You're from Yusef? Yusef is here. Oh, great. Oh, there you are. Hi. Tiny on my computer. Well, thanks for, thanks for availing yourself. Yusef, it's good to have you. And good to see you. Where are you? Are you far away? I'm in Nashville. Wow. Well, happy spring. Thank you. It's actually just as cool or cold or dry or wet or whatever, as it was at home. So it looks pretty. Just a little chilly. It's nice here. So great. It sounds like we think this is everyone for now. This is everybody for now. I think we'll be able to. That we can plug Andy and if he comes in, he's the one that would be late. Okay. So I guess we call the meeting to order. We're going to call the meeting to order. I think we're going to call the meeting to order. It's six o three. And I think we've already heard everyone's voice and we see everyone's picture. So that's working. All right. Roll call. Well, we know who's here. I don't know if we really have to do an official roll call, but we have a notes taker. Anyone willing to take notes? Yeah, I can do that again. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. How many people have, have a check their email here today? Sorry to butt in Carolyn. The other thing that that we have also done is Carolyn is now a chair. I did send the copy. Andy. Andy has been apologizing to me about not getting the minutes from the last meeting. But he did get that to me. He sent that to me yesterday. You know, and it's been a long time. I just couldn't believe it was a minute. So, so I think we are out there getting the minutes sort of minutes. Anyone get a chance to read that through that? I was just reading it right now. Although I can't really vote on it because I wasn't there. It appears that. He left in a. Section from a different set of minutes from the, the CPA committee to do with approval of the minutes. Yeah, I don't think we can. Yeah, so I guess we just want to prove I'm not sure if I'm not sure if Amy was at your meeting or that was also from the CPA meeting. Do you remember Ray was that February or was that January? I don't think I don't think Amy was at. These are the notes from 10th of January. Yeah, I don't think those were. I don't think that these public comment, I don't think Amy was that he was at the. The January meeting. Okay, so I guess we're not going to vote on the approving the minutes, but he'll, he'll update them and send them back out again. Is that how it works? Yes. Okay. One member has already reached out to him about about a couple of procedural pieces in there also so. Thank you for pointing that out. Okay. There was no public. Is there anyone else in the wings there that we should be calling on or opening floor to looks like there's a. Yes, we have, we do have 2 people as attendees. 1 is, well, we have 2 people as attendees. Okay. And Amy is 1 of them. And we have public comment on the agenda for now. I don't know what that stands for. Is that. Anything or that would be an opportunity for any member of the public if they wanted to. If they wanted to share or ask any questions, if they had any public comment, they would like to bring to our attention now. If there are any attendees in the room that have anything. We can raise your hand and we can introduce you otherwise. Otherwise we can proceed into the submission meeting. Okay. I have no request for comment. All right. So the first item is pickleball. Okay, so the first section on the agenda here today is basically our, our large. It's, I appreciate Carolyn for being involved and involving herself with the, the pickleball petitioners she has met online and in person. A couple of times with the, with the pickleball group that pushed for the proposal last year for CPAC. And so I, I appreciate Carolyn's doing that because my encouragement for the commission is that we start to involve ourselves with those large public projects. You all are through a liaison between the community and our programming and our department. I, I, I think that it's important. I'm comfortable saying that we are in the process as I've shared with the commission here before I'm comfortable saying that we are making progress slow progress but we're making progress towards making their vision happen. It's important for me that they also have multiple years to, to ask questions of so it doesn't have to be my just telling them in case I'm wrong in case, in case we need to spread that pressure out in different avenues. So I asked if they would mind my connecting them Carolyn and Barbara enjoys. And I think that's a productive use of commission resources. I'm not involved in that conversation Carolyn certainly can share as we have met also and what some of their requests and the information they're looking for as to how to advance their projects interest. We are still when I say slow progress, it is still, we're still looking at sites, we're still looking at cost estimates of those sites. We're looking at what the, what the most appropriate next steps are we have a couple of ideals I've shared with you before, but we have a couple of ideal spaces that we are looking at for a lot of reasons which may be more expensive and more long term projects. We're also looking at the viability of, of maintaining our, our goals, developing those tennis ball courts where the temporary pickleball is right now, and turning that into the forever home for pickleball. You know, the process right now, it's not stuck. I don't believe that it's stuck right now, we just now are looking for ways to advance to the next process and Carolyn as a commission representative myself in my communications with DPW with town hall and with the pickleball group, which is not, they're not, they're not a voice that actually has weight in this process right now other than being now they've moved back into a general public public public request for information and for guidance and for for you know, some updates, but in our conversations with them, I believe that we are moving in a direction that that makes pickleball thing of our future. Now, as for right now, I can say that we are still, we are still working on on as soon as the spring comes officially and as of 20 minutes ago spring is here. As, as soon as our spring season begins and that's the next conversation we have with DPW also as soon as spring brings people back out to our fields and to our courts and to all of this. We are now in the process of trying to get equipment and and maintenance for those temporary courts while we figure out what we're doing essentially I saw your hand raised. Yeah, thanks right I just wanted to confirm. No, no plans have been set. There is no plan, but we do not have the definite site, but the thinking is to turn the two court to tennis courts existing tennis courts at Mill River into the home for pickleball. Is that what I heard. Yes, and it could be two spots it could be one spot if we can we we heard this commission. Amy and I when we spoke about this and spoke about this with our with town hall. I heard this commission in December, speaking about the one thing I heard I took away from that meeting more than anything was an interest in making sure that if we do pickleball we do pickleball correctly we do pickleball and they have space that they can put it in. So that's the, that is a focus that I want to try and keep on the, on the table here that we don't end up just finding a space on the side of somebody else's existing space, and make that make that sort of make it work for whatever it is we want there to be a pickleball space here and so the connection with tennis as to whether or not we, we remove tennis from that, from that site which is not ideal whether we accommodate tennis in that site, and and still give pickleball his own space that's the, if it was as simple as just saying we're going to get rid of tennis we probably would have done that already, but I don't think that we want to give up something that we haven't really tested out to see what the impact would be. And so our process right now is in cost estimates of the different sites and also programming estimates of what we lose if we, if we make the decision to like the easiest decision because there's there's tennis courts there and it involves still some modification. The easiest thing would be just to say those tennis courts are pickleball, and we're going to get rid of tennis at that site, but I'm not prepared to make that decision now nor nor is anybody that's making decisions on this we're not prepared to make that decision right now, without knowing exactly what we're gaining what we're doing. The other sites which I think are fantastic to involve more money and more long term investment and that's where our, our research that's where DPW and engineering research comes into establishing that that estimate. Yeah, I just want to clarify, in response to Sanjay's comment that I think if I'm not mistaken that that mill rivers being looked at as a temporary space, it may become permanent, but the bigger picture really is cow field graph park, whatever, maybe even the other side of the mill river parking lot. It's not that we're going to turn the tennis courts into pickleball courts and stop. I think there's no bottom to the list of interested people. I think they have something like 400 people on their, on their list for Amherst or some of the most of the Merriamist residents. I don't think we could have too many pickleball courts. So that's kind of what I'm trying to do is look at the next step and how much we can get for the money we've got and where we will put them. And as soon as possible because they first came to us two, two and a half years ago. I think it was. And I, you know, I think it's just prudent of us to push for resolution as soon as possible because they're waiting. So it's a bigger picture than mill river, but who knows when or where it's where. I was under the impression we were further ahead. That's why I was a little surprised, but yeah, I always thought that the tennis court was just a temporary place for it while we figured out, you know, another area. That is, that is the plan right now as far as I know, it will be, I mean, it's, I guess it's somewhat it's possible it could be the only one but there's a budget for more. There's money for something else. There will be something else. I'm not sure how long it'll take. But they are planning on using the mill river area immediately or as soon as we can get nets over there. There's something. And this is the time where we can really sort of test as I was sharing with with pickleball last fall when we first laid the lines down. This is the time where we can start to experiment with getting nets out there and seeing what the, what the. How it, how it cooperates with tennis the culture of pickleball the culture of tennis. How many people we can start measuring that because as the weather gets nice and we have nets out there the only people who use it right now or have used it in the fall as it started to get called as we move towards hibernation. And people who have their own nets and many pickleball folks do have their own nets and their own rackets or what have you, but now is a chance for us to see a little bit more as to whether or not there is sort of a, you know, how extensive that culture goes beyond those pickleball fanatics and that we can, we can do some. We talked a little bit Karen and I were brainstorming earlier today about potentially doing, doing a little intro or training session for vacation camp kids or would have you to start to start introducing pickleball as part of the language of recreation would be this would be a the process of, of this spring for us to see if it has a home in our, in our, in our thought process in our, in our general, in our general state. Sanjay. Thanks Ray and thanks Caroline for the clarification. I, let me say I'm impressed by the way the pickleballers organize themselves. And I'm sure there are a lot of them out there. And I think a temporary solution at Mill River does not sound unreasonable. I'd like to point out a couple of things first of all, you may find, I don't know, but you may find that all of a sudden there are a lot of tennis players and they're very well organized when something gets taken away from them. In general, I would hope as a department as an attempt and as a town. We could avoid reducing one recreational opportunity into in order to provide another.  