almost any piece of software if we had enough time and enough people with a high enough pain threshold for clicking checkboxes. But with no cues and draggable views, we can order the content on our site, we can store that order, and then we can use that store to order wherever else we want to on the site. And so once again we have information that's crucial to the display of our site that's stored in a separate data structure. So how we use that data, how it's stored, that's all important and we want to make sure that taking between these two options that we're comfortable with how it's being stored. And second of all, is it really crucially important or with a simple, you know, that promoted field is feeling lonely. It's been there in Drupal forever and people don't always use it when maybe that's all they needed was to promote the one item to the top of the list. We didn't have to add a whole module to add that one feature. I had a co-worker who did a whole presentation about site building smells. So I wanted to give a shout out to this as a way to when you're inheriting a site begin to tell, you know, what kind of site is it and what kind of shape is it in. This comes from code smells. When people do code reviews, they talk about code smells. So it's like, it's this like tingle you get on the back of your neck when you're reading through the code and you're like something's wrong here, you know, there's something wrong in the universe and you start to get this sense of like it's not quite right and so this is people trying to put their thumb on it. Like this is what made me uncomfortable. This is what made me start to question the quality of this code. And so I've got some things that allow you to do that when you're inheriting a site as well. So these come straight from our site audit. We do a lot of site audits on new customers we're bringing on at Chapter 3 and so these questions come straight from our site audit and we try to use these to get like a flag of this needs more attention, we need to dig in more here and figure out what's going on. So the number of vocabularies like if I see a site with 50 vocabularies I'm going to start asking a lot of questions really quickly. Like what is so crucial that it needs to be powered by taxonomy in here or did this person not even know that content types existed and they used taxonomy for everything. So you've got to start asking a lot of questions if there's a huge number of vocabularies and then you start looking into them and you realize this has the same content as this other one. Did they just recreate this one because they didn't know how to reference the other one? Like if you start seeing a big complexity and a big number it's like you've got to start asking questions. With content types the same kind of questions apply. So how many individual content types are there? If I see a list of 50 or 60 content types that's usually a big head scratcher. Like most Drupal sites I've seen can get by with like 10 to 20 and sometimes you can get by with a lot less than that. And then when you go into the content type does it have 50 fields on a single content type? Are they using a module that controls access to those fields instead of just separating those objects to separate content types? Did the lines between the content types make sense? Like a lot of times when you go in you're auditing the site, you go into the database, you realize that only two copies of a lot of content types, like only two nodes were ever created for that content type. So it's like did that content type just, was it a relic of when somebody was doing some tests during the site building phase of the project? So I'm always asking these questions. It's like why is this here? What purpose does it serve? Is it even displayed anywhere in the site or is it just a relic of developer's past? And then the last one is a lot harder. It's a lot more opinion. And that's the thing about this whole presentation. There's a lot of strong opinion here. Which is that every module I listed in that first special cases section serves a valid purpose on a production site for someone and serves them really well. Otherwise it wouldn't exist. It wouldn't be maintained. It would have died on the vine a long time ago. So this is where you start to ask these big questions. Does it all make sense? Does it seem like it was done deliberately by somebody who was really thinking about what they were doing? Or was it done on accident over three years and ten different developers? And so when you're looking at a site you need to look at whether or not... I'm holding this from scratch today. It's always like, you know, hindsight's always 2020. But you know, is there a way that this could be done better? Is there a way that I can spend two days right now and clean this all up and make it better for the next person? So coming up to the next section, so when your software developer documentation is not optional. You're going to fail your first code review if you didn't provide any documentation with the code that you're writing. And unfortunately for the world of site builders, it seems like documentation kind of is optional. You're not doing standard documentation where you're doing a Word doc that you attach to the site. And there's a lot of opportunities for documentation within Drupal that are also being missed ignored, bypassed. So I'm going to step through some of those right now. So everyone here has probably seen this screen. It's rarely you build a Drupal site and you use the types that are provided to you. So a show of hands, how many people fill out that second massive field on here? So we got like half the room and that's probably based on what I've seen, you know, what you usually get. So you get a nice huge text area here where you could write a novel about what was in your head the moment you click this button and start creating this content type. And a lot of times you're lucky to get one line in here. And you know, the thing is you're not doing this just