So when it comes to filming fight scenes for movies what if I told you that there are two more elements that were just as important if not more important than the martial arts ability of the actors themselves? We're gonna get to that in just a second. So of course hybrid martial arts ability is important for a fight scene in the film or a TV show or whatever it is but it's not the only thing that makes it work when it comes to a visual medium. There's two other elements and we're gonna talk about those now. Now we're gonna draw on the experience that we had of Mr. Zack and I we actually worked on the project several years back it was a short film project and just to keep it in a nutshell we were trying a whole bunch of different filmmaking techniques and the different camera moves, different special effects, location shooting wardrobe props and we wanted to insert a martial arts scene so we do have a brief fight scene in the film and I thought this would be a fun opportunity just to talk about that as a little bit of a different topic and share what we learned the difference of you know sparring or training in the classroom versus trying to make something look good for the cinema. In our film really didn't even have a story which was a little infiltration piece of a guy sneaking into an air force base and he got into a confrontation with another soldier and that was our fight scene. Now the first major component when it comes to doing fight scenes is planning. You have to plan and you have to choreograph and I'm sorry but if there's any art knows about choreography but the truth of the matter is you know unless you're a Hollywood film with who have massive budgets those films will spend months with your actors on the map practicing and training and blocking out scenes and choreographing scenes especially you know when you're talking about films that cost a million dollars a day on set they need to know what to do in beforehand but in this case we had a very very very non-existent budget it was just a fun project and we had a day and a half to film at this at an airport local airport and we knew that that was a very tight schedule to film our whole film it's about a 10 minute movie so we knew that we had to go bang bang bang bang we had to keep a very tight agenda and we did for the most part even though the fight scene itself took a couple of hours to film that was a good chunk of the day so we knew going into this that we had to have that blocked out exactly or at least pretty close to exactly how we wanted it so of course we we scouted the location ahead of time we knew where we were going to look where we were going to shoot and then we spent a quite a bit of time back in the dojo my instructor's dojo at the time and we we found two individuals who had some arts experience so right off the bat we didn't have to worry about teaching them basic moves they already knew them it was just about what we thought would look cool for the scene and we walked through it we had them walk through it we let them sandbox a little bit we got a rough idea down and it got to the point where it was memorized and we thought not okay now that we've got it good on the map now we can take it out to the concrete and do it for real and actually now that we know what we're gonna do and like I said the fight scene lasts about a minute but it took us a few hours to film it and you know we had to reset the camera there's reflectors there's lights and we did record a little bit of audio and we filmed it from multiple different angles and one of the things when it comes to shooting fight scenes in movies what a lot of people don't realize is how exhausted it can be I mean you're when you're watching the movie back you got two characters are fighting for a minute okay they're fighting for a minute do you have any idea how many takes those actors have probably have to gone through to get that minute a lot and that's one thing that a lot of new directors will do is when they're directing fight scenes is that they have the actors do the whole scene and they'll reset the camera film the whole scene again set up a close up to the whole scene again the problem with that tactic is you are wearing your actors out even if they are professional athletes doing that for hours you're going to start to get a loss in the performance because this is exhausting work especially how they have to amp themselves up when the cameras are rolling so basically one of the main tricks movies do is you film the whole thing in a wide shot so go through your whole choreograph sequence in a wide shot the whole thing's not going to look pretty the angle's not flattering for every move but at least you have coverage and if you really have the time you know try maybe two or three wide shots at different angles and do the whole sequence that way and that way at least you have it in the can so you can always cut to that as needed then plan a bunch of close ups and the angle changes but only film those sections and this is where planning comes into play know the shots that you want to close up pick your dramatic shots pick your angles and shoot those sections and close ups and take breaks breaks are important even if you've got a tight schedule you have to let your actors recharge or even for safety reasons in our case we were filming at an airport at the dead of summer it was 95 degrees and for anyone who knows florida 95 degrees of florida with a lot of humidity feels like 110 and the air hugs you it is uncomfortable and we had to do this for hours and at one point you know we ran through it so much one of our actors did have to take a break he was not feeling very well so we definitely had to cool him off um so whenever you're filming fight scenes you got to plan these things in you can't expect your actors to go hours and hours and hours without stopping so in many cases a lot of films will spend days on fight scenes if you have the luxury or the budget to do so so you know they're not so quick to film as people anticipate them being now when it comes to actually making contact um there's a lot of obvious tricks you can do with certain camera angles especially like when you angle a camera and one person's in front of another one you know punches look like they connect a little bit better kicks look like they connect a little bit better and because the camera produces a flat image especially if you use um a little any bit of a zoom zooming will actually flatten your image a little bit more it kind of compresses distance so it can sell that effect a little bit better other tricks um you'll see these tricks all the time in movies just those angle changes even in the movie like the karate kid at the end the crane kick if you look very very closely you will see that uh Daniel's foot does not actually make contact with Johnny's face that they are slightly standing I mean they're standing very close together but they're on a slightly different plane it looks like if you look at their back legs the Daniel is maybe a few inches to maybe a foot further into the background than Johnny is but you really can't tell by the camera placement especially with that zoom it looks like he's running into the kick when actuality is Johnny you know here's the camera here's Johnny and here's Daniel's foot like right here so he's not on a he's on a separate plane he doesn't actually make contact so there's a lot of obvious tricks like that in terms of camera angles and especially when you start adding sound effects when it happens like this and it's quick and you're in the moment the illusion sells itself if it's done properly if it's planned outright and if it's shot properly the second thing that really makes a difference in movie fight scenes is the editing so you've got your planning and you have your editing I think people greatly underestimate how important good editing is to sell an effective fight scene the editors are some of the most under appreciated film staff in a lot of cases because the ones that are really good you won't notice their work so the best edit is the one that you don't see so when it comes to fight scenes there's a lot a lot of little tiny tactics and tricks that can make a scene that they can make or break a scene and we found out with this film too you know even though we blocked out our shots so if you look at our rehearsal footage we knew exactly the moves that we wanted we pretty much knew the camera moves that we wanted and then we filmed it on set it went pretty much according to plan and then we did a rough cut and we watched the rough cut back and we're like this is kind of slow this is kind of dull and boring like this seems a little bit more intense on set but then of course that was just a rough cut we went back and we trimmed it up and there's a lot of little tricks you can do for example uh switching angles more often kind of gives the illusion of more of a frantic action also there's something called elliptical editing where when you cut you can kind of trim out like in between frames so like for example you're going to cut from one camera shot to another you could take a few frames off the first action a few frames off the last action and when it splices together it makes it look like a throw or a kick or a strike is a little bit faster than actually was just because you trim up the timing we went in and we tighten up the frames we chose some alternate shots so for example here you can see that for the choke our actor went for he kind of loaded up first so he loads up his arm and goes in for that choke it looks kind of cool but it did kind of slow down at least by a half beat for the timing so when we went back and recut we just found a different angle so we definitely saw that as a first result for the rough cut we watched it like ah wow this came seems kind of dull it felt rehearsed whereas the second round it felt a little bit better it was tighter we feel we got a better result out of it and it can still use some more work but there's a lot of little tips and tricks like that and you just got to understand that editing is a huge part of movie making especially when it comes to fight scenes it can make or break the scene and a good example of this is the show Cobra Kai when the show first started you could tell that especially within Ralph Machio's case that he was he's not a martial artist in real life so you know they had to work with him in his fight scenes and his moves were extremely limited but by the time they got to season five they had much better editing they had you know bigger budgets they had stunt fighters on it the actors were much more primed and conditioned for the work so I want to point out in particular a scene in season two when Daniel and Johnny face off in Johnny's apartment um it's a brief moment but if you really look at what makes that scene work is purely the editing the moves that they use are so basic it's a shot in a small space and all you really catch are glimpses of Daniel and Johnny movie but the inner cut shots from the first movie for dramatic effect but this cutting back and forth the cutting on action and there's elliptical editing in there made the fight scene a little bit more believable than it actually was I guarantee you had we just watched a whole scene play out in a wide shot it would have been pretty boring like most fight scenes would be so that's a great example of how they were able to amp up the effect and the level of believability and dramatic investment of that fight scene just with a little bit of creative editing and of course there's a lot of other tricks that they use in Hollywood you know there's CGI there's advanced special effects so you can take some actors and map the main actress faces onto you know deep fakes all sorts of tricks in the book but there's a lot of rudimentary stuff that works just as well in some places better and we just wanted to share our experience with you just to show you a little bit of a glimpse into this project um if you want to know more about this project I am releasing a video right now on Patreon you want to go there and check it out for our members it's a little bit more of a behind the scenes of what this project was what our goals were for it how much we got done you know what the future of it is in store for it and a little bit more a little bit more of a closer look so if you want to go check that out it's available now on our Patreon and on YouTube memberships now if you really want to talk about what's involved in the choreograph and the fight scene you're going to want to talk to Aaron Cohen he was one of our guests and he was one of the tactical coordinators who helped train canaries for John Wick too so you're going to want to really hear the story from the real John Wick himself and his fascinating background if you want to know more about movie fight choreography


Hi everybody, today we're going to talk about pronouns. We use a subject pronoun before a verb. A subject is the person or the thing doing the action. For example, Sammy is a nurse. Sammy is a woman, so she is a nurse. Sammy and she are the same thing. Sammy's the one doing the action. She's the one doing the action. Subject pronouns are I, you, she, he, it, we, and they. For example, I am a teacher, I is the pronoun. She is from Somalia, she is the pronoun. They are nice people, they is the pronoun. Possessive pronouns go before a noun, not a verb. Possessive means something belongs to you. For example, my book is on the table. It's not your book, it's my book. Her husband is in school. He's not my husband, he's her husband. Subject pronouns are my, your, his, her, it's, our, and their. Their teacher is nice. Our house is in Bellevue. Your name is Elias. You can listen again if you'd like to hear this again.