I don't know if I don't know if the existing tennis players know this is coming or not, or may just have a lingering sense that it's coming from the spray painted lines that appeared on what they probably think of as their courts. But I suspect that there will be some surprise tennis players and that you may wind up hearing from some of them. Ray, you probably are as aware as anyone that the indications are that tennis players and pickleballers will not get along very well. It's like this golf and regular golf, you know, no, but you know what, it's funny that when we first heard about it, I had no idea what it was I had to Google it during our meeting. But, you know, now it's not every resort that you go to it's, you know, it's an advertisement so I don't think it's going to be a problem filling those courts or having them being used. Right. The problem is finding more space. So, I think Sanjay is right about the tennis players though and I hope we can find a way to communicate it and maybe even have to facilitate it might come to that I don't know. But as long as we can keep the middle school courts opens on Jay do you think that will address that at all. I think one could reasonably point out to a tennis player that there are six courts available publicly at the middle school. And that you mass and Amherst College are relatively generous with use of their own tennis courts, although I think not enough. I don't know but I think not in a formal way. I think there are several pickleball courts in town right now. So this is a fair numerical point to make. The courts of the middle school are used. I mean where one drew the line for heavily or not heavily I think is open for debate and depends on the season and so on. But there are definitely times when either I or other tennis players I know go to the middle school and there is no court available. So is it those courts are closed to the public, other than when the high school is playing. Well I think actually tech. Well, Ray may know better than I are if their school property they're closed entirely during the school day. Summer is not school day right so we're correct additional seasons here, but my understanding is that they are not available to the public from sort of 830 to four during school session days. I think the team is using it Amherst rec schedules camps there. They are, they're well used. And again, I don't have numerical data, but they're the times at which people try to play tennis there and there is no court available those that event that event exists. Sorry for, I don't know what happened I got everybody froze on me in the middle of the century saying something but I think I kind of figure where we are right now. It needs to be totally clear I'm not at all suggesting we not provide opportunities for pickleballers. I like sports, I like every sport, there should be more sports. I'm just sounding a little bit of a warning about the about what happens when you take something away from one group to provide for truth. And I think that that was a very, very important perspective for me to hear in December when we had the meeting and I know yours was one of the voices that sort of said that you're echoing or adding to what you had said before about that. I thought you did a nice job of speaking for that's you as a commission did a nice job of speaking for pickleball but also making sure that we don't just run run tennis out of a position where they're where we say we're going to we're going to we will sacrifice tennis and a space. I wouldn't make the decision to do that if it was, you know, if there wasn't some weight placed on what we were losing in that in the first place. But I think I think that that was an important. That's an important voice for the tennis community there, and the people who historically views even if it's a smaller number there than it's been in the past, even if there are fewer people using that space for tennis and I don't know for sure that there are my sense of it my anecdotal what I get about the courts are that it used to have a lot more people on there, but that doesn't mean that that the few now are, are, you know, we need to sort of remove them because they're not, there aren't as many of them anymore. It's important that we do meet those concerns before we make that decision. And I heard the Commission saying that when Amy and I spoke about it and then spoke about it with the with town hall, I think it was clear that we had heard you speaking in that area. Thanks, right. I'm sorry to interrupt but just want to let folks know that I joined I got here about quarter after and I've been listening since I got on it was off video while I was eating but at the risk of, or I hate asking people to repeat but have we made the decision then that we would be for temper. Okay, so, so the temporary deployment of pickleball at Miller we're still up for debate. The temporary, it is still our temporary site we still have it lined, we are going to invest in bringing pickleball programming there, seeing what we need to do about about sharing space in the meantime, while we're looking for forever home, just how to manage the two of them in the same space for the, for that transitional period of time is that a short period of time is a long period of time. That is, that's what our attention is going to be beyond in the spring time. And so we're going to have nets out there that we can that we can share with the public in the spring time. We're going to, if we need to set aside time and manage times because there's an overlap that doesn't work for people as we get certainly into the summertime. Of course the end of the school year and when people when those two ecosystems collide. If we need to manage time and scheduling out there we can do that but wanted to see what the organic over overlay is on those courts. First, if there's, if they need management if there's, if there's a sense that either one needs more space or more time that we can try and get involved with that. The, but in terms of a final decision on where pickleball is going to be that is the, that's our next. That's the next progression in the conversation. Okay, I have a quick temporary thought then so we have how many nets to tune that so we set up. We don't have any out there right now. We don't have any pickle one that's it has been pickleball users who bring their own in the fall when we line the courts pickleball users, the lot of a lot of pickleball aficionados have have nets of their own portable nets they can come and prop up and use. There are two courts available though. Yeah, I guess my question is, as a temporary solution would you could you just take two courts from the high school instead of, or from the middle school instead of here just. It's been a while since I played tennis but I will say I always like going to Miller River because of the shade. It was just more pleasant to play in there than at the middle school which kind of sun is beating down on you. And if it's two courts. You know, you could either take out all of Miller River you can take out part of the middle school. You know, provided we could get access to middle school so so I guess that's another potential consideration at least. And maybe for the summer. That's such a, I think that's a great suggestion is such a great suggestion that I think, you know my first response was, why don't I think about about that. The, the, I think my, my response that would be because tennis camps here at the middle school. There is a, the tennis camps use all of those courts during the day. And then, and then, you know, you know, there's there. I think the overlap with with programming on the tennis courts at the heist at the middle school, are the reason why that wasn't our first thought for it. But I mean that still is a still is a fair conversation to be had. Thanks Tom. Okay. I think it's my responsibility to get us moving on because we're almost out of time in our agenda for this section. And other than that, well I see Sanjay has something else to say. Yes, yes. I'll do my best to be quick. But I would, I would strongly warn Ray again against using the middle school courts for pickleball. I think and again I'm not I haven't played tennis. I am not the no pickleball camp. I think there should be pickleball. They've done a great job advocating for themselves. I'm just trying to make us aware and your department was aware Ray of what you may face. One sort of technical issue with the middle school courts is that they were resurfaced with a grant from USTA five or six years ago, and I don't know any of the financial or contractual history of that. But there could be an issue. So the tennis I know what I know what happened. I don't know any of the ramifications of on on our use of it. Yeah. The other thing about that is also we spent money on lining the mill, the mill tennis courts with the temporary lines and that I mean that that did cost us labor hours paint and so it would, it would take again another project to move lines out there. If this looks like something that that is going to take a while, then at the very least, we can keep that in mind as a possible alternative to make sure that there's enough space if if there was a sense that tennis needed more space at mill. So we could look at that and try and phase back we could go back to the drawing board, if we choose one of those long term projects for the pickleball site to move off of either of those two sites then maybe the, what I hear Andy's question there. Right there is to maybe using that the middle school is not to say that that's going to be at all of forever home, but that if you if you want to try and, you know, limit the amount of tennis that you move and move away, then maybe putting it in a place where there's a lot there's a lot more tennis courts would make more sense, giving a couple of courts over there. I don't know how that I don't know how much we need to move off of the mill site right now I don't know if it's incompatible or anything like that. But I do know that that because those lines are down over there right now we're committed to making that work for temporary space. How should I transition Carolyn. I think, yeah I think if we can move on everyone else is satisfied then we can go on to youth empowerment and in the meantime I have to plug in my computer so if I look like I'm moving all over the place that's why youth empowerment is the space that is. I think there's it's, it's less concrete if it's if that's possible, it's less concrete right now than the pickleball details, youth empowerment youth empowerment Center is essentially. It is a conversation best way I can describe it is this is a conversation that has been restarted. I'm in, I'm in a conversation I personally wanted to kickstart this conversation again. It was about a month or two ago it's probably two months goes in January I believe, where we. Myself, a couple of town counselors sat down to say what do we need to do to get this, get the, the youth empowerment which has been a pet project I think of some of the town counselors, certainly of members of the community who also have been pushing for that large and integrated plan for the town for years. That also received our funding last year, and I want to, I want to sort of provide you with a general capsule of what this is, I don't know if it's if recreation is where it ends up I don't know if it ends up underneath our umbrella, I don't know if it's something that that I have a major role in it going forward, I may have a very small role in it going