Let me start with the usual caveat. Our institute is very closely associated with the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our ambassador is present here, but it's not a part of the ministry. So I'm not obliged to give you any official Belgian point of view, vice versa. The ministry is not obliged to accept any of my brilliant recommendations, but that's an arrangement that the two parties seem to be able to live with. The debate about strategy has just become un-topical again, because there is an initiative by four member states, Sweden in the lead, it is set with Poland, Italy and Spain, they have tossed their national institutes like the institute here, to start a reflection about what they call a European global strategy, just to end with a report sometime in the spring of next year, in which no doubt the four member states will try to use to further the idea of adopting a formal new strategic document at the EU level. They tried to last year, they proposed the more or less the same countries to revise the existing European security strategy, which now goes back to 2003, but they didn't really manage to convince enough other capitals, about three or four member states were explicitly in favour, about three or four member states were explicitly against and the rest didn't really seem to care that much, a result of which the debate ended in a stalemate, and I think this is sort of a new attempt to have the same debate under a different name, should we not need more European strategy. The usual three points in my speech, all the great speeches have three parts. First of all, why do I think that indeed we need some more strategy? My own very self-interested reason is of course that means I can write yet another book about this fascinating topic, but there are more objective reasons too. In the European security strategy, I think we have a document that operates at the, what I would call the grand strategic level, thereby I mean that contrary to what its name suggests, it's not just about security policies, actually about foreign policy or EU external action. But it's not a complete document, I think it's a document that mostly sort of codifies how the EU likes to do things, a sort of preferred methodology. We like to be preventive about things, we like to do things in a multilateral setting, and we like to be holistic or comprehensive. That tells us how to do things doesn't really tell us what to do, what are actually EU objectives, what are the priorities of EU foreign policy. And especially after the Lisbon Treaty came into force and we created this whole new machinery, our own external action service, a much strengthened position of the high representative, the question then soon became well what are they here for, what are they supposed to do, and to that existing strategies don't really provide an answer. As a result of which the EU I think will too often tend to be quite reactive, and of course foreign policy is often about reacting to what goes on, but that doesn't exclude at the same time one should try to proactively shape certain events and developments in areas in which one is very interested. That of course means that one has to define some priorities beforehand. At the same time, as you all know, we're living in an increasingly multipolar world, meaning there are more and more actors that have global reach, which tend to be much more proactive. I think the Chinese, to name just the obvious example, have a much better idea for themselves of what their interests are and what their objectives are. It doesn't mean they're always successful in pursuing them, but it does mean that they pursue them much more determinedly than the EU, which often is a bit wishy-washy. What do we want? Do we want something? And as a result, we easily get played off the field. I always quote my colleague, Jacques Coulmond, who said, at the global stage, many of the other actors, they seem to be playing chess, and the EU is stuck playing ping-pong, rather less sophisticated. I dare to argue. Finally, I think in the recent years, we have been confronted with some events, some developments, that have an impact at the whole of EU foreign policy, and therefore demand a debate at this grand strategic level. There's the Arab Spring, which brings enormous geopolitical change in our immediate periphery. There's the so-called American pivot to the Asia-Pacific, but also to the greater Middle East, which just means that the US expects every European to do its duty to take care of our own security problems. And there's, of course, the financial crisis, which means that we have less means available for foreign policy. It also means we have lost a lot of soft power, I would argue, and a lot of prestige and leverage in the rest of the world. Those three factors have an impact on everything that the EU does in terms of foreign policy, and therefore you cannot just discuss them, I think, within the box of one specific foreign policy field. You cannot just talk about the Arab Spring within the box of the European neighborhood policy because, well, for one, there are linkages with regions that are outside the European neighborhood policy. Think about the Sahel, think about the girl fair and actors like Saudi Arabia. For another thing, we might want to decide that because our periphery is so important to us that we want to shift means from one policy area to the neighborhood policy area. Or we want other strands of foreign policy, think about development, to refocus on the neighborhood. I put this just as an example. So in my view, we need a debate about at this grand strategic level of the whole of EU foreign policy sets some priorities. And this has been difficult. There is not great willingness to undertake this. And it seems to me that very often we confuse a bit the question of substance with the question of formalities. The official debate, yet again at the Gimlich in March, always tends to focus on form and process. People seem to be stuck up about, yes, but who will write it? And will we be able to have a small drafting team? And what's the role of a document like this? And in which way should we write it down? And nobody really seems to talk about the question, what should our strategy actually be? And whether we write it down or in what form is then, in my view, the second question. But the first question, what should our strategy be, tends to be a bit overlooked. So I'm hopeful that this new initiative of the four countries, at least it's another attempt to get the strategic debate into gear. So we need, in my view, a new really substantial debate on strategy. What should our strategy be in the second part of my talk, which is briefly touched upon a couple of dimensions that I think require much more attention. One is obviously the neighborhood policy. I've been saying this as before the Arab Spring, but it's all the more valid, all the more valid now. We haven't really reassessed our policy towards our southern neighbors since the Arab Spring. We have shifted a few means, 5% of the budget around, from the left to the right or from the right to the left. I'm not quite sure. But we're basically doing more of the same. And indeed, the program is called more for more. I would say it's more of more rather than more for more. I'm not saying that this is not useful, but I'm not sure it is quite sufficient. You're seeing enormous changes there. You see within all of our neighbors, we see new actors coming to the fore. We see new alignments arising among our neighboring countries, and we see a new role for certain outside actors. The risk, I think, is that many of these actors now look away from Europe. Now, we don't want these actors to look up to us. That's not what we are there for. We're not about to craft a sphere of influence, I would say. But we would hope that they want to look towards Europe and regard us as partners. Of course, our legitimacy is quite low now because many of the regimes where there have been revolutions that have been brought down were until that very day are supposedly our friends and allies. It's a bit difficult to go to Tunisia and say, okay, we support the local dictator for 50 years, but now we'll explain to you how to do democracy. If I were at Tunisia, I would say, merci beaucoup, but perhaps I can sort it out myself. But we do need partnership with these countries because of vital interests that are at stake in the region. Think about energy, think about migration, think also about economic interest in the region per se. There are also opportunities. We are perhaps a little too worried about the fact that political Islam comes to power that doesn't need to be negative. The President of the European Council is a member of a religious party, the Flemish-Christian Democrat Party. If that is not a problem in Europe, we should not automatically assume that the religious party outside Europe is a bad thing. And if we look at the recent utterings of the President of Egypt, it is clear that there is not 100% in, for example, the Iranian camp. If you look at the speeches he gave there. So I would expect some much more proactive initiative by the EU in seeking out new partners and seeking out new alliances. And of course, there's the ongoing conflict in Syria, and there is that is there that we have some sort of new region-wide Tunisia confrontation. I don't think, for example, that it's up to the EU to pick sides in this confrontation. I don't think it's a goal to arrive at a situation in which all regional actors can find themselves. So obviously, lots of questions there. Second issue, our position in the multi-polar world. Strategic partnerships are supposedly one of our priorities, always repeated. We have about 10 of them now with most of the key global players, the United States obviously, the BRICS countries. Some countries from nowhere can see why they are a strategic partner like Mexico. With many of these, we have a strategic dialogue, I think we can talk about everything, but we don't really do a lot together necessarily. And for me, partnership is more than dialogue. It means joint action. So how to give substance to those partnerships? It seems to me that all too often we regard those as instruments to further the bilateral relations. And they are, of course, that, but not just that. We should also look at them horizontally and use them in function of our predefined horizontal foreign policy interests. Try to make coalitions and issue areas, perhaps on issue one, we can agree with the Chinese and the Indians to act together. Another issue will be with the Brazilians and the Indians, but try to find more joint action. That is, of course, difficult because many of our strategic partners start from a very different value system, we think about China, but it's not impossible. We can combat piracy together with the Chinese. Is that a one-off thing, or