Where to start? The preamble for this presentation comes from the utter frustration that I have with rolling out open source and open standards based software and technology in a large public sector organization. So at the sort of when I started in 2014 as the CIO with the public health service I was at with the private health service in Townsville before that and there was a number of projects I wanted to do and I thought you know once I finally got to the top tier of IT management I thought I would have enough prowess, political capital to get my own way. Much of my dismay that's not the case especially looking for around the public sector because obviously we have agencies and governance layers. So at the beginning of the year I actually started writing all of these excuses down in the back of my diary just because I thought it would be a cute little exercise in sort of trying to keep me sane. Towards the end of the year they actually started grouping together so not with any sort of scientific method at all I put together a list of the ten most common barriers is the polite way of saying excuses some might say or you know basically crap that people say why you can't do open source technology and if you want to know number one had about 86 hits and number and number ten had about four hits so that's sort of the range. I'm looking to tell you what the end is and all that sort of stuff because it's not actually proper statistics. So who are we? We're a public health service that covers 23,000 times the size of Singapore that's the health service area. We're also a tertiary referring hospital for that sort of green triangle rhombus shape thing there so we get tertiary referrals from Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, bits of Micronesia and that sort of stuff. So we're big and it's a fun hospital to work for and health service because we get a lot of really different cases. The static population of our catchment area for our secondary and tertiary is about 300,000 so obviously probably about one one-fifth of the population sorry one one-twentieth of the population of Singapore. We employ about 6,000 staff it's about two-thirds clinical one-third administrative in rough terms. We provide 65,000 inpatient occasions so that's people who actually obviously get admitted to hospital and we have more than 62,000 emergency department attendances each year. It gives you an idea of how big the the organization is. I have a long sordid history and open source. I was part of the formation of a software startup in 1996. We did quite a lot of open source technology, quite a lot of open source development. It went incredibly well for many years and went incredibly badly for a number of years. Those years were 2000, 2001. So I moved on with the Australian overseas aid service. I worked in Vanuatu and as a side project I set up the first free mail exchange server in Vanuatu which was used to provide basically email services, just a dial-up email service. We will send mail server kicking in the background. It certainly changed a lot of things. Really cute application of a small technology that made a big difference because finally NGOs and non-government organizations in Vanuatu were able to actually use email and join the rest of say the donor organizations and things sending and receiving email. I used to be part of, I used to lead a political party in Australia called the Australian Democrats in the ACT. It's the president of the branch there and we were actually successful in 2004 in getting open source legislation through the Legislative Assembly basically by changing the Procurement Act that basically the government needed to actually look at open source software first before procuring proprietary software. Didn't really do much good but we had a good tilt at it. In 2006 I was with the World Bank sort of back to funding system with Australian overseas volunteers again and we put together a PNG coffee corporation logistics system. We were able to raise the farm gate price of coffee by about five to ten percent which was quite good for them. Obviously that's the main thing that they involved. I was in Cambodia in 2009 helped with the development of MoonOS. It's not really going as well as it used to but it was first Cambodian language operating system around which did quite a lot of good things and obviously currently I'm the CAO of Townsville Hospital and Health Service. I'm not going to look at me but I just wanted to say I am actually deeply committed to open source technologies and the use of open source methodology to try and get outcomes for organisations. I'm not a hardcore coder or programmer in any way but I guess I sold my soul to being management now so I can't really go back. Number one reason. Difficulty. Like I said it scored 86 or 84 times in the back of the diary. Three main reasons. It's tricky for the uninitiated user to use. User interfaces are far inferior those of other operating systems. Not that anyone really uses them in my workspace. It's just not what I'm used to. So the first barrier that we're up against is basically an uninformed user base that doesn't really understand the opportunities that they are with open source mitigating the challenges of actually using it. I'm going to go through the slides reasonably quickly because at LinuxConf I ran a similar scenario and we had a lot of questions and I didn't have enough time so I'm going to try and get through this fairly quickly and then there's looks like a lot of informed people here so it'd be great to have a bit of discussion about what your thoughts are on that. The second, it's the default and this is mostly your technical people that give you this. The exchange of documents with suppliers or customers or internal people. Proprietary software vendors have already gone into things like universities and training colleges and trained the students to use their software. This was a large problem in the engineering sector in Australia because there's a particular AutoCAD developer and vendor that will actually give the licenses for free and the software for free to the students so that by the time they actually get into the engineering firms they don't want to use anything else because it costs them too much productivity even if there is a mandated company default software. Not identical in terms of functionality, user interface, performance, plugins, yada yada yada. That's a little bit of a bleed from the last slide but the reason it's in this one is that basically people get used to using things in a particular way and don't really want to commit any extra training. In an organisation like a health service you quite often have people coming to you saying well you're putting in this new software, what sort of training are you going to provide, what are you going to do and those sorts of things. It's interesting that computer literacy and literacy within information systems isn't actually considered to be a core part of people's jobs or a skill that they need to maintain. For example a nurse needs to continue to have basic life support. She needs to know, well they need to know how to do CPR and give mouth to mouth those sorts of things and that's just part of their job. They need to keep that training up to date to keep their job. However IT skills and literacy is not one of those things. It's an interesting dichotomy in the zeitgeist. Number three, support. You would have thought it was number one but it actually comes in at number three. Paying for guaranteed vendor response. Admittingly the open source sector isn't very developed in Australia and often we lack large or what would be considered to be large organisations to actually back software to provide solutions for the organisation. Free Libre open source community. So obviously the acronyms change. Foss, floss, Libre or open source are interchangeable in our community so I'm just going to stick with floss at the moment. Community responds quickly to queries posted on forums and pages but yeah sorry and the dot dot dot dot is but yet you can't pay them to do so. Well that's the idea that was put forward at that time. Externalising risk by giving projects to separate third parties. So it's almost like a catch-22 because there aren't any large vendors of open source software. There's a catch-22 we can't externalise our risk. Now within the public sector as opposed to say the private sector or community sector, it's not so much financial reasons why organisations make decisions or the financial impact or those sorts of things. It often comes down to political capital and the willingness to actually risk one's own what would you say profile within your organisation. So risk externalisation is a major underlying motivator for many of the public sector leaders that you're trying to actually commit to making open source purchases and if they can't externalise the risk it's a no go basically. Longevity, there's no guarantee that proprietary software vendor will stick with a product and on the other way small developers may not be around is sort of the coefficient of that one. Yeah that one's loaded and I think I'll go on a side tangent if I go through and explain that too much but that was an interesting one from one of my staff members. If an open source project is small there's also a danger that the person behind it may lose interest and any quick search of source for which will find many orphan projects as I don't know who quoted is probably an anonymous quote but they always say that success is many fathers but father is the orphan. Large vendors are likely to be around in a few years and to honour their commitments they give you. Well I don't exactly agree with it but it's a reason that's often put forward by many public sector leaders why they don't want to adopt open source. This is actually not so much a reason why but a reason sometimes actually question whether or not something's actually open source. The cloud which unfortunately I mean words like the cloud, digital disruption and innovative excellence get overused in the Australian public sector in its verbiage and I'll probably vomit the next time I hear it used by an uninformed user but basically even if the hosted software is built entirely on open source software you don't normally get access to the software anyway so to the code I should say the code base either in escrow or in some other mechanism to make sure that if they were to go out of business or if they were to be attacked or any of those scenarios why you want to look at their source code or even quality control you don't often get access to it because they just say look you're buying it as a service you don't have rights to do that those sorts of things. The benefits of using the cloud solution as a service model often outweigh the disadvantage of not having access to the source code that's the counter argument for that is basically if it ain't broke who cares I don't have to fix it why would I be why would I be worried about the source code so yeah let's let's use the cloud but it doesn't really matter to me if it's open source cloud or it's not open source cloud or how much the vendor wants to put the code into say open forums no sorts things it's yeah that's that number five is one of the ones I get very passionate about in arguing and debate. Closed