Hi everyone. Thanks for joining today's webcast. We're excited to have you join us. Click housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar is recorded and we'll share the recording over emails to everyone who registered. We'll save questions for the end of the webcast, but please feel free to type in a Q&A whenever you have one. It's located to the left of your webcast console and can be hidden or pulled up using the button at the bottom. Okay, let's get started on today's webcast. My name is Emily. I'm a content marketer at GitLab and joining me today is Allison, our UX team lead, and Sarah, our UX researcher. I'll start with a quick introduction of GitLab, then Allison will explain how the UX team makes design decisions and prioritizes the many different streams of feedback they receive. Sarah will chat about our UX research efforts and share how you can help. Finally, we'll close the session with a Q&A or we'll be joined by additional UX team members who can answer all of your questions. GitLab is the integrated platform for the full software development lifecycle. It's built on top of Git, the leading version control system. Git allows developers to store a local copy of their source code, propose changes to it, and share those changes with others. We help you create great software by strengthening and integrating your source code management, code review, testing tools, and deployment process in one platform. A unified experience across the development lifecycle helps increase developer productivity by reducing the number of times your developers have to switch from one platform to the next. This ensures everyone on your team is more productive and more collaborative, providing the most efficient approach to software delivery. The UX team is integral to the product by designing the interface, responding to feedback, and helping fit new features into our understanding of the needs of all users. Ensuring that all members of your team, technical or not, can communicate and collaborate. Because of the expansive nature of our product, our UX team routinely tackles a series of unique creative challenges. While most other developer tools only focus on one aspect of the lifecycle, our UX team has worked to piece together all the tools we ship with GitLab in one package. If that weren't enough, this is the jigsaw that the UX team re-navigates for our release on the 22nd of every single month. Finally, they have to design for all technical levels and ensure that the product remains user-friendly for everyone from developers and PMs, admins, and managers. Even our marketing team uses GitLab to create materials like this. We understand how important UX is for the adoption of new software, and we want to make it as easy as possible for your team to start using GitLab right away. As your needs change while you're using GitLab, our UX team has their ear to the ground for each monthly release, and is eager to hear about your use case. For more on how they work, I'll hand it off to Allison, our UX team lead. Thanks so much, Emily. Hi, everyone. So to get started, I wanted to chat a little bit about how we make design decisions here at GitLab. And so at every stage, we have to carefully think through why decisions are made and for whom we're making all these decisions for. We do have a number of methods that help us do this, you know, all kinds of research and testing and surveys. We also work really closely with our internal developers, as well as carrying on a constant conversation with our wonderful community. One of our major challenges, as a lot of UX people might feel, is decoding what people say by finding what they might actually mean and why. Verbal feedback is super helpful, but sometimes it can be better for us to really watch user behavior or watch how they've set up their repos and projects. And so our research will really help us see where the objective challenges are. We work hard to dig beyond the surface level feedback. A lot of people have easy design fixes to propose, but when we look at these, we need to think about the impact of every single change on all our various user groups and also how these changes impact our larger goals or vision for the product. Easy design fixes sometimes are just kind of solving the symptom of a deeper problem. And so it can be very helpful for us to watch and ask questions and listen to make sure we actually understand the real problem that is coming to light. And so this can often lead to a win-win situation, as it can help us create even better solutions than originally proposed and it aligns better with our larger design system and principles. And so in addition to all this, we work with nearly every team at the company of GitLab and carefully triage all the issues and requests that come in. We incorporate the perspectives of our management team, support team, sales, and internal developers. And we do this every single month for our release on the 22nd. One of the things that makes us pretty unique is that we use our product day in, day out for our job. A UX designer or researcher who works in e-commerce, for example, might very well shop online regularly, but it's unlikely that they only shop in the store that they designed or that they spend their entire day in their own product. And so this gives us a very intimate understanding of how the software is used. It does empower us to also become users with opinions. But it forces us to be extra thoughtful about removing our own bias from our evaluation of the UX. We take it very seriously that we need to represent all opinions and not just our own. UX is about the calculated decisions and the logical analysis, not just anyone's idea about what they like best. So we naturally adopt a sort of split brain approach when using the software and observing the behavior. We have to emphasize both as users and as technical experts. We also work very closely with engineering and products. Being a remote startup, one of our rather unique challenges is building a shared vision and perspective for our user experience while we are scattered across the globe and across all the features of the product. We're working hard on this by documenting everything that we can in our UX guide, which you're free to read through and let us know what we're missing. But more and more of the industry is becoming remote. And so we're excited to be experimenting with different ways to stay connected and work through these kinds of problems together. And we believe what we can learn by doing this will be increasingly valuable to other companies. So we navigate our relationship with the product team by understanding that they are both users and builders, too. We also have to translate their feedback and their ideas for features using the same methods we use for ourselves and outside users. We're all part of the same conversation just as developers, but we need to bring in the different birth and perspectives to represent. Our center challenge is very common and well-known to all those in the UX field. And it's building something that satisfies and works for all kinds of people. So at GitLab, this means bringing something that's inherently technical and functionality that was originally designed for developers. It's a place where it works well for product managers and marketers and everyone who needs to use it. So one of the recent examples of this is around this feature of resolvable discussions. So this feature comes from a merge request and allows people to have active conversations about a piece of code with a back and forth until they come to an agreement. However, we realize that we could pull all this functionality outside of the realm of code when you edit plain text or even when you're having a conversation. There are particular moments when you have to push for an agreement. So moving this kind of functionality beyond code brings more value to more people, you know, such as people working in marketing or legal and makes everyone more productive. So in this way, we can help influence decisions about which features to work on next. So in general, we do a lot of listening, watching, and learning about how the project is working and how people want to use it. We also have to be very sensitive to all the different ways of working. We always need to balance all these different perspectives, the enterprise needs, the community needs, and our own values as a company. We're definitely opinionated and we have our GitLab workflow, which we use at GitLab as a company. But we do understand, though not everyone works the way we do, some of our company's values, for example, extreme transparency, need to be made optional for users and other companies. For example, when we think about how permissioning should work, things that we care about or don't care about is very different than other people care about. And so in addition to this, we also build things that we ourselves don't currently need. It's true that GitLab has grown credit a bit in the last year, and we now have 40 plus developers. But we know there are teams out there with hundreds to thousands of developers working towards a common goal, and we want to build GitLab to support them. And so there are many features that I geared towards helping manage these larger teams trying to achieve huge amounts of work. These are features such as merge request approvals, waiting of issues, time tracking, that we as a team in the company have no need of. And so we find it very important for us to keep building out these features, though, to fill out our idea to production vision and help large companies map their process to the GitLab workflow. Thus, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we balance feedback. So as I mentioned, we listen a lot and we make sure to keep up steady communication with a lot of people. And so we get a lot of feedback. And in order to keep up with all these monthly releases and figure out what to deliver in terms of the minimal changes, we need to prioritize and amplify some versus. So we adjust issues in a particular order. First and foremost, we really care a lot about our enterprise customers. Our support team is super vital to helping us understand what our customers need, how they're using the products, what challenges they're running into. The outside community is next in terms of who we love listening to. We love seeing how people work differently with a product. And that really kind of pulls us out of our bubble of our own work style and process. And finally, we love working with the developers on our team. They know the product inside and out. They're opinionated, passionate, and wonderful to work with. They're constantly balancing all the feedback as it comes in. And now I'm going to pass this off to Sarah. Hello, everyone. I'm Sarah, GitLab's first UX researcher. So what do we want to learn at GitLab and how are we learning it? Well, we've built and