OK, let me try that again. I'm used to sanitizer equipment. It's one of those things you do in automatic, and you got the wrong button. So I'm Joey Coleman. I'm a journalist here in Hamilton, Ontario. I run a website called The Public Record. The Public Record covers Hamilton's civic affairs in great depth and great detail. The Public Record is a member of the National News Media Council. I'm also a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. I'm going to go through my bio in the presentation. What my goal today to do is to discuss how WordPress has democratized information and communication and enabled me with my background to be a journalist. And that's actually quite something else when you learn my background that I'm a journalist. And the fact that I can be a journalist is because of the fact that the internet has opened the lines of communication. And because of platforms, WordPress being one of the predominant ones that have opened up the internet for people to use who are pro-amateurs. So I'm not a coder. I can play with code, but I can't build code. I can play on the back end of a server, but I can't actually build a stack from start. I can use WordPress, and I can modify the PHP, but I couldn't write it all myself. And that is amazing when you think that 20 years ago, I couldn't exist. I couldn't have a voice. And today, not only do I have a voice, but it is very powerful. So I've already done that. So this here, this picture here, most of you probably don't even know where this is. This is a building. This is Congress Crescent. It's social housing. So I always enjoy this, because the city has tried numerous times to rebrand this survey with various nice names. So officially, the city calls it Pine Grove Place. And they've been calling it Pine Grove Place in every document for 15 years. They don't even put the address down anymore because they want people to stop calling this Congress. But people who live there and who are from there, we call it Congress. It's one of my favorite things is to have arguments with senior city staff about the fact that I call it Congress. I'm like, I grew up there.  You bureaucrats downtown can call it Pine Grove Place. That's fine. This is a social housing development. It's an interesting survey. It's one of the more, so city housing in East Hamilton, when these were built in the 60s and 70s, a lot of these surveys, the city housing surveys, were built on isolated plots of land where the land was on the Red Hill Creek, which gave it a geographical constraint. So this apartment complex here, there's about 1,000 to 1,200 people that live in this survey. Sorry, correction. I actually have mixed up my numbers. There's about five to 600. I was counting Oriole in there as well as doing the subsection. So there's about five to 600 people that live in this survey and it only has two entrances in and out. And it's a very constrained place. And I put that up there to give you a sense of where I come from. And the fact that, you know, out of all the people that I knew as a kid in this complex, three that were closest to me, one's in jail, one's living there now with her children and her grandchildren, the third person we don't know whatever became of them. It's a place where poverty is really generationalized. And I go in there often and I can tell you who's grandchildren of who are even great grandchildren. You know, so that's where I start. A little bit about me. Journalist, blogger, amateur coder, activist. And I use that term quite openly and quite proudly. I don't, so in journalism, we like to use the term activist as a pejorative. You know, so for example, the citizens who were calling for the end of minority voter dilution in Hamilton. So in Hamilton, our current wards dilute minority voters more so than any other municipality in Canada. We're the worst for suppressing minority vote power because what we've done is we've created wards where mostly white Anglo-Saxon communities. And this was the term that the city used at the hearing. They explained these are predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, homogenous communities of interest. We've created a system where minority voters are concentrated in three wards with high population and non-minority voters are in wards with lower populations. And so the spectator, they covered the ward boundary hearing. They called the people that were pushing for voter equity activists. And when the Ontario Municipal Board came down and said, no, this is not proper. You have to consider minority voter dilution. You cannot give disproportionate power to white Anglo-Saxon homogenous community of Dundas, Flamborough, and rural Flamborough. There were citizens that started a petition to go to the divisional court and the spectator referred to them as concerned citizens. So, their activism was to keep the wards as it is. And let's be clear that we're not referring to these people as being motivated by race. They were motivated because they wanted to keep the status quo of their neighborhood, their unique character, their former municipal communities. The unfortunate side effect of that was dilution. And so I wanted to explain why I use that term because I actually think that we've created a discourse where activist is a negative and it should not be. We should be looking at the type of activism. Engaged citizen, I'm a Crown Ward. So Crown Ward is I was in foster care. So after Congress, a lot of housing, a lot of instability in the family situation until I ended up in foster care. And that's an important part of my background. It's not something I generally have talked about till about the last three years. Because most people when you leave foster care and you're fighting to make your way in the world, you're trying to shed that. But it's important to how I've got to where I am. I volunteer, I'm in the Neighborhood Association. My hobby is I'm a pinball player. And if you go back to my old blog, like long, long time ago when I was in university and universities had arcades, I had a daily blog post of my pinball scores. Bit of a time, and people loved it. Bit of a timeline, so my first website was in 1996. My school had two computers with dial-up internet. And I wish I had a copy of that first 1996 site only because it's hilarious. It's got the scrolling text, the flashing text, the star background, the spitting bear. How many of you do branding for a living? Branding, marketing. Okay, so 1996, I'm 14. 1998, I'm 16. I'm running my school network. I'm on school board committees and the new school board, the Hamiltonian District School Board, released their new logo. And they had only put it up on their website for five minutes. And what do I do? I grab the logo. I change the color of the logo at the proportions of the logo to better fit my high school website and put it up. And that was the first time I understood that branding people really care about color. You know, teenager, I'm like, our colors are orange. Who cares if the board's blue? We're gonna make this logo orange on our website. 1999, at 17, I moved out on my own. I ran for school board trustee in 2000. I was the first candidate to have a website in Hamilton. You know, because as soon as I registered, it was like the website thing. And it was quite interesting because there were a lot of candidates that never had websites in 2000. And that's really hard to believe today. In 2001, I joined the Canadian Forces. So for three years, I was off the internet. Like, I was still using the internet, but no website, no posting on social forums, nothing interactive. 2004, I left the military. The night I left, I went home, cracked open a really nice bottle of wine that I bought, you know, and just said, okay, so what's next? And I looked at where the internet was and that's how joeycollman.ca started. I wrote a lot about student politics, student affairs, just as a blogger, purely as a blogger. I had no intention of being a journalist. And on March 11th, 2007, McLean's magazine calls me up, offers me a job. Only four days before I had turned down writing a column for the eye opener at Ryerson because I wasn't gonna be a journalist. But when McLean's called and offered me a job, I was like, hmm, I think I'll do this. So I spent two and a half years at McLean's, then I went to the Globe and Mail on a contract. So at McLean's, I was a full-time contract. At the Globe and Mail, I was once a week writing. I left McLean's in, my contract had come to an end. They were going in a different editorial direction than what I was going. So when they said they were going in that direction, I said, I'm not planning to renew my contract. They bought out the remaining four weeks I had. And I was planning to leave journalism. The Globe and Mail called me up, said, hey, you know, why don't you write for us once a week? We can't pay you much. I actually worked it out per word. They were paying me pretty well, but mostly because I was only doing one column a week. Whereas at McLean's, I was the guy that just blogged all day, all night. Paul Wells and I used to compete with each other to write the most each day. 2010, I