Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar. My name is Crystal, and I'll be your host. Today we're taking a look at libraries as innovation hubs and community-driven design processes. Public libraries are hubs for innovation and community engagement, and library workers listen closely to community needs to design programs and services that are responsive to continuous changes. Today we have two guests joining us to share examples of community-driven design processes that they have used to spark innovative solutions. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements. Today we will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number that we've shared in the chat. If you're having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archive email within a few days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIBS, and we have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event so you can join us in the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to the technology, resources, and support they need so that you can operate at your full potential, more effectively deliver your programs and services, and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services available to public libraries and nonprofit organizations. This includes products from Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit techsoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. And for today's webinar we're joined by two guests. Sarah is now currently the Director of Community Engagement for Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup, where she works with communities to develop tools that help organize, access, and use local resources to address pressing problems. She's spent the past 17 years strengthening communities by focusing on the power of public libraries in towns big and small. And it's worth noting that she developed and led for many years the library program here at TechSoup. Chris Kayak works as an Information Systems Specialist for the Alameda County Library where he is one-part librarian, one-part systems administrator. He has a deep interest in solving the problem of the digital divide and establishing the library as a community hub. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat we have Susan Hope Bard, and on Twitter we have Molly Bacon, both joining us from the TechSoup team. Now we'll have time for Q&A after each presenter, and we'll be tracking your questions throughout. So again, please share your questions in the chat as they arise. Now we'd like to know a little bit about you. So please tell us what type of library or other organization you're joining us from today. So you can review the choices here and click the radio button to select your answer and then click Submit. And then you'll see all of the results populating. And I see some people are – well we have mostly public library audiences so far. I'll give you a few more seconds to respond to this. But I see some people coming in with the other response category. I see a state library in the chat. Welcome. A non-profit literacy organization that's excellent to hear. So you can just tell us if you're from some other type of organization what that is. I see another state library. That's excellent. And I see some academic and some special libraries responding as well. Looks like we're getting most of our responses in, so I'll just close the poll in just three, two, and one. We've got a few last responses in there. And here are the final results. So over 80% public libraries. And we do have both of our guests today are speaking about examples that have a relationship to public libraries. But the concepts are applicable across all types of organizations. And certainly even in the public library setting we're talking about maybe collaborating with community agencies as well. So hopefully if you've joined us from a non-public library entity then you can still apply some of these principles in your work. And it's great to see you here. And then the other thing, before we get started I just wanted to kind of set the stage. What do we mean when we are talking about innovation and community-centered design? What is it that we're talking about today? And in brief we're talking about the way that libraries can bring people together in collaboration to find creative solutions to community problems. And Sarah's part of this is to share Caravan Studios' process for community-centered design to develop technology solutions to solve real problems. This process has been successfully applied to projects with key libraries, or with libraries as a key strategic collaborator most recently in Indianapolis. And then Chris later will talk about the Alameda County Library's Innovation Fest which was a collaborative team challenge for public library staff. And the Innovation Fest was designed to help library staff become more comfortable with design processes and with risk-taking so that they could create better solutions to serve library patrons. So that's what is on our agenda for the day today. So at this point I think we're ready to hand things over to Sarah Washburn, Director of Community Engagement for Caravan Studios. Sarah? Hi, thanks Chrisville. I'm so happy to be here. Hi everyone. I'm Sarah. So one of my favorite things to say is this happened at the library. Whether I'm with friends, with strangers at work, or sitting on the board of my local friends group, I love sharing what happens at libraries. So if you know me, you will have heard this before. Today I'm going to talk about my work and how libraries sit at the center of it. But first, a bit about me and my awesome team. I work for Caravan Studios which is a division of TechSoup, the nonprofit behind this webinar. Caravan Studios works closely with communities to uncover problems and design solutions together. Mostly these solutions are mobile apps like what you see here. The first one on the left is SafeNight, an app that sends alerts when there's no shelter for a survivor of domestic violence or human trafficking. When you receive an alert, you can make a tax-deductible donation that pays for emergency shelter, a safe night in a hotel. And then next to that is the range app that you might have heard before. You can use range to find where free food is served to youth in the summertime, and also to find safe places like all of the public libraries in the U.S. Both of these apps were made with the community and both of these are free. So the short story is we make apps for social good. The longer story is we don't do it alone. We start off with generator sessions where we invite people who work in a particular issue area, and then guide them through phases of our community-centered design process that starts with a lot of questions, like these. And then it ends with designs for technology interventions, like this. But