understanding of who I use without and how they work. We get a lot of great feedback from the community. That is really useful, but we want to make sure that we are capturing the voices of all our target users. We're developing personas that will allow us to relate to different types of users and subsequently predict their behavior. This is essential for our key challenge of creating a unified experience for teams big and small, so that they can stay focused on their goals. You can learn a bit more about this in my recent blog post for GitLab. The survey, which you should all take, has designed some of the similarities and differences between how users use GitLab, dependent on their organization size and role. It will also help us to confirm or disprove a couple of series I have, such as whether using GitLab initially for hobby projects increases the likelihood of using GitLab for work-related products with a later date. I'm also really interested in hearing from people who don't use GitLab or even Git, so I can understand why you make a say using a different form of source control or perhaps the challenges you are facing in convincing your organization to move to Git. What will this help the community decide on in the future? Well, it will help us to make sure our UX goals and vision align to what our users need. It will help us decide on both the large directions and small details that confirm using the experience and functionality in the right direction. We believe the results can be valuable across the company. UX looks very closely with the front end and back end teams to build GitLab, so helping them understand our users will help us work as a team towards a shared goal. The products and marketing for those products should also feel related. Whilst who we are selling GitLab to may differ from who is using the product daily, we have to understand both to build a compelling product that people want. UX research can bring a particular set of insights about our users and customers that can help across products, marketing, support, and sales. We absolutely will feel to help us out and take the survey. As a thank you for your feedback, once you have completed the survey, you can enter your email address to have a chance at winning a 200 aligns and gift card. If you are interested, there are also opportunities to participate in future research. Simply read your email address and prompts during the survey or you can drop me a line directly at www.siratgitlab.com. We can now move on to any questions you may have. Hi everyone, this is Dimitriux. One of the UX designers at GitLab. We'd love to get your questions. We're going to be getting them in, so we're trying to process them on which answer. If you have any particular questions on certain areas in the interface or on the application, we'd love to hear them. Coop with us for a second while we try to see which questions are interesting for everybody to hear. We'd love to have you. Sarah, maybe you can talk a little bit about the process you're going with personas and how many personas do you have to design for as one of the questions that is coming in. Yeah, great question. We don't actually know the number of personas that we have at the moment because we're still in discovery phase. In terms of like kind of discovering how to solve a need, we've obviously got the survey. We're also using some user testing with users, to these are people who perhaps get all very detailed answers in the survey who would like to follow up with. We can stick more into the kind of frustrations that we have to get live or how we're using it. We're also using whether analytics were possible and to support the formation of the personas. In terms of deciding what questions we'd like to ask, to be honest, it's been a bit of a blank slate because we don't actually have much user research on our kind of users at the moment. So it's finding out kind of what frustrates and the very kind of basic stuff, how are we using it? What frustrates and what can be improved? How can we help them out? It's good for us to understand that if you're perhaps not even using GitLab, why are you not using it? What is it about GitLab that you don't like or perhaps you're using a competitor product on? What do you prefer about that? So there's quite a number of questions on there for different types of people to try and discover the kind of well-survived users and also those people who may be potential users as well. Thanks, Sarah. Another question that's coming in is, does our UX team use the GitLab MergerCast workflow for collaboration on all binary assets? So the way that our UX team works, we work very heavily in issues and having conversations as issues come up showing explorations and iterations and exploring what solutions make sense to the problem brought up in the issue. Once we kind of have landed on a direction, then that gets pushed to code and MergerCast and we're a part of the process in terms of reviewing the changes that happen but we don't necessarily, we don't really use the MergerCast workflow for our binary assets. We do have the GitLab design repository and that's where we share all of our working files and as we collaborate and work together but that's more just a shared file repository. So I think the main thing I'd say would be no, we don't use the MergerCast workflow for collaboration on our binary assets but we are a part of the whole flow as we build the features. If I can often in answering that question, maybe interesting for people to know on how we use Git to enhance our GitLab design repository. As for example, we use Sketch preferably to use our or create our design assets and one of the options you can have is by using an incredible plugin for Sketch called Sketch Measure and what it exactly does is it exports your design specs into a, you can put it online and your developers can see into it and get exact measurements from your design files and how we did it in Git, we make use of the PCI and CD features from GitLab which is really nice to look into it and we automatically host those spec export files which is basically a website and host them up if you give them a certain file naming convention in order to produce a URL to give to your developers in order for them to see your design specs. It's a partly automatic process that enhances our GitLab design repo just to inform you on that. Alison, back over to you. Thanks, that was perfect. So the question just came in about how do we decide how to design for mobile versus desktop clients and what ways the user will interact with it and so this is definitely something we have had conversations about first and foremost we, with a lot of what we build, we do focus a lot on desktop experiences. This is just kind of to map how our customers and everyone is using it today. It's a very much, you know, when you're coding and sitting down and really deep in work, a lot of it happens on desktop but there are definitely things that are very important on mobile and we do very much care about mobile experiences. It's just finding the right features that make sense more on mobile to kind of optimize for and so a lot of, you know, understanding the status or monitoring progress or a quick response, you know, to questions, issues, discussions that come up, those kinds of experiences we think are very valuable on mobile and we want to continue to kind of improve and build upon them as much as we can so we definitely don't want to ignore mobile but we need to find the right balance because there's definitely things that you're not, I don't think you're going to do very commonly on mobile and if we can optimize the mobile experience for what matters then that can feel very, you know, quick, awesome and amazing on mobile and desktop can be, you know, feel focused for what desktop is good at. So, you know, it's kind of balancing some of these conversations when it comes to mobile and we do track how for gitlab.com we understand people who like how many mobile users and how many desktop users do come to gitlab.com and so I help them understand, you know, kind of what pages might be more used on mobile or desktop. And another question that is coming in is what has been the biggest challenge for the UX team when building the platform? I think, see, there's the good question is a lot going on. I think part of it is being able to keep up and with the awesome speed, you know, adding all the features we want at the speed that we can, addressing all this wide variety of feedback we're coming in, you know, what features are we building that's, you know, great and focused for our enterprise customers and what will be super helpful for the, for, you know, our awesome community and what is good for us as a team is it's balancing all the stuff coming in and building, you know, what is the right thing at that moment, how do we prioritize all the stuff coming in and keeping up with the speed that we want to keep up with in terms of getting features out there and pushing features out there. And so there's a lot of, you know, let's try this, let's try that. Sometimes we try something and it doesn't work out well and since we had to write so quickly, we can, you know, pull back and, and rethink the design. So it's really just kind of managing all this feedback that is coming in and figuring out the right direction to push from there. Yeah, I think it's part of the design direction that KitLabs shows that all the philosophies and that feedback after having it in is this much more accurate than presumptions you make as GitLab, as a designer or as someone who designs any, any function that is inside GitLab. You can only trust so much into your intuition and knowledge and if you implement it and see that, for example, you implemented 20 features and two of them are apparently not what they should be then you roll them back and you implemented 18 instead of just, for example, less if they're not perfect. I think it's part of the philosophy of getting ahead further and faster, implementing it, reverting and getting on. I see there is a question on the navigation of the, of the, of GitLab, it's a top navigation. I think it's an important aspect of the GitLab interface. Perhaps Alison, could you give a bit of insight in what is planned ahead of us? Because it is, of course, a thing that I... Thanks, Rinti. Yeah, it's something we get a lot of feedback about and we're very aware of and we're trying to kind of think through the right way to solve and approach it. We understand the current pain right now with the two levels of navigation and the feeling of having to kind of, you know, feeling that you have to click and then click it kind of feels, it could feel slow. So we've got a lot of feedback and are thinking through the right way to adjust that. We need to balance it with, if we, we need to balance, so GitLab, there's a lot to go, there's a lot of pages, a lot of features, a