Everybody by my name is Tracy Hart and I coordinate the main loon restoration project and work for main Audubon. This is very much a partnership project so I'll be co-presenting with Maggie Welch and she is from the Lakes Environmental Association. And then I also see Brooke Adam on here as an attendee and she is going to be on an intern for the project this year. So yeah, it's really nice to see all of you. Oh, that looks like, okay. Oh, I see everyone's turning into panelists. So that's why I'm starting not to see everybody on my list. Okay, so just we're really excited to get going and to see all of you on the water this year and we're going to be continuing to rely on you to help us track out our loon protection efforts are going. We're going to have a few other sessions as well, but today's session is going to be on loon rafts and nesting signs and then how we're monitoring breeding success. So I'm going to, let's see, go ahead. Oh, I wanted to, yes, Rob, since you're on this is a fantastic picture that Rob took. And it's a good one, I think, to start this off because it shows one of our newer types of rafts it shows the modular rafts and you can see obviously it's being used by the loons and they've already hatched one chick here off on the left. And there's still one egg being incubated so it's a really nice picture that captures what this project's all about. And yet one more. This is the end of your fame though Rob. This is the last picture I have from you in here. But, yeah, so more about today's session so there will be a lookout for loons program coming up so you can learn more about outreach or going to have a project overview webinar. But this one specifically for people who have been involved either with posting a warning signs on nests, or getting rafts in the water, and then doing the monitoring that's involved in seeing how well those are protecting survival and breeding success. So, but we also welcome others. So if you're new to the program, you're welcome to this one. We just encourage you to maybe sign up for another program as well. And then, if you don't have a rafter sign, it's also good to do some monitoring around other parts of the lake so that we can learn a little bit more about how other pairs are doing so. So all are welcome but this is specifically geared towards people who have been involved before as a refresher course. We're hoping to leave time at the end for, you know, questions and some planning did go a bit over last time so hopefully I can go quicker this time. Okay, so we're going to I'll dedicate the first section to a little bit of reminder and refresher on rafts, then get into nesting signs, and then how we're going to be doing monitoring this year and reporting observations. Okay, so, you know, first just wanted to give the bigger picture and reminder that this is part of the overall mainland restoration project. And I mentioned that Lakes Environmental Association as a partner, but main lakes also has been instrumental and they've been taking over the outreach recently. The United Nation is putting some rafts out on tribal waters and we've been funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service Trustees through an oil spill settlement fund and the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife has been instrumental in helping with this project as well. Yeah, and overall we're trying to do two things and increase work reproductive success and decrease mortality of loons. Okay, so I want to start with a pop quiz just so that we don't get in webinar mode so everyone stays awake and engaged and to get you to start thinking about loons again so I will go ahead and raise your hand if you're willing to take a shot at answering this. It's one of two questions I have for you so which category would you place these loons in. So, if you remember from last year we had three different categories of loons. Is it a downy young, a small young or a large young? Is anyone willing to give it a shot? It is okay if you're wrong also. That's part of learning. Anyone, anyone? Bueller, Bueller. Ah, go ahead. Okay, Kathy. Go ahead and unmute yourself if you can. There. Okay, am I unmuted? Yes, you are. Yeah, nice to hear from you. All right, I'm going to guess that's a large young. It looks like it's got quite a few of its like close to its colors coming. You got it. That is a large young. Yep. Yeah, so large young, they don't have any of, they've gotten all of their contour feathers in. They're more of a gray color. And so you won't see all the like the fluffiness. They're about the same size as an adult. And you can see that, you know, the bill is really long compared to a really young loon. So mostly it's size and then that nice smooth gray feathering that they have. So great. Nice, nice work. And here's the other one. So first, you know, what would you call this behavior if you saw it. And if you saw a loon doing this behavior around another loon, would you mark the other loon as its mate, a competitor or part of a social group? Do you want to try this one? I would say, can I? Yeah, go ahead. Who's that? I can't actually see. Elaine. Oh, hi Elaine. How are you doing? How are you? I'd say be a competitor. Yes. And why do you say that? Because of the loon's positioning and it's, how do I say it's, it's warning, it's warning, it's doing that. Penguin, yeah, penguin dance. Penguin. I was just saying emperor. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. So this is, some people mistake it for some other more relaxed behaviors, but the key things here that it's splashing its feet, moving forward aggressively and then its head is all curled back like that. And sometimes the wings are out sometimes in, but that that head position and the splashing of feet and moving toward the threat.  So, you're great. Okay, nice job. All right. So, and thanks for chiming in. So, so, since most of you have been involved with rafts before already or have had some, some nesting signs. We've probably already determined that the area where you are meets the criteria for a raft. But there's, it's worth asking each year, you know, are those conditions still present? Do we still need a raft? So I just wanted to quickly go over. Why, when it's appropriate for a raft, just because I think I mentioned the last year that, you know, rafts can have downsides and they can be dangerous and harm productivity if they're not needed and they're not monitored and or if they're in a bad location. So the things we're looking for are that we want to know that the territorial pair is really struggling so they don't have to successfully hatch a chick every year to be okay. But if you see a pair that's failing to hatch chicks for the last three years, then that could be one that could need some help with the raft. So nest failure, that's due to reasons that a raft can address. So, water fluctuation, like you can see these eggs. This nest has been flooded. So water fluctuation from wake or from rain or from dam management. Those can all be something that a raft can address. There's loss of nesting habitat. So this can provide habitat if a nest area is lost either to development or increased recreation. And then land animal predation too is another good, it's a good possibility to get it offshore but some predators can still get out to the rafts. But it helps. And then we want there to be a suitable location. Primarily, there's a place where you can put the raft in a protected area outside of the predominant winds, often westerlies in this part of the state. It has to be enough water, we say like two to six feet deep all all year season long so that the raft isn't stranded on the bottom and lens can get to it and swim to it. And then we normally try to put them 10 to 50 feet offshore, and that distance varies by, if you have a lot of anglers you might want to put it. Anglers or recreators you might want to put it closer to the shore, so that people aren't going in between the raft and the shoreline. And 50 feet if you're really concerned about predators. So you might want it farther off so it's just a little bit harder to get to. And so, yeah, and then if there's a committed group that can commit to ongoing monitoring so this project is going through next year so through 2025. And then, if there's an additional funding then we will be asking everyone who's been involved to continue on on their own. So, we're going to be working a lot this year and next year to try to make everyone confident and being independent, putting your raft out maintaining it and monitoring the success. So, yeah, so if your area still meets all those criteria then yeah, it'd be great to still get a raft out. So, a bit about timeline. So now until the end of March, we're going to be contacting you you can contact us and start thinking about what materials you would need and if you need our help. So, yeah, so we'll be in touch about that and definitely feel free to reach out to us as well. And then about signs. So if you are looking at just having a sign. In addition to your raft or on its own. If you have a pair that nests in the same place every year, then you could go ahead and deploy the sign before they've established. Otherwise, you might want to wait till later in April, or even into May to put until they selected their site, just so you're putting it in the right place. And then mid April to mid May, who are going to be deploying rafts either on your own or with us and weekly monitoring can begin in early May. And then we'd like to come out and see you so whether we've helped you put the raft in or not. We'd love to see how things are going about two weeks after you deploy the raft. So that can be pretty flexible but some target somewhere around there. So we can give some additional monitoring training bring materials. Yeah, so, and then mid May to mid June, we'd like to do another staff site visit. Often this is when they're, they're nesting or starting to hatch. And then if, and then we can be available as needed this year, and it will be a little bit less available next year. In August, yeah, removing the rafts or doing, if you're going to leave them in over the winter, if you have a cedar raft and can leave it in, then winterizing it. So that's kind of the timeline we're looking at. And just keep in mind as you're putting rafts out what we're really trying to achieve here so loons nests in several different places but they prefer islands. So these, these floating islands, they mimic a natural nest. Loons can also nest on, you know, floating bog mats they can nest on shoreline they can nest on several other places, but islands are preferential. But the advantage of these over natural nest is that they can rise and fall with lake levels. So, or they can also sustain some some wake there are limits to that. But and it also it brings the nest away from predators so that's another advantage, and away from on shore activity so. So there are a few things that rafts allow and provide that we don't see with natural nests. But what you're looking for is to have this the raft well within the territory. So we often target putting the raft near a former nesting site one because data is shown that they take two rafts more often when you're close to a natural nesting site and also because then you're sure that it's well within the territory if it's near an old nest, not near the edges where you might invite competition from intruders. So, and then you're also going for some shade as things as temperatures warm up it's it's hard for the adult loose to stay on so on the nest in the heat so it's good to have some shade. We go for easy off and on. And so our rafts are one to four inches above water level. So it's sometimes even easier I think than natural nest as you can see this one. Yeah, in a protected and low disturbance area. Okay, so that's what we're going for. And nesting science so some of you have chosen to have nesting science others haven't. And so traditionally main didn't really allow loon nesting science but there's been a lot of success with them and other states like particularly Vermont has used nesting science and found that it's really increased productivity. There are some places that are at risk