for the person coming after you. You're not just doing this for your boss when he's going through and reviewing your work. You're doing this for you two days later when you can't even remember which section of the site you were working on and where you left it. Because all of a sudden you know you're tapping into your own brain from the past. And you know the same rules that apply to software development apply here. Whereas great documentation is going to make it a lot clearer when you need to work on it again. And you know every developer that inherits the site after you is going to thank you for taking the 30 seconds to type out a little line of text here. So that's the content type screen. So unfortunately taxonomy gets a little bit of shorter description. You're going to have to wordsmith it a little bit. You can still have a non-optional field. You know this makes me think I should just write a contrib module that makes all of these description fields required. So it's an optional field. I could probably get turned this into a text area as well. That sounds like a good project for the rest of the week.  And we should, anytime we have the option to give a little bit of information we should provide that information. So menus, we get a nice big description field again. But once again it's optional. So we can leave it blank and we can still press submit. And never know what was in the person's head when they were creating that menu.  But this one actually shows up a lot. So on that block listing page this information is hugely important. And if you weren't really careful about your title, which a lot of times on the title it is being shown to the user so you don't have a lot of room for exposition there. So that description might be the only way you can actually explain to the person using the site what this block does. So use it carefully. Make sure it's filled out. Think about yourself when you're going back to the site and you're being asked to disable the block. And you have to click through the configure settings for 10 different blocks to figure out which one to disable. I was joking with a co-worker. I didn't actually know this existed. So I'm just as guilty of this as anybody in this room. So in views buried a level deep on that right hand column is we have a nice big comment section for a view and we can fill that out. And I feel like more than the content types, more than anything else, views a lot of times are real head scratchers in terms of why was this created, what does this do, which section of the site does this apply to, how come this view has multiple displays, how comes there's this other view that seems to do the same thing but it's not used as a display. So views, there's a lot of things you can write about and a lot of information you can provide here, but it's definitely not front and center and super easy to forget except when you're initially creating the view with the builder. So to wrap things up, I'll have some time for questions. Conclusion is we want to add complexity deliberately. So every time we're going, we're clicking, we're finding a new module, we need to do that for a reason. So we're not adding a module, we're not using it distro blindly, we're using it because we want everything that it offers and we're going to use everything that it offers. And we want to name things carefully and this is probably the most important which is those content type names, those block names, those field names. Those, if you're going to not fill out that description, that's the only waypoint the next person has. This was prefixed with that name so it obviously refers to that section of the site. So think about how you're naming things. Have a plan before you start creating things for how you're going to name them. And comment liberally. So every time you see a text area to start typing in it, when you're in the back in a Drupal it's just getting shared, it's not getting shown to the users but you're just leaving notes for yourself, you're leaving notes for the next developer on how the site was built, why the site was built the way it was and what you were thinking, what was going on in your head while all that was happening. So that's it. Any questions? Nope. Alright, thank you for coming out and enjoy the rest of your Drupal time.


This is the House Education Committee in the Vermont House of Representatives. We have a couple of things to do today. First, I just wanted to give you an update on our discussion about district budgets, and then we will take up a bill to delay Act 173, which will be in the House tomorrow. So just as people know, the Senate has come forward with a plan to provide a default budget should a district be unable to pass a budget. Their default budgets would be to adopt last year's budget, the 2020 budget, and then they can continue to vote. We had worked on another option, we are continuing to work on that option, but at the moment our discussions, because we have an agreement that given the challenges of remote voting, we are looking to have agreement between the two bodies, between our two committees before we bring something to the floor, and that's primarily due to the complexity of trying to deal with a vote with 150 people voting remotely. So we are continuing those conversations. I don't have a plan forward yet, is what I would say. So are there any questions on that? Before we go on, I realize we have two members of the House Ways and Means Committee in the room and wanted to see if you had any questions or thoughts. I've got to get my link up here. I see George tell you have a question. Yes, thank you. I'm wondering, is there progress with the Senate, you know, the House plan makes so much more sense than the Senate plan. I'm just wondering where the holdups coming in terms of, you know, coming to some agreement. Yeah, at the moment, the Senate has not been interested in looking at, by the last conversation, was not interested in an alternative proposal. They, and I'm, please, Jim, step in if I'm