lot of, you know, a lot going on. And so like the information architecture navigation is very important for us to kind of structure and make sense and make sure that the flows and the steps you go through through the various pages of GitLab make sense and that we group the right elements together. And so that's constantly, you know, something we talk a lot about and it's constantly evolving. So we are looking at that. And so that's one aspect of what we're thinking about navigation is just making sure that our layout of pages makes sense. The other question that continues to kind of come up is some of the details of the interaction and Michael, you know, micro interactions of how you interact with the navigation. Some of the feelings is just, you know, how it might feel slow, potentially on GitLab.com. And so there's, there's work elements on that. There's always a balance of, you know, we've looked at different ways to show the secondary levels of navigation without the over-complicating the interface and we do plan to improve it. So stay tuned, we will have some improvements on that. But it's just, you know, making sure we're moving things in the right direction and we're thoughtful with navigation because it's something where if we change it, we want to make sure we change it to the right direction. It can be very disruptive and, you know, if we change it too much, it can be very confusing. And so we want to make sure we kind of move it in the right direction. And so we're working on that and finding ways to simplify both for people who aren't very technical and are using different sections of the UI versus people who are deeply, you know, technical and finding the right balance there. There's also the question about the icon overflow on the right mid and top. I think that's maybe referencing the setting icon, which we are actively working on incorporating with the rest of navigation. So we're making improvements and hope to keep improving and feel free. There's plenty of discussion on it on gilab.com. So any feedback and ideas we'd love to hear on that? And just to add to what Alison was saying, the second part of that question says, how do you approach investigating your menu effectiveness? Well, I think one of the ways in which we do this, we'd actually strip the design away from it and concentrate on the information architecture first. And we do this using card slots. So we'd ask people to group the content together, which is the always most related to one another. And we would also then follow that up with tree testing. So this allows us to test the information architecture without the design there to kind of lead users. And they would click through what is essentially called a tree. It's like a hierarchy of pages. And they click through these pages to then try and find that information highlighting when you think we found it. Once we've got a strong information architecture, we can then re-implement the design into this information architecture. And this may mean that we've missed more tweaks than the design still may implement the information architecture. But we would go through rounds of testing with users, asking them to find certain information, ensuring that we don't directly ask the UC wording that is in the navigation to ensure that they understand that the content that they're looking at is what we're looking for. Thanks. So there's a question about what is our process for designing new features? What, you know, when do we sketch ideas on paper and then present the mock-ups, the users get feedback? Or, you know, how do we ask users for requirements? You know, how many kind of round trips are there to users on ideas and shipping of features? And, for us, this is a constantly evolving process. We're still, you know, figuring out some of the best ways of working and still kind of figuring out the right, you know, users and people to talk to as we're forming our personas. So another shout out to survey is part of what's going to really help us understand who our users are and help us figure out who to reach out to. So another shout out to fill that out. But in terms of what our process is, it really varies. You know, a lot of it is in the issues on GitLab.com and there's just a lot of conversations, you know, people will post feedback, you know, users and customers will post feedback as issues and then we'll think through it and kind of explore or ask questions. And so there's ongoing conversation with people there. I think, yeah, it's kind of hard to answer if there's, you know, an explicit number of round trips to users from ideas and shipping. Something we want to get better at continuing to show earlier, rougher ideas to users to get feedback faster. But today we also shipped so fast that we'll push something out there and get feedback of, hey, this isn't working. And so that's, you know, even though we've pushed it out live, we're more than happy to kind of rethink and how we might need to improve upon it. I don't know if there's any other, Sarah, if you had anything else to add to that question? No, I think we pretty much covered it. Cool, cool. I just saw an interesting question about it was related to this and how we approach or reach our goals in designing as we are dog feeding our own application, actively using it ourselves, basically. And I think there are a lot of examples of this as our own developers use this, but we ourselves make a lot of the, for example, our design discussion goes on in issue discussions. And of course you become, if you get into the discussions and you use it, you will reach pain points or things that you think will work differently if they were designed otherwise. And I mean, there have been many discussions on, for example, the merge quest, which is really example or shining example of what we want to build out into a better product and a better UI feature. And it's a thing that is used by almost anyone who puts in a merge quest. It gives the status of either the pipeline or if you want to merge it. And there's been some clear feedback and discussion going on on this. And we hope to improve this in one of the upcoming releases. Perhaps Alison or Sarah, perhaps you know of another good example of a past feature that has been introduced by us by Duff feeding our own application. I mean, the merge request feature is a great example, I think, of that.  So it's just finding that right balance there.  Like, there's all these issues, how do you even start to triage or figure out, you know, and different people use labels differently or waiting differently or due dates differently, and to figuring out, you know, everyone has their thing that they really, you know, their system that works for them, works for the company, how to, like, triage and find the issues and prioritize them. And so that's something where I think it's continuing to kind of evolve and it's interesting to learn how different people do it. So there's also this question that came up about, are there any plans to display due dates on the issues in the issue board view? And, you know, it's a good question. There's been conversation about it. There's this balance we have because, you know, some people want due dates on the issue board view. Some people want wait on the issue board view. Some people want the task list there. And, you know, and I could keep going of all the things that people are like, oh, no, this is the one thing that, you know, would help. And so it's finding the right balance because the issue board view can only show so much. And so what is that view focus for? What is it great at? What level of detailed information is important there? And then, and so, you know, there's that balance of, okay, what opinion do we have of what makes sense for this feature and then what level flexibility?  And so, yes, we've had conversations. We're continuing kind of conversations of what makes sense for the board view, what information makes sense to help people make decisions. Right now, we're still kind of thinking about keeping it at the top level kind of, these are issues, like top level in terms of scope and priority of the issues, but it's something that there's ongoing conversation about. Oh, yeah, just to add to that, while Elson was talking, a shining example came up into my mind, which actually just been released, or you can watch it live at gitlab.com, which is the issue list search and filtering functionality. And it's been recently been upgraded to use a sort of uni search box. And that is, that has been done because the old search functionality wasn't flexible enough. It used too much space, both vertically as well as horizontally as it can be extended with more and more features. And I think this is a really good first step in making it extendable for the future and also more user-friendly in the process. I think a follow-up question to this is really a really good one. As our developers use our platform, do you involve them early in UX process? And then do they actively discuss the process and planning of new feature? And yes, this is the main point of our workflow in designing new features. UX people know a lot, but not everything. And developers have their own sights on how things should be or will be implemented if it costs much time. And also a good thing to think about is how it will impact back-end design. For example, feature UX design, people can think of or invent or design. It will perhaps be a little thing, but for example, for someone on the back-end, it will create an impossible thing to do and will be a really big effort. I think of an example in this effort would be we thought about creating a real-time markdown preview next to the comment editor. And this is an awesome feature and it would be really great to have this in. And we have looked at this feature for a long time. In the end, for now, we have to get to help back on it because it involves a lot of back-end changes to be made in order to be able to make it a thing that could be done. And we have to be careful not to create features that will impact performance too much, for example. And there are lots of other examples that are a good example. I mean, sometimes you've got a simple thing to implement in the 3D heart and sometimes you don't. Thanks, Vinicius. I'm just kind of looking for some more of the questions that came in. So there's a question, kind of, how many mobile device platforms do we test with and what does our mobile development testing look like? I believe right now is a little bit at hawk and part of it is kind of, you know, what we see that kind of comes in. You know, we get a lot of, you know, part of it is our community is awesome at finding things that we miss and we try to, you know, do our best to catch things. You know, we're trying to get better at this. We're trying to find ways where we can make sure we're viewing our, you know, these tools out there to let us view our experience