of nest failure from disturbance. So, and they also put them out because for an educational tool they feel like it's only benefited in places they put them out to make people more aware of loons. And it's led to some other conservation, but there are some possible downsides it can attract attention so if there's a hidden nest. It can attract attention. And, and, yeah, so you have to think hard about whether what the pros and cons are the we have some criteria from the state. So we're putting signs in places where it's highly visible. The nest raft can be that way can be more visible than a natural nest, or if it's in a really heavily trafficked area. Also, if the nest is being disturbed so whether it's visible or not, if it's going to receive disturbance it's probably best to put a sign out. And then the states asked that we put signs only in places where it's not in a way of angling or recreation since it's public waters, and that there's landowner permission. So, if you have a floating sign, just getting some permission and buy in from people who are living right near where the sign is placed. So, um, yeah, and so this, these are some of the ways that the signs have been posted. We don't provide the basis for the signs, but we can give you some designs. So there are a few different ways you can post these signs one is on a post like this. Here I'll use my pointer. So like a garden post like that. You can do that if you have a type of substrate where you can pound it in enough and it will stay. You can also use this cross design, where you have two two by fours you have some flotation around here and then the sign is mounted with a backing. That can be a way and then this there are also some creative ways to do it so some staff members in the past had done this with some extra logs that we had. So you can find other ways to make these signs sign basis. Yeah, so just let us know if you think you have an area that meets that criteria for sign and you'd like to try to reduce disturbance with one. Then we could get you some designs and help you with the launching of it while we're there. So, great. Okay. So, I have a question. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to say thank you for the sign. Because our loan raft actually got taken by some teenagers last year, they took the whole raft. I remember that. Yeah. So, a little annoying because we lost the weights. You know, so I think that sign maybe would have helped to be either nearby or on the raft. So thank you for presenting that. Great. Okay. Yes. And we can, yeah, we can get you one of the signs. Did staff bring you one last year? Or do you need one still? I think we would need one. Yes. Okay, that's great. Yeah. So after this, I'll send it to you. Yeah. So you did eventually recover the raft, right? But it was just the anchors were gone because it had been unattached, right? We had some very observant neighbors who saw the boat going away, them carrying it took pictures even so we got it. Yeah, that's the worst I've heard of and we really have not had a lot of tampering, which is impressive. So, yeah, yours was definitely the worst case I've heard of. And other than that, I haven't heard a lot. So that's good to hear. Yeah, it is. So I'm sorry that it was you, but, but at least it's not a widespread thing from what we've seen so far. But it is, I guess the more we can have eyes and ears out there, the less it'll happen and the sign might help with that too. And we have found with signs that education around the sign is really important. So doing out corresponding outreach can be an important piece of it too of the science success. Okay, well, thanks for that question. And then, so for both signs and rafts we really hope to get breeding pair monitoring and, and the reason why it's vital to get monitoring and one of the biggest contributions you can make to this project is, is monitoring the success of the breeding pair is that is really three reasons for catching nesting success.  And are they using the raft for catching raft issues and sign issues. So things like someone taking a raft.  If you're flooding in the raft and you know that's something that you observation can really help with. Here this is showing that a wakeboat went by and flooded this raft. So, in this case, you can consider, you know, was this a one time thing do we need to find a different location would wave guards help. So, it's a really helpful thing to just have people watching to see what's happening from day to day on that raft and tracking threats. So threats can change we might have put the raft out for one reason but those threats can change and some of those threats, like predators can persist even when you put a raft out. So here there's a raccoon. It's hard to see because it's blurry. It swam out so it was further away from shore than the natural nest but still not far enough. So could we put this further away could we put it somewhere else where the raccoon wouldn't get there. So, so a big part of the success of both signs and rafts is keeping up with monitoring. So we're really focusing in on a single loon pair you're welcome to monitor others but we really want to focus in on one loon pair and find out if they're using the raft. If you know the number of chicks that have been hatched by that pair over a season number of chicks that survived and by that we mean up to six weeks at least. We'd love to see people monitor all through when they fled off the lake to see if they they made it off the lake. But if that's not possible at least to six weeks. And also how many nesting failures there were, and if we have any clue as to what might have happened to the nest, and also any threats and disturbance. So those are some key pieces of information that we're going to be trying to to get from the monitoring that we're we're doing on these lakes. So great. So yeah, I think, and I think from all of that we can start to really tell the story of that breeding pair and whether our efforts are helping or for there's still more we need to do is like this last year we had some chicks that hatched off the raft and then they were killed afterwards so is there more that we could do after hatching to in addition to rafts and signs. Okay, so then we do this year we have some monitoring instructions on our website. And here's the, the link to it we can send that link to you after this but you can find it on our website for the project to in the monitoring section. And it goes over what to bring when to survey and how to survey responsibly in a way that you won't disturb the nesting pair. It goes over the how to do it. Like, for example, in most cases you can't really complete these surveys from shore, a lot of the time, because you need to locate other members of the pair. They'll not be right near the nest. So you need to often have some kind of watercraft. And then how to record your observations on the survey form so yeah I really encourage you to familiarize yourself with these instructions before you head out. And there are some changes from last year. I know many of you were involved last year in monitoring. So the forms have also changed a bit largely based on feedback from you at the end of your survey. So I really appreciated that feedback. Yeah. So how to find your survey form. This is the link to our Lunar Restoration, Main Lunar Restoration Project website. Once you get on that, then there's a section on a monitoring program. You can scroll down to monitoring resources. And then you can click on this link here about download or printable survey form for your Lake. Dropbox and we have every pair that has a raft or a sign on it should be in that in that list and you can download it and print it. And should you find that yours isn't in there just email us and we'll create a form and email it right out to you so yeah, and then there's also a link to the online data Maggie's going to go over some of that. And then the next thing is in that section is the reference sheet. So oopsie. Sorry about that. So many of you last year we brought these laminated reference sheets. And these are really important for it so that to help you guide you and answering the questions on the survey form. So it goes over things like which behaviors indicate stress and concern so you know if you are other predators other loons or other people are causing concern or distress. It also goes over how you know if you have a territorial pair, you know, a mated pair, and those chick development stages that I had in the quiz. So, great. And there we have more resources to in that section on Moon behaviors. Okay, so when and how often so we're still hoping to get people out there monitoring weekly it's just it's too easy to miss really key events like when they get on the nest. And then the eggs hatch if a predator comes comes by. If there are people who are approaching the nest, it's just getting out there more often is better, but without overwhelming the nesting pair either. So, so weekly seems to be a good balance of those if you can't do it yourself. You can contact us and we can see if we can find someone, maybe you can find someone else who's on the lake so as much as you can try to shoot for that target. And we'd like to see people starting in early May and going through August, or at least until the chicks are six weeks old. So that's the same as in past years. Okay. So then just quickly going through some of the, you know what you can expect while you survey, surveying at different parts of the year. Early on, you'll be surveying to really to locate the pairs the members of the pair and to observe their behaviors. And during that time from ice melt to about mid May. You'll see the loons establishing their territories and forming breeding pairs, and they'll be beginning courtship and you might even see mating, and you may see them getting up on land and testing out sites. And that'll look a bit different than if there's a lead poison loon so a lead poison loon or a loon that's injured will stay up on the beach. When that's testing on a nesting site it'll just be poking around and then you'll probably see it either start building a nest or it'll, or it'll get off and look for other sites.  Yeah, and the second phase around mid May to mid June. That's when you're going to be hopefully locating a nest so hopefully they're going to be on the nest around that time. And then you'll be trying to locate both pair members so here I've shown with a T that there's the pair members aren't together in this case, and one is near a raft so here's an R that we've listed for a raft. So the loons at this time, they're going to be laying eggs, could be to mid June it can be later if they are on a second try. And then they're incubating their eggs for about a month. So we normally say it's between 27 to 29 days. But if they incubated for a month that's information that tells us that those eggs probably won't hatch, they're probably not viable. And then the last phase is, hopefully when you're going to be watching chicks grow, you'll have an unoccupied raft or natural nest, and you'll see them in a nursery area. And so hopefully that that'll be the case that you get to watch chicks hatch and grow. Otherwise, there may be a pair that didn't produce any chicks, but still worth tracking them, because they might re nest and we might learn some clues as to why they're not nesting. Yeah, and so egg loons at this time we're going to be hatching eggs and the chicks are going to be maturing. And when they reach 12 weeks and they are at an age when they're ready to fledge. Okay, so now getting into the survey form. It's going to look a tiny bit different than last year. Again, we've taken some of your feedback and also seen where people had some challenges and tried to address those. But again, you're going to, on the top of the form, you want to put all of your contact information, give your loon pair a name so that you can name them the same thing every time, and how many people were involved. And then this is a section where you're going to be mapping your observations and I'll go into that into in some more detail. So, first is chicks. So we want to know, sorry about the blurriness of that but we're looking