switched to local news. 2012, my personal website, Joey Coleman. So I was writing a lot about local news. I crowdfunded it, 2014. I rebrand and relaunched the public record. And that extra bit there, I'm actually not sure how that ended up in as I was reformatting the timeline. I knew there was gonna be an air somewhere in the slides. So, to give you a bit of an idea, blogger or journalist, I really enjoy this debate, not actually because I enjoy the debate itself. I think it's rather frivolous, but I enjoy mocking the debate. And when I got hired by McLean's, my official title was something associate, or I think it was associate or assistant, or no, assistant editor, universities. Journalists love titles. I actually had put on my business card, reporter slash blogger, universities. And that always raised eyebrows and it heckles from other journalists. I'm like, it's what I do, I report on my blog. I don't need a fancy title. And it's also because I think blogging is a very noble pursuit when done properly. Much as journalism is a noble pursuit, but when not done properly, we've seen the consequences of that. So, up in the top left is how the blog looked before I was writing about anything that interested people. Literally, for the first six months, my blog was writing so that I now regret and picture each day. And the people that I was writing for were basically my friends. I was basically doing that at the end of the day, so I had content to play around with the CMS, reformat, redesign. The writing was not the primary. I get elected to student union council in January, 2005. And that's when the blog really changed into a blog that people read. On student affairs and student politics, so that's in the middle. There's McLean's. There I am like this. This photo here, I showed you the first photo of Congress Crescent. Not my pretty bland building, very institutional, very boring, very... This is me in Doha, Qatar. And it's amazing how many buildings. I went there twice, six months apart, and the skyline had changed in six months. Like they just building buildings. And I remember I was on a tour with the interior ministry and I asked the guy what they were putting in one of these like 80 story buildings. He says, oh, we haven't figured that out yet. I'm like, so why are you building? He says, because Dubai has a similar building, but there's this two-story shorter. But that was me on assignment in the Persian Gulf. Completely crazy assignment. Yeah, I mean it was amazing to go from Congress to sitting in first class on a Middle Eastern airline where the longest I had to wait for food was 12 minutes while they made it. McLean's website, my picture there. Let me tell you it is an ego boost to open up McLean's magazine to... What would it be now? 11 years ago and have a full page ad with your big picture on it. It's quite the ego boost. Actually, my ego got the better of me a little bit at that time. And then over at the Globe and Mail and you can somewhat clearly see the headline here in the style of writing. Like I'm talking about labor relations at Lake Head University about forelogging and labor relations boards, like really nerdy stuff. But the Globe and Mail let me do that. And that was the thing, right? Because one of the things with the democratization of information is that even in the media that imprint, that would have never been a print column. It's way too niche. But online, that's fine. You know, the pre-blog age.  I loved BBS as the fact that you could go in these forums and maybe 12 of the people locally. So BBS, how many people are familiar with that term? Okay, so bulletin board system, basically pre-internet. Before the World Wide Web, you could call somebody's computer and people would have like 12 phone lines into their house and a computer server, less powerful than your smartphone, of course. And you'd have basic text. And in grade four, my teacher did not know what to do with me in terms of the fact that I was in a class school where 90% of the students English was their second language. And myself, I was 2%ile below the gifted program when I tested in grade three. The areas of the tests that I had done, I got perfect, but a quarter of the test, I had never been taught the concepts. And nowadays that would result in a person in that type of school situation going into the gifted program because they have now started to weigh other factors. So my teacher literally put me in the computer room with a manual and a modem and said, have fun. And so I really enjoyed that exchange of ideas. And so when the first, when the internet first came out, there was this idea that the internet was going to give us an exchange of ideas. It was gonna be, the world was gonna be smaller.  It was gonna be a utopia. Instead, it delivered cheesy graphics, bad medleys and in sync fan sites. You know, and so I loved the XKCD tribute to GeoCities when it went down. I was like, even though this isn't a real GeoCities site, it really captures how GeoCities was. I mean, I had a GeoCities site and I wish that the World Wide Web Archive had captured it better. But in a way, you know, this sort of was a democratization of information and communication because people weren't talking about what they loved. GeoCities was horribly organized. It wasn't that complex to use, but it had no structure. And that was a problem. People just dragged stuff all over. It was messy and you could see the promise of people putting content on the internet, but it wasn't yet organized. It wasn't yet structured. And this is the best that I could do. There was a picture of me. There was like a bunch of pictures, but you see the sign guest book and it's like, yeah, I'm eventually gonna update this website and I never actually did because I was running my school website. That was my fun. But even there, you got like the little widgets that you could drop and drag and it's just ugly. The blogosphere starts and you know, this is where we're seeing the start of what we called Web 2.0. This is the start of that promise is coming together. And the early blogs were developers like Dave Wiener who were just trying to organize their own websites. And it was the start of open source culture. So they were sharing the programs they were building for their own websites. And two came to really dominate the early internet, blogger and movable type. Blogger is still around and still used. I don't, I've got like a couple of blogspot websites that I still follow, but those are sort of remnants, university professors or people that started in the height of the blogosphere and rarely blog now. Moveable type is basically a few corporate sites that are custom built by six apart. Moveable type is effectively dead, which is quite amazing when you think about how dominant both those platforms were before WordPress even existed as a concept. So you've got the early blogs and it's one of those things where, so blogger arrives in 1999, movable type arrives in 2001, but they're very niche products. There's maybe a couple thousand sites worldwide that are doing this. And then we have President George W. Bush and we've got the Iraq War. And the Iraq War gets people talking. It gets people fired up. And now the blogosphere becomes where people debate these ideas because people have opinions and ideas about this major topic. And that's what began the American political blogosphere which really lit blogging on fire. It's when it got attention. There is a capture of Glenn Greenwald's blog. And I, how many of you are familiar with Edward Snowden? Okay, so you're familiar with Glenn Greenwald, journalist who broke that story. Glenn Greenwald started as a blogger against the Iraq War. He had amazing writing. It was very well documented. He linked out, he shared information. He was one of the nodes of the blogosphere. He started on blogspot and then got hired by Saloon to write for Saloon. Got hired by The Guardian, broke the Edward Snowden story and now is one of the managers of The Intercept and probably the world's most famous journalist of the internet age. Without the internet, there's no Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald's writing against the Iraq War would never have appeared in mainstream media. He would have never had a voice if it weren't for the fact that he started blogging. WordPress itself comes in to play. It forks off of another project called B2 Cafe Log in May 2003. So the blogosphere is not yet at its crescendo but it's a force in early 2003 and WordPress just starts. It's just another, at this time, there were dozens of blogging platforms. There were dozens of attempts to build something that people felt corrected the flaws of movable type or corrected the flaws of blogger. None of these projects were meaning to replace. There was no feeling from people that they had to move. Then, some of the early flaws that WordPress would end up correcting is blogger was not self-hosted. So you could redirect your URL to blogger and have your own domain, but very few people did because once you've redirected your domain, well, you can't use your web domain for much of anything else