before I go further, I wanted to pause a moment to talk methodology. I imagine there are some process wonks in the crowd, so for you I'll talk briefly about our methodology. It should look familiar to you if you know something about design thinking. But what's different is that the community owns what we're creating. Our first phase is called generate. And really what happens here is we leave our assumptions at the door, our team, the Caravan Studios team. Sure we've done some desk research so we're conversant with the issues related to what we're discussing, but the ideas and the work is done by those in the room. Next we have our design phase. This is when we bring participants to a point where they can balance the need and the users and the type of intervention that's possible and let them design the solutions. Select is simple. They vote. And by vote I mean the broader community, not just the people who participated in the generate session or the design session. This is when we bring the ideas out further into the community to really get a sense of what people think. The next is build. We build the tech sometimes, or other times the community partner builds it. And sometimes what happens is we find someone who has already built something that meets the needs of the community and we advocate for it or we share it and amplify it and sometimes help find funding to make it better. Our last phase in our methodology is called use. And that's what you could imagine. It's just getting the tools in the hands of people who need them. But we do this together with the community. So now that you know a tiny bit about how we do it, I'm going to talk about what we're doing in Indianapolis right now. It all started with an email from a stranger. A person from the city of Indianapolis who had seen the range app was interested in us building something similar for them, maybe even a website, to help residents access resources for finding emergency food assistance in Indianapolis. But the thing is, we don't do that. We're not a design shop that makes apps. We're a nonprofit that creates the environment and the methodology for the community to identify problems they're facing so that we can design solutions together. So we decided to organize a two-day generate and design event starting with a question. How might we design solutions that connect Indianapolis residents to emergency food assistance? And we began planning to bring people together in Indianapolis. And just so you know, and I think you probably know this, but we're in San Francisco so we're doing this locally in Indianapolis.  So you're probably thinking, right, space to convene, that makes sense. But that's only a tiny bit of the story. While it's true that the Indianapolis Central Library provided a gorgeous space for 25 or so of us to meet, they did much, much more. Because when librarians and staff participate in our events, magic happens. You might not know this about yourselves, but your magic, it's true. So who was there? Well, participants at the generate design session were representatives from local pantries, nonprofits, from the city, from community-based organizations that help residents find food resources, from the local 2-1-1 organization, from the local university, and of course from the library. And I'll say that a mix of participants that had never been to the library were also there. So we provided ample time and a lot of encouragement to wander around the awesome library. The library itself was an inspiration. On breaks, people saw the moveable seating areas where families lingered and ate together in the children's area, which is this right here, which is something I have never seen and it was always full. In fact, there were three or so of them in the children's area. People marveled by how a 100-year-old building could be so wondrously fused to a 10-year-old addition. And everyone took time to go to the top floor and gaze across the gleaming city of Indianapolis. That's what you see on the sixth floor. And of course there were people who participated who had been to the central library who were beaming with pride, so happy to share the library with others present. Just the act of us meeting at the library was community engagement. During the generate and design session, one thing that's really important to note is that what we do is not technical. It's an exercise in ideas.  Librarians have participated as subject matter experts, community advocates, information specialists, and in general just smart people. A memorable moment for me happened during our introductions at the start of the day when Melanie Whistle, the program development manager at the library, shared how she had attended some local meetings recently and had just learned about Indianapolis' struggle with becoming a growing food desert. She was actively planning how the library might engage with the public. And she shared with everyone her early ideas for the library's summer reading program called Read It and Eat. I'll let you Google their hashtag, but you should know that people ooed and awed and took note the library is a smart organization to partner with. And this is a part of my presentation where I make my case for the library magic. It's been a consistent theme that including librarians and staff and the development of tools that solve local problems is magic. After librarians begin participating, other participants eventually approach the librarians in the room, exchange business cards, talk about collaborations, and share what the library does and can do. Librarians also help us all understand an issue. We held a generator session once on serving youth on the spectrum, and the librarians present talked about the library's resources, the knowledge the staff holds, and the intricate web of collaborations and partnerships libraries weave in their communities. They were also thoughtful and smart community advocates. During our design phase at the library, we guided the group through activities that helped take their ideas and questions and frame them into focused design statements that can be built into a technology tool. To flesh out their ideas and make them shareable visually, as a team, they imagine and develop what their app might look like in an app store, like this, the app store for range. So this is the example that we provided them. So this exercise in the design session, this is kind of the meat of it, and it entails some serious skills with glue, scissors, construction paper, and sometimes even protractors. So this is what people end up doing once they've gone through the process and they're ready to start designing their app. Once their designs were complete, teams pitched their ideas to the rest of the group and received feedback from their colleagues. Remember how the person who originally contacted us had an idea of what the