forward there places where their interests are adjacent to ours, but the youth empowerment Center grew out of the CSWG though the working group community safety working group that was established in the wake of the George Floyd, Minneapolis. And so the town of Amherst in looking at a number of different facets of how our town operates it's, it's, it's, you know, first responders how we, we ensure public safety and equity and public safety, looked at a lot of different things about community involvement and one of the places where they were they pushed hard for with the town with the town's involvement was in developing a youth empowerment Center division at the time was that there is going to be a sort of building with with programming in it that basically looks at BIPOC students in particular at cultural fluency at academic integrity and health that looks at programming that that that provides, you know, whole, whole mind whole brain development for students who sometimes get lost in in the systems that we have here one of those systems is mine so I understand why, why people would be concerned or worried when recreation was involved in the process of making that that youth empowerment Center work that there are systems in the town that have lost children lost lost members of the community to in the sort of in the shuffle. That would be recreation that would be the schools that would be in some ways are first responders that the people basically are are the relationship between members of the community in the town can be strengthened the youth empowerment Center was one. And to basically make it as brief as I can the youth empowerment Center is one of the most important tools towards answering those problems. So, inside of that vision of having a building with professionals that can speak that can do programming that helps to helps to counter some of the historical and and community community issues that that that that young people in the town can face without a place to do without it without things to get involved with, and without a connection to those programs that are trying to reach out to to them. The, the, the programs inside of that building. It's going to take a lot of money to build a building to create a building and to create space or to convert some space. It's going to take a lot of money it's going to take a lot of not that it's impossible, but we want instead of looking way down the road and looking at all those pieces we created myself and the counselors I spoke to wanted to try and talk about what we need to do to create some of the programs get some of the programming going while the town figures out what to do with that our money. We can come up with a picture of what that that programming looks like and, and, you know, trying to put together a working group I think where we are right now is the town is going to be building a a working group. I'm not in charge of that group, I may be a part of it. The town is going to be building, I think I'm a part of it, but the town may be building a working group that can work on the next stages of that youth empowerment center. There are some places they're adjacent to our interests. There are some places where recreational interests are definitely met here of having a drop in center about having recreational activities that are worthwhile for for equitable and are in our challenging and are inclusive and that they speak to the needs of the community as the community has already stated and will continue to state what the interests are. But I did want to just share with you that that pivot here to building that group will still be looking for rec recreation recreational involvement. I'm right now, and I share with Carolyn that I may be backing out. I'm trying to investigate how to move myself out of a director's role in it for a couple reasons number one because I don't want it to be seen by the community by the town by my staff as being this is a project that is necessarily going to take put youth empowerment under the recreational department. My involvement from the very beginning was to was to essentially say their wreck interest and I have I have personal and and professional interest in a project like this that are partially attached to my work here in recreation. There are pieces underneath underneath the umbrella of a youth empowerment center that are recreational, but there are also pieces that go beyond what we do. If it was done under recreation, I'd need a lot of resources a lot of staff, a lot of funding to be able to bring in people it may be social services it may be therapy and psychology it may be tutorial or or job training sort of things that involve others. I would have to make sure that I have the resources to make that work out of recreation and I don't know that that necessarily happens unless it's brought into a larger picture. I don't think I can just take it on and say hey now that we have it can I get a lot of money. And so, so one reason why I may be backing out of a directorial out of a, out of a guidance role in that is that the other reason is because we have a massive turnover in my department, which I have been responsible for doing a lot more than my job for last month, two months here, and I will be continuing to do that. And so now is not the best time for me to be spending spending my energy and resources in a direction that may not long term be a recreation department program recreation department benefit. I'd love to be involved. I'd love to stay involved, but I don't know that I'm going to be directing that they do need recreational involvement. And so I, I think that's the pitch that I need to make here. As I mentioned with Carolyn and getting involved with the pickleball group, which is a smaller scale version of what this youth empowerment center would be. And this is my, this is my encouragement to commission members to make themselves available. You can reach out to me into individually I can connect you with people, both in town hall and the community but I could, I could basically put you into a listening position that could become something bigger if you wanted to be put into a listening position and access for members of the community that I think need our support. And so this is my encouragement for, for members here to think about getting involved making themselves available for that push, which I think begins in earnest in March, April here. So let's just say someone, someone will get in touch with you if they're interested in being that connection between this commission and that group. Because, yeah, I guess, if to think about it, I think it does everyone know enough about it. Do you feel like to make a commitment of any kind or do you need to know more questions or comments. Okay. I will say like, I don't know a ton. I know what Ray shared in the last couple meetings. And then also I will just say that that if this is certainly March, April, May type of timeframe I'm, I don't have the time to vote. I am very familiar with your, with your work schedules and your commitments. I am, I am far from if anything to a fault.  I'm, I don't, I don't. Again, I appreciate Carolyn's being Carolyn's willingness as our chair to reach out to the pickleball group. Again, like I said that is a relatively speaking that's a small scale version of what we're talking about here. If youth empowerment has a has a potential to become much bigger, much broader than the, than the push for pickleball facilities, and it affects a larger cross section of the community. So that could be like our little microcosm of test case. I don't need somebody to get involved right now.  I would like to just keep you all informed on what that process is and what they're looking to do. There will be people who you've already like you've already put some put more thought into this than perhaps some people who will be involved in the process later on so it's not like it's not like you have to get in and steer the situation, but as far as recreational interests are here. I, I think it's important that that, you know, where there's an overlap between youth empowerment and recreation that recreation is heard. We also have two or three new commission members hopefully coming on board the next couple of months and, you know, maybe there'll be someone there that, especially with three years ahead of them is willing to get involved. Also, and that's that actually I could, I could introduce that right now because I don't think I have it on the agenda but we, I think we have the two open seats I'd share with you that Sarah Ewell as easy come easy go that Sarah Ewell did have to back out because she had a fantastic promotion at work and she sent her regrets. But that leaves us with two positions open, and those two positions, I believe might be confirmed tonight I'm hoping that they're confirmed tonight. And because I think we have to put those forward to the to the Council's vote to have them confirmed commission. But we'll be looking again when in the summertime when use of and Carolyn's terms are up we'll be looking again to fill commission roles. And so if you know people I now kind of have a better sense for for how to go out and recruit people in. But if you know people who might be interested in being involved we will be looking to try and fill spaces again, relatively so. Okay. So, that gets us on to the next one capital requests. And that's a really quick easy one where five minutes that's good. I can, I can basically summarize by saying that most of our requests this year, our departmental requests were essentially a, a updated van or van is in tough shape. And we also have an extension of signage we have a last year's request for town signage we're, we're connected to town hall Brianna son read has, and Dave Zomek have started a push to try and unify some of our, our recreation property signage. And so we'll be working, we'll be working on that that was part of last year's request but most of our requests this year were cherry hill related were related to operations at cherry hill. So, I think the most public serving public facing piece of that is the parking lot, which, you know, some of it is sort of getting into the. It's the equipment interests. The equipment that was basically got an 86 and had a 15 year lifespan and we're still working we're still operating with them. But in terms of the parking lot we are working on the solution it hasn't been finalized yet but we obviously we need to fix that parking lot for people who've been out there. Whether it's a sort of transitional fix for us here where we're going to be asking for more later on or whether we say look we're going to, we're going to try and do this right and and really, you know, if you want to spend money and really do it right here, then potentially save us money in the future that's where that's where capital is is trying to make a decision right now but we have capital requests are tied up in cherry hill right now. So, in terms of what they gave us we looked at some they're down the road but but cherry hill equipment and making sure we can continue to match problem, let our, our revenue drive our, our operations over there, match our match our costs with revenue and allow that to continue to be healthy, as I think it is. Questions, fair enough. We actually are going to have a, this is going to be a very short meeting for us is. Caroline may I move on to program updates is there any. And so, program updates. Originally this was put this is sort of a modification from our intended February piece. And, and some of it feels like it's a long time, a long time ago we got rid of winter fast yay winter fast I thought that was a really nice bit for us. Aquatics right now we are moving into our are basically a full calendar year with Amherst United and our, our, our swim program feeder program for the swim team. We are excited to have gone through a full year of programming there and we, we think that that's a program that we are very