is there a scope for more? Big debate there. Finally, being very brief here, but I'll try to keep to my time, peace and security. What is actually EU's ambition as a global security provider? For me, the operation in Libya demonstrated once again that collectively we have no idea whatsoever of which regions or which types of contingencies we as Europeans feel responsible for. And as a result, our responses are always ad hoc and improvised. Clearly, Libya demonstrates what we already knew that there is not enough Europe in security and defence. But Libya also again made clear that there is likely to be less America in European security and defence in the future. The Americans keep on signalling that we would like you to take care of problems like these on your own. You are the first line responder and you should acquire the capabilities to do that. This requires a collective European response because the capabilities that we need to borrow from the Americans are the most capital-intensive ones, which no single EU member state can acquire on its own. It's not France by itself or it's not even the Franco-British alliance, the defence agreement, that will acquire an NATO air refueling capacity or the satellite capacity that you need to do modern military operations. The only possible reply is a collective reply. Europeans need to decide what capability means they want to have. But of course, normally you can only decide if you know what you actually want to be able to do. So in a way, the American pivot is dependent upon a European strategy. Europeans deciding, what is our level of ambition then in dealing with some of these security issues for which the Americans now sort of impose autonomy upon us. It's a Belgian, by the way. I find it greatly irritating that we can always only be autonomous. Apparently if the Americans order us to be autonomous, but okay, if that's the way it works, that's the way I'm happy with the result. What does this mean also for the way we organise security and transatlantic relationship? What we saw is that in Libya couldn't be a CSDP operation because Europeans, EU member states among themselves disagreed and the EU, of course, disappears. Then the debate shifts to NATO. But in NATO, the Americans say we're not going to lead, we're not going to take initiative, it's up to you to decide what you want. Well, NATO minus the Americans is more or less the same bunch of Europeans again. So they replay the same debate and lo and behold, they still disagreed. So what you get is a NATO that I think more and more is an instrument. It's a tool. It's a service provider. It's a good one. It delivers very effective command and control of military operations that is less and less an actor in its own right. You basically have two real actors. You have the European system and you have the Europeans. If and when the Europeans concert, which I don't do often enough, but they are more likely to do it in the EU because there they can look at the whole of foreign policy and if and when they decide that foreign policy in a specific case needs a military reply, well, then we can make use of the tools that we have and we choose which one we need on an ad hoc basis. That will sometimes be NATO. If you want to do something rather large, military terms, that will sometimes be our own CSDP. More and more NATO becomes an instrument, a toolbox, and for once there I say it, Donald Rumsfeld seems to be right. The mission defines the coalition. Damn, this was on the record, was it? Well, there you go. These are just, there are of course other debates that these are for me the key questions on which we need some more strategic thinking to lead into priorities. What I would start from is to say, well, we don't need to throw away the strategy that we have because I think the method, holistic preventive multilateral is still very much valid and I think in this world of today it can still work basically because we have multi-polarity but also interdependence. The great powers are much more interdependent than they were before. Just think about in economic terms, how we're all very much interlinked. I think also about some of the global challenges which we can only solve if we cooperate. We will cooperate but we know that no great power can solve something like global warming on its own. So our method I think is still valid but we need to outer with interest and interest is often in EU circles a bit of a dirty word. I've sat in quite a few debates about the intervention in Libya for example and people say to me, well, Europeans intervene in Libya but they have interest there. Therefore it is bad. What would you prefer then? The interventions when it's against our interest when we have no interest at all? Not quite clear. By the way the same people who tell you that you intervene in Libya and criticize you for not intervening in Syria. That's another debate. So I really would bring in interest and I think what is distinctive about EU strategy is that we at least try to safeguard our interest while respecting the legitimate interest of others. But that's what makes our strategy distinctive. It's not about being disinterested. It simply does not exist. In our research at the Institute we made as a list of vital interests of course we need to protect our territory. We need to safeguard the supply of all the natural resources that we need for our economy. We need to safeguard, we need to keep open all our lines of interaction with the world in physical as in cyberspace, global trade power. We need to manage migration. We need to manage climate change. I would argue that upholding the basic tenets of international law is a vital interest. And we need to preserve our autonomy. By that I mean that EU member states should be able to make up their own minds and decisions should not be made for us in Beijing, Moscow or Washington for that matter. I think starting from those interests and applying the method, continuing to apply the method that we have applied it should be possible to define some priorities. I don't think the aim of such an exercise strategic reflection should be to find consensus on each and every imaginable item in foreign policy but rather to establish some priorities in which we agree one they're important for all 27 and two there is added value in collective action. But then also to mandate the institutions that we have created high representative in the external action service to mandate them to initiate policy on our behalf while now member states seem to use the external action service as a secretariat of their national ministries rather than regard as a policy actor in its own right which has of course something to do with perhaps a lack of willingness within the service and at the top of it itself. Final point and much more quick point this was the substantial debate then I do think the question comes do we need to write this down or not and I think once you have a strategy you also need to sell it and first of all then EU needs to sell it to its own constituency to the public in its member states to national parliaments it also needs to sell it to the outside world and therefore I think producing some sort of strategic document would be an important instrument to provide ourselves with a new strategic narrative you know actors need this from time to time the 2003 document if you read it everybody says it but it's still valid well it's true but nobody cares about it anymore you know you need to refresh it from time to time just like NATO in 2010 reviewed its strategic concept doesn't say anything new or unexpected one but NATO you know its main advantage is much shorter than the previous one and therefore readable but NATO needed to rebrand to rebrand itself and EU needs to do the same thing and I would say we need to write a positive document a positively toned document don't start from threats and say everything is you know everything is going down the drain start from a very positive agenda and I would say look we Europeans have a model that is distinctive in the world we do democracy plus capitalism plus strong government or big government as the Americans would call it as a result of which Europe is the most equal continent in the world you manage to provide to the greatest share of our citizens the greatest prosperity greatest freedom and the greatest security that's all distinctive thing and we happen to believe that if other states would apply not the same model in all its details but start from the same value set that would actually be better for everybody better for their own population but it would bring stability and therefore would be better for us so I would start from this very very positive agenda and then bring in interest because interest are the vital conditions that have to be fulfilled in order to preserve our own model they are not something that is per se bad and then set out some priorities and of course not all of it needs to be written down in one document I think the end result of this can also be a tasking to develop more specific action plans or to implement some of the policies that some of the policies that we have what is important and I'll end with that is that we create some sort of follow up mechanism if we are not debating continue to debate whether or not we should revise the 2003 strategy is because at the time we didn't provide for this in 2007-8 there was an attempt to revise it which failed so by coincidence it is later and now next year will be 10 years sort of by coincidence we are debating it again but the fact is that people as I know all people are very busy so if the strategy that we have is not somehow integrated and incorporated into some bureaucratic system that for example says that with every new mandate of a high representative he or she has to provide for an update of the strategic thinking then after a while people stop thinking about it because they have too much to do and I know that I may wake up every morning and read the European Security Strategy and do so again before I go to bed but normal people probably don't well my students might but only until they pass the exam so we need to create a follow up mechanism and make sure that there is ownership which also means I think that we need to involve all the relevant actors in the strategic thinking so the exercise that started now led by four member states would mostly be a think tanking exercise as far as I understand our institute will probably be an associate partner of it they have just in fullness but at some point it needs to involve the political actors in the member states meaning member states governments but for me also member states parliaments, the defence and foreign affairs committees and of course the NGOs and the academics and the think tankers that does sound a bit like a mini convention and why not because it is sort of by having this debate outside the normal bodies in Brussels that you can arrive at something more creative and that is much more daring but I know that in politics courage is a difficult world, thank you very much