community needed? What's so interesting and what always happens is that people show up differently than they expect. That is, by listening to others, fleshing out ideas, and working collaboratively, people who identified one problem at the beginning ended up working on something completely different. And in the end, the three apps that were designed were very different from each other. Here they are. So this is food compass. This helps people understand what type of assistance they should apply for, how to do it, and what information they have to provide to get the assistance. And as you can see, this is not a technical exercise. People have to know a little bit about apps, but not so much. They just have to know how to describe their idea and understand the audience they're trying to reach. The next is Pantry Power. Pantry Power provides information about local pantries in an effort to get potential volunteers to find the right opportunity. The app also provides an easy way to donate to a collective of pantries. This one's called Reasonable Ready Recipes. And this one, I know that you can't see all the details, but I'll tell you, and you'll be able to see them later. Reasonable Ready Recipes helps people on a budget learn how to cook healthy meals with five ingredients or less. It links to local stores and highlights sales on items. This one was really interesting. I watched it surface as participants kept having side conversations about how cooking with healthy ingredients is a lost art and a necessary one. After the pitches, we then took their app designs home to our office in San Francisco and developed posters of their ideas like this. So you can see that we really just took their drawings and designed them to look similar with little cell phone things around them, and then that's all their ideas and then the pictures of them designing them. And these posters are currently displayed in over 30 locations across Indianapolis right now. So they are people are seeing them all across the city at every library, at the Indianapolis Public Library, and at various community-based organizations along with voting cards so indie residents can vote on the app they like best. So this is our select phase when we go beyond the people who created it and outside into the community so that we can find out, does this work for you? Would you use it? What do you like best? And what else do you wish this did for you? And I'll tell you right now, we're getting the feedback. In fact, I looked at it right before we got on this webinar. And what's so interesting is that a lot of people are saying that they want everything into one or at least a couple of them to combine, but it's really creative, the ideas they're giving us and the organizations that are now aware of this and want to help us design it. So these posters are also translated. They're translated into Spanish and Hakka Chin, which is Burmese, and displayed at key locations identified by the experts who are at the session. And here is a tweet from the Chin community of Indiana. And those are their translated posters, and people are voting there at that nonprofit in Indy. And here's the library. Here's one of the branches of the Indianapolis Public Library. And you can see in the front those cards that they're using to vote. So you don't have to be an Indianapolis to vote. People can also vote online from anywhere. This information will help us understand which features people like, how the designs might be improved, and it provides great context for us to take it to funders to get it built. And at the end of this presentation, I encourage you to visit the website and vote. And if you're an Indianapolis, go to the library or another location and share your ideas. So me telling this story is not because I expect all of you to replicate what our team does, but there's aspects of our work that you're probably already either already doing, or you might just want to try. First, get out and learn about your community. I know you're doing this already. Your information specialist, find out what's going on. Find out what problems people are facing. Invite local organizations. Invite techies, students, local companies. Tell them what you're learning and find out what they know. Invite people together. Get involved. Share what you're learning. And here's the thing, bring everybody together. Hold an event or a hackathon at your library. The thing that we notice the most about hackathons, and if you've ever been to one you might have seen this as well, is that there's a great group of energetic people who want to solve problems. And what they have is the tech. They understand how to build things. But they don't necessarily know what the problem is or understand what's really useful. And if you can put some of your energy towards bringing those people together with the techies, hackathons, or tech building exercises will go so much better because you'll have people advocating for real people who need solutions. So before I end, I just wanted to show you a picture of everyone who was there who designed these apps. In fact, there's probably twice as many people. This is the people at the end of the second day. But these are all the people who designed these apps that people are actively seeing all over Indianapolis. And I just wanted to thank you guys. Thank you guys for listening. And really, please go to that website right there, the slash emergency food assistance. And look at the apps and share your two cents or share it with your patrons or whomever. We really want to know what you think. And truthfully, I expect that what gets built in Indianapolis will be not just for Indianapolis. It will be for people outside of that region. So it's really worth it to check it out. And you can follow the conversation on the hashtag Caravan Select and get in touch with me with any questions. Thanks guys. Sarah, thank you for sharing so much rich information over such actually a relatively short period of time. And I just, first off, just wanted to not only thank you but let everybody know that we'll be sending out the slides. We've got a chance to take a closer look at some of those images if you want to dive more deeply. Or to look at some of those steps of the process that Sarah talked about. And hopefully you might have some questions and you'll share those questions with us in the chat. Sarah, I had one question maybe to start with. And I'm actually going to take us back in the slides because early on you talked about the types of questions that you asked when you were going through some of your process. And I wanted to just ask you how you went about identifying these questions. And I think just to give some context here, is it these, in the picture on the right, these are the questions you were asking the people that you were working with and they were responding