to find out where chicks are so you just mark a C on the map if you saw a chick. Then we're asking if it's a downy small or large chick. And, and I'll go ahead and say which one this is so this one's a downy. And the way you can tell. First, it's very small. It's very fluffy, like there's a lot of down on it. And that's why we call it downy and then it has a short little bill compared to its head. As it gets older, you'll see that lengthen. So if you see that that kind of ratio of a really short bill, you're most likely in the in the downy stage, and you'll also see them riding on the parents back at this stage. So here I'm going to go into the stages a little more. So I just mentioned some of that where, yeah, when they're downy stage, these are all these three all very young so there's one on the back. They only do that for about the first 10 days. These have that dark down. It does get lighter as I get older. So these are still in the downy phase. What you can tell that is they still had they're all covered in down. You can't see any places where any contour feathers are coming in, which you can, when you get to this stage. So see right here, you can see there's contour feathers coming on the face for the small young. There's also contour feathers here on the back. So then if you're seeing that, you know that they are no longer downy, and they're starting to transition to their, their adult feathers. So then you know this is a really blurry photo I must have brought it in incorrectly but you can also it does still show the how messy they look in this phase. If they're in transition, they can look really unkempt. And then the last phase, which, yeah, which you answered well was that this is a large young with the gray feathers all smooth sleek contour feathers. And these are just about the size of adults or fully the size of adults. Any questions about those anything that you've struggled with on on chick stages, or move on. All right, great. Okay, and there are some ways while you're in the field. So that monitoring reference sheet it also shows and describes the chick stages, and then in our monitoring instructions right here. I now have some paintings from a volunteer who an artist who painted these different phases to point out the different features that are on the different chick stages. So, so you're a few resources to help you determine those. I would also say the loon preservation committee they have a really nice section on their website on chick development so I really encourage you and some videos to the time series so encourage you to look at that. The question then is about whether the chick has been seen for six weeks or more. So this is when we know that the chick is likely to fledge after it makes it to six weeks. Some ways that you can tell that so first if you, if someone has been has seen the chick for six weeks and if you know the hatching date that's another way to know that if you don't know any of that then you can tell from the size of the chick. So from the category, if it's a downy chick, you know it's not six weeks yet. If it's in the large category, you know that it has reached six weeks at least. It's only in the small stage that is a little bit tougher to tell. So I would say only leave this blank. If you don't know the hatching date, and it's in the small stage, otherwise you should be able to say, whether it's been, it's a six week old chick or not. And yeah, feel free to ask more questions about that as well. Okay, then we're asking you to map where you mark where you saw an adult from a pair. So where did you observe a member of the territorial pair. How do you know that sometimes you won't. And if you suspect that it's a territorial pair then you can put a T and a question mark and that's fine that'll let us know that you know you think it probably is but you're not quite sure. But if you see one on a nest, that's definitely part of a pair. If you see two together and there's no other loon around often that will be two parts of a pair. And then you can also differentiate by behaviors. So we can go over those there are some characteristic behaviors, both mating behaviors and territorial behaviors that can tell you whether it's a competitor or whether it's actually a pair. So, and then you can always verify that it's an adult if it has the black and white coloring, and the bright red eye. Okay, so some of the ways to tell it's a territorial pair. I know some of you have seen these. So if you see them swimming together diving together forging together. They'll sometimes do these bill dipping together. They'll do the soft hoots. If they're away from each other they'll wail to each other to communicate. And then you'll see yes and relaxed feeding. If you're lucky you might see mating I know some people did see some mating on the rafts last year so that that's exciting. And then you might see them searching out some nest sites. So that is, you know, those behaviors are all signs of a pair, they're not threatened by each other. On the other hand, if you see these types of behaviors, you can be pretty sure that it that you have a competitor and a member of a territorial pair. So, you know, Kathy I think you saw a fair number of these attacks last year. Yeah, these can go on for a long time and they can be pretty brutal. Yeah, Kathy, you're coming in. Yeah, you had a third one for a long time last year right. Yeah, we did. Yeah, it really can, yeah disrupt nesting. So they're much later last year too. I remember right.  In pictures it's really hard to show because it looks like just normal wing flapping, but this little series I have here shows how it's more of an escape behavior. So they'll have their, their breasts down on the water and then they use their wings to row them forward quickly to it usually to escape every so often and they'll go towards a competitor but usually it's to escape an attack. Yeah, and you can see the penguin dance, you can see, sometimes they'll circle each other really aggressively they'll do these splash dives. So it's just more sudden movements and more aggression towards each other, instead of that relaxed behavior. Okay, and so then, yeah, this is where we want you to mark some of these behaviors on the bottom of this and we've again we've changed the list a little bit and honed it down from last year. But does anyone want to give it a shot saying, if you saw these four behaviors what you would check on this on this sheet. Anyone want to give it a try. It can be panelists to if you want. Anybody anyone looks like this is Kevin Healy. Hi, it looks at least two of those are hiding behavior. The one in the nest is sunk down real low, low in the water. Last year when we first started noticing our parent nesting, there was a lot of hiding behavior. They knew that we were in the area. I didn't let on that I was watching them but they knew I was there so they were so showing that penguin dance of course is, you know, a confrontation type of thing. The one in the middle is the stretch neck. Looks like she's alert or he's alert whichever it is hard to tell of course, but but not not necessarily threatened but very alert about what's going on. So that's how I would interpret those four. Absolutely, you got it right on. Yep, so I'll go ahead and give my yeah so yep the head raised an alert position right here. The head down on the nest or the lunar this is showing that the moon might leave the nest anytime soon. It feels very threatened down here is the hiding or floating low on the water. And yeah and this is aggressive behavior. So yeah so the only thing they don't see here is pair behavior. So, great. Okay, yeah. So that's interesting that you saw directed towards you even though you felt like you're really far away that there's so you have it sounds like you're a particularly sensitive pair, which might be why they had such trouble finding a nesting location. I know they switched a lot last year. So hopefully this year they'll take to the raft and stay there. Alright, and then so the next part is a lot of you are really disappointed last year that you couldn't list other loons that you saw. So we did put a category here this year where you can put an L for other loons that you see. If you see an adult right near the pair. And you can figure out which one it is, then you can put an L for an adult loon and you might see a whole group of loons together outside of the territory and you can put all those, you know, the number of adult loons you see outside the territory. So we all know about nesting activity so you can put an N where you see a natural nest, and you would put a T because there's a loon on the nest. And then if you see one on a raft that's occupied, then you're going to want to put an R and also the T because there's a loon on that raft for a raft that isn't used you put a you on your map, but it can sometimes be hard to tell if it's an unused draft. If you see eggs it's used if you see a loon on it. If there's nothing it could be a pair that left, such as what Kevin said or that sometimes they leave if they think someone's near. But so you would just say unused at that point and then later on eventually you probably see a loon on the nest if it's occupied. So, so you could change that on your surveys going forward. Okay, and I looks like I need to hurry some because I'm taking up a lot of time. So nesting activity this is very similar to what we had last year so just if you see them building a nest sitting on the nest. Don't go close to find out how many eggs but if you can see that with binoculars great. And incubating more than 30 days if the chicks have passed eggs are missing if their eggshells if they've left the nest. All those are things that we want to know and you can check here. And then don't forget about the back of the form. So we still have phone numbers for calling if you see any problems entangled dead loons injured loons. We do still have some questions some of you wanted those questions to go away but we decided some are important and we even added one. So now we want to know how much time you've spent on the project since your last surveyed, including emails and trainings like this and emails with us. And then yeah if you've already answered some of these questions like the date the adult was first on the nest or the date that the chick first hatched, then you don't need to put that a second time. But we would like to know the total number of chicks each time if that's changed and if a chick disappeared. So we added a much larger comment section by popular demand so everyone seemed to want more space. So we did make it bigger but we just ask that because it's harder for us to translate comments into data into numbers and dates that you try to pick the most important details and you try to make it easy for us to pick that information out. The last part is sending your forms in so really important you can Maggie's going to go over a little bit about how to enter it online and this is the what you'll use as your link. So it's different from last year and but this will stay from now on to the rest of the project. You can use that link to access the online form, or you can send the paper forms into us by mail, or by email. And so that I think, yeah, a few slides at the end but I'm going to turn this over to Maggie now to give a little bit of information about the online forms. Tracy. Yes. So just like the paper form has changed a little bit the online survey has also changed and evolved with the time to hopefully make things a little more concise and simpler. I will note though before I do the screen share that it's we tried very hard to make them match exactly but that some of the question options are a little a little different but the information sharing is, or the information that we're asking for is the same. So when you type in on your web browser, the link at the bottom right hand corner of the paper form that may not a bond or slash monitoring. This is where it brings you and then you just click this top button up here. Now you can also access this survey on a survey 123 app that you can download onto your phone. You do not have to have a survey 123 account in order to enter information in the form. However, if you want to use that survey would be easiest for you if we just sent you a little hyperlink. You know those little square barcodes. I don't remember what those are called. We can send you one and that way you can just take a picture of that and it'll take you right to the app.  