So thanks so much Marie, really appreciate the invite to the Women's Fedora Weekend and to talk at us. It's an absolute privilege to do it, whether I have much insight now with another thing. So I just kind of chatted about my experiences and so far. Things I've learned, challenges that I faced and a few accomplishments that we've made as well. So a little bit about myself. My name is Sarah Finn and I'm an agile coach with the CPE team. So the Community Platform Engine at Nearing Team, which looked after a lot of the infrastructure within Fedora and also sent us. I joined in November 2019, came in shortly after EFA, our product owner who gave a great talk yesterday. Both myself and EFA are the only women at the moment on the team and the guys that we work with are amazing. They're really champion us and really support us in all the different things that we do and the new things that we're jumping into as well. So that's really, really positive. It's a great team to work with. I'm also part of the agile practice team within Red Hat as well. So it's a group of agile practitioners and it's growing nearly every month or so. There's so many there. So it's great to have that community as well within Red Hat to be able to bounce off a few ideas and that. I'm a mother of two great girls. Addison is 10 and Isabel is 4, coming up to 5 in the next month. So definitely the job of balancing the career with family life can be quite challenging sometimes. I'm from Waterford in Ireland as well, down to sunny south east. And I'm very much an advocate for a team and an agile coach. I think there's enough said about that. But genuinely, I'm all about the team and trying to ensure that when people are working together that they're happy with how that's going. They're feeling quite content and feeling valued and getting a chance to celebrate their accomplishments. So how I became involved in Fedora. So I joined the site Red Hat in November 2019 and I joined the CPE team. So the community platform engineering team as their agile coach. So open source was definitely something I was familiar with in other organizations. And it's always that kind of conversation where we were discussing technology and different platforms and tools to use. And architecture and solutions, did we want to go down the open source route and go that route. But I never really got a chance to deep dive into it. So when I joined Red Hat and CPE, it was a huge learning curve for me and it opened up so many conversations. And just it was mind blowing, to be honest, to seeing all of this great work being done by such a large community. The vast amount of different technologies and things like that. It was just amazing to see. And also I became accustomed to IRC. So we've done that pretty quickly and got used to collaborating with the team and reaching out to them on that as well. Also I got to meet my helmet. So you can see in the chat there, Ifa and myself because that's Helma Louise. We haven't drove off that clip yet, thank God. But we're great, we're a great team I have to say. And we bounce up each other and we have that great bond and great support. So as I said, joining Red Hat, joining CPE, joining, I suppose, this door of open source and communities in regards to Fedora and CentOS, it was absolutely mind blowing to delve into this area. Because my background and my experience would have very much been an organisation of business-based, that this was just mind blowing to see lots of different people contributing together. Just because they liked doing it and they valued gaining ideas from other people and sharing their insights. It was just amazing to see and something I definitely wanted to explore a lot more. So why is it so mind blowing? And I thought about this over the last couple of days and I thought, okay, it's going back over my experience. What experience did I have in the last few steps and decades? Not too many decades, but one or two. So my background, I actually started out, I did a Bachelor's of Business Studies in Marketing. And I went straight into the marketing field. Even around, God, probably about 13, 12 years ago, it was not longer. So I loved marketing. I loved, I think, the kids watching advertising ads on TV used to play game called ads. They used to have to guess which ad it was, which product they were trying to sell, which brand. So I kind of gravitated towards that. But really, for me, when I thought about it, it was very much around the psychology of marketing. So why would somebody buy Nike over Adidas? Why would someone buy a Samsung over an iPhone? I really was intrigued by the decisions people were making. And I got a chance then to study a lot into emotion and rationality of marketing and that mindset. And what was really important to me as well was the ethics. And that has always been important since I've grown up. My family would definitely instilled a kind of an ethical mindset in everything that I did. I was always there to, I suppose, support people and to ensure that people were getting the right information. And if they were deciding to buy a product or a service, that they were buying it for the right reasons. So ethics was a big part for me. It has been in my life, but definitely in my career as well. However, the experience was a lot much different than what I thought it might be. This is a picture of a pressure cooker if people don't know what this is. And when I got more and more into the kind of corporate and business world, all I sensed all the time was pressure. Like constant keeping things going, keeping on that, that hamster wheel all the time. Very little time for actually collaborating, for reaching out to help people. The general kind of human aspect of it was really, was not existent. You were really reaching out to people to ask them to do something for you or to gain something. There was very little of the kind of kindness and human element to the corporate world that I experienced. A lot of people felt to get ahead. Maybe they had to take credit for everything. There was very much an I, I, I mentality more so than we. So it's not coming from my background. I was very much wanting to come together and to kind of build on things together. Not to single myself out of, you know, I'm going to achieve this and I'm going to do this. I was very much, you know, it takes a community, a team to build anything of value or to progress as humans and as goals for the organization for it. So then I discovered agile. And that was another moment where my mind was absolutely blown because it was a kind of a project management platform or approach that really was centered around people. So within when I came across agile, I was moving more from the marketing side of things and more so into the project management side of things. So the marketing, as we know, became huge online and digital marketing and all of that. It was very little traditional. So my role has started to be coming into more web development apps and that kind of thing, very much front end solutions. And I really felt my feet in project management, but I never liked the traditional project management. Data we picked from the sky and when we need a certain solution over the line by or we need, you know, this amount of hits on the website for to ensure that this is a valuable opportunity that we've gone down that route. This was agile to me was something that just made sense, you know, would allow people to check in with each other. It created opportunities for collaboration. It shared accountability across an organization for the delivery of value and for the delivery of the value to our users. So it just made complete sense and it creates a safe environment for people that they could speak up and share their thoughts and views. And if they felt something wasn't worth doing, there's an opportunity to say that if they felt they wanted to work on something in particular that they'd like to work on, there was an opportunity to do that as well. So really, I found that I was more comfortable being in the background and supporting others to take those leaps and to move forward and push outside of the comfort zones. So then when I came across Red Hat and open source of Fedora in 2019 when I joined last year, again, as I said, my mind was just blown because it all came together. Like the four foundations of Fedora just really sat with me so well. So freedom, you know, freedom to chat, to share ideas, to be innovative, to elaborate and to just be really open and honest. And I was just music 20 years ago. It was great friends. So like first, you know, first with foremost that it's a group of people that are friends. So not just people that are working together on bills and packages and upgrades and all of that, but that they're actually friends working together. I thought really, I really loved seeing that features as well. And first, so it was just all this innovation and this lovely warm environment that I just felt everything came together. So that's why my mind was blown when I became involved with Fedora because I finally found a career in a company and a community that shared my values where people were at its core. So like there was times where I felt, God, was I more, should I went down maybe the teacher route or the nurse route? What I wanted to do was kind of care for people and ensure I find my best is supposed to have people have a nice day. You know, they say kind of smile at somebody and might bite in their day. But the more I thought about it was like with that, I, you know, I love the world of innovation and technology and organizations and business and how much we can do together when we come together. But definitely I think this is, I've kind of come to terms, this is my calling in regards to bringing a bit of humanity and into the organizations and ensuring that it kept in communities as well. So how do I contribute to Fedora so far? So as I said, I'm very much behind the scenes, but always in the wings supporting CPE and its stakeholders as well. So as an agile coach, as you can see, there's a wide remit on what we do and how we do it. So there's a lot of coaching, there's a lot of time spent on just observing and seeing how things are going. Is there anything that's frustrating or challenging people or a team and just giving them the opportunity then to come together to discuss how they might try and resolve that. Is there another new approach they could take? Is there something they want to try out? So it's just that extra support for a team to maybe come up for air a little bit ever so often and to have a chat around where they'd like to go and what is I suppose there? Where do they feel comfortable, you