without creating a huge amount of name records. There was a limited ability to customize them initially and blogger was both the host and the platform. So they controlled, if something happened to blogger, you lost your content. You weren't in full control of your content. That was the flaw of it. And in terms of the ability to design and customize, has anybody ever seen a really nice looking blogger powered blog? The other challenge was they had a barrier to entry. So this here is from my original hosting provider. One of the pictures of how you had to install movable type. And for a lot of people, the idea of changing permissions on certain files and not other files, that was intimidating. And if you change the permission on one file incorrectly, you could have your site easily hacked. You had a vulnerability. So there was a barrier to entry. The other thing, so movable type basically controlled. Moveable type was the WordPress of 2003, four, five. Most websites use it. The Huffington Post launched on movable type. The Washington Post used movable type. The New York Times used movable type for their first blogs. Moveable type was the platform. But it's most fatal flaw. Because all of the difficulty to install WordPress had the same problem at the time. That could have been solved. It's ultimate flaw was it was not open source and it alienated its community. Is there anybody here that was using movable type back then? Okay, so you probably remember when movable type out of nowhere announced that you could no longer just use it for personal use free. You had to pay them a license if you have more than one author and one blog. And they quickly retreated from that, but that was it. People went, wait a second. You can do that to us. Suddenly just shut down my blog, make it hard for me to blog. Okay, and at that point, the community of bloggers went elsewhere. And while movable type core was not open source, movable type had plugins. So there was a huge ecosystem of developers who were developing plugins for movable type. And they dispersed all over the place, but one of the projects that grabbed some of the key developers was this thing called WordPress. And myself, I stayed with movable type. I wasn't prepared to move after I customized my template, I customized my site, all that. But that was ultimately the fatal flaw was the second that they decided not to be open and to be arbitrary, people fled. And that's where WordPress really had its key moment was when it got those developers. I can't see how well you guys are seeing this. So it hasn't really worked out well in this format on the screen, but basically if you could see this well, you have really nice topography and it's basically a blog where there's a link, list of links on this side, there's the content in the center, and then this was very much a thing in 2005, these little badges of everything and anything.  So a couple of the things that, here's BBC, BBC's blogs were powered by movable type. We still live in the legacy of movable type. Moveable type invented the track back. Moveable type had some of the first capture comments. Yes, I remember when track back happened, when they invented, I thought it was the greatest thing ever because it was one of those things was there were all these sites that would try to index the internet and tell you what sites were linking to you.  And for a person like me, whose website was bringing in tens of thousands of viewers per month, and I was just getting traffic all over the place, it was really hard to organize looking at my analytics of where people were coming from because analytics were a monthly count. I was interested, you know, who in the last week or sorry, analytics were daily but the referrals was a monthly dashboard. Who was linking to me was something that when track back came, I was like, oh, but the other reason that that was important was because you wanted to go over and comment in that conversation. If that person was linking to you, you wanted to read what they were saying, but you also wanted to join the dialogue in the comment section at the bottom of their blog. So I talked about the fiasco of the licensing issue. Trust is important. So this is really one of the key themes that I wanna hammer home is that trust is important. So this is one of my favorite headlines. It's like, I just love this headline because of how absurd it is. The headline states, Canadians trust doctors less, journalists more, pull. You wanna talk about journalistic bias. So what happened was doctors in one year, people the trust went down 22 points in doctors. And so 63% of people said they trusted doctors. 32% said they trusted journalists, which was up one point from the year before at 31. So the headlines technically correct. People trust the journalists more than they did the year before and doctors less. But when you read that headline, you're thinking, why do people trust journalists more than doctors? It's one of the challenges in the age that we're in is trust. Cause, you know, the public doesn't know journalists. And this is actually one of the great challenges facing journalism is that most people have no, they don't know a journalist. Journalism has become a very class stratified trade. A guy like me, you know, I'm out not in mainstream journalism for two reasons.  Nobody's gonna tell me to go chase clicks cause I didn't start chasing clicks. I have no interest in chasing clicks. But two, I, you know, I'm a crown ward. I'm a guy who grew up in social housing. I have gone to journalism interviews where they've said, you haven't paid your dues because I haven't worked for two to three years in Toronto on paid. And you know, when you explain to them, yeah, I, you know, can't afford to, don't have somebody to pay for me to work.  But, you know, so that's one of the challenges with facing journalism. And it's also the collapse of local news because you don't have journalists in your community anymore. So when you read articles that are written by journalists, they're an other. And we are naturally, we don't trust the other. Unless we know people, unless we have some sort of relationship, if they're the other, we're untrustful of it. But then we've also got the problem of politicians that lie and politicians loving to lie about journalists right now. Like we created, as a trade, we created the factors that have enabled us to be used as a wedge issue by politicians. But that does not get the journal, that does not get the politicians off the hook for lying. They're still lying.  And that's it. And the other challenge is that journalists, we tend not to know people outside of our circles, but we're like most human beings. You like to stick with what's familiar.  I know what to prepare for. I'm pretty relaxed. I'm comfortable. But when I, and I do this as much as I can, and I do look at who I'm sourcing my stories with and I try to change up my sources. So tomorrow I'm going to be sitting and reading a bunch of graduate student papers to try to find new sources, to try to find new knowledgeable people. But when you first interview that person, it's an uncomfortable experience because you're not in a familiar setting. So we tend to end up not going outside of our circles. I've talked about the fact that, you know, people don't know local. This guy here, I really, I like this photo and I've read his collection of his writings. This is a man named Al Macintosh. How many of you have watched Ken Bird's documentary, The War? Okay, so you'd be familiar with Al Macintosh's writings. So this is a guy who worked for, oh geez, I think it's the Rock County Gazette. It's a small newspaper in rural Illinois. He had the chance to work in Chicago, New York for the big name newspapers of his day. But he stayed as the editor of this relatively small community paper and he wrote eloquently of how the war was impacting his community. And when Ken Burns went into his documentary on the Second World War, he found the writings of Al Macintosh and he said repeatedly, talk after talk, that that was the greatest discovery out of all the archives he went through. Thousands, tens of thousands of hours of research. This guy's writing was there. And I put him up there because people in his community trusted him. If he wrote an editorial, people read it, believed that they trusted him because he lived in his community. He liked being part of his community. And the internet is a form of community. It's not a geographical community. It's a community of people nonetheless. And that's one of the reasons why blogging is so important. A little bit of comic relief here. Right now we tend to use social media instead of blogging. And this would have been a blog post 10 years ago. I would have done this as a blog post. Again, it's not as clear. So how many of you are from Hamilton and familiar with Hamilton politics? Know who Brad Clark is? Okay, so Brad Clark is a red Tory. So a bit right of center, really nice guy. Not opposed to Bikeshare, but it wasn't, Bikeshare wasn't his biggest priority. So I had a little fun with one day. The only choice I had for bike was one named Brad Clark. So I did, if it was Capital Bicycles and not Social Bicycles, the free market would reign and I'd have more choice. Right, Brad Clark? Implying that I didn't want to take a bike named after Brad Clark. I didn't actually mind. Blogging will research. We're at a moment right now in our civic discourse where there's a lot of tension. There's a lot of division. But there's a real hunger for good, high quality information. There's a real hunger for a return to the fact that what was great about the early blogs was you could read somebody's 1,200, 1,800 word essay on a topic and then click all the links and dive further. And I think we're at a moment much like the tensions that surrounds at the Iraq war in America where there's a division, but there's a, people are seeking clarity. They're seeking a deeper dive. They're seeking something that actually challenges them. And blogging peaked between 2006 and 2010. There are many reasons why it declined. Twitter, Facebook, mostly Twitter. Twitter was, if you were a blogger before, if you had an idea, you had to write a blog post. Now you could do a tweet and I'm one of the worst for it. But as you know, I go back in my tweets and I'm like, ah, that I should have done as a blog post, because now I can't find it and I have to go download my archive, search the archive on my local then click through. It's annoying.  