on all kinds of, you know, devices and we're working on kind of building that up a bit more. So, yeah, right now I think it's a little at hawk, but it's something we're constantly working on improving and we're also very receptive to any feedback we hear about it on our issues. So there's a question about what tools we use for analytics. We actually use database monitoring on gitlab.com, but we're in a bit of a unique situation in the fact that most installations of gitlab are on premise. So we don't use tools like Google analytics and things like that. In addition to that, we also feel being a kind of open source community and very honest and transparent, but we don't want to track everything that people are doing. We don't want to feel like we're being big brothers, I suppose. At the same time, we still need to get a balance of user feedback. So there is definitely more of an emphasis, more on like qualitative research, so user testing and surveys and things to give us insight. I hope that answers your question. Perhaps in addition to that, I think at least of my particular set of knowledge, but I think we're actively looking into possibilities of using Prometheus and to getting more statistics and analytics in everything from the application, both inside as well as performance. I see here a question about if you actually is actively engaged in designing of the API and command line side of things on gitlab. I think we're less so at the moment. However, I know that, for example, my colleague, Pedro, is actively engaged in, for example, designing the chat ops functionality with MetaMOS. And it's an area we should or we are looking into it more and more. There's a question about our user testing process and what does it look like and do we test with current gitlab users or do we find users who have no experience with gitlab and how do we find these users? Jared, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more to some of that. Yeah, sure. Well, we're still in the process of kind of building that user testing. So, at the moment, we're only in a very initial stages of doing testing with users. If you answer survey, there's the opportunity to sign up for as a research participant for gitlab. So, that's one way with quite a few users. And that will include users who are familiar with gitlab, but also those who don't use it. And so, it will give us the option to test with both. Other ways you can kind of find users to test them is like through social media, is a great option. Also, through email, blog posts, just like that. To be honest, we're very lucky that we do have a kind of very vocal community. So, there's always a lot of people out there that are willing to help us. And through the presentation, it's more finding the quieter voices sometimes and ensuring that their voices are heard too. Cool. And there's another question about our design process and just kind of how does it work and all. And there's a lot of kind of ways that our design process works. There's responding to issues that come up. So, if someone suggests either a problem they're having or an idea that they have, we start to kind of dig into that and understand why they're having that problem. So, we might have questions or we might, you know, explore it ourselves. We also, as a team, we'll create, when we have ideas, we'll, you know, create, as you see a common theme, is there's a lot with issues. So, we'll create an issue ourselves and we'll talk through, you know, what the idea is trying to solve. Sometimes, it's very important for us to take a step back and start with the goal through the context of the area, especially when we're thinking of kind of, you know, more, you know, larger features. And so, sometimes it's, like, let's make sure we're all on the same page in terms of goals and then we'll sit down and start to kind of explore, iterate, sketch, post, you know, start to kind of create some mocks and talk through what makes sense and what doesn't make sense and flows. You know, there's a lot of, just a lot of conversations we have and a lot of back and forth. Being, you know, part of why we use GitLab issues so heavily, I mean, first of all, using our own project helps us understand it. But also, because we're a distributed team, you know, we want everyone on the team to be a part of the conversation and everyone's working at different times for the time zones and everything.  And so, we do, you know, we will have video calls and conversations and Slack and all where we do kind of have a real time back and forth, but we try to push and optimize for, you know, having the asynchronous conversations and ideation together. So, that's kind of a big part of our process. And it's also just kind of following the work as it comes from the initial kind of conception of it. You work on it, you ideate on it. And then, you know, the moment that there's, you know, a branch and some of it's been implemented, you know, we'll check it out ourselves and, you know, continue to kind of iterate and solve problems or questions that come up at that point from a UX perspective. So, I don't know if there's like a clear answer of what our design process is, but that's some of what gives, how it goes. I see a follow-up question that takes into that, which is like, what was the biggest issue of frustration of getting get led what it is today? I think it taps into what our design process is like. And as Alison said, we make use of the conversational development in GitLab, which tries to optimize for a synchronous conversation. And basically, the thing is, you try to involve all the important people for an idea, which is an issue is basically into the conversation as early as possible to see what kind of reach this idea has. And part of this thing is distilling an idea to its bare minimum, as when you implement the bare minimum of an idea, it will be better the next implementation of it. So, if you implement the idea and you use it actively, you can see, okay, now we have a clear way of what the next iteration of that idea should be, instead of implementing it all at once. I mean, you can develop an idea and this is sometimes a pain point. You want to do so much while keeping it to a bare essentials is the better way to go, as it will evolutionize into the right shape instead of what you assume to be the right space or shape. Just to notice, I think we have a little more than nine minutes less for this UX webcast. So, we'll just get your last questions in, if you have any. There's one that I just saw about what tools do we use to discuss UI sketches remotely. This is also kind of, we're constantly lobbying and learning how to do this. I mean, a lot of it is you know, we still mostly use GitLab issues to discuss and, you know, you can put sketches in there, you can put all kinds of comps in there and then talk about it.  So, you know, we're still evolving on how we can improve some of our remote kind of brainstorm capabilities. We do, you know, meet weekly and that's sometimes when we need to just have a more kind of back and forth, let's talk through, you know, the big carry problem and kind of find a focus or goal on that. So, there's, and you know, you put stuff in fact, but we don't, there's not any specific tool outside of GitLab and, you know, we have our shared repository with sketch files and so we can just kind of use each other's sketch file to look at things. But a lot of us have seen that, posting images and issues and talking about it. There are various questions on the tools we use and our design tools. I think the design process has already been talked about. However, the design tools, I think it's been mostly being clear, but we mostly use GitLab itself and the issue design discussion or the issue discussion is the design discussion itself. We post images in there. As said previously, we'll make use of sketch measure, as is one of the things that we use to give spec exports of our designs we made in sketch to our developers in order for them to implement them. And for example, we are looking into ways of enhancing the discussion itself to better fit our design discussion. There are interesting examples of that, for example, getting better image functionality in there amongst other things. I see that there's a question about image comments. Yes, we're actively looking into that. And just as an example of that on our summit, we have had a great discussion on that and looking into ways and which way or which routes we will take to implement it to be useful not only for ourselves, but everyone that will use GitLab. And there's a question about how large our UX team is. So there are five UX designers, one UX researcher and then myself as team lead. And we work very fluidly. A designer might kind of be more involved with a feature for most of it if they can, focus and spend the time on it. But they can pull in other people of the team as they need help or have questions or just need another pair of eyes. A lot of features are kind of ship monthly. A lot of things, every month there's kind of a new iteration, new version, a new kind of thought in that area or on that feature. And so there are definitely some general areas that some of the designers focus on. But it's not anything strict or anything. There's a lot of fluid movement. Everyone's kind of a part of the conversations and everyone can jump in with ideas and thoughts. And so, yeah, there's some features. There might be a designer who's there the full time working through everything. I want to make sure that there's clear understanding of who's the right person to reach out to if you have questions as the developer works on it, who they can work closely with. But it constantly evolves as we need to evolve. A question that is a thing actually that came up apart from using Sketch is that we are looking into using Framer for the more advanced designs that actually need some... I forgot the word for it. However, for the advanced designs that are needing motion or animation, etc., there's also some optimization for this in the design workflow itself. And it can make some design discussions very clear as motion. It's hard to explain words only. Yeah, definitely like when we're thinking about flows or prototypes or what not wanting to kind of, you know, some times it's useful to move the design beyond static images and to really figure out how something feels or what the motion, what that can add or do track from the experience and what are the subtle interactions that matter. So, yeah. We have a few more minutes. Let's see our questions come in. Do we... So the question came in, do we ever have to settle AUX arguments and how or who is responsible for that? And what are the ultimate reasons to choose a design over another? So, I don't think there's been really heated arguments. I think for the most part we're able to talk things through. A lot of it is if you bring it back down to the core