know, where are they content? If they're feeling quite under, if they're feeling under pressure, if they feel like there's no downtime, how could we and what changes can we make to try and improve that? So what I'm doing is coaching, mentoring, again with any transformation or any new way of dealing with things. It takes a lot of change and takes a lot of time sometimes for people to kind of build the mindset of behaviours and build them a resilience. So they're open to new things and new approaches as well. So at the heart of everything I do, as I've said, is my motivation is always around helping people. So from the skills that I use on a day to day basis, I'm there to try and reduce stress and to create more compassion for ourselves. More so, that's first and foremost, that we feel that we are good enough and that we give every day is good enough. And then once we have that, then we'll definitely start feeling compassion for others and help each other when we're going through difficult times. Become more open and real. So creating a safe space and opportunities to be open to flag difficulties that are happening and actually giving people a reality check, you know, in what is possible and what's not possible. And just going back to the draw on board around it as well. As I said, people to feel good enough that every day, you know, what they're contributing to the community or what they're contributing in all of their life is good enough. Everyone is doing their absolute best. So to feel valued and heard. So everything that you're doing each day is valued and that you feel heard that you can have a conversation or flag any concerns that you might have. And also that you feel a sense of accomplishment. So I think if we were to really reflect on things, we want to feel that we're accomplishing things within ourselves, you know, that we're moving forward. So to do that, sometimes we just have to stop a little bit and reflect and go, you know what, God, you know, I got that over the line today that was really, really challenging. Or I reached out to Ali or our contributor. We worked really well on that. It was really nervous to do it, but I still did it. And we got that over the line. And so that's what I'm trying to encourage is just people to break down those barriers a little bit to be really compassionate with each other and to bring the more human side to it as well. There's a quote here that I think I came across a couple of months ago that for me, it sums up what success is for me. And the last three lines is it's what sticks with me. So to know even one life is really easier because you have lived that is to have succeeded. So my motivation is that it's people, it's not around going up a corporate ladder or anything like that. If I put a smile on someone's face or if people feel less stressed after having a chat with me, happy days. I'm happy. I succeed that day. So what challenges did I face when I joined CPE and Fedora and the world of Red Hat as well? So honestly, I was a newbie, newbie to open source, newbie as well to the world of software. As I said, a lot of my experience would have been front end solutions more so than the back end. So this was hugely new for me. It was quite nervous around it. But I knew I suppose that with the experience that I would have had in lots of different industries that I had to tweak and change that at the end of the day, the philosophy was still the same. It's around trying to encourage more collaboration and address challenges and frustrations. So yeah, it was like a fire hose. It really was. And I think Lee Griffin, who's the CPE manager, has said that to me. How's that fire hose going? And I think the fire hose was on a steady flow there for a good three to four months of information. So what I couldn't get over was just the vastness of Fedora and how far it spread. The amount of packages and tools and everything that was just there. It was just, it was in awe to be honest of all the talent that's out there and how people were coming together. And I really got to see that through IRC and how people were collaborating and also on GitHub and places like that as well. So what I learned as well is definitely the relationships and the passion that was instilled within Fedora. And for me, I suppose I never really understood that to that extent of what it is in Fedora. Because a lot of the time, as I said, my experience would have been in organizations. There was passion there, but it was from, you know, it was at the end of the day, it was a job, you know, that kind of way. But here, what I see is just this, I don't think there's hard sums at office, just this fire of passion for, you know, the values that you have there. And it was really good to see that. But it took me a while to grasp, you know, how people were very passionate about it and to ensure that I was giving enough time and really taking that on board when I was chatting with various stakeholders and team members as well. Also wearing multiple hats. And so I came in into this role as an agile coach, but my experiences would have been very much product owner, scrum master, Kanban coach. And so this was my first role whereby I had to kind of step up a little bit and help out other people that were going to be in those roles. And so I was trying to juggle, how is I going to do that? Where do I step in? Where do I step out? Also navigating the different people that we needed to reach out to within CPE, within the Fedora community. So how was our relationships at that time? How can we improve them? What are the challenges there? And there were some challenges at that time as well. And how best to approach them? How best to go about it? And also there was obviously skepticism with this agile coach that came in, you know, what is their agenda? You know, what is the end agenda? Where does she want to get to? And it takes time, you know, to build that trust. But I think I have done that with the team, think it's cost that I really am, you know, just around supporting people to get things done and to do that in the most compassionate way possible. Also, I was a mom, obviously, I'm still a mom, that didn't drop. But as you all know, if you've experienced it before, starting a new role, you're talking at least six months. But for me, anyway, anything more that I started, six months it takes for you to feel, okay, I get it, I know where we're going, I know what's happening. And it's all consuming. When you go into a new role, it's all consuming. And especially with this agile coach role, because I wanted for the team and for people that I was interacting with and being very mindful that when I interacted with the team that anything that we might have discussed and things like that might have impacted things in the community as well. So I wanted to ensure that everything that they experienced was a positive experience. So that was a lot of pressure that I put on myself at that time. And the reason I wanted it to be as positive as possible was because of that skepticism and sometimes with agile and with other experiences, some team members with my event or some community members may have had the experience with agile coaches or squad masters and things like that. I wanted to ensure that I was instilling that the team were the captain's, you know, the partnership of the changes that they were making. I was just creating opportunities and suggesting different ways we might do that. So obviously as we were kind of looking at everything, I wanted things to be quite positive. So that took a toll on family life, which was quite hard. And I feel the MAMI guilt and all that that happens with it. But I have a great partner. I have a great family as well. And the colleagues that said with NCP have been amazing. But I just, you know, I'm now at a point where I can step back a little bit more and allow the team to move forward. But I think it's great for the girls. And when I was doing this today, I was saying to Addison, I'm going to do a bit of Fedora thing today. She said, I'm really proud of you, MAM, to do that. So, like, I won't get emotional now. But, you know, as I have daughters, they want them to pursue things and not feel, you know, that guilt sometimes and to move forward with their dreams of what they want to do as well. So what victories did we achieve? So we had lots of victories within CPE and I suppose within the Fedora community as well. So there seems to be a lot more opportunity to collaborate. Like within Fedora, anyway, there's huge collaboration there. There's huge transparency there. That's never, never, ever, ever been an issue. And again, that was a learning curve for me as well because I come from an organization whereby there was a lot of meetings, closed meetings where, you know, a set of people were invited into a meeting and everything was, you know, maybe top secret until we could go out with something kind of more formal, you know, what that announcement might be. So to see, you know, an environment that was so transparent and open with what they were doing, as I said, it was just music to my ears. It was great to see that. So really what this illustrates is it's just a little bit more within the CPE environment there. Just having a chat when we see these requests coming in, when we have maybe bigger pieces of work that we'd like to work on, you know, that we're having a chat around, okay, who do we need to work on this? What's going to be the outcome of it?  Or is it, you know, a year long thing? So it's just happened that conversation to see what skills we need and what resources and what support needed to ensure that we're delivering value to the community that they can use at the end of that period. It's all about balance and we're always going to be there. And I think within the team now, what I can definitely say, you know, within the team, that they've gone into a mode of reflection and reviewing things that we're doing. So for example, if we're having a meeting every week and we feel, you know what, I think we could change this up and gain more from it. Team members are now speaking up and suggesting new ways of dealing with that, which is great to see. Yeah, with IRC as well. I sort of definitely on that, love it. And I've also done a few, what are they called? Upgrades. So BIPL has taught me to do a few package upgrades for my Google Chrome and all that. So I'm delighted and thrilled to get that done. We asked for a lot of feedback. So you might see the community engagement or community happiness survey that goes out. So we set up a community happiness initiative. We're about members of CPE and also representatives from the Fedora community join a bi-weekly call and we look at ways on how things are going and how we can improve within the community as well. The team are starting to look at the both different paths. So it's not just one path that we want to go down. There could be lots of different approaches to things. And again, just having that opportunity to discuss that. So it's brilliant to see that. So that's definitely something that's become a more and more the norm within the team. Also the man here, I don't know what he is. Is he a Viking or something? I'm not too sure, but with the shield as well. So it's around trying to protect yourself a little bit more as well. And I'm glad to see the team doing that. So being comfortable to say, no, we can't do that or there's no value in us doing that. Or yes, we can do that, but we can't do this. So it just reduces this ever-growing backlog of to-do list whereby we log off at the end of the day and think, oh my God, there's still another load there for me to do the next day. That we look at what makes sense for us to do and what ensures that it's ever creating that value to our community each day, each month and each quarter. And we're taking time out to celebrate.  