hardware well obviously our session beforehand obviously was a great leader into this and I think most of the points were covered in the previous session proprietary hardware has specialized drivers often closed source is is not available from the manufacturer. What's really interesting about that is that we have quite a lot of biomedical devices that are locked down like Fort Knox and quite often when integrating a system into a hospital scenario the biometric device or biomedical device may not actually work with even though it might be running on say some sort of light window system or light Linux system because the interface even though there's HL7 a number of standards if because it's proprietary often they're standalone devices so when trying to implement a electronic medical record and get say I don't know regular observations out of a particular bedside biometrical device sometimes the vendor won't actually allow you to actually plug your interface layer or your middleware layer in with theirs and there's a number of great examples of that on the internet. When I was working for an engineering firm and that point number three is important and our previous session was also you know basically the developers don't have access to the actual code and the hardware so therefore they find it very hard to build things for that hardware and that then becomes an ongoing loop. You don't really know what the black box is doing. That's a more of a thing why you should have open source but sort of the counter argument from you know there's that thing in the corner it doesn't break so we'll just trust it works and it's got a big you know stamp on it from a company that we trust we'll just leave it alone but literally my network so on a tangent I've about 140 staff I have about 7000 desktops and about I think it's close to 10,000 devices on my network as my slab of the network and then obviously we have a wide area network which has about 90,000 devices on it. The amount of devices that I don't even know about and it keeps me awake at night and thank God I'm in Singapore I can get some sleep but where the manufacturer just actually has a VPN tunnel straight through into its box and it's sitting in my network and sure I've got a quasi layer two layer three network sitting there and a bit of security but hey anyone in the room can tell you the security problems with that yeah and that leads into the last point that of course the vendor needs 24 by 7 remote access so A obviously from the previous points if they're a small open source vendor they're probably not going to be there 24 7 need them and B you need to give them access all the time anyway it's not like these devices it's some it's that sort of idea that you often get that people think that if a biometric device goes down then someone's going to die or something's going to happen but in the end people still make people better machines are only there as a tool you know I mean it's it's it's a hard argument to win liability I would have thought it came up higher but it didn't because people don't actually like to think of it this way what it is in liability indemnity matter a lot a lot in the risk adverse public sector as I mentioned before many open source projects aren't backed by commercial organizations I either had to sue most most organizations public sector organizations don't actually sue but it's sort of that same zeitgeist that basically you know there's nobody there to be responsible there's nobody we can go after if it really hits the fan you know and it's a major reason why people don't want to do want to go with it I would have thought that it would become number one but people don't you have to sort of tease it out of people so what is actually the reason why you don't want to go with an open source solution and in the end it is actually that sort of covering one's own reputation budget now this is a complex one that I've sort of jammed a couple of reasons together so it doesn't really it doesn't really fit one particular sort of idea but they all are financial and it comes down to the way within Australia and I think probably other other countries have a similar sort of public sector budgeting cycle that an organization has given a certain amount of money and it really needs to expend that money by the end of the financial year otherwise it won't get an increase in funding or a similar amount of funding it's a it's a common sort of issue so a few things there people think free when they see in front of open source they think of free beer and not free as a freedom so often it's very very hard to actually get them to understand that you really should pay for your open source software even though you're not required to do so I mean obviously if there's some sort of professional services agreement that you can enter into with an organization and that's great but even if you're using some cute little some cute little piece of software that someone's made and just chucked up on Sourceforge or on GitHub and you should probably donate to the to the project it's just good citizenship and in an organization especially public health where being a good corporate citizen I mean there are many say that there are many medical for an example there are many medical procedures that we do that we were that were never fully paid for whether by public funds or by private funds yet we do them anyway because someone's going to die someone's going to get hurt so you know there's there's generally a culture you would have thought a culture of basically of good corporate citizenship or good community citizenship but as far as software goes we're happy to rip off other people's IP and not pay for it budget structure is anti-open source it's it's funny in an in a it's something that I really tackle as a as a senior executive in a health service if you can capitalize the money IE it's a project expense it happens it's like purchasing some hardware or purchasing if you say you're doing project software is a little bit hard with this sometimes then it's far easier to get the money than if it's an operational cost because the underlying budget in Australia we've got this what's called an efficiency dividend which is basically that each public sector organization needs to try and run more efficiently by 2% each year and it's it's it's it's it's quite a anyway that's that's another debate so when I'm putting projects forward if I can actually capitalize the project I can make it a project a proper project sorry I'm using big the low and small p project then I'm able to get it through the budget and if I can keep it within a year then it's just like purchasing a new wheel for the car done you know where we go but a because open-source software especially the smaller and more of innovative stuff tends to be tends to be done by small projects and they they really want you to pay them a monthly fee which is what you want to do it's very hard to capitalise so there's this sort of counter intuitiveness actually being able to support some of this innovation and last one if the open-source solution is used to support critical applications quickly and cheaply it often goes unrecognized on and under resourced I can't tell you the amount of open-source software and some well how mostly open source software that just gets put in you know like people go oh I found this online and you know just run it and the way we go whether that is true open source you know built you know some sort of lampstack web server app or something right through to someone's pinch some excel code from someone else on the internet it very rarely goes recognize that it's actually open source and that it's actually that it's actually used anyway I'm slowing down I'll keep going segways very nicely into intellectual property the need to protect the organization from any intellectual property challenges challenges from open-source software basically if something goes wrong someone wants to sue us and it was this piece of software who's actually responsible chain of command liability once again replace replace any code found to be in violation of intellectual property rights so it's funny most of these actually come from our procurement people and they're pretty acetic but trying to actually purchase something you've obviously got to go through the procurement people because they pay for things and what it often happens is they're very very scared about the fact that if a another company suddenly buys out another company so like I know Oracle buying out Sun micro systems was a big one for us in a few years ago then some of that code then becomes proprietary because it wasn't strictly under the GPL or some other mechanism at the time therefore we have to start paying for it in the future I don't have one single case where that's actually happened but our procurement people are actually quite worried about that maybe they studied at university during their degree or something I don't know if our own staff contribute to an open-source project who actually who actually owns that intellectual property we're a public sector organization I would say the public does so you know and there are many mechanisms to do that but it's a we don't want to give out IP away just willy-nilly to anybody even though in the organization we often you know take intellectual property from other people and don't give them credit for it so it's quite a bizarre you know zeitgeist the last one who's intellectual property is it anyway it's often very very hard to actually nail down who created and who didn't and those sorts of things this isn't so much a reason but it was two long conversations I had and my stance is you know as a public sector organization or not public money go to supporting you know open-source solutions and open systems and providing code to the public other than then took company that's going to basically make profit and unfortunately the majority of software in in health care is actually for profit proprietary organizations that develop software on the public purse and then make a lot of money for it somewhere else and so yeah anyway I could go on about that one but I won't so that's my observations over the first would you say two and a half years of being a CIO and a public sector organization a lot of those I was hoping would start a discussion and ask some questions and so I'm happy to take any questions I thought some of them would be provocative okay first of all I work in a government related agency so this is pretty interesting to me and we do research so IP is obviously very important and I'm surprised that it came number nine indeed but one of the things that I have to deal with also is I mean not just open source adoption we we often see open source as kind of a shortcut or if it's already there it's working well we could use that but there's a bit of a fear also about copy lab licenses because then you can't sell that as your own IP because you have to you have to give all all the this product that you just developed using with the aid of the GPL or with other similar licenses you have to give that out for free because that's the third of the license indeed indeed and hence why so many new licenses have been made your Apache licenses in the area my tea licenses and stuff but then if you have dominant pieces of software like word