with these post-it notes. Am I right about that? Yeah, actually not quite. So what happened is that people were asked to think about the questions that they want solved. So what are the big burning questions that keep them up at night? And they did that on the post-it notes. And then we kind of distilled these down into bigger categories after we shared all of this. And then people went and put their post-it notes that showed kind of the energy toward one particular category. So we did not, everybody shared everything they had because you can see that's a huge pile of sticky notes. And so then they put them. So these are all questions and ideas that came from everyone in the room. So it wasn't us saying, how might we lower barriers to nutritious eating habits? It was them. Excellent. Yeah. And I guess then part of the question I had was maybe around the process of creating these questions. Was there anything around that? Because sometimes it's hard to ask the right question or come to that. So did you have any insight about that process of the question creation? Yeah. Well, we lead them through this process that gets them to creating these how might we statements. And it is a way for them to – and I'll say there's a couple things. We have a couple of ground rules when we're talking about the problems that people face and then once we get to the how might we. So we've got the problems are the sticky notes. And what we do is we say, the problems can't be concerned with money or staff because we can't create an app that's going to give you that. And that's actually hard. I mean it's really hard because a lot of problems, a lot of things that keep us up at night especially under resource nonprofits are about money and staff and resources. And so we go through this process where we talk about the different sorts of ways to look at problems. And that helps people kind of compartmentalize what it is that they feel could actually lead to a technology intervention. And I'll say when I say technology intervention it's so that I don't say a mobile app because it's not always an app that we're creating. Great. And so what are other types of technology interventions other than a mobile app that you might help them create? Yeah, well so one thing that I showed you earlier was the Safe Night app. But actually the Safe Night app is part of a larger system called the Safe Shelter Collaborative. And the Safe Shelter Collaborative helps domestic violence and human trafficking agencies in a particular region, so a geographical region, find shelter faster for survivors in their region. So what that means is that instead of them calling up each agency every single day, and this is what a lot of DV and HT agencies do is they call up other agencies in their region to find out if they have space for a survivor in their shelter. Instead of doing that, they use basically it's a website and it's a secure website where they're all connected. And they send enough non-identifying information about a survivor to each other so that they can find out within minutes if there's space. And then if there isn't space then they use Safe Night to alert people like you and me who want to help DV and HT organizations. And if you have a Safe Night app then you receive an alert and you can make a text, a deductible donation that pays for emergency shelter. And so we call that a service. That's not just the app. There's something that happens before that. And actually the website also provides the technology to send that alert to. So it's a much bigger system in that regard whereas range is a standalone app. Thank you for explaining that. Sure thing. Great. We have a couple of other questions that have come in, and I think we have time for them now. Laura asked, how did you make sure that non-English speakers were fully integrated into the process? That is a great question. And I'm guessing that by process you mean in the design sessions? So in our generate and design session that we held in Indianapolis everyone there was English speaking. However, people there worked at organizations that supported people who spoke Spanish and Hakka Chin which is Burmese. And that's how we knew that it was really important. So those people then, these are advocates, were there to tell us what was really important and what we needed to be thinking about. And so that's how that happened. They didn't speak the language however. That was a translation activity that happened later. But as you saw at the Chin Center in Indianapolis people from the Indie Food Network worked very closely with them and people from the Indie Food Network were at our event. Oh, and I'm sorry. And then being that everything is translated the cards where they vote and all of that is all in their local dialects at those particular agencies and at the libraries. Great. Excellent. I think we have time for one more question before we move on. And actually this is a great one to end your section with.  And the question from Sarah is, she says, wow, this is really cool. I would love to do something like this at my library. Any suggestions for getting started? So I'm bringing us back here because I know this was some of your bigger suggestions. But what might be next steps for libraries or other organizations looking to try this? I really think the first thing is identifying a problem. Looking outside of your library and finding a community problem that you think that you can bring other people around it so that it's not just the library tackling it alone. Earlier I talked about Melanie at the Indie Library and how she had gone to a community meeting just recently. And she had found out, she hadn't known how serious the food desert situation in the city of Indianapolis is. And just as a tangent, it's really easy to find out about that and it is really bad. And so she was already thinking about what the library could do. And it just happened that then I contacted her. And that's how this all happened. But she was already doing that work. And I think it's really an important thing. And that doesn't mean necessarily that you have to say, oh, and now we think we have to create an app to solve it. That doesn't have to be your solution. It happened to be ours. But I really think that bringing community-based organizations around a particular problem and the people who are troubled by that problem and trying to find out what can you do. And even if it were that you're sticking together these resources a little bit better and providing them and making them known a little bit better to your patrons who are troubled by those problems, that in itself is a fantastic output. So I really do think that finding out, learning about what's going on, and finding those problems, and then bringing people together is a great next step. Great. Well, Sarah, thank you for your presentation and for