And so you had, yeah, three streams of where people ended up out of the blogosphere. You had the people that professionalized like myself, Glenn Greenwald. There's a whole host of people that ended up getting hired by publications. The Atlantic was a great example. They hired a lot of great bloggers. As far as the reason why the Atlantic is such a great site today is because they pulled some of the best talent and the best talent went there because they could get paid. There were people that just, once they had another platform, social media, they were happy to leave blogging. They didn't really, that wasn't really their format. And then there's the third. The people that are still blogging to this day, but it was never their primary source of income or their primary thing. They did it as a side hobby. It never consumed them. Well, today we have crowdfunding. We have Patreon. So you can see there, there's the graph for Canada Land. Jesse Brown, Canada Land Show, one of the most popular podcasts in the country, 10 years ago, he could not exist because there was no easy way for payments to be processed. And this is why people want good quality content and now they have the ability to pay for it. And I expect that we're gonna start seeing sites powered on WordPress resurging. So myself, I'm an example of this in that I have a site called the Public Record. I cover Hamilton City Hall in ridiculous steps. I cover the most boring subcommittees straight through to the most entertaining of council meetings. And it's entirely reader funded. It's entirely open. How many of you subscribed to my RSS feed? And okay, so how many of you use RSS? Okay, this is something that thanks Google for destroying Google Reader and destroying RSS. So you could read my entire site purely in your RSS app. You don't have to come to my website. Everything's open. All of the content I produce, a lot of high value in the sense of a lot of resource intensive, very niche, it's completely open. And there are people that voluntarily subscribe for a monthly payment to my service to enable me to provide it for everyone. And so the site's powered on WordPress. The template is something called Largo. The theme is, you would call it a theme. Traditionally, if you got it in the WordPress theme site, but it's actually not in the WordPress theme site because it requires some customization, not much. And it's an open source project run by a network of independent news sites in the United States. You can sort of see a bit of the layout of those sites. My site itself is a fork of a theme done by the Chicago Reporter. And so I'm able to focus on journalism. So I set up the website, I managed the backend, but I don't have to code the theme. I don't have to worry about updating the parent theme when WordPress updates because the community takes care of that, enabling me to do my journalism. Without an open source project like WordPress, I don't exist. Some of the things that power my website. So you can see here, I'm not sure how clear it is. The next thing is that if you go to the publicrecord.ca, scroll down to the footer, there's a section that says our equipment, gear and software, and you can actually see everything that I use to do everything that I do. So in terms of patron payment processing, so I actually process the payments through Stripe. That setup is done through INN. So INN laid out, here's how you use gravity forms and Stripe to create a secure payment system. I followed that guide. So I didn't have to try to invent that.  My information security plan is not to have information that needs to be secured. Flat out and simple, I'm a journalist.  I don't want your personal information because then I have to worry about, not if I get hacked, but when I get hacked anymore. I mean, the reality is, is that a guy like me trying to secure information, it isn't my primary thing.  And every once in a while I see some of these lists that have I been hacked or whichever one, Tony, can't remember his last name, the, do you remember the guy, Microsoft VP? Tony Hunt, or Troy Hunt, is it Troy Hunt? It's Troy Hunt.  Like I look at some of these things, I'm like, why the hell did you have that information that got hacked? She even had it in the first place. I use Let's Encrypt for my certificate. My web hosting is Web Faction. And I'm not giving, I love Web Faction, they're really great, but I'm not necessarily doing a referral here because there's lots of great services out there and you need to find the service that works for you and I'm not an expert on that, so I'm not gonna give you recommendations. Talking about my themes, there's all the plugins. I did remove the anti-spam plugin earlier this week, mostly because I'm obsessed with no third party, transfer of information, like I've got no embeds of share buttons. I do embed YouTube videos, but even there it's, you click to get the embed loaded, it doesn't load automatically. I'm obsessed with no third party calls at all. And so I removed the anti-spam, which is a bit annoying to deal with the spam, but right now I'm just in the phase. I'll probably put it back on once I get tired of dealing with spam. So live blog is, this is one of the things, people live tweet and live tweeting was a sort of cool thing, but I can tell you that I've gone back to live blogging because you can do more than 280 characters. You don't have to read things. You don't have to worry about somebody retweeting a 280 character block that in context makes sense, but outside of that context makes you look like a fool.  I don't need to have the platforms do it for me. Okay, I won't quit my day job. But I actually did a live blog of a Ontario Municipal Board hearing into the War Boundaries, and that live blog at the end of it, of, geez, I, okay, I'm glad he put the five minutes. So mission statement of the public record, you can go to the website, basically it's to inform people that they can be good citizens. So watch your own blog. You should control your content. You really need to control your content. That's the big thing. Go out, even if you use WordPress.com, because WordPress.com, actually you can export it, and WordPress.com has a business model. I love mediums layout. I love the idea of the ecosystem that mediums created, but they haven't figured out their bloody business model and they screwed a whole bunch of journalists sites earlier this year when they decided suddenly, you know that partner thing we were doing? We just canceled it.    Don't be needlessly mean. That's my key tip. Don't check your statistics, don't worry about them. It doesn't need to be WordPress, but WordPress is easily. Open up, credit, link to others, be open, use Creative Commons licensing. This here is the text of a blog post I wrote in 2006. This is my most read article ever. This article had 30,000 reads, 30,000 unique readers on the day it was published, as it was being updated. 30,000 in 2006. 30,000 today, I'd be like, whoo, 2006. But look at the text. You can see there was lots of linking up. Basically what I was doing was aggregating. This was a student union impeachment in BC. I was sitting in the basement of the Student Center at McMaster in Hamilton covering it. But you can see here, and these are all blogs. These are all people that were writing at this university. And it's amazing. And those people were coming back to me and we were exchanging information. Like it's not a pretty post, but it's got utility. Like that is the perfect blog post. 30,000 reads in the day that it happened. Creative Commons licensing.  I don't have time to go into it, but I use the Creative Commons by attribution share alike. It's an open license. It allows people to use the content without reaching out to me. It allows them to modify it. The only thing it requires is that they also use an open license if they significantly derive from my work. This is one of my favorite fan mail. You get lots of good fan mail. This is my personal favorite.  