press for example yeah you can't really change your license on that no so we've had to find fairly obscure that this for a basic CMS function well that's kind of a it's a very good product hmm how many of you work in large organizations save more than say a hundred people one two so what's how much open source do you work with yeah indeed yeah I mean it's good to hear that Google actually does quite a lot of open source stuff I guess my my often my frustration coming to these sorts of events is that we as we in open source tend to be in our own little bubble sometimes and I'm right at that crossroads every single day fighting the trenches to try and actually get people to use open source and I just find it incredibly difficult to try and you know a cute story on the side is that I'm Libri office okay so Queensland Queensland health is was predominantly on an XP environment earlier this earlier late last year projects now going through to actually clean out and make go make go to Windows 7 which is a fantastic option that's sarcasm and we through various leadership shortcomings we we only ended up with for the 90 odd thousand desktops we only ended up with about 60,000 license or 6,000 licenses for an office upgrade so from 2003 to 2010 which is of course then we haven't have and have not sort of environment and so my automatic answer was well there's Libri office you know let's let's just roll out Libri office and so I had a package by my own team I had it rolled out and I just basically rolled it out to everybody they're now in the process even though they don't have a replacement for everybody for Windows 2010 to even go to 365 or something like that they're now trying to actually claw back and discourage people from using Libri office because of their perceived the perceived threat that it causes with document version control and those sorts of things not that the jump from 2003 to 2010 will cause the same problem so it's a it's a it's an interesting mix and another sorry go ahead oh no I was going to start another story which I can say well I guess related to this maybe it's the other topics so you rolled out Libri office and relatively successfully despite maybe some pushback but did you have to overcome any of the challenges you mentioned here related to you know having a service providers having someone to provide support how did you rationalize that if you even have to people just kind of accept it in that case well it's mostly basically people were so desperate for something that was better they just lapped it up but I'm currently in a lot of in a lot of conversations people that are because so within Queensland there are 16 health services so we're just one of 16 we're the third largest so the two large hospitals are in Brisbane our capital city and my hospital is the largest but actually it's the largest hospital outside a capital city in Australia so it's about a 650 bed facility plus eight other hundred odd bed hospitals and so when I take leadership on something people kind of go oh because you know we're big we're not the biggest but we're big and no I'm currently in in discussions with them about but it like I said it comes back to that literacy argument it's like well do you really need a vendor for an office product shouldn't you just use it and get on with it I'm obviously we put through through group policies and that sort of stuff we made sure that it saved them to 2003 first and that sort of stuff but yeah it's mitigation another great example though is we were using for our IT asset management HP open view product and we're transitioning at the moment away from that and the new the new system that they're going to go to I won't even discuss but we we've sort of fell short of actually our asset control and those sorts and licensing control so I obviously quick market scan snipe IT is not a bad product I instructed my server team there's four of them to load snipe IT onto a onto a lamp stack that I've already built for them basically because they're like oh we don't do Linux so I built the lamp stack and got it all running but I needed them to do the LDAP and stuff to actually you know hook it into the network and that sort of stuff literally while I was away on leave in not to in November last year they took snipe IT they ditched my lamp stack obviously CIOs can't be too technical I don't know where the problem starts but and they actually engineered it they got online clever little sods that they are they got online and they worked out how to shoehorn the thing into an iOS environment so they could actually run it and so even with direct instruction to stuff that are directly reportable to me they went out of their way like like a couple of days worth of serious effort to engineer it in a way to give me the result I wanted to but have the back end that they wanted to that's the sort of sort of cognitive dissidents that you actually up against a lot of the time it's an interesting story. You mentioned something about monthly subscriptions from difficult to get to what you know in fact it's it's it's actually a real problem because often when the federal government which it doesn't have a responsibility in Australia for health care it's it's a for secondary health care which hospitals are I should say often when we get projects funded from the federal government to do something it often is and this is where the capitalization comes into it it's often a certain amount of money to put in a certain capability as a project and so the money comes in it's then put against our budget but it's but whenever we're very rarely given money to continue that project on onwards so often what I have to do is think how long is the software going to be used for maybe four to five years and I sometimes actually have to capitalize the whole project and I put the whole lot in and so I will purchase a forward facing agreement for maybe five years so that I don't have to pay a monthly fee and raise the operating raise the operating costs of my department that's that's the problem and the problem is when you're mucking around with with innovative small companies and you're trying something out that might be huge in the future you can't do that you well you can but you're gonna fall short because there's no way to accurately you know sort of anticipate where you're going to go with that technology and so yeah it's it's a real bind I mean we've got a considerable amount of money for um there's quite a gap between indigenous health outcomes and well First Nations health outcomes would have turned me like to use and say the standard populace we get considerable amount of money to do certain things and it gets really hard to put technology in for this group because federal funding you know it's what it's a yearly based thing something maybe three years but the life of the technology I mean our patient administration system is 40 years old at the moment it's an old green screen piece of software from CSC and it still takes a long I mean there are banking bits of software that are probably over 60 years old sorry so you have so much problem how your service provider can you help well I sort of well because I used to work for a service provider and we and a lot of this kind of conflict with customer indeed indeed and I sort of ran this session it's a modified session from LinuxConf in Australia to try and it was a sort of a how you as a startup can get money from us the big government and it got very depressing actually but um but there are there are ways service provision can be done but you're looking to make sure that and not a lot of innovative not a lot of open source companies do this they don't talk about exit points so if you're going to go to a public sector organization that needs to capitalise the majority of its budget especially if you're being used for a particular project might be funded from a different party you need to say look we're going to provide this software say you're a SAS provider we're going to provide this solution to you for five years and the cost it is a fixed cost of this and you'll need to leave it that and what that means is that the actual innovation risk is then put upon the small provider which is very dangerous having been a been a startup myself not where you want to be you want people actually pay for what they use but quite a lot of time that's what you need to do but it doesn't mean that you have to be static there you can call that one project the biggest the biggest thing that kills what I've seen kills small innovation companies and stops large public sector organisations from taking on that technology is scope creep if you can get your scope sorted and you can get your requirements sorted and it's for a project then that's fine and if that particular if same our health service wanted to use it for something else you say well look that's actually a different project why don't you find some more money we'll give you another slab of the the pie I guess that's sort of answer well you know what you say you use a liberal office right yeah a liberal office have a version every couple of years every couple of months have different tasks so even that they want to provide them want to fix the scope well yeah I mean Libra is not a great it's not a really great example because we're using it for free I'm still trying to work out a way of actually somehow remunerating the open document foundation for Libra I still haven't worked that out yet I've only got a couple of I've probably only got maybe hundred and I think it's 120 users of my six thousand so far so it's not a big problem but I'd like to do something about it but the majority of the funding I have is for the office 365 project so I'm in a bind there as well but yeah it's sort of shifting sands but you know you're right you never know where technology is going to go it seems to be a lot of talk at least on the federal level where DTO or no sort of example I can't explain it so I don't know if I can cover that for this but do you think that is going to help in terms of pushing it down towards the very Australian so very Australian centric argument so the DTO is our digital transition office it's part of our department of communications at a federal level and what my colleague here is talking about is there's a change in our well there seems to be a change in our government finally to a more innovative approach and we're all very excited in Australia because we're a little bit behind everyone else when it comes to innovation at the moment and they set up a special department to actually look at well not look at but be sort of a clearing house for innovation is it's sort of how I see it I don't know the DTO is too young at the moment to actually see how much effect it's going to be the majority of their effort seems to be with other federal departments so as a state organisation I'm not so sure our main federal sort of interface is through the primary health care networks which is a federally funded GP doctor sort of push at the moment sort of a primary care sort of situation and the my health record the national electronic health record and I haven't and what I find interesting when your question is I haven't seen the DTO actually involved in any of that discussion yet maybe because I don't have any visibility at the moment but and if