Because at the end of the day, we do have a lot on our to-do list. And if we just keep going, we never take any opportunity to celebrate how great we are and what we're doing and how we're improving people's lives. So we definitely have done a lot of that in CPE as well. And you can definitely see the team becoming a lot more self-organized whereby they may not no longer need to have a coach in the next couple of months because they're creating these opportunities themselves now organically, which is amazing to see. And I feel very proud to see that as well. So as I said, really, my role was just to ensure that they're creating these opportunities for themselves to address challenges, frustrations and try and include people into decision-making and being very open with what's happening and what's not. So my final thoughts is really for women, more women to come into tech. If that's something that they love to do, it's around women and men championing each other and just coming together and to support each other in doing that. And I can definitely say that a shout-out from my experiences of Elizabeth Fedora on the development list within CPE, the men and the women have just been beyond supportive, very open to answering all my questions that they might think are very silly questions, but I don't care. And it's just brilliant to see. So I think the more and more we break down these barriers and create space for more questions to be asked and for women to really champion themselves and just go for it. And we'll be here to support you along the way. So that's it for me. Thanks so much for your time. Not sure if there's any way valuable, but again, I really appreciate it. Thank you. Hi. Hi. You do not need to question if that was valuable. That was so awesome. And I have like too many questions. Thinking of more and more questions. Okay. So my first question is when did you first get involved? Like when did you first get hired in tech? When did you first get? Okay. So hired into tech was probably 10 years ago with a consultancy firm in the college called Waterford Institute of Technology. And they were very much around website bills, apps bills, working with companies to really get into the mindset of their users and what value would bring to the users and things like that. So that was in around 10 years ago. Now, God, I'm getting old. I'm just like you're very, very early 20s. Already 20s, very early, very early. Okay, cool. Yeah. And school for tech or did you go to school at all? Like did you go to university for, you said you were from marketing, right? So yeah, so I did a BBS in marketing and then I'd say about six months or so after that and I could really see like the marketing was becoming online again, very much digital marketing. So I did a web development course then. And then after that I did little kind of other courses, very small kind of tech side things, but I very much stayed on the front end. So more of the marketing, the user experience more so than diving into software and things like that. Cool. So now that you're in more of the tech world and the agile coaching and the project managing and all of these things, do you miss the marketing stuff? Sometimes I do, I'll be honest. More so around this with the visuals. So everything in marketing is UI. You know what I mean? It's like jazzy, you know, it's a lovely clean design and color, all that kind of thing. So it took a long time for me when I was in IRC, you know, kind of all of this text and all of that, even on the terminals and things was quite different to me. But I think I do like this upper end side of things. I do like seeing how things work, you know, and just a little bit of code and so much up here as I was delighted to upgrade my own Google Chrome to the date. But I do miss it, but I do see, I am bringing a little bit of that experience into CPE as well. I know Stefan, he's the manager, a new manager who's just joined CPE and he kind of comes from a little bit of that background as well with a lot of visuals and UI and things. But again, we need to look at our audience and ensure what people are comfortable with them and all of that too. So I have thoughts about this. I have a design and finer background. That's what I went to school for. So yeah, that was honestly something that took some effort to overcome was the format and the presentation, like you weren't around in these days, but we used to use something called track. And it was honestly, as someone who was used to it, like I was in college and at the university we used Apple. We used, you know, it's going from that to something that is not wrapped nearly as shiny or pretty, and it's the UI and that. So I think that there's, I kind of had this goal to improve design and open source, but it's a hard one. There are some open source design groups, but I've always been so involved with Fedora. It's kind of hard to bring it out past that. But the reason they ask if you were missing marketing is because we have marketing opportunities in Fedora. Right, but it's very good. And I was just, I was looking at your presentation and which slide it was, it was the one we were talking about, you know, the things that you attempt to do for others in a very concrete way. It just made me think of my mentorship experience. It made me think of the kind of things I think about and do when I'm mentoring other people in the community or now more officially through Outreachy. I think you would be such an ideal mentor for Fedora and actually just to shout out Sarah, which she is co-mentoring an intern for this upcoming Outreachy session with a couple members from CPE. So I don't know what your role is in that, but I see you're involved and I'm really excited about that now because I hope you can talk about it. Yeah, interact with applicants and share this kind of energy with them. That's awesome. I can't really say that it was productive. It really supported me in it and go on the Outreachy program. He's the coordinator for the interns stuff for Fedora, so we definitely thank him for all of that support. He definitely gives me reminders about things I have to do. That's great. What do you feel like since you've been on the CPE team?  What categories do you think you've fallen with that? When I joined CPE they were an amazing group. Anyway, you know what I mean? Their hearts are 100% in the community. I felt for them sometimes definitely at the start. When I was introduced and people were probably unsure of what my role was. They had a heart in the community and a heart in Red Hat. It's quite challenging there. I think I hope what I've left them with or what I'm bringing is I value all of that. I just think it's excellent to see them contributing so much to the community. I definitely want to encourage them to do things they enjoy doing within the community and create space to do that. I hope that I have instilled that in them so they know that it's not one of the other. It can absolutely be all of it. Hopefully that's it. Awesome. For people who are familiar with Fedora Space there's this thing called the Develop List or for people who are unfamiliar. We have the Develop List and Sarah mentioned it in her talk. I can kind of tell why. She was like about a year ago when we had a lot of passionate people on there. That was a really nice way of saying it's kind of like a dumpster fire. I guess I want to ask how did you try to do their job and maybe they have more understanding of why they're doing what they're doing with the average Fedora etc. How did you coach the team through that? It definitely seemed intense. I'll just say it was a really good forage. It was an intense couple of weeks that we had all together and it was pretty emotional. I'm curious how did you support the team through that? Yeah, so absolutely. I think the word passionate is a great word because it's only when people do get upset or are angry about certain things that are done it comes from a good place. It comes from a passionate place. It's obviously reasons why and it's to protect things or whatever that might be. I always see any feedback whatsoever as a positive actually I find the more that we're open with that and the more that we become more content with just listening and just hearing then I suppose to come together and try and see what we can do together. So what is our common goal and what is our common purpose but not to what would you say, take those feelings and make them personal. They're not. They're somebody else's experiences that they're having. So to try and I suppose detract yourself from the emotions that somebody is feeling and try and see through where that anger is where that's stemming from or where that disappointment is around it. So it would have coached the teams individually and also management and stakeholders as well on how we were communicating around it. I'm using it very much as a lesson, a lesson learned. So we're not perfect we're not going to get everything right there's going to be things that we're going to not do right or people feel we haven't done right you're not going to leave everybody. But I think if we learn from things and then as we go forward to try and improve it and I think having the community happiness initiative we're coming together and seeing how we can improve things and having that survey there as well that can help us not come up against that in as much in the future. Very cool. Thank you for answering all my questions. So I don't see any questions in the chat right now of course people are welcome to drop some in but as you were here I'm sure you know what's coming next I was hoping Oh no I'm so proud of this. I was hoping you would read this little script for us we're putting together some content after this with our footage one of the really cool things about working online this way for events for events as we get all this content recorded so here it is I need to try to figure this out a little bit yesterday maybe you remember and then we added in one more piece at the bottom we are Fedora so when I'm ready go ahead and unmute myself I'm going to say this in Irish first so you say the first part in Irish the part about yourself okay and the part in English okay so what is the what's the second part we are from different countries we speak different languages okay the only thing I'm not sure about is I am a woman and I speak English let me see because you know that the translation for I am a woman and I speak Irish there Google and standby okay let's go over this the translation I it's a bit embarrassing that we don't know I think it said just oh there you go do I have it on there okay perfect thanks so much for that so do you quit it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not on film it's not made we are from different countries we speak different languages we are of different cultures but Fedora unites us with open source we are Fedora awesome thank you for doing that and thank you again for coming here I hope you get to hang out and chat and see a couple more stories from other folks and guess what I'll see you at work on Monday absolutely thank you thank you