misrepresenting this, but my understanding is what they like about their proposal is that they at least have a past budget, which is last year's budget, so that they like the fact that people have actually voted on something. So that's why they prefer their approach, the approach that we've been discussing in the House. Is that accurate, Jim? And am I reflecting? Am I reflecting there? I haven't had those conversations with Tim Ferriss. I'm not sure exactly what his rationale is. Okay. That was, that was my understanding. Ours was approach has been looking more at what we can do to stabilize these communities in a time where voting is far more complicated and our concern is it's putting them in a different class of moving forward, they're definitely functioning farther behind than the districts that actually had an opportunity to pass the budget. I realize that that doesn't really clarify anything. There's still some hope that we might be able to get some movement, but they're working on that. Sarita, Austin. I'm wondering if the Senate and our committee agree on the 4% inflator over the last year, that's really important to me because it sounded like it was really important to the people, the stakeholders who testified last week. When I observed the Senate committee, they had rejected that. I don't know if there's still flexibility on that, but they rejected that at the time. Thank you. Okay. Anybody else? So that's, that's where we are at this point. Thank you. So with that, we will move on to the next issue, which is the delay to Act 173, and where this stands right now is that past the Senate, it's been messaged over. It will be sent to our committee tomorrow. We will vote on it tomorrow. What I want to do is do kind of a straw poll today. I think we've kind of done one, but I want to just make sure that we're okay. And then we will vote on it tomorrow, and then Representative Coopily will be presenting it on the floor. So with that, Jim, could you update us where we are with, it's Act 173 that has a number, what's the number, 363? Yeah, sure. So it's the record, Jim, Dan, where there's console. I think that's all here. Hold on. Kate, could I interrupt for just a quick second? Yes, please. It's just a technological thing. I don't, I was just on the streaming site and I don't see that this is in fact streaming. It says it's, it says it's live on YouTube. Okay. Yeah, I don't see it, but it could be a technical issue on my side. Yeah. Because I'm having a lot of freeze ups here. All right, thank you. Yeah, I can't. I think it's not really working right. I mean, I can't. I can't see anybody. Okay. Well, I on my, my screen, I've got that we are live on YouTube. Right, but I'm on YouTube and it's not showing up. It's, I know it's delayed. Yes, you usually not this far delayed. Okay. I think we got some kind of malfunction going on. Now it is up. Let's see if it's looking. Yeah, it's fine. The audio is coming through fine. It looks like, but the video is having some trouble, which I think we're probably all experiencing. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I'm, I'm doing fine here. I can see everybody and I can hear everybody. I'm not sure if the thing does say live on, on YouTube. So I do believe we're live. We are taking up. Is it S363? Is that what the number is, Jim? S. 3. 3. S3 43. And this is the bill that we've been talking about in our committee related to delaying implementation of ACLA and 73. It has passed the Senate. It has passed the Senate. It has passed the Senate. So if it's going to make to us. We will, it will be in our committee. The center of committee tomorrow. My intention is for us to vote on it. And send it back and representative Cougar. He will. Present it on the floor. So Jim. Demaray. Can you present the bill? Yeah. So we need to open the bill up to people to see it. We have been through this bill numerous times and the last time we went through it, you heard testimony from John Carroll, Chair of the State Board of Education. He wanted some changes made to some of the rulemaking timing. So that's how it included in this bill. And also to give the advisory group one more year of life. It's now in this bill as well. So let's go to the sections that you haven't seen. We can go back and review more if you want, but we haven't seen, we can go to page five, section four. Yeah, just a little higher there, if you could. Right there, perfect, okay. So this is amending Act 173, which created the Census-based Funding Advisory Group. And what it does is it extends the life of the group. It was going to cease on June 30, 2022. Now it's June 30, 2023. And if you scroll down further, you'll see that the number of meetings they can have in any fiscal year has been increased from eight meetings to 12 meetings because I understand they've run out of meetings in the last year that would be compensated. So they now have 12 meetings for which they would receive compensation per year. Therefore the appropriation goes up from $5,376 to $9,018 per year. So that's what that section does. If we can scroll down, Avery to page seven, section nine, right by the page. Impassionation, okay, great. So a couple of things here. The State Board mentioned that they have the update towards rule series 2200, which is the series that deals with approved independent schools. And I'm sorry, let me go to B first. B first and then A, B first. He mentioned that the State Board of Education rule series 1320, 360, which are the ones that would implement the census grant are out for public comment. And that comment period would expire this summer and he wanted to extend that period until the end of the year, given the state of emergency. So B extends the comment period until the end of the year and adjust the other timelines accordingly under the Administrative Procedures Act. And then A, there was no date in Act 173 by which the State Board had to initiate rulemaking for approved independent schools. And remember that Act 173, in addition to changing