responding to questions. It's all the questions we have time for right now. I'm just going to pop here one more time because we've got your contact information in the slides and also the links to the program with Caravan Studios and also the hashtag. And at this point we're going to move on and now here from Chris Kayak who's going to talk about the Innovation Fest at Alameda County Library, which was a staff-based innovation and collaboration program. So Chris, why don't you take it from here. Hi everyone. Thank you for coming. I'm really excited to share with you what I did with my Innovation Fest. So what was the Innovation Fest? The Innovation Fest was an 8-hour day. It was an in-house library staff-focused team challenge for 60 people from different systems and classifications to come together and just dream up new ideas. Now you might wonder what caused this idea? I had attended an Atlassian conference and one of the things they talked about was their ship-it days which were 24 hours of what they described as 24 hours of pure creativity and in-house hackathon. And the idea for it was they can start and ship an idea in 24 hours. And by ship I mean they start it and it's actually a functional prototype 24 hours later. And I went, you know what? We should have this in libraries. So my team and myself worked with Crystal and Carson Block to build the Innovation Fest. The Innovation Fest was an event designed to build innovation in libraries. In a nutshell, what I wanted Alameda County Library and attendees to learn was to risk bravely, to dream up an idea as a team, then present on it in front of a crowd, to risk together, and in doing so innovate together to get some of the best and brightest libraries together in one room and see what happens. Now one of my key goals was to increase connections, to break silos, both between our own Alameda County community and all of the logos on this slide are people who attended or were mentors for the Innovation Fest. So it was between our own Alameda County community and the library community in the Bay Area. So as you can see from this slide we had a huge range of different library systems attending, systems from over 100 miles away came for the event, which I'm still boggled by. And we together found that we shared a same silo of problems, but by working together we found fresh perspectives. An example of this at a very high level, it's a great way for an event like this to explore collaboration interdepartmentally. So for this example shows feedback from another Alameda County agency that we invited to the Fest. It's a great way to show that the library is much more than just books. And that's a perspective or an assumption that we're still trying to show to other departments within Alameda County, within my own overarching governmental entity. A second success was to build people's capacity for what we called ideation. We wanted people to learn high level skills that we thought were crucial to innovation, to learn by doing, by practicing fast prototyping, risk management, and project management. And we knew that design and risk were not exactly things are used to doing on a regular basis. So we built a learning framework to guide the way, a sort of scaffolding. And this scaffolding helps staff learn to pivot throughout the day and ultimately bring all they had learned to a pitch in front of judges. And this was a success where participants expressed how they had liked, how the Fest had allowed them to explore the unknown and what they called a free design space. And I wanted to close with this closing win. I believe that the Fest empowered staff to feel comfortable with innovation. We wanted to shift the paradigm to a risk taking and continuous improvement friendly culture. A culture that can embrace fresh perspectives and an element of play as well because I believe that play is super critical in people being able to learn all of these really challenging ideas. And together, so that we can all together come to a dream of what if. And this is difficult to measure empirically, but I've had participants even among my own staff who are asking when the next Fest would be. So I can consider that excess because people are already looking to the next what if we do this or that. And that is a success in my own mind. Now here are some in line with being risk friendly. Here are some fails that we encountered. So we planned a day long event and we started this a year before and by the time we had rolled it around we were in a major staff shortage. So it's very difficult to work around and a lot of other libraries encountered the same issue. So please be aware of this possible issue when you are trying to come up with an event like this. And here is another big fail. It's sort of the elephant in the room. And one question that I often get when I'm talking about the Innovation Fest without the people, which was were there significant progress on the projects and the ideas that were developed during the Fest? And not really, because what we found was people were really excited during the Fest but they go back to their day jobs. And it's hard to find the time to continue working on the projects. But there's definitely still interest among the participants to do so. But in the next iteration of the Fest we would want to build an explicit project time for projects among attendees in their administration. And so here are some quick start steps if you want to put a similar event on. Definitely get administrative buy-in. There's a lot of moving pieces you need to get approval for ahead of time like say make sure you have your liability covered. The staff time for whoever is organizing it as well as their team, a budget. So ours was generously grant funded through an innovation grant through the Pacific Library Partnership. But you may not have that flexibility. The second quick start is to set a date well in advance because you'll need plenty of extra time for things that may not have come together as quickly as you would like. And definitely ask for help. You will need lots of help. I will tell you after having put this on you need a lot more help than you think. And here's a Google Doc with some of the resources that we had sent out to the Fest participants and some of the planning documents. So you can use these when trying to put one on your own. And please do reach out. Here's my email and I'm absolutely happy to answer any questions because I know that there's a number of different things that people need assistance with. And I'd love to help you put on another event in your own library or organization. All right, Chris, thank you for sharing your experience with the Innovation Fest and how you use that to kind of work towards some creative problem solving for libraries. And also what I want to go back to first with some questions here and then I'll