I'm Jay Fidel, and this is Community Matters. And the title of our episode is Glyph Slater writes about transit, and does he ever? It's growth, it's decline, and it's pending demise. That's going in distance, isn't it? So what's at the end of the road for transit? Here's a book cover. It's available on Amazon. And it's absolutely worth looking at because it looked into the future and it connects all the dots about everything that has happened. Not only locally, we'll talk about that, but nationally. You know, they used to say that as General Motors goes, so goes the nation. Well, I would like to say, and maybe Glyph will agree with me, as transit goes, so goes the nation. Welcome to the show, Glyph. It's an honor to have you here. Thank you. I totally agree with you. I only mentioned Honolulu Rail twice briefly in the book. I talk about it being the last gospel of the Royal Renaissance. It is so bad so far, okay, but it's not worth covering. Well, you've been covering this. You've been covering rail transit here in Hawaii, and now in the national scene for 30 years.  And this book and your efforts, your remarks, your positions on rail at the time that Mufi Adamin was forcing it down on the throats, in my opinion, have been very helpful to the public conversation. Unfortunately, the political wins determined the result, and now we have the result. So let's talk about rail in Honolulu first, even though it's only mentioned in your book a couple of times. I remember you saying, and you said it a number of times in public, I was on the neighborhood board at the time, and I was listening, that rail wasn't going to work. Your thoughts about that, your thoughts about whether the federal government has seen what you were saying. When I said that it was going to go over $7 billion, he accused me of lying. It's over $10 billion now, and it's stealing his way to $15 billion. So I guess he should eat those words. Yeah, yeah. But Pena's Prevalores, who's more qualified than anybody, says that he thinks it's just going to be $15 billion before it's all finished. In the beginning, when it first came out, when I was talking about $7 billion, I never thought that there would be any cost over runs before they got to dealing at. How can you get cost over runs and not building something in an open field? There's no obstruction. Now, they'll be going now into denser areas. It gets to be quite tricky, especially when you get into the waterfront, because that waterfront is mostly filled land. It's very plastic. You've got nothing dealing with anything that's really solid. The fact that they still don't have anybody, and haven't from the beginning had anybody that has ever built a rail line, okay? Let alone an elevated rail line.  Well, they've had a lot of politicians in there. Yeah, and they've got a lot of qualified engineers, but rail is a different bird all together. You really need to get real expertise. Even then, you've got to be prepared for cost over runs. What about the ridership? It started out last summer with the inaugural trip, and it's still working on the inaugural trip, because not a lot of people are taking it, even though it's supposed to be functioning. Your thoughts about ridership in the beginning and the middle and the end? Well, first off, I think it was an error on their part to carry people from nowhere to nowhere, okay? I mean, they can't expect to have any ridership. That was really an error, because people finish up laughing up. I think in time, when they eventually get to Alamoana, their ridership will be, I think, about a quarter of what they forecasted. That was based on, if you look at all the other rail lines that have been built, especially the elevated ones, and you look at riders per million of population, you look at the riders per length of track, you come up with a number that's like 25% of what they're forecasting. Well, it sounds like a boat. It sounds like a boat. You know what a boat is? A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money, and a rail sounds like a hole in the ground into which you pour money, because it's going to get worse, not better. Am I right? It's going to get more expensive as it gets older, right? Yeah. Oh, yes. That's the problem. They keep saying, once you've got a rail line, it's in, it's forever. It's not forever at all. They start replacing rails in as little as 15 years. The average, I think, is 25 years. That's just the rail, and then the refurbishing of the trains themselves, they don't last that long. You've got a lot of people, of course, when you don't have many people riding them, they'll last longer. That's a loss every day is greater. It's a loss every single day. Well, the big thing is that they try to hide the maintenance costs, but in addition to the maintenance, there is the replacement. The replacement and refurbishing. And this is the thing that always comes as a surprise when somebody says, we need another $20 million to do X. We need $50 million to do this, and it just adds up. But the time 50 years rolls around, you'll spend pretty much what it costs you to build in the first place. One of the issues that came up when you gave me a ride on a bus, you arranged a bus from West Oahu into town following the path of the then planned rail, and we drove through, and what was clear to me is that wherever the rail went, it was going to have an elevated rail, as in New York, as in the Third Avenue subway and all that. It has an effect on the neighborhood, doesn't it? And that's permanent. You can't really undo that so well, and where you could see the mountains and the ocean and the sky in or around this elevated rail, that's gone. Is that something that we should be concerned about now? Very much so. Very much so. That portion when the rail transitions from Dillingham over to Nimitz and Vaisal Moana. You've got two major stations there, trying to town and downtown, and they're just going to wall off the ocean view. Well, the other thing, and I haven't followed this, maybe you have, is that when you're going to build rail, you have to cut the corners of a square block. In other words, the rail doesn't go 90 degrees. It goes in an easy, gradual arc around the corner of that block. So you have to condemn a good part of that block to accommodate that arc. And I don't think they ever finished acquiring the land and the rights to move that rail anywhere. I don't know where it stops, but I don't think it goes to Alamoana, certainly, and they have not planned for or acquired the rights to go there. So if and when, and maybe never, they decide to go as far as they were talking about to Alamoana, it's going to cost them a fortune because they haven't done it yet. Am I right? I'm not sure about that part. I know that it's still an open situation on a good number of parcels that they need, but I mean, you know, no condemnation can stop them from condemning it. And condemnation suits can get very political, especially around what is reasonable compensation for the rights being condemned. It's not like a fee simple thing.  Let me go to a Pete Buttigieg came here last week. What was the significance of his visit? What's the takeaway from his visit? And how is that going to affect things? I always remember another former Department of Transportation guy who rolled in and testified at City Council, this was a marvelous, you know, this was a marvelous thing for the city. And then I later found he'd been paid $10,000 for that. Yeah, that's what happens. So somewhere in here, you know, you were the Gadfly. You were the, you and Panos Previduros, I should say. We're talking about the city planning considerations and whether this was going to work. And you concluded that it was not going to work and you were a very strong voice for that proposition for a long time. But in the end, it was determined by political considerations and Buffy and unions and what have you. And here we are. Somewhere in there, you got to be national. Somewhere in there, you started focusing on learning about writing about the national transit scene as reflected in your book, Transit. Its growth, decline and pending demise, which just came out and it's available on Amazon elsewhere. And here's the cover. And I'm very interested in, okay, you had a correction to what I said. It's available on Amazon, except to Hawaii residents.  