they do get involved with that that might really be interesting because obviously with the failure of the last more failure with the non-success of the last private health public health record it might work out can I ask where you where you work what space you're in I'm actually here in Singapore so I just had a passing interest and well I can hear the Australian accent so yeah seeing you come in and taking a lot of learnings I guess from the UK and the US yeah and I think when Turnbull set it up when he was minister for communications I think he really was looking at the what was it was 2010 when they started there was it GOV I forget what the name was it GOV.UK or what anyway their digital transition and obviously the CEO of the DTO was actually from the UK who was working in that process so obviously we've tried to scout some talent there so no I'm really excited to be in Australia I was away overseas in 2010, 11 and 12 running my own open source business intelligence organisation in Scotland and when I came back to Australia I got a little bit depressed about where we were and it seems that we're moving forward if we've run out of questions yep I think we've run out of questions thanks everybody I'm around for the rest of the conference I don't need business cards on me I've already been completely pillaged for business cards but I'll have some more tomorrow and I'm around to talk to and all that sort of stuff thanks very much for turning out yep and now it's at Foster Asia yes so basically you're reaching to the choir right is there a way to make the public sector people more aware of these limitations and how their excuses or their reasons of their barriers are not as valid as they seem my hope was actually the opposite was that to actually bring the open source community in from the cold and say well look these are actually the expectations that public sector organisations have not that I feel I'm holier than they are or anything like that but it's really that you know we have a considerable amount of revenue that we need to use for innovation we only work with proprietary organisations and this comes down to a really great debate we could have maybe with three aside is you know is it our responsibility to seek out open source solutions because we're a public sector organisation and somehow coax coax the open source innovation into the organisation or is it the open source community's responsibility to aggressively go after our revenue and our issues and those sorts of things I think it's probably a hybrid between the both but the reason why I come to these sort of conferences to explain things is that I'm a die-hard open source person and every single open source organisation not every one sort of clad in sorry I mean the majority of open source organisations that I work with are just not on the page they're just not consumer friendly they're not trying to solve they want they they basically want you to meet them 80 down the road and they don't want to meet you halfway even if you are an open source person I mean I can tell you a hundred examples of where I've tried to use an open source technology from a service provider get them get their funny little hat and feathers whatever you need to do to be a government supplier I still think it's a dark art and bring them in and actually you know it's like dragging them in from the cold another process I've tried to use is we have a an education database that we use it's not it's it's got a learning management system there's a moodle in there as well but it's basically tracks courses that people have been on and what sort of qualifications they have it's a learning management system but a qualifications management system and that was developed in-house and we actually moved that into GitHub and we get in from we're co-located with James Cook University and we actually get normally we start off with a cohort of like 12 or 14 that whittles down to maybe about three or four hard you know hardcore people and they work on that project for us and so we have an open source and not that that whole project has been implemented somewhere else but parts of that project have been implemented somewhere else within Townsville and I'm glad that that's happened so even though I even though I'm not remunerating them they're really just getting course points and experience it's it's one way of sort of getting more open source to happen but you know I'd love I mean what it comes down to was back I mean another one was back when I was working for the private organization in Townsville we didn't have an electronic medical record and I literally tried to put a cohort of about five or six Catholic hospitals together and to either implement open Vista or one of the other open source ERMs that are out there electronic medical records I should say because the medical record when you're implementing it I mean you're looking at about $100,000 per bed so if you're a 650-bed hospital just do the sums on that it's phenomenal and most of that is in vendor costs and vendor professional costs and change costs which I think open source could be better at and that's actually the theme of my thesis so maybe next year I might come back with some learnings on that thanks very much for your time thanks guys


Learning about Australian history is a part of being an Australian citizen but there are heaps of other things that are definite things about Australia that are definitely more important to learn about to be good to be a good citizen for example learning about our government system, our laws, our foreign policy and trade. We can learn the background and culture of other people and we can put that in our everyday life and just be a better person in general because we're aware of what's going on and what people have been through. Part of our identity what being Australian means, part of what's happened to the country over the last few centuries. You learn about your culture and the past in your country and you can learn about the mistakes that your country's made and the achievements it's made and then that will help you to move forward as a country and as a personal person. You know you kind of need to know what happened before you to be able to understand what's happening now and what's gonna happen in the future. It's definitely made us who we are today. Because it means you know like how the Aboriginal's betrayed and like learning from our past can help the way we act in the future with things like close the gap and we can help the way that we've treated people. I think it's really important that we learn about Indigenous history especially and like the abuse of international power from European countries because if we don't know like the backstory to close the gap and stuff like that then like we can't really consider ourselves to be good citizens.  From Australia we're an incredibly privileged nation we are in terms of the economy our social liberties and every other observable factor we are one of the luckiest countries on earth and to learn about the less fortunate puts things subjective and tells us why we need to preserve what we've got and makes us more grateful. If we can learn about what they're going through we can prevent that from happening in our country as well as learning and taking on board positive things they do and putting that in our society. We're all the same species so I think we should know what's going on around the world what's happening to our fellow humans. There's riots in America and they impact on other Western countries with similar values and that creates tensions.  I think it helps us become a better and stronger nation for example with the COVID pandemic having that forewarning has really helped us prepare as a nation so we haven't so we've continued to strive. Australia is quite isolated and I think that learning what's going on in the world helps with people's perspective and just like knowing your general knowledge about like what other people are going through and experiencing is important. It gives us a greater sort of global education and we can learn more about other people from around the world even if they don't have similar lives to us. Because you know what's happening in the world and not just within your own country. If you don't you may not know like what they're doing if they're planning something or I don't know and if you ever go over there you might want to go know a bit about their culture history and stuff I guess.


She's one of the best undergraduate researchers I've ever worked with, both at ASU and before I came to ASU. And that's not even considering the fact she does varsity sports, which is an enormous time commitment. If it wasn't proven to me, I would have guessed what Linda does is impossible. But it's obviously not impossible because she does do it.


Γεια σας, είναι Βικη, εδώ και κατασχαριστούμε. Σήμερα έχω ένα πολύ καλό καρδί για σας και θα χρησιμοποιήσω αυτές οι δυνατές από τον Τονιξ-Τοδιος. Αυτό είναι ο Φεστήφ Ζάιν-Πωστς και θα δείξετε τα δυνατές για να κομμάσεις το Ζάιν-Πωστ. Θα ανοίξω να ανοίξω για να δείξετε τι είναι το βιβλό. Έτσι, έρχεται με όλες τις διαφορές να κρατήσεις το Ζάιν-Πωστ και τρεις διαφορές να κρατήσεις το Ζάιν-Πωστ. Έτσι, έρχεται με όλες τις λαπίτσες να κρατήσεις το Βιβλό και ένα σνόμπανγ για το κόμμα του Ζάιν-Πωστ. Τώρα, αυτό είναι το σνόμανγ και το πέγγουιν και νομίζω ότι είναι απλά αδόραμμα. Τα δυνατές κάνουν πολύ καλό φορά, επειδή είναι πολύ μεγάλη. Μπορείτε να έχετε δυνατές σε ένα καρδί ή μπορείτε να έχετε δύο σνόμανγ. Μπορείτε να κάνετε δύο σνόμανγ ή δύο σόμανγ όπως θέλετε. Παρακολουθώ να τα κάνω από το κόμμα, γιατί βλέπεις τι είναι μέσα. Είναι παρακολουθεί με νομίζεις και υπάρχει ένα λίγο καρδί εδώ σε το πέγγουι που παρακολουθεί τι είναι όλες αυτές τα δυνατές. Έτσι, θα καταλαβαίνετε τι είναι το νομίζω και τι είναι τα δυνατές για το σκάφετο, etc. Τώρα, σε αυτό δεν υπάρχει καρδί επειδή όλοι είναι πολύ εξπανή. Τώρα θα αφήνω να τα βάζω στον παρακολουθείο του. Το παρακολουθείο του είναι πολύ σκοτός, όπως μπορείτε να δείτε, και είναι σαν ένα σκάφετο, γιατί αφήνει και κλώσει εύκολο. Και να κάνετε σωστά, ότι δεν θα μεταξύψετε. Είναι έναν καλύτερο σκάφετο. Σήμερα θα βρήκαμε ένα καρδί, γιατί θα σας δείξω τα δυνατές εδώ. Πρώτα, θα ξεκινήσω με ένα καρδί λετρασμένο, θα το βράσω σε 1.5, γιατί είναι σε 5.5, και θα το βρήκαμε με ένα σκάφετο, και θα το βρήκαμε σε 2.18, και θα το βρήκαμε και θα το βρήκαμε σε 2.18. Τώρα, όταν αφήνω τα δυνατές, θα έχω ένα καρδί λετρασμένο, γιατί είναι 4.25x5.5, αλλά αυτήν τη φορία μου have a nice opening like a gate. Τώρα θα λάξω σε ένα σκάφετο και θα μπορείς να δούμε να είναι σε 4 δυνατές. Θα μπορείς να χρησιμοποιήσεις μόνο το έργο, αν θέλεις να δεις ή μπορείς να χρησιμοποιήσεις τα σκάφετος που είναι πραγματικά σκάφετος. Τώρα, ένα από τους μπορεί να μπορείς να χρησιμοποιήσεις τον πρόρο της σκάφετας σας. Τώρα θα βρήκαμε μείνονα σκάφετο και θα θα το βρήκαμε σε όλες τα σκάφετο. από έναν κομμάτι και να χρησιμοποιήσω τον καλύτερο μου μέρος να χρησιμοποιήσω τον κομμάτι, διότι να χρησιμοποιήσω με διαφορετικά λίγο πιστόνες από έναν κομμάτι, αλλά αυτός είναι στους εσείς. Και είμαι also going to cut out all the pieces that I need for the little bird, as well as for the signpost, the saying on the signpost and I went with the one that says North Pole. Now I'm going to use one of those sticky papers and this is actually double sided tape, so I'm going to peel off one side and I'm going to apply it on top of a white cardstock and once that's there I'm going to peel off everything and then I'm also going to peel off the top so I end up having a cardstock that has one side full of adhesive. Now instead of using a sticky tape if you don't have that you can always use double sided tape to completely cover up your paper and then on top of that I'm going to apply this new product this is called sparkle dust and the color I'm using is snow glow and it's going to turn my paper into glitter paper. I didn't have this kind of glitter paper so I decided to create my own. Now this is perfect for creating snow it gives a beautiful shine and this is really fine glitter it's not chunky at all so it sticks perfectly fine on top of the adhesive and it's not going to go anywhere.  