funding from the reimbursement to census grant also a separate part of it, which required approved independent schools to enroll students on IEP if the Supervisory Union for that student recommends it. But there's no date by which the rulemaking had to be done. So if you would like to have rulemaking initiated on before June 30th, 2021, and that's what this one does. And then if you scroll up a little bit, a brief section eight, and we're going to have I order, scroll up a little bit higher, right here. In Act 173, there was a small piece of law that required the State Board adopt, review and update its rules for independent schools in order to speed the process for getting approval in various specific special education categories. So you might recall that to be a couple of years ago that one of the issues that independent schools have or have with complying with new part of it is it takes too much time. If they're forced to take on a student who is on IEP, there are 13 disability categories under law and they have to be approved for that category. And the approval process was taken too long. So this was designed to have the State Board somehow get that process sped up so that they can actually do that. That date was November 1, 2020. It's now been moved to June 30th, 2021, which corresponds to the date we just went through in section nine when the State Board asked to basically update its rules for current independent schools. So those are the changes to those dates. So aside from those changes to dates, which really deal with rules, rulemaking, and the additional year for the census-based group, sorry, the advisory group, aside from that, the bill is the same as you saw last time. So unless there are questions over on the bill, that's all I had to say, but I'm happy to go through more, I'd like to. So Larry Kupley on mute, Larry. I have to get used to that mute button. Does this have to go to appropriations before it goes anywhere? Well, it does have a higher appropriation to it. So I'm not sure how they would deal with it in this time period, give them what's going on. But usually- So it's come to our committee tomorrow. We vote on it. I can't see it going anywhere until it goes through appropriations if I'm not mistaken. Kate, any- I have sent that language to our contact in appropriations. I will follow up with them on that plan, whether it's going to need to go to them afterwards. They are aware that there's an appropriation in it. Okay, thank you. Stephen Austin. I'm just wondering about the public comment time. Is there a way remotely that the public, I mean, I'm sure there is. I'm just curious what it is, how the public will provide input remotely? Yeah, I'm not sure how that will work actually, but Boston, right now he's concerned because he can't really comment at this point, obviously. I think he's thinking that as your progresses, there'll be more chance for people to meet and make comments or not, but that's who knows, I guess, is the answer. Okay, the members of the board come from some pretty varied experience as well, representing groups that have an interest in this bill. This law. Mary Coopley, are you still there? Are you, your question got answered? Yeah, I'm fine. I should have put my hand down, I didn't. Yeah. Okay, so just looking at everybody then, just taking a straw poll, just raise your hand if you're comfortable with this bill as written. Raise your hand if you're comfortable with it. Is there anybody that is not comfortable with it? Okay. Okay, good. We will take a formal vote tomorrow on this. And so Kathleen, that will be you and have you got the arrangement on that? By tomorrow, I will have gotten the arrangement. Thank you. Do we have a scheduled time, Kate, that that will take place? I have to check that out with the clerk's office on how that will work. I'm not quite sure myself, but I will sort that out before tomorrow. So I see, we do have, so yes, Jim. What time is it to have some of the floor more? Is it nine o'clock? I think it's 1030, isn't it? Are we having a house meeting at 930? No. I've got 1030 tomorrow morning. Yes, 1030 and then again at one. So I'm assuming what we'll do is probably meet between shortly after the floor and take a formal vote and Avery and Kathleen will have it all figured out on how the voting works. And then I'll sort that whether it has to go to appropriations. Just it's a little confusing. The house calendar does say 9 a.m. but our Zoom invitation says 1030. So Kate, our committee vote will be after the first floor session. Yes, we have to have possession of the bill to actually vote on it. So we will get possession of it tomorrow and then we'll vote on it. Okay, I need to look through my emails. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's got a lot of unemployment emails right now. So I need to try to look through my emails and find, do I check in with Avery or Bill on committee voting procedures or both? You know, I got a nice response from Rebecca. So let me send that to you as well. Okay, if you could just resend, that would be great because a few things have gotten lost, not lost. Hard to find, let me put it that way. Yes, exactly, buried. Buried, thanks. Okay, thank you. So that at this point is our business for today. I am in conversation, Representative Conlon and James and I had a conversation with the president of the New England board of higher education, asking them to help us understand trends, future trends in higher education in post-secondary education. So we will have a joint committee meeting with commerce and economic development, looking at just getting a better idea about what's happening around the country, what's happening around New England, what are the trends in post-secondary education? So that's gonna take a little while to set up because they wanna pull together and organize some information for us. I understand that Georgia has some interesting things that they have done. I think there are a couple of other states that might be of interest. But