just invite if you have questions for Chris, please put them into the chat. We've got plenty of time for questions right now. But Chris, I want to go back and I'm just going to go back to some of these image slides so people can take a closer look as we do the questions. And one of the things you talked about was how people were staff were working in teams. They had come from all over. And I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how you put the teams together and how the teams came to identify the problems that they wanted to work through and try to find a solution for during the day. Sure, and that's a great question. One of the things that we explicitly tried to do, and I had mentioned silo breaking earlier, we tried to put together teams of people who didn't know each other beforehand at all. And that way, they were able to connect with people who may not have been, they may have not known before. And the other question of how they get the projects settled was we had asked them to submit ideas ahead of time through a type form which is sort of like a Survey Monkey link. And then we also asked them to express sort of interest in what projects they would like to work on. And so we used that as sort of a dual scheme method where we put teams together based on interest. And then we put them together across different organizations so we could get a wide range of experiences. So they could also break silos in their own networks, in their own experience. And what types of problems did the groups end up working on? Can you give us just a few examples of some of the problems that people identified to focus on? Sure. So let's see. Some of these are shown in these slides. So this one was really neat. This one is a team who wanted to work on a partnership between animal shelters and libraries. So this is actually a team that came with their own idea. And then we formed a team based around that. And this is actually one of the winning projects. And it was definitely a really playful presentation. It was really amazing to see them kind of jump into the idea of presenting in a more fun way where they built their own animal ears. And we had put out these stuffed animals as a sort of creative aid and they actually utilized it. Another example of a project that was worked on was this team who was from the Pacific Library Partnership. And they were working on a better way of sharing foreign language cataloging expertise where they could have catalogers who are experts in Chinese or Spanish kind of assist in a consortium-wide cataloging endeavor. Let's see. And I can share the full list of projects later on. And let me just end with this one, which was another really cool project. This one was for a library launch pad where it's kind of along the themes of the pop-up library where you would have a small library launch pad that would come up in say a laundromat that would offer services like, as you can see in the slide, resume workshops or story times. And this is just a really innovative way of reaching out and connecting with our community. Great. And Chris, you've also, in sharing all of these examples, we've been seeing different parts of the day. But one thing that I want to go back to and have you explain and I'll let you move through the slides if you want to show some of the visuals again. But can you say what it was like for the teams coming for this full day event? What was the order of operations? Or what was the agenda for the day for them? And ending with these presentations, of course, that they gave about their final ideas. But what did they do to get there? Sure. So one of the things I had mentioned just very briefly was we worked with Carson Block to create keynotes that would introduce people to the framework of innovation. And these were keynotes that were created ahead of time and shared with people who had signed up for the Fest. And so there were two keynotes that happened before the Fest itself. And then there was a third one that was kind of the opening keynote for the Fest itself. So people arrived at the Fest. We provided food, which was, by the way, it's very important to provide really good food throughout the day. We devoted a significant amount of our budget towards food because I believe good food and innovation are very tightly connected. So they had breakfast. Then they had the keynote. Then we did some logistical walking through of the day, which was watch the keynote. And then they were free to break out into their teams to start working in spaces like this. Like you might see in the back of it, it says creative space. And so we had different spaces throughout the library that would allow for different kinds of personalities and design thinkers to find a space that was best for them. Like say, this was a creative space with a lot of pipe cleaners and construction paper and scissors and markers. So we gave them some time to work on that. And we had the mentors who were the organizations within Alameda County that I touched on earlier. So mentors from TechSoup, from Innovative, and some other organizations that were within Alameda County. And then they stopped for lunch. And then after lunch, we gave them time to start prepping for their pitch, so to speak. So this is where you start seeing people really kick it into gear because a lot more time than we had actually anticipated in the very beginning. What's been on the ideation, people trying to come up with the idea, which comes back to the, it was contentious at times, but it was ultimately fruitful. So it was actually very, very interesting just to see how people went from like not just a lot of ideas, and then it came to an actual physical exhibit in a very rapid way. And then so after lunch, they had time for the pitching, as I had mentioned.  And this was just a really critical way that I wanted to, and they were pitching for prizes actually. I built in prizes into the fest because I wanted to also build in some sort of competition just as an additional incentive, so to speak. And so each one of these teams went up in pitch in front of judges, and nobody dropped out, which was really amazing. Everyone was very courageous and risk-friendly, and they all did really well. So Chris, that's a great way to kind of hear how the flow of the day happened. And I want to go back to, well, you mentioned Carson being a keynote speaker, and I actually want to come back to this image where you had stations throughout the library, and this one in particular asked the question, what is your fire in the belly? And I was wondering if you could give a little bit of context to this particular activity, and then you had mentioned different zones throughout the library. So if there's anything else you'd like to elaborate on there as far as the different areas beyond this one. But starting with this one, what is your fire in the belly? Sure. Lee, just really wanted to expose the, I guess the dreams that each of the attendees were coming with. What were the things that inspired them? Because I think that all library staff have something that drives them to do what they do every day. And so we wanted to express what was the fire that drives them to do amazing things every day?  