You know, I no longer put the person's name.  Questions, so I'll take questions in a moment. We'll leave the contact connect up. So I actually, I am gonna be around all afternoon, so please feel free to come and ask me questions then. I'll take one or two questions now and I thank you all for listening. Okay, sorry? What's next, what's the next big thing? Well, it's getting the public record sustainable. So right now I'm about to launch a campaign to get enough monthly patrons to be sustainable just for me, but then to start hiring local journalists and start fixing local news. People really want local news, but they want local news that's not chasing clicks. They want local news that's actually boring, but insightful and boring in the sense of people, there's not much I can do to make subcommittees interesting. There's not much I can do to make technical reports interesting, but I can give people insight and people really want that. People do click and share the crime weather traffic stories. Like that's what the media does is a lot of, I call it journalism, but they're not willing to pay for that. They really do want the in-depth content. The problem is it's chicken or the egg. The in-depth content requires somebody to be able to have the time and the resources to do it or be willing in my case to make the sacrifice of the startup and then people will pay for it and it's getting there. It's not yet sustainable, but somebody has to do it and ironically, part of the reason I can do it is because I come from the background I do, I have no desire to be part of the club. Don't get me wrong, traveling to the Middle East was a lot of, or the Persian Gulf was a lot of fun, but I didn't actually enjoy the state dinner and the second state dinner I got invited to, I went to Applebee's that night and read a book. I mean, I'm not the guy that likes the student tie. I do like the opera though, no ads whatsoever. So the question was, do you cover anything outside of Hamilton and do you ever take ads? I don't take ads at all because firstly, when you're doing ads, now you're doing third-party tracking of your readers. Secondly, ads do not, you can't put an ad beside a live blog of a quasi-judicial hearing.  And then also, your readers are going well, if you're getting advertising money, people think advertising makes money. It doesn't make money, but if they see it, they're not gonna find you because they're like, well, okay, you're double-dipping at best. In terms of outside of Hamilton, no, for two reasons. One, I don't have the time. Like I literally work 80, 90 hours a week read every agenda at City Hall, but two, it's also brand dilution. People need to know exactly what I represent. So I barely touched on the provincial election. That's the big hot issue right now. But I haven't touched it at all because then I'm all over the place. I got to focus on fixing municipal affairs. And in four years, hopefully I have a staff working for the public record where we can provide great coverage of the provincial election. As a leader, how do you trust more people like, you know, how do you combat Fort Chan, for example? You don't combat Fort Chan, you know? How do people have Fort Chan? Yeah, so the question was this, how do you build trust, how do you deal with, basically the dark parts of the internet and build trust? Well, building trust as a reader, look at the site. Look at, are they linking out? Are they making a logical argument? Is there a depth to it?  It's like, and I've actually separated my personal website and I run a different platform and different design completely on my personal website to try to differentiate between when I'm just a random guy ranting and when I'm being a journalist. But even when I'm ranting, I have to be very, like I can't be malicious, I can't be, I'm still a journalist. But, you know, when you go and look at where are they linking, what depth of research is there? In terms of battling Fort Chan, the reason that Fort Chan has success is because they figured out how to game the system. They figured out that journalists love chasing clicks.  There's an instant gratification of you got likes and shares. And so Fort Chan's figured that out. The reality is, is that we all just need to pause and I'm as guilty as anybody else of it. I've got a lot better, but I've also been burned in the process. Like, you know, I thankfully learned that once you burn your nose on the stove, don't put your nose to the stove again. But I've put my nose to the proverbial stove a few times. And I think you're right. I'm very interested in more in-depth articles, you know, or a platform like the Long Leeds. And I find that, you know, modern journalism, they're forced to be shallow, so I'm fascinating. Yeah, like, I mean, so the question was trust. And, you know, one of the reasons that you're losing trust is that articles are shallow. It's a challenge of, if you're running an advertising-based model, you've got to generate clicks. You know, when I was working for McLean's, I was covering a really in-depth issue of policy that I felt was important for its nation's education funding. But nobody cared to read it. Like, it wasn't an issue that got people fired up. But a student politician at Carlton University said, cystic fibrosis is a white man's disease. Therefore, we're not going to fundraise for it. And boom, through like the McLean's analytics on that story was through the roof. And my editor's going, you know, why am I paying you to go to Belleville to cover this story that's getting a couple hundred reads when the intern is writing the story that's generating the clicks? And, you know, it's a system, the system is broken until we fix it. You know, it's not going to fix itself. And it's going to require that readers pay for the news that they want. They see that news, you got to pay for it. And for example, I'd go back to the Ontario Municipal Board where I live, blogged it. That was a real risk for me. That was a 10-day hearing where for 10 days, all I was doing was that hearing. The hearing started at 9 a.m. every morning, went till 6 p.m. and then I would have to read case law that was cited throughout the day or at it. But in the end, it turned out well for me because everybody went, wow, Joey did a great job. Like that really helped my crowdfunding in December. But the risk was that if something more interesting had happened and I had committed my resources to that hearing and nothing happened at that hearing. And so it's why people need to start funding the news and they will. But it's the chicken or egg. What's optimistic about that? So what's optimistic is, and it's basically accepting how the internet works, the internet has a 991 tier which is 90% of your visitors just visit. They never interact. 9% will sometimes interact, could be incited to leave a comment or click like. Like you think about when you put something up on Facebook, how many people are clicking like and how many are putting in a comment? Like is probably 9%. 1% are commenting, 90% are viewing it and not engaging. And it's much the same with journalism. So I'm building a model where I'm accepting that 1% I'm gonna be able to get to pay fairly easily. They're gonna go, this is great. I really like this. I like what you're doing. I like the concept I'm in. 9% I'm gonna have to work to get them to pay. And when I say to get them to pay is they're willing to, how do I figure out the incentive for them? 90% will never pay. But journalism has to be a public service. If I'm not a public service, then why does the public give me access, media officers access to public documents, that type of thing. So it's just bringing the cost structure down. We can see out this window with the trees while the trees are now blocking. There's a gigantic building with a huge printing press that costs tens of millions of dollars. Well, now you can go to wordpress.com and start for free. So it's both accepting that we're gonna lose revenue, but also bringing the cost structure to meet where that revenue is at. One last question. So I've considered that. And so there's two reasons why it won't work. One is the people who are funding at very large amounts. There's one patron who's giving $50 a month. And they're actually not using the content as much as most other patrons, but it's that they like the fact that their $50 a month is providing information for everyone. So the concept, the open, people like the open, the brand consistency of everything's open, creative commons license. Two, I have very limited resources. I'm literally myself. Every feature I add requires me to drop something else because I no longer have time to add anything. So now I'm creating more work for myself that's taking away from producing the actual content. And lastly on that, I said to originally, but lastly, what I'm doing is so niche that almost in effect, it's an exclusive product. Okay, thank you everyone for today.