happy with and, and look forward to to to put together here for a long time. We are gearing up as most of what our looks are in the program updates this is like that falling out process we're right in the middle of Bambi here and it's like Twitter patient. We are, we're going to that seasonal change here and next you know the birds going to be singing in the grass going to be growing and it's going to be all of the, all the fun times the recreation goes through its little reemergence and the aquatics we already are looking at, at looking at pools and maintenance of pools we want to try and run our equipment early here this year and see if we can't make sure that we have no surprises but we are looking forward to having those open and operating on time, actively to get our, to get our, to get our camps running to get, we just had our budget meeting this past week and, and, you know, it's, it's clear in our revenue where that we're still hurt us last year. I think that this is a chance for us to again have a full year in the pools and, and, and see what that does in a full healthy year, not go would prime time vacation camp. This was put in for the, for February because we had February camp coming up. I think I'll leave it in here and just say that we are really excited to be offering vacation camp. But for April, for April break, we're already gearing and getting ready for that. That's always, you know, sort of a fun time for kids who are on vacation it's essentially childcare over the vacation week. You know, Grace Marchuk has some fantastic operational plans, ready for them on site and some, some bring bring outsiders to the camp doing some activities she has a staff of, of young folks, a lot of them are from prime time daily operations that are back with her but we're looking forward to the last big thing of the year once vacation camp is done then it's basically normal programming at prime time but the, the April vacation camp is coming up. AYBL just wrapped its, its AYBL is probably our biggest cultural event over the course of the winter it's our biggest sports event over the, over the winter time because of the number of people who were involved in because the number of people who participate that had their basketball, had their championships this past weekend, and now this next weekend they're doing their all stars and then, then the kids are basically transitioning full time into spring sports. And so that's, I think AYBL is sort of self fulfilling that they, the numbers are down from where it's been pre pandemic, but it, I think Jose has done a really nice job of getting them back to a, to a operational standpoint. And now spring offerings, we're very similar to last year we are looking at a few possibilities in here but we're very similar to what we did last year, we're working right now on trying to secure our summer sports camps. We have our second year with, with baseball, essentially sort of sort of working partially under our umbrella but certainly the work that Sanjay and Amherst baseball put into getting access for the middle schools and building a feeder program that will that that will help serve recreational interests of providing the high school with ready athletes people who are in terms of their skills in terms of their ready preparation, especially with the pandemic stuff to be prepared for the high school when they need them. We wanted to make sure that we have that opportunity and lacrosse is fully we have that all registered and ready to go we're still opening registrations for that as we speak. So, so really the spring offerings what we're working on getting fields line getting fields set up and prepared for them so that when they run out there in April that they are going to be, they'll be running out into space that is ready for them. But it is, I think it's an exciting time talk to Jose Jose Jose is and go mold right now. Sanjay. Yep, just a quick numerical update since this is a program that is sort of a hybrid between Amherst baseball and Amherst rec at this point. We have. It looks like right now we have 14 seventh and eighth graders from the middle school registered for the baseball program. Excellent. That's, that's great numbers. Yeah, it's great. And then another five or six, a couple of from the Chinese school and a couple of home schoolers as well who are interested in playing. You may have also heard just to stick the bats and balls for a minute that there's likely to be a junior varsity softball team at the schools this year with I think 21 is the latest number I heard in terms of girls interested in participating in softball. We just had somebody come in today and express interest in, in running a coaching youth softball and so we're going to investigate that a little bit and see if that's something that there is a market for here we're trying to make there's a little bit of a difference now with volleyball because volleyball is, which is, which has certainly been a house for a large number of people for us. We have instructor transition going on there that we're, they were trying to make sure that we, if there is a market there that we don't drop it because we just aren't prepared to make it, make it happen. But we have had, we have had some interest in running a wrestling club, which I'm fascinated by. I think I think that would be not just interest in running it but a lot of sort of grassroots interest and participating in it. And so we may try and investigate how to make that operate here. Get that going in a, in a, in a trial sort of season. If rate, just to follow quick, if you, if so, I, I call us Amherst baseball a lot, we're also Hadley Amherst softball. So we offer softball programs from ages five to 12, which is pre middle school. So if someone contacts you about wanting to get involved with you softball, we have, we have an existing program in town and I'd be happy to be their contact point for getting involved. But that is perfect. That is Sanjay trying to, trying to get involved with another one of those small cases I see you getting involved like that's, that's commission getting involved. Youth empowerment is big. This one is another one of those nibbles at the side here, if I can, if I have people who are interested in trying to get involved with an existing program or running a program for wreck, I will make sure I we don't have the infrastructure for wreck built in right now. And so, I probably would have been reaching out to you Sanjay anyways to find out how to make that happen.  Yes. I'll take your court expo. Yes, of course. So, I mean, our roster is pretty the schedule events is pretty consistent here I think that's, you know, it's not old bag yet. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not in just cruise control yet, but you're having some familiarity with last spring is helping me feel like this is a little bit more normal than maybe I went into it last year. Comments, concerns, feedback. I just have a question about cherry hill I know it's going to be opening pretty soon. We just kind of let it kind of do its own and see what happens again, or do we have anything placed for trying to make more things come out of that. We tried a couple things late I think that. First of all, the, the schedule for us, I spoke to John Quello today. And it looks like we for a while we were really hoping for an early open, we're look we're open we're hoping to be able to get out. What we didn't close early last year was to make sure that our extra help budget would would sustain it if we wanted to open early we usually have more people are interested in starting as soon as it gets nice out and we have when daylight savings time hits in November and everybody's sort of miserable and just trying to move to the next thing. And so we, we sacrificed a week at the end of last season to hopefully open up early this year that it looks we were targeting the April 1 start. Our target was to try and open at the beginning of April and then we had got hit by three storms in March. And our fear was that that wasn't going to happen. It looks like it may be our target is to be open that second week of April, which just means we get a bunch of time to open up here so our calendar is not that far off we aren't that set behind as you can see the New England complains about snow but then it comes hard and it melts almost immediately. In terms of our tinkering around and trying to make some things happen. Yes, there are some things I know I've already started to talk to about putting in the works there. We tried a couple things last year that were that were, you know, towards the end of the season like a family day. The, the women's league was a huge success for us last year and we're introducing a men's league we are we are starting men's league for members this year. And we're, we're hoping that we can ride some of the interest and things like that into some success. We started to talk about. I talked about, again, transform the clubhouse. We're going to take a look and see what, what the cost was of having a moderate, moderate energy over the course of the wintertime being used up there and see if we can't. Jose and I have been, have been working on trying to find programming for that that would be available to to monetize the cherry hill in the off season but then also to try and invite brings an invitation in for the, for the season here, but especially for our off season planning when, when, when we want to try and try and keep that space available to the public. Right now we don't see it being a community center of course we don't see it as being a place where people are going to go and hang out. If there's not something that's drawing them to specifically, but we are looking at the possibilities of reintroducing food reintroducing some sort of sort of draws and gifts and some, some, you know, prize raffles trying to do some do some attractions to bring people into the, into the space. You're talking about off season or during the season during the season. Okay, but we there. Go ahead. Okay, is there any thought about maybe getting a group of people involved because obviously, you guys only have so many people there. And you can't go off course. I mean, like, normally a golf course you have a golf professional, you know, they have people running a golf course and that's all they do and obviously we don't have a luxury in town so, you know, maybe something get some volunteers to help at least the brainstorming and some programming and things like that. It is what we ended last season, looking at ways to involve I spoke to the male district in particular, but they're too proud, their interest in cross promotion, then also their interest in helping us transform the clubhouse, and being involved in cross promotion for our for our departmental interest but then also being a part of as you're describing being a part of a, you know, sort of community panel of people that can look at at, you know, redressing at, at tidying up at, at making services out of the clubhouse so. I am giving myself a note to, to restart that conversation here also and see where we are. Okay. Ready to move on right all set. I am everybody else. Okay. How many even about five minutes so. Yeah, I, the only thing I know we have to talk about still if there's no other new business or comments is next meeting and Ray and I were talking about just asking you guys if an in person meeting would be preferable or if a hybrid form would be preferable if you just like the zoom and we keep it this way. So, I don't know, let's, I guess, start with that question and then find a date if that's possible. Is anybody with anyone prefer an in person meeting. I'm not sure, necessarily the next one but you know the zoom is super convenient but it also would be great to have at least one more and get to meet somebody folks face to face who I haven't met in person yet. I feel the same way and also, you know, it might give us a chance to meet at some of the sites