Now I'm going to cut out of this glitter paper that I have created a couple of snow banks as well as different parts for the snow and the snowman and if you don't have those dies for cutting out the snow banks then you can just use your scissors and create a little curve. Now I have created two panels out of blue cardstock and these are four by five and a quarter so these are just a tiny bit smaller than the standard card which means that when I place them on top of my card I will have a white border around it and this is the same case for the inside of my card. Now these blue panels are going to be the sky. So I'm going to apply some tape adhesive at the back of my snow banks and I'm going to stick them at the bottom of those blue panels so I'm going to use one of them at the front of my card and the second one on the inside. As I place that on top of my card you can understand that I need to cut it in half and since the width is four inches I need to cut it at two inches exactly. And as you have probably noticed I'm using the Timholtz kilo tin which I really love. I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and if you want to see a review on this I would gladly post one and I'm going to mention both of the advantages and disadvantages since this is not going to be a sponsored post. Now as you can see I'm applying some tape adhesive at the back of those two panels and now I'm going to place them directly on top of those two folds making sure that I align correctly. And I'm going for a little scene on front and on the inside of my card today so this is going to be a beautiful background. And now since I didn't use colored cardstock for cutting out all the little pieces which of course you can go ahead and do I decided to go and color everything with my distress inks and my dabbers. Of course you can use your watercolors you can use your alcohol markers anything you fancy and I don't know if you have noticed but those dies for the wooden planks give actually a beautiful detail and it is going to show now since I have applied my ink and you can even use them as a stencil so you can place them directly on top of your pieces and then go over them with a darker ink just like I'm going to do here which is going to make that detail even more vibrant. I will use the same technique for coloring the rest of the pieces and as you can see I'm working on my glass mat I did a review a while back on this glass mat and to tell you the truth the more I use it the more I love it and now it's time to assemble my signpost I'm using some white glue at the back and I will start sticking one on top of the other and as I'm doing that just to let you know that as always you will find links down below to the description area as well as on my blog on all the products that I'm using today and I'm also going to make sure that I link you to both US and UK online shops for your convenience. For the top of your sign you can use three different sayings that are included in this die set one says Santa Stop here the other one says Rudolph this way and the one that I am going to end up using is North Pole. When you are creating a gatefold card the flaps when you use heavy card stock tend to stay open so I'm going to keep them closed using magnets Now these are very thin magnets hopefully you can see how thin they are and they have a sign on top of them so you know which goes with which one I'm using a plus one and a minus one and I'm going to hide to hide one of them behind the sign post and they are self-adhesive so they are very easy to use I'm going to stick the other one on top peel off the backing and now it's very sticky I decide where I want this to be on the front of my card and I'm going to press so that the second magnet is going to stick directly on the inside of my card Now each time you close the card those two magnets are going to fit nicely one on top of the other and they are going to keep that card nicely closed and I use some white glue at the back of my sign post to stick that in place I'm also going to stick the bottom for my sign so that it doesn't float there and the front of my card is pretty much finished and you can see that those magnets grab together even when you have the other fold closed they are quite strong so no matter how many layers of paper you add on top of them they will always grab one on top of the other so you see here you have to cover up this magnet with the paper and my background for the inside of my card is ready and even with all those layers of cardstock the magnets work perfectly fine Now for the inside of my card I'm going to create a little snowman and I love this die because you can interchange different pieces you can make him as high or as short as you like so there are actually three different pieces for creating your snowman but I don't want him to be so tall and I am going to omit the middle one so I'm going to use the main body as well as the head and that's a great thing about those buildables these come from the buildable collection by Tonic Studios that you can mix and match different things and create pretty much your own designs now I'm going to use the dies to cut out the scarf his nose his eyes as well as his ear muffs and again just like I did for the front of the cart I'm going to cut out all of these in white and then just color them with my distress inks after quickly coloring all the bits and pieces it's time to assemble my snowman so I'm going only to use those two pieces the head and his body I'm going to attach the scarf and I have cut out two pieces for the the edges of the scarf and I like those because you can place them anywhere you like as if it is there is wind or not so you can actually use them to give some motion and interest to your snowman now there are tiny little dots that you can use for adding buttons on the body of your snowman I'm not going to bother with those tiny little ones I just cut out two of them and color them black to add them as his eyes and I really like using white glue for sticking all those different pieces on my card just because it gives me a little more flexibility so that I can slide them until I'm happy with their placement and for the outside of my card I'm going to stick that little birdie that I have already assembled I have actually attached him with some foam squares at the back and my card is pretty much finished all I need to do is to add some finishing touches such as a black dot for his eye and I'm also going to bring in some white NuvoDrops to create some snow and here is a close up look of the card hopefully you can see the shine on the snow as well as the dimension that I got from the NuvoDrops and hopefully you can see how that magnet grabs nicely all through those layers and keeps those gates shut and I still have enough space on the inside of my card to write my note here and write it on the flaps There is also this magnet that is visible if that bothers you you can always cover it up with another piece of paper I don't mind so I'm just going to leave it as it is So that was the card for today I hope you had fun as much as I did while making this card I think it's just adorable Here are some close up photos of the card that I made today Don't forget to comment, like and subscribe if you haven't done so already Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you next time


So I'm Chrissy Siegman and I'm the Acting Manager of Procurement Logistics at CFA. So we're down here at the CFA State Logistics Centre which is an 8,000 square metre purpose built facility based in Scorsby and from here we help support our 55,000 members across more than 1,200 sites. So we stock and hold over 1,900 line items and they range from things that will be worn on the back of a firefighter to things that will be utilised on the back of an appliance, PPC or your clothing, gloves or your overalls down to things that we hold on our trucks like our foam and our hoses and our other pieces of equipment. So in the Procurement Logistics team we have 11 of our staff located down here at the site and we also are co-tenanted with Fleet and PE department and all up I think we're pushing nearly 30 members. So my name is Danny Jones. I'm the Executive Manager of Fleet and Protective Equipment. The Fleet part of our team that was based in Berwood moved down to the new State Logistics Centre nearly 12 months ago. What this Centre has given us is the ability to better manage things like our transport fleet changeover so we can better manage that in a centralised sense now where we can take delivery of new cars at this facility, secure them, fit them out in our dedicated bay, ready for delivery. So that's given us a good drive-in, drive-out service whereby an operator of a car can just come in with the old vehicle, change over their gear and then drive out on the new one and they're ready to operate it. So it's fitted up, it's got its fuel card, it's got a slog book and it's ready to go. I guess the other great advantage down here now is for our Fleet Engineering team we've got an area dedicated for them to start to look at some R&D and actually do that in-house now rather than them having to go out and find a place to do that.


And now for your strong Europe spotlight. During Noble Partner 17, soldiers from the 2nd Cavalry Regiment took advantage of a Georgian firing range. Pretty similar. I'd say the big difference is the lifter targets.


I'm Gavin Chate from a company called Whitehawk and my company specializes in open data consulting all over the world. As a novice, without any idea of how FRI works and of what the process is, the platform is tremendous. It's just step by step you start here and at the beginning I feel like a pro now because I've done 350 requests. I think I've done a fair number that have gone right through the entire process including the various legal steps. But at the time I had no idea what I was doing and to have something that already has the complete database of everybody you need to contact already has a very structured way of simply doing it as well as recommendations of how to structure your request is really, really helpful. And the team are incredibly responsive and so when I had a query of is this normal I just got this response and it doesn't make any sense to me.  It's great. I think every single person who has an interest in data and has a particular, you know whatever it might be an edge to scratch or a commercial interest pursuing their bioprocess.