civil society, assess, voyager or yetola's achievements ahead of the Oshun state's governorship elections and will expose use as the PDP as they give former president of Lucia-Gomobassanger 48 hours to clarify remarks on a ticket. For this, it's plus politics. I'm Mary-Anna Conn. Intent grassroots campaign by political parties and candidates, allegations and counter allegations, as well as party inter-party defections have characterized the buildup to the July 16 governorship elections in Oshun state. Now the incumbent APC governor, Voyager or yetola, is eligible for re-election and has been renominated by his party. Nonetheless, supporters say the election is likely going to be a contest between the incumbent governor, Voyager or yetola and who's the candidates of the APC by the way and the PDP's Senator Adimola Adiriki. Now in his address there at the various campaign venues across the state, governor or yetola constantly retrated his message that he had no money to give voters before, during or after the elections as a form of inducement. He has also assured the people of good governance that will impact positively on the lives of Oshun residents. The governor expressed joy at the reception he got from his supporters saying it's heightened his hope of victory come July 16 governorship elections in the state. What's running us to discuss his achievements and more is the Mr. Loufemi Loss and he's a pro- democracy activist. He's the media entrepreneur and is also the national auditor of campaign for democracy. That's a very big profile. Thank you for joining us. First things first, we are looking at the progress that the governor of Oshun state has made since he took over from the now minister of Oregwa Shala and we have seen a lot of a chain of events that have happened building up to this election whether it be insecurity whether it be allegations defections like I said at the beginning of the conversation but let's look at the man himself. He took over in 2018 and had had a lot of eyes on him. How can you assess his achievements so far? Do you think that he's done well? Let's start by looking at changing the tide from Iroha of Oregwa Shala government to Anu Yatila government. What has been the most significant change that has taken place? Well the most fundamental change from my physical assessment and close interaction with not only Oshun state's political space but the people who had lived there, have families there, have businesses there and of course haven't been actively involved in pro-democracy activities in the state even before the former governor of Oshuna era suggests that Governor Yatila today is one of the most under-reported governors. When you talk about governance over the last couple of years in Nigeria in fact a lot of people particularly those who are keenly involved in what was the situation in Oshun state before he came into 2018 and now would agree with me that this is a government which was not the typical Nigerian politician that blows trumpets about how much more they have been able to deliver on their mandates and of course their promises to the electorate. Between what he just said and now there are fundamental differences which may not be in tandem with the usual political aspiration of politicians. The aspiration of the people. The Arab administration of Governor Yatila as radical as it was in coming to the position of Oshun state was such that had so much conflict of interest with the people of Oshun state. Yatila came with a lot of visions, came with a lot of programs where some of these programs were secured out of the aspiration of the people. So no matter how beautiful they were, it was always a conflict with the people and now we receive a servant with the political class and some other. But what Governor Yatila was able to do from the beginning was to return governance to the people and to begin to execute government policies and programs in line with the demands of the people. Let me give you an example. One Governor Robert Shula came, he embarked on a school reform program, you know, immunization of school uniforms, school curricula and some other things. This pitched the governor against the people for almost eight years that was Governor of Oshun state. But when Governor Yatila came, he didn't just bring out policies for education in Oshun state. He went back to the people, constituted committees and interactions with people across the state. What do you really want? How should we really want the educational system? Both professionals don't say that the former governor was not connecting with the people. Not as beautiful as his programs were supposed to be. So this governor returned the culture of asking the people, and that is what the school reform program in Oshun state has enjoyed the acceptability of the Oshun state people. Schools now wear their own uniform, unlike the singular uniform program of the Arayashila administration. That is just an instance. And if you look at the way this government is executing this project, having been part of the groups of civil society that have supported Oshun recently, you realize that most of the communities visited. Projects have been executed on the basis of the need of the people. It is good to have beautiful ideas. You may think it is enough for us to be fly over in this community, and for the people it's about having portable water or basic air centers. So that flyover will make no meaning because it does not conform with their need. What the Oitela administration has been doing from our interaction with the people is to meet with the people, meet with the communities, and assess their need. Even with the need assessment program of the federal government, and bring projects and programs. And that is why today, Oshun state, as we speak, has the highest number of working primary aid care centers. I've been to the state of Nigeria by the virtue of my work, and I can say that Oshun was the state way between one world and the other. They found not just aid centers that are built for the purpose of having buildings, working aid centers with personnel, with facilities, with, you know, drugs are never something required to call these basic aid centers. And these aid centers were built by Governor Yatelap? Over 300, as we speak. Over 300 in the last three years have been built by the incumbent administration. Interesting. And I were to go there on a fact-finding mission, and to be certain that these... There are visions. I ask this because several governors in different states have built state-of-the-art health centers. And six months down the line, those health centers are not working. Can a governor Yatelap go walk into any of those health centers and get treatment, as opposed to flying outside of the country? Because it's one thing to say you've built a nice healthcare center for the people, but it's not something that you can use. What has been the situation in Nigeria just with FAPTO is that one governor just sits in only comfort of his living room and assume that we need to build in a multibillion-aid facility in the state capital or wherever, maybe in his village, in the name of the state. And mostly these are usually tertiary and secondary-aid institutions. But if you look at the basic-aid care need of the people, you speak from the ordinary Mawad Malia, the women with underground antennas, who does not actually need to go to the general hospital because even before these big hospitals came there are these traditional beds and claimants, there are nurses, no, traditional medical practitioners in the neighborhood who treat these basic-aid issues. So what he did is not to build gigantic-aid infrastructures, even though the state institution is building a tertiary-aid facility, but it is about the fact that I don't need to go to the general hospital to treat Malia, to treat headache. It is about building healthcare delivery to the people. So it is sustainable because you don't need to bring a scanner, you don't need to bring all sort of big equipment and machines to the basic-aid center. It has to do with the fact that I don't need to travel from Iboku or my village to Oshubu to get healthcare, the tertiary-aid institution. So it has to be able to take healthcare delivery closer to the people, but you may not need to go and register your wife at the state general hospital because you have to go to Malia and Inata. So these are the things that these basic primary-aid facilities are taking care of. So it is not about the fact that when there are issues that require surgery, some other