goals or context you're trying to solve and then you can have like very analytical conversation of what, you know, design works better for another, the pros and cons and base that in as much as you can in terms of user data or feedback that we have or our understanding of our users with personas to help us balance and make a decision. And so it, you know, is one decision map better for our overall long-term goals or decisions or visions for GitLab? What, you know, what makes things better for enterprises versus, you know, small teams and how we have to balance all that? So there's a lot of conversation like that and is just kind of having, you know, as much as you can bring, you know, our understanding of our customers and users into our decision making the better. And so that's, that's it. I mean, there's a level like when it, you know, comes down to it as the AUX, you know, as the AUX team and as the AUX team lead, we're responsible and it comes down to us to make the decision. But it's usually, you know, very much a, a kind of just analytical think through what works, what doesn't work, and how can you decide what, what makes one design make more sense than another. So I think we're just about at time that I want to thank everyone so much for taking the time to join us in this podcast today and for all the awesome, wonderful questions. Super helpful, great conversation. Let's see, one more, one more question just kind of flipped another one or what under the wire about any tips for leading the UX team. But yeah, overall it's just, I mean, it's been so helpful that I, it's just been such a great team. So it's been easy. But just awesome, making sure that there's, you know, a clear kind of shared vision or direction as a team. And so part of what I've been trying to do is really, you know, when decisions are made by the team to document what I can in the UX guide to kind of weigh in and make sure we all understand what our, you know, goals is or print our principles are as a team. So if everyone has the same base that they're coming from, then they're all able to, everyone's able to kind of work as a team, even if we, you know, are all working at different times in different places on the globe, we have that same shared direction that we're pushing towards. And so that's kind of, you know, making sure we all come from the same place. Anyway, I think we do have to call it. So thank you everyone for, for taking the time to join us today and for asking all those great questions.


I don't know what to do, wait a minute, maybe I better unbutton this, huh? Yeah, that was about that, there we go, lucky you're cooperating, great, how did we get her to sit still, sir could you look up here, that's great, lucky you are, as she said I'm surrounded, don't touch your face though, that's fine, yes, yes, how it curls around in the top, yeah, lucky look this way now, no those teeth are still sharp, lucky, lucky good, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, look this way now, sir look this way, that's it huh, went after went on strike, that's it, yeah, thank you, my fellow Americans on Monday morning we will submit to the Congress our budget for fiscal year 1986, it is a budget that carries an enormous investment of human time and effort, indeed I believe the most exhaustive effort ever made to rein in governments chronic overspending, every proposal is based on a careful review of what government should and should not do, what's worked and what hasn't, what we can and can no longer afford, collectively the more than 50 proposals we're making can stop the excessive growth of federal spending in its tracks and put budget deficits on a permitted downward path, we'll be going into details on Monday and asking Congress to join us in a strong bipartisan effort but today I want to lay a few facts on the table so you understand why some so-called solutions you'll hear aren't solutions at all and also what all of us must do to cure governments overspending once and for all, first as surely as night follows day you'll hear that we can't make lasting progress bringing deficits down until we agree to a tax increase, wrong our problem isn't that you're paying too little taxes it's that government is spending too much money in the past ten years your tax revenues have grown by more than four hundred billion dollars but spending by government has grown by almost six hundred billion forty percent more than revenues and government spending has grown more than one-third faster than the growth of our economy in other words Washington's policy is heads I win tails you lose when your families do well government spends and borrows when you don't do well government spends and borrows our future economic success depends on the economy growing faster than government spending that's why raising taxes would boomerang economic growth would slow revenues would decline and the budget deficit would swell the second so-called solution you'll hear is that lasting progress won't be made without deep cuts in defense wrong again defense spending accounts for less than thirty percent of our budget today far less than twenty years ago we've cut our plan defense build up three years in a row and cut it again this year and all this while our adversaries have raced ahead with the greatest military buildup in the history of man it's time everyone faced up to why government for nearly fifty years has been heading down a one-way street of overspending and rising public debt part of the spending is understandable improve social security benefits for a growing elderly population for example but much of it results from the combination of special interest groups and flawed budget procedures our system of budget making in the Congress practically guarantees spending growth and this unsettles financial markets and helps keep interest rates from falling when government makes redistributing income more important than producing it people reallocate their energies from economic to political action the growth in special interests which many in Congress lament parallels a pattern of government taking from some to give to others it parallels the ability of special interest to lobby for benefits and override the national interest by concentrating great power on a small group of legislators so spending and taxes rise and growth declines that's why we have a rising national debt and a growing burden of paying interest on that debt our challenge is to strive for the strongest possible level of economic growth while making sure spending by government remains well below that to accomplish this we're proposing three long-term reforms first we want to reform the tax system make it more fair and simple for all so we can bring down tax rates for individuals and businesses provide incentives for stronger growth and thereby increase revenues to government second we want the Congress to pass a constitutional amendment mandating government spend no more than government takes in I will urge the House of Representatives to follow the positive actions of the Senate and pass this long overdue reform third we need passage of a line item veto so presidents would have the power 43 governors now have to veto individual items of wasteful overspending in appropriation bills we're doing a lot to bring down spending growth and keep our economy growing we could do a lot more if we keep our eyes on the facts and work together until next week thanks for listening and God bless you just just the hand yeah because I've got a mark but they're all I know is that I have to get that last mark on time or I'll have to finish the thing okay thanks well keep on chewing on wires you're gonna feel funny when your teeth line up


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If you've seen Talk of the Town before, you know that we like to take in this series the opportunity to introduce folks to Arlington and Arlington to certain local officials. In this case, we're actually going to be introducing a new committee to Arlington. And to help us do so, we've got Jim O'Connor with us. Jim is the chair of the Election Modernization Committee, which was recently born. So Jim, to start off, first of all, thanks for being here. We always appreciate it, and we hope that you are well. Yes, I'm fine and so far so good. Good. Great. Why don't you just take us a little bit? I know that before we went on camera, you were saying that this is born, the committee and the project, born of Town Meeting of 2019, so very recently. So why don't you just take us quickly through both the origins and then what the intended goals are, et cetera? Okay. Initially, in the spring 2019 Town Meeting, there was a warrant article proposed by Christa Keller-Hur and 10 registered voters, which was intended to establish an election modernization study committee. The purpose of which was to look at options like rank choice voting, voting by mail, more efficient use of our polling locations, questions about issues of disability access, ease of voting principles, how we go about procedures for qualifying voters, and to make recommendations to Town Meeting for any potential bylaw changes and or recommendations to the select board to submit home rule legislation. That's like the slag of tasks there you've got. Yes. Well, the, so the committee was actually approved 188 to 2 by Town Meeting back in Spring of 2019. And we began our work in August upon the filling of all the slots. There's 13 members, six of which are ex-officio department appointees, and seven members, five appointed by the moderator, and one appointed by each of the political parties, the Democratic Town Committee and the Republican Town Committee. Sounds good. And the moderator, five appointed by the moderator, are you talking about the town moderator? Yes. The town moderator, John Leone. Great. And, you know, it is fortuitous in a lot of ways that we're getting to have this conversation with you in the midst of both our current election, because we're speaking to you right at the end of May of 2020, and also within the pandemic that everybody is hyper aware of, of course, because if anything, this current situation has once again, exaggerated and exacerbated perhaps and highlighted for sure, the need for modernization of our election, our election procedures. Several of the things that you've mentioned have been part of conversations we've had with the town clerk's office and others about the current election. So in other words, we are having to rely a lot more on mail in voting than we ever did before. How in other aspects of increasing access, which sounds like a big part of what you guys are wanting to do, are all, it's clear that all of this is very important to the Arlington community for sure. What is the time, like what do you understand your mission to be? We've laid out the things that you're supposed to do or at least make progress towards. Is there, are there