like, you know, for talking about pickleball we can go to one of the pickleball sites and talk about that know exactly what we're looking at so. Okay, so we'll, you're right you're really busy right now so if, you know, anybody else has a strong feeling one way or the other. Let's talk about it otherwise continue with zoom I guess, Matt. Yeah, I find the zoom is convenient for these evening meetings that we have to squeeze around other things. I'm open to doing like a field trip if we could coordinate a time. Okay. Keep that in mind when we're planning the agenda I guess for the next meeting or two and hopefully before the time before you step and I are gone, we can meet you guys. Nice to know you in person for a minute anyway. So, okay. And how about meeting for next what is this March for April, first to second week of April, second and third week maybe we're up to now. April third shows up on the calendar. If we go by regular. Your attempt was to get a little. That's soon right. Especially, especially for the three matt Sanjay and Andy. Well, especially for those three but for all of us. The question is also do we want to stick with Mondays. It sounds like Mondays work for us. I want to make sure if they're three people who are going to be with us beyond July. If that wasn't good for those three people, then that would be, that would be a, I could certainly look at changing that but I like Mondays. The issue of course is, I sent you the, the, the notification, the town council has a, what is it a liaison liaison from the town council. Pat was Pat was expressed regrets that she couldn't make this one we scheduled on a Monday that they have a town council meeting. They don't meet every Monday, obviously, and I don't know if they meet on that, on that date, we don't have to schedule it so that we avoid town council meetings. I think that might be, it might be good for us to try and make sure that our liaison is not is not prohibited from attending our meetings all the time. So you don't know when that is do you want to wait and find out or should we pick a date and check with her can pick a date and check with her I think if if April 3 works for us I say we go April 3. That's two weeks. Wait. I won't have anything new for you in two weeks. You want to try the end of the. Where are we right now. Let's try like the third week in April and then maybe to avoid conflict we could move it a week, one way or the other. That sound good. Well, April 17 is during the school break I don't know that affects anyone. April 17 is the holiday. So we should skip to the next to Monday. If that's the Monday of the break week, then that's Patriots Day. Yeah. 24 24. How's that work for people. It works. Works for me. Okay. We can talk about the fourth and. Yep. If, if there are any, if there are any conflicts that come up, feel free to reach out to Carolyn or myself. I could send you all the emails I think they're available on our website I. I conveniently block you all from the emails on the BCC, but if you all need particularly Carolyn's email address, I can send you email addresses for each other. If necessary, just so you have contacts, but if you need to change, if you need to, if you have a conflict that comes up, you can certainly reach out to myself and or Carolyn. That reminds me there was one more thing Andy that was brought up at the beginning about the minutes. Did you get my email today? Yeah, I did. I haven't had a chance to look at anything, but I got an email. That's fine. Ray, I got an email from you as well. There's one more. There was one more comment about something that I didn't see. Okay. Now I'm blocking out on what it was wants to refresh us. Yeah, so it looked like you'd left some paragraphs in there from a CPA minutes. Okay. Near the top. There was something to do with a December minutes approval, and I think that was the CPA and then above that I think there was a section about Amy Rusecki being present and I think that was also from the CPA meeting. She, she was actually present at that meeting. She was. Okay. Yeah, she. She she called. It's just just just the minutes then. Okay, I will make that change and as well, Carolyn and Rand, looking at your emails and I'll just email it back to you or. Okay. Do we have to approve it somehow or would we approve it next time or was it just go get posted? If you, if you can, if you both can identify any other changes, we can approve it with the changes. If we can do it this way. Andy, if you send me the, the edited minutes, I can share that with everybody and ask for a for a, I believe that's, that's okay. I can ask for everybody to, to accept the minutes. If you send them to me tomorrow, I can, I can get everybody to confirm them over email. Okay. Works. All right. And then we'll watch the minutes from tonight before the next meeting. Sounds good. Okay. Thank you, Ray. Thank you. Thank you for stepping into the chair. True thing. See you next time. See you next time. Bye bye. Bye.


Good morning, and I'd like to welcome members to the 14th meeting in 2018 of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee. We have apologies this morning from David Torrance. Agenda item 1 is for the committee to agree that its consideration of its work programme should be taken in private at a future meeting. Do members agree to take the item in private? Thank you very much. Our second item today is for the committee to consider an application for the recognition from the proposed cross-party group on social enterprise. I'd like to welcome Ben Macpherson MSP to the meeting. Ben is the convener of the proposed group, and Ben would like to invite you to make an opening statement about the purpose of the group. Thank you very much, convener. Very good morning, colleagues, and thanks for your time this morning. I was approached by Social Enterprise Scotland a while ago to consider reconvening this proposed cross-party group on social enterprise. I understand and know from colleagues who were here during the last session of Parliament that this was a very successful cross-party group, a very well-attended cross-party group. Simply was not reconvened at the beginning of this session because those who headed it up were no longer members of the Scottish Parliament after the election. As a constituency MSP for Edinburgh Northern Leith, I work a lot with social enterprises in my constituency. There are a lot of very successful social enterprises operating out of my constituency, so I believe that is why I was approached to set this up. Of course, working with Social Enterprise Scotland, I then reached out to colleagues and now have a diversity of colleagues, both as vice conveners and members of the cross-party group. Social enterprises, otherwise known as not-for-profit organisations, trade for the common goods, strengthen our communities, work to improve people's life chances and help to protect the environment. Empower communities and tackle social problems are known for their high-quality goods and services, which reduce inequality, lift people out of poverty and create jobs, particularly for people who are at a disadvantage in the standard jobs market. There is definitely a trend in our society at the moment towards greater numbers of social enterprises and greater numbers of people in business and whether social conscience is starting those enterprises. Furthermore, consumers are increasingly seeking out socially responsible products that are helping to drive that growth. The social enterprise movement, of course, is connected to the fairer Scotland agenda, inclusive growth agenda, the real living wage movement and the Scottish business pledge, all of which are important to all parties in this Parliament. Currently, social enterprises contribute £2 billion to our economy each year and employ 80,000 people. That was the last census that was done in 2017. There are 5,600 social enterprises that were identified during that census, and 35 per cent of those were located in rural areas. It is important to emphasise the point that social enterprises are not just operating out of urban Scotland but play a key part in rural Scotland and the rural economy. Importantly, 64 per cent of Scotland's social enterprises are led by women, so it is absolutely a key sector in terms of making sure that we have an inclusive economy as possible and that driving social enterprise growth is very much led by women. There is a lot more that I could say, but I am sure that you have questions about the strength of the social enterprise movement and why it is important that it has this voice here in Parliament. In the submission to the committee and to the Parliament, it detailed what the CPG's purpose is. To re-emphasise, it is to help to give social enterprises that strong, united voice here in the Parliament in the centre of Scottish decision making in order to influence policy making. Both with the Government but also to raise awareness among all MSPs, the public and the media, to demonstrate the wide-ranging social impacts of social enterprises and their contribution to the economy and to tell the inspiring stories about the human and environmental and social impact of social enterprises. Importantly, the purpose of the cross-party group would be to make sure that it has real purpose in promoting the growth and success of social enterprises in communities, the role in delivering services or helping to deliver and design public services and also to help boost even further the private sector use of social enterprise models. In establishing the CPG, there is a determination to assist the sector that is growing and the benefits that it has to all communities of Scotland, but also to work with other CPGs that are related to the social enterprise movement or would benefit from collaboration as well on their number that I have identified in the form and thereafter. I hope that that gives us an obsess of the ambition, the purpose and the need and rationale behind why I think that this would be a purposeful and positive CPG to re-establish here in the Scottish Parliament. Thank you very much, Ben. Do any of the committee have a question? Ben, we are now two years into Parliament. Why has it taken two years to re-establish something that you say is so successful? That is a good question, Tom. I was approached last year about re-establishing this group, so I do not know whether there were efforts by Social Enterprise Scotland in the year before to identify other MSPs to take it forward. However, I was at the AGM of Social Enterprise Scotland yesterday and I can assure you that there is strong ambition in the sector to re-establish this group and to have it here in the Parliament and a recognition of what it gave to the sector in the previous session and an ambition to re-establish that. Some of the time that was taken as well was to make sure that there were MSPs from across parties that were engaged in this. If the group was approved by the committee, I would also be seeking to recruit more MSPs to the group, but the five MSPs that are currently signed up represent a good spread of not just political parties but the different aspects of our society in terms of rural and urban representation and different backgrounds and interests in the economy and innovation. If I can follow on, what do you say to the comment that it might be that Social Enterprise is a general heading? Is it actually too wide to be effective in the end? One of the challenges around social business in general is that in the UK it is just no less from being a commercial solicitor before being elected. In terms of establishing social business models, we are in a period where that is something that is quite new to a lot of entrepreneurs. There is the new model of a community interest company that was established by the UK Government a number of years ago, and that is gaining some traction. The breadth of the social enterprise term and the inclusive nature of it is about how we generally utilise