Most of the questions you we have here have these square boxes next to them and that indicates that you can choose multiple answers. Now sometimes the the question order changes based on what you you click you know if you click you have a territorial pair different questions pop up below, but that's okay. It's just where all of the information we're collecting is the same as on the paper. We're just trying to save you the time of having to answer questions that might not be relevant in doing that. Now one of the more difficult questions that that we've learned over time is actually the map questions. And so we've got two map questions on the survey. The first one pops up when you indicate that your territorial pair is nesting. And if you're on the web browser, your web browser, you'll, it's going to pop up like this now on your computer if your location services are turned off, then it'll just take you to a large image of the of the world and you'll have to slowly zoom in or you could type. Type your location in the top map. I'm sorry in the little search bar here, and that'll help zoom you in.  And it's the same on the phone app. It'll just take you to wherever it identifies your phone is being. So I'm going to zoom in to. It's hard to type when people are watching. So, if you just are screw or scrolling with your, your mouse and your scroll bar, the survey is going to move up and down. So what you can do is you can press control. And then you can, if you press control and hold that down, you can use your the scroll button on your mouse to zoom in and out. Another way you can, you can move around the map is to press the plus side that's in the map here. You can press it like that and then you go, let's say I had a couple of loons over here or a nest over on one of these islands. I would just zoom into the island. And then I could double click. Now on some people's browsers, a single click will do it. And I would just the first couple of times you give it a go try one click or try to. Unfortunately, there seems to be a little bit of inconsistency based on which internet browser you're using or what kind of computer type, but a couple of clicks should do it. And when you move, when you need to move across the screen and you use your hand to grab it, it's actually not the pointer that moves it's the base map underneath. So if you need to move over here, you just click and drag and then double click again, or single click again and it'll bring the cursor here. So after this you don't have to press enter. If you can see the marker and it's in the right place, you're good to move on to the next question. So if you would like a more detailed base map here, some people like to use I myself to I like to use imagery I find it a little more informational instead of contours. So you can come over here to the top right hand corner where there's this is little this little grid of boxes, and you can click on that, and choose your preferred base map, and use that to navigate to where to where you are. And so that is the first map. The second map is a little bit different, because we're asking which, how many, where each chick you saw was now some wounds can have up to three chicks. And so the most of this process is is the same here I'm going to go ahead actually and put it back on the imagery because that's what I how I like to do it and I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to zoom into these islands here. Now let's I'm going to pretend that this loon pair on watching Lake has two chicks. So for the first chick the process is is very much the same.  And then you're done with this one. But if you want to add a second chick you come. There's a plus sign that's next to a number one. On the internet browser. This plus sign is above the map. But if you're using the phone app, this plus sign is below the map. You click the plus sign and it brings you right to where you want to be again, or right to where you were last time. And then the process is the same. And then this chick is over here. Now I can, I can double check that I've got two chicks in here by had by looking above looking to where the numbers are next to the trash can and the plus sign one two means two checks if you only have one chick, then there should only be a number one there. Are there any questions. Did I explain that. Fine. No news is good news. So the rest, the rest of the survey is very much just like the survey form. Except for the pictures if you're using that you're the internet browser, you'll need to have a way to upload those or just to grab them from Google photos or wherever you, you have them and that's easy to do you just click this button here the drop image here or select image. And then you can, if you would like to add a second or third picture you just click the plus sign. If you're using the phone app. I've had some difficulties using the live camera so if you're on your phone actually it gives you the option of taking a picture live while the app is running. If that doesn't work too well with the survey it's better to take the picture with your phone before you enter the survey information, and then you retrieve the picture from your photo library on your phone.  And it should tell you, voila, you have submitted this successfully. Okay. If you have any questions, you can take it back, Tracy. I'll stop. All right. See, I'll go ahead. So yeah, I'd like to give us a chance to talk. So I just wanted to mention that. That can everyone see my screen. Okay. Yeah. I don't hear anyone. Oh, yes, we can. Okay, great. Yeah, that you can also in addition to monitoring you can also have a game camera we have a number of them, and they can be really helpful for catching things that are just hard to catch so things at night. So this is one of our raccoon on a raft. You can have other critters that are on there. And then you can get a sense of how much disturbance there is by having that we were testing this location.  So, yeah, just a lot of people in that area. So it can be a really nice supplement to catch those off hours when you're not there are eyes on the raft. So let me know if anyone's interested in that. I did have something on next steps. So most importantly on this one is our two email addresses so if you're you've been working with main Audubon on loon on loon nesting rafts or signs go ahead and contact us at loon restoration at main Audubon org, or you can contact Maggie at Maggie at main Lakes dot org if you're working with Lakes Environmental Association. So great. So I think yeah that's about all we have I did have one more slide on another project that is not related to us which we can go over if you're interested. So it's called the translocation project there in the final year this year, but they are trying to reestablish some chicks down some of reading population down in Massachusetts so they are taking some chicks from Maine. So, not something that's not our project but it is something that there are chicks that could be taken from lakes throughout Maine. So I just wanted to mention that project so you're aware of it.


Good morning, John. Two days ago, Dan Howell uploaded a video called Why I Quit YouTube, and the first half of it is one of the most eloquent, thoughtful, and in my opinion, accurate takes on the history of YouTube and the many bad parts of being a YouTuber. And there's not much I can add to it. Like, it's very good, I agree with everything in it, which is weird, because I've talked to Dan like twice in my life. Also, it's 85 minutes long, and we have a four-minute time limit. But listening to a summation of some of the worst parts of the last 15 years of my life did make me kind of wonder, why didn't we quit? Why haven't we burned out on this? Why didn't we focus on some of the many other things that we had to focus on and just like, sorry, YouTube, we're done. Certainly a lot of other people have done that, and I respect that decision a lot. Like, I understand. And I can't answer this question for you, John, because I think this is very personal. I think that different people respond to all of this stuff very differently. But I can think back to the times when I did kind of entertain the idea of maybe quitting. And it has been because the weight got too heavy for the support that I had to carry. And to get an idea here are two of the forms that that weight has taken. First, feeling a responsibility that I don't know that I can live up to. To be like, everyone's unproblematic king. Like, to not only be what I have attempted to say that I am, which is already a fairly high standard, but also to be what everyone is imagining me to be, which is, of course, impossible because people imagine different things. Like, occasionally I will say something on Twitter that is something that I have believed for a long time. Like, since high school, and people will be like, wow, man, you've changed. I'll be like, yes, I have, I have, but not in that, not that thing. That thing has been the same. So that's hard. And one thing I think a lot about is that people have too many reasons to kind of lose faith in the world right now. And the last thing I wanna be is one of them. Another form that the weight can take is just having people really dislike me and be mean to me on the internet. So the thing that happens, it hasn't happened in a while, but it has happened and it's bad. And so in those moments when it has been bad, that has made me feel like, why am I doing this? I don't have the support necessary to carry this weight. And John, I think that we have been very lucky in both the weight department, like not carrying as much as we might have if we got less lucky or had different lives, and in the support department where we just have good support, which can be both internal and external. Like, I am my own support, but I have support around me. It allows you to not just like handle the weight when it's like sort of piling on, but to enjoy it when it's like an appropriate amount. Because of course, some weight is good. I want some responsibility. I want people to rely on me. I want to be held to a standard. I wanna take what we have regardless of whether we deserve it cause what is deserving and do the best things we can with it. That is what makes the weight actually feel good. And that is I think why this community has done so much different stuff over the years. We kinda shoulder it all together and we do good things with it. Like for example, the Awesome Sox Club, which has donated over a million dollars to Partners in Health for our work in Sierra Leone. We have a short sign up window open now if you wanna check it out, there's a link in the description. Every week I make a video, it could be my last video and I know 100% that everyone watching would be supportive of me stepping away if I felt like I had to. I did not upload this video today because I felt like I had to. I uploaded this video today because I feel like our work here isn't done. And I don't know if I could have articulated that before I watched Dan's video. So Dan, thank you for that. After 15 years, because of your support and our parents' support and our friend's support and Catherine and Sarah's support and the support of all the people we work with at Complexly and DFTBA and hopefully by engaging thoughtfully in what we are attempting to do, it's not like we don't talk about it a lot. We talk about it a lot. We've been able to continue creating together and the weight has for the most part remained healthy and the support for the most part has remained strong. How I'm feeling after all that is just grateful to have had the luck and the support that we have had. Without which to be certain, we would not have gotten all these cool things done and we would have quit. Like that's absolutely true. So to everybody who's been a part of this, thank you. Thank you, thank you. We're very lucky. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.