timelines attached to those? Well, initially, the committee had a lifespan of one year, which was to expire after a report to this year's town meeting with our recommendations. Obviously COVID-19 both changed part of our endeavors and our prioritization. But also postponed the opportunity for this warrant article to extend our membership to two more members and extend the timeframe for which we'll be in play. So that would have, sorry to interrupt you, but are you saying that would have happened if without the intercession of COVID-19, that would have been presented to this year's town meeting, the expansion of two more members? Our committee realized early on that a few appointees in town or designees from boards and et cetera felt that they didn't want to participate if they didn't have a vote. So as chair, I talked to a John Leone and we both decided that we would get a straw vote of the full membership and let the voting members have the official membership to be in compliance with town meetings wishes. But we felt that we wanted to submit three articles this year before town meeting. The first article, article 21 was intended to both extend our life at least one year in addition to 2021 and potentially to 2022. But the other was to give all current members a voting status and to add a member from the young community of Arlington, someone under 25, and the other was to have a representative from the League of Women Voters. So that article was postponed by the select board until a special town meeting that'll occur likely later this fall. We also had two other articles. I'm sorry, before letting you go on and describe that, I wanted just to clarify that you were saying that the designees to the committee didn't want to proceed forward without having a vote. I think you had explained to me before we started the interview officially that in fact the committee, the voting members of the committee are those who were appointed by the moderator and the representatives of the two parties, I think, all of the town officials who are designees on the committee do not have a vote as it currently stands. Yes. The moderator's designee myself, the designee or Marika Palca from the select board, the town clerk's office, the registrar designee, and I'm missing two people. The disabilities commission is a fifth one. It's okay, we won't cast you to knowing all of them. You were mentioning the other two changes as well, which I guess have also been the proposed changes also postponed till the fall session. We had the first one, article 23, was intended to change the format in which we vote for town meeting. Every time we have a full federal census, the town like the state has to realign their polling locations depending on density and location of residents so that at each of those intervals, there's a full slate of all the candidates for all three years of terms that come up for the voting ballot. The way it's done is when a precinct turns over like that, the first four voting members that get the most votes get the three-year term, the second four highest get the two-year term, and the least vote getters, the third group of four would have the one-year term. We were proposing that perhaps that sort of format also occur for town meeting elections on a regular basis, and that would be because if there's a vacancy currently, the way that a vacancy is filled is that the members of the town meeting precinct vote in a new member until the next annual local election. And at that local election, we have a slate that includes four people that have the three-year term and then perhaps one for a one-year term or one for a two-year term. What happens sometimes is people think about it and say, well, the four incumbents, you know, have been in service for a long time, so why don't we go for the shorter term and have a better potential for being elected? Well, sometimes what happens is the person that runs for the three-year term gets more votes than the person for the three-year term. So we thought it would be best to say the recommendation that we were going to put forward to town meeting was to change the town manager act to enable the election of town meeting members so that the person with the four with the highest votes would get the three-year term and the next highest person would get a two-year term or the one-year term, whatever was remaining. And that could change the outcome rather than have people, you know, select one race. So that would require legislative approval. So that was one of the things we considered. Article 24, go ahead. What's your new proposal as in you guys really looked at the situation and figured out something very novel as a way of dealing with it, or is there precedent for it? There is precedent in other communities. They do things like this. So we presented a report to the select board back in September of our initial recommendations and then before town select board members, in January we had a meeting where we recommended their approval of our warrant article submissions. Okay.  The third warrant article was rank choice voting. That occurs in a few places, one of which is Minneapolis, Minnesota. Some of the towns in Massachusetts are already doing that. And it involves with a town-wide election, which is all we'd be, you know, trying to change. For a contested race, if nobody got more than 50% and there were three candidates for one position, you would drop the lowest vote getter and then re-examine who was the second choice and who was the third choice to determine really what the people chose and not necessarily just because the results come out one way. Somebody could win with just a few more votes than another candidate only because it was a split vote, but nobody got 50%. Right. So rank choice voting would have voters indicate who their first, second and third choices were, and then you would take that whole into account in terms of deciding who among the three, if there's again nobody with the majority, who among the three should in fact be the winner in that case. That's correct. Okay. So in our next full-town meeting, which will probably be the special in November, we'll bring this article up, make recommendations for home rule legislation and present it to the town more thoroughly. Okay. And curious about have there been costs associated with your efforts already or will there, it seems like there are sure to be, how are your, how is the work of the committee being funded right now, if at all, and what is the funding piece in general? For our committee, all our committee members as many committees in Arlington are, it's comprised of volunteers with an initiative to develop new ideas and attempt to implement them. And so we, if we, you know, did some research, several members in the committee have various ideas about good things to research. One of the things we did is we did a collaborative effort at the invitation of Envision Arlington to add several questions to the townwide survey, which went out in January. As to any concerns that people had, first we asked, did you vote in the last election? Have you ever gone to a precinct meeting? Have you ever encountered any problems and please indicate what they are? And in large part, there was a question about parking, parking availability at the schools where we currently have several polling locations. At a major election, if school is closed for a professional day, then the teachers are elsewhere and there's more parking for the voters. But such as the presidential primary, it, in some polling locations was a big problem because the teachers were there, the poll workers were there, and the voters had to walk significant distances to get to the polling location. What we're trying to do is increase the access, the turnout, and dispel the voter apathy by getting the voter to feel that they're being heard. In that last sentence that you just said, basically, is that an encapsulation of the mission of the committee and the effort, basically? Well, it's in large part part of it. Anything not included there that you would want to make sure people understand about the work of the committee? In other words, we know expanding access, reducing apathy, as you said, just kind of doing everything that makes sense to increase participation. I think everybody is on board with that, I assume. But is there anything else that is important for our viewers to understand? Well, I think the other focus is to look at ways to modernize the voting process. So we were certainly looking at the option of voting by mail, finding out where that was currently happening, and looking into ways that we could maybe instrument that in Arlington. As of January, none of us had any idea that we'd be voting by mail in this local election. COVID-19 and the pandemic just totally forever changed everyone's perspective on the way we do things. And so voting by mail was the first recommendation that members of town government, including the manager, the select board, the town council, the health and human services, directive facilities and myself as part of a planning team looked at what can we do to meet the voter need. And one of the needs was to assure that everyone would be able to vote safely. So the legislature back in March voted X for the chapter 45 of the Acts of 2020 that enabled voting by mail for this upcoming election. And that totally changed the process where the first step said, well, we could ask people to download a ballot application for voting by mail or absentee voting. And some people don't have printers. Some people don't have access to a computer. And so the decision was made to send every individual postage prepay to postcard. So our first effort is in the last week, more like last weekend or Monday, people should have received a postcard in the mail. There's information on the town website to this effect. And people should make every effort to return it as soon as possible. And they can put it in the mail. Once the clerk's office gets it, they will initiate immediately the process of mailing someone a ballot. That way they don't have to go to the polls and they don't need an explanation as to why they're voting by mail. And who put that postcard together? I ask in part because there has been some confusion, as you may be aware, in terms of the wording on the postcard and not being clear enough for some voters for them to understand exactly what they needed to do. Do you have any idea how that, just basically how that was. Yes. Well, it went through several drafts. The final draft was reviewed by both town council, which because it's a state law for absentee voter applications, the state law states that an individual can request an absentee ballot up until noontime the day before the election. So on the postcard, which I happen to have right in front of me, the postcard clearly states, request for ballots must be in the town clerk's office by noon on June 5th. The day before the election, postmark is not valid for acceptance. And several people have emailed me as the election modernization committee chairperson after we had public forums and we somewhat addressed this. Why is that on the postcard? Because if I put it in the mail and it gets delivered by Friday, June 5th, how on earth am I going to get the ballot by June 6th in return and be able to postmark it? But that was put on there by state compliance requirement, which unfortunately, as town council, Doug Heim told us, when the legislature put this acts of chapter 45 of the acts of 2020 together, they tried to work in early voting by mail with the current procedure for absentee voting. So that's why the requirement states that you can request a ballot up until noon the day before. But on the town website, we have asked people to send them in as soon as possible. It's been on the town website ever since. Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's not worth, you know, delivering this too much. I think that the clearly the confusion derived from what you've already explained, people not being sure how they would get a ballot. And so the combination of both the sentence that says you've gathered until June 5th and the one that says, hey, when you get this, get it back to us in a reasonable time for us to be able to get you the ballot, that that just didn't give people, I think, maybe a specific or concrete enough, you know, idea about what it was that they needed. Well, the other part of this, because of COVID-19, the town hall is closed. We can't go into town hall to the clerk's office and request a ballot. But that's where legally this came from, that any voter up until noontime the day before the election could present a request at the clerk's office and receive a ballot right there. It's like one stop shop and you walk in, I need a ballot. You could vote it then or you could take it home and you could return it the day of the election. But because of that, that's why that that seems to be confusing to people. And sometimes the law gets in the way of, you know, simplicity, because we have to help people. Yes, this is the absolute deadline. And we're hoping that people respond quickly. There's been reports that the requests for early ballots have been coming in very strongly. And ballots are being sent out. The town has also authorized staff from other departments to work in the clerk's office to help with the additional workload so that they're trying very efficiently to return the ballots to individuals as quickly as possible. And then they request that those ballots come back. One note for clarification that I can tell you is the reason for the noontime deadline on June 5th is that the voter lists that are issued to each of the polling stations have to be generated by a computer system called the VRIS. That is the voter registration information system. When an absentee ballot or in this case an early ballot application has been requested, then what happens is they indicate that on the voter's list via the VRIS system. And then the day of the poll, the actual election, those lists indicate that these people have gotten an absentee ballot. And that's to protect the system in a way because somebody could have a ballot at home and then say, well, I want to go to the polls and I want to vote. And we don't want duplicate voting. So we at least know that a ballot has been issued and that the ballot's been returned to the clerk's office and it should come out to the polls. That was a question that is in the FAQs at Dugheim Town Council issued is what would happen if I wanted to change my vote after I've submitted an absentee ballot? And the fact is that the law provides that someone can come to the polls. They can fill out a affidavit that says, I acknowledge that I received a ballot but because it has not yet been processed, I would like that ballot spoiled and stored for record keeping. And then I would like to process my own ballot right here in person. So they can request to vote in person if they, if the election workers can determine that their name is not crossed out. One of the things that is also confusing to the public is that although people are voting by mail, by state law, none of those votes are actually counted until the polling stations are open the day of the election. And each of those ballots then has to be manually inserted by the poll wardens or workers that are present at the polls. They go through the checks and balances of being checked in and checked out for dual accounting and then they're inserted into the machine. And that's when the ballot is actually cast. So that's what makes this issue about appearing in person. So I'd like to make sure that people watching understand that you can change your vote. If you were thinking that one of the contested races, you chose one candidate then learned something a week later and said, this is my candidate. They could actually appear in person. We're hoping that that doesn't necessarily happen a lot because the whole idea of the mail-in voting is to reduce the exposure to COVID-19 to both the poll workers and the people. But we're making a significant effort to provide enough PPE so everyone that comes to the polls must wear a mask. They'll be asked to sanitize their hands before they enter. All the poll workers are going to be issued gloves, masks, face shields, and they'll be behind a plexiglass window when they talk to the voter. So we're doing everything we can to prevent exposure. Yeah, all conditions we're getting more and more used to, that's for sure. But the very good that you were able to clarify all of the procedures themselves. And also what you said makes clear why we here at ACMI, as you probably know, we generally provide live election return coverage. And we have found out that we may not be able to do that this year because for all of the reasons you've outlined and more, there just may not be the results may not be coming in in the usual timely fashion that they do. And again, your explanation for how that is all going to happen helps you to understand why that would be. Let me ask you something. Well, this election also has another caveat. And that is because of the drop boxes. Legally, we close the polls and in each of the precinct locations. So there are eight precincts, the seven schools and Town Hall. If a ballot is mailed in and the Postal Service receives it prior to their closing, they would deliver to Town Hall. And if those ballots then have to be recorded in the system as having been returned by the absentee voter because there's a signature envelope that that voter sign saying I completed my ballot. Here's my signature. That has to be checked before it goes out to the polls. So if it comes in late in the past, the town clerk's office would process those manually if they were to come in. But because of the fact that we're going to be working late, they may be distributing them to the actual poll locations later in the evening. Those will also be hand counted at eight o'clock though the machines will be started their summary reports. We'll stop the poll receipt by walk in voters. And if the because of this special circumstance of the election, the town clerk's office will with a police officer pick up all ballots dropped off by eight p.m. at all three drop boxes. So if you couldn't get from East Arlington to your polling location, you could drop it off quickly in front of Fox Library. And then, in fact, it's moved a little bit. So the exact location may be slightly different.  If you drop it there by eight o'clock, the officer and the clerk's office representative will pick up those ballots and they will be processed. One of the reasons we will have later hours of operation where those ballots have to be counted. So people just to be perfectly clear and especially because it could again help to reduce traffic at the actual polling places, which would be a good idea. People have the option of using these drop off boxes, putting the ballot into the box up to, you know, up to the same time to which they could vote. So, PM on election day on the 6th. Yes. Great. Let me ask you, clearly, your committee has been busy from the get go here because an awful lot of ideas and proposals are being presented and going to be considered a town meeting and beyond. Wondering, though, do you, is it part of your mandate or simply just part of how you did business that you would establish criteria for how you would know whether this was successful or not? We always like to ask around any kinds of programs or initiatives. How are we going to know? How are we going to measure if this is successful or not? Obviously, even I can think of, OK, if the percentage of voters increases, we can declare success on that on that level. But I'm just wondering whether you've established criteria and if so, what those are? Well, in some in some ways, the full committee has not been doing some of the actions that I did. I've gone beyond the chairperson ship of the committee and working with the town for the reason that I was concerned watching the select board meeting of March 30th, where unlike the meeting of March 23rd, when the open forum was more public comment in open forum, the the question about what does the state of emergency that the town declared do in Arlington? Are we going to be under martial law? There was a lot of apprehension and concern. What I heard on the 30th was several people were still asking a lot of questions. And I personally was very concerned that Arlington should be working together, should be full of love and not consternation. So that's when I approached the manager and I asked if we could have in a meeting of our election modernization committee and include a public comment section, which was quite extensive. And I know there's a copy of it on your website. And during that, we had approximately a hundred and forty four people attend via Zoom to go over questions and the manager, the clerk's office and candidates were all there to try to help kind of illustrate what our process was going to be. And I got a lot of comments from people about the fact that it was a very open process that people felt they were being heard. For me personally, that's the biggest benchmark of what our committee is trying to do and what I personally wanted to do. So then I approached the manager again about having a public forum on the elections, which I moderated later in April. And then in May, we just had a meeting of the EMC and we also enabled part of that meeting to be for public comment and the elections and invited both the manager and council to answer questions. I think in terms of success, one of the things that we won't know until we can get some statistics of the total number of voters in Arlington that are registered, how many actually requested a early ballot or previously requested an absentee ballot so that they exercise