private business activity for the common good. In our economy and in company law, there is no single way of doing that at the moment. Yes, we have community interest companies, but most of those operating in the social enterprise sector at the moment are private limited companies. For example, it is important that they are included and acknowledged as being key to the inclusive growth agenda that this Parliament is supportive of and absolutely behind in my experience. I know that there is a co-operative CPG, and that is very specific. There is a credit union CPG, and co-operatism CPG and credit unions are many of which are social enterprises. However, without a social enterprise CPG, we are not able to encapsulate that wider private sector ambition and growth that there is in our economy and give them that voice and that ability to influence Government and to raise more awareness about what they are doing and to increase the acceleration and momentum that there is in the sector at the moment. Take social bite, which many of you will be aware of. That is a social business established by limited by guarantee. I know that it is not one of the members at the moment, but there is a possibility that it could be. I am using it as an example because it is well known. If there did not have a CPG on social enterprise, then there is no place for that in terms of the CPGs that we have here in the Scottish Parliament at the moment. It was just a very quick one. I see that there are some organisations there that cover the highlands and highlands and islands, but I am sure that you will appreciate their difficulties for particularly organisations on the islands to travel down. I was just wondering how you may be looking to encourage social enterprises and those interested in them based in Scotland's islands to attend to be involved and how you might facilitate that. That is a really important question. In the census, it notes that the highlands and islands are very significant in terms of the density of social enterprises located there. 21 per cent of Scotland's social enterprises are located in the highlands and islands, out of only 9 per cent of the population. It is cognisant of that. The membership base in terms of the initial members of the CPG that Social Enterprise Scotland has put forward includes Newstart Highland and others who are in the highlands and islands. We would need to be cognisant of how we would utilise technology, for example, in order to make sure that, if those in the highlands and islands were not able to attend in person, they were absolutely able to be part of the cross-party group, including through video conferencing, for example. It would be worth contacting to look at ways in which they could be involved, should the group get the go-ahead. I would make sure that the secretary made that clear and reached out to as many social enterprises in the highlands and islands as possible, particularly given the figure that I just gave about how popular a model is and how many social enterprises operate in the highlands and islands. I was just interested in the fact that you were saying that there is a bit of a crossover with co-operative cross-party groups and credit unions. I think that you also said maybe housing and social enterprises. It was more a practical question because you talked about perhaps doing joint meetings, which would obviously make some sense. You also said that the previous CPG was extremely successful with large numbers of attendees around 50 to 80 at meetings. That seems quite large to manage. Also, if you were then hoping to have joint meetings, just in terms of the practicalities of that, do you think that you would maybe have to limit your numbers? I appreciated that I was not here during the last establishment of CPG. It is a really good question around how we make sure that the membership is representative of the social enterprise movement and those with an interest in growing the sector, but also make sure that the numbers at meetings do not become unwieldily and impractical. I know that Social Enterprise Scotland has not been cognisant of that in the specific social enterprises that they have included in the membership so far. In terms of collaboration, I am certainly keen to think about how the CPG would collaborate. I sit on housing and credit union CPGs already. Given the momentum behind the inclusive growth agenda and how important that is to all of Scotland and how we develop our economy, is there an opportunity to bring those cross-party groups that are operating in that area together at some point during this session to have a joint meeting on inclusive growth and what we are all doing to advance that and what we can do together to affect policy change and make that representation to the Government? I appreciate that the committee rooms in this Parliament probably are not big enough for that, so we need to look at how, practically, that would be doable, but perhaps it would be a matter of delegation from each CPG and how we do that forward. If I may convener, I wonder if you were going to have to book the chamber. It raises another issue, which is more general, around the fact that CPGs are supposed to be around informing members, and they are not public meetings. Sometimes, the lines get a little bit blurred around that with some CPGs, so would you be quite clear what the remit of yours would be? Absolutely, to make sure that it is not just a good way of social enterprise Scotland getting people together for a discussion. To me, one of the aspects that I am very clear about in my own CPG membership of current CPGs and the establishment of this one is to make sure that it is very solution focused around how we inform members and then use meetings as a mechanism to make sure that we are relaying messages to Government, looking to effect policy, looking to reach out to private sector, if appropriate, in this case. Thank you very much, Ben, for coming along today. The committee will consider whether to approve the application for recognition at agenda item 3, and you will be informed of the decision. Thank you very much for all of your time and your questions. We will now move to agenda item 3, which is where the committee will consider whether to accord recognition to the proposed cross-party group on social enterprise. Do the members have any comments? Are we content to approve the cross-party group now? Thank you very much. The committee will now move into private session to consider agenda item 4. Once that consideration is complete, the committee will move back into public session.


Okay welcome everybody so we are pleased to have you here so our talk is called CIP install sustainable software stacks and long-living products CIP stands for civil infrastructure platform and in this talk you will learn what this is what purpose of this is who's contributing how you can contribute and first of all let us introduce ourselves so maybe Yoshi to start hi I'm Yoshi from Toshiba and also CIP and I'm working at CIP as a technical steering committee chair to discussing our more technical directions about that. Thank you for coming. Thanks Yoshi we are doing this talk together so I'm worst line with Siemens and we are just about to get started now so civil infrastructure and industry trends so what is coming and what is upcoming and so price it's a lot about Internet of Things IoT and you all see or we all see around us a lot of devices get connected like cars for example not just uploading data but also uploading or exchanging information with servers in order to enable new business models and like like car sharing apps and things like that but also in industry in the city area there are a lot of systems which get connected at the moment to enable also yeah just gathering data to do predictive maintenance to do better quality inspection optimizations regarding production and so on and the same is true for for smart cities so there are a lot of hidden systems in the city which get connected to gather data about power consumption and even and traffic flow and more and more connected to each other and data is matched energy function weather forecasts and everything and but the special thing compared to maybe these typical devices we all know is that there are still these old systems behind ensuring the normal operation of the whole infrastructure like controlling the trains on the rails like also smaller systems like ticket gates all the hundreds of system managing power grids for example or in the power plants controlling turbines and similar devices and many more so a building automation is controlling light fire safety products that is all this telecommunication equipment which which helps us to also do these broadcasts here which is is running in the background and we highly rely on the systems not the health care and I already mentioned it also the industry so this is a smaller domain on affecting every body but there are a lot of automation systems helping to run the production and at the precision we needed and the efficiency we need it and when talking about IOT the question is what's so special about all the systems and why does it need why do we have the need for a project created in this area so if you look at classical conzi my IT devices so it looks basically like this you have light bulbs or other devices TVs connected to a central server and if you look if you compare this to systems installed in infrastructure systems and industry yeah you see this immediately it's much more complicated there are more systems involved interacting with each other and we have what we call these industrial grade requirements like robust 24-7 operation and even operation if certain things do not work like the the connection to the cloud for example so if you use your smartphone or it does not it matters too much so it's maybe annoying but it does not affect anybody else in the in quite a case what we have is we really have to ensure that all these systems are mentioned are constantly working and also another topic is the bottom line guarantee latency throughput and report responsiveness that's because of these systems are interacting with the physical world so you really are interacting with physical processes with real traffic and so on so we really have to guarantee times here we are talking about real-time systems and this in total is what we call industrial grade systems in addition to this one other speciality if you want the system is that they live quite long so if you look at some control systems they look somehow like what you see on that slide so they are really old and that also means the systems we built today will stay there for a while and we somehow have to ensure that the system can work such such a long time and all this together we are living in a connected world that opens up much more possibilities of cyber attacks so security is also the big question how to ensure this and we really have a lot of devices and at the moment we have a lot of devices which are have different we had to have different computer or software architectures in okay let's go to the next slide so this summarizes basically what are the challenges so we talked about industrial grade systems we are reliability some times functional safety and real-time capabilities and then we have to build sustainable software stacks so systems are living for for decades not for years we have to ensure backwards compatibility and I am just getting the message that the audio is quite bad so maybe we will try to switch to the phone just a second oh sorry this is talking the audio is not working well so we need to switch from PC to phone so please wait a moment sorry about that so it should be better now can you hear me yeah I can hear you thank you very much for waiting okay so this slide summarizes what I was talking about so our systems which are part of civil infrastructure which are part of industry have to be industrial grades in the sense that they have