critical-aid issues, they are transferred to the secondary-aid institutions that are managed by the state. And of course, in the state, there are also federal-aid care institutions. But the primary need of the people is the focus of the government from the beginning. So we talk about, you know, making the state viable, the viability of the state economically, business-wise, how many business opportunities have been created under his administration? What's the ease of doing business status of the state, especially the city, the big city? What kinds of investments has he attracted? One of the fundamental ingredients required to actually attract investors into any society is the safety and security of investment, which has been one of the major reasons why people don't actually come to you to invest in your community, in your state, or your society. Today, the state is rated as one of the most peaceful in the country because of the commitment of his administration to the security of properties and lives in the state. This is one of the states least expected, even from some of us as Yoruba people, to implement the Amotec on the Southwest security network. It's one of the states where the network is effectively working today, and you realize how much what the state has been able to do in empowering the police and other security agencies. So the state now has enjoyed peace. It has attracted a lot of economic activities. For people who have visited Yoruba some 15, 10 years ago, you will know that it is no longer the same state today. All banks have their branches in the state. Investors are beginning to invest not only in the minor activities, in other socioeconomic activities, and the tasks improved from my interaction, even with the citizens and state actors, the internally generated revenue of the state. And that can only happen in an atmosphere where there is peace and stability, just like we saw. Let's go, let's just talk more about the security aspect. There was a very big incident in the state at the time where all eyes were on Oshun state. And you did speak about the fact that Amateko seems to be very active. And they have collaborated with the police. If Amateko has been that active, why did we have that kind of incidents? I remember in Ogun states when it first started with the so called unknown gunmen and the issues of herders and the ban on open grazing. Has that also been implemented in Oshun states in terms of grazing? Because we saw other states saying they would stay action, they would not be abandoned open grazing. But how protected are the farmers, how protected are the people of Oshun state, especially with what happened recently? What happened recently happened in Nambu state, the award incident. Not the award incident, there was another. A clash? Yeah. Yeah, if you look at the security system in the southwest, and if you want to make an analysis of the farmer, herders conflict, you know, herders invasion of farms or attacks on villages, if you rate it comparatively, you realize that Oshun is one of those states where, just like the girls, where there have been few or no incidences of clashes within herders and farmers or attacks on villagers, if today there is hardly a week that you know reports from parts of Oshun state, Oshun state where communities are being invaded by these health militias and some criminal elements, we also mask herders, herders, you know, across the communities. But today you can really find in the news, in this organization where there are issues or where there are clashes between herders and farmers. We have interactions with the Amoteco Co. in Oshun state, with the director, you know, at the point of our interaction, we will add, you know, we were opportunity to witness a scenario where a particular leader of the eight men around Okeila put a call across to the director of the Amoteco Co. reporting amnesia of Catruwa sleep. They can begin to analyze the level of trust that has been built in the Amoteco in Oshun state. They leave out the herders called the didger of the Amoteco Co. reporting an incident of some Catruwa slas who came from Echiti to Rosu Catruw from Okeila to Echiti state and were caught. So he was asking them whether the didger should take over the case from the local Amoteco unit that apprehended them at that local government of the state. So it tells you that the state have been able to do a lot in ensuring that not only is the security, you know, is the Niger police force nipping crimes in its world, but that in Amoteco is effectively also delivering on its mandates in Oshun state. How about youths? The youths is a very important factor even as the governor is returning to that office. He had spoken about the fact that the future is not an option and that he definitely hopes to return. Many would say that he probably is dependent on the power of incumbents. But what has the government done to empower young people? We see that most of the crimes that I committed are committed by young people. Even the election violences, I would not see you, if I see you carrying a ballot box and running away, but we see that young people are engaged in this. How has his government impacted young people and what's the level of employability for these young people? Because Nigeria is suffering under employment and, of course, unemployment. What's being done to make sure that the average Oshun youth is engaged one way or the other, whether it's private or public? It's a national issue just like you said. A lot of competent young people are unemployed and a lot, of course, are unemployed as we speak. And the truth is that no states or federal government has the capacity to bring into its own workforce the number of young people that are living in schools, that are graduating or that are going through vocational processes and needs job to be self-sustaining. But what the government has been doing from our observation, from our assessment is the opportunities it is creating with the intervention from the federal government with the job opportunities that are being created by small and medium enterprises that are emerging in Oshun state, not in the capital but across the state. And the state also has delivered policies through its ministry of youth and sport to engage young people. It is impressive that the governor touched it wise to appoint a very young person as commissioner for youth and sport in the state Ms. Hayame Lawa who has been effectively engaging with young people and they have a series of programs focused on the young people to empower them to give loans to create opportunities. That's why I asked at the beginning, what's the spread? There's always a tendency of mass migration to the center which is the capital. That's because most of these empowerment programs or whatever you do does not spread across the state. Yes, unlike what the ordinary should be saying around the state, capital everybody wants to cluster around the government, the seat of government to get this benefit. This has been able to the government has been able to distribute it significantly to other parts of the state in a way we've been to processing factories where people now engage in vocational activities of processing foods through their culture programs and not a part of the state where people will get loan, cannot do their own businesses without having anything to do with the government in the state capital. Let's talk about the politics of 2022. July is just around the corner and a couple of days we will see heightened campaigns and everybody is getting ready for the elections Akiti just got concluded was still seeing lingering issues about electoral malpractices etc. We've also seen drama happen during certain campaigns there was a shootout from the ministers allegedly from the ministers convoy at some point during the primaries we also see that there were many people in the APC that seemed not to be very happy with what's been happening let's talk about what's been happening in the APC in Oshun state how together is the party I saw the governor reaching out begging members of the party not to be angry but to look to the future but how much can he pacify the members of the party as they get ready for the elections It is expected that the governor has the leader of the state as the father of the state will do everything possible to speak, to appeal to enjoy citizens to support him and to bury our church and of course especially those within his political parties so as to ensure that his governor continues but the truth is that what is happening or what is