their right to vote. Secondly, how much did all this effort do to alleviate the risk of voters coming to the polls by being able to vote conveniently from home? I think those are two questions that we would look at. A third would be how many total votes were cast in Arlington for a local election that routinely reaches 10 to 15 percent. If we were to get a 40 percent turnout, I would be totally elated. Furthermore, I think the fact that we have contested races for school committee, for housing authority, for select board, for town clerk is going to really enhance the voter interest because no matter which candidate you choose, you're going to decide to vote because your vote makes a difference. Right. And of course, we don't want to forget the assessors, which is also a contested race. But it's an unusual year. We've got five contested races here. One thing I'm wondering about, though, I think if I heard correctly in the various innovations that you guys are considering and changes that you'd like to see made, we're still sticking with what is fundamentally a kind of physical paper oriented process, right? Yes. Is there any, you know, how much thought, I guess, or how much propulsion is moving in the direction of substituting some kind of technological voting process to reduce the paper kind of physical, you know, and the inefficiencies that come from that? Well, we are New England and our legislature is highly reluctant to consider they have been highly reluctant to even act on mail-in voting so far for September and November's election. The acts of 2020, Chapter 45, stipulated that only elections through June 30th could actually be done by this special process of early vote by mail. And unless they extend that, we'll be back to the old system of only absentee voter applications would be accepted. It is certainly our hope, and I'm sure many others are thinking, we got this process now. It's kind of the cat's out of the bag. Let's see if it works. Arlington's election is one of the largest local elections around because the cities in town of the cities, you know, normally have their elections in the fall. So this is really going to demonstrate the effectiveness of this. Some of our neighboring towns had an election back in March and got it in just before COVID-19 really had its impact. So we'll have to see. But I really think that it will be one of our initiatives to look at whether online voting was possible. I think that because of the fact that the current executive branch opinion is that voting by mail causes more fraud. Well, that's being questioned by both the media and Twitter. And there certainly is a lot more fact checking of what the fraudulent opportunity risk is. And I think that we're moving in that direction of enabling everybody an opportunity to vote. So just to make sure I understand, though, what you're saying is unless the legislature or state legislature does something else, as of right now, both the presidential primary later this summer and the president. The state primary and the presidential election. Right. Excuse me. And and then the election itself in November will be returning to the old system unless the legislature says otherwise. Correct. And it requires an act of the legislature. The Secretary of State only has certain authorities for the online systems, which is for voter registration, which there's a big change this year. Unfortunately, we're speaking today on the March of May the 28th. Yesterday was the last day to register to vote. But one of the things says I've been a warden in the town of Arlington at a precinct for 22 years. And occasionally I've had people come up and say, I know I registered to vote because I saw this on my driver's license application or my change of address application up until this year. It was an opt in checkbox. It said when you go to do your license update or request a license or an ID that you also check the box and request that your city or town gets notified and that you're going to be enabled a registration via that method to vote. That would then require that the registrar of the city or town send you an acknowledgement notice. And it would inform you as to where you vote and that you are in fact registered. If people don't get that notice, then they may not be registered because of a glitch. But when the Secretary of State changed the policy this year, it's an opt out rather than an opt in. So if you change your license or your registration address and you change your ID or information, then it'll automatically notify the city or town unless you say, I specifically do not want this to happen. Yeah, that's going to enable a lot more accuracy of the system. That's for sure. And one simple, you know, one simple change. I say simple, you know, that can that that can really be galvanizing. I would I would think that that was a pun, wasn't it? Secretary Galvin. There you go. Good.  Yeah. This has been a long conversation. Hopefully people have stuck with it, though, because there was a lot of information for you to share with us and you've done an excellent job. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Well, I'm happy to do it. And as you know, I've been watching the public interest in these things. There's a lot of questions that are raised about the postcard, about the voting process, about the drop boxes. And we don't want this to fail because people, to me, it's a failure if even one person doesn't get a chance to vote that wants to. So we want to get the word out to respond as quickly as possible for a ballot request and then respond by sending the ballot back. And we want everybody to feel they they know where the poll locations are, if they want to vote in person, that they will be safe. That we're taking all the precautions that we can to enable everybody to vote. I've designed schematics for each of the schools so that you enter from one door, you follow a lead like you go to the grocery store that says you go here and then here. And you exit another door so people are not going to be passing one another and we're going to do everything to maintain social distance and protection of everyone involved. Okay, I'm happy and thank you for having me. Absolutely, we really, we really appreciate both your efforts and you're taking the time to explain those to us. I've got maybe one or two more things, then we're going to let you go. Okay, it's just a clarification. Again, it sounded to me like what you were saying is that all of the warrant articles that you guys would have generated as part of the committee are being pushed off to the, you know, To the fall and that the June meet meeting that is going to happen. Who knows exactly how on Pierce field just to deal. I think with the most essential business will not include any of those Yes, all the citizen warrant articles or committee articles were put on A no action Postponement so that they can come up in the fall. And the only things we're going to be dealing with since I'm assistant moderator of the town. I can answer this question that we, John Leonie and I Have discussed it together, but as moderator, he is establishing in the scent agenda for specific housekeeping articles that will flow quickly like what we we allow certain things with free cash and with funding that has to happen. And then we're going to be talking about the finance articles, the CPA appropriations, the CBTG funding and the budgets, right. Right. The idea is to make sure prior to June 30. In fact, by the 22nd. We need to have a meeting so that There's a seven day period before the close of the fiscal year so we can operate under a new budget in July. Makes sense. And do you expect Is the is the election modernization committee now in some kind of no man's land because your mandate original has expired. You haven't had a chance to introduce the extension or So does that mean your guys are just like lame ducking at the moment or will you be Oh, hardly because of COVID-19 we've had a breath of life infusing us to discuss these things and help to propel new ideas amongst the talk of the town, if you will. And When I talked to the moderator, I requested that he take the article 21 up so that our committee would have an extension of its life and he said Under the provisions of postponement and the provisions of extending these articles until a later date that there'll be no change in our committee composition or Useful life that we will continue until the next town meeting when we give our what would have been an annual report our year and a half report, perhaps. And are there we are going to continue Do you just your committee actually release minutes or anything like that. Is there a web. Yes, the minutes. The minutes are posted on the town website on the election modernization page and the Greg Dennis is the clerk of our committee and he has Suggested that the storage of last two meetings. That is the meeting of April 7 and the meeting of May 19 We have not actually posted minutes to the town website because we've got a posting on YouTube and a posting on the ACMI government channel for our meeting and he said, I don't really think I could do a better job of minutes than what somebody can see by viewing the audio and video combination.  So, you know, you will get all the information you need. Well, actually, just listen to hear for the last 45 minutes hour, whatever it's been and you would have gotten all the information you would need, I would say so. Thanks again, Jim, for joining us today and for being a font of so much useful information and context for people. So we I expect we'll talk to you again because your work is not yet done the committee's work is not yet done and there will be elections coming forever. Right. Yes. And before I go, let me say that the select board is still inquiring of Arlington's members of community that would like to work at the polls that there are a few openings left and they were looking for competent people who would like to work during that day and will be protected with PPE. So that if there's anyone that would like to do that, they could contact the select board.  No, these are compensated positions. Okay. And if a potential applicant contacts the board by tomorrow, the first thing they do is to see that they are registered voter that they do live in Arlington and unless there is some extraordinary reason why they shouldn't be appointed, they would be brought up on Monday night's meeting of the select board to be approved to work at the election on June 6th. All right. Excellent piece of useful information with which to end. Okay. Thank you very, very much. You've been watching Talk of the Town. I've been talking to Jim O'Connor about the work of the Election Modernization Committee and about our elections generally. Jim, appreciate it and we'll see you again and to you in the audience. Thanks for joining us. I'm James Milan. This was Talk of the Town. See you next time.