And on another note, it was to also help them connect with other attendees because they can see, oh, my fire is toddler story time. And then someone else who may be working in a completely different say an academic library may also be like, you know what, we also really strongly believe in the power of story time or in telling stories. You may notice on the bottom left there's these handouts. And so one of the things that we did was, as I had mentioned earlier, was the building of a scaffolding framework that was to, these were basically handouts that would help guide people and thinking about how they would say design their project, what it is to some framework for project management and what is a good way to manage risk. And so there was a sort of a pathway. So you would start at this fire in the belly and then you may see in the top left you could kind of walk around and there were these other stations that let people just learn a little bit more about how they should go throughout their day. And Crystal was a really integral part of building that. And you can see kind of the fruits of that in the next slide where people were able to just come up with these really interesting, very diverse questions. Crystal, I have a couple questions now coming in that I want to get to. And Rachel mentioned, I'll preface Rachel's question by saying clearly this was a big undertaking and you can see just through the pictures throughout the library, the library being closed that day, the number of people involved. So this was a huge undertaking. And Rachel says, you mentioned admin buy-in which is no easy task. How did you get your own administration to buy into the Innovation Fest? That's a really good question. I was really lucky in my own administration and that they were very open to the idea of putting on a basically a risky endeavor like this where it could have gone really badly but it turned out really well. It was one of those things where getting buy-in is something I worked really hard on from the very start. One of the things that helped was this was all started through a call for applications for what a local consortium calls the Innovation Grants. That's the Pacific Library Partnership. And so before I had even started I reached out to my administration and was like, you know, this is an idea I have. Would you be willing to devote the staff time and the resources for me to pull this off? And admittedly it was somewhat more than we had anticipated from the beginning but my administration was definitely behind me the whole way. So for those of you listening, I couldn't have done it without the buy-in and it was not actually a heavy lift. It's just be aware when you're doing something like this that it will take up a lot of resources. I would say that the connections and the outputs, just the intangibles were really worth all of it in the end. And it's also a great framework for future endeavors. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm getting questions from both attendees and other administration who attended which is, you know, when is the next Fest? So they definitely saw it as a worthwhile endeavor. Great. Well, it's certainly helpful to hear about your experience. And of course your event, the Innovation Fest, is different from the first one we heard from Sarah. Sarah's was focused on working outwardly with the community. And Chris Hears was focused on inward staff development of new ideas of course that cross over into the community services but was really also focused on developing staff skills. So it's interesting to hear that contrast. We are getting close to the end of our hour and so I think it's time for us to start to wrap up. We did get a few questions that we did not have time to answer and we will follow up with you later via email on those. So if your question didn't get a response, don't worry, we will get back to you soon. But with that I think we'll say thank you to Chris and to Sarah and move into just a few more announcements before we wrap up for the day. Now just one more thing I'll mention is that you will receive an archive of this webinar. It's been recorded and we'll share the slides with you and all of those links so you'll be able to access those sometime later this week. We'll have that out to you via email and so you'll be receiving that. Also coming up we have some upcoming webinars that you may find interesting. On Thursday June 8th we have a webinar on accessing TechSoup donations and resources. We also have a library webinar again on Wednesday June 28th focusing on the Outside the Lines initiative and you can learn more about that during the webinar and how it is helping to shift perceptions of libraries. There will be a social media focus to that webinar as well. So we're happy to have Outside the Lines back for another webinar this year. And then if you haven't visited it you should take a look at the TechSoupforLibraries.org website. We have blogs and library spotlights and all of our webinar listings there. And you can also sign up for our newsletter which comes out monthly for TechSoupforLibraries. And there's also an opportunity for you to share your stories. So if you have something you'd like to submit there's a way that you can do that there. And so with that I think we're at the end of our time for the day. I just want to give one thanks to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. And that is also available in the TechSoup product donations if you're looking for an online meeting host. It's something that we offer but ReadyTalk was our sponsor today. And I just want to thank again Chris and Sarah thanks for sharing your experiences in this area of libraries serving as innovation hubs and being the community-centered design processes that we use for those innovation events. So thank you so much for sharing that. And thanks to all of you for joining us and spending an hour of your time today. We hope you have a great day. Bye-bye.


Genomic analysis using long reads is becoming increasingly popular, but the computational power required to process them can be prohibitive. To address this problem, researchers have developed an FPGA-based solution that integrates a novel alignment algorithm into an existing long-read, assembler. The resulting system is able to significantly reduce the time needed to process large amounts of data, while maintaining high levels of accuracy. This article was authored by Carolina Tong, Ranawi Jakejian, Jiang Chaowang and others.