What is it? Radioactive? I don't know. When you try to buy it, they take you all the way to the end and then tell you that there's something wrong with your address and you can't ship to that address. Okay? No, not okay. So having spent many, many hours getting the run around from Amazon, I finally concluded that something like that suspicions earlier, but now I'm of the opinion that Amazon needs a lot of city permissions for their new warehouse and the city as it's leaned on. That's a story. That's a story all in itself, if that's an outrage. So anyway, you got involved in looking at rail from a national point of view when you wrote this book. It is top of the block. It's a masterwork on rail in these United States. It goes into so many issues and historical developments and public officials. And you have a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover. That's got to have a significance. Do you want to talk about the history and how Lyndon Johnson got involved and what's the track of the book and the coverage so we will all know where rail has taken us nationally? When the first move was made with the Urban Mass Transportation Bill of 1962 and that Kennedy was involved and he was quite clear that he wanted where possible, he wanted everything to be private, profitable. People would pay appropriately. And there was really a free message to Congress in 1962. That was a free market statement if you ever wanted one. So then he was assassinated and so then we have Johnson takes over. And John, the bill that Johnson signed in 1964 was the absolute antithesis of what Kennedy wanted. But he still didn't get any money. They passed the act but they didn't fund it. So it went until 1970. There's another bill 1970. And that to everyone's surprise was funded by Nixon. So the tune of $10 billion which was a lot of money in those days. So it was a real bipartisan effort. So what I get from your book and from the review of it is that we started out with the Kennedy approach, entrepreneurs, private capital building rail systems and other transit systems around the country. And that was successful. But somewhere along the line, the federal government got involved and it essentially caused government to buy up the positions of all these private entrepreneurs. And so you look on phase one, it was owned and operated by private capital. And phase two, it was owned pretty much, all of it was owned pretty much by municipal, state, and federal capital. And if I'm going to build a rail system, the God, this is an adage about building railroads here. If I'm going to build a rail system, I don't want government doing it. In this country, I want private industry doing it. So we went from private industry to government running rail. And government has the money for sure, but does government have the management skills? Does government have the ability to actually run these systems? And was that a good move? I take it from your book and from the reviews of it that you don't feel it was a good move at all. No. For example, it takes twice as many people to run transit today for the expense and the employees for each 100,000 rides takes twice as much today as it did when it was private in 1970. And you can't run a railroad that way. You know, the other thing is with the rail, when they started to build it, it was in private hands. Okay? Then over time, governments took it over because they felt they needed for employees. Okay? But the buses stayed private. Okay? So as we get to say 1960, the buses, bus companies are largely private. Okay? And the rail lines leaving aside these street cars, that was all government run. Okay? Now, so now we get, and this is where we get into the urban transportation bill, is this is where they made it and they were very obvious about it. I'm not sure that in the book Congress was quite obvious in their intent to socialize the bus system. That's right. Indeed. It got socialized because the government was willing to pay the entrepreneurs at least fair market value and maybe more. And the entrepreneurs are only too happy to sell it to the government. Right? We had that here with the bus system. Right? Used to be private. Yeah. Harry Weinberg. Harry Weinberg. Yeah. That bus system was private and profitable so the day it was taken over by the city. The other thing I think it's appropriate to include in our conversation here is the technology. The one thing about rail and fixed infrastructure like this is very hard to change it. And if the community changes, and of course it changes the communities such as we are seeing with Honolulu Rail now, but if the community around it changes and more importantly, if the technology changes, you've got a big problem on your hands because it no longer fits within a dynamic urban plan. Can you comment on that? Well, you've got a perfectly good example of where two things, Uber and remote work, that's caused about one third drop in the rail and that's caused real problems for everybody even if they don't want to admit it. And most are really admitting it now. Okay, what are we going to do now? Under the body of administration, we have a priority for infrastructure that certainly includes rail and the Department of Transportation and the Board of Judge. But the reality is the government is to maintain the rail system, the transit system that has been built or is in the process of being built in this country is going to cost the federal government a lot of money. And the fact is that rail is expensive. It's in the billions every time you look. And that is always more than you thought.  When you talk about the fiscal policy going forward and you include rail that we don't actually need, this creates a national problem. I think that's what you're saying, is it? Yeah. Yeah. We're, I can, chapter six, for example, I showed that the recovery from COVID of the rail and you see it come up to the ridership, one third less than it was in 2019. And it seems stuck there. But Uber is doing better than they did in 2019. And because the traffic flow is same as it was before, has been for some time. From the outset, even from the day when you took me for that bus ride from West Oahu, this is all a question of urban planning, urban development. It's a question of putting the roads where they should be. It's a question of maintaining the roads, managing the roads. And, you know, in general, planning the expansion of the city. And one of the big focus points in that period of time was the Kakako, which I must say is really not a successful venture, a successful chapter in urban planning. That's my opinion anyway. But clearly, when you have a situation where the downtown is becoming less relevant, vacancies are going up downtown. Landlord profitability is going down. And rail is going to serve these areas with fewer and fewer riders because remote work, as you said, has changed. So how does the city, the urban authorities, including the federal government that supports the urban authorities, how do they modify the original plan and expectations on the basis of which they provided and promised to provide many tens of billions of dollars around the country? How does the change, how should they, can they adapt to that change? I don't think that rail in time or rail or transit in time is going to be relevant. It doesn't provide really what people want. You know, one of the things that I looked at recently and didn't have, I don't have the book, but I put it on the website. What's the name of the website? cliffslater.com. Thank you. And that is that in Los Angeles, that Uber is cheaper than light rail. Well, let me offer it. It's also more democratic. If I need transportation, I call Uber, I pay for that. The other guy who doesn't need transportation, he doesn't pay for it. So there's an equity there. If I'm getting the benefit, I'm paying the cost. When you have a community infrastructure like rail, everybody pays, even those who never use it. You know, you imply, Cliff, that over a period of time, as rail becomes irrelevant, not only in Honolulu and transit, I should say, but elsewhere in the country where it doesn't keep up with changes in the urban dynamic, where people have other ways to get around or they don't need to get around, rail becomes irrelevant. And thus, you know, it falls into disrepair. It falls into even disuse. Maybe the authorities that wanted to have it before no longer want to have it. But what happens to a 10 or 15 billion dollar project that is essentially irrelevant? What happens over five, 10, 15 years to that project and to the community that it runs through? Well, it's a problem. So I wish they would not, you know, damage is done as far as bringing the rail in as far as Middle Street, but I wish they'd stop there because to go across our waterfront, no reasonable future for ridership. You know, one of the things about building concrete, such as we have done in Kakarako, is that you can say for a mortgage or a lease, you can say, oh, this has a useful life of, say, 50 years or maybe even 100 years. But in fact, the structure in concrete is going to last a lot longer than that. And it's going to take some kind of action. You know, in Singapore, buildings in concrete have to come down after a period of time.  We don't have that in Hawaii or in the United States. You can't force the demolition of a building unless it's, you know, dangerous in some way. But my thought is that, gee whiz, if you build it in concrete, it has a useful life, really, of hundreds of years. And the cost of removing it is astronomical. I mean, if it costs 10 or 15 billion dollars to build Honolulu Rail or any rail system, transit system in a similar city, it costs the same amount to tear it down, right? I don't think so because they don't, they don't need the engineering staff to pull it down. It's just, you know, that's just construction folks will take it. I accept that, but it isn't easy, though. Yeah. Well, you know, the environmental work that has gone into this thing, I mean, because the trains are just a minor, minor cost in this thing. Let me go further and say, if you were in charge of this, and I'm not, I suppose I'm bifurcating my question, if you were in charge of what has happened here in Honolulu, and in like cities, like systems elsewhere, which have been supported by the federal government to the tune of many tens of billions, what would you do with a rail system that doesn't work? What would you do with it? How would you change it? How would you demolish it or abandon it? What do you do with all these very expensive systems that the federal government has paid for and managed? Well, I guess the place you'd go look at would be New York because they had all elevated rail, and they took it all down. Yeah, I mentioned the 3rd Avenue L a little while ago, which was really, it was awful to be anywhere near that elevated rail. People hated to be there. They took it all down, and all of a sudden it was sunshine again, sunlight. And that was because people really hated it, and they politically required it to take it down. And so that was a good move, and that was the logical extension of all of this, isn't it? I think so. There are certain things that we could do, take it to Middle Street, and have it join up there with buses. Look at that as a possibility. Our original proposal to the city, which they lied about, was that we could have, for a lot less money than they were then proposing for rail, $5 million, $5 billion. We were proposing a three-lane, elevated highway that would come into town, basically to Middle Street, and to pick up stuff in the cars in the couple A area. And bring them in and spread them out over downtown. That could have been done for a lot less. We got that example from the one in Tampa, Florida, where they did exactly that. They built 10 miles of it for like something $400 million, if memory serves me right. It was just unbelievably inexpensive. Now, given Hawaii's union stuff, it may have cost us double that. There's still nothing like what the rail has cost, and will continue to cost. What about national policy? What does the administration and the given administration do to alleviate this problem? Here's the question. How can we reverse the Lyndon Johnson shift, the Richard Nixon shift, and go back to private ownership instead of federal and municipal ownership? Is that a possibility? And if so, how could we do it? Well, first off, just take up the thought of Uber being cheaper than light rail. And think in terms also of the forthcoming driverless automobiles, buses. When you can have a four-passenger bus and working automatically, utilizing Uber-like software, exactly how that would work. I don't know, but we have to think in those terms. And I think that I don't think I think what will happen is that people will just abandon the rail, because the thing that kills transit and all this has is affluence. As we get more affluent, transit has become, for many years now, an inferior good.  