4 reasons why completing a TEFL course is a good idea for EFL teachers. Taking a TEFL course allows future teachers to know the basics of teaching a TEFL class. A TEFL course shows the best techniques of teaching a TEFL class, and how to prepare a lesson plan. It also shows how to use a coursebook and how to interact with specific types of classes. 1. Good preparation for a real-life teaching. For many people that want to teach English to foreign students, this will be their first time teaching. The course helps future teachers learn the basics of what is needed to teach a class properly. The course goes over the different parts of grammar, written, and oral, that are often taught in a TEFL class. A TEFL course helps future teachers to be better prepared for teaching a TEFL class for the first time. Some problems often arise in a classroom and the practical solutions to those problems. For example, checking and preparing a presentation on a projector. Sometimes technology does not want to work properly, and it is a good idea to set up the projector before class. As well as having a backup plan in case the projector does not work. 2. Methodology. The TEFL course also goes over the types of teaching techniques, such as group activities and board work. The course also goes over how to lesson plan to ensure that the lesson goes smoothly, and the lesson can be completed by the end of the class. The course also teaches that lesson planning is a good idea, so there is a record of what has been taught, and what will be taught in the next couple of classes. 3. Coursebooks. This specific TEFL course also teaches the learner about coursebooks that are popular to TEFL classes. The course also explains why coursebooks are beneficial to the learning of the students. The course also shows the disadvantages of coursebooks. For example, coursebooks may not always meet the needs of the students. But a solution can be to emit parts of the coursebook and to supplement or replace parts to better fit the needs of the class. 4. Balance. TEFL courses teach how to balance the role of the teacher, and how the teacher should interact with the class. One example is to not correct every mistake made by the students. Another piece of important info taught in TEFL classes, is how to teach different types of classes, or even just one-on-one lessons. Many of the things taught in a TEFL class, are things that someone would never really think about until they teach a class. TEFL courses like the one I am completing help the learner to know, what is needed for teaching classes beforehand. These courses help the learner to think about the different parts of the English language, and how to use different teaching methods. Lastly taking a TEFL course allows schools that are hiring to see that the potential teacher knows the basics of a TEFL lesson. The certificate also shows that the potential teacher is dedicated, to becoming the best teacher they can be. Do you want to teach English abroad? Take a TEFL course today. TEFL courses help future teachers to better understand what is needed to effectively teach a TEFL class. With a course like this one, teachers will be able to better teach students, and to be prepared for all of the situations that are rising in a classroom. Here are some tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.


So most of my presentation is going to be focused, obviously, on my particular bent, the library box piece of technology. But you can apply a lot of the theoretical stuff I'm going to talk about near the end to any of the pieces of software that I just mentioned and a lot that I didn't mention. So what is a library box? Why do we care? The general description that I use is portable private digital distribution.  I'm holding one here and there's a handful of other options for hardware here. A little tiny hockey puck shaped thing. This is all commodity hardware, very, very inexpensive, very cheap that you can use to provide access to digital objects in a very private controlled small space. So that's this thing that I'm holding here. And the general idea to kind of wrap your head around it is the internet is big.  Maybe somewhere where there isn't any infrastructure. Maybe somewhere where the infrastructure that is in the area has been damaged in some way. So how do you deploy digital information? How do you take the web with you into places that don't have anything? Well, you can do it with these sorts of devices. Library box works with open source software, standard web technologies. It provides its own Wi-Fi signal that is obviously anything with Wi-Fi can attach to it and then anything with a web browser can interact with it. So again, standard web technologies, cell phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, e-readers, anything like that. If you get bored, there is one that is running here in the room. The SSID is library box. And if you just want to catch up on your Khan Academy studies or read some Wikipedia articles or watch Plan 9 from outer space, that's all being served to you right now by this little battery powered box that I can put in my pocket. So I'm going to go through very quickly the history of library box and kind of how it got where it is now before we go into the future of it. It started with Pirate Box. Pirate Box was originally developed by Dr. David Darts at NYU as a sort of art project. It wasn't really seen at the time as a technology project even. It was mostly about anti-copyright stance. He developed it as an anonymous way to share copyrighted material. That really was the kind of art project that he put together. It was big. The original instantiation of Pirate Box required some fairly big hardware, lead acid battery, sealed up in a lunch box with a little external antennas and, you know, it was a pretty hefty little suitcase size sort of thing. Shortly after he rolled out the kind of initial code base for Pirate Box, I saw it and got the idea that if we could manipulate it a little bit, it would be really interesting in a library context to be able to share information out in the world, right? To take, again, to break off a piece of the web, to take a piece of the library out into the world with you and be able to share it directly with people. So in the spring of 2012, I forked Pirate Box and then came up with Library Box version one. Very, very, very prototype. It relied on a lot of customization through the terminal. You had to go in and really kind of hack at Linux for a little while to make it work. So it was a great proof of concept, but nobody was going to use it. Nobody was actually going to build one of these things because it required a fair amount of hackery, especially in the library world. There's just not that many people that were going to go through the trouble. So in fall of 2012, I changed the installation process and basically automated it to make it a little bit easier for people to build. This is when the project really started getting some traction and started taking off. And I saw kind of what it could be, where it could go after it started getting some attention in a variety of places out in the world. So then with the 2.0 release, I decided I really wanted to go big or go home. I wanted to have something that was really a reasonable piece of interesting technology that people could take out into the world. And that included the ability to have statistics on it, the actual easy installation, something that didn't require you to be able to tell that into Linux and run terminal commands. It needed to be responsive because obviously responsiveness is an important thing for web design. It needed to have easily customizable web pages so that if a library or other group wanted to customize the experience, they could do that. And I wanted to expand the hardware choices. At the time we were really only playing with kind of one little corner of the hardware world and I wanted to make it as international as possible because not all hardware is available in every country. So to make it kind of worldwide, I wanted to expand the hardware choices. So I needed money and when you have an idea and you don't have money, one of the options is Kickstarter. So I went to Kickstarter in June of 2013 and I launched a Kickstarter campaign at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago in the summer of 2013. I thought at the time that I needed a few thousand dollars, right? I was aiming very low. It was going to be a small project. It wasn't going to be a big deal. I was going to need three or four thousand dollars to kind of, you know, slide a developer to let them do some custom coding for me. No big deal. So I launched it and it was funded in six hours. In two days I was over double my goal. And then on about day three, this guy came in the picture. And if you don't know, that's Corey Dockdrow, famous sci-fi author, EFF Evangelist and generally all around famous on the internet guy. And he was at the American Library Association Conference. I had a chance to meet him and I had a chance to show him library box which led to Boing Boing doing a story about it and eventually Corey himself backing it. And it turns out when the largest blog in the world backs your Kickstarter project, well, you know, things happen. So over the course of the 30 days I ended up at a thousand percent of my goal and it showed me that there really was a like desire for this sort of technology that allowed people to run private, the private sharing of digital information to a small group of people out in the world. It's kind of a proof of interest. So that was delivered, that information, that particular code base. We worked on it post-kickstarter. We got the 2.0 out in the spring of 2014. And then we went to the next one, right? We started the next round of development because it can always be better. And this time around I ended up with a Knight Foundation prototype grant for the project, which is fantastic. And in this particular round we added a lot of things that I think are incredibly important for the kind of future of the project. We added localization and internationalization for language so that we're using, we have a translation engine that's doing internationalization. We expanded the hardware reach of the code base. We added a mini-DLNA server so you can actually use it as a multimedia server for your smart TVs and things like that. We added more responsiveness in the HTML and directory listings and then we added an automatic updater so that on the next rounds of updates we get some automatic updating going on. These are the languages, we're at 11 languages now and I know there are a lot of people in here that speak more than one language. So one of the things that I will talk to you about later is hey, if you would like to help me internationalize it yet further, that is something that I would love to do. So how's the project being used? This is really the interesting bit, right? Is how are people using the project? What are they doing with the hardware? How are they dealing with it? And I will say like any good tool it's being used in ways that people didn't mean for it to be used, right? So I developed it initially with the thought really for kind of libraries and education. It turns out there's a lot of other uses. The typical uses do tend to be in the education and library space. A lot of libraries are using it for outreach. They'll preload it with electronic books and movies, things like that and then go out into their community on their bookmobiles or other kind of mobile sharing sites and use library box to share things that way. It's being used internationally. This is the State Library of Queensland tweeting about their use. They're