to be reliable sometimes we have functional safety requirements they very often need to fulfill real-time capabilities the systems live for a long time like decades not years we have a need a strategy how to exchange things so the backwards compatibility and security wise yes we have also to consider how do we ensure security over the years that means security vulnerability management this means we need a robust software update concept and of course behind that we have to ensure that there are no regressions in the system and how do we solve these challenges so systems become more complex and one thing is that a development which we see on this slide which is true for for the whole IT world that we build more and more and so-called on so-called commodity components which are open source mostly and that's proprietary differentiating part gets percentage wise smaller and smaller in those systems and that's why we also said why don't we also team up for these domains so for people who build systems which which have a long lifetime and have these industrial requirements and then start to start to to develop a strategy on this and not only a strategy but also really developing software we'll come to this so one part of this is that at the moment we noticed or a couple of years ago we noticed that we even in these big companies like Toshiba itachi Siemens and and others we have a lot of different software stacks around which all have to be maintained and so there was a strong demand for a harmonization to agree on starting with the Linux kernel to to agree on the same kernel to agree on the same packages used the same sources the same infrastructure and so forth that's why we created this project just called civil infrastructure platform and this basically consists of parts which are the foundation for industrial Linux distribution so and since we started small and had a few partners we started with the kernel which was the most pressing demand at that time and said okay let's team up for the kernel and extend the existing long term support initiatives up to 10 years maybe more but that's something we we thought we could commit on and then and this is happening now extend this by the packages which everybody needs so for very small systems where you can be pretty sure that this is in and so we are continuously extending the extending the story so how does this use then in the company so we take the lower parts out of these project out of the civil infrastructure and then we have a layered approach and put domain specific extensions on on top most of them are then coming from from yeah from the Debian releases in this case so they are not part in the upper areas of the CRP project so the maintenance and the development of these packages is then in the responsibility of the respective units of the companies but at least we have a common base and we are continuously extending this and yeah the next slide basically shows the same so we of course use what is there in terms of long term support so the Debian long term support and extended long term support programs and this together then results in a sustainable maintainable way of base for distributions and a lot of people were asking us why are you doing this why I'm not just jumping to the next to the latest kernel version the reason is that there are a lot of restrictions behind their certification for example and switching the operating system so switching the kernel and packages above to a newer version would mean insist these systems running the complete test process up to the system test doing the certification again and this is really a lot of work which is which we try to avoid so in many cases it's easier to backport security patches for example it's less work and if we share this work like we do in this program it's it's even less compared to doing this alone so the setup of the project is the setup of the project is like this so how does this work we have several companies so this is renaissance Siemens Toshiba code think sabbatras to touchy moxa and play at home at the moment who teamed up and these companies provide two things basically so this is their own people this is developers and maintainers on one side and this is budget on on the other side and there's an error between budget and developers this should mean that we can extend our team of developers and maintainers by using some of the budget to hire additional people from the kernel community or from different projects or just people who are good at what they are doing and so we have a common budget we do a cost sharing on the things which we want to drive this is developers and there's an error down this means we are also funding projects which are important for us like if we have requirements which we wanted to place in debian packages or in we want to push also some real-time Linux efforts we are also funding certain tasks in these respective projects and the policy or the strategy here always is we don't want to create something on our own so the policy is upstream first so we are always working together with the upstream projects we are using whatever is there and we are trying to push back all the changes we need to the upstream projects so with this I would like then to switch over to Yoshio goes a little bit into the detail of the actual work of the project and the progress of the last year all right thank you very much to us so from now on I directly talking about the current latest status update for CIP projects so CIP is around to solve our key issues since we like the stable Linux and also reliable Linux and so on so we currently have a lot of issues as you can see in this slide there are a lot of books but some of them is only allowed so we currently focusing on the six activities and this first one is a super long term support then we expand our CIPD to real-time and so on so the reason why we expand our CIPD step-by-step is we prioritize for the topics from the request of our customer requirements and also our actual requirements for CIP infrastructure so this is a CIP governing structure and project marking so each project focusing on scopes for CIP kind of work zones so every CIP activities it is on to ensure industrial grade for CIP infrastructure and systems and some of them are focusing on the sustainability for example CIP core and things there's a lot on the CIP card and CIP core itself to expect its stability for the systems so this kind of works on the from our technology and also each working groups working on the specific topics to ensure it goes so as I said we have some absolute policy so CIP you can see in CIP project they also have many projects already running so there are goals for example CIP needs to real-time future to use Linux in the industrial controlling systems but a real-time projects already exist so that means real-time Linux project is upstream for us CIP try to contribute this kind of upstream project first to involve its goals and then I use the upstream core results in the CIP platform project to manipulate and to configure for our use case and that is the result of CIP open source space area so in the left side corner there are many contributed projects by CIP we also have other interest projects like software data, real-time hypervisor something like that so this kind of innovative project currently considering to use CIP members for the future candidate in the CIP base layer so this is a structure how we work with upstream communities and also to create open source base layer so this is the most important for us to create our open source base layer for industrial systems so let me describe more details for the each working groups from now so this side so CIP is super long-term support current development so we have CIP current team in the CIP project and the project is metering by Ben Hatching he is also working on deviant current maintainers and those kind of works for the stable relationships so he meters our maintenance of Hiro and Abel so to us the stable community because our maintenance is experienced current developer but we also try to have more experience from experienced stable maintenance so that's why we have this structure and maintenance and under the maintenance we have a couple of developers to maintain and to review the CIP corner and purchase so we work with upstream corner so our upstream is mainline also stable release so currently there are six stable releases when you see the current of all sites and we picked up two current versions for super long-term support so first one is version 4.19 we currently maintain the latest versions and 4.4 is our first CIP super long-term support current so to create CIP long-term support channel we first pick up the LTS channel then we start work with long-term stable teams so that means we also review the parties and also of course the review result to the stable maintenance so this is how we work together with stable current team and the next slide so also currently related topics. LTS channel development is also currently ongoing but unfortunately LTS is not mainline yet so we address the activities to mainline our main LTS channel because currently LTS current patch is separated with mainline current that means if we want to use stable current in the future we need to create stable T-colon so that makes twice which means we need to maintain stable current and stable T-colon so when this LTS channel is masked we also address and contribute to the stable stable project so that makes much easier for not just only LTS channel users but also our use cases so this is why we address and contribute to the LTS channel project and after we joined the LTS projects there are a lot of progress so we are looking forward to mainline LTS current purchase so this is a current version of project 3 URL so our first project is 4.4 and that is released on 2017 November 2017 January so this is our very first release and it's about three years and the project is 10 years and we are releasing so yeah so that is our plan for the color maintenance and the next one is 4.19 that was released one year and a half years ago and project 3 URL is 229 so maybe some thing is also direct to know what is the next current version so we currently running to test because next current versions because our expected to the current units is nearly two to three years so that means we will decide for the next one so this is the CEP's current development statistics so in total CEP 4.4 current is released four to five times and the current is released nine to ten times so we currently release almost periodically but after a few years later we changed the release video because it's stability from the current so that is what we are doing and the next one shows the CEP 4.4 CEP 4.4 is mostly focusing on the user-level programs and our goal for CEP 4.4 is to provide a reference implementation with CEP 4.4 package and currently we have two suppliers, one for tiny and that we use for small IoT devices and controlling devices and the other one for them that is for much richer environment something like IoT catering and currently both implementation is available on the website you can find both CEP 4.4 and CEP 4.0 so we are using Debian to create a CEP 4.4 this area that is why we start finding for the Debian HD's project to make more stable this area. Then I pick up some of the Debian packages from the Debian projects on the road so Debian HD's project to create our base layer. So this structure is currently we are working on and for the testing is to provide a test environment to test the CEP higher and CEP core packages. So currently we will test the distributed testing environment on AWS, VLava and RCI and this is the kind of structure for the CEP system. So we have two profiles for CEP 4.4 and CEP 4.4 to create the root file systems by using CEP kernel and also Debian partition. And when we create each proper root file system we run on the VLava environment on CEP different hardware. So