ink some of the few asks aren't aren't The end of the world. It really just comes down to the inclusionary component and whether or not that's going to If it's a word, I don't know disincentivize. I mean incentivize became a word since we've been adults, I guess But to discourage development Is something we just don't want and I recognize that that this is a this is a difficult conversation for people in Santa Cruz county to have and people don't like the term growth They don't like but I mean realistically what we're talking about is a new kind of development To both meet the needs that we haven't met for the last 40 years And to meet the future needs when these aren't single family homes in suburban areas That's part of the code mod But I just don't know whether the inclusionary is there and that's where I'm torn on this I appreciate you answering those two questions But I think that these should be more of a holistic discussion that we're having right now Which is my hesitancy on voting just on this element. Thank you Let's open it up for public discussion then Please come forward crowded room this this morning Casey Byer from the santa cruz county santa cruz area chamber of commerce chairman leopold and and supervisors. Thank you for Meeting with us over the last couple of weeks is your staff I brought this forward in october and now again for a hearing today And I want to compliment your staff for also meeting with us and giving us their insight of how they got How they arrived at their position today We disrespectfully disagree on a couple of items and we we believe as a supervisor friend has said That two years simply put is not it's not a lengthy enough time to make an evaluation whether program is working or not Ask any developer in santa cruz county how long it takes to get a construction permit Just ask that question And it's not two years It's more like seven years and in some cases more like 15 years depending on the location What we are recommending is that you continue this item and bring it into a more holistic conversation with the community and the stakeholders We're not against inclusionary zoning We just think if it's got to be done right and it's got to be done where there's land used opportunities where that type of development can be placed I call it right size right location you're going through a Zone modification program, but that's a year and a half away Now you want to put this particular item in front of it And then ask the developer to say okay build those seven units And by the way make make one or two of those units inclusionary And he's gonna he or she's gonna ask you the question. Where's the land? Where's the available land to do that? Where's the the land owner is willing to sell at a market rate so that you can build those units All of those questions are unanswered in this report I respectfully appreciate Julie and kathy's work on this and for meeting with this and I just respect having an opportunity to talk to the ceo But please take a look at where you're going. I think there's better judgment ahead. Thank you Good morning Good morning chair leopold board I just want to echo More of what supervisor friend said in terms of taking some time and having a more holistic approach to To this kind of policy spectrum of dealing with housing affordability generally I won't take up too much of your time when we sent you a letter. We've sat down and met with most of you As well as staff and the ceo So I'll tell you a little bit of time in terms of we would love for you to To continue this to a later date so when we can have a more holistic assessment of The impact these policies may have but to tell you what we're going to do in that time In that time we would compile proformers We will compile Statistics that would give you a local context around how these policies are being implemented currently We'd provide you with case study analysis of looking at other areas that have addressed this Dressed this issues and drafted their own inclusionary ordinances I would definitely point towards the city of santa cruz Which has brought in multiple consultants just on inclusionary ordinances and just on the kind of New nuances and different kinds of balancing approaches You can take whether it's incentive structures or whether it's tiering different fee structures But we're happy to provide this education to host some of these meetings And to just provide more local context around the impact that these policies might be having so We would encourage you to continue this ordinance to a later date At which time we'll use that time to provide more information more context Ultimately help you to inform you make a better decision. So thank you Thank you Good morning Yeah, good morning tim will be speaking for affordable housing now And today i'm here to speak for the approximately 13 000 people Who are on a housing authority wait list for affordable housing of which several thousand are section 8 applicants and for the 460 seniors who Did not get spaces in the st. Stephens project So that's our name affordable housing now Not several years from now now all those people need it now not later Um, I would like to point out that for years and years and years As miss conway pointed out all across the state of california There have been 15 inclusionary requirements and builders have built everywhere Including our own area with a 15 inclusionary requirement The only thing that has changed Is That now they want to wait and not have an inclusionary requirement when they get through with their study They'll say we can't have it. It's a disincentive Well, they made the same arguments before and they still built in this environment with the most expensive housing sales And the most expensive rents. That's a preposterous argument. I'm sorry. I don't buy it Anyway, we also have a disagreement with the hac on the rental requirement On the inclusionary part of the rentals If you do the math, it still doesn't make sense. Okay, if you build Say a 40 unit project with a thousand square feet in each unit That would give you with a 15 percent requirement Six affordable housing rentals if you pay two dollars per square foot. That's 80 thousand dollars That doesn't even buy half Of a unit You the average I think is around 130,000. So it makes no sense at all If I could just make one more final statement. You have a minute left. Okay So as was brought out there is this There is a substitute of doing section eight And it would seem to me that a developer would like that Because they lose no money at all to get the same rent That they would otherwise however if you're building 12 1500 Square foot units That doesn't make sense So it was smaller units. It would be better. Otherwise what we end up with are Units that are affordable only to the most Prosperous people. So please take action. Don't wait. Thank you. Thank you Good morning. Good morning Kent Washburn former chairman of your housing advisory commission I understand two of my colleagues were here this morning when I had a court hearing and couldn't be with you Um, I think the item before you represents good staff work I support it and uh, and its recommendations not because I think it's a final step or a solution But I think I'm just looking at the same elephant from a different side as a zack and some of the rest of you are Seeing it as only a partial, uh, you know one step and a long journey that needs to be taken Uh concerning the needs of uh of our community for low and moderate, uh affordable housing We're not getting the job done. That's um, and and we we file farther and farther behind Every year we rank in the least affordable housing market statistics every year nationwide not just in california in terms of the difference between our Our median income and our median real estate prices I think to some extent today's uh directive which staff Our today's proposal which fulfills a directive made two years ago Reflects the time two years ago when we didn't see as much of an emergency today from the uh from the standpoint of Of the widening gap. I think it represents Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic after it has hit the iceberg The iceberg meaning the tremendous need for affordable housing Your staff didn't have a directive to to steer around the iceberg or the power to steer around it All they had all they had was a directive to to take care of deck chairs And it's a good idea to keep them out of the way when when people are headed to the lifeboats But uh, we have people in our community the elderly and retired people with health problems people Who who can't get good work? On With with needs that are not being met. I have four recommendations for you First of all turn the hack loose the housing advisory commission It's a mandate says to conduct a continuous study of housing issues and report to the board of supervisors on its work And I think you should uh should give us more work Your staff will tell you that it needs more staff time. So give them a little more funding. Please Uh julie conway since I met her about four years ago Always is trying to get more than 24 hours a day to to take care of housing needs and she keeps failing And and she's not getting any younger So give give her more staff Bite the bullet of the political debate that we all know needs has to happen here in order to think outside the boxes of the past I helped to write measure j when I was a law student clerking for County council and gary patin was uh was moving that forward. So I've I've been part of this for a long time And uh help us to think outside the box. Thank you Interns do go on to great things Good morning. Good morning board members. My name is tom burns and uh while i'm affiliated with affordable housing Now i'm here speaking for myself this morning and hadn't planned to speak but I just think this is a really important item We all agree that we have a housing crisis in santa cruz county Well, all people can respectfully disagree about what to do about that And I really am pleased to see the board Making a number of initiatives. I wish they could go faster To address this problem sustainable santa cruz the funding measure that will hopefully be on the ballot next year and others But I don't think the inclusionary housing program needs to be thrown in the basket with all those other things and in fact Stand strongly on its own two feet. It's the one program that provides dispersed affordable housing units And it's the one program that provides affordable housing for moderate income people Which you know is a huge Need in this community and not to say the measure j has come close to meeting that need but it's something Those other efforts are going to take years And so if this is put off today, we're talking about leaving this as it is for many years to come In the decades of working in land use in santa cruz I can't think of one situation where I heard a developer say if it weren't for those inclusionary housing programs The requirements we would be able to do x y or z. They complain about a lot of things But that was not the main thing that people complained about Um In fact I'm sure the economics have all changed But one of the previous speakers referred to development performance I went through a number of those at the time and it was really clean and really simple The land value was based on the number of market rate units that could be built on the site It was not based on the inclusionary requirements. So the developers paid for land based on that They were able to recover most of their construction costs on the sale of the house And again, that's not why they complained Rental housing is more complex And I understand the need for trying to create inducements for more rental housing But to have the opportunity which I didn't realize till last week already on the code to allow section eight Renters in those units seems like a win-win for section eight voucher holders Who can't find units and developers who are seeking better cash flow for their projects So in conclusion Again, it's great to see the county taking seriously this issue affordable housing But don't hang this one up it stands on its own and it provides some really good small, but everything's going to be small Outcomes for the community. Thank you. Thank you Is there anyone else who would like to address us? Seeing none, I'll bring it back to the board. Uh, supervisor McPherson Yeah, I'd like to make some comments before I ask for Continuance of this item and that planning department saying oh my gosh, we've spent a lot of time on this already. I know But I think if we want to solve our housing crisis, um We're going to need to change our ways In some ways that haven't been done before For nearly 40 years now since the passage of measure j and a short two-year term of The amendment to increase the fee structure Affordable housing really hasn't put a dent in what's available out there for us And we have a never-growing number of residents to be clear The county has slowed population growth as was desired with measure j Even as it as we continue to grow in this county ever so slowly, but we've seen as Um permits for marketplace housing crept along at a the 50 level year in and year out people kept adding up here and 15 percent of very little doesn't mean very much We now have what we have all identified as a housing crisis here And I'm not for accepting a bill that any costs mentality, but I'm and I'm not pointing our fingers at our planning