Call now toll-free at 1-877-927-6648 internationally at<PHONE_NUMBER> Welcome back folks to doubt now is up a 528 with an Aztec of 122 S&Ps are up 52 yesterday folks is Sharon Ferguson Sharon is the CEO of fan saves fan saves the digital platform that features discounts and deals from sponsors affiliated brands sports teams organizations all the above their website is fansaves.com Sharon welcome to TFNN Hi Tom Shannon here Shannon sorry shame on me it's all good you know you it's pretty bad you it's pretty bad about that my my niece is Shannon in Amirah so I should know Shannon upside down shame on me so hey tell us tell us about fan saves tell us how this works yeah sure so fan saves is a digital platform that offers fans discounts and deals from sponsors of their favorite teams and basically my co-founder and I were working in minor professional hockey selling sponsorship and we recognized and this was four years ago and we recognized that a lot of businesses in the community actually wanted more out of their sponsorship than just a ring board or scoreboard on they wanted something that was digital that they could actually drive people in and track analytics and demographics so that's how the idea of fan saves came about and yeah we've been growing across North America ever since so it figures that you're an advertising business I you know and I learned a long time ago so so pitch to this channel this is this is a crazy story I've been doing this since 1994 but on the air and my neighbor um I just moved to this place and I didn't know this guy owned one of the biggest advertising agencies in the country so he asked me what business I was in I told him he says oh I feel sorry for you he says people don't buy advertising you sell it right I mean we know how this goes which is really cool I just want to get the aspect of how I can see how you got here there's no doubt about that so what type of money do fans save how does how does that work let's let's say that you know I'm going to you know I don't know Florida State or something like this how how would it work yeah so how it works you can think of fans is like Instagram needs Groupon but for sports teams and organizations so you download the free app or go to our website and sign up for your free account yes and then you follow your favorite teams um or community organizations okay um and once you follow them you have access to different deals from their sponsors so say Pizza Hut is a sponsor yes you actually get a deal from Pizza Hut so 10 off or a free slice or anything like that that really drives fans into their their business which if you think about the last you know sporting event you went to where watched you went watched on tv you know everyone knows their sponsors all over the walls and the boards and the field and the ice but we all know that once the game is over you're remembering who won who lost how you felt during the game you're not remembering who those sponsors are and that's what fans is is really helping with nice so let me ask you and you know I'm sure that you got to stay on the phone quite a bit how do you get sponsors outside of calling calling calling I guess what you have to do right actually our business well actually our business model is really unique so we actually have to have boots on the ground um cells in the cities the teams that we're working with so we actually our customers are the teams when you get the team you're going to get the sponsors with it so like me if I sign up and I get the team that I then I can go to Pizza Hut I can go somewhere else that that's really that's a great idea I mean I think it's fabulous so and you know there's no doubt like there's sponsorship yes and and there's no doubt that I mean I would say that you know when you have fans with teams they like to sponsor them right I mean you like to follow me like to take care of them yeah and I can see if you might have a good game and you know particularly myself I like to basically take care of the people that are taking care of what we like that's what it comes down to you know what you talking about small world I know you come out of the minor league but we have a lot of listeners in Canada also and I forget it's it's craft craft runs something for the AAA every year the big like whatever AAA city can get the most votes they get a new rank or something and so for three or four years in a row this goes back like seven or eight years we front loaded this deal it was great because what ended up happening the listeners up in Canada all the hockey players they're calling down here I have everyone voting down here right it was it was great I mean it was you know because of course their town was so excited because I think that it was you know they were smaller towns and there was a there was a good prize at the end of the prize and so going going forward what are you looking for going forward yeah so you kind of hit the nail on the head what we're really doing is creating the first couponing network so we're giving fans a way to really come together and support those sponsors so right now we've proven our product in you know the minor leagues and we're we're we're in discussions with major league teams we were just in in Florida you know talking with a bunch of teams down there so for us Florida is is huge growing in Tampa Champa Bay of course sure it's so big with all the schools and the amazing pro teams getting a footprint in Tampa is really on our on our list yeah you only need a couple of these Florida teams man I mean I've been here for 25 years but these Florida schools they are so huge it's like it's amazing yeah it really is collegiate athlete collegiate athletics are definitely big on our list as well because you know those schools and their teams they have sponsors but again students why do students care who's sponsoring a team unless again if they're getting a deal so yeah hey listen it's a great concept I wish you a lot of luck I'd love to have you on again and hopefully you're gonna be ringing that bell at the NASDAQ three or four years that's the goal and we'll definitely let you in on that and we'll have you we'll have you there if it happens that's a beautiful thing well Shannon you have a great one a safe one we look forward having you on again thank you so much and have a great day you also have a great one have a safe one


God became a human being. Human beings can become God. The Christian message isn't about wrath and death. It's about being united. Being united with the Creator of life. The breath that animates all living things. It's about theosis. Jesus prayed that we would be one just as he and God are one. You were wonderfully and fearfully made. So you go. Go be one.