actually making library boxes and going out into incredibly rural areas of Australia. If you know anything about that part of Australia, it is rural beyond belief. And they are going out and delivering electronic things out into the world using library boxes. It's being used when libraries do author talks to deliver when an author agrees, obviously, to license their books for free distribution as Cory Doctorow does. When he goes to libraries, often libraries freely share his books, right, using a library box. It's being used in pop-up libraries. This is actually a small town in northern France where they built a little pop-up library next to a bus station and included a library box as a way to deliver information at point of need to people who are just standing around waiting on buses. It's being used by the Monterey Bay Aquarium to deliver scholarly papers out to remote Pacific islands, which I thought was really kind of a fascinating use of it, as a series of researchers that are going out into very, very, very tiny remote islands on the Pacific, but they need to be able to share scholarly research that they found with the people, with the researchers that are already there. They're using library boxes as a way to move that information back and forth. It's being used at Fort Knox, Kentucky, at the Army base, both as a tool to promote the library and as a tool to share library resources with people that are just coming in. There have been robots built with library box on them. This was a robot that was built by Steve Teary at the Detroit Public Library for a maker day that they had there at the library, and it just basically wandered the floor sharing books, which I thought was pretty fantastic. There is a librarian named Patrick Sweeney who has the book boat that sails the Pacific coast of California delivering books to small coastal communities who has a library box on the book boat to share information as he docks and can share things that way. It's being used by corporations. These are two of my favorite examples, Sparkfun Electronics and Open Hardware Electronics. Manufacturer in Boulder, just outside of Boulder, Colorado, does a lot of educational work, and they're preloading all their code samples and code bases onto library boxes and then taking them with them out into when they do middle school and high school educational events and then using that as the point of need sharing. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a middle school or high school Wi-Fi network understands why they have to have something to share the information with rather than relying on the internet inside a school because boy, howdy, that's terrible. This was one of the most surprising uses. IBM was using a library box at a conference to deliver sales materials to people, and I was trying to understand why IBM didn't have a better tool for this, but I'll take it. I'll allow it. The largest single user probably in the nonprofit space at this point for a library box is the American International Health Alliance nonprofit that does health education, mostly in Africa. They have distributed almost 50 library boxes in, let's see, Zambia, Ethiopia, and South America as part of their AIDS education in the area. So they preload library boxes with educational information about the prevention of AIDS, and then they take them out along with some nursing materials and things and then take them out into very remote communities in Africa to be able to share the information. People have mobile phones but may not have connectivity. This is an easy way to get them the information they need. My very favorite example of a library box use before we talk a little bit about the future of the box is an English teacher who contacted me from Shenzhen, China who wrote me an email that said, you know, I'm teaching English in this area where I have students from all sorts of, from a wide range of economic classes, and the students from households with, you know, not as much money can't afford a VPN to get through the Great Firewall to get the information that I am suggesting that they read. And it's blocked. The higher economic households have VPNs at home and they can just tunnel through the Great Firewall and it's no big deal. They just get whatever they want. And this disparity in the ability, literally just across economic lines to get information is, I think, at the heart of what I want library box to be doing. He would then obviously preload the stuff that he wants and take it into the class and everybody could get to it regardless of what their home internet situation was like. It's grown. The project keeps growing and I hope to continue this sort of growth. Since 2012, we've expanded fairly regularly throughout the world. This is last month's data that I have. Because it's an offline sharing device, it doesn't connect to anything. It's an island. I don't actually have a way to track because I can't poke it, right? It doesn't connect to anything. So I kind of rely on the community to tell me where library boxes, library boxes have been, you know, installed. So this is the community's report to me of where library boxes have been placed. We're up to about 33 states, 37 countries and six continents. And I have said this every time I've talked about library box. But if anyone knows anyone that goes to Antarctica regularly, I really want to get a library box on that seventh continent. So I will happily send them one for free if anybody knows someone who regularly goes back and forth to Antarctica. So I will happily, happily make that happen. And if any community knows somebody that regularly goes to Antarctica, it's probably this one. So tell me. What? Excellent. Fantastic. That's great. I really want to get one on that seventh continent. Okay. So I'm here as a Berkman fellow this year to work on this project, to push it forward, to make it more interesting, to make it do more, to make more people aware of it, all of these sorts of things, right? So what sorts of things am I looking to do over the next year? Put another way. What are the sorts of things that I would love this community to help me do over the next year? And there are a number of them, some of them technical and some of them not. The technical ones are things like I would love to find a reliable way for the devices to mesh network together. We have some very rough mesh code in the release right now where it does some automatic syncing, but it's not true kind of networked mesh. And that would be interesting to do small local networks with these devices. Encryption and security is another one. Because these devices are offline, they don't obviously connect to the internet. They're little islands. They can't use the traditional mechanisms that websites use to secure themselves. SSL is right out because you can't have trusted security certificates not talking to the rest of the world. So figuring out exactly how to make that happen is something that I would really like to do. I would love to have more secure connectivity on library boxes. Content packs on the non-technical side, I would really like to work with people who are interested in education and curricula and develop open access curricula for deployment on boxes so that we could put together a school in a box and give it out to people. It would be really fantastic. Custom hardware is something that I'm interested in. I'm very, very interested in open hardware and pushing kind of what open hardware can do. So I'm interested in kind of working on what the hardware choices are for our code base. And then of course, funding. Everybody needs funding all the time for all their projects. So that's something that I'm hoping to work on. The thing that really at the bottom, like all of the open access to information, easy sharing of information, all of this stuff is deeply held as a core thing for this project. The thing that interests me about the project, though, goes deeper than just that level. The thing that really interests me is the stuff that's kind of four years from now, five years from now. Everyone knows Gordon Moore's law about chips getting faster and cheaper over time. Kumi's law is one that's less known but has to do with the same timeframe. Every 18 months, a computer chip does the same amount of processing for half as much power. So the power curve goes down over the course of time. And when you combine the two, all of our electronic stuff gets better, faster, cheaper, and uses less power. So these boxes run on about 3.5 to 5 volts. They're incredibly power-efficient little things. They'll run on solar panels. But what happens when you're able to have these, right, even smaller, even cheaper, even more energy efficient, even more memory? As these sorts of things become smaller and easier for people to implement, I think that the concept of individuals having their library, if you'd like to co-op the word for it, that they bring into the world and share with you is an interesting one, because that's going to get easier and easier and easier and easier and easier for people to do. And it is going to increasingly confound copyright law, right? That gets easier and easier and easier for people to do and harder and harder and harder to track, because these are not connected to the net. And you can't just know that someone is sharing, right? You can't audio fingerprint the YouTube video and send a DMCA takedown because it's not online. Those things are very, very interesting. As we move into the so-called Internet of Things, just a phrase that drives me crazy, but as we move in that direction, everything in the world having an IP address, I'm really interested in people controlling that and having the devices on open hardware and open source software that control and allow those things to happen rather than relying on the corporate overlords to provide it to us. So the long game is making things that make it easier for people to control their own information as a result of being easier to use and cheaper. That's the long game for this project. So that's it. That's Library Box. We'll have a lot of time for questions. And I'm looking forward to it. That's Library Box. And that's me if you want to contact me afterwards if you have to run for something. We'll have a lot of time for the questions. So thanks, guys. Let's have a discussion. Oh, I think that first hand was over there, and then Nathan. On the grounds, you shouldn't be able to see me. My name is Mary Gray, my fellow this year. This looks so fascinating. And I think the thing that caught me was, at the end, when you're imagining, you know, the incredible shrinkage, is that necessary to the vision? And I think about some of the critiques of kind of positioning that as a law with a big L. What have you thought through what you get out of keeping it at this really fantastic portability and where you would go with that? Yeah, that's a great question. I do think that shrinkage, I do think that Moore and Kumi are fairly inevitable. I mean, I know that there are physical limits, electrons only want to be so close together, and I know all that stuff. But I don't think that the march of those two laws is going to slow anytime in five, ten years even, probably. These are great.  