department Who has followed the constant continuous string of ordinance that has been approved by the county board of supervisors over the year and implemented by county administrators And and really some of those decisions on housing are out of our hands when it gets to the coastal commission possibly site limitations for housing taken place the up and down marketplace And additionally we always have to address some very limited infrastructure Opportunities here we have or should we say realities that we have in Issues such as water and transportation But I think if we don't If we don't change our housing or planning processes So people have a better understanding of what we want for them We're going to have the same conversation in 40 years or two years for down the road So I believe some of the we've we've heard from the housing advisory committee earlier today and right now And I do believe some of the ideas from the consortium of the housing advocates as they're called I guess And others that has merit and we should continue this I don't know how long we want to continue it. I think three or four I don't want to have this thing go on for another two years I think we ought to address some of the issues that have been brought up here And by those interests that have been mentioned But if we could come back in three or four months or a short period of time It and air some of those proposals openly And consider including them in our housing and I do believe our planning department has been listening to what others have to say But some that really particularly make sense to me Is establishing a new mixed use policy for instance That more housing units are needed to make a commercial venture go if they're Mixed together I I think that that has been discussed Possibly adding ad use as partially offsetting our affordable housing inclusion of 15 percent Establishing a bonus Which has been been made Been mentioned by the planning department for including inclusionary affording affordable housing And maybe even establishing by right zones We have limited properties here for housing to take place, but we have a tremendous need for that to take place And so I would I'm just not comfortable And I do appreciate again what the planning department has brought forward to us since our October meeting, but I think there still needs more there's more that needs to be done and that We should take Into consideration more seriously. I've mentioned a few I'm sure some of the of our other board members have some ideas as well, but I think we really should Be different as was stated think outside the box and really say If we're going to address this housing issue and in particular affordable housing Let's include some of these suggestions that have been mentioned And discuss them more thoroughly and come back in three or four months five months and really Be in a position. I think to make a better decision Supervisor cap it With the What's the current fee that we have for a unit that's uh 500 square feet or less Is there a fee right now? $2 per square foot of we're actually Suggesting that we I want to be sure I'm clear about what type of unit you're talking about if there was a new Single-family home of 500 square feet proposed, which would be unlikely They tend to be more in the neighborhood of a thousand square feet when they're small That Unit would be charged two dollars per foot An addition Or an ad you would deduct the first 500 square feet and then after that be charged two dollars a foot All right, and then uh, I was looking at it Uh, it is rent, you know, control controlling the rent. It's part of the agreement Uh, and it did say like for um One bedroom would be about 1044 But if they if they were put on section eight, they're getting about double Yeah, uh, what you're referring to is the rents that can be charged on affordable units That are controlled by the county So for for many years the measure j program has had a provision. They're called investor owner units They're allowed to be rented the rent is set and required to be affordable calculated at 60 percent of median income The board changed the policy In 2012 to allow for the higher rents And the reason for that was really, um, we were having a crisis which has continued To find for find units that people with section eight vouchers Other tenant based subsidy can use We have found that that provision of allowing fair market rents to be charged is actually Proving to be very interesting To developers looking at building rental housing Because they can have deed restricted units And remember under the density bonus program That is currently in place chapter 1712, which is consistent with state law Um, 35 percent of those units are deed restricted as affordable in perpetuity. So forever So the landlord is agreeing to do that that that agreeing that they will always rent to Low-income households and charge them an affordable rent So the fact that your board has that policy Actually is we believe an incentive to density bonus projects and we believe that Not by the number of projects that have come in for approval But by the number of developers that are coming to talk to us About density bonus Projects which would get us additional units. They do tend to be small So Because they're rental units and they tend to be smaller units which we want more of Thank you I had a couple comments that I wanted to make Um When um, when we made this change a couple years ago Um, I didn't support it. Um, I thought it was it wasn't a good policy strategy Um, it was there was no clear information Um, uh from developers Uh, that said that it was a real effect on them um And the board decided to try something Um in those two years which people have said is not a very Long amount of time I I think in my district alone. There was five units that were not built So we got to ask ourselves how many years do we want to do this? Do we want 10 units to go away? 15 20 units One of the speakers says that it takes 15 years to get a uh a permit So should we wait 15 years to try to figure this out? No We didn't the I appreciate the staff work on it because it didn't just you know Look at themselves and try to come up with something that they thought would work out They actually talked to economists And they looked at at at financial numbers and they had performs Um So this isn't a casual recommendation Um, and I appreciate the um testimony from our former planning director He has spent a few years looking at development projects in santa cruz county um And so I take his uh testimony seriously um Meanwhile, there's another side that says Well, give us time to put together something. You know try to figure it out um When I met with the the representatives here they didn't provide me with uh any proformas or economic information. It was just What they thought and they had clear ideas of other things we should do I respect that and I I saw a draft just uh yesterday of the monoray bay economic partnership paper On housing and there's some things that we're doing and some things that they um that they'd like us to do But uh We we're not making we're not this change is not being suggested casually um it uh And the other thing that I would and and not only has it been studied, but it's been reviewed by our volunteers Um as part of the housing advisory commission not once but twice Um, they have stated pretty clearly where they stand on it And just to be clear This doesn't take away the ability for a developer To pay an illu fee It requires them to come to this board That's that's far different than than than a mandate um So I support these changes and I think we should make them now and I think that that uh That uh, it it will make a difference to those who say those 500 units that were created by measure j since the time Uh that the that that measure passed Is not enough. I would argue Show me a better strategy to build 500 units of dispersed housing in santa cruz county at no cost to the county um and We could argue that it should have been more And that that that uh that if that if we had some different policy We wouldn't be in the housing crisis we're in I would argue that's just not Accurate it's there are communities across Uh, california some who have inclusionary zoning some who don't some that have changed it and we have a housing crisis in california um this board has uh Let an effort and been unanimously supportive of it efforts around sustainable santa cruz We should be talking about how we get that environmental work done on the sustainable santa cruz done quicker um because If we had that done that we could make those mixed use changes that we talked about we would have those new Zoning pieces in place We wouldn't need to wait So I say this is these are good recommendation based on real facts Reviewed by economists supported by our housing advisory commission Um And even approved in concept unanimously by this board just a couple weeks ago So I think we should move forward with it and it doesn't mean we stop the discussion It means we continue to discussions and we work hard and maybe we need to to think about strategically Do we need to to provide extra money to planning to get the sustainable santa cruz county plan done quicker? But I would I don't think we should miss this opportunity to provide the community sure so, uh Somewhere in between the comments of the my fellow board members today I support returning to an inclusionary option at the board's discretion Um, but I also appreciate supervisor McPherson's ideas around looking at other changes we can make um in order to create incentives For not only more market rate housing and more affordable housing But also smaller housing in both those categories And I'm not sure our fee structure is doing quite enough when I look at some other jurisdictions To to really look at how we can use these fees to create incentives in both the market and um and the affordable category and so, uh, I think Wait a couple months. I'll bring maybe a few. I don't want to wait for the code modernization and have the the two Um, although I agree with supervisor friend that the two are intricately uh Intertwined, but I do think are there there may be some interim things we can do To add a little nuance and to add some other incentives in order to get the kinds of housing Um that we so desperately need so I support You know a short delay that allows for some, uh, some more conversations Uh within the context of assuming If there are the the votes that we move towards, uh reinstating the inclusionary piece, but what what else can we do to make sure that uh that we maintain market interest in smaller units More units, uh, and more and obviously more affordable units So, uh, um I'm not sure Do you want to do you want to attempt a motion? Sure. Uh, so I'll move to continue this item until Uh The second meeting in march whenever whenever that is Oh second Let me ask a question. Are we not going to change the the the fee structure or anything else? I mean I I'm just I I still I still have some questions around the fee structure and because because of the size my interest in In creating some incentives, so I wasn't uh quite Ready to go there yet today All right, so there's a motion by community seconded by cap it to uh continue this item to when second meeting in march second meeting in march March 20th I'll just say uh I don't support the motion. Um, I think we could make these changes and still continue the discussion and come back on march 20th and and Make things even better. Um, I I think this is a missed opportunity this would will be a missed opportunity and You could use the same reasoning to put this decision off Uh forever and always and uh as as sometime you have to just sort of Um, you know make a clear decision and and move forward and continue To to use all the tools that we have to accomplish our policy goals Would uh What is the staff recommendation uh to actually vote on it or continue it? No, I couldn't uh to vote on it You have in your packet, uh red line of changes to Chapter 1710 of the county code Um, so there's a number of provisions that have been discussed from the last meeting in this meeting That includes some changes so The recommendation was to hold a public hearing And discuss the changes to the code And um make make a decision one way or another. Okay, so to make a final vote on it I mean right now rather than continuing. Yeah, it's it's on the screen right in front of you I don't know. Do we have any other comment on this on the motion or anything? I'm going to be supporting the motion Okay All right. I just don't want to you know throw I hear your point there and I just don't want to Make it a lot harder on your staff. So Okay, all right, but I'll support the motion Um, if there's no other comment, uh a call for the vote all in favor signify by saying aye. Hi Opposed no So on a four one vote, uh, we vote to continue this matter till March 20th Uh, that brings us to the end of our morning session of the No, we have one we got one more Sorry We'll move on to item 60, which is consider reappointments of julia hill and alan smith the law library board of trustees Returned to expire december 31st 2018 I'll take a motion Motion by McPherson seconded by cappett all in favor signify by saying aye And the opposed motion carries unanimously That ends our morning portion and we will be coming back at 1 30 Uh to hear the remaining items on our agenda. We'll be taking closed session at the end of that