that is controlled by VLava and AWS and the results are also going to show CEP project. So currently we use RLava and CEP project and we also contribute to CEP project to improve their activities. So to make them more stable is our built layer. So in CEP testing we currently have six, seven different supports and one different support candidate on that. So each different support is a CEP test kernel but some of the supports only support the latest CEP test kernel. That's because the older kernel doesn't support newer hardware. So we currently plan to increase our different supports to make more stable and also more useful kernel. So that's different supports are decided by a CEP developer standing committee. So if you would like to increase more different supports, please talk with us. So this is the kind of a way to involve this project. And the fifth one is security working groups. So security is one of the most important topics nowadays because in IoT devices many of devices connected to network to provide their functionalities which means also that kind of devices with some security risks. So in security working group goals, at the beginning we tried to provide guidelines and different implementations to ensure the standard deployment. So currently we're focusing on the IEC 2.6443 standard. And in our team case, you can see the nice side box and also yellow blue boxes. So we just implemented test cases to ensure this standard and also we directly provide guidelines and evidence for that. And current status is already completely taken in the case of IEC 2.6443 as this requirement. And current status is when you would like to have a gap assessment with cyber certification body because a certification body satisfy CRT base area to ensure other cyber standards. So without certification body assessment, we can't see anything. This is almost certified or not. So we just started the cyber certification assessment with a certification body. So that is very interesting. And we look forward for this result. And the last one is a software update. So our goal is for the software update is to incorporate common solutions for software updates going to CRT core. So nowadays many devices connected to the network and we have to manage all of them. And we use specific solutions but we try to create more direct solutions for other use cases. So currently we use a cyber update for the base updating systems. And the data updating system is currently controlling the whole system. So we use that with our current state to create alternative limitations by using both systems. And this is the safe update of our view. So this is a bit complicated but this is our latest result. So I mean, you use this result. You can make sure that the system image is exactly the same as we expected. And also that is security loaded and also installed. So this is an important feature for industry use cases. So all implementation is available on the website. You can also find our data update in CRT infrastructure wiki. And currently we implemented expensive implementations but this is still kind of perfect for the data. So our future plan is we just require it's code for more stable and flexible implementations. So let me summarize our activities. So we currently have 6 activities from Khan and Maitreya and software updates. So our activities are dedicated to ensure the secret of open source space area. So also collaboration is a most important aspect to rearrange our open source space area. So thank you very much. Let me change tools for concluding this talk. No, I needed to unmute. Yes. So as we said, I think we motivated why so-called open source space layer how we call it for industrial great software is really needed. And I think we are doing this the right way. So there are several big companies which teamed up and create this. So it's big companies, all of them have in common somehow to have products which are long-living, which are living in industry environments, which are living in city and traffic and so on requirements. And also with Renes, we have a semiconductor on board and they are providing their boards with CIP support out of the box. And we saw this in the test set up. On your slide, we have four test labs running up and running, ensuring that there's no regression. And I think the way to success is here to not build new things. To team also up with the other open source projects to work upstream. And it also helps to harmonize the tool change and to also work on this to improve the tool change, to build Linux-based embedded systems and to ensure the quality of the releases at the end. So that's basically the main conclusion. Again, we have a slide showing all the companies who are at the moment actually contributing and we of course hope to get others on board. So be it from the industry space, from the infrastructure space or from the semiconductor area and I think this will get more important in the future and especially also in times like this we see how important this infrastructure is for us and that's important to have a sustainable not only hardware but also software stack supporting this. You'll see on that slide. We'll upload the slides by the way to Sked Arc. This was one of the questions and they will find all the links. So feel free to join the mailing list. So it's an open source project. So everyone can contribute or just read it. And of course there's the website and the Linux Foundation entry pages and Yoshi already mentioned the Wiki which is also open to everybody. And last but not least, of course there are Git repositories which we will try to. That's it. I think we have a couple of minutes left for questions. So feel free to ask questions. Maybe use the questions panel. There are some questions already. So maybe we start with the first one which I found. One question is there a dedicated CIP layer available for your tool? Maybe Yoshi, this goes in your direction. So we currently use YOKUTO as tools. So we currently use Bitfake as tools from YOKUTO. But we currently use Debian source code. So we don't use actually YOKUTO source code. The reason why is at the beginning of our project, there are no features for the long term support in the YOKUTO project. So that is why. And also Debian has more than five years maintenance period. So this is why we choose Debian source code. This is Bitfake. That is the answer for these questions. So the answer is not there. Partly yes, but I'm not exactly using YOKUTO itself. Yeah, the thing is the commitment about the releases and the support. And for us, YOKUTO is at the moment not committed to have a release plan. So it's done in some cases and some cases not. And so it's, we are conservative and we need a long term plan. And so Debian is as far as the base, which allows us to build the systems. Okay, then there's the questions on verified and secure boot. What actually is the plan there? I'm not sure what it's meant. Yeah, the question is that it should be done more basically. And maybe we could also refer to the security working group. They're actually discussing what to include into CIP and whatnot. Regarding the actual question regarding the verify and so on. Yoshi, can you answer this? So security boots is one of the important features as well. That's the use cases. But currently we are not good parts. So this is the kind of our future plan. I think that's all for the moment. If there's still some questions open, just feel free to contact us. You have the contact information and the slides. There's the mailing list, which is always a good place to place questions. Maybe it's also interesting for others. And with this, I think. Yes, questions. I can find the other questions. The last question is. Something related to the CIP. How do we use CIP? And how difficult do we use CIP? It's their project. Sorry, I missed that one. Maybe it's just deleted. So let me answer these questions. How do we use a CIP colonel to migrate CIP colonel to CIP colonel? I really expect that to be here. Just move from the CIP colonel to the SPS colonel, to other vendor colonels. Because we try to mix between the CIP colonel and server colonel. Okay, I think that would have been all questions. So thank you again for attending. And I think we have pretty much in time. We have like three minutes left. So I think it's okay to say goodbye and hopefully see you on the mailing list or hopefully also pretty soon on a physical event. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.


Your Excellency, Mr. Chairman, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union, Excellencies, Distinguished delegates, the ICT industry, ladies and gentlemen, Good morning and talofa lava from beautiful Samoa. I bring you warm greetings from the government and people of the independent states of Samoa. It is indeed an honor and privilege for me as the Minister of ICT and digital transformation of the government of the independent states of Samoa to attend my first ITU Plenty Potential Reconference in this fast developing and exciting city of Dubai. I wish to thank the government and people of the UAE through your excellency, Mr. Chairman, for the warm welcome and wonderful hospitality we have received in our arrival. Being a Minister for Small Island Developing State in this fast changing sector and transforming economies through ICT innovations and digital applications, I find these big conferences very interesting and encouraging, especially we small island nations. We for sure would like to swim together with the others, sharing ideas and experiences through the importance of our attendance in these major events. International connectivity is the key to digital transformation of our economies. Samoa officially launched its new three Samoa submarine cable early this year and now enjoys unlimited capability capacity and fast speed internet. Business is booming with the demand and usage far exceeding expectations and forecasts. This has been a great public-private sector partnership, model for improving our internet connectivity with the outside world. Our new cable project has also benefitting some neighbouring countries who express interest to be connected to us and have come on board to share costs with us. In June this year, we held an Oak Road Digital Pacific 2018 Summit in a PSI Moor. This was co-organised by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology and the United Nations System. We were joined by delegates from the Pacific Island Nations as well as digital transformation experts and private sector from around the world. Given the advancing state of connectivity in the Pacific and intergovernmental approach to closing digital divide, introducing national IDs and establishing e-covenant systems would significantly enhance opportunities for employment, business and improved living standards through better access to services at an accelerated pace. Taking a joint regional approach on these issues will help us harmonise our systems and significantly minimise costs. Samoa started its digital transformation journey and is ready to share its lessons. Before I conclude, I must thank the ITU Secretary General, the sector and staff for the great effort and work you are doing in assisting the developing countries, especially the LDCs, LLDCs and SIDS. I thank ITU and other developing partners for helping us with cyber security and establishing our national cert. I also pledge the ITU membership to seriously reconsider the grouping of SIDS and LDCs so that SIDS also get access to fellowship to help with capacity building. Mr Chairman, we must explore some of the key policy and regulatory issues in ICT today and to foster the collaboration and cooperation that will help us move ahead together. Government should encourage partnership and investment in local markets and at the same time offer incentives to attract investors to contribute to the development of ICTs and digital economy. I wish you a very successful conference. Thank you and God bless.