They easily fit in a pocket. I think one of the more interesting things that might come from the march of, at least Kumi's law is, so you've got these two separate pieces of hardware. This larger one is heavier and has a 10,000 mAh battery in it. This one is much smaller, just a little over the size of a credit card and has, I think, a 2200 mAh battery in it. This runs for about five or six hours. This runs for about three days. And if they got more and more energy efficient, I think that's better for remote uses, right? So the more energy efficient we can make them, I think that's a win for everyone. I would love to be able to have something that was, you know, half this size that ran on, you know, a solar panel that big. Like that would be fantastic if we could get that level of power going. So, I think Nathan was next. I know one of the ways you contrast library box with pirate boxes, that library boxes read only. Yeah. And pirate box, you know, you can upload and share. Sure. At the same time, it seems like libraries are becoming more of a commons for sharing and creating and remixing. So, I know why you've done it in sort of V1, V2. Is there a rewrite future for library box? Yeah, I definitely think that there is. I mean, I think that you're completely right that the future of libraries is the collection of information from their communities. I mean, the history of libraries is the collection of information from their communities as well. We've kind of lost that in the midst of the, well, commercial copyright world. So, long-term, I definitely think so. Using one of these as a story box where you go out into the world and you collect your patrons' stories, photographs, those sorts of things, I think is a really powerful use for this sort of tech. The reason initially that I went with the no uploading as an interface choice was purely to make libraries comfortable with it. It's way easier to sell it, not sell it, but to make it available for their use if they are not worried about it. So, it was marketing more than, more than obviously tech. There are a few other differences at this point. We've, we support each other. Pirate Box and library box support each other. We've run our code bases back and forth a couple of times at this point where the installation process that we did for the V2 went into the Pirate Box core code. So, we've, we work together well. I can see us working together more. Yeah, up here. Sure. What sort of capacities do you have now in terms of memory storage and so forth? Yeah. Second is, well, actually I'll just do two. Make it shorter. Second is, is there anything about this that couldn't possibly be fundamentally implemented as a cell phone app on a WAP, you know, access point enabled cell phone? Yeah, great, great questions. So, for my bent on the technology, right, the limitation for drive storage is the USB that you throw at it? So, yeah. So, you can, you can do a number. I mean, to actually get into it, you can do a number of things. If you're doing things kind of deeper into the, the Linux part of it, which is OpenWRT and the Linux underbelly that we use, you can telnet or SSHN and, you know, just go to town. If you want to customize the look or the feel of the UI, that's all on the USB key, as well as all of the shared files. So, if you just want to put a new book on it, all you have to do is turn it off, pull the USB, throw it in your computer, load stuff, put it back in, turn it on. Same with customizing the website that it delivers you, anything like that. All of that is on the USB. What was the second, again? Second question? Oh, smart phones, smart phone use. Yes, as a matter of fact, PirateBox has an Android app that does, that does act as effectively as a PirateBox. It is entirely possible that we would eventually go that way. There are two reasons that we haven't. One is cost. So, let me see. I think this is the cheapest one I've got up here. So, this box is about $22. Right? Like, it's hard to beat for an access point that you can put in your pocket and you can carry around with you. Even with smart phone prices going through the floor, I think it's going to be a little while before we hit $22 for the ability to do this sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that's, a lot of the communities that libraries serve and a lot of the places where the education market is may not have the sort of smart phone that can run apps. Right? And that's a worry. Eventually, totally. I mean, we're going that direction, right? Everybody's going to have a smart phone at some point. Yeah, sir. Adrian Grapper.  Yeah, sure. You talk in, you mentioned the ability to have automatic upgrades, as well as was brought up, the right capability. Yeah. At what point does the library box have to merge with your router for any of these reasons? In other words, will these be separate things or are they invariable going to have to merge in terms of owned hardware, sovereign hardware? I see the kind of the roles of the kind of traditional Wi-Fi router and the roles of the library box different. Obviously, this is a router. That's what it does. That's what the hardware is built to do. But I think it is, from my perspective, philosophically important that this never be on the Internet. Like the part of the strength of the project is that this, none of these boxes connect to the broader web. And that, in some ways, is a problem because we can't tell where they're being used, right? And I can't push an update to them. But I can give, when I said automatic updates, what I meant was you put a file on the thing, you put it in and you turn it on and it works. It updates itself. Keeping it air-gapped from the real Internet, I think is part of the strength of the tech. And if you build it into the router, obviously, that's all bets are off. So I think that having it as a separate thing philosophically is an important piece. So you say it's air-gapped, but it's connecting to the machines that will connect to the Internet. It could. Totally true. I think that from the use cases you're describing, in some cases it's going to be operating in a hostile environment where this device might be gathering the details of what media people are accessing and then that's a very attractive target. Yes. You're talking about encryption. How much have you engineered for that use case? That is one of the things I want to do this year, is over-engineer the safety of the network traffic that's passing through it as devices connect. As I mentioned very briefly, the traditional way of doing it on the web just doesn't work, right? You can't have an SSL cert. And another one there might be the state on the box. What kind of logging is it doing or not doing? Yes, that's a fine point. Because this was built with the initial code base and the initial concept was all built with libraries in mind, it's not doing any logging, no MAC tracking, none of that. It keeps statistics of links clicked, but there's no IP and no MACs related to any of that that's ever on the box. So yeah, privacy is key. When I showed the map, it would seem that most of the users are in the US or Europe. So I'm wondering whether this is because the libraries can afford it more there, or is it the reports are more abandoned from this very year, or is it like a personal network that is affecting this? I think it's a combination of a number of things. Obviously, it's easier for me to evangelize in the US. It's easier for me to go to national conferences and I talk about this. So the fact that the user base is larger in the US I think has a lot to do with the fact that more people have heard of it.  Europe was interesting for reasons that I am not entirely clear on. One of the largest initial groups to latch onto the project was in France. And from there, it spread fairly quickly. One of the lead developers for the project is in Germany as well, and that helps in kind of getting information in Europe. So that may explain it, but that's a fine thing. I would love to know more. I mean, that obviously is something else I could probably do while I'm here is work on kind of how it's been distributed and why the kind of social net that has done it is something that's really interesting to me. Yes, sir. A couple questions about content. Sure. How much can you put on the box? Yeah. And I would think that reading from a mobile application would be really ideal for this. So do you have a way of optimizing the content for reading on mobile devices as opposed to browsers and other things? Sure. So the only limit for storage is the USB that you connect to it. So if you may not be able to see very clearly, but you can come up and take a look at the devices afterwards. There's a little USB, a little thumb drive. And the thumb drive is your hard drive. So if you connect a 16 gig thumb drive, you've got 16 gigs of storage. If you connect a 128, you've got 128 gigs. If you connect an external hard drive and you plug it in and you've got a four terabyte raid, you've got four terabytes of storage. It's entirely dependent upon the external storage for that. We have, again, kind of philosophically intentionally not optimized for any particular kind of content. That is intentional. It is up to the client that connects to be able to read the content in question. So if you throw an MP4 at a phone that doesn't have an MP4 decryption program, if it can't read the codec, then it can't read the file. But that also means that we can serve anything. So you want to serve huge data sets to people? Fine, throw them on here and give them something that can read huge data sets and they can pull it off. Totally agnostic as to the digital thing that you want to share. It also means that we can stay within web standards for the sharing, which means that any browser can access it. So we've had discussions with people about optimizing with an app, having an iOS or an Android app that connected directly to the box and was the interface for getting content off. But again, that walls you, it doesn't free you. So we want to make it as accessible as possible. That just makes me wonder. There's some new stuff that's coming out with Wi-Fi authentication that might be interesting to do that sort of automated login. There's a handful of newer Wi-Fi things that I would love to look into. There's a corporate Wi-Fi thing that I looked at very briefly that does end-to-end encryption without using SSL. That one didn't go very far, but I hope to find something that does because it would be ideal. That's what I want for it to be end-to-end encrypted on every device. Yeah, in the back. I've been working on one laptop for child school server for many years. It's kind of a larger version of this. Yeah. First the good news. When I worked in Madagascar in Ghana, people prefer this to the Internet. Yeah. And the so-called whites can't because they're addicted to Google and they're addicted to their smartphones. So there's a limited window because it's faster. The content is closer. And it's a cultural divide. We cannot resist grabbing Google in our pocket. We just can't. We're addicted to it. So there's a kind of a limited time to deploy these things, whether it's 10 years or whatever. And my perspective, so this is pessimist, so you're supposed to be the optimist, is that it's not going to work unless we have an incredibly powerful brand name like Wikipedia or United Nations or Pick Your Favorite Private Public, whatever. Because the costs to deploy are much larger than the cost of the hardware. We all have $10 units, $100 units. I consider that completely irrelevant. The deployment costs are the real cost. And so unless we find a way to become Henry Ford, this will remain a Tinkerer's game. An interesting Tinkerer's game. Yeah. I don't disagree. I would love to become Henry Ford. Well, okay. Part of Henry Ford. Hi, I'm Ellery. Just going off of that, can you talk about how, how do I get it if I live in Zambia and I don't know you or me or any of us? I mean, I think just a lot of these tools, they're really cool and can be useful in context with low connectivity, how do you get it if you don't have a credit card, if ordering something online is not an