But I think that the rail, I just think just, let's say they build it as far as we want to send it. They're not going to have much to ridership as they anticipate. But they're going to have the expense. Over here, we've got people starting to operate automatic bans to take people door to door on call. And the automatic bans will have access to the shopping center. As that stuff impacts more and Uber pool becomes automatic, then I just see the transit fading away. And then you finish up being left with the infrastructure. So then you've got a problem. But you're always anticipated. You always warned us about that. And your book is a warning about that. So are you going to write another one? Are you going to write a sequel?  Some of the things that were in fun in the history, for example, I find that in London, when buses were all private until 1930, okay? Now, prior to that time, they had no fixed stops for buses. Okay? If you wanted a bus, you had one going by, okay? And if you wanted to stop and hang on the bell, but there was no fixed stops anywhere. And they're private. I'm thinking, I'm still looking into this. I'm thinking, if they're private and they are resisting change that some people are calling for at the time, then it must be more profitable for them to not have stops. A good point. Okay. Now, going from taking a lot more buses from stops to no stops, that's going to take a little bit of work. Well, it costs money to make a bus stop. There'll be people who will oppose that as they do. In the end of the day, it's not just urban planning, it's politics. And it's kind of the reverse of NIMBY. I want you to have a bus stop at my door. When I first started to do this is when Frank Fassie got reelected on 1984, and then proposed the rail system. And I just started to look at the financial projections. And I thought to myself, this doesn't work.  So my wife and I went in the various senators. And they were, because I thought, well, they just don't know what they're getting into. And after talking to not too many of them, we all thank me for taking time out of my busy day. Okay. Now, you have dedicated, may I say, aside from the fact you had a career with Maui Divers, you founded that company. And you were the businessman first. But then somewhere along the line, you got into rail and unloom and now national rail. And you have dedicated your life to that. So I want to say that I truly appreciate the contributions you have made to the public conversation about it. And I hope people go and find that book and look at that book. And if they're worried about it, you know, not getting to them because of this twist with Amazon, then what they could do is send it to their families on the mainland and have their families send it to them here in Hawaii. But they can get into Bons and Noble. There you go. All right. Thank you very much for that. Who don't have a warehouse. Simple. Okay. Well, Cliff, it's been great to talk to you and catch up with you. I haven't seen you in a long time and it's really a joy to be able to share our thoughts together and hear what you're doing and hear about this book. I wish you all the best in every way. Cliff Slater, a businessman who has seen the light on rail and who has expressed himself for decades and decades. It's great for the public conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Aloha.


President Joe Biden did not keep his promise to end the era in the U.S. His voice to produce more fossil fuels than any other country. We have been affected by climate disaster. We deserve justice. We are all here to protect the planet, the people. We're putting their chance at light to fossil fuel corporations like the Mountain Valley Pipeline. We need to stop funding fossil fuels now and power up the real solution instead. We need to direct resources towards renewable energy solutions that are led by communities worldwide. People, universities, president and Biden are going to be living on this planet and we will not take no for an end.


Minister for Planning and Member of Parliament for Sufra for Sejaq, Honourable Herod Stanislas, has assured that St. Lucia's wood heritage site status is not in jeopardy. The Minister gave a detailed account to the House of Assembly on Tuesday of an ongoing development within the petal management area. In a comprehensive report, the Minister explained that the present administration has undertaken every precaution to ensure that the development does not threaten the UNESCO World Heritage Site status of the petals which our nation achieved in 2004. The Minister explained that the development is in keeping with the limits of acceptable change study of 2013 which is utilized as a tool for appraising applications for development within the PMA. Mr. Speaker, I have visited the site of the project myself and it is clear that the project is being closely monitored by the relevant competent authority and that the developer has paid close attention to environmental preservation and is only building within the footprint of a structure which was already erected at the site in the policy number one area. It is also important to note, Mr. Speaker, that one, there are currently approximately 120% from the community of Shwezel and Soufre employed on the project. Over 1,000 trees will be replanted and a nursery for the plants currently exist next to the site. The home is 3,500 square feet and has been constructed on foundation which previously existed. The developer and contractors are committed and have continued to abide by strict development rules. Beach access in the area remains public and in fact the developer has improved the road access to the beach. A public park area which did not exist before has been allocated by the developer and the developer has also commenced assisting the Soufre Regional Development Foundation with improving the Gropiton Nature Trail. The minister's comments on the project have been supported by the project manager on the site and people from the communities of Soufre and Soufre. What is happening here right now, the project, like everyone knows, is an eco-friendly project. Okay, so whatever you've seen happening here right now, okay, whatever the construction you would see, everything has to be restored, okay. You took your land on the top of the aqueduct which we're going to restore, make it a beautiful attraction for our kids from school who want to come and see, all right. So the project is not what people make it now to be, okay. It is something that will help the community and all of us who work here appreciate what is happening here right now. And we are ones for the environment and keeping the environment as pristine as possible. We have a lot of fuss about the project but I feel the project is very beneficial in my opinion to the area, very beneficial as in, well, most of the guys, we have other guys from surrounding areas, we have guys from as far as Newport, Soufre but most of a lot of the guys are from around the area, young guys, I grew up with that basically out of jobs who had been working for a while and are currently employed with the project. And I believe it's definitely a good investment in the area because indirectly I benefit because you know for the guys buying the soft drink or the juice and stuff so that's a very good flow because I've never seen in my whole life like consider over a hundred people being employed in a small community like that and I've been in the community for over 15 to 20 years, you understand, since I got married in the area, you understand. And to me it's a very good thing for the community and no matter who's in power I believe they should definitely continue, let the project continue because it will impact on all of us right here in Soufre and also Soufre area. The project is a good project for Soufre people and also for Soufre people, it's some place that Soufre people come to work because a lot of Soufre people, for them to get to work, they have to migrate to castries or go to Viewfort or Soufre, so if we have a project like what is going on here, they can take maybe 10 minutes to get to work now, they don't have to go up to castries, lose ties with their family, don't see them for years upon years, forget their roots, forget their history and stuff like that. In his statement to the House of Assembly, the minister explained that a development spans both the previous and present administration as he cited letters and correspondence between the developers and the former prime minister as well as the minister for planning and the former minister for sustainable development. Minister Stanislas also presented the chronology of events surrounding the development in Ansela Voin. The minister explained that following all the assurances previously given to the developer, the present administration had worked to ensure the development stays within environmental guidelines. Minister Stanislas maintains that there are several issues which need to be addressed regarding the pitot management area and called for the discussion to be elevated, taking into account all who are affected and impacted. Let me say once again, the pitots are not being sold, the World Heritage status is not at risk. After all the promises and assurances given by the former administration as a government, we have worked with the developer to scale down the development in keeping with the guidelines of the PMA. Mr. Speaker, I know the season we are in. However, as responsible representatives of the people, we must recognize that this issue is too important for us to play to politics. Let us discuss the facts regarding the PMA. Taking into account the plight of the families who own private lands, the PMA, the rules and guidelines established to manage development within the PMA, the protection of livelihoods and the protection and preservation of our whole heritage site. I thank you, Mr. Speaker. Like many in Souffre and Swazel, the Minister believes St. Lucia must continuously strive to find a balance between development and preservation. Reporting for the Office of the Prime Minister, I am Nicole McDonald.