present to be happening in the APC is not peculiar to APC today as we speak two major political gladiators have led the PDP to contest in this election at the intro narrated the contest as being between the governor and the PDP's candidate but as I speak with you the person who almost won the governorship primary of the PDP in 2018 Dr. Aki Ogubi is in this race as the candidate of their court party popular candidate and intellectual a business magnate who is also in the race the former deputy speaker of the Nigerians as of representative as candidate of also one of the major political parties the Labour party is not a push over politician in the national state it's also one of those who have contested from the PDP what it means is that it is not the only APC in the national state that has issues but the truth is that politicians whether from the factions of the PDP and the APC have the same obligation as the governor has to promote unity to encourage those who are dissatisfied to come around and ensure that the party attains victory but the ultimate decider in every election is the people and you have called out several opponents of the governor who in your words are no mean you know the ordinary politicians so that poses a threat of source it does not really pose it it does it because if you look at every elections what is the percentage of politicians or political actors who vote and become in the outcome of every election it is usually about we must understand that governments democracy is about the people you always have the majority of the people who are non-partisan that is the reality nobody can tell you that it is the majority of particular political party members that vote or decide who is an election then the APC can come here and tell me that the governor has done so great and then the PDP can come here and also tell me the governor has not done but it is not but yet it is of course grateful that you are saying that it's down to the people and if the people are unhappy with governor he will be voted out and they will have a better choice and there are no indications that people are not happy with him especially if you know the history of the state I don't expect you to say anything the working state is known there is nothing to mean about it this was a state that was known for worker strike that was known for protest by pensioners we were all here some six, eight years ago where Osho was always in the news for non-payment of worker salary for protest by pensioners for all sort of disturbances but today I think we report even from the news medium about worker strike in the working state and the direct impact of the people it's not about how politicians feel politicians will always be aggrieved it is left for politicians, the governor and his party to be consigned with the politicians but the ultimate deciders are the people and they decide the outcome of this election well we look forward to July as the elections in Osho state come to play of course we have been speaking with Femi Lawson who is of course a good governance advocate here the expectations for the elections come July this month I would say thank you for being part of the conversation we will have more of these conversations as the elections draw closer well we'll take a quick break ladies and gentlemen when we come back we will be talking about the people's democratic party a conversation between the former president of Lucia-Guang Bassenger and the PDP who's giving him an ultimatum to clarify his recent remarks about the former vice president of Lucia-Guang Bassenger


All right, Bolo buddies if you're not following me on what not now is the time head on down to the description of the video or the Comment section and look for my referral link if you join what not with that you're gonna get $15 to shop I am adding this to my buy it now section on what not for five dollars buyer pays Shipping so it is a mixed lot of photos and greeting cards It's an ephemeral lot mostly photos black and white and color But you're gonna grab it all for five dollars plus shipping I am gonna be having a show on Sunday night So bookmark that and I've got some other show scheduled so I'd love for you guys to bookmark those Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for being here Thank you to everyone that has come out and supported me by watching or making a purchase you guys are awesome And thanks for watching


It's magic. It's that quick little solution that creates huge benefits. It's magnificent. It's awesome. It has such creativity because of our people, because of the knowledge that they have. We are inquisitive, steadfast and innovative. The plant materials program is beneficial. We do rely on that base of expertise. The Plant Materials Center started during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the entire six, seven decades since. So they've been involved with developing plant materials to solve conservation problems, whether it's soil erosion from wind or water, or restoring disturbed lands. The NRCS Plant Materials program really has its roots in the beginnings of the agency, the old soil conservation service. There was a lot of wisdom that went into the architecture of that agency, based primarily on soil surveys, snow surveys, plant materials and conservation planning. Plant materials being one of the basic programs that was originally authorized looked at the fact that if we were going to do conservation in this country, we had to try to mirror what the good Lord did when he made this world, and that is put a cover on the soil. The Plant Materials program evaluates conservation plant performance in real-world situations. A superfund site in the east, a dairy farm in the upper Midwest, a native landscaping project in the Rocky Mountains. Each plant materials center finds plant solutions for their region of the country. For example, the Golden Meadow Plant Materials Center in Louisiana is studying the ongoing disappearance of marshlands along the Gulf Coast. The current project, called the Maritime Forest Ridge, will be 8 feet in elevation and 400 feet wide. It will provide the port with much-needed protection from the rough seas. To ensure the ridge's success, Augu has called in the experts from the Golden Meadow Plant Center. We bring plants from the wild and we bring them here to look at them and see how to grow them and then take them back out to the wild. Gary Fine, director of the Golden Meadow Center and his staff, search for native coastal plants that are well adapted and able to survive in the harsh wetland environment. Our facility exists on 90 acres. We have 26 constructed ponds that we do much of our work in for evaluation of plant materials. Probably at the present we have about in the range of 60,000 containerized plant materials that we're growing out for studies throughout the coastal region. The plant material program helped me do my job by taking the guesswork out of what will work out there or not. They provide me the information, the tools that basically, so when I meet with the landowner, the confidence that I can share with him that these plants will grow well out there. Nurseries and commercial seed growers rely on the Plant Materials program to provide conservation plant releases not found anywhere else and the guidance on how to successfully grow them. The program works through a network of 26 plant material centers serving all 50 states and U.S. territories. From the conservation programs of the Farm Bill to community responses to natural disasters, the Plant Materials program provides plants and conservation technology to heal the landscape after droughts and floods, hurricanes and wildfire. Roughly a third of our ranch was taken, the grazing area was burned off and it couldn't have come up better. I don't think there was a grain of seed that didn't hatch. Planting grasses along the New Jersey coastline, improving grasses for livestock grazing in Georgia and biofuel production in Mississippi, establishing native wildflowers along Iowa highways, restoring upland bird habitat in Texas, preventing invasive species in Glacier National Park in Montana and in Yosemite National Park in California. All across the landscape you can see the first 70 years of the Plant Materials program's success. What about the next 70 years? In the future for the Plant Materials program, we need to emphasize on the concerns that are happening now. For example, carbon sequestration, air quality is a big issue. We need to do a good job of recruiting new individuals with new ideas. Thank you.