to clarify, I know people have had some interest in this conversation. Our committee at this point will not be weighing in on the decisions related to what's happening at the Vermont State Colleges. Our committee will not be looking at their finances, will not be looking at their enrollment, will be not be looking and trying to come up with a plan for the colleges. I figured our role might just better be to get a sense of what the trends are in higher education. And that might be a more useful use of our time. And as far as the other bill, that still looking for an avenue for the budgets, delayed for the 19 districts. At this point, the Senate is firm on their position to, and I'm repeating this because I believe we weren't live before. They are prepared to offer their solution to us at this point are not interested in further testimony on the work that our committee has done. So anything else? Sarita, do you have something that you want to say? Can we send you questions to possibly ask that the group on post-secondary education? Can we submit questions to you to possibly ask them? Sure. Okay, perfect. I'm gonna keep it at the pretty much 50,000 foot level. We're not going into the buildings right now at Vermont State Colleges. Will the Senate be at 50,000 feet, Senator? Excuse me? Will Senate education also stay away? I didn't understand that. Will the Senate Education Committee also be at 50,000 feet? Or are they gonna be diving in? Oh, on the Vermont State Colleges? I don't know. I haven't had a presentation about the Vermont State Colleges. Um, Kayla Belder. Yeah, thank you. I don't know if you can hear me while I'm not having great success this morning, but hopefully you can. So can you just reiterate, Kate, the Senate's recommendation on the budgets? Again, I think you said that a little earlier. We weren't on the record. If you could just give the quick summary of their recommendation, that would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah, the Senate's plan is that if you do not, and Jim, I should probably let you do it, but let me see if I've got it here. The Senate's plan is that if you do not have a budget by July, by June 30th, then they will have a default budget that agency of education will give them a default budget, which will be last year's budget. So that will be their budget. They'll be able to set tax rates on that budget. And then the communities can continue to vote. And if they pass another budget, that will supplant the budget that was set by the agency, which is last year's budget. That's what their position is. Thank you. And presumably they've heard testimony from the Vermont School Board's Association similar to what we heard. My understanding is they have received a letter from the State Board of Education, and which was supported by the Superintendents Association. I am not aware of any testimony that they have taken. I have not in any committee meetings I've seen, I've not seen any testimony, but that's my current understanding is that they do have a letter. Okay. They do have a memo. Kathleen James. Thanks, Kate. So considering the kind of constraints of how we're working now, what will be the path forward in trying to come to compromise between our idea of what might be the best path forward and the Senate's idea of what might be the best path forward? That looks like the options before us are, we accept the Senate's proposal. We hold out with them accepting our proposal or negotiating that position, or nothing happens at which point that would mean that they're left with the borrowing 87% until they get a vote. Sarita Austin. And Jim, if I, it helps me to kind of put it in English, but to have the lawyer right there to say, well, you know, it's not quite right, I think it was, please. You're perfect. Okay. I hope that's not in a President Trump sort of perfect, but I'm sorry, you were on YouTube, aren't we? Sarita Austin, you had a question? Yeah, I'm just wondering if it would be possible since Brad James and I believe Secretary French both support the 4% inflator if someone in the Senate could give a rationale as to why they wouldn't support that. You're more than welcome to reach out. You're more than welcome to reach out to your senators. Okay, thank you. I am not choosing to, I'm not choosing to reach out to the members of that committee because I want to be respectful of the chair. Any other questions or concerns? Kate, I don't have my hand up, but this is our topic of conversation Friday, is that correct? Excuse me. Is this our topic of conversation on Friday? I will let you know if we're gonna have, well, I will let you know if we're gonna meet on Friday. Okay, thank you. Okay, so at this point in time, we will meet Wednesday. We'll let you know when that's gonna happen, probably right after floor, that's okay with everybody. We will then have the bill and we will vote on that. And then on Wednesday, I will keep you posted as to whether we're going to meet on Thursday, I mean, on Friday. At this point, I don't have an agenda. Larry Coupoli. Yeah, is there, we have members from Ways and Means with us this morning. Do we have any comments from them or any recommendations or suggestions that would be different from the Senate bill? Don't be afraid to speak out. Hi, it's Robin. I don't feel like I'm in a position to say anything different. This is brand new news to me, so I'm just taking it in and I think your chair knows what the options are. I expect that our chair, if she doesn't already know what's happening, we'll know very shortly and we'll go from there. Thank you, Robin. Anybody else? Okay. Bill, did you wanna say something? Yeah. Can you tell me what the vote was from that Senate committee? I understand that it was unanimous, but it hasn't left the committee yet. Okay, thank you. There is, you can watch, you can, when everybody's looking for us to watch another YouTube Zoom meeting, but we're looking at our options. And with that, I guess we will adjourn. Everybody be ready to meet right after.