option and you're not connected to these kind of networks. And then how do you know how to use it? The last mile problem is a real one and especially for physical goods. Part of the goal of the project has been to make it as easy as possible to install, to build. So we have intentionally tried to support international versions of all of the hardware. So you can go to a local electronics store in much of the world. I won't say all of the world because I don't know all of the world. But much of the world, you can go into a local electronics store and buy whatever the local version of this hardware is. Because TP-Link, these are all TP-Link routers, well, okay, three of them are TP-Link routers, they're a global company. You can buy some version of this that we support almost everywhere. Now, if you're in a remote area that doesn't have an electronics store, obviously that's a problem. As far as building it, you do need initial access to be able to build it. So the implementation can't take place in a vacuum. And honestly, I don't have a solution for how do you build it in the middle of nowhere. We can slowly start answering that question maybe through better methodologies for installing it from offline. But we're not there yet. But we have tried to make sure that we support some version of hardware that is available, again on every continent in most countries. Certainly anywhere that anyone has contacted me and said, I haven't been able to find the MR-3020. Our local version is the WR-173. Okay, well, we'll now build it for the WR-173. So we've tried to hit when people ask. But, yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. Have you talked to FabLab communities at all to kind of following off of that? Could you make a library box that makes other library boxes, essentially? The plans on it, the information you need. Maybe two USB ports so that you can copy over the code. You can build a box from a box, yes. That's totally doable and legit and works and is fairly easily done. So, yes, once you have one, you can have many. The FabLab communities are one of my favorite communities in the whole world. I absolutely love, love, love all things maker, makerspace, fabbing. Working with SparkFun on a couple of projects has produced me two wide swads of that community. And, yes, I would adore working with them more, especially on the open hardware front to try to free, I mean, these are, you know, open source code, but the hardware on this particular box is not open, which bothers me and I would like to continue to work with communities to make it more so. To riff off of the, I'm Willow, hello everyone. To riff off of the idea of FabLabs and data that you brought up earlier in openness, I do a fair amount of hackathons in places with low connectivity and being able to walk in with the libraries and the data would be dreamy because the power is never reliable and the connectivity is never reliable and taking enough with me to be able to leave them would be great. Well, that is exactly the sort of use case that I think this particular project shines with. That is almost exactly SparkFun's use case. They have pre-built all their libraries and everything into a box and they just take it with them and the box costs $40. They just leave it with the school. Yeah. To follow up on that question, wouldn't it make sense for all of us to have this software on our laptops?  Oh, sure, sure, sure. There are really cheap laptops so if you have a $50 laptop, sure you can leave it behind. The goal of this is to try to push the price down to the point. One of the goals is to try to make it absolutely I want these things in cereal box hardware. I want it to be as cheap as humanly possible to roll out. To give you so I did I've talked a couple of times about solar panels I brought one just to these boxes will run if you're in full sun on a solar panel this size so it doesn't take a lot of space if you're running it in a remote area. So I think with a lot of these questions you're hearing about can it be an app can it be on my laptop. I've rolled my own version of this 20 times in the last 10 years and I think everyone should maybe in some ways I think you're stuck on the thing of the box versus the thing of the light box and that like maybe it's better if people say oh I've set up a web server on my land and you can it's like oh I put up a library box and maybe it has nothing to do with your software or hardware it's just it's a now a verb I library boxed it I would love to be a verb that'd be awesome. Henry Ford and a verb. It's a concept that the idea that you don't need the internet you have the right to share freely licensed content and that this is something you should do as a community act or a resistant act or something like that's a bigger gift to the state of the world than like selling your box. Yes, totally. Yeah, no, that's well said. Thank you. I was sort of impressed by the picture you put on your presentation showing a sort of bookshelf that was half empty with just a little library box. I was reminded of the own efforts we've been having in my department at University of Geneva of downsizing some of our libraries because they were saying you have everything online you have everything digitized anyway so I was wondering do you have any policy standpoints regarding the issue of the digital dark age the idea that every data is now digital and we'll have big we're going to have trouble getting back to our own history and getting back to our data like 50 years from now. I definitely, I mean obviously there are lots of libraries that have thought about that there's probably librarians in the room that are more qualified to talk about that than me honestly. I do think that one of the things again kind of philosophically that makes me continue to be interested in this project and projects like it is the idea that it is possible for people to easily and cheaply be their own archive that their information can easily be kept and shared by themselves and I think that again concept is fairly powerful once you start seeing it in the world. Got through all the questions? One more? Sure. Sort of a semi-comment the image that just came to me I recall I think it started around 10 years ago where you'd see people especially kind of geeky people at geeky events who would have their USB thumb drive hanging around their neck with all of their vital stuff. This sort of strikes me as like a USB thumb drive that broadcasts. Yeah. But I think that the question raised here is really when you look ahead I mean with the technology changing as rapidly as it is the notion that you can rely on archiving in these forms starts to get a little daisy doesn't it down the road? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean if no data format is immutable or you know immune from bit rot or any number of other you know problems digital information storage over time both in codec and in just again physical storage I mean physically storing digital things is hard if what you want is absolute bit for bit copies. Yeah I do not think this is a magic archive box. That is just not what this is and this really is more about sharing than archival but as a potential point as I said to Nathan's question a little earlier the potential point for using it as a collection device and then moving it into the archival sort of a more stable archival form I think is a fairly interesting one this could be the shuttle craft for the mothership right so thanks Gary. Just a tiny push back on the laptop question one of the things that we're playing with in our kind of one laptop per child the server world is well not officially kind of an underground hack of the old old PC laptops to turn them into something like this because there's about three million of these littered around the world so the cost is zero literally zero because they're being pushed out of schools and they're easy to find so why pay anything when it's completely free so you have a screen as well and maybe the laptop is actually a better form factor because if you're looking at cultural adoption you're not demanding someone have any fancy smartphone low-end smartphone anything and as one of the gentlemen over here I forget said you have an AP you're spreading the knowledge through the little village and do you consider that form factor possible as well? Yeah, yeah no I mean the OLPC project in general is a great one the particular reuse of it I mean I it is a fantastic idea to reuse old hardware in this way that is really yes I mean both environmentally friendly and it's just an awesome use of old hardware I mean we again like my particular project hasn't gone that route because we don't have access to three million free laptops you got it I will happily talk to you about using them but yeah no I the form factor again kind of philosophically form factor doesn't matter at all it's more about the kind of re-conceptualizing the way that we share things being able to do it very very very cheaply in areas with no infrastructure honestly I think that's an important re-conceptualization of the way we share digital things. So I think we have time for one more question if anyone with one more? I didn't even look at what time it was so alright so last one I didn't want to take the mic if somebody else had something to say well I was I was going to say and I don't know this is probably obvious to most people in the room but this is like such a lovely example of values and design so you really embedded of philosophical several philosophical positions in your in your build and I missed the very beginning of your talk so I'm not sure if you laid out how the philosophical principles that are there and I did want to introduce at one point you used the word we're kind of agnostic to what the data is those places where there is very much a philosophical position that means you can't necessarily make claims to agnosticism and if you if you maybe agree or disagree with that statement but it just does seem like such an interesting example for people like me who would say oh actually your values are absolutely baked into what you're doing this is like par excellence so what we're talking about when we say that. Yeah I absolutely agree I mean the I am by training a librarian I have spent time as a librarian over the last decade it is fairly clear to anyone that knows librarians and libraries that there is a the philosophical basis of it is pretty firmly rooted in the library world open and free access to information everywhere all the time agnosticism about what people are reading is a core library value right we don't care what you read as long as you're reading we don't even want to know what you read we just want you to read we don't care so all of those sorts of library values I think are are part of the are part of the underbelly of this project at least I hope they are I want them to be and it makes me really happy that you think they are because that is I think a piece of what I want to put out with the project is those positions it is one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves from all of the other potential projects right there are other ways to do this as again I keep relating back to Nathan he said people have rolled their own on this sort of thing a lot there are other ways you can do this but we have a particular bent and we want a particular thing out of the project and I'm willing to I'm willing to make the decisions that make it go the way we want so thank you alright thank you guys I'll put mine there's me again if you